Jenn Turner 0:00
This episode may contain topics of conversation and themes sensitive to some individuals. It is our intention to talk about the impact of difficult or painful experiences, rather than the graphic details of what happened that being said, these topics may still very well be activating. Feel free to read the description or show notes for a time stamped list of potentially activating content discussed in this episode. Please care for yourself as you listen today, we're glad you're here with us.
Jenn Turner 0:42
Well, welcome to on trauma and power. I'm your host. Jenn Turner, co founder of the Center for trauma and embodiment. I'm so glad you're here with us. Each episode I sit down with different experts, educators, authors, survivors and practitioners sharing different trauma informed experiences across various fields, join us as we explore the complex intersections of trauma and power through embodied healing and diverse perspectives in both Our Personal and collective healing journeys. Let's dive on in.
Jenn Turner 1:31
Hey Lee, thank you so much for joining us and joining me on this conversation. Just going to start us with a little intro, and then you can kind of ground us with a journal
Speaker 1 1:44
entry. Sounds good? Glad to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.
Jenn Turner 1:48
Absolutely So. Today's guest, Lee Hawkins is the author of I am nobody's slave, how uncovering my family's history set me free, which traces 400 years of his black American family's lineage, revealing the deep interconnections between black and white families and the intergenerational impact of slavery Jim Crow and historical trauma using genetic testing, investigative reporting and historical documentation, Hawkins uncovers stories of resilience injustice and survival, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2022 Hawkins is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who worked there for 19 years. His journalism explores economic discrimination, racial violence and land theft and how these forces have impacted black families across generations. His work also addresses the long term effects of adverse childhood experiences and systemic racism. Inspired by Dr Martin Luther King, he has long advocated for non violent social change. One of his main missions is to expand the non violent social change concept to homes, communities and schools again. Thank you. What an amazing bio to read, and all the work that you're doing in the world. We often start this podcast with a grounding exercise, a chance to frame the conversation, to drop in, and you've offered to read us a journal entry today.
Speaker 1 3:20
Yeah, you told me that you like people to give something personal and special. And I thought that, I mean, there was kind of a journaling process that I went through when I was writing, I am nobody's slave. And in 2019 or so, I went back and I found this passage, and I'll just read this to you because it maybe it will help us put things into context. So I say, Thank God our family survived and thrived, but the pattern of hiding and internalizing the resulting pain and depression that comes from grief as shame has been passed down. It frustrates me when I encounter people today who expect me to keep fueling this cycle of secrecy. We are no longer enslaved or living under Jim Crow laws. I'm not going to keep secrets about the murders and the injustices experienced by forgotten family members. You can forget that because it won't happen. We have no obligation to carry around the toxins of trauma. We have to stop conditioning each generation to hide their pain. Our ancestors had to do it for their survival, and often led to heart attacks, strokes and cancer. But we don't have to do that anymore. If you're battling something, please don't be afraid to discuss it or ask for help. We're powerful and resilient, but we are not super human, nor are we sub human. We're built on the same framework as everybody else. We need to liberate the minds and hearts of our young people and give them the power and the freedom to tell their stories this may be hard to hear but internalize stress and grief. Kill. If we want to increase the life expectancy of black America and America as a whole, we must give ourselves the gift of expression, self care and empowerment through confronting the things that happen to us with no shame. I love you all, Paul. I mean, it gives you a sense of and I think at that time, I was really thinking about a group that I was speaking to of psychoanalysts, the Harlem Family Institute, which is a group that trains people to become certified psychoanalysts. And a lot of the things that I was dealing with at that time had to do with the guilt that came from telling all these secrets and explaining not just the intergenerational trauma within one family, but the intergenerational trauma that has been passed down through The generations in our country. And you know that larger parallel in which you know, both in our families and in our country, we've been expected to try to push down the difficult things, the dark, the dark parts, and focus more on the light than the darkness. But what that does is it makes people sick. We know that, but it also it stands in the way of future generations having the level of enlightenment that they deserve.
Jenn Turner 6:33
What stood out to me, I think, from your from that entry, was that we no longer, I think something about we no longer have the obligation to carry our family's pain or of holding our family's pain. So I hear that in that right, that struggle of but do I, or do we? You know that that guilt, right and maybe it, maybe it's a question or just a thing that you were wrangling with at that time? It sounds
Speaker 1 6:59
like, Yeah, I mean, it was something that my therapist, who was a guy named Dr Lee Jenkins, who actually lived through Jim Crow apartheid, as I call it. You know, when I was a kid, I grew up thinking that what my father lived through in Alabama, growing up in the 1950s was just segregation. You know, that's what we were all taught, that the worst of it was water fountains and being separate and black people sitting in the back of the bus. But I didn't realize the extent to which racial violence and homicide was a big part of it, and my family was affected by that. So it was important to have a therapist who had lived through Jim and you know, my therapist, Dr Jenkins, is in his 80s now, and you know, I just think he has such a profound understanding of these issues, and it was him who helped me understand that by uncovering the fact that there are 9 million living African Americans who survived through American apartheid and have Never been acknowledged as apartheid survivors, that that would that would ultimately be a good thing into of course, but the that the long term benefit would be there, but the short term benefit would be all of the pain that that would come from having to reflect back on the murders in my family, which There's been a murder in my family every generation since 1837 including my grandfather and both of my great grandfathers in Alabama, and their primary crime, you know, for all of these people, was land ownership. I mean, it was just so rooted in the the founding of our country, and so unpacking all of that and and then having to piece together how it affected my grandparents and how having their fathers murdered when they were children, and how it affected my father, and the pressure that he felt to keep secrets from me, because I Never knew that his father was murdered until I did this project, and then I found out myself, and went to him, and he explained to me what happened, or what he knew about what happened. And his father and mother kept their father's murders from him, and so every generation kept secrets from this from the next generation. And I think when I I wrote this, I was just kind of reflecting on that to try to give myself a boost. Yeah. So continue to move forward.
Jenn Turner 9:57
I'm curious about how you. Would reflect on the role of secrets like, I want, I want to turn us to like, how did you start this book and what led you? But I'm also, I don't want to lose sight of the power of secrecy and and what we get taught about that and and what it's like to break that, especially with a book like this.
Speaker 1 10:20
Yeah, I think it's right on Mark, because that's exactly why I wanted to write the book. That's what led me to write the book, is this understanding that so many secrets have been kept from me, and I did not know. I did not know what my family's history was in America. I didn't know when we came here. I didn't know very much about my ancestors. Didn't even know anything about my grandparents on my my father's side, and all of them were in Alabama, but I was his kid growing up in Minnesota, and all I knew was that my father moved to Minnesota from Alabama when he was 12 in 1961 as a result of his mother's death, he would never speak about Alabama. He would never speak about his mother, very rarely. But I did know that obviously there were some things that had happened there, because my father would have nightmares occasionally when I was a kid. And whenever I would muster the courage to ask him what he was dreaming about, he would just say Alabama. Son, Alabama. So he would never go into detail. So the fact that he wouldn't go into detail, it just, it just produced a longing in me to know what happened, because I wanted to know what produced those nightmares and what could make this man who loved me so much and was so omnipresent in my life, resort to Violence against me as a child. Whenever, you know, whenever he felt that I was breaking rules or that could get me in trouble in the broader society. And so, yeah, the secrecy part, and also the movie Roots was a big influence on me. I saw it when I was young, and I there's a harrowing scene of Kunta Kinte, who was the main character, and he's actually whipped in that scene for refusing to take the name that the colonizer wanted to give him. And in that moment as a young child, I even saw the parallel between the use of the whip on that plantation in the use of the belt in my own home, and I wondered if there was a connection, and if it had anything to do with family members who had been enslaved, because I had no idea if slavery had affected us or how it had affected us. And so when I became a journalist, I found myself being able to answer all of these questions and do all of these incredible investigations about everything but my family. I'm there, you know, I could uncover almost anything, but I couldn't tell you who my great grandparents were on my father's side and or what happened in Alabama. So it was, you know, the secrets that made me, you know, with any journalist, you keep secrets. It just makes them, you know, more determined to get to the bottom of them. And so I think it was part of it, and it was also wanting to help my dad, because my dad started to open up once he saw that I had taken a DNA test through ancestry.com and I was starting to come and share information with him, and information that had been kept from him, and articles and old newspapers and things like that, and It just opened up, and it had a profound impact on my life and my relationship with my dad.
Jenn Turner 14:08
It's It's so moving to hear you speak about that you know your capacity to both, you know experience harm at the hands of your father and also to come at it with a desire to help, to understand, to explore. To me that's I just find that so moving to hear you talk about that.
Speaker 1 14:34
Yeah, thank you. Once again, it's important I didn't even understand at the time that for all but 60 years of America's existence, white supremacy was the law. And that's not a political statement. It's a very controversial two words to use with people I. Is to say that America was a white supremacist country for all but 60 years of its existence. And I think the reason is, once again, because of the secrets that have been kept even in our educational system, and the way that we have idealized our our country's narrative. Um, I love this country, and I think because of my love for the country, it's it behooved me to go back and to really look at what my family lived through and and I think 95% of the people who make commentary on enslavement or make commentary on the civil rights movement or the period of segregation that I'm referring to, really don't have the faintest idea of how severe the racial violence and The homicide was in those periods, and so I think that setting the stage. Now I just want to make it clear that this work that I do applies to my family and survivors of apartheid, but it also applies to people from any family who's gone through significant trauma, particularly political, social or economic related injustice, Holocaust, Japanese internment, Armenian Genocide. There are all kinds of things that families had gone through. You know, people have left countries and flee to come here for a better opportunity, but when they come here, they still bring a lot of those experiences, and that can haunt the bloodline, if not addressed through generations. And so a lot of my work, you know intergenerational trauma is a term that in some ways, some would say it's been overused, but I don't think so. I just think it's commonly used now because it is such a part of our historical narrative as families and as a country, and the best thing that we can do for ourselves now is to lean in on all of that and try our best to not have it define who we are, but certainly find ways to confront and move along past it or with it in a way that we can manage it going forward for generations.
Jenn Turner 17:42
Yeah, right? And I mean, I think that intergenerational trauma is so omnipresent, and so we the reason it may feel like we're talking about it a lot is because we're waking up at this moment, and we may fall asleep again, but waking up to the reality of the presence of that. I wonder if you might talk a little bit about apartheid and how you landed on using that word that I'm sure, for some people, is like a lightning rod. Well,
Speaker 1 18:13
I landed on it because there's a woman named Dr Ruth Thompson Miller who wrote a book about Jim Crow before me, which I read, and her book was much more academic in that sense, because she is an academic, my book is really a story about one family through the generations, and it reads like a novel, right? It's non fiction, but it really reads in that way, as opposed to me taking positions. And you know, when I spoke with her about her experience, she had mentioned that she was in South Africa doing research as, I think, as a PhD candidate, and she was interviewing people. And it just occurred to her was very clear that it was the same thing that her father lived through, right? I call myself an inter generation, or a integration generation child, and what I meant by that was that, and also a first generation American. And the reason I call myself a first generation American is even though my family's been here since the 1600s and I'm a descendant of Revolutionary War soldiers and Civil War soldiers, and even my father enlisted in the Vietnam era Air Force when I was a baby, I'm the first generation, or part of the first generation of my family to be born under the Constitution, equal to a white person. And you know, knowing that you. Has implications, because it then made sense why my father was so afraid for me as a kid, afraid, and it wasn't just you know, if you go to that party, you could get in trouble. It was if you go to that party, you could be killed. You could be hung from a tree. A whole family could be killed. And you know that, to me, was a very severe way for him to look at things. For me and for my my younger sister, we were kids who grew up in the black community on the weekends, where our family and our church was, but we went to school in a predominantly Scandinavian high school in Minnesota, which was very suburban, and we did well, you know, we did well socially. You know, I was a class president all four years. My sister was a homecoming queen and the class president all three years, we had a ton of friends of different races and backgrounds, mainly white people who were blonde hair. And that was hard for my dad. That was hard because his mind was still very much locked in a very you know, Alabama and the segregation there, and he had very little faith in the benevolence or trustworthiness of white people. And so, you know, whenever a situation came up with my activism or something, if I gave a speech, that might have been a little too, you know, boisterous or whatever, he would share those concerns in my life. In general, as a kid, I got the belt over 150 times, and it wasn't just me. I mean, I knew a lot of black kids around me in my neighborhood, the few who lived in my neighborhood, but also a lot who I knew in the city, who had parents and grandparents from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Texas, who had been raised under Jim Crow. And it wasn't until I did this work that I recognized how close in proximity, we were to people who actually lived on plantations and were enslaved and living under the whip every day. So these were our great grandparents, or my father's grandfather was born into slavery. And so in my book, I talk about my great, great grandmother, charity, Pugh, who was the last generation of our family to live under enslavement. She lived under bond in bondage for 30 years, and then the last 60 years she lived under Jim Crow apartheid. And the reason I know about her was because we actually did go one time to Alabama in 1991 when I was an aspiring journalist, not a very good one, either. But the key was that we interviewed an uncle who was 93 at the time, and he was talking about his childhood in Alabama, and talking about his father and how sad he was that his father was murdered for his land and in a livestock dispute as well. And that was the My great grandfather who was killed. And he was the son of charity Pugh, and he was telling us all about his grandmother, charity, Pugh, and how on his father's farm, she was the one who would supervise them, and if they weren't working fast enough, she would whip them. And so he called her a mean old lady, but he did not tell me that she was enslaved. I had to find that out in my research, and when I pieced together her life. I started to recognize that during that period there was a system called the pushing system, which was a system which, after the cotton gin was developed, when the slave when the enslavers got the cotton gins and went to the bank to get the cotton. Jenn, well, they needed to get more labor, more cotton production, from the enslaved people, but they didn't a lot of times they didn't have the credit to do that, so they had to get more out of out of what they had. And they used the pushing system, which was just basically a system in which at the end of the day, the cotton was weighed, and anybody who didn't meet quota would would be whipped in front of everyone. And that was something that people lived under every day. You know, they. That they knew that if they didn't meet their quota, this would happen. And so that kind of hyper vigilance and stress on the parasympathetic nervous system is, you know, unbearable and unimaginable, but it was something that I understood at that time, because I had understood trauma. I had studied trauma and the way that the parasympathetic nervous system and the fight or flight system reacts when it's triggered over and over and over and over and over, it hardwires you for anxiety, which was, you know, cortisol, adrenaline, and this is what my great grandmother, my great great grandmother, lived under. But it's important to note that we knew her that, that my family knew her that, and that was the first time that I gained the understanding that, you know our ancestors who lived under slavery, you know, she died in the 1930s okay? And so they were so close in proximity to us generationally that we would be grossly mistaken if we were to think that they would have no impact on our socialization, on our worldview and everything, and so I now understood how the belt basically came into my family and how it was passed down through the generations because the system of slavery, and also the slave codes which were enforced by the government, which said that grandma charity would get 39 to 100 lashes, if she was if she was reading or writing, or if she was with four other black people without a white person present, 39 to 100 lashes and who would administer the punishment. There were no police. Then back then they had it was a requirement for every white man under the between the ages of 18 and 45 to do one night a week of slave patrol. And they all had a whip, and they all had a gun, and their job was to police grandma, charity and everybody in Butler County who was under enslavement. And not to mention, when I took the DNA test, I found out that the enslaver, who, who she was owned by, was my blood relative. And so that started to introduce the idea of sexual assault, but also that he was the justice of the peace of Butler County, which meant that he was over all of the slave patrol, and that he was the person who actually administered punishment on many occasions, but also encouraged and controlled the controllers, basically, and so for her to live under in that environment, basically where she was constantly under threat, it's no wonder why she was a mean old lady, according to my
Speaker 1 28:14
to my green, my my grand uncle. But the key is that she was also a strong lady who survived and thrived despite America, you know, and what America had done to her. And so if we want to be honest about improving our families and improving our country, then we have to be honest about the history and to confront so that we can start to process it, analyze you past it
Jenn Turner 28:44
again. There's so much love in that sentiment. Right to look at the story of someone who you know you knew, to whip or beat your family members, who is your your grandma, charity, and then to look at her through as a as a survivor that she is, and was right, and to me, that's, I think, what we talked about, maybe even on another call around that act of of curiosity, being one of the highest or the highest form of love, and how potent That is, and how, what an antidote that is.
Speaker 1 29:22
Yeah, I mean, shame is powerful, and so you know, one of the things that's happening in Florida right now is they're ripping books out of the curriculums and enacting laws that say that content that makes any student feel guilty, should should be banned from school. And of course, you're talking about Caucasian students who might see part of themselves and the narratives of the people who came before. And I just think it's such a cruel. Thing to do, particularly to Caucasian students, because it kind of makes them it shelters them in a way that it keeps them in a homogenous environment and experience, and they're going to be thrust into a world where that is not their grandparents, America, that is much more diverse, and they actually really need to know this history and the in the stories behind their professors and their bosses at work and or their coworkers at work, and different people who have have come into the American experience in different ways. And so what a cruel thing to do, to sentence them to ignorance because of a failure of the educational system. And so when I say the highest form of love is curiosity, what I mean is, why did we enter into genocide against the indigenous people. Why did we use black people to build up the country? Why was there subjugation of women for all of these generations, and what was the impact, as opposed to fixating on the judgment of things that we can't change? Right? And even in my own family, my father, as I say, I know that my father loved me just by the amount of time that he spent with me and his belief that I could achieve anything that I wanted to if I put my mind to it. But the key was that when I did this work, I had to understand the level of guilt that he was carrying, and I wanted to know more why these things happen and how they came about. What were you experiencing in Alabama? What did you bring into to Minnesota with you when you had your own children? What were your primary fears for me, and I think that that taking that approach and giving him a chance to talk, as opposed to talking at him through the lens of anger that I was feeling in my, you know, in my early 30s, when I started to have my own nightmares, that wouldn't have been productive for me to stay in that place. I do think that anger is appropriate and expressed and should be expressed appropriately, because I think particularly minoritized and marginalized people, women, people of color, people with special needs, all kinds of people who are on the fringes of society are often not allowed to express the full range of human emotion that when they show anger, it's off. Look at this angry, nasty woman. Look at this angry black man, or, you know, look at this crazy person like we don't want to you don't want to trigger those stereotypes. But what that does is to not have a liberal, a liberated sense of expression. You know, is a penalty that will end up making you have to turn inward and turn it on yourself. And so it's healthy to get it out. It's healthy to communicate directly with people. And when I did that with my dad, I was able to get past that dark place that I talk about in my book, where I tell the whole story, where my father and I didn't speak for over two years as a result of that anger, and then I chronicle that evolution to how we were able to get to this place. And at the heart of it was me finally understanding that the highest form of love that I could show for my dad would be to be curious, as opposed to judgmental.
Jenn Turner 33:57
So powerful, I wonder if we might also my brain is going in two directions. I'm thinking about what you also said around sentencing people to ignorance. I mean that that is profound and curious to also understand more about your process of, you know, moving through that. And you know, people can also read the book for sure, right? It's so powerful and brilliant, but wondering if you might share just a little bit more about moving through that anger to get to curiosity, because I think it is so heavily stigmatized, like you name and and oftentimes there's fear wrapped up in anger, because we may have received anger from others in abusive and harmful ways, and so we can be afraid to touch our own because what if we touch within ourselves the capacity to harm others, or, you know that in that intensity? Yeah.
Speaker 1 35:00
Yeah, I think getting working through anger is something that is a process. And I think part the biggest in my own experience, I think the biggest frustration that I had with with both of my parents, when I was trying to get help about reflecting on those having nightmares and reflecting on the belt whippings of my childhood was that I couldn't get them to take responsibility for it. I couldn't get them to acknowledge that it was abuse, right? There's this very tricky there's a tricky part of the experience of black Americans who lived, who descend from slavery and Jim Crow that makes us think, many of us, I don't want to speak on behalf of everyone, but I'll speak on behalf of you know, my family and a lot of the people who I've discussed this with, that violence is a form of love. Because if it's seen as a form of protection, as a form of wanting to beat the children, to make them scared, so that they would to scare them into perfect behavior, then it's not really seen as something that was done in a malicious way, right? So that, and then also the incredible reverence and respect that we have for elders and that we're required as children to be seen and not heard, almost to not give our opinion, to not speak out, to not get angry. And that, obviously, is a legacy. Comes from the legacy of slavery as well, and the way that children needed to be for survival, socialize in order to survive. You know, if your parent told you, sit in this barn and don't leave until I come back. Don't you dare leave, right? Well, that that could be a life or death situation. Or if that child left, they could be branded an errant child and then be sold away from the family. And so, because this was so close in proximity, generationally, we still kept, without even knowing what had happened to our ancestors, we kept these practices in the family system. And you could be someone who's 32 years old and a reporter for The Wall Street Journal you know, filled with fear about expressing your opinion to your parents about how you were treated as a child, and that's the situation that I found myself in, and it was very difficult for me to then to hear them say, we did that because we loved you. How dare you tell us that that was abuse? We did that because you deserved it, because you broke the rules, you know, and to not acknowledge even that they did that right? That was that was a part two. That was just crazy. Um, my father had the character enough to eventually admit to that, and then that was when we got it. We I my anger started to subside when I ended up going to counseling getting the apology that I needed. I didn't need a lot more than that. I needed an acknowledgement and an apology, and I think the people who don't get that are more likely to stay that anger thing, sometimes for an entire lifetime, and the issue I would never rush anybody along in their process of confronting anger. And I believe that everybody should feel that emotion and allow themselves to go through that full range of human emotion. But it's important to understand that if your peace depends on somebody else giving you the validation that you need to move forward, that's problematic, and so that's where the soul searching and the reflection is to go come in, because oftentimes people are not even here, people who have committed atrocities against us are long gone or dead, or whatever it is. And we have to figure out a way to move to express that anger and to live in that anger in a in most productive way and safe way possible, without staying there. And I think that's where the professionals like you come in. I mean it, you know, and community support. You know, for me, I have a loving little sister who had experienced a lot of the things that I. Experience and having her and talking to her about the aspects of our childhood, because, in other ways, we had a great childhood, but the aspects of our childhood that involved violence, that was very powerful for me to have her as that, you know, support network that I needed because validated each other long before our parents took responsibility for their part. I
Jenn Turner 40:27
think it's so powerful how having a witness to trauma can completely transform the experience, both during it, but even more so in the processing and understanding the echoes of trauma and the the impact of trauma on our body, on our minds, when someone can validate and say, yes, that did happen. Yes, I was there. I and, you know, because I think we are programmed, particularly with our families, toward loyalty, and loyalty is often intertwined or conflated with protection, which maybe it's not conflated, actually, that's maybe that is loyalty, but to cut, to be able to name and acknowledge someone that you love and can and counted on also perpetuated harm. It's really hard to do in isolation. Most of us tend to then turn toward whether it's gaslighting ourselves or denial of what happened.
Speaker 1 41:26
Yes, and I love what you just said about loyalty and protection, because those of us you know, I think that there are people in every family. Some people call them the black sheep. I call my I call them the cycle breaker, the person who understands that some of the cycles that we're seeing in this family system are toxic. I refuse to carry them forward. I want a different situation for my parents, or from my parents if they're still living but also for my children. Most important for my children, right? And I don't want my children to go through the things that I had to go through. And you know, those people are very courageous, brave people, because, you know, studies show as as you know, and most people know, watching this podcast, that it's more likely for people to repeat the practices, particularly go corporal punishment. I mean, if you receive the belt, especially in the 70s and the 80s, I mean, you're a lot of people who were experiencing that most many people, even today, will say the problem with today is that we're not beating the kids enough. That's what we need. We need to bring that back. And they don't say it that that clearly, but that's basically what people say. There's a glorification and a glamorization of using physical force in children, and so it's really, really hard to break that cycle. So people who decide that they're going to be different with their children are really, really, in my opinion, some of the bravest people, because we know how powerful the feelings of love and loyalty and protection are in the guilt that can come with feeling like you're disloyal because you decided not to be your children, and that's crazy, or because you took issue with the fact that the practice was used in your home or in your school, where you know, right now, 17 states still have legal authorization to beat children in schools, and they're mainly the slavery states in the South, and it's happening disproportionately to black and brown children and and children with special needs, but it happens to a lot of different children. And, you know, I've met people who have gone through that experience and challenge. Wanted to challenge that and that they, you know, once again because of what happened to them at home and in school, that they had decided that they would never do that to their child. And I would say that that, to me, is true loyalty to your family and true protection of your family, because what it says is, as we evolved through the generations. You know, our goal, in the context of the American dream, is to redeem the sacrifices of the previous generation. I don't care what background you come from, whether your family's first generation, second generation, or whether you've been here for many, many generations, we are hardwired to believe that every generation it should get better. And sometimes people say it is money, right? But I will expand on that it's not. It really doesn't have as much to do with generational wealth, which is very important. And I know I write. About that, but to me, it's emotional wealth, psychological wealth. You know the idea of being able to rid yourself of the demons that haunted your bloodline, and understanding if you believe in the ancestors and in the power of the ancestors, you have to know that your ancestors, if they didn't know while they were here, that it was wrong, they certainly know now, anybody who would use that wisdom and that evolution and education and all of the different things that that empower us, because when we know better, we do better. Anybody who would break those cycles is actually doing a great service to their ancestors, as opposed to being disloyal to them. It's the best thing that you can do for your bloodline and your family system going into the future.
Jenn Turner 46:05
One thing that I've learned from you is that, you know, it's in a in a new way, is that it's it's also not just on the backs of individuals or families that you know these cycles can be broken, but then brought back into existence by systems like you mentioned, and schools and government. And I wondered if you might share a bit about the story of your grandmother who broke the cycle, and then how corporal punishment got reintroduced in your family. To me, is like very stark explanation of the interlocking systems that we exist in
Speaker 1 46:40
Yeah, thank you for letting me do this. Talk about my grandmother, because, you know, I never got to meet her. Her name was Opie Pugh Hawkins, and she was the daughter of Isaac Pugh senior was killed in 1914 he was actually killed on my birthday. I was born on the August 28 he was killed on August 28 1914 and, you know, when I was a kid, I would see things on PBS, and they were all about this, the civil rights and they were all black and white, you know, the marchers and the dogs and the fire hoses and Dr Martin Luther King. And it's crazy because, you know, this was the early 70s, and it wasn't really that long before, you know, the civil rights movement was really the 60s, and yet and still, because it was in black and white, and it was always presented so grainy, I would think it was so long ago, you know. And I would ask my dad, dad, you know, did our Did Did grandma and grandpa? Did they march in the civil rights movement? And my dad told me, No way. You know. As a matter of fact, my grandmother, your your grandmother used to say that Martin Luther King, he better stop that what he's doing speaking out against these white folks, because they're going to end up killing him. And I was always very ashamed of that, because I was a student who actually did a lot of forensics, and I gave the Martin Luther King speech in high school at a lot of different debate competitions and stuff. And I was just, you know, a student of nonviolent social change, and I remember being ashamed of my grandmother and that, because that was one of the only things that my father would tell me about Alabama. But when I did this work, and I found out the why, right, the fact that her father, she, you know, I had to figure out that she was nine when her father was murdered, and when I got the newspaper accounts, and then piece that together with all of the oral history, and realized that after he was shot, he was on a mule, and the mule he was shot in the back. When he was on a mule, and the mule rode him home. His feet were still in the stirrups, and my grandmother and her brothers and sisters came outside and they saw their their father's blood, blood and bullet riddled body, and she was nine years old, so that gave me the sensitivity to understand, of course, she thought that Martin Luther King should be quiet, you know, probably out of love and protection for Martin Luther King, but Also, just because we're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get us right. The truth was they did kill Martin Luther King for his activism, so she was right, but when my father started to open up even more about his mother, that was when I understood how powerful I. Of a of a force for non violent social change. She was because she would have also been paddled by grandma charity. But my father talked about how she only hit him two times, and there were both times. One of the times was when he was drinking out of water fountain that he wasn't supposed to be drinking out of at a store. And she had to do that in a very performative way for the benefit of the white people who were there. In another time, he was on a swing with the white girl. And, um, he she, she did it then, but he explained that she was a very peaceful woman and that she did not, she did not believe in that with him. And it was the school that actually corporately punished my dad. You know, if show up late, anything, any kind of infraction. It was a wooden board that said, board of Jenn on it, and it had holes. And my father learned through that for first 12 years of his life, that, you know, that was the way to discipline a child, and that was introduced into his mind because he didn't get from his mother, um, and that was enough for him to introduce that and use that in our home. And you'll see in the book, if you read the book, I talk about my grandmother at my father witnessing my grandmother standing in the way of situations that involved domestic violence against women. And you know, it just took me so long, but I finally, as I pieced together my grandmother's life and her experience, I recognized that she was about non violent social change just as powerfully as Dr Martin Luther King was. And I see a lot of the work that I do. I see myself. I see her in that work. I see that I'm in a position to do things that she was unable to do as a black woman in her time, who was born in in the early part of the 20th century. And so to use, once again, talking about the redeeming the sacrifices of previous generations so that we can do the things that our ancestors were unable to do, is really powerful. And what I I see now is that my work really aspires to expand on what Dr Martin Luther King promised America. He said we would be free of violence when we protest, right? And so they were in the basement of churches, and they did everything they could to train every Freedom Rider, every protester, and they would basically do drills in the basement of churches, and they would say, we're going to spit on you, we're going to call you names, we're going to do all of these things, and if you use Violence back, you can't march with us, right? And so my work really expands on by saying, why don't we introduce nonviolent social change in our homes? Can men make that promise to their wives? Can they make that to their children? Can mothers make that to their children? Can communities make that as communities to stop the homicide crisis that we're seeing in our community, and can schools abolish punishment, so that our children are not hardwired for anxiety as they go through the years, and so that that renewed commitment to nonviolent social change is something that I was able to see when I studied my grandmother, and I saw the ways she tried to keep violence out of her surroundings and to give my peace of life.
Jenn Turner 54:16
So much of what I hear as you talk about intergenerational trauma is also intergenerational healing and the potential for that and and that how that has also transpired in your history. I don't know if I'm inflating that or not, but it just it keeps coming through in my mind as you're talking.
Speaker 1 54:34
Oh my gosh, yeah. I mean, you know, this book leans into trauma, and it's I do it in a very intentional way, because I don't want this. I think so many people try to skirt over it with respect to to African Americans. But the key for me is that I. I've had the I do show how the relationship with my father was healed and how we were able to work for you know, over over 20 years, on perfecting our relationship, I would say that that was the closest friendship that I've ever had, and and one that I'll never have a friendship that close in the one that I had with my father, and I think a lot of it had to do with the the extreme honesty and the fact that we were able to go there and to work through these things and to come out with such tremendous respect for each other. And I think to have that 20 years of that kind of relationship with my dad was really powerful, and therein lies the healing. I think. What else, if there's any that I'm proud of about this process, is having been contacted by cousins, people from Alabama and from all over the nation who I've never met, who have shown up at my readings. And you know some of these people, you know the tightness of those hugs and the tightness of those hugs of these cousins that you're meeting for the first time. And that's not just the black ones, but it's also the ones who are white, who I met as a result of taking that DNA test and actually did research with the tightness of those hugs. It's a feeling that you just you can't get enough of, because all of these people who tell me that they're so proud of me and that they have gone through their own journeys as a result of this is powerful, because we do come from the same family, and which means that we were socialized in the same way, and we Have a lot of the same experiences. And even my white cousins, who I'm related to, because of slavery, they received corporal punishment. Of course, they did right, because that was on the other side of the bloodline, and many of them as well are just very encouraging. And you know, the fact that we even speak and that we have, that we have embarked upon this work together, once again, I think, is, you know, that's the kind of healing that we need in America. That's the kind of loyalty and protection we need to talk to the people who were on the other side of slavery, to talk to the people who lived on the other side of Jim Crow, and to understand that we can't change the past, but we certainly can affect our present and shape our future and so so Much of the work that, that I do around healing has to do with with having a conversation. You know, we had we had slavery, but we also had emancipation. We had Jim Crow, but we also had the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and by the way, there wasn't a black person in the Senate or the Congress at that time, and the President was a good old boy from Texas. But they got it done, and they got it done through dialog. I don't think we could do that now today political climate that we're in today, and so a lot of my work is to try to bring people together by confronting the hardest parts of our family narratives in our country's narrative.
Jenn Turner 58:47
I could talk with you and listen to you all day. This is the your journalist or your storytelling coming through. It's thank you so much for spending this time with us. I really hope that people go and read your book and check out other things that you're doing in the projects that you're up to. Is there anything that we didn't get to today that's top of mind or that you'd like to shine forward?
Speaker 1 59:12
Yeah, thank you, I think. And thank you for this opportunity and for the work that you're doing. You know, I believe this is God's work. I believe that mental health and childhood trauma are probably the most important issues, you know, confronting our world today. And so anything we can do to lean into that is critical. And so I would say that what my goal is is to proliferate the world with with this book, and to try to get into teachers who are teaching high school AP courses and professors who are teaching college undergraduate courses. Because. Once again, this book is a story about trauma and intergenerational healing, but it is pulled through the story of one black American family, and really is written in the same way that, you know, the books that we really admire that just tell the story and allow the reader to draw the confusions are written. So there I'll just say this last thing. For some reason, and I don't know it just seems to be happening, happening very organically. I've been contacted by returning citizens, you know, groups that work with Justice impacted people who are now in society and dealing with a lot of the trauma to speak to them. And you know, the one thing that I'm realizing that I really need to do now is to commit myself to also talking to prisons, talking to people who have been incarcerated, talking to people who have had that situation in which they're now living with the mistake they made, or or or with a felony on their record, and trying their best to navigate through and as they do that, I'm hoping that this story about how I dealt with a lot of the things that haunted me from childhood as an adult, will help people who read it so that they can begin to, you know, address all the other issues that they have to and I think that, you know, it's a forgotten aspect children, and children are A forgotten part of our society. They're the most vulnerable, but the least protected. So I want to make sure that I get to the young people, but I also the people who have paid their debt to society as proof. I also want to,
Jenn Turner 1:01:56
yeah, amazing. I think that there, we could probably have a conversation around enslavement of in modern day, in the prison system, but maybe we can do it as follow up at some point.
Speaker 1 1:02:09
Yeah, I'll find out when I get out there and talk talk to people, but I will say that the education and literacy is is the primary way that will enable them to not go back. And so that's why reading a book that's engaging, that is not just a textbook and really a story of American history, I think would benefit a lot of the people who are dealing with these issues in the in the audio book is I narrated it so and I tried hard make it as good as possible. So I hope people check it out
Jenn Turner 1:02:48
Absolutely. Thank you so much for this conversation and for sharing your powerful work with us.
Speaker 1 1:02:55
Thank you again. Keep up the good work.
Jenn Turner 1:02:59
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Jenn Turner 1:03:59
thank you so much for being with us today to find out more about today's guest. Head to heal with cfte.org/podcast follow us on Instagram at on trauma and power, to stay up to date on future episodes, and be sure to like and subscribe to on trauma and power. Wherever you listen to your podcast, we'll see you next time. Take care you.
