Tell Your Story with Jonathan Capehart

0:00The formal name was Main Street. The colloquial name was White Street. And so my mother would make that right. And I never understood why. I was like, mom, you just go down there and go. But driving down south in your brown 450 SL Mercedes. Which I was like, stop there. Stop there, mom, Capehart. With your Benz. I know, with her Benz. She was like, and we going down White Street in our Benz. In our Benz. And as I write in the book, it was like her, it was a slow motion protest at 15 miles an hour.

0:41This episode is brought to you by Theraflu. How are you? I am really well. I got a good night's sleep last night. And I have the beds at the Airbnb to thank for it too because. Oh, that's right. Yeah, you've got, so the beds are comfy. Comfy where you're staying. And you know, not everybody has the same mattresses, right? But this one is on a platform. So it's not like a box spring and a mattress. This is just the mattress on a platform, but it feels like I'm on a regular bed. Oh, well, there you go. Yeah. That's a good tip off. Enough about my night. Uh-huh. Yeah. We have a guest here. We do.

1:25But one of the things we said we wanted to do today because we want to officially welcome back Natalie, our producer, who has been on maternity leave. And she is a new mommy of a beautiful baby girl. Remind me of your daughter's name, Leona. And she's back. Welcome back. And, you know, we also have to say. thank you to Julia who substituted in your stead and did an excellent job. So Julia, thank you so much. Welcome back to Natalie and thank you to Julia. I know. Do we get both of you now all the time? Okay. So we have a friend of yours and I met him many years ago during the first administration in the White House.

2:22But I told him it was so many people I met and I probably I was still coaching, so I probably had lost the game and didn't want to... I don't know how you can not know Jonathan Capehart. I mean, Jonathan Capehart is like, he's a fixture in so many homes. Yeah, I know of him, of course. But you didn't remember whether you meet him. I didn't remember meeting him. And, you know, Jonathan is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He's also the co-host of the morning edition of The Weeknd. He's an analyst on the PBS NewsHour. This man's got a lot of jobs. I know, I know. K-Part was previously associate editor at the Washington Post, where he was also an opinion writer.

3:07His memoir, Yet Here I Am, was published earlier this year and was an instant New York Times bestseller. Yes, it was. It is a really nice read. It's a beautiful book. It's a beautiful book, and I'm looking forward to talking to him about it. So without further ado, Jonathan K. Park. Here he is. Hi, hi, hi. Hi. Good to see you. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here, man. Great to see you. Great to see you. Nice to see you again. Jonathan, Jonathan, welcome to IMO. Thank you very much. We did this. We concocted this visit because of your bestselling book. We talked about it a bit. I was like, why don't we talk about it on IMO?

3:54And I was thrilled, thrilled that you wanted to have me on and talk about the book. And I'm looking forward to these. Do you understand how weird this is? I'm the journalist. I'm the one who asks the questions and try to find ways to get you to not get off your talking points. And now I'm getting it from you guys. This is going to be fun. I don't know. You say that now. But this is what I love about the book. It's a beautiful book. It's a wonderful journey through your life. But I love it because in telling your story, we get to see all of Jonathan Capehart. It gives us a real connection to you as a human being, as a man.

4:37Your journey is beautiful and it's beautifully told in this book. So congratulations. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a nice read. It really is. And I didn't become a reader until I was an adult. I knew how to read. I know the way you say that. I was like, whoa, I missed that part. I only read for school. And I've told this story many times that the first book that got me to be a reader was Firestarter by Stephen King. And so I try to, I have this pattern of I have to read two nonfiction books in order to get to read one fiction book. And yours, of course, is a nonfiction book. So thanks for doing it.

5:22Oh, sure. I feel like now I feel like I know. I mean, if you don't know me, I don't know what book you read. So tell us about the process of it and how it sounds like it was wonderful. But I want to hear from you. So what was it like writing it? So during the first Trump administration, I decided to, you know what? This is a little intense. I'm going to get off this merry-go-round and all these stories that I had in my head for my summers as a kid, spending them in North Carolina with my maternal grandparents, I'm finally going to get them out of my head and onto the screen. And I spent an entire weekend just writing what I started calling the down south chapter.

6:08Wow. Writing about how, the prominent thing is my, I went to Catholic school in the north and then would go down south to North Carolina and spend the summers with my Jehovah's Witness grandmother. That was that. That stood out. Because I don't think I knew of your connection to Jehovah's Witness faith. And I didn't realize that your grandmother was such a devout witness. Are they called witnesses? Yeah, yeah. So you had started, you've been going down south since how old? I can't even remember the first time I went down. But, you know, I went basically every summer until I was 12. Yeah. And so going down south, being in the heat, the humidity, the mosquitoes, the thunderstorms, the rain hitting the tin roof, all of that, just, I mean, those memories, the smells of the summer never left me.

7:04And especially going witnessing with my grandmother. It was this woman, she only had a fourth grade education. She knew how to read. She knew how to write. And she was such a devout Jehovah's Witness that we would go witnessing on these country roads in North Carolina. That's a trip. If I'm just picturing this old lady and this well-dressed little man in the back. Talk about what, you know, help us paint that picture for us. Grandma or Sister Alame. Sister Alame. Sister Alame and I made for quite a pair. Now, we'll put aside my fashions for a moment. My grandmother, she liked to dress. And she would get a simplicity.

7:51She would look through that. Wasn't there a book or something you could look through? Simplicity, buttermilk. There were tons of catalogs for patterns. Right, so she would flip through and then she would see a pattern. And then we'd go into town, Murfreesboro, and go find the pattern and bring it back home. and grandma would make her dresses right there on the kitchen table. I could still hear the scissors crunching on the metal tabletop. And then she would sew them. She'd get behind her little singer sewing machine. And then on Sunday, you couldn't tell her nothing. She'd put, just slip that sack dress on over her head, put her faux pearls on, cock that wig on just right, and put her, you know, purse in the crook of her arm, Queen Elizabeth style.

8:37Yes. And you couldn't tell. Sister Isla Mae Kindred, not a thing. And so then there's me, you know. So my family calls me Todd. Everybody in my family calls me Todd. So there I am, little Todd or Todd. Todd. And I see myself in like khaki pants. Of course. A little shirt. Button down. A little button down. Blue? White? I don't remember. I mean, I do remember like a khaki pants and a red, like a red polo of some sort. I like to look good because of my grandmother, but also my Aunt Annie, Aunt Annie Brand. She's like, I like it when you dress up. You look nice. And so it was all about looking good for Aunt Annie, looking good for grandma.

9:26And of course, you're going to Kingdom Hall on Sunday. You got to look your Sunday best. So it stuck. Fuck. So you're pulling up to somebody's house. I'm sorry. No, I'm just going to say, we didn't go down south as often as you did. You went every summer. We went like a couple of times, three times maybe in our childhood. Oh. Yeah. So you all, you and grandma all dressed up. You go down a country road to witness. And you're going to all kinds of folks' house, white folks, black folks. Oh, I wasn't sure. Because one of her friends. Ah, yes, Miss Betsy. Miss Betsy. Tell us about Miss Betsy because that story was very sweet to me.

10:11So I don't remember how grandma met Miss Betsy. But Miss Betsy was a true character. True, true character. Jehovah's Witness, but her husband didn't know. Her best friend was my grandmother. Her husband, according to Miss Betsy, was just this out-and-out racist. So could never know that, one, she was a Jehovah's Witness, and two, she was cavorting with black people. And so whenever we would have to go, not to Kingdom Hall on Sunday during the daylight, she could make her way. But if they went witnessing or in the evening or Bible study, Miss Betsy would call. And the phone would ring and we would go, I'd go get the phone.

10:58Hello? And then there would be silence on the other end. And that was like, oh, this is Ms. Spetson. It's time to move. Right. So I would wait to listen. And then she would whisper into the phone like, I'm on Country Road, Route 4, by the big tree across from the house on the bend. I'll be in the hiding in the ditch. You just, you honk your horn when you get there. Like, okay. Hang up the phone. I'd run in. Okay, I know where Miss Betsy is. I'd tell grandma and grandma. Driving really slow. Hour later. I'm just picturing Miss Betsy in the ditch, wondering where is she? No, she knew. She knew. So we pull up in this one instance that comes to mind.

11:44And, you know, it's pitch black. The brights are on. And grandma beeps the horn. And we just sit and we wait. Because, you know, what if we were followed? What if her husband's following us? And then out of nowhere, Miss Betsy would pop up out of the darkness. And she's this white woman in her own sack dress, purse in the crook of her arm, Bible in the other hand. Just the white version. Right, the white version of Grandma. And she would come running, you know, old lady Wally running to the back. Miss Betsy would dive into the backseat and get on the floor. and then we would drive away in case her husband was following us, which he never did.

12:23And then she would get up and we'd be laughing and she was just wet. She was always just stopping. Well, after laying in the ditch and then running in a sack dress, I mean, I'm like, I bet she was sweaty. Heat and humidity. She would kiss us and give us hugs and kiss us. Cheeks all wet. I hate that to this day. But it was so sweet. It was really, really sweet. I mean, it's a sweet story moving, touching on so many levels, but it spoke to the challenges of a deeply still segregated South. And you witnessed, you grew up in that. I mean, like Craig said, our experiences in the South were intermittent, but you going down there every summer and living it.

13:10and talk about what it felt like to be a Black boy in the segregated South. I mean, I didn't know what it felt like until, you know, decades later, and particularly when writing this book, understanding, well, wait, well, what were those summers like? Oh, Severn, North Carolina is a Jim Crow relic of a Southern town. You know, my mother, I read about how my mother, when driving down South, when you're coming down the road, the first right will take you down Main Street. The second right further down will take you down the street where she was born and raised. My mom always took that first right down Main Street.

13:51Main Street, wide, paved boulevard, double yellow line. The street was lined with these big houses. And the formal name was Main Street. The colloquial name was White Street. And so my mother would make that right. And I never understood why. I was like, Mom, you just go down there and go. But driving down south in your brown 450 SL Mercedes. Which I was like, stop there. Stop there, Mom Capehart. With your Benz. I know, with her Benz. She was like, and we going down White Street in our Benz. In our Benz. And as I write in the book, it was like her, it was a slow motion protest at 15 miles an hour.

14:38You know, the black daughter of Severn is back in town. She's announcing, I'm here. I don't have to honk my horn. Let the car do the talking. And I'm home. I'm here with my Northern address and my education. And I'm bringing my kid. And so, but then you get around the band in those early years in Severn. that street wasn't paved. It was a dirt road. And it had no name. And one summer we came back and it was paved, but it was paved in sort of like tar and those pebble rocks. So when the sun was beaten down on the summer, it would bubble up in tar. So my feet would be covered in tar because I'm running around.

15:25I'm a kid in the summer running around in the street and on the grass and everything. Again, no formal name until they named it South Street, but it's still known to the same, Colored Street. Yeah. Wow. We were the first generation in our family that didn't have to pick cotton. And we were sort of the first generation of sort of, quote unquote, post-civil rights movement kids. I was born exactly three years to the day after the enactment of the 64th Civil Rights Act, less than two years after the passage of the 65th Voting Rights Act. So at, you know, five, six, seven years old, I'm the first child, we're the first children in our family to live in de jure freedom in the United States.

16:16And I'm doing it there in this, you know, where segregation is still kind of around us. It is among the many memories in writing the book where I realized just how much those summers shaped my worldview, my view of this country, my view of myself, Miss Betsy.

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19:25Your mom, I want to talk about your mom too, because just a lot of things you said in describing your time down South. Number one, Southern girl comes back after with an education, a beautiful car, successful. But your mom was a single parent and she did all that on her own. And I just want you to talk a bit about Margaret, who, by the way, I would want to have here because Margaret is actually my favorite Capehart. You know, she is going to dine out on that forever. Well, tell us about your mom's story, her journey, and, you know, how she pushed through and what she was like as a mother to you, all of that good stuff.

20:17So, a few things. Foundational facts. Yes. I know you know how to do this. My mother and father married two years before I was born. They moved to Brooklyn, to Park Slope, and then moved to Newark. My father died when I was four months old. He had a blood clot that went from his legs to his lungs, to his heart. I found out from my godfather years later that the doctors told him he needed to have his legs amputated. And so my father apparently said to them, well, I like to dance. And so you are not taking my legs. I was born with two legs. I'm going to die with two legs. And my godfather told me that from that moment, he decided to live life the way he wanted to live it.

21:14And unfortunately, that meant he left his pregnant wife before I was born. And so when he passed away in 1967, no one called my mother to tell her that he had passed away. Oh, I left out a key point. When he left, he moved in with another woman. No one called her to tell her that he had passed away. She would call daily the hospital to check in on him because my mother is a nurse. She's now retired, a nurse. And they said he passed away. And then she told me a guardian angel called, came to the apartment in Newark and said, you need to get over to Capehart's place now and get his legal papers.

22:07Go and get all of them. My mother said, you know, he always traveled around with an entourage. And so she goes over to the house with police officers. And she said, you walked in and there were just people sitting around. Any of these jokers are going to call his wife? Because he didn't divorce her. She got the legal papers. And then another person, another guardian angel, as she described them, told her that, you know, you're entitled to veterans benefits for the rest of your life. And it's those two guardian angels who changed the trajectory of our lives. I would also say that, you know, Willie Capehart changed the trajectory of our lives by not divorcing my mother, because as a result, we were able to avail ourselves of those things.

23:00So my mom, she worked her butt off double shifts she taught me how to iron how to do laundry how to how to okay mom even knows this she's not a great cook oh but but she did teach me how to boil water to make pasta she taught me things so that way as she said you don't want to have to rely on anybody else you want you have to be able to depend on yourself And, you know, there's some upsides to that. There are also some downsides to that. But she instilled in me an independence that she knew I would need. She sheltered me as much as she could from the slings and arrows of life, particularly when it comes to matters of race.

23:51And we left Newark and moved predominantly white towns. The first day of school, she would say, okay, two things. One, anybody calls you the N-word, you let me know right away. And two, don't let them put you in vocational education. They're always trying to push us into voc-ed. You are going to college and you should be in college prep courses. Yes, ma 'am. And did she intentionally move into a neighborhood where she felt you would have, how did she think about education? And the fact that she lived in a predominantly white community. I think you said she made choices about where she was going to live to ensure that you got.

24:31Oh, sure. Now, it wasn't as like today, folks like, hey, what is the elementary school? What are their scores and their placement within the state? No, mom was like, we got to get out of Newark and we got to go someplace where it's not Newark. So the first place was North Plainfield. Lovely, not ideal. We only lasted two years. And then we went further south to Monmouth County to this town called Hazlitt, New Jersey. And we were only there for four years. But to me, that was an incredible lifetime. And, you know, another predominantly white town where I just dove in. I ran for student council, became student council vice president of Beer Street Elementary School, and then did the same at Raritan High School.

25:21I dove right on in. And you felt accepted? Did you have issues of race teachers lowering your expectations? Did you have any of those kind of challenges? When I got to Raritan High School, I was looking forward to going to homeroom with my fellow nerds. And instead, my homeroom was the shop. They tracked you. Sitting around this giant wedge table with the, what's that thing called? The vice. The vice. Yes, that vice thing. Smell the turpentine and wood. And oil. And metal and stuff. Jonathan's like, where am I? This isn't Kansas anymore. What is that? Like, Aggies, they're going to get dirty. How dare they?

26:10But Jonathan, I want to go back because I think there are a lot of mothers who are like Margaret. Single mothers who are raising black kids. and somehow she gave you the confidence to walk into these spaces and be okay, fit in, not feel intimidated. How did she do that? That is a great question. I mean, I think it's a combination of her parenting, but then also just sort of the way I was. I took it upon myself to be like hi I'm here let's be friends also you're an only child you want to go make friends so it was just perfect my mother I'll never forget she again her admonition was if anyone drops the N-bomb you let me know well it happened one day in Hazlitt right outside our apartment and it was a kid who was not part of our crew, but he dropped it.

27:18And I ran in screaming to my mother. It happened! He said it! He said it! Mom! He comes running out. Halfway one to see what would happen. Right, right. So mom comes down and she breaks it up and says, my little friend's home. And then she says, Todd, come here. We have to talk. Sit down on the sofa and skip. my next door neighbor was also my very best friend and she says now listen you and Skip right now you're equals you're right here but as you get older and you move through life Skip is going to climb higher and he's going to climb higher because he's white I was screaming at the tops of my lungs how can you say that that's not true you're lying Why are you doing this?

28:16She tore my heart out, this conversation. Tears. I screamed myself hoarse. And I remember just the look on my mother's face, in hindsight, was one of sorrow. Yeah, sorrow is the way I would put it because just think about it. She has had to have this. She knew this conversation was coming. she probably knowing me she knew what my reaction would be and you can steal yourself against that and prepare yourself for that as much as you can but when you see your child respond in that way how could that not be heartbreaking but also heartbreaking because you know at some point that same child is going to come back to you decades later and say, you were right.

29:12I was naive. In a lot of ways, I still am that naive little boy, but it was that naivete that gave me the blinders to plow ahead, to walk into rooms where people would look like, who's this black kid? Who does he think he is? And also, you know, back to my mother, my mother always made a point of ensuring that our education was front and center. We would go out to the mall and she would say, don't even think about going into Toys R Us, KB Toys, not going, not buying you a damn thing. But we go into Barnes & Noble because mom would always go into the bookstore. You all spend whatever you want on any books.

29:58She said, you are going to college. And if you are 18 and not in college, you are not living here because I'm not taking care of a grown man. So I was always going to college. It was just a matter of getting in and where would I go. So speaking of college, I want to delve into the Carleton College because you write about knowing that you were gay since you were 10 years old. But you did not feel comfortable until you got to Carleton. Can you talk about that? Because I'm just fascinated by that because I'm a Midwesterner and I think people in the Midwest are nice. What was it about Carlton that made you feel comfortable enough to sort of be yourself?

30:41Well, two reasons. One, Carlton is a very nurturing environment, one. But two, it boils down to a person, and his name is Matthew Brooks. And he was a year behind me in college, and we met my sophomore year, his freshman year, in Goodhue Hall. And he was gay. He didn't tell you he was gay. He's gay. He didn't run away from it. And in fact, he took over, took over. He, you know, became part of the leadership of the gay group on campus. Okay. Moved it from the basement of the chapel to the second floor of the student union. And just symbolically bringing it out of the shadows, putting it someplace where, you know, yeah, people might see you.