The Destroyed Palace

kindly a family thinks, it is bonded by hardship. Parents and children sometimes become more intimately known by strangers than by one another, and more children don't know their parents or deals. That's rich Benjamin political analyst, cultural anthropologist, speaker, and author of Searching for White Topia, An Improbable Journey

into the Heart of White America. We which is is a story of silence within a family, the kind of silence that is like a blanket, muffling every potential question, thrown over every curiosity, until there are no more questions. There is no more curiosity. But when an inquisitive child evolves into a deeply thoughtful adult, a journalist, there comes a time when the need to know and understand becomes

more powerful than the silence itself. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I grew up mostly in a suburb of Washington, d C. Called the Festa Maryland, and it was so monochrome that one of the people who went to high school years before I did was called Darren Starr And who came up with a script called Potomac two oh eight five four, which is the suburb I

grew up with. But Hollywood studio executives didn't want it to be about Maryland, and so he changed his script and he called it Beverly Hills nine to one oh. So that gives the kind of sense of where I grew up and how I grew up a suburb of Washington, d C. But we also moved around quite a bit because of where my father's work took me. I have a twin sister, an older sister, and an older brother in my twin and I we are the youngest in the family. What was your mother like the mother of

your childhood? The mother of my childhood was very fierce and determined. She was stern. My friends at the time were required to call her Mrs Benjamin. And sometimes if you asked her something and you replied, you didn't just say yes, because then she would quit yes dog, cat monkey, and that was your cue to say yes mom or yes mother. So that being said, she had to be attentive to me because I had a blood disorder called sickle cell anemia, so we spent a lot of time

going to the doctor together. A lot of conversations were had, but also a lot of silences. Even though we'd spent a lot of time going to medical doctors, there were no exact stories at all ever told about her past when I was in grade school and when we commuted to the blood doctors together. But there was a fierceness I remember of her protectiveness to me, the way she wanted me to be batt already, the way I always fell uh survivor mentality in her, and I couldn't understand

what it was or why it is. I just assumed it was medical that she wanted me to survive this blood disorder because when I was born, one and four children would not survive this disease, and the life expectancy for me at the time would have been forty years old. If I were lucky. How long was that period of time of that kind of fear about your health? How long did that last? It lasts to this day, but at the time, you know, it's lasting in my childhood.

It's kind of really creeping up into every dynamic of our relationship. And sometimes if I don't return my mother's call soon enough, or if she suspects something in my voice, such as she suspects I might have an infection, it returns me to that six year old self where my mother is saying, what did you do to deserve to be sick? Or oh, my goodness, are you really calling me from an emergency room and not letting me know.

I remember, as a full grown at all, I went hiking in Montana and I caught walking pneumonia and with they also the altitude of the high kick. It kind of triggered this medical crisis. And then my mother and I are having the same conversations and dynamic that we had when I was a young boy. Just lives inside the relationship lives inside both of you. And tell me about your father, the father of your childhood, the father of my childhood was very breezy, very effusive. People loved him.

People wanted to spend time around him. He worked extremely hard, it was extremely generous. He was ebulent, and we often joked that if you wanted something, you went to my father and not my mother, because if you went to my mother, you'd get a stern no, but if you went to my father, you get a yes. And this pertains to our dogs spending antica, and it pertains to one thing. And my mother always scolded my father for

being impractical as she saw it. I mean, one time he returned and it's a Saturday afternoon and there's a scold Lexus in the drive way and all the kids, needless to say, are enamored by it, and we're jumping and hooting around this car. And my mother was furious and she gave my father a dressing down. You know, why do you borry this car o on a whim? You know we're going to be suffering for this if So,

there was that dynamic. And also the final thing I'll say is my father tended to have the better taste. He was the more humanistic and the more creative, and so he was often delegated with kind of decorating our houses and that kind of thing. Partly they came from similar backgrounds in the sense that they both grew up with so many siblings seven and eight apiece. Um. They both grew up under very ethically honest parents who wouldn't steal a penny. They both grew up under stern, hard

working parents. So the irony is they had very similar backgrounds growing up in these sort of uh nuclear families of multiple children with hard working and effective and successful parents in their own worlds. But they had very, very, very different personalities. And I think my father had more stability growing up. My mother's had more instability growing up

with all the political turmoil surrounding her family's home. One thing Rich does know about his mother's family history as he grows up is that she came to the US from Haiti when she was thirteen, But this fact is shrouded in mystery. It's never spoken about. He doesn't know any specifics about this journey. I couldn't have told you whether they came on a boat or raft a plane. I assume it was a plane. But I couldn't have told you when they left. I couldn't have told you

precisely why they left. I couldn't have told you what their mood or their fears or their anxieties were when they left. I couldn't have told you what happened when they landed. I literally didn't have a detail to tell you. When you say they, who's they? They is my mother and her younger siblings who all came together. But it also applies to her parents, Daniel and Carmen. I couldn't tell you the circumstances and the details of how her

parents arrived to America in ninety seven. Either when was the first time that you felt in any way curious or that you registered the absence of the stories, you know, the stories that weren't being told. That's funny looking back. Subconsciously, that I was not being told these stories was registering because I was hearing from classmates, you know, in high school.

They would say, oh, my ancestors came from Ireland during the potato famine, or oh, you know, my ancestors came from Ukraine during the programs, you know, at the turn of the last century. So it began to register subconsciously that this was a secret and that it was not being talked about. But I never pressed it more. And also I would say when I graduated from high school and people's grandparents turned up, you know, with their white hair and their sweater sets in their cardigans and that

kind of thing. Or when I would see a grandfather in a Christmas commercial, it would register to me that way a second, Uh, where's your grandfather? But in those kind of subconscious and subtle ways it registered to me growing up, and then it really hit me only as an adult, like many kids who have grown up in strict homes. In riches home, there's no cursing, no dating, no smoking, no drinking. So when it comes time for college, he flees to Wesleyan University, an ideal environment in that

it's intellectually rigorous and also a hard party school. Rich loves it there, and upon graduation he moves to New York City, hungry for more. It was a similar trajectory in similar circumstances, where there was a fever in me and I'm running from my past, I'm running from strictness. I'm running from just kind of a mi las I

couldn't put my finger on. And the same story. I came to the village, I read seriously, I did culture seriously, but I partied my face off around this time as we're just coming to really know himself in that early twenties kind of way, his family still doesn't fully know him. There are more secrets I never formally came out. They were clues. So for one example, you know, gay men were getting what we call a Caesar haircut, you know,

dusty sprinkles of hair on your head. My mother saw this haircut and she shrieked, she hated, and she's like, are you gay? And at that time, I must have been seventeen, I denied it, but I think word cut to her. And there's a point at which a mother knows would be someone in my family told her, and I would say that would probably be when I graduated

from college. But it was never discussed. Never. It's so interesting when secrets are kind of baked in, when they're just part of what you know, the air that you breathe, They're part of the dynamic of a family. There's never just one of them, right, there's just all these silences and all these ways in which people don't talk to each other. Yes, and that was the case on her, and it was only as an adult. I'm beginning to think, well, if her childhood is a secret, what other secrets are

kept on that end. And if, as you said, secrecy is the culture of the family, they were just all around. We'll be right back. Secrecy and silence build up so much pressure, and that pressure has to go somewhere, right, Hard partying can be its own pressure release valve when it all feels like too much to handle. For many of us raised in secrecy and silence, we want a quick fix, a release from holding all that is unexpressed.

In the East Village, rich immerses himself in the club scene and surrounds himself with running buddies who aren't too inquisitive. It was so raucous, Danny, because on the one hand, the parting was so anonymous. You never wanted to be surrounded by people who asked too much questions because that invaded your privacy. In it kind of punctured the air

of secrecy that you were that I was containing. But at the same time it still managed a form of intimacy where you saw people kind of doing crazy things at vulnerable moments, you know, and by vulnerable I mean drug related vulnerable moments, vulnerable sexual moments, And so that was the ideal party, Buddy, is this air of anonymity, people who don't ask to any questions. But also there was a level of intimacy, people you could trust to

also not devulge your secrets. And some people describe the East Village at that time as a kind of queer Heyday because by that time, you know, the police or city forces weren't enforcing strict nuisance laws or imbibing laws, and it was just rampant with nudity, with drugs, with sexuality, with fantastic DJs. And we didn't know what was going on at the time, you know, we were just like ratty libertine kids, ingesting our drugs and just carrying on.

And it was an age before Instagram and Facebook and now the myth is, you know, to put yourself out in the public to have followers, to be seen. At the time was the reverse. It was the more private, the more exclusive, the more unseen you were a the better the partying and the more caschet you had. And so we partied for each other. We partied for the moment. We didn't party to have followers, and this contributed to

the success of the Secret. The gay rights movement has changed so much, but at the time it was shameful. I mean, it was shameful at work, it was shameful among families. It was you know, there was just so much shame in your tide and associated to this quote unquote shameful disease that is consuming a community. And so you know, it was a very different culture of shame back then, the late nineties in the East Village or an immersive whirlwind for Rich he's consuming culture along with drugs.

He's writing, he's finding the truest version of himself. Meanwhile, the truth of his ancestors and his family history is still obscured. Even at that time, the ancestry and my mother's story coming here was deeply secret. I did not give it a thought, nor did relatives tell me during all those years in the East Village of what was going on. And there's a funny incident. I remember a cab driver looking at me and asking are you Haitian? And I just worded no, because in my mind that

was so secret and it was just so undiscussed. I think there's a deep part of me that didn't even think I was Haitian years past, and which is a lot less interested in partying. He considers himself more of an adult. He has a great job, and he's published a book. This is also the year his life is forever changed in the worst recorded earthquake in the Western hemispheres history. It's Haiti. So By I'm working in a serious think tank, I had just launched a book that

had done well, and leaving the think tank. One night I caught glimpse of the news and I remember vividly was Anderson Cooper on the Plasmas green hanging in the lobby. And then I'm hearing Hadi, I'm hearing had on the screen crawl and I'm seeing, you know, things going on in Haiti. And my body clenches because as an American, any time Haiti has mentioned, it's in the context of catastrophe. But this felt absolutely devastating, and I could not take my eyes off the news for the next ten days.

And watching it, all the suffering people, all the faces peering at me from the television, from the internet, It's like, what is going to be our witness? Who will be our witness? And the one indelible image that spoke to my family history, the images of Haitians suffering, that's just spoke to me as a human being but an indelible image flashed across the screen, and that was the huge

damage suffered by Hate's presidential palace. And it's just, you know, the quote unquote seat of power of that country could not protect itself. It was just a crumpled building and dust. And then that's when it was very strange. Danding is just this sort of denial, this cloud of secrecy, this shame, this all of it just kind of busted open, and I'm like, this is untenable. You know, I have to find out what's going on. I had known as a fact that my mother's father had been the president of Haiti.

But it's that knowing that fact being told to me by a stranger, for example, Knowing that, you know, as a historical factor, is a political factor. Knowing that from a stranger, you know, you can't avoid that. Knowing that it is very different than knowing why he came, what his tenure was, like, what impact it had on my mother, how it shaped her as a human being, how he

shaped her as a human being. That's what I meant by you know, all all these dark intangibles that were unknown to me, but the fact itself I had known, And do you remember how you knew that fact. Well, I think a cousin might have, you know, mentioned it pridefully, oh, our grandfather was president of Haiti, Or for example, my mother's own aunt, who was a witty woman, might have made a sarcastic remark of, oh, you know, that man was deranged by his politics in reference to my mother's father.

So the fact of it would slip out either as a tart remark or as a point of pride in those kinds of ways. But everything that surrounds that fact was kept a secret when you were growing up and having that one fact, but then all this silence around it. I'm even more interested in that because it's like there's the mythology or the easy mythologizing of, you know, the idea that grandparent was the president of a country, right, and then yet nothing is known and nothing is spoken

of about that person exactly. It's very kind of bizarre. On the one hand, you have a fact that one would think generates a lot of pride, and I think for some cousins or aunts it did generate a lot of pride. But the fact that it's not discussed that made me curious, especially in the context of that earthquake and seeing that palace destroyed. Seeing the destroyed palace made the secret more visually real. It made him in his life,

and more importantly, my grandmother's life more visually real. My grandmother, which is to say, my grandfather's wife, who I grew up knowing. I was extremely fond of her. She was such a poised, kind woman, and people who describe her after the facts say that when you were in her presence, you had the sense that you were in the presence of someone substantial, not someone who is arrogant and important, but someone of substance and character. So I grew up

with her. And even though she could be funny and say these hilarious you know things about x y Z when she was no nun or schoolmarm. She smoked, she drank, but at the same time there was a melancholy lingering to her. You know, there's like a sadness around her. And I had no idea what it was or why, or who she had been married to, you know. And she spent substantial amounts of time in her home. She succumb for Thanksgiving, she succumbed to Potomac for many Christmas Is.

She used to send birthday cars. But you know, how did she get in America? And she spoke with an accent, so clearly she wasn't a native born American. And so the presidential palace destroyed in the news also made me think of my grandmother who had died by then. Did you know, growing up and being close to her, where your grandfather was or whether they were still together or had he died or what was the story that you knew if any uh, nothing, nothing. Isn't that bizarre? And

that's what I'm saying. Most grandparents come in sets, or they come with an explanation. This couple has been divorced in some kind of you know, backstory as to why they're divorced. But here I have this single grandmother with no context as to where her husband is, why he is, where he is, when they got divorced, and all of that. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.

As Rich stands watching the news on that plasma screen, as he remains glued to the television for the next stretch of days, he's stricken by the image of the destroyed Presidential Palace and becomes determined to know more about his grandfather his determination is visceral and immediate. He embarks on a research expedition, an expedition into the depths of

his own family history. So the earthquake happens in January, and by June, I'm dropping hands and I'm telling my family, I e. My siblings and my mother that I intend to go to hate And part of my intention was to volunteer my time. And that's just independent of this story, because I know people are volunteing uh their time for different catastrophies around the world. So that was one intention. Another intention was I will go find this story, and so I start to tell them in June, and by

November I'm on the plane. What was it like for you landing in Haiti for the first time? It was discombobulating. I think for any American it's totally disorienting to land in Haiti at that moment, because in November of that year of the capital Port of Prince was still in rubble. In other words, you're driving through the capitol and you just see rubble everywhere, and the whole it's just prevalent

all over. There's also the fact that it was in the midst of a cholera epidemic, just an awful, deadly color epidemic. And also it was in the midst of a presidential election. So I land there and it's kind of a whiplash feeling of a landing in the midst

of quite a bit of tumult and turmoil. Also landing and just feeling a sense of knowing nous And I say knowing this because when the Haitian women, when I hear them in border prints, I hear my grandmother's voice, I hear my aunt Ji Jean's voice, and I hear my mother's voice, and just the culture kind of envelived me. And there was an immediate I would call it familiarity landing in there. So that's the whiplash. It was very distant, but it would be for anybody given what was going

on politically in the country. But it felt instantly familiar. While you were there, what were you hoping to find and what did you find? So I was hoping to find artifacts of my grandfather that might be in the National Archive in the Capitol, such as video footage of his inauguration, such as his KAI clip, such as some of his books. I was expecting to find that because

speaking to scholars in the US. I was able to get what they call a manifest of what the archive contains, and the archives in Haiti supposedly contains some of his belongings. I was hoping to find that. I was hoping to go through original newspapers to learn more about his life, to learn about how he lived, about his domestic life,

hoping to find all of that. But a monkey ranch was that the archives, the national Archives of Haiti, were destroyed and I would say debilitated by the earthquake as well. And so when I show up to the archive, it's also looking like a construction site, like many buildings in the country. So that's what I was hoping to find. Thankfully, I was able to locate some people who had worked for my grandfather in the nineteen fifties. I was able

to find some of his political associates. But also I was just hoping to get a general sense of Haiti itself and what had this man been involved in. You know, what's this country like. Did you feel at that point like you were beginning to piece him together for yourself a little bit? I did, because he was such a Haitian figure, and I mean that he was such a pop the list. He was such a literal man of

the country, of the people. That was his platform. And so what I one lesson I gleaned was I could never understand him or my mother or their secrets unless I had some sense of the country. Once the earthquake happens, my mother softens to telling this story. She resigns herself to the fact that I'm going to hate you to tell a story I should mention. My mother is also a scholar and a social scientist, so half of her

is thinking, this is good. Finally, what this man did, where he stood in this country's history, is good that someone is finally writing about him. As she ages, I think the social scientists and intellectual and my mother really liked the fact that I would write about him. But the mother in my mother, I think she's a bit mortified. What I would discover, what I might publish, what I would find, how I would find it, how it would make me look, how it makes would make her look,

how it would make him look. And by that I mean I don't think she wants me to make him look that good in the personal context. In other words, she's proud of what achieved publicly, but I once remember her saying something really blurting, something really tart, about that man was no angel, and don't you dare do a hang geography? And she was talking about his personal aspect. Did she open up to you at all about her

own experience? Yes, not entirely. This happens over months and years and grips and drafts, and it's not like you ever sit down for an interview and you get everything you need. The information comes just when you're not expecting it, just when you're not explicitly having the conversation about that, it comes outsideways. And so yes, over the years she softened and I was able to get more information, starting to put the pieces together of the Storian, so much

that you didn't know. I know it's ongoing, but what did that feel like? And what does that feel like? To be honest, it's comical and it's infuriating, and it's comical because by now I tell the family very clearly, I'm writing a book about us in the past, and people shut down, They refused to talk, They refused by an email and interview. And there are times where my mother is perfectly willing to have the conversation, and there's

times when she's not most you not. And the comical part is, like in my real word quote unquote, like I went to the Bush White House and I told the chief of staff and the chief political director, if you don't grant me a fucking interview, this, this, and this is going to happen. And this is how you score an interview in your real working life as a writer. But you can't subject your family to that, especially when you're talking about you know, sixty and seventy year old aunties.

You're talking about your mother who you know you're close to. And so that's the comical part, is you know in your real life who you're able to get to speak to you versus your family members. And the sad part, though, is the people are getting sick, people die off, and I feel the story slipping from me a because of the natural disaster, but just be people's memory. And so that's that was the sadness to me, and that is

also what made this project more urgent to me. And I remember my last couple of days in Haiti, the government there put the country on lockdown and so all flights were indefinitely canceled, and so every day I'd show up to the airport. Can I fly out today? Can I not fly out because of the political and unrest? But finally, when I do get out, it's December of that year of the earthquake, and I think, let me

go look for this man in the archives. Because his life takes place during the Cold War, let me imagine that perhaps the US has operatives in port of Prince. So I go to the National Archives in Washington, and I have modest expectations of what I'd find, perhaps a

memo here, a letter there. But when I'm searching the cavernor's basement, I hit a gold mine, and I hit hundreds of pages of memos which were classified in secret at the time of the U. S. Government surveying him, his speeches, his writing, even his day to day activities. So I did not expect to find that. But how many pages are we talking? It sounds like a book. It's like a book. What did that feel like, both discovering it and then going through it and parsing it.

It seems like that would be the closest that you would ever be able to come to knowing him. Yes, indeed, as a scholar and a writer is exhilarating you know, when you make that fine, As the grandson of this man, part of me is mortified. You know, it's an invasion of privacy, it's an invasion of civil liberty, and it's partly a form of violence that he suffered when he

was ejected from his own country. As you were interrogating all this, as you were digging in, as you were trying with you know, sort of every skill you have to put him together, you know, to breathe life into him to know him. Was there anything you were afraid you were going to find out? Where? Was there anything you were hoping you were going to find out? There

was nothing I was afraid to find. And I was hoping to find just his story leading up to his oust from his presidency, but also his exile from Haiti and into America. I was just hoping to understand how and why that went down. It's during this period of interrogation that rich finally is able to flesh out the story of his mother's arrival to America when she was thirteen, had happened in ninety seven, the same year his grandfather was ousted and their family was ordered to leave Haiti.

Had he not been ousted, had he been able to weather the political storm, the entire trajectory of which his life and the lives of countless others would have been monumentally changed. I thought about that when I saw the presidential Palace destroyed, and I thought about that when I

left for Haiti. And here's another secret, Denny. When my grandfather was ousted, his rival Papa Duck du Valier, who went on to become one of the worst dictators and by that I mean one of the bloodiest dictators in the history of the Western Hemisphere, took power from that time in seven when the dictatorship of Duvalier took place, and then he passed his dictatorship onto his son, which lasted another generation until had he never recovered from that.

And so this quick period when this happened really cast a long shadow. And for me, that's the darkness of it. And do you think that that's a part of what the secret keeping in your family as you were growing up was about, was that it was just so painful, Um, you know what happened, and then what happened to the country, you know following um Papa doc coming into power. I mean that it just was something so impossible, so unspeakable

that it couldn't be spoken of. Yes, yes, absolutely, it was both so personally, so publicly, and so historically unspeed couple that, I think that pushed the secrecy further into the closet. And I should mention my grandfather had one brother. That brother's children, under due Valier's regime, we're always cast into shadows. Every time they saw a police force. Every time they saw a police person, they would turn the corner wondering whether they would be arrested or even killed

merely by being a relative of my grandfather. When my grandfather was exiled and in duval to power, it became illegal to speak my grandfather's name in public, to print anything about him. So he himself, you know, became a secret and cast under shadow. So yeah, I think part of a layer of the secrecy is just the sorrow, the darkness, the danger of people who are living under a dictatorship and being associated to du Valier's rival when

du Valley took power. So now that you've been at this for more than ten years and thinking so deeply about all of this and you know, living it, living with it, and attempting to have the conversations that you can have with the people who are willing to talk. Where does it leave you in terms of thinking about secrets. Gosh, it's such a big question. I'm just left with the damage that secrets cause, and I guess I'll start at the intimate level and then work my way more broadly.

At the intimate level, for me, let's see, received done have often chipped away or sabotaged my ability to have an intimate life, mostly with romantic partners, but also with my mother to some extent, and secrets with a family.

I mean, you put this so beautifully earlier, the way that there's never just one secret, so that if a family member suffers from mental illness or a drug addiction, or you know, an abusive relationship, which is not uncommon on my mother's side of the family, then secrets really, you know, harm those already difficult episodes and they make them worse. So for me, that's what I'm left with. Secrets on the intimate level. On the public level, I've

been thinking about this more broadly. Sometimes or often will see a disaster in a country, and let's say Haiti, because it's the country we're talking about, and people have in amnesia, and people have this cluelessness about what they're seeing in the news. And because things have been secret and because certain people get to write history, there's no context to understand why a country finds itself in the

predicaments it does. And to me, this is maddening. You know, this story that hasn't been told, all the stories of countries around the world that are not told, that are suppressed, whether by you know, literally the CIA, or corporate forces or political forces or own bad actors in those very countries. It leaves us with all this misinformation, this gap of knowledge, and then when things happen in the country finds itself in a crisis, you know, we scratch our heads and

this is absurd. And it happened when the president of Haiti was assassinated and journalists descend on the country and they say, oh, why is Hati such a mess? What's going on in Haiti? What happened after the earthquake? And there's no context for this long, secretive history. So that's what Secrets have left being with family. Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Molly z a Core is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share.

Please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.