The Waging Peace Podcast

Embracing Love's Transformative Power with Marcie Alvis-Walker

• Diana Oestreich • Season 1 • Episode 8

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Blackness + Holiness and a daughters tribute to a Mother with mental illness.

Marcie Alvis Walker is the creator of the popular Instagram feed Black Coffee with White Friends. She is also the creator of Black Eyed Bible Stories. Marcie is passionate about what it means to embrace intersectionality, diversity, and inclusion in our spiritual lives. 

  • Find out what 8th grade Marcie + Diana would be wearing if our dreams came true.
  • The transformative power of a Mother's love- and how society erased her value because her mental health struggles.


  • We uncover the transformative power of love—how it shapes us, molds us, and ultimately, leads us to our essential truth.


  • Love's role in the arena of public justice, drawing inspiration from the likes of Cornel West and the vibrant black trans community celebrated in "Paris is Burning." 


  • The release of "Everybody Come Alive"  Marcie's book is more than just an announcement—it's a call to action, urging us to live out the very tenets of love and justice we've discussed.

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Speaker 1:

You are listening to Waging Peace, the podcast that hosts hopeful conversations with peacemakers and world changers about how we can take action to make our communities more just, equal and connected. I'm your host, diana Ostrich. I'm so glad you're here with me. Buckle up, because these episodes are going to change you in all the best ways. Welcome, marcy, to this adventure of the Waging Peace podcast. You have been just one of my favorite voices and just a delightful human being. That, I feel like, makes me want to do more and to believe more and make the world more just, but I also feel like you've got this whimsical side that just makes me smile a lot. Thank you for putting that out into the world in such a rough couple of years.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that makes me feel really real. I mean I might shed a little bit of a tear. That makes me feel good, because what more could you hope for? I mean, that touches me deeply, so thank you.

Speaker 1:

Well, I know that it's part of who you are, but it is also at a cost, and so I feel like when you create and when you show up when you are most aching and hurting, I feel like that is the artist's gift, and that's why we're still reciting roomy poems Because of years after he lived, like this is the gift, and so I'm just really excited that you are sharing your gift. So we are going to dive right into how you are telling the story of justice and joy through your everyday life and your work, and I just think these are stories of Waging Peace. I've waged war and I know what that looks like, but it only showed me that what I really want to do is wage peace. So anytime I see somebody who is like going towards the violence and speaking the truth, I'm like that's Waging Peace. And, marcy, you do it so eloquently and you do it for not just you and your people, but also for the community and for the future.

Speaker 1:

And I kind of wanted to start with a question about your eighth grade self, because sometimes I think we have these little slices in time that are a whole lot of us, and when we kind of go back to that we get to kind of see what we wanted then might be this thing that's still part of us today. So, anyways, are you ready to go back in time to your eighth grade self?

Speaker 2:

Oh, I love time traveling to my childhood, so, yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I've got a real question for you, but this is just a diet question. What would your eighth grade self be wearing If you could? You know, I mean, if you had everything that you wanted to wear to school? Like, what would eighth grade Marcy be rocking?

Speaker 2:

Okay, so funny that she said that the minute that she said eighth grade. I don't know if you guys remember this. I'm a girl of the eighties. I was born in 69. So in eighth grade I would have been. It would have been like I don't know, 82 somewhere around there, 83 maybe, and prairie skirts was a thing. It was the Laura Ashley Gunny Sax look was a thing.

Speaker 2:

And there was this girl named Life Laubinger and she actually appears in my book. I changed the name of her family in the book, but that perfect family that you read about in the book, that's their family. Her mother had made her a prairie skirt, just with the lace and the calico, and she came into. She's working in the student office. She came in to deliver a note to like my history class to the teacher and I got. I got like when I saw her I was like, oh my goodness, I need that skirt and so I think I ended up trying to make one in my home at class.

Speaker 2:

It didn't turn out like hers, but that is the outfit. Whatever Life Laubinger, from head to toe, was wearing, she had the ballerina slippers on, which was a big thing during that time. That was a really big deal and the other outfit that I really wanted to wear was Sassoon was a big label back in that day and they had this like jersey that had the like okay symbol, the Sassoon symbol, and I had this dream of wearing one of those T-shirts with the pink Sassoon symbol and I wanted a pair of powder blue Nikes with the white swoop and a pair of Jordan Ash jeans. That was like the idea outfit.

Speaker 1:

I love this cause. I'm getting like a picture of like eighth grade Marcy that she was rocking it, Like for me I would have been in like Jebo jeans and one of those Esprit purses a pink Esprit purse. It was just like, seriously, it was like a garbage bag. Why was it so big? But like I wanted it so bad.

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh, you're taking me back. I remember all this. Free things yes, all of it.

Speaker 1:

So my real question was what brought your eighth grade self joy?

Speaker 2:

Fashion in the mall. It was really what brought I had. My mother was a fashion plate. My grandmother not quite the fashion plate that my mother was cared very deeply about how we dressed and how we presented in the world. It was a thing throughout my family.

Speaker 2:

I had three older sisters and an older brother. Looking clean was the name of the game. Like you know, we wanted to be and when I say clean I mean, like you want to be tight from head to toe.

Speaker 2:

We would spend a lot of time at the mall because all of my older sisters were not just a little older like my, the one that who I shared the most clothes and bedroom with. She was five to six years older, somewhere in there, and then my oldest sister's 10 years older and then my next oldest is nine years older. So it was like they were always going to the mall because when I was in eighth grade they would have been graduated from high school or just graduated from high school, or they would have been in high school. They would have been in high school and they had jobs. So they had this and they lived at home, so they had disposable income and my sister would buy Kenneth Cole shoes and this, that and it was my great joy to be shotgun in a seat with anyone on their way to the mall. That was my joy.

Speaker 1:

I love that because that is what. That is what we did. Like people went to the mall and like that, that was the meeting place, that was the like activity and someone I just had seen, someone I written that. Now, kids, instead of going to the mall to meet up with 12 friends you didn't even know we're there and see a movie, kids have it all in their iPhone.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's so. I it makes me so sad because that was such a big deal to meet up at the premiere of a movie and to go to see Indiana Jones or whatever it was. That was the other thing. Me and my family, we were very big on movies. The best thing that ever happened was the VHS player. That was the best thing that ever happened to our family and it's weird because we always had this excitement of waiting for the next release and, like these kids today, they don't really have that Like it's there's always something good to watch. Like they don't know what it's like to only have grease to the watch over and over and over again. So I loved it, that was it, that was all that there was to watch. They understand, like what it is to not have choice, you know, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

But I think I said to my husband recently I'm so grateful to have had an 80s childhood and there's part of me that feels like we were the last to experience that kind of pre school shootings kind of existence where we just went and we we actually were talking about how you can't make a movie like Stranger Things, a TV show like Stranger Things, where kids are completely untethered and having a totally different reality than their parents today. Because, as parents today and I know I was with Max was 21, I was so locked in, like all of our it was. Every activity was a mommy and me activity basically. So you know you didn't drop your kid off at actually, my parents never dropped me off anywhere. For the most part it was my bike, took me everywhere I needed to go and I couldn't imagine Max getting on my bike and riding the miles that I wrote to go to a friend's house without letting anyone know and that being so bizarre.

Speaker 1:

And I think there's this gradient to the childhoods that we got, that our kids aren't having in that spontaneity, yeah, and risk Like you would go to the mall and not know if anybody was going to be there and you would just have to make it work and I think, just that little bit of adventure that says I don't know what's going to happen next, but I'm going to show up and I'm going to figure it out. I think that now I think there's some expectation that, as parents and even kids, everything has to be planned out and everything has to be I don't know. I do think they're missing a little bit of this grit of just spontaneity that says I cannot know what's coming up next, but I'm going to be okay and we're going to do it, just not having those small things where you might go to someone's house and they might not already know you're coming.

Speaker 2:

We used to we used to. You expected that you might eat dinner at a friend's house, because if you were there you were often offered do you want to eat dinner here? And I remember calling home where are we having for dinner? I'm going to have dinner here, like you know, or oh, they're making this at home. I'm going to go home, but I don't know that. Kids, I hope in my head, I hope in my fantasy land, I hope there are some children who are having some kind of experience like that. Maybe they live in a cul-de-sac and it's a little like that. Maybe they don't get on their bike and go miles, but they at least can go down the block. I don't know. I hope that that's happening.

Speaker 1:

I think it's a different kind of spontaneity that we have to kind of model, because now it's not built in Like I find I have to like create experiences, stretch them, be like, well, we're going to go here and we don't already know how to get there. You know where it was, but I love thinking about you and what brought you joy as an eighth grader, because at the very end I'm going to ask you what brings you joy now or where you've seen joy. But I want to dive in to your first book because I truly believe there are going to be many more. Thank you, we're saying yes to that.

Speaker 1:

So your book is called Everyone Comes Alive, and you begin your book with this quote that grabbed me from the jump. You say fold it into a family, a mixed batter of ethnicity, culture and neighborhood. Then for the rest of our lives we're consumed by love that names and claims us. We're inscribed with labels that try to define us and divides us.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

So I just wanted to ask you to tell me more about that quote.

Speaker 2:

Well, you know, I think that quote came late. I think most of the book had probably been written before I wrote this as part of the forward. I think I called it a story before we began or before something like that but as I wrote the book, I started writing this book in the end of 2017, beginning of 2018 or maybe just in 2018. It was a while ago and so much happened along the way, and one of the things that happened was my kid came out, and when my kid came out, I really thought wow, you come into this world. I thought I'd been telling my kid out of love who they were, not out of a way of controlling it, but out of genuine love, labeling them. You are our daughter, you are a strong young woman, you are a science girl, like all this stuff, right, and my kid's non-binary, and so you know. It's like, oh, wow, we do. We spend all this time putting labels, and then labels will certainly place upon me and you're lucky if they fit. You're just lucky if it just so happens that they fit. But there are a lot of labels that were placed upon me that just kind of didn't fit.

Speaker 2:

I was always the smart one in my family and I don't think I was so smart, I just think I was a reader and my whole family reads. But I think I did it differently than my sisters, and my mother and my grandparents did Like I didn't. I read for survival, I think. As a kid I read and every story was the most important story and so I started to write stories and then I was the smart one, right, and then I went to college and I realized, oh, I don't think I should be here, this is not where.

Speaker 2:

I want to be. This is really hard, and I ended up dropping out of college, I think, like my. I think I had 10 credit hours to go and I was overwhelmed by the whole of it and I didn't know what to do with this label of you're supposed to be a smart, academic one who's going to graduate from college and then you're not that thing. So you have these labels put on you with love from your family, and then you have. You go out into the world as a kid and you have these labels put on you almost immediately to divide you, to separate the herd, and it starts as early as kindergarten Girls over here, boys over there. You know what I mean the tallest in the back, the shortest in the front, right Reading group, red reading group, green reading group.

Speaker 2:

So you just spend the rest of your life having all these ways of sifting you into these different pockets of groups, that label. And it's really hard when someone raises their hand and says, excuse me, I'm in the wrong group and we have a really hard time with that. And so when I went back to think about all the things that were most true about me and for me it's being black, being a woman and being holy. How do you undo all the other things so that you can get to that? This is what's essential, and because we spend so much time trying to erase the essential in a society that is based on a white supremacist, patriarchal hierarchy, we spend a lot of time defeminizing yourselves in rooms meant for men. Right, don't cry during that meeting.

Speaker 1:

You know what I mean. It's the world that's meant for men.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and the world that's meant for men. If you're black, don't speak with any sort of black scent. If you're on the board, you know what I mean. And if you're a Christian or any sort of faith practice, don't show your scars, your doubt, your flaws, because you'll be deemed unholy. So it's a lot of the whole. That little sentence that you pulled out speaks to that, that wondering how we can maybe do better. I don't have any answers for anyone, but I do feel that it is something of value to consider.

Speaker 1:

I feel like that sentence was just such a gut punch, because it allows us to walk into the room of this family where we're named and we're claimed and it's all supposed to be goodness, but at the same time we're being told who to be or who we are, before we even know who we are.

Speaker 1:

And so then you come to this point where, instead of always being told who to be, be, more like them all through our life, you're asking this question of how do we love and we live and we love by our families, but then how do we actually find our own essential self between these places that raised us and loved us but also told us, maybe, stories that don't fit Exactly and kind of like what you said, almost like what your son had to do was like I'm not in my group, so this group doesn't fit me, and that courage that it takes to, at whatever age we start to know we aren't, what our labels are, whether it's from our families who love us or all the discrimination of the world that tells us stuff, I don't know. You come to this reckoning and I feel like your book just brought this reckoning of how to love yourself and then how to handle what love was given to you, love that fit well or meant well, but love that may not fit well for you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm glad that you got that from me. I certainly hope to have presented that it is a book of love, even though there is an interrogation of that love for sure. But at the end of the day, I would say that it is a book about how we become the beloved that we're meant to be in the world.

Speaker 1:

Which is super beautiful, because nobody there's this quote I love that says nobody can cross your own bridge for you.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's, so true, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And whenever I'm like rrr, rrr, you know it's so hard. I read that quote and I'm like, oh, like you know, becoming beloved to ourselves, like that's ours to do the glory of it is ours and the drudgery and the pain of it is ours but also like so worth it, you know, like that's our bridge to ourselves.

Speaker 2:

That's a little bit.

Speaker 1:

And there's this other quote that I really love and I love. I feel like yours is a little bit of a primer for, like some of the great thinkers, mothers, theologians we get, like Thurman Morrison, you know.

Speaker 2:

I might keep saying things like that. What did you say? I might think if you keep saying things like that, but thank you, that's generous Thank you.

Speaker 1:

So there's a Tony Morrison quote you have, and it says books are the plane on which certain battles are fought. So what battle did you want to fight by writing your book?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I actually know that clearly. I know it now I read it. You were so generous to send me the questions ahead of time so I can think of things. I actually was like I don't know how I'm gonna answer that and then the minute that came out of your mouth, I actually knew there is this battle within Christianity and that's the faith tradition that I was raised in and the faith tradition that I am certainly wrestling with to this day.

Speaker 2:

And one of the things is only certain people have value, only certain stories have value. Only certain people can teach or preach or lead, and I always felt that I wasn't a scholar. I wasn't. I didn't go to seminary, I didn't finish college. I felt like, because of those things, that I couldn't, that my story couldn't help someone or there wasn't anything to learn from my story, and so I always leaned on all like, especially with the so-called racial way reckoning that we had in 2020 or we had with the election of the former president in 2016. I always felt in the movement of Black Lives Matter, starting with Trayvon. I felt like all the people who were speaking were scholars, like all the African-American people who were speaking, all the Black people voices that I was hearing that had the most potent and important things to say were wise, award-winning, award-winning Black people, like people who won MacArthur, geniuses and Pulitzers, and people who were credentialed, Like they had a lot of letters after their name. And I was just this Black woman, actually just living a Black experience.

Speaker 2:

And so one of the things that I was battling with this book, that I wanted to battle was the idea that within Blackness there's a whole group of people. There are names that I, people who I've read and loved and value that my sisters, who are working class, very close to the poverty line, one of my sisters, two of my sisters are had a lot of heartache. My brother is in and out of rehab for drug addiction. None of that applies to them. Like reading Stan from the beginning is not gonna help my brother with his drug addiction and it's not gonna help him feel more seen. And it's not any shade on these wonderful books. But I used to come into a room with my siblings trying to save them with I don't know something out in red and for them they're just like if I'm just trying to put food on the table or I'm just trying to make it to the next day without using or I'm just grieving my child who, you know, died and was taken from me, and I wanted to write a book for the regular people who are living these faithful lives outside of a spotlight.

Speaker 2:

And my mother is the character of this for my book. My mother, who was a black woman raised in Jim Crow, southworn in 1942 in West Virginia, whose father was an ex-inslave man, whose mother was a domestic, who lived in this tiny house with all these, grew up in this tiny house with all these siblings who wanted nothing more than to get to the North, gets to the North, gets married, has five kids and struggles the rest of her life with a debilitating illness, gets so effective disorder and ends up in jail late in life, like in her fifties. So I wanted to write up about what it is to be that woman who still says I love me, some Jesus and God's got this, when there's no reason for my mom to have, there's nothing that my mom is receiving materially or even in community. Because let me tell you, when you are mentally a woman, your community dwindles quickly. The community doesn't wanna gather around. They're trying to figure out how to get you out of the neighborhood, not keep you in, and so what does that faith look like when you are that person and how?

Speaker 2:

And when you're that person's daughter, how do you make those voices heard as well? So that is really what I hope to do in all of my writing is to be this voice for the truly voiceless. Not the voiceless who didn't get tenure, not the voiceless who didn't get that position on a board, for the voiceless that I'm never gonna have those things offered to them, ever. That's just not and that's okay, that's not but who still want to be heard and who still want to feel that their stories matter. Because we don't think, we think, that black lives matter. Some of us think that black lives matter, but we may not think that black, uneducated, at the poverty line, mentally ill lives matter.

Speaker 1:

And I think what's so beautiful like. When I was reading your book, I felt like it was kind of like a garden, like you would plant the next wildflower and there'd be this beautiful story of, like, the people that we aren't getting to hear and my partner he always calls them salt of the earth people they're the people that actually give our days flavor. They're the people that, like, we talk to on the street. They will never be the influencers, they won't be the story that is blaring that we always have to hear, like the same story over and over, with just a different protagonist. Who got the tenure, who got the next thing. But these are the people that we're gardening with. Like, they're the people that give us flavor, they're the essentials and those are like.

Speaker 1:

I feel like it brought so much dignity to people that are purposefully unseen. Like my background one of my backgrounds is as a nurse and people are fine about a broken leg, but mental illness they scatter. It is this discriminated and it is our health, it is our bodies, it is our chemistry. Nobody chooses to be born with diabetes or schizophrenia, nobody chooses depression, but with mental health, I feel like people don't. They aren't willing to hear the story, because there is such. I think it just makes people uncomfortable and I think it's hard. It's hard to be someone who's experiencing mental illness and it's also hard to be their community. But I think that when you bring your mother's story and then your story's a daughter who loves her mother but is seeing how the world is not loving her back, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

I think that just put power for all the children who are growing up with people that they love, that they can see their magic. But they also see that the world sees their weakness and then treats them weak.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. You said that. I couldn't have said it more perfectly. Yeah, it's exactly what it is for me this ongoing. My mother has passed in 2010,. But there's this ongoing dialogue I feel with her and her story and as many times as I try to put it down, there's always something that happens that makes me pick it back up again, because there's just so much there, because my mom really had the least and also she spent time in prison, so she was an ex-pallant. So you have this person who is dotted with every margin, that so many margins that she's practically erased, and I don't ever want her to be erased.

Speaker 2:

Malcolm Gladwell said this beautiful thing in his book what we do when we meet people. I can't really think of the title, but he says about Sandra Bland that he doesn't wanna forget Sandra Bland, and I'm like I don't either, because Sandra Bland is my people. She could have easily been my mom, my sister, my cousin, my niece, and the same thing with Breonna Taylor. Like there's so many names of people were women who I recognize so clearly because they're like family, in the sense that I recognize what their life was, because I see it and I think often in my work I'm so removed from it that people forget where I'm coming from sometimes because, I present differently in the world.

Speaker 2:

I have far more privilege than my cousins, my nieces, my sister, my mother had in this world. But that doesn't mean that I don't understand what it is to be without privileges, because I've also been that, and people without privilege are the people that I love the most in the world my sisters, my trans, non-binary black kid who is also challenged with bipolar disorder. So like when I look at I can sit and say why me Lord, why am I given privilege? And I think it's a mistake to think that my job is to tell their story. I think that's a huge mistake. I think it's more of it's not a pick and choosing of gods. And they're going you, you, you, you, you margin, you, you, you, you privilege.

Speaker 2:

I think what it makes me do is go back and look at all the ways that the system failed them, that the systemic things that are built into our foundation withheld them from entering certain rooms, and what I also see is that my mom pushed me into rooms that she couldn't enter, and that's really an amazing thing for someone who was so terrified of what those rooms might offer. To do for me is to say, no, you're going to go to this better school. No, you're going to take these ballet lessons because all these other children are taking these ballet lessons. No, we want you to go to college. That's an amazing thing for the daughter of a slave to do.

Speaker 1:

It's a legacy of like this forward motion that almost seems like cosmic, you know, like of all those challenges she somehow could put you into these places. And then, as a mom because I'm a mom and I'm raising one stunning black boy and then one very handsome white boy I never know what to do Like never. One I've never raised kids before and two I have no experience of. And you're always asking the question like is this where I push or is this where I protect, like forever? That's that question. And to push when they don't want to be pushed into that room. So I can't even imagine what your mother felt with knowing she wanted to push you into these places because she wanted all of that for you, but also wanting to protect you from those very same rooms.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think one of the things that was on my mother's side is that there's a true sense of desperation that I just don't have in my world. I don't know what it is to. I don't think I've ever had a truly despairing moment like my mom ever. I mean, I just, you know, I've never had to light candles because I couldn't pay the electric bill, like I just never had to do that. And so I think you're a lot more courageous than your backstory is how these pockets of such despair you're a lot more willing to.

Speaker 2:

The last thing my mom needed was worried about was me being angry with her about things, about her decisions. I think I worry so much about my child being angry with me about the symptoms because I have the privilege to worry about that, but I'm gonna have the privilege to worry about my feelings so, and I wish that she would have the privilege of worrying about my feelings she was too busy worrying about my survival to worry about my feelings and was robbed of that the beauty of what that would look like to worry about my feelings and to process with me and things.

Speaker 1:

Yeah like not a thing, not a thing, but she should have had that, she should have had that, she should have had that.

Speaker 2:

For sure. But you know, that's just. That's not what she had. What she had was I have five children here and I don't even think she wanted us to survive for ourselves. I'm just gonna be real. My mom wanted us to survive so that we would be able to, in turn, take care of her, and she should have wanted that. There's nothing wrong with her wanting that, but I think it's really funny to me. I think one of the things that I know so much about the difference between me and my sisters and my brother is that I have these expectations that my sisters and brothers do not deal with, a lot of unmet expectations, simply because they aren't expecting the things, the wild things that I'm expecting, the very capitalistic things that I expect from the world. Because, you know, I walked into a room, basically, and my sisters just don't have that, they're just. I remember watching 90210, just to go back to oh yeah, the peach pit.

Speaker 2:

I was watching 90210 with my sister and they were at Kelly's house and Kelly lived in this fabulous house in California at night and this is a code of 90210. And I remember saying to my sister don't you just want a house like that? Oh, could you imagine? My sister just cracked up. It just was not. It just was not even something. She's just like just walk to the show. Why are you trying to put yourself into the story? We're not in this story. She just was so and I was just like I don't know how, you don't. I didn't know how to watch a show or to watch.

Speaker 2:

I used to watch Day so Laugh back in the day, what the Stuart used to be on PBS on Saturday mornings. I remember the very first episode. She turned a soap bottle like the dish soap. She, her very good thing was to show us how we could get a pretty glass bottle with a pump and put your dish soap in that. And I watched this on a Saturday morning and ran downstairs into the kitchen. It's like you know what. I just saw this really great idea for our dish soap and I was laughed out the kitchen because you know it, just to them, it's just like it's just.

Speaker 2:

That's just an expectation that they're not expecting in life. You know, and I love my sisters, for I feel like they have a lot more joy, they're just so. Not the whole Pinterest mommy blog, you know, fomo thing. It doesn't exist for them because their needs are entirely different and their desires are entirely different. I remember a cousin saying her number one criteria for a husband was that he come with a pension. That was it, like it was. So you know who comes with a pension? Maybe the mailman, maybe a guy who works for the post office, or a guy who works for federal express, or a guy who works for UPS, or you know someone who works at the Ford factory and I think, and oh my gosh, I'm going to grow up and marry Michael Jackson, like it was just so.

Speaker 1:

You weren't even like marrying for love, you were marrying like celebrity.

Speaker 2:

Celebrity, like just different expectations, and I hope that when I wrote the book I really was thinking about my sisters, a lot like how I was processing this world. We never talked about race, what was happening to us at school. We were all the onlys in our class, the only black kids in our classes. We didn't talk about the traumas that we were facing. And we just now started talking about all of that and it's really funny because I noticed that my sisters were not nearly as shocked by it all as Iowa.

Speaker 1:

So there's a lot to be said about the difference those 10 that 10 year difference made in our in our ages 10 years is a lot, but I love that you bring your sisters into the story and I love that they're like the older, cooler, and yet you do make it really clear that like they're living in a in a different kind of experience than you had for like multiple reasons.

Speaker 1:

And I'm not going to ruin it for everybody because they need to read the book, but look for, look for the sisters in there. And there's this, there's this last quote I have for you that I thought had your mom in it and I thought it was just something that I've like wanted to ask you about. So it says I was a kid thirsting for mercy, looking for God's grace reflected in the ordinary light of day, mercifully seated at the center's table. Or, even better, I was looking for one despised adult who was riddled and naked with shame, who, even when standing at a distance, could see that my mother's full-on crazy was a beautiful reflection of themselves and not apart from them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I had growing up we were that house. I don't know if you had these in your neighborhood, but there was always a house that everyone wanted their kid to be friends Like. There was always that kid in the class that you know all the kids want. Your parents are proud that your friends with this kid you know because of the status that comes from that family and there's always the family that you know you hope your kid doesn't be friend because that family comes with trouble or parents have done this or that. We were the latter and it was interesting how I could almost see adults pat themselves on the back whenever they extended some sort of grace or or. I don't believe that we extend grace, I think God does, but when they extended, when they were just humane to me you know when they were just a little simple kindness.

Speaker 2:

So I remember being at parties, like birthday parties, and having and this isn't my mom's black neighborhood, this isn't necessary, this isn't just about race, this was socioeconomic and also my mom not being in an able body and a mentally able body. So I remember being at M people's homes and them just being so proud that they had allowed me to be in their presence and being asked at birthday parties. I know you're having a good time Like you know being like I got your. You're having fun, aren't you? Aren't you glad that you were invited, being just brought out, ask that and then also hearing adults whisper. You know you're playing the games. You hear adults whisper oh, it's really good of you that you invited that child because you know her mama, the statin, the other. And so I never heard a single adult ever look at my mom with any kind of mercy or to place themselves in their own struggles as being equally shame inducing. The pride that was there was astonishing. And then when I was with my grandparents in the white neighborhood where I went to school, it was the same thing you would get these white moms who felt so proud that they had, like the black kid, came to their kids party because it showed that it made them feel like, well, we're not racist because I invited every child. And that was the thing that was so funny. It was always that they didn't specifically invite me, like that wasn't what was happening. What they would do is do I'm going to invite every child, that way I'm also inviting the black child, and the black child isn't. That way I can.

Speaker 2:

If a parent asked me, oh, why did you invite the black child? Because in the 70s this was new, the integrating of schools. And if a parent was asked, oh, why is the black child going to be there, they could say why invite all the kids? But they could feel good inside that they were capable of that. Because I don't know, people know this the etiquette now of millennials and Gen Xers is all the kids get invited, right. But that wasn't the etiquette back in the 70s. Your friends get invited to your birthday party, not every kid in the class, and so it would be this thing where parents white parents definitely felt very intrigued by me and they loved having me come over because it made them feel less racist. You know, just put it plain. It made them feel charitable. I was a mission trip. Let's just put it plain.

Speaker 1:

I can't imagine what your small self was like feeling with that ricochet of all of these things coming at you from these other people. That I'm not racist. Oh, I'm being charitable, oh, aren't you like I'm giving you such a great afternoon, like I just can't imagine having all of those things bouncing off of your little kid's soul. Who, like, is feeling it? You might you know what I mean. Like, kids get it, they get what's coming at them, even if they can keep going.

Speaker 2:

Especially when and I think the thing that adults didn't understand is that when you were a child whose parent is not present in the way that they should be present, you develop this kind of sixth sense about other adults, where you're automatically processing the adults in the room more so than you are the children in the room. You're trying to figure out if you're safe where you are and unfortunately, as kids, we don't always use the right indicators to decide that, which can be troublesome. But we really do spend this great amount of time figuring out the adult in the room and we're really assessing them. And it's really funny because I knew for a fact that my life in a lot of those homes was a lot happier than my. I would like there were moms who were just, you know, like I would see they just be overly effusive and but also very controlling and I would just know like, yeah, I'm not buying what you're selling, I'm gonna eat these cookies because you offered them.

Speaker 1:

But which is really cool, that you're yourself knew it. You know what I mean and you knew enough to take the cookie but like, yeah, keep them on their side. But I think it's super true too that I think was really beautiful in your book that even though the times when you describe being with your mom at your mom's house had like probably like less stability and less all of these things, there are still this like pixie dust of like how she loved you and she kind of delighted in you and her fashion and just what she put into you. Where you would contrast your grandparents house that you know like had more things like show worthy but it did not. It almost like hurt your soul a little bit being there, even though it had more of the like things that you think a home should have.

Speaker 2:

But one of the things was that there's this thing called colorism in the African American community and in communities of color where the closer you are to being white, like the lighter skin you have. You have light eyes, you have good hair, straight hair, and my grandmother was very much afflicted with this. She did not like dark skin, black people. I was a dark skin little girl who landed on her door for her to have to care for and so while I had, I lived in this Brady bunch split level house and we had nice things in that home. Her care of me was very rough and very abusive emotionally and just really mostly emotionally and verbally a lot of verbal abuse, whereas at my mother's home a smaller house in a less in a black neighborhood and my mom was far more loving and caring and generous towards me, even in her sickness, whenever she was having an episode that's not true for my siblings, my siblings and was almost flip flop. Also, my mother was quite hard with them. But it's interesting to me just how that informed how I would go to school and how I went off to college and all that.

Speaker 2:

I didn't know about the beauty of my blackness because there were all these different stories being told about it. My grandmother saying you know, get set with me and call me a racial slur and a bunch of other things. My mother would tell me that I was the brighter price than that. The sun and the moon set on me because I was dark skin. So it's like you go into these rooms of you know every kid is white in the classroom and you and you know the popular boy. If you're waiting to see what he thinks of you and if he says you know you're in and if he says that you're out, it depends on which narrative that you're being fed, that you're going to listen to, and I will say that all too often it was my grandmother's narrative that went out because it most aligned with what I saw in the world.

Speaker 1:

You know, I made sense from what you saw.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, and I was like I'm going to be to Nyong'o at that time for me to look towards and say, oh my gosh, there's a beautiful dark skin black woman who other people are saying is a beautiful dark skinned woman, right.

Speaker 1:

Because I feel like those are those three threads that as you move through the book with you, you're like bringing in this story of these two, two different stories. You keep getting told about your blackness from your mom and your grandma, and then two different stories about being a woman and who can a woman be, and then your holiness Having like those two different stories. So I think it's just powerful to get to because we're in that story. I feel like everybody we find ourselves in your story of like, what's our holiness? What were souls first, but we obviously live in a gender. What's that mean for me, you know? And then the story that we've been told from white supremacy, like how do we live our story against and dismantling that and through it and bring our people with us. Because one thing I think you you knit such a cool like feeling of community of your family that there was always people in your life, there is always people in your life and you're not coming at this alone, you're building it for the next, for the next person.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

So I kind of want to wrap up with one of the quotes that Cornell West says that I love is. He says what is it? Justice is what love looks like in public, and so I just think, like that means so much, I think, and that's what we want to see. We want to see more love in public, not behind closed doors, not giving people a cookie, not with all these like ways that like it's not love If, if, if you're not feeling more dignified and more seen and more whole, like full stop. So I guess I want to end and ask you, where are some places that you are seeing that love in public, like that's giving you hope that you're seeing justice happen by seeing more of it happen than maybe you've you've seen before.

Speaker 2:

For me and probably for a long time, come in, it will always be the black trans community. I am astonished at how the black trans community has shown up. I am astonished at their resilience. I yesterday was Mother's Day and it was a hard one for us for lots of different reasons, but we watched Paris is burning because we had never seen this documentary about the ball, the ballroom scene in New York, the underground ballroom scene of the 80s with Vogue and all of that. And so to hear the stories of the mothers, the house mothers, and to hear how they would say well, these kids have been kicked out and they don't have a mother, and so we take them in and we become family, and the audacity of them to not only make their own families and have a house mother and sometimes a house father, but also to name their homes after luxury brands Like to be like and we are the house of, you know, gucci is absolutely amazing to me. Or to put the house mother's name, the house of extravaganza, to put their, their stage name into history. And a lot of these houses that you see in this documentary still are showing up at the ballroom scene here today in 2023.

Speaker 2:

The world and performing, and I had watched the whole, the whole, every season of Legendary on HBO Max, which led me to watch. Paris is burning, and I think the reason I'm always amazed at the resilience that injustice will fuel. I'm astonished by it because I'm just like how are, how are black people even still here with the amount of injustice that was placed on them? And it seems like this pressure thing, like the more pressure, the more resilience, the more rising. It shouldn't be that way, it shouldn't, but it almost seems like a built in mechanism of humanity that helps me not worry about what's being banned, the lies that are being spread, because I truly know that if that New York ballroom scene can decide that we're going to have a category called Wall Street Business to show that we can look like that too, and we're going to create our own system of awards, our own Oscars, basically, I'm on a wave by that.

Speaker 2:

To me, we're watching it and I'm like, oh my gosh, that is God right there in front of us and we don't recognize it. To me, it is what it is equivalent to Peter being on the boat. I'm sorry, I'm just going to get a little bit. I do it A little bit. Peter is on the boat and he keeps throwing the net out on one side of the boat and nothing's coming up. They keep throwing all these nets over on the one side of the boat and they're not getting anything. And Jesus says I think it's Peter, maybe James and John and Peter says and Jesus says, try the other. And they do, and they pull up so many fish that the boat almost tips over.

Speaker 2:

I think of it like that. I think of the ballroom scene like that. They could have kept casting their nets into the institutions that kept rejecting them, but someone heard the inspiration and power of spirits say to cast your nets elsewhere, cast them on the other side. And they did. And what they read from it is a whole bunch of saved lives that would not have been saved without this ballroom scene. And it just boggles my mind the reciprocity of love that marginalization can burst. And it's so important that we start to learn from that love because it is so pure. It is so pure because it's not about your label and that is the genius of it.

Speaker 1:

And that is, that's the divine in it. I feel like only that pure love can actually beget love. You know, perfect love casts out all fear. When people are on the margins, I think they know how to love because we need it. And you see, you see love explode in a place where other places look suffocated. They look sick, sick, you know. So thank you for sharing that. That like gives me tingles.

Speaker 1:

I'm like man to see beautiful love be built and shown and shouted out in places that people had said no, yeah, like I feel like that's what catches the eye and I think that's continuing, where we see the divine catching our eye, saying this way, you want more this way.

Speaker 1:

And to those who are willing to leave the path the old Jericho Road and the Good Samaritan, like you know, all those three other religious people just kept going. They're like I'm busy, the priest went ahead because he had something to do. I think we're still in that situation People who are unwilling to see and to change and to go and build something beautiful instead of walk on by and say, oh, that's so sad, yeah, so thank you. Thank you for bringing that, and I just want to thank you so much for being here, I feel like there is just your joy, and your words and the people that you bring into the room are celebrated, and I hope that we see more and more love happen as your book gets to be in more people's hands. So tell us all where we can buy your book, and then, when is your release date?

Speaker 2:

Okay, the book is Everybody Come Alive, a Memoir and Essays. But you can buy it anywhere it's going to be. You know, you'll be able to get a Target Walmart if that's where you shop. If you can buy it from an independent bookstore, I would love that. It's not necessary if you cannot, but Amazon, bookshoporg, any place that sells books, barnes, noble, any place that sells books, will have it.

Speaker 1:

Well, I can't wait to Well, I read it, but I can't wait for other people to read it. And do you know? You already have reviews on Goodreads, so props to them who are doing it.

Speaker 2:

That's lovely, I won't look at them, just because it's funny, because my husband's a big Goodreads person and I said before you, just when I first got the book deal, I was like I don't want to know a single review, I don't want to know the number. I don't need to know any of that because you know you got to be careful both ways, like you know you got to be careful with the ones that praise. You Got to be careful with the ones that condemn you. So it's exciting to know that people care enough to review either way. But no, I have no idea.

Speaker 1:

Well, we are all going to buy one or three books to support you because authoring is hard and I want more and more authors to be supported so we have more people getting to tell their stories instead of less. So that is really one of my big hopes. So, marcy, thank you so much for being here on the Waging Peace podcast, and we can't wait to keep seeing more of what you're doing in the world.

Speaker 2:

Absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

You've listened to the entire episode. Big High Five and a Hug Know someone who needs to be reminded that they matter. Share this episode and leave a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, because we need to find our people and our people need to find us. We're a community of courage activators shouting for you to pull up your seat at the peacemaking table, because you are exactly what our world needs. See you next time.

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Diana K Oestreich

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