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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. From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. I've recently been working with a storyteller for an upcoming mainstage event, and her story deals with her life basically getting upended, something that a lot of people can relate to, especially coming out of a global pandemic.
She was saying that as upsetting as it was, she realized that sometimes we have to sit in the discomfort in order to figure out a way through it. As I was putting together this hour, I was reminded of that because all of the stories in today's show have those moments, whether it's stepping up to a challenge or into new territory, dealing with stark realities of the past or working through grief. As uncomfortable as those moments might be, they can show us a lot about who we are.
Before we start, I just want to note that some of the stories in this hour touch on mature themes of addiction and sexual violence. So listener discretion is advised. Our first story comes from Stephanie Whittles-Walks. She told it in an evening we produced at St. Anne's and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, New York. Here's Stephanie live at the Moth. I was changing my baby's diaper in a public bathroom when the phone rang.
It was an L.A. area code. I didn't know it, so I pressed ignore, continued to deal with the dirty diaper, but it rang again, and my stomach dropped because I knew. When I picked up, a detective told me very matter-of-factly that my only sibling, my lifelong best friend, my most loyal sidekick, had died of a heroin overdose. I can't remember exactly how she delivered that news, if it was...
He died or he's dead or your brother's dead, but the idea is that it was over. His battle, his struggle, his war with himself was over.
I screamed for my husband who ran in and grabbed the diaperless baby who was now shrieking. I was shrieking too and sobbing and hyperventilating. I hit the ground on this bathroom floor and pounded my fists and somehow pulled myself up to a standing position and ran out of the building and was totally shocked to see that the world was still turning.
The detective, who was still on the phone, then told me that she tried to reach my mother, but she couldn't. And I realized in that moment that I'd have to be the one to deliver that news and that it would be the most horrific moment of my life. Way more horrific than this one. So I got in the car, even though I had no business driving at all, and somehow the car got to my parents' building. And as I pulled into the driveway, I saw my dad. And he was coming up from the parking garage.
like he did every weekday at 5 o'clock for 40 years. And he's carrying his briefcase in his left hand, and he's got his white button-down shirt and his khaki pants and his black sneakers. And he's coming towards me, and I'm thinking, this is so normal, but this is the last normal day he's ever going to have. Once I say what I've come to say, it's going to destroy him. And so we sit on this concrete bench outside the building, and I say it somehow in between sobs.
He's dead or Harris died and he looked at me and said, "I knew when I saw you that he was gone." And then a tear ran down his cheek. We got up and we made our way up to the 17th floor but my mom was not home. And I'm trying to figure out what do I do now? Do I text her? Do I call her? What do I do? And as I'm having this debate, the phone rings again and this time it's my brother's business manager who I didn't know even existed.
He told me that he was at my brother's house earlier that day when the detectives were there and that there was a coroner's notice affixed to the front door now. And when the word got out, it would be a runaway train out of our control. And that's because my brother wasn't just my brother. He was a beloved comedian named Harris Whittles, and he wrote for TV shows like Parks and Recreation, and people loved him and his work. His death would be viral breaking news, and I...
needed to tell my mother before she heard it from the internet. So I texted her something really casual. "What are you doing?" She said, "I'm at a sushi restaurant," and texted me a picture of her dinner. And I wanted to be like, "Mom, you gotta come home now," but I didn't want her to panic and then call, or worse, call and then drive. And so when she said, "What's up?" I just didn't respond.
A little while later, the phone rings again. This time it's my brother's best friend. And he said, TMZ is reporting that Harris died of an overdose. Is it true? And as I'm trying to process this new layer of nightmare, the phone rings again. And this time it's my mom. And she's downstairs in the parking garage. Her friends have driven her home because she got this cryptic text message about my brother and her voice is...
So high pitched and trembling. And I said, stay put, mom. I'm going to come right down. And I sprinted down the hallway and I'm pressing the elevator button and I go down 17 floors and I'm looking everywhere and she's not there. And so I get back in the elevator and bolt back into the apartment. And there she is in a little ball on the floor wailing. And my dad is wrapped around her. And it was the saddest thing I've ever seen.
My brother was always a recreational drug user, but things took a turn when he was prescribed OxyContin for back pain. He finally confessed to me three days before my wedding that he was, in his words, a drug addict and that he was spending $4,000 a month on pills. $4,000 a month on anything isn't sustainable, so after his first stint in rehab, he switched to heroin. And I remember when I asked him how he learned to do that, he told me he'd watched a YouTube video.
I couldn't understand how someone so epically smart and talented could be so self-destructive. It made no sense. I mean, nothing that he did made sense. Like, the night he died, for example, he did his favorite thing. He made a room full of people laugh at a comedy club, and he came home, and he sent this beautiful email to my mother saying how grateful and happy he was, and he told her he loved her.
But none of that stopped him from using that night. None of that stopped him from dying. A few months after his death, Entertainment Weekly published his autopsy report all over the internet, and strangers flocked to the comments to say, "'What a junkie,' and, "'What an idiot,' and, "'My favorite one, anyone who sticks a needle in their arm deserves to die,' and elicits no sympathy from me.'"
I wanted to respond, "You are correct, person on the internet. There is no sympathy from you. No bad things will ever happen to you. You can just continue to perch on your puffy white cloud, looking down with scorn upon the rest of us." But I didn't, because what is the point? You know, no one comes to the internet to try to understand each other, much less the complex nuances of addiction.
So instead, you know, I know this because I posted something very thoughtful and sincere that I took a long time working on. It was about my brother and it was very loving and I was bombarded with notification upon notification of even more insensitive comments.
So this time, instead of taking the high road, I engaged more aggressively, which is exactly what my brother would have done. He was never one to shy away from an internet battle. In fact, the word humblebrag, which you've heard, came from his brain and now lives in the dictionary. And that...
That phrase originated on Twitter. He would get so annoyed with people bragging in this self-deprecating way that he created this humblebrag account and started calling out offenders by retweeting them. And so in the spirit of Harris, I started funneling my grief into fighting every single battle on the internet.
No topic was off limits. I would go ham defending abortion, Me Too, healthcare, climate change, Halloween candy, all of it.
an angry person by nature. I just, I had this kid who refused to nap anywhere but in the car and so I was constantly stuck in parking lots and driveways and I had all this time to do it. And you know, I basically would just sort of carry myself with the dignity of a person who never planned to apply for another job again. I was like, a bar, a hundred times a day, metaphorically picking a fight with the biggest guy in the room. And I'm five foot tall, so you know, no business doing that.
And, you know, people liked it, is the thing. I mean, the rush of all those hearts and retweets, I mean, it was intense. And also intense were the people who didn't like it. I was called a moron, an imbecile, a cunt, a fun little lollipop triple-dipped in psycho. I was told to shut up, to relax, to fuck off, to move to China, to move to Mexico, to move to Venezuela, to move to Chicago.
to knock off my weepy emoting and virtue signaling, to renounce my citizenship, and the kicker from a guy named Steve: "You're a woman. Shut the fuck up and bake an apple pie. No one cares about your histrionics." Well, I don't know how to bake, Steve, so... So I continued to log on. And then a few months later, I got a postcard in the mail to my house!
where my children live. And it was from Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was anonymous. I don't know anyone from Grand Rapids, Michigan, but my name and address were printed in big black letters. And then the artwork was this Nazi propaganda thing. And there was this World War II soldier displaying this armband instead of the swastika, though there was a democratic donkey mascot. And then on the bottom, it said, it's not fascism when we do it.
So I was freaked out and I went online that night and I tried to hide my address from public record but since I'm not a judge or a military person or a medical examiner, I didn't qualify. And at this point I had already been thinking about deleting Twitter. You know, I mean, you know, my phone had started sending these horrific weekly screen time reports that was telling me exactly how much time I was spending
and it was like a full-time job, like eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. So it's like that night felt like a natural breaking point. And so I did it, I deleted the app and it felt really great for like five minutes. And then I started freaking out about all the stuff I was missing. And so I put it back on my phone.
And then the next day I was at my daughter's ballet class and I'm waiting in the lobby and telling another mom about the postcard thing and she's a therapist and so her opinion is actually valuable and she like shouted at me, delete it and detox. Like I needed to go to Twitter rehab. So I did it. I deleted it. And we had this great day. My family and I adopted a rescue dog. We...
Spent the whole day outside. We played fetch. We paid attention to each other. By the end of the day, my batteries were recharged and I wanted to keep that feeling in my body forever. And so I was like, okay, no more with this app. I can only look at Twitter when I'm on my computer.
And then I swear to God, the next day my computer died. And I had to take it in to get repaired and I wasn't going to have it for seven to ten days. And so I reinstalled it on my phone, but this time I put it on the last page of my apps so that I had to scroll over six pages to get to it. And I made this deal with myself that I couldn't actually post anything. I could only scroll mindlessly.
But then I had gotten this big insurance bill that day and I was really pissed off about it. And so like as soon as I logged on, I posted this long thread about insurance companies being evil and I felt so disgusting after my slip that I deleted it again. And then 12 hours later, I was sneaking peeks on my browser. I didn't tell my husband I was using it. I would use in the bathroom, I would use in the car, I would use in line at the grocery store.
while knowing how destructive it was and doing it anyway, like feeling this need to detox and then relapsing, being at war with myself over my use of it. And then it occurred to me that this is how my brother lived up until the moment that he died, at war with himself, wanting so badly to be free of his addiction, but being physically unable to do so. Twitter isn't heroin.
I'm not trying to make them equals. But that feeling that I get when I use it makes me understand and empathize in some small way with how awful it feels to not be able to control your own behavior. How much self-loathing accompanies that. How exhausting and defeating that can be. It's easy to look at someone with addiction and think, just stop. Just don't do it. Simple. But it's not. It's not simple. Because if it were...
He'd still be here. Thank you. Stephanie Whittles-Walks is the author of the bestselling book, Everything is Horrible and Wonderful, a tragicomic memoir of genius, heroin, love, and loss. She's the host of the award-winning podcast, Last Day, and co-founder of Lemonada Media, a podcast network with a mission to make life suck less.
She's happy to report that she logged off Twitter in December of 2022 and now prefers other sites because they're just nicer on the whole. She lives in California with her husband, Mike, her daughter, Iris, and her son named Harry, after her brother, Harris. Every year, Stephanie celebrates Harris's birthday with her family by going to his favorite restaurant, Chili's. They always order a plate of nachos, which was his favorite, and they talk and remember what they most loved about him.
Coming up on the road to jeopardy 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 Meg Bowles.
Sometimes life presents you with uncomfortable situations, but sometimes you choose to do a thing, even though the thought of it might make you nervous or scare you down to your toes. Like skydiving or dating or like our next storyteller, Wes Hazard, pursuing a lifelong dream. Wes shared this at an open mic story slam we produced in Jersey City, New Jersey, where WNYC is our media partner. Here's Wes Hazard live at the Moth. All right. Hey, um.
In October 2017, I got a really good email. Maybe the best email I ever got in my life, or at least the most exciting. It told me that I had passed the online test and I was invited to go audition live for Jeopardy. I got to do that. I was very, very excited. Thank you.
And sort of an email I've been waiting for for 20 years. I love that show. I really, really enjoy it. And on an average day, if I have the time, I will watch the daily episode of Jeopardy on TV and then, like, you know, I'll spend 90 minutes a day looking up random crap on Wikipedia. That's how I have fun, all right?
I got that email. I'm like, oh, we're obviously going to orient our entire lives around this now. And so I started going hardcore, like every day watching it. I would watch old episodes on YouTube. I bought a student atlas, like minimum 90 minutes map studies every day. UK Kings line of succession. I'm like in the J archive, like a database of all the online Jeopardy episodes just every single day, hours. And I started watching it behind a music stand, standing up with a ballpoint pen in my hand to get the timing down. I'm like really into it.
And throw some numbers at you. Every year, Jeopardy says, yo, we're going to have an online test. And about 300,000 people say, I would like to take that test. And Jeopardy allows about 70,000 of those people to take the test. And of those 70,000, 2,500 get invited to go audition live. And of those 2,500, about 400 people per year get to be on Jeopardy. The odds are not in your favor. But I'm like, whatever, right? Yeah.
And backtrack, I take an online test and it's 50 questions and you're watching them on a screen, a little box pops up, you type in your answer, it stays there for eight seconds and it goes away and the next question. Out of those 50, I know from research online that you gotta get at least 35 out of the 50 to even make the cut. And I was scorned as I go through. I've been doing this and I played high school bowl,
college quiz bowl, lost my virginity at 21. Like I play trivia, all right? Like so I'm into it.
And I think I only got like a 37 on that test, which is not great, but just over the line. All right, fine, great. And then you go in for the live audition, and it's three parts. So the first part is like a 50-question test again, but this is a little bit different because it's recording of Alex Trebek, and he does the answers, and they give you a blank sheet with 50 answer spots on here, and you kind of have an advantage with this.
one because they don't get yanked away after each question and if you're moving through these questions at the speed that an average Jeopardy person needs to be at you're gonna bank some time some of them you're just gonna know immediately some of them you might not get immediately but you can like jot a little note down to yourself and at the end of that you know you get like maybe a minute or so where you can go back and like nail the answers and I gotta say I'll stand before you here with humility and say that on that 50 question test I um
I freaking murdered that. Like 47 just destroyed it. Feeling real strong. Yeah. Because like three of them, like, all right, I didn't know them. That's life. I didn't know three. But like at the very end, like with like 17 seconds left to go, there were just three that were like just at the top of the tongue, edge of the mind. It was just like basically what's the capital of Croatia? What is the Civil War internment camp where war crimes were committed? And what is the element within your body that helps break down proteins? And I couldn't get it. I couldn't get it.
and I couldn't get it, and then when like 17 seconds left, it was like, Zagreb, Andersonville, Enzant, hell yeah! Like shit came from God, like ah! Feeling good, all right, nice.
And then you go up, and the second part of the interview is like a mock game. And they didn't even really care. These are just softball questions. There's no stakes. There's no Alex. There's no lights. There's no crowd. It's you and like 20 other people in a hotel room in whatever town you're in. And I was going there, and they really don't care. They just want to know some basic stuff. Do you know how to play Jeopardy?
"Do you answer in the form of a question? Do you keep it moving? Do you have good energy? Do you look crazy on TV?" Like, you know, basic stuff like that. And I'm just whipping through. I'm like, "Emancipation Proclamation." Rosa Parks is hitting it. It's like, you know, John McCain was one of them. That was weird, but I got it. It was nice. And like, so cool, feeling good on that. And then the third part is just like a little mock interview. Like, you know, they ask everybody the same question.
What would you do if you won a bunch of money? And everybody's like, "Oh, you know, I'd fix up the house, pay off some debt, travel, help the grandkids." And I said that I wanted to reunite the cast of the '90s sitcom from Fox, Living Single for my 40th birthday party.
Yeah, and they reacted thusly. And at the end of it, I'm like, I'm my own harshest critic. Like, when I fail, I tell myself in detail how I failed and how, you know, maybe we can correct it in the future. I got out of that audition. I was like, Wes, how do you feel you did? And they're like, I do not think I could have conducted myself better. Let's continue to study as if we're going to be on Jeopardy. And that's a big commitment because they tell you nothing.
They don't tell you your scores. You don't know. I only know. Again, I'm keeping track. Like, you get out of there, and I'm like, all right, everybody, thank you so much for coming. You should be proud you made it this far. If we get in touch, you'll be within the next 18 months, and that's it. Just go home and wait 18 months for a phone call that may never come, all right? And I'm just like, get out of there. I'm just like, shoot.
Do you know what pressure is? Like, my God. Like, think about the scenarios of, like, going on Jeopardy. Like, what could happen? Like, best case scenario, you go on. You win, like, 10, 15, 20 games. You become a minor national celebrity. You go on Fallon. You, like, you know, like, you know, you get to retire and just, like, play trivia and write trivia books for the rest of your life. That's best case scenario. And I knew that probably wasn't going to happen. But, like, worst case scenario is, like, I go on there and I don't have enough money to compete necessarily.
in Final Jeopardy and then I hang myself. Like, you know, that was just like the pressure was in, like I was watching a game from that season and I'm just like, the answer was Harriet Tubman at home and I said, "Sojourner Truth," and I'm like, what if that happens, all right? What if I just go on national TV, embarrassing my whole family, getting black history questions wrong, you know, just like that?
It is insane, it's intense, alright? Just like, ugh. And all this stuff is going through my head, so I got to the point where like, four, five hours a day, easily, like studying, just like, I got to the point where I wouldn't allow myself to go to bed if I didn't hit five Final Jeopardies in a row. Like, you get one wrong, you better believe you're getting up and looking that whole article up on Wikipedia. Like, the whole thing, like, you know, intense. I had Broadway trivia books, Bible trivia, the whole bit. It was crazy.
And then one day I got an even better phone call, and then I got an email. And if you happen to watch Jeopardy this past July, you would see that I was a three-time Jeopardy champion. I was very excited.
That was three-time Jeopardy! champion Wes Hazard. Wes is a comic and writer. He's author of the book Questions for Terrible People and is co-host of PBS World Channel's program Stories from the Stage. And in his spare time, you can still occasionally find him going down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia. In an email, he shared that the experience of prepping for the program and dealing with doubt and pressure was definitely one that shaped him.
In the end, being on Jeopardy was more than he could have hoped for. He told me that being able to stand on the soundstage and see what we, the viewers, don't get to see at home was amazing. Wes was also fortunate enough to be on while Alex Trebek was still with us. And he said, and I quote, off camera, he was everything you could have wanted him to be.
I asked Wes if he had any advice for other folks dreaming of making it on Jeopardy! And he said, "Do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day and look up anything you didn't know. Watch the show, new episodes, old episodes. Look at a world map for 10 minutes a day. Know how to bet. It's shocking to see how many people miss out on becoming Jeopardy! champions because they don't follow some well-established betting basics."
Lastly, I asked if there were any answers he was exceptionally proud of, and he said there were a couple, but one of them was being able to say, I'll take opera for a thousand and getting it right. Next up, we have a story from Sufjan Zimakov. He told it at a Grand Slam we produced in Washington, D.C., in partnership with public radio station WAMU. Live from the Lincoln Theater, here's Sufjan. ♪
Last summer, my girlfriend Margarita and I were in North Carolina, and we stopped at a fruit stand. And suddenly, another customer, a blonde woman about my age, announced to nobody in particular, "I have blueberry bushes at home that need picking. Now I'm an introvert with strict rules towards strangers, never talk to them,
Never ever believe them and never ever, no matter what, follow them. Only before I knew it, my girlfriend, who is an extrovert with a completely opposite set of rules, introduced us to her new best friend, Terry. And to my horror, we were following Terry's car to pick blueberries. And Terry led us first on the highway, then on the bus.
country roads and a dirt road and my confidence in our surviving this adventure deteriorated with the road quality. As Terry's car stopped at a lonely standing house, I heard loud dog barking. "Yay, you've got dogs!" my girlfriend exclaimed. "Can we pet them before we pick blueberries?" But validating my introvert instincts, Terry said,
"Those are our bear hunting dogs. But don't worry, they are locked in cages." Okay, I thought, "She's a hunter and not a gatherer like us." And my girlfriend said, "I wonder if bears eat blueberries, while I wondered if hunters eat gatherers."
Then another big hunter and a little hunter came out of the house and Terri introduced us to her husband Scott and her grandson Kyle. And to Margarita's delight, Kyle, a seven-year-old boy, was carrying a cute puppy that also made me feel safe, thinking they're not going to traumatize the puppy and get away with us in front of it.
Then they took us to the blueberries in their front yard, and Scott, a fellow introvert, and I started picking blueberries in awkward silence while Margarita and Terry kept talking. And Terry machine-gunned questions at us. "Where are you from? How do you like it here?" And Margarita fired back,
We love it here. I'm originally from Ukraine and Sufjan's from Russia, and we live in DC now. And suddenly, Terry stopped. And an ominous silence descended upon us as it happens when extroverts stop talking. And Terry suspiciously asked, "Are you liberals?" Uh-oh, I thought, this can't be good.
And that's when Margarita said something that deserves hashtag sheer admiration. "Would you still let us pick blueberries if we were?" she said in her charming way. That broke the ice. Terry laughed, of course, and instantly resumed her interrogation about everything from President Biden's age to mine. To dodge the politics, I told her mine.
"We are the same age," she said. "This is incredible. We have so much in common. I've never had such an interesting conversation with liberals before." Scott took a selfie of all of us, including the puppy. Terry gave us goodbye bear hugs, and Margarita and I drove away, back toward liberal democracy. Margarita checked her phone and said,
Terry just sent me a friend request, and she posted our picture. Listen to what she wrote, and she read it to me: "Today, my faith in humanity was restored." Met these two, they're Democrats, we're Republicans, she's from Ukraine, he's from Russia. Two different sets of people communicated mutually. That's what the world needs today. And I agree with Terry.
she and Margarita changed my perspective. Now I believe in talking to strangers, because they might surprise you if you keep an open mind. And I also believe in blueberry diplomacy that might change the world.
Sufjan Zimakov is an award-winning author and performer. His stories are based on his personal experiences as a first-generation immigrant and political analyst, which he says might be funnier than it sounds. He told me that he included this story in a presentation he gave for the Congressional Office for International Leadership titled Current Division in America.
The story inspired the deputy executive director to come up with a Be the Blueberry logo for a workshop. You can see a picture of that along with one from the fateful blueberry picking adventure and find out all the info about his solo shows, Flirting Like an American and From Russia Without Love. That's on our website, themoth.org. Coming up, a woman sits with spirit on the grounds of the Bellamede Plantation. ♪
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 Meg Bowles and our final story in this hour comes from Bridget Jones. She told it at St. Ann's in Brooklyn, New York. Here's Bridget.
In 2015, my then-boyfriend, now fiancé, Sean and I were living in Nashville. And one day, on the way home, we passed a sign for the Bellmead Plantation. And clearly my excitement was written all over my face because before I could get the words out of my mouth, Sean was like, "Hell no. I am a black man. It is 2015. What I'm not going to do?"
is go to a plantation for fun. I said, why? It's our history. And he said, because slavery is over. So I'm not going to a plantation for fun. So I very audibly pouted for the rest of the ride home. Later that day, about an hour into my attitude-induced nap, Sean comes to wake me up. And he's like, get up, get dressed. We have somewhere to go.
So I get up, I get dressed, and I silently ride to our unknown destination with an attitude, and lo and behold, we pull up to the Bellmead Plantation. Now halfway through my tour, I'm feeling real confident because I have this brand new, unused degree from the historically black Tennessee State University, and my degree is in African American history with a focus in southern race relations.
So I'm in my element. So I get all my Leo attitude together. And I'm thinking to myself, I can do this job and I can do it better. So I go walk up to my tour guide who, mind you, has on full antebellum attire. And I go say to her, I can do this job. Well, 10 cold emails and an interview later, I landed the job. Yeah. Now, my...
I immediately wanted to tell two people once I got the job. I wanted to tell my mama and my fiance Sean. Sean was the easy one. He was just happy that I wasn't gonna be calling him crying from the car no more because I got another rejection letter. But my mama was a different story because my mama was born in 1952 in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Yeah. So to my mama, her baby girl going to work on a plantation in 2015? Child, she thought I was going to say to all black people back 400 years. But I'm the direct descendant of enslaved Tennesseans, and I have always been passionate about honoring their sacrifice, respecting their work, and acknowledging their tribulations.
My very southern grandmother, Mayroy Jones, was born in 1925 in Grand Junction, Tennessee, on the Ames Plantation. That very same plantation had enslaved her ancestors prior to emancipation.
Now I don't know about y'all grandmama, but my grandmama loved pictures. And I can vividly remember being a kid staring up at what seemed to be hundreds of photos from the 1940s and 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. All these pictures that lined the walls of my grandmother's South Memphis home.
I can vividly remember eavesdropping on the grown folks' conversations as they talked about who was doing what with who and what folks used to do back in the country. But what really piqued my interest were the conversations about a particular period in time where Black people specifically couldn't do this or that. I honestly think that it was these conversations and those photographs that piqued and sparked my initial love and interest in Black history and culture.
I think it was growing up knowing that I was only roughly an hour away from the very same plantation that had legally enslaved my ancestors that made me look at the antebellum South and antebellum history in a way that fascinated me. Now I can remember my very first day of work at Bellmead. We did typical work stuff, paperwork. I got an in-depth tour of the grounds. But what I was really excited to do was meet my new coworkers. And when I walked into that office, I noticed two things. One, everybody had on antebellum attire too.
But the other thing I noticed was that I had just become Bellmead's only black tour guide. I remember clocking out that day and I had a binder legit y'all the size of a Harry Potter book and tons of other supplementary material that I was going to need to learn and memorize before I was cleared to give my own tour. And eventually I was cleared. I had my own antebellum dress and everything.
And honestly, I wish y'all could have been a fly on the wall the day that I, a then 23-year-old black woman with an afro, opened the front door to a plantation mansion in an antebellum dress for 30 white people. Shocked was an understatement. But I relished in that discomfort because I knew that their discomfort was rooted in their wondering about what side of history I was going to be interpreting.
You see, in the early days of my work at Bellmead, the interpretation of slavery was limited to two people. There was Bob Green, the head hostler, and there was Susanna Carter, the head of domestic staff. And I absolutely wanted to tell their stories, but I also wanted to tell what the institution of slavery had done to individuals like them, to a race of people like theirs, to a culture like theirs, and ultimately to a generation of their descendants. But everybody didn't like my interpretation of history.
I can remember this one time in particular. There was this lady on my tour as I dug into the pain of slavery. She would fly to y'all, Gucci down, I ain't gonna lie. As I was getting deep, she stood up in the middle of my tour and interrupted me by saying, "I don't need this. I have a master's degree." And she left. I remember looking over at her daughter. Her daughter's face was beet red with embarrassment.
But honestly, her embarrassment didn't have a thing on the anger that I felt in that moment. But I used that anger to push me deeper into the history. Well, three years and God almighty, a discontinuation, a costume tour was later. I was named Bell Meads' very first black director.
My title was Director of African American Studies, and I spearheaded the creation of the Journey to Jubilee Tour. And this tour sought to stretch beyond the narratives of two people and tell a larger story of all 136 who had been enslaved on the property. This tour was not just important, it was personal. Now, my mama is a preacher, and we Pentecostal. And in the Pentecostal church, we speak in proverbs and quotes.
And there's this one Maya Angelou quote that always stood out to me. Maya Angelou said that, "I come as one, but I stand as 10,000." I remember my very first day giving the Journey to Jubilee tour, and when I got to work that day, I had this yearning desire to sit with spirit, as I call it. So I remember walking over to the clearing where the slave cabins once stood, and I just sat down and I began to talk to the ancestors.
I told them that although my ancestors likely faced similar situations, the stories of the enslaved at Belle Meade was not mine. And I was going to need their help to tell this story. Essentially, I was going to need them to speak to me and through me. And I sat in that space for about 30 minutes and I meditated in that presence and I wiped the tears from my eyes and I got up and I went back to my office to begin my day.
About an hour later, I was standing back in front of the slave cabins. This time I was in front of roughly 25 middle-aged white people and I was nervous. I had all these thoughts and feelings and I didn't know how they were going to come out, but the tour started smoothly. Eventually, I told my guests that we were going to make our way from the slave cabin to the kitchen house. And on our short walk, I answered all of my usual questions. When was the house built? Did the Civil War happen here? My personal favorite.
Were they good slave owners? I can remember walking into the kitchen house and letting them look around for a moment and told them to have a seat so that we could begin our discussion.
The weight in the room started to get a little heavier as I began to break down the myth of the lost cause and the supposed difference between enslaved field workers and house workers. But what really broke the camel's back was when I told them that 11% of Bellmead's population, 11% of 136 people, were mulatto. Half black and half white. Now I was clear, we don't know where the mulatto slaves came from, but what we do know is
Is there a lot of people? Don't just fall out the sky. I pushed on and explained that there is this supposed idea that slavery only affected black people. And I wanted to take my guests on a journey and explore everybody who could have possibly had a role in this type of situation. And the first person I introduced them to was Master's wife.
I began circling the room as I asked a question. How does it feel to have to look into the face of your husband's mistress every single day? Now, what happens when that enslaved woman becomes pregnant and now she has to look into the face of her husband's indiscretions every single day? As I'm asking these questions, I make sure to look each and every white woman on my tour directly in her eye. How does it feel?
I made sure to acknowledge the lack of control that white women of that time period had over her husband and his actions outside of her. But I also made sure to detail the nature of revenge that many white women took out on this enslaved woman and her illegitimate children. You know, the threat of sale to alleviate her own emotional turmoil. I pushed further. I shifted my focus. How does the enslaved woman feel?
How does it feel to have to bear the brunt of someone's anger and aggression and resentment for a situation that you did not ask for nor can you control? How does it feel to have to have a baby by a man, a man who only views that baby as pure property to be bought and sold at will in actuality? That's not even really your baby. How does it feel? I saw a tear slide down the eye of a beet red brunette in the group. I shifted my focus one last time.
How does it feel? Because what if, just what if that slave had a husband too?
This time I'm looking at all the men in the group. I ask, how does it feel to have to go work six days a week from sunup to sundown and then come home to an 8x10 shack that you share with 8-10 people and lay down on a cot next to your wife and know that she has been and she is being raped but there's nothing that you can do about it. There were audible sobs in the room at this point.
Ask how does it feel to watch a baby come out of your wife? A baby whose shade of brown is going to be a whole lot lighter than your shade of brown. And even though you know who it belongs to, there's nothing that you can do about it. You can't help her. Hell, you can't even help you. So you love it and you love her as best as you know how. But in the midst of loving them, what did it do to you?
Mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. In that moment there were tears streaming down my own face, my hands were shaking, I broke.
It was like I was there but I wasn't there. It was like I had emotionally transcended from my present location and into my own family history of biracial babies on the 1870s, 80s, and 90s census record listed as mulatto. Time had merged and I could feel the weight of 136 formerly enslaved men, women, and children hovering over my tourists and I in that kitchen house.
And as I came to out of my history induced trance, I noticed that there was not one dry eye in the room. You see, I looked around and noticed the flood of emotions over fully grown white men and women. And I said to myself right then that this is it. This is my journey to Jubilee.
The feeling that had shifted the room that day, it was like alchemy. I had asked my visitors to come face to face with the ethos of black people's plight. I asked them to feel it, and by God, they felt it. I showed them the pain that most black people don't show white people. I showed them just how deeply the legacy of slavery is still hurt on a personal level. I took off my mask. I had no use for it. I let them see me.
There's an African proverb that says that until the lion learns to write, the hunter will be glorified in every story. And in that moment, I had become the lion that could write. And although I was just one little black girl from Memphis, I was standing in that room as 10,000.
I now take the ancestors with me into every room I enter. It's like I walk with them instead of being led by them. I have cried for them. I have cried with them. I have laughed at their ability to slight their oppressor without them ever even knowing. I have seen them through the history books perform the alchemy of turning nothing into something for the last 400 and some odd years. You see, I used to just know I was black in color and culture, but now?
Now, I stand in that blackness, bold and proud of each and every person that has come before me. Thank you. Bridget Jones said that when she took the job at Bellamy Plantation, she got a few raised eyebrows. But once the word got out about what she was doing and how she was doing it, people got on board and supported her.
Since telling her story, Bridget is relocated to Atlanta, Georgia to become an assistant executive director for Arabia Mountain Heritage Area Alliance, a nonprofit arm of the National Park Service. In an email, Bridget said, "These stories are only a reflection of where we've been. They don't have to be who we are. But if we don't tell the stories, we allow those who figure the past wrongs have been righted to go on living in the bubble that keeps some people endangered and others blind to that danger.
Not talking about homelessness doesn't eradicate homelessness. Just as neglecting an illness doesn't make it go away. Not talking about racism and the evils of it will never help America. In fact, that thinking might be the beginning of its end. You can find out more about Bridget and all the storytellers you've heard in this hour on our website, themoth.org. That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us again next time.
This episode of the Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Meg Bowles, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show. Co-producer is Vicki Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. Additional Grand Slam coaching by Chloe Salmon.
The rest of the Maltz leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jeunesse, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cloutier, Leanne Gulley, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Casa. Maltz stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.
Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Breonan Giddens and Francesco Teresi, Chili Gonzalez, Merv Griffin, Cormac, and Rhythm Future Quartet. We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.
