So daddie is one of those words in cape Verdian creole that doesn't have a direct English translation. Roughly, it means missing someone or something, but it's deeper than that. It's a longing that feels more like a whole, like a part of your soul is gone. There are many songs written about this, the most famous, of course, being
by Sesadia Avora, the queen of cape Verdian music. Anyone can have this feeling of sodad, but for those of us in the cape Verdian diaspora, it takes on a very specific meaning because no matter where you live now or where you were born, all cape Verdians have this nostalgic feeling. It's a yearning to be in capleverd or to be with the people who have left, or with who you've left behind. I'm cape Verdian and on my dad's side, he has a huge family, but for simplicity's sake,
they're two branches, the Graces and the Dapinas. My great grandfather, Manuel Grace immigrated to America around the same time as Daddy Grace, which was the beginning of the twentieth century. I never met him. He died long before I was born, but I did know my dad's mother, Lydia Grace Depina, and his father, Jonathan Depina Senior, who I called Papa.
I adored him. He and my Nana often took care of me when my parents were working, and I spent hours with them, happily tagging along behind Papa when he bent his chickens or helping Nana plant perfect rows of beans, cal and carrots. I still remember Papa saying to Kenya, the most important thing in this country is to have your own land and to pass it on to your children.
I was a curious child, and one of my favorite things to do with him was to take long walks and ask him questions about his life back in Cablevere. He came to the US when he was six on a schooner named the Volante. I loved hearing about his childhood back in Cablevert the way the mountains of Fontana's always sat shrouded in clouds, or the beauty of the flowers and the people. Listening to these stories made me feel transported, my own imagination filling in the gaps of
what his life had been like. To me, Cableverd was a place of wonder, a place I felt so connected to, a place I could not wait to experience myself. But within all of that, what I most remember was a feeling of my papa's mixed emotions, because within his stories about life on Bravo, I heard a tinge of sadness
in his voice. And when I'd asked my Papa if he missed Cablvert and if he wanted to go back, he'd look at me and say, for what, I'm mercy to Pena and from iHeart podcasts enforce the media group, this is sweet, Daddy, Grace.
You're glad, you're being happy.
Bow, thank, You're glad.
Ahead and they laugh against happy brown and crying, we're.
O b ing.
Daddy immigrated to the United States from Kabovid, just like my grandfather. It was a country that both then and now, not many Americans outside the diaspora know much about. But to get to know Bishop Grace, you have to know where he came from. The Kapoveti Islands are located about three hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean. In Portuguese, Kabovid means green cape, which is quite a bit of a misnomer, as the
country is not particularly green. The islands are situated in the crossroads of two of the driest trade winds in the world, so there is very little rain, and several of the islands are basically deserts. Capplevedy is made up of ten islands, nine of which are inhabited, and while they are proudly connected as one country, each is a little different. Each speaks its own dialect of Creole, for example,
and the cultures are a little different too. The people of Santiago, the largest island, are known for the music of batucu, a form of drumming and dancing that is primarily done by women. Sanvicentz is known for its carnival, but it is also deeply influenced by the British, who used the island as a coal refueling station in the early eighteen hundreds. Embravo, where my family is from, is the smallest island, known for its hospitality nationally revered poet
Eugenio Tavars, as well as its waterfalls and flowers. We are most united, perhaps by the fact that at its very essence, to be Cape Verdean means to have roots from around the globe, because before Portuguese explorers landed there in the mid fifteenth century, the Caboverti Islands were actually uninhabited, and as was the case during this time period, the Portuguese government was interested in two things, producing sugar and
enslaving Africans to do it. But the land was so dry the sugar crops failed, and the Portuguese realized that their new colony was actually much more useful as a port in their slave trade, which was quickly expanding. Many Africans brought to Kabulvid were sent on slave ships to the Americas, but many also stayed. Some were enslaved to work for Portuguese landholders, and others escaped into the mountains where they formed their own communities, which still exists today.
So Cape Verdean Creole culture developed. As these populations African European Middle Eastern intermingled to become something very much its own. Economically, however, Kablevid was turning into a tough acquisition for the Portuguese.
After around a century of colonization, the land could no longer grow much like the indigo they had used to trade for enslaved Africans, and by the late eighteen hundreds, the slave trade itself had ended, so the colonizers abandoned the islands and left the people of Kabove to fend for themselves. Many people suffered horribly. They were literally dying of starvation and dehydration. The islands experienced chronic droughts, where
sometimes fifty percent of the population would die. Many Cape Verdians were forced to leave, trying to make whatever money they could to send back home to feed their families. Many never returned. The main way out was on railing ships. The eighteen hundreds were at height of the whaling industry, and Cape Verdians played a big part as crews on the American owned boats. They were known for their courage, work, ethic,
and maritime skills. Remember Moby Dick. It was published in eighteen fifty one and one of the harpooners on board Dago is thought to be Cape Verdian. But eventually the work dried up.
When whaling went into decline in the United States, was harder to get young Yankees to serve as crew on whaling vessels.
That's my stepmom. Marilyn Halter again, scholar of Cape Verdian American history and professor emerita at Boston University.
So when they would stop in the Cape Verde Islands. By the late nineteenth century, they were eager to find people to man these ships.
Cape Verdian men bought old whaling boats, prepared and started what was called the packet trade. Now Cape Verdian owned and operated ships would crisscross the Atlantic, bringing supplies from the United States back to Cobblevid and bringing immigrants to New Bedford, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island. Because of this, the first voluntary African immigrants to America were Cape Verdeans. This ended up giving them an advantage when they arrived, they still had community.
Really, unlike any immigrant group, white or black, they were the only population to actually have control over their means of passage to this country. And when you contrast that with the other African immigrants who came here involuntarily, the slave population, who had absolutely no control over anything in their lives. There was a lot of cultural and community support.
Part of that support meant access to work, though often the kind of jobs available were the ones no one else wanted.
There was such a racial and ethnic hierarchy that the only jobs for them was at the lowest rung of the ladder, so the Irish got the best jobs, and then the Portuguese and the French Canadians, and then you know, Cape Verdians were at the bottom of the ladder. There was work at the stack textile mills, on the Cranberry brogs, and in maritime related occupations such as longshoremen and cooks and other kinds of dock workers.
Details are scarce about Daddy Grace's immigration story to the US. We know he had come over from the island of Brava and landed in New Bedford in nineteen oh four on a ship called the Louisa. His parents and at least seven siblings were already there waiting for him. The New Bedford Evening Standard wrote about the Louisa's arrival. It mentioned one passenger who looked quote every inch a dude with his trousers carefully pressed in an immaculate shirt front.
I'd like to hope that was our Marcellino. I get the feeling he always stood out. He first made his living in America, like basically all Cape Verdian immigrants did, working various jobs. He picked Cranberry's in the bogs, a job he apparently hated so much he threw down his wheelbarrow and quit. He also sold patent medicines, ran a grocery store, and worked as a cook in a local
restaurant and later on on the railways. My own great grandfather, Manuel Grace, the one and I never met, arrived in the United States around the same time as Daddy Grace, and in some ways their stories were similar, including the fact that they were both from Brava and both named Grace.
The way it was explained to me by Uncle Abel was that he found out that his father was being promiscuous.
That's my cousin Jonathan. Again from what Jonathan has been told. Our great grandfather, who everyone called Nola Locke, left Kabovid when he was just seventeen years old.
He had told his mother before he had left and gone to school, and I guess during the day she confronted him when he was coming home that his father was pitching rocks at him, telling him, don't come back here no more. One of the times that he was hit, he was hitting the head and then he went down where there was a whaler stocking up, and that was his first time that he had left home.
My aunt Judy Jonathan's mother picks up the story from there. He had no money.
He came on a whaling ship working and his destination was the United States. However, he jumped ship in Bermuda and worked on a sugar plantation there to earn money to continue to travel. Sailed around South America and went to Hawaii, and then he went to San Francisco. He was there during the nineteen oh six Great Earthquake.
After the earthquake, my great grandfather got a job on the railroads and made his way east across the country. His final destination a small seaside town outside New Bedford called Mattapoisa, where he had family nearby. Life there suited him. He got a job doing manual labor and soon saved enough money to buy a small pig farm and a house. He was around forty old for a bachelor those days, and was ready to settle down.
Then.
He was not a young man, and I believed that he had an arranged marriage with a Cape Fridian woman from Brava.
With just a horse and buggy, he started a small business collecting trash in the neighborhood, and he eventually won a contract with the town But when I asked my aunt to describe Nola Lock for me, she mostly talked about his spirituality, and he was very, very.
Much into his religion. In our dining room, we had a large farmhouse kitchen and we always ate there. I don't ever recall eating in the dining room, but what I do remember is that was where my grandfather had his Bible, and that he sat there and read the Bible.
So food wasn't.
Served there, but the Word of God was served there.
My aunt Judy stories got me thinking about how similar Nola Lock and Daddy Grace's lives must have been in America, At least at first. They worked the same blue collar jobs that all Cape Verdians did. They went to the same shops. They both married Cape Verdian women and started families. But where we related. I started asking other family members
what they knew or who I should talk to. One person told me that years before Daddy Grace founded the United House of Prayer, he would sometimes preach at the church that Nola Loc attended, the Portuguese Pentecostal church on Cape Cod pastored by Joseph de Grace, Daddy Grace's elder brother, and that in the early days. They enjoyed discussing the Bible together when Daddy Grace would visit Nola Lock's house. Nola Lock's house the one he bought with the trash
collection earnings. It yielded another clue. I was on ancestry dot Com looking through some old census records from the nineteen twenties and thirties. The house that Nola Lock owned it was right next to a house owned by Caesar Grace, Daddy Grace's older brother. I had heard their families were close, that Caesar's daughter and Nola Locke's daughter my Nana called each other Prima's cousins. This in itself didn't prove anything. It's customary for Kate Burdian's to call each other family,
even if the relationship isn't blood. I still call my parents' friends TiO and Tia. But it did help explain what happened later. When Daddy Grace asked Nola Lock's daughter my Nana to go out on the road with him as part of his church that man.
Showed up on the farm thinking he could talk to your grandmother. My father would have no part of it, and then he would go into speaking creole where he would say, showing him the axe and saying, you know this is the axe, I'll sharpen it on your head.
Daddy Grace would have been in his mid forties, and here he was asking Nola Lock's teenage daughter to leave home and join his church and travel with him unaccompanied, without even asking permission from her father. Daddy Grace had to have known that this was not appropriate behavior and something Nola Lock would not have liked. No wonder Nola Lock was so enraged he threatened Daddy Grace with an axe. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Why
Nola Lock in Daddy Grace's lives diverged? Why are families diverged? My great grandfather he was a conservative man. After having spent years disconnected from his own family, traveling around the globe, working and searching for a home, he was happy to stay in Massachusetts, working his farm, running his businesses, raising his children, and living a stable, if modest life. In contrast, Daddy Grace was always looking outward, far from New Bedford.
He didn't seem interested in settling into the role of a family man. He had a burning desire to spread the gospel far and wide. In nineteen twelve, after just a few years of marriage, he left his wife and two young children, hit the road and traveled the country and the world, refining his evangelical message. The decisions he made his life must have seemed truly wild to my great grandfather. Daddy Grace had his own style, and it
wasn't traditional. It was flamboyant. His hair was long, he wore colorful clothes, and he wasn't afraid to show off his success. I'm sure that got people talking and that he quickly realized that he was outgrowing New Bedford. I
can relate. Growing up in New Bedford. I always felt different. Yeah, I hung out on the beach and participate in all the traditional Cape Verdian activities, but I would also skip school and take the bus to New York City for the day to shop and discover the latest music and fashions. By this time I got to high school, I knew that if I wanted to do anything creative, I need to leave. I needed to explore outside of the fish
bowl of the Cape Verdian American community. Like Daddy Grace, I needed to find my place in the world among the many pieces of Daddy Grace. Material I've collected is a copy of his nineteen fourteen Declaration of intention to
become an American citizen. I've studied it trying to understand more about this man from the few details listed, like, for example, how at the time he was employed as a cook, that he renounced any allegiance to the Republic of Portugal, that he was thirty one, five foot eight and one hundred and sixty six pounds, that his skin color was black, but that he had a light complexion. Knowing how complicated identity can be for Cape Verdians in America,
this last part was especially interesting to me. How Daddy Grace viewed himself was a big source of controversy around him at the time, something both black and white Americans had trouble wrapping their heads around. In nineteen fifty two, Daddy Grace was featured in a piece in Ebony magazine. He told the writer, I am not a Negro. I am white by race. But he also tells the same reporter, I am a colorless bishop. Sometimes I'm black, sometimes I'm white.
I preach to all races. I wonder what Ebony readers, who were predominantly black would have made of this statement. Did Daddy Grace think that by claiming to be white that would take him further? Was he a race denier or did he just understand the power of a life little controversy. I can understand why people might have thought that when they heard that quote. There were Cape Verdians who, thanks to colonialism, were brainwashed to believe that they were Portuguese.
And of course many of us do have Portuguese blood. But I don't think that's what Daddy Grace meant. Daddy Grace did not consider himself a black American. He considered himself Cape Verdian because Kabalvid was still a colony of Portugal. Daddy Grace came to America on a Portuguese passport, but he didn't look like how Americans thought a Portuguese man looked.
He didn't look white, he didn't look European. He had curly hair, light brown skin, and he was always dressed to the nines with a three piece suit, a ten gallon hat and his jewels. He also spoke with an accent, which further confused how others perceived him. And because of that, I think he was misunderstood by temporary Americans whose own views of race didn't allow much room for nuance. Throughout his time in America, Daddy Grace's racial categorization changed based
on whoever was filling out the paperwork. Immigration listed him as black African from Portugal on his nineteen oh four arrival. On the nineteen ten census, he was listed as Mulatto, but his nineteen eighteen draft card says Negro, and his nineteen thirty two marriage license lists him as Caucasian. No wonder, Daddy Grace said he was colorless. He saw right through the absurdity of the system and perhaps saw the opportunity
to define himself on his own terms. This seemingly arbitrary racial categorization imposed by other people was actually quite common, and so wrestling with identity race was something that he
and all Cape Verdian immigrants were very familiar with. These immigrants were escaping a system of white supremacy and colonialism only to arrive in America and see how Black Americans were being violently oppressed through racist Jim Crow laws in the horrific terror of lynching, and the people doing the lynching didn't care about where you were born or how you identified In August of nineteen twenty one, it was reported that a mob threatened to lynch three quote Cape
verd Island negroes on Cape cod who had been charged with a criminal assault on a white woman. This was the world they needed to figure out how to position themselves in to survive and to thrive.
They were arriving at the height of racial misgenation and de facto segregation in this country.
That's Marilyn and again, nobody had.
Any interest in recognizing them as Cape Verdians as a separate identity. All they saw was black or white, and so they were treated with the same level of discrimination, prejudice, and hostility as African Americans or other people of color in this country.
Other Americans didn't understand Cape Verdians in our rich multi ethnic identities. What island you were from, what type of creole you spoke, what's your family name? That was what was discussed, not just your skin color.
It was so uncomfortable, even oppressive for Cape Verdeans to arrive here and just being categorized by other people in ways that weren't even recognizable to themselves, let alone to the rest of society. And it's a kind of a rature of who you are.
This still feels true to me, a third generation Cape Ritian American. Where do you actually fit in?
Daddy Grace, in his interview in Ebony magazine, said, I am a colorless man. I am a colorless bishop. And to me, that's like just so Cape Ridian. He's enhancing his black side and his white side, and he's bringing it all together. I think that Cape Verdeans were actually pioneers of how to navigate the waters of American pluralism. They've challenged these notions of race, color, ethnicity, and identity well before anyone else, any other population in this country that I know of.
So basically, the intentionality behind why folks would choose to call themselves cape Verdian but then not claiming black as a race or saying that they are Portuguese. Why is that? Is it because of the desire to have proximity to whiteness or wanting to hold on to white supremacist ideals. So I always talk about intentionality as it relates to identity of our people.
Doctor terzel Minev's is a professor of political science at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and because she's also a Cape Verdian immigrant herself. She can give context to the struggle Cape Verdian's face around identity in America.
I think that it's an intergenerational conversation controversy or our ancestors who arrived here in the late eighteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds and beyond, where segregation racism was just, you know, the dominant conversation. Of course, you're going to try to separate yourself from the Black American community because of this notion. You see how Black Americans are being treated and you're trying to distance yourself from that. But then you know you're not white, and the other white
groups don't see you as being white. Not quite Black American by choice and by force, but you're not Portuguese or white. So then you stick to what you know and you begin to rely on each other. And so that's not to say it's wrong or right, it's just what happened.
Times have changed since Daddy Grace and other elders came to the United States, and Tarsa experienced the transformation of her own identity within the racial construct of America. She says much of this was thanks to the professors and peers she was surrounded by at Clark Atlanta University.
I'm very specific about saying that I'm a Black African woman. That's how I see myself, and that is all due to the socialization and the education that I received. Most of the professors were black, but there were a very diverse group of black people from the United States and also from many of different places in the diaspora and the continent of Africa as well. All through those years, I was able to be grounded in what I wanted my identity to look like.
I was born here in the United States, and I've always identified as a black woman, but I also see myself very much as a Cape Verdian woman. By the time we got to my generation, Cape Verdian Americans had experienced a century of oppression in the United States and had been fighting alongside black and African diaspora Americans for
a dis dis mantling of structural racism. And I grew up in the hip hop generation, where principles like pan Africanism and knowledge of self led me to discover my ancestral roots, unravel the heinous system of the Afro Atlantic slave trade, and explore the deep connection of those entangled in it. But identity is complicated. As soon as you define what it means to you, society and people in
general impose their perception of you onto you. So there's this kind of internal and external negotiation of determining exactly who you are. It's a never ending cycle that starts with the question what are you. I took my first trip to Cubovid in two thousand and five, and since then I've been back many times, spending time there seeing the things my papa talked about in Parson, understanding a bit deeper how hard it must have been for my ancestors to leave their home and try to have a
better life. All of that has helped me to figure out who I am in a way I never could in the United States. Cabovid feels like home to me, but I was born and raised in America. So when I'm in Caubovid, my style, my accent, and many of the ways in which I operate make me stand out. So that question what are you? I can't escape it. In Kapovedi, either Cape Verdeans in Cabalvid see me as their American cousin. They see me as someone who is
not native to the islands. They call me things like Portuguez, or laugh at me when I spoke Creole because it gets mixed up with Portuguese, which I also speak. Or they would even call me white girl. But I'm Kenya because I am light skinned. But here's the thing. Cape Verdian's born in Kabulvid may not have these same issues in the Islands, but just like Daddy Grace, as soon as they leave, their own identities are also questioned.
So I am cape Verdian. I was raised here in Praya, cabu Verdi. My family everyone is cave Verdian.
That's Simone Spencer. She's an artist and educator. I talked with her in Praya when I was there last. Talking with Simon helped me unpack some of the feelings that I had about identity, race and perception.
When you are hearing Kabu Verdi, you identify yourself as cape Verdian, not as black or white. You only feel the need to identify as either black or white once you move out. I went to study in China and that's when the identity thing came to me. Cave Verdin is such a small country in the whole world that when you go abroad, people don't even know about the country.
So just being Cape Verdian was not enough.
I had very, very very short hair, and because my eyes are a bit slented, people would think I'm a Chinese from the south and my name is Simone Spencer. It's like an Irish surname, and I'm like, definitely not Irish.
I have very curly hair and my skin is not white at all. Why you have an Irish surname. It's colonialism, by the way. It's colonialism.
So then it's where the real searching for an identity came.
I can relate to this. Living in the Cape Verdian bubble of New Bedford, no one ever thought that I was anything but Cape Verdian. I mean, I went to school with a gang of cousins. We all know each other's families, and we all went to the same Cape Verdian clubs. But after I left home, I got a lot of confused expressions about my last name to Pina and the way I looked. In New York City, everyone spoke to me in Spanish and assumed I was Puerto
Rican or Dominican. I got that question again, what are you. Anyone who's ever been asked us before knows how aggravating it can be, especially because in my case, a lot of people have never even heard of Kabovad. But there's also something powerful and not being easily defined. Simoni feels this too.
It's something you can't describe. It's complicated. It's like being the perfect spy. Yeah, because you are so ambiguous. It's being everything and nothing, because you'll come from everywhere, but it's nothing because on the world stage, almost nobody ever heard of you.
During one of my most recent trips to Kaboved I tried to track down my ancestral records and Daddy Grace is too. Maybe this would help me understand more about where we both came from and either confirm or deny that there is a blood relation. I visited the National Archives in the capital city Praya, certain they could help, but once I actually got inside, I ran into one
bureaucratic roadblock after another trying to access any records. They took my email address, but I'm still waiting for information. I was also hoping to finally make it to Brava, the island where my ancestors and Daddy Grace are from I wanted to see the place where my family called home, and I wanted to visit the Catholic Church, which is known for keeping reliable baptism records. I thought that would definitely help me to confirm my family's history. But getting
to Brava is difficult, really difficult. It's the smallest of the populated islands, with only around five thousand people. There is no airport. You have to take a boat, and the boats, for one reason or another, are often canceled. This happens a lot. The same thing happened to me the last three times I tried to make the journey. So I'm trying to figure out options. Standing at the travel agency and a room full of people all clamoring and trying to get to Brava, and my friend says
to me, what are you doing. You're an American girl, You have an American passport.
Use it.
You can use that passport to get you first in line, and not just shook me. Because here I am with people who've been waiting to get home for days, some for weeks. This one is sick, this one's waiting to bring money home, this one's bringing food. These are people with real struggles, real issues, and I'm dealing with first
world problems. The average Cape Verdian salary is around one hundred and fifty dollars a month, making it economically impossible for people to survive without remittances from relatives that are overseas, and one hundred plus years after my ancestors fled, it's still easier for a Cape Verdian to travel abroad than to find reliable and safe into island transit to Brava. Not until that moment did I ever think of myself as privileged. I grew up poor on welfare, eating government
cheese and powdered milk. My mother worked nights a latchkey kid, but my mother didn't have to get on a flight or a boat to come home or immigrate to find work in Praia. Not only did I feel the sting of privilege, but I also felt survivor's guilt. Because my ancestors sacrificed so much, I had opportunities and access to resources that most people in Kabovid can only dream of. I never did get to Brava. I felt like a failure, like I let my ancestors down, but also my team
back in New York. I had traveled across the Atlantic and had failed to find any new information on not only my family but Daddy Grace. I was no closer to proving or disproving my relation to him. After I got back to the States, I couldn't stop thinking about my trip and everything that I had brought up. I was searching for answers, but came back with more questions. I still didn't have the origin story, my origin story,
or Daddy Grace's. I sat down with my friend Darryl Stewart, who's also a producer on this show, to help me unpack some of the deep feelings that came up from me about race, identity and how people's roots and stories get lost over the generations.
So I'm Black American, identify as Black American, and unfortunately for me, we can only trace our ancestry back. But so far we know that our ancestors were from the Geechee Island area, that they were slaves brought in off of the coast of Carolinas.
But that's pretty much.
Oh, we know. Can you talk a little bit about connecting to your ancestry?
How was that shit?
How you see the world today living in a place like New Bedford, where most of the black people are Cape Verdian. I didn't think about it as much when I lived there, because you know, I was among everybody's pretty much the same. It wasn't until I moved out of the area that I started to have more questions about my identity, or at the very least, have questions about how other people perceived me, because when I was growing up, there were never any questions. Nobody ever was like, oh,
are you mixed? So yes, being Cape Verdian I quickly realized was a big part of my identity, right, and that is something that's different from being Black American and you're having what you can trace of your ancestral roots here. But upon a further investigation of what it means to be Cape Verdian, you know, you quickly realize that I can only go back so far to trace my family lineage. Like, yes, we from a place that is in Africa and has
its own cultural identity, its own language. But Cape Verdians wouldn't even exist if it wasn't from the slave trade, so we cannot trace our ancestral roots either.
Do you think that's where Daddy Grace struggled with his identity. What do you think about that.
I do think that Daddy Grace was an outcast within the Cape Verdian community.
Why.
I think he was rejected because I think Kate Verdians felt he was too audacious, not humble, just ostentatious with the display of his money. I think also some of his ways in which he operated people were, you know, really questioned, like the fact that he was surrounded by a lot of attendants. He didn't give conservative cape Verdian man. He gave flamboyant, unapologetic I'm gonna be me and you were going to recognize that I am a very wealthy man and I'm not gonna hide at I think that
he had to have struggled with that. I think that even if outwardly he might never have said, like, oh, I feel rejected by the Cape Verdian community. And it wasn't just the Cape Verdian community. He was rejected by the black community too, and he was obviously rejected by the white community. So I think he had to have had an unshakeable belief in himself. He really felt that I'm here to spread God's word. This is my mission.
He even says in some of his teachings that he was just being persecuted the same way Jesus was.
And you know what, shout out to my mother.
She used to say that too.
She used to say, I don't know why you kids are so concerned about what other people think because they talked about Jesus.
So guess what people are going to talk about you too.
Move into your purpose.
That's exactly what Daddy Gray said.
There is another side to this right where people are like, I'm successful, I made it, my bills are paid, my life is wonderful. You know, fuck everybody who who doesn't like me or who didn't support me, etc. This is my time to shine. But I think it gets complicated for us, right, people of color. So much of our identity is steeped in family and community, right, and we do, many of us in some ways, we don't feel fulfilled until we have the co sign right of family, of community,
of et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this is my final question for you.
What does your Cape Verdean heritage mean to you? That's a serious question, Darryl, so serious a question that I couldn't give Darryl a concise answer. But I kept coming back to those days spent with my grandparents, learning about the ways of the old country, tending to the garden and the animals, Sitting around the table with my extended family as they laughed, playing cards for pennies and telling stories.
I thought about the feeling of Sodi and how Cape Verdeans in the diaspora are always longing for home, and how those in Kabulvid are always yearning to be reunited with their loved ones spread across the globe. I also kept coming back to what Simoni had said about being a spy. Cape Verdians have a unique way of blending it. Oftentimes, unless someone comes out and says it, you won't even
know that their roots are in cabol Vid. People like actors Michael Beach and Anika Nanni Rose, or Congressmen Haki Jeffries, or jazz musicians Horace Silver and Paul Gonzalves, the disco group the Tavars and rapper coy lay over the generations. Our identity merges with Black Americans, although we never forget our Cape Verdian heritage. And then, of course, I thought about Daddy Grace. Daddy Grace was a citizen of the world. He didn't see himself in the same racial construct that
we see ourselves here in America. Plus, as a man of God, he knew race didn't mean a thing when it comes to being saved. Right before his death, Daddy Grace recorded a live sermon. There's this section I especially like where he gives us clues about how he saw himself.
And I'm on my way, however, and I'm there now, I'm every aware, no where I am now, I'm everywhere right now. Don't you say, God, He's everywhere. I'm everywhere. All you gotta do think of me, love me.
Ready is to go with me.
Where I am.
You there.
And the people, well, they were ready to go with him. That's next time. Sweet Daddy Grace is a production of iHeart Podcasts Enforce, a media group. This show is hosted by by me Marcy de Pina. It's written and produced by Marissa Brown and Me. Our story editors are Darryl Stewart, Duncan Riedel, and Zarren Burnett. Editing, sound design and theme music by Jonathan Washington. Original music by Enrique Silva of Acasia Mayor. Show cover art by Viviana Salgado of Studio
Creative Group, fact checking by Austin Thompson. Our executive producers are Marcy Depina and Jason English. Special Thanks to Will Pearson, Nikki Ettore, Ali Perry, Tamika Campbell, and Lulu Phillip of iHeartMedia, and all of my family members who talked to me for this show, my ancestors, the United House of Prayer for All People, and the countless number of people who
shared their memories of Sweet Daddy Grace with me. Thanks also to doctor Marie Dollum and doctor Danielle brun Sigler, whose academic work on Sweet Daddy Grace has been incredibly helpful. And finally, I want to thank Bishop Grace himself for choosing me to tell his story. For more information on Bishop Charles M. Grace, check out the website Sweet Daddy Grace and follow me at Marcy Depina on all social platforms