137: What if you were the one to break the silence? 44:10

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I don't know what I was thinking, but I was just feeling just worthless, bro. I just kept feeling the waves of shame because of the shame I made them feel. And I just did everything that I was taught not to do. Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation, a presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 137, What If You Were The One To Break The Silence?

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. My mother and father were juniors and sophomores at Jackson State University when they met.

According to my mom, the first time they had sex, they got pregnant. According to my dad, it took a few more times than that. But regardless, they got pregnant. My mom, she was 19. My father went to Zaire to do some work. He was working with this group called Republican New Africa. He went to Zaire on the books for school. But off the books, he was in there doing work about liberation, black liberation. And then when he came back, I was I think I was probably like a week or two after I was born.

One of his friends there was named Kiese and he sent that name to my mom. She agreed that that would be the name they gave me. We were together as a family for a few years, like maybe two years. And then when it got separated, my father moved up to D.C. I was five or six and all my entire childhood was just spent in Jackson in Mississippi, primarily on the campus of Jackson State.

You know, Jackson for me was more home than any place in the world. That's where I made my first friends. My grandmother, you know, she had the biggest garden in Forest, which is a small poultry town about 45 miles outside of Jackson. So we would just shuck the corn, you know, hull the peas. She would get these live catfish people would just bring. I'd see her like, you know, I'd see her gut the catfish and scale them and clean them. And so...

My memories with, like, the land and food start, really, when I start to spend more time with my grandmother. I loved my grandmother, and I loved the food. She was, like, the best cook in the world, and I loved just being around her. And my grandmother, you know, she grew up Black and Jim Crow South, so she couldn't vote until...

So, you know, she was in her 40s, actually, before she could actually vote. And I think that says everything. You know, she'd have to go work the fields before school and would spend her mornings working in fields, often that white folks owned or working in houses that white folks owned. And then she would walk to school and then she would see the same white kids who would look out of their windows and smile and laugh at her. She'd see them on a bus walking.

driving to school as she's walking to school and they still be laughing at her. And she always just talks about how beyond the politics of that being just like absolutely terrifying and abysmal, how just like emotionally humiliating it was that these little girls who were her age could stay in their rooms until it was time to go to school. And she always talks about how we don't talk enough about the role of humiliation, not just in the Jim Crow South, but just in the nation in general when it comes to black folk and white folk.

she's like, I didn't need retrospection to be able to understand that that was wrong. That was hurtful. She was like, as a kid, it was like nothing but humiliating. And also like, it just made her really angry. Um, and so like, it's just another example of how all of that stuff lives in the body. It just lives in the body. And so she just always wanted her kids to work, but also just to like get as much education as possible, partially so they wouldn't have to work in chicken plants and work in white people's homes and stuff. So

You know, my grandmother was really proud of her children. She was really proud of my mom, particularly because my mom took education as far as you could take it.

I didn't see much other than like love and joy between my grandmother and my mother. As I got a little older, I started to see something a little different than love and joy. But, you know, for most of my life and definitely most of my childhood, I just saw my mother marveling in who her mother was. And I saw my grandmother marveling at the daughter that she helped create.

But, you know, like loving home still can create trauma. Sometimes sad things happen. Right. And my grandmother, as far as I can tell, tried to shield him from those sad things. But you just can't. You just can't completely shield your children from from from from the world. So, yeah.

Like, you know, there's a bathroom that says, you know, colored. There's a bathroom that says white only. There's some stores that just say white only. So she just knew that there's something wrong with the system that won't allow people into spaces, not based on like who they are as people, but like what they are.

It creates absolutely like trauma, but it also just creates like a suspicion of the system. Because at the same time, you're experiencing like various forms of racial terror. You're also seeing, you know, on the radio or on television at the time, people talk about how great America is. And so I think what that does is it shows you that America's greatness often has been

Nothing to do with like how it is treating, you know, you and the people who love you and who look like you. So I think it's like America's traumas are often like put on the backs of like young black children, even, you know, of course now, too, but definitely in the 60s and 50s and when my mother and my aunts grew up.

When the schools finally did desegregate in high school, you know, my mom was a valedictorian of her class and, you know, she had to share that honor with the white student.

One of the good things about it is that, like, my mom would say, like, she never really internalized this idea that, like, white people were better than us. My mom's plea right now is she always, like, don't internalize their shit, Key. Don't internalize their stuff. And I just think she learned that early on from my grandma because my grandmama didn't want her children to internalize the traumas too much.

You know, I only lived in black neighborhoods. Right. But I just loved us. You know what I'm saying? Like growing up, you just it wasn't what I never had an experience where I was like, man, I wish I was white so I could blah, blah, blah. I mean, I understood the structurally white people had more stuff than us. And the main things they had were access to second chances.

But I never believed in like this idea of like black inferiority. I thought that the nation and the state did everything it could to strip us of the structural things we needed to be healthy. And I think we tried to fight back and create alternative means for that. But I loved growing up in Mississippi, you know, and that doesn't mean it wasn't some way violent and there wasn't, you know, lots of horrible stuff that happened.

but there was way more joyful, incredible things that happened than horrifying stuff for sure. By the time I'm in elementary school, you know, maybe fourth or fifth grade, you know, my mom has a reputation, not just in my neighborhood, but in the city of being a black political scientist who's on TV talking a lot about politics, national politics, local politics. So my mom in some way was like a celebrity within my city.

I mean, also she was still young at the time. So like we were just best friends, you know what I'm saying? We laughed a lot. And then she got involved with somebody who, you know, initially we both loved a lot. Like a lot of young people, you know, she fell in love with somebody when she moved to Jackson and this person was really kind to her until he stopped being kind to her. And when he started to become much more physically abusive with her, I noticed that she would be a lot more physically abusive to me.

I could tell if something happened with them by how she would treat me when she came home. And I understood early that if my mom had a bad day at work, and primarily if she had a bad day or night with her partner, I needed to really be careful, you know, like tiptoe around the house, not get her upset, which means early on I knew that like when I was getting punished, sometimes it was for things I'd done, but often it was because of what people had done to my mom.

And I could tell sometimes by like the bruises, but I could also just tell by how she treated me. She was living two lives. Like on one hand, she was a super, super duper strong, absolutely committed professor. Some would say activists in our community. And on the other hand, she was in this relationship with someone who was not kind to her.

Sometimes I'd see them together and they would be so happy and we all felt like a family. He would go out of his way to not be physically abusive to her when I was around. But I saw the effects. I mean, that was my heart. That was still my best friend. That was my everything. And I felt like I was her everything. But...

She would beat me. She would hit me a little bit more, but she would also show me love in a lot of different ways, too. So like I think our relationship did not fundamentally change as a young person. It didn't make me hate my mom or anything like that because, you know, I understood why when I got a little older, I started to be less understanding. And I was like, OK, I'm an older kid. You know, I was a big kid. My mom was a very small, short woman. So, you know, by the time I'm 10 or 11, like I'm bigger than my mom, I'm taller than my mom.

She's 5'4", you know, 8th grade. I'm 5'10", you know, 9th grade. I'm 6 feet, 10th grade. I'm 6'1", you know, and my mom is still sometimes beating on me.

When I started to look like a man and I would still be getting my ass beat by my small mom, I definitely became resentful, especially when I knew some of the times that I shouldn't have been getting a whooping. So, yeah, when I was in high school and she would put her hands on me, or even when I got to college and she would put her hands on me, I definitely resented that. And part of it was just like also at that point, it's just been so many years of being

wondering if I say the wrong thing today, is my mom going to, you know, do something to me? And I'm saying by the time you get to be in high school or you get to be in college, you know, I don't know about other people, but I was just like, nah, I'm not really, you know, like as a kid, everybody I knew was getting whippings. But when I'm in high school and college, you know, I didn't know a lot of people whose parents were putting their hands on their children.

There were times I was just to be like, man, I could hurt you. You know, I would never, ever hurt you. But, you know, if you did what you're doing to another person, you would never do it because they could hurt you. Other than that, you know, like we were a team, like we were squad. And sometimes squad is really bad to each other. Like, I mean, most parents in this country are abusive directly or indirectly. They don't know how to fucking parent. And.

And so I wasn't special in that way, but I was special in that how close I was to my mama. You know what I'm saying? Like the intimacy we had was definitely something that distinguished us from our other friends. And again, part of it was that most of my other friends, they didn't just have one parent. You know, they might have had two grandparents who lived in the house or two parents who lived in the house. And so I was like one of the only kids I knew who was just who lived just with their mother. So like it was it was much more intimate than most of my other friends relationships.

At the time, she would not have used the word abuse. People weren't using those kind of words. But it didn't work. Like physically disciplining me never worked. I always say this. It just made me conflate intimacy with terror. Like when a person I love more than anybody in the world feels like they can put their hand in my face or hit me in the face with a shoe or whatever, it just made me confused about what love actually means.

And I just realized by 16, 17, I could articulate that. And I could just be like, nah, you're not going to hit me again. You know, you're not going to hit me again.

I was a big kid. I played sports my whole life. I've been in plenty fights. I never lost a fight in my life except to my mom. My mom beat my ass if you consider them fights. She whooped my ass a lot. I had no wins against her. Anybody who's out there who's been in a fight or had their ass whooped before, the physical pain is a lot, but it's just not a good... You don't feel good. You don't feel good when people try to wreck you or...

or when you allow yourself to be wrecked. One of the wonderful things about my mom is that psychologically and intellectually, like she saw me as an equal. I think one of the reasons I'm able to be whatever I am in the world is because my mom treated me like an equal, except when she was disciplined in me. And so like psychologically, when she beat me, like I never felt small or anything like that, particularly because she would always apologize and

So this is what I think complicates it, right? Like nothing about the story I'm telling is like clean. I mean, she beat me and then she, you know, hugged me and apologized and

except when all the Rodney King stuff happened. That was one of the only times I got a whipping when I was like, man, I might deserve this. And that had everything to do with like, I just seen these cops watch these other cops beat up Rodney King. And I'd heard these people talk about him. And then all of the stuff my mom had been saying to me about protecting myself from white people and all of those beatings that she gave me, which often came with like these proclamations of how she wanted me to act and

It all started to make sense. So like that day I saw Rodney King get beaten. I was in my first relationship ever. I was in a relationship with a white girl. My mom found out that day and she beat me and she beat me because she she was afraid of what being in a relationship with a white girl in Jackson would mean. And she beat me because she just seen the Rodney King video and she didn't want that to be me. So, again, like I knew she was lashing out at a system that was bigger than me.

And I knew she was beating me because she wanted me to do a better job of protecting myself. And so I just took it, you know, and I mean, I gladly took it because I was I just gladly took it. But I also know a few seconds after those interactions, like this is the fault of the person who's doing the abuse, not the person who is surviving it.

I never thought it was my fault I was getting beaten any more than I thought it was my fault. You know, when cops pull me over and say they saw me throw crack out of a window. I blame myself for a lot of things that happened, but I didn't. I never blamed myself for my mom beating me. I just knew that that wasn't that a lot of times it just didn't have anything to do with me. But the crazy thing is I don't ever remember my mom and like we didn't even talk about it. You know, like that's.

What happens when you experience these life-shifting events, but you don't

Know how to open your mouth to talk about it with the people you love the most in the world You know, we didn't discuss what was happening to her with her partner We didn't like actually sit down and discuss what was happening what my mom was doing to me You know, we didn't we didn't talk about any kind of sexual violence We didn't talk about it because if I talked about with my mom I was gonna have to talk about sex with my mom and I don't want to talk about sex with my mom And obviously my mom didn't want to talk about sex with me

Even though, you know, I heard her having sex often with her boyfriend, she found out I was having sex often with my girlfriend. We still, you know, never talked about sex, which means we never talked about sexual violence, which means we never talked about consent. We didn't talk about anything really that was really hard. But the thing we did talk about was

um, was race. You know what I'm saying? Like if there was a racial dimension to anything, we often talked about it, but I just often wonder how we, you know, how well we actually talked about race and white supremacy or anti-blackness or like, I don't know how you really talk about those things if you forget the body. And that's what we did. You know, when we did talk about things, we would talk about them like detached from the body. We talk about race, you know, we talk about what white folks were doing to us, but it was detached from

From like what what what it made us feel again in terms of shame and humiliation. We didn't use the word shame. My grandmother taught me the word humiliation like years earlier, but we didn't use those words. So, you know, we didn't talk about anything that was really hard to talk about, like most American families.

If I have any regrets, and I do, I have plenty, most of them are just like, I wish I would have tried as a child to have those conversations. I wish my mom would have forced those conversations on me, but I wish as a child that I would have tried.

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Even though we didn't talk about a lot of sexual violence and just like violence and gang violence and stuff, I experienced and saw a lot of that. And so my mom could see something was off with me and the way I was acting and behaving. So she tried to send me to like this...

child psychologist who she knew and she's trying to get me to talk more about what's happening in the house and I think she at one point she wanted me to talk about my mom like putting her hands on me but then I was like man I can't talk about my mother in any way derogatory with strangers is what I felt and I think my mom didn't want me to do that either and so we talked around and ultimately the psychologist was like well when you start to feel angry just count to 10.

My mom and I drove home in silence. And then when we got home, when she finally talked to me, she was like, you want to play some basketball? And I was, yeah, I was probably like 13 or so at the time. And I was like, yeah, because we played a lot of basketball. She had one of her students put a goal up in our front yard. And so we played ball. And I remember like,

I could just tell in that game that like she needed to win way more than I needed to win. You know, I could tell by, you know, the first time I saw bags under my mother's eyes. You just know when your person you love is like sort of in distress. And I remember like letting her beat me. And she was at the end, she was like, thank you. And I was like, you're welcome.

A night starts off with us going to a child psychologist and ends with me letting my mama beat me in ball because I just knew, and we just knew, we just knew that that's what she needed. You know, she needed a win. Even if it was a small win and beating your son one-on-one, like she needed a win.

I graduated from high school. I really wanted to live in Mississippi because I believed, you know, a lot of people who could leave Mississippi were leaving. I really wanted to stay. I stayed in my city. I went to this college called Millsaps. I was going to play basketball there. I gained a lot of weight my first semester. My mom also, the year that I went to college at Millsaps, she left Jackson and went to Harvard for a year because she had a postdoc. So I was in Mississippi for the first time in my life by myself.

That was scary, but also I just felt so free man. I felt so free I got really bad grades that semester at college and she came in there and you know She was gonna whip me from my grades and I'm just standing there She started whipping me across my like neck or whatever and I just grabbed that belt I took the belt from her I threw it against the bookshelf and I looked at her I think for the first time in my life like I

Nah, like that's not going to happen no more. You know what I'm saying? You're not going to be putting your hands on me and putting welts all over my body. She went on about her business and left the house. And that was the last time that anything happened with between us in that way. You know, I stopped being around my mama a lot. Like I was trying not to put myself in a situation where she would feel like she wanted to hit me again.

I just didn't want to be in that situation. Not because I was going to ever hit her, but just because I just didn't like how it felt. I don't like how it felt when my mom felt like she needed to put her hands on me. And I couldn't control her want to put her hands on me, but I could control being around that. Two years later, so, you know, she moves back to Mississippi and I end up getting kicked out of school. Ultimately, I got kicked out of school for taking a library book out of a library without checking it out.

The real reason I got kicked out of school was because I was an editor at a newspaper where I was writing really critical essays about the president, about the administration, and about the Greek system, and particularly about one or two fraternities. And they didn't like that. I ended up taking a library book out of the library without checking it out. Red Badge of Courage, I brought the book back.

But they got me on tape stealing a library book. So they ultimately kicked me out of school for stealing. My mom has to come up to the school and meet with me and the presidents and the deans. And when my mom came up to school, it was the first time that I'd seen my mom be like really small. Like she's a big presence, even though she's short, you know, sitting around a table with all of those white men.

She just she just shrank. And I realized sitting there, I was like, oh, wow, like she's not going to be able to save me. And more than that, I just was like, oh, man, you have really hurt her, you know, because she valued education so much. And just to go back to this idea and theme of humiliation, like people all across Jackson saw not just that I got kicked out of school for taking for stealing and fighting, which is what it looked like.

But it also looked like Mary Coleman's son got kicked out of school for stealing and fighting. So it humiliated her. It humiliated my grandmother. I left Millsaps and I went to Jackson State University for a semester. But one day, somebody who I respected told me I needed to apply to Oberlin College because they were like, Oberlin College is the only college that will accept you because of what happened, not in spite of what happened. My mom was like, well, you got to do the application. I was at home and I was like, okay.

It doesn't matter if I do it or not. They're not going to accept me. And then she just got so mad at me. She was like, hey, you giving up like you letting that school take your heart. And I was like, mama, I pretty I was disrespectful. I was like, pretty much. I was like, fuck you. You know, you don't get to tell me anything at this point. I didn't say those words, but I said pretty much words that like were the equivalent of that. I said, it's my application. I'm all I'm all handwrite this thing. And then she went to her room and she got a gun and she told me to get out.

She pulled a gun out because she was at her wits end. And, you know, and really she pulled a gun out because life was eating her up at the same time. But but, you know, really, like she was just like, man, I'm losing this boy. Like I've lost him. I think at that point my mom was like, I don't have any other parental tools at my disposal. And she just pulled it out. And then she and then she started talking and I was talking back and then she told me to get out.

And I know my mom should not have pulled a gun on me. And I also know that I should have not gotten kicked out of school. I shouldn't have given them like such a clear shot. I'm not at all saying that my mother was right to pull a gun on me. I'm saying I understand why she did it. I don't think it was the right thing to do, but I understand why she did it at that point in her life.

I just was so angry, bro. Like, I just wanted to take everything that I thought was wrong. I wanted to take on structures. I wanted to take on systems. I wanted to take on police. Like, I kind of just, I wanted to fight people who were wrong, who I thought were wrong.

My mom was like, you're not special in that way. Like this is what black people have been feeling for forever in this country. But you got to do it smarter. You know what I'm saying? You can't just be out there giving them all of this power. So she felt that. But also in her life again, you know, she was she was dealing with like her relationships, you

And she was dealing with, you know, like at that point, I think my mom was really sick of being in Mississippi. She'd given her life to the state. It's a beautiful, wonderful, incredible state, the greatest state in the nation to me. But it's a tough state to be in if you give your entire life to it like that, like she did. And and she was just heartbroken and scared. And she didn't know what I was going to do. And she kind of just wanted to scare me straight, I think.

So I went outside the house and I just sat in this ditch that's right outside our house. And I spent pretty much the whole night there in that ditch until she left in the morning. And then I got back in the house.

And probably second time in my life I just really didn't want to be alive, man. So I got her gun. I went to the bathroom. I got in this tub of water. It was weird, too, because our lights were out. The bill hadn't been paid. So I'm just sitting in this tub of water. It's really hot because it's like, I don't know, bro. Like, I just really did not want to be here.

I mean, most of the time I was in that tub, I wasn't, I don't know what I was thinking, but I was just feeling just worthless, bro. Like, I just kept feeling like the waves of shame because of the shame I made them feel. And because education was so crucial to them and writing and reading and really evading white people was so crucial to them. And I just did everything that I was taught not to do.

My mom used to always had this saying, which is like, don't let them shoot you out of the sky. But, you know, I let them, you know what I mean? Like I let them shoot me right out the sky. I gave them clear shot and they took it and they got me. And I just started to think about my mom and my mom's voice.

And then I really just started to hear my grandmother's voice for the first one of the first times in my life. Like I just heard her voice, like all of her voice. And then I saw her voice. I could see her voice. And, you know, her voice was sort of shaped like her body, but it was it was like bigger than her body. And I just was like, man, you feel like shit right now. You've, you know, humiliated yourself. You've harmed your family. But taking yourself out is not the way to do it.

You don't want your grandmother or your mama to live in a world where you killed yourself in a bathtub, you know, over what some fucking like racist ass school did to you.

I just kept thinking if I don't want them to live with the shame of having their grandson be kicked out of school for theft and fighting, I definitely didn't want them to live with the like absolute terror of being in a world where their grandson who'd been kicked out of school for fighting and theft also killed himself. That's just not what I wanted to do to my people. Eventually, I came to that conclusion and got up out of that tub and

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I realized at that point that I had to, like, be excellent, you know? In this weird way, my mom had been trying to tell me to be excellent my entire life, but I kept rebelling against it. And, you know, long story short, I got into Oberlin, transferred to Oberlin. And while I was at Oberlin, you know, I became the student my mom wanted me to be throughout my entire career. You know, I edited three or four publications. I played basketball. I got a lot of undergrad fellowships.

And I didn't I didn't talk a lot to my mom during this period when I was at Oberlin, not much, but I also lost a ton of weight. And then I got into graduate school. And by that point, you know, I just knew that whatever my mother and I had made of us.

Like it could be unmade, but right now wasn't the time. So I wasn't I wasn't really trying to put a lot of effort into that relationship. But I did want to do a lot of things that made her happy. So right out of undergrad, I went to grad school. And three years after I got kicked out of college for taking a library book out of a library, I was teaching in a graduate program by 2001. I was, you know, seven years after I got kicked out of school, I was a professor at Vassar.

I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that. Primarily my mom teaching me to read and write and love reading and writing. But most of it was because I just felt so much shame and regret for humiliating her and my grandmama by getting kicked out of school for some bullshit. So I just committed to not be a part of what humiliated them anymore. And so when I started my job up at Vassar, you know, I got that job when I was like 26 and

And, you know, I was adjunct for three or four years. And I mean, I became more of the son I think she always wanted me to become. But she also wanted really close proximity to me. But I was like, no, I got to protect myself. You know, like I I don't feel comfortable like being around because I just don't know what's going to happen. And I don't like how it all makes me feel.

I think that was really mean, but also understand why I did it. I'm just out here, you know, I love my mom, I love my grandmom, I love my father.

But I kind of just want to be out here trying to do my thing and be around parental figures as little as possible. But the other thing that happens in between that is like I become my mom as a professor. You know, my mom was this person who gave her entire life to her students in her institution. And so I started to become that person in ways that initially I thought were healthy.

But ways that I found out very soon were like unhealthy. Like not only was I giving everything I could to them in a classroom and office hours, it's like anything they needed. I wanted to be there to provide and satisfy every need they had. And at the same time, you know, I'm starving myself. You know, I was a really big kid during all that stuff with my mom early on in my career. At this point, I'm like one hundred and fifty something pounds, like two percent body fat.

And for me, it was just, again, control. I wanted to control what I could control and I could control my body. I was eating nothing and I was not sleeping and I was giving everything I had to the job and I was running lots of miles every day.

And eventually my body broke and I couldn't run and I couldn't even walk. And so then I gained, you know, I went from 150 to like 200 and I went from like 200 to 210 and 210 to 220 to 220. And like, so when I'm gaining all of this weight,

I had not dealt with any of that shit. I hadn't dealt with my relationship with my mom. I hadn't dealt with getting kicked out of school. I hadn't dealt with police calling me a crack dealer when I fucking never sold crack. I hadn't dealt with any of that kind of stuff. And I just think the consequence sometimes of not tending to like your emotional, physical business is that your body breaks. And so...

I literally tore up both of my legs and couldn't walk, particularly my left leg. And then I just wanted that endorphin rush. There's this rush of endorphins that sometimes you get when you starve and sometimes you get when you run a ton of miles. And the only thing at the time that gave me that same sort of rush was gambling.

My mom and my family, they liked casinos my entire life, but I just never imagined that they could be addicted or that I could be addicted or anything like that. I never thought about gambling addiction. But for me, beyond that, it was just like I just wanted to give away everything that I worked for. I had worked hard for this bit of money in the same way that I wanted to give away my health at different points in my life. And

Again, like the main thing that brought me there is just like I was just walking around lying to myself for three decades and

I wanted to punish myself for those lies. And like, I was punishing myself for failing my students, for protecting myself from my mom, like not seeing my mother. I was really punishing myself still for like hurting my mom and my grandmama by getting kicked out of school. You know what I mean? It's not logical necessarily, but I grew up in a family where like

You know, if you wanted anything that was worthwhile, the idea was like you had to punish yourself. You had to hurt yourself. I grew up in a sports culture, which is ultimately like push your body until it can't take anymore and you'll be better because of it. Like sports is all about punishment because Americans love to hurt themselves in really fucking like boring ass ways. And so I think, you know, I've been trained to punish myself. I've been punished myself for decades.

When I couldn't punish my body through running, I punished it by eating. But the way that ultimately really broke me was the gambling. That was the most brutal, terrifying, really, experience of my life because it was just, you know...

literally like giving away all of my money. Like I get paid at 12 midnight. I'd be at the casino. I'd cash my check. And by like one o'clock in the morning, I would have no money. I'd spent all the money that I worked for for a month would be gone by 1 a.m., which means now I got to scramble to make money for the rest of the month. At some point, my mom moves up to the Northeast,

And I still like I don't go to her house for all the reasons we talked about earlier. But I would sometimes see her at the casino up in Connecticut. I wouldn't want to. I would see her, but I would hide from her. And I assume she saw me often would hide from me. One of the turning points to me ultimately was like.

I lost my car, I gambled my car away. I lost my savings account. I lost my checking account. I lost everything gambling. And my mom had lost a lot gambling. And I see her in the casino and she's lost it all. I've lost it all. And I'm like, can we just talk? And we talked in one of those rooms, one of those hotel rooms in the casino.

you know, we start trying to talk about a lot of the things we've talked about

But instead of really getting into it, we do this thing that I think Americans do where we congratulate ourselves for even being in the room. We congratulate ourselves for even trying to have a conversation about violence and sexual violence and abuse and addiction and joy and wonder. And we, you know, we instead of really sitting in that room, we both we do this thing. We're like, can we just promise we'll be different people? And yeah.

You know, I think I asked her that and she was like, yes. And then she was like, can you promise me you'll lose weight? And I'm like, yes. And then, so we just had, we just start talking about promises instead of talking about where we'd actually been and what our bodies were feeling and doing. And so we walked out of that hotel room and the casino promising we were never coming back, promising we were going to be honest with one another. And, you know, I paid for her to get a cab back to the train and I got in a car and I left and, um,

And then I found, you know, it was like $10 or something I had in that car. And so like, I get like two miles away from the casino and my mom is in a taxi going back to her house in the Northeast. And I turn right back around and go right back in the casino. And so like, you know, and lost a little money I had again.

I was just rock bottom, bro. Like I, you know, again, I gambled all my money away. Relationships were absolute shit. Like, you know, I'd left wreckages of myself and other people. And I just didn't want to be that person. I just didn't want to be who I had become. But I needed to look at like the intricacies of like how I became in order to like not just be different, but

but to be nicer to myself and be nicer to people who love me. I knew that my mom had been living in the Northeast for years and I knew I wasn't going to her house and she knew I wasn't going to her house. And more importantly, like I knew these feelings that I felt for her that I just didn't feel like I could talk about. Cause you know, I also come from a culture where you just never say anything bad about

Not just your parents or your grandparents, but the way you were raised. So, you know, I just knew that there were some things I was taught not to write about or talk about. And I knew that like those are the things ultimately that I needed to write or talk about to look some of that stuff directly in the face and feel where your body has actually been. And then I started trying to write this new book called Heavy, which is a book written directly to my mother about us and about us.

The consequences of not talking about joy and harm and hurt and abuse and wonder, you know, if there is a turning point, it's like when I really sit down to be like, mom, I'm writing this book to you, which means I have to talk to you about a lot of things we didn't talk about.

And, you know, I was like, we're not you know, it's not going to be no promises, not going to be no congratulating ourselves for having this conversation. It's going to be messy at times. It's going to feel brutal. But I'm telling you, like, I really need this at this point. And I think we need this at this point as as a mother and a child. And so then we just sit down and we start having these conversations over the course of a few years together.

where we actually do start to put words to some of what happened, where we actually do sit in what we are apologizing for, where we reckon with the way to where we've been. And then we talk about where we want to go. And that's that's what happened. That's what happened with us. You know, I mean, and that doesn't mean that like the book was a panacea, like the book was the corrective to make everything right. But the writing of the book gave us the opportunity to sit down and

and be honest with one another and be dishonest with one another, but still like sit down and do work that we should have done a long time ago. And I just want to, I want to try to be a better person, but I don't want to be a better person at the expense of the truth.

And I'd be like, Mom, remember that day you picked me up and your eye was swollen? And then she'd tell me what she remembers about that day. And then the question I ultimately asked my mom in every memory was like, what did your body remember when blank happened? She was grateful that I wrote the book and thankful because it helped us talk about things we had never talked about. And then when the book started to do well, I think she was

She was ecstatic that like her son created just an art object that people who value art objects really valued. But I've turned my relationship with my mom inside out. And that's cool in a way. But like, it's also really scary to have like a product of your insides that's

being like bartered and you know like shared or sold for people who might not know much about the context of who we are necessarily you know what i'm saying like there are people who buy this book who might even like this book who i've been taught like you can't trust

The gambling was the hardest thing because you work ultimately to feed an addiction, but that addiction has no, like most addiction has no love for you, no love for my mom, no love for me. And so, you know, telling my mom that I too was addicted to gambling was hard, fam.

So the hardest thing to write about was the gambling, because to write about the gambling effectively, I have to write about my body. To write about my body, I have to write about abuse. To write about abuse, I have to also write about sex and joy. To write about sex and joy, I also have to write about my grandma. To write about my grandma, I have to write about humiliation. So you have to do all of this stuff at one time, because that's the way I think the world works. It comes into you as these very tightly wound webs of everything.

But the one thread in that tightly wound thing that was hardest to write about was definitely the gambling because it is connected to every other thing that I was afraid to write and talk about. My mom, you know, she's just going with the flow. But ultimately, I think she feels a mix of like extreme pride, gratitude, but also just I think she worries a bit about what it means to put a book out like

like this in this country, where there are a lot of people who haven't tended to their mess. And like most Americans, when you read other people who haven't tended to their mess, you're like, oh, I'm better than that person. Look at what those people have had to go through. One thing I know for sure, my mom never wanted to feel pity from any group of people, definitely not from white folks, but anybody.

It's just complicated. You know, I know we're in a better place and there's nothing I won't talk to my mom about today. There's nothing I won't sit there and ask her to talk with me about. But it's also like nothing is pure, you know, like so tomorrow we might not be in a good place, you know what I'm saying? But we're definitely in a better place now.

And I know that I love her and I know I want to be as close to her as I can. And I know that I don't have a chance of making it to, you know, 45 without her. And I know she doesn't have a chance of making it to 66 without me. We are going to hold on to each other and not forget who we've been or what we did and try to be better and try to be loving, but never at the expense of honesty or truth.

Today's episode of This Is Actually Happening featured Kiese Lehman. Kiese is a professor of English and the author of the book Heavy. You can see more of his work at kieselahman.com. That's K-I-E-S-E-L-A-Y-M-O-N dot com. This Is Actually Happening is brought to you by me, Witt Misseldein. If you love what we do, you can join the community on our official Instagram page at Actually Happening.

You can also rate and review the show on iTunes, which helps tremendously to boost visibility to a larger community of listeners. Thank you for listening. Until next time, stay tuned.

If you like This Is Actually Happening, you can listen to every episode ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence and then she left him there.

In January 2022, local woman Karen Reid was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

And after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.