Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I
Speaker 1: realized I never knew my father. I think other guests
Speaker 1: in your podcasts have talked about that, I really never
Speaker 1: knew who he was. And it's still taking me many years,
Speaker 1: and he's taken many years to even say that, and
Speaker 1: I think it will be many more years to understand
Speaker 1: what that means. That's Emily Bernard. Emily is a university professor, essayist,
Speaker 1: and memoirist, author of the acclaimed book Black as the Body.
Speaker 1: Emily also wrote an essay for Oh, the Oprah magazine
Speaker 1: about forgiving her father's mistress. This is a story about
Speaker 1: the many ways in which understanding and compassion can turn
Speaker 1: anger and enmity into something else, something that might even
Speaker 1: be called beautiful. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets,
Speaker 1: the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
Speaker 1: keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1: And my mother's daughter and that I don't have a
Speaker 1: natural relationship to the natural world. She was a child
Speaker 1: who was very much sent her in the natural world
Speaker 1: when she grew up in the rural South and Hazel Lors, Mississippi.
Speaker 1: But when we moved to the suburbs. She really stayed
Speaker 1: inside as much as possible, and I wanted to be
Speaker 1: with her. So that was my planet, you know, the house.
Speaker 1: Um and emotionally, my mother was the center of everything.
Speaker 1: My mother was a beautiful woman inside and out. I
Speaker 1: don't think there's a single person who would deny that
Speaker 1: she was religious. But religion didn't nominate her, but it
Speaker 1: was deep and it was true, and it's how she
Speaker 1: organized her life around, you know, very traditional Christian values.
Speaker 1: She was a kind person, a generous person. She's reserved.
Speaker 1: She was very funny, and she was whip smart and
Speaker 1: very creative, very thoughtful, but also depressed from a very
Speaker 1: young age, something she had inherited from her paternal line
Speaker 1: and grappled with that before there was a real language
Speaker 1: around it. She said to me, once you know, we
Speaker 1: had the blues. It really hindered her um and also
Speaker 1: I think her since of privacy hindered her a lot too.
Speaker 1: She had a problem making connections with people outside of
Speaker 1: the family. That made her very much alone, even though
Speaker 1: people liked her. Feeling very afraid of my father. But
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember just a constant feeling of anxiety,
Speaker 1: not being able to relax. Worried that I was going
Speaker 1: to set him off somehow, and his disapproval was something
Speaker 1: that hovered over me all of time. My father ruled
Speaker 1: the roost and that was that. So I had to
Speaker 1: learn to live within those confines. And my mother didn't
Speaker 1: raise wilting flower. She raised someone who could speak her
Speaker 1: own mind. But my father. One of the best things
Speaker 1: I've heard that helped soothe me years ago, a therapist said,
Speaker 1: you just weren't a good fit as parent and child,
Speaker 1: and I gave me so much comfort. I think that
Speaker 1: was really the problem. As much energy and money he
Speaker 1: has he put into my education, the fact that I
Speaker 1: was a childhood girl who talked back and had her
Speaker 1: own opinions, he could not manage that. Emily's parents meet
Speaker 1: in Nashville as university students in the nineteen fifties. Her
Speaker 1: father was in medical school and her mother was a
Speaker 1: well regarded campus poet. His story was that he just
Speaker 1: revered her from afar. In fact, one of his stories
Speaker 1: he liked to tell was that he knew how much
Speaker 1: she loved art, and so he got a print of
Speaker 1: the Mona Lisa and put it under her door for
Speaker 1: dorm room, and I think that did seal it from
Speaker 1: my mother that this guy with a buzz cut and
Speaker 1: awkward glasses could be interesting for her romantically. My father
Speaker 1: was a deeply charismatic person, and he had a lot
Speaker 1: of fans um. He was somebody who come in a situation,
Speaker 1: always had a joke, always had a handshake. He had
Speaker 1: a heavy presence, and as much as he was someone
Speaker 1: who had a ready joke with his children, he was
Speaker 1: deeply judgmental. We never we never really measured up. I
Speaker 1: grew up with that sense of always bordering on disappointing him,
Speaker 1: and so I followed the path that he had laid
Speaker 1: before me, you know. And education was important to both
Speaker 1: of my parents, and they wanted us to perform at
Speaker 1: a high level. And it was the way I got
Speaker 1: his approval, if not his love. Emily does perform at
Speaker 1: a high level. She goes off to Yale, a school
Speaker 1: her father would most certainly have approved of. She comes
Speaker 1: back to Nashville one winter break. She's home with her
Speaker 1: mom and her brother's Her mom was Emily's dad's office manager,
Speaker 1: and she kept the books both for his office and
Speaker 1: the household finances, so she's balancing the books, and her
Speaker 1: mom sees something that doesn't add up, a plane ticket
Speaker 1: purchased in the name of a patient who also works
Speaker 1: part time in her father's office. She said, why, I
Speaker 1: wonder why he would do this? Why would he buy
Speaker 1: this ticket? And I was very quick to rationalize it
Speaker 1: or just dismiss it. And also my mother was a warrior,
Speaker 1: so you know, I just reassured her quickly that it
Speaker 1: was nothing, and she was imagining it, and that's what
Speaker 1: she lived with. Unfortunately, I was part of the complicity
Speaker 1: or the silence that surrounded her. The ticket was made
Speaker 1: out to a woman by the name of Jeanette Curry,
Speaker 1: and after Emily returns to college, it starts to become clear,
Speaker 1: at least to her, that something troubling is going on
Speaker 1: back home. You're a college senior and you write in
Speaker 1: your journal Jeanette Curry won't stop calling mom. Why is
Speaker 1: she doing this to her? At that point I was
Speaker 1: hearing I was I was in Connecticut and she was
Speaker 1: in Nashville, and she would call me and tell me
Speaker 1: about Jeanette's phone calls, and it was very confusing to me.
Speaker 1: Jeanette had been part of our landscape. Are family landscape
Speaker 1: for for years. At that point. My mother and I
Speaker 1: were very close and we talked almost every day when
Speaker 1: I was in college, so it would be it would
Speaker 1: punctuate our conversations this phone call and my mother would,
Speaker 1: you know, call the phone company and change the number.
Speaker 1: And then Jeanette would call the phone company and say,
Speaker 1: this is Mrs Bernard and I've forgotten my number. And
Speaker 1: I think those things would not be so easy to
Speaker 1: do now, And I often think about that, the things
Speaker 1: that could have protected my mother or given her some relief,
Speaker 1: But it was like her world was an open book
Speaker 1: because she had no protection. My father was not protecting her,
Speaker 1: and Jeanette had trained her attention on my mother because
Speaker 1: she wasn't getting the response from my father that she
Speaker 1: wanted those Emily and her mother were certain Jeanette was
Speaker 1: lying a demented fantasist, that she was just playing crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, who stalks someone like this. The family narrative
Speaker 1: was that this woman was just after his money. Her
Speaker 1: father was insistent on this point, and he was apparently
Speaker 1: very convincing. Besides, he was a formidable figure and it
Speaker 1: must have felt impossible to push him. My father had
Speaker 1: such a casual relationship with the truth in general, that
Speaker 1: I didn't like to ask him direct questions because I
Speaker 1: knew his inclination would be to lie. He was someone
Speaker 1: who just made up stories about his life and everybody
Speaker 1: in his world just believed them. But in fact, when
Speaker 1: Emily wrote those lines in her college journal, Jeanette Curry
Speaker 1: won't stop calling mom, why is she doing this to her?
Speaker 1: The answer was being played out in another home, in
Speaker 1: another neighborhood in Nashville. There was a baby, a boy
Speaker 1: named Lee, a toddler by this point, the child of
Speaker 1: Emily's father and Jeanette Curry. Could you describe Jeanette. We
Speaker 1: went to a very state Episcopal church where we recited
Speaker 1: the Latin, the Mass and Latin you know, in the
Speaker 1: high holidays um and Jeanette would come and she would
Speaker 1: shout about Jesus and it was just the most misort thing.
Speaker 1: I mean between I mean literally the b our pew
Speaker 1: that we occupied as one of the old families in
Speaker 1: the church, and Jeanette would sit on the other side
Speaker 1: and she'd be shouting, and people would just not know
Speaker 1: what to do with this person. So she was uncontainable.
Speaker 1: She was a free radical in our world, and that
Speaker 1: made it also very hard because she she had no shame,
Speaker 1: She was unembarrassed about her relationship with my father, and
Speaker 1: as opposed to my parents, who were very concerned with
Speaker 1: self composition and how we appeared, she didn't care at
Speaker 1: all about that. So we didn't have a choice about
Speaker 1: how much we could conceal from our larger world because
Speaker 1: she was making it public all the time, while your
Speaker 1: father was all the while denying it. Yeah, he would
Speaker 1: sit in his view and just to act nothing was happening.
Speaker 1: So he left sort of everyone else to deal with
Speaker 1: the mess. But he was an island of stoicism and denial.
Speaker 1: So there's a baby, there's a mistress, and there are
Speaker 1: family Sundays in church. Emily's father pretends nothing's going on.
Speaker 1: But as with all good secrets and lies, this one
Speaker 1: eventually proves impossible to contain, no matter how he'd like
Speaker 1: to pretend otherwise. So tell me about this legal battle that, then,
Speaker 1: I guess, results in your father taking a paternity test.
Speaker 1: There was a call place to it's a d C
Speaker 1: for the Child Welfare Services in Nashville that triggered a
Speaker 1: blood test to determine Lee's paternity. And again I'm still
Speaker 1: trying to sift through figure out the actual, the meaning
Speaker 1: and what happened here. And the test revealed that my
Speaker 1: father was Lee's father, as Jeanette had been claiming, So
Speaker 1: it vindicated Jeanette. So we don't know who placed that
Speaker 1: call that that triggered the whole episode. I don't quite
Speaker 1: believe it, but Jeanette says, it's my mother who plays
Speaker 1: a call. She thought that that would be a way
Speaker 1: to kind of get Jeanette out of our life. And
Speaker 1: even at that moment, my mother said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: these tests are only reliable. I think about this so
Speaker 1: much in my own life and also in the stories
Speaker 1: of so many of my guests. On family Secrets, the
Speaker 1: tagline for the show is the secrets that are kept
Speaker 1: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. And I always find that
Speaker 1: last part the most resonant or haunting, the secrets that
Speaker 1: we keep from our elves that were capable of keeping
Speaker 1: out of self preservation, out of love, out of fear,
Speaker 1: out of shame, out of so many things. But so
Speaker 1: now your mother, no, I mean your and your father. Denies, denies, denies, denies,
Speaker 1: and then at some point he says yes, and so
Speaker 1: what doesn't really matter. Everybody does this. That was his
Speaker 1: attitude which shocked my mother. I mean, he did all
Speaker 1: the classic things and begged her not to leave, and
Speaker 1: um told her he didn't know what he'd do without her,
Speaker 1: told her that he knew the kids would go with her,
Speaker 1: which was true. We would have certainly taken my mother's
Speaker 1: side and anything she wanted we would have given her
Speaker 1: in terms of shows of loyalty, and she stayed. She
Speaker 1: was very practical, and she knew what happened to women
Speaker 1: after divorce. She had been so talented, but she spent her,
Speaker 1: you know, so much of her life and our our
Speaker 1: lives working in my father's office and being an excellent homemaker.
Speaker 1: So she didn't believe she could compete in a job market,
Speaker 1: and she didn't want to. I think she felt she
Speaker 1: had built my father's career. She was going to stay
Speaker 1: and and reap some of the benefits. I remember at
Speaker 1: one time saying to her, you know, Dad, he would
Speaker 1: never hold it against you. If you are afraid of
Speaker 1: the social stigma of divorce, you don't have to divorce him.
Speaker 1: You can travel take his money. He would never regret
Speaker 1: you that. And she said, Emily, I made this home
Speaker 1: and I'm going to stay this. So that's what she did.
Speaker 1: Emily's mother also does something quite extraordinary here. She wants
Speaker 1: to see Lee taken care of because that's the right
Speaker 1: thing to do. Despite everything, For all of her disappointment,
Speaker 1: she didn't want another kind of unacknowledged black child in
Speaker 1: the world. So she told my father, you have to
Speaker 1: write him into your will in some way. So you know,
Speaker 1: my mother is a deeply ethical person, and you know,
Speaker 1: cared about the community. She cared about black people. She
Speaker 1: cared about this child even though she never knew him
Speaker 1: and wanted to know him, and she cared I think
Speaker 1: about what she would be leaving behind. But she was
Speaker 1: very angry. I think she ricocheted between a lot of emotions.
Speaker 1: I think she was almost making a conscious choice about
Speaker 1: how to deal with this, how to be in the
Speaker 1: wake of this. So she tried anger, and she tried vindictiveness,
Speaker 1: and she tried I think, almost mimicking Jeanette and kind
Speaker 1: of being out of control and letting her emotions fly.
Speaker 1: But in the end, my mother was a decorous and
Speaker 1: decent person who preferred a contemplative life. We'll be back
Speaker 1: in a moment with more family secrets. Emily's mom dies
Speaker 1: at the age of seventy. She had struggled all her
Speaker 1: life with depression, the blues, and she felt humiliated by
Speaker 1: the role she had been forced to play in her church,
Speaker 1: her community, that of the spurned wife. She also had
Speaker 1: trouble breathing and suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. By
Speaker 1: the end of her life, she was really a shut in,
Speaker 1: a recluse, and all during her mother's decline, Emily begins
Speaker 1: her life as an adult. She gets her doctorate, starts
Speaker 1: to teach. Eventually she meets her husband and becomes the
Speaker 1: mother of twin daughters. What must it have been like
Speaker 1: to carry the weight of all that history, Well, my
Speaker 1: mother was my first concern, and I think this was
Speaker 1: true for my brother's as well. Um I never wrestled
Speaker 1: with how I really felt about it. I had a
Speaker 1: lot of rage toward my father, and we did not
Speaker 1: have an easy relationship, and this was the icing on
Speaker 1: the cake, and I buried that rage. It was very
Speaker 1: hard for me to beat around him physically, and there
Speaker 1: was just thick and unspoken distance between us. We both
Speaker 1: knew why we never spoke of it. He never talked
Speaker 1: to me about Janette, never spoke her name, He never
Speaker 1: spoke Lee's name in my presence. He talked to my
Speaker 1: brother is more about it. But I think I was
Speaker 1: the girl. And also I was in rage with him,
Speaker 1: and he felt my judgment and it scared him, so
Speaker 1: we never spoke about it. I was angry at her
Speaker 1: sometimes for letting this break her. I needed to believe
Speaker 1: she had choices because I was growing up and I
Speaker 1: wanted to have choices. I hated to see her beaten
Speaker 1: down by this man because it had not been an
Speaker 1: easy marriage. She would always counsel me to make a
Speaker 1: different kind of choice when I get married. So that
Speaker 1: was the idea that my life would be sort of
Speaker 1: corrective to what she was experiencing. But it tore it
Speaker 1: me watching her decline. She didn't want my help. She
Speaker 1: actually disappeared into the marriage even deeper. My father took
Speaker 1: care of her, and he administered all of her medications.
Speaker 1: All the while. Emily isn't just contending with her sadness
Speaker 1: and grief about her mother and her rage at her father. No,
Speaker 1: She's also dealing with the spectra of Jeanette, who in
Speaker 1: some way she blames for the whole thing. Whenever I'd
Speaker 1: see her, I would feel homicidal. I mean really, I
Speaker 1: learned about anger from my experience with this woman. Because
Speaker 1: she was whittling my mother away. Myself was ricocheting between
Speaker 1: a lot of different emotions, and it was easier to
Speaker 1: bury them, to stay buried in the New England, and
Speaker 1: then to remind as far away as I could get
Speaker 1: from them and stay in the United States. I didn't
Speaker 1: allow myself, I think, to confront what I felt my father,
Speaker 1: even though he had done such damage, he still ruled
Speaker 1: the roost. He was a king and we were subjects.
Speaker 1: I never would have been able to conceive of even
Speaker 1: bringing this woman's name up to him. It was out
Speaker 1: of the question. She would be at our church. She
Speaker 1: would come up to me, I mean she again, this
Speaker 1: woman obeyed no conventional boundaries, and she would talk to
Speaker 1: me about my family. And there was one moment when Isabella,
Speaker 1: my utter, who was just a very sweet child, and
Speaker 1: she came up and said, oh, Isabella's gotten so much bigger,
Speaker 1: And Isabella went in to hug her because she was
Speaker 1: responding to the tone of her voice, and I just
Speaker 1: put my hand in Isabella's back. And I went home
Speaker 1: that day from church and I heard my father on
Speaker 1: the phone saying, and these low, soft tones, well, you
Speaker 1: have to be the bigger person. And I knew down
Speaker 1: to my toes like a lightning bolt. He was talking
Speaker 1: to Jeanette, and then he was casting at that moment
Speaker 1: as if I had been so rude, inexcusably rude, and
Speaker 1: she should rise above. What it did was it just
Speaker 1: kept the bottom kept falling out, the bottom kept descending,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. There was no floor to
Speaker 1: my feelings of disappointment and my father and I still
Speaker 1: needed a father, I mean, I still needed him to
Speaker 1: be a person I could respect. So it was easier
Speaker 1: just to let him lie and to keep my distance.
Speaker 1: But eventually Emily does go visit her father. She describes
Speaker 1: the trip to Nashville as a whim. She was working
Speaker 1: on her book and wanted to do some research. There
Speaker 1: was some journals she wanted to lay her hands on.
Speaker 1: I'm still stunned by the turn of events that happened
Speaker 1: now four years ago, almost exactly. It came in the
Speaker 1: house and I was looking for the journal, and my
Speaker 1: father came upstairs, and my mother had all these They
Speaker 1: were all these pill bottles that were still on the
Speaker 1: bathroom sink. She had died in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: um seven years before. And I said, what are these
Speaker 1: bottles doing here? And he said, you know, I just
Speaker 1: I think I'm still in love with your mother. And
Speaker 1: we hugged, and it was the most sincere and deepest
Speaker 1: hug that we'd had in many years, maybe since I
Speaker 1: was a child. He was not comfortable really with a
Speaker 1: lot of touching, so he was even a little but
Speaker 1: I kept him close, and I noticed at that moment
Speaker 1: that in my heart I received those words purely and
Speaker 1: without the usual sarcasm I felt. And I'm so grateful
Speaker 1: that those are the last words we spoke, because the
Speaker 1: next morning he was dead, and my father was in
Speaker 1: perfect health. He'd never been sick of day in his life.
Speaker 1: Amazing the way sometimes we're given a gift, even in
Speaker 1: the midst of great pain, a hug, a moment between
Speaker 1: a father and a daughter. Who what was it? The
Speaker 1: therapist once told Emily weren't a good fit as parent
Speaker 1: and child. After her father's death, Emily reaches out to
Speaker 1: the relatively new reverend from her family's church, Reverend Cynthia.
Speaker 1: Her father had been gone for only hours. His body
Speaker 1: was still seated in the chair where he was stricken
Speaker 1: by the massive heart attack. Reverend Cynthia comes to the
Speaker 1: Bernard at home. She performs a beautiful ritual and anoints
Speaker 1: Emily's father's body with oil. And we said that my
Speaker 1: father is sitting in the chair, and tell her everything.
Speaker 1: And she knew everything. And she told me the situation
Speaker 1: between my father and the Curries had been the biggest
Speaker 1: drift in her congregation. She was pretty new to the church.
Speaker 1: My father was mentoring her. He was trying to introduce
Speaker 1: her to the kind of social infocacies at our church
Speaker 1: and help her become adjusted to the life at our church.
Speaker 1: And she was trying to make things right. But there
Speaker 1: are people who could not forgive my father. And that
Speaker 1: was the first time I knew that people actually had
Speaker 1: been my mother's side. But during the course of their conversation,
Speaker 1: Emily makes another painful discovery. Despite the bottles of her
Speaker 1: mom's prescription medication, despite her dad's confession that he still
Speaker 1: was in love with her, he still had remained intensely
Speaker 1: involved with Jeanette Curry, Jeanette's husband, children and grandchildren, but
Speaker 1: not as a romantic partner. And I found out that
Speaker 1: my father he was eating every meal at Jeanette's house.
Speaker 1: Her grandchildren called him Grandpa. She and her husband had
Speaker 1: a child, and then she and your father had a child,
Speaker 1: and this somehow coexisted as some version of modern family. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I often think when I understood it when I read
Speaker 1: The Color Purple, I think I was in college and
Speaker 1: at the end of that novel, Mr and she could
Speaker 1: cause Sally so much pain. But they were sitting together
Speaker 1: on the on the porch, and I think they were
Speaker 1: knitting or doing something, all three of them. And that
Speaker 1: was the situation between my father and Jeanette and her family.
Speaker 1: They were survivors of a war, and it was a
Speaker 1: war of their own making, but it was a war
Speaker 1: all the same, and they lived together. Really, my father
Speaker 1: would go over to their house, he every meal there.
Speaker 1: If this man is never gonna stop disappointing me, how
Speaker 1: could he have a relationship with this family after what
Speaker 1: they did to my mother? But he did. He took
Speaker 1: Jeanette's grandchildren to church, to school, He helped them with
Speaker 1: their homework, something he never did with my brother. My
Speaker 1: brothers and I think were surprised because he was a
Speaker 1: different person of them. He was an active grandfather. He
Speaker 1: and Jeannette had more of a relationship of equals. They
Speaker 1: would argue. He never argued with my mother. My mother
Speaker 1: never would have questioned him. She was quote unquote the
Speaker 1: perfect wife. You know, That's that's who she was. She
Speaker 1: was living out of some magazine, I mean, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't fake, you know, it was sincere. She was just
Speaker 1: someone who believed that the husband was at the head
Speaker 1: of the family. I mean, I think there's half of
Speaker 1: her that really questioned that. But again, she had been
Speaker 1: groomed for a certain kind of adult life. But he
Speaker 1: Intoett were sparring partners. Um she confronted him with his
Speaker 1: hypocrisy in a way my mother I don't think she
Speaker 1: really would have ever felt comfortable doing that. He was
Speaker 1: nurtured in that family, and he was seen in that
Speaker 1: family in a way that he was not seen in
Speaker 1: our family. He was himself there in a way that
Speaker 1: he could not be with me. I think in my
Speaker 1: brother's and my mother, I learned also that he he
Speaker 1: was trying to in some ways I think repent and
Speaker 1: he and Jeanette would go into you know, laurencome neighborhoods,
Speaker 1: the projects, if you will, and proselytize and bring Bibles
Speaker 1: and try to convert people. I mean, I always had
Speaker 1: always on who's very religious. He grew up in the
Speaker 1: Anglican Church in Trinidad. It was very obedient in that way.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I'm still trying to understand this and
Speaker 1: reconciled this portrait with the person I grew up with.
Speaker 1: But that was the truth. I mean, it was corroborated
Speaker 1: by you know, several people that he was on a mission,
Speaker 1: it seems, in the final years of his life, perhaps
Speaker 1: to make right with my mother's memory. He got me
Speaker 1: all for clemp to the it Ish word for little emotional.
Speaker 1: So Emily initiates a face to face with Jeanette. She's torn,
Speaker 1: on the one hand by the horrible history of Jeanette
Speaker 1: and her mother and trying to square that history with
Speaker 1: the stories she now hears from Reverend Cynthia about Jeanette's
Speaker 1: current very different relationship with her father. Meanwhile, she's a
Speaker 1: grieving daughter, a complicated grief, to be sure, and she's
Speaker 1: about to bury her father. I behaved in ways I
Speaker 1: really regret around the funeral. I didn't want Jeanette's family there.
Speaker 1: My brothers were bewildered by my degree, my anger, and
Speaker 1: they sort of backed off and said, whatever she wants.
Speaker 1: I didn't want her the service. I made it very
Speaker 1: difficult for her to come to the wake. I was
Speaker 1: full of unleashed fury and I regret that now, and
Speaker 1: Jeanette knows that I regret it. But I couldn't control myself.
Speaker 1: It was a really different story, and I thought, now
Speaker 1: I'm gonna, you know, seek vengeance. And I asked Reverend
Speaker 1: Cynthia to be there because when I wanted to witness
Speaker 1: and too, I didn't know if I could trust myself
Speaker 1: and how I would behave so I wanted someone that
Speaker 1: I respected that I thought, you know, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to act full in front of her. And as soon
Speaker 1: as I came in the room, I mean, it was
Speaker 1: just strange to be looking at this woman in the
Speaker 1: eye and I'd studiously ignore her. It was about acting superior,
Speaker 1: but it was also because I was afraid to look
Speaker 1: in her eyes, you know. Over the course of a
Speaker 1: three hour conversation, and I asked her could record it,
Speaker 1: and she agreed. I mean a hundred pages of a transcript.
Speaker 1: I realized that she was as much a victim in
Speaker 1: the situation as my mother. When you say you were afraid,
Speaker 1: you would always been afraid to look around the eye,
Speaker 1: what we were afraid of seeing there? Do you think
Speaker 1: it was maybe that you were afraid of seeing that
Speaker 1: she was a human being? Yes, I think I was
Speaker 1: afraid of seeing a real person and not the villain.
Speaker 1: I needed to keep her as a villain, you know,
Speaker 1: to keep it uncomplicated her as much as I could.
Speaker 1: During that conversation, she says to you, I just wanted
Speaker 1: your mother to forgive me. I wanted her to forgive
Speaker 1: me so bad. And it seems like that was the
Speaker 1: moment for you that it kind of, you know, broke
Speaker 1: open absolutely, because don't we all want that, you know,
Speaker 1: I am also my mother's daughter, and that, you know,
Speaker 1: I religion or my faith in God is really important
Speaker 1: to me. And you know, every week in church we
Speaker 1: pray for forgiveness. And she made a mistake, something she's
Speaker 1: used as a mistake now. But I'm not a saint,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, I've I've hurt people I've been
Speaker 1: careless with other people's emotions. I've been forgiven, you know,
Speaker 1: by friends and by family, So how can I not
Speaker 1: offer her that? And everyone who was hurting the situation
Speaker 1: is no longer alive, so it's really the two of
Speaker 1: us now. And my mother at the end of her
Speaker 1: life was talking a lot about forgiveness and telling me
Speaker 1: that I need to be more forgiving. Ironically, I mean
Speaker 1: she was after I'm holding the George for her for years,
Speaker 1: feeling like keeping her anger alive was important. I really
Speaker 1: believe that probably up to that moment with Jeanette, or
Speaker 1: maybe experiencing her anger that she couldn't experience, because the
Speaker 1: way you've described her, that was like the last thing
Speaker 1: she wanted to feel, absolutely and I felt when I
Speaker 1: went to a meet Jeanette, I remember thinking I'm a panther,
Speaker 1: you know. I always thought my mother was like, you know,
Speaker 1: the steer in the headlights, and Janette was like some jackal,
Speaker 1: and I just I was tired of that. And when
Speaker 1: I sat and listened to her, honestly, I realized that
Speaker 1: what she wanted was very simple, was from my father
Speaker 1: to be a father to his son, and after he died,
Speaker 1: had gone through all of his papers. I found at
Speaker 1: least one check she had returned from my father, saying
Speaker 1: I don't want your money. But my conditioning was so
Speaker 1: thorough that I edited out of my consciousness. And as
Speaker 1: soon as she said the part about one of my
Speaker 1: mother's forgiveness, it came back into view in my head.
Speaker 1: I thought she never wanted his money. She wanted to
Speaker 1: get you hid to give to Lee what he had
Speaker 1: given to us, which was a step up and a
Speaker 1: step out of, you know, all the limitations they were
Speaker 1: living with. She also described for you, or explains to you,
Speaker 1: the reasons why she was harassing, which I thought was
Speaker 1: really kind of amazing too. Yeah, and you know, I've
Speaker 1: been driven crazy by a man before. I mean, you
Speaker 1: know what happens. And I think that's partly what happened.
Speaker 1: I think Jenna and I are learning to tell the
Speaker 1: truth to each other. So there are many layers of
Speaker 1: the story that are unfolding. And you know, I think
Speaker 1: it's difficult sometimes to be really truthful when we've heard
Speaker 1: someone so deeply or made mistakes, and I think she's
Speaker 1: grappling with that herself. There's a way which she shaped
Speaker 1: the story to help herself survive. I mean, my father would.
Speaker 1: I also realized that he'd set me up as his
Speaker 1: straw man. I mean, he would tell Jeannette, well, Emily
Speaker 1: wouldn't want me whenever she wanted him to help her,
Speaker 1: I think with a down payment on on a condition
Speaker 1: she wanted to buy any He was supposed to be
Speaker 1: someone who signed and at the last minute he said, well,
Speaker 1: Emily doesn't want me to do that. Emily doesn't and
Speaker 1: I had never heard of this, So she had a
Speaker 1: feeling about me that it was not accurate because my
Speaker 1: father again was telling multiple stories and keeping people in
Speaker 1: their places. Um. So we've had to undo a lot
Speaker 1: of that, and we've laughed a lot about all the
Speaker 1: things that we believed about each other. But I think, um,
Speaker 1: as we talk, she's feeling safer to tell me the truth.
Speaker 1: You know, she was in a situation at our church
Speaker 1: where all of the people were doctors and lawyers. Here.
Speaker 1: She was feeling very alone, feeling very out of place,
Speaker 1: and everyone was making her feel that way because of
Speaker 1: you know, again loyalty to my parents. She was coming
Speaker 1: to church, I found out because my father had been
Speaker 1: asking her to come to church. I mean every time
Speaker 1: I would come home, she would be at church. I mean,
Speaker 1: he had this idea that he could normalize things and
Speaker 1: then we would come around. And she told me, because
Speaker 1: your father, you're the one he was afraid of, and
Speaker 1: you know, and the thing that was it was funny
Speaker 1: and it was true, but it was also odd to
Speaker 1: realize how much he talked to her about me and
Speaker 1: his fears about me and how I felt about him.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, I know those kids think I
Speaker 1: killed their mother, and I did. So he knew me
Speaker 1: better than I thought he did, and she had a
Speaker 1: lot of intuitive feelings about who I was. It's so
Speaker 1: much about knowing and being known, isn't it. You know
Speaker 1: what I asked you before about what it felt like
Speaker 1: for you when you were in your twenties and thirties
Speaker 1: watching your mother's decline and moving forward in your life,
Speaker 1: and the various feelings you know, you describe them as
Speaker 1: you know, like like all these different trying on different
Speaker 1: feelings for size. I'm going to try vindictiveness, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: try rate, I'm gonna try you know whatever. But mostly
Speaker 1: your concern was about your mother. So I guess what
Speaker 1: I'm wondering is what now is the feeling. You're a
Speaker 1: mother of teenage kids, you're a professor, you're memoirist, you're
Speaker 1: a wife, you know, you're a friend, your many things.
Speaker 1: Why is it important? You know, some people at my
Speaker 1: church have really encouraged me to my home church and Nashville,
Speaker 1: out of concern for me and may be concerned about
Speaker 1: what I'm going to discover, have really advised me very
Speaker 1: gently to leave the story alone. And of course it
Speaker 1: makes that attracts me even more to the story. This
Speaker 1: is the story of my life in some way. When
Speaker 1: I was going down to Nashville to have this talk
Speaker 1: with Jeanette, you know, I was myself confused, why am
Speaker 1: I doing this? And I said to my husband, you know,
Speaker 1: do you understand, because I wanted him to tell me why,
Speaker 1: And he said, this woman has more had more impact
Speaker 1: on your life than any other person besides your parents.
Speaker 1: I think I'm driven to know. I mean, my parents
Speaker 1: are both gone, and you know that's I'm next. So
Speaker 1: the understanding I have from my own experience about just
Speaker 1: wanting to know the truth in all of its ugliness
Speaker 1: and all of its mysteries, I would like to know
Speaker 1: realize I never knew my father. I think other guests
Speaker 1: in your podcast have talked about that. I really never
Speaker 1: knew who he was, and it's still taking me many years.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's taken many years and even say that,
Speaker 1: and I think it will be many more years to
Speaker 1: understand what that means. Janette is honestly one of the
Speaker 1: only people I have left who knows the story. She
Speaker 1: lived the story. I no longer have, you know, vengeful
Speaker 1: feelings toward her, but we have an odd bond. She's
Speaker 1: had some health issues over the years, and at the
Speaker 1: time I went down to talk to her, I felt
Speaker 1: a little urgency about that. You know, before anything happens
Speaker 1: to her, I need to have this conversation. And then
Speaker 1: there's a matter of Lee, Emily's half brother. In a
Speaker 1: story so much about forgiveness and understanding even in the
Speaker 1: most difficult circumstances, this too, is of course a bridge
Speaker 1: that must be crossed. Can you tell me about meeting
Speaker 1: him for the first time? We connected on Facebook? And
Speaker 1: I'm a little embarrassed to say that my first response
Speaker 1: to him was, you know, what is that you want?
Speaker 1: One of the things I've come to realize is that
Speaker 1: when there is what feels like a quote unquote interloper
Speaker 1: in a family without exception. In my experience, the very
Speaker 1: first feeling is threat It's a primitive, hardwired, biological thing
Speaker 1: that happens, which is your other you're outside and people,
Speaker 1: even when they often eventually come around to realizing that
Speaker 1: that's just not the case, I feel threatened. I absolutely
Speaker 1: felt threatened. And Lee said, you know, I just want
Speaker 1: to know my siblings. I just want a big sister.
Speaker 1: Why would I deny him that Lee was thirty one
Speaker 1: years old and Emily in her late forties when they
Speaker 1: first met, and he'd recently been paroled after a minor
Speaker 1: drug offense. It's interesting that this only happened and probably
Speaker 1: only could have happened in the aftermath of your father's death.
Speaker 1: It wasn't gonna happen while your father was alive. And
Speaker 1: I think also if I hadn't been there, the curries
Speaker 1: would have discovered him, and that would have been terrible
Speaker 1: because I was still locked in a place of bitterness
Speaker 1: forward them. So I am again it was a great
Speaker 1: gift that he let go of life when I was there.
Speaker 1: It started the whole thing. And right I've told Jette,
Speaker 1: I said, I could never have done this with my father,
Speaker 1: really lea because it would have made him too happy,
Speaker 1: It would have pleased him too watch. There's no way
Speaker 1: I could have ever, you know, because I found out
Speaker 1: if his death that that's what he had wanted. And
Speaker 1: he had promised me that he was going to try
Speaker 1: to foster a relationship. But he was too afraid of me,
Speaker 1: I think to say that to me. But it was
Speaker 1: so easy, you know. I mean, my father gave me
Speaker 1: the gift of his death. If I can say that,
Speaker 1: it sounds cruel, but he can't disappoint me anymore. He's
Speaker 1: not allowed to disappoint me anymore. So I can. I
Speaker 1: can warn him, and I can remember him, and he's
Speaker 1: sort of still. And the curtain opened, and there are
Speaker 1: these people and one of them is my brother. And
Speaker 1: you know, my daughters are adopted. And I know that
Speaker 1: love happens in blossoms outside of the genetic relationship. But
Speaker 1: there's something that happened, something that happened. As soon as
Speaker 1: Lee and I saw each other, my heart melted. We
Speaker 1: planned to get together and I thought we should have them,
Speaker 1: we should have a date. So first we're reading things together,
Speaker 1: you know, we're reading. That's my mode so we were
Speaker 1: reading books, you know, between exactly and the first time
Speaker 1: we did based on I really couldn't even speak. We're
Speaker 1: just smiling so much. So we met and I looked
Speaker 1: exactly with my father, I mean, the older I get.
Speaker 1: You know, if I walked through the streets in North Nashville,
Speaker 1: people are falling out, there's Dr Bernard. So he was stunned.
Speaker 1: And Lee is just extraordinary. I mean, he had one
Speaker 1: of those kind of revelations when he was in prison
Speaker 1: that you know, he was the author of his own experience,
Speaker 1: and he let go of a lot of bitterness with
Speaker 1: my dad. I have been really humbled by that because
Speaker 1: he has just accepted it, even though he told me once.
Speaker 1: You know, he was in jail when my father died
Speaker 1: and he wished he could have asked him, why did
Speaker 1: you have me? Why was I born? And you're left,
Speaker 1: as so often is the case, holding the story holding
Speaker 1: you know, your mother's the rage she couldn't feel that,
Speaker 1: you know that you've worked through, and your father's guilt,
Speaker 1: the guilt that it doesn't seem that he was particularly
Speaker 1: capable of feeling, you know, but it was there. It's
Speaker 1: almost like it was in the cosmos, and somebody had
Speaker 1: to actually kind of contend with it. And so I mean,
Speaker 1: that's how it striking me, is that you're at this
Speaker 1: point where you have these two new relationships, neither one
Speaker 1: of which you could ever have anticipated, you know, one
Speaker 1: with Jeanette and one with Lee, and this is sort
Speaker 1: of the work that needed to be done, and it
Speaker 1: couldn't be done by either of your parents, but it's
Speaker 1: being done now by you. I think part of the
Speaker 1: story when it's taught me is I mean, I thought
Speaker 1: I experienced every emotion, you know, at my age, and
Speaker 1: I hadn't, and I'm experiencing new emotions now that are
Speaker 1: very intriguing to me. I'm surprised every time I hear
Speaker 1: from Janette about the lack of rancor and the eerie
Speaker 1: connection that I have hard time explaining. For instance, after
Speaker 1: this essay came out, I hadn't anticipated how emotional it
Speaker 1: would be to see it in print and to contend
Speaker 1: with the aftermath of telling this little sliver of the truth.
Speaker 1: And there are people who cautioned me again in my life,
Speaker 1: elders who care about me, who asked me, but also
Speaker 1: with some frustration, you know, why are you talking to her.
Speaker 1: Why do you believe her? Maybe I'm naive, but I'm
Speaker 1: interested in what she has to say, and I don't
Speaker 1: think she's lied to me yet. I think she's done
Speaker 1: with lying, and I think we're both at a place
Speaker 1: where we want to know the truth. In fact, when
Speaker 1: I started to write the piece and the magazine, she said,
Speaker 1: you know, our story has a lot to teach people
Speaker 1: about fregiveness. And again I just humbled by the wisdom,
Speaker 1: by the clarity, the generosity. Well, and it's interesting because
Speaker 1: at least as you have spoken about her and written
Speaker 1: about her, she wasn't a liar. She's a lot of
Speaker 1: other hurtful things, but lying, which your father did you
Speaker 1: know full on? It doesn't seem like Jeanette did that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of truth. I'm still content with this.
Speaker 1: I mean, I had a lifetime of hating this woman.
Speaker 1: It's sometimes hard to accept the fact that she was truthful,
Speaker 1: even when it's staring me in the face. I also
Speaker 1: think she's a human being and did more damage than
Speaker 1: she is able to really face right now, which again
Speaker 1: I empathize with him. I think that's just true of
Speaker 1: being a human being that sometimes it's hard to face
Speaker 1: our mistakes, especially when they've been profound. There are parts
Speaker 1: of the story they're still very mysterious to me. But
Speaker 1: Janette Is knows I need to see receipts, as we say,
Speaker 1: and you know, because she wasn't believed, has kept voice recordings,
Speaker 1: She's kept correspondence. She kept records because no one believed her,
Speaker 1: and she's sharing them with me now because she wants
Speaker 1: me to know. I'd like to thank Emily Bernard for
Speaker 1: sharing her story with us. Learn more about Emily's memoir
Speaker 1: Black Is the Body, Stories from My Grandmother's Time, my
Speaker 1: Mother's time, and mine by visiting Emily Bernard dot com.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan
Speaker 1: is a supervising producer. Julie Douglas and Bethanne Macaluso are
Speaker 1: the executive producers. If you have a family secret that
Speaker 1: you like to share, you can get in touch with
Speaker 1: us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
Speaker 1: Facebook at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pod.
Speaker 1: For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot
Speaker 1: com Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit
Speaker 1: the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.