Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. I am six
years old and standing next to a gravestone with my
name on it. The little girl with my name is
buried here, along with her mom, who was my father's sister,
and her dad. There were others who died in the

(00:22):
wreck too, some who were buried here and some who
are buried at the other cemetery that looks just like
this one. I cannot keep up with all the dead people.
I am not sure how many there are, because I
have never heard anyone list all of their names at once,
or tick them off on their fingers, one by one.
I do not ask what happened to the girl, because

(00:43):
I already know what my father will say, the same
thing he said when I ask why I have just
one grandmother the wreck.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
That's Cassandra Jackson, professor of English at the College of
New Jersey, where she teaches classes about African American literature
and visual culture. She's the author of several books, most
recently The Wreck, a Daughter's Memoir of Becoming a Mother.
Cassandra's is a story of a tragedy that happened before

(01:17):
she was born, a loss so profound that it seeped
into every corner of her childhood and her family's life,
until finally, in the fullness of time, she was able
to lay it to rest. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this

(01:45):
is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
I grew up and were class black family.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Everybody in my family.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
The most part it spent their entire lives in Alabama.
It was a really, in some ways, a really tough
way for place to grow up in that it felt
like history was all around us, like we were always
walking on hallow ground, in part because even though I
was born after the Civil Rights Movement, the world just

(02:27):
hadn't changed that much in that space. So I remember
it as being incredibly oppressive. I remember being very aware
of what it meant to be black in that space
where the people who had the power, who had the

(02:47):
most prestigious jobs, who ran the town were almost exclusively
white men. And in some ways, it creates this really
sort of strange idea of what home is when the
first place that you grow up in is one where
you are very alien to that place, even though it's

(03:07):
the place that you're from.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
And you grew up with your mother, your father, and
a much older sister and brother.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yes. Yeah, So I was a very late baby with
siblings that were already in their teens, so I didn't
have a chance to get to know them as children.
They were already sort of like many adults by the
time I could remember them. My sister did a lot
of stuff with me when I was a kid, and

(03:40):
a lot of the things that people sometimes expect moms
to do, Like she was the one who did my hair,
the one who, you know, would make a little picnic
and we'd take it outside in the backyard fresh peaches.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
She was that person.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
And my brother was gone a lot when I was
a kid, Like he sort of started moving into adulthood,
I think, at a different rate from my sister, which
I think is not uncommon, particularly in the part of.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
The stuff that we grew up in.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
So he was already sort of moving out into the
world even as a teenager. I felt like he was
like sort of gone in his car all the time.
You know, my sister, my mother, and my father were
the people who were present the most in the household.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Did you feel in any way like an only child,
given that your sister was how many years older?

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Thirteen years older.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yeah, I did feel very much like an only child
because they moved out before I was even you know,
in the fifth grade. It was incredibly lonely. I played
by myself a lot. I played with some of the
kids in the neighborhood, but it was not the same

(04:52):
as having another child in the household. I remember being
alone a lot. I remember being very aware of the
relationship between my parents in the house because there was
no other place.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
For my focus to go.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
It's not as though there was like another child there.
So yeah, it was much more like growing up as
an only child, and I definitely was really aware of
my isolation in that way. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
One of the things about only children, and I say
this as one myself, or actually as someone who had
a much older half sister, which is why I asked
that question, there's a way in which only children or
people who feel like only children study their parents. And
I'm wondering what you can tell me about your mother
from your early memories of her and what she was.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
Like for you.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
She was a big presence in the sense that she
had very specific ideas about how things should be done and.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
What things should look like.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
She was very obsessed with our house, and our house
was constantly being redecorated based on things that she saw
in various magazines, and everything was in this constant state
of transformation. And it was interesting because no matter how

(06:18):
much she did it, she was never completely satisfied with
the result for very long and it became clear that
the transformation part of it was the point, not the
end result. And that was largely her entertainment. And it
was unusual though in the sense that it was sort

(06:38):
of obsessive. She was also a very anxious person, and
so one of my memories was of her getting dressed
on an ordinary morning and she would come out wearing
one outfit or half of an outfit and say, how
does this look? And I would say, oh, it looks great,
and then she would go back to her room and

(07:00):
then she'd change again, and then she'd come out wearing
half of another outfit.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
And she would go back and change again.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
So self presentation and having you know, sort of control
was very important to heart. Some of it was about respectability.
I think she had grown up in poverty and you know,
hadn't always had the things that she needed, and so
she was absolutely meticulous about having control over the way

(07:32):
she looked when she walked out of the house.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
What did I feel like to you? As the kid, It.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Felt anxiety producing. It's like a child sometimes you know
something is wrong and you don't know exactly what it is,
but you are certain that something's not right. This was
definitely that thing in that I understood that you weren't
supposed to change clothes six times before you left the

(07:58):
house on an ordinary work day, and by the time
we would leave, she would be in a complete panic
because of course we would be late, and that lateness
did not fit with her ideas about respectability. And yet
at the same time she struggled with just organizing herself
to get out of the house. And I absorbed a

(08:20):
lot of her anxiety as she was sort of going
through these paces in the morning, and I can remember,
you know, sort of I'd be sitting on the sofa
Washington o'clock as this was happening in my own anxiety
getting higher and higher as I.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
Watched her going back and forth.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
As for the transformations, I think that one of the
ways that it affected me was that my body was
also a part of it, and that she was not
satisfied with how I look either. She wanted control over
everything that I wore, but she was constantly shopping for
something that would make me look different. She thought it
was too thin, and she wanted me to be bigger.

(09:03):
She thought my sister was too big and she wanted
her to be thinner. And so some of the anxiety
was really about the fact that I think I understood
that there was something wrong with me in her eyes,
and that I didn't know how to address it, something

(09:23):
kind of unfixable, and I felt like I didn't have
control over the things that you know, she was disappointed in.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Tell me about your father.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
I remember him as this very loving father who was
much more accepting, and yet he really wasn't that present
in the sense that he drank. He was, you know,
sort of trying to cope with a lot of grief

(09:59):
and things he experience in his past. And I think
that he was self medicating for a good portion of
my childhood. And he was very susceptible to alcohol as well.
So you know, if I were to say to somebody
how much he was drinking, they would say, well, he
wasn't drinking very much, but very little alcohol could really

(10:21):
knock him out, and it made it such that it
was lights out usually during and sometime after dinner, because
it didn't take a whole lot of alcohol for him
to fade into a dream like state where he would
be kind of snoozing in our home, usually in the

(10:44):
din and so it was pretty normal to walk into
the den and for him to basically be sitting in
this like lounge chair, but he's actually like asleep and
he's dreaming, and I can hear him. I think sometimes,
you know, I've heard people imagine that the parent who
is the alcoholic is this you know, horrible person who

(11:05):
is out doing all of this harm in this very
sort of vindictive way. But really, in a lot of ways,
he was somebody who was incredibly like sort of loving
and accepting when he was present with us. He just
couldn't be present with us.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
He just wanted to check out.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yeah, he wanted to check out. And it was something
my parents argued over as well, about his you know, drinking,
And yet it was difficult because on the one hand,
they argued about it, but at the same time, you know,
I don't think either of my parents understood that was alcoholism,
I think in their minds, because he got up and

(11:44):
went to work every day, and he was a very
hard worker and he was very sort of successful at
the factory where he was working. I think that that
meant that he couldn't possibly be an alcoholic, because in
their minds, an alcoholic as somebody who drinks to the
point where you know they can't go to work. He
wasn't doing that, but he was the functional alcoholic.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
When Cassandra's a little girl, her father often asks her
to take a ride to the country. That's what he
calls it, the country. Her mother goes along for the
drive as well. These regular outings stand out as unsettling
and strange.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Where I grew up, there was this distinct difference between
living in a town and then the more rural areas
outside of it. And my father had grown up in.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
One of those really rural.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
Areas, and so we would go to visit people that
he knew in his childhood. We would go there to
visit relatives, and we would get there and I would
meet these older people who in my mind were really
at the time because I was five, and they would

(12:55):
stare at me, they would act very oddly sometimes around me.

Speaker 3 (12:59):
They were very interested.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
In my appearance. I remember them trying to feed me constantly,
Like I would get there and they would say, oh,
let me go get some cookies, let me go get
some candy. There was always take lemonade, something that they
wanted me to eat. And they would often remark about
how much I looked like my father's family, who died

(13:24):
before I was born, And they would have these really
kind of interesting expressions because they were often, I think,
sort of trying to figure out if the resemblance was
just a resemblance, or if there was something of the
occult that was happening in these encounters, right, And so

(13:47):
in some ways, the whole thing about trying to get
me to eat was about trying to make sure that
I was like a real child and not something else.
And so they would sit there and watch me eat
whatever it was, and then they would be sort of satisfied, like, oh,
it's just a resemblance. But they talked about it constantly.
They would say to me, like, you look so much

(14:09):
like my father's sister, Maggie Joe, or you look so
much like Bernice's his mother. And they would say that
to my father over and over again. They would say, Oh,
she's just like them, mains, She's just like them. And
it's interesting because this was one of the things that
became pretty regular in my childhood when we would do this.

Speaker 3 (14:30):
It happened over and over again, and even as I got.

Speaker 1 (14:32):
Older, people still often responded in that way of feeling
as though they were trying to figure out or understand
something about the ways in which you know, there was
this genetic link between me and the past, and what
did it mean.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
It also seems like those comments that they would make
in front of you as a child, they weren't even
really directed to you. It was almost like you weren't
even there. They were talking to your parents about them,
talking to your father about them, they were talking to
each other about them.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
It's really true.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
And frequently it was if I was an object in
the room or so than a person, right, And even
with the staring without any real you know, sort of
self consciousness about the fact that you were looking at
another person was related to that in the sense that
it was something to be addressed and to be talked
about and to be discussed, but not necessarily with me.

Speaker 2 (15:29):
Do you have any recollection of what that felt like
at the time.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
I found myself thinking about it a lot, because I
think it felt different at different times. When I was
really little, I remember wanting to go home, and I
knew that we weren't going to stay at these places
for very long because my father couldn't stand to be
there for very long either, So we might drive a
good forty minutes and within ten minutes he's like, well,

(15:54):
it was nice seeing you, repeatedd back out the door.
But I do remembering rather nervous and like I was
supposed to do something and I didn't know what it
was I.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
Was supposed to do.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
I felt as if I did not really want this
attention that I was getting any situations, especially when I
was really small.

Speaker 3 (16:15):
And it didn't make sense to me. I didn't know the.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
People that they thought I resembled. I had never met them,
and we didn't talk about those people as a family either.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
When you were a child at that point, what did
you know about your father's family before you were born
and what had happened to them.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
I knew that there had been a car accident that
my father always referred to as the wreck when it
did come up, but we did not talk about it ordinarily.
Occasionally I would be looking at a photo album and
maybe point to a relative in that photo album, and
he would say, Oh.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
She died in the wreck.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
I knew there had been a wreck, I did not
know where it happened. I did not know when it happened,
and I wasn't clear on who was in the wreck
and who survived it and who died. I knew there
were a lot of people who died, but no one

(17:20):
ever said to me, this is what happened, this is
where it happened, this is how it happened, and this
is how these particular people died. And so it was
one of those things that I felt like I was
learning about it kind of like piecemeal. But I had
a very hard time as a child keeping track of

(17:41):
all of these people.

Speaker 3 (17:43):
I was too little, I guess, in some ways to
keep track of it.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
But also we just didn't really talk about it unless
my father was saying, oh, the wreck, and that was
the explanation in those two words.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
So did you have a sense as a child that
you shouldn't bring it up?

Speaker 1 (17:59):
Yes, absolutely, I think I understood that there was a
reason that we weren't talking about this and I think
I also understood that this was a very painful thing,
and that in our family you don't talk about painful things,
and so I figured if they weren't talking about it,

(18:20):
I wasn't supposed to be talking about it either. And
I'm not even sure if I knew how to talk
about it, because at no point was there and open
enough conversation about it that I would have understood, like
the language in terms of that kind of conversation about
grief and loss. And so there was no model by

(18:43):
which to understand how you talk to someone about what was,
you know, the worst day in my father's life.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
You also had a grandfather, so Daddy Blewett, it was
your father's father. He was a presence in your childhoo.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
Absolutely, he was there in the summers usually, And he
was the only person too who ever really talked about
the wreck. And he didn't tell me what happened, as
much as he would repeatedly tell this story about the
aftermath and an incident he remembered in the hospital of
someone coming and trying to give him a shot and

(19:24):
having to be held down when they were giving him
this shot. And so that one story was really the only.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Story I ever heard about.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
What happened exactly, and even that wasn't about what happened.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
It was really about the aftermath in the hospital.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
So I knew that he had been in the wreck,
and you know, he never said very much about when, how, where,
none of that.

Speaker 3 (19:50):
But he did tell that one story about it over
and over.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
Again, and it was clear that he was telling that
story in a repetitive way that suggested trauma. And I
would listen to him to tell the story over and
over again, and I felt like I understood how to
participate in that particular conversation about it, because you know,
he could be very sort of emphatic when he was
saying things, and I.

Speaker 3 (20:13):
Would sit there like a little.

Speaker 1 (20:15):
Later and be like, mm hmmmm, that must have been awful,
like very like responding in ways that I understood how
to talk about this, because.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
We weren't really talking about loss or emotions.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
He wasn't talking about the fact that his wife had
died from that accident. He was just telling this story
about what happened to his body after this accident.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
The way you're describing it makes so much sense to me.
I mean, trauma is recursive. The mind goes to the
same place over and over and over again. The story
doesn't progress until it does if it does, and so
he was trapped in that story. When he would tell
you that story, would you welcome it? Were you sort
of hungry for it because maybe you were going to

(20:59):
find out a little bit more?

Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, I was so hungry for it. It was very
clear to me that my family was really keeping secrets
about what had happened, and it felt like being let in,
you know, it felt like I was being treated as

(21:24):
if I was somebody who deserved to know. And in
all the other ways, I felt like with my father
that that story was not mine, even though it was
obviously impacting our family in ways that impacted me and
it was part of my story, I did not feel
like I could lay claim to it enough to be.

Speaker 3 (21:44):
Able to say, hey, what happened?

Speaker 1 (21:46):
And I think that I performed that sort of role
with my grandfather because it felt like I had a
role now, you know, like it felt like, oh, I'm
being told about this, and he's telling me because I'm
somebody who's supposed to know, and that felt like a

(22:07):
kind of belonging in a really sort of interesting way.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
We'll be right back when Cassandra's nine years old, her
mother tells her that one of the people who died
in the wreck was her father's first wife, a woman
named will A Deane. This is the first time Cassandra

(22:40):
hears this name, and the first time she's told her
dad had been married before her mother. Cassandra's mind begins
to work overtime, trying to figure out how it's possible
that there could be something so big about her father's
past that she didn't know, and what does it mean
to have not known. She also begins to about her

(23:00):
older sister, Annette. The two of them look nothing alike,
which is something that's always commented upon. Maybe she's not
a full sister, Cassandra wonders, maybe Annette's mom is Willa Deane.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
I remember that experience so well because my mother said
it so matter of factly, like I'm just looking through
a photo album I see and I'm like, oh, who
is this, Oh that's your daddy's first life. And she
just went back to reading, like I think it was
like a newspapers, Like she just went back to what
she was doing. And I felt like somebody had just
snatched the floor out from U under me, not the rug.

(23:37):
The whole floor was gone for a moment there because
I'm thinking, like, if you didn't.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
Tell me this, what else do I not know?

Speaker 1 (23:46):
I just remember it being such an uncomfortable experience, and
that it raised so many other questions, including about my sister,
because everywhere we went people remarked on how different we
look I mean, and it was a constant kind of conversation.
I was very very thin, my sister tended to be heavy.

(24:09):
We did not resemble each other in any way. Our
hair with different colors, like, there was nothing, and people
are remarked on it all the time, and at no
point had anybody ever said there's a reason for this.
At that point, and I thought, well, maybe this is
the explanation, Maybe this could explain it.

Speaker 3 (24:28):
And I began just sort.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
Of snooping through my parents' things, you know, trying to figure.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
Out who is my sister, Does she have a.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
Different parent, could this woman have been her mother.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
It's funny because snooping comes up so regularly on this podcast.
There's something about there's something about the deep knowledge, there's
something you don't know, that there's something that's hidden, there's
something that's being withheld what other records is there? Then
you know I'm going to turn into a little child

(25:03):
detective and figure that out. Tell me about the snooping.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
I go to my parents' room, and I know where
they keep all of their paperwork, and it's in this
sort of briefcase that my father received as a gift.
He worked in a factory and he used for a briefcase.
So they put all of our paperwork, like birth certificates
and insurance papers and all this stuff is in it.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
So I go, I pull it out.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
I open it up. There's no lock on it, and
I'm looking through it and looking through it, and I
find my sister's birth certificate. And I'm a little kid.
I don't know how.

Speaker 3 (25:34):
Birth certificates work at this point.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
And I pull out this birth certificate and it's got
both of my parents' names on it and my sister's name,
and I'm like, wow, it was so unexpected. I just
knew it was going to say something else. And I'm
looking at this piece of paper and almost disappointed because

(25:58):
I'm so certain that there's something I don't know. I
thought this would be the key to this missing piece
of information among many missing pieces of information, and yet
I still knew something wasn't quite right, and at one
point I even asked, my sister was my father's first

(26:18):
wife without your mother? And I remember her just really
laughing this off. But she must have mentioned it to
my mother, because it was after that that my mom
showed up in my room in the middle of the
night one night and starts telling me in the darkness,
she does not turn on the light, starts telling me

(26:38):
the story of a relationship that she had before my
father that resulted in my sister. I remember being just
utterly destroyed by it in the moment. It was one
of these moments when you think it's one thing that

(27:00):
you don't know, and it turns out there's a whole
world of things that you don't know, and they're probably
connected in ways that you don't understand. And it felt
like such a colossal piece of information to withhold, But
it also felt a little scary in that part of
me was thinking, I have so many questions about who

(27:23):
you are, mean and my mother, but who this person was,
because I've never met that person. So in my mind
I had already worked out an explanation of what the
secret was, and I'm hearing an entirely different one from
my mother, and then wondering who knows and who doesn't know.

(27:45):
I mean, I think that's one of the first things
I said. He I was like, well, does she know?

Speaker 3 (27:48):
Does she know this?

Speaker 1 (27:49):
Because given everything that had been said at that point,
I felt like it was quite possible that she didn't know.
And it turns out she did know. My mom said, yes,
she knows, and then as she was leaving, I remember
saying to her, does my brother know? She didn't answer,

(28:13):
and I knew then that he didn't know.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
If he did, I think.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
She would have turned around and said he did. And
then of course I found out much much later that
he didn't know, and he was so hurt by it all,
you know, so he was probably in his forties by
the time he don't know, and he ends up finding
out because my sister thought he knew, and so she

(28:39):
mentioned something about a half sibling who was not our
mine or my brother's sibling, and he did not know
what she was talking about, and she just assumed that
if I knew, he knew, and that was not the case.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
You know, it's such an interesting thing with secrets, because
there are secrets and then there are in a way,
either the implicit or explicit instructions to people to also
keep the secret. And it sounds like, I mean, when
you found out your father knew something, your mother knew something,
and your sister all knew something that you did not know.
And then all those years later, your brother finds out

(29:14):
as a grown man and finds out that all of
you knew something that he didn't know.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Yeah, he was really devastated by it.

Speaker 3 (29:21):
Ye and my sister really grew up together.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
They were not that far apart in age, like around
two years, and so they really spent.

Speaker 3 (29:29):
Their childhood together, and they grew up together.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
And I don't even know if I can completely fathom
what that must have felt like to him, as opposed
to what it felt like to me. For that reason,
because in his mind, this is a secret that they
kept from them even in their childhood, and I found
out in childhood.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
The tragedy of the wreck and the avalanche of secrets
kept in its wake make for an environment that Cassandra
wants to flee. She starts thinking about leaving home and
making a life elsewhere. As early as eleven or twelve
years old.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
I was thinking I'm out of here I'm not saying,
and there were a whole lot of reasons for that.
As I said, like, you know, it.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Felt like a very oppressive place to live for a
black girl.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
But my house didn't feel like my house either, you know,
So those feelings of like alienation that I was experiencing,
I think in the larger community were really matched by
what was happening in my own household, because it all
felt like a secret. Most of the people who lived
outside of our home would never have guessed that my

(30:43):
father was drinking in the way that he was, that
he was, you know, sort of engaged in addiction.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
And really unhealthy when and I don't.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Think that that was something that anyone around us knew
so much so that I could remember there were quite
a few teenage boys in the neighborhood who they had
a problem. They would come and want to talk to
my dad, and sometimes they were friends with my brother,
but oftentimes they weren't. They would just come knock on
the door and say can I talk to mister Jackson?

(31:16):
And he would go outside and they would talk, and
he would offer advice, and you know, it was frequently
about school or helping kids think through their futures, like
he was an extremely respected person who was pretty much
completely checked out on us, you know, And I don't

(31:37):
think I wanted to live with all.

Speaker 3 (31:38):
These secrets anymore.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
It felt like secrets on top of secrets, and I
didn't feel that I could speak or talk openly about
anything that was happening in my household. Like I think
I really understood that I was not supposed to do that.
And I think that in my mind, the solution was
go somewhere else, so you can be somebody else, you know,

(32:02):
that you could separate from the space, and that that
would be enough to create a kind of launching point
for like a different life.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Cassandra goes off to Spelman College, a black women's college
in Atlanta. At Spelman, for the first time in her life,
she sees all these different possibilities for who she might
become and undergoes several important shifts in her identity. She

(32:41):
starts to imagine herself as a writer a professor. She
also comes to realize that her background is quite different
from the young women surrounding her.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
It's kind of the first time I was in a
space where majority of people who were around me had
parents who were black professionals, and many of them had
been a college educated for generations, where I was first generation.
So I felt myself different in those ways in terms
of class, and yet there were other ways of which,
like it just made all of these you know, sort

(33:15):
of new things seem possible. The other thing I think
though that happened there was seeing other people's family lives.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
You know, when you go to college and.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
You're staying in a dorm and you were hearing people
making phone calls to their family, or you're seeing little
care packages that their family sent that they want to
show you or share with you. And I remember thinking like,
who are these people?

Speaker 3 (33:41):
You know, they keep saying.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
I love you to their parents, and I think their
parents are saying it back to them. And I'm seeing
like these little cards and love notes and these care packages.
And we were not a family that said I love you.
We were not a family where there was hugging and touching.
We were very much, you know, kind of a family

(34:05):
that didn't communicate a lot and certainly didn't have these
like intimate conversations.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
So I would hear these.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
Young women calling their family and saying.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
Oh, that's such a best day.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
Well this happened, and thinking, why are you telling her that,
like you really need to grow up?

Speaker 3 (34:22):
You know.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
It's like it never occurred to me in that first
year that there.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
Was something normal about that.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
I was like, what happened to all these people that
they can't seem to cope with their lives with at
having these conversations where they say I love you to
their parents and it was that alien to me. And
I think that it was when I began to recognize
that there were a whole lot of people living in
relationship to their family in a way that was completely.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
Foreign to me that I started thinking.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
Oh, so there were actually a whole other ways of
being in the world, Like not everybody is carrying around all.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
Of these things that I'm carrying around.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
And all of these conversations and questions that could never
be said aloud. That not everyone is carrying that around.
There are people who were actually having these conversations where
they're expressing these intimate parts of their lives and they're
talking about their feelings and they're vulnerable with their own parents.

(35:25):
I had never seen my mother cry, I'd never seen
my father cry like there was no way in which
I was really privy to their internal lives in that way. Instead,
I got glimpses of things that.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
I wasn't supposed to see. And when I say wasn't
supposed to I mean things that my parents wouldn't have
wanted me to be aware of.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
So, you know, I was aware that my father was
often having dreams when he was drinking, in which he
was constantly trying to save people from something in these strains.
And the main reason I was aware of it is
because he was saying my name frequently during these dreams,
or at least I thought he was saying my name,
but frequently he was saying the name of the child

(36:07):
that I was named after, and this was his niece
who died in the wreck. And so even when I
got glimpses of my parents, you know, sort of internal lives,
it wasn't something we could talk about because I was
never supposed to see it in the first place. And
so being this person who had gone away to this
other space was really really important to me because it

(36:28):
gave me other ways of living that were entirely new
to me, so new to me that at times these
beautiful things were a little repulsive because they made me uncomfortable.
When I was a kid, whenever my parents would see
couples expressing public affection, they would kind of recoil from it,

(36:50):
and my mother would always make a point of saying that,
you know, he probably beats her as soon as they
leave here, you know, like that's that's the only reason
they would be doing that, is that this person was
doing some terrible.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
To the other person in private.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
That's the only reason they would be expressing affection in public.
And it was all very strange to me having this
window into other people's lives.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
During that period of time. Where does the wreck reside
inside you? You're coming into your own your meeting mentors
and professors and role models, and your world is expanding
at a really rapid rate in terms of like just
seeing the possibilities and different ways that families live during

(37:39):
those years, you know, as a college student, as a
young adult, where does that history live inside of you?
Is there still the hunger? Is there still the wanting
to know more? Or does it subside for a while.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
I think that both of those things happened, And what
I mean by that is I did become more outward
thinking because I was seeing, you know, the way that
other people's families operated. But it made me long for
more intimacy with my own family.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Part of that was this past that we didn't talk about.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
So on the one hand, I found myself becoming much
more demanding of my mother, especially in terms of wanting
her to start saying I love you.

Speaker 3 (38:30):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
This is this is an actual conversation that we have
to have when I come home from school and I'm like,
how about you never say this? Her response is because
you already know that. And I had to explain to
her why expressing that is important to me. And yet
I think there's some part of me that also understood
that if you can't even say I love you, then

(38:52):
you have no avenues.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
To talk about the past.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
So in some ways, this longing for intimacy was also
a longing to be let into this secret history that
I didn't know about.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
Also, during these college years when she's a junior, Cassandra
meets Reginald, the man who will become her husband.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
We met in a philosophy because very early on we
were having these very intimate conversations about our childhoods.

Speaker 3 (39:26):
And I mean, I know that that's how I fell
in love.

Speaker 1 (39:29):
That relationship was a place where I could have these
conversations where I was really sort of reflecting on these
very personal and cultural and familial experiences, and he didn't
turn away from any of it.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
As Cassandra becomes more involved in the academic world as
well as more involved with Reginald, she engages in the
adult version of snooping research. In her research, she encounters
the term replacement child, and she comes to realize that
by giving her the same name as the child who
died in the wreck, her parents had in some ways

(40:09):
placed this loss directly upon her. When Cassandra and Reginald
decide to try to have a child of their own,
something which it turns out isn't simple and easy for them,
Cassandra feels an especially intense longing to know more about
her family history.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
I think that it really struck me in that moment,
as we were trying and failing to get pregnant, that
there was something about legacy that was really important to me.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
To be able to pass on. And it's interesting.

Speaker 1 (40:49):
Because I would have had a hard time expressing in
words at the time, but what began to happen as
we were trying is I found myself thinking more and
more about genetic legacy and this resemblance that was so
meaningful to so many other people in my life, and

(41:13):
yet understanding that it's quite possible that we were not
going to be able to have a child, and trying.

Speaker 4 (41:23):
To put together the pieces of that past felt really
urgent in that moment, because on the one hand, it
felt like I would at some point want to know
this stuff in order to pass on to a child,
like I would want to be able to share a
family history in some way.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
But it also.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
Felt like I was in some ways trying to create
an extension of our family in this way that I
was created. So I guess it made me recognize something
about the way in which reproduction was often connected to

(42:10):
certain ideas about what survival looks like, especially for black people.
My father could not talk to me, you know, about
that accident, and yet he had made me I existed
because of the accident, and there was a way in

(42:32):
which he was creating the future even when he couldn't
fully talk about the past, and it was all still connected.
I was an extension of that, and it made me
think a great deal, probably almost obsessively at times about
these ancestors that I had never known, and particularly my

(42:55):
father's mother and his sister, and that you know, they
were the ones that people all that she looks just
like them, and you know, people would look at my
face and clearly be seeing somebody else ohm I had
never known, and so it felt like I needed to
at the very least know what happened to them. I

(43:16):
knew a few stories about them, because when our extended
family would get together when I was a child, which
is usually funerals, but when our extended family would come
to visit, all they did was tell stories about their
mother mostly, and they would be these just incredible stories
about her sort of heroism, and all the stories were

(43:37):
about her really sort of defending her children against you know,
Jim Crow, segregation, racism, And so I felt like I
needed to know more than I knew, because I knew
very very little. I knew about the resemblance, obviously, and
that was about it. And it felt like whether or

(43:57):
not I had a child, and whether or not that
was a logical childlie. It felt like I need to
know this. This is my story too, and I need
to know it. The problem was my mother didn't think so.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
During this time, Cassandra is on two parallel journeys that
are deeply entwined. The first is into the complex and
harrowing world of assisted reproduction. She and Reginald are determined
to do absolutely everything they can to have biological children.
They go through IVF cycle after IVF cycle, their hopes
dashed again and again. At the same time, her powerful

(44:36):
desire to know more about the relatives who died than
the wreck becomes something she can no longer pack away.
She sends for their death records, which include five names
Bernice Jackson, Willa Deine Jackson, Maggie Joe Ray, Robert Ray,
and her namesake, Cassandra Ray, along with the dates of

(44:58):
their deaths. Sandra is startled to realize that much of
the information on the death records isn't accurate. For instance,
her grandmother and her father's first wife are listed as
having been employed as domestics, and they were not employed
as domestics, had never been employed as domestics. It was
all anyone could think a black woman in Alabama could

(45:19):
have done at the time.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
I felt like at that point, when I get the
death certificates, there's stuff written on them, and it's been
marked out, and there are all these ways in which
I'm realizing that this record is not just inaccurate, but

(45:42):
was done in a way that would suggest that these
people's lives don't matter very much. And you know, the
one thing that I think I learned from those that
I think was really important was looking at the dates
and realizing how long the dying went on, because it's
not as though, you know, there was a wreck and

(46:03):
everybody died instantly. You know, you've got a child who
dies on site. You've got people arrive at a hospital
alive and die after. You've got another person who has
the surgery that afternoon.

Speaker 3 (46:13):
Even the accident happens in the.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Morning, the surgery and then dies after that one and
another person who was retent days and it was overwhelming,
I think to look at those death certificates and understand
that this was something that was happening in time right, that.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
It happened in a place.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
And I realized from the death certificates as well that
I didn't understand the circumstances of the accident in terms
of like I didn't even know where my relatives were living.
The death certificates indicated that some of them were just
visiting when this happened to them, and so I realized

(46:57):
them It's like I have to go home because the
only person who can really sort of fill in the
blanks in the story is there in Alabama.

Speaker 3 (47:07):
I need to talk to my dad.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
When I had tried to talk to him over the
phone about what happened, it was really hard for him
to talk about. He could give me a certain amount
of information for a certain amount of time, and he
would stop. And the last time that he had stopped,
he had said to me, you know, it was in
the newspaper.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
And I remember thinking, like, what do you mean it
was in the newspaper and he said, no, it was
on the front page of the newspaper.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
And he's like, this was a really big accident, and
he kept saying it was in the newspaper. You know,
I don't know how you would get the newspapers, but
you could get the newspaper.

Speaker 3 (47:44):
And I thought, I know how to get a newspaper.
I'm an academic.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
If I could do anything, I can do research. I
was like, I have to go to Alabama and find
out the secret of what happened there. Yeah, I got
on a plane and I went down there, and I
think that in the beginning, I really thought but that
I would be able to have the revival conversations with
my father over the phone and a lot of this.
Neither of us had the practice talking about any of

(48:10):
this that we would have needed to be able to
have like really productive conversations about it. And I get there,
and I get up the next morning and I'm on
my way to the library and he's finishing up, picking
breakfast and cleaning up, and he says, oh, wait, mine, honey,
I'm going to take you down there. And I remember thinking, what, No,

(48:32):
I thought the whole point of me going to look
at the newspapers was so that you wouldn't have to
relive this experiences what I was thinking.

Speaker 3 (48:37):
But it was very clear to me that he.

Speaker 1 (48:40):
Wanted to do this with me, and he said, oh, no,
I'll drive you down there, and we go down there
to the library together.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
It's important to know here that your father had stopped drinking.

Speaker 1 (48:52):
Yes, yes, he is like a different person at this point,
and I think that his life could change pretty dramatically
since you know, the time when I was a kid,
in the sense that he had started going to church more.
He had become a leader in that church, and it
was around that time that he just really stopped drinking,

(49:13):
and it made him into just an incredibly different person,
Like suddenly he's present and he's like, Oh, yeah, I'm.

Speaker 3 (49:19):
Gonna drive, I'm gonna take you, I'm gonna do this
with you.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
And I think part of what was so scary for
my mom about this was that I think she was
concerned that him revisiting his grief in this way might
snatch him back to drinking, because I do think that
the drinking was a primary way in which he coped

(49:45):
with what had happened, and it was a way of
just turning everything off.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
I think she was really worried that.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
He would start drinking again if he was really sort
of faced with that tragedy again.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
So what happens in the library?

Speaker 1 (50:03):
To go to the library, and it was such a
strange experience because you know, I'm at home in library,
you know, like I know what I'm doing in those spaces,
but this felt scary to me and that I know
what I'm looking for, but I don't know what it
looks like, right, Like, I don't know if we're looking

(50:24):
for something that's like a small column on an accident
that happened, or if we're you know, looking for something bigger.
And what happens is we're using a machine where you've
got to kind of scroll through the newspapers to get
to the daily paper that has the.

Speaker 3 (50:43):
Accident in it.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
And it was a really troubling experience in that you
are completely engulfed in another time, and these newspapers really
bring what saigation looked like at that time in Alabama
to life. So we get to this page, but by

(51:07):
the time we get to it, I've seen about three
dozen articles with the title that's a Negro prowler, right, Like,
there is no good reason that you're in a newspaper
in you know, Alabama in nineteen sixty if you're black.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
Right, Like, you don't want to be in that newspaper.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
And so you begin to realize all of these customs
white supremacy are present in the newspaper. And so that's
the context within which I encounter this article. And so
it's on the front page the day that it happens,

(51:52):
but the paper came out in the evening back then,
and so the first story is a little bit shorter
than we get to the second story and it's a
little bit longer, and there's all these pictures and they
are devastating vehicles melded together. I can see my ancestor's
shoes that have come off in this horrible wreck. And

(52:14):
I'm trying to read the articles and my father is
reading them at the same time, because I'm realizing he
has never read these before.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Right, he was at the hospital watching.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
His family die, so he was not reading about this accident,
and so he's reading these things for the first time,
just like I am. And I'm feeling like he's kind
of adjusting in some ways to nineteen sixty way faster
than me because he lived through it. But I can't
get past the first part of the article because I
noticed that the names of the white victims in the

(52:48):
accident have to be mentioned first, like that's the custom, right,
and they get a moniker, so it's like mister and
missus so and so, and then black people's names have
to be listed after all the white people have been listed.
They don't get a moniker, so it's just a name
and then a comma and the word negro behind them.
And I'm supposed to be this expert in like race

(53:12):
in the United States. I've written books about this, and
I am floored by this in the sense that you're
reading about how your family died, and you're at the
same time recognizing all these ways in which their humanity

(53:36):
is denied even in the telling of what happened to them.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
And then I quickly.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
See these accounts of the wreck, and you know, my
father stands up at one point and he says, they've
got this all wrong. They dodn't got it all wrong.
And at this point he had already told me how
the accident had happened. But the account that's in the
newspaper is clearly suggesting that the problem is these you know,

(54:04):
Negro drivers, and when the accident happened, my uncle was
in the accident, he's like driving a new Pontiac. And
there's clearly this idea, and they make a point of saying,
and he was driving a new Pontiac Like it's very
like biased in the sense that if an accident happens

(54:25):
between a white person and a black person and it's
nineteen sixteen, you're in Alabama, it's the black person's fault.

Speaker 3 (54:32):
It does not matter what.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
Happened because black people are supposed to get out of
the way of white people, so no matter what happens,
it's the black person's fault. And my father knew what
had happened, and he knew the account was.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
Not correct because his mother had.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Lived for ten days and he remembered her telling him
exactly what happened and telling him he needed.

Speaker 3 (54:53):
To remember it because they would tell a different one day.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
And just sort of recognizing all these ways and when
which all these just humiliations that were part of the
way in which the newspaper operated because it adheres to
all of these customs. So the next thing that we
were trying to do, after we go through all of
the articles, and there's quite a few of them, we

(55:17):
start looking for the obituaries because I was trying to
understand something about all of these funerals, because you know,
he then had to basically bury five people.

Speaker 5 (55:26):
How old was he He would be about twenty five
at the time, and he buries his wife first, but
you know, there are other family members who are waiting
for other family to arrive for certain funerals.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
So all this to say, though, is that we can't
find the obituaries while we're sitting in the library. And finally,
while we're looking for them, there's like one of those
like library dudes, these guys who like they hang out
and read all newspapers in the library all the time.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
Them.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
You know, I don't know what exactly they're doing them,
but they.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
Live in the library.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
And there was a guy like that.

Speaker 3 (56:08):
He was sitting back there.

Speaker 1 (56:09):
He was back there the entire time we were there,
and he had not made a sound, even when my
father was saying out loud, they've got it all wrong,
they got it all wrong, like he had said nothing.
And he looks over at us and he says, excuse me.
He actually begins with I don't want to offend y'all
or nothing, and I was like, oh god, this is
not going to go all already. He said, are you

(56:29):
looking for the obituaries of people who are African American?
And we said yes, and he said, well, you're not
going to find them in the obituary section because they
didn't print black people's obituaries in the section where white
people's obituaries were. They had to be printed on a

(56:50):
separate page. And it only came out in a column.

Speaker 3 (56:55):
Called News about Negroes that.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
Came out once a week and my father says, oh, yeah,
like the guy had said, Oh, they moved, you know,
they changed the peanut butterial at the grocery story.

Speaker 5 (57:08):
It's like, oh yeah, it was like.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
That wasn't it. And I'm just sitting there like you
have got to be hitting me, Like you couldn't even
print a black person's obituary next to a white person's obituary,
and yet you claim to be a news source about
an accident that black people were in.

Speaker 3 (57:30):
You know, it said so much.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
About how that world operated, in the ways in which
sort of journalism was both a reflection of that world
but was also creating and participating in segregation, in white supremacy.

Speaker 3 (57:45):
And so we go to the column News about.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
Negroes, and it shocked me because it's basically a column
that was written by a black woman, and it had
every single thing that could have happened to a black
person that was good or bad in it. And for
the most part, though, it read like a society column. Oh,
such and such, we'll be visiting the so and sos

(58:09):
this week, you know, And it was the only part
of the newspaper where black people had titles. So it'd
be like, oh, Colonel, Lieutenant so and so was opposed
to just such and such negro It would have all
the weddings, all the church socials, everything crammed into this
tiny column. And at the very end of it, it
would have funeral announcements. And that was how we were

(58:30):
able to locate the obituaries and so that I could
understand the sequence of funerals that my father had to
attend and basically arrange as well. And so, yeah, it
was all in a little section called news about Negroes.
And like I said, like I'm supposed to be some
sort of expert, and you recognize that there's something about

(58:54):
so much of this history that has been actively repressed
that when I go out and I get talks and
this comes up, most people are pretty stunned. And it's
hard to believe. It wasn't that long No, it just
wasn't that long ago.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
I'm imagining like the experience, you know all of this
as an academic, as an author. You're sitting there as
a daughter and a member of a family in the
town that you grew up in, looking at this nineteen
sixties newspaper. It makes it so incredibly stark and personal.

Speaker 1 (59:33):
So personal because it hurt to see my family's names
not just without monikers, but also this common negro because
the point of it was to make sure that no
white person picked up the newspaper and thought that blew
with Jackson was the one that they know, right, like, oh.

Speaker 3 (59:53):
No, it's just a Negro.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
And of course half the information is wrong too, like
there's biographical mistakes or other ways in which they make mistakes,
plenty of them, but they don't make any mistakes when
it comes to white supremacy. And so yeah, it was
incredibly painful. It was also I think very painful for
my father, though, to see the accident reported in the

(01:00:18):
way that it was.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
What was it like to then have had that shared
experience with your father? Was there a shift in your
family in your sense of the secret is no longer
a secret? There's this shared kind of uneersing of it.
What was that like for you?

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
It was meaningful in ways that would have seemed unimaginable
to me before that day. And I think what I
mean by that is that it opened up this shared
space that allowed for me to be able to ask
questions about his experience.

Speaker 3 (01:01:04):
It was as if this idea of sort.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
Of sitting here and reading about it together, and his
willingness to relive it in that moment in that way
with me as a witness to that that felt like
a new kind of bond between us for sure, and
that me reading those papers in this way is like

(01:01:30):
completely freshed, like never seeing any of this before and
then recognizing it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
Wait, this is.

Speaker 1 (01:01:34):
Also fresh to him, and it clearly took him back
into the past in a way that was different from
the way in which I was experiencing it, but it
was simultaneous, like we were there together reliving this, and
it allowed me to be able to experience that with him,

(01:01:55):
but also to be able to ask questions that I
had spent my whole life afraid of asking. And knowing
that I could ask that question and that he would
not fall apart and I would not fall apart, that
we would still be whole at the end of.

Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
The day, that felt like a completely.

Speaker 1 (01:02:15):
New possibility to me, because you know, when you spent
your whole life tiptoeing around secrets and not talking about things,
it feels like if you broach the subject that that
will be enough to destroy all of you, that you
will all sort of go up in flames if someone

(01:02:36):
brings up something that hurts. And we got in the
car and we drove home together, and it felt like
I knew him in a way that I hadn't known
him before, and that it wasn't accidental, that it was
very purposeful because.

Speaker 3 (01:02:57):
He just didn't have to come with me that day.
It felt like such a gift, like such a gift
that he would.

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Go there with me, do this with me, experience this
with me in this way, and that we could.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):
Trust that we would still be.

Speaker 1 (01:03:14):
There together at the end of it.

Speaker 6 (01:03:17):
And that felt very new, And I will always be
really grateful for having had that experience with him.

Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
Very shortly after this extraordinary experience with her father, something
else extraordinary happens. After several IVF attempts, on the fifth try,
Cassandra becomes pregnant. She and Reginald have a daughter, and
just a couple of years later they have another. It's
almost as if the excavation of her legacy allowed her

(01:03:53):
to continue it. But when Cassandra's daughters are seven and four,
her father, who has that cancer for some time so
it comes to his illness. She is heartbroken. Of course,
but feels grateful that he did get the chance to
know and spend time with his granddaughters.

Speaker 1 (01:04:14):
I think about talk about gifts him being able to
spend those like last days. We just happened to be
there visiting when he was dying. You know, when we
got there, he's like playing with the kids, And we
get there on a Tuesday, and he dies the following Tuesday.
And I remember thinking that what a gift it was

(01:04:38):
that he got to spend his last days with them,
and that they were there and had this chance to
say goodbye. Because we don't live in the same place.
You expect to get a phone call, and it was
so incredible that we were there and there was this

(01:05:01):
opportunity to say goodbye, and to know that you're saying goodbye.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
And in a way, I guess to be saying the
best kind of goodbye is it has to be goodbye,
which is that it's all been said, it's all been expressed.

Speaker 3 (01:05:16):
Oh definitely.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
One of the last conversations I had with him was
about the book that I was writing, and to be
able to say that and to know that that was
what he wanted to was also incredibly sort of freeing
as a writer to have a parent basically sort of

(01:05:38):
give you their blessing in writing.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
About the ways.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
That you experienced your life with them.

Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
Here's Cassandra reading one more passage from her powerful and
beautifully written memoir The Wreck.

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
I will tell my daughter that the body is a
story that does not end with the body. That we
carry others from room to room on our backs, calling
out the names of our dead and our sleep, and
that this is why I have given her a new
name of her own.

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
I will teach her the other names in due time.

Speaker 2 (01:06:41):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacur 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 eight
eight Secret zero number zero. You can also find me

(01:07:02):
on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to
know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check
out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit

(01:07:37):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.