Family SecretsWhat’s in a name? And what’s not? With a splintered identity and a voracious hunger for truth, David travels far and wide for answers.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
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. My guest today is David Wright Falade, novelist, university professor, and author of the recent essay in The New Yorker, The Truth About My Father. David is a story of identity and belonging and the extraordinary unfolding of a buried secret history.
My earliest memories are from Kansas City. I was born in France, but we came here when I was around two, So my earliest memories are from Kansas City, when I was probably about four. My dad, Jack Wright, we called him Dottie. My big sister Marriam and I were both born in France, and it's just what we called him. And it was only with age and I recognized that what we were saying was daddy, but we'd learned to pronounce it as little French kids. And so when we were here, cousins with teesus and whatnot. But we lived in a part of Kansas City in subsidized housing at that time, sort of projects We called it the Gateway Apartments, but it was a gateway to the West apartments, and I learned later that the police called it the cancer of Kansas City. It didn't feel I mean, you're a kid, and you just you're there. We played outside and my big sister and I were seventeen months apart and really close, but that's the space we lived in, so I have that first memory of there. And it was fairly tense between Dottie and my mom, and they divorced right around then, and we moved to Junction City, Kansas, where there was a military base. My mom, she was a GI bride, and another French GI bride that she knew, a woman named Lilian who'd also married a Black GI, was stationed there, and so we moved there. We lived with them for a brief time. That part of Kansas was you know Kansas as you would imagine, light rolled in grasslands and all that, and we eventually were able to have our own little house, my Mom and Miriam and I. Dottie wasn't always the most responsible person with child support. I got the document. Now he was ordered to pay fifty dollars a month or something like that, but he sent it irregularly. Another thing that I understood with time my mom, when she was raising us by herself, or when she was married, first to Dottie and then to my stepfather, she felt most safe. Is this woman, this French jew who had survived the Nazi occupation of Paris. People had been to Porto, She'd lost family, they'd been in hiding in her youth, and she was old enough to have memories of this. Also, with this understanding of sort of racism in the United States, she felt most comfortable when we were on or near military basis. This is loving v Virginia as nineteen sixty seven. I was born in sixty four, about nineteen sixty eight sixty nine. Interracial couples were just really, really rare, to the extent that I remember when we were little kids, Miriam and I and my mom and we'd see in you know, a mixed race family on the street. We would point them out, smiling. It was just that rare we felt for us. It was like a sort of joy. For my mom. I think she felt vulnerable and unsafe, so we typically lived on or near military basis. I think it was more than anything race. So I'm born in sixty four and Mirriam was born in sixty two. We were both born in France the Badatti and Mom married in fifty seven and at first they're stationed in New Jersey and then Colorado. But at one point he gets stationed in Georgia, and this is like fifty eight to fifty nine. She can't go, you know, as his white wife, and so she's in Kansas City with his family and she's probably the only white person around and has a sort of difficult relationship with his family, his mother. So my grandmother, Dotty's mother was shark with her, difficult with her. Maybe they had just a difficult relationship. So I think she was just fatally aware of a race more than anything. And also it was just sort of the precarity, you know, the danger of the sort of racial threat in the fifties and sixties United States.
What sense did you have as a child growing up of your mom's history as a child herself during the Holocaust. I mean she was nine in France when she she.
Was born in thirty one, so when the Nazis occupied Paris, yes, she was nine years old. And so that period of Nazi occupation from forty to forty four, she was nine to thirteen. Mom's pagental thouts, so her my grandfather's family were really wealthy. It was this great upple, but it would have been the quivalent of my mother's grandfather. He was the president of the Antiquarian Society of Europe. I mean, he was an art collector and they had this antique shop. They were very, very, very wealthy, and so my mom grew up in this real ease and comfort. And then when the occupation happened, that person and his wife, well he killed himself. She was deported. My grandfather was able to get papers that didn't claim they were not Jewish, but it diminished their jewishness before the law. So you know, had the occupation gone on longer, they could have been deported too, but they just weren't high up on the list. And in that time they enrolled my mom in Catholic school, Catholic day school, so she grew up in this. Really she just was really conflicted I think about her identity as a Jew. They were secular Jews, so I don't know that she really understood herself as a Jew, even though all her family, the people that they socialized with were Jewish and then suddenly she had to try to navigate this world where she's in Catholic school, she takes holding Communion. She had this memory of these twin girls who lived nearby teasing her and calling her a derogatory name for Jewish, and she didn't quite understand what they were saying. So I think it was very confusing for her, and that contributed to the rebellion of the outrage that she felt after the war.
David's mom stays with Dottie for about a decade before they split up in nineteen sixty seven, shortly after she meets a man named Ed Wheeler. Ed is about to be sent to Vietnam. Just as the two fall in love, they marry and Ed becomes David's stepfather. In turn, Dottie now resides on the paternal periphery.
When Mom leaves, he's not very present, he's not sending child support. And then when she starts dating at Wheeler, but Dotty could be really funny. He would refer to Ed Wheeler as Jesus Christ. Because my mom, I think, just spoke up Ed Wheeler to anybody at the time, and so he wasn't very present, but he was the sort of person that people came to for help. His family, my cousins and things like that, his brothers and sisters. He was the person they would go to when they needed anything, and he would always find it. And so again, if we fast forward a little bit Ed Wheeler comes back from Vietnam, we follow him to you, Arizona, where he's stationed some Rencourt Air station out there. For some reason, he has an army person is stationed there. And my mom ended up getting pregnant and didn't want the child, and Ed Wheeler and my mom got into a terrible fight, violent, and she turns to Dottie. She calls Dottie. Dottie is the one who sends us the money for bus tickets from Yuma to LA, then sends you know, Wire's money Western Union to LA, pays for the abortion, and then wires it. So he's driving a cab at this time he's not in the military. And then so the time that he earns enough money, he then wires the money. So we took a bus from Mom and Miriam and I from LA to New York. And I remember that parts of it we'd all sit right behind the bus driver. I remember one bus driver told a joke, you know, I'm whatever I am at that time six He's like was stretched with an ow and ends with an oh and is high in the middle. And my little six year old Ed can't figured out it was pretty obviously. He's like, Ohio, and we're going through Ohio. But we end up in New York and I remember being in JFK. I remember wooden benches at that time, and Dotty wired the money and we got a flight back to France, where my mom wanted to be. She didn't want to be in Kansas City. She couldn't be in Yuma. So he was that person who when you needed him, he was there, but if not. There was a period of five years we kind of disappeared from Mirus in my life. So he was a conflicted character. He was a difficult character, but a big soul too.
There's a line in your Wonderful piece in the New Yorker identity is rooted in place as well as in parentage. So what rooted you and how did you think about fatherhood as in your father during those years, how did you think about paternity? Dottie was your father, Ed Wheeler became your stepfather, there's so much that strikes me in your story of these kinds of fractures that then aren't fractures, or that are potentially confusing for a kid. I mean, how did all that reside for you during those years?
This hole's really true when I think about that time, even as an adult, but as a kid, my understanding of family was my mom, Miriam and me, and Dottie was important and present at a young age. But I was so young. When they're fighting and they split up and we end up indruction City and intruction City, it's really just us. If Miriam was part of this conversation, she would recount many of the same things, but have a slightly different slant, by which I mean for Miriam. I think it was more difficult for me. My family was Mom and Miriam and me, and they were miriam Is just as much as my mom took care of me. As fathers came in, it was sometimes difficult. And I think that that my understanding of race, of myself as a black person, is tied to that. My mom always felt like she felt like I needed a black man in my life. I think she was drawn to black men, but she also felt like if there was going to be a man in our lives, it was going to be a black man, and so she dated black men. But for me until we move with Ed Wheeler, after they get together, after the you My Arizona breakup, they get back together eventually. Until then, family to me was Mom and Miriam at the time that we lived in the Gabway apartment, so it's you know, it's Dotty Miriam, me and Mom. And my mom used to have like what was called a vanity, you know, like that sort of little bureau with a mirror, and that's where she'd put on makeup at the beginning of the day. And as she recasts this event, like I'm over her shoulder watching or she's putting on makeup, and I'm really fixed on her, you know, like I was just sort of an adoration before my mother. And at a certain point I turned her and I point to myself in the mirror, and I go, who's that colored boy? Because I don't think I understood, Like I think what I thought of myself. I thought of myself as like my mom that so I should therefore look like my mom, as this white person. So I think that it was all kind of in my little four year old head was kind of muddled and in my mom I can't remember how she responded, but like that's you and da da dah, and you know, I think she's become very aware of helping me understand race. But I think that that ties into how she felt like Miriam and I both needed and maybe I especially needed a black man in my life, and I think it becomes associated with that. To me, it's it's more like me, Miriam and my mom and then these men who might be part of our lives that I might more or less feel close to.
When David's mom and Ed Wheeler get back together, the family follows him to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. They spend three years there. After Ed Wheeler retires from the Army, they end up in Amarillo, Texas, when David is about eleven. David and Miriam are two of four black students in the entire middle school in Amarillo. Here, David encounters racism for the first time, or at least this is his first conscious experience of it. Some other boys pin him down in the playground, hold him down, and give him something called red belly. After the school treats this as just a prank, not racism.
When we moved to Amarillo, we're in a space where we are the no biracial families that I remember, and Amula, there's a black Community's small, but there's one. But that's not where we lived. We lived on the outside of town at the Texas State Technical Institute, where my stepdad to good job in security. And so, yeah, we're four black kids. I'm the only black boy, and I remember sort of the class clown in my class, funny kid, but he was kind of also you know, western shirt, big belt buckle, sort of stereotypical, and I'm aware enough to be leery, but he was one of the boys that jumped me on the playground and they hold me down and just that feeling of power, I mean, the red bellies when they hold you down and they expose your stomach and then they just slap you know, stomach with their open hand until your skin turns red. They called a red belly. It hurts, I have to say, but it was less the hurt than that, you know, to be physically held down and restrained in that way, vulnerable in that way, completely vulnerable, and it's these white boys. Yeah, to me, it was a completely like racialized hazing, and you know in the school again, the school is just like, ah, these these are boys. They just sort of ride it off. But in my family, we understand like this is a problem. And so Miram and I actually went back to Lawton where Fort Sill was and lived with my mom's friend for a while so that we wouldn't be in that school. And then when we came back to Amberillo, one of our neighbors taught at a school in town that was more racially mixed, and my mom found somebody's address and used the address that we could enroll in that school, and we ended up going to that school. The hazing actually continued in weird ways for both of us. Merriam and I met a little bit less so, but you know, it was a very it was a mixed school that there was a black population. It wasn't huge, but it was notable. It was a very big a Mexican American population, and probably a white population about the same size as the black population. But in that mixedness it was it could be kind of a rough school. And I remember Miriam, I didn't notice what had happened, but she told me afterwards like she had been being hazed by black girls because she's like complected and she's you know, pretty, and these black girls were threatening Miriam and she ended up taking a steak knife to school to defend herself. Emerl wasn't great for us.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. In David's personal history piece in The New Yorker, he writes, indignation simmered within me, a rising fury at the sweep and scope of the horrors that we African Americans had born since our very beginnings. That feeling is also coupled with a tinge of shame that comes from a long history of oppression. Then one evening, David and his family watched the Alex Haley television series Roots, a cultural sensation when it came out in nineteen seventy seven, And so like.
We are watching Roots together and I don't know why. It wasn't conscious, it was subconscious, but I just I just I just didn't want to do it. I just was like, I don't want to see that we all have to do it. Part of it like being a eleven to twelve year old resisting what her parents want to do, but in retrospect, part of me understands, or I think I understand that there was something deeper going on. My mom made me sit there, so I sat there and watch and completely getting grossed from the beginning. And as I'm watching sort of you know Punti Quinte's experiences first in Africa and then you know he's in the United States, and we're watching this as a family, My mom, my stepdad, my little sister, shaw Tala is born at that point. She's way too young to know what she's watching, but she's sitting in my mom's lap. And over the course of having that experience felt to sort of racial awakening where there's a certain pride. J are you're feeling this moments? I mean, it just was a moving experience for me. And this again is when we're at Ambrillo, so that hazing experience that happened, Ream and I at this point are in the school in town. So there's this feeling of black pride but also at anger. So pride and anger that this is what we, as black people we were subjected to, but also a little bit of a tinge of shame that we are also associated with these people who were constantly diminished and depressed and whatever. So it was a really complex feeling, Like I feel like the resistance that I didn't probably have words for that made me a little averse to what I was about to watch had something to do with that when I watch it. When I watched this series over the course of that week, you know that it comes on or whatever. You know, I feel this pride and this anger and a rebelliousness that I'm trying and hear it from my mother on some level, but it's beginning to find voice. But there was also a little hint of shame that was mixed in there too that I have to acknowledge.
After Amarillo, David and his family follow ed Wheeler again, this time to Borger, Oklahoma. This feels like a whole new world, described by David as the epitome of late seventies Bible Belt, socially conservative Christian symbolism everywhere proselytizing in this landscape, David begins to learn code switching as he continues to question and develop his identity. He's always been a self described mama's boy, but now that his mom is made sure her son has yet another male presence in his life, David's leaning more toward traditional male behaviors and activities. For instance, he joins the football team. This is also when he really begins to clock and navigate the racial nuances around him.
When we first moved to Borger, there's still a Black You Center and a White Youth Center, at least that's what they call them. The White You Center everybody can go to, but mostly black folks didn't. That's where the pool was, and the Black You Center only black folks went to. You know, it wasn't sort of hardline segregation like it had probably been ten years before, but the remnants were still there. As a kid, you don't quite know what you're seeing, but that was how it was. But even though that stuff was there, people were just kind of friendly. You're driving down the street and people hank at you in wave and like aftertime you're like, I don't know who that is. But it was friendly in that way. And I think also I was maturing as a racial being, sort of learning to coachwitch and navigate these spaces and all that. One of my first best friends was a Mexican American kid named Lord Gardunio Jerry Paul Smith down the street with his white kid But then from school, Leroy Horton, who to this day is still one of my best friends, was a black kid from the other side of town. So I just had just a more diverse experience and generally people were more friendly, and even though the racism was there, it wasn't. It could be on the surface, but it wasn't necessarily on the surface. And the other difference was that my stepdad was hired by the sheriff to be a deputy sheriff, and he was the first black deputy sheriff in the county. There was another a black man named Greg Belton who was an engineer and he was active, like on the school board. But aside from that that, we were kind of the black bourgeoisie of Borger to the degree which serves a black bourgeoisie and Borger and it is bourgeois, so we had the different sort of class and caste experience too in that way. I mean, I probably had some inclusive code switching before then, but it really is something that I'm very consciously doing at that point when we moved to Borger in seventh eighth grade.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's also a huge church culture in Borger. In the pervasive tension between being both insider and outsider. David starts to attend. It's not like he is committed, but he is curious. But then one day, all of a sudden, he finds himself being saved.
My friend Jerry Paul, he went to that church, and my football coach was at the church, and he taught our Sunday school class, and it was very social to me. It was like guys from the team and my friends, and I mean these are the kids that like, at night, we're sneaking out of the house and were like, you know, vandalizing stuff, and we called it being roguish. I mean, there was nothing Christian about my friendship with these boys, but on Sunday we would get together at church and the youth minister and my coach and then eventually the preacher were like, have you thought about being saved? Have you felt christ in your life? And then one day it just sort of kind of happened bigger than me, and I just was like, yeah, you know, I felt really good about it, like in this way, like I don't know that it was the I mean, I'm sure on some level was the Christian part of it. You know, I'd sort of been receiving all these messages about heaven and Hell again it's fire and Brimstone Church, Heaven and Hell. And all my other friends Lee Roy across town. I'd go to church with him sometimes because his mother was very religon just I mean, Christianity was just part of the culture. And so when I get saved, I think, I'm I think I'm understanding myself as as being Christian. I don't think I fully understand how that might have implications on me being Jewish, because I understand myself to be Jewish. But I'm just like, you know, hey, And but my mom, she was she could be mad. She had She was a tiny, tiny wish. She was like five to one. You know, I'm her son, I'm her child. I had seen her mad, but I had never seen her mad like that. When I came home from being saved, I was all like, you know, in the clouds, sort of like, oh, I just had this great experience and I'm feeling good about myself and I'm going to heaven and I'm part of this community. And she was waiting for me in the yard because the preacher, who had, you know, asked if I was feeling the Lord or whatever. He had gone home and told her, which was first mistake back at his part, because I think he got probably worse than I did. My mom was not afraid to, you know, get in somebody's face. But then when I, you know, walk down the street and she's sitting in the are, she started screaming at me. When she saw me, she was outraged, and I think it was because she was very struck by the hypocrisy of how she experienced what she felt like was a hypocrisy of Christianity the United States. Even though she was not a practicing Jewan anywhere, she always wore a Star of David, very prominently a pendant, and I never asked her actually, but she must have experienced it as some sort of betrayal.
Well. It's fascinating because she was very focused on and made sure that there would be a black man as a role model in your life, and understood that as a biracial man, a boy, you would be walking through life recognized as black, not recognized as Jewish. I mean, you weren't wearing a Star of David, right.
I think the thing that my mother feared I was betraying was race, at least as much as not more than Jewish is, because both Dottie and Ed Wheeler were Christian and Dotty wasn't practicing in any way. He was sort of he was a jokestra and he wouldn't make jokes about anything, and he would call himself Christian, I'm sure, but he wouldn't go to church. But his family very much so you know, his mother Midi right with whom my mother had a complicated a difficult relationship, and his sister his older son were very Christian. But Ed Wheeler too. There was a time where when they were first dating, when we were still in Joussian City, where we went to church with him a few times. So it wasn't, or at least it wasn't mostly the Christianity part. I think it's the fact of that white church. And I learned this from Miriam because Miriam overheard everything, which he's you know, cussing out the creature, but the note that it ends on he had two daughters and she says to him, what are you going to do when my son wants to date your daughters? So for her it's the racial piece. It's the racial threat that me and this white community, and as a black boy, and I'm interacting with these people and they're calling me, you know, their brother or their whatever in Christ. But you know, if I step across some line that I maybe she fears I don't know how to navigate, like this is I mean, a real threat. Not so long after that, it was the summer that I was sixteen. There was a small town named Stanette, about ten miles away. It's much smaller than Borger, maybe a few thousand people. But one of my best friends was this kidnamed Bud, a white kid, and but now were really close. But he was dating this girl from Stanett, a white girl. But the three of us were hanging out, and I remember I was working at this place called the Mister Burger. It was just this little drive through burger place and I was the only person there. The manager had quit and I basically ran the place, even though I wasn't technically the manager. And Bud pulls up and he's like, yeah, these guys for Stinette, they want to kick your ass. And I was like huh. And they're like, they think you're dating Susan and I was like what, And so you know, again testosterone, sixteen year old me and budd get in the car and we wround up some guys and it's mostly other white guys, interestingly, but from them, their point of view is sort of Borger versus Stanette. When we get there, I realize, you know, this fight that's about to happen, this is potentially dangerous. And Susan comes and she's crying, and she was there visiting her uncle. She was saying how her uncle, so a grown man, had gathered some of his friends and they had guns. So my mom's fear was not it wasn't irrational. This is a real danger, and between those experiences, I always sort of understand that it's there, but I understand in real terms that I could die, This could end very poorly for me. So my mom's fears weren't unreal, right, right, of course?
Yeah, I mean it strikes me that the whole insider outsider dynamic only goes so far right, you're an insider until until you're not.
And maybe it's too late at that point to retract or to back up. Yeah.
The spring David turned sixteen, his mom's marriage to Ed Wheeler is deteriorating. They're heading toward divorce. It's during this time David's mom and sits him down to tell him something, something worth shaking.
They had gotten together and split up so many times. I mean, they had a really rocky relationship. And at this point on the one end, I'm born again. You know, I'm pretty you can't see it, but I'm putting your quotes. I'm bored grand I'm Christian in some way. And he wants to hold this secret that she has told him over her head as a way to I don't know, shame her in front of me, or I don't know exactly what his motivation was. So she beat him to the puncha. She sits me down. She goes, you need to know that, you know, Dottie, isn't your father. Your real father is this man, Max falla Day. And it's this man I knew from my youth. He was my first love. And when you know, we were stationed in France after Miriam was born. Dottie had always been a little bit of a lady's and he was very handsome. He was tall and carried himself in that way, and he had not been faithful, and my mom was like an eye for an eye. This is how she's explaining to me and you know, it makes a certain sense of me. Know how I knew my mom and she's like, she told me she'd only they'd only slept together once, which I find as an adult, I find kind of improbable. But she told me we'd only slept together once. But I got pregnant, and so Max Valade is your real father. And at this point, you know, Africa to me is still like, you know, what I'd learned from roots, LeVar Burton and OJ Simpson in the forest or whatever. You know, I have no conception of what Africa is. It's a UNICEF commercial where they're wanting change or something for starving children. But she's like, you know, he comes from Dahome and he's an architect, and he works for the un and he's from this very distinguished family, and so you need to know this. My reaction was the oppostion where my stepdad would have expected. To me, it just it just made a weird sort of sense. I had no idea who Max Validay was, but I it just made a weird sort of sense to me. It's hard to.
Explain why, even in the instant.
Even in the instance, it sort of made a weird sort of sense. My mom. She had this thing what she interpreted of the character of her men with the character of her children. So Dottie was a tricker. So her big fear for Miriam was at Miriam would be an alcoholic with Ed Wheeler, you know, he could be very kind of petty, he could be kind of small, and he was, yeah, vindictive and all that, and she would fear that. Shall tell my little sister inherited that. And with me, I don't know, she just put different expectations on me. I mean, I didn't seek to explain it, but it wasn't easily explicable. Had I Miriam Micheal both are really smart, and Miriam was always like I had idolized Mirham. She was just so sharp, she read and she was super funny. In my mind, she was the smart one. But I was always treated as the smart kid, and I think it sort of associated with things like that. And so when when I get this information, I find out he's from this distinguished family and he was, you know, the first West African to graduate from it called de Boza in Paris. You know, I was like, okay, it just made a certain sense.
You know, yeah, yeah, I do, And really a feeling of like, oh, every like the pieces are falling into place now.
Yeah, very much, so I wrote in this letter. I mean, I'm also like I'm sixteen, and so I'm also becoming more independent, autonomous. I was, you know, developing as a football player. I was ranked high in my class. You know, I just was getting closer with Dottie. I never had a close relationship with Ed Wheeler, but you know, I was just my own person in my own mind. And so when I find out about Max Falla Da, the letter that I wrote was just sort of like, dear Max. I'm sure I called him Max. My mom told me I found out Da Da Da. It was more or less just I wanted you to know that I know. And he wrote me a letter back totally that was very neutral. What I remember most distinctly is he wrote me in English. He's like, I need you to know that there is nothing for you. I have nothing for you. And it wasn't that it felt like a rejection. I think it just felt it's stung because I deliberately did not ask him for anything. You know, I was like going, hey, I want to meet you have nothing. It was just sort of like, I know and his response was to sort of create this distance. But even more so, the thing that I understood from how my mom had told me about him, her best friend growing up was these two African women, and one of them I had met when we lived in France briefly, maybe both of them, but one of them, and they were It turns out these are her relatives. What is his sister, and other is his niece, And those were my mom's best friends from growing up, and they remained best friends. So I knew I had a sense of the fila of day family, or at least as these figures that I had met when I was six, and so what she's telling me about him when I'm sixteen, that was part of it making sense. And so his complete rejection in that way felt like it wasn't just of me but also of her, and that because I to this day I admired my mom. She was complicated and difficult, and I'm not sure she always made the best choices, but I loved her then and love her still and admired her, and so for him to treat her in that way, in my eyes, was worse than what Ed Wheeler was threatening to do or Ed Wheeler had ever done. It was really it felt terrible because it felt like it said something about my mom.
And you also, I think had or developed the sense that he was her one true love, that there was a quality of their relationship that was unrequited for her. Yeah, and somehow this was the beginning of him letting you know that.
Yeah. I mean she said as much when she was explaining to me the affair. She was like, he was my first love. And she said it subsequently, and not just to me, but to Miria Michelle Tall. She's like, you know, this is the man that I truly love. She told me she was first attracted to Ed Wheeler because they had the same voice. The Valadays all the men and the women all have a very grave voice, and I do too, And she would say that she was first drawn to Ed Wheeler because he had Max Valaday's voice, and so, yeah, I understood the depth of her feeling for him, and the thing on the other end was so unreciprocated. It just it was painful. It was really painful.
David's sixteen seventeen. He's thinking about college, becoming more and more autonomous. When he starts taking PSATs and thinking about where he might want to go. He knows two things for sure. He wants to play college football, and he's not going to school in Texas. He ends up very much in a place that is not Texas, far from the Panhandle, at Carlton College in Minnesota. As for Max Falladay, David packs that information up into a box and intends to move on with his life. If his father doesn't want to have anything to do with him, well, then the feeling is mutual. Max Faladay is nothing more than a bullet point. David has a great experience at Carlton, becomes captain of the football team, and is on his way to earning his BA when his mother calls. She had stayed in contact with Max, and Max has told her that he wants David to come visit him in Addis Ababa, where he's employed by the UN Economic Commission for Africa.
It very much cold cocked me. It was very very unexpected, and it was also coupled at the time. So Dottie had been a drinker and I had been with him as he was getting sick and he ended up developing gangreen and so he's hospitalized and you know, they amputated toe and then another toe, and eventually a foot. And at the end of this process, it happens over two years. But at the end of this process, you know, he's basically gotten either legs and he's living in a nursing home. And this is happening at the time that my mom is like, Max wants to meet you, Dottie. At that point we had grown close. Again. I'm not a grown man. I'm a college student, but I feel like a grown man. And I'm on my own in Minnesota. And on the way to Minnesota, I would spend time with Dottie and one time he told me, you know, this is before the gangreen, but he had told me, you know, captain of the football team, and you're in college. He told me, you're my hero. You know, I'm tearing up now. It just sort of broke my heart. I mean, it was the same time Max reappears, and so I was in all that mix of things. But I agree to go. And when I I agree to go, we made up this big elaborate lie, or I made up Mom and I made up this big elaborate lie to Dottie that I was going to be traveling in Europe with friends and stuff. So he wouldn't know. And I do meet some friends in Paris, and I stayed with my grandmother and my aunt for a little bit, and I meet an African ant, my mom's best friend, who again i'd seen as a six year old, but I you know, when I met her as a six year old, she's just my mom's African friend. And then I fly to Adis Ababa, and I meet Max.
Dottie never knew about Max. Is that right?
So what's complicated? My understanding at the time was that Dottie did not know that he never knew the same aunt. Max Holiday's sister. She's still alive and she and I are very close, and we talked still, and she is convinced that my mom told Dottie, And that may a certain sense to me too, in that my mom was my mom again if he's cheating on her, and she maybe is inclined to want to be with Max, but the pretext is Dottie cheating on her, and Dottie was gone, he was in Vietnam briefly, and the timing of the pregnancy maybe doesn't work. And Jeraladine, Max's sister, who's who's my aunt who I'm close with She's like she told him. That makes a certain sense to me because the most angry that Dottie ever got with me. This is again around that time that I'm fifteen or sixteen and Mia and I would spend the summer with him. Then right before going this is before I knew about Max. When we were about to go up, Miriam was just super chrying. Everybody still do this day likes Miriam better than me. It's just just fun and funny that I could be a oldle dower maybe, But I remember thinking, I don't think Dottie likes me very much. And I made the mistake of telling my mom, like just sort of we were close, I confided in her, right, I told her, don't tell him. But the first thing she does is she tells him. And so I'm at Kansas City with him and We're riding the cab, just him and me and his anger. When he confronted me about it, it was not just anger, but it was like this hurt. And when I revisited that in retrospect a few years later, when he tells me I'm his hero, you know, that plays into it. And then fast forward two decades and I find out that mom had told him, like, it just makes a certain sense. Yeah, But at that time I was told, or at least led to believe the opposite, that he didn't know because we construct this elaborate live so he doesn't know that I'm going to Adiz.
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's so fascinating to me about your story is that there's kind of a reckoning with what it's not possible to know. I mean, there's some things that you know, you're left to put the pieces together as best as you can. Yes, you'll never a thousand percent know because the principal players are gone, and you know, what you're left with is that gut feeling that oh yeah, this makes sense and kind of going with that and yes, and that's enough.
That's a lot, It's a lot. Yeah.
So David goes off to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It's nineteen eighty five. There's widespread famine, and the country is under a dictatorship.
It's my first time in the developing world, and it is really the developing world. It's in a really difficult place. The night before I had been out because again we had this pretext of travelery friends, and I did meet some friends. The night before, I'd been at like Jim Morrison's grave with these friends, and we met these other folks and we were drinking from a Jerger wine. So I'm on airy Ethiopia in shorts and a tank top and hungover. So you know, I landed adis in the developing world, completely disoriented, not feeling very good physically. Ethiopia at that time. You know, this is nineteen eighty five. It's not computerized in any way, and you know there's a strong military presence, and there's this crowd of people. So when I finally work my way into the airport, going through customs and getting a little bit harassed, I'm looking around for somebody who looks like me. I've never seen a picture of Max, so I'm looking around for somebody who looks like me, whatever that might mean. And I see somebody who's built more or less like me, and he's looking my way, but then it's clear it's not him. And at a certain point, as the airport is clearing out because there's two flights a day or somebody, it's not like a huge airport like we might imagine, like all the people from the from the plane are basically leaving and gone, and the airport's clearing out and I realize I'm on my own. I changed some dollars into two beer and I got a cab and I just said the africahol and I get there and the security lets me through with my American passport and I find my way to his office and he's not there, and Tricity's in a meeting his secretary. It's not clear she knew I was coming or not. I'm pretty sure I didn't say I was his son, but I explained I'm David Wright, and she doesn't know who I am. But she lets me sort of wait in this ante chamber and there's a couch and I just remember just falling asleep, you know, sort of too much me and Paris and I before and the trip and the stress. And when I wake up, he's standing above me, and I will remember forever this really warm smile that was so much the opposite of that letter I got when I was sixteen, that made me feel welcome. So we're talking, and it was just from the very beginning it was just so warm on a personal level. But then as soon as other people, I mean, he's married at that point, and I have a little brother and sister who's like my little brother is he's between one and two, and my little sister had just been born, and his wife is only like five years older than me. But so when it's us in that context, you know, he lives in this house with and this is very true in the developing world, certainly in Africa, you know, especially for people of his status. He has housekeepers and all this stuff, and to me from small town Texas, that's super uncomfortable. But when we're in the context of his house, him and me, or him and me and his family, it's very warm. I would go with him to work at se there's nothing to do. I'd go with him to work, and I'd spend time in the library, right you know. Sometimes I'd just walk around on diese. Whenever we'd find ourselves with other people, he would immediately create this distance. He would introduce me as mister David Wright from America. He would never go this is my son. It was difficult. Frankly, again, I wasn't expecting this warm embrace, but I clearly must have been expecting more than that, because it was it was difficult. There was one instant this friend because she was a woman, and he had this way of being. He was very charming, he had this way of being that it was all sort of plurirtatious. And this woman was just a good friend of her. She was married and had children, but they were clearly good friends. And as they're talking, he introduces me mister David Wright from America, and she's looking at me and they're kind of playing back and forth in a certain port. She goes, Max, don't tell me this boy is in your child, and he looks at her and he has this sort of smirk and he goes, situvu if you wish, And that broke my heart really again. I wasn't asking to be recognized as his son, but he was so deliberately have a leer about it that I was just like, I was so happy to have met him. I was enjoying the stay, and I felt a little bit like when I was sixteen. It felt clear to me that when I left that that was it. We would never see each other again, and I was okay with it. It turns out that I wasn't exactly welcome. I've arned over the course of the two and a half weeks I was there, my mom and my aunt, his sister had sort of, you know, gotten together and sort of forced his hand. He would have been just as happy for me not to come. I sort of figured out over the course of that visit.
So on the flight home, you felt that you had met your father, you had checked that box, and that was going to be it. You had all the information that you needed.
Yeah, I was good to go, and I was twenty. And so if I was beginning to feel independent at sixteen, at twenty, you know, I'm coming into my own, especially like the angry part of me. Like my little sister would call me Malcolm Farakahn, you know, playfully, because I could be really angry about stuff, and that twenty year old me was that person. I was very you know, when I left the country and I went to England in France, it was to get to know family. Part of it was to play football, but that was the pretext. It was really I was reading James Baldwin and I was leaving the country like I was going to be an expatriate, and as a black man in America in nineteen eighty six, that was just not tolerable. And so if there was a part of me, like when I you know, I'm on the plane out of Adis and Max and I will never see each other. I'm okay with it. I mean, I'm going back to the States at that point. But it's the nacid part of that part of me, the beginning of that part of me that's just angry black man, and try to reckon me as a black man in America.
We'll be right back a couple of years past Dave. It is a year out of college and he's living in England, where he's playing semi professional American football. One day, he gets another teutonic shifting phone call from his mom. She says, your grandfather is on his deathbed and wants to meet you before he goes. David's confused. His grandfather, Jack Writ's father ed Wheeler's father. He asks his mom who, and she replies, simply, your grandfather.
She had stayed in touch with Max, but also with Jaladine Accessister, her best friend growing up. Jaldine is a little bit in the Faladay family. She was a little bit the repel, the one who would sort of push against these family more's And at that point, when I meet Max, one of the things I come to understand is that the faladays don't know about me. This is my understanding with Todd. I learned that that's not true, but at that point, the Faladays don't know about me. Max has kept it a big secret, and so I know that he's got this distinguished family in Dajome, but he's not acknowledging me to people in Adis. So it makes complete sense to me that that his family doesn't know. And his older sister is this really distinguished psychoanalyst. She had first been a pediatrician, the protege of this important French pioneer im pedetitician, and then she moved from pediatrics to psychoanalysis and she was Jacqulaicans protege. So I knew she existed. She distinguished person, just like Max was distinguished. But all those people don't know about me. So when my mom calls me, she's like, your grandfather knows. I'm just like, it doesn't make sense that that would be the grandfather she's talking about, and how does he know? But she's like, he's dying, he's in his nineties. He wants to meet you. So I'm told that I need to go to Paris. From London that I'm going to meet Solange, who's Jacqualicanz Protege, and that she's going to arrange this trip. By this time, max is retired from the UN and lives in what's been in now what had been Dajo May. So I go to Paris. I meet Solange. She's great, she's super warm. I feel really welcomed by her, embraced, and I take this trip to being in to see my father for the second time, but then also to meet the rest of the family.
What is it like to be welcomed by a family that was never your family. It's this whole other world that has been you know something, even in all of the insider outsiderness of your history up until that point, you had never encountered anything like this.
Nothing, nothing, So I think it's it's hard to pinpoint, but I think it's sometime between when I go to Ethiopia and my grandfather. I know that Maxi's father is the son of a king. What that means I don't know, but it turns out what I learned over that period of time is that the kings of Dahomey and the Kings of Dahomey had been slave traders. So that part of West Africa, you know, there was what it's still called the avery Coast, and next to it is gone, but it was called the gold Coast, and next to the gold coast was called the slave coast. And that's where being In, being In and Togo and part of my Geria still are. But the dominant kingdom for about two hundred and fifty years during the period of the slave trade was the Kingdom of Dahomey and the Kings of Dahomey. Then the last king of Dahomey was a man named king named Bejanzen Bealzen. I don't know how you pronounced it in English, but my grandfather was his son. So I find out that I've descended from the slave trading kings of Dahomey. And I don't know a whole lot more than that, but I have a sense of it. So when I meet so Luge in Paris, I ask her some and she begins explaining it. So I don't arrive there with absolutely no knowledge, but not a lot. And when I arrive my grandfather, who's in his ninety so this was inwty seven, but he had been born in eighteen ninety four, and so he had had this really crazy life. But this incredible life, you know, descended from the king. Right when the king is defeated, is when you know his mother might what would be my great grandmother was pregnant with my grandfather. So when the king is exiled to Martinique, she stays in Dahomey, but my grandfather has to be in hiding as a child. And he has this really complicated backstory, and he also has a really complicated relationship to his legacy, to his roots. He doesn't take the name Baylzen, even though all the beals as it now knows that he's one of the sons of the king, but the man who more or less adopted him, who was named Fala Day, he takes his name. He has this really just complicated relationship to his paternity. And I don't know that as I land, but that's what I learned as I meet him. I mean, he's very he's on his deathbed and he's bent. He's very frail looking. I mean he's on his deathbed figuratively because he would sit in his chair. He moved very difficultly, but he would sit in his chair in the front room, and I was staying with him. So I've in another developing country that I've never been. It's not like the OPN eighty five, but you know, it's a Marxist lenon estate, very restrictive. I have my visa, I get there and I'm living in my grandfather's house where he has electricity, but there's no running water. And it's him and then these two African workers who work for him, who are great, very friendly, but they're workers, you know. So it's me and him sitting in his room all day and he were just talking. And you know, I was there for three weeks and I spent most of them with him. For as frail as he was physically, he is incredibly lucid, but also this really strong personality. And I'm again twenty two, twenty three year old me, So I'm just asking him questions very frankly about bayon Zen, about his upbringing. You know, about my father when he was a kid, and my grandfather. You know the way that family works in Africa. You know, the head of the family is king for lack of a better word, and so there was a certain deference that everybody had to when people would come and visit us. But there was all this deference that wasn't just sort of like, you know, my parents and I'm going to be respectful. There was this real deference and so yeah, I had this really incredible experience with him. My expectation wasn't to be embraced. I don't know what my expectation was again, because he sought me out, but he completely embraced me. I thought he was very religious during his upbringing, his father's exile, and then his father dies and he's his surrogate father sends him to the missionaries for an education, and he ends up with this man named Father Opier, who ends up being this really important missionary. So I mean, it's conflicted, right, the missionary presence in West Africa. But this man was really had this anthropological interest in Daljomey and he took my grandfather his wing and was a father figure, another father figure of my grandfather. So my grandfather sort of caught between native culture and tradition and this important priest who takes him under his wing. At this point, dajome is the stereotype of African savagery, you know, because they're slave traders, you know, and the slave trade was brutal in all aspects, but the kings of Dahomey were particularly brutal in their way of affecting the slave trade. They had a professional military, and they would slaughter people as a way to dominate neighboring villages and stuff. He's caught between that sort of image of Dahomey and this sort of culture thing that he's being educated into. He has become a journalist, an anti colonial activist. He's disappeared by the French during the war, and in fact he sent us to death. The father Opier intervenes and other people intervened, and he ends up being But he's just had this tumultuous life and he's telling me all these stories. And at one point when I'm there, he invites his priest because he can't go to church anymore because it was a condition. But he invites the priest to his house. And in the moment, I thought, okay, it's just a priest coming by to, you know, do whatever ritual thing happens. I learned and after the fact that it was super important that he was sort of presenting me as his only son's eldest son to the church. But then even more significantly, he organizes this trip, and again, being at right now is in a very different state, but in nineteen eighty seven, it's really a developing world. Like the roads are really rough. A lot of times they're not paved. It's just really rough. But he organizes this trip to the village he was raised in by the Vala days, and he's going to introduce me to the family. So it's not just sort of like he embraces me like hey, you're my grandson and a clap on the back. He formally introduces me to the family and to that society as his grandson. So it was, yeah, it was super flattering, completely shocking, very unsettling in that again, I'm sort of James Baldwin wannabee me played football, a very Unbaldwin thing, played football in Paris, and then suddenly I'm part of this big African family that is very distinguished in the society, but also that hascended up these slave trading kings.
It's just a stunning nott of identity. And David's grandfather doesn't only want to introduce him to his living family, he wants to introduce him to his ancestors as well. Disrespect for and worship of ancestors being central to his culture. David finds himself in a group of people speaking in Yureba, a circle of elders, including Max, and here David is being introduced as a Falladay in a very transparent way. It's the opposite of the way Max had treated him when he was last in Oddis. He says, this is the eldest son of my eldest son. He is the product of a black person and a white person. And then the village blacksmith arrives.
I didn't know that in the moment it's explained to me when the blacksmith is coming, because I'm I'm asking you know why the blacksmith. And the first thing they tell me is that the blacksmith is descended from slaves. So this blacksmith that was like a caste position and in dalha Mann society, so there are slaves that they sent into the slave trade, but they also had slaves themselves, and it was more cast position, and the blacksmith was this thing that was passed from father to son. So the blacksmith that arrives, I'm told he's the descendant of slaves. I'm imagining a younger man but he's very old, and it's explained to me that as someone who works metal, who transforms metal, they know secrets, right, and so he is exactly as you explained that he is in a sort of priest role for this ceremony that's going to take place. And on the right there in the car, my grandfather and my father were soul and the driver. There was a certain solemnity, so I knew it was more than just sort of visiting family. But then as we're going through all these sort of you know, like where you're welcomed and people come out and we're sitting on a porch and we exchange drinks. But then when the blacksmith comes, they go into this room and I see the room and there's an altar in there, a voodoo altra, and it's I mean, if somebody had explained to me that that we call it voo doo, it's Vouduan's it's a religion, but it's also a way of understanding of the world. And so to communicate with the ancestors through the intermediary of this blacksmith, they go before this altar. Again, if somebody doesn't explain it, I don't know what I'm looking at. But it was just I remember, like bird feathers and a few chicken bones and a mask maybe, But the site was holy. And my grandfather and the other elder representative maybe a couple of elder representatives of the Faladas who lived there, and the blacksmith go in the room. My father and I are in the threshold of the room. We weren't prohibited. I was just following cues, so my father stayed out, Max stayed out. I stayed out, or at least at the threshold of it. And they're speaking in Yuruba. And it's not a formal ceremony per se. It's nothing that I recognize as a ceremony. But it's like talking and maybe again pouring some liquid, some exchange of something. It was nothing like you might see in a movie where there's like dance and this and that was very quiet, but it was super solemn, and I understood the gravity of it.
During this trip. In his embrace of David, his grandfather gives him a new name in their native language of Urreba.
My grandfather and is acceptance of me, named me in Uruba Omole. The child has returned home. I think that's what it is. But then also in font again he's stuck. He's not stuck, but he's sort of split between these two traditions, the Yuruba one and the font the balzan one font is the king Bale's inside. And that name was erro no and pronounced erro and it means compute, traveling companion. And he explained it to me. He said, my father his son to France to get an education, and he came back with a traveling companion. So I have the two days.
It just took a while.
Yeah, exactly, you're right.
I was a grown man now past wanting or needing a father. So where did this land with you?
You know?
And where does it land with you now? And also I'm curious you took Falada as part.
Of your name.
Yeah, at what point in this journey did you do that?
Max? And I with time, especially after that, it was not immediate. It took years, and I ended up living in France, and we see each other in France. We became very close, and at one point he asked me to take the name and I agreed to, but I said that I would not drive right. Dotty was dead at that point. But it felt even if Dotty wasn't always the most responsible father, he was a father, you know, especially as I learned that he had probably known the fact that he never made a difference, even though he probably knew, that just seemed disrespectful and not possible. So I told Max that I would add falla day, and that didn't sit well with him, so he didn't say yes or no, but he didn't pursue it. So I remained David Wright, but that was always there between us, and I was actively part of the family. I'm living in a place that he owned in Paris, and I'm still playing football in France. But I'm close with so Lane, my aunt and all the rest of the family, and I'm going regularly to be an ad to visit. But then as he got older, so this was much more recently. That was the nineties at early yes, But then he ended up having Alzheimer's, and as he was sick and could no longer work, and my mom was sick too, and Dottie was long dead before he lost the capacity to understand, it felt important to me to acknowledge to him that I accepted the name, and so I told him I was accepting the name. We talked about it, and you know, he seemed happy, but it's still you know, in the public world, I'm just still David, right. I mean, at that point, I'm in my whatever that was, I'm in my fifties and I'm just David. Right.
It's during this time, with a new book on the horizon that David begins to explore his personal history head on and begins signing his name Faladay as well.
You know, this is the other piece. It also felt really respectful of my mom, My mom, her whole life. It's not just this love and this unrequited love and whatever their complicated relationship was, but she was invested in me being a Faladae, and it felt respectful to her wishes to take the name.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacour is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd like to know more, about the story that inspired this podcast. Check out my memoir Inheritance.
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