March 7, 2019 • 22 mins
What if, as a child born into a white Jewish family, anytime someone remarked about your skin color, a story was told about a distant Sicilian grandfather? Even if it was obvious that wasn't the whole story? Lacey Schwartz talks about what it's like to live in an alternate universe of knowing-not knowing your own secret.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Lacey
Schwartz was born into a Jewish family who lived in Woodstock,
New York. Her twenty sixteen documentary, Little White Lye, begins
with glimpses of home movies Lacy as a young child
surrounded by her family. This is in the late nineteen seventies.
(00:21):
Her mom is fair with big blue eyes. Her dad
is dark haired, intense looking, brooding. Actually, her parents look
kind of cool, hippieish, like a young James Taylor and
Carly Simon, which is appropriate since this is Woodstock. And
then there's Lacy. What the viewer notices instantly is that
(00:42):
the child is black, but no one in her family
seems to notice or take in this fact. I can't
stress how obvious it would be to anyone looking at
this family that there is no way little Lacy, a
beautiful girl, was caramel skin, dark eyes, kinky hair, and
decidedly African American features, is the daughter of her two
(01:03):
very white parents. I mean, maybe she's the daughter of
one of them, but both out of the question. Except
this is a story in which what people wish to
believe will themselves to believe, becomes what they actually do
believe the story of a family who raises their only
child to believe that she is something other than who
(01:24):
she is. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
secrets that are kept from us, secrets we keep from others,
and secrets we keep from ourselves. So did you have
(01:48):
any sense at all growing up that something didn't quite
make sense? Absolutely? I mean I solely because the way
I loved from the time I was very very um.
I either have memories of being questioned about the way
I love and why I looked the way I did
because I did seemed to like fit in with my
(02:08):
family and surrounding and I looked different than other people,
And it also became almost like a little bit of
family lore that you know, the first vacation, at least
I was aware that we went on as a family
and we went to Puerto Rico, and as an infant,
you know, people thought I was Puerto Rican. So it
was always very clear that people thought I looked different
(02:29):
from my parents. I know something about growing up with
a profound disconnect between who I was told I was
and the truth that stared back at me in the
mirror every day. A couple of years ago. As nothing
more than a whim, I spit into a plastic file
and sent a d n A sample to one of
those genetic testing companies. When I got my results, I
(02:52):
found out that my dad wasn't my dad. Half of
my family tree was locked off at the roots. The
person I thought I was was not the person I
actually was, at least not biologically. At a time when
I was in the midst of my freak out, a
friend told me about Lacey's film. I watched mesmerized as
(03:14):
a beaming black girl held the Torah on her bot mitzvah,
her parents proudly looking on as she read from the
Hagada at the pass Over table with her family, as
she laughed as a toddler on her mother's lap. My
family knew who they were, and they defined who I was,
the adult, Lacey narrates. I was raised in an Orthodox
(03:38):
Jewish family on my father's side. It was a lineage
that stretched back into the shettles of Lithuania and Poland.
My cousins all look unmistakably Jewish. In fact, some of
them wear the black hats and long beards of Hassad's.
I grew up in a Kosher home, spoke fluent Hebrew,
and attended a yeshiva at Jewish day school. And every
(04:01):
day of my life I was told that I didn't
look Jewish. I was very fair and blue eyed. But
it wasn't just that I didn't look Jewish. It was
that I did look like something else, like I came
from another part of the world altogether. But in my family,
we laughed off this strange genetic twist of fate that
had me looking like Swiss miss wandering over from the
(04:23):
Alps and into the dusty shuttle. It was a source
of amusement and hilarity. I mean, when I was three
years old, I was the child in the Kodak Christmas poster. Literally,
I was the little girl wishing the entire world a
merry Christmas. As the end credits rolled in Lacy's film,
I turned to my husband Michael, so I said, the
(04:46):
level of denial in her family was really extreme, not
like what happened in mine. Michael paused and looked at me. Yeah, no,
pretty much the same, he said. There's all different kinds
the secrets of families kind of, but a lot of
times it's because people's existence. They're like stigmatized. People don't
want to talk about having affair, they don't want to
(05:07):
talk about being inter at all, they don't want to
talk about the fact that maybe they are partning before
our marriage. There's all different kinds of things that people
lie about, absolutely, and we're also living in a moment
in time where a lot of those lies or very
closely kept secrets are tumbling out because of the combination
(05:29):
of the Internet and DNA testing, where people find out
all sorts of things that were meant to be kept
secrets to the grave. Yeah. No, absolutely mean. I have
a bunch of friends through through genetic testing, the kind
of over the kind of generic testing, has found out
that they are not their parents child. There was within
my family a kind of the story that was told
(05:52):
was that my father had a dark skinned Sicilian grandfather
who I had never met, had passed away about her
Warren by looking at family photos, that was who I
looked like. It was darker as features and c around,
and that it was kind of its idea like re
set of gene And that was a story that was
repeated and kind of was passed on and would come
(06:14):
up at various moments, so I would say that, you know,
for me and becau's really worth knowing that, in in terms
of my own time, I was denial that my denial
was very much learned, you know, it was something that
was passed on to me. Lazie grows up in a
self described bubble in Woodstock. Despite its fame, it's a
small town, mostly white. No one really challenges her or
(06:38):
her parents about what is glaringly obvious. But then, as
bubbles do, hers begins to Expand we're going to take
a quick break. We'll be back in a moment. When
Lazy enters middle school and then high school, she's bussed
(07:00):
to a much larger town, and it's then that she
begins to get the questions and deep down to question herself.
There's a moment in your film, if I were call
it correctly, where there's a sense that the African American
kids in that school are looking at you like you're
one of us, Like what's up that this isn't making
(07:20):
you know, like we we recognize you exactly. Part of
that was understanding how you know, I had come to
convince myself to believe that I would still I kind
of push back a rationalize against it, but I would
say that probably around high school is when kind of stuff,
or maybe even middle school was when I realized that
you dine you the truth but wasn't willing to admit it.
(07:42):
And I think I went through most of my adolescens
in that phase. The phase Lacy is talking about here
has been coined by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas as the
unthought known, what we know deep down but cannot bring
ourselves to think. Sometimes we spend our whole lives in
the unthought known, and sometimes life intervenes and we're confronted
(08:06):
with knowledge that we can no longer bury from ourselves.
When Lazy is sixteen, her parents, who had been having issues,
split up. This fissure in the foundation of her family
is the first step in a fissure inside of Lacey.
She can't articulate it, but she knows that something doesn't
make sense. The fall of her senior year, when she
(08:29):
applies to colleges, she leaves the box that would identify
her ethnicity unchecked. Back in those days, I don't think
college is still do this. Lacey would have sent a
photograph along with her application. So Lacey is admitted to
Georgetown as a black student. Do you remember anything about
(08:51):
that moment? Was that a conscious choice? Was that a
moment of I really just don't even know what to
put here? Or you tell me, like you know, it
almost feels like a challenge, like you tell me who
who am? I? And I've spent to a fair amount
of time analyzing this and discussing it with the people
that were close to me. But I think in retrospect
(09:12):
that what I was, even if it was, as you said,
the the unknown truth or what was that you said,
what was that crazy? The unsought known, the unsought known?
And that was really so my parents went around was
six team a junior year in high school, right, So
I was sending in my applications more or less that
summer fall afterwards. At that point I was really my
(09:35):
bubble was popped, and so I think seeped down at
that point. I didn't know the truth, but I was
very much prioritizing the issues I was dealing with my life.
But at the same time, largely around I wish with
one person, a guy that I was dating at that time,
who had already gone off to college, who he himself
was also bi racial black and had come from the
(09:56):
same sound as me and was just saying, like, yo,
it's one thing that you think walking around in this
relatively small community that we grew up in and saying
that you're white or you know, identifying as such. But
you know, when you go out into the bigger world,
like people are going to laugh at you, like it
doesn't add up. And so I was conscious enough to
know at that point that there were things that weren't
(10:17):
adding up, But I wasn't prepared to really do the
deep dive at that point under my you know, but
still the time my parents root, I wasn't in the
proximity of my parents ready to do that diving a
cigarette like, well, then who am I if I am
not the daughter of both of my parents. Lacy goes
off to college and begins to try on her new identity,
(10:40):
living in what she describes as a racial closet. She
doesn't say a word to her mother, she doesn't say
a word to her father. It isn't until she's been
away from home for her entire freshman year that she
broaches the subject with her mother for the first time.
So I went to my mother and was life with
then I wanted as a truth, like why do I
(11:00):
the way I did, and my mother, as she tends to,
kind of comes in haunt and took a whisle me
pushing her for her to finally kind of sit down
and really have the conversation about what occurred around me
being conceived and how likely it was that my father
was not my biological boma. So by the time I
found out and really fundamentally again, it was more a
(11:22):
confirmation process than it was a revelatory process, because by
the time I went to my mother and stop to her,
I was ready just to have the imformation firm so
I could confirm my own identity and be able to
figure out who I was. Lacy's mother does not want
to talk about it. At first, she denies it, but
(11:43):
eventually she tells Lazy the truth her mom had had
a long affair was an African American man named Rodney,
a friend of the family that Lacy has known growing
up and who Lacy resembles to such a point that
friends have pointed it out, and so kind of at
that point she shared the information and shared what is
basically outline it. It's not that she had had a
(12:05):
relationship with my biological father, and there was a very
good chance that I was to his child, and for me,
I mean again, based on the side that I really
physically looked fairly somewhere at him, it seemed pretty obvious
what the truth was. Once Lazy has the truth of
her identity confirmed, you'd think she'd pay her dad a
visit go talk to him. Lazy's mom tells her that
(12:27):
the two of them have never discussed it. My parents
never talked about the truth to this day. They haven't
actually really pull out had a conversation about the truth
for a long time, obviously because my mother. But now
at this point, my father guys made it clear to
her that he doesn't want to sit down and talk
it out, that he just doesn't want to talk to
her about it. And they had never had a moment
with each other when you were born or in your childhood.
(12:50):
There wasn't that when when he moved out, like when
they were pretty much in the processive him moving out.
One one moment he said, you know, I know, Lazy
not my biological child, and the point her, you know,
she cried and cried and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
But they didn't actually have a competition like that was
the expect of the competition. How long after the hemming
(13:13):
and hawing with your mother and then finally her admitting
to you that it was possible. How long before you
then ended up speaking with your father about it? A decade?
A decade? We're going to pause for a moment. You know,
(13:37):
Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if I
had found out the truth about me and my dad
while he was still alive. Now it's easy for me
to wish I could talk to him, to wish I
could ask him what he suspected or whether he flat
out new and if he did know whether it mattered.
But would I have been able to sit my father down,
(13:57):
look him in the eye and have that moment into
saying I am not your biological daughter. For me, I
think it was really about living for a long time
in fear that if I spoke the truth about my race,
which was directly linked to my fraternity, that I would
(14:17):
be at risk of losing my father, And so I
always telling my father was my father, and I was
scared of losing him, And it took me a while
to come to accept that I actually only now realized
that I probably was never really at risk of losing him,
But I actually had to accept that I had to
(14:39):
be willing to move forward regardless of the potential of
losing him, because I couldn't live my life under these
secrets and be able to move for with my life
in a healthy manner. And then after I was came
to that realization and acceptance and actually didn't move forward,
I came to realize that when I kind of sent
(15:01):
my own boundaries and owned my own truth, that in fact,
my father was fundamentally still going to be there. Like
I literally thought there one or two things was going
to happen. Either he and I were going to totally
like sit down and working all out beyond the same page,
or we were going to have nothing to do with
each other. And I didn't realize that there was a
middle ground between those two, that we could actually have
(15:23):
live our own separate realities but still being in each
other's lives, which is what exact happened. And it also
took me a while to really accept the fact that
nobody except for me was going to actually bring up
these conversations that in and of itself was something I
had to come to terms with. It's like why won't
they whether it was like send the family and my father,
(15:44):
why don't think forward was having the conversation but realizing that,
you know, this is my life and I couldn't be
a victim within my own life, and so if this
was something I needed to do, I needed to take
responsibility and do it. The discovery of such a massive
secret that was always hiding in plain sight is one thing.
The work of metabolizing it is another. It isn't easy
(16:07):
to digest a new truth about yourself that changes the
very nature of your identity, and in Lacey's case, this
is complicated by the fact that there's a politicized racial
identification going on. She has to reconcile being black with
a lifetime of believing she was white. She has to
come to an understanding of what it means to be
(16:27):
both black and Jewish. If you think about it, identity
is usually something that we're born with and grow into,
but what about when it isn't so. Lacey embarks on
making her documentary first thinking that she's going to explore
dual identity, what she calls two iconic identities, being black
(16:48):
and being Jewish, But as she begins working on the film,
she realizes that while it's a good idea. She doesn't
quite know what the story is until she realizes that
she and her family is the story. And one of
the things I think is most interesting about this is
that the art form Lazy chooses film is a visual, clear,
(17:10):
direct medium, one in which Lacey would be pointing the
camera at her parents who never ever wanted to talk
about this, and essentially pushed them to talk. Like, you
didn't make an opera out of it. You make a
book out of it. You to make a play out
of it, or a poem out of it, or a
podcast out of it. You made a film. It's like,
(17:31):
in a way, what it feels like to me is
you were saying, I'm going to pin this down as
much as it can be pinned down, because it wasn't
pinned down for all of those years. It really is
like a coming out product. You know. I had literally
lived in regi Ploset where it was out and about
in my world and kind of you know, identifying a
certain way that I would come home and I with
(17:52):
whitewash and my existence and I would tell France, you know,
remember my we don't talk about me being black at
home from the just I had to live it and
therefore capturing the living of it. Just made sense to
me just to go through it and just hold myself
accountable to really not only living through it, but then
actually going back and processing it. And this just felt
(18:15):
like the way that made the most soundsels I was
really living out experience, and doing a documentary was really
capturing what was happening in real time at that moment.
Right Also, it gives you permission and forces you in
a certain way to ask the tough questions to go there,
to keep your mother in the chair, to have that conversation,
to have that conversation with your father um which no
(18:36):
other art form would afford you. Until I uncovered my
family's secrets, I was never going to learn to live
with my joy identity being black and Jewish, and I
was never going to be able to internally integrate my
identities until I was willing to go through the process
of moving past my family secrets. I suppose that it's
(18:57):
core this is a story about the extraordinary a capacity
that we human beings have to believe what we want
to believe, to bury our own secrets, even from ourselves,
and at the same time the capacity we also have
to shed those secrets to move past them and become
holy ourselves. You now have five year old twins, is
(19:21):
that right? So in your family life, how does being
black and Jewish play into the way that you think
about raising your kids and dual identity and is this
kind of an ongoing story in a way for you
part of what you think about as a mom as
having kids of your own now totally, I mean, I
think I'm infertan ways. I think I'm very typical, which
(19:42):
is that like identified with the Jewish, I've always practiced
in my own way my whole life. But now I'm
figuring out what that means in my family and my husband,
who was raised in Baptist Church. We are raising the
kids Jewish, but we're figuring out what that means, you know,
my husband is not Jewish. But also to know who
they are on every piece of it. I mean, I
think that for us the thing that helps us that
our world are not divided in that space. Like my
(20:05):
in law is even expressed, you know interest in coming
to synagogue. We have a church with them on some
of the big holidays. I think that you know, we
wanted to know who they are completely and totally, but
we're still figuring it out. I mean, I think everybody
is figuring out. Previously, when I wasn't like kind of
(20:25):
speaking my truth and owning and and I hadn't had
the conversation with my family, I lived with a lot
of anxiety about things being revealed. And you can see
some of those moments within the film and the tension
that I was living with and I don't live with
them anymore. That is actually gone from my life, that
that anxiety has been relieved, And so there are a
very physical difference in terms of how I lived my
(20:47):
life now and how I was putting it before, Like
the apprehension and anxiety around this secret being will be
able to talk about our reference is now gone, and
I feel that physical difference. I'd like to thank my
(21:11):
guest Lacey Schwartz for sharing her story with us today.
You can find out more about her documentary at Little
White Lie. The film dot com. Family Secrets is an
I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer,
Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers, and
Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a
(21:34):
family Secret, you'd like to share. You can get in
touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast
dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram
at Danny Writer, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and
Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's FAMI Secret Spot. For
more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Lacey
Schwartz was born into a Jewish family who lived in Woodstock,
New York. Her twenty sixteen documentary, Little White Lye, begins
with glimpses of home movies Lacy as a young child
surrounded by her family. This is in the late nineteen seventies.
(00:21):
Her mom is fair with big blue eyes. Her dad
is dark haired, intense looking, brooding. Actually, her parents look
kind of cool, hippieish, like a young James Taylor and
Carly Simon, which is appropriate since this is Woodstock. And
then there's Lacy. What the viewer notices instantly is that
(00:42):
the child is black, but no one in her family
seems to notice or take in this fact. I can't
stress how obvious it would be to anyone looking at
this family that there is no way little Lacy, a
beautiful girl, was caramel skin, dark eyes, kinky hair, and
decidedly African American features, is the daughter of her two
(01:03):
very white parents. I mean, maybe she's the daughter of
one of them, but both out of the question. Except
this is a story in which what people wish to
believe will themselves to believe, becomes what they actually do
believe the story of a family who raises their only
child to believe that she is something other than who
(01:24):
she is. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets,
secrets that are kept from us, secrets we keep from others,
and secrets we keep from ourselves. So did you have
(01:48):
any sense at all growing up that something didn't quite
make sense? Absolutely? I mean I solely because the way
I loved from the time I was very very um.
I either have memories of being questioned about the way
I love and why I looked the way I did
because I did seemed to like fit in with my
(02:08):
family and surrounding and I looked different than other people,
And it also became almost like a little bit of
family lore that you know, the first vacation, at least
I was aware that we went on as a family
and we went to Puerto Rico, and as an infant,
you know, people thought I was Puerto Rican. So it
was always very clear that people thought I looked different
(02:29):
from my parents. I know something about growing up with
a profound disconnect between who I was told I was
and the truth that stared back at me in the
mirror every day. A couple of years ago. As nothing
more than a whim, I spit into a plastic file
and sent a d n A sample to one of
those genetic testing companies. When I got my results, I
(02:52):
found out that my dad wasn't my dad. Half of
my family tree was locked off at the roots. The
person I thought I was was not the person I
actually was, at least not biologically. At a time when
I was in the midst of my freak out, a
friend told me about Lacey's film. I watched mesmerized as
(03:14):
a beaming black girl held the Torah on her bot mitzvah,
her parents proudly looking on as she read from the
Hagada at the pass Over table with her family, as
she laughed as a toddler on her mother's lap. My
family knew who they were, and they defined who I was,
the adult, Lacey narrates. I was raised in an Orthodox
(03:38):
Jewish family on my father's side. It was a lineage
that stretched back into the shettles of Lithuania and Poland.
My cousins all look unmistakably Jewish. In fact, some of
them wear the black hats and long beards of Hassad's.
I grew up in a Kosher home, spoke fluent Hebrew,
and attended a yeshiva at Jewish day school. And every
(04:01):
day of my life I was told that I didn't
look Jewish. I was very fair and blue eyed. But
it wasn't just that I didn't look Jewish. It was
that I did look like something else, like I came
from another part of the world altogether. But in my family,
we laughed off this strange genetic twist of fate that
had me looking like Swiss miss wandering over from the
(04:23):
Alps and into the dusty shuttle. It was a source
of amusement and hilarity. I mean, when I was three
years old, I was the child in the Kodak Christmas poster. Literally,
I was the little girl wishing the entire world a
merry Christmas. As the end credits rolled in Lacy's film,
I turned to my husband Michael, so I said, the
(04:46):
level of denial in her family was really extreme, not
like what happened in mine. Michael paused and looked at me. Yeah, no,
pretty much the same, he said. There's all different kinds
the secrets of families kind of, but a lot of
times it's because people's existence. They're like stigmatized. People don't
want to talk about having affair, they don't want to
(05:07):
talk about being inter at all, they don't want to
talk about the fact that maybe they are partning before
our marriage. There's all different kinds of things that people
lie about, absolutely, and we're also living in a moment
in time where a lot of those lies or very
closely kept secrets are tumbling out because of the combination
(05:29):
of the Internet and DNA testing, where people find out
all sorts of things that were meant to be kept
secrets to the grave. Yeah. No, absolutely mean. I have
a bunch of friends through through genetic testing, the kind
of over the kind of generic testing, has found out
that they are not their parents child. There was within
my family a kind of the story that was told
(05:52):
was that my father had a dark skinned Sicilian grandfather
who I had never met, had passed away about her
Warren by looking at family photos, that was who I
looked like. It was darker as features and c around,
and that it was kind of its idea like re
set of gene And that was a story that was
repeated and kind of was passed on and would come
(06:14):
up at various moments, so I would say that, you know,
for me and becau's really worth knowing that, in in terms
of my own time, I was denial that my denial
was very much learned, you know, it was something that
was passed on to me. Lazie grows up in a
self described bubble in Woodstock. Despite its fame, it's a
small town, mostly white. No one really challenges her or
(06:38):
her parents about what is glaringly obvious. But then, as
bubbles do, hers begins to Expand we're going to take
a quick break. We'll be back in a moment. When
Lazy enters middle school and then high school, she's bussed
(07:00):
to a much larger town, and it's then that she
begins to get the questions and deep down to question herself.
There's a moment in your film, if I were call
it correctly, where there's a sense that the African American
kids in that school are looking at you like you're
one of us, Like what's up that this isn't making
(07:20):
you know, like we we recognize you exactly. Part of
that was understanding how you know, I had come to
convince myself to believe that I would still I kind
of push back a rationalize against it, but I would
say that probably around high school is when kind of stuff,
or maybe even middle school was when I realized that
you dine you the truth but wasn't willing to admit it.
(07:42):
And I think I went through most of my adolescens
in that phase. The phase Lacy is talking about here
has been coined by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas as the
unthought known, what we know deep down but cannot bring
ourselves to think. Sometimes we spend our whole lives in
the unthought known, and sometimes life intervenes and we're confronted
(08:06):
with knowledge that we can no longer bury from ourselves.
When Lazy is sixteen, her parents, who had been having issues,
split up. This fissure in the foundation of her family
is the first step in a fissure inside of Lacey.
She can't articulate it, but she knows that something doesn't
make sense. The fall of her senior year, when she
(08:29):
applies to colleges, she leaves the box that would identify
her ethnicity unchecked. Back in those days, I don't think
college is still do this. Lacey would have sent a
photograph along with her application. So Lacey is admitted to
Georgetown as a black student. Do you remember anything about
(08:51):
that moment? Was that a conscious choice? Was that a
moment of I really just don't even know what to
put here? Or you tell me, like you know, it
almost feels like a challenge, like you tell me who
who am? I? And I've spent to a fair amount
of time analyzing this and discussing it with the people
that were close to me. But I think in retrospect
(09:12):
that what I was, even if it was, as you said,
the the unknown truth or what was that you said,
what was that crazy? The unsought known, the unsought known?
And that was really so my parents went around was
six team a junior year in high school, right, So
I was sending in my applications more or less that
summer fall afterwards. At that point I was really my
(09:35):
bubble was popped, and so I think seeped down at
that point. I didn't know the truth, but I was
very much prioritizing the issues I was dealing with my life.
But at the same time, largely around I wish with
one person, a guy that I was dating at that time,
who had already gone off to college, who he himself
was also bi racial black and had come from the
(09:56):
same sound as me and was just saying, like, yo,
it's one thing that you think walking around in this
relatively small community that we grew up in and saying
that you're white or you know, identifying as such. But
you know, when you go out into the bigger world,
like people are going to laugh at you, like it
doesn't add up. And so I was conscious enough to
know at that point that there were things that weren't
(10:17):
adding up, But I wasn't prepared to really do the
deep dive at that point under my you know, but
still the time my parents root, I wasn't in the
proximity of my parents ready to do that diving a
cigarette like, well, then who am I if I am
not the daughter of both of my parents. Lacy goes
off to college and begins to try on her new identity,
(10:40):
living in what she describes as a racial closet. She
doesn't say a word to her mother, she doesn't say
a word to her father. It isn't until she's been
away from home for her entire freshman year that she
broaches the subject with her mother for the first time.
So I went to my mother and was life with
then I wanted as a truth, like why do I
(11:00):
the way I did, and my mother, as she tends to,
kind of comes in haunt and took a whisle me
pushing her for her to finally kind of sit down
and really have the conversation about what occurred around me
being conceived and how likely it was that my father
was not my biological boma. So by the time I
found out and really fundamentally again, it was more a
(11:22):
confirmation process than it was a revelatory process, because by
the time I went to my mother and stop to her,
I was ready just to have the imformation firm so
I could confirm my own identity and be able to
figure out who I was. Lacy's mother does not want
to talk about it. At first, she denies it, but
(11:43):
eventually she tells Lazy the truth her mom had had
a long affair was an African American man named Rodney,
a friend of the family that Lacy has known growing
up and who Lacy resembles to such a point that
friends have pointed it out, and so kind of at
that point she shared the information and shared what is
basically outline it. It's not that she had had a
(12:05):
relationship with my biological father, and there was a very
good chance that I was to his child, and for me,
I mean again, based on the side that I really
physically looked fairly somewhere at him, it seemed pretty obvious
what the truth was. Once Lazy has the truth of
her identity confirmed, you'd think she'd pay her dad a
visit go talk to him. Lazy's mom tells her that
(12:27):
the two of them have never discussed it. My parents
never talked about the truth to this day. They haven't
actually really pull out had a conversation about the truth
for a long time, obviously because my mother. But now
at this point, my father guys made it clear to
her that he doesn't want to sit down and talk
it out, that he just doesn't want to talk to
her about it. And they had never had a moment
with each other when you were born or in your childhood.
(12:50):
There wasn't that when when he moved out, like when
they were pretty much in the processive him moving out.
One one moment he said, you know, I know, Lazy
not my biological child, and the point her, you know,
she cried and cried and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
But they didn't actually have a competition like that was
the expect of the competition. How long after the hemming
(13:13):
and hawing with your mother and then finally her admitting
to you that it was possible. How long before you
then ended up speaking with your father about it? A decade?
A decade? We're going to pause for a moment. You know,
(13:37):
Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if I
had found out the truth about me and my dad
while he was still alive. Now it's easy for me
to wish I could talk to him, to wish I
could ask him what he suspected or whether he flat
out new and if he did know whether it mattered.
But would I have been able to sit my father down,
(13:57):
look him in the eye and have that moment into
saying I am not your biological daughter. For me, I
think it was really about living for a long time
in fear that if I spoke the truth about my race,
which was directly linked to my fraternity, that I would
(14:17):
be at risk of losing my father, And so I
always telling my father was my father, and I was
scared of losing him, And it took me a while
to come to accept that I actually only now realized
that I probably was never really at risk of losing him,
But I actually had to accept that I had to
(14:39):
be willing to move forward regardless of the potential of
losing him, because I couldn't live my life under these
secrets and be able to move for with my life
in a healthy manner. And then after I was came
to that realization and acceptance and actually didn't move forward,
I came to realize that when I kind of sent
(15:01):
my own boundaries and owned my own truth, that in fact,
my father was fundamentally still going to be there. Like
I literally thought there one or two things was going
to happen. Either he and I were going to totally
like sit down and working all out beyond the same page,
or we were going to have nothing to do with
each other. And I didn't realize that there was a
middle ground between those two, that we could actually have
(15:23):
live our own separate realities but still being in each
other's lives, which is what exact happened. And it also
took me a while to really accept the fact that
nobody except for me was going to actually bring up
these conversations that in and of itself was something I
had to come to terms with. It's like why won't
they whether it was like send the family and my father,
(15:44):
why don't think forward was having the conversation but realizing that,
you know, this is my life and I couldn't be
a victim within my own life, and so if this
was something I needed to do, I needed to take
responsibility and do it. The discovery of such a massive
secret that was always hiding in plain sight is one thing.
The work of metabolizing it is another. It isn't easy
(16:07):
to digest a new truth about yourself that changes the
very nature of your identity, and in Lacey's case, this
is complicated by the fact that there's a politicized racial
identification going on. She has to reconcile being black with
a lifetime of believing she was white. She has to
come to an understanding of what it means to be
(16:27):
both black and Jewish. If you think about it, identity
is usually something that we're born with and grow into,
but what about when it isn't so. Lacey embarks on
making her documentary first thinking that she's going to explore
dual identity, what she calls two iconic identities, being black
(16:48):
and being Jewish, But as she begins working on the film,
she realizes that while it's a good idea. She doesn't
quite know what the story is until she realizes that
she and her family is the story. And one of
the things I think is most interesting about this is
that the art form Lazy chooses film is a visual, clear,
(17:10):
direct medium, one in which Lacey would be pointing the
camera at her parents who never ever wanted to talk
about this, and essentially pushed them to talk. Like, you
didn't make an opera out of it. You make a
book out of it. You to make a play out
of it, or a poem out of it, or a
podcast out of it. You made a film. It's like,
(17:31):
in a way, what it feels like to me is
you were saying, I'm going to pin this down as
much as it can be pinned down, because it wasn't
pinned down for all of those years. It really is
like a coming out product. You know. I had literally
lived in regi Ploset where it was out and about
in my world and kind of you know, identifying a
certain way that I would come home and I with
(17:52):
whitewash and my existence and I would tell France, you know,
remember my we don't talk about me being black at
home from the just I had to live it and
therefore capturing the living of it. Just made sense to
me just to go through it and just hold myself
accountable to really not only living through it, but then
actually going back and processing it. And this just felt
(18:15):
like the way that made the most soundsels I was
really living out experience, and doing a documentary was really
capturing what was happening in real time at that moment.
Right Also, it gives you permission and forces you in
a certain way to ask the tough questions to go there,
to keep your mother in the chair, to have that conversation,
to have that conversation with your father um which no
(18:36):
other art form would afford you. Until I uncovered my
family's secrets, I was never going to learn to live
with my joy identity being black and Jewish, and I
was never going to be able to internally integrate my
identities until I was willing to go through the process
of moving past my family secrets. I suppose that it's
(18:57):
core this is a story about the extraordinary a capacity
that we human beings have to believe what we want
to believe, to bury our own secrets, even from ourselves,
and at the same time the capacity we also have
to shed those secrets to move past them and become
holy ourselves. You now have five year old twins, is
(19:21):
that right? So in your family life, how does being
black and Jewish play into the way that you think
about raising your kids and dual identity and is this
kind of an ongoing story in a way for you
part of what you think about as a mom as
having kids of your own now totally, I mean, I
think I'm infertan ways. I think I'm very typical, which
(19:42):
is that like identified with the Jewish, I've always practiced
in my own way my whole life. But now I'm
figuring out what that means in my family and my husband,
who was raised in Baptist Church. We are raising the
kids Jewish, but we're figuring out what that means, you know,
my husband is not Jewish. But also to know who
they are on every piece of it. I mean, I
think that for us the thing that helps us that
our world are not divided in that space. Like my
(20:05):
in law is even expressed, you know interest in coming
to synagogue. We have a church with them on some
of the big holidays. I think that you know, we
wanted to know who they are completely and totally, but
we're still figuring it out. I mean, I think everybody
is figuring out. Previously, when I wasn't like kind of
(20:25):
speaking my truth and owning and and I hadn't had
the conversation with my family, I lived with a lot
of anxiety about things being revealed. And you can see
some of those moments within the film and the tension
that I was living with and I don't live with
them anymore. That is actually gone from my life, that
that anxiety has been relieved, And so there are a
very physical difference in terms of how I lived my
(20:47):
life now and how I was putting it before, Like
the apprehension and anxiety around this secret being will be
able to talk about our reference is now gone, and
I feel that physical difference. I'd like to thank my
(21:11):
guest Lacey Schwartz for sharing her story with us today.
You can find out more about her documentary at Little
White Lie. The film dot com. Family Secrets is an
I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer,
Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers, and
Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a
(21:34):
family Secret, you'd like to share. You can get in
touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast
dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram
at Danny Writer, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and
Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's FAMI Secret Spot. For
more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.