Jeanette

Emily also wrote an essay for Oh, the Oprah magazine about forgiving her father's mistress. This is a story about the many ways in which understanding and compassion can turn anger and enmity into something else, something that might even be called beautiful. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. And my mother's daughter and that I don't have a

natural relationship to the natural world. She was a child who was very much sent her in the natural world when she grew up in the rural South and Hazel Lors, Mississippi. But when we moved to the suburbs. She really stayed inside as much as possible, and I wanted to be with her. So that was my planet, you know, the house. Um and emotionally, my mother was the center of everything. My mother was a beautiful woman inside and out. I don't think there's a single person who would deny that

she was religious. But religion didn't nominate her, but it was deep and it was true, and it's how she organized her life around, you know, very traditional Christian values. She was a kind person, a generous person. She's reserved. She was very funny, and she was whip smart and very creative, very thoughtful, but also depressed from a very young age, something she had inherited from her paternal line and grappled with that before there was a real language

around it. She said to me, once you know, we had the blues. It really hindered her um and also I think her since of privacy hindered her a lot too. She had a problem making connections with people outside of the family. That made her very much alone, even though people liked her. Feeling very afraid of my father. But I mean, I remember just a constant feeling of anxiety, not being able to relax. Worried that I was going to set him off somehow, and his disapproval was something

that hovered over me all of time. My father ruled the roost and that was that. So I had to learn to live within those confines. And my mother didn't raise wilting flower. She raised someone who could speak her own mind. But my father. One of the best things I've heard that helped soothe me years ago, a therapist said, you just weren't a good fit as parent and child, and I gave me so much comfort. I think that

was really the problem. As much energy and money he has he put into my education, the fact that I was a childhood girl who talked back and had her own opinions, he could not manage that. Emily's parents meet in Nashville as university students in the nineteen fifties. Her father was in medical school and her mother was a well regarded campus poet. His story was that he just

revered her from afar. In fact, one of his stories he liked to tell was that he knew how much she loved art, and so he got a print of the Mona Lisa and put it under her door for dorm room, and I think that did seal it from my mother that this guy with a buzz cut and awkward glasses could be interesting for her romantically. My father was a deeply charismatic person, and he had a lot of fans um. He was somebody who come in a situation,

always had a joke, always had a handshake. He had a heavy presence, and as much as he was someone who had a ready joke with his children, he was deeply judgmental. We never we never really measured up. I grew up with that sense of always bordering on disappointing him, and so I followed the path that he had laid before me, you know. And education was important to both of my parents, and they wanted us to perform at a high level. And it was the way I got

his approval, if not his love. Emily does perform at a high level. She goes off to Yale, a school her father would most certainly have approved of. She comes back to Nashville one winter break. She's home with her mom and her brother's Her mom was Emily's dad's office manager, and she kept the books both for his office and the household finances, so she's balancing the books, and her mom sees something that doesn't add up, a plane ticket purchased in the name of a patient who also works

part time in her father's office. She said, why, I wonder why he would do this? Why would he buy this ticket? And I was very quick to rationalize it or just dismiss it. And also my mother was a warrior, so you know, I just reassured her quickly that it was nothing, and she was imagining it, and that's what she lived with. Unfortunately, I was part of the complicity

or the silence that surrounded her. The ticket was made out to a woman by the name of Jeanette Curry, and after Emily returns to college, it starts to become clear, at least to her, that something troubling is going on back home. You're a college senior and you write in your journal Jeanette Curry won't stop calling mom. Why is

she doing this to her? At that point I was hearing I was I was in Connecticut and she was in Nashville, and she would call me and tell me about Jeanette's phone calls, and it was very confusing to me. Jeanette had been part of our landscape. Are family landscape

for for years. At that point. My mother and I were very close and we talked almost every day when I was in college, so it would be it would punctuate our conversations this phone call and my mother would, you know, call the phone company and change the number. And then Jeanette would call the phone company and say,

this is Mrs Bernard and I've forgotten my number. And I think those things would not be so easy to do now, And I often think about that, the things that could have protected my mother or given her some relief, But it was like her world was an open book

because she had no protection. My father was not protecting her, and Jeanette had trained her attention on my mother because she wasn't getting the response from my father that she wanted those Emily and her mother were certain Jeanette was lying a demented fantasist, that she was just playing crazy. I mean, who stalks someone like this. The family narrative was that this woman was just after his money. Her father was insistent on this point, and he was apparently

very convincing. Besides, he was a formidable figure and it must have felt impossible to push him. My father had such a casual relationship with the truth in general, that I didn't like to ask him direct questions because I knew his inclination would be to lie. He was someone who just made up stories about his life and everybody in his world just believed them. But in fact, when Emily wrote those lines in her college journal, Jeanette Curry won't stop calling mom, why is she doing this to her?

The answer was being played out in another home, in another neighborhood in Nashville. There was a baby, a boy named Lee, a toddler by this point, the child of Emily's father and Jeanette Curry. Could you describe Jeanette. We went to a very state Episcopal church where we recited the Latin, the Mass and Latin you know, in the high holidays um and Jeanette would come and she would shout about Jesus and it was just the most misort thing.

I mean between I mean literally the b our pew that we occupied as one of the old families in the church, and Jeanette would sit on the other side and she'd be shouting, and people would just not know what to do with this person. So she was uncontainable.

She was a free radical in our world, and that made it also very hard because she she had no shame, She was unembarrassed about her relationship with my father, and as opposed to my parents, who were very concerned with self composition and how we appeared, she didn't care at all about that. So we didn't have a choice about how much we could conceal from our larger world because she was making it public all the time, while your

father was all the while denying it. Yeah, he would sit in his view and just to act nothing was happening. So he left sort of everyone else to deal with the mess. But he was an island of stoicism and denial. So there's a baby, there's a mistress, and there are family Sundays in church. Emily's father pretends nothing's going on. But as with all good secrets and lies, this one eventually proves impossible to contain, no matter how he'd like

to pretend otherwise. So tell me about this legal battle that, then, I guess, results in your father taking a paternity test. There was a call place to it's a d C for the Child Welfare Services in Nashville that triggered a blood test to determine Lee's paternity. And again I'm still trying to sift through figure out the actual, the meaning and what happened here. And the test revealed that my father was Lee's father, as Jeanette had been claiming, So

it vindicated Jeanette. So we don't know who placed that call that that triggered the whole episode. I don't quite believe it, but Jeanette says, it's my mother who plays a call. She thought that that would be a way to kind of get Jeanette out of our life. And even at that moment, my mother said, well, you know, these tests are only reliable. I think about this so much in my own life and also in the stories

of so many of my guests. On family Secrets, the tagline for the show is the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. And I always find that last part the most resonant or haunting, the secrets that we keep from our elves that were capable of keeping out of self preservation, out of love, out of fear, out of shame, out of so many things. But so

now your mother, no, I mean your and your father. Denies, denies, denies, denies, and then at some point he says yes, and so what doesn't really matter. Everybody does this. That was his attitude which shocked my mother. I mean, he did all the classic things and begged her not to leave, and um told her he didn't know what he'd do without her, told her that he knew the kids would go with her,

which was true. We would have certainly taken my mother's side and anything she wanted we would have given her in terms of shows of loyalty, and she stayed. She was very practical, and she knew what happened to women after divorce. She had been so talented, but she spent her, you know, so much of her life and our our lives working in my father's office and being an excellent homemaker. So she didn't believe she could compete in a job market, and she didn't want to. I think she felt she

had built my father's career. She was going to stay and and reap some of the benefits. I remember at one time saying to her, you know, Dad, he would never hold it against you. If you are afraid of the social stigma of divorce, you don't have to divorce him. You can travel take his money. He would never regret you that. And she said, Emily, I made this home and I'm going to stay this. So that's what she did.

Emily's mother also does something quite extraordinary here. She wants to see Lee taken care of because that's the right thing to do. Despite everything, For all of her disappointment, she didn't want another kind of unacknowledged black child in the world. So she told my father, you have to write him into your will in some way. So you know, my mother is a deeply ethical person, and you know,

cared about the community. She cared about black people. She cared about this child even though she never knew him and wanted to know him, and she cared I think about what she would be leaving behind. But she was very angry. I think she ricocheted between a lot of emotions. I think she was almost making a conscious choice about how to deal with this, how to be in the

wake of this. So she tried anger, and she tried vindictiveness, and she tried I think, almost mimicking Jeanette and kind of being out of control and letting her emotions fly. But in the end, my mother was a decorous and decent person who preferred a contemplative life. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Emily's mom dies at the age of seventy. She had struggled all her life with depression, the blues, and she felt humiliated by the role she had been forced to play in her church,

her community, that of the spurned wife. She also had trouble breathing and suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. By the end of her life, she was really a shut in, a recluse, and all during her mother's decline, Emily begins her life as an adult. She gets her doctorate, starts to teach. Eventually she meets her husband and becomes the

mother of twin daughters. What must it have been like to carry the weight of all that history, Well, my mother was my first concern, and I think this was true for my brother's as well. Um I never wrestled with how I really felt about it. I had a lot of rage toward my father, and we did not have an easy relationship, and this was the icing on the cake, and I buried that rage. It was very hard for me to beat around him physically, and there was just thick and unspoken distance between us. We both

knew why we never spoke of it. He never talked to me about Janette, never spoke her name, He never spoke Lee's name in my presence. He talked to my brother is more about it. But I think I was the girl. And also I was in rage with him, and he felt my judgment and it scared him, so we never spoke about it. I was angry at her sometimes for letting this break her. I needed to believe she had choices because I was growing up and I

wanted to have choices. I hated to see her beaten down by this man because it had not been an easy marriage. She would always counsel me to make a different kind of choice when I get married. So that was the idea that my life would be sort of corrective to what she was experiencing. But it tore it me watching her decline. She didn't want my help. She actually disappeared into the marriage even deeper. My father took care of her, and he administered all of her medications.

All the while. Emily isn't just contending with her sadness and grief about her mother and her rage at her father. No, She's also dealing with the spectra of Jeanette, who in some way she blames for the whole thing. Whenever I'd see her, I would feel homicidal. I mean really, I learned about anger from my experience with this woman. Because

she was whittling my mother away. Myself was ricocheting between a lot of different emotions, and it was easier to bury them, to stay buried in the New England, and then to remind as far away as I could get from them and stay in the United States. I didn't allow myself, I think, to confront what I felt my father, even though he had done such damage, he still ruled the roost. He was a king and we were subjects. I never would have been able to conceive of even

bringing this woman's name up to him. It was out of the question. She would be at our church. She would come up to me, I mean she again, this woman obeyed no conventional boundaries, and she would talk to me about my family. And there was one moment when Isabella, my utter, who was just a very sweet child, and she came up and said, oh, Isabella's gotten so much bigger, And Isabella went in to hug her because she was responding to the tone of her voice, and I just

put my hand in Isabella's back. And I went home that day from church and I heard my father on the phone saying, and these low, soft tones, well, you have to be the bigger person. And I knew down to my toes like a lightning bolt. He was talking to Jeanette, and then he was casting at that moment as if I had been so rude, inexcusably rude, and she should rise above. What it did was it just kept the bottom kept falling out, the bottom kept descending,

you know what I mean. There was no floor to my feelings of disappointment and my father and I still needed a father, I mean, I still needed him to be a person I could respect. So it was easier just to let him lie and to keep my distance. But eventually Emily does go visit her father. She describes the trip to Nashville as a whim. She was working on her book and wanted to do some research. There was some journals she wanted to lay her hands on.

I'm still stunned by the turn of events that happened now four years ago, almost exactly. It came in the house and I was looking for the journal, and my father came upstairs, and my mother had all these They were all these pill bottles that were still on the bathroom sink. She had died in two thousand and eight, um seven years before. And I said, what are these bottles doing here? And he said, you know, I just

I think I'm still in love with your mother. And we hugged, and it was the most sincere and deepest hug that we'd had in many years, maybe since I was a child. He was not comfortable really with a lot of touching, so he was even a little but I kept him close, and I noticed at that moment that in my heart I received those words purely and without the usual sarcasm I felt. And I'm so grateful that those are the last words we spoke, because the next morning he was dead, and my father was in

perfect health. He'd never been sick of day in his life. Amazing the way sometimes we're given a gift, even in the midst of great pain, a hug, a moment between a father and a daughter. Who what was it? The therapist once told Emily weren't a good fit as parent and child. After her father's death, Emily reaches out to the relatively new reverend from her family's church, Reverend Cynthia. Her father had been gone for only hours. His body was still seated in the chair where he was stricken

by the massive heart attack. Reverend Cynthia comes to the Bernard at home. She performs a beautiful ritual and anoints Emily's father's body with oil. And we said that my father is sitting in the chair, and tell her everything. And she knew everything. And she told me the situation between my father and the Curries had been the biggest drift in her congregation. She was pretty new to the church.

My father was mentoring her. He was trying to introduce her to the kind of social infocacies at our church and help her become adjusted to the life at our church. And she was trying to make things right. But there are people who could not forgive my father. And that was the first time I knew that people actually had been my mother's side. But during the course of their conversation,

Emily makes another painful discovery. Despite the bottles of her mom's prescription medication, despite her dad's confession that he still was in love with her, he still had remained intensely involved with Jeanette Curry, Jeanette's husband, children and grandchildren, but not as a romantic partner. And I found out that my father he was eating every meal at Jeanette's house. Her grandchildren called him Grandpa. She and her husband had a child, and then she and your father had a child,

and this somehow coexisted as some version of modern family. Absolutely, I often think when I understood it when I read The Color Purple, I think I was in college and at the end of that novel, Mr and she could cause Sally so much pain. But they were sitting together on the on the porch, and I think they were knitting or doing something, all three of them. And that was the situation between my father and Jeanette and her family.

They were survivors of a war, and it was a war of their own making, but it was a war all the same, and they lived together. Really, my father would go over to their house, he every meal there. If this man is never gonna stop disappointing me, how could he have a relationship with this family after what they did to my mother? But he did. He took Jeanette's grandchildren to church, to school, He helped them with

their homework, something he never did with my brother. My brothers and I think were surprised because he was a different person of them. He was an active grandfather. He and Jeannette had more of a relationship of equals. They would argue. He never argued with my mother. My mother never would have questioned him. She was quote unquote the perfect wife. You know, That's that's who she was. She was living out of some magazine, I mean, and it

wasn't fake, you know, it was sincere. She was just someone who believed that the husband was at the head of the family. I mean, I think there's half of her that really questioned that. But again, she had been groomed for a certain kind of adult life. But he Intoett were sparring partners. Um she confronted him with his hypocrisy in a way my mother I don't think she

really would have ever felt comfortable doing that. He was nurtured in that family, and he was seen in that family in a way that he was not seen in our family. He was himself there in a way that he could not be with me. I think in my brother's and my mother, I learned also that he he was trying to in some ways I think repent and he and Jeanette would go into you know, laurencome neighborhoods, the projects, if you will, and proselytize and bring Bibles

and try to convert people. I mean, I always had always on who's very religious. He grew up in the Anglican Church in Trinidad. It was very obedient in that way. But I mean, I'm still trying to understand this and reconciled this portrait with the person I grew up with. But that was the truth. I mean, it was corroborated by you know, several people that he was on a mission, it seems, in the final years of his life, perhaps

to make right with my mother's memory. He got me all for clemp to the it Ish word for little emotional. So Emily initiates a face to face with Jeanette. She's torn, on the one hand by the horrible history of Jeanette and her mother and trying to square that history with the stories she now hears from Reverend Cynthia about Jeanette's current very different relationship with her father. Meanwhile, she's a grieving daughter, a complicated grief, to be sure, and she's

about to bury her father. I behaved in ways I really regret around the funeral. I didn't want Jeanette's family there. My brothers were bewildered by my degree, my anger, and they sort of backed off and said, whatever she wants. I didn't want her the service. I made it very difficult for her to come to the wake. I was full of unleashed fury and I regret that now, and Jeanette knows that I regret it. But I couldn't control myself. It was a really different story, and I thought, now

I'm gonna, you know, seek vengeance. And I asked Reverend Cynthia to be there because when I wanted to witness and too, I didn't know if I could trust myself and how I would behave so I wanted someone that I respected that I thought, you know, I'm not going to act full in front of her. And as soon as I came in the room, I mean, it was just strange to be looking at this woman in the eye and I'd studiously ignore her. It was about acting superior, but it was also because I was afraid to look

in her eyes, you know. Over the course of a three hour conversation, and I asked her could record it, and she agreed. I mean a hundred pages of a transcript. I realized that she was as much a victim in the situation as my mother. When you say you were afraid, you would always been afraid to look around the eye, what we were afraid of seeing there? Do you think it was maybe that you were afraid of seeing that

she was a human being? Yes, I think I was afraid of seeing a real person and not the villain. I needed to keep her as a villain, you know, to keep it uncomplicated her as much as I could. During that conversation, she says to you, I just wanted your mother to forgive me. I wanted her to forgive

me so bad. And it seems like that was the moment for you that it kind of, you know, broke open absolutely, because don't we all want that, you know, I am also my mother's daughter, and that, you know, I religion or my faith in God is really important to me. And you know, every week in church we pray for forgiveness. And she made a mistake, something she's used as a mistake now. But I'm not a saint, you know, I mean, I've I've hurt people I've been

careless with other people's emotions. I've been forgiven, you know, by friends and by family, So how can I not offer her that? And everyone who was hurting the situation is no longer alive, so it's really the two of us now. And my mother at the end of her life was talking a lot about forgiveness and telling me that I need to be more forgiving. Ironically, I mean she was after I'm holding the George for her for years,

feeling like keeping her anger alive was important. I really believe that probably up to that moment with Jeanette, or maybe experiencing her anger that she couldn't experience, because the way you've described her, that was like the last thing she wanted to feel, absolutely and I felt when I went to a meet Jeanette, I remember thinking I'm a panther, you know. I always thought my mother was like, you know, the steer in the headlights, and Janette was like some jackal,

and I just I was tired of that. And when I sat and listened to her, honestly, I realized that what she wanted was very simple, was from my father to be a father to his son, and after he died, had gone through all of his papers. I found at least one check she had returned from my father, saying I don't want your money. But my conditioning was so thorough that I edited out of my consciousness. And as soon as she said the part about one of my mother's forgiveness, it came back into view in my head.

I thought she never wanted his money. She wanted to get you hid to give to Lee what he had given to us, which was a step up and a step out of, you know, all the limitations they were living with. She also described for you, or explains to you, the reasons why she was harassing, which I thought was really kind of amazing too. Yeah, and you know, I've been driven crazy by a man before. I mean, you know what happens. And I think that's partly what happened.

I think Jenna and I are learning to tell the truth to each other. So there are many layers of the story that are unfolding. And you know, I think it's difficult sometimes to be really truthful when we've heard someone so deeply or made mistakes, and I think she's grappling with that herself. There's a way which she shaped the story to help herself survive. I mean, my father would. I also realized that he'd set me up as his

straw man. I mean, he would tell Jeannette, well, Emily wouldn't want me whenever she wanted him to help her, I think with a down payment on on a condition she wanted to buy any He was supposed to be someone who signed and at the last minute he said, well, Emily doesn't want me to do that. Emily doesn't and I had never heard of this, So she had a feeling about me that it was not accurate because my father again was telling multiple stories and keeping people in

their places. Um. So we've had to undo a lot of that, and we've laughed a lot about all the things that we believed about each other. But I think, um, as we talk, she's feeling safer to tell me the truth. You know, she was in a situation at our church where all of the people were doctors and lawyers. Here. She was feeling very alone, feeling very out of place, and everyone was making her feel that way because of

you know, again loyalty to my parents. She was coming to church, I found out because my father had been asking her to come to church. I mean every time I would come home, she would be at church. I mean, he had this idea that he could normalize things and

then we would come around. And she told me, because your father, you're the one he was afraid of, and you know, and the thing that was it was funny and it was true, but it was also odd to realize how much he talked to her about me and his fears about me and how I felt about him. He said, you know, I know those kids think I killed their mother, and I did. So he knew me better than I thought he did, and she had a lot of intuitive feelings about who I was. It's so

much about knowing and being known, isn't it. You know what I asked you before about what it felt like for you when you were in your twenties and thirties watching your mother's decline and moving forward in your life, and the various feelings you know, you describe them as you know, like like all these different trying on different feelings for size. I'm going to try vindictiveness, I'm gonna try rate, I'm gonna try you know whatever. But mostly

your concern was about your mother. So I guess what I'm wondering is what now is the feeling. You're a mother of teenage kids, you're a professor, you're memoirist, you're a wife, you know, you're a friend, your many things. Why is it important? You know, some people at my church have really encouraged me to my home church and Nashville, out of concern for me and may be concerned about what I'm going to discover, have really advised me very gently to leave the story alone. And of course it

makes that attracts me even more to the story. This is the story of my life in some way. When I was going down to Nashville to have this talk with Jeanette, you know, I was myself confused, why am I doing this? And I said to my husband, you know, do you understand, because I wanted him to tell me why, And he said, this woman has more had more impact on your life than any other person besides your parents. I think I'm driven to know. I mean, my parents

are both gone, and you know that's I'm next. So the understanding I have from my own experience about just wanting to know the truth in all of its ugliness and all of its mysteries, I would like to know realize I never knew my father. I think other guests in your podcast have talked about that. I really never knew who he was, and it's still taking me many years. I mean, he's taken many years and even say that, and I think it will be many more years to

understand what that means. Janette is honestly one of the only people I have left who knows the story. She lived the story. I no longer have, you know, vengeful feelings toward her, but we have an odd bond. She's had some health issues over the years, and at the time I went down to talk to her, I felt a little urgency about that. You know, before anything happens to her, I need to have this conversation. And then

there's a matter of Lee, Emily's half brother. In a story so much about forgiveness and understanding even in the most difficult circumstances, this too, is of course a bridge that must be crossed. Can you tell me about meeting him for the first time? We connected on Facebook? And I'm a little embarrassed to say that my first response to him was, you know, what is that you want? One of the things I've come to realize is that when there is what feels like a quote unquote interloper

in a family without exception. In my experience, the very first feeling is threat It's a primitive, hardwired, biological thing that happens, which is your other you're outside and people, even when they often eventually come around to realizing that that's just not the case, I feel threatened. I absolutely felt threatened. And Lee said, you know, I just want to know my siblings. I just want a big sister.

Why would I deny him that Lee was thirty one years old and Emily in her late forties when they first met, and he'd recently been paroled after a minor drug offense. It's interesting that this only happened and probably only could have happened in the aftermath of your father's death.

It wasn't gonna happen while your father was alive. And I think also if I hadn't been there, the curries would have discovered him, and that would have been terrible because I was still locked in a place of bitterness forward them. So I am again it was a great gift that he let go of life when I was there. It started the whole thing. And right I've told Jette, I said, I could never have done this with my father, really lea because it would have made him too happy,

It would have pleased him too watch. There's no way I could have ever, you know, because I found out if his death that that's what he had wanted. And he had promised me that he was going to try to foster a relationship. But he was too afraid of me, I think to say that to me. But it was so easy, you know. I mean, my father gave me the gift of his death. If I can say that, it sounds cruel, but he can't disappoint me anymore. He's

not allowed to disappoint me anymore. So I can. I can warn him, and I can remember him, and he's sort of still. And the curtain opened, and there are these people and one of them is my brother. And you know, my daughters are adopted. And I know that love happens in blossoms outside of the genetic relationship. But there's something that happened, something that happened. As soon as Lee and I saw each other, my heart melted. We planned to get together and I thought we should have them,

we should have a date. So first we're reading things together, you know, we're reading. That's my mode so we were reading books, you know, between exactly and the first time we did based on I really couldn't even speak. We're just smiling so much. So we met and I looked exactly with my father, I mean, the older I get. You know, if I walked through the streets in North Nashville, people are falling out, there's Dr Bernard. So he was stunned.

And Lee is just extraordinary. I mean, he had one of those kind of revelations when he was in prison that you know, he was the author of his own experience, and he let go of a lot of bitterness with my dad. I have been really humbled by that because he has just accepted it, even though he told me once. You know, he was in jail when my father died and he wished he could have asked him, why did

you have me? Why was I born? And you're left, as so often is the case, holding the story holding you know, your mother's the rage she couldn't feel that, you know that you've worked through, and your father's guilt, the guilt that it doesn't seem that he was particularly capable of feeling, you know, but it was there. It's almost like it was in the cosmos, and somebody had

to actually kind of contend with it. And so I mean, that's how it striking me, is that you're at this point where you have these two new relationships, neither one of which you could ever have anticipated, you know, one with Jeanette and one with Lee, and this is sort of the work that needed to be done, and it couldn't be done by either of your parents, but it's

being done now by you. I think part of the story when it's taught me is I mean, I thought I experienced every emotion, you know, at my age, and I hadn't, and I'm experiencing new emotions now that are very intriguing to me. I'm surprised every time I hear from Janette about the lack of rancor and the eerie

connection that I have hard time explaining. For instance, after this essay came out, I hadn't anticipated how emotional it would be to see it in print and to contend with the aftermath of telling this little sliver of the truth. And there are people who cautioned me again in my life, elders who care about me, who asked me, but also with some frustration, you know, why are you talking to her. Why do you believe her? Maybe I'm naive, but I'm interested in what she has to say, and I don't

think she's lied to me yet. I think she's done with lying, and I think we're both at a place where we want to know the truth. In fact, when I started to write the piece and the magazine, she said, you know, our story has a lot to teach people about fregiveness. And again I just humbled by the wisdom, by the clarity, the generosity. Well, and it's interesting because at least as you have spoken about her and written

about her, she wasn't a liar. She's a lot of other hurtful things, but lying, which your father did you know full on? It doesn't seem like Jeanette did that. Yeah, there's a lot of truth. I'm still content with this. I mean, I had a lifetime of hating this woman. It's sometimes hard to accept the fact that she was truthful, even when it's staring me in the face. I also think she's a human being and did more damage than she is able to really face right now, which again

I empathize with him. I think that's just true of being a human being that sometimes it's hard to face our mistakes, especially when they've been profound. There are parts of the story they're still very mysterious to me. But Janette Is knows I need to see receipts, as we say, and you know, because she wasn't believed, has kept voice recordings, She's kept correspondence. She kept records because no one believed her, and she's sharing them with me now because she wants

me to know. I'd like to thank Emily Bernard for sharing her story with us. Learn more about Emily's memoir Black Is the Body, Stories from My Grandmother's Time, my Mother's time, and mine by visiting Emily Bernard dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer. Julie Douglas and Bethanne Macaluso are

the executive producers. If you have a family secret that you like to share, you can get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.