Alexis Okeowo says Alabama, where she grew up, shows the best and worst of the American experiment. In her new book, “Blessings and Disasters,” she wrestles with the state’s complicated past.
Guests
Alexis Okeowo, staff writer at The New Yorker. Author of the new book “Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama.”
Transcript
Part I
AMORY SIVERTSON: It depends on who is doing the looking. That’s how journalist Alexis Okeowo opens her new book, Blessings and Disasters. Alexis herself has done a lot of looking and telling. She’s a staff writer at The New Yorker. She won the 2018 PEN Open book award for her debut, a Moonless, Starless Sky, which tells the stories of people standing up to extremism in Africa.
She’s worked as a foreign correspondent reporting from Mexico, Cuba, South Africa. She’s covered gay rights in Uganda, religious violence and terrorism in Nigeria, slavery in Mauritania now in Blessings and Disasters, Alexis Okeowo is looking at what’s possibly the most complicated, definitely the most personal place for her yet. The place she grew up, Alabama.
Alexis Okeowo, welcome to On Point.
ALEXIS OKEOWO: Thank you so much for having me.
SIVERTSON: Thank you so much for being here. And I guess I want to start with that opening line of the book. It depends on who is doing the looking. Because that’s a throughline throughout the book. This idea of who gets to tell the story of a place.
So where did that idea come from for you?
OKEOWO: Yeah, so I had the experience of being from a place that I felt like I was not seen as part of its story. And so because Alabama is a place that is defined by a certain telling of its history, by its extremes, and by what I see is a oversimplified telling of what’s happened there.
And so I was interested in telling a different story, that included my experience, that included others’ experiences that I feel have been left out of the story of Alabama and really of the larger South.
I was interested in telling a different story, that included my experience, that included others’ experiences, that I feel have been left out of the story of Alabama.
SIVERTSON: So we’re going to be talking about some of those experiences, but I was interested in this idea that you bring up, that you wanted to tell the story of Alabama as if it were another foreign country that you were reporting on.
So why take that approach?
OKEOWO: Exactly. So spending so much time in Africa, I was familiar with the practice of showing up in a place that I felt like had either been stereotyped or just simply ignored, and trying to tell nuanced stories from that place. And spending time back in the U.S. after so much time abroad, I realized there was a similar thing happening to Alabama, especially after the 2016 presidential election.
There was a sense of blaming a lot of the country’s woes on the South, on Alabama, and of seeing it in this very reductive way. And despite all the state’s faults, I didn’t recognize that version of it, that version that was being held up as the butt of the joke or the source of the country’s ills.
There was a sense of blaming a lot of the country’s woes on the South, on Alabama. … And despite all the state’s faults, I didn’t recognize that version of it.
And so I got a little defensive and I thought, I want to do something about this.
CHAKRABARTI: So you grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, but your parents are both from Nigeria. How did they end up in Alabama?
OKEOWO: So my parents almost ended up there by accident. They each are from separate parts of Nigeria.
My mom’s older sister was already attending college in Alabama and so when she got the opportunity to attend, she thought, let me go and didn’t even realize that she was signing up to study at a historically Black university. And ended up having a unique experience there. And my dad had showed up to the United States a few years prior.
He was studying in California and then needed to switch to a more affordable school. He opened a directory of state colleges and Alabama was one of the first on the list. And he thought, let me go there. And he knew Alabama had a reputation for sort of racial strife at the time. This was in the 1970s.
But he saw a chance to get a good education relatively cheaply. So he went and then they met on the campus of this historically Black university, Alabama state.
SIVERTSON: Yeah. There’s so much history sprinkled throughout this book, including the origins of the school that would become ASU. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
OKEOWO: Yeah, it’s interesting because my parents, when they arrived there, I don’t even think they knew the history of this place. ASU was a center of the Civil Rights Movement down South. It produced so many luminaries, activists who would later participate in the Montgomery Bus boycotts, who participated in the march from Montgomery to Selma.
Lawyers who would defend those activists once they got arrested. Activists who supported Rosa Parks. Again, during the bus boycott, it was such a hub of Black resistance, and that’s something that it always isn’t, it doesn’t always get credit for. And even after the Civil rights movement, ASU continued to champion for the higher education of Black students in the state, which hasn’t always been easy.
SIVERTSON: So your parents start to make a life there, but they did move around a bit to Tennessee and Texas, where you were born, what brings them back to Alabama?
OKEOWO: Yeah, it’s funny. Alabama has a way of pulling you back even when you don’t expect it, because my parents each showed up thinking, we’re going to go to college here, and then probably eventually make our way back to Nigeria.
And they met while an undergrad. They left to each do graduate degrees in Tennessee and Texas, and then a job at Alabama State pulled them back. A job for my dad, and they missed it a little bit. Because while they were in college, they had formed the small community of other West African students who had come to study, and those people had stuck around, had gotten married, had kids, got apartments, and my parents did the same too.
And a lot of its values also appealed to them. The idea of family, a strong family unit, church community. And so they came back and made a life.
CHAKRABARTI: So tell me a little bit about your childhood in Montgomery. What was your neighborhood like, your community, your schools?
OKEOWO: Yeah, so I often say I was bridging two worlds in a sense, because on the one hand it was a very deeply southern upbringing.
I, for the first several years of my life, I lived in a majority Black neighborhood in Montgomery. I went to public school, but I was bused, or I was part of a busing program, and so I went to public school that was majority white on the other side of town, because the academics there were better.
And my parents wanted me to get a better education. And so my parents didn’t actually allowed me to bus. My parents drove me there, which was very kind and overprotective of them. And yeah, I was a product of public school. I lived in that neighborhood for several years. But at the same time, I also had this rich Nigerian world of my aunties and my uncles.
And their kids who I saw as cousins. And these were my parents’ friends from as back, as far back as their time at Alabama State, who also lived in Montgomery. And on the weekends we would have parties or get togethers in the park where they played Nigerian music and they ate, and they hung out. And so I felt like I was experiencing these two worlds, Southern and African.
I was experiencing these two worlds, Southern and African.
SIVERTSON: Okay. So speaking of these two worlds, in thinking about Montgomery itself and downtown Montgomery, you write that you think downtown Montgomery seems to be having a bit of an identity crisis. Can you say more about what you mean by that?
OKEOWO: Yes, so Montgomery, Alabama in general, the South at large, I believe, is a place that’s obsessed with its past. I write that Alabama loves nothing more than looking back, and you can see it everywhere in Montgomery, the capitol. Its downtown, it’s almost over cluttered with history. It feels present when you’re there.
You have everything from the first house of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis once resided, to museums on civil rights. Now you have the lynching memorial. You have markers about slavery, because it was literally the place where enslaved people got off the dock there and were marched too slave markets, and it’s all commemorated in a very visceral way.
And there’s something really, and what I’m interested in about that is I’m interested in the way Alabama tells the story of itself. Because for a long time it started with perhaps slavery and the Civil War, and then had a sort of a neat tidy ending with the Civil Rights movement.
And of course, there’s so much left out. And that’s what I was interested in.
SIVERTSON: So it’s interesting, you have confederate flags in downtown Montgomery, but you have Civil Rights history. You have a majority Black neighborhood, but you’re also being bused to a school where that might not be the case.
You have Black Americans, you have Nigerian Americans. I’m curious, when you were, say, 18-year-old Alexis, newly minted high school graduate, did you have a sense back then of what it meant to be Alabamian? Based on all of these different experiences and realities that you were seeing just in Montgomery alone?
OKEOWO: It’s interesting. I don’t think at that time I did. It wasn’t really until I left that A) I was able to, I had to confront others’ perceptions of what Alabama was, and then also, I think in writing this book, exploring what about being there shaped me. Because back then, all of that seemed normal.
The contradictions didn’t become apparent until much later, that not every state capitol is full of contradictions like mine was, yeah, I thought, yeah. What’s unusual about having a Confederate flag floating in the distance beyond a monument to civil rights. And then it was later on I realized, okay, that’s actually not normal at all.
Part II
SIVERTSON: Alexis, we’ve gotten to the point where you leave Alabama for the first time in a significant way, when you went to Princeton in 2002.
But not before contacting the admissions office, I should say, like the journalist you would end up becoming, to ask what percentage of their student body was Black. What did you learn and why did you end up going?
OKEOWO: (LAUGHS) It’s funny to think about that, and I guess that just shows you my mindset. Because, again, maybe some stereotypes or perceptions of Alabama would not see the state as actually being quite Black, quite diverse. But that was my experience growing up. And to me, Princeton seemed like a place that would be not diverse at all, and perhaps not comfortable or welcoming. And they responded immediately, and told me they had 9%. And I didn’t really know what that would mean on the ground, but that would have to do. And yeah. And so I went.
SIVERTSON: So then when you get there and people find out that you’re from Alabama, the question you usually get is, what was that like?
So how would you answer them back then?
OKEOWO: Yeah, and the way it was delivered, it was so loaded that there was clearly only one kind of answer expected, which was horrible. And I felt I could understand where they were coming from, because there are ugly parts of Alabama’s history and there’s no denying that.
But it also felt like there was no room to talk about the nuances of what it was like, about the fact that I had an interesting childhood. I had gained a lot by being there. But then that would push me to being a booster or defending a history that I couldn’t defend. I felt like I didn’t have a good answer, or at least a truthful answer.
SIVERTSON: Sure. So these kinds of questions come back in a new way, you said, around the 2016 election.
What kinds of things were you hearing then? What was the same about the kinds of questions people were asking, and the things you were hearing about a place like Alabama and the South in general, and what felt different to you?
OKEOWO: Yeah, so what I was hearing was the 2016 election was understandably upsetting for a lot of people. And there was a sense that the blame for it could be attributed to places like the deep South. That it was, I was hearing the same things again. It was too, it was racist, it was backwards, it was too religious, that kept coming up over.
And again, this sense I was getting from other people of how could you be from there? How could you still have family who live there? And so again, it was being put into the position of trying to explain why people still call this place home.
SIVERTSON: So would you say that the 2016 presidential election was the real impetus for writing this book?
For taking a more critical but also expansive look at Alabama.
OKEOWO: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think also, oh, sorry. I also think this book, I’ve now realized, I think it’s something I wish I could have handed people in college who wondered what it was like.
SIVERTSON: Just read this book. Here you go.
OKEOWO: Exactly. Exactly.
SIVERTSON: So pretty early, what seems like pretty early into your reporting for this book. You go to a rally in Alabama in 2017 for unknown Confederate soldiers, which is telling in its own way. And I was really struck by the inclusion that you say that you felt more uncomfortable on the country road going to that event than you did reporting in African war zones.
OKEOWO: Yeah. That was really my first, one of my first reporting experiences back in Alabama after being away for so long, and I had started to believe the stereotypes fully again, I think there was so much on the media and the news from conversations in person, of people painting this place as extremely hostile, especially to people like myself.
That I began to forget. Some of what it was like to be there and to grow up there and that I shouldn’t have been worried, but I was on that country road driving to the Confederate rally, a bit paranoid, and then I get there, and even though I didn’t agree with anything they were doing, they welcomed me in.
People came up to talk to me. And I began to remember, all the contradictions of being in this place.
SIVERTSON: Yeah. So you spend some time with a guy named Calvin, who’s a Civil War reenactor. A Confederate reenactor, and who takes great pride in that. So what is a conversation with someone like Calvin like for you, what approach are you taking?
What approach is Calvin taking, talking to you? Do you get the sense that he’s maybe answering things differently than he would if you were a white person interviewing him?
OKEOWO: It’s interesting. The reason I chose Calvin is because even though, again, we don’t agree on a lot of things as it pertains to the Confederacy, I felt like he was open. We could talk, which is also, in a way, our relationship signifies a lot about southern convention and politeness. Because we can talk, we’re not necessarily agreeing, but we’re hearing each other.
And so my task was to put him at ease so that he could talk. But I also felt there was a certain barrier I was never going to get past, by virtue of the different, the extreme differences in our identity and beliefs about this part of history.
But I did think it was interesting that he was open. He talked about going to the lynching memorial. He talked about the way we tell the story of Alabama, about history, and I was interested in the way he told the story of his family. And so that was useful to me, even though, as I said, there were many things we didn’t agree about.
SIVERTSON: So I want to talk a little bit about the first Alabamians. This is a native tribe that’s known today as the Poarch Creek Indians. When did you first learn about them?
OKEOWO: I honestly learned about them in depth only when I was working on this book. I was aware, of course, that Alabama was Indian territory before it became part of the American Union, but I wasn’t aware that a small group of Creek Indians had been able to hang on past the Creek War, past Indian removal.
Become federally recognized, and then become incredibly prosperous within the state. And not only that, but that they consider themselves as fiercely Alabamian as they do native.
SIVERTSON: Yeah. Recognized by the state, but to what extent embraced, what is incredible that it is, this tribe that manages to not be sent on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s and ’40s.
They’ve stayed there, but what is their relationship like with the government, with the business community?
OKEOWO: Yeah. So they were a great example that will become, that becomes apparent over and over again in the book. Of a people that claim Alabama as their home and Alabama doesn’t always claim them, let’s say.
There’s this tension of, they have the right to be sovereign. They have the right to run their gaming and entertainment businesses, but they’re constantly being challenged on both of those rights by the state. There is, there’s just constant battle between the tribe and the state.
And the tribe is, says, their position is, they don’t understand why can’t we be friendly neighbors who work together and get along? And it’s clear that the state of Alabama feels threatened by their activities and so is constantly challenging them. And so yeah, the tribe has long been in this uneasy position.
Of claiming Alabama as its home. Even though Alabama doesn’t always claim them back.
SIVERTSON: You spent a lot of time with the tribe’s leader, this woman named Stephanie, and I’m curious what the sense that you got from her of what being Alabamian means. Not just that you live on the land that is now Alabama, but what does being Alabamian mean to someone like Stephanie?
OKEOWO: So it comes back to those Alabama values I mentioned earlier, which kept, again, coming up and up again, this idea of the strong family unit. Of church being an integral part of their lives, of community, of a neighborliness, of, yeah, of a sense of sticking around and looking out for each other.
And that is what their forefathers did to be able to get to where the tribe is now, is literally by sticking around and looking out for each other. And it struck me as she talked, because she just, yeah, she sounded like so many mothers of the kids I grew up with. This vision of Southern womanhood.
But she’s also right, the chief of this tribe that has a contested presence in the state. And so, yeah, I was fascinated by this duality, which kept coming up and up again, coming up and up again with other groups who claim the state and have this experience of the state not often treating them well.
SIVERTSON: Yeah. To this idea of Southern womanhood, there are these two other women that you profile in the book. One is a Black woman named Mary McDonald and a white woman named Tina Johnson. Can you tell me a little bit about these two women and maybe how their stories cross each other and diverge.
OKEOWO: Yes. So Mary is the daughter of Civil Rights activists, grew up in the Black belt, which itself was a hub of local Civil Rights movements in the South. And she grew up watching her mom do everything. She supported the men in her life who were also activists. She was an activist, and she also held the family together, cooking, cleaning, keeping the home, hosting activists when they were visiting, like Stokely Carmichael.
And yeah. And then Tina Johnson is a white woman who grew up in northern Alabama and they grew up poor with a single mother, who really, according to Tina, couldn’t really even read or write, but who always knew how to make money to keep them going, and who relied on men.
Also, her relationships with men to protect and advance the family. And so both of these women, born in the ’60s and seeing how the strong women in their life did a lot for them, but also suffered a lot. Trying to keep their families together without really the help of anyone, even the men they were with at the time.
And Mary responded to that by choosing to stay single most of her life. She didn’t marry, she didn’t have kids. Because as she told me, I saw my mom and the other women in my life do everything, especially during that time, during the Civil Rights movement. And I didn’t want that for myself.
I wanted my own way. Whereas Tina did the opposite. She was a beautiful girl growing up, and she was told that was the basis of her value. And she tolerated all the worst men as partners, she also suffered abuse from men and her family. And it wasn’t until the #MeToo Movement that she finally resisted that and spoke out about some of that abuse from a prominent politician at the time.
SIVERTSON: Yeah. Tell, walk us through that a little bit. Tina ends up in the office of then just a lawyer named Roy Moore, a prominent lawyer. Who, of course, goes on to become the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court before he’s removed.
He runs for the Senate twice. What happens between Tina and Roy Moore?
OKEOWO: So Tina’s going in there for a custody matter with her mom. During the whole meeting, Tina’s married at the time and so is Roy Moore, but he’s flirting with her. He is asking her out on a date. She declines, and then as they’re leaving, he grabs her.
He grabs her private parts, gropes her forcibly, and Tina doesn’t react. She just keeps moving, gets out of the office. She later tells people in her life, but never, she doesn’t even tell her mother. Because she just didn’t feel like her mother would understand or support her. But when she saw on the news in 2017 that another woman had come out against Roy Moore for molesting her while she was very young. 14 years old.
I believe Tina decided she was going to come out too and support that other woman. And finally speak out about some of, this is only some of the abuses that have happened to her in her life.
SIVERTSON: Tina’s story and Mary’s story, they’re obviously very different, but there are these, these threads of Southern womanhood.
These ideas of being caretakers, of being women of faith, of occupying male spaces. Does anything about this idea of Southern womanhood resonate with you or feel like it connects to your upbringing in Alabama in any way? Do you see yourself in either of these women?
OKEOWO: I do. It’s powerful.
I think of myself as still unlearning some of it actually. Because there was a lot of pressure to be put together. To be seen as perfect and to defer, at certain moments.
To know when to speak up and to know when to defer. And I think, yeah, a lot of that is harmful to women because it doesn’t allow for a full expression of one’s identity. And it’s so pervasive. And so I do see it, I do see this idea of being seen as put together, feeling like you have to do everything.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.