When Trymaine Lee began writing his first book, he didn’t realize that the gun violence he was reporting on was such a central part of his own story. But then he began digging into his family history, only to fully learn about a series of racially motivated murders involving his ancestors. Lee’s book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, soon became more personal than he’d planned. He realized he needed to “speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history.”
On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 2 of a conversation about generational trauma, the challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how learning about his family’s history has changed how he writes and reports on Black Americans killed by violence. And if you haven’t listened to part 1, you can find that conversation here.
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Dig Deeper
Listen: Mississippi Goddam (Reveal)
Listen: Being Black in America Almost Killed Me Part 1 (More To The Story)
Read: Trump Prepares to Wipe Out Years of Progress on Gun Violence (Mother Jones)
Watch: Hope in High Water: A People’s Recovery Twenty Years After Hurricane Katrina (Peacock)
Read: A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America (St. Martin’s Press)
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Transcript
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
| Al Letson: | Today on More To The Story, part two of my conversation with journalist Trymaine Lee. We talk about the burdens we bear as Black journalists reporting on violence involving Black people. |
| Trymaine Lee: | There’s nothing like arriving at a crime scene and seeing someone that looks just like you, dressed just like you, got some Air Force 1’s fresh just like you. The family and that look in a mother’s eyes that could be your mother, there’s zero things in this universe like that pain. |
| Al Letson: | More with Trymaine Lee after this. |
| This is More To The Story. I’m Al Letson and this is part two of my conversation with journalist Trymaine Lee. His new book is called A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America. If you’re just joining us, go back and check out last week’s episode, but a quick recap. Shortly after completing a draft of the book, Trymaine suffered a life-threatening heart attack. It forced him to look at death in a completely new way, and that connected a lot of dots for him. From years of reporting on Black violence to the generational trauma in his own family, he came to see that he was carrying around a massive weight, one that nearly killed him. Before we start, a reminder that we’re talking about violence in this episode, and it may not be appropriate for all listeners. | |
| You have this book that you finished right before this massive heart attack and then you dive back in to make your edits and to polish it up, but your experience just changed the whole trajectory of the book. Talk to me about that. | |
| Trymaine Lee: | Yeah, man. More than that, when I first turned that 90,000 word manuscript in it was really super rough. The book it is today is honestly about 25% of what it was into what it became. Initially, I was always going to hold the reader’s hand a little bit and speak to my own experiences. My grandfather’s murder in 1976 is this massive space in my life. It occupies a massive space in my family’s life. Two years before I was born, growing up seeing my family’s portraits of better days and people talking about his voice and his sense of humor and just how he moved through the world, I always knew that part. So part of the storytelling was even your friendly neighborhood journalists who you’ve come to know telling these stories has been touched by this thing, and here’s what it cost my family. |
| What I had less of an understanding of was that my grandfather’s was not the first murder in our family. Going back to the rural South, Jim Crow Georgia in the early 1920s to discover that my grandmother, who was a baby at the time, had a 12-year-old brother who was shot and killed in a sundown town where the men came together, and this is documented in the newspaper, came together in Fitzgerald, Georgia to outlaw Black labor and Black voting in this community in the late 1800s, ’cause that sparked my family’s journey into the migration to Philadelphia first and then South Jersey only to have a second of my grandmother’s brothers shot and killed by a state trooper, and to for the first time look at those headlines where it says, trooper’s gun kills youth, as if this gun just hopped up and shot a Black teenager under these weird circumstances. | |
| Then 20+ years later, my grandfather’s murder. A prospective tenant. They owned an apartment in Camden, New Jersey and were going to rent it to a guy. He disappeared after leaving a deposit, wanted his money back, and my grandfather said, “No, I’ll see you in court.” He came back and murdered my grandfather. 20 years after that, my stepbrother’s shot and killed in Camden. A girl put a bullet in the back of his head. In the early 2000s, another cousin killed in Atlantic City. | |
| So, the psychic residue of what’s been passed down and me grappling with telling these stories that Black families across the country experience in terms of the violence of police in the system and the violence of the community and the systemic violence, again, that binds us all, wraps us all up, this became so much more personal. As you know, for a long time I was trying to be somewhat arm’s length, even though I was very close to telling these stories. Now, was time to drop all of that and speak honestly about what I now know to be crushing down on me, which is the weight of this family history. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, as you were talking about it, it just made me think about my own family history and think our stories are so similar. My great-grandfather, the reason why my family ended up in New Jersey is because something happened to him in the South, and there are no records of it, but family lore is that he was lynched. I don’t have anything to prove that, but the family lore is that he was lynched and then that moved my family to New Jersey, and then all sorts of violent incidences happen there as well, and it just kind of seeps into you. |
| The funny thing for me is that I had no idea about any of that until I started reporting on a story and I thought, let me look into my genealogy and just think about … and when I saw it all, I was like, wow, I am reporting on the story of my family and didn’t even know it. | |
| Trymaine Lee: | Time and again. |
| Al Letson: | Time and again. Time and again you find yourself in these horrible stories, sad stories about people that look like you and then you find out they are you, and it’s a heavy weight to carry. At Reveal we worked on this series called Mississippi Goddam, and I get choked up when I talk about it. I remember … ooh, God, man, I’m so sorry, I’m getting choked up. |
| Trymaine Lee: | No, man. |
| Al Letson: | I remember feeling like it was going to kill me. My blood pressure was ridiculous. I would check my blood pressure in the morning and I thought to myself … literally the blood pressure thing would tell me to go to the hospital, because it was that high, but I couldn’t stop, because I had to turn in this story. I had to turn in this story and I felt like I … and I did. I don’t think this was wrong, but I felt like I owed this family and I owed the young man that I was telling the story about like I had to finish it, but also when I look back, I owe my children to be around if I can. But I couldn’t see it then, I just was like- |
| Trymaine Lee: | Of course not. |
| Al Letson: | … “You got to get through this thing.” Oof, man, I’m so sorry. |
| Trymaine Lee: | No, of course, man. |
| Al Letson: | But every time I sat down at that computer or to write these episodes and listening to this tape and looking at autopsy reports and all of that type of stuff, and graphic photos of this young man’s death, I felt like I had to keep doing it. The more I did it, the higher my blood pressure went, the more I thought … I literally would think I’m going to stroke out, but I don’t have a choice, I have to finish this, I have to finish this. |
| I mean, just to be honest, Reveal, especially at that time, most of the people in that workplace were white, and I had worked so hard and championed the story for so long that I was finally getting a shot, and I knew I couldn’t drop it and just the amount of pressure and time it took. Then afterwards I realized like, bro, you acting crazy, so I went to a therapist that guided the therapy and I took three months off from Reveal. I just couldn’t do it, ’cause I thought it was going to kill me, and I think by the grace of God it didn’t, but carrying that, oh my God. | |
| Trymaine Lee: | Brother, that same feeling. Again, I feel like I’m looking into a mirror and I’m hearing a echo bounce from me to you and back to me. Those early days especially, there’s nothing like arriving at a crime scene and seeing someone that looks just like you, dressed just like you, got some Air Force 1’s fresh just like you with their brain matter splattered across the pavement. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. |
| Trymaine Lee: | The family and that look in a mother’s eyes that could be your mother, there’s zero things in this universe like that pain, and that we are the burden bearers of that and we have to be and we have always had to be. Ida B. Wells did not like this season either. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. |
| Trymaine Lee: | Her blood pressure was probably through the roof- |
| Al Letson: | Absolutely. |
| Trymaine Lee: | … but it’s a reminder that we cannot report our way out of the pain, we cannot educate our way out of the pain, we cannot drink our way out of the pain. |
| Al Letson: | No. |
| Trymaine Lee: | When you’re a young man, you can’t run around and have sex. You can’t sex it away, we have to engage with it. Until we have those conversations about what it means to carry that weight when you have to carry the weight, because no one else will and no one will care when we die of a heart attack, because it happens every single day, right? |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. No, absolutely. |
| Trymaine Lee: | What you got me doing here, bruh? What you got me doing here? You got me. That’s what we need though, that’s what we need. [inaudible 00:09:49] |
| Al Letson: | Hey listen, I’m just mirroring you, bro, ’cause I’m sitting here talking to you with tears in my eyes trying to be like, “Brother, calm down. What are you doing, Mr. Letson?” So, to go back to trauma- |
| Trymaine Lee: | Yeah, let’s do more. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, let’s do more. One of the things in your book that I think about a lot, and again I’m giving so much personal information here. So my oldest son, I had no idea he was born. I didn’t find out about him until he was five years old and he lived all the way across the country. We had no communication or contact until I found out when he was five and I was 23. So I was 23, I was a kid when I flew out to get him, I was taking him home back to Florida and I didn’t know what to expect. I’d seen his picture, this was long before the days when we had video calls, so I talked to him on the phone a little bit. |
| Back then my thing was with him when I found out about him, I started writing postcards and sending him … ’cause he was a kid and getting mail’s a big thing, right? I was a flight attendant, so I’d be in different places and sending him stuff. Anyway, I go to get my kid, first time meeting him in-person, and the thing that tripped me out is that he was so much like me at that age. I mean, things that he would say were things that I … really specific things. I’m a little bit older than you, but when I was young, we had this saying, I think it went something like up your nose with a rubber hose or something like that, right? | |
| I remember the first time I’m meeting my kid, he’s like, “Up your nose with a …” I was like, “What?” Then I brought him home to my mother and my mother who likes him more than me was like, “This is you as a kid.” He was so much like me. I tell that story to just say that I believe that DNA is way more powerful than we talk about. | |
| Trymaine Lee: | Yes, yes. |
| Al Letson: | That I believe that our family’s history is encoded in our DNA and we carry both the good, but also the trauma. You can’t get away from it, it is in you. It is in your blood, it is in your bones, it is who you are. I think especially for Black folks in this country whose ancestors have experienced a crazy amount of trauma, you carry it with you every day. So when you talk about going into your grandparents’ home and being at the spot where you know your grandfather died, can you talk to me about that? |
| Trymaine Lee: | Yeah, man, there’s the ways that these moments reshape the way we raise our children and the way we move through the world, how we teach them to survive in America and teach them to carry a bit of this trauma, that’s one thing in a practical way, right? This moment changes everything, there’s the emotional pain that we experience. When you think about those epigenetics and that post-traumatic slave disorder, that we’ve arrived at that moment after a long series of these cuts and slices. There’s one part of the book that I had to shrink down for the sake of the story, but it’s the guns for slave cycle and a psychic connection to the violence and the pain. |
| Not just a genetic one too, but there’s this other one, this ethereal psychic trauma that we carry from being bartered for guns, and that Europeans plied these regional African powers with guns and some would only trade in guns for enslaved people to create war instability. So this idea that we were forced out of Mother Africa with a muzzle of a gun at our back, and then we arrive at the hell of the Western world and experienced all this other violence and trauma that we then pass down for five, six, seven, eight generations to arrive on the South Side of Chicago, to arrive in Camden, New Jersey, to arrive in West Berlin, New Jersey where my grandfather was killed and stand in that spot, and then read in the newspaper about how the blood was smeared on my grandmother’s nightgown and what it means. How do we disrupt that? Is there any disrupting that? | |
| I think acknowledging it, that it exists and it’s not some sort of fantasy of our Hoodoo, Voodoo imaginations that we’re carrying that, but I think it’s something that we have to acknowledge it, because it’s there, and we know it’s there. We know it’s there, and I just don’t know how we reconcile that. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right is that the key is talking about it, ’cause America will convince you it is not there. We’re I wouldn’t say the beginning, but maybe America has always been in the process of the great forgetting. America loves this idea of collective amnesia that it continually pushes on people, and so if you’re pushing the collective amnesia, we’re not engaging with all the things you just talked about. |
| Trymaine Lee: | That’s right. |
| Al Letson: | If you don’t engage with it, it just gets bigger and it begins to guide your steps in the future, because you don’t know it’s there, so you have to talk about it. |
| Trymaine Lee: | That’s right. One of my guiding, and this is a guiding principle for my journalism, but also for this book in particular, because this is not a very prescriptive book, this is not a policy book, this is about how we’ve been shaped and our experience with the violence, but it’s that ain’t nothing wrong with us. Ain’t nothing wrong with us. If you want to understand what’s wrong with us, let’s look at this machinery around us. |
| Al Letson: | Right. |
| Trymaine Lee: | Right? Let’s look at what we’ve carried in us, what was sparked by this white supremacist violence and a society bent on our breaking, that’s what’s wrong with us. So even though the gun is certainly the vehicle and that kind of violence is the vehicle, for me it’s like this is how we arrived at this moment, this is how we got here. But ultimately there is nothing wrong with us except for how we’ve experienced this country. |
| Al Letson: | Coming up, Trymaine says there is healing to be found in facing down some painful realities. |
| Trymaine Lee: | Confronting the violence, the silent, quiet violence from within, and as men in particular, but in general, finding the strength and courage to face that down and live freely and live happily and find peace. That’s why this matters, because it hurts so bad. |
| Al Letson: | But before we get to that, we have been bringing you More To The Story for six months now, and I just want to thank you for coming along on this ride with me. Getting to bring you all these kinds of conversations has just really meant the world to me. We are building a community of people who care about the world we live in and we need to grow. So come on, please invite your friends to take a listen, give us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app, share it on your social media posts, all the things. You know what it is, because what we are trying to build is powerful and these type of conversations are needed now more than ever. All right, back to me and Trymaine in just a moment. |
| This is More To The Story, I’m Al Letson. Journalist Trymaine Lee and I are going deep today talking about what it means to be Black in America, and the weight of being a journalist bearing witness to the violence that has surrounded Black families for generations. | |
| So, this country is moving. I’ve heard people say that this is unprecedented what we’re seeing right now. I would say that we saw all this at the end of reconstruction, and this is a rerun of reconstruction. Just the writers of America season five are pretty bad. This season- | |
| Trymaine Lee: | They really jumping the shark, man. This is crazy. |
| Al Letson: | This is like, what are you doing? We need new characters. But as we are living in this time period, and given all that you have reported on and gone through personally, where’s your work going to take you now that we’re here? |
| Trymaine Lee: | You know what? I’ve been having these conversations a lot lately with Black men in particular, but Black people in general. Not unlike those post-reconstruction days when the nadir or the nadir … I’m from New Jersey, I say nadir. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, right, right, right. |
| Trymaine Lee: | I might be wrong. Nadir just sounds right to me, so nadir. But beating back our efforts at nation building and institution building, and finding for the first time some fullness, some fullness of what it means to be an American and solidify this conditional citizenship that we’ve had. I think now is the time that we build and collaborate and double down on telling our stories and telling the truth. So for me, I think this book is an important bridge for me. |
| For more than 20 years, I’ve been a journalist in the newsroom, in print, in digital, in broadcast, in podcasting, now I have my first film coming out on the anniversary of Katrina on Peacock, I have the book coming out, I want to [inaudible 00:19:12] ways in which we speak to the Black American experience. This is not new or novel, but I think now is the time to continue to build in that catalog, because what’s going to happen is as they continue to try to erase us and erase our story, in 100 years when they’re on the fourth nadir, when they’re on the fourth burning down of any kind of reconstructive efforts, they have to understand that this is not unprecedented, that this is precedented, that this is the default position and this is how you survive it. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. |
| Trymaine Lee: | This is how you survive it is to look it square in it’s face and tell the truth as they’re renaming military bases after these fake Robert E. Lee. They’re so bent on making sure they honor- |
| Al Letson: | It’s so ridiculous. |
| Trymaine Lee: | … the heroes of [inaudible 00:19:55] |
| Al Letson: | Can we just talk about the ridiculousness of white- |
| Trymaine Lee: | That’s Robert Jenkins Lee. |
| Al Letson: | Right, exactly. |
| Trymaine Lee: | Thing about this. We’ve been around long enough, we are just now comfortable enough to say white supremacist system, white supremacy. |
| Al Letson: | Oh my God, absolutely. |
| Trymaine Lee: | We couldn’t say that- |
| Al Letson: | No. |
| Trymaine Lee: | … we’re just there. |
| Al Letson: | It’s just that America’s understanding of what it means to be Black and how we see the world and experience the world, we haven’t caught up and journalism absolutely hasn’t caught up. |
| Trymaine Lee: | Even among our friends and friends of the truth, there is an acceptable level of anti-Blackness in this country that is okay- |
| Al Letson: | It’s okay. |
| Trymaine Lee: | … even among people who wish it would be different. |
| Al Letson: | Yep, it’s okay. |
| Trymaine Lee: | But we’ve accepted it, it’s part of what this is, right? So that’s why you have to have an argument about whether the founders of this country, these transnational human traffickers are white supremacists or not. |
| Al Letson: | But the idea that my ancestors’ lives didn’t matter. One of the things that our friend Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about a lot is that you can’t have this history and it matter, and suddenly this history doesn’t matter. |
| Trymaine Lee: | That’s right. |
| Al Letson: | It doesn’t make sense. |
| Trymaine Lee: | That’s right. |
| Al Letson: | It doesn’t make sense. You got to own the whole thing America, you just got to own it. |
| Trymaine Lee: | That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Our friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, you can’t have the credits without the debits, right? |
| Al Letson: | Exactly. |
| Trymaine Lee: | It has to be both, but also the idea that our existence and experience is kind of inconsequential when we are foundational in all of the ways. We were the economy- |
| Al Letson: | Absolutely, exactly. |
| Trymaine Lee: | … we were our flesh. |
| Al Letson: | Exactly. |
| Trymaine Lee: | But the fact that we’re still fighting to tell these stories. |
| Al Letson: | Exactly. |
| Trymaine Lee: | You’d imagine a great nation would say, look how far we’ve come, and when we couldn’t do the right thing we did. Certainly this founding was A, B, C, or D, but we are such a great nation where look at the strides. The strides were made through bloodshed and sacrifice. |
| Al Letson: | Absolutely, absolutely. |
| Trymaine Lee: | Come on. The truth, as we know, is so dangerous though, because the idea that … especially with Black people, this idea of liberation, but that America itself will be freed, finally freed, that’s a very dangerous proposition for those who don’t believe in our equality or humanity. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Trymaine, is there anything that you wanted to hit on the book before I let you go? |
| Trymaine Lee: | I don’t think so, just that this truly is my life’s work. I have joked that this book almost killed me, which it did, but it truly is my life’s work and it finally became what it was supposed to be. I hope people not only find an understanding about how guns have shaped us and the industry that profits while there’s so much pain here, but that there is a healing and power and strength in facing down the hardest parts of what we harbor within, right? Confronting the violence, the silent, quiet violence from within. |
| As men in particular, but in general, finding the strength and courage to face that down and live freely and live happily and find peace. That’s why this matters, because it hurts so bad what we’ve experienced, what we’ve carried in our genes, the psychic residue of the violence that we’ve experienced, the systemic violence and the actual violence. What it means to finally find peace within that, that to me I hope is the great strength and power of this book, and I hope it finds the audience that it deserves. | |
| Al Letson: | Trymaine Lee is the author of A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America. Trymaine, man, I feel like we just did a therapy session with each other. |
| Trymaine Lee: | We laughed, we cried, brother, confronted all the things. This was an honor, man. Thank you. |
| Al Letson: | Thank you, man. Good to talk to you. |
| Trymaine Lee: | Likewise. |
| Al Letson: | That was journalist Trymaine Lee. His book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America is available now. We have a link to it in our show notes. So you heard me talk about it, but I would love for you to listen to the Reveal series, Mississippi Goddam. Not only did it win a ton of awards, but I poured my heart and soul into this project with an amazing team. |
| It’s the kind of reporting that can only happen with your support. That’s right, we are listener supported. That means listeners like you. You can help us thrive by making a gift today. Just go to revealnews.org/gift. Again, that’s revealnews.org/gift, and thank you. This episode was produced by Josh Sanburn and Kara McGuirk-Allison, Brett Myers edited the show. Theme music and engineering helped by Fernando my man, yo Arruda and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. I’m Al Letson, and let’s do this next week, and why don’t you bring some friends with you. This is More To The Story. |