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I still have the travel coffee mug I received as a gift last October, when I visited the set of Showtime’s new limited series “The Good Lord Bird.” It’s a good one; it has a snug lid and keeps coffee hot. It was given to me upon my arrival by an enthusiastic man from the Virginia Film Office, as part of the state’s bid to brand itself as a prime filming location. Virginia is home to vast fields, farmlands, rivers and mountains; it’s a perfect setting for many American stories, which is mostly what American films try to tell.
Of course, many of those fields and hills — the vast rolling plantations and, later, the prison farms — were trod and worked by enslaved people. Indeed, the production office for “The Good Lord Bird” was housed in a defunct detention center. I spent childhood summers in the region, and it has always been hard for me to travel through its terrain without thinking almost exclusively of the enslaved ancestors of mine who toiled and bled on such land. This is why I have mixed feelings about the mug. It features the new slogan for the Virginia Film Office, which is a riff on the state’s slogan: It says “Virginia Is for Film Lovers.” Then, underneath, in smaller letters: “Great locations since 1607.”
The “Good Lord Bird” shoot was taking place outside Richmond, adapting James McBride’s National Book Award-winning novel. McBride’s book tells the story of Henry (Onion) Shackleford, a light-skinned enslaved boy of 10 who is working with his father at a dusty Kansas-territory tavern and barbershop when a mysterious stranger appears. This stranger turns out to be none other than the fearsome white abolitionist John Brown, who instigates a gunfight with Onion’s owner. Onion’s father is killed, and in the chaos Brown “liberates” the boy, who he assumes is a girl, absconding with Onion to the campsite where his ragtag abolitionist army is posted. Too scared to correct the old gunfighter, Onion goes along with the mistake, and spends the next couple of years riding along with Brown’s outfit as “Henrietta.”
McBride excels at viewing the “peculiar institution” of slavery from multiple perspectives. In his novel, the slave owners are just as often dirty and down on their luck — men who are barely making a way for themselves — as they are grandiose, self-important and lacking humanity. With his children to feed, business to run and land to manage, Onion reflects of his former owner, “fact is, looking back, Dutch Henry was something like a slave himself.” Similarly, McBride’s version of John Brown is a complex character — a man whose absolute certainty of mission combines with a bumbling presence, and whose ability to reframe every misfortune as a Gift from the Lord sits alongside an absolutely savage capacity for bloodshed.
Brown is played, in the TV series, by Ethan Hawke, who expertly captures these competing urges. His eyes are glistening beads under bushy eyebrows, spittle dribbles down his scraggly beard, liver spots decorate his weathered face. But that gruffness is undercut by a roiling current of sentimentality, one that borders on foolishness. As with his turn in Paul Schrader’s 2017 film “First Reformed,” in which he played a minister struggling with his faith, Hawke offers a studied, subtle portrait of a religious leader: the sense of responsibility; the showmanship; the inflated, godsize ego; the absolute determination to enact the Lord’s will no matter what anyone, friend or foe, has to say about it. Brown may appear, in one scene, trying to preach the gospel to a bunny, but he remains an unrepentant letter of blood.
“If someone came into our home and stole one of your sisters, two of your brothers, your mother, your grandmother, chained them, raped them, forced them to work with no pay, only enough food to keep them alive, and I met that thief, I would stab him through his eye socket the second I saw him,” he admonishes his squeamish sons before a defender of slavery is beheaded. “I would kill his friends and anyone who laughed at his jokes.” In McBride’s novel, Brown beheads three men for the cause. The series shows only one.
On a sweltering Virginia afternoon last fall, the season’s penultimate episode was being shot, including scenes in which Brown’s army awaits its pivotal raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry. I walked around the sets — period towns built from the ground up and imbued with magnificent detail — as did Hawke, sweating buckets in a woolen vest and bedraggled fake beard, presiding over the production like a proud father. This is, in part, his show: He’s billed not just as its star but as a creator, executive producer and co-writer. The series was originally set to premiere in February 2020, but has been pushed back multiple times, across a year during which the nature of public dialogue about race has changed rapidly. When I ran into Hawke at the Television Critics Association conference in January, he emphasized that he wanted to take as much time as was necessary to, in his words, “get it right.”
How, precisely, one “gets it right” when it comes to the intersection of slavery and Hollywood is at this point unclear. Last year’s “Harriet,” meant to lend movie magic to one of America’s most truly heroic figures, Harriet Tubman, landed with a thud. So far, this year’s “Antebellum” — which trades on the considerable power of Janelle Monáe to tell a horror tale that both is and isn’t about slavery — seems to have underwhelmed audiences. The problem isn’t just that the films aren’t particularly well made; most movies aren’t. It has more to do, I suspect, with the offensiveness inherent in subjecting the still-living trauma of America’s racism to the unavoidably flattening and glossifying effect of Hollywood. The challenge faced by Hawke and company is that for white men to prominently place their names on a tale of slavery on Showtime in 2020 is a far sight riskier than for McBride, a Black man, to have spun his yarn in a novel in 2013. It is a daunting proposition, and one that makes me wonder: Can a white person ever usefully tell a slave story — or, more specific, can they tell a story that is useful to the descendants of the enslaved, rather than to their own egos or cinematic fantasies?
This is not a new question: For centuries, white content creators and abolitionists have built careers waxing literary about the meaning of slavery. The most famous attempt, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was written to spur white abolitionists; unsurprisingly, it did so by trading in stereotypes of Black people so broad and damaging that the name of its main character remains an insult among the people the novel purported to save. A century and a half later, you could follow the debate over Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 movie “Django Unchained,” a stylish revenge thriller built upon the very real pain of slavery — joyous to some and sinister to others.
Less noted, in between, is William Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” a novel from the point of view of the very real Black man who led a bloody uprising against slaveholders in August 1831. Styron’s book landed in 1967, at the height of another movement for Black rights. He wrote it because, while gathering notes on Turner, he was challenged over dinner by none other than James Baldwin to write from inside Turner’s head, as a first-person narrative. Styron went full tilt, attempting to mimic Turner’s voice from the pamphlet Turner dictated as he awaited execution; at one point the narrator refers to whites as “brandy-fragrant sun-scorched snaggle-mouthed anus-scratching farmers.”
This effort was breathlessly lauded by white critics and awarded a Pulitzer Prize, even as the Black literary world was so roiled by the text that a collection of essays examining it — “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond” — was published the following year. Chief among the complaints was that in trying to humanize Turner, Styron created a white fantasy of a Black man, a figure with a compassion toward and lust for whiteness that were not evident in Turner’s actual words. Turner’s rebellion led to the death of at least 55 white Virginians, many of them women and children, some of whom, Turner admitted, had been kind toward him. But his own text contains little by way of remorse.
Baldwin would later moderate a debate between Styron and the actor Ossie Davis, who led a campaign to stop a film version of Styron’s novel. “While Bill’s novel is a more or less private act,” Baldwin observed in his opening remarks, “what happens with this onscreen?” Davis, he said, believed it was possible that “thousands of Black people will die.” Davis himself argued that “the choices we make, all of us, the choices of any consequence, are those choices which draw blood.”
Baldwin’s blurb, on the paperback edition of the book, said that Styron “has begun the common history — ours.”
In the strictest sense, we do have a common history. But whether acknowledging that history, or working from it, constitutes a path toward liberation for Black people is a more complicated question. Gallons of ink and miles of celluloid have been devoted to that “shared history” without ever easing its impact; for many people, at this moment, there is no more good to be mined from it. It is hard to imagine the worth of that history when a white man, in the year 2019, can beam proudly as he hands me a mug claiming that Virginia has had great filming locations since 1607.
James McBride’s book arrived at a very particular solution for how to tell a story about slavery. He tells it as comedy, from within, using a narrator who has, for the entirety of his life, taken slavery as a given; Onion’s innocent eyes relieve him of the need to preach its obvious horrors. “This is not the typical story of the white savior that comes to save African-American people,” the writer said this past January, at that Television Critics Association conference. “This is the African-American perspective on the white savior that comes to save us, and that’s why it’s so funny. It’s a story of caricature.”
McBride’s novel is primarily concerned with the relationship between a growing boy and the wild-eyed father figure who has come to him by recklessly causing the death of his actual father — just one among many, many layers of grim irony and humor. When Onion travels back East with Brown so that the abolitionist can guilt white liberals into donating to his cause, Brown asks the boy to assist by telling the donors some tales of woe — or, as he puts it, “your life of deprivation and starvation as a slave. Being hungry and all. Whipped scandalous and them type of things.” To this, the book’s Onion tells us: “I didn’t want to confess to him I weren’t never hungry as a slave nor was never whipped scandalous. Fact is, only time I was hungry and eating out of garbage barrels and sleeping out in the cold was when I was free with him. But it weren’t proper to say it, so I nodded.” But in the TV series, created by Hawke and adapted by the showrunner Mark Richard, Onion challenges his guardian, pointing out that it is only under this “freedom” that he’s been hungry, cold and shot at. “I would stay off that subject entirely,” Brown mumbles, before changing the subject.
In McBride’s framing, no white person, whether free-stater or pro-slaver, ever fully sees Onion. They don’t even know his gender. “Black people have been hiding from white folks so long,” McBride told me of the choice to put Onion in a dress, “that that gives you room as a writer to work, because it shows the separation between the two races. Because racism is so stupid; it’s obvious to us.” A running gag is that nearly every Black character immediately recognizes Onion as a boy dressed as a girl, and immediately considers it the least important thing about their exchange. Brown, who is regarded (perhaps most of all by himself) as the most fearsome abolitionist in the country, views Onion sometimes as a good-luck charm and other times as a tragic symbol, but it takes the entire story for him to grow the ability to see Onion as a person. Even as Brown rallies abolitionists to the cause, Onion notes that the scene makes him “a bit sad” — “them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren’t hardly ever any Negroes present at most of them gatherings.” It is, he observes, “like a big long lynching. Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.”
Last year, I met with McBride at the place where he can most readily be found on any day of the week: the humble church his mother was a founder of, across the street from the housing projects in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where he grew up. The front door was open at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, and a few workers were inside, carrying folding chairs down a rickety flight of stairs. I stopped one of them and asked him if he knew where I could find James McBride. Turns out he was James McBride.
We sat in a basement under fluorescent lights and talked. In Onion, McBride said, he saw something that he felt Black people today may be able to relate to. “It’s easy as a kid to say, ‘Well, if I was a slave, I’d have done a Quentin Tarantino and shot up …’” he told me. “Man, you ain’t shootin’ up nobody! The cops pull you over here on Centre Street and Clinton, you keep your hands where he can see them and hope the guy didn’t have a bad day. Onion is the opportunist in us all, because so few of us are really able to say, ‘I’m going to leave what I have and take it to the rack, and lose my chance to get Mister Softee’s on Friday and a good house and good car.’ There’s an Onion in all of us, you know? It’s just a question of how much.” His story is not judgmental about the decisions Black characters make as they work through a complex calculus of freedom and survival; Onion refers to one companion, a man always focused on their coming out of every affair with their heads still attached, as the bravest coward he ever met.
As for the character of Brown, McBride says he is someone you can’t help loving for his singleness of purpose. “He was wrong in a lot of the things he did,” McBride added, “but in the greater scheme, was he wrong? He was crazy, but I loved him, and I loved what he stood for. And it took me a long time to really accept him fully enough that I could write about him.” Later, at a news conference, I would ask McBride — who serves as an executive producer on the show, but was not involved in writing it — if he had any concerns about telling what could be seen as the tale of a white man’s saviorism, and if that risk was doubled by attaching a prominent white name to the television project. He acknowledged the concern but was, on this point, very clear. “You know, I still work in my church, in my little storefront Baptist church in Brooklyn,” he said to the assembled crowd. “I know a lot of the pain and suffering that happens that white people don’t pay no attention to. But I’m also hip to the fact that a lot of people, whatever their race, pay a lot of lip service to the poor, what the poor in this country need and what they should have.” Here he paraphrased a quote from the Rev. Joseph Lowery: “My house is on fire,” McBride said. “My children are in it. I don’t care who brings me the water.” Brown, he said, was “a real hero to me and to many Black people who are no longer alive, and I’m so glad that we brought this story to people.” He continued: “John Brown gave his life and two of his sons’ lives to the cause of freedom for Black people. And he started the Civil War. And they buried this man’s story for a long time because nobody could figure out how to tell it without losing money or losing their career or getting themselves deep-sixed some kind of way. We managed to do it.”
Remarkably, the way they’ve done this is with a kind of warped buddy-comedy format, one that attempts to be as mordant and funny as it is earnest. McBride borrows heavily from the book’s most obvious literary antecedent, “Huckleberry Finn,” wherein a man and boy also journey through antebellum America, running into gamblers, slavers, prostitutes and louche characters of all stripes. His story is just as reminiscent of the buddy comedies of Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, or the more serious treatment that dynamic was given by films like “In the Heat of the Night” or “The Defiant Ones,” in which Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier play escaped convicts who are chained together.
There’s much, in both the book and the television series, that’s irreverent to the point that you’d be horrified to come across it out of context; Onion, for instance, offers many apologetics for slavery. And the show’s treatment of Fredrick Douglass, as played by Daveed Diggs, is sure to disturb some viewers. Constantly referred to as the “King of the Negroes” by Brown, the famous orator turns out, up close, to be a self-important blowhard who lives with his Black wife and white mistress, gorges himself on sweetmeats and cognac, flirts drunkenly with the young Onion (whom he believes to be a girl) and behaves like a Shakespearean performer even in his own parlor. There is little historical evidence for this characterization, and watching it on Showtime, it’s uncomfortably difficult to decide whether you’re seeing Hollywood writers lampoon a Great Man with minstrel stereotypes, or a Black author using humor to take some air out of a family story. The answer depends entirely on whom you imagine behind the camera and whom you imagine behind the story. But Douglass’s engagement with the cause of abolition is treated with more gravity, and at a crucial moment, before Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, we see him as something of a tragic character, forced to make a historic choice with the burden of a people on his back.
For McBride’s story, the only relevant political observation is that white folks are gonna white folk, no matter the context. “Whatever he believed he believed,” Onion observes of Brown in the book’s opening scene. “It didn’t matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.”
The Black-white buddy comedy has always been born of an optimism that, in the end, we are all in this together — a sentiment that, as of 2020, feels pretty hard for me to embrace. Before I parted ways with McBride in Red Hook, though, he took the opportunity to offer me some writerly advice. “The wisest among us,” he said, “are those who maintain a sense of almost boundless optimism about what this community is capable of. And I think that’s the danger of journalism, you know, for a young Black writer, someone like yourself. You’re always looking for what’s wrong and you very rarely look for what’s right. But if you can find what’s right, oftentimes you find the greatest stories imaginable.”
James Baldwin was right: For whatever reason, a novel can be a private act in a way that a Showtime television event — with its ceaseless promotions, subscriber pushes and social-media discourse — can never be. We may never know Baldwin’s true intentions in daring Styron to write “Confessions,” but it’s worth noting that upon its release he made the following assertion: “Bill’s going to catch it from Black and white. Styron is probing something very dangerous, deep and painful in the national psyche. I hope it starts a tremendous fight, so that people will learn what they really think about each other.” It is tempting to think that Hawke and Richard are walking toward a similar fate. But in 2020, haven’t we already learned what we really think about one another? The only question that remains is: What will we do about it?
In the show’s second episode, Brown has ridden off alone after the death of one of his sons to “commingle with our Great Father.” Onion finds himself trapped in the small town of Pikesville, Mo., and my handlers on set seemed more at ease talking about the thoroughness with which they’d recreated a period town — light topics, like the crafting of 19th-century dresses — than about what Onion sees there. In Pikesville, a group of enslaved people’s insurrection plot has been uncovered, and its leader, Sibonia, has been sentenced to hang. Sibonia’s trial — during which she echoes Nat Turner by explaining to the town pastor why she would have killed him and his wife first, even though they had been “good” to her — constitutes one of the most affecting scenes of the entire series.
The show, perhaps like John Brown himself, finds itself trying to balance two competing impulses, and this moment represents one of them. The other is more optimistic. By the time you reach the final scenes between Brown and Onion — one Black person approaching manhood, one white person approaching death — it is hard to imagine that Hawke and Richard didn’t harbor at least some hope that their work could introduce some healing into America’s often acrid racial discourse. “I want to be able to produce a show where everyone can watch, and not put people in their corners,” Richard told me. He also told me about his personal funding of a Black church in his hometown, Franklin, Va. — and indeed, this is one reason McBride felt confident that Richard was qualified to handle this material. “I didn’t know Mark from Adam,” McBride told me, “but Mark was a Southerner, and he really understood Southern things. He understands the familiarity between whites and Blacks in the South.”
From a racial perspective, the script that Richard and Hawke are using works best when white characters and Black characters are in direct dialogue about the nature of the country and freedom. I found myself particularly riveted by the opening of the sixth episode, in which, while preparing for the final battle, the Black men of Brown’s army challenge Brown’s sons on their true intentions. Brown’s sons respond by telling the story of the time their father gifted them with white slaves: “Any time someone tells me they’re for slavery,” he told them, “I think they should try it.” The brief scene unfolds patiently, full of deft emotional turns and unspoken calculations in each man’s head; it is quiet and simple and perfectly acted. I later learned that it is one of the episodes for which Erika L. Johnson, a Black woman who previously worked on “Queen Sugar,” is listed as co-writer.
By necessity, the series must take Onion more seriously than the novel does. McBride framed his book as a tall tale — notebooks found in a church lockbox after a fire, in which someone has recorded Onion telling his story. The Onion who tells this story is 103 years old, still occasionally passes himself off as a woman and is spinning this yarn in order to preserve his status as a Sunday-school teacher after “scoundreling and funny-touching” a young woman in the congregation. This introduction is noticeably absent from Hawke and Richard’s show, replaced in spirit by an opening epigraph that seems to nod to Twain: “All of this is true. Most of it happened.” The series does little to situate Onion as a narrator, let alone an unreliable one. It does, however, occasionally pull at the white-savior narrative, laying bare Brown’s hypocrisies and working to center Black people’s stories. Living portraits of Black people appear randomly throughout the series, and despite the story’s treatment of Frederick Douglass, it is his character who lays the grounding for a way of seeing Black people, and images of Black people. He wants, he says, to become the most photographed person of the century. “Captured likenesses of individuals will be the great equalizers of our culture,” he says. “This new invention will portray the Black man’s humanity and reveal slavery’s inhumanity.”
From a media-studies perspective, his view would be prescient, though I suppose it depends a great deal on who’s holding the camera. In 2020, the death of Black people is one of the most popular forms of content. George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery were killed on camera. At a time when Black people are facing life and death in public on a regular basis — when we are once again taking to the streets to demand not to be killed by the state, and for white people to stop standing aside, either justifying it or doing little materially to stop it — it is a tall order for a story of slavery, wedged into the pop-culture landscape, to do much beyond inflame the justified anger and resentment many of us feel toward a culture that takes our lives and deaths as little more than theory or entertainment. And this is a real problem for “The Good Lord Bird.”
In Pikesville, the insurrectionist Sibonia’s hanging is shown onscreen, intercut with close-ups of her standing trial, sparkling with holy determination, while Nina Simone’s rendition of “I Shall Be Released” plays. For me this lands roughly: It is movie trickery mistaken for power. The camera pushes in dramatically, and there are shots in slow motion. The sequence is dressed up as a powerful moment, but its placement in the script suggests a lack of understanding about the true meaning of showing a Black woman being hanged in 2020. Sibonia is introduced in this episode and dies in this episode, never to be heard from again. Her death, predictably, starts the awakening of Onion from his me-first stupor — the classic Disposable Woman trope.
Hawke admitted to me that he and Richard received notes from Showtime and Blumhouse, the production company, asking that they make sure the Black characters didn’t die too violently. “I think they don’t want to perpetuate that kind of horrible imagery,” he told me between takes. “And that’s probably a good idea, because nobody wants to see that [expletive]. And on the other side, there has to be a threat of where the South was at, in terms of their willingness to be violent.” Here he described to me a short list of barbaric acts committed against Black people, acts I will spare readers from. “If you shortchange that,” he said, “you kind of shortchange how brave these guys were.”
The problem with most mainstream cinema is that while it does not shy away from barbarism, it is ill-equipped to grasp what that barbarism means. Its real charge is to portray beauty. The lighting, the attention to detail, the music, the photography — the people who work on these things are aesthetes who take pride in their work. When you show the killing of a Black woman on film, you are on some unavoidable level showing it as a beautiful thing. The second time I watched the series, it occurred to me that Sibonia’s death wasn’t even the final scene in an episode; it was simply an act break, a Black woman’s onscreen murder serving as a plot device on Episode 2 of a seven-episode series.
Thus we live in split realities. One can argue that white audiences need to be shown the realities of violence. But the same was true of Vietnam movies: The idea was that if the horror of the war was shown at home, we would wake to it. What happened instead was that the horror of war was converted into a kind of fiction, a series of visual and cinematic tropes.
It is exhausting to watch Black bodies be killed, over and over again, so that others can finally understand what is horrible about that. It is yet another way in which our bodies are tools for white actualization, and not tools for our own. Black people die because our deaths are not considered real, because our lives are not considered real. What does a show about a white man, made largely by white people, have to say about that? The lives of Black people will always be a fantasy for white creators. The same applies to white policymakers and lawmakers and people who sit at home opining about law enforcement and protest strategies. Our nation’s history has ensured that it is so. What, then, is the cost of that fantasizing?
It must be said that “The Good Lord Bird” works as a series. The source material is excellent, and the people who created it know what they’re doing. It is at times funny, empathetic, affecting, well written and beautifully shot. Hawke’s performance, in particular, is a treasure. Joshua Caleb Johnson’s portrayal of Onion shows a heartwarming transformation from boy to young man. Strong performances come too from Rafael Casal, as a raconteur and gunfighter who joins Brown’s army; from the excellent Hubert Point-Du Jour, as a particularly shrewd traveling companion; from Orlando Jones, who surprises with a grizzled turn as the mysterious Rail Man; and from Zainab Jah, who embodies clarity and strength as “the General,” a.k.a. Harriet Tubman.
The story is rife with humor and compassion, plenty of gunfights and a few welcome elements of a heist flick, as Brown plans the Harpers Ferry raid that would help spark a civil war. The musical score focuses almost entirely on midcentury American gospel, using Mahalia Jackson’s upbeat “Come On Children, Let’s Sing” during the opening credits, and featuring songs by the Redemption Harmonizers, Spirit of Memphis Quartet, even a particularly powerful use of an Elvis Presley gospel recording, “Where Could I Go But to the Lord.” All this is entertaining. The bigger question, of course — the very difficult question the show opened itself to when it took on this story — is what any of this means as an entry into America’s struggles with race.
It is not until the third episode, when Brown sits at Frederick Douglass’s dinner table, that the abolitionist is finally challenged on any of his assumptions. “You know what the Negro needs?” Douglass says, his voice raising in anger for the first time. “Please do not presume to tell me what a slave will or will not do.” Brown is silenced, uncharacteristically humbled. “I cannot speak for the slave,” he finally replies, quietly. “But, Frederick, I can speak for the depths and shallows of the slavers’ hearts.”
I suspect the same can be said for Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard. “The Good Lord Bird” is a complicated work; it asks questions, refutes facile narratives and plays with contradictions, as much art does. But in 2020, it feels — to some perhaps more than others — that we are facing life and death, and people understandably have less tolerance for contradictions and questions. Where our families are dying, we would like answers, not questions. This is what made John Brown such a potent figure in his time, and so ripe to be resurrected in ours: There were very few questions, for him, regarding the morality of racism. He was touched, in his view divinely, by a simple and unrelenting call to address it head on, violently, without apprehension or compunction, as an immutable evil. It was not a complicated issue for him. It was either life or death, and it almost didn’t matter whose. “The crimes of this guilty land,” he is reported to have said in his final note before execution, “cannot be purged away but with blood.”
Is that how it must be? One hundred and sixty years later, it’s clear that many people believe there are more comforting solutions, to be found in watching good TV dramas, reading books that educate you about racism, shopping at black-owned businesses or putting up the right yard signs. Whether you think that’s enough, it would seem, depends how much Onion is in you, and how much John Brown.
Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster based in Oakland, Calif. His last article for the magazine was about parenting Black teenagers through protest and pandemic.
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