Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio.

I am six years old and standing next to a gravestone with my name on it. The little girl with my name

is buried here along with her mom who was my father's sister and her dad. There were others who died in

the wreck too. Some who were buried here and some who were buried at the other cemetery that looks just like this one.

I cannot keep up with all the dead people. I am not sure how many there are because I have never heard

anyone list all of their names at once or ticked them off on their fingers one by one. I do not

ask what happened to the girl because I already know what my father will say.

The same thing he said when I ask why I have just one grandmother, the wreck. That's Cassandra Jackson, professor of English at the College of New Jersey, where she teaches classes

about African AmericanAmerican literature and

visual culture. She's the author of several books, most recently, The Wreck, a

daughter's memoir of Becoming a Mother. Cassandra of becoming a mother.

Cassandra's is a story of a tragedy that happened before she was born,

a loss so profound that it seeped into every corner of her childhood and her family's life,

until finally, in the fullness of time, she was able to lay it to rest. I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we

keep from others and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

I grew up in a working class black family. Everybody in my family, the most part had spent their entire lives in Alabama.

It was a really, in some ways a really tough way or place to grow up in that it felt like history was all around us like we were always walking on hallowed ground in part because even though I was born after the civil rights movement, the world just hadn't

changed that much in that space.

So I remember it is being incredibly oppressive. I remember being very aware of what it

meant to be black in that space where the people who had the power who had

the most prestigious jobs who ran the town were almost exclusively white men.

And in some ways it creates this really sort of strange

...