Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. In fact,
Speaker 1: I am consumed by the whole conundrum of being a
Speaker 1: child and a parent, the spiritual hurt of absentee parents,
Speaker 1: the way that parents have complicated lives before having children,
Speaker 1: the parents one thinks one has, the parents one might
Speaker 1: wish to have had, The way that family members go
Speaker 1: missing on each other, And the way, no matter how
Speaker 1: kindly a family thinks, it is bonded by hardship. Parents
Speaker 1: and children sometimes become more intimately known by strangers than
Speaker 1: by one another, and more children don't know their parents
Speaker 1: or deals. That's rich Benjamin political analyst, cultural anthropologist, speaker,
Speaker 1: and author of Searching for White Topia, An Improbable Journey
Speaker 1: into the Heart of White America. We which is is
Speaker 1: a story of silence within a family, the kind of
Speaker 1: silence that is like a blanket, muffling every potential question,
Speaker 1: thrown over every curiosity, until there are no more questions.
Speaker 1: There is no more curiosity. But when an inquisitive child
Speaker 1: evolves into a deeply thoughtful adult, a journalist, there comes
Speaker 1: a time when the need to know and understand becomes
Speaker 1: more powerful than the silence itself. I'm Danny Shapiro, and
Speaker 1: this is family secrets, secrets that are kept from us,
Speaker 1: the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from ourselves. I grew up mostly in a suburb
Speaker 1: of Washington, d C. Called the Festa Maryland, and it
Speaker 1: was so monochrome that one of the people who went
Speaker 1: to high school years before I did was called Darren
Speaker 1: Starr And who came up with a script called Potomac
Speaker 1: two oh eight five four, which is the suburb I
Speaker 1: grew up with. But Hollywood studio executives didn't want it
Speaker 1: to be about Maryland, and so he changed his script
Speaker 1: and he called it Beverly Hills nine to one oh.
Speaker 1: So that gives the kind of sense of where I
Speaker 1: grew up and how I grew up a suburb of Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. But we also moved around quite a bit
Speaker 1: because of where my father's work took me. I have
Speaker 1: a twin sister, an older sister, and an older brother
Speaker 1: in my twin and I we are the youngest in
Speaker 1: the family. What was your mother like the mother of
Speaker 1: your childhood? The mother of my childhood was very fierce
Speaker 1: and determined. She was stern. My friends at the time
Speaker 1: were required to call her Mrs Benjamin. And sometimes if
Speaker 1: you asked her something and you replied, you didn't just
Speaker 1: say yes, because then she would quit yes dog, cat monkey,
Speaker 1: and that was your cue to say yes mom or
Speaker 1: yes mother. So that being said, she had to be
Speaker 1: attentive to me because I had a blood disorder called
Speaker 1: sickle cell anemia, so we spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: going to the doctor together. A lot of conversations were had,
Speaker 1: but also a lot of silences. Even though we'd spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time going to medical doctors, there were
Speaker 1: no exact stories at all ever told about her past
Speaker 1: when I was in grade school and when we commuted
Speaker 1: to the blood doctors together. But there was a fierceness
Speaker 1: I remember of her protectiveness to me, the way she
Speaker 1: wanted me to be batt already, the way I always
Speaker 1: fell uh survivor mentality in her, and I couldn't understand
Speaker 1: what it was or why it is. I just assumed
Speaker 1: it was medical that she wanted me to survive this
Speaker 1: blood disorder because when I was born, one and four
Speaker 1: children would not survive this disease, and the life expectancy
Speaker 1: for me at the time would have been forty years old.
Speaker 1: If I were lucky. How long was that period of
Speaker 1: time of that kind of fear about your health? How
Speaker 1: long did that last? It lasts to this day, but
Speaker 1: at the time, you know, it's lasting in my childhood.
Speaker 1: It's kind of really creeping up into every dynamic of
Speaker 1: our relationship. And sometimes if I don't return my mother's
Speaker 1: call soon enough, or if she suspects something in my voice,
Speaker 1: such as she suspects I might have an infection, it
Speaker 1: returns me to that six year old self where my
Speaker 1: mother is saying, what did you do to deserve to
Speaker 1: be sick? Or oh, my goodness, are you really calling
Speaker 1: me from an emergency room and not letting me know.
Speaker 1: I remember, as a full grown at all, I went
Speaker 1: hiking in Montana and I caught walking pneumonia and with
Speaker 1: they also the altitude of the high kick. It kind
Speaker 1: of triggered this medical crisis. And then my mother and
Speaker 1: I are having the same conversations and dynamic that we
Speaker 1: had when I was a young boy. Just lives inside
Speaker 1: the relationship lives inside both of you. And tell me
Speaker 1: about your father, the father of your childhood, the father
Speaker 1: of my childhood was very breezy, very effusive. People loved him.
Speaker 1: People wanted to spend time around him. He worked extremely hard,
Speaker 1: it was extremely generous. He was ebulent, and we often
Speaker 1: joked that if you wanted something, you went to my
Speaker 1: father and not my mother, because if you went to
Speaker 1: my mother, you'd get a stern no, but if you
Speaker 1: went to my father, you get a yes. And this
Speaker 1: pertains to our dogs spending antica, and it pertains to
Speaker 1: one thing. And my mother always scolded my father for
Speaker 1: being impractical as she saw it. I mean, one time
Speaker 1: he returned and it's a Saturday afternoon and there's a
Speaker 1: scold Lexus in the drive way and all the kids,
Speaker 1: needless to say, are enamored by it, and we're jumping
Speaker 1: and hooting around this car. And my mother was furious
Speaker 1: and she gave my father a dressing down. You know,
Speaker 1: why do you borry this car o on a whim?
Speaker 1: You know we're going to be suffering for this if So,
Speaker 1: there was that dynamic. And also the final thing I'll
Speaker 1: say is my father tended to have the better taste.
Speaker 1: He was the more humanistic and the more creative, and
Speaker 1: so he was often delegated with kind of decorating our
Speaker 1: houses and that kind of thing. Partly they came from
Speaker 1: similar backgrounds in the sense that they both grew up
Speaker 1: with so many siblings seven and eight apiece. Um. They
Speaker 1: both grew up under very ethically honest parents who wouldn't
Speaker 1: steal a penny. They both grew up under stern, hard
Speaker 1: working parents. So the irony is they had very similar
Speaker 1: backgrounds growing up in these sort of uh nuclear families
Speaker 1: of multiple children with hard working and effective and successful
Speaker 1: parents in their own worlds. But they had very, very,
Speaker 1: very different personalities. And I think my father had more
Speaker 1: stability growing up. My mother's had more instability growing up
Speaker 1: with all the political turmoil surrounding her family's home. One
Speaker 1: thing Rich does know about his mother's family history as
Speaker 1: he grows up is that she came to the US
Speaker 1: from Haiti when she was thirteen, But this fact is
Speaker 1: shrouded in mystery. It's never spoken about. He doesn't know
Speaker 1: any specifics about this journey. I couldn't have told you
Speaker 1: whether they came on a boat or raft a plane.
Speaker 1: I assume it was a plane. But I couldn't have
Speaker 1: told you when they left. I couldn't have told you
Speaker 1: precisely why they left. I couldn't have told you what
Speaker 1: their mood or their fears or their anxieties were when
Speaker 1: they left. I couldn't have told you what happened when
Speaker 1: they landed. I literally didn't have a detail to tell you.
Speaker 1: When you say they, who's they? They is my mother
Speaker 1: and her younger siblings who all came together. But it
Speaker 1: also applies to her parents, Daniel and Carmen. I couldn't
Speaker 1: tell you the circumstances and the details of how her
Speaker 1: parents arrived to America in ninety seven. Either when was
Speaker 1: the first time that you felt in any way curious
Speaker 1: or that you registered the absence of the stories, you know,
Speaker 1: the stories that weren't being told. That's funny looking back. Subconsciously,
Speaker 1: that I was not being told these stories was registering
Speaker 1: because I was hearing from classmates, you know, in high school.
Speaker 1: They would say, oh, my ancestors came from Ireland during
Speaker 1: the potato famine, or oh, you know, my ancestors came
Speaker 1: from Ukraine during the programs, you know, at the turn
Speaker 1: of the last century. So it began to register subconsciously
Speaker 1: that this was a secret and that it was not
Speaker 1: being talked about. But I never pressed it more. And
Speaker 1: also I would say when I graduated from high school
Speaker 1: and people's grandparents turned up, you know, with their white
Speaker 1: hair and their sweater sets in their cardigans and that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Or when I would see a grandfather
Speaker 1: in a Christmas commercial, it would register to me that
Speaker 1: way a second, Uh, where's your grandfather? But in those
Speaker 1: kind of subconscious and subtle ways it registered to me
Speaker 1: growing up, and then it really hit me only as
Speaker 1: an adult, like many kids who have grown up in
Speaker 1: strict homes. In riches home, there's no cursing, no dating,
Speaker 1: no smoking, no drinking. So when it comes time for college,
Speaker 1: he flees to Wesleyan University, an ideal environment in that
Speaker 1: it's intellectually rigorous and also a hard party school. Rich
Speaker 1: loves it there, and upon graduation he moves to New
Speaker 1: York City, hungry for more. It was a similar trajectory
Speaker 1: in similar circumstances, where there was a fever in me
Speaker 1: and I'm running from my past, I'm running from strictness.
Speaker 1: I'm running from just kind of a mi las I
Speaker 1: couldn't put my finger on. And the same story. I
Speaker 1: came to the village, I read seriously, I did culture seriously,
Speaker 1: but I partied my face off around this time as
Speaker 1: we're just coming to really know himself in that early
Speaker 1: twenties kind of way, his family still doesn't fully know him.
Speaker 1: There are more secrets I never formally came out. They
Speaker 1: were clues. So for one example, you know, gay men
Speaker 1: were getting what we call a Caesar haircut, you know,
Speaker 1: dusty sprinkles of hair on your head. My mother saw
Speaker 1: this haircut and she shrieked, she hated, and she's like,
Speaker 1: are you gay? And at that time, I must have
Speaker 1: been seventeen, I denied it, but I think word cut
Speaker 1: to her. And there's a point at which a mother
Speaker 1: knows would be someone in my family told her, and
Speaker 1: I would say that would probably be when I graduated
Speaker 1: from college. But it was never discussed. Never. It's so
Speaker 1: interesting when secrets are kind of baked in, when they're
Speaker 1: just part of what you know, the air that you breathe,
Speaker 1: They're part of the dynamic of a family. There's never
Speaker 1: just one of them, right, there's just all these silences
Speaker 1: and all these ways in which people don't talk to
Speaker 1: each other. Yes, and that was the case on her,
Speaker 1: and it was only as an adult. I'm beginning to think, well,
Speaker 1: if her childhood is a secret, what other secrets are
Speaker 1: kept on that end. And if, as you said, secrecy
Speaker 1: is the culture of the family, they were just all around.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. Secrecy and silence build up so
Speaker 1: much pressure, and that pressure has to go somewhere, right,
Speaker 1: Hard partying can be its own pressure release valve when
Speaker 1: it all feels like too much to handle. For many
Speaker 1: of us raised in secrecy and silence, we want a
Speaker 1: quick fix, a release from holding all that is unexpressed.
Speaker 1: In the East Village, rich immerses himself in the club
Speaker 1: scene and surrounds himself with running buddies who aren't too inquisitive.
Speaker 1: It was so raucous, Danny, because on the one hand,
Speaker 1: the parting was so anonymous. You never wanted to be
Speaker 1: surrounded by people who asked too much questions because that
Speaker 1: invaded your privacy. In it kind of punctured the air
Speaker 1: of secrecy that you were that I was containing. But
Speaker 1: at the same time it still managed a form of
Speaker 1: intimacy where you saw people kind of doing crazy things
Speaker 1: at vulnerable moments, you know, and by vulnerable I mean
Speaker 1: drug related vulnerable moments, vulnerable sexual moments, And so that
Speaker 1: was the ideal party, Buddy, is this air of anonymity,
Speaker 1: people who don't ask to any questions. But also there
Speaker 1: was a level of intimacy, people you could trust to
Speaker 1: also not devulge your secrets. And some people describe the
Speaker 1: East Village at that time as a kind of queer
Speaker 1: Heyday because by that time, you know, the police or
Speaker 1: city forces weren't enforcing strict nuisance laws or imbibing laws,
Speaker 1: and it was just rampant with nudity, with drugs, with sexuality,
Speaker 1: with fantastic DJs. And we didn't know what was going
Speaker 1: on at the time, you know, we were just like
Speaker 1: ratty libertine kids, ingesting our drugs and just carrying on.
Speaker 1: And it was an age before Instagram and Facebook and
Speaker 1: now the myth is, you know, to put yourself out
Speaker 1: in the public to have followers, to be seen. At
Speaker 1: the time was the reverse. It was the more private,
Speaker 1: the more exclusive, the more unseen you were a the
Speaker 1: better the partying and the more caschet you had. And
Speaker 1: so we partied for each other. We partied for the moment.
Speaker 1: We didn't party to have followers, and this contributed to
Speaker 1: the success of the Secret. The gay rights movement has
Speaker 1: changed so much, but at the time it was shameful.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was shameful at work, it was shameful
Speaker 1: among families. It was you know, there was just so
Speaker 1: much shame in your tide and associated to this quote
Speaker 1: unquote shameful disease that is consuming a community. And so
Speaker 1: you know, it was a very different culture of shame
Speaker 1: back then, the late nineties in the East Village or
Speaker 1: an immersive whirlwind for Rich he's consuming culture along with drugs.
Speaker 1: He's writing, he's finding the truest version of himself. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the truth of his ancestors and his family history is
Speaker 1: still obscured. Even at that time, the ancestry and my
Speaker 1: mother's story coming here was deeply secret. I did not
Speaker 1: give it a thought, nor did relatives tell me during
Speaker 1: all those years in the East Village of what was
Speaker 1: going on. And there's a funny incident. I remember a
Speaker 1: cab driver looking at me and asking are you Haitian?
Speaker 1: And I just worded no, because in my mind that
Speaker 1: was so secret and it was just so undiscussed. I
Speaker 1: think there's a deep part of me that didn't even
Speaker 1: think I was Haitian years past, and which is a
Speaker 1: lot less interested in partying. He considers himself more of
Speaker 1: an adult. He has a great job, and he's published
Speaker 1: a book. This is also the year his life is
Speaker 1: forever changed in the worst recorded earthquake in the Western
Speaker 1: hemispheres history. It's Haiti. So By I'm working in a
Speaker 1: serious think tank, I had just launched a book that
Speaker 1: had done well, and leaving the think tank. One night
Speaker 1: I caught glimpse of the news and I remember vividly
Speaker 1: was Anderson Cooper on the Plasmas green hanging in the lobby.
Speaker 1: And then I'm hearing Hadi, I'm hearing had on the
Speaker 1: screen crawl and I'm seeing, you know, things going on
Speaker 1: in Haiti. And my body clenches because as an American,
Speaker 1: any time Haiti has mentioned, it's in the context of catastrophe.
Speaker 1: But this felt absolutely devastating, and I could not take
Speaker 1: my eyes off the news for the next ten days.
Speaker 1: And watching it, all the suffering people, all the faces
Speaker 1: peering at me from the television, from the internet, It's like,
Speaker 1: what is going to be our witness? Who will be
Speaker 1: our witness? And the one indelible image that spoke to
Speaker 1: my family history, the images of Haitians suffering, that's just
Speaker 1: spoke to me as a human being but an indelible
Speaker 1: image flashed across the screen, and that was the huge
Speaker 1: damage suffered by Hate's presidential palace. And it's just, you know,
Speaker 1: the quote unquote seat of power of that country could
Speaker 1: not protect itself. It was just a crumpled building and dust.
Speaker 1: And then that's when it was very strange. Danding is
Speaker 1: just this sort of denial, this cloud of secrecy, this shame,
Speaker 1: this all of it just kind of busted open, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, this is untenable. You know, I have to
Speaker 1: find out what's going on. I had known as a
Speaker 1: fact that my mother's father had been the president of Haiti.
Speaker 1: But it's that knowing that fact being told to me
Speaker 1: by a stranger, for example, Knowing that, you know, as
Speaker 1: a historical factor, is a political factor. Knowing that from
Speaker 1: a stranger, you know, you can't avoid that. Knowing that
Speaker 1: it is very different than knowing why he came, what
Speaker 1: his tenure was, like, what impact it had on my mother,
Speaker 1: how it shaped her as a human being, how he
Speaker 1: shaped her as a human being. That's what I meant
Speaker 1: by you know, all all these dark intangibles that were
Speaker 1: unknown to me, but the fact itself I had known,
Speaker 1: And do you remember how you knew that fact. Well,
Speaker 1: I think a cousin might have, you know, mentioned it pridefully, oh,
Speaker 1: our grandfather was president of Haiti, Or for example, my
Speaker 1: mother's own aunt, who was a witty woman, might have
Speaker 1: made a sarcastic remark of, oh, you know, that man
Speaker 1: was deranged by his politics in reference to my mother's father.
Speaker 1: So the fact of it would slip out either as
Speaker 1: a tart remark or as a point of pride in
Speaker 1: those kinds of ways. But everything that surrounds that fact
Speaker 1: was kept a secret when you were growing up and
Speaker 1: having that one fact, but then all this silence around it.
Speaker 1: I'm even more interested in that because it's like there's
Speaker 1: the mythology or the easy mythologizing of, you know, the
Speaker 1: idea that grandparent was the president of a country, right,
Speaker 1: and then yet nothing is known and nothing is spoken
Speaker 1: of about that person exactly. It's very kind of bizarre.
Speaker 1: On the one hand, you have a fact that one
Speaker 1: would think generates a lot of pride, and I think
Speaker 1: for some cousins or aunts it did generate a lot
Speaker 1: of pride. But the fact that it's not discussed that
Speaker 1: made me curious, especially in the context of that earthquake
Speaker 1: and seeing that palace destroyed. Seeing the destroyed palace made
Speaker 1: the secret more visually real. It made him in his life,
Speaker 1: and more importantly, my grandmother's life more visually real. My grandmother,
Speaker 1: which is to say, my grandfather's wife, who I grew
Speaker 1: up knowing. I was extremely fond of her. She was
Speaker 1: such a poised, kind woman, and people who describe her
Speaker 1: after the facts say that when you were in her presence,
Speaker 1: you had the sense that you were in the presence
Speaker 1: of someone substantial, not someone who is arrogant and important,
Speaker 1: but someone of substance and character. So I grew up
Speaker 1: with her. And even though she could be funny and
Speaker 1: say these hilarious you know things about x y Z
Speaker 1: when she was no nun or schoolmarm. She smoked, she drank,
Speaker 1: but at the same time there was a melancholy lingering
Speaker 1: to her. You know, there's like a sadness around her.
Speaker 1: And I had no idea what it was or why,
Speaker 1: or who she had been married to, you know. And
Speaker 1: she spent substantial amounts of time in her home. She
Speaker 1: succumb for Thanksgiving, she succumbed to Potomac for many Christmas Is.
Speaker 1: She used to send birthday cars. But you know, how
Speaker 1: did she get in America? And she spoke with an accent,
Speaker 1: so clearly she wasn't a native born American. And so
Speaker 1: the presidential palace destroyed in the news also made me
Speaker 1: think of my grandmother who had died by then. Did
Speaker 1: you know, growing up and being close to her, where
Speaker 1: your grandfather was or whether they were still together or
Speaker 1: had he died or what was the story that you
Speaker 1: knew if any uh, nothing, nothing. Isn't that bizarre? And
Speaker 1: that's what I'm saying. Most grandparents come in sets, or
Speaker 1: they come with an explanation. This couple has been divorced
Speaker 1: in some kind of you know, backstory as to why
Speaker 1: they're divorced. But here I have this single grandmother with
Speaker 1: no context as to where her husband is, why he is,
Speaker 1: where he is, when they got divorced, and all of that.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: As Rich stands watching the news on that plasma screen,
Speaker 1: as he remains glued to the television for the next
Speaker 1: stretch of days, he's stricken by the image of the
Speaker 1: destroyed Presidential Palace and becomes determined to know more about
Speaker 1: his grandfather his determination is visceral and immediate. He embarks
Speaker 1: on a research expedition, an expedition into the depths of
Speaker 1: his own family history. So the earthquake happens in January,
Speaker 1: and by June, I'm dropping hands and I'm telling my family,
Speaker 1: I e. My siblings and my mother that I intend
Speaker 1: to go to hate And part of my intention was
Speaker 1: to volunteer my time. And that's just independent of this story,
Speaker 1: because I know people are volunteing uh their time for
Speaker 1: different catastrophies around the world. So that was one intention.
Speaker 1: Another intention was I will go find this story, and
Speaker 1: so I start to tell them in June, and by
Speaker 1: November I'm on the plane. What was it like for
Speaker 1: you landing in Haiti for the first time? It was discombobulating.
Speaker 1: I think for any American it's totally disorienting to land
Speaker 1: in Haiti at that moment, because in November of that
Speaker 1: year of the capital Port of Prince was still in rubble.
Speaker 1: In other words, you're driving through the capitol and you
Speaker 1: just see rubble everywhere, and the whole it's just prevalent
Speaker 1: all over. There's also the fact that it was in
Speaker 1: the midst of a cholera epidemic, just an awful, deadly
Speaker 1: color epidemic. And also it was in the midst of
Speaker 1: a presidential election. So I land there and it's kind
Speaker 1: of a whiplash feeling of a landing in the midst
Speaker 1: of quite a bit of tumult and turmoil. Also landing
Speaker 1: and just feeling a sense of knowing nous And I
Speaker 1: say knowing this because when the Haitian women, when I
Speaker 1: hear them in border prints, I hear my grandmother's voice,
Speaker 1: I hear my aunt Ji Jean's voice, and I hear
Speaker 1: my mother's voice, and just the culture kind of envelived me.
Speaker 1: And there was an immediate I would call it familiarity
Speaker 1: landing in there. So that's the whiplash. It was very distant,
Speaker 1: but it would be for anybody given what was going
Speaker 1: on politically in the country. But it felt instantly familiar.
Speaker 1: While you were there, what were you hoping to find
Speaker 1: and what did you find? So I was hoping to
Speaker 1: find artifacts of my grandfather that might be in the
Speaker 1: National Archive in the Capitol, such as video footage of
Speaker 1: his inauguration, such as his KAI clip, such as some
Speaker 1: of his books. I was expecting to find that because
Speaker 1: speaking to scholars in the US. I was able to
Speaker 1: get what they call a manifest of what the archive contains,
Speaker 1: and the archives in Haiti supposedly contains some of his belongings.
Speaker 1: I was hoping to find that. I was hoping to
Speaker 1: go through original newspapers to learn more about his life,
Speaker 1: to learn about how he lived, about his domestic life,
Speaker 1: hoping to find all of that. But a monkey ranch
Speaker 1: was that the archives, the national Archives of Haiti, were
Speaker 1: destroyed and I would say debilitated by the earthquake as well.
Speaker 1: And so when I show up to the archive, it's
Speaker 1: also looking like a construction site, like many buildings in
Speaker 1: the country. So that's what I was hoping to find. Thankfully,
Speaker 1: I was able to locate some people who had worked
Speaker 1: for my grandfather in the nineteen fifties. I was able
Speaker 1: to find some of his political associates. But also I
Speaker 1: was just hoping to get a general sense of Haiti
Speaker 1: itself and what had this man been involved in. You know,
Speaker 1: what's this country like. Did you feel at that point
Speaker 1: like you were beginning to piece him together for yourself
Speaker 1: a little bit? I did, because he was such a
Speaker 1: Haitian figure, and I mean that he was such a
Speaker 1: pop the list. He was such a literal man of
Speaker 1: the country, of the people. That was his platform. And
Speaker 1: so what I one lesson I gleaned was I could
Speaker 1: never understand him or my mother or their secrets unless
Speaker 1: I had some sense of the country. Once the earthquake happens,
Speaker 1: my mother softens to telling this story. She resigns herself
Speaker 1: to the fact that I'm going to hate you to
Speaker 1: tell a story I should mention. My mother is also
Speaker 1: a scholar and a social scientist, so half of her
Speaker 1: is thinking, this is good. Finally, what this man did,
Speaker 1: where he stood in this country's history, is good that
Speaker 1: someone is finally writing about him. As she ages, I
Speaker 1: think the social scientists and intellectual and my mother really
Speaker 1: liked the fact that I would write about him. But
Speaker 1: the mother in my mother, I think she's a bit mortified.
Speaker 1: What I would discover, what I might publish, what I
Speaker 1: would find, how I would find it, how it would
Speaker 1: make me look, how it makes would make her look,
Speaker 1: how it would make him look. And by that I
Speaker 1: mean I don't think she wants me to make him
Speaker 1: look that good in the personal context. In other words,
Speaker 1: she's proud of what achieved publicly, but I once remember
Speaker 1: her saying something really blurting, something really tart, about that
Speaker 1: man was no angel, and don't you dare do a
Speaker 1: hang geography? And she was talking about his personal aspect.
Speaker 1: Did she open up to you at all about her
Speaker 1: own experience? Yes, not entirely. This happens over months and
Speaker 1: years and grips and drafts, and it's not like you
Speaker 1: ever sit down for an interview and you get everything
Speaker 1: you need. The information comes just when you're not expecting it,
Speaker 1: just when you're not explicitly having the conversation about that,
Speaker 1: it comes outsideways. And so yes, over the years she
Speaker 1: softened and I was able to get more information, starting
Speaker 1: to put the pieces together of the Storian, so much
Speaker 1: that you didn't know. I know it's ongoing, but what
Speaker 1: did that feel like? And what does that feel like?
Speaker 1: To be honest, it's comical and it's infuriating, and it's
Speaker 1: comical because by now I tell the family very clearly,
Speaker 1: I'm writing a book about us in the past, and
Speaker 1: people shut down, They refused to talk, They refused by
Speaker 1: an email and interview. And there are times where my
Speaker 1: mother is perfectly willing to have the conversation, and there's
Speaker 1: times when she's not most you not. And the comical
Speaker 1: part is, like in my real word quote unquote, like
Speaker 1: I went to the Bush White House and I told
Speaker 1: the chief of staff and the chief political director, if
Speaker 1: you don't grant me a fucking interview, this, this, and
Speaker 1: this is going to happen. And this is how you
Speaker 1: score an interview in your real working life as a writer.
Speaker 1: But you can't subject your family to that, especially when
Speaker 1: you're talking about you know, sixty and seventy year old aunties.
Speaker 1: You're talking about your mother who you know you're close to.
Speaker 1: And so that's the comical part, is you know in
Speaker 1: your real life who you're able to get to speak
Speaker 1: to you versus your family members. And the sad part, though,
Speaker 1: is the people are getting sick, people die off, and
Speaker 1: I feel the story slipping from me a because of
Speaker 1: the natural disaster, but just be people's memory. And so
Speaker 1: that's that was the sadness to me, and that is
Speaker 1: also what made this project more urgent to me. And
Speaker 1: I remember my last couple of days in Haiti, the
Speaker 1: government there put the country on lockdown and so all
Speaker 1: flights were indefinitely canceled, and so every day I'd show
Speaker 1: up to the airport. Can I fly out today? Can
Speaker 1: I not fly out because of the political and unrest?
Speaker 1: But finally, when I do get out, it's December of
Speaker 1: that year of the earthquake, and I think, let me
Speaker 1: go look for this man in the archives. Because his
Speaker 1: life takes place during the Cold War, let me imagine
Speaker 1: that perhaps the US has operatives in port of Prince.
Speaker 1: So I go to the National Archives in Washington, and
Speaker 1: I have modest expectations of what I'd find, perhaps a
Speaker 1: memo here, a letter there. But when I'm searching the
Speaker 1: cavernor's basement, I hit a gold mine, and I hit
Speaker 1: hundreds of pages of memos which were classified in secret
Speaker 1: at the time of the U. S. Government surveying him,
Speaker 1: his speeches, his writing, even his day to day activities.
Speaker 1: So I did not expect to find that. But how
Speaker 1: many pages are we talking? It sounds like a book.
Speaker 1: It's like a book. What did that feel like, both
Speaker 1: discovering it and then going through it and parsing it.
Speaker 1: It seems like that would be the closest that you
Speaker 1: would ever be able to come to knowing him. Yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: as a scholar and a writer is exhilarating you know,
Speaker 1: when you make that fine, As the grandson of this man,
Speaker 1: part of me is mortified. You know, it's an invasion
Speaker 1: of privacy, it's an invasion of civil liberty, and it's
Speaker 1: partly a form of violence that he suffered when he
Speaker 1: was ejected from his own country. As you were interrogating
Speaker 1: all this, as you were digging in, as you were
Speaker 1: trying with you know, sort of every skill you have
Speaker 1: to put him together, you know, to breathe life into
Speaker 1: him to know him. Was there anything you were afraid
Speaker 1: you were going to find out? Where? Was there anything
Speaker 1: you were hoping you were going to find out? There
Speaker 1: was nothing I was afraid to find. And I was
Speaker 1: hoping to find just his story leading up to his
Speaker 1: oust from his presidency, but also his exile from Haiti
Speaker 1: and into America. I was just hoping to understand how
Speaker 1: and why that went down. It's during this period of
Speaker 1: interrogation that rich finally is able to flesh out the
Speaker 1: story of his mother's arrival to America when she was thirteen,
Speaker 1: had happened in ninety seven, the same year his grandfather
Speaker 1: was ousted and their family was ordered to leave Haiti.
Speaker 1: Had he not been ousted, had he been able to
Speaker 1: weather the political storm, the entire trajectory of which his
Speaker 1: life and the lives of countless others would have been
Speaker 1: monumentally changed. I thought about that when I saw the
Speaker 1: presidential Palace destroyed, and I thought about that when I
Speaker 1: left for Haiti. And here's another secret, Denny. When my
Speaker 1: grandfather was ousted, his rival Papa Duck du Valier, who
Speaker 1: went on to become one of the worst dictators and
Speaker 1: by that I mean one of the bloodiest dictators in
Speaker 1: the history of the Western Hemisphere, took power from that
Speaker 1: time in seven when the dictatorship of Duvalier took place,
Speaker 1: and then he passed his dictatorship onto his son, which
Speaker 1: lasted another generation until had he never recovered from that.
Speaker 1: And so this quick period when this happened really cast
Speaker 1: a long shadow. And for me, that's the darkness of it.
Speaker 1: And do you think that that's a part of what
Speaker 1: the secret keeping in your family as you were growing
Speaker 1: up was about, was that it was just so painful, Um,
Speaker 1: you know what happened, and then what happened to the country,
Speaker 1: you know following um Papa doc coming into power. I
Speaker 1: mean that it just was something so impossible, so unspeakable
Speaker 1: that it couldn't be spoken of. Yes, yes, absolutely, it
Speaker 1: was both so personally, so publicly, and so historically unspeed
Speaker 1: couple that, I think that pushed the secrecy further into
Speaker 1: the closet. And I should mention my grandfather had one brother.
Speaker 1: That brother's children, under due Valier's regime, we're always cast
Speaker 1: into shadows. Every time they saw a police force. Every
Speaker 1: time they saw a police person, they would turn the
Speaker 1: corner wondering whether they would be arrested or even killed
Speaker 1: merely by being a relative of my grandfather. When my
Speaker 1: grandfather was exiled and in duval to power, it became
Speaker 1: illegal to speak my grandfather's name in public, to print
Speaker 1: anything about him. So he himself, you know, became a
Speaker 1: secret and cast under shadow. So yeah, I think part
Speaker 1: of a layer of the secrecy is just the sorrow,
Speaker 1: the darkness, the danger of people who are living under
Speaker 1: a dictatorship and being associated to du Valier's rival when
Speaker 1: du Valley took power. So now that you've been at
Speaker 1: this for more than ten years and thinking so deeply
Speaker 1: about all of this and you know, living it, living
Speaker 1: with it, and attempting to have the conversations that you
Speaker 1: can have with the people who are willing to talk.
Speaker 1: Where does it leave you in terms of thinking about secrets. Gosh,
Speaker 1: it's such a big question. I'm just left with the
Speaker 1: damage that secrets cause, and I guess I'll start at
Speaker 1: the intimate level and then work my way more broadly.
Speaker 1: At the intimate level, for me, let's see, received done
Speaker 1: have often chipped away or sabotaged my ability to have
Speaker 1: an intimate life, mostly with romantic partners, but also with
Speaker 1: my mother to some extent, and secrets with a family.
Speaker 1: I mean, you put this so beautifully earlier, the way
Speaker 1: that there's never just one secret, so that if a
Speaker 1: family member suffers from mental illness or a drug addiction,
Speaker 1: or you know, an abusive relationship, which is not uncommon
Speaker 1: on my mother's side of the family, then secrets really,
Speaker 1: you know, harm those already difficult episodes and they make
Speaker 1: them worse. So for me, that's what I'm left with.
Speaker 1: Secrets on the intimate level. On the public level, I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about this more broadly. Sometimes or often will
Speaker 1: see a disaster in a country, and let's say Haiti,
Speaker 1: because it's the country we're talking about, and people have
Speaker 1: in amnesia, and people have this cluelessness about what they're
Speaker 1: seeing in the news. And because things have been secret
Speaker 1: and because certain people get to write history, there's no
Speaker 1: context to understand why a country finds itself in the
Speaker 1: predicaments it does. And to me, this is maddening. You know,
Speaker 1: this story that hasn't been told, all the stories of
Speaker 1: countries around the world that are not told, that are suppressed,
Speaker 1: whether by you know, literally the CIA, or corporate forces
Speaker 1: or political forces or own bad actors in those very countries.
Speaker 1: It leaves us with all this misinformation, this gap of knowledge,
Speaker 1: and then when things happen in the country finds itself
Speaker 1: in a crisis, you know, we scratch our heads and
Speaker 1: this is absurd. And it happened when the president of
Speaker 1: Haiti was assassinated and journalists descend on the country and
Speaker 1: they say, oh, why is Hati such a mess? What's
Speaker 1: going on in Haiti? What happened after the earthquake? And
Speaker 1: there's no context for this long, secretive history. So that's
Speaker 1: what Secrets have left being with family. Secrets is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. Molly z a Core is
Speaker 1: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share.
Speaker 1: Please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 1: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight Secret zero.
Speaker 1: That's the number zero. You can also find me on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Danny writer. And if you'd like to know
Speaker 1: more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out
Speaker 1: my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts. For my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.