November 26, 2020 • 45 mins
Julia McKenzie Munemo’s late father made his living by churning out trashy novels—that was about as much as she was willing to admit. But she had no desire to crack open any of the dusty paperbacks she inherited, until a nationwide reckoning made it clear she had no choice but to confront the racist legacy her dad left behind.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning.
This episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
If you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at three and
(00:22):
four and huddled in the backseat of the VWS square back.
My fingers are dusty from the dirt of the community garden.
The patched knees of my jeans are caked and brown.
The community garden is a city of square plots with
this figot in the middle. It's a sea of green
(00:43):
beans and lettuce. There's no room to grow at home.
It's communism and free choice in the land of the people.
It's ideals. I don't understand. Home is a left out
of the parking lot, and we always turn left out
of the parking lot and go home after. But today
(01:03):
Dad turns right, and I can hear my heart and
my ears when I reached my thumb into my mouth.
I have never turned right out of the parking lot.
And what is up this hill? What is beyond these gardens?
How far does this road go? And where will it
lead us? We are lost, Dad says, And it's laughter
(01:27):
in his voice and cunning. Let's get lost, he shouts,
And am I alone in the car? And how far
do we drive? Lost? The word throbs through my head
like lightning, and I can't see out the window, but
I strained to see something I recognize, and my thumb
(01:47):
is in my mouth. And then I close my eyes,
but I still see him wild at the wheel. He
drives a cartoon car with television abandoned. We are lost.
That's Julia Mackenzie Muonemo, reading from her new memoir The Bookkeeper.
(02:11):
Julia grew up beneath the shadow cast by her father's
mental illness and suicide. You might think that this would
be her family secret, But the secrets surrounding Julia's father
involve dusty paperbacks written under a variety of pen names,
hidden in a box that Julia couldn't bring herself to
(02:34):
open or face for the longest time. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
(02:55):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
of your childhood, you know, I would say the landscape
of my childhood was sort of like indoors and somewhat anxious.
I came home from school and I found my mom
(03:19):
in the TV room. Most of the time, she worked
from home, and her office was just outside the TV room,
and we would sort of gather there and watch soap
operas all afternoon. She periodically had to dash off to
answer her business phone, but that was really our time together.
And you know, I vaguely knew that I had friends
who did sports or other things after school. Even my
(03:41):
siblings did sports and other things after school, but I
wasn't interested in that. For most of my childhood. I
really needed to be near my mom, and that's where
she was. What soap operas did you watch? What was her? Um?
The Guiding Light was the big one, that's what That's
what came on right at three o'clock, was around the
time I got home. Um, but on like half days
(04:03):
or vacation that you know, they're whatever the ones were
on Channel three. But that was what it was in Northampton.
So we were the Guiding Light side of things, not
the general hospital side of things. It was kind of
a war, yeah, I was. I was more of a
general hospital kid myself, so almost everybody was Yeah, So
the other place I spent a lot of time as
a child was at um My mother was a nikedo
(04:26):
instructor and she ran a dojo a couple of miles
away from home, and so I spent a lot of
time there with her on weeknights and Saturday mornings, and
you know, sort of watching her throw people around. And
it was not anything that was interesting to me. I
wasn't interested in niketo. I wasn't there to study. I
was there just to make sure that she was safe.
(04:47):
I think I spent a lot of my childhood kind
of paying attention to my mom and making sure that
she was alive. There was this big absence, which was
my father, who was always missing, and you know, sort
of the absence also of talking about the fact that
he was missing. We didn't really, I didn't really do that.
We didn't talk about him or mourning him or missing him.
(05:07):
We just sort of plotted along with soap operas and
aikido and things like that. Describe your mother a little
bit for me. My mother, I think before my father's death,
and I think certainly before we were born, I think
she was a very vibrant, socially active woman. You know,
(05:28):
they hosted dinner parties all the time they traveled the world.
They had lots of friends. After his death, a lot
of with friends I think sort of faded away, you know,
some remained, but a lot of them didn't, And so,
you know, it's sort of a lonely time. And I
(05:49):
think my mother sort of wore the suit of that
almost as an armor. You know. She would never have
said that she was lonely, and she wouldn't call herself lonely.
Now she you know, lives alone and says she's happy
to do that. But I see her as lonely, and
I think I saw her as lonely as a child too.
She's incredibly intelligent. She's one of the smartest people I know.
(06:12):
We had a joke when we were little that she
didn't know the answer to something, she would just make
it up, and often the made up answer was better
than the real answer, so we liked it better. I
always trusted her implicitly to sort of see us through
whatever needed seeing through. You know, she was a fierce
advocate for us when she felt that people had wronged us.
(06:32):
So there was a time when I was placed in
an English class that she thought was below me. In
high school, and I just remember her kind of charging
in and talking to the guidance counselor and taking over,
and you know, my whole curriculum shifting as a result,
much for the better, obviously, but that was work. I
don't know that I would have ever done right. I
didn't see it really as a lack and so that
(06:53):
my mom kind of came to my defense. She advocates
for us when she needs to. Yeah, you know, she's
fears she's a niketoist, right. She was one of the
highest ranking female aketoists in the country who was in Japanese.
How did your mother and father meet? They met at
a bar in New York City, um called the Riviera.
(07:13):
So when they met, they were both married to other
people and were introduced by a mutual friend. And my
understanding is that it was just kind of immediate that
spark was was quite alive right away. And my mother's
marriage first marriage was very young, and she very quickly
discovered that he was an alcoholic and there were all
(07:35):
sorts of lives that he had told her, and she
was able to get that marriage annulled. So I grew
up with the sense of, like my mother was sort
of married before, but there's this word that means she
really wasn't ever married before, and it's annulment, so she
had her marriage annulled. My father was married to a
Dutch woman who I always understood to have been around
(07:57):
for not a very long time, much like my mom husband.
Doing research for my book, I learned that she had
been around for actually quite a long time. They were
married for a while, but he left her, and he
and my mom got on a freight ship and sailed
across the Atlantic to write books under contract for various
(08:17):
sort of what they called factories of paperback originals, these
publishing houses that just kind of put out what my
mother would describe as trashy novels, And so they had
contracts to write those, and I have pictures of them
on that ship, sitting in there underpants, you know. Add
two typewriters romantic huh, a couple newly in love sailing
(08:40):
across the ocean on a freighter, pecking away at their
twin typewriters turning out trashy, pulpy novels, sort of like f.
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the non literary version. These are
the kinds of books that might display a man and
a woman wrapped in all manner of torrid embraces on
our paperback covers. It's so interesting that very often in
(09:05):
that generation, if there were early marriages and there were
no kids, especially if they were brief marriages or even
more especially annulled, the kids would never have known. Parents
wouldn't have told. So that wasn't a secret. No, we knew.
There were things that a lot of people would have
kept from us that my mother just insisted on being
(09:25):
truthful about. And so the whole sort of definition of
secret in our family is feels a little different. Julia's
mom and dad were from very different backgrounds. Her father
was Jewish, raised in Brooklyn by Holocaust survivor parents who
were Orthodox. Her mother was raised in Albany in a
waspy family who were members of the local country club.
(09:48):
Her dad's mother is very unhappy that he's marrying a
non Jewish girl, super unhappy, and that doesn't change as
they start to have kids. The story is that she
said to my mom while she was laboring with my sister,
who's the oldest. You know you're not religious anyway, Susie,
So why don't you just convert, and my mom was like,
(10:10):
it's because I'm not religious that I can't convert. Right,
I have a sort of moral compass about this. So
you know whether or not that conversation happened actually during
her labor, I cannot confirm, but that's sort of the
legend way to choose a moment. Tell me about what
you remember of your father. Yeah, my memories are spare um,
(10:34):
although I started to develop more as I was writing.
I remember this sort of you know, this larger than
life figure. I just he was physically enormous, you know,
very tall, strong and muscular, and you know, sort of
dark hair, mustache, glasses, this kind of not really Clark Kent,
(10:56):
but he felt like a superhero to me. Right. I
definitely stories from friends of his about the way he
yelled my name when I came into a room, or
um sort of the way he held us and how
much he loved us. So there was the sense of
this warm kind of they're like figure, And I don't
mean teddy bear, I really mean like sort of animal
(11:16):
kind of again. Vibrant also, you know the word I
used to describe my mother too. I think that there
was a vibrancy to him, and my brother certainly talks
about the sort of before and after. The dad he
knew before his illness set in was just you know,
he was Daddy. He was this loving, larger than life figure.
(11:36):
You're the youngest of three, I'm the youngest of three.
And what's the age difference between you and your older siblings.
So my brother is three years older and my sister
is five years older, so enough of an age difference
that they would really have had much more concrete memories. Yeah,
they definitely knew him better than I did. Will be
(12:00):
back in a moment with more family secrets. Julia's father
is frequently absent. He's looking for nothing less than the
meaning of life. It starts with the practice of Aikido,
which both of her parents become deeply involved in, but
(12:23):
then he branches out into other philosophies and spiritual seeking.
I don't know that he always knew what he was seeking,
but I think a sense of sort of answers he
had a he had a kind of quest to understand
cosmos in a way, I think he wanted there to
(12:43):
be something better than, something bigger, and he wanted to
be a part of it. He went on sort of
any excursion that would take him into the path of
someone he thought was sort of enlightened, right, So he
went to see the Dalai Lama speak he would go
on a retreat, eat and meditate for days on end.
So when I was I think two and a half,
(13:06):
he left for one such retreat, and it was at
ten days, and it was the kind of retreat where
I believe that it was meditation primarily, and there's a
teacher who you follow, and he was very eager to
impress the teacher, and he was very eager to return enlightened.
He felt that he was sort of ready to receive enlightenment,
(13:31):
whatever that might mean. And so his plan, which I
believe he executed, was to go there and in addition
to meditating all the time, also not sleep and I
believe eat as little as possible. So he was really
sort of taking this ten day retreat to an extreme,
and it didn't go well. So he had an altercation
(13:54):
with the teacher, who pointed out to him that the
quest for enlightenment was not one you could speed up
or compete to win. It was really a journey, and
he didn't like that at all. Julia's father sort of
falls apart. On this retreat, he steals a sacred bowl,
(14:18):
and then he escapes and drives back home. While he
was driving home, my mother got a phone call that
that it hadn't gone well and that he didn't look
right when he left. And this is actually, this is
a memory that I have, is um the moment that
he came home, which you know, the memory is very vague.
(14:39):
I was very young, but just this image of him
walking in the door pretty obviously transformed physically, not the
dad who had left. And in the image that I have,
he's just sort of standing in the entranceway of the house,
looking pretty rattled and confused, and he turns and looks
at me and starts coming towards me, and I don't
I don't think anything horrible happen next. But that's where
(15:00):
my memory sort of shut out. And so that was
his what his family says is his first breakdown. Are
sort of the family lore that that was his first breakdown,
and he didn't really ever come back from that one.
So he spent a lot of you know, the next
two years two and a half years in and out
(15:21):
of psychiatric institutions and in and out of therapy. There
weren't the same kind of treatment then, so um, he
didn't like the treatments that there were that he didn't
like the way they made him feel. Um. And he
was really, really smart, and you know, one of the
things that he could do quite well was sort of
trick a therapist into into thinking that he was better,
(15:44):
better enough to sort of lower their guard. And so
then in probably November of the year that I was five,
he agreed to go to a psychiatric institution in western
Massachusetts called Austin Rigs, which I don't think anyone knew
very much about at the time, but it was a
(16:04):
place that he was willing to go because, like James
Taylor had gone there to kick a habit or something,
it felt like a place that he could respect. There
were people he respected who had gone there, and he
went and it turned out not to be the kind
of facility that was prepared to deal with his level
of illness. And he was there for a month. He
(16:25):
came home briefly at Christmas to see us, and went
back to the hospital, and on January five, he hanged
himself in his hospital room. Did you know right away
as a five year old what suicide talked about Yes,
(16:45):
I did as a five year old to know that
his parents wanted us to be told that he had
had a heart attack, and my mother was unwilling to
lie to us, and we also knew that we also
knew that his parents wanted us to know that he
had an heart attack, so we knew from the beginning
that it was a suicide. I didn't know the method
(17:09):
of that suicide. My sister and brother both did, at
least earlier than I did. My mother was certain the
line to us was not the solution that we needed
to know that it was suicide. We had known he
was mentally ill. I think we didn't use words like
schizophrenic or bipolar at that time, but we knew that
he was mentally ill, and the suicide was not kept
(17:32):
a secret. But it wasn't for several years until she
told me that that he had hanged himself. And that
just that piece took up a lot of space in
my imagination as a very young child, not knowing how
he had committed suicide, I spent a lot of time like, oh, well,
did he shoot himself? No, where would he have gotten
(17:54):
a gun. He was in a psychiatric institution. Did he
slid his wrists, Like again, where would he have gotten
the razor blade? I was sort of plagued by this question.
And when I did finally find out that we know,
when my mother told me that he hanged himself, I
still had the questions because I didn't know with what
I was so sort of fixated on these details as
(18:16):
a kid. Just think of the imagination of a very
young child, a precocious, creative child, thinking about how her
father took his own life. Julia doesn't ask her mother,
it's just too hard. It was years before she learned
that he had hanged himself with his belt. Julia survives
(18:40):
the tragic loss of her father, grows up, excels intellectually
and academically, and heads off to bar to college. At
what point do you meet the man who will become
your husband? M hmm, Very early in my last semester
of college. So I'm going it comes from Zimbabwe and
(19:05):
I was a student at Barred and they had an
exchange program with schools in South Africa and Zimbabwe as
part of a program in international education. And he arrived
at Bard in you know, early February, in the middle
of a snowstorm in clothes you might expect someone to
(19:26):
arrive from Africa in, right, like light pants that didn't
go all the way down to his ankles, and you know,
a sweater that he had probably bought at the airport.
He looked so out of place and so handsome. And
I've noticed in the minute he stepped into the cafeteria.
I'll never forget that moment. Yeah, what had been your
(19:50):
in a sort of dating life before that? I had
had a relatively serious boyfriend earlier in college who I
had felt great seriousness for. Right, I think that I was,
from a pretty young age, kind of seeking a partner
and like a family. I wanted that sense of security
and that sense of sort of constancy that I didn't
(20:12):
have as a child. And so I had sort of
attached myself to this white Jewish man in college and
that didn't last terribly long or end with any grace.
My best friend in college said to me at one
point when I was trying to figure out how I
was going to go forward and date someone, she said,
you know what, it was so great. You're not the
(20:33):
kind of girl but a man wants to date. You're
the kind of girl that a man wants to marry
and like college boys don't want to get married. And
what do you think she meant by that was it
is kind of a seriousness about the way that you
were taking your life that you know, a lot of
college students aren't kind of there yet. Yes, I had
taken time off between high school and college before it
was called a gap year and a cool thing to do. Um,
(20:56):
I had taken time off because I wasn't ready, so
I was a little bit older than the other people.
But yes, I was serious. I was interested in kind
of figuring out the great mysteries of my family, of
my dad, of what that meant, what his history meant
about who I was. I had this real, deep sense
(21:17):
that I needed to connect myself to someone so that
I would never be alone again. Right, of course, I'm
now much older and understand that that's impossible, but at
the time I just thought, well, isn't that what you
do right? You find love and you get committed and
and that person is your rock. And I think I
was really looking for a rock and lo and behold
(21:40):
in locked and Gone from Zimbabwe. And he too was
very serious and was very interested in these larger questions.
He too came from a family with lots of complexity
and also with mental illness, and we just had a
lot of questions and common and we were both willing
(22:01):
to sort of be that rock for each other from
very early on. I love that phrase, questions in common.
What a great way to go through life with a
partner with shared questions. And this is just what happens.
Julia and Goni become bonded and serious from the start.
(22:24):
They're together for two semesters and then Goni returns to Zimbabwe.
This is by now, and Zimbabwe is beginning to fall
apart politically. The university where he hopes to do his
graduate work to eventually become a professor is shut down.
Julia fears Forni's physical safety, but there is a way
(22:47):
he can come back on a fiance visa. As Julia
and Goni plan their wedding, there's one person she fears
isn't going to be happy about it. Remember her father's mother,
the Holocaust survivor who hadn't approved of Julia's parents marriage.
Julia's grandmother had met and Gooni once and had been
(23:08):
rude to him. Tell me a bit about that encounter
with your grandmother when you went to see her and
tell her my grandmother was a you know, she obviously
had had more heartbreak in her life then really and
anyone should have had to survive. But as a result,
(23:29):
she was pretty broken. By this time. We had relatively
regular contact up to the time that I started dating Goni,
but she really did not approve and so communication had
already been tense for some time. But I think she
felt that she had sort of dodged a bullet when
he moved back to Zimbabwe. So when I came to
her to tell her that we were getting married, she
(23:52):
I don't think was ready for that news. She had
this very physical you know, she'd move her body, but
her face just I had never seen someone's face just
go white, and it was clear to me immediately that
this was it. This was the sort of breaking point
for us. And at first she cried. There were a
(24:16):
lot of tears. She then sort of exploded in anger.
And at this point where so we're at her condo
in a development for older people in Connecticut, and we're
moving between her living room and her kitchen, and she's
sort of having this breakdown. I think, you know something.
(24:36):
She stands at her counter in her kitchen and she
sort of punches her fists onto the counter and she
just says, to me, where will the children be? And
that's when I realized that it wasn't really about me
being white and going to being black. Her anxiety was
about what would come of the children of such a union.
(24:58):
And at the time it was so naive. But at
the time I was like, I have the answer to this.
This is so easy, right, because she also thought that
my mother and father were such a union that would
create children who didn't have a place. And so I said, oh,
but Grandma, look at me. I'm fine. No one wonders
(25:19):
what I am. I'm half Jewish, I'm half Christian. It's
not an issue. By the time our children are born,
it won't be an issue. Like I was. It was
just so naive, and you know, in love and wanted
love to answer all problems. But you know, she knew
much more than I did about racism and hatred and
what hatred could do to a people. Right, she had
(25:41):
lost a lot of people in the Holocaust, and you
know it had of course soured her. What I grapple
with is this question of why it soured her in
this particular way why she became what I see is
as really racist. So she asked me that question, where
will the childre and be? Ferociously I answered it. She
(26:03):
wasn't satisfied with my answer, and then she sort of
turned around and picked up this thing that I had
never You know, I'd spent some time in this condo
of hers. I had never seen it before, this strange
glass basket like thing. Was her grandmother genuinely concerned about
the future of Julia and Boni's children or was she
(26:24):
just using them as a cover for her own bigotry. Regardless,
it seemed impossible that she could get out of her
own way and realized that she was perpetrating the very
thing that had been done to her. In fact, she
was willing to lose her granddaughter over it. After we
had the rest of our conversation, which did not go well, um,
(26:46):
she told me, you know, if I was going to
marry and Gony, I could never come back to her.
I was heart of standing in the doorway with the
door open, ready to leave, and I turned around to
sort of say, are you sure do you really want
me to leave this way? Because I'm choosing and GONI
right if there's a choice, it's obvious to me. And
she thrust this glass basket thing into my hands and
(27:09):
close the door. And it was such a strange moment
for me. It was really surreal, you know. I sort
of walked back to my beat up Toyota Corolla and
put this basket on the seat next to me and
drove away. It was not the last time I saw her,
but it was last time I saw her for a
very long time. Do you think it was a wedding present? God,
(27:32):
I'm asking him, because you know the way you're describing it,
it's like wedding presents are often these strange glass things, right,
Like just it's like something maybe just happened in her
psyche that was like, I'm not going to see you again,
but you're getting married, and here's my gift. That's so funny.
I have never thought of that. Maybe, yeah, maybe it
(27:53):
felt like this heavy sort of talisman of her hatred. Right,
it was not. It's not something I held on too.
We'll be right back and Gooni and Julia Mary and
(28:17):
have two sons. They moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts, Whereon is
a professor at Williams College. It's a lovely town. They're
a lovely family living a lovely life. But there's a
secret lurking beneath the surface, because that's what secrets do.
They lurk. You knew that your father had written these
(28:42):
kind of pulpy novels, that this was what your parents
did when they traveled across the Atlantic, and this is
how he made his living, and he had all these
different pen names. You didn't know what the contents of
some of those novels were and what they would reveal
(29:04):
to you about his preoccupations and his psyche and this
whole kind of history. So can you maybe start from
your discovery about that. So when my first son was
born and was a toddler, and my cousin came to
visit us and sort of dropped this box of books
(29:25):
on my dining room table. And this is my cousin
on my mother's side, and so it was a surprise
to me that what they were were books my dad
had written. And they each had these very racially charged,
selecious covers on them. They were clearly pornography, and you know,
each one had a muscular black man in some form
(29:48):
of undressed with his wrists and chains and a sort
of stereotypically Southern bell type white woman. On the cover,
Julia's father wrote slave porn, or what was sometimes known
as plantation porn. This was a thing, a dreadful subgenre
(30:11):
of the trashy novel. There was an appetite for this
kind of racist kinkiness, enough so that Julia's father turned
out a whole bunch of them, along with the other
less offensive pulp. When my cousin plopped those books on
the counter, I was shocked. I was horrified. I was
(30:32):
certain I had never seen them. I couldn't believe that
anyone would want to bring them into a house with
this two year old child in it and let him
see them. I was just the whole thing. I was
filled with shame, and I didn't believe that my father
had written them. And she said to me, no jewels,
(30:52):
look in the back, right, and her mom had written
written by George Wolk on the back so that everyone
would remember, right, sort of posterity. I hid them away
when my cousin brought them to me, and continued to
hide them. You know, we moved a couple of times.
By the time we landed in Williamstown, I thought I
might be ready to face those books. We've moved around,
(31:15):
We've lived in Zimbabwe and Batswana and Virginia, and so
our stuff has been in storage for a long time.
And we're finally settling down and I think, oh, but
I'm gonna I'm gonna alphabetize all the books and I'm
just gonna put all of Dad's books out. I'm just
gonna see how that feels. And it immediately felt so
horrible that I packed them right back up and put
them in the back of the closet. How many of
(31:39):
them were there, But at this point I still just
had those four that my cousin had brought me um,
and I had no real sense of how many more
I might find. I didn't even have a sense of
wanting to find more. I just knew I didn't want
those books out in the world. He had written four
books under his own name that I did have on,
(32:01):
you know, alphabetized on my bookcase, but which I had
never read. And you know, people would ask me over
the years why I had never read them, and I
was like, well, yeah, I just I just don't think
he was probably a very good writer, and I don't
want to know about that. I want him to still
be some kind of a great person in my memory. Um,
(32:22):
I don't want to be disappointed. And that was sort
of the story I told myself, and so then passed
forward more years. The kids are probably nine and twelve. Yeah,
they were nine and twelve. It was when Tamir Rice
was killed, you know, twelve year old African American boy
(32:43):
killed by a police officer. He had a toy gun
in his hand. And when that happened, Julius was also
turning twelve very soon, and I just was sort of
shattered awake. It was way too long in coming. I
had these boys who were nine and twelve, who are
growing up as black children in the United States. I
(33:04):
should have woken up much earlier than I did. But
when Tamir Rice was killed, I just I couldn't see
a future in which I didn't figure out who I was,
what my race meant in my household, what my legacy meant.
You know. I knew that I had been hiding these
books in my closet for ten years. So by this
(33:26):
point I know what I'm hiding, right, and I just
couldn't keep that up. I knew that it was time
for me to to face that history and to face
my whiteness. So at that point I sort of crept
to the closet and picked up one of these books,
and it was hard. It took months to read just
(33:46):
the first one. When your cousin first brought those books.
What was the quality of your response in that moment
at your kitchen table. Were you shocked or stunned or
was there more of a sense of Oh, I kind
of somewhere somewhere within me, I knew this. And this
This is where I have loved listening to your podcast
(34:08):
so much, because you talk about the unthought known? Is
that what it's called? Yes, ah, the unthought known? When
it comes to family secrets, this psychoanalytic phrase comes up
again and again what we know deep down absolutely no,
but cannot allow ourselves to think because it's just too dangerous.
(34:33):
Julia is certain that she's never seen these books before,
But when she mentions them finally to Goni and shows
him a particularly disturbing cover, he's strangely nonchalant, and he said, oh, yeah,
that one, And I was like, what do you mean
(34:53):
that one? And I was completely confused. When would he
have seen this? Did my mother show these to him?
And I just don't know. And I this time did
ask this question, and he said, you showed these to
me when we were dating. They were in the bottom
shelf of a glass fronted bookcase in your mom's bedroom,
(35:15):
and you showed them to me. And I believe him entirely.
I mean, in part because he remembers it. He wouldn't
have made that up. But also I have no memory
of that. I can't even like construct the memory of that,
now that he's told me all the details. You know,
at what point did my shame kind of wash over
(35:36):
me and shut that down? You know? Was it that
I showed him one and saw the look on his
face and was so ashamed that I just pretended it
never happened. Maybe I think that's possible. Or was it later?
Was it after the kids were born? I was just
couldn't imagine that my father had made his living doing
this thing, but felt like it went so against who
(35:57):
my family was. I don't know, I don't know, but
in that moment at my kitchen counter, I was shocked
and believed I had never seen those books before. Um,
but that isn't true. It's so extraordinary the way we
can know and yet not be able to bear the thought,
(36:19):
and so the thought can really just vanish. And so
then when you do come back around and you are
actually interrogating these books for the first time, and you know,
as you said, it was very difficult to took a
long time to read. What was that feeling? Like, what
(36:39):
was the If you can bring back the feeling of
beginning to read this material, that's so horrifying. Yeah, So
at this time in my life, I was back in school,
I was getting an m f A. And I was
working with a writer who was so supportive of this
journey and really encouraging me to do it. And I said,
(37:04):
I can't, you know, I can't read these books. I
took a picture of it to show him, like some
of the covers, and I was like, how could you
expect me? You know, because it was a little residency
m f A, so we were we were very rarely
in person. I took a picture and I sent it
to him. I said, you can't expect me to read
these books. You know, this isn't even what I'm working
on right now, this isn't even my project. And he said,
(37:24):
I want you to read one book, and I want
you to trace physical description. Just write a write a
paper about how your father described black people and how
we described white people. I was like, okay, that's dumb, right,
Like I was at so dismissive of this idea. In
giving me an assignment, it gave me a path in
(37:45):
and now I felt like, well, I have to do this, right.
My professor told me that I have to do this,
and so I will. So I read the first one
over the course of I don't know, a month probably
You know, these are not long books. They don't take
to read um, but I had to read them in
very small doses because they were really upsetting, right. I mean,
(38:08):
you know some people have when they hear the beginning
part of the story, Oh, my father wrote pornography that
you know. I've had friends before they know the whole story,
laugh and say, well, what's it like to read something
that your dad wrote? Have it turned you on? And
I was like, no, no, wait, no, that's not that's
not the problem. The problem, of course, was encountering her
(38:28):
father's racism right there in start well, black and White,
what has it been like for you to trace and
discover things, very uncomfortable things about your father's psychology By
becoming in a way, sort of a literary salue, and
(38:54):
you know, trying to piece him together, this man that
you know that you lost when you were five, and
that you make this really difficult discovery about. I went
into reading his books believing that they would hold the
key to his racism. That I once I could finally
read them and had sort of gotten over the hump
(39:15):
of that first one, which took me so long, I
was like, well, this is the key. This is the
place where I'm going to understand what made my dad
a racist and why he could make his living on stereotypes,
and what that reveals about the beliefs that he held,
even if they went against his kind of liberal politics.
So I went in with this very clear aim, and
(39:38):
I was frustrated, as makes sense, right, how does any
one of us trace our racism to its route? Right?
But that was sort of what I hoped I would
be able to do with his books. What I didn't
expect was to trace his mental illness through his writing,
and certainly not through his writing under pseudonym I somehow
believed that I would learn some being about his mental illness.
(40:00):
It would be under his books that he wrote under
his own name, which it's foolish, right. No matter how
many different names he used, they were all him. And
so it was jarring to sort of enter this project
expecting to go on a journey about race and my
race and my husband's race, and the race of the
characters in my father's books, and end uh also taking
(40:22):
this sort of parallel journey into his mental illness. And
so what I discovered was that in every single one
of his books, there was a hanging, There were multiple suicides.
There were many times his protagonist was black and was
someone who had either been stolen and was on the
slave ship or who was living as a slave. And
(40:45):
these men are often in his novels grappling with their sanity,
trying to do anything to stay sane. Julia's deep reading
into her father's books and her delving into his history
leads her into a greater awareness not only of his racism,
(41:06):
but also drives home the legacy of his mental illness.
Gooni too as a mentally ill father. What will this
mean for her two boys? One thing is certain, the
legacy of family secrets is one that is not being
passed down. Julia and Gooni's sons know about her father's
(41:28):
racist move They also are aware of the rocky shoals
of mental illness that exists in their genetic history. Because
this tough inheritance has not been covered up, it will
not fester. There's no cause for secrets because the shame
is not theirs to carry. You know, there are unanswerable
(41:51):
questions about the genetics of mental illness, and I mean,
one never wants to believe that this is the kind
of thing that could pass on to your children right
through your genes. And here are my children who have
two grandfathers who neither of whom they ever knew, both
of whom were mentally ill. It was a difficult journey
to take. It was uncomfortable most of the time. How
(42:15):
has it settled within you? You know, probably as much
as you can, as much as it's possible to know.
And now there are no more secrets. I guess I
would say I feel very lucky to have two sons
(42:36):
who are there now fourteen and seventeen, and they are
open to the world, right they're open to me. They're
very clear about who they are. They're they're very different
from each other, but there's very little about their sort
of inner psyche that feels like a mystery to me. Obviously,
(42:56):
the older one is beginning to do things that I
don't know the details of, and that's fine, but I
feel like I know who he is and how he is,
and that's also true for my fourteen year old. I'm
also married to a man who is so aware that
the world can kind of shift at any moment, which
is very handy at times like this. It's good to
(43:20):
sort of be grounded by someone who's like, yeah, well,
anything can happen. There can be a pandemic. What we
have control over is what's happening in our house. And
so he's also quite clear that we need to continue
that sort of vigil that I started as a teenager
and that I imagine he did too, to make sure
that our kids have what they need, but that we
(43:42):
don't have much control over over any of this, and
so really the best we can do is stay tuned
into them. What has become clear is how much it
matters to my kids that they know this history and
that not a secret. And if we had kept from
(44:03):
them my father's illness or my husband's father's illness, it
would feel dangerous and it would feel probably like something
that couldn't talk to us about, and so it's so
important for them not to feel those those pressures that
secrets can bring. Family Secrets is an iHeart Media production.
(44:36):
Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is
the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special
thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have
a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a
voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Our number is one eight eight eight secret zero. That's
(44:58):
secret and then the number zero. You can also find
us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook
dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami
Secrets pot. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(45:26):
the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning.
This episode contains discussions of suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
If you are a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at three and
(00:22):
four and huddled in the backseat of the VWS square back.
My fingers are dusty from the dirt of the community garden.
The patched knees of my jeans are caked and brown.
The community garden is a city of square plots with
this figot in the middle. It's a sea of green
(00:43):
beans and lettuce. There's no room to grow at home.
It's communism and free choice in the land of the people.
It's ideals. I don't understand. Home is a left out
of the parking lot, and we always turn left out
of the parking lot and go home after. But today
(01:03):
Dad turns right, and I can hear my heart and
my ears when I reached my thumb into my mouth.
I have never turned right out of the parking lot.
And what is up this hill? What is beyond these gardens?
How far does this road go? And where will it
lead us? We are lost, Dad says, And it's laughter
(01:27):
in his voice and cunning. Let's get lost, he shouts,
And am I alone in the car? And how far
do we drive? Lost? The word throbs through my head
like lightning, and I can't see out the window, but
I strained to see something I recognize, and my thumb
(01:47):
is in my mouth. And then I close my eyes,
but I still see him wild at the wheel. He
drives a cartoon car with television abandoned. We are lost.
That's Julia Mackenzie Muonemo, reading from her new memoir The Bookkeeper.
(02:11):
Julia grew up beneath the shadow cast by her father's
mental illness and suicide. You might think that this would
be her family secret, But the secrets surrounding Julia's father
involve dusty paperbacks written under a variety of pen names,
hidden in a box that Julia couldn't bring herself to
(02:34):
open or face for the longest time. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
(02:55):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
of your childhood, you know, I would say the landscape
of my childhood was sort of like indoors and somewhat anxious.
I came home from school and I found my mom
(03:19):
in the TV room. Most of the time, she worked
from home, and her office was just outside the TV room,
and we would sort of gather there and watch soap
operas all afternoon. She periodically had to dash off to
answer her business phone, but that was really our time together.
And you know, I vaguely knew that I had friends
who did sports or other things after school. Even my
(03:41):
siblings did sports and other things after school, but I
wasn't interested in that. For most of my childhood. I
really needed to be near my mom, and that's where
she was. What soap operas did you watch? What was her? Um?
The Guiding Light was the big one, that's what That's
what came on right at three o'clock, was around the
time I got home. Um, but on like half days
(04:03):
or vacation that you know, they're whatever the ones were
on Channel three. But that was what it was in Northampton.
So we were the Guiding Light side of things, not
the general hospital side of things. It was kind of
a war, yeah, I was. I was more of a
general hospital kid myself, so almost everybody was Yeah, So
the other place I spent a lot of time as
a child was at um My mother was a nikedo
(04:26):
instructor and she ran a dojo a couple of miles
away from home, and so I spent a lot of
time there with her on weeknights and Saturday mornings, and
you know, sort of watching her throw people around. And
it was not anything that was interesting to me. I
wasn't interested in niketo. I wasn't there to study. I
was there just to make sure that she was safe.
(04:47):
I think I spent a lot of my childhood kind
of paying attention to my mom and making sure that
she was alive. There was this big absence, which was
my father, who was always missing, and you know, sort
of the absence also of talking about the fact that
he was missing. We didn't really, I didn't really do that.
We didn't talk about him or mourning him or missing him.
(05:07):
We just sort of plotted along with soap operas and
aikido and things like that. Describe your mother a little
bit for me. My mother, I think before my father's death,
and I think certainly before we were born, I think
she was a very vibrant, socially active woman. You know,
(05:28):
they hosted dinner parties all the time they traveled the world.
They had lots of friends. After his death, a lot
of with friends I think sort of faded away, you know,
some remained, but a lot of them didn't, And so,
you know, it's sort of a lonely time. And I
(05:49):
think my mother sort of wore the suit of that
almost as an armor. You know. She would never have
said that she was lonely, and she wouldn't call herself lonely.
Now she you know, lives alone and says she's happy
to do that. But I see her as lonely, and
I think I saw her as lonely as a child too.
She's incredibly intelligent. She's one of the smartest people I know.
(06:12):
We had a joke when we were little that she
didn't know the answer to something, she would just make
it up, and often the made up answer was better
than the real answer, so we liked it better. I
always trusted her implicitly to sort of see us through
whatever needed seeing through. You know, she was a fierce
advocate for us when she felt that people had wronged us.
(06:32):
So there was a time when I was placed in
an English class that she thought was below me. In
high school, and I just remember her kind of charging
in and talking to the guidance counselor and taking over,
and you know, my whole curriculum shifting as a result,
much for the better, obviously, but that was work. I
don't know that I would have ever done right. I
didn't see it really as a lack and so that
(06:53):
my mom kind of came to my defense. She advocates
for us when she needs to. Yeah, you know, she's
fears she's a niketoist, right. She was one of the
highest ranking female aketoists in the country who was in Japanese.
How did your mother and father meet? They met at
a bar in New York City, um called the Riviera.
(07:13):
So when they met, they were both married to other
people and were introduced by a mutual friend. And my
understanding is that it was just kind of immediate that
spark was was quite alive right away. And my mother's
marriage first marriage was very young, and she very quickly
discovered that he was an alcoholic and there were all
(07:35):
sorts of lives that he had told her, and she
was able to get that marriage annulled. So I grew
up with the sense of, like my mother was sort
of married before, but there's this word that means she
really wasn't ever married before, and it's annulment, so she
had her marriage annulled. My father was married to a
Dutch woman who I always understood to have been around
(07:57):
for not a very long time, much like my mom husband.
Doing research for my book, I learned that she had
been around for actually quite a long time. They were
married for a while, but he left her, and he
and my mom got on a freight ship and sailed
across the Atlantic to write books under contract for various
(08:17):
sort of what they called factories of paperback originals, these
publishing houses that just kind of put out what my
mother would describe as trashy novels, And so they had
contracts to write those, and I have pictures of them
on that ship, sitting in there underpants, you know. Add
two typewriters romantic huh, a couple newly in love sailing
(08:40):
across the ocean on a freighter, pecking away at their
twin typewriters turning out trashy, pulpy novels, sort of like f.
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the non literary version. These are
the kinds of books that might display a man and
a woman wrapped in all manner of torrid embraces on
our paperback covers. It's so interesting that very often in
(09:05):
that generation, if there were early marriages and there were
no kids, especially if they were brief marriages or even
more especially annulled, the kids would never have known. Parents
wouldn't have told. So that wasn't a secret. No, we knew.
There were things that a lot of people would have
kept from us that my mother just insisted on being
(09:25):
truthful about. And so the whole sort of definition of
secret in our family is feels a little different. Julia's
mom and dad were from very different backgrounds. Her father
was Jewish, raised in Brooklyn by Holocaust survivor parents who
were Orthodox. Her mother was raised in Albany in a
waspy family who were members of the local country club.
(09:48):
Her dad's mother is very unhappy that he's marrying a
non Jewish girl, super unhappy, and that doesn't change as
they start to have kids. The story is that she
said to my mom while she was laboring with my sister,
who's the oldest. You know you're not religious anyway, Susie,
So why don't you just convert, and my mom was like,
(10:10):
it's because I'm not religious that I can't convert. Right,
I have a sort of moral compass about this. So
you know whether or not that conversation happened actually during
her labor, I cannot confirm, but that's sort of the
legend way to choose a moment. Tell me about what
you remember of your father. Yeah, my memories are spare um,
(10:34):
although I started to develop more as I was writing.
I remember this sort of you know, this larger than
life figure. I just he was physically enormous, you know,
very tall, strong and muscular, and you know, sort of
dark hair, mustache, glasses, this kind of not really Clark Kent,
(10:56):
but he felt like a superhero to me. Right. I
definitely stories from friends of his about the way he
yelled my name when I came into a room, or
um sort of the way he held us and how
much he loved us. So there was the sense of
this warm kind of they're like figure, And I don't
mean teddy bear, I really mean like sort of animal
(11:16):
kind of again. Vibrant also, you know the word I
used to describe my mother too. I think that there
was a vibrancy to him, and my brother certainly talks
about the sort of before and after. The dad he
knew before his illness set in was just you know,
he was Daddy. He was this loving, larger than life figure.
(11:36):
You're the youngest of three, I'm the youngest of three.
And what's the age difference between you and your older siblings.
So my brother is three years older and my sister
is five years older, so enough of an age difference
that they would really have had much more concrete memories. Yeah,
they definitely knew him better than I did. Will be
(12:00):
back in a moment with more family secrets. Julia's father
is frequently absent. He's looking for nothing less than the
meaning of life. It starts with the practice of Aikido,
which both of her parents become deeply involved in, but
(12:23):
then he branches out into other philosophies and spiritual seeking.
I don't know that he always knew what he was seeking,
but I think a sense of sort of answers he
had a he had a kind of quest to understand
cosmos in a way, I think he wanted there to
(12:43):
be something better than, something bigger, and he wanted to
be a part of it. He went on sort of
any excursion that would take him into the path of
someone he thought was sort of enlightened, right, So he
went to see the Dalai Lama speak he would go
on a retreat, eat and meditate for days on end.
So when I was I think two and a half,
(13:06):
he left for one such retreat, and it was at
ten days, and it was the kind of retreat where
I believe that it was meditation primarily, and there's a
teacher who you follow, and he was very eager to
impress the teacher, and he was very eager to return enlightened.
He felt that he was sort of ready to receive enlightenment,
(13:31):
whatever that might mean. And so his plan, which I
believe he executed, was to go there and in addition
to meditating all the time, also not sleep and I
believe eat as little as possible. So he was really
sort of taking this ten day retreat to an extreme,
and it didn't go well. So he had an altercation
(13:54):
with the teacher, who pointed out to him that the
quest for enlightenment was not one you could speed up
or compete to win. It was really a journey, and
he didn't like that at all. Julia's father sort of
falls apart. On this retreat, he steals a sacred bowl,
(14:18):
and then he escapes and drives back home. While he
was driving home, my mother got a phone call that
that it hadn't gone well and that he didn't look
right when he left. And this is actually, this is
a memory that I have, is um the moment that
he came home, which you know, the memory is very vague.
(14:39):
I was very young, but just this image of him
walking in the door pretty obviously transformed physically, not the
dad who had left. And in the image that I have,
he's just sort of standing in the entranceway of the house,
looking pretty rattled and confused, and he turns and looks
at me and starts coming towards me, and I don't
I don't think anything horrible happen next. But that's where
(15:00):
my memory sort of shut out. And so that was
his what his family says is his first breakdown. Are
sort of the family lore that that was his first breakdown,
and he didn't really ever come back from that one.
So he spent a lot of you know, the next
two years two and a half years in and out
(15:21):
of psychiatric institutions and in and out of therapy. There
weren't the same kind of treatment then, so um, he
didn't like the treatments that there were that he didn't
like the way they made him feel. Um. And he
was really, really smart, and you know, one of the
things that he could do quite well was sort of
trick a therapist into into thinking that he was better,
(15:44):
better enough to sort of lower their guard. And so
then in probably November of the year that I was five,
he agreed to go to a psychiatric institution in western
Massachusetts called Austin Rigs, which I don't think anyone knew
very much about at the time, but it was a
(16:04):
place that he was willing to go because, like James
Taylor had gone there to kick a habit or something,
it felt like a place that he could respect. There
were people he respected who had gone there, and he
went and it turned out not to be the kind
of facility that was prepared to deal with his level
of illness. And he was there for a month. He
(16:25):
came home briefly at Christmas to see us, and went
back to the hospital, and on January five, he hanged
himself in his hospital room. Did you know right away
as a five year old what suicide talked about Yes,
(16:45):
I did as a five year old to know that
his parents wanted us to be told that he had
had a heart attack, and my mother was unwilling to
lie to us, and we also knew that we also
knew that his parents wanted us to know that he
had an heart attack, so we knew from the beginning
that it was a suicide. I didn't know the method
(17:09):
of that suicide. My sister and brother both did, at
least earlier than I did. My mother was certain the
line to us was not the solution that we needed
to know that it was suicide. We had known he
was mentally ill. I think we didn't use words like
schizophrenic or bipolar at that time, but we knew that
he was mentally ill, and the suicide was not kept
(17:32):
a secret. But it wasn't for several years until she
told me that that he had hanged himself. And that
just that piece took up a lot of space in
my imagination as a very young child, not knowing how
he had committed suicide, I spent a lot of time like, oh, well,
did he shoot himself? No, where would he have gotten
(17:54):
a gun. He was in a psychiatric institution. Did he
slid his wrists, Like again, where would he have gotten
the razor blade? I was sort of plagued by this question.
And when I did finally find out that we know,
when my mother told me that he hanged himself, I
still had the questions because I didn't know with what
I was so sort of fixated on these details as
(18:16):
a kid. Just think of the imagination of a very
young child, a precocious, creative child, thinking about how her
father took his own life. Julia doesn't ask her mother,
it's just too hard. It was years before she learned
that he had hanged himself with his belt. Julia survives
(18:40):
the tragic loss of her father, grows up, excels intellectually
and academically, and heads off to bar to college. At
what point do you meet the man who will become
your husband? M hmm, Very early in my last semester
of college. So I'm going it comes from Zimbabwe and
(19:05):
I was a student at Barred and they had an
exchange program with schools in South Africa and Zimbabwe as
part of a program in international education. And he arrived
at Bard in you know, early February, in the middle
of a snowstorm in clothes you might expect someone to
(19:26):
arrive from Africa in, right, like light pants that didn't
go all the way down to his ankles, and you know,
a sweater that he had probably bought at the airport.
He looked so out of place and so handsome. And
I've noticed in the minute he stepped into the cafeteria.
I'll never forget that moment. Yeah, what had been your
(19:50):
in a sort of dating life before that? I had
had a relatively serious boyfriend earlier in college who I
had felt great seriousness for. Right, I think that I was,
from a pretty young age, kind of seeking a partner
and like a family. I wanted that sense of security
and that sense of sort of constancy that I didn't
(20:12):
have as a child. And so I had sort of
attached myself to this white Jewish man in college and
that didn't last terribly long or end with any grace.
My best friend in college said to me at one
point when I was trying to figure out how I
was going to go forward and date someone, she said,
you know what, it was so great. You're not the
(20:33):
kind of girl but a man wants to date. You're
the kind of girl that a man wants to marry
and like college boys don't want to get married. And
what do you think she meant by that was it
is kind of a seriousness about the way that you
were taking your life that you know, a lot of
college students aren't kind of there yet. Yes, I had
taken time off between high school and college before it
was called a gap year and a cool thing to do. Um,
(20:56):
I had taken time off because I wasn't ready, so
I was a little bit older than the other people.
But yes, I was serious. I was interested in kind
of figuring out the great mysteries of my family, of
my dad, of what that meant, what his history meant
about who I was. I had this real, deep sense
(21:17):
that I needed to connect myself to someone so that
I would never be alone again. Right, of course, I'm
now much older and understand that that's impossible, but at
the time I just thought, well, isn't that what you
do right? You find love and you get committed and
and that person is your rock. And I think I
was really looking for a rock and lo and behold
(21:40):
in locked and Gone from Zimbabwe. And he too was
very serious and was very interested in these larger questions.
He too came from a family with lots of complexity
and also with mental illness, and we just had a
lot of questions and common and we were both willing
(22:01):
to sort of be that rock for each other from
very early on. I love that phrase, questions in common.
What a great way to go through life with a
partner with shared questions. And this is just what happens.
Julia and Goni become bonded and serious from the start.
(22:24):
They're together for two semesters and then Goni returns to Zimbabwe.
This is by now, and Zimbabwe is beginning to fall
apart politically. The university where he hopes to do his
graduate work to eventually become a professor is shut down.
Julia fears Forni's physical safety, but there is a way
(22:47):
he can come back on a fiance visa. As Julia
and Goni plan their wedding, there's one person she fears
isn't going to be happy about it. Remember her father's mother,
the Holocaust survivor who hadn't approved of Julia's parents marriage.
Julia's grandmother had met and Gooni once and had been
(23:08):
rude to him. Tell me a bit about that encounter
with your grandmother when you went to see her and
tell her my grandmother was a you know, she obviously
had had more heartbreak in her life then really and
anyone should have had to survive. But as a result,
(23:29):
she was pretty broken. By this time. We had relatively
regular contact up to the time that I started dating Goni,
but she really did not approve and so communication had
already been tense for some time. But I think she
felt that she had sort of dodged a bullet when
he moved back to Zimbabwe. So when I came to
her to tell her that we were getting married, she
(23:52):
I don't think was ready for that news. She had
this very physical you know, she'd move her body, but
her face just I had never seen someone's face just
go white, and it was clear to me immediately that
this was it. This was the sort of breaking point
for us. And at first she cried. There were a
(24:16):
lot of tears. She then sort of exploded in anger.
And at this point where so we're at her condo
in a development for older people in Connecticut, and we're
moving between her living room and her kitchen, and she's
sort of having this breakdown. I think, you know something.
(24:36):
She stands at her counter in her kitchen and she
sort of punches her fists onto the counter and she
just says, to me, where will the children be? And
that's when I realized that it wasn't really about me
being white and going to being black. Her anxiety was
about what would come of the children of such a union.
(24:58):
And at the time it was so naive. But at
the time I was like, I have the answer to this.
This is so easy, right, because she also thought that
my mother and father were such a union that would
create children who didn't have a place. And so I said, oh,
but Grandma, look at me. I'm fine. No one wonders
(25:19):
what I am. I'm half Jewish, I'm half Christian. It's
not an issue. By the time our children are born,
it won't be an issue. Like I was. It was
just so naive, and you know, in love and wanted
love to answer all problems. But you know, she knew
much more than I did about racism and hatred and
what hatred could do to a people. Right, she had
(25:41):
lost a lot of people in the Holocaust, and you
know it had of course soured her. What I grapple
with is this question of why it soured her in
this particular way why she became what I see is
as really racist. So she asked me that question, where
will the childre and be? Ferociously I answered it. She
(26:03):
wasn't satisfied with my answer, and then she sort of
turned around and picked up this thing that I had
never You know, I'd spent some time in this condo
of hers. I had never seen it before, this strange
glass basket like thing. Was her grandmother genuinely concerned about
the future of Julia and Boni's children or was she
(26:24):
just using them as a cover for her own bigotry. Regardless,
it seemed impossible that she could get out of her
own way and realized that she was perpetrating the very
thing that had been done to her. In fact, she
was willing to lose her granddaughter over it. After we
had the rest of our conversation, which did not go well, um,
(26:46):
she told me, you know, if I was going to
marry and Gony, I could never come back to her.
I was heart of standing in the doorway with the
door open, ready to leave, and I turned around to
sort of say, are you sure do you really want
me to leave this way? Because I'm choosing and GONI
right if there's a choice, it's obvious to me. And
she thrust this glass basket thing into my hands and
(27:09):
close the door. And it was such a strange moment
for me. It was really surreal, you know. I sort
of walked back to my beat up Toyota Corolla and
put this basket on the seat next to me and
drove away. It was not the last time I saw her,
but it was last time I saw her for a
very long time. Do you think it was a wedding present? God,
(27:32):
I'm asking him, because you know the way you're describing it,
it's like wedding presents are often these strange glass things, right,
Like just it's like something maybe just happened in her
psyche that was like, I'm not going to see you again,
but you're getting married, and here's my gift. That's so funny.
I have never thought of that. Maybe, yeah, maybe it
(27:53):
felt like this heavy sort of talisman of her hatred. Right,
it was not. It's not something I held on too.
We'll be right back and Gooni and Julia Mary and
(28:17):
have two sons. They moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts, Whereon is
a professor at Williams College. It's a lovely town. They're
a lovely family living a lovely life. But there's a
secret lurking beneath the surface, because that's what secrets do.
They lurk. You knew that your father had written these
(28:42):
kind of pulpy novels, that this was what your parents
did when they traveled across the Atlantic, and this is
how he made his living, and he had all these
different pen names. You didn't know what the contents of
some of those novels were and what they would reveal
(29:04):
to you about his preoccupations and his psyche and this
whole kind of history. So can you maybe start from
your discovery about that. So when my first son was
born and was a toddler, and my cousin came to
visit us and sort of dropped this box of books
(29:25):
on my dining room table. And this is my cousin
on my mother's side, and so it was a surprise
to me that what they were were books my dad
had written. And they each had these very racially charged,
selecious covers on them. They were clearly pornography, and you know,
each one had a muscular black man in some form
(29:48):
of undressed with his wrists and chains and a sort
of stereotypically Southern bell type white woman. On the cover,
Julia's father wrote slave porn, or what was sometimes known
as plantation porn. This was a thing, a dreadful subgenre
(30:11):
of the trashy novel. There was an appetite for this
kind of racist kinkiness, enough so that Julia's father turned
out a whole bunch of them, along with the other
less offensive pulp. When my cousin plopped those books on
the counter, I was shocked. I was horrified. I was
(30:32):
certain I had never seen them. I couldn't believe that
anyone would want to bring them into a house with
this two year old child in it and let him
see them. I was just the whole thing. I was
filled with shame, and I didn't believe that my father
had written them. And she said to me, no jewels,
(30:52):
look in the back, right, and her mom had written
written by George Wolk on the back so that everyone
would remember, right, sort of posterity. I hid them away
when my cousin brought them to me, and continued to
hide them. You know, we moved a couple of times.
By the time we landed in Williamstown, I thought I
might be ready to face those books. We've moved around,
(31:15):
We've lived in Zimbabwe and Batswana and Virginia, and so
our stuff has been in storage for a long time.
And we're finally settling down and I think, oh, but
I'm gonna I'm gonna alphabetize all the books and I'm
just gonna put all of Dad's books out. I'm just
gonna see how that feels. And it immediately felt so
horrible that I packed them right back up and put
them in the back of the closet. How many of
(31:39):
them were there, But at this point I still just
had those four that my cousin had brought me um,
and I had no real sense of how many more
I might find. I didn't even have a sense of
wanting to find more. I just knew I didn't want
those books out in the world. He had written four
books under his own name that I did have on,
(32:01):
you know, alphabetized on my bookcase, but which I had
never read. And you know, people would ask me over
the years why I had never read them, and I
was like, well, yeah, I just I just don't think
he was probably a very good writer, and I don't
want to know about that. I want him to still
be some kind of a great person in my memory. Um,
(32:22):
I don't want to be disappointed. And that was sort
of the story I told myself, and so then passed
forward more years. The kids are probably nine and twelve. Yeah,
they were nine and twelve. It was when Tamir Rice
was killed, you know, twelve year old African American boy
(32:43):
killed by a police officer. He had a toy gun
in his hand. And when that happened, Julius was also
turning twelve very soon, and I just was sort of
shattered awake. It was way too long in coming. I
had these boys who were nine and twelve, who are
growing up as black children in the United States. I
(33:04):
should have woken up much earlier than I did. But
when Tamir Rice was killed, I just I couldn't see
a future in which I didn't figure out who I was,
what my race meant in my household, what my legacy meant.
You know. I knew that I had been hiding these
books in my closet for ten years. So by this
(33:26):
point I know what I'm hiding, right, and I just
couldn't keep that up. I knew that it was time
for me to to face that history and to face
my whiteness. So at that point I sort of crept
to the closet and picked up one of these books,
and it was hard. It took months to read just
(33:46):
the first one. When your cousin first brought those books.
What was the quality of your response in that moment
at your kitchen table. Were you shocked or stunned or
was there more of a sense of Oh, I kind
of somewhere somewhere within me, I knew this. And this
This is where I have loved listening to your podcast
(34:08):
so much, because you talk about the unthought known? Is
that what it's called? Yes, ah, the unthought known? When
it comes to family secrets, this psychoanalytic phrase comes up
again and again what we know deep down absolutely no,
but cannot allow ourselves to think because it's just too dangerous.
(34:33):
Julia is certain that she's never seen these books before,
But when she mentions them finally to Goni and shows
him a particularly disturbing cover, he's strangely nonchalant, and he said, oh, yeah,
that one, And I was like, what do you mean
(34:53):
that one? And I was completely confused. When would he
have seen this? Did my mother show these to him?
And I just don't know. And I this time did
ask this question, and he said, you showed these to
me when we were dating. They were in the bottom
shelf of a glass fronted bookcase in your mom's bedroom,
(35:15):
and you showed them to me. And I believe him entirely.
I mean, in part because he remembers it. He wouldn't
have made that up. But also I have no memory
of that. I can't even like construct the memory of that,
now that he's told me all the details. You know,
at what point did my shame kind of wash over
(35:36):
me and shut that down? You know? Was it that
I showed him one and saw the look on his
face and was so ashamed that I just pretended it
never happened. Maybe I think that's possible. Or was it later?
Was it after the kids were born? I was just
couldn't imagine that my father had made his living doing
this thing, but felt like it went so against who
(35:57):
my family was. I don't know, I don't know, but
in that moment at my kitchen counter, I was shocked
and believed I had never seen those books before. Um,
but that isn't true. It's so extraordinary the way we
can know and yet not be able to bear the thought,
(36:19):
and so the thought can really just vanish. And so
then when you do come back around and you are
actually interrogating these books for the first time, and you know,
as you said, it was very difficult to took a
long time to read. What was that feeling? Like, what
(36:39):
was the If you can bring back the feeling of
beginning to read this material, that's so horrifying. Yeah, So
at this time in my life, I was back in school,
I was getting an m f A. And I was
working with a writer who was so supportive of this
journey and really encouraging me to do it. And I said,
(37:04):
I can't, you know, I can't read these books. I
took a picture of it to show him, like some
of the covers, and I was like, how could you
expect me? You know, because it was a little residency
m f A, so we were we were very rarely
in person. I took a picture and I sent it
to him. I said, you can't expect me to read
these books. You know, this isn't even what I'm working
on right now, this isn't even my project. And he said,
(37:24):
I want you to read one book, and I want
you to trace physical description. Just write a write a
paper about how your father described black people and how
we described white people. I was like, okay, that's dumb, right,
Like I was at so dismissive of this idea. In
giving me an assignment, it gave me a path in
(37:45):
and now I felt like, well, I have to do this, right.
My professor told me that I have to do this,
and so I will. So I read the first one
over the course of I don't know, a month probably
You know, these are not long books. They don't take
to read um, but I had to read them in
very small doses because they were really upsetting, right. I mean,
(38:08):
you know some people have when they hear the beginning
part of the story, Oh, my father wrote pornography that
you know. I've had friends before they know the whole story,
laugh and say, well, what's it like to read something
that your dad wrote? Have it turned you on? And
I was like, no, no, wait, no, that's not that's
not the problem. The problem, of course, was encountering her
(38:28):
father's racism right there in start well, black and White,
what has it been like for you to trace and
discover things, very uncomfortable things about your father's psychology By
becoming in a way, sort of a literary salue, and
(38:54):
you know, trying to piece him together, this man that
you know that you lost when you were five, and
that you make this really difficult discovery about. I went
into reading his books believing that they would hold the
key to his racism. That I once I could finally
read them and had sort of gotten over the hump
(39:15):
of that first one, which took me so long, I
was like, well, this is the key. This is the
place where I'm going to understand what made my dad
a racist and why he could make his living on stereotypes,
and what that reveals about the beliefs that he held,
even if they went against his kind of liberal politics.
So I went in with this very clear aim, and
(39:38):
I was frustrated, as makes sense, right, how does any
one of us trace our racism to its route? Right?
But that was sort of what I hoped I would
be able to do with his books. What I didn't
expect was to trace his mental illness through his writing,
and certainly not through his writing under pseudonym I somehow
believed that I would learn some being about his mental illness.
(40:00):
It would be under his books that he wrote under
his own name, which it's foolish, right. No matter how
many different names he used, they were all him. And
so it was jarring to sort of enter this project
expecting to go on a journey about race and my
race and my husband's race, and the race of the
characters in my father's books, and end uh also taking
(40:22):
this sort of parallel journey into his mental illness. And
so what I discovered was that in every single one
of his books, there was a hanging, There were multiple suicides.
There were many times his protagonist was black and was
someone who had either been stolen and was on the
slave ship or who was living as a slave. And
(40:45):
these men are often in his novels grappling with their sanity,
trying to do anything to stay sane. Julia's deep reading
into her father's books and her delving into his history
leads her into a greater awareness not only of his racism,
(41:06):
but also drives home the legacy of his mental illness.
Gooni too as a mentally ill father. What will this
mean for her two boys? One thing is certain, the
legacy of family secrets is one that is not being
passed down. Julia and Gooni's sons know about her father's
(41:28):
racist move They also are aware of the rocky shoals
of mental illness that exists in their genetic history. Because
this tough inheritance has not been covered up, it will
not fester. There's no cause for secrets because the shame
is not theirs to carry. You know, there are unanswerable
(41:51):
questions about the genetics of mental illness, and I mean,
one never wants to believe that this is the kind
of thing that could pass on to your children right
through your genes. And here are my children who have
two grandfathers who neither of whom they ever knew, both
of whom were mentally ill. It was a difficult journey
to take. It was uncomfortable most of the time. How
(42:15):
has it settled within you? You know, probably as much
as you can, as much as it's possible to know.
And now there are no more secrets. I guess I
would say I feel very lucky to have two sons
(42:36):
who are there now fourteen and seventeen, and they are
open to the world, right they're open to me. They're
very clear about who they are. They're they're very different
from each other, but there's very little about their sort
of inner psyche that feels like a mystery to me. Obviously,
(42:56):
the older one is beginning to do things that I
don't know the details of, and that's fine, but I
feel like I know who he is and how he is,
and that's also true for my fourteen year old. I'm
also married to a man who is so aware that
the world can kind of shift at any moment, which
is very handy at times like this. It's good to
(43:20):
sort of be grounded by someone who's like, yeah, well,
anything can happen. There can be a pandemic. What we
have control over is what's happening in our house. And
so he's also quite clear that we need to continue
that sort of vigil that I started as a teenager
and that I imagine he did too, to make sure
that our kids have what they need, but that we
(43:42):
don't have much control over over any of this, and
so really the best we can do is stay tuned
into them. What has become clear is how much it
matters to my kids that they know this history and
that not a secret. And if we had kept from
(44:03):
them my father's illness or my husband's father's illness, it
would feel dangerous and it would feel probably like something
that couldn't talk to us about, and so it's so
important for them not to feel those those pressures that
secrets can bring. Family Secrets is an iHeart Media production.
(44:36):
Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Mcaluso is
the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special
thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have
a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a
voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Our number is one eight eight eight secret zero. That's
(44:58):
secret and then the number zero. You can also find
us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook
dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami
Secrets pot. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(45:26):
the i Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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