February 27, 2020 • 41 mins
Emily Bernard never felt close to her judgmental, domineering father, who, for most of her life, denied he’d ever been unfaithful to her mother. It wasn’t until her dad’s sudden death that Emily began the process of getting to know the woman who caused her family so much pain: her father’s longtime mistress.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I
realized I never knew my father. I think other guests
in your podcasts have talked about that, I really never
knew who he was. And it's still taking me many years,
and he's taken many years to even say that, and
(00:22):
I think it will be many more years to understand
what that means. That's Emily Bernard. Emily is a university professor, essayist,
and memoirist, author of the acclaimed book Black as the Body.
Emily also wrote an essay for Oh, the Oprah magazine
about forgiving her father's mistress. This is a story about
(00:44):
the many ways in which understanding and compassion can turn
anger and enmity into something else, something that might even
be called beautiful. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets,
(01:08):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
And my mother's daughter and that I don't have a
natural relationship to the natural world. She was a child
(01:28):
who was very much sent her in the natural world
when she grew up in the rural South and Hazel Lors, Mississippi.
But when we moved to the suburbs. She really stayed
inside as much as possible, and I wanted to be
with her. So that was my planet, you know, the house.
Um and emotionally, my mother was the center of everything.
(01:50):
My mother was a beautiful woman inside and out. I
don't think there's a single person who would deny that
she was religious. But religion didn't nominate her, but it
was deep and it was true, and it's how she
organized her life around, you know, very traditional Christian values.
She was a kind person, a generous person. She's reserved.
(02:12):
She was very funny, and she was whip smart and
very creative, very thoughtful, but also depressed from a very
young age, something she had inherited from her paternal line
and grappled with that before there was a real language
around it. She said to me, once you know, we
had the blues. It really hindered her um and also
(02:33):
I think her since of privacy hindered her a lot too.
She had a problem making connections with people outside of
the family. That made her very much alone, even though
people liked her. Feeling very afraid of my father. But
I mean, I remember just a constant feeling of anxiety,
not being able to relax. Worried that I was going
(02:55):
to set him off somehow, and his disapproval was something
that hovered over me all of time. My father ruled
the roost and that was that. So I had to
learn to live within those confines. And my mother didn't
raise wilting flower. She raised someone who could speak her
(03:15):
own mind. But my father. One of the best things
I've heard that helped soothe me years ago, a therapist said,
you just weren't a good fit as parent and child,
and I gave me so much comfort. I think that
was really the problem. As much energy and money he
has he put into my education, the fact that I
was a childhood girl who talked back and had her
(03:37):
own opinions, he could not manage that. Emily's parents meet
in Nashville as university students in the nineteen fifties. Her
father was in medical school and her mother was a
well regarded campus poet. His story was that he just
revered her from afar. In fact, one of his stories
he liked to tell was that he knew how much
(03:59):
she loved art, and so he got a print of
the Mona Lisa and put it under her door for
dorm room, and I think that did seal it from
my mother that this guy with a buzz cut and
awkward glasses could be interesting for her romantically. My father
was a deeply charismatic person, and he had a lot
of fans um. He was somebody who come in a situation,
(04:22):
always had a joke, always had a handshake. He had
a heavy presence, and as much as he was someone
who had a ready joke with his children, he was
deeply judgmental. We never we never really measured up. I
grew up with that sense of always bordering on disappointing him,
and so I followed the path that he had laid
(04:45):
before me, you know. And education was important to both
of my parents, and they wanted us to perform at
a high level. And it was the way I got
his approval, if not his love. Emily does perform at
a high level. She goes off to Yale, a school
her father would most certainly have approved of. She comes
back to Nashville one winter break. She's home with her
(05:07):
mom and her brother's Her mom was Emily's dad's office manager,
and she kept the books both for his office and
the household finances, so she's balancing the books, and her
mom sees something that doesn't add up, a plane ticket
purchased in the name of a patient who also works
part time in her father's office. She said, why, I
(05:28):
wonder why he would do this? Why would he buy
this ticket? And I was very quick to rationalize it
or just dismiss it. And also my mother was a warrior,
so you know, I just reassured her quickly that it
was nothing, and she was imagining it, and that's what
she lived with. Unfortunately, I was part of the complicity
or the silence that surrounded her. The ticket was made
(05:52):
out to a woman by the name of Jeanette Curry,
and after Emily returns to college, it starts to become clear,
at least to her, that something troubling is going on
back home. You're a college senior and you write in
your journal Jeanette Curry won't stop calling mom. Why is
(06:13):
she doing this to her? At that point I was
hearing I was I was in Connecticut and she was
in Nashville, and she would call me and tell me
about Jeanette's phone calls, and it was very confusing to me.
Jeanette had been part of our landscape. Are family landscape
for for years. At that point. My mother and I
(06:34):
were very close and we talked almost every day when
I was in college, so it would be it would
punctuate our conversations this phone call and my mother would,
you know, call the phone company and change the number.
And then Jeanette would call the phone company and say,
this is Mrs Bernard and I've forgotten my number. And
I think those things would not be so easy to
do now, And I often think about that, the things
that could have protected my mother or given her some relief,
(06:58):
But it was like her world was an open book
because she had no protection. My father was not protecting her,
and Jeanette had trained her attention on my mother because
she wasn't getting the response from my father that she
wanted those Emily and her mother were certain Jeanette was
lying a demented fantasist, that she was just playing crazy.
I mean, who stalks someone like this. The family narrative
(07:21):
was that this woman was just after his money. Her
father was insistent on this point, and he was apparently
very convincing. Besides, he was a formidable figure and it
must have felt impossible to push him. My father had
such a casual relationship with the truth in general, that
I didn't like to ask him direct questions because I
knew his inclination would be to lie. He was someone
(07:43):
who just made up stories about his life and everybody
in his world just believed them. But in fact, when
Emily wrote those lines in her college journal, Jeanette Curry
won't stop calling mom, why is she doing this to her?
The answer was being played out in another home, in
another neighborhood in Nashville. There was a baby, a boy
(08:04):
named Lee, a toddler by this point, the child of
Emily's father and Jeanette Curry. Could you describe Jeanette. We
went to a very state Episcopal church where we recited
the Latin, the Mass and Latin you know, in the
high holidays um and Jeanette would come and she would
(08:25):
shout about Jesus and it was just the most misort thing.
I mean between I mean literally the b our pew
that we occupied as one of the old families in
the church, and Jeanette would sit on the other side
and she'd be shouting, and people would just not know
what to do with this person. So she was uncontainable.
She was a free radical in our world, and that
(08:48):
made it also very hard because she she had no shame,
She was unembarrassed about her relationship with my father, and
as opposed to my parents, who were very concerned with
self composition and how we appeared, she didn't care at
all about that. So we didn't have a choice about
(09:09):
how much we could conceal from our larger world because
she was making it public all the time, while your
father was all the while denying it. Yeah, he would
sit in his view and just to act nothing was happening.
So he left sort of everyone else to deal with
the mess. But he was an island of stoicism and denial.
(09:32):
So there's a baby, there's a mistress, and there are
family Sundays in church. Emily's father pretends nothing's going on.
But as with all good secrets and lies, this one
eventually proves impossible to contain, no matter how he'd like
to pretend otherwise. So tell me about this legal battle that, then,
(09:53):
I guess, results in your father taking a paternity test.
There was a call place to it's a d C
for the Child Welfare Services in Nashville that triggered a
blood test to determine Lee's paternity. And again I'm still
trying to sift through figure out the actual, the meaning
and what happened here. And the test revealed that my
(10:13):
father was Lee's father, as Jeanette had been claiming, So
it vindicated Jeanette. So we don't know who placed that
call that that triggered the whole episode. I don't quite
believe it, but Jeanette says, it's my mother who plays
a call. She thought that that would be a way
to kind of get Jeanette out of our life. And
(10:35):
even at that moment, my mother said, well, you know,
these tests are only reliable. I think about this so
much in my own life and also in the stories
of so many of my guests. On family Secrets, the
tagline for the show is the secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. And I always find that
(10:55):
last part the most resonant or haunting, the secrets that
we keep from our elves that were capable of keeping
out of self preservation, out of love, out of fear,
out of shame, out of so many things. But so
now your mother, no, I mean your and your father. Denies, denies, denies, denies,
(11:16):
and then at some point he says yes, and so
what doesn't really matter. Everybody does this. That was his
attitude which shocked my mother. I mean, he did all
the classic things and begged her not to leave, and
um told her he didn't know what he'd do without her,
told her that he knew the kids would go with her,
which was true. We would have certainly taken my mother's
(11:37):
side and anything she wanted we would have given her
in terms of shows of loyalty, and she stayed. She
was very practical, and she knew what happened to women
after divorce. She had been so talented, but she spent her,
you know, so much of her life and our our
lives working in my father's office and being an excellent homemaker.
(11:59):
So she didn't believe she could compete in a job market,
and she didn't want to. I think she felt she
had built my father's career. She was going to stay
and and reap some of the benefits. I remember at
one time saying to her, you know, Dad, he would
never hold it against you. If you are afraid of
the social stigma of divorce, you don't have to divorce him.
You can travel take his money. He would never regret
(12:21):
you that. And she said, Emily, I made this home
and I'm going to stay this. So that's what she did.
Emily's mother also does something quite extraordinary here. She wants
to see Lee taken care of because that's the right
thing to do. Despite everything, For all of her disappointment,
she didn't want another kind of unacknowledged black child in
(12:43):
the world. So she told my father, you have to
write him into your will in some way. So you know,
my mother is a deeply ethical person, and you know,
cared about the community. She cared about black people. She
cared about this child even though she never knew him
and wanted to know him, and she cared I think
about what she would be leaving behind. But she was
(13:05):
very angry. I think she ricocheted between a lot of emotions.
I think she was almost making a conscious choice about
how to deal with this, how to be in the
wake of this. So she tried anger, and she tried vindictiveness,
and she tried I think, almost mimicking Jeanette and kind
of being out of control and letting her emotions fly.
But in the end, my mother was a decorous and
(13:27):
decent person who preferred a contemplative life. We'll be back
in a moment with more family secrets. Emily's mom dies
at the age of seventy. She had struggled all her
(13:47):
life with depression, the blues, and she felt humiliated by
the role she had been forced to play in her church,
her community, that of the spurned wife. She also had
trouble breathing and suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. By
the end of her life, she was really a shut in,
a recluse, and all during her mother's decline, Emily begins
(14:11):
her life as an adult. She gets her doctorate, starts
to teach. Eventually she meets her husband and becomes the
mother of twin daughters. What must it have been like
to carry the weight of all that history, Well, my
mother was my first concern, and I think this was
true for my brother's as well. Um I never wrestled
(14:32):
with how I really felt about it. I had a
lot of rage toward my father, and we did not
have an easy relationship, and this was the icing on
the cake, and I buried that rage. It was very
hard for me to beat around him physically, and there
was just thick and unspoken distance between us. We both
knew why we never spoke of it. He never talked
(14:55):
to me about Janette, never spoke her name, He never
spoke Lee's name in my presence. He talked to my
brother is more about it. But I think I was
the girl. And also I was in rage with him,
and he felt my judgment and it scared him, so
we never spoke about it. I was angry at her
sometimes for letting this break her. I needed to believe
(15:15):
she had choices because I was growing up and I
wanted to have choices. I hated to see her beaten
down by this man because it had not been an
easy marriage. She would always counsel me to make a
different kind of choice when I get married. So that
was the idea that my life would be sort of
corrective to what she was experiencing. But it tore it
(15:37):
me watching her decline. She didn't want my help. She
actually disappeared into the marriage even deeper. My father took
care of her, and he administered all of her medications.
All the while. Emily isn't just contending with her sadness
and grief about her mother and her rage at her father. No,
She's also dealing with the spectra of Jeanette, who in
(15:59):
some way she blames for the whole thing. Whenever I'd
see her, I would feel homicidal. I mean really, I
learned about anger from my experience with this woman. Because
she was whittling my mother away. Myself was ricocheting between
a lot of different emotions, and it was easier to
bury them, to stay buried in the New England, and
(16:22):
then to remind as far away as I could get
from them and stay in the United States. I didn't
allow myself, I think, to confront what I felt my father,
even though he had done such damage, he still ruled
the roost. He was a king and we were subjects.
I never would have been able to conceive of even
bringing this woman's name up to him. It was out
(16:46):
of the question. She would be at our church. She
would come up to me, I mean she again, this
woman obeyed no conventional boundaries, and she would talk to
me about my family. And there was one moment when Isabella,
my utter, who was just a very sweet child, and
she came up and said, oh, Isabella's gotten so much bigger,
And Isabella went in to hug her because she was
(17:08):
responding to the tone of her voice, and I just
put my hand in Isabella's back. And I went home
that day from church and I heard my father on
the phone saying, and these low, soft tones, well, you
have to be the bigger person. And I knew down
to my toes like a lightning bolt. He was talking
to Jeanette, and then he was casting at that moment
(17:31):
as if I had been so rude, inexcusably rude, and
she should rise above. What it did was it just
kept the bottom kept falling out, the bottom kept descending,
you know what I mean. There was no floor to
my feelings of disappointment and my father and I still
needed a father, I mean, I still needed him to
(17:53):
be a person I could respect. So it was easier
just to let him lie and to keep my distance.
But eventually Emily does go visit her father. She describes
the trip to Nashville as a whim. She was working
on her book and wanted to do some research. There
was some journals she wanted to lay her hands on.
(18:13):
I'm still stunned by the turn of events that happened
now four years ago, almost exactly. It came in the
house and I was looking for the journal, and my
father came upstairs, and my mother had all these They
were all these pill bottles that were still on the
bathroom sink. She had died in two thousand and eight,
(18:34):
um seven years before. And I said, what are these
bottles doing here? And he said, you know, I just
I think I'm still in love with your mother. And
we hugged, and it was the most sincere and deepest
hug that we'd had in many years, maybe since I
was a child. He was not comfortable really with a
(18:54):
lot of touching, so he was even a little but
I kept him close, and I noticed at that moment
that in my heart I received those words purely and
without the usual sarcasm I felt. And I'm so grateful
that those are the last words we spoke, because the
next morning he was dead, and my father was in
perfect health. He'd never been sick of day in his life.
(19:17):
Amazing the way sometimes we're given a gift, even in
the midst of great pain, a hug, a moment between
a father and a daughter. Who what was it? The
therapist once told Emily weren't a good fit as parent
and child. After her father's death, Emily reaches out to
the relatively new reverend from her family's church, Reverend Cynthia.
(19:40):
Her father had been gone for only hours. His body
was still seated in the chair where he was stricken
by the massive heart attack. Reverend Cynthia comes to the
Bernard at home. She performs a beautiful ritual and anoints
Emily's father's body with oil. And we said that my
father is sitting in the chair, and tell her everything.
(20:00):
And she knew everything. And she told me the situation
between my father and the Curries had been the biggest
drift in her congregation. She was pretty new to the church.
My father was mentoring her. He was trying to introduce
her to the kind of social infocacies at our church
and help her become adjusted to the life at our church.
(20:23):
And she was trying to make things right. But there
are people who could not forgive my father. And that
was the first time I knew that people actually had
been my mother's side. But during the course of their conversation,
Emily makes another painful discovery. Despite the bottles of her
mom's prescription medication, despite her dad's confession that he still
(20:45):
was in love with her, he still had remained intensely
involved with Jeanette Curry, Jeanette's husband, children and grandchildren, but
not as a romantic partner. And I found out that
my father he was eating every meal at Jeanette's house.
Her grandchildren called him Grandpa. She and her husband had
(21:05):
a child, and then she and your father had a child,
and this somehow coexisted as some version of modern family. Absolutely,
I often think when I understood it when I read
The Color Purple, I think I was in college and
at the end of that novel, Mr and she could
cause Sally so much pain. But they were sitting together
on the on the porch, and I think they were
knitting or doing something, all three of them. And that
(21:28):
was the situation between my father and Jeanette and her family.
They were survivors of a war, and it was a
war of their own making, but it was a war
all the same, and they lived together. Really, my father
would go over to their house, he every meal there.
If this man is never gonna stop disappointing me, how
could he have a relationship with this family after what
they did to my mother? But he did. He took
(21:52):
Jeanette's grandchildren to church, to school, He helped them with
their homework, something he never did with my brother. My
brothers and I think were surprised because he was a
different person of them. He was an active grandfather. He
and Jeannette had more of a relationship of equals. They
would argue. He never argued with my mother. My mother
never would have questioned him. She was quote unquote the
(22:13):
perfect wife. You know, That's that's who she was. She
was living out of some magazine, I mean, and it
wasn't fake, you know, it was sincere. She was just
someone who believed that the husband was at the head
of the family. I mean, I think there's half of
her that really questioned that. But again, she had been
groomed for a certain kind of adult life. But he
Intoett were sparring partners. Um she confronted him with his
(22:36):
hypocrisy in a way my mother I don't think she
really would have ever felt comfortable doing that. He was
nurtured in that family, and he was seen in that
family in a way that he was not seen in
our family. He was himself there in a way that
he could not be with me. I think in my
brother's and my mother, I learned also that he he
was trying to in some ways I think repent and
(22:59):
he and Jeanette would go into you know, laurencome neighborhoods,
the projects, if you will, and proselytize and bring Bibles
and try to convert people. I mean, I always had
always on who's very religious. He grew up in the
Anglican Church in Trinidad. It was very obedient in that way.
But I mean, I'm still trying to understand this and
reconciled this portrait with the person I grew up with.
(23:20):
But that was the truth. I mean, it was corroborated
by you know, several people that he was on a mission,
it seems, in the final years of his life, perhaps
to make right with my mother's memory. He got me
all for clemp to the it Ish word for little emotional.
So Emily initiates a face to face with Jeanette. She's torn,
(23:45):
on the one hand by the horrible history of Jeanette
and her mother and trying to square that history with
the stories she now hears from Reverend Cynthia about Jeanette's
current very different relationship with her father. Meanwhile, she's a
grieving daughter, a complicated grief, to be sure, and she's
about to bury her father. I behaved in ways I
(24:07):
really regret around the funeral. I didn't want Jeanette's family there.
My brothers were bewildered by my degree, my anger, and
they sort of backed off and said, whatever she wants.
I didn't want her the service. I made it very
difficult for her to come to the wake. I was
full of unleashed fury and I regret that now, and
(24:31):
Jeanette knows that I regret it. But I couldn't control myself.
It was a really different story, and I thought, now
I'm gonna, you know, seek vengeance. And I asked Reverend
Cynthia to be there because when I wanted to witness
and too, I didn't know if I could trust myself
and how I would behave so I wanted someone that
I respected that I thought, you know, I'm not going
to act full in front of her. And as soon
(24:53):
as I came in the room, I mean, it was
just strange to be looking at this woman in the
eye and I'd studiously ignore her. It was about acting superior,
but it was also because I was afraid to look
in her eyes, you know. Over the course of a
three hour conversation, and I asked her could record it,
and she agreed. I mean a hundred pages of a transcript.
(25:13):
I realized that she was as much a victim in
the situation as my mother. When you say you were afraid,
you would always been afraid to look around the eye,
what we were afraid of seeing there? Do you think
it was maybe that you were afraid of seeing that
she was a human being? Yes, I think I was
afraid of seeing a real person and not the villain.
I needed to keep her as a villain, you know,
to keep it uncomplicated her as much as I could.
(25:35):
During that conversation, she says to you, I just wanted
your mother to forgive me. I wanted her to forgive
me so bad. And it seems like that was the
moment for you that it kind of, you know, broke
open absolutely, because don't we all want that, you know,
I am also my mother's daughter, and that, you know,
(25:58):
I religion or my faith in God is really important
to me. And you know, every week in church we
pray for forgiveness. And she made a mistake, something she's
used as a mistake now. But I'm not a saint,
you know, I mean, I've I've hurt people I've been
careless with other people's emotions. I've been forgiven, you know,
(26:19):
by friends and by family, So how can I not
offer her that? And everyone who was hurting the situation
is no longer alive, so it's really the two of
us now. And my mother at the end of her
life was talking a lot about forgiveness and telling me
that I need to be more forgiving. Ironically, I mean
she was after I'm holding the George for her for years,
(26:42):
feeling like keeping her anger alive was important. I really
believe that probably up to that moment with Jeanette, or
maybe experiencing her anger that she couldn't experience, because the
way you've described her, that was like the last thing
she wanted to feel, absolutely and I felt when I
went to a meet Jeanette, I remember thinking I'm a panther,
(27:03):
you know. I always thought my mother was like, you know,
the steer in the headlights, and Janette was like some jackal,
and I just I was tired of that. And when
I sat and listened to her, honestly, I realized that
what she wanted was very simple, was from my father
to be a father to his son, and after he died,
(27:24):
had gone through all of his papers. I found at
least one check she had returned from my father, saying
I don't want your money. But my conditioning was so
thorough that I edited out of my consciousness. And as
soon as she said the part about one of my
mother's forgiveness, it came back into view in my head.
(27:47):
I thought she never wanted his money. She wanted to
get you hid to give to Lee what he had
given to us, which was a step up and a
step out of, you know, all the limitations they were
living with. She also described for you, or explains to you,
the reasons why she was harassing, which I thought was
really kind of amazing too. Yeah, and you know, I've
(28:10):
been driven crazy by a man before. I mean, you
know what happens. And I think that's partly what happened.
I think Jenna and I are learning to tell the
truth to each other. So there are many layers of
the story that are unfolding. And you know, I think
it's difficult sometimes to be really truthful when we've heard
someone so deeply or made mistakes, and I think she's
grappling with that herself. There's a way which she shaped
(28:32):
the story to help herself survive. I mean, my father would.
I also realized that he'd set me up as his
straw man. I mean, he would tell Jeannette, well, Emily
wouldn't want me whenever she wanted him to help her,
I think with a down payment on on a condition
she wanted to buy any He was supposed to be
someone who signed and at the last minute he said, well,
Emily doesn't want me to do that. Emily doesn't and
(28:54):
I had never heard of this, So she had a
feeling about me that it was not accurate because my
father again was telling multiple stories and keeping people in
their places. Um. So we've had to undo a lot
of that, and we've laughed a lot about all the
things that we believed about each other. But I think, um,
as we talk, she's feeling safer to tell me the truth.
(29:17):
You know, she was in a situation at our church
where all of the people were doctors and lawyers. Here.
She was feeling very alone, feeling very out of place,
and everyone was making her feel that way because of
you know, again loyalty to my parents. She was coming
to church, I found out because my father had been
(29:39):
asking her to come to church. I mean every time
I would come home, she would be at church. I mean,
he had this idea that he could normalize things and
then we would come around. And she told me, because
your father, you're the one he was afraid of, and
you know, and the thing that was it was funny
and it was true, but it was also odd to
realize how much he talked to her about me and
his fears about me and how I felt about him.
(30:02):
He said, you know, I know those kids think I
killed their mother, and I did. So he knew me
better than I thought he did, and she had a
lot of intuitive feelings about who I was. It's so
much about knowing and being known, isn't it. You know
what I asked you before about what it felt like
(30:22):
for you when you were in your twenties and thirties
watching your mother's decline and moving forward in your life,
and the various feelings you know, you describe them as
you know, like like all these different trying on different
feelings for size. I'm going to try vindictiveness, I'm gonna
try rate, I'm gonna try you know whatever. But mostly
your concern was about your mother. So I guess what
(30:46):
I'm wondering is what now is the feeling. You're a
mother of teenage kids, you're a professor, you're memoirist, you're
a wife, you know, you're a friend, your many things.
Why is it important? You know, some people at my
church have really encouraged me to my home church and Nashville,
(31:08):
out of concern for me and may be concerned about
what I'm going to discover, have really advised me very
gently to leave the story alone. And of course it
makes that attracts me even more to the story. This
is the story of my life in some way. When
I was going down to Nashville to have this talk
with Jeanette, you know, I was myself confused, why am
I doing this? And I said to my husband, you know,
(31:29):
do you understand, because I wanted him to tell me why,
And he said, this woman has more had more impact
on your life than any other person besides your parents.
I think I'm driven to know. I mean, my parents
are both gone, and you know that's I'm next. So
the understanding I have from my own experience about just
(31:53):
wanting to know the truth in all of its ugliness
and all of its mysteries, I would like to know
realize I never knew my father. I think other guests
in your podcast have talked about that. I really never
knew who he was, and it's still taking me many years.
I mean, he's taken many years and even say that,
(32:16):
and I think it will be many more years to
understand what that means. Janette is honestly one of the
only people I have left who knows the story. She
lived the story. I no longer have, you know, vengeful
feelings toward her, but we have an odd bond. She's
had some health issues over the years, and at the
(32:37):
time I went down to talk to her, I felt
a little urgency about that. You know, before anything happens
to her, I need to have this conversation. And then
there's a matter of Lee, Emily's half brother. In a
story so much about forgiveness and understanding even in the
most difficult circumstances, this too, is of course a bridge
(32:57):
that must be crossed. Can you tell me about meeting
him for the first time? We connected on Facebook? And
I'm a little embarrassed to say that my first response
to him was, you know, what is that you want?
One of the things I've come to realize is that
when there is what feels like a quote unquote interloper
(33:18):
in a family without exception. In my experience, the very
first feeling is threat It's a primitive, hardwired, biological thing
that happens, which is your other you're outside and people,
even when they often eventually come around to realizing that
(33:41):
that's just not the case, I feel threatened. I absolutely
felt threatened. And Lee said, you know, I just want
to know my siblings. I just want a big sister.
Why would I deny him that Lee was thirty one
years old and Emily in her late forties when they
first met, and he'd recently been paroled after a minor
(34:03):
drug offense. It's interesting that this only happened and probably
only could have happened in the aftermath of your father's death.
It wasn't gonna happen while your father was alive. And
I think also if I hadn't been there, the curries
would have discovered him, and that would have been terrible
because I was still locked in a place of bitterness
(34:26):
forward them. So I am again it was a great
gift that he let go of life when I was there.
It started the whole thing. And right I've told Jette,
I said, I could never have done this with my father,
really lea because it would have made him too happy,
It would have pleased him too watch. There's no way
I could have ever, you know, because I found out
(34:47):
if his death that that's what he had wanted. And
he had promised me that he was going to try
to foster a relationship. But he was too afraid of me,
I think to say that to me. But it was
so easy, you know. I mean, my father gave me
the gift of his death. If I can say that,
it sounds cruel, but he can't disappoint me anymore. He's
not allowed to disappoint me anymore. So I can. I
(35:10):
can warn him, and I can remember him, and he's
sort of still. And the curtain opened, and there are
these people and one of them is my brother. And
you know, my daughters are adopted. And I know that
love happens in blossoms outside of the genetic relationship. But
(35:31):
there's something that happened, something that happened. As soon as
Lee and I saw each other, my heart melted. We
planned to get together and I thought we should have them,
we should have a date. So first we're reading things together,
you know, we're reading. That's my mode so we were
reading books, you know, between exactly and the first time
we did based on I really couldn't even speak. We're
just smiling so much. So we met and I looked
(35:54):
exactly with my father, I mean, the older I get.
You know, if I walked through the streets in North Nashville,
people are falling out, there's Dr Bernard. So he was stunned.
And Lee is just extraordinary. I mean, he had one
of those kind of revelations when he was in prison
that you know, he was the author of his own experience,
and he let go of a lot of bitterness with
(36:15):
my dad. I have been really humbled by that because
he has just accepted it, even though he told me once.
You know, he was in jail when my father died
and he wished he could have asked him, why did
you have me? Why was I born? And you're left,
as so often is the case, holding the story holding
(36:40):
you know, your mother's the rage she couldn't feel that,
you know that you've worked through, and your father's guilt,
the guilt that it doesn't seem that he was particularly
capable of feeling, you know, but it was there. It's
almost like it was in the cosmos, and somebody had
to actually kind of contend with it. And so I mean,
that's how it striking me, is that you're at this
point where you have these two new relationships, neither one
(37:03):
of which you could ever have anticipated, you know, one
with Jeanette and one with Lee, and this is sort
of the work that needed to be done, and it
couldn't be done by either of your parents, but it's
being done now by you. I think part of the
story when it's taught me is I mean, I thought
I experienced every emotion, you know, at my age, and
(37:24):
I hadn't, and I'm experiencing new emotions now that are
very intriguing to me. I'm surprised every time I hear
from Janette about the lack of rancor and the eerie
connection that I have hard time explaining. For instance, after
this essay came out, I hadn't anticipated how emotional it
(37:46):
would be to see it in print and to contend
with the aftermath of telling this little sliver of the truth.
And there are people who cautioned me again in my life,
elders who care about me, who asked me, but also
with some frustration, you know, why are you talking to her.
Why do you believe her? Maybe I'm naive, but I'm
(38:09):
interested in what she has to say, and I don't
think she's lied to me yet. I think she's done
with lying, and I think we're both at a place
where we want to know the truth. In fact, when
I started to write the piece and the magazine, she said,
you know, our story has a lot to teach people
about fregiveness. And again I just humbled by the wisdom,
(38:33):
by the clarity, the generosity. Well, and it's interesting because
at least as you have spoken about her and written
about her, she wasn't a liar. She's a lot of
other hurtful things, but lying, which your father did you
know full on? It doesn't seem like Jeanette did that. Yeah,
(38:56):
there's a lot of truth. I'm still content with this.
I mean, I had a lifetime of hating this woman.
It's sometimes hard to accept the fact that she was truthful,
even when it's staring me in the face. I also
think she's a human being and did more damage than
she is able to really face right now, which again
(39:17):
I empathize with him. I think that's just true of
being a human being that sometimes it's hard to face
our mistakes, especially when they've been profound. There are parts
of the story they're still very mysterious to me. But
Janette Is knows I need to see receipts, as we say,
and you know, because she wasn't believed, has kept voice recordings,
She's kept correspondence. She kept records because no one believed her,
(39:42):
and she's sharing them with me now because she wants
me to know. I'd like to thank Emily Bernard for
(40:05):
sharing her story with us. Learn more about Emily's memoir
Black Is the Body, Stories from My Grandmother's Time, my
Mother's time, and mine by visiting Emily Bernard dot com.
Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan
is a supervising producer. Julie Douglas and Bethanne Macaluso are
(40:25):
the executive producers. If you have a family secret that
you like to share, you can get in touch with
us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com.
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
Facebook at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pod.
For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot
(40:48):
com Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
(41:09):
listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I
realized I never knew my father. I think other guests
in your podcasts have talked about that, I really never
knew who he was. And it's still taking me many years,
and he's taken many years to even say that, and
(00:22):
I think it will be many more years to understand
what that means. That's Emily Bernard. Emily is a university professor, essayist,
and memoirist, author of the acclaimed book Black as the Body.
Emily also wrote an essay for Oh, the Oprah magazine
about forgiving her father's mistress. This is a story about
(00:44):
the many ways in which understanding and compassion can turn
anger and enmity into something else, something that might even
be called beautiful. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets,
(01:08):
the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
And my mother's daughter and that I don't have a
natural relationship to the natural world. She was a child
(01:28):
who was very much sent her in the natural world
when she grew up in the rural South and Hazel Lors, Mississippi.
But when we moved to the suburbs. She really stayed
inside as much as possible, and I wanted to be
with her. So that was my planet, you know, the house.
Um and emotionally, my mother was the center of everything.
(01:50):
My mother was a beautiful woman inside and out. I
don't think there's a single person who would deny that
she was religious. But religion didn't nominate her, but it
was deep and it was true, and it's how she
organized her life around, you know, very traditional Christian values.
She was a kind person, a generous person. She's reserved.
(02:12):
She was very funny, and she was whip smart and
very creative, very thoughtful, but also depressed from a very
young age, something she had inherited from her paternal line
and grappled with that before there was a real language
around it. She said to me, once you know, we
had the blues. It really hindered her um and also
(02:33):
I think her since of privacy hindered her a lot too.
She had a problem making connections with people outside of
the family. That made her very much alone, even though
people liked her. Feeling very afraid of my father. But
I mean, I remember just a constant feeling of anxiety,
not being able to relax. Worried that I was going
(02:55):
to set him off somehow, and his disapproval was something
that hovered over me all of time. My father ruled
the roost and that was that. So I had to
learn to live within those confines. And my mother didn't
raise wilting flower. She raised someone who could speak her
(03:15):
own mind. But my father. One of the best things
I've heard that helped soothe me years ago, a therapist said,
you just weren't a good fit as parent and child,
and I gave me so much comfort. I think that
was really the problem. As much energy and money he
has he put into my education, the fact that I
was a childhood girl who talked back and had her
(03:37):
own opinions, he could not manage that. Emily's parents meet
in Nashville as university students in the nineteen fifties. Her
father was in medical school and her mother was a
well regarded campus poet. His story was that he just
revered her from afar. In fact, one of his stories
he liked to tell was that he knew how much
(03:59):
she loved art, and so he got a print of
the Mona Lisa and put it under her door for
dorm room, and I think that did seal it from
my mother that this guy with a buzz cut and
awkward glasses could be interesting for her romantically. My father
was a deeply charismatic person, and he had a lot
of fans um. He was somebody who come in a situation,
(04:22):
always had a joke, always had a handshake. He had
a heavy presence, and as much as he was someone
who had a ready joke with his children, he was
deeply judgmental. We never we never really measured up. I
grew up with that sense of always bordering on disappointing him,
and so I followed the path that he had laid
(04:45):
before me, you know. And education was important to both
of my parents, and they wanted us to perform at
a high level. And it was the way I got
his approval, if not his love. Emily does perform at
a high level. She goes off to Yale, a school
her father would most certainly have approved of. She comes
back to Nashville one winter break. She's home with her
(05:07):
mom and her brother's Her mom was Emily's dad's office manager,
and she kept the books both for his office and
the household finances, so she's balancing the books, and her
mom sees something that doesn't add up, a plane ticket
purchased in the name of a patient who also works
part time in her father's office. She said, why, I
(05:28):
wonder why he would do this? Why would he buy
this ticket? And I was very quick to rationalize it
or just dismiss it. And also my mother was a warrior,
so you know, I just reassured her quickly that it
was nothing, and she was imagining it, and that's what
she lived with. Unfortunately, I was part of the complicity
or the silence that surrounded her. The ticket was made
(05:52):
out to a woman by the name of Jeanette Curry,
and after Emily returns to college, it starts to become clear,
at least to her, that something troubling is going on
back home. You're a college senior and you write in
your journal Jeanette Curry won't stop calling mom. Why is
(06:13):
she doing this to her? At that point I was
hearing I was I was in Connecticut and she was
in Nashville, and she would call me and tell me
about Jeanette's phone calls, and it was very confusing to me.
Jeanette had been part of our landscape. Are family landscape
for for years. At that point. My mother and I
(06:34):
were very close and we talked almost every day when
I was in college, so it would be it would
punctuate our conversations this phone call and my mother would,
you know, call the phone company and change the number.
And then Jeanette would call the phone company and say,
this is Mrs Bernard and I've forgotten my number. And
I think those things would not be so easy to
do now, And I often think about that, the things
that could have protected my mother or given her some relief,
(06:58):
But it was like her world was an open book
because she had no protection. My father was not protecting her,
and Jeanette had trained her attention on my mother because
she wasn't getting the response from my father that she
wanted those Emily and her mother were certain Jeanette was
lying a demented fantasist, that she was just playing crazy.
I mean, who stalks someone like this. The family narrative
(07:21):
was that this woman was just after his money. Her
father was insistent on this point, and he was apparently
very convincing. Besides, he was a formidable figure and it
must have felt impossible to push him. My father had
such a casual relationship with the truth in general, that
I didn't like to ask him direct questions because I
knew his inclination would be to lie. He was someone
(07:43):
who just made up stories about his life and everybody
in his world just believed them. But in fact, when
Emily wrote those lines in her college journal, Jeanette Curry
won't stop calling mom, why is she doing this to her?
The answer was being played out in another home, in
another neighborhood in Nashville. There was a baby, a boy
(08:04):
named Lee, a toddler by this point, the child of
Emily's father and Jeanette Curry. Could you describe Jeanette. We
went to a very state Episcopal church where we recited
the Latin, the Mass and Latin you know, in the
high holidays um and Jeanette would come and she would
(08:25):
shout about Jesus and it was just the most misort thing.
I mean between I mean literally the b our pew
that we occupied as one of the old families in
the church, and Jeanette would sit on the other side
and she'd be shouting, and people would just not know
what to do with this person. So she was uncontainable.
She was a free radical in our world, and that
(08:48):
made it also very hard because she she had no shame,
She was unembarrassed about her relationship with my father, and
as opposed to my parents, who were very concerned with
self composition and how we appeared, she didn't care at
all about that. So we didn't have a choice about
(09:09):
how much we could conceal from our larger world because
she was making it public all the time, while your
father was all the while denying it. Yeah, he would
sit in his view and just to act nothing was happening.
So he left sort of everyone else to deal with
the mess. But he was an island of stoicism and denial.
(09:32):
So there's a baby, there's a mistress, and there are
family Sundays in church. Emily's father pretends nothing's going on.
But as with all good secrets and lies, this one
eventually proves impossible to contain, no matter how he'd like
to pretend otherwise. So tell me about this legal battle that, then,
(09:53):
I guess, results in your father taking a paternity test.
There was a call place to it's a d C
for the Child Welfare Services in Nashville that triggered a
blood test to determine Lee's paternity. And again I'm still
trying to sift through figure out the actual, the meaning
and what happened here. And the test revealed that my
(10:13):
father was Lee's father, as Jeanette had been claiming, So
it vindicated Jeanette. So we don't know who placed that
call that that triggered the whole episode. I don't quite
believe it, but Jeanette says, it's my mother who plays
a call. She thought that that would be a way
to kind of get Jeanette out of our life. And
(10:35):
even at that moment, my mother said, well, you know,
these tests are only reliable. I think about this so
much in my own life and also in the stories
of so many of my guests. On family Secrets, the
tagline for the show is the secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. And I always find that
(10:55):
last part the most resonant or haunting, the secrets that
we keep from our elves that were capable of keeping
out of self preservation, out of love, out of fear,
out of shame, out of so many things. But so
now your mother, no, I mean your and your father. Denies, denies, denies, denies,
(11:16):
and then at some point he says yes, and so
what doesn't really matter. Everybody does this. That was his
attitude which shocked my mother. I mean, he did all
the classic things and begged her not to leave, and
um told her he didn't know what he'd do without her,
told her that he knew the kids would go with her,
which was true. We would have certainly taken my mother's
(11:37):
side and anything she wanted we would have given her
in terms of shows of loyalty, and she stayed. She
was very practical, and she knew what happened to women
after divorce. She had been so talented, but she spent her,
you know, so much of her life and our our
lives working in my father's office and being an excellent homemaker.
(11:59):
So she didn't believe she could compete in a job market,
and she didn't want to. I think she felt she
had built my father's career. She was going to stay
and and reap some of the benefits. I remember at
one time saying to her, you know, Dad, he would
never hold it against you. If you are afraid of
the social stigma of divorce, you don't have to divorce him.
You can travel take his money. He would never regret
(12:21):
you that. And she said, Emily, I made this home
and I'm going to stay this. So that's what she did.
Emily's mother also does something quite extraordinary here. She wants
to see Lee taken care of because that's the right
thing to do. Despite everything, For all of her disappointment,
she didn't want another kind of unacknowledged black child in
(12:43):
the world. So she told my father, you have to
write him into your will in some way. So you know,
my mother is a deeply ethical person, and you know,
cared about the community. She cared about black people. She
cared about this child even though she never knew him
and wanted to know him, and she cared I think
about what she would be leaving behind. But she was
(13:05):
very angry. I think she ricocheted between a lot of emotions.
I think she was almost making a conscious choice about
how to deal with this, how to be in the
wake of this. So she tried anger, and she tried vindictiveness,
and she tried I think, almost mimicking Jeanette and kind
of being out of control and letting her emotions fly.
But in the end, my mother was a decorous and
(13:27):
decent person who preferred a contemplative life. We'll be back
in a moment with more family secrets. Emily's mom dies
at the age of seventy. She had struggled all her
(13:47):
life with depression, the blues, and she felt humiliated by
the role she had been forced to play in her church,
her community, that of the spurned wife. She also had
trouble breathing and suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. By
the end of her life, she was really a shut in,
a recluse, and all during her mother's decline, Emily begins
(14:11):
her life as an adult. She gets her doctorate, starts
to teach. Eventually she meets her husband and becomes the
mother of twin daughters. What must it have been like
to carry the weight of all that history, Well, my
mother was my first concern, and I think this was
true for my brother's as well. Um I never wrestled
(14:32):
with how I really felt about it. I had a
lot of rage toward my father, and we did not
have an easy relationship, and this was the icing on
the cake, and I buried that rage. It was very
hard for me to beat around him physically, and there
was just thick and unspoken distance between us. We both
knew why we never spoke of it. He never talked
(14:55):
to me about Janette, never spoke her name, He never
spoke Lee's name in my presence. He talked to my
brother is more about it. But I think I was
the girl. And also I was in rage with him,
and he felt my judgment and it scared him, so
we never spoke about it. I was angry at her
sometimes for letting this break her. I needed to believe
(15:15):
she had choices because I was growing up and I
wanted to have choices. I hated to see her beaten
down by this man because it had not been an
easy marriage. She would always counsel me to make a
different kind of choice when I get married. So that
was the idea that my life would be sort of
corrective to what she was experiencing. But it tore it
(15:37):
me watching her decline. She didn't want my help. She
actually disappeared into the marriage even deeper. My father took
care of her, and he administered all of her medications.
All the while. Emily isn't just contending with her sadness
and grief about her mother and her rage at her father. No,
She's also dealing with the spectra of Jeanette, who in
(15:59):
some way she blames for the whole thing. Whenever I'd
see her, I would feel homicidal. I mean really, I
learned about anger from my experience with this woman. Because
she was whittling my mother away. Myself was ricocheting between
a lot of different emotions, and it was easier to
bury them, to stay buried in the New England, and
(16:22):
then to remind as far away as I could get
from them and stay in the United States. I didn't
allow myself, I think, to confront what I felt my father,
even though he had done such damage, he still ruled
the roost. He was a king and we were subjects.
I never would have been able to conceive of even
bringing this woman's name up to him. It was out
(16:46):
of the question. She would be at our church. She
would come up to me, I mean she again, this
woman obeyed no conventional boundaries, and she would talk to
me about my family. And there was one moment when Isabella,
my utter, who was just a very sweet child, and
she came up and said, oh, Isabella's gotten so much bigger,
And Isabella went in to hug her because she was
(17:08):
responding to the tone of her voice, and I just
put my hand in Isabella's back. And I went home
that day from church and I heard my father on
the phone saying, and these low, soft tones, well, you
have to be the bigger person. And I knew down
to my toes like a lightning bolt. He was talking
to Jeanette, and then he was casting at that moment
(17:31):
as if I had been so rude, inexcusably rude, and
she should rise above. What it did was it just
kept the bottom kept falling out, the bottom kept descending,
you know what I mean. There was no floor to
my feelings of disappointment and my father and I still
needed a father, I mean, I still needed him to
(17:53):
be a person I could respect. So it was easier
just to let him lie and to keep my distance.
But eventually Emily does go visit her father. She describes
the trip to Nashville as a whim. She was working
on her book and wanted to do some research. There
was some journals she wanted to lay her hands on.
(18:13):
I'm still stunned by the turn of events that happened
now four years ago, almost exactly. It came in the
house and I was looking for the journal, and my
father came upstairs, and my mother had all these They
were all these pill bottles that were still on the
bathroom sink. She had died in two thousand and eight,
(18:34):
um seven years before. And I said, what are these
bottles doing here? And he said, you know, I just
I think I'm still in love with your mother. And
we hugged, and it was the most sincere and deepest
hug that we'd had in many years, maybe since I
was a child. He was not comfortable really with a
(18:54):
lot of touching, so he was even a little but
I kept him close, and I noticed at that moment
that in my heart I received those words purely and
without the usual sarcasm I felt. And I'm so grateful
that those are the last words we spoke, because the
next morning he was dead, and my father was in
perfect health. He'd never been sick of day in his life.
(19:17):
Amazing the way sometimes we're given a gift, even in
the midst of great pain, a hug, a moment between
a father and a daughter. Who what was it? The
therapist once told Emily weren't a good fit as parent
and child. After her father's death, Emily reaches out to
the relatively new reverend from her family's church, Reverend Cynthia.
(19:40):
Her father had been gone for only hours. His body
was still seated in the chair where he was stricken
by the massive heart attack. Reverend Cynthia comes to the
Bernard at home. She performs a beautiful ritual and anoints
Emily's father's body with oil. And we said that my
father is sitting in the chair, and tell her everything.
(20:00):
And she knew everything. And she told me the situation
between my father and the Curries had been the biggest
drift in her congregation. She was pretty new to the church.
My father was mentoring her. He was trying to introduce
her to the kind of social infocacies at our church
and help her become adjusted to the life at our church.
(20:23):
And she was trying to make things right. But there
are people who could not forgive my father. And that
was the first time I knew that people actually had
been my mother's side. But during the course of their conversation,
Emily makes another painful discovery. Despite the bottles of her
mom's prescription medication, despite her dad's confession that he still
(20:45):
was in love with her, he still had remained intensely
involved with Jeanette Curry, Jeanette's husband, children and grandchildren, but
not as a romantic partner. And I found out that
my father he was eating every meal at Jeanette's house.
Her grandchildren called him Grandpa. She and her husband had
(21:05):
a child, and then she and your father had a child,
and this somehow coexisted as some version of modern family. Absolutely,
I often think when I understood it when I read
The Color Purple, I think I was in college and
at the end of that novel, Mr and she could
cause Sally so much pain. But they were sitting together
on the on the porch, and I think they were
knitting or doing something, all three of them. And that
(21:28):
was the situation between my father and Jeanette and her family.
They were survivors of a war, and it was a
war of their own making, but it was a war
all the same, and they lived together. Really, my father
would go over to their house, he every meal there.
If this man is never gonna stop disappointing me, how
could he have a relationship with this family after what
they did to my mother? But he did. He took
(21:52):
Jeanette's grandchildren to church, to school, He helped them with
their homework, something he never did with my brother. My
brothers and I think were surprised because he was a
different person of them. He was an active grandfather. He
and Jeannette had more of a relationship of equals. They
would argue. He never argued with my mother. My mother
never would have questioned him. She was quote unquote the
(22:13):
perfect wife. You know, That's that's who she was. She
was living out of some magazine, I mean, and it
wasn't fake, you know, it was sincere. She was just
someone who believed that the husband was at the head
of the family. I mean, I think there's half of
her that really questioned that. But again, she had been
groomed for a certain kind of adult life. But he
Intoett were sparring partners. Um she confronted him with his
(22:36):
hypocrisy in a way my mother I don't think she
really would have ever felt comfortable doing that. He was
nurtured in that family, and he was seen in that
family in a way that he was not seen in
our family. He was himself there in a way that
he could not be with me. I think in my
brother's and my mother, I learned also that he he
was trying to in some ways I think repent and
(22:59):
he and Jeanette would go into you know, laurencome neighborhoods,
the projects, if you will, and proselytize and bring Bibles
and try to convert people. I mean, I always had
always on who's very religious. He grew up in the
Anglican Church in Trinidad. It was very obedient in that way.
But I mean, I'm still trying to understand this and
reconciled this portrait with the person I grew up with.
(23:20):
But that was the truth. I mean, it was corroborated
by you know, several people that he was on a mission,
it seems, in the final years of his life, perhaps
to make right with my mother's memory. He got me
all for clemp to the it Ish word for little emotional.
So Emily initiates a face to face with Jeanette. She's torn,
(23:45):
on the one hand by the horrible history of Jeanette
and her mother and trying to square that history with
the stories she now hears from Reverend Cynthia about Jeanette's
current very different relationship with her father. Meanwhile, she's a
grieving daughter, a complicated grief, to be sure, and she's
about to bury her father. I behaved in ways I
(24:07):
really regret around the funeral. I didn't want Jeanette's family there.
My brothers were bewildered by my degree, my anger, and
they sort of backed off and said, whatever she wants.
I didn't want her the service. I made it very
difficult for her to come to the wake. I was
full of unleashed fury and I regret that now, and
(24:31):
Jeanette knows that I regret it. But I couldn't control myself.
It was a really different story, and I thought, now
I'm gonna, you know, seek vengeance. And I asked Reverend
Cynthia to be there because when I wanted to witness
and too, I didn't know if I could trust myself
and how I would behave so I wanted someone that
I respected that I thought, you know, I'm not going
to act full in front of her. And as soon
(24:53):
as I came in the room, I mean, it was
just strange to be looking at this woman in the
eye and I'd studiously ignore her. It was about acting superior,
but it was also because I was afraid to look
in her eyes, you know. Over the course of a
three hour conversation, and I asked her could record it,
and she agreed. I mean a hundred pages of a transcript.
(25:13):
I realized that she was as much a victim in
the situation as my mother. When you say you were afraid,
you would always been afraid to look around the eye,
what we were afraid of seeing there? Do you think
it was maybe that you were afraid of seeing that
she was a human being? Yes, I think I was
afraid of seeing a real person and not the villain.
I needed to keep her as a villain, you know,
to keep it uncomplicated her as much as I could.
(25:35):
During that conversation, she says to you, I just wanted
your mother to forgive me. I wanted her to forgive
me so bad. And it seems like that was the
moment for you that it kind of, you know, broke
open absolutely, because don't we all want that, you know,
I am also my mother's daughter, and that, you know,
(25:58):
I religion or my faith in God is really important
to me. And you know, every week in church we
pray for forgiveness. And she made a mistake, something she's
used as a mistake now. But I'm not a saint,
you know, I mean, I've I've hurt people I've been
careless with other people's emotions. I've been forgiven, you know,
(26:19):
by friends and by family, So how can I not
offer her that? And everyone who was hurting the situation
is no longer alive, so it's really the two of
us now. And my mother at the end of her
life was talking a lot about forgiveness and telling me
that I need to be more forgiving. Ironically, I mean
she was after I'm holding the George for her for years,
(26:42):
feeling like keeping her anger alive was important. I really
believe that probably up to that moment with Jeanette, or
maybe experiencing her anger that she couldn't experience, because the
way you've described her, that was like the last thing
she wanted to feel, absolutely and I felt when I
went to a meet Jeanette, I remember thinking I'm a panther,
(27:03):
you know. I always thought my mother was like, you know,
the steer in the headlights, and Janette was like some jackal,
and I just I was tired of that. And when
I sat and listened to her, honestly, I realized that
what she wanted was very simple, was from my father
to be a father to his son, and after he died,
(27:24):
had gone through all of his papers. I found at
least one check she had returned from my father, saying
I don't want your money. But my conditioning was so
thorough that I edited out of my consciousness. And as
soon as she said the part about one of my
mother's forgiveness, it came back into view in my head.
(27:47):
I thought she never wanted his money. She wanted to
get you hid to give to Lee what he had
given to us, which was a step up and a
step out of, you know, all the limitations they were
living with. She also described for you, or explains to you,
the reasons why she was harassing, which I thought was
really kind of amazing too. Yeah, and you know, I've
(28:10):
been driven crazy by a man before. I mean, you
know what happens. And I think that's partly what happened.
I think Jenna and I are learning to tell the
truth to each other. So there are many layers of
the story that are unfolding. And you know, I think
it's difficult sometimes to be really truthful when we've heard
someone so deeply or made mistakes, and I think she's
grappling with that herself. There's a way which she shaped
(28:32):
the story to help herself survive. I mean, my father would.
I also realized that he'd set me up as his
straw man. I mean, he would tell Jeannette, well, Emily
wouldn't want me whenever she wanted him to help her,
I think with a down payment on on a condition
she wanted to buy any He was supposed to be
someone who signed and at the last minute he said, well,
Emily doesn't want me to do that. Emily doesn't and
(28:54):
I had never heard of this, So she had a
feeling about me that it was not accurate because my
father again was telling multiple stories and keeping people in
their places. Um. So we've had to undo a lot
of that, and we've laughed a lot about all the
things that we believed about each other. But I think, um,
as we talk, she's feeling safer to tell me the truth.
(29:17):
You know, she was in a situation at our church
where all of the people were doctors and lawyers. Here.
She was feeling very alone, feeling very out of place,
and everyone was making her feel that way because of
you know, again loyalty to my parents. She was coming
to church, I found out because my father had been
(29:39):
asking her to come to church. I mean every time
I would come home, she would be at church. I mean,
he had this idea that he could normalize things and
then we would come around. And she told me, because
your father, you're the one he was afraid of, and
you know, and the thing that was it was funny
and it was true, but it was also odd to
realize how much he talked to her about me and
his fears about me and how I felt about him.
(30:02):
He said, you know, I know those kids think I
killed their mother, and I did. So he knew me
better than I thought he did, and she had a
lot of intuitive feelings about who I was. It's so
much about knowing and being known, isn't it. You know
what I asked you before about what it felt like
(30:22):
for you when you were in your twenties and thirties
watching your mother's decline and moving forward in your life,
and the various feelings you know, you describe them as
you know, like like all these different trying on different
feelings for size. I'm going to try vindictiveness, I'm gonna
try rate, I'm gonna try you know whatever. But mostly
your concern was about your mother. So I guess what
(30:46):
I'm wondering is what now is the feeling. You're a
mother of teenage kids, you're a professor, you're memoirist, you're
a wife, you know, you're a friend, your many things.
Why is it important? You know, some people at my
church have really encouraged me to my home church and Nashville,
(31:08):
out of concern for me and may be concerned about
what I'm going to discover, have really advised me very
gently to leave the story alone. And of course it
makes that attracts me even more to the story. This
is the story of my life in some way. When
I was going down to Nashville to have this talk
with Jeanette, you know, I was myself confused, why am
I doing this? And I said to my husband, you know,
(31:29):
do you understand, because I wanted him to tell me why,
And he said, this woman has more had more impact
on your life than any other person besides your parents.
I think I'm driven to know. I mean, my parents
are both gone, and you know that's I'm next. So
the understanding I have from my own experience about just
(31:53):
wanting to know the truth in all of its ugliness
and all of its mysteries, I would like to know
realize I never knew my father. I think other guests
in your podcast have talked about that. I really never
knew who he was, and it's still taking me many years.
I mean, he's taken many years and even say that,
(32:16):
and I think it will be many more years to
understand what that means. Janette is honestly one of the
only people I have left who knows the story. She
lived the story. I no longer have, you know, vengeful
feelings toward her, but we have an odd bond. She's
had some health issues over the years, and at the
(32:37):
time I went down to talk to her, I felt
a little urgency about that. You know, before anything happens
to her, I need to have this conversation. And then
there's a matter of Lee, Emily's half brother. In a
story so much about forgiveness and understanding even in the
most difficult circumstances, this too, is of course a bridge
(32:57):
that must be crossed. Can you tell me about meeting
him for the first time? We connected on Facebook? And
I'm a little embarrassed to say that my first response
to him was, you know, what is that you want?
One of the things I've come to realize is that
when there is what feels like a quote unquote interloper
(33:18):
in a family without exception. In my experience, the very
first feeling is threat It's a primitive, hardwired, biological thing
that happens, which is your other you're outside and people,
even when they often eventually come around to realizing that
(33:41):
that's just not the case, I feel threatened. I absolutely
felt threatened. And Lee said, you know, I just want
to know my siblings. I just want a big sister.
Why would I deny him that Lee was thirty one
years old and Emily in her late forties when they
first met, and he'd recently been paroled after a minor
(34:03):
drug offense. It's interesting that this only happened and probably
only could have happened in the aftermath of your father's death.
It wasn't gonna happen while your father was alive. And
I think also if I hadn't been there, the curries
would have discovered him, and that would have been terrible
because I was still locked in a place of bitterness
(34:26):
forward them. So I am again it was a great
gift that he let go of life when I was there.
It started the whole thing. And right I've told Jette,
I said, I could never have done this with my father,
really lea because it would have made him too happy,
It would have pleased him too watch. There's no way
I could have ever, you know, because I found out
(34:47):
if his death that that's what he had wanted. And
he had promised me that he was going to try
to foster a relationship. But he was too afraid of me,
I think to say that to me. But it was
so easy, you know. I mean, my father gave me
the gift of his death. If I can say that,
it sounds cruel, but he can't disappoint me anymore. He's
not allowed to disappoint me anymore. So I can. I
(35:10):
can warn him, and I can remember him, and he's
sort of still. And the curtain opened, and there are
these people and one of them is my brother. And
you know, my daughters are adopted. And I know that
love happens in blossoms outside of the genetic relationship. But
(35:31):
there's something that happened, something that happened. As soon as
Lee and I saw each other, my heart melted. We
planned to get together and I thought we should have them,
we should have a date. So first we're reading things together,
you know, we're reading. That's my mode so we were
reading books, you know, between exactly and the first time
we did based on I really couldn't even speak. We're
just smiling so much. So we met and I looked
(35:54):
exactly with my father, I mean, the older I get.
You know, if I walked through the streets in North Nashville,
people are falling out, there's Dr Bernard. So he was stunned.
And Lee is just extraordinary. I mean, he had one
of those kind of revelations when he was in prison
that you know, he was the author of his own experience,
and he let go of a lot of bitterness with
(36:15):
my dad. I have been really humbled by that because
he has just accepted it, even though he told me once.
You know, he was in jail when my father died
and he wished he could have asked him, why did
you have me? Why was I born? And you're left,
as so often is the case, holding the story holding
(36:40):
you know, your mother's the rage she couldn't feel that,
you know that you've worked through, and your father's guilt,
the guilt that it doesn't seem that he was particularly
capable of feeling, you know, but it was there. It's
almost like it was in the cosmos, and somebody had
to actually kind of contend with it. And so I mean,
that's how it striking me, is that you're at this
point where you have these two new relationships, neither one
(37:03):
of which you could ever have anticipated, you know, one
with Jeanette and one with Lee, and this is sort
of the work that needed to be done, and it
couldn't be done by either of your parents, but it's
being done now by you. I think part of the
story when it's taught me is I mean, I thought
I experienced every emotion, you know, at my age, and
(37:24):
I hadn't, and I'm experiencing new emotions now that are
very intriguing to me. I'm surprised every time I hear
from Janette about the lack of rancor and the eerie
connection that I have hard time explaining. For instance, after
this essay came out, I hadn't anticipated how emotional it
(37:46):
would be to see it in print and to contend
with the aftermath of telling this little sliver of the truth.
And there are people who cautioned me again in my life,
elders who care about me, who asked me, but also
with some frustration, you know, why are you talking to her.
Why do you believe her? Maybe I'm naive, but I'm
(38:09):
interested in what she has to say, and I don't
think she's lied to me yet. I think she's done
with lying, and I think we're both at a place
where we want to know the truth. In fact, when
I started to write the piece and the magazine, she said,
you know, our story has a lot to teach people
about fregiveness. And again I just humbled by the wisdom,
(38:33):
by the clarity, the generosity. Well, and it's interesting because
at least as you have spoken about her and written
about her, she wasn't a liar. She's a lot of
other hurtful things, but lying, which your father did you
know full on? It doesn't seem like Jeanette did that. Yeah,
(38:56):
there's a lot of truth. I'm still content with this.
I mean, I had a lifetime of hating this woman.
It's sometimes hard to accept the fact that she was truthful,
even when it's staring me in the face. I also
think she's a human being and did more damage than
she is able to really face right now, which again
(39:17):
I empathize with him. I think that's just true of
being a human being that sometimes it's hard to face
our mistakes, especially when they've been profound. There are parts
of the story they're still very mysterious to me. But
Janette Is knows I need to see receipts, as we say,
and you know, because she wasn't believed, has kept voice recordings,
She's kept correspondence. She kept records because no one believed her,
(39:42):
and she's sharing them with me now because she wants
me to know. I'd like to thank Emily Bernard for
(40:05):
sharing her story with us. Learn more about Emily's memoir
Black Is the Body, Stories from My Grandmother's Time, my
Mother's time, and mine by visiting Emily Bernard dot com.
Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan
is a supervising producer. Julie Douglas and Bethanne Macaluso are
(40:25):
the executive producers. If you have a family secret that
you like to share, you can get in touch with
us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com.
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
Facebook at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pod.
For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot
(40:48):
com Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
(41:09):
listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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