Knowing Our Mothers for Ourselves with Denene Millner

[00:00:00] When I became a journalist, I decided that I was going to use my powers for the good of us. I wanted to make sure that I made my mark in showing the everyday humanity of Black people. What's good?

[00:00:14] I'm Nikesha Elise Williams and this is Black and Published, bringing you the journeys of writers, poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds. Today's guest is Denene Millner, author of the novel One Blood, a story Denene culled

[00:00:32] from her own life as an adoptee and crafted in her imagination to both interrogate and understand the lives of her mothers. I don't know anything about my mother. I don't know anything about her, like the details that you can look online and see every

[00:00:50] single solitary factual thing you can about me because I've written about it extensively. But I didn't have that information from my mother and so all of the questions that I wish that I could ask her right now to her face, I asked Lolo and that's how her story

[00:01:11] came to life. A New York Times bestselling author and famed celebrity ghostwriter, Denene got her start as a beat reporter for the Associated Press and the New York Daily News. Her beat was Black people. Why she says she never felt stifled in her career covering her own.

[00:01:29] Plus, the reason she was 11 books deep before she felt confident in her voice. And how One Blood is a way for her to rewrite her own rules for love, for life, and getting free with wisdom, experience and grace. That and more is next when Black and Published continues.

[00:01:52] Alright, so let's jump into this interview. First question, when did you know that you were a writer? Oh, so I have been writing professionally since I was 17 years old. I got my first check for writing from a magazine called Black Collegiate Magazine.

[00:02:18] And I had gotten the gig from sitting next to the person who was the editor-in-chief of that magazine at an NABJ convention. I was an intern there and they sat me at the table and I finessed my way into writing for the magazine.

[00:02:35] And he paid me $500, which might as well have been $5,500,000, $5 million to a broke 17-year-old freshman college student, right? But I think the day that I realized that I was a good writer and that there was something

[00:02:53] to my voice was when Jimmy Breslin, and he was this old, crotchety white man columnist. And I loved Jimmy Breslin because he had like this, he was like a smoker, he had a raspy voice and his voice was all over the page.

[00:03:12] Like you could read his words and it would feel like you were sitting on a stool in like this seedy bar in New York, you know, with all the lights low and you know, the floor

[00:03:23] is sticky and he's got a cigarette on one hand and some kind of brown look at another and he's just talking mess. But that's what his columns read like to me. And it was the best storytelling at the time. And I wanted to have that kind of voice.

[00:03:40] I wanted people to be able to read my work and be transported in that kind of way by the way that I put the words on the page. And so I wrote this story for the Daily News. It was about Tiger Woods.

[00:03:56] He was on Oprah and he was saying something to the effect of he doesn't consider him himself black, he considered himself Kablin Asian, which was a mixture of Caucasian, black and Asian.

[00:04:09] And basically what I said in the story was like, boy, if you stood out on a corner of like 57th and fifth at, you know, nine o'clock at night, the taxi drivers would not recognize you as Kablin Asian.

[00:04:22] They would recognize you as a black man that they wouldn't stop to pick up because they're scared or they just don't feel like being bothered with your black ass. And so I wrote that in this piece.

[00:04:33] And who calls me to congratulate me on my voice and my writing? Jimmy Greslin. And I swear to goodness, it like this was before we had cell phones. I'm really dating myself now. But he left this message for me, basically telling me that he really loved

[00:04:51] what I was writing, what I was doing. He was following my work. He appreciated my perspective on things. And that I was one of the young writers that he was looking after. And that's when I knew I was onto something. What did that validation do for you?

[00:05:08] Not just as a journalist, but creatively as well. It told me to keep going because here was this old, crotchety white man telling me that he appreciated the fact that I was using my pen at the Daily News to explore blackness, right?

[00:05:26] And when I went to the Daily News, when I became a journalist, I decided that I was going to use my powers for the good of us. Because I'm from a generation where when you saw black people in a newspaper,

[00:05:41] they were usually being perp walked across the cover of the newspaper or they were bouncing a basketball, one or the other. There was never anything in between that showed just sort of the everyday humanity of us until, you know, like Black History Month.

[00:05:57] Then all of a sudden everybody threw everything at us, right? Like so now we got all the books, we got all the music, we got all the movies. We got all the attention during February.

[00:06:06] But outside of that, the only time you saw us was when we were being negative or portrayed as negative. When we were on television, it was still an event, right? I remember sitting down and watching Michael Jackson's video. Remember the time because it was such an event.

[00:06:26] And so when black people sat down to watch it, it was a moment. And those moments we held dear because they weren't normal. They weren't every day. And so I grew up in that kind of space.

[00:06:40] And so when I decided to be a journalist, I wanted to make sure that I made my mark in showing the everyday humanity of black people. And so to have when I went to the Daily News and I made that clear

[00:06:53] that that was my mission, I was told that I would never advance in my career, that I would never succeed just covering black people because that was painting myself into a box. And I always considered covering black people when I was a journalist, my beat.

[00:07:09] And I did really well at the Daily News and at the Associated Press when I focused on that. And so to have this man come along and say, no, no, no, no, no, they're all wrong.

[00:07:20] Like you're doing exactly what you should be doing and you're doing it really, really well. That just gave me sales. Like I can I can fly through this. I can I can go really fast if I continue to do this. Yeah. Oh.

[00:07:35] So I find that a lot of the authors that I speak to take one of two tracks because I think for black people and black families from a certain generation, like being a writer is not a job. So we want to be writers and we don't know how.

[00:07:53] So then we become journalists because that's a job. Or we do academia because that's a job. You can be a professor, you can be a journalist, but writing, who knows, is a crapshoot, right? Right. But I find that and especially in the story that you just told about,

[00:08:09] you know, black people being your beat, it's still like that. Did you feel like that work stifled you at all? And if so, what was your outlet? Um, I didn't I didn't feel like it was stifling me.

[00:08:21] Like I I understood that people thought that I was stifling myself. Right. I understood that people looked at it as if, you know, like I was somehow lesser than because I would get sent up on Sundays.

[00:08:34] If I were if I were working on Sundays, I would get sent up to Harlem to Abyssinian Baptist Church to sit and see if, you know, like the pastor made news that day or I would get sent to Brooklyn

[00:08:45] to see if that pastor made news today or I would, you know, have to follow around Al Sharpton to see if he made news. Like I understood that other people looked at that as as me being played small,

[00:09:00] but I always found like the the jewel in that, right? And and people followed my work because I approached it with the respect and care and attention that it deserved. And so I never looked at it as I'm being used.

[00:09:20] So then I have to ask if no one you wanted your work to be in service of black people, when did you decide, you know what? Being a journalist and editor is not enough. I need to move to books.

[00:09:35] Yeah. So my my foray into being an author was completely unexpected. It just was not even on my radar, not even a little bit. My goal in life was to be a columnist, a New York City columnist for one of the top New York City newspapers.

[00:09:56] That's all I wanted. That was my goal in life. And thank God I learned to think bigger. But I had written a story for the Daily News for this section called Thursday. It was T.H.E.R.S.D.A.Y.

[00:10:09] And I'd written this piece about the book called The Rules, which was this really popular book back in the 90s by these two white women from Long Island who were telling women how to get a man.

[00:10:23] The rules like don't call him back until he calls you three times or be coy and mysterious on a date. Don't talk too much because men don't like that. Like those were the kinds of rules that they had. And I just thought the book was absolutely back-crap crazy

[00:10:39] because I'm like who wants to go on a date and not talk? And if Jerome calls me on Thursday talking about let's go see Jill Scott, I'm going to see Jill Scott. I'm not going to turn that down and not return his phone call

[00:10:53] until he calls me back three times. I don't know. Nan Negro, who's going to be bothered with calling me three times. So I wrote a story for Thursday saying the rules would never work for black women because black men would never go for it.

[00:11:09] And the way that it was illustrated on the cover, my boss at the time and I didn't know that she was going to do this, she got one of my co-workers to dress up in a Superman suit

[00:11:20] and he was standing on the cover of a mock book cover. And it said rules for the sisters can black women find true love and they made it look like a book and that it was written by me.

[00:11:32] So I come into work and there are 14 messages on my answer machine when I when I arrived with my bagel and my coffee slightly late. But you know, that's the way I always got my work done. It don't matter now. Right exactly. It means nothing now. Right.

[00:11:50] So 12 of them were from women saying that they had already gone to the bookstore looking for rules for the sisters and couldn't find it. Where could they find this book? And one was from an editor at Ms.

[00:12:01] Magazine saying she loved my writing and I needed to be writing for them. And then the 14th one was from an editor at William Morrow, who was like, do you want to write the black version of the rules?

[00:12:13] So I had a book deal by three o'clock that afternoon for $50,000. You better. Agent. And that was the beginning of my writing books. It came out in 1997, like right before I got married. And all of these magazines were following me and my now ex husband

[00:12:33] all around the world, literally like Time magazine came and did a story on us while we were on a honeymoon. Newsweek did a story on us while we were on a honeymoon. People did a story on our wedding. They were at my wedding.

[00:12:45] Like everybody was like, oh, this is the black girl rules. And she actually found a man like that was the story. Yeah. And so I thought that was going to be it. And then one of our friends, a really dear friend of ours at the time,

[00:13:00] Valerie Wilson Wesley. She's a prolific author from the 90s. She was like, well, I bet you if you and redacted husband write a book about relationships that he said she said that you would, you know, get a good book deal rather quickly.

[00:13:18] And so she bet us $10 that if we put together a proposal and pitched it that it would get purchased. And sure enough, it got purchased. We gave her her $10 in our and our then new book.

[00:13:31] And then we went on to write three books that sort of did like a nonfiction. What brothers think? What sisters know? And then we wrote them. We went into novels. So, you know, and then it just kept going. I wrote novels with my friends.

[00:13:46] I had editors asking me if I would write four other people. And that's how I got into celebrity memoir writing. And then I had people asking me if I could turn scripts into novels. And it just kept going and going and going.

[00:14:02] So all of that is how I got into writing books. But I didn't have confidence in myself to be just an author until I was about 10 or 11 books in. Hmm. What did gaining confidence in your work? 11 books in do for you?

[00:14:23] Hmm. It just made me feel like I could I could sustain myself, right? Like my my dad didn't stop saying I should get a teacher's license until maybe like four years ago. Because Barbara was like, you know, if this book thing doesn't work out

[00:14:43] and you don't have a full time job, you know, like me, you could always be a teacher, like, you know, it's like it was like there's always jobs down at the post office. You can always go down there and be a teacher and, you know,

[00:14:56] and help the kids with they writing and still get a check and some money towards your pension. Like my dad is 88 and he believes in stability. OK. So that's then sold in that, you know, like he saw me as able to to do this full time.

[00:15:14] But, you know, like it it took me a minute to I always have something else going even to this day. You know, I have an imprint. I make pretty good money with my imprint now. Like I didn't necessarily in the very beginning with

[00:15:33] I get publishing and even at Simon and Schuster took me a minute to get to the part where, you know, I was doing this more as a job than a hobby and had to make everybody else

[00:15:45] understand that this is a job for me and not a hobby, too, because it takes up a lot of time. And it wasn't until recently that I started getting paid my worth or the books that I that I write.

[00:15:58] And when you're not getting paid your work for the things that you do, it's hard for you to see it as something that can sustain you. And so it took me a minute to get there. Me and my daddy, it took us a minute to understand that,

[00:16:15] you know, like I have I always knew that I had the talent. But getting other people to see that respected and pay me accordingly is has always been a challenge. Oh, we're not going to have testimony service here on this. You mentioned your imprint.

[00:16:35] You first started publishing in 97. How has the publishing industry changed from 1997 to 2023? Oh, my goodness. So in 1997, you know, again, we were coming off of the heyday of people really loving Black women's books and celebrating them

[00:16:55] and making space for them, writing about them, treating us all like rock stars. So when the Sisters Rules came out in 97, I literally, you know, had a story written about me in the Washington Post. And I showed up to a book signing in Largo, Maryland,

[00:17:14] and the entire place was stacked with people, stacked with people. I walked in and I could barely believe what I was seeing. It was just full of people. And that's the way that it was every time I wrote a book

[00:17:34] or every time my ex-husband and I wrote a book together, the rooms would be packed. There literally would be auditoriums of people who wanted to talk about relationships and wanted to, you know, see the husband and wife team who were talking about the differences

[00:17:51] between the way that men think about relationships versus the way that women think about relationships. And there was just that there were stories about it. People were, you know, just really going out of their way to celebrate us today and 2023.

[00:18:07] I mean, you would think that there are like five black people that, you know, like will get attention when the newspaper is doing reviews or or they're deciding to do a profile on them. There's like five black people who get that same

[00:18:23] get on the Today Show or get on, you know, whatever show that will push their book, right? And the rest of us are just, you know, like tap dancing on Instagram. Like, can you buy my book? Please buy my book.

[00:18:40] It is near impossible with all of the different outlets that we have that the social connection has made it so that we are not connecting. And we're not connecting with people who have something to say who have work like the work that we do.

[00:19:02] And again, I think it's maybe because we feel like, oh, if I saw an Instagram or TikTok, I don't really need to go and see her at the bookstore or I could just sit on Zoom and watch her, you know, talk about her book

[00:19:14] from the comfort of my home. And I don't need to buy the book because, you know, like, you know, who wants to go to the bookstore? Who wants to order, you know, who wants to Amazon Prime it?

[00:19:25] I can, like, you know, just listen to her talk about it. And that's more than enough. And that's not the way that we looked at books and authors and particularly black women in the 90s. So knowing all of that and going through that,

[00:19:40] how are you besides doing everything you can to promote one blood? But how are you taking that knowledge and that experience into making the publication of what I would say, the book that you've been meaning to write your whole life?

[00:19:55] Oh, and making that one, that like making that the success that all of your previous works have had that have had your name on it or your touch on them. Yeah, it's just a matter of talking to people like you,

[00:20:09] you know, who I know have incredible platforms that are respected that give people a chance to really hear what it is that I try to do with this book. It's leaning on my friends. Like, give me your address and I'll send you a book.

[00:20:23] And because I'm Danine and not some random weirdo, you know, like they respond and they send me their address because they do want the book. But those are big mouths who will, you know, I'm hoping who will share the book and show that they have it

[00:20:38] and say that, you know, like, you should support this sister. This is my friend. She supported me when I was doing something and I'm supporting her now. It's really us sort of linking arms together as creators and saying, you know, like, let's do this together.

[00:20:52] Let's try and find these audiences. And the audience is still out there, right? It's just a matter of trying to figure out how to reach them and then convince them that, you know, these books are are worth their time and attention.

[00:21:06] All right. So then let's get to the book. Do you have it with you? I do. A little something for us so we can get into Grace, Lolo and Ray. Absolutely. Absolutely. One blood by DeNene Milner is the story of Grace, Lolo and Ray.

[00:21:24] Grace, an unwed teen mom who was forced to give up her baby. Lolo, the woman who raised that baby with her husband and a house full of secrets. And the daughter, Ray, who in keeping her mother's secrets made herself so small it took years before she learned freedom

[00:21:42] was worth fighting for. Here's DeNene. OK, I'm going to read from the book of Grace, the fourth chapter where Grace is laying on a grave and looking at an aunt and being really angry at that aunt. And then she's forced to remember

[00:22:02] that her grandmother taught her to respect the land. Here we go. Mama had taught her better than that, told her to care for all living creatures, be responsible to them as they each served a critical function in the chain of being.

[00:22:18] Roosters get the day going, announcing the sun, waking everybody up. Bees and spiders kiss the flowers so food can grow and sketers can find something else to chew on. Even snakes deserve to be. Now you quit all that hollering.

[00:22:34] She'd once yelled at Grace, smashing her hands together for emphasis, jarring her granddaughter from a loud and boisterous jog away from the vegetable garden. Freshly picked circus naps were flying every which way from Grace's gathering skirt as she took flight spooked by a black

[00:22:51] rat snake slithering around the peabush and her bare feet. Mama, that's a great big old snake over there. Grace had said, why'd I pointing as she backed away? What you running foe? Mama asked, waving a stray weed she punished for trying to marry with her marigolds.

[00:23:10] You ought to be thankful that little old snake for prancing in our garden, all pretty and proud. He helping. But mama, that snake long as my arm looked like he helping itself to a whole peabush. He happened at Peabush by making the mice run.

[00:23:28] The mice run, they take a few seeds with them and somebody get a new peabush right where they need them or eagle eat up the mouse so he can grow strong and fly high up in them trees and shake a seed, make a new tree for all

[00:23:41] the birds and squirrels are playing and such. And squirrels make a fine stew. And at Peabush, well, the snake helped the peabush and that peabush help us so we can eat. We eat. I can help the mamas bring the babies into the world

[00:23:55] and they grow up sweet like you. Have they mama's plant flowers and make squirrel stew? Mama said, bending over, peering between the marigolds inspecting for more weeds. Make the whole world fat and pretty. Make all a smile and thank Mama Earth for giving us all this life.

[00:24:14] One big circle. The way I see it, that snake is light. Thank the snake. Pick them peas. Now Grace pressed her cheek and chest and stomach and hip and palms into the dirt that was covering over her circle.

[00:24:30] Bassie was no more to this world than a mouse driven into the ground by a snake that people saw fit to let slither around the pulpit. Big and black and bold in his presence, his fearlessness. They ate up his lies about the Jezebel didn't bother

[00:24:46] doing the figuring necessary to make his rationale for beating a woman to death with his bare hands makes sense. She was lust, a menace, a threat to the goodness of this of their pristine productive gardens. And so ashes to ashes, dust to dust was all that

[00:25:03] was meant for her. All she deserves. Same for the Jezebel's crazy mama mixing up potions and talking trees, talking to the water like they could hear her, but they could talk back. A sin against the living God, the omnipotent. It was what it was.

[00:25:19] Her evil caught up to her is what they said. Didn't matter that she was the town's most prolific midwife. Babies had wriggled from pregnant bellies just fine before her. They reckon they do the same without her. Let that circle be broken. Thank you. It's my pleasure.

[00:25:38] So you focus the book on the the matrilineal connections between the three characters, but as much as that is, you know, the source on the page, you also spend a lot of time talking about the nature. And so it makes me think like as blood is to

[00:25:58] people, soil is to nature. And then you also have this tension between the spiritual and the religious and ritual and all of that. Where did all of that come from? OK, so Mama, who is the grandmother who's saying, you know, like be cool with these trees

[00:26:24] and these squirrels and these snakes and all that stuff. She is a composite of my father's grandmother, my great grandmother, who was a midwife and a healer in Southern Virginia in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. And she actually birthed all of my my father and

[00:26:44] his six siblings and pretty much everybody in the community. And she also was a healer. My dad told me this crazy story once and it actually made it into the book that his brother had hit his leg with an ax.

[00:26:59] And there was a lot of blood in my grandmother. Her name was Ida May told my father to go get a piece of pork salad, which is much like a collard green, but you have to know how to cook

[00:27:12] it because it can be poisonous and a spider web and some snot. And she was able to use the three of those things to make a poultice for his leg. And his that that thing was healed up, he said, within a week and a half.

[00:27:28] And so knowing that she was a healer, knowing that she was most likely spiritual, knowing that she was a midwife and wanting to understand where a healing could come from at that time. It required spirituality and it also required sort of an understanding of something bigger than yourself.

[00:27:51] When I was writing this book, I was brought to understand that there is something bigger than myself outside of the religion that I was raised in. I was raised as a Baptist Christian. My mom was she job for Jesus every week. She really loved the Lord, right?

[00:28:08] But in around 2017, I was introduced to a different religion, a different way of understanding the universe and understanding our ancestors, i.e. angels and how they can work through your life. And I am confident that my mothers, both of them, both my birth mother and my mother were

[00:28:32] here with me when I was writing. I was new to making altars. I was new to calling the ancestors to me. I was new to paying attention to my dreams and understanding the messages that were being passed on to me.

[00:28:45] I was new to, you know, like making sure that my house is protected in a very specific way, making sure that spirits are either welcomed in or escorted out in a very particular way. In the middle of writing that book, I was

[00:28:59] learning all of those different things and understanding the very specific powers that I have to communicate with the other side to go through that veil and really understand and ask for help. And so, you know, what I was feeling spiritually at the time very much shows up

[00:29:20] in the work. And a lot of times there were moments where I would sit and write for two, three hours at a time and then pull myself away from the computer and be like, I don't even know where those words came from.

[00:29:33] I am certain that, you know, like my mothers had their doing in the stories that pertain to the kind of life that I, in my mind, as an author and a novelist, thought that they probably went through. I can feel them in the room.

[00:29:52] There's times when I can feel them here surrounding me, pushing me, you know, on my back to just move forward. And so that's what you're seeing in one blend. I think that comes through in the language, especially in Grace's chapter and then

[00:30:09] also in Lolo's cadence as well and in all of the Southern speaking inflections and in terms of phrase. Mama reminds me of baby Suggs, holy from beloved. Thank you for that. You're welcome. That's who mama put me in the mind of. Yeah.

[00:30:35] But that first book, the book of Grace is so damn heartbreaking. Yeah. Speaking of your spiritual audience just keeping on the same, I guess, kind of train. How did you have the courage to tell that story and also protect yourself from just the hideousness of it?

[00:30:57] I can't protect myself from the hideousness of it because I'm a product of it. Right. Like I am. I'm adopted. Grace is who I envision in my mind, her to be my birth mother. Right. Like I don't have any details about my birth mother.

[00:31:17] I although I did end up finding her during the course of writing this book, which is a whole other crazy story. But up until I wrote this book, I didn't know any details about my birth mother and had very scant details about my own birth story.

[00:31:34] No, what I had been told was that I was a little baby when somebody left me on the stoop of an orphanage and that my parents came and found me four days later when they went looking for a baby girl. And so that is pretty much the

[00:31:49] beginning of Lolo's story. But that's also the beginning of Ray's story. But Grace's story is what I imagined in my mind happened to my birth mother. Because I don't have any details, I choose to look at her with the love and light and grace,

[00:32:12] i.e. her name that she deserves. You know, when you think about birth mothers, there's all kinds of negative connotations behind them if you do think of them at all. Most of the times you don't think of them. When you're thinking of an adopted child, everybody

[00:32:29] expects you to clap and applaud for the parents who adopted that person and raised that person. Right? And we as adopted children are required to clap and celebrate that somebody took us in. And I am grateful to my parents, but there was somebody

[00:32:49] that I was connected to before them. Right? And that is my birth mother. And she carried me in her womb and I choose to look at her in a way that gives her the grace of birthing a baby and having to wear with all to love

[00:33:08] that child beyond measure. Now, what happens to grace in the book isn't the way that I chose to see what happened with my birth mother. But I wanted to use her story to honor the decision making that birth mothers make to give their babies away.

[00:33:30] Sometimes they're taken away. Sometimes they have no other choice. Sometimes they make that choice out of love. Sometimes they make it out of selfishness, right? But their stories deserve to be heard. And so I wanted to honor grace by having a reader understand that birth mothers

[00:33:47] are not callous or foolish or selfish or that they don't love their babies or these babies were made out of hasten and, you know, a lack of integrity that sometimes things happen and sometimes babies are made and sometimes they don't get to stay with their

[00:34:08] parents and everybody has their own story that needs to be honored. Yeah, you say in your acknowledgments I wrote this story because my birth mother and many more like her deserve context deserve some color and the stark black and white judgment we reserve for women

[00:34:22] who give their babies away. I wrote this story from my mother and the black women of her generation who were led to believe that their various survival was wholly dependent on their being mothers and wives in that this should be the sole source of their ambition, even

[00:34:34] as American racism conspired to stop black women like my mother from stepping into and succeeding at those very roles. First of all, praise hands hallelujah. OK, so many underlines in this book. I was like, I can give it to no one to borrow because it

[00:34:51] all of my annotation. But going on this same path, what I love about the book is trying to do better and the next generation or questioning some of those things. And then even the kitchen table conversation between Lolo, Sarah, Cindy and Parley where they're talking about

[00:35:12] marriage. You spoke earlier about how your first book was the rules for black women and then you went on to write several other books with redacted. And now it seems like this book is even a correction of that record. Oh, without question. OK, so you caught that.

[00:35:32] You caught it. You caught it because let me tell you something. There is a vast difference between what I was thinking when I was twenty seven years old and what I was thinking when I was 50. I wrote this book between age 50 and 54. I'll be 55 in October and birthday.

[00:35:53] Thank you. And what I thought about where I should be and what kind of relationship I should be in and what that fellowship with a significant other should look like has vastly changed with age, experience and wisdom. And so I don't even think I

[00:36:12] would have written the sisters rules had somebody come to me today to write it. You know, there are parts of act like a lady think like a man that I no longer subscribe to. Right. And not that I completely subscribe to it at the time.

[00:36:27] But the way that I think about relationships and womanhood and black womenhood and what it means to get free is completely different from what you'll see in my earlier work for sure. So then as we pray generations of women and young women, older women, elders come to this

[00:36:54] book. What is it that you want to glean from this text? Older women who come to this book, I hope they'll recognize the love and respect that I was trying to pay them for how I want us to understand what they came through. Right. Like particularly with

[00:37:14] with the book of Dolores, Lolo's story is filled out with the answers for all the questions that I had from my own mother. She passed away 21 years ago as of July and we had a pretty we had a good relationship, but we also had a relationship

[00:37:33] that was very starkly drawn between mother and daughter. And my mother was of the inkling that children were to be seen and not heard. Right. That you stay out of grown folks business and I'm going to be deeply private about what I do with your daddy,

[00:37:54] what I've done in my past, where I come from because I don't need us rehashing what I've been through and I don't need us harping on what I've been through. And my mom didn't start talking about her childhood until I had my own child. And then only

[00:38:14] then did she look at me as a woman and not just as her daughter and then and only then did I start looking at her as a woman and not just my mother. And so that that coming together over womanhood only lasted three years.

[00:38:31] And that was three years when I was in a fog of raising a brand new baby and being pregnant with the second one. Like my second baby was born just six weeks before my mom passed away. So she got to see my little one three times

[00:38:45] before she died and she was very close to my older daughter. But I never got to ask her the questions that I wanted to ask her. You know, like, well, why couldn't you have babies? Well, why couldn't what possessed you to adopt children then?

[00:39:01] You know, like, why did you keep it a secret? Why was it important to you to keep it a secret? Why don't you marry daddy? Like, could you have lived by yourself at the time? And and if so, how would you have afforded it?

[00:39:13] Or did you, you know, I don't I don't know anything about my mother. I don't know anything about her, like the details that you can look online and see every single solitary factual thing you can about me, because I've written about it extensively

[00:39:31] about motherhood, about being someone's daughter, about being adopted, about being a wife, about being a divorcee, all of that. Right. But I didn't have that information from my mother. And so all of the questions that I wish that I could ask her right now to her face,

[00:39:49] I asked Lolo and that's how her story came to life. And so with older women who are reading this book, I hope that they can see that I see them, their way of living and I respect it. I hope that when they go to the Book of Dolores,

[00:40:07] they understand that I saw the way that they were forced to live and I respect it. And I hope that when they read the Book of Ray, they could see that Ray was taking cues from Lolo and how Lolo was raised in her life

[00:40:22] and trying to make different choices for herself because her mother made that way for her. And Ray respected that and used it to get free. Yeah. I love the book so, so, so, so much. And I wish you the best success with it.

[00:40:40] I want to do a little speed around in the game. OK, so for this afternoon. All right. What is your favorite book? Oh, my favorite book is, ironically, a children's book called Tar Beach. It's a book by Faith Ringgold. It's based on a story quote that she did.

[00:41:00] She's a really prominent and beautiful Harlem Renaissance era artist who is still alive today. And she makes story quilts and she turned this particular story quote called Tar Beach into a book about a little girl named Cassie May Lightfoot

[00:41:17] who dreams that she flies through the skies of New York City and everything that she flies over becomes her own. She owns it. And I just love the idea of being able to imagine yourself soaring and having exactly what you want.

[00:41:35] And I love the the old to Brooklyn, in particular, New York City and Blackness, this Black family having a party out on the top of their their roof and just enjoying the moon and the stars and watermelon and fried chicken and each other and poker and and Pocchino

[00:41:54] and whatever card game they were playing and each other. Who is your favorite author? This feels so basic and banal because who doesn't say Toni Morrison, right? But it's Toni Morrison and J. California Cooper, who I really love. Yeah. What is your favorite song?

[00:42:12] Oh, that's that's that's cool and unusual punishment to whittle it down to just one. But definitely Erica Baidu's Clevver. OK, what is your favorite book to movie adaptation? Probably Queen Sugar. I don't know if one blood is in the movie talks yet. I hope that it is.

[00:42:30] But if you don't dream out loud. Yes, if your book is adapted, who would you want to play the characters of Grace, Lolo and Ray? Oh, OK, so I literally have this written down. So for Mama would be Alfre Woodard or Tina Lifford. Grace will be Burgundy Baker.

[00:42:53] She's one of the main characters in The Shy. Bassie would be Nicole Bihari. Lolo would be Anika Nani Rose. Ray would be Zazie Beats. And Hattie would be Amira Van. Miss Ernestine from Underground. Yes, Miss Ernestine from Underground. That's it. All right.

[00:43:14] So you talked a lot about getting free. What are three things that define freedom for you? Being uninterrupted. And when I say being uninterrupted, I mean having the money stability and wherewithal to be able to make decisions for yourself that are not rooted in fear.

[00:43:35] Right? I'm still a work in progress for that, but I'm close to it. Rita would be also creating a space for my children, my daughters to feel like they are uninterrupted. Right. So they get to be what they want to be without fear.

[00:43:57] And the third thing would be not depending on a man to feel fulfilled, you know, don't get it twisted. I still love male energy and I still, you know, appreciate the attention in time of a male, right?

[00:44:17] But freedom is understanding that I don't need that in order to be whole. So our little game is called rewriting the classics. Name one book you wish you would have written and classic is any way you define classic. Maybe J. California Coopers in search of satisfaction.

[00:44:37] Just because she was just preaching in that book about freedom. Like that's what that book was about. And boy, if I could write like that. And then another one would be Ocean Bronx on earth. We're briefly gorgeous.

[00:44:52] Just because the writing is just it made me want to throw my computer against this wall. Like I just can't even imagine having that kind of ability and hold over words to put them onto a page like that. Like I wish I could write like that.

[00:45:09] Name one book where you want to change the ending and how would you do it? Oh, oh goodness. Um, yeah, probably would have been one of my own. I was going to end up here. It's one of my own.

[00:45:30] If I could go back and change the ending to sisters rules and tell women, girl, you don't need a man to feel whole, right? Like the whole book is about what you need to do to get a man.

[00:45:47] And it's definitely rooted in, you don't have to do this old school act dumb and, you know, be quiet and all of that foolishness to get a man. So that's there. But I wish that I could have written somewhere in that book, particularly at the end.

[00:46:03] And oh, by the way, you can use all these rules if you want to. But it's OK for you to be by yourself too. It's OK. And then name a book that you think is overrated or overtought. And why? Any dead white man you could possibly think of.

[00:46:23] That's me saying, yeah, I have a serious issue with the way that dead white men are foisted upon, particularly children of color. And we are, you know, told that somehow we are not smart enough if we don't understand it or we don't glom into it.

[00:46:43] Or it's not just our speed and anything that's not dead white men is not worthy. So one of those books is The Great Cats Me. He did the Great Cats Me. And I'm from Long Island, New York. I didn't understand it. I didn't care for it.

[00:47:00] I didn't care about it. It just it wracked my nerves. The trying to understand this foolishness that had absolutely zero zilch to do with my reality. Amen. So my final question for you today, when you are dead and gone and among the ancestors,

[00:47:21] what would you like someone to write about the legacy of words and work that you've left behind? That she loved black people so much. She loved us so much. And she saw us as humans, as full humans, the full range of emotion and lives that deserved a flashlight,

[00:47:44] lives that deserve to be held up to the light. Big thank you to Deneen Milner for being here today on Black and Published. Make sure you check out Deneen's latest novel, One Blood, out now from Forge Books.

[00:47:59] And if you're not following Deneen, check her out on the socials. She's at My Brown Baby on Twitter and Instagram. That's our show for the week. If you like this episode and want more black and published, head to our Instagram page.

[00:48:15] It's at Black and Published, and that's B-L-K and Published. There I've posted a bonus clip from my interview with Deneen about how an edit to remove a Donnie Hathaway reference in a profile of Jay-Z

[00:48:30] led her to quit a high profile job and come to work directly for the culture. Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments. I'll highlight y'all next week when our guests will be Dolan Perkins-Valdes,

[00:48:46] author of the novel Take My Hand. I feel sometimes that I don't get enough credit for some of the doors that I opened. Talk about it. You know, and I say that with all due respect to the people who open the doors for me. Right.

[00:49:04] And when my book came out, Winch came out in 2010, it was at a time where we were sort of in a different moment. People said that they had slavery fatigue. They didn't want to talk about those old stories anymore.

[00:49:16] And then the book was published and we learned there was an appetite for it. That's next week on Black and Published. I'll talk to you then. Peace.