Secrets and Lives

Revelation as redemption

My first memoir was all about a big reveal. After keeping the secret my entire life, I told the world that my mother was a numbers runner, that she’d given us a middle-class life by taking bets on 3-digit numbers, collecting money from customers when they didn’t “hit”, paying off their winnings when they did, and profiting from the difference.

Everywhere I went, people asked me the same thing: Was it hard to keep that secret?

No, not at all. That was my normal, from the time I was born. I always knew not to tell anyone what went on in our household. Besides, it wasn’t a shameful secret. I was proud of my mother, which is why I was able to easily follow her edicts: Keep your head up and your mouth shut. And: Be proud but be private.

Besides, the Numbers wasn’t the biggest secret in my life. I had a much darker, scarier one.

I revealed this bigger secret in the book about my mom, but only in passing, and only after my editor insisted I do so. “You’ve mentioned your siblings throughout,” she said to me. “Readers will want to know what happened to them.” “Fine,” I said with an attitude. “But I’m including only one paragraph about all that. Only one.” In her infinite grace and wisdom, my editor simply said, “Ok, Bridgett. Thank you.”

And so, I allowed that one disturbing paragraph into The World According To Fannie Davis. But because the rest of the 293-page book was all about my dynamic and extraordinary mother, Fannie, and her number-running enterprise, I was confident that everyone who asked a question at a book talk or during an interview would focus on that. And I was right. Even when Dani Shapiro interviewed me on her podcast Family Secrets, we only discussed the secret of my mom’s underground lottery business.

I was free and clear. Until I talked with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Forty-five minutes into a 50-minute interview, she said to me: “Your mother had five children and lost three of them in the 1980s….that’s a lot of tragedy to survive in one decade. How did you handle that?”

To say I was caught off guard is an understatement. I managed to answer Terry truthfully: “I don’t know,” I told her. “That’s the completely honest answer. I do not know. I just remember feeling as though I could not add more of a burden to my mother. That the last thing I wanted, was to give her something more to worry about by having to worry about me. And so I know that that enabled me to soldier through.”

My dark secret, as it were - that by the time my mother died, I’d already lost three of my siblings, two of them to murder — was out.

Why didn’t I ever tell people this terrible truth before I was outed on national public radio? Death doesn’t come up easily in any conversation. Besides, I didn’t want folks to look down on my family. Sounds crazy, I know. But I used to think: Is there something wrong with our family? Isn’t God seeking His wrath? Was my mother remiss in her parenting? What did we do to deserve such a fate? As writer Michelle Cliff has put it: “At times they thought the cause of their losses lay in themselves.”

Mostly, I didn’t want to be judged, didn’t want to go through what I confronted when being interviewed for my teaching job at a college in New York. I uncharacteristically revealed my familial losses to a professor on the hiring committee, and she said, “So, do you think you’re capable of doing your job?” That’s what I wanted to avoid, being seen as broken, as a sad, grieving somebody who couldn’t function in the world. Such a thing felt like an added insult to all my mom had done to give me a life of opportunity. Going forward, I made sure to keep my mouth shut. To be private. And that meant, I never spoke about my deceased sisters and brother to anyone.

Of course, secrets weigh on us. And an odd thing occurred after my interview with Terry Gross. I realized I’d revealed the loss of my siblings on Fresh Air, and the world didn’t stop. No one looked at me differently. And that’s when my courage started to grow, and I decided the next book would be about my siblings. All of them. Essentially, that paragraph my former editor had insisted I include became the basis for my 361-page new memoir, the one that’s now on its way into the world.

In this new book, I explore what all that grief was like for me and my remaining sister: “Back when we were losing loved ones, Rita and I felt like freaks,” I wrote.

And then I lost her too: “After she left me, I felt like a singular freak. I was alone in my grief, often hiding it, carrying it around as a sad secret. That secrecy kept me grieving.”

LOVE RITA is a tribute to my sister and to the ways she and I forged a life, side-by-side, despite all that loss. It’s also about how I survived losing her.

Nothing frees you from the grip of a dark secret like exposing it. While few people I know have suffered the multiple losses I’ve suffered (six of my origin-family members gone by the time I was 40), everyone I know has suffered loss.

“Grief, when we’re really in it, we are in the commons of the soul,” says psychotherapist Francis Weller. “Anytime you walk down the street, any pair of eyes you look into, they will know loss; no one’s been excluded from that club. One of the most if not the most common human experience is one of loss. But when you’re in a grief-phobic culture, that language, those commons, don’t get to be visited.”

And as for Black folks, those “commons” are doubly or triply so. “We are a mourning people,” poet Claudia Rankine flatly put it. “So much of Black journalism is obituary,” writer Danyel Smith noted in The New York Times Magazine.

Now my dark secret isn’t one anymore. I’ve come clean, even as I’ve honored my loved ones’ lives. And I survived. In fact, as hard as it’s been, I’ve thrived.

That’s a revelation, and I can think of nothing more redeeming.