The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner A “beautiful, tragic, and inspiring” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) memoir about three Black girls from the storied Bronzeville section of Chicago that offers a penetrating exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the powerful forces at work that allow some to flourish…and others to falter. They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong as they come; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded—fervently and intensely in that unique way of little girls—as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, in the warm glow of the recent civil rights movement. It has offered them a promise, albeit nascent and fragile, that they will have more opportunities, rights, and freedoms than any generation of Black Americans in history. Their working-class, striving parents are eager for them to realize this hard-fought potential. But the girls have much more immediate concerns: hiding under the dining room table and eavesdropping on grown folks’ business; collecting secret treasures; and daydreaming about their futures—Dawn and Debra, doctors, Kim a teacher. For a brief, wondrous moment the girls are all giggles and dreams and promises of “friends forever.” And then fate intervenes, first slowly and then dramatically, sending them careening in wildly different directions. There’s heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why? In the vein of The Other Wes Moore and The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Three Girls from Bronzeville is a piercing memoir that chronicles Dawn’s attempt to find answers. It’s at once a celebration of sisterhood and friendship, a testimony to the unique struggles of Black women, and a tour-de-force about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming to you with another great podcast who knew this was going to happen again? Almost 1,000 episodes, and we're just like, let's do one more. Do another podcast.

What's going on there? Today, we have an amazing guest on the show. Before we get to her and her amazing book that's just killing it on the charts right now, you want to check out the video version of it because the video, the iTunes thing is nice, but really, watching the video is so much more interesting. At least if you ignore my half of the video, you'll be, and that's usually what most people do. But there's so much more you can take and do. Plus you can see all the reviews and everything we do on the Chris Voss Show. Go to youtube.com, Chris Voss, hit the bell notification. It's free for an unlimited time. You want to get on that deal while it's still available.

Also go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. You can see all the books we're reading and reviewing over there as well. Also, go to all the groups we have on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. I can't even keep up with where all the cool kids are at nowadays, but you can go see all the things the show is doing over there as well. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book.

It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader,

and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you

can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today, like I mentioned, we have an amazing author. We just go to the Google machine. We type in amazing authors that are just blowing up the world and they come to us and we go, hey, get that person on the show. And we have one of them. We caught one today. It sounds like we're fishing or something. I don't know what that's about.

She is Dawn Turner. She is the author of the newest book out, Three Girls from Bronzeville, a uniquely American memoir of race, fate, and sisterhood. This book just barely came out on September 7th. So it's still just coming right off the presses, and you can take advantage of it there. And data that we have on her, let me see if we can get to her bio real quick. We got a few different emails open here. She is an award-winning journalist and novelist. She's a former columnist and reporter for the Chicago Tribune. I'm thinking of pizza now.

Turner spent a decade and a half writing about race, politics, and people whose stories are often dismissed and ignored. Turner, who served as a 2017 and 2018 juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, has written commentary for the Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, CBS Sunday Morning Show, NPR's Morning Edition Show, and the Chicago Tonight Show and elsewhere. She's held fellowships at the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. You can tell I didn't go to college. Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Welcome to the show, Dawn. How are you? I'm doing really well. Thank you for having me.

Maynard Institute. One of these days I'm going to college and I'm going to learn something. Welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. This is awesome. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. We're happy to have you. Tell people where they can order the book for you and any plugs you want. Are you on Instagram at all or anything like that? I am on Instagram. I'm on Facebook and I'm on Twitter. And you can get the book. It's widely available at your local, your neighborhood independent bookseller, as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. So you can find it many different places.

Order the darn book. I didn't get into Instagram much. And then all the authors that came on the show, they're like, Instagram's really good for authors. And I'm like, we should be over there more. So there you go. What motivated you to write this? The book is the story of three girls who start out in virtually the same place with very similar aspirations and wind up taking wildly divergent paths. My sister, Kim, my best friend, Deborah, and I came of age in the 1970s in the afterglow of the civil rights movement. It was a moment when our parents believed that this country would finally be amenable to affording us the opportunities that it had denied generations of Black folks. And our parents would soon be disabused of this. But in that moment, they set their sights on promising futures for their daughters. We would go to college, we would have great paying jobs,

and we would become homeowners and partake of every aspect of the American dream. But for Kim and Deborah, that dream would prove elusive. They were my first great loves. And I set out to understand when did we lose them? What happened? And that was the motivating force behind the book. When did we lose them? Now, you're one was the motivating force behind the book. When did we lose them? Now you're one of the three girls, is that correct? Yes. Just to clarify that, because it is a memoir, but I wanted to make sure people understood that. So it's a journey of going through life and where you end up in life. Is that maybe somewhat of a summation? Yeah, it's because we all know this is a universal story in that we

all know people who started out at a certain place and there was so much promise before them and they land in some place completely unexpected. So they didn't expect to land there and people watching them who love them, care for them, they didn't expect that as well. And so that is, it's a story of our divergent paths. And I have to say, Chris, that I had been reading books for years about men who have different faiths. I don't know if you've read The Other Wes Moore, which is fantastic. It was published in 2010 by Wes Moore. There's another book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. Also just amazing. But there were so many of these books about men whose paths diverged.

And I hadn't read anything about women and certainly nothing about black women. And the subtitle is a uniquely American story about race, fate, and sisterhood. And you talk about the junction of not only your lives and these girls' lives, but what's going on in America, not only in your youth, the promise or the hope or promise of a new dream and generation. James Baldwin, of course, is iconic in his words of reminding us that what he said is still true today, and we just haven't fixed so many different problems and issues that we have in America and our culture. And so it's interesting to me because you've tied that all together in the book and put that forward so that people can see that it's just

not about people. This is an American story. This is the intertwining of everything when it comes to our lives and culture. The story is about people, but it's also about place. And it's set in a neighborhood in Chicago called Bronzeville. And Bronzeville was the city's, the cradle of the great migration. And it's a story of people coming, white people coming up from the South to escape the ravages of Jim Crow and coming to Chicago and being forced to live in a very confined space. And you had so many people packing into this area and it did begin to expand, but there was so much decay that resulted in having so many people in one area. And that is something that transcends race.

And you see this all the time in different places that what happens is that the places that the institutions tend to fail, such as garbage pickup and the streetlights aren't fixed correctly. Then the areas are often over policed or under policed. But what was so fascinating about Bronzeville is that there were so many different classes of people and you had so much innovation and a drive toward excellence. Ida B. Wells, the great anti-lynching journalist lived there. Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize, lived there. Dr. Daniel Helm Williams, the heart surgeon who was the first surgeon to perform the first successful heart surgery, lived there. So you also had the Chicago Blues and gospel music had its birth in Bronzeville. And so when I talk about this being an American story, you see the tragedy,

breadlining, restrictive housing covenants, but you also see a group of people who continue to chase the American dream. And that is our American story, all of our American story. You know, in fact, didn't redlining come out of Chicago? I know that it started in the 1930s, a banking policy. And interestingly, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago just did a study showing that those 1930s policies, you can draw a straight line between that time and the black-white disparity in homeownership and home values. I think they said about nearly half of that disparity is attributed to those policies. So where exactly they started, I know that it had an incredibly strong foothold here in Chicago. Yeah. I had a mortgage company for 20 years,

and they would teach us about redlining. And I'm like, Jesus, are you serious? I know we had Eddie Glaude Jr. on the show. We talked in length about how one of the problems we have with our culture and societies, we're so separated in our neighborhoods. And part of that comes from that redlining. In fact, freeways were built to separate our neighborhoods. And because of that, we don't know each other well and integrate well. And therefore, that's one of the reasons we still have these strifes with race and racial division. I'm sorry, go ahead. Yes, that's part of the social aspect, but there is a very clear wealth aspect too, because a lot of people hold their wealth in their homes. And if you don't have the ability to become a homeowner, it doesn't just affect you and your family, but it affects generations.

And so when we talk about generational wealth, this is a huge disparity that has clear social impacts, but also financial impacts as well. And you led me into my next question that I had set up for you. You talk in the book about this issue of housing and one of the racist tropes that they have of black people burning their own neighborhoods. And this was a complex that was developed by a Black dermatologist, Theodore K. Lawless, and by the famed Black publisher, sorry, John H. Johnson. And there was another Black dentist, his last name was Walker. And they conceived this place that would, in today's parlance, we'd call it affordable housing, but it was a beautiful development with manicured lawns, and you had these three ivory towers, and ivory just in terms of the color.

You had colorful playgrounds, and it was absolutely a beautiful place in the beginning. And so as part of what our parents thought our promise was, as these kids coming up in the afterglow of the civil rights movement, is that we needed a decent, a beautiful place to live. And that was Lawless Gardens. My mother would later say the name isn't the best for a black, but the conditions were just beautiful. But right across the street from us was a public housing project that had a beautiful name because it was named after Ida B. Wells. But when we were growing up in the 1970s, the housing project had begun its slide. There was decay everywhere. It was becoming a very tragic place to live. And so what became very clear to me is that just from

looking at the community from across the street and even hanging out over there from time to time, that when people live in squalor, when, as I said earlier, when garbage isn't picked up regularly, when streetlights aren't replaced, and there's so few opportunities, then people begin to, they begin to have that be a part of who they are. And so when something happens, when there is an uprising, and when people say, why do poor Black people burn down their communities? Then I think what isn't understood is that there are people who do not feel like they have a stake in the community. And especially when they can look maybe a mile away and see that there is another community that is functioning in the way that

communities are supposed to function. And so if you feel like you don't have a stake in your community, if you feel like you have nothing to lose, then you begin to act that way. And you can see that the city is doing their own racial prejudice where they're in those nicer communities, they're functioning well and picking up garbage and replacing street lamps, but they're not taking care of other areas that clearly there's something going on there. Absolutely. I think that it's this issue that begins to feed on itself. So you ask, which comes first? What I have seen, and I have to say, just as an aside, I remember in 2005, covering Katrina, Hurricane Katrina. And when there were a lot of people who were put into, they were displaced, and they were corralled into one of the stadiums down there. And you could see

clearly that there were so many people in this small amount of space and it was fairly temporary. And people didn't know what their homes were like, but they knew they had to get to safety. But after a couple of days, the conditions began to deteriorate more and more. And these weren't just black people. These were people who were uncertain about their future. They didn't know what was coming. And they didn't have many resources in that moment. And so I guess what I started to see in 2005, but I also started to see this last year at the beginning of the pandemic, that the conditions that we're in, they really do begin to shape us. And that does not take personal responsibility out of the equation.

But I think we as a culture or society have to begin to see it as a combination of things. And if we do, we get to be more empathetic. Yeah. I think me and Eddie Glenn Jr., we talked a lot about how do we unravel this? Because when you really look at systematic racism and oppression and what this country was sadly built on for 450 years or however long it's been, going back to the original lie of the shining city on the hill, quote unquote, it's just, it's extraordinary. And trying to unravel it is the hardest part to do when you understand how integrated and just the wires that are through everything. You just start yanking and there's more. But you bring up a good point, to your point,

that understanding this all, educating ourselves and being aware of it is a good step in the direction of being able to solve it. You talk about the war on drugs. Of course, that was created by the Nixon administration. They've been very overt at saying that was a racial attack and destruction. The rise, you guys probably, I don't know if you talk about it in the book, but of course, the Reagan era things where they took away a lot of social services and then, of course, increased policing, which just destroyed a lot of communities, especially poor communities around the nation.

It really was a racial attack, if you're familiar with Reagan and his whole setup. It's funny how I think Larry Elder supported him back in the day, and Larry Elder just about won California as governor. Oh, my God. I think this is important, and this is why stories are this important. Your parents wanted the best thing for you. They wanted all three of you girls to have access to the American dream. That's, I think, what most parents want for their children, especially those that live here or those that want to come here. Where do things go wrong, and what challenges happened from growing up in that community?

I think it's also important to just say that there are young people who come into this world and there's so many strikes against them that they are almost predestined for something bad. And that always breaks my heart because maybe they don't have enough interventions or maybe their safety nets are threadbare. But that was not Kim's and Deborah's story. They both had, as you were saying, and I think most parents, I mean, the dream as a parent

is that your kids do better than you do. But Kim was, when she was 17, she got pregnant, even though our family said, this is something that you shouldn't do. And she lost the baby. And the baby, and that really haunted her and tore her apart. And she began to drink heavily. And so when she was 24, she died of alcoholism. And then Deborah actually left Chicago. Her family, her parents moved their two daughters out of the city to Indianapolis,

just as Deborah was entering high school. And so she was in Indianapolis. She did fine in high school, but right around the time that she and I were talking about going to college, Deborah said she was going to put off college, which was quite disturbing for me because college was something that I thought we both were, the three of us were headed toward. And so Deborah, her life began to devolve. She got addicted to drugs and she wound up shooting a man and he died. And so she was charged with murder, convicted of murder, and sentenced to 50 years in prison. She was from the outset supposed to do 25 because it's a day for a day. And so she wound up

doing 21 years in prison. She was released in 2019 when I went to pick her up along with her sister and her aunt. But if I can go back a little bit, the three of us, I met my sister when I was three years old, when our parents brought her home. And she was a mystery to me, headstrong, willful, stubborn. And I met Deborah in the seventh grade. I was just mesmerized by her. She was the prettiest girl, but she was also the one who misbehaved the most. And I was just attracted to her immediately. And she, like my sister, trafficked in trouble. But we became best friends in the third grade. And so with both of them, I knew them at their beginning when they were brand new and starting out when the three of us were. And so the story kind of, the story looks at the trajectory of our lives and how we started to go in different places, go in different, started to move in different circles and go down different paths. And as the young lady who ended up in prison, how is her life now? Has she been able to reform or? Oh yeah. She's, And she's doing exceptionally well. In fact, when she was first sentenced, the judge said to her that how you landed here, I don't know, but here we are. But once she was clean, she was able to find herself and find her path. And now she works full time. She's renting a home and she's living life again.

There you go. Now you're the third person in the equation. How did that turn out? We know right now, but tell us what the journey was like. One of the things that I did with this book that I didn't, it was important for me that this book not just be about two girls. So one girl talking, writing a book about two girls. I wanted to write a story that gave each

of us equal weight. So I talk about my missteps as well. As much as I wanted to go to college, and I just, I dreamed, I literally dreamed of being on college campuses when I was in high school. But I got to the University of Illinois in Urbana. And after my freshman year, I flunked out. And I flunked out and not so much because I was partying, but I was protesting. And when you come home and say you flunked out, it doesn't matter. That's the most important thing is that, okay, so what happened? And my former husband and I, we were friends in high school. And when I told him that I got this letter saying that I needed to sit out a year, and then I would have to go to some other school, bring my grades up, and then return, that I told David. And then David took me to talk to his parents. And I was reading this letter,

and I could not have been more depressed at that moment. That was like the most devastating, at that time, that was the most devastating thing that had ever happened in my life. And so he had me talk to his parents and his father. I adored them. And his father told me, he said, do you want to return to the university? I said, absolutely. But they said I can't, you know, I can't come return to the university? I said, absolutely. And I said, but they said, I can't, you know, I can't come back until I've spent a year away. And then he

said, why don't you go down, go back down there and talk to the dean? And I said, but the letter says that this is non-negotiable. And he said, Dawn, everything is negotiable. And I went back down there and I talked to the dean. And so the dean said, okay, the dean gave me a hard time, which I deserved. And he said, okay, then sit out for a semester. And that was still devastating, but it was less devastating. And I stayed with my father and my stepmother that semester. I went to a community college. And that's why I just, I'm so grateful for community colleges. And I did my semester, got my grades way up, returned to the university, and got on the dean's list several times and still graduated in four years. Yeah, there were other missteps. But again, I guess my point is that I just really wanted to say that everybody makes mistakes, right?

You do not get out of this life without making a mistake. And recovery is what's important. And that's the beauty of it. Sometimes it's a painful beauty. You're going to fail. The key is to learn from those things. And you learned a great lesson. Everything is negotiable.

I mean, once you learn that lesson, I learned that in sales. I know that's wrong with this. So where do you go from there after college? After college, I went to, I spent, first of all, I did a quick internship at the Chicago Sun-Times. And then I spent a year at the Orlando Sentinel newspaper in Orlando, Florida. And then, because people told me, and this was something that was important back then, but I don't think it's so much the case now. But because there were newspaper chains and the Chicago Tribune at the time was like a destination newspaper. And a lot of my mentors told me that what you wanted to do was find a newspaper in a company.

And then you could move around. Once in the company, you could move from newspaper to newspaper. And so the Orlando Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune were sister newspapers under the Tribune Company umbrella. And so I spent a year in Florida. I really didn't care for it because I like seasons. I love cold weather. I know I'm probably a little weird, but I spent a year in Florida and then came up to Chicago and started working for the Tribune. There you go. I always like to say Florida is the Florida of Florida. I don't know what that means, but it's really bad. Anytime you get bored, just Google Florida man and you'll have entertainment for hours. So you go back to Chicago and you get the wonderful pizza they have there.

And nice people in Chicago, too. Just so nice. Sometimes they creep me out a little bit. I'm like, look, you got to back off of the nicest. Like, you're weirding me out here. But they're really nice. Now, where are you from? Las Vegas.

Okay. So that's probably why we're all assholes out there. So what can you say? But it's, I don't know where I'm going with this. So where does your journey take you on from there? And do you put a lot of lessons from your memoir and the book or just your insights and your experience? How does that play out? The story really talks about, as I said, it's about people and place. But in terms of my career, I realized that it was informed a lot by my relationship with Deborah and Kim. And so when I began to write, I was an editor with the Chicago Tribune for a while. And then I became a writer, a reporter, as well as a columnist. And so as a columnist, I got in as a reporter, I got a chance to choose the stories I wanted to write. And I often sought stories about people who had undergone some type of major transformation, who had turned tragedy into triumph. And I know maybe that sounds a little cliched, but I'm always attracted to,

I've always been attracted to those types of stories. The first time I wrote about Deborah was that, first of all, I'd never written about my sister in the pages of the Chicago Tribune, but I wrote about Deborah the first time in 2000, right after her trial and her sentencing. And I wanted to tell this story. And the editor at the time said, we write about people who have committed murder and people who were sentenced. So what makes her story? And what made it different was that I had known her before all of this, before her missteps. And these were, as she would say, she made a horrible mistake. But I wrote about her in 2000, then again in 2002. But in 2007, I wrote a story about her graduating from college while in prison.

And so the other stories had gotten a lot of attention with readers responding in different ways. But the 2007 story, I just got this avalanche of email and letters. And then I realized the reason was because the first two stories were cautionary tales, right? Where you would show your kid maybe the story and you say, don't do this. But that third story was a story of transformation. It was for makeover. And people like the idea that you can change your life if you can do it before the clock runs out. And those are the types of stories that I have pursued because I'm just fascinated at how people, how they do that. We may have, there are a lot of people who have like mini makeovers.

Then there are people who have these kind of full out where they, this transformation. And I just, I love those types of stories because it is not easy. It's possible, but it's never easy. And that's, I think that's what makes it so identifiable to so many people that they mirror it, that they go, hey, this is, this is something. Those stories are, like you say, transformation or redemption. We all make a lot of mistakes in life, the more that we can count. And we need a whole nother show for that, but a couple thousand shows, but we all go through those mistakes and then we all go, man, how can I change? How can I be better? One of the things I didn't really learn until, I don't know, later in life that stories are so important from that aspect of where people

learn from and sharing your journey, your stories. Cause a lot of people don't want to share their pain or what their struggle is. And yeah. Right. Yeah. And they're worried about being judged. And I wrote being a man, we don't talk about our feelings much. And I had one of my first dog child die. And I just got drunk that night and poured my soul on a Facebook post. How bad it hurt. And I thought, God, this is way too much to be sharing about. Who gives a crap about me and my stupid life? And I shared it, but it helps so many people that I had people write me and say they were crying because they didn't realize they had gotten closure from their family members and other things. And so these stories, like the ones you've written in your memoir and you wrote about

in the Tribune, they resonate with people in that way. They do. Yeah. And you don't realize to which they will resonate, but they, oh my God. And for people, because we like to see ourselves, we put up all of these walls, whether they're based on race or gender or ethnicity or just all of those, there are so many walls and then we can break them down a bit by sharing these shared experiences. I think Bobby Kennedy talked about it when he said, you know, each of us can make a difference and send forth ripples of hope that can tear down the mightiest of walls. And that's really, as a culture, as a society, what we need to do through education, reading books like yours, understanding people's life journeys, their challenges, and go, how can

we make things better so that we, and it's a constant journey, sadly. We never seem to arrive at it and go, it's a perfect world. And I imagine as long as you have human nature, we won't have a perfect world, but we could sure try. There's a lot of distance we can go. Yeah. And I think that there is a lot of work to be done. And it's so important to try and to make a difference because we can't afford to just continue on this path of everybody being in their own little silos and feeling also that there is this zero sum game in that if I win, then you have to lose. And that's absolutely not the case. Yeah. A rising tide lifts all boats, that's what I always like to say on the show.

And so what did you learn about yourself? I learned a little bit about myself and I was reminded about my younger self when I wrote the book. What did you learn about yourself when you wrote the book? That's a great question because as I started to, one of the things that was incredibly important to me about this book is that I did not want to just write based on memory. So I interviewed so many different people and I interviewed a lot of people about my sister, about my best friend, and I also poured over court documents relating to her case and just had a lot of correspondence, letters over the years. And I would see things like, oh my God, I forgot I said that. So it's the whole, the interrogation included me learning about my, I learned that I'm really good

at compartmentalizing. And so that when something is over, I pack it up. And this is a lot of us do this, where you pack it up and you push it off to the side. But when you have to go through this, and I'm so grateful that I did have the opportunity to write this memoir, because you realize that some of the things that you thought were true, especially stories that you hear over the years, and you've heard them so many times that they sound true, but you start to go and investigate all of that stuff. There's a chapter in the book that deals with my dad. My parents divorced when my sister and I were very young and we had to choose a side and we were two mom. But I didn't know my father very well. And he was always involved in our lives, but I just didn't know his family as well.

And so my father worked as a dispatcher or an overnight manager at a taxi company. And one night in 2004, one afternoon in 2004, I was researching a story, and my mother called to tell me that my father had a heart attack. And I was surprised at how I could feel it. And it was such a visceral feeling that if I lost him, there would be so many questions about him, about me that would go unanswered. And so I set out to spend Friday nights with him. So once he left the hospital, he was okay. He left the hospital. I spent several Friday nights with him interviewing him, not as a daughter, but as a journalist, because I couldn't do it as a, I couldn't do it as a daughter. So I did, I brought my notepad, my pen, and I met him at the taxi company and his shifts. He was the overnight manager. And we would we just sat amid a bunch of yellow and red cabs in the garage. And I asked him I asked him a series of questions from about March of 2004 until the end of July, because I had to go cover the Democratic National Convention in Boston when we first met Barack Obama on that national stage.

And then after that, I went to the Republican National Convention. But it was that those months with my father and talking about learning about me that I really did get a chance to understand why I don't eat meat. I don't care for meat. But my father, this African American man who came from the South, it was just so rare. It was not his favorite food either. As I said, I knew my dad, but I learned about my grandfather who bought 160 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1920s. That was fairly unheard of. And just how much my father loved his father. And so it was just a, it was a rewarding, that's one of the chapters in the book, but it was, I got to see me in a different light. And that was incredibly helpful.

Isn't that, isn't it so wonderful that we're able to spend that time? Most, more people should do what you did. I did some of that with the end of my father's life. He was having lots of heart attacks and seizures. And you could see the end was coming and the time was near. And so I sat down with him and we cleared all the decks and asked him all the questions. And I did that with my uncle before he passed away too and got beautiful histories.

And those stories are just amazing. And you find out, I don't know what the analogy is, but there's something about knowing our history and who we are and where we came from that shapes us so much. And a lot of people don't really, a lot of people, especially when they're young, they don't care about that. I don't care about the past. But I think you reach a certain age where you're like, who the hell am I?

And where did I come from? Yes. It makes you whole. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe that's why ancient cultures and stuff, you always had the historians that would come in and teach people. There was the old times where people actually sit down for dinner and talk about history. I think a lot of Jewish folks, they do different things at dinners where they go around the table or something and share stuff.

People remember. Yeah. And those memories are entwined with those lessons you talked about in the book. What are things you want to touch on in the book that you think readers will really be? I've written two novels and I wanted to tell this memoir in the same vein as you would tell a story when your child says, tell me a story. And I wanted it to be a story. And so it's not preaching. I'm hoping, and this is what people have told me, that it unfolds. And it just as a story. And so it's not preaching. I'm hoping, and this is what people have told me, that it unfolds and it just as a narrative. And that's something that's really important to me.

And that the characters who are real people, that they are not caricatures. They are fully realized. This is my hope. This is my intent, that they're fully realized humans. And I think that the main thing is that, because I've had a couple of reviewers say something like, this is a book about one person who succeeded and the other two who didn't. And that's not the purpose. That's not the point of this book at all. The main through line here is, there but for the grace of God, go I. And that what happened, that there's this razor thin margin of error, especially when it comes to little black girls. You can go one way or another way. And even when you have parents who have worked incredibly hard to guide and parent things, bad things can happen. But so that's why it's very clear to me that this is not me judging them at all, but I'm very grateful for my path. And I just wish that theirs could have been different. Definitely. You look at the growth of people

that go through stuff like that, and clearly those reviewers haven't gotten the message. One of the hardest lessons that I had to learn in life, because I was really destination-oriented and goal-oriented, and we must get to the end of the thing. And the hardest lesson for me to learn was it's about the journey, not the destination. And that's what those reviewers need to learn about. We had the author Nicholas Bukola on From the Fire Is Upon Us, the James Baldwin, William F. Buckley debate. And I believe it was him who told me early on, he read that he had two black brothers, I think. And he read that one out of three young black boys will end up in prison. And he looked at his two other brothers and said, which one of us? And that's a hell of an outlook to have it when you're eight or 10 years old.

That's a hell of an outlook. And it puts a damper, it affects you in a way, and your outlook, and like you talked about, your neighborhoods and everything else. Yeah, people, that's the beauty of these stories is, and I think a lot of people, you're probably getting this feedback now, they see themselves in their own lives and the mirrors of their own lives and the journeys that they went through and they identify with it. Absolutely. And that's one of the most gratifying things about having written the book is that when people come up to me or send me an email saying that they see themselves in our story or they see themselves in one of us. So it's, no, that's incredibly gratifying. You're right. Yeah. That's the beauty of these books and stories and everything else. How does your sister feel about it in the family of your friend? in lockstep the whole time during the writing process. If I had any question, if there was anything that I was unsure about, she was there to help guide me. But she's very proud of the book. And a couple of days ago, I spoke to a bunch of women from an organization, this prestigious

organization, they're Black professional women. And they created or they commissioned a, that is an interpretive dance of the book. And we both, Deborah and I both were just in tears watching these three young, young girls dance and dance out the story, dance out our story. So that's also really gratifying just to see how other people interpret our, my words. It's amazing when you're in the writing process, I don't know how your writing process was, but in mine, I was like, no, one's going to read this. Yeah. You have that fear. You're like, is anyone going to read this crap that I wrote? I wrote some real crap in my life, but it's great when it comes out and people identify with it and it helps uplift the world, hopefully educate the world, and leave the world a better place. Sure. That is the hope. And that is,

you want to make sure that there's that, because when you start, especially with a memoir, but I think it's with anything you write, you really put your heart and your soul into it. And then with a memoir, you're going back into the past. There's a lot of excavation there. And there are things that, the way that we move forward is to pack everything up and push it off to the side, but then to run back toward that and then to open everything up again, it's just very difficult. I was lucky enough that some of the hardest chapters and clearly the hardest chapter for me, two chapters was when learning my sister had died.

And in the chapter of her funeral, I could not stay in my home office for those two chapters. I went and spent a weekend with a friend and at least started to sketch it out and write that way. These things are just so difficult to write that you do. The prayer is that somebody will read your words. Yeah. And did it help with closure at all? Or you already achieved closure? Did it help you? It was cathartic.

There's some closure. I will continue to pursue the stories that I pursue, writing about the dispossessed, people who don't necessarily have a whole lot of agency. So that will continue. And as I said earlier, I do credit part of the reason why I'm attracted to this because of Deborah and Kim. But in terms of this story, I really do feel like it's time to put it to bed and that I know it's got, the book will be read and read, but I don't have to pursue this story, this specific story again. And so in that way, it has been cathartic.

There's kind of a nice comfort that comes over you that you go, all right, we got that on paper. That's out there. That's in the history books. It would probably make a great wink to anybody in Hollywood listening, but there you go. I'd watch it. It's a beautiful story. And I love stories. Like I said, I, sadly in life, I figured out that stories were important. I wish I would have figured out earlier. I'd always been a story collector and collected stories and, but I didn't realize how incredibly valuable they were. And so hopefully that's a lesson people learn if they're listening and, and of course, pick up your book. Anything more you want to touch on before we go out? It's been a pleasure to be here.

Thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure to have you, Dawn. And we love stories and we love just wonderful literature that can share, change the world, make the world a better place. Give us your plugs if you want or wherever to buy the book as we go out. Yes, you can buy it at your favorite independent bookstore and you can go online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble. So it is widely available. There you go. Order the book up, guys. It's fresh off the presses.

Just came out September 7th this month, so it's right there. Three Girls from Bronzeville, a uniquely American memoir of race, fate, and sisterhood. Pick it up wherever fine books are sold. Remember, only go to where the fine books are sold. Stay away from those alleyways with the broken glass. You don't want to get the books in there. I don't know me. Or go to Amazon. Isn't that the same thing? Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning

in. We certainly appreciate you. Go to youtube.com, 4Chess Chris Foss. See the video versions. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Foss to see all the books you're reading or viewing over there. But all the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and all those crazy places those kids are at. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you guys next time.

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