Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. I am six
Speaker 1: years old and standing next to a gravestone with my
Speaker 1: name on it. The little girl with my name is
Speaker 1: buried here, along with her mom, who was my father's sister,
Speaker 1: and her dad. There were others who died in the
Speaker 1: wreck too, some who were buried here and some who
Speaker 1: are buried at the other cemetery that looks just like
Speaker 1: this one. I cannot keep up with all the dead people.
Speaker 1: I am not sure how many there are, because I
Speaker 1: have never heard anyone list all of their names at once,
Speaker 1: or tick them off on their fingers, one by one.
Speaker 1: I do not ask what happened to the girl, because
Speaker 1: I already know what my father will say, the same
Speaker 1: thing he said when I ask why I have just
Speaker 1: one grandmother the wreck.
Speaker 2: That's Cassandra Jackson, professor of English at the College of
Speaker 2: New Jersey, where she teaches classes about African American literature
Speaker 2: and visual culture. She's the author of several books, most
Speaker 2: recently The Wreck, a Daughter's Memoir of Becoming a Mother.
Speaker 2: Cassandra's is a story of a tragedy that happened before
Speaker 2: she was born, a loss so profound that it seeped
Speaker 2: into every corner of her childhood and her family's life,
Speaker 2: until finally, in the fullness of time, she was able
Speaker 2: to lay it to rest. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
Speaker 2: is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
Speaker 2: the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
Speaker 2: keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1: I grew up and were class black family.
Speaker 3: Everybody in my family.
Speaker 1: The most part it spent their entire lives in Alabama.
Speaker 1: It was a really, in some ways, a really tough
Speaker 1: way for place to grow up in that it felt
Speaker 1: like history was all around us, like we were always
Speaker 1: walking on hallow ground, in part because even though I
Speaker 1: was born after the Civil Rights Movement, the world just
Speaker 1: hadn't changed that much in that space. So I remember
Speaker 1: it as being incredibly oppressive. I remember being very aware
Speaker 1: of what it meant to be black in that space
Speaker 1: where the people who had the power, who had the
Speaker 1: most prestigious jobs, who ran the town were almost exclusively
Speaker 1: white men. And in some ways, it creates this really
Speaker 1: sort of strange idea of what home is when the
Speaker 1: first place that you grow up in is one where
Speaker 1: you are very alien to that place, even though it's
Speaker 1: the place that you're from.
Speaker 2: And you grew up with your mother, your father, and
Speaker 2: a much older sister and brother.
Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah, So I was a very late baby with
Speaker 1: siblings that were already in their teens, so I didn't
Speaker 1: have a chance to get to know them as children.
Speaker 1: They were already sort of like many adults by the
Speaker 1: time I could remember them. My sister did a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff with me when I was a kid, and
Speaker 1: a lot of the things that people sometimes expect moms
Speaker 1: to do, Like she was the one who did my hair,
Speaker 1: the one who, you know, would make a little picnic
Speaker 1: and we'd take it outside in the backyard fresh peaches.
Speaker 3: She was that person.
Speaker 1: And my brother was gone a lot when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, Like he sort of started moving into adulthood,
Speaker 1: I think, at a different rate from my sister, which
Speaker 1: I think is not uncommon, particularly in the part of.
Speaker 3: The stuff that we grew up in.
Speaker 1: So he was already sort of moving out into the
Speaker 1: world even as a teenager. I felt like he was
Speaker 1: like sort of gone in his car all the time.
Speaker 1: You know, my sister, my mother, and my father were
Speaker 1: the people who were present the most in the household.
Speaker 2: Did you feel in any way like an only child,
Speaker 2: given that your sister was how many years older?
Speaker 3: Thirteen years older.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I did feel very much like an only child
Speaker 1: because they moved out before I was even you know,
Speaker 1: in the fifth grade. It was incredibly lonely. I played
Speaker 1: by myself a lot. I played with some of the
Speaker 1: kids in the neighborhood, but it was not the same
Speaker 1: as having another child in the household. I remember being
Speaker 1: alone a lot. I remember being very aware of the
Speaker 1: relationship between my parents in the house because there was
Speaker 1: no other place.
Speaker 3: For my focus to go.
Speaker 1: It's not as though there was like another child there.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it was much more like growing up as
Speaker 1: an only child, and I definitely was really aware of
Speaker 1: my isolation in that way. Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the things about only children, and I say
Speaker 2: this as one myself, or actually as someone who had
Speaker 2: a much older half sister, which is why I asked
Speaker 2: that question, there's a way in which only children or
Speaker 2: people who feel like only children study their parents. And
Speaker 2: I'm wondering what you can tell me about your mother
Speaker 2: from your early memories of her and what she was.
Speaker 3: Like for you.
Speaker 1: She was a big presence in the sense that she
Speaker 1: had very specific ideas about how things should be done and.
Speaker 3: What things should look like.
Speaker 1: She was very obsessed with our house, and our house
Speaker 1: was constantly being redecorated based on things that she saw
Speaker 1: in various magazines, and everything was in this constant state
Speaker 1: of transformation. And it was interesting because no matter how
Speaker 1: much she did it, she was never completely satisfied with
Speaker 1: the result for very long and it became clear that
Speaker 1: the transformation part of it was the point, not the
Speaker 1: end result. And that was largely her entertainment. And it
Speaker 1: was unusual though in the sense that it was sort
Speaker 1: of obsessive. She was also a very anxious person, and
Speaker 1: so one of my memories was of her getting dressed
Speaker 1: on an ordinary morning and she would come out wearing
Speaker 1: one outfit or half of an outfit and say, how
Speaker 1: does this look? And I would say, oh, it looks great,
Speaker 1: and then she would go back to her room and
Speaker 1: then she'd change again, and then she'd come out wearing
Speaker 1: half of another outfit.
Speaker 3: And she would go back and change again.
Speaker 1: So self presentation and having you know, sort of control
Speaker 1: was very important to heart. Some of it was about respectability.
Speaker 1: I think she had grown up in poverty and you know,
Speaker 1: hadn't always had the things that she needed, and so
Speaker 1: she was absolutely meticulous about having control over the way
Speaker 1: she looked when she walked out of the house.
Speaker 2: What did I feel like to you? As the kid, It.
Speaker 1: Felt anxiety producing. It's like a child sometimes you know
Speaker 1: something is wrong and you don't know exactly what it is,
Speaker 1: but you are certain that something's not right. This was
Speaker 1: definitely that thing in that I understood that you weren't
Speaker 1: supposed to change clothes six times before you left the
Speaker 1: house on an ordinary work day, and by the time
Speaker 1: we would leave, she would be in a complete panic
Speaker 1: because of course we would be late, and that lateness
Speaker 1: did not fit with her ideas about respectability. And yet
Speaker 1: at the same time she struggled with just organizing herself
Speaker 1: to get out of the house. And I absorbed a
Speaker 1: lot of her anxiety as she was sort of going
Speaker 1: through these paces in the morning, and I can remember,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of I'd be sitting on the sofa
Speaker 1: Washington o'clock as this was happening in my own anxiety
Speaker 1: getting higher and higher as I.
Speaker 3: Watched her going back and forth.
Speaker 1: As for the transformations, I think that one of the
Speaker 1: ways that it affected me was that my body was
Speaker 1: also a part of it, and that she was not
Speaker 1: satisfied with how I look either. She wanted control over
Speaker 1: everything that I wore, but she was constantly shopping for
Speaker 1: something that would make me look different. She thought it
Speaker 1: was too thin, and she wanted me to be bigger.
Speaker 1: She thought my sister was too big and she wanted
Speaker 1: her to be thinner. And so some of the anxiety
Speaker 1: was really about the fact that I think I understood
Speaker 1: that there was something wrong with me in her eyes,
Speaker 1: and that I didn't know how to address it, something
Speaker 1: kind of unfixable, and I felt like I didn't have
Speaker 1: control over the things that you know, she was disappointed in.
Speaker 2: Tell me about your father.
Speaker 1: I remember him as this very loving father who was
Speaker 1: much more accepting, and yet he really wasn't that present
Speaker 1: in the sense that he drank. He was, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of trying to cope with a lot of grief
Speaker 1: and things he experience in his past. And I think
Speaker 1: that he was self medicating for a good portion of
Speaker 1: my childhood. And he was very susceptible to alcohol as well.
Speaker 1: So you know, if I were to say to somebody
Speaker 1: how much he was drinking, they would say, well, he
Speaker 1: wasn't drinking very much, but very little alcohol could really
Speaker 1: knock him out, and it made it such that it
Speaker 1: was lights out usually during and sometime after dinner, because
Speaker 1: it didn't take a whole lot of alcohol for him
Speaker 1: to fade into a dream like state where he would
Speaker 1: be kind of snoozing in our home, usually in the
Speaker 1: din and so it was pretty normal to walk into
Speaker 1: the den and for him to basically be sitting in
Speaker 1: this like lounge chair, but he's actually like asleep and
Speaker 1: he's dreaming, and I can hear him. I think sometimes,
Speaker 1: you know, I've heard people imagine that the parent who
Speaker 1: is the alcoholic is this you know, horrible person who
Speaker 1: is out doing all of this harm in this very
Speaker 1: sort of vindictive way. But really, in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: he was somebody who was incredibly like sort of loving
Speaker 1: and accepting when he was present with us. He just
Speaker 1: couldn't be present with us.
Speaker 2: He just wanted to check out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he wanted to check out. And it was something
Speaker 1: my parents argued over as well, about his you know, drinking,
Speaker 1: And yet it was difficult because on the one hand,
Speaker 1: they argued about it, but at the same time, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't think either of my parents understood that was alcoholism,
Speaker 1: I think in their minds, because he got up and
Speaker 1: went to work every day, and he was a very
Speaker 1: hard worker and he was very sort of successful at
Speaker 1: the factory where he was working. I think that that
Speaker 1: meant that he couldn't possibly be an alcoholic, because in
Speaker 1: their minds, an alcoholic as somebody who drinks to the
Speaker 1: point where you know they can't go to work. He
Speaker 1: wasn't doing that, but he was the functional alcoholic.
Speaker 2: When Cassandra's a little girl, her father often asks her
Speaker 2: to take a ride to the country. That's what he
Speaker 2: calls it, the country. Her mother goes along for the
Speaker 2: drive as well. These regular outings stand out as unsettling
Speaker 2: and strange.
Speaker 1: Where I grew up, there was this distinct difference between
Speaker 1: living in a town and then the more rural areas
Speaker 1: outside of it. And my father had grown up in.
Speaker 3: One of those really rural.
Speaker 1: Areas, and so we would go to visit people that
Speaker 1: he knew in his childhood. We would go there to
Speaker 1: visit relatives, and we would get there and I would
Speaker 1: meet these older people who in my mind were really
Speaker 1: at the time because I was five, and they would
Speaker 1: stare at me, they would act very oddly sometimes around me.
Speaker 3: They were very interested.
Speaker 1: In my appearance. I remember them trying to feed me constantly,
Speaker 1: Like I would get there and they would say, oh,
Speaker 1: let me go get some cookies, let me go get
Speaker 1: some candy. There was always take lemonade, something that they
Speaker 1: wanted me to eat. And they would often remark about
Speaker 1: how much I looked like my father's family, who died
Speaker 1: before I was born, And they would have these really
Speaker 1: kind of interesting expressions because they were often, I think,
Speaker 1: sort of trying to figure out if the resemblance was
Speaker 1: just a resemblance, or if there was something of the
Speaker 1: occult that was happening in these encounters, right, And so
Speaker 1: in some ways, the whole thing about trying to get
Speaker 1: me to eat was about trying to make sure that
Speaker 1: I was like a real child and not something else.
Speaker 1: And so they would sit there and watch me eat
Speaker 1: whatever it was, and then they would be sort of satisfied, like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's just a resemblance. But they talked about it constantly.
Speaker 1: They would say to me, like, you look so much
Speaker 1: like my father's sister, Maggie Joe, or you look so
Speaker 1: much like Bernice's his mother. And they would say that
Speaker 1: to my father over and over again. They would say, Oh,
Speaker 1: she's just like them, mains, She's just like them. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting because this was one of the things that
Speaker 1: became pretty regular in my childhood when we would do this.
Speaker 3: It happened over and over again, and even as I got.
Speaker 1: Older, people still often responded in that way of feeling
Speaker 1: as though they were trying to figure out or understand
Speaker 1: something about the ways in which you know, there was
Speaker 1: this genetic link between me and the past, and what
Speaker 1: did it mean.
Speaker 2: It also seems like those comments that they would make
Speaker 2: in front of you as a child, they weren't even
Speaker 2: really directed to you. It was almost like you weren't
Speaker 2: even there. They were talking to your parents about them,
Speaker 2: talking to your father about them, they were talking to
Speaker 2: each other about them.
Speaker 3: It's really true.
Speaker 1: And frequently it was if I was an object in
Speaker 1: the room or so than a person, right, And even
Speaker 1: with the staring without any real you know, sort of
Speaker 1: self consciousness about the fact that you were looking at
Speaker 1: another person was related to that in the sense that
Speaker 1: it was something to be addressed and to be talked
Speaker 1: about and to be discussed, but not necessarily with me.
Speaker 2: Do you have any recollection of what that felt like
Speaker 2: at the time.
Speaker 1: I found myself thinking about it a lot, because I
Speaker 1: think it felt different at different times. When I was
Speaker 1: really little, I remember wanting to go home, and I
Speaker 1: knew that we weren't going to stay at these places
Speaker 1: for very long because my father couldn't stand to be
Speaker 1: there for very long either, So we might drive a
Speaker 1: good forty minutes and within ten minutes he's like, well,
Speaker 1: it was nice seeing you, repeatedd back out the door.
Speaker 1: But I do remembering rather nervous and like I was
Speaker 1: supposed to do something and I didn't know what it
Speaker 1: was I.
Speaker 3: Was supposed to do.
Speaker 1: I felt as if I did not really want this
Speaker 1: attention that I was getting any situations, especially when I
Speaker 1: was really small.
Speaker 3: And it didn't make sense to me. I didn't know the.
Speaker 1: People that they thought I resembled. I had never met them,
Speaker 1: and we didn't talk about those people as a family either.
Speaker 2: When you were a child at that point, what did
Speaker 2: you know about your father's family before you were born
Speaker 2: and what had happened to them.
Speaker 1: I knew that there had been a car accident that
Speaker 1: my father always referred to as the wreck when it
Speaker 1: did come up, but we did not talk about it ordinarily.
Speaker 1: Occasionally I would be looking at a photo album and
Speaker 1: maybe point to a relative in that photo album, and
Speaker 1: he would say, Oh.
Speaker 3: She died in the wreck.
Speaker 1: I knew there had been a wreck, I did not
Speaker 1: know where it happened. I did not know when it happened,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't clear on who was in the wreck
Speaker 1: and who survived it and who died. I knew there
Speaker 1: were a lot of people who died, but no one
Speaker 1: ever said to me, this is what happened, this is
Speaker 1: where it happened, this is how it happened, and this
Speaker 1: is how these particular people died. And so it was
Speaker 1: one of those things that I felt like I was
Speaker 1: learning about it kind of like piecemeal. But I had
Speaker 1: a very hard time as a child keeping track of
Speaker 1: all of these people.
Speaker 3: I was too little, I guess, in some ways to
Speaker 3: keep track of it.
Speaker 1: But also we just didn't really talk about it unless
Speaker 1: my father was saying, oh, the wreck, and that was
Speaker 1: the explanation in those two words.
Speaker 2: So did you have a sense as a child that
Speaker 2: you shouldn't bring it up?
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely, I think I understood that there was a
Speaker 1: reason that we weren't talking about this and I think
Speaker 1: I also understood that this was a very painful thing,
Speaker 1: and that in our family you don't talk about painful things,
Speaker 1: and so I figured if they weren't talking about it,
Speaker 1: I wasn't supposed to be talking about it either. And
Speaker 1: I'm not even sure if I knew how to talk
Speaker 1: about it, because at no point was there and open
Speaker 1: enough conversation about it that I would have understood, like
Speaker 1: the language in terms of that kind of conversation about
Speaker 1: grief and loss. And so there was no model by
Speaker 1: which to understand how you talk to someone about what was,
Speaker 1: you know, the worst day in my father's life.
Speaker 2: You also had a grandfather, so Daddy Blewett, it was
Speaker 2: your father's father. He was a presence in your childhoo.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, he was there in the summers usually, And he
Speaker 1: was the only person too who ever really talked about
Speaker 1: the wreck. And he didn't tell me what happened, as
Speaker 1: much as he would repeatedly tell this story about the
Speaker 1: aftermath and an incident he remembered in the hospital of
Speaker 1: someone coming and trying to give him a shot and
Speaker 1: having to be held down when they were giving him
Speaker 1: this shot. And so that one story was really the only.
Speaker 3: Story I ever heard about.
Speaker 1: What happened exactly, and even that wasn't about what happened.
Speaker 3: It was really about the aftermath in the hospital.
Speaker 1: So I knew that he had been in the wreck,
Speaker 1: and you know, he never said very much about when, how, where,
Speaker 1: none of that.
Speaker 3: But he did tell that one story about it over
Speaker 3: and over.
Speaker 1: Again, and it was clear that he was telling that
Speaker 1: story in a repetitive way that suggested trauma. And I
Speaker 1: would listen to him to tell the story over and
Speaker 1: over again, and I felt like I understood how to
Speaker 1: participate in that particular conversation about it, because you know,
Speaker 1: he could be very sort of emphatic when he was
Speaker 1: saying things, and I.
Speaker 3: Would sit there like a little.
Speaker 1: Later and be like, mm hmmmm, that must have been awful,
Speaker 1: like very like responding in ways that I understood how
Speaker 1: to talk about this, because.
Speaker 3: We weren't really talking about loss or emotions.
Speaker 1: He wasn't talking about the fact that his wife had
Speaker 1: died from that accident. He was just telling this story
Speaker 1: about what happened to his body after this accident.
Speaker 2: The way you're describing it makes so much sense to me.
Speaker 2: I mean, trauma is recursive. The mind goes to the
Speaker 2: same place over and over and over again. The story
Speaker 2: doesn't progress until it does if it does, and so
Speaker 2: he was trapped in that story. When he would tell
Speaker 2: you that story, would you welcome it? Were you sort
Speaker 2: of hungry for it because maybe you were going to
Speaker 2: find out a little bit more?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was so hungry for it. It was very
Speaker 1: clear to me that my family was really keeping secrets
Speaker 1: about what had happened, and it felt like being let in,
Speaker 1: you know, it felt like I was being treated as
Speaker 1: if I was somebody who deserved to know. And in
Speaker 1: all the other ways, I felt like with my father
Speaker 1: that that story was not mine, even though it was
Speaker 1: obviously impacting our family in ways that impacted me and
Speaker 1: it was part of my story, I did not feel
Speaker 1: like I could lay claim to it enough to be.
Speaker 3: Able to say, hey, what happened?
Speaker 1: And I think that I performed that sort of role
Speaker 1: with my grandfather because it felt like I had a
Speaker 1: role now, you know, like it felt like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: being told about this, and he's telling me because I'm
Speaker 1: somebody who's supposed to know, and that felt like a
Speaker 1: kind of belonging in a really sort of interesting way.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back when Cassandra's nine years old, her
Speaker 2: mother tells her that one of the people who died
Speaker 2: in the wreck was her father's first wife, a woman
Speaker 2: named will A Deane. This is the first time Cassandra
Speaker 2: hears this name, and the first time she's told her
Speaker 2: dad had been married before her mother. Cassandra's mind begins
Speaker 2: to work overtime, trying to figure out how it's possible
Speaker 2: that there could be something so big about her father's
Speaker 2: past that she didn't know, and what does it mean
Speaker 2: to have not known. She also begins to about her
Speaker 2: older sister, Annette. The two of them look nothing alike,
Speaker 2: which is something that's always commented upon. Maybe she's not
Speaker 2: a full sister, Cassandra wonders, maybe Annette's mom is Willa Deane.
Speaker 1: I remember that experience so well because my mother said
Speaker 1: it so matter of factly, like I'm just looking through
Speaker 1: a photo album I see and I'm like, oh, who
Speaker 1: is this, Oh that's your daddy's first life. And she
Speaker 1: just went back to reading, like I think it was
Speaker 1: like a newspapers, Like she just went back to what
Speaker 1: she was doing. And I felt like somebody had just
Speaker 1: snatched the floor out from U under me, not the rug.
Speaker 1: The whole floor was gone for a moment there because
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, like, if you didn't.
Speaker 3: Tell me this, what else do I not know?
Speaker 1: I just remember it being such an uncomfortable experience, and
Speaker 1: that it raised so many other questions, including about my sister,
Speaker 1: because everywhere we went people remarked on how different we
Speaker 1: look I mean, and it was a constant kind of conversation.
Speaker 1: I was very very thin, my sister tended to be heavy.
Speaker 1: We did not resemble each other in any way. Our
Speaker 1: hair with different colors, like, there was nothing, and people
Speaker 1: are remarked on it all the time, and at no
Speaker 1: point had anybody ever said there's a reason for this.
Speaker 1: At that point, and I thought, well, maybe this is
Speaker 1: the explanation, Maybe this could explain it.
Speaker 3: And I began just sort.
Speaker 1: Of snooping through my parents' things, you know, trying to figure.
Speaker 3: Out who is my sister, Does she have a.
Speaker 1: Different parent, could this woman have been her mother.
Speaker 2: It's funny because snooping comes up so regularly on this podcast.
Speaker 2: There's something about there's something about the deep knowledge, there's
Speaker 2: something you don't know, that there's something that's hidden, there's
Speaker 2: something that's being withheld what other records is there? Then
Speaker 2: you know I'm going to turn into a little child
Speaker 2: detective and figure that out. Tell me about the snooping.
Speaker 1: I go to my parents' room, and I know where
Speaker 1: they keep all of their paperwork, and it's in this
Speaker 1: sort of briefcase that my father received as a gift.
Speaker 1: He worked in a factory and he used for a briefcase.
Speaker 1: So they put all of our paperwork, like birth certificates
Speaker 1: and insurance papers and all this stuff is in it.
Speaker 3: So I go, I pull it out.
Speaker 1: I open it up. There's no lock on it, and
Speaker 1: I'm looking through it and looking through it, and I
Speaker 1: find my sister's birth certificate. And I'm a little kid.
Speaker 1: I don't know how.
Speaker 3: Birth certificates work at this point.
Speaker 1: And I pull out this birth certificate and it's got
Speaker 1: both of my parents' names on it and my sister's name,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, wow, it was so unexpected. I just
Speaker 1: knew it was going to say something else. And I'm
Speaker 1: looking at this piece of paper and almost disappointed because
Speaker 1: I'm so certain that there's something I don't know. I
Speaker 1: thought this would be the key to this missing piece
Speaker 1: of information among many missing pieces of information, and yet
Speaker 1: I still knew something wasn't quite right, and at one
Speaker 1: point I even asked, my sister was my father's first
Speaker 1: wife without your mother? And I remember her just really
Speaker 1: laughing this off. But she must have mentioned it to
Speaker 1: my mother, because it was after that that my mom
Speaker 1: showed up in my room in the middle of the
Speaker 1: night one night and starts telling me in the darkness,
Speaker 1: she does not turn on the light, starts telling me
Speaker 1: the story of a relationship that she had before my
Speaker 1: father that resulted in my sister. I remember being just
Speaker 1: utterly destroyed by it in the moment. It was one
Speaker 1: of these moments when you think it's one thing that
Speaker 1: you don't know, and it turns out there's a whole
Speaker 1: world of things that you don't know, and they're probably
Speaker 1: connected in ways that you don't understand. And it felt
Speaker 1: like such a colossal piece of information to withhold, But
Speaker 1: it also felt a little scary in that part of
Speaker 1: me was thinking, I have so many questions about who
Speaker 1: you are, mean and my mother, but who this person was,
Speaker 1: because I've never met that person. So in my mind
Speaker 1: I had already worked out an explanation of what the
Speaker 1: secret was, and I'm hearing an entirely different one from
Speaker 1: my mother, and then wondering who knows and who doesn't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's one of the first things
Speaker 1: I said. He I was like, well, does she know?
Speaker 3: Does she know this?
Speaker 1: Because given everything that had been said at that point,
Speaker 1: I felt like it was quite possible that she didn't know.
Speaker 1: And it turns out she did know. My mom said, yes,
Speaker 1: she knows, and then as she was leaving, I remember
Speaker 1: saying to her, does my brother know? She didn't answer,
Speaker 1: and I knew then that he didn't know.
Speaker 3: If he did, I think.
Speaker 1: She would have turned around and said he did. And
Speaker 1: then of course I found out much much later that
Speaker 1: he didn't know, and he was so hurt by it all,
Speaker 1: you know, so he was probably in his forties by
Speaker 1: the time he don't know, and he ends up finding
Speaker 1: out because my sister thought he knew, and so she
Speaker 1: mentioned something about a half sibling who was not our
Speaker 1: mine or my brother's sibling, and he did not know
Speaker 1: what she was talking about, and she just assumed that
Speaker 1: if I knew, he knew, and that was not the case.
Speaker 2: You know, it's such an interesting thing with secrets, because
Speaker 2: there are secrets and then there are in a way,
Speaker 2: either the implicit or explicit instructions to people to also
Speaker 2: keep the secret. And it sounds like, I mean, when
Speaker 2: you found out your father knew something, your mother knew something,
Speaker 2: and your sister all knew something that you did not know.
Speaker 2: And then all those years later, your brother finds out
Speaker 2: as a grown man and finds out that all of
Speaker 2: you knew something that he didn't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was really devastated by it.
Speaker 3: Ye and my sister really grew up together.
Speaker 1: They were not that far apart in age, like around
Speaker 1: two years, and so they really spent.
Speaker 3: Their childhood together, and they grew up together.
Speaker 1: And I don't even know if I can completely fathom
Speaker 1: what that must have felt like to him, as opposed
Speaker 1: to what it felt like to me. For that reason,
Speaker 1: because in his mind, this is a secret that they
Speaker 1: kept from them even in their childhood, and I found
Speaker 1: out in childhood.
Speaker 2: The tragedy of the wreck and the avalanche of secrets
Speaker 2: kept in its wake make for an environment that Cassandra
Speaker 2: wants to flee. She starts thinking about leaving home and
Speaker 2: making a life elsewhere. As early as eleven or twelve
Speaker 2: years old.
Speaker 1: I was thinking I'm out of here I'm not saying,
Speaker 1: and there were a whole lot of reasons for that.
Speaker 1: As I said, like, you know, it.
Speaker 3: Felt like a very oppressive place to live for a
Speaker 3: black girl.
Speaker 1: But my house didn't feel like my house either, you know,
Speaker 1: So those feelings of like alienation that I was experiencing,
Speaker 1: I think in the larger community were really matched by
Speaker 1: what was happening in my own household, because it all
Speaker 1: felt like a secret. Most of the people who lived
Speaker 1: outside of our home would never have guessed that my
Speaker 1: father was drinking in the way that he was, that
Speaker 1: he was, you know, sort of engaged in addiction.
Speaker 3: And really unhealthy when and I don't.
Speaker 1: Think that that was something that anyone around us knew
Speaker 1: so much so that I could remember there were quite
Speaker 1: a few teenage boys in the neighborhood who they had
Speaker 1: a problem. They would come and want to talk to
Speaker 1: my dad, and sometimes they were friends with my brother,
Speaker 1: but oftentimes they weren't. They would just come knock on
Speaker 1: the door and say can I talk to mister Jackson?
Speaker 1: And he would go outside and they would talk, and
Speaker 1: he would offer advice, and you know, it was frequently
Speaker 1: about school or helping kids think through their futures, like
Speaker 1: he was an extremely respected person who was pretty much
Speaker 1: completely checked out on us, you know, And I don't
Speaker 1: think I wanted to live with all.
Speaker 3: These secrets anymore.
Speaker 1: It felt like secrets on top of secrets, and I
Speaker 1: didn't feel that I could speak or talk openly about
Speaker 1: anything that was happening in my household. Like I think
Speaker 1: I really understood that I was not supposed to do that.
Speaker 1: And I think that in my mind, the solution was
Speaker 1: go somewhere else, so you can be somebody else, you know,
Speaker 1: that you could separate from the space, and that that
Speaker 1: would be enough to create a kind of launching point
Speaker 1: for like a different life.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 2: Cassandra goes off to Spelman College, a black women's college
Speaker 2: in Atlanta. At Spelman, for the first time in her life,
Speaker 2: she sees all these different possibilities for who she might
Speaker 2: become and undergoes several important shifts in her identity. She
Speaker 2: starts to imagine herself as a writer a professor. She
Speaker 2: also comes to realize that her background is quite different
Speaker 2: from the young women surrounding her.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the first time I was in a
Speaker 1: space where majority of people who were around me had
Speaker 1: parents who were black professionals, and many of them had
Speaker 1: been a college educated for generations, where I was first generation.
Speaker 1: So I felt myself different in those ways in terms
Speaker 1: of class, and yet there were other ways of which,
Speaker 1: like it just made all of these you know, sort
Speaker 1: of new things seem possible. The other thing I think
Speaker 1: though that happened there was seeing other people's family lives.
Speaker 3: You know, when you go to college and.
Speaker 1: You're staying in a dorm and you were hearing people
Speaker 1: making phone calls to their family, or you're seeing little
Speaker 1: care packages that their family sent that they want to
Speaker 1: show you or share with you. And I remember thinking like,
Speaker 1: who are these people?
Speaker 3: You know, they keep saying.
Speaker 1: I love you to their parents, and I think their
Speaker 1: parents are saying it back to them. And I'm seeing
Speaker 1: like these little cards and love notes and these care packages.
Speaker 1: And we were not a family that said I love you.
Speaker 1: We were not a family where there was hugging and touching.
Speaker 1: We were very much, you know, kind of a family
Speaker 1: that didn't communicate a lot and certainly didn't have these
Speaker 1: like intimate conversations.
Speaker 3: So I would hear these.
Speaker 1: Young women calling their family and saying.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's such a best day.
Speaker 1: Well this happened, and thinking, why are you telling her that,
Speaker 1: like you really need to grow up?
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like it never occurred to me in that first
Speaker 1: year that there.
Speaker 3: Was something normal about that.
Speaker 1: I was like, what happened to all these people that
Speaker 1: they can't seem to cope with their lives with at
Speaker 1: having these conversations where they say I love you to
Speaker 1: their parents and it was that alien to me. And
Speaker 1: I think that it was when I began to recognize
Speaker 1: that there were a whole lot of people living in
Speaker 1: relationship to their family in a way that was completely.
Speaker 3: Foreign to me that I started thinking.
Speaker 1: Oh, so there were actually a whole other ways of
Speaker 1: being in the world, Like not everybody is carrying around all.
Speaker 3: Of these things that I'm carrying around.
Speaker 1: And all of these conversations and questions that could never
Speaker 1: be said aloud. That not everyone is carrying that around.
Speaker 1: There are people who were actually having these conversations where
Speaker 1: they're expressing these intimate parts of their lives and they're
Speaker 1: talking about their feelings and they're vulnerable with their own parents.
Speaker 1: I had never seen my mother cry, I'd never seen
Speaker 1: my father cry like there was no way in which
Speaker 1: I was really privy to their internal lives in that way. Instead,
Speaker 1: I got glimpses of things that.
Speaker 3: I wasn't supposed to see. And when I say wasn't
Speaker 3: supposed to I mean things that my parents wouldn't have
Speaker 3: wanted me to be aware of.
Speaker 1: So, you know, I was aware that my father was
Speaker 1: often having dreams when he was drinking, in which he
Speaker 1: was constantly trying to save people from something in these strains.
Speaker 1: And the main reason I was aware of it is
Speaker 1: because he was saying my name frequently during these dreams,
Speaker 1: or at least I thought he was saying my name,
Speaker 1: but frequently he was saying the name of the child
Speaker 1: that I was named after, and this was his niece
Speaker 1: who died in the wreck. And so even when I
Speaker 1: got glimpses of my parents, you know, sort of internal lives,
Speaker 1: it wasn't something we could talk about because I was
Speaker 1: never supposed to see it in the first place. And
Speaker 1: so being this person who had gone away to this
Speaker 1: other space was really really important to me because it
Speaker 1: gave me other ways of living that were entirely new
Speaker 1: to me, so new to me that at times these
Speaker 1: beautiful things were a little repulsive because they made me uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, whenever my parents would see
Speaker 1: couples expressing public affection, they would kind of recoil from it,
Speaker 1: and my mother would always make a point of saying that,
Speaker 1: you know, he probably beats her as soon as they
Speaker 1: leave here, you know, like that's that's the only reason
Speaker 1: they would be doing that, is that this person was
Speaker 1: doing some terrible.
Speaker 3: To the other person in private.
Speaker 1: That's the only reason they would be expressing affection in public.
Speaker 1: And it was all very strange to me having this
Speaker 1: window into other people's lives.
Speaker 2: During that period of time. Where does the wreck reside
Speaker 2: inside you? You're coming into your own your meeting mentors
Speaker 2: and professors and role models, and your world is expanding
Speaker 2: at a really rapid rate in terms of like just
Speaker 2: seeing the possibilities and different ways that families live during
Speaker 2: those years, you know, as a college student, as a
Speaker 2: young adult, where does that history live inside of you?
Speaker 2: Is there still the hunger? Is there still the wanting
Speaker 2: to know more? Or does it subside for a while.
Speaker 1: I think that both of those things happened, And what
Speaker 1: I mean by that is I did become more outward
Speaker 1: thinking because I was seeing, you know, the way that
Speaker 1: other people's families operated. But it made me long for
Speaker 1: more intimacy with my own family.
Speaker 3: Part of that was this past that we didn't talk about.
Speaker 1: So on the one hand, I found myself becoming much
Speaker 1: more demanding of my mother, especially in terms of wanting
Speaker 1: her to start saying I love you.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: This is this is an actual conversation that we have
Speaker 1: to have when I come home from school and I'm like,
Speaker 1: how about you never say this? Her response is because
Speaker 1: you already know that. And I had to explain to
Speaker 1: her why expressing that is important to me. And yet
Speaker 1: I think there's some part of me that also understood
Speaker 1: that if you can't even say I love you, then
Speaker 1: you have no avenues.
Speaker 3: To talk about the past.
Speaker 1: So in some ways, this longing for intimacy was also
Speaker 1: a longing to be let into this secret history that
Speaker 1: I didn't know about.
Speaker 2: Also, during these college years when she's a junior, Cassandra
Speaker 2: meets Reginald, the man who will become her husband.
Speaker 1: We met in a philosophy because very early on we
Speaker 1: were having these very intimate conversations about our childhoods.
Speaker 3: And I mean, I know that that's how I fell
Speaker 3: in love.
Speaker 1: That relationship was a place where I could have these
Speaker 1: conversations where I was really sort of reflecting on these
Speaker 1: very personal and cultural and familial experiences, and he didn't
Speaker 1: turn away from any of it.
Speaker 2: As Cassandra becomes more involved in the academic world as
Speaker 2: well as more involved with Reginald, she engages in the
Speaker 2: adult version of snooping research. In her research, she encounters
Speaker 2: the term replacement child, and she comes to realize that
Speaker 2: by giving her the same name as the child who
Speaker 2: died in the wreck, her parents had in some ways
Speaker 2: placed this loss directly upon her. When Cassandra and Reginald
Speaker 2: decide to try to have a child of their own,
Speaker 2: something which it turns out isn't simple and easy for them,
Speaker 2: Cassandra feels an especially intense longing to know more about
Speaker 2: her family history.
Speaker 1: I think that it really struck me in that moment,
Speaker 1: as we were trying and failing to get pregnant, that
Speaker 1: there was something about legacy that was really important to me.
Speaker 3: To be able to pass on. And it's interesting.
Speaker 1: Because I would have had a hard time expressing in
Speaker 1: words at the time, but what began to happen as
Speaker 1: we were trying is I found myself thinking more and
Speaker 1: more about genetic legacy and this resemblance that was so
Speaker 1: meaningful to so many other people in my life, and
Speaker 1: yet understanding that it's quite possible that we were not
Speaker 1: going to be able to have a child, and trying.
Speaker 4: To put together the pieces of that past felt really
Speaker 4: urgent in that moment, because on the one hand, it
Speaker 4: felt like I would at some point want to know
Speaker 4: this stuff in order to pass on to a child,
Speaker 4: like I would want to be able to share a
Speaker 4: family history in some way.
Speaker 3: But it also.
Speaker 1: Felt like I was in some ways trying to create
Speaker 1: an extension of our family in this way that I
Speaker 1: was created. So I guess it made me recognize something
Speaker 1: about the way in which reproduction was often connected to
Speaker 1: certain ideas about what survival looks like, especially for black people.
Speaker 1: My father could not talk to me, you know, about
Speaker 1: that accident, and yet he had made me I existed
Speaker 1: because of the accident, and there was a way in
Speaker 1: which he was creating the future even when he couldn't
Speaker 1: fully talk about the past, and it was all still connected.
Speaker 1: I was an extension of that, and it made me
Speaker 1: think a great deal, probably almost obsessively at times about
Speaker 1: these ancestors that I had never known, and particularly my
Speaker 1: father's mother and his sister, and that you know, they
Speaker 1: were the ones that people all that she looks just
Speaker 1: like them, and you know, people would look at my
Speaker 1: face and clearly be seeing somebody else ohm I had
Speaker 1: never known, and so it felt like I needed to
Speaker 1: at the very least know what happened to them. I
Speaker 1: knew a few stories about them, because when our extended
Speaker 1: family would get together when I was a child, which
Speaker 1: is usually funerals, but when our extended family would come
Speaker 1: to visit, all they did was tell stories about their
Speaker 1: mother mostly, and they would be these just incredible stories
Speaker 1: about her sort of heroism, and all the stories were
Speaker 1: about her really sort of defending her children against you know,
Speaker 1: Jim Crow, segregation, racism, And so I felt like I
Speaker 1: needed to know more than I knew, because I knew
Speaker 1: very very little. I knew about the resemblance, obviously, and
Speaker 1: that was about it. And it felt like whether or
Speaker 1: not I had a child, and whether or not that
Speaker 1: was a logical childlie. It felt like I need to
Speaker 1: know this. This is my story too, and I need
Speaker 1: to know it. The problem was my mother didn't think so.
Speaker 2: During this time, Cassandra is on two parallel journeys that
Speaker 2: are deeply entwined. The first is into the complex and
Speaker 2: harrowing world of assisted reproduction. She and Reginald are determined
Speaker 2: to do absolutely everything they can to have biological children.
Speaker 2: They go through IVF cycle after IVF cycle, their hopes
Speaker 2: dashed again and again. At the same time, her powerful
Speaker 2: desire to know more about the relatives who died than
Speaker 2: the wreck becomes something she can no longer pack away.
Speaker 2: She sends for their death records, which include five names
Speaker 2: Bernice Jackson, Willa Deine Jackson, Maggie Joe Ray, Robert Ray,
Speaker 2: and her namesake, Cassandra Ray, along with the dates of
Speaker 2: their deaths. Sandra is startled to realize that much of
Speaker 2: the information on the death records isn't accurate. For instance,
Speaker 2: her grandmother and her father's first wife are listed as
Speaker 2: having been employed as domestics, and they were not employed
Speaker 2: as domestics, had never been employed as domestics. It was
Speaker 2: all anyone could think a black woman in Alabama could
Speaker 2: have done at the time.
Speaker 1: I felt like at that point, when I get the
Speaker 1: death certificates, there's stuff written on them, and it's been
Speaker 1: marked out, and there are all these ways in which
Speaker 1: I'm realizing that this record is not just inaccurate, but
Speaker 1: was done in a way that would suggest that these
Speaker 1: people's lives don't matter very much. And you know, the
Speaker 1: one thing that I think I learned from those that
Speaker 1: I think was really important was looking at the dates
Speaker 1: and realizing how long the dying went on, because it's
Speaker 1: not as though, you know, there was a wreck and
Speaker 1: everybody died instantly. You know, you've got a child who
Speaker 1: dies on site. You've got people arrive at a hospital
Speaker 1: alive and die after. You've got another person who has
Speaker 1: the surgery that afternoon.
Speaker 3: Even the accident happens in the.
Speaker 1: Morning, the surgery and then dies after that one and
Speaker 1: another person who was retent days and it was overwhelming,
Speaker 1: I think to look at those death certificates and understand
Speaker 1: that this was something that was happening in time right, that.
Speaker 3: It happened in a place.
Speaker 1: And I realized from the death certificates as well that
Speaker 1: I didn't understand the circumstances of the accident in terms
Speaker 1: of like I didn't even know where my relatives were living.
Speaker 1: The death certificates indicated that some of them were just
Speaker 1: visiting when this happened to them, and so I realized
Speaker 1: them It's like I have to go home because the
Speaker 1: only person who can really sort of fill in the
Speaker 1: blanks in the story is there in Alabama.
Speaker 3: I need to talk to my dad.
Speaker 1: When I had tried to talk to him over the
Speaker 1: phone about what happened, it was really hard for him
Speaker 1: to talk about. He could give me a certain amount
Speaker 1: of information for a certain amount of time, and he
Speaker 1: would stop. And the last time that he had stopped,
Speaker 1: he had said to me, you know, it was in
Speaker 1: the newspaper.
Speaker 3: And I remember thinking, like, what do you mean it
Speaker 3: was in the newspaper and he said, no, it was
Speaker 3: on the front page of the newspaper.
Speaker 1: And he's like, this was a really big accident, and
Speaker 1: he kept saying it was in the newspaper. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't know how you would get the newspapers, but
Speaker 1: you could get the newspaper.
Speaker 3: And I thought, I know how to get a newspaper.
Speaker 3: I'm an academic.
Speaker 1: If I could do anything, I can do research. I
Speaker 1: was like, I have to go to Alabama and find
Speaker 1: out the secret of what happened there. Yeah, I got
Speaker 1: on a plane and I went down there, and I
Speaker 1: think that in the beginning, I really thought but that
Speaker 1: I would be able to have the revival conversations with
Speaker 1: my father over the phone and a lot of this.
Speaker 1: Neither of us had the practice talking about any of
Speaker 1: this that we would have needed to be able to
Speaker 1: have like really productive conversations about it. And I get there,
Speaker 1: and I get up the next morning and I'm on
Speaker 1: my way to the library and he's finishing up, picking
Speaker 1: breakfast and cleaning up, and he says, oh, wait, mine, honey,
Speaker 1: I'm going to take you down there. And I remember thinking, what, No,
Speaker 1: I thought the whole point of me going to look
Speaker 1: at the newspapers was so that you wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: relive this experiences what I was thinking.
Speaker 3: But it was very clear to me that he.
Speaker 1: Wanted to do this with me, and he said, oh, no,
Speaker 1: I'll drive you down there, and we go down there
Speaker 1: to the library together.
Speaker 2: It's important to know here that your father had stopped drinking.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, he is like a different person at this point,
Speaker 1: and I think that his life could change pretty dramatically
Speaker 1: since you know, the time when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: in the sense that he had started going to church more.
Speaker 1: He had become a leader in that church, and it
Speaker 1: was around that time that he just really stopped drinking,
Speaker 1: and it made him into just an incredibly different person,
Speaker 1: Like suddenly he's present and he's like, Oh, yeah, I'm.
Speaker 3: Gonna drive, I'm gonna take you, I'm gonna do this
Speaker 3: with you.
Speaker 1: And I think part of what was so scary for
Speaker 1: my mom about this was that I think she was
Speaker 1: concerned that him revisiting his grief in this way might
Speaker 1: snatch him back to drinking, because I do think that
Speaker 1: the drinking was a primary way in which he coped
Speaker 1: with what had happened, and it was a way of
Speaker 1: just turning everything off.
Speaker 3: I think she was really worried that.
Speaker 1: He would start drinking again if he was really sort
Speaker 1: of faced with that tragedy again.
Speaker 2: So what happens in the library?
Speaker 1: To go to the library, and it was such a
Speaker 1: strange experience because you know, I'm at home in library,
Speaker 1: you know, like I know what I'm doing in those spaces,
Speaker 1: but this felt scary to me and that I know
Speaker 1: what I'm looking for, but I don't know what it
Speaker 1: looks like, right, Like, I don't know if we're looking
Speaker 1: for something that's like a small column on an accident
Speaker 1: that happened, or if we're you know, looking for something bigger.
Speaker 1: And what happens is we're using a machine where you've
Speaker 1: got to kind of scroll through the newspapers to get
Speaker 1: to the daily paper that has the.
Speaker 3: Accident in it.
Speaker 1: And it was a really troubling experience in that you
Speaker 1: are completely engulfed in another time, and these newspapers really
Speaker 1: bring what saigation looked like at that time in Alabama
Speaker 1: to life. So we get to this page, but by
Speaker 1: the time we get to it, I've seen about three
Speaker 1: dozen articles with the title that's a Negro prowler, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there is no good reason that you're in a newspaper
Speaker 1: in you know, Alabama in nineteen sixty if you're black.
Speaker 3: Right, Like, you don't want to be in that newspaper.
Speaker 1: And so you begin to realize all of these customs
Speaker 1: white supremacy are present in the newspaper. And so that's
Speaker 1: the context within which I encounter this article. And so
Speaker 1: it's on the front page the day that it happens,
Speaker 1: but the paper came out in the evening back then,
Speaker 1: and so the first story is a little bit shorter
Speaker 1: than we get to the second story and it's a
Speaker 1: little bit longer, and there's all these pictures and they
Speaker 1: are devastating vehicles melded together. I can see my ancestor's
Speaker 1: shoes that have come off in this horrible wreck. And
Speaker 1: I'm trying to read the articles and my father is
Speaker 1: reading them at the same time, because I'm realizing he
Speaker 1: has never read these before.
Speaker 3: Right, he was at the hospital watching.
Speaker 1: His family die, so he was not reading about this accident,
Speaker 1: and so he's reading these things for the first time,
Speaker 1: just like I am. And I'm feeling like he's kind
Speaker 1: of adjusting in some ways to nineteen sixty way faster
Speaker 1: than me because he lived through it. But I can't
Speaker 1: get past the first part of the article because I
Speaker 1: noticed that the names of the white victims in the
Speaker 1: accident have to be mentioned first, like that's the custom, right,
Speaker 1: and they get a moniker, so it's like mister and
Speaker 1: missus so and so, and then black people's names have
Speaker 1: to be listed after all the white people have been listed.
Speaker 1: They don't get a moniker, so it's just a name
Speaker 1: and then a comma and the word negro behind them.
Speaker 1: And I'm supposed to be this expert in like race
Speaker 1: in the United States. I've written books about this, and
Speaker 1: I am floored by this in the sense that you're
Speaker 1: reading about how your family died, and you're at the
Speaker 1: same time recognizing all these ways in which their humanity
Speaker 1: is denied even in the telling of what happened to them.
Speaker 3: And then I quickly.
Speaker 1: See these accounts of the wreck, and you know, my
Speaker 1: father stands up at one point and he says, they've
Speaker 1: got this all wrong. They dodn't got it all wrong.
Speaker 1: And at this point he had already told me how
Speaker 1: the accident had happened. But the account that's in the
Speaker 1: newspaper is clearly suggesting that the problem is these you know,
Speaker 1: Negro drivers, and when the accident happened, my uncle was
Speaker 1: in the accident, he's like driving a new Pontiac. And
Speaker 1: there's clearly this idea, and they make a point of saying,
Speaker 1: and he was driving a new Pontiac Like it's very
Speaker 1: like biased in the sense that if an accident happens
Speaker 1: between a white person and a black person and it's
Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen, you're in Alabama, it's the black person's fault.
Speaker 3: It does not matter what.
Speaker 1: Happened because black people are supposed to get out of
Speaker 1: the way of white people, so no matter what happens,
Speaker 1: it's the black person's fault. And my father knew what
Speaker 1: had happened, and he knew the account was.
Speaker 3: Not correct because his mother had.
Speaker 1: Lived for ten days and he remembered her telling him
Speaker 1: exactly what happened and telling him he needed.
Speaker 3: To remember it because they would tell a different one day.
Speaker 1: And just sort of recognizing all these ways and when
Speaker 1: which all these just humiliations that were part of the
Speaker 1: way in which the newspaper operated because it adheres to
Speaker 1: all of these customs. So the next thing that we
Speaker 1: were trying to do, after we go through all of
Speaker 1: the articles, and there's quite a few of them, we
Speaker 1: start looking for the obituaries because I was trying to
Speaker 1: understand something about all of these funerals, because you know,
Speaker 1: he then had to basically bury five people.
Speaker 5: How old was he He would be about twenty five
Speaker 5: at the time, and he buries his wife first, but
Speaker 5: you know, there are other family members who are waiting
Speaker 5: for other family to arrive for certain funerals.
Speaker 1: So all this to say, though, is that we can't
Speaker 1: find the obituaries while we're sitting in the library. And finally,
Speaker 1: while we're looking for them, there's like one of those
Speaker 1: like library dudes, these guys who like they hang out
Speaker 1: and read all newspapers in the library all the time.
Speaker 3: Them.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know what exactly they're doing them,
Speaker 1: but they.
Speaker 3: Live in the library.
Speaker 1: And there was a guy like that.
Speaker 3: He was sitting back there.
Speaker 1: He was back there the entire time we were there,
Speaker 1: and he had not made a sound, even when my
Speaker 1: father was saying out loud, they've got it all wrong,
Speaker 1: they got it all wrong, like he had said nothing.
Speaker 1: And he looks over at us and he says, excuse me.
Speaker 1: He actually begins with I don't want to offend y'all
Speaker 1: or nothing, and I was like, oh god, this is
Speaker 1: not going to go all already. He said, are you
Speaker 1: looking for the obituaries of people who are African American?
Speaker 1: And we said yes, and he said, well, you're not
Speaker 1: going to find them in the obituary section because they
Speaker 1: didn't print black people's obituaries in the section where white
Speaker 1: people's obituaries were. They had to be printed on a
Speaker 1: separate page. And it only came out in a column.
Speaker 3: Called News about Negroes that.
Speaker 1: Came out once a week and my father says, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: like the guy had said, Oh, they moved, you know,
Speaker 1: they changed the peanut butterial at the grocery story.
Speaker 5: It's like, oh yeah, it was like.
Speaker 1: That wasn't it. And I'm just sitting there like you
Speaker 1: have got to be hitting me, Like you couldn't even
Speaker 1: print a black person's obituary next to a white person's obituary,
Speaker 1: and yet you claim to be a news source about
Speaker 1: an accident that black people were in.
Speaker 3: You know, it said so much.
Speaker 1: About how that world operated, in the ways in which
Speaker 1: sort of journalism was both a reflection of that world
Speaker 1: but was also creating and participating in segregation, in white supremacy.
Speaker 3: And so we go to the column News about.
Speaker 1: Negroes, and it shocked me because it's basically a column
Speaker 1: that was written by a black woman, and it had
Speaker 1: every single thing that could have happened to a black
Speaker 1: person that was good or bad in it. And for
Speaker 1: the most part, though, it read like a society column. Oh,
Speaker 1: such and such, we'll be visiting the so and sos
Speaker 1: this week, you know, And it was the only part
Speaker 1: of the newspaper where black people had titles. So it'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, Colonel, Lieutenant so and so was opposed
Speaker 1: to just such and such negro It would have all
Speaker 1: the weddings, all the church socials, everything crammed into this
Speaker 1: tiny column. And at the very end of it, it
Speaker 1: would have funeral announcements. And that was how we were
Speaker 1: able to locate the obituaries and so that I could
Speaker 1: understand the sequence of funerals that my father had to
Speaker 1: attend and basically arrange as well. And so, yeah, it
Speaker 1: was all in a little section called news about Negroes.
Speaker 1: And like I said, like I'm supposed to be some
Speaker 1: sort of expert, and you recognize that there's something about
Speaker 1: so much of this history that has been actively repressed
Speaker 1: that when I go out and I get talks and
Speaker 1: this comes up, most people are pretty stunned. And it's
Speaker 1: hard to believe. It wasn't that long No, it just
Speaker 1: wasn't that long ago.
Speaker 2: I'm imagining like the experience, you know all of this
Speaker 2: as an academic, as an author. You're sitting there as
Speaker 2: a daughter and a member of a family in the
Speaker 2: town that you grew up in, looking at this nineteen
Speaker 2: sixties newspaper. It makes it so incredibly stark and personal.
Speaker 1: So personal because it hurt to see my family's names
Speaker 1: not just without monikers, but also this common negro because
Speaker 1: the point of it was to make sure that no
Speaker 1: white person picked up the newspaper and thought that blew
Speaker 1: with Jackson was the one that they know, right, like, oh.
Speaker 3: No, it's just a Negro.
Speaker 1: And of course half the information is wrong too, like
Speaker 1: there's biographical mistakes or other ways in which they make mistakes,
Speaker 1: plenty of them, but they don't make any mistakes when
Speaker 1: it comes to white supremacy. And so yeah, it was
Speaker 1: incredibly painful. It was also I think very painful for
Speaker 1: my father, though, to see the accident reported in the
Speaker 1: way that it was.
Speaker 2: What was it like to then have had that shared
Speaker 2: experience with your father? Was there a shift in your
Speaker 2: family in your sense of the secret is no longer
Speaker 2: a secret? There's this shared kind of uneersing of it.
Speaker 2: What was that like for you?
Speaker 1: It was meaningful in ways that would have seemed unimaginable
Speaker 1: to me before that day. And I think what I
Speaker 1: mean by that is that it opened up this shared
Speaker 1: space that allowed for me to be able to ask
Speaker 1: questions about his experience.
Speaker 3: It was as if this idea of sort.
Speaker 1: Of sitting here and reading about it together, and his
Speaker 1: willingness to relive it in that moment in that way
Speaker 1: with me as a witness to that that felt like
Speaker 1: a new kind of bond between us for sure, and
Speaker 1: that me reading those papers in this way is like
Speaker 1: completely freshed, like never seeing any of this before and
Speaker 1: then recognizing it.
Speaker 3: Wait, this is.
Speaker 1: Also fresh to him, and it clearly took him back
Speaker 1: into the past in a way that was different from
Speaker 1: the way in which I was experiencing it, but it
Speaker 1: was simultaneous, like we were there together reliving this, and
Speaker 1: it allowed me to be able to experience that with him,
Speaker 1: but also to be able to ask questions that I
Speaker 1: had spent my whole life afraid of asking. And knowing
Speaker 1: that I could ask that question and that he would
Speaker 1: not fall apart and I would not fall apart, that
Speaker 1: we would still be whole at the end of.
Speaker 3: The day, that felt like a completely.
Speaker 1: New possibility to me, because you know, when you spent
Speaker 1: your whole life tiptoeing around secrets and not talking about things,
Speaker 1: it feels like if you broach the subject that that
Speaker 1: will be enough to destroy all of you, that you
Speaker 1: will all sort of go up in flames if someone
Speaker 1: brings up something that hurts. And we got in the
Speaker 1: car and we drove home together, and it felt like
Speaker 1: I knew him in a way that I hadn't known
Speaker 1: him before, and that it wasn't accidental, that it was
Speaker 1: very purposeful because.
Speaker 3: He just didn't have to come with me that day.
Speaker 3: It felt like such a gift, like such a gift
Speaker 3: that he would.
Speaker 1: Go there with me, do this with me, experience this
Speaker 1: with me in this way, and that we could.
Speaker 3: Trust that we would still be.
Speaker 1: There together at the end of it.
Speaker 6: And that felt very new, And I will always be
Speaker 6: really grateful for having had that experience with him.
Speaker 2: Very shortly after this extraordinary experience with her father, something
Speaker 2: else extraordinary happens. After several IVF attempts, on the fifth try,
Speaker 2: Cassandra becomes pregnant. She and Reginald have a daughter, and
Speaker 2: just a couple of years later they have another. It's
Speaker 2: almost as if the excavation of her legacy allowed her
Speaker 2: to continue it. But when Cassandra's daughters are seven and four,
Speaker 2: her father, who has that cancer for some time so
Speaker 2: it comes to his illness. She is heartbroken. Of course,
Speaker 2: but feels grateful that he did get the chance to
Speaker 2: know and spend time with his granddaughters.
Speaker 1: I think about talk about gifts him being able to
Speaker 1: spend those like last days. We just happened to be
Speaker 1: there visiting when he was dying. You know, when we
Speaker 1: got there, he's like playing with the kids, And we
Speaker 1: get there on a Tuesday, and he dies the following Tuesday.
Speaker 1: And I remember thinking that what a gift it was
Speaker 1: that he got to spend his last days with them,
Speaker 1: and that they were there and had this chance to
Speaker 1: say goodbye. Because we don't live in the same place.
Speaker 1: You expect to get a phone call, and it was
Speaker 1: so incredible that we were there and there was this
Speaker 1: opportunity to say goodbye, and to know that you're saying goodbye.
Speaker 2: And in a way, I guess to be saying the
Speaker 2: best kind of goodbye is it has to be goodbye,
Speaker 2: which is that it's all been said, it's all been expressed.
Speaker 3: Oh definitely.
Speaker 1: One of the last conversations I had with him was
Speaker 1: about the book that I was writing, and to be
Speaker 1: able to say that and to know that that was
Speaker 1: what he wanted to was also incredibly sort of freeing
Speaker 1: as a writer to have a parent basically sort of
Speaker 1: give you their blessing in writing.
Speaker 3: About the ways.
Speaker 1: That you experienced your life with them.
Speaker 2: Here's Cassandra reading one more passage from her powerful and
Speaker 2: beautifully written memoir The Wreck.
Speaker 1: I will tell my daughter that the body is a
Speaker 1: story that does not end with the body. That we
Speaker 1: carry others from room to room on our backs, calling
Speaker 1: out the names of our dead and our sleep, and
Speaker 1: that this is why I have given her a new
Speaker 1: name of her own.
Speaker 3: I will teach her the other names in due time.
Speaker 2: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacur is
Speaker 2: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 2: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 2: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 2: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 2: eight Secret zero number zero. You can also find me
Speaker 2: on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to
Speaker 2: know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check
Speaker 2: out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
Speaker 2: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 2: your favorite shows.