GENE DEMBY, HOST:
Just a heads up, y'all, this episode contains discussions of sexual assault and rape.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI, HOST:
I'm Shereen Marisol Meraji.
DEMBY: I'm Gene Demby, and you're listening to CODE SWITCH
MERAJI: From NPR.
If you've been listening to the podcast lately, you know that all this month we're talking about books and particularly books about freedom, all kinds of freedom.
DEMBY: And, Shereen, freedom is something that we realize that we have only when we no longer have it, like when it's been compromised or taken away. I was thinking about that a lot when I sat down to talk with Ashley C. Ford.
MERAJI: I know Ashley. Well, I know of her. I've been following her on Twitter for a very long time. She's an editor; she's an essayist; she's a podcast host; a very big deal on the internet, as they say.
DEMBY: She is all those things. She is also, for our purposes, the author of a new memoir that's called "Somebody's Daughter." And, Shereen, it knocked me on my ass.
MERAJI: Oh, OK. Tell me about it. What was it that hit you?
DEMBY: A lot of her experiences growing up as a Black child of a single mother just really resonated with me. Like at some point - there were certain pages that felt directly pulled from my childhood. Like, it felt like a little bit too candid and bracing. So, yeah. But, you know, her book is about a lot of things. It's about race. It's about childhood. And it's also about what people in a family owe to each other. But one of the central facts in this book, Shereen, is that it's about her father's incarceration and how his imprisonment fundamentally shaped her childhood and the lives of her mother and her siblings.
MERAJI: It sounds like a very intense book.
DEMBY: It is very much so. But one of the things that was so bracing about "Somebody's Daughter" to me is just how clear-eyed Ashley is about everything and everyone that she talks about in it, you know, from her father's crime to the ways her mother tried to cope with this unexpected single parenthood that was foisted upon her. We had a very heavy conversation about a month ago, and I asked her about what it was like going to meet her father in prison in her 20s after not having seen this dude for over a decade. And she talked about how hard that visit was, not just emotionally and psychically but also just logistically because like, you know, he was in a state prison. He was hours away, and she said, you know, those visits could just be cancelled and called off by the prison for any reason.
MERAJI: Oh, I didn't know that.
DEMBY: Yeah.
MERAJI: So you go through all of this effort and then they can say, forget it, this isn't going to happen today.
DEMBY: So you can make the whole trip and not know that it's not happening until you get there. Like, maybe there was a lockdown in the cellblock where the person you're going to see is in prison. Maybe a guard decided that you, the visitor, was dressed inappropriately. Like, anything, right? Any of that, you would not even know that until you were there. So you're kind of making this trip to a prison on faith.
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DEMBY: When you saw your father that first visit, what were you feeling? Do you remember what - the moment when you saw him? Like, was he seated already? Did he come out?
ASHLEY C FORD: He was seated already. The way it works is that you walk into what feels like an elevator, except it's not an elevator. It's just, like, a space. And you're in there with everybody else who's coming into the room for your visit. And they shut a door. The door in front of you is locked. The inmates are on the other side. They lock a door behind you. And all of you visitors are in this little thing, like, pushed together, and then they unlock the door in front of you. And then you have to come out in lines. And you come out, you sign this sheet. And my heart was pounding. I mean, the second I stepped into the room, my heart was pounding.
I signed the sheet, told them who I was there to see. They told me he was already seated. And as soon as they said that, I turned around because I knew that, like - I knew that if he was already there and I turned around, I could see him and I just turned around to try to find him. And it was really easy because as soon as I turned around, he stood up (laughter) and he's tall. And I know his face. So I knew that it would not be appropriate for me to run in the prison visiting room, so I didn't do that. But I did walk very quickly toward him, and we hugged. And it was this massive, massive, massive, massive relief.
DEMBY: You are deciding after nearly 13 years of not seeing your father and only very occasionally responding to his letters, you write in the book, (reading) there's a lot of work that goes into visiting a prison, and I had no interest in doing that work. When someone you can't remember being physically involved in your life asks for physical involvement in your life, it is hard to know where and how to make room for them. I was 25 years old before I decided to make room for my father. The weight of this lingering choice should have shamed me, but the high of possibility, the potential for what kind of man my father might be, persisted. I did not have time to be ashamed.
So just tell us what you were hoping for with that meeting with him and that reconciling with him.
ASHLEY FORD: I think I was hoping for an affirmation of my feelings or my suspicion that what he had done was not all of who he was and that maybe there was something there, something else that I could feel connected to or that would help me understand why I loved this person and why I felt connected to this person.
DEMBY: We should say, when you say what he had done, you mean the crime he was in prison for?
FORD: I mean...
DEMBY: Which was...
FORD: The crime he was in prison for, which was rape and sexual assault.
DEMBY: Mmm hmm.
FORD: Yeah, which was something that had happened to me when I was 13 years old, and I found out that that's why he was in prison when I was 14 years old. And it caused a mental and emotional upheaval in me that I was mostly forced to deal with alone.
DEMBY: You said you wanted to know why you still loved him. This person wasn't in your life, and especially after you found out why he was in prison.
FORD: Yeah.
DEMBY: Did you figure out why you did?
FORD: I think what I figured out is that I was looking for justification to love him is what I eventually discovered, was that I thought I needed some way to justify to other people why I loved him. And that stopped feeling right to me. That stopped feeling like the right answer because I realized that when - the reason why I thought I needed justification to love him was because I thought only certain kinds of people deserved to be loved by anyone. And I don't believe that anymore. That's not a belief that I have. I think you have to decide what love looks like to you. You have to figure out the definition of love, how it shows up, what it means, how it behaves, all of those things. And if you decide that you love someone, you're making a decision about how you want to show up for them.
And my definition of love, personally, just doesn't include a lack of accountability. I don't think that my love for someone means that they shouldn't face consequences for their actions. I think my love can love someone through those consequences, you know, especially when they take them seriously, especially when they try. But my love is also a gift, and not everybody deserves it. So not everybody gets it.
DEMBY: When you - I want to talk about how you found out that this is what your father did. Can you just sort of tell us that scene - because it was your grandmother who told you first?
FORD: Yes. After years of telling me and my brother that it was not her place to tell us why our father was in prison, she told me the reason. In the mall, in the food court, over Chinese food, she told me that my dad was in prison for rape, and she did it in defense of my mother because my mother and I had gotten into an argument earlier that day. My grandma didn't know what it was about, and my mother didn't want me to talk to my grandmother about our argument. And so this is just the way it ended up going, that she decided today was the day that she wanted to defend my mom. And she wanted to do it by telling me that I didn't understand everything that my mom had been through. And if I did understand that this is what my mom had been through, then I would only seek to make her life easier or as easy as possible.
DEMBY: At the time, when you were 14, when you found this out, did you understand that that was what your grandmother was doing?
FORD: No. No. I, honestly, at the time, felt like she was just always looking for a reason to be on whoever's side wasn't right in front of her (laughter). My grandma was not the kind of person that, if you came to her and told her about something that happened with someone else, that she would be like, you know, well, why would they do that? Well, you should tell them - like, she is not going to automatically be on your side.
She's going to be like, what did you do? What did you say? And so I thought that that's what was happening, was that she had just used this information as kind of an ultimate card, a trump card to lay on the table and say that, you know, you don't know the kind of pain that she's felt. Here is an extreme example, a traumatic example of her pain - just one traumatic example of her pain. And because you are her daughter, it is your job to soothe that in her or to, at the very least, keep your feelings about it away from her.
DEMBY: How did you reconcile what your father was - I don't know if you have reconciled it - the crime that your father was in prison for with your own feelings of vulnerability as a Black woman moving through the world with, you know, this person that you met, that you were in the process of building a relationship with?
FORD: I think it's just accepting reality, like, more than anything else because the reality is that I have this dad, my biological father, who is a big part of the foundation of my self-esteem through these letters that he sent to me as a child. That's true. It is also true that my dad is a person who raped two people, and that will always be true. It's true that 30 years later my dad is out of prison. He lives a small, quiet life and just makes things and minds his business. And he has to carry all of the things that he's done. And there are other people in the world who has - who have to carry what he's done to them. And all of those things are true at the same time. That's just reality. I can decide how I want to move through reality. I can decide how I want to react to reality. But I think what's most important is that I just accept reality.
And there will always be consequences for our actions. But what are you going to do on a day-to-day basis while you're living your life? Are you going to live in a place where you deny reality and you think to yourself, I love this person, but only because I choose to forget that they've done terrible things, heinous things? Or do I say this is reality? This is what it is, and I love you. And this thing that you've done - this terrible, horrible, heinous thing - I can't forgive you for, and I'll never try.
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MERAJI: When we come back...
FORD: Almost every win I've had is because I would not bow to authority. I refused.
DEMBY: Stay with us.
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DEMBY: Gene.
MERAJI: Shereen.
DEMBY: CODE SWITCH.
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DEMBY: We're talking with Ashley C. Ford, the author of "Somebody's Daughter." Her memoir might, at first blush, seem to be about her relationship with her dad, who was in prison for this horrible, horrible crime. But, Shereen, it's probably actually more so about her mother.
MERAJI: Because her mom was actually there. Her mom raised her. Her mom, I'm assuming, can't be as romanticized or idealized or even abstracted in the way that kids might do that to a parent who's not around.
DEMBY: Right. Like, her mom is there every day as a whole, flawed person, right?
MERAJI: Yeah. And also, her own dreams for her life were probably completely upended when Ashley's father was locked up.
DEMBY: And, you know, her mom was young and angry and trying to figure out what to do with this new life that she didn't sign up for. And so Ashley and I talked about that.
There's a moment that you recount from when you're in grade school about her - you coming home and getting a beating because a teacher called home, called your mom and told her that you said something vulgar in class, which you did not say. And the next day, you confronted the teacher, which, by the way, props to you for confronting that teacher. That scene was very powerful to me, like, oh. And the teacher realized that something had happened at home. And then when she sort of inquired, she realized that the little - that another little girl had misremembered the moment and sort of misattributed this thing to you.
So this teacher calls home again to your mom, tells her what happens. And you get home, little, you know, grade school you. You get home, and you're basically waiting for your mom to apologize to you for beating you and for not believing you. And she just would not or could not do that. She could not give you that. Why did you - I mean, I - so let me just say that hit so close to home for me on a bunch of levels. Why did you decide to include those moments - like, moments like that in the book about your mom?
FORD: Because I realized in doing creative work and also some therapy work - like, let's be real; I've been in a lot of therapy - I identify that as pretty much the moment that I stopped trusting my mother's judgment, when I began to second-guess most, if not all, of her choices because I stopped feeling safe. I stopped feeling like my mom was primarily concerned with my safety. And it wasn't that I hadn't suspected that before that moment, which is sad. It was just that before that, I think it was more of, like, this confusion.
I kept thinking that, you know, yes, my mom is this way sometimes, but I keep doing the wrong things. I keep saying the wrong things. I keep not reading her mood or her desire right, and that's why I keep getting in trouble. And I confronted that teacher because I knew that I was right. I knew that I hadn't done it. And so I was confused about why this had happened. And, you know, I was probably really hopped up on some Nickelodeon where kids had a lot more power than they do in real life.
DEMBY: Yep.
FORD: And (laughter) I went, and I talked to her about it. And, you know, to her credit, the teacher was like, oh, I've made a mistake and really did seek to rectify it. And my mom's reluctance to just say she was sorry or to even say, like - just say, like, not even I'm sorry, like, I hit you. If she had just said, I'm sorry I didn't listen or I'm sorry I didn't believe you or something very small and specific - I'm sorry that I made you call the little girl in class who's your best friend and apologize to her for having to hear you say that.
Like, it was a lot. Her anger was just - it was overwrought, and it was cruel. And as I got older, I realized that a lot of people's moms did stuff like that. I think that's why I decided to include it, was because it's one of those things that I hadn't ever read about. I had never found a moment like that in a memoir that I felt like, yeah, this is what this is like. Like, this is that moment. I had never, ever found it.
But I knew from talking to my classmates, from talking to my peers, talking to my cousins, that that was really common for our parents to have this moment of rage or this moment of, like, misdirected violence, like, in some capacity and find out that they were wrong and just refuse to apologize. Like, being able - and we were all able to have this thing as well, where it's almost like we looked into their faces and knew that they realized that they should apologize, and we watched them decide not to, and we didn't know why. And we all came up with our own reasons why.
DEMBY: I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent here, so bear with me. But...
FORD: That's OK.
DEMBY: I wonder how much a moment like that shaped your eventual politics - right? - because one of the things...
FORD: (Laughter).
DEMBY: I remember having a moment reading this book, thinking about a very specific time - I have a twin sister - in which we got a beating for something that did not happen. And it was sort of the germ of this idea that, like, violence was capricious and arbitrary and that the people who wield it will not apologize, right? And this is my mom, right? And I don't think I ever connected those things at all until I was reading your memoir. Like, oh, this is - the reason I feel this way about policing today - right? - is because of that experience when I was in the second or third grade.
FORD: Yes, Gene. Yes. Listen, this was - I'm so glad that you're talking about that because I often think of that moment, and I'm not kidding you, as the root of so much of what I would realize eventually was a budding and developing political ideology. My biggest - oh, I don't even want to say biggest. I would just say one of my many points of contention with the way most things are run is the idea that authority is infallible and that - when you are in a situation where someone has named or unnamed authority over you, that you should lean into their reality to the detriment of your own, to the detriment of your own experiences, to the detriment, at times, of your humanity - that is what authority demands of us, that that is what order or even structure demand of us.
And I am not convinced. I mean, I've spent my whole life up until this point essentially being like almost every win I've had is because I would not bow to authority. I refuse. And when people would say things to me or try to get me to do things based simply on their authority, not being able to convince me or even engage with me about the whys or wherefores - like, that's the easiest way to just never have to deal with me again. I will just remove myself from the equation.
And I think a lot of it does come from these moments of, like, I'm sorry, I didn't have the kind of childhood where I felt safe. Most of the adults around me did and said things that were demonstrably wrong and/or hypocritical. And it's not that that's the worst thing in the world. You know, like, these are human beings. What was the worst thing was being told that I was the human being and they were gods, which is sort of how I was supposed to look at it.
DEMBY: You write that your mother almost died. She had this medical scare. And in this moment, you write, quote, "I was hers, and she was mine. That's how it had always been. Who would I be if not hers? I didn't want to be without her," end quote. Can you talk about this tension between what your relationship with your mother was and is and what you wanted or maybe still want it to be?
FORD: There's always been a tension in our relationship because my mother believes and has always believed that my love for her should allow me to selectively hear and remember. And I believe that - without realizing that this was the implication of it - that my mother has asked me, in her own way, to deny myself in order to allow her to see me the way she wants to. And as much as I love my mother, I don't think it's a fair request to ask me to choose. In my dream of dream of dreams, in my fantasy, it was always, you know, one day, my mom and I will have some conversation that breaks everything open, and we will realize that we can be honest with each other and we can be open with each other. And she will give me the benefit of the doubt, and she will understand that my need to talk about true things is not an attempt to punish her but an attempt to connect with her.
And, you know, that's the fantasy. The reality is that my mom is who she is, and she is who she will always be. And I know that she loves me, and I know that she's proud of me. But I am now at a place where I have decided that I just have to trust her to be on her own journey and process things her own way. And I do. I do trust her to be on her own journey. I think she can do it. I think she has everything she needs to do it. And I think that when she does, I will be here, you know? I'm here now. And that's what I think about my mom. That's what I think about our relationship. It's - it is always the same, and it is always changing.
DEMBY: One of the things that I think about a lot when I have these very conversations with my friends, with frightening regularity, about our own parents is how much it feels like we are equipped with - you know, because of - like, obviously, like, you and I have very similar backgrounds in that, like, we, I think, occupy a different social location than our parents did, right? So we have access to therapy and things like that. And there's, like, language that we use and, like, frameworks we use about this stuff, trying to recontextualize the stuff that we - the ways we grew up - right? - that we have that they didn't have. And sometimes, when I'm talking to my mom - trying to talk to my mom about this stuff, I can just feel this, like, gigantic divide. And, like, she cannot - she does not know what I'm talking about. You know what I mean?
FORD: Right, yes (laughter). I think that that's one of my most favorite things about my book, is the fact that I wrote about my very individual, unique experience of childhood, but I also tried to write the common experience of a kind of childhood that I don't see written about a lot. And that's the childhood that you don't necessarily look back on and think, man, I had a terrible childhood.
DEMBY: Yup.
FORD: Like, this is a - you know, some "Child Called 'It'" shit. Like, it's not like that. But it is - it's something about it that you're like, but there were these moments. There were these moments. And it's like, yeah, we got to work through that stuff. But it's also important to tell those stories because kids are still going through those things. They might be going through them in a different way, but they know those feelings. They know those feelings of, like, I need to feel less alone. I need to feel safer. I need to feel like this isn't going as fast as it's going. I need to feel like - you know, if somebody else isn't on my side, then, please, somebody, teach me how to be on my own side.
Like, we grow up, so many of us, with all of that going on inside us. And I think we get older, and we look back, and instead of being able to look at that confused child self with compassion, we look at them with derision. We look at them like, why were you so stupid? Why were you so weak? Remember when you did this embarrassing thing? Remember when you believed this wrong thing? And we have so little compassion for the fact that, like, well, yeah, I believed wrong things. I was learning. Like, that's, like, the point of childhood. I was a child. That's why I believed that. And the only reason we can't look back at that child self and have compassion for them is because we probably didn't experience anybody else having compassion for us when we were a child.
DEMBY: Yeah. One of the things you just said that resonated with me is - like, that is exactly right. Like, that - I grew up in an environment in which there was a lot of precarity, right? But it was not like the - there were people who were around me who were really, really, really going through it, right?
FORD: Mmm hmm.
DEMBY: And comparatively, like, I was like, oh, I'm not - that's not me, you know? Like, I almost felt like I never knew how to contextualize my childhood - right? - because it wasn't - like, I had a good childhood and, like, in all these ways, right?
FORD: Right.
DEMBY: And especially compared to the people who were in proximity to me, right?
FORD: Yes.
DEMBY: But I just never knew what to do with the fact that, like, eh, some of this shit was kind of...
FORD: Sus. Some of it was kind of like, ah, no, this hurts. That's a lot of what it is, is like it hurt or it was confusing in some way.
DEMBY: Right.
FORD: But you weren't allowed to be hurt or confused. Like, I - like, people will be like, well, what would happen when you would tell your mom you were sad? Tell my mom I'm sad?
DEMBY: Right (laughter). What kind of - what are you talking about? Why would I do that?
FORD: What are you talking about? Why would I do that? Why would I tell her I was experiencing any emotion that wasn't coded as positive? And I carry that in me all the time, even as, like - it wasn't until I was an adult and started - you know, you have that moment, I think, sometimes, when you repeat something that a parent said to you or a parent did to you that has maybe become a family joke or, like, an inside joke between you and your siblings, and everybody looks at you like, that's not funny. That's not very kind, you know? Or you repeat something - oh, the worst - you repeat it to, like, your therapist because you're like, well, you know, such and such and such a thing, and the therapist gives you, like, the eyebrows and is like, I'm sorry that happened.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
FORD: And you're like, wait, what? (Laughter) Like, what? Like, is that - and it's because every time you hurt, every time you got upset, it was so downgraded. It was - you were made to feel so silly for experiencing that emotion that you learned to turn it into something silly, and you've never considered how it has seriously impacted you, and it has seriously impacted you (laughter). It's not great. It's not great. All you have in your head is this rolling tape of, like, well, yeah, my mom did this, but I have a list of 50 other things that she didn't, so I think this one doesn't count.
DEMBY: Have you talked to your parents, either of them, about this book? I'm just really, really curious as to whether they read it and how they received it.
FORD: They haven't read it yet. My dad is - I'm going to see my dad next week, and he wants me to, like, hand it to him and, like, sign it in front of him and stuff. So he won't read it until then, though I think he has listened to a lot of my interviews and, like, read the articles and things like that.
My mom probably won't read it. I don't know. Like, she might read it. She might not. I don't feel very attached to whether she reads it or not. I didn't write it for her. I love her, and I wanted to be fair to her. But I did not write the book for her.
DEMBY: Who did you write it for?
FORD: I wrote it for me. This is the book I was looking for the first and last time I visited my local library. You know what I mean? Like, this is the book that I really wanted and needed. Like, I read that quote years and years and years ago, that random quote that I think is - and I can't confirm, but it has been attributed to Toni Morrison a few times that I've seen, where she essentially said, you know, write the book you needed or write the story you needed or something when you were younger. And at first, I thought that was, like, some hoo-ha and, like, didn't make a lot of sense. But eventually, I realized that that's what I was already doing. I was trying to write the book that I needed when I felt most alone and most lost. Yeah. I wanted to write something that was specific but that had the potential to connect to a wide berth of people under the common experience of childhood, you know? Childhood is hard.
And I also wanted people to know, you know, we remember things (laughter). I think that's also part of it. I remembered. These are my memories. This is my story. And I didn't get to tell the truth without fear for a really long time. But now I have me to protect me. And the person - the young, young person inside me who felt like she couldn't tell the truth about who she was has a really strong ally with a little bit of writing talent. And we did our best, and we put it out in the world. And that's my win. That's my win.
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MERAJI: Well, I'm really looking forward to reading it myself. And one more time, for those of you who may not have written it down, we were listening to Gene in conversation with Ashley C. Ford about her new memoir called "Somebody's Daughter."
DEMBY: And that's our show. You can follow us on Twitter and IG at @nprcodeswitch and subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter.
MERAJI: This episode was produced by Brianna Scott, Jess Kung and Christina Cala and edited by Christina Cala, with help from Leah Donnella. And a shoutout to the rest of the CODE SWITCH familia - Kumari Devarajan, Alyssa Jeong Perry, Natalie Escobar, Steve Drummond, LA Johnson, Karen Grigsby Bates and Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. Our intern is Carmen Molina Acosta.
DEMBY: I'm Gene Demby.
MERAJI: And I'm Shereen Marisol Meraji.
DEMBY: Be easy, y'all.
MERAJI: Peace.
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