- Mary Ellen Pleasant is the mother of civil rights
in California.
Here's my money. Here's $30,000
so you can buy guns and stuff.
- Mark Twain gets his start... as Mark Twain,
but he's telling some fucking drunk riverboat captain's story.
Yeah.
It gets that dirty in the frog jumping world.
- The next time we see Patty Hearst,
she's got a machine gun at a bank,
and she's like, my new name is Tania.
Get the fuck down.
- San Francisco was built on, like, thieves and whores,
and this is a place where the freaks and weirdoes come
where they feel they can be accepted,
and that is where some of them can be.
The Gold Rush was a bunch of poor men
running to where they could get money,
um, getting money where you can,
and it still is.
Like, Twitter, Facebook,
whatever, you know? It's, like, the new shit.
Like, oh, let's fucking make a gold mine on that.
It's not titties and ass,
but it's a whole nother angle of that dangle.
City by the Bay.
I really want a drink.
Hello.
Today, we're gonna talk about Mary Ellen Pleasant,
the mother of civil rights in California.
Mary Ellen Pleasant was a light-skinned black woman.
She was a slave
until one day a planter bought her out of slavery
and made her a free woman.
So when she went to California,
she pretended that she was a white woman.
Now, first off, she was a chef,
and people are coming in and she's cooking for them.
And people love her.
People had started bidding for her to be their personal chef.
And she was like, you know what, fuck all that.
I'm gonna open my own restaurant.
She was head bitch in charge.
She had made some shit happen.
She had made shit happen for, like, black people...
getting jobs.
So as a white woman, she started opening restaurants.
She owned laundries.
She owned boarding houses.
She started getting black people hired
for positions they'd never normally be hired for
at that time.
This woman was a Renaissance Woman.
In the late 1850s,
Mary Ellen Pleasant is making a ton of fucking money
in California,
but she said, even though I'm kinda, like, light-skinned
and I get along with everybody
and everybody thinks I'm white
and I could live a very comfortable life
if I wanted to... pfft!
Pfft! Fuck that.
She took that money
and she started doing some shit.
During this time,
she'd been actively freeing slaves.
She said, you know what, James Brown.
No, it's John Brown.
John Brown, a famous abolitionist,
who was a white man,
you know, he's trying to free slaves.
Here's my money. Here's $30,000
so you can buy guns and stuff.
They buy land in Canada
because they're gonna open a home and a farm
so that these freed slaves can go live.
John Brown gets caught,
and they find a letter on him that says something like,
hey, I'm in support of you
and I'm gonna keep being in support of you.
Just make some shit happen.
And instead of M.E.P., it looked like W.E.P.
So it was published everywhere.
Everybody be on the lookout for some dick named W.E.P.
Where was I at, historically?
At that time, she was in love with a man named Thomas Bell.
He was a Scotsman.
He was a businessman,
and she loved him.
That is... That was not me farting.
That's... the... chair.
And they had businesses together,
I mean, laundries,
and blah, blah, blah, and bullshit.
And together, they amassed a fortune
of $30 million.
Which, like, nowadays...
is like a batrillion gillion a-dollars.
In, like, one of the "censuseses,"
she outted herself as a black woman.
When the love of her life, Thomas Bell, died,
people started talking about her badly.
They... what's it called?
They "dismissinated" her.
They "shenamenanated" her.
They her.
No, but really. They said terrible things.
She eats babies. She steals babies.
She does this, she's a whore, she's a whore madam.
She's a this, she's a that.
That's when they gave her the name "Mammy."
And they called her "Mammy Pleasant."
The fuck's that about?
And you know what, in the end,
she made money like a true American,
and she fought for people's freedom and rights
like a true the most American.
She did exactly what she wanted to do
and said, "I'd rather be a corpse than a coward."
I'm free, I want y'all to be free,
and I want me to be free.
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
And p.s. I count
'cause I'm a motherfucking person, dickfaces.
There's some park in San Francisco
that is dedicated to her, and she haunts it.
- Now, why would she haunt something
that pays tribute to her?
- 'Cause it's the smallest motherfucking park
in San Francisco.
- That's an angry ghost.
- I don't know if she's angry.
Can ghosts be angry? They're already dead.
What are they pissed off about?
- That they're dead.
- Yeah, I guess it depends what you feel about things.
- Again, that wasn't me farting.
- Mark Twain starts taking on, like, the local politicians
and police force.
He's a fucking America's most wanted.
- I love Mark Twain. He started in San Francisco.
He came to the city and became a...
Kind of a, uh, ambassador.
San Francisco is an excellent place
to discover who you are and who you want to be.
Ahh!
Hello, America!
Za-zoom!
I'm just a guy that likes to wear ladies' lingerie.
- Hello.
My name is Derrick Beckles.
And today we're gonna talk about Samuel Clemens,
aka Mark Twain.
Wow.
Samuel Clemens, he was from Missouri.
He grows up along, like, the Mississippi.
In his heart, he wanted to be a writer,
and it wasn't going well.
"Mark Twain!"
is what the riverboat captain would scream.
He was like, oh, that's clever.
So when he goes out West,
he starts writing under the pseudonym of Mark Twain,
which nobody in the West understands
what the fuck that is.
When he's writing under this name,
I guess maybe he feels a bit more emboldened.
He's got a bit of a name for himself,
but he pisses off the wrong people.
The person who he wrote about was not pleased.
Well, he was just like, ooh, you wrote something about me.
You wrote something about me in the newspaper.
And, uh... ha!
Okay, where am I right now?
I don't remember where I am right now.
Not co... not cool.
I'm gonna challenge you to a duel.
I'm gonna blow your fucking head off.
Meet me on the street, 3:00.
And Mark Twain's like, all right, let's do this thing.
Oh, you can't duel in Nevada.
So he was, like, breaking federal law.
So he went to San Francisco.
He was just a master provocateur.
He starts taking on, like, the local politicians
and police force.
He would just, like, take jabs at them
in his writing for the local newspapers and shit.
He was just like, pfft. Okay, what do I do next?
Mark Twain fucked up.
He is straight-up a fucking America's most wanted.
And he goes out to the middle of fucking nowhere
and hangs out at the local fucking watering hole, saloon,
and there's a guy who's hanging out there
who constantly spins yarns.
Oh, I got a story. My name's Ben Coon.
I got another story for you.
And they're like, fucking I don't wanna hear it.
I don't wanna hear it no more.
I know what I'm talking about. I know what I'm talking about!
There's Mark Twain sitting at the back of the bar.
Uh, I'll fucking listen.
Ben Coon's like, finally.
Somebody's gonna fucking listen to my bullshit.
So he's like, okay, here's the deal.
There's these two dudes
are pitting frogs against each other
in a leaping contest.
So everybody else is just like, god damn it,
I've heard this fucking story 100 times.
And one man sabotages the other man's leaping frog
by feeding him lead-filled buckshot
so that the opponent's frog can't jump as high.
Yeah.
It gets that dirty in the frog jumping world.
Anyways, Mark Twain's just like,
this is an awesome fucking story.
Yes! I'm gonna write about this shit.
Mark Twain goes back to his typewriter
or whatever the fuck... His computer...
And goes, brrrrr.
I'm gonna transcribe this in this dulled-down,
everyman's storytelling.
Bang!
That story gets picked up and becomes a fucking huge hit.
And it's described as "the story of the day!"
Mark Twain has hit the shit.
What he's done is amazing.
So it becomes the story of the day
and it just, like, spreads to every newspaper,
and Mark Twain gets his start...
as Mark Twain.
But he's telling some fucking drunk riverboat captain's story
of a fucking frog filled with lead.
Blah, blah, pbbt.
His signature becomes this dumbed-down vernacular.
He, like, laments,
oh, I'm only known for this frog story.
But that was his jump...
This frog story was his jumping off point.
He became this, like,
sloe gin...
porch...
storytelling...
patriarch.
And I think the Mark Twain that became the Mark Twain
was like a Liberace that became the Liberace.
- Then all of a sudden, she opened the door
and they all came pouring in.
And they're like, ahh!
And they beat up the math teacher, strangle her.
- Well, San Francisco's interesting
because its history, there's cool people,
there's beauty, there's architecture,
there's art and hills and water.
It's like New York but on the water.
It's really nice.
I say we have the actual tequila.
- Yes, that is... chilling.
- With the orange juice that we just squeezed.
- I say we put that in there after we do a quick shot.
- I never do shots. I always sip it.
I should just do a shot, right?
Well, hello.
Today, we're going to talk about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
So Patty Hearst descended from William Randolph Hearst.
He is a very wealthy man, and her dad is Randolph Hearst,
but essentially, they own all of media.
And so, you know, she's from that kind of...
The people who made the country.
At 19, Patty Hearst was living in Berkeley
in this nice apartment that her parents are paying for.
So they're sitting at home,
and she's reading in her bathrobe with her fiance.
And then there's, like, a knock at the door.
No, Cutie, it's okay, it's okay. It's fake.
They didn't have dogs.
Quiet! Quiet, quiet, quiet!
She opens the door.
Like, oh, can we help you?
We ran out of gas money. Blah, blah, blah.
And then all of a sudden, they all came pouring in.
And they're like, ahh!
And they beat up the math teacher,
strangle her, take her captive.
Bring her in a van over to their headquarters.
She's blindfolded. She's gagged.
I don't know if she's gagged. She's definitely blindfolded.
They put her in this closet
that's, like, the size of a closet.
And she doesn't know what's happening, really.
So it's 57 days she's in this room.
So finally, one day,
they let her get out of the closet,
and they take off her blindfold.
And she looks out and she sees all the people.
She's like, oh, my god, you're so beautiful.
Oh, who are these peo...
Like, you guys like... You're my mommy.
This is essentially what Stockholm syndrome is.
That was the Symbionese Liberation Army.
First of all, "Symbionese" is not a word.
It's... they kinda made it up.
They're not the brightest people in the world.
Now your name's Tania,
and this is your new life.
And she's like...
okay.
And then they do a photo shoot,
and she puts a beret on and a machine gun,
and she's, like, all with the S.L.A.
So she started recording these audio tapes
and sending them to her parents.
Mom, dad, I'm okay.
But I need you to feed every poor person.
That ends up being like 300,000.
$300 million.
They're already stupid. Like, they could not count.
And the Hearsts are like, we don't have that much money.
We'll give you $3 million.
Whatever, dude.
I mean, can you imagine?
So they started all these, like, um, food kinda trucks
on the corners of San Francisco,
and they would start, like, distributing foods.
And then they said they wanted even more.
Mom, dad, there was no beef or lamb.
That's not the kind of food
that you should be giving to poor people.
That food sucked.
Meanwhile, everyone's, like, worried about her.
Her family is freaking out.
So they're just like, what the fuck is happening?
And they're dressed in black, and they're saying,
we don't know what happened to Patty.
What's gonna happen?
And then she's like,
mom, take off that dumb black dress.
It's not helping anything. You're embarrassing us.
Like, I'm not dead. I'm alive,
and I feel that what you're doing is wrong,
with being a rich person.
And I'm here to be part of the people...
of the people people.
Basically, what happens is they decide...
I forgot to pee.
- Let me interrupt.
- Good. - No, I wanna do a...
- Do a Jell-o shot with... Come here... Lydia.
Dave. - Derek.
- No, that's Dave.
- So what do... I've never done a Jell-o shot.
- Put your finger in it.
- You just give it a little stir so everything goes down smooth.
- Okay. - More than that.
You have, like, woman hands.
- Give your finger a lick, shake it up.
- Shake it up, then do it. Mm-hmm.
That's good, isn't it?
Isn't it good?
- It's kind of a bad decision with your life...
- Mm-hmm. Bad decision.
- But it's efficient.
- This does not taste good. - No.
- It tastes a little good.
- The next time we see her,
she's got a machine gun at a bank,
and she's like, my new name is Tania.
Get the fuck down.
And so she's like, doing this, like...
You know, like, threatening everybody in the bank.
And she's kinda into it.
It's in the news, and her parents own the newspaper,
so it's like... It's... it's everywhere.
People are like, Patty Hearst. Where is she? What's happening?
This is, like, all that the news is talking about.
What's happening with Patty Hearst?
And so this bank robbery is the first time
that she has, like, been out in the public.
And they don't catch her.
And then, all of a sudden, in L.A., there's a shooting.
And the police are all there. They start shooting.
The whole house is just like... Becomes flames,
and everyone thinks Patty Hearst is in the house.
Well, here's what happens.
Patty's still alive and she's with this couple,
watching it in a hotel in Anaheim.
Hi, Blanche. Come here.
So people...
People start...
What was I saying?
She moves to San Francisco,
and she just starts, like, living her life,
going grocery shopping, doing whatever.
Then all of a sudden, one day, like, on a errand,
Patty Hearst gets spotted.
Someone recognizes her.
And when she comes into jail,
she's gotta say what her profession is,
and she says "urban guerilla."
They sentence her to 35 years in jail,
and then after 22 months, Carter commuted her.
When she comes out of prison, she is like,
I'm so excited.
I'm about to go on vacation.
She's, like, a great example of a really rich person
who could've just, like, stayed an idiot
and who was like, now I understand, like...
what it's like.
She was really attractive.
I have to get some water. - Okay.
- Like, I don't... Your affect is,
like, what you're showing to the world.
- Oh, shit. - Your affect is so flat.
Which is... that means that whatever you say is just like...
- So I'm like a Charlie McCarthy dummy.
- You're a goldfish.