We recorded this interview with Deesha Philyaw shortly after she found out that her debut collection of short stories, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, had won the Story Prize (2020/2021). We spoke with her about these stories and their masterfully readable exploration of the intersection of Black women, sex, and church; writing about home when you've made home elsewhere; and how to navigate consent issues that arise when writing about your children.
Author Bio:
Deesha Philyaw is an author, columnist, essayist, and public speaker.The Secret Lives of Church Ladies won the Story Prize (2020/2021), was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and a 2021 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, Apogee Journal, and elsewhere. Philyaw is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow.
To Learn More:
Visit us online at Freedom Reads and follow us on Twitter @million_book
[00:00:00] Reginald Dwayne Betts:: There's somebody in like, you know, Sydney, Australia right now with a book in their hand is thinking about the world. Along the same lines of the conversation that we're having.
[00:00:12] Jason Reynolds: It's literally us manipulating and maneuvering 26 letters into different arrangements that might just liberate somebody.
[00:00:21] Miriam Toews: Literacy is, is freedom.
[00:00:25] Reginald Dwayne Betts:: So, so many people was yelling, you know, and it was wild to me. I was like, this is literature right here. You to be, I was like, I was like, this is the importance of books.
[00:00:36] Betts: You're listening to the freedom takes a podcast from the million book project. I'm your host Reginald Dwayne Betts. I'm a poet, a lawyer, and a director of a million book project.
[00:00:48] Kelly Hernandez: And I'm Kelly Hernandez guest co-host, I'm a student at Yale working with Dwayne on the million book project.
[00:00:54] Betts: So, you know, on this show, we talk to authors about their books and about their lives as readers and as writers and really about what it means to be free.
Now today Deesha Philyaw is our guest: author, columnist, essayist, and public speaker. Her book, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is killing it. And by that, I mean, it's a 2020 finalist for the national book award for fiction. It is a 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction finalist, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. And, and listen, you heard it here first, maybe second, but the book has won the 2020 Story Prize. Her work has been listed as notable in the best American essay series and a writing on race, parent and agenda and culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney's.
The rump is brevity apology journal, and elsewhere. Could you introduce The Secret Lives of Church Ladies for our listeners who haven't read it? And treat us to a reading.
[00:02:02] Deesha Philyaw: Absolutely. Thank you. Um, the secret lives of church ladies is a collection of nine short stories about black women, sex, and the Black church.
And I'm especially glad to be here reading it to you because ultimately it's a book about freedom. I'm going to read excerpts from two of the stories. The first excerpt is from a story called Snowfall. And all you need to know, um, to get into this one is that the narrator's voice that you hear, um, her name is Arlitha and when she says "we" she's talking about herself and her girlfriend, Rhonda. When my teaching job at the university brought us here last summer, we knew there would be snow, but we didn't know the stuff would shape the course of so many of our days and nights.
Neither of us has fully mastered driving in the snow yet. And our experience with Uber drivers has been hit or miss. So, we stock up on groceries and run as many errands as possible on clear days. But, it's not just the snow. The cold temperatures alone have kept us in binge watching episodes of The Office and having Thai food delivered.
There's just something about being out in it that makes us mildly cranky and singularly focused on getting to the next heated place. We were born and raised in warmer places, Georgia and Florida. Warmer too, in the residual charm, polite smiles, and gentility of the white people whose ancestors owned ours. In the South the weather does not force tears from your eyes, causing the faces of passing strangers to register worry about you for a millisecond. It's the wind, you want to tell them, but a millisecond is not enough time. In the South, the weather does not hurt you down to your bones or force you to wake up a half an hour early to remedy what has been done to your steps, your sidewalk, your driveway, and your car as you slept.
But the South has hurricanes. They say, yes, but not damn near daily, not for a full quarter of the year. You tell people up here that you're from the South and nine times out of 10, they say the same old thing. "I'm sure you miss the sunshine." Rhonda and I both miss taking sunshine and easy morning commutes for granted, but what we really miss are the laughter and embrace of our mothers and grandmothers and aunties kin and not kin.
We missed the big oak tables in their dining rooms, where as kids in the seventies and eighties, we ate bowl after bowl of their banana pudding. As they talk to each other about how much weight you gained, like you weren't even there. We miss helping them snap green beans and shell peas sitting at their kitchen tables, watching the young and the restless on the TV, perched on the passed through.
We miss how they loved Victor Newman, hated Jill Foster, and envied Miss Chancellor, and how she dripped diamonds and chandeliers. We miss their bear brown arms reaching to hang clothes on the line with wooden pins. We missed their sun tea brewed all day in big jars on the picnic table in the backyard.
Then later loaded with sugar and sipped over plates of their fried chicken in the early evening. We miss lying next to them at night. And they're four poster beds with two soft mattresses covered by iron sheets and three generation old blankets. We miss their house coats, perfumed with Absorbine Junior Liniment and hints of the white shoulders they'd spritzed on from an atomizer that morning before church. We miss tracing the soft folds in their skin when we held hands and watched our favorite TV shows in their beds. Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing and Falcon Crest. We miss how they laughed and were easy with each other, how their friendships lasted lifetimes, outlasting wayward husbands and ungrateful children.
Outlasted that time Alma caught Joe cheating and she whacked him on the top of the head with the sword he'd brought back from the war, but he told the people at the hospital, he didn't know who did it. Outlasted having to hide your medicine bottles and your shoes because otherwise seven of your nine children were liable to steal them.
We miss how they seem to judge everyone, but themselves. Or maybe that judgment was in the nerve pills. They procured from the Chinese doctor on Bay street, who didn't ask questions. We miss their furtive cups of brown liquor on Friday and unabashed cries for Jesus come Sunday. We miss their one gold tooth that made us wonder who they had been as young women.
We miss their blue crabs, the shells boil to a blood red and wash tubs atop bricks over makeshift fires built in the yard. The wash tubs reminded us of cauldrons full of rock salt and cayenne drenched water bubbling and rolling, mesh bags of seasonings and halved onions and peppers floating on top, along with potatoes and ears of corn.
We miss how they stood over those cauldrons, like witches stirring a potion. With sweat beating on the tips of their noses and smoke swirling around their hands and wrists they willed it long handled spoons to press the frantic flailing crabs toward their deaths. We miss how they made our Easter dresses and pound cakes and a way out of no way. But we lost all those things when we chose each other.
Only the memories remain. Which is why, even though we grew up in different places, so many of our bedtime conversations start with, "remember when," as we lie there in the dark with our nostalgia and nothing to distract us from it, not even each other, not anymore.
The next excerpt I'll read is from a story called Peach Cobbler. Peach Cobbler is a story told through the voice of a girl named Olivia. We meet her when she's five, and then the story follows her into adolescence. And her life is marked by the fact that her mother is having an affair with their pastor, with the pastor of their church.
And Olivia has the burden of keeping, the secret. My mother's peach cobbler was so good, it may God himself cheat on his wife. When I was five, I hovered around my mother in the kitchen watching close enough to memorize all the ingredients and steps by the time I was six, but not too close to make her yell at me for being in the way, and not close enough to see the exact measurements she used.
She never wrote the recipe down. Without having to be told, I learned not to ask questions about that cobbler or about God. I learned not to say anything at all about him hunching over our kitchen table, every Monday, eating plate after plate of peach cobbler, and then disappearing into the bedroom I shared with my mother.
I became a silent student of my mother and her cobbler making ways, even when I was older and no longer believe that God and Reverend Troy Neely were one in the same, I still longed to perfect the sweetness and textures of my mother's cobbler. My mother who fed me TV dinners, bake the peach cobbler with fresh peaches every Monday, her day off from the diner where she waited tables.
She always said Sunday was her Saturday and Monday was her Sunday. What I knew was that none of her days were for me and for many of those Mondays off and on during my childhood, God, to my child's mind would stop by and eat an entire eight by eight pan of cobbler. My mother never ate any of the cobbler herself.
She said she didn't like peaches. She would shoo me out of the kitchen before God could offer me any, but I doubt that he would have offered, even if I'd sat right down next to him. God was an old fat man, like a black Santa. And I imagined my mother's peach cobbler contributing to his girth. Some Mondays God would arrive after dinner and leave as I lay curled up on the couch, watching Little House on the Prairie, in the living room. Other times my mother and God would already be in the bedroom when I got home from school. I could hear moaning and pounding, like a board, hitting a wall. As soon as I entered the house, I would shut the front door quietly behind me and tiptoed down the hall to listen outside the bedroom door.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. My mother would cry. I could hear God too. His voice low and growly saying "yes, yes, yes."
[00:11:07] Betts: So that reading,
[00:11:08] Philyaw: Thank you.
[00:11:09] Betts: You know I think, one, it is so hard to be funny, um, as a writer and to be serious at the same time. And one of the things I'm just really impressed that as, um, I know that it's all of the technical work that's done in those stories to make them cohere in a way that they do, but I could close my eyes and just feel like if somebody that's just like telling me how it is and that's the thing I greatly appreciate about it.
It has this power based on what's being said, um, and it's helped by the craft, but it's like what was being said really, really matters. I think that was just, just dope.
[00:11:46] Hernandez: Yeah, no, no. I love Peach Cobber by the way, so I'm so happy you've read that. Um, it's like probably
[00:11:51] Betts: You love peach cobbler the food?
[00:11:52] Hernandez: Both.
[00:11:53] Betts: The book?
[00:11:56] Hernandez: Both. *Laughs* Both, uh...
So Deesha, uh, as a queer woman who grew up in the Catholic church, I really appreciated also the epigraph in the beginning of the book.
[00:12:07] Philyaw: Yes.
[00:12:08] Hernandez: So for the listeners who haven't read it, um, it says, "Let it be known, I did not fall from grace. I leapt to freedom" by Ansel Elkins, Autobiography of Eve. And I think it's so fitting, uh, because in many of these stories, um, you write about women who are often restricted, um, boxed in as, as the folks in Snowfall are.
Um, what do you hope young women take away from your stories?
[00:12:36] Philyaw: Man, I hope they take away that they can get free much sooner than a lot of us did. They don't have to wait until they're 35 and, uh, at the, on the occasion of their mothers too early death, like I did, to finally say this isn't working for me. Um, and so I hope it saves them.
A couple of decades and gets, and they get free sooner. I hope that it sparks conversations that they'll have with their mothers and anybody in their lives that are invested in those restrictions invested in those binaries that don't serve anybody. Um, I hope they see themselves. Um, and, and know that they're not alone because I think a lot of times we think that we're the only ones grappling with these things and the secrecy of it,
is because we've been told that we can't even speak these things. We can't even speak these feelings and these truths. And so we hide it. And so hopefully by putting it on the page, they'll understand that, you know, this is something that a lot of us go through and that there's a real sisterhood. In the best sense of that word, um, in that we help each other get free.
You know, we, we make the most of what we have and what we have and what we've always had is stories.
[00:14:01] Hernandez: In, um, in all the stories are all these different relationships and women, different stages of their lives. Um, but one that seems to come up very often is the relationships between mothers and daughters.
[00:14:13] Philyaw: Yeah
[00:14:14] Hernandez: So you've also written a co-parenting book with your ex partner. I thought that was incredible by the way. Um, it stood out to me though that some of these stories, uh, were from the perspectives of daughters. So I was wondering if this was something that you did intentionally to write from the perspective of a daughter or not to write from the perspective of a mother?
[00:14:36] Philyaw: Believe it or not, it was not intentional. I sent the manuscript in. And when it was done. And I was thinking about the stories and I was like, there's a lot of mothers, daughters stuff in this. And it was like, well, duh, you know, I lost my mother when she was 52 and I was 34 to breast cancer. And we made our peace. I mean, it was, it was definitely the defining relationship of my life.
One of the most difficult relationships I have ever had, but we had six weeks before she died and we got right. But clearly we had some unfinished business and it showed up in these stories. It showed up in the mothers, it showed up in the daughters. Um, there are pieces of us all over this book. There's, but there's no one character that's me or one that's my mother. You're right in that it's daughter perspectives, because I tend to need a wide birth, before I tackle stuff that's rooted in my personal life. Um, I'm still mothering. I'll be mothering forever. So I don't know when I will take that position. You know, the mother position. Part of it too, is, I wrote about my kids a lot when they were little, I wrote a column for Literary Mama for four years, um, about my kids and about my youngest daughter in particular, who is, she is adopted.
And I have regrets about writing about my kids as much as I did, because they could not consent to that.
[00:16:11] Betts: I do want to say what I found powerful about this though, is that, I got a, I got a, a, like a really profound glimpse into the interior landscape of women. Um, those who suffered in really different ways, whose fucked up cause it's the catalyst for it was men who were mistreating them. Right? And I'm thinking about the way in which sometimes our role in the world actually strangles your freedom. And I guess my question is, um, what is the parallel story written by somebody else? I mean, really written by somebody that identifies as a man who you feel like even comes close to approaching a level of being seen, that gets revealed in these stories on like multiple layers.
[00:17:05] Philyaw: I think about the question of what I thought you were going to ask me was, um, you know, men's role in all of this. And I would have said listening and talking to other men, um, because I I've had men kind of say a variation of what you said, which is, you know, I'm seeing and hearing these women and girls for the first time.
And I always say, no, this is not the first time y'all just don't listen to us.
[00:17:31] Betts: Well see I ain't say that cause I listen. So I just want to be clear
[00:17:34] Philyaw: Okay Okay.
[00:17:35] Betts: To the listeners, like I didn't say that
[00:17:37] Philyaw: *Laughs*
I want to go back to, um, Dwayne's question, cause I had more time to think about it. Nathan McCall Makes Me Want To Holler. And, um, not Claude McKay is a Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land?
[00:17:55] Betts: Yeah, it's Claude Brown.
[00:17:57] Philyaw: Those two books. Um, I really saw. Black men and boys, I felt like I was being led in on secrets.
When I read those books in it, it made my heart hurt for them. Um, I felt like I understood so much and you know, there's a huge window of time. I mean, they were writing about totally different decades and in totally different places, you know, Nathan McCall, I believe he was in Virginia and Claude Brown was writing about New York City, um, and, and upstate New York.
Um, and those books just devastated me.
[00:18:36] Betts: Uh, I still know cat- dude Tootsie. I still remember the cat name that got raped in the McCall book. I think, like men know how to write about violence that we've experienced. And I include myself in this. I think we still know how to do a better job of depicting the violence.
Then like fully engaging in what it means to resist the violence. And I don't mean that you have to, because sometimes there was no resistance in a moment. And when we talk about like sexual violence in prison, we actually don't have an imaginative response that says, how do I intervene? In fact, you know, typically like we don't intervene in any kind of violence in prison.
And so like part of the abolitionists conversation, part of a decarceration conversation should put some onus and some burden on people who are in prison. For us. I mean, I'm not there anymore, but for much better job to be done and thinking about what it is to live in such a violent, in a brutally violent place.
But, um, that shit is frightening because men don't, we can't write what you wrote. We can't, because it is really predicated on "I will fuck you up. If you step out of line, I will hurt you." And that is like, that is my end response to everything. If you step out of line, I am going to hurt you or I'm a try, right?
[00:20:02] Philyaw: Well, it's interesting you say that that, that they do, but then in prison they don't on behalf of someone else and
[00:20:09] Betts: Right.
[00:20:10] Philyaw: You know.
[00:20:11] Betts: And I think outside a lot of times we don't on behalf of women.
[00:20:14] Philyaw: Not even in conversation, I don't even like a physical, physical violence, isn't happening, but one of the things that we often want for you all, we always say, men, talk to other men.
Maybe I'll maybe they'll listen to you because they're not listening to us. Um, but yeah, with Jaya and, you know, th the violence with the, or her protecting herself with the bottle, Is, uh, you know, uh, sort of a precursor to what comes later. And, you know, when I was a girl that age, we weren't doing that.
[00:20:46] Hernandez: So, so just, just pause for a minute. I don't think people know what is going on in Jaya story. Can you tell us a little bit about that moment?
[00:20:53] Philyaw: Yeah. Jaya is my favorite character. First. I want to, you know, in all of the stories and I love all my characters, but I love that girl the most. Um, she's 14 years old.
Um, she is being raised by her great grandmother. And I think for context, um, her neighbor is a sexual predator, who's 35 years old. Um, and she is also being, she and her friend are also being harassed on the street by, um, other men and boys in the neighborhood. And she fights back.
[00:21:25] Betts: Nah, she don't just fight back. She's like, this is the code. She's like, I'm trained to go on site. I'm breaking bottles. It's funny though, because you had mentioned earlier about, um, regret um writing about your children because they couldn't give consent. And I think that I think consent is important and especially any kind of sexual consent, but I wonder cause, um, cause my son is like backed up so he could hear what I'm saying right now.
And I wonder what permission I have to write about him and his brother. So he's 13 and his brother's nine. And I do believe that. Just like everybody else we choose to write about, they should give consent. But then I'm like, yo, you fucking shout, man. You're supposed to be seen and not heard. And, and like, I just don't want to pretend like, like you have too much right to govern. And I hope that I don't embarrass you. But part of me feels like I just have to say whatever I need to say under all of the circumstances.
[00:22:23] Philyaw: Well, and that's the thing, cause it's still, it's still our stories to tell and you run up, you bump up against this line of where does my story end and there's begin and the other way around, and then there's overlap.
Um, it's tricky and, and, and I don't have any easy answers and I think there's no blanket protocol. I think every parent child has to sort that out for themselves. I'm certainly not saying never, you know, I think it's a problem to ever write about your kids. I just wish I had done it differently. Um, and I did get one occasion to do it differently when my youngest she's 17 now, when she was 13, I was more cognizant of you know, trying to respect her privacy. And I was writing an essay about her wanting to take a DNA test because she's adopted and she wants to know as much as she can, you know, about her biological self and roots. And so we did that and I wrote an essay and the editor was like, there's just something missing.
I'm like, yeah, my daughter. Cause I, you know, I'm trying to tow this, trying to carve, I was like gerrymander, the damn essay. Right? And so, um, the editor was like, well, can you talk to her about it? And so Peyton and I started talking about it and I was like, you know, can we just write this together? Can we just, you know, then I won't speak for you.
I can speak about you, but then you can speak for yourself as well. And so we wrote that essay together.
[00:23:52] Betts: Oh, that's dope. I think that's, that's probably one good way to, to approach it. I, I tell my son, we writing the book together. He was like, really we doing this. I was like, damn right. How are you going to get to college?
This college fund, baby.
Let him know! This is how it works.
[00:24:07] Hernandez: I'm not, I'm not a parent. So I'm just, just sit here and recognize that there is a lot of interesting consent issues that I'm not privy to. But I appreciate it. I'll just say for one, as a, as a daughter of immigrants, parents, like that's never crossing their mind, like consent, et cetera, et cetera.
That just like not at all how I was raised. So I appreciate that y'all are having these conversations. I eventually will myself, hopefully, but, um, to get back into the conversation about Peach Cobbler, um, one thing that I really appreciated also is, um, I mean, I think I had just never read something like Olivia's character and the situation she was in. One of the things that, um, we often see as women in shows in like novels and such is, is often fighting the other woman, quote unquote. And I was just really appreciative that that dynamic was not present, um, in this. But I also made me wonder, um, that there's a line in the story, um, that made me think that the narrator from Peach Cobbler, Olivia, was also the narrator in "Instructions for Married, uh, Christian Husbands." And you're nodding. Is that an affirmative? Yes, that was her.
[00:25:26] Philyaw: Yeah, that was her. I couldn't, I couldn't let Olivia go. I didn't plan that, but when I was writing that story, um, and I got to that part and it was like in she, oh, I own a bakery and I make the best Peach cobbler in town, I was like, that's her, that's her. This is where she landed. Cause I think I, I, I needed to know for myself. Um, and I didn't know when I ended the story the way I did, I did. I felt the same way that, people tell me, they felt, which is like, what's she going to do? You know? But I still felt like that was a good way to end.
Um, and then you mentioned about not pitting the women in the tr- in the, you know, the, the affair triad against each other. That was definitely an intentional choice. Um, even though Olivia's mother kind of does it by proxy by sending her child into that woman's house, which was foul.
[00:26:20] Betts: It's interesting was it? I wanted to say, was foul at first and then I thought when you have nothing really to give your child, what does it mean to be so desperate that when you want your child to see a better life, you showed him the kind of life that it feels like is denied from you. Where else would she has sent her daughter, you know, it's just like, that's the strange part about it.
Cause if some, it was some power in that too. You go to the, this dude's son who has all of the opportunities that you don't, you, you are affirmatively like capable of being who he is because you make him who he is. You know? So I don't know. I don't know. I. I struggle with that. I thought that that was a power move.
Well,
[00:27:07] Philyaw: It's the same reason. She didn't want her to go to the birthday party, cause it was like, you know, I don't want you thinking that, you know, this is how life is going to be for you. Cause it's not. But where she failed on both counts is she didn't think about, well, how does this make my child feel? And again, we were talking about old school parents, children didn't have feelings in the seventies and eighties. I, you know.
[00:27:32] Betts: I'm not certain they have feelings now.
[00:27:35] Philyaw: Right? So that's where she, you know, she had whatever her intentions were, she didn't pause to say, okay, that's how I feel about it. How might my child feel about it? Because, one of the things that's at least hard for me as being my mother's child. And I just knew I wasn't going to do this as a parent.
And Kelly, I will just tell you, you may not fuck up the way your parents fucked up, but you will fuck up. So just, you might as well just do what you want. If I had parenting to do it again, I do more of what I wanted to do, cause it's like, there's going to be some shit they're not happy about no matter what you do. But, um, but that was, that was the thing.
Like my mother saw me so much as an extension of herself. And I think that when people do that, they don't always think, "how is this decision going to land?" And my mother had trouble not taking it personally that we were so different.
[00:28:31] Betts: Man, you just taught me something because I do think one of the huge troubles I have is seeing my children as extensions of me.
I mean, we even have language for it, you know, that's your little mini me, it looked like you spit him out. Did you birth him? Dwayne? I was like, yeah. Yeah. And that shit was labor intensive. You know. It's this line, you know, it's this line in Snowfall that I just wanted to, like this is a beautiful line. And the narrator says, it's really talking about how they moved to a new city and that they have friends and that, and that they have work that they love.
But then she says, uh, "but friendship is not the same as history." Snowfall is, is, is really about the relationship between the two women, but it's also about their relationship today at home. And I wonder how, how do you think about that, that tension and that struggle, um, as a writer, when, when your world is, is frequently, not the community you grew up in and where do you locate your home? Do you still, are you from, um, Pittsburgh?
[00:29:35] Philyaw: From Jacksonville, Florida.
[00:29:37] Betts: See, I mean, so like, how do you think about home? If, if, if that's true, if friendship is not the same as history, how do you locate home? Um, both in your work, and also how you try to make your work intersect with your life.
[00:29:52] Philyaw: I mean, my feelings about home wrote this book. I mean, it was nostalgia, it was memory, it was longing. Um, because, you know, I grew up what people would call poor slash working class. Um, but in retrospect, I had a great childhood. I was raised by a mother and grandmother who absolutely loved me to pieces, whatever issues I had with my mom. I didn't doubt for a second.
There was not a moment. I didn't know that I was absolutely loved and cared for and safe. And, um, and so, even when my circum-, my economic and social circumstances improved when I was a stay at home mom. Um, and you know, I had two degrees and, and uh, one of them, an Ivy league degree and all of that, I was so unhappy.
I was so unhappy. And so when I was writing and I was dissatisfied, so I tell people, I haven't always been writing about church ladies per se, but I've always been writing about dissatisfied women because I was dissatisfied. Um, and it just showed me, it doesn't matter how much stuff you have. What I didn't have was that feeling that I had growing up with my friends that, you know, that it was just the best place in the world.
You know, we go outside and play and be gone all day. But the kids I grew up with, we're not like, you know, still connected. I mean, we're connected like on Facebook, but not connected. And so I miss that and that's what I keep going back to that era of my life. And that's where the church ladies live and, and that's where my grandmother's friends live and the Salem cigarettes and the doers and the Johnny Walker Red and all of that stuff that, you know, when I think back to, um, my childhood and those moments that's what I miss. And Snowfall in particular came from that, um, on a freezing weekend here in Pittsburgh. And I was trying to write something that would fit in the collection, but be about feeling displaced and feeling and having that question. Where is home? Because I was asked to read as part of, um, my friend's book launch and my theme that I connected to my work and her work and the other reader's work was displacement.
And I felt like a displaced southerner in this cold place, cold in every sense of the word. And I miss my mother. I miss mama. She had been gone a decade at that point, and there's not a day that I don't miss my mother, but I was really missing my mother. And, um, and that's where that story came from. Just feeling like my mother was too much, but then I wanted her and it was cold outside and I didn't want to shovel the damn snow out, you know, uh, all of that, that ache, that ache, that ache, that ache. That's where that story came from.
[00:32:53] Hernandez: So now I want to take a moment to talk about another story. Dear Sister. So in this story, Dear Sister, um, it really resonated with me for different reasons. Uh, first of all, that it was hilarious. I was cackling at times, so, uh, I really appreciated that, but then it also hit close to home because my family had long heard rumors about girls that look just like us growing up.
Um, and there was one day, uh, that my mom, my grandma, and my aunts , and myself basically show up on the doorstep of my grandpa's entire other family. It was messy.
[00:33:28] Philyaw: I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh.
[00:33:32] Hernandez: It was messy. We showed up with gifts though and food and a lot of good food. So it was good. It could have gone worse is all I'll say. But like, what I really, really appreciate from Dear Sister is that they have some type of kinship that sisters have growing up when they grow up. Um, it wasn't necessarily the reality for my family we're working on it.
Uh, but I'm wondering, um, if there was a story like Dear Sister that resonated with you the most, or that you connected the most to.
[00:34:07] Philyaw: I'll say this about Dear Sister. Um, I have four half sisters, so that's five of us. Four of us knew each other growing up. And my one sister Tracy and I, our mothers raised us like sisters.
And then we met our other two sisters when they were little and then once when they were older and that was it. And so the four of us came together though when our father died. And we were sitting around at my stepmother's house. And her mother, so I guess that's my step mother-in- grandmother-in-law, um, was like, y'all know, y'all got another sister y'all and we had heard her, we'd heard that over the years, but she never came around.
And, um, she was like, she, you know, she deserves to know. And it was a wild coincidence. My stepsister had her, our other sister's number in her phone, because they had been to like a, you know, like a pampered chef party together or something. And she was like, what's her name? I got her number right here. So we like let's call her.
So it's not like showing up on somebody's doorstep, but I don't recommend what we did. Cause we were all excited about her. Not thinking there's a reason this woman has not come and connected with this side of the, her family. She didn't want to, and I, I don't blame her. Um, but us calling her like that made it seem like we were all close.
And so Dear Sister, those are the relationships, the kind of relationships that I wish I had with my sisters. But I only have one. I only, I'm only close to one of them. I mean, now we all have like the group chat, including the sister who we called up. Um, but back then, you know, we didn't have that. So Dear Sister is me imagining what could have been. Even the mess of it.
Even the fact that, you know, Tashina and Renee don't get along. Um, but even that I miss that we didn't have that, um, so.
[00:36:16] Betts: Man
[00:36:17] Philyaw: See call your everybody call whoever that is that you, you know.
[00:36:22] Betts: I'm about to call my sisters. I got, I got, I got three, I got three half sisters and they got, I mean, I have three sisters, they got the same, we got the same dad, different moms and they got the same mom.
And then I got a brother with a different mom and I got another brother with a different mom. So my dad got six and, and we don't talk. I was locked up. I feel bad though. Cause um, cause they actually tried, you know, they would write me letters at least one of them will write me all the time. And I was just like, I came home and I was just like about my business. I feel bad, actually.
They really did try to reach out. And you always are trying to figure out how to like, build a relationship. But sometimes when you, when you didn't have one and you lack, you say like, like you just say, you say like, uh, like friendship is not the same as history. You know, not having a history with my sisters meant that, you know those histories built like synapses and shit in your brain. And you remember when, when you got mad or whatever, and then when that's disappeared...
[00:37:16] Philyaw: Right.
[00:37:16] Betts: It's hard to, it's hard to recover it.
[00:37:18] Philyaw: Your siblings, um, that, that trying to connect thing, it doesn't have to be this grand production. I'm gonna tell you what I have with my, my sisters right now.
We have a group chat and we say happy Friday every Friday. And we may send a little gifs and things on the group chat. And there may not be anything else until the next Friday and that's okay. But that's, that's one thing that we can all do that just says I'm here and we're here.
[00:37:46] Hernandez: Um, I'm loving my sister every day. And especially today with this conversation. Um, also I think that's honestly better than a big production as my family found out. So...
[00:38:00] Deesha Philyaw: Letters better than calls because a phone call, cause that was too much, but a letter, um, you know, that person can take it in as, as, as much or as little on their timeframe. So it it's, it's just grace for everybody.
[00:38:14] Hernandez: Yeah. Um, so I guess if it's okay with y'all I'll ask the last question. Yeah. Okay, cool. So we ask all our guests, this question, Frederick Douglas said that when we read, we become forever free. How do you think about this relationship with reading and freedom?
[00:38:36] Philyaw: I'm going to be real. Can I keep it like really real?
So this is the same man that he and his white mistress mocked, his illiterate black wife. So my first reaction to that quote is like, with so many great men, when they say things they weren't thinking about me, they weren't thinking about people that look like me. They weren't thinking about black women.
So that was first. So now I need you to say the quote again, so I can actually think of that.
[00:39:09] Hernandez: No. That's like, that's real though. And I appreciate that because, I mean, I, I remember reading that for the first time and being like deeply disappointed, but like also not surprised at the same time.
[00:39:22] Philyaw: Right. Cause you know, we're multitudes, you know, we do some fucked up shit and we're great at the same damn time, you know, there are so many things that we love about Frederick Douglas and, you know.
[00:39:35] Betts: And I didn't know that. And I know that I've read that book because we all, that's why we read books multiple times. Cause cause sometimes we gloss over the worst parts of ourselves and I think it's important to remind ourselves that we need to live up to our expectations. Right. So I'll read it. Frederick Douglas said that when we read, we become forever free.
How do you think about the relationship between reading and freedom?
[00:40:01] Philyaw: I know I read myself free. Um, so I it's, I can definitely see a direct connection because reading was what allowed me to know that the world was bigger than what was right in front of my face. And I don't look at my, um, My childhood or my circumstances as anything I needed to escape, but I think it's something that all of us need to know that the world is large and that we are trying to, as we're trying to find our place in it, the place for us might not be the place where we started.
It may be somewhere else. And it's great to see as much of the world as you can, but you don't know what's out there, if you don't read about it for most of us, that's how we get started. Um, and so I tend to, you know, get lost in the worlds of the stories that are created. And I've been doing that since I was reading Judy Blume, who was like my favorite author when I was growing up.
And so that's what books did for me. They told me about what was possible. Um, and so, having the freedom to move in the world, move beyond where you, you know, where you find yourself. Obviously, you know, having that freedom is what I wanted for myself is what I want for my children to never feel like they have to stay in any physical space or any emotional space, any relationship space.
Um, so reading helped me know that. There's much more that's possible beyond my present circumstances. And to me, that's, that's freeing.
[00:41:34] Betts: Well, you know, we greatly appreciate having you here.
[00:41:36] Philyaw: Likewise.
[00:41:37] Betts: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, folks, that excellent book that will be coming your way soon.
Thanks for joining us for The Freedom Takes a new podcast from the Million Book Project. We'll be back next time with another contemporary writer. You can find out more about the Million Book Project, and subscribe to our newsletter at millionbookproject.org. Our initiative was made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
This podcast was produced by Erin Slomski-Pritz with production assistance by Elsa Hardy, Kelly Hernandez, Tess Wheelwright, and Molly Augner. Theme music by Reed Turchi.