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This autumn, fall for Moth Stories as we travel across the globe for our mainstages. We're excited to announce our fall lineup of storytelling shows. From New York City to Iowa City, London, Nairobi, and so many more, The Moth will be performing in a city near you, featuring a curation of true stories. The Moth mainstage shows feature five tellers who share beautiful, unbelievable, hilarious, and often powerful true stories on a common theme. Each one told reveals something new about our shared connection.
To buy your tickets or find out more about our calendar, visit themoth.org slash mainstage. We hope to see you soon. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns. One funny thing about storytelling is that you're almost always talking about the past, even if the past just happened a few minutes ago. Sometimes someone will be telling a story about a harrowing life-or-death incident, and there's a built-in spoiler alert since the fact that they're here to tell the story means that they survived. Right.
The stories in this episode are all told by people who've been forced to confront the past, or in the case of our first story, confront our country's past. The story concerns the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. It was told way back in 2008 in New York City, where we partnered with the public radio station WNYC. Jerry Mitchell is a bit of a modern-day Avenger, and we were so thrilled to have him tell a story for us. Here's Jerry, live at the Moth.
I'm standing on the front porch facing Byron D. LeBeckwith, the notorious Klansman who killed Medgar Evers. He wasn't caught doing that, but he was caught trying to plant a ticking time bomb outside a Jewish leader's home in New Orleans. You see, my stories are the ones that got the case reopened against him, as well as other Klansmen.
But he hadn't figured that out, or at least I thought so. My wife was eight months pregnant at the time. She begged me not to go visit him. It's a trap. I have to go. I don't want to raise the children by myself. I have to go. If you go, I'll never forgive you. Karen, I have to go. Beckwith made me answer all these questions before he'd ever let me come to his house. Where'd you grow up?
What are your parents' names? Where do they live? Where do you live? Where do you go to church? Are you white? Fortunately, my conservative Christian Southern upbringing meant I passed with flying colors. So he welcomed me at his house and walked me into the living room. And for six hours, he spewed one racist remark after another. After the interview ended, he walked me out into the darkness, walked me out to my car, then blocked my way.
He stood in front of me and said, "If you write positive things about white Caucasian Christians, God will bless you. If you write negative things about white Caucasian Christians, God will punish you. If God does not punish you directly, several individuals will do it for him." As soon as he got out of the way, I was in that car and down the hill.
My descent into the world of racist killers began when I saw the movie Mississippi Burning with a couple of FBI agents who investigated that case, which involved three civil rights workers who were killed in '64 in Mississippi, two of them from here in New York City. But that--the thing that's just always stuck in my craw is for someone to get away with a crime, especially murder, and that's what happened in these cases. And what made these cases so egregious was the fact
Not just that these Klansmen got away with murder, but the fact that everybody knew these Klansmen got away with murder. That's what upset me. I talked to Beckwith not too long after that, and he had figured it out by this point that I'd done the stories.
So I talked to him on the telephone and he said, "I'm gonna live to be 120. I don't know how much longer you've got. You're a reckless driver. You may have a wreck or somebody may molest you. Do you know somebody who'd do that?" And I said, "Do you?" It frightened me and I remember checking into my car for a while and the thing I realized was he could kill me but I also hated bullies.
Probably because of all those times I got the crap beaten out of me on the playground. And I wasn't going to be intimidated by Byron D. LeBeckwith. So I persisted. He was arrested, hauled into the courtroom, and then one day in the courtroom he spotted me, yelled at me, You see that boy over there? When he dies, he's going to Africa. I turned to my friend Ed and said,
You know, I've always wanted to go to Africa. On February 5th, 1994, a jury convicted Byron D. LeBeckwith of the murder of Meg Evers.
And when the word "guilty" rang out, the sound cascaded down the hall, the cries of joy, until it reached an open foyer of white and blacks and just exploded in applause. I just felt chills down my spine because I realized what had seemed so impossible
really was possible. There were dozens more cases that could be prosecuted other than this one. A couple of days later, the sheriff calls me and tells me that when they took Beckwith off, he kept saying two words. I'm like, what two words? Like, Jerry Mitchell? He's like, he would tell me, you know, well, you know, you might not want to go home the same way every night. And, you know, that kind of disturbed me a little bit. And
But I never told my wife about that because she was already worried I was going to be killed or her family harmed. She wanted me to write other investigative stories. But one day, the family of Vernon Dahmer asked me to come and meet with them in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And the widow of Vernon Dahmer, with tears in her eyes, asked me to help her find justice in her husband's case. So here I weighed my own family's interest
and heard her story, I couldn't say no. You may have never heard of Vernon Dahmer, but you should have. He was an African-American farmer who spent his whole life fighting for the rights of all to be able to vote. The Klan didn't like that. They attacked him and his family one frigid night, January 10th, 1966. They threw firebombs into the house, began firing their guns into the house.
He woke up, grabbed his shotgun, ran to the front of the house to defend his family so his family could escape safely out a back window. Unfortunately, the flames of the fire seared his lungs and he died later that day. A few weeks later in the mail came his voter registration card.
He had fought his whole life for the right of all Americans to vote, but had never been able to cast a ballot himself. The man who ordered that killing was a man by the name of Sam Bowers, the head of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, the most violent Klan organization in America. If you saw Bowers, he looked like a kind grandfather in a seersucker suit. And I had people tell me this too. They're like, "Jerry, why do you bother these old guys?" And I say, "Look,
The thing you're forgetting is these are just, these are young killers who just happen to get old. You see, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were responsible for at least 10 killings in Mississippi and Bowers ordered every single one of them. While I was investigating this case, I got a phone call from a Klansman. He said, "Did you think we were going to let you go unscathed? We know where you live. We've got pictures of you and your family."
Well, I've gotten a lot of death threats in doing what I do, but this one really frightened me because he's threatening my family. My wife became extremely upset about it. I tried my best to tell her, look, all right, I promise this is going to be it. I'm not doing any more after this. This is it. The guy who was the main witness against Bowers back in the 60s was a guy named Billy Roy Pitts. Billy Roy Pitts was involved in the killing, had dropped his gun, got caught,
pleaded guilty to murder and sentenced to life in prison. I've been told the reason there wasn't a record of that was because he went into the Federal Witness Protection Program. But in my research, I found out the Federal Witness Protection Program didn't even exist at the time. So guess what? He had never served a day of his life sentence. So I wanted to talk to him, but no one seemed to know where he was. And this will sound like an advertisement from an internet site, but I got on switchboard.com and typed his name.
And up it popped: Billy Roy Pitts. His address in Denham Springs, Louisiana, and his telephone number. So I called him. First 20 minutes of the conversation went like this: "How'd you find me? How'd you find me? How'd you find me?" It's on the internet. "The internet? I got an unlisted telephone number." I'm like, "Well, you have to take it up with them." So as a result of my story, Mississippi authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. He didn't like that.
In fact, he ran. And while he was on the run, he sent me an audio cassette tape in the mail, and I got it, and I put it and played it, and this is how it began. "Jerry, I just thought I'd let you know you've ruined my life." "But I promised if I talked to anybody, I'd talk to you, so here's this tape." "It proceeds to tell me all about his involvement killing Vernon Dahmer and his involvement in all this other Klan violence."
Shortly after that, he turned himself in, and this led to the arrest of Sam Bowers and his trial in August of 1998. One Klansman actually got up and said that the Klan was a benevolent organization, passing out fruit baskets to the needy at Christmas. Under cross-examination, he admitted that he had never actually passed out any fruit baskets himself. Bowers was represented by a lawyer,
for the Klan back in the 60s, he represented all these guys. And one of the perks of being a lawyer for the Klan back in those days was, well, free membership. So he's cross-examining Billy Roy Pitts about this planning meeting that took place prior to the actual raid. And he's like, "Mr. Pitts, who all was at that planning meeting?" And Pitts is like, "Ah, let's see. I was there. Sam Bowers was there. Well,
"You were there?" And Bowers' lawyer's like, "Uh, objection, your honor!" I've covered a lot of trials in my life, but that's the only trial I ever covered where a witness implicated the defense lawyer in the case. On August 21st, 1998, Sam Bowers was convicted and sent to prison, just one cell down from Byron D. LeBeckwith.
Back home, I had promised my wife I would stop, but I couldn't stop. My heart wouldn't let me. I couldn't let these Klansmen get away with murder. So I started secretly kind of working on these cases, continuing to work on these cases, and sure enough, she caught me. I was worried she'd just be furious with me. And she told me she was always going to worry about me. She would never stop worrying about me.
but that she understood these cases were more important than her fears. She gave me her blessing. I felt so, so relieved. It's like a burden had been lifted from my soul. Twenty-one more men followed Sam Bowers to prison after this, a miracle if ever there was one. And the FBI today is investigating dozens more killings that were unpunished in the civil rights era.
Not long after Sam Bowers was convicted, Billy Roy Pitts testified in this hearing. And when he got done testifying, he walked to the back of the courtroom and ran into the Dahmer family. There was a widow, Mrs. Dahmer, several of the Dahmer children. And Billy Roy Pitts apologized to Mrs. Dahmer for what he had done and asked for her forgiveness. And she forgave him.
And she began to cry. And the day her children were there began to cry. He began to cry. I began to cry. And isn't that what redemption's all about? Trying to make things right, even when they've gone so terribly wrong in the past. May God bless you in your own journey of redemption. Thanks, guys.
That was Jerry Mitchell. Jerry's investigative reporting helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars. He's a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, the author of the book Race Against Time, and founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. All of the convicted Klansmen he spoke about have died in prison. Coming up...
A woman meets a man who reminds her of her own family's complicated past. That's when the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns. In this show, we're talking about those moments in life when we're subtly confronted by our past.
We met our next storyteller at a show we produced at the stunning Majestic Theater in Texas, where we partnered with the San Antonio Book Festival and a show sponsored by Lifetime TV. Here's Reyna Grande live at the Moth. I was at the San Antonio Airport on my way home to Sacramento. This was city number 23 of my latest book tour, and I was fed up with airports and hotels.
I was tired and homesick, and I just wanted to be back with my children and my husband and celebrate Halloween with them before having to head out again. To be honest, I hated the thought of having to get back on another airplane. So I'm making my way down the jetway, and I notice this young Latino man.
Unlike me, he doesn't seem frustrated by traveling, but rather scared and disoriented. I noticed that he has no luggage with him, not even a backpack. He's wearing stained jeans and a white t-shirt, and he has no jacket. But in his hand, he's clutching a white envelope. And then it hits me. I know exactly who this young man is. I say to him,
"¿No tienes maleta?" He breaks into a smile, clearly relieved that I speak Spanish. He says, "No, no tengo nada." I have nothing. And then, without me asking, he confirms what I suspected. He tells me that he was released from an immigration detention center that morning. It was the envelope that alerted me to his situation.
A few years ago, I took donations to a migrant shelter in Tijuana, and I learned that when released from detention, migrants have nothing but the clothes on their backs and an envelope containing their paperwork. He says to me, "I've never been on an airplane before. How does this work? Where do I sit?" I tell him to follow me, and I find us a seat together.
After I show him how to put on his seatbelt, I learn that his name is Hector, that he's from Guatemala, and that he's been at the airport for eight hours with nothing to eat and no money. He devours the snacks I offer him while we share our stories, which are mirror images of each other. He tells me about his wife and his one-year-old daughter.
He had to leave them behind in Guatemala when he headed north to try to find a way out of the poverty, the instability, and the corruption in his country. Luckily, he's found himself a lawyer who's helping him with his asylum case, and in the meantime, he's been allowed to go live with relatives in Sacramento while he waits for his court date. What he wants more than anything in the world
is to be allowed to stay and for his wife and his daughter to be able to join him here so that they can start a new life together in this country. I recognize that desire. It's the same desire I once had for me and my siblings and my parents to be reunited, for my family to be put back together and be whole again. Like Hector,
My own father had to leave me behind when he headed north to look for work in Los Angeles. There were no jobs in my hometown, Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, which is the second poorest state in Mexico and at present, it's most violent. I grew up looking at a black and white photograph of my father hanging on the wall, memorizing every detail of his face.
wishing that his paper eyes could move and that he could see me, wishing that his paper mouth would open and that he would tell me he missed me as much as I missed him. I was nine years old the first time I met my father. I stood in my grandmother's living room, rooted to the floor in shock, staring at him.
I've almost given up hope that I would ever see him again, and now here he was in living color standing before me. And his skin was a beautiful dark brown, not a dull gray like in his black and white photograph. My aunt said to me, go say hello to your father, pushing me toward him. But he was a complete stranger to me, and all I wanted to do was run away.
Still, I forced myself to go to him, and I hugged him. He hugged me back too, but briefly, and I realized that I was a stranger to him too. My brother, my sister, and I asked him, so, are you finally back to stay with us? We couldn't bear the thought of losing him again, but he said he couldn't stay.
He said, "What kind of a life could he give his children earning a measly $5 a day?" He said that someone like him, a maintenance worker with a third grade education, was too poor and uneducated to qualify for a visa. Asylum was also out of our reach. Mexican nationals are rarely granted asylum in poverty, no matter how extreme.
is not an asylum category. So, because he couldn't come back to live with us and we couldn't travel legally to go live with him, there was only one path for him to take. He decided to hire a smuggler and take my older brother and sister back with him to Los Angeles. They were 12 and 13, old enough to attempt the dangerous journey across the border. As for me,
He said I was going to have to stay behind again until I got older. I begged my father not to leave me again. Please take me with you, I pleaded. But he said, you're too little, Chata. I'll come back for you, I promise. I shook my head and said, but the last time you left, you were gone for almost eight years. Please, Papi.
Don't leave me again. I don't know how, but I managed to convince him to bring me along. And so I found myself at the U.S. border, risking my life, all for a chance to finally have a father. The smuggler would shout orders for us, and we obeyed. Walk, run, crawl, hide, hide.
My body was burning from the heat of the unforgiving sun and the white-hot fear inside me at the thought of being caught and sent back. My father was right. I was too little to make the crossing, and I put everyone at risk of being caught. I couldn't make my feet run fast enough, and so my father had to carry me on his back most of the way. And it was there, at the U.S. border,
where I got my first piggyback ride from my father. I clung to him as we ran through the bushes, branches grasping at me as if trying to tear me away from him. When we found a dead migrant in the bushes, it seemed as if he were sleeping. But then I realized that it was the kind of sleep you don't wake up from, and so I clung to my father even more as we ran.
Border Patrol caught us twice. Back then, families were not being separated at the border like they are now, so after they took us in for interrogation, they put us all in a van and then drove us back to Tijuana. On our third attempt, my father decided to try at night under the cover of darkness.
The border that night was pitch black. We couldn't see where we were going and so we had to hold hands so that we wouldn't lose our way. A helicopter came by and we ran into the bushes to hide from its searchlight. A beam of light fell on my shoes and the coyote made me take off my white socks so that they wouldn't give us away. After the helicopter left,
I ran into the darkness. I ran and I ran as fast as my legs could carry me. And when the sun finally came up over Otay Mountain, we were looking at it from the other side of the border. We had made it into California. And later that day, we finally arrived at my father's home. After finishing my story, I tell Hector,
I have been in this country for 33 years now. What I don't tell him is that I came when things were different. When our Republican president, Ronald Reagan, passed a law that forgave 3 million people, including both of my parents, for coming into the country illegally.
and he had allowed them to remain as legal permanent residents and build a life here. I don't tell Hector how free and limitless I felt when our green cards arrived in the mail when I was 15. I don't tell him how I took that green card and I ran with it to my American dream, all the way to being a college graduate, a best-selling author, and a public speaker.
I feel guilty. I feel guilty that I came at a time when forgiveness and a chance of legal status were still possible. I wish I could give him hope. I wish I could assure him that those times will come again.
I wish with all my heart that Hector's daughter doesn't have to grow up looking at her father's photograph hanging on the wall. When we land, Hector gives me a hug goodbye and he whispers, Gracias por todo. Se lo agradezco. Thank you for everything. I'm very grateful. And I'm grateful too because he has reminded me why I do what I do.
He has reminded me why I have to push past my exhaustion and keep going. Two days later, when I'm back at the airport, heading to city number 24, I think of Hector and his one-year-old daughter back in Guatemala. And I get on that airplane, determined to keep on riding and fighting for him, for her,
for all those fatherless daughters and daughterless fathers separated by border walls longing for the day when they will see each other again. Thank you. Reina Grande is the author of the best-selling memoir, "The Distance Between Us" and its sequel, "A Dream Called Home." We asked Reina if she kept in touch with her fellow passenger. She said she was able to connect with him briefly and he was still waiting for his court hearing.
Something that stayed with her was that when she met him, he hadn't had anything to eat for 17 hours. She wrote, "I offered him all the snacks I had, and he accepted all except for the can of tuna. He said the smell of tuna would bring back bad memories. He'd eaten nothing but tuna for breakfast, lunch, and dinner as he made his way across Mexico to the border. I imagine that for the rest of his life, the smell of tuna will trigger the trauma of his journey."
Raina says now the smell of tuna will always remind her of him. Raina continues to fight for people's right to have better ways to gain citizenship legally. To see a photo of Raina with her father, go to themoth.org. Coming up, a woman on the verge of motherhood struggles to make peace with parts of her past. That's when the Moth Radio Hour continues.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the public radio exchange, PRX.org. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns. Our final story took years to develop. It's about how the past can sometimes get in our way when we're trying to live out our dreams. A warning to listeners, the story includes a depiction of sexual violence. Here's Sarah Jane Johnson, live at the Moth.
My partner and I are at a fertility clinic in a downtown Brooklyn high-rise. It feels sterile and expensive, because it is. I don't have any fertility issues, at least none that I know of yet, anyways, outside of the fact that my wife doesn't make sperm.
I think Carrie-Anne is pretty nervous too, but per usual she's playing it pretty cool. She has a high pressure job so is often quite serious, but luckily for me she's pretty soft on the inside. I remember the first time I saw her roughhousing with her nephews and she's just throwing them around the air and they can't get enough of it and I thought to myself, "I can't wait to make a baby with this woman."
So we're waiting for the specialist and I'm thinking about how expensive sperm is. It's also a really unfortunate word, so I like to call it batter. So unless you're using a friend's batter or a friend's of a friend's batter, and this works beautifully for a lot of people, but if you are like me and are married to an attorney who manages risk for a living, this is not your path.
You are poring over anonymous donor profiles and reading case laws about same-sex couples having to adopt their own children. So, this process is starting to get a little tricky for me. I'm starting to feel myself pulling in these procedures. When I'm examined, I sometimes feel like my body is not my own.
And it takes me to a place in my past that was one of the darkest things I've ever lived through. Fourteen years ago, I was studying abroad, and I went to Paris for the weekend. And one night, I hung out with a couple of guys. And when they offered to walk me back to my hotel room, one of them raped me in the lobby of an apartment building. He was caught three days later, and this thrust me into a seven-year journey
being in a foreign legal system, in a language that I could only order a sandwich in. But I chose to prosecute, and I went back multiple times, and one minute it was wildly empowering, and the next minute I was drinking my memories away. Being a survivor became my identity, and it determined my worth. And there was a time when I was so broken
I actually thought it was the only thing that made me really interesting. The daily experience of living with it was like a boulder on my chest. It was suffocating, a weight I just didn't know how to carry.
And you really never know where a reminder will come from. I mean, going through airport security for me is a nightmare. I have no power. You have to fully submit. Doesn't matter if I don't want to be touched in that way. I mean, I used to even carry a card I could hand to an agent that said, "I'm a survivor of sexual assault, and please make sure you tell me everything you're going to do before you touch me." A few years ago, I was living in a small town, and I went to this cozy family planning clinic.
and kind of felt like the furniture came from staff members' homes over the years. And one of the exam rooms has posters of these different cities on the walls. I put my feet in stirrups, it's my yearly exam. You can imagine this is not the greatest day for me. And I lean back and there on the ceiling is a poster of the Eiffel Tower. The poster card image of the city, the source of all of my pain.
You think being a survivor, those are those moments where you're walking down a dark sidewalk and the guy walking towards you gives you this feeling, washes over you, your ears are ringing, you have flashes behind your eyes, your stomach drops, heart pounding. And it is those moments. But it's also the cozy family planning clinic. So you learn to keep your fists up.
And I learned that that is an utterly exhausting way to live. So I tried to work that boulder, rub it down, make it a little bit smaller. And eventually, I tried to believe, I tried this concept of thinking that maybe I deserved a little bit more stability in my life, some more goodness. And so I'm out with a group of friends, and I meet a friend of a friend, and she's pretty cool.
And they're bragging about their glory days playing college basketball. And I'm like, "I played basketball too in high school." And they were like, "Yeah, cool." And I was like, "No, no, no, no. I had a uniform and everything." And they were like, "Right, cool."
And no surprise, there had been some drinks involved. And truth be told, I was not good at basketball in high school. And I just, I can't tell if I'm on her radar at all. And before you know it, I'm on my feet and I'm doing something that I actually was really good at in high school, which is cheerleading. And I've got my best turkey, I'm landing jumps, spirit fingers, I do a kick, and I get us kicked out of this bar.
It never happened to me before. And things got a little blurry that night, but two years later we were married. And the safety of Carrie Ann filled holes in me that I didn't know how to fill. And I used to not know if I deserved a family or if I could be a mom, but now I know. The process, though, of us starting a family relies on me...
changing the concept I have of my body. And it's stirring all of this stuff up. And I just can't reconcile how I'm supposed to make a baby in the same exact place in my body that I've received so much violence. So we decide to try and get pregnant at home. And this is stretching her boundaries, but it makes me feel cared for in a way that I never had been before.
So I read a 528-page gay Bible called The New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth. And I'm a little cheap, so I don't have the batter shipped to our home. I schlep to Midtown. And the tank is really heavy, so they have a special backpack for it. And I strap it on, and I walk to Grand Central for Baby's first subway ride. And I...
I get home, and when Kerri-Anne comes home that night, she sees the tank on the counter, and she looks at me, she looks at the tank, she looks at me and yells, "Fire!" And we're so nervous and excited, and when finally the time comes, we put on garden gloves so that we don't burn ourselves on the dry ice to pull out the violet batter. And we do this routine for four months, but it's not working. We're getting really frustrated.
But then we hear about this midwife who will actually come to your home and help you be a little bit more exact and medical about this turkey baster situation. And just for the record, you don't actually use a turkey baster. So we're waiting for her to arrive, and we're in the bedroom, having a glass of wine, trying to relax. We have our Lucky Cubs t-shirts on because they had won the World Series that year.
And the midwife arrives with her kit and the lights are low so she plunks on this headlamp and essentially just hops into bed with us. And you can imagine the thoughts racing through Kerian's mind like, "Good God, why are we not at a doctor's office?" But this is how much I needed to control this. And this is how much she loves me. And it works.
And so now I'm going through this incredible process of this pregnancy and I'm actually feeling more in my body than I ever have. And I'm dreaming of like this super crunchy birth where I like, I'm rolling around in a wheat field like, I desperately want to have a home birth, but you all know who I'm married to so this is not my path.
But now I'm obsessing about a birth plan and I want no drugs. I'm truly terrified of being inside of a process where I'll have to have medical intervention and an epidural. And an epidural means that I won't be able to move from the waist down and this is a level of feeling trapped that I can't grasp.
But those thoughts are opening the doors to this darkness and these doubts, and I'm starting to panic. Like, maybe I'm not as far along in my healing as I thought that I was. And what if I can't show up? And what if I can't feel it all, even the good stuff? But these feelings are countered with this carnal desire to finally push this boulder off of my chest and get on with my life.
I think a lot of new parents worry about losing their identity. But I welcomed it. I couldn't wait for my baby to be the center of my story. So I go to bed on a Tuesday, and just after midnight, the contractions start. And I thought that it would have been a little bit more of a crescendo.
But they start pretty strong. But it takes us a full day for them to get close enough for us to be able to go to the hospital. And once there, we spend another full day of me walking the halls, trying to work this baby down.
And we're getting nervous, and it's getting complicated. And I'm trying to believe Carrie Ann when she tells me that I'm a warrior, and I'm trying desperately to not leave my body. I'm trying so hard to not let the pain of my labor talk to the pain of my trauma. The midwife had warned me that it could be similar. And in the darkness, these thoughts are creeping in like...
Maybe you didn't get all of that darkness out, like there's still something in your way. But after 65 hours of labor, that included four hours of pushing, I had a C-section. But they pulled this ray of light from me and lifted him into the air and said, "Welcome to the world, Harvey!" And the room went wild, and they finally brought him to me, and Carrie Ann was at my shoulder, and everything faded away.
and his skin was on my skin and I finally saw that little face. And I realized in that moment I had never been so proud of my body. Harvey is a daily reminder of where I have come from and the goodness that lies ahead. I know now that trauma is not linear. I suppose I take some comfort in knowing that it will always be here, but that I am who I am because of it. But I don't have to carry this boulder every day. It's small enough to fit in my pocket.
It can sometimes be awkward. I might sit on it out of the blue. But my hands are free to do other things. I called my baby boy. Thank you. Sarah Jane Johnson is the writer and performer of the solo show Devil in a Box, which chronicles her journey from sexual assault through the French justice system and into life after trauma. She lives in Brooklyn with her family. Sarah Jane gave us a powerful range of photographs, which you can view at themoth.org.
Sarah Jane's appearance on the Moth stage was a long time coming. Potential storytellers sometimes go through quite a process trying to figure out what story they want to tell. Sarah Jane is actually on our staff at the Moth, and she worked with us for years before finally telling her story. Well, and certainly the moments where we would pass each other in the hallway and I would like not make eye contact with you because you were like, are we going to talk about your story yet? And I think that we thought the story would be about the trial, but
But we'd talk about the story, and I would ask you, you know, how are you doing? And blah, blah, blah. And you were in the middle of your pregnancy. And you would just tell me all these fascinating, deep, beautiful things. And I think one day I was like, holy crap, you might not want to hear this, but I think you might be currently living your moth story. That was a moment that we had. I don't think I realized how much my –
trauma was going to come up in my pregnancy journey. And you had seen my one woman show. And so I just kind of also had this assumption that like, oh, this will just be kind of a, you know, boiled down version of that, which primarily focuses on the trial. Which I thought too. Yeah. And I guess sort of finding myself like stuck in this previous identity I had for myself. I didn't
really let myself think down the road about what else I had to say. Sarah Jane and I talked about what it was like for her wife, Carrie Ann, who was famously private, to hear Sarah Jane tell such an intimate story from their lives on stage. Yeah. Oh, man. That was so wonderful. I felt like she was...
I think that she was really proud and it was cool. We had her aunt and uncle were also there and their response afterwards was like, oh, wow, that was so beautiful to like get to see your love story, which was I loved it. That was their takeaway, you know, because so much of this is all possible because of our love story and the
the healing and the strength that Carrie Ann has given me. And so it was pretty cool. I love that. Okay, one last question for you. We talked a little bit about your one-woman show. So you had a one-woman show about your assault. So you actually spent years on the road telling your story, talking to survivors. Was telling a story at the Moth different from telling it on stage night after night in theaters? The process of Devil in a Box...
You know, there's many minutes go by and the process of memory in my script, if you will, like the audience has a long time to get to know me and my humor and feel safe before I tell them about the violence and the assault. Yeah.
So in, you know, and I'm very much in character while I'm myself, there's still a performative nature where the moth is about stripping away that performance and really living in the telling of it. Yeah.
And so much about this process has been acknowledging how trauma was showing up in my birth story and discovering that, you know, giving birth was really another rebirth for me as a person, as a survivor. ♪
That was Sarah Jane Johnson, and that's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us next time for the Moth Radio Hour. Your host this hour was the Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns, who also directed the stories in the show, along with Jodi Powell. The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Ginesse, Jennifer Hickson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Emily Couch. Special thanks to Nicole James for her years of dedication to the Moth.
Most stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Bill Frizzell, Henry Kaiser and David Lindley, Yvonne Resendez, and Stellwagen Symphonette.
The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. To find out more about our podcast, to get information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.
