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The patent record hides inventors whose names it never describes, and the checklist orders the search made anyway, by name, and the result printed honestly. The search ran thus: every name the build's Black-history record holds for Mishawaka — the Powell family's century from 1868, the names of the 1970 count's community of 107 souls in a city of 35,517, every Black Mishawakan the peoples record names at any strength — was checked against the patent roster of 216 grants and the six-grant annex, and against the standard national rosters of Black patentees. No Mishawaka Black inventor stands in the result: no name from the city's Black record appears in its patent record, under any spelling the search could construct. The negative is printed with its structural cause stated plainly, because the distinction is the entry's honesty: the patent record of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries does not record an inventor's race, grants issued to Black inventors across the country were routinely taken in white partners' and employers' names or left as shop inventions never carried to Washington, and a city whose Black population the census counted at 107 in 1970 kept its Black mechanical genius, if it had it to keep, below the patent system's sightline. What can be said is what was searched and what was not found, and it is said: by name, by roster, by cross-check — nothing. The negative is a record negative. It is not, and this entry does not let it read as, a people negative.