Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thanks for sharing part of your day with us. The next hour we're going to be talking about gossip, so pull your chair up. The gossip pages have been long regarded as guilty pleasures, but they're also powerful barometers of societal values. A new podcast uses stories printed in the gossip pages of African American newspapers after the Civil War. These newspapers exploded nationally, and by 1890 there were close to 600. They fiercely competed for the news, in addition to tips, about the growing class of what our next guest calls the Black elites.

The podcast is called Our Ancestors Were Messy. Some of the bold-faced names might sound familiar, like Frederick Douglass or Ida B. Wells, but many are families who were successful in their communities and at the time had various reasons and had various scandals that just needed to be printed. The host and creator is Nichole Hill. She's an award-winning producer and is also the producer and the host, The Secret Adventures of Black People. Nichole, welcome to the show.

Nichole Hill: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, do you have a family messy? A messy family secret? Did your distant relative elope with someone in the family they disapproved of? Have you got an extra brother or sister that no one ever talked about? Tell us. We're here. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Maybe someone had a scandalous affair or lived a double life. You can call in and join our conversation, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can reach out to us on social media as well as that-- Our address is @allofitwnyc.

Your podcast, people know The Secret Adventures of Black People. In the trailer for that, you say something along the lines of leveraging something other than our pain and focusing on the peopleness of Black people. How does your new podcast factor into that philosophy?

Nichole Hill: With the title, Our Ancestors Were Messy, of course, we're going to be talking about the gossipy, the imperfect sides of our ancestors, but really, honestly, it's meant to make people feel-- the modern listener, it's meant to make you feel like you are recognizing yourself and your ancestors much more than I felt I had before when they were just these iconic figures on a hill who endured and endured and eventually succeeded. They did that, and they also got into some trouble.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] How did you first discover these gossip pages in the Black papers?

Nichole Hill: I have loved old movies the majority of my life. Starting in the 6th grade and on, I was at Blockbuster, always buying anything in black and white. I would see little glimpses of Black life, but I couldn't get a sense of what it was during this time period, the '20s, the '30s, the '40s. Then later on, I'm older, I'm an audio journalist. About five years ago, I'm working and living in Washington, D.C. and doing research for a story on gentrification and the history of the city.

I just stumbled across the Library of Congress, this digital archive they have of tens of thousands of these papers organized by states, going as far back as the 1880s-- 1860s, actually. I started skimming through them and found that the images of Black life that I was looking for are perfectly captured in these little snapshots in these newspapers. After that, I was hooked.

Alison Stewart: You decided to craft stories out of the gossip pages?

Nichole Hill: Yes. I wanted to bring people into the newspapers, into this world of the-- These segregated communities were so vibrant and so interesting, and everybody is exploring all these ideas of, "We're the first generation to be born free. What is it going to look like?" All throughout the paper, there are really interesting things, but they all collide in the gossip columns, in the society pages, the arts and entertainment section. That's why I decided to focus there.

Alison Stewart: When you're putting together the podcast, and you invite a guest to be on Our Ancestors Were Messy, what does the guest give you as a producer? What do they give you on the podcast?

Nichole Hill: I wanted to be able to enjoy these stories with somebody. I am a very amateur historian and archivist. These stories really brought me into that world. I wanted to have a play cousin to go through these stories with and laugh about all the drama and laugh about all the intrigue, but also process what it is to look at our ancestors this way and process the way it makes us feel about who we are now, looking at who they were then, but from this messier vantage point.

Alison Stewart: We'll get into some specifics in a minute, but what did they write about?

Nichole Hill: Oh, they write about everything. It's so fun to read. A lot of times there'll be-- one of my favorite columns is an advice column. The advice is often so horrible, but people are writing in and being like, "My neighbor has a dog, and it's so loud and it's so annoying. What Do I do?" People will write in about their love affairs. So often people are talking about love. How do I get this person to love me? How do I leave my marriage? How do I get into a marriage? There's a lot of that.

Then there's a lot of like, we're all going to go to the shore this weekend for fun. Who wants to come? Or, everybody's going to this dance. Or, have you heard about Louis Armstrong? He just released this new album and we think he's going to be a big deal. It's really just a lot of people. I often compare it to Instagram. It's a lot of what you would post on Instagram is what I find in these pages.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Nichole Hill, host and producer of the podcast Our Ancestors Were Messy. Episodes drop every other week. Listeners, do you have a messy family secret? Did a distant relative elope with someone the family disapproved of? Did you have a scandalous affair or someone in your family who lived a double life? We want to know about it. Give us a call, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Let's talk to Paul from Brooklyn, who will spill some family tea. Hi, Paul.

Paul: Hey. How's it going?

Alison Stewart: Going okay. Are you going to tell us your family story?

Paul: Yes. After my mom passed away, I learned that her boyfriend of many decades was actually married to another woman.

Alison Stewart: No.

Nichole Hill: No.

Paul: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Paul: Yes. He had taken us to his place in Martha's Vineyard. He showed up at my events for a long time, and I had no idea. I know that my mom-- I met him the first time and I was like, "Mom, he seems cool. You should marry him." Then she gives me some excuse about money. I just take that at face value, and I'm like, "Okay." Then he blurted it out after my mom died assuming that we knew.

Alison Stewart: [gasps] Wait, he told you assuming that you knew?

Paul: Yes.

Nichole Hill: So your mom knew? Did your mom know?

Paul: Yes, my mom knew.

Alison Stewart: Mom knew. Oh, mom definitely knew. [laughs]

Nichole Hill: Mom knew. Okay. Wanted to get clear on that. Okay. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: How did you respond, if I may ask?

Paul: I asked him what he was doing around the time I was born.

[laughter]

Nichole Hill: A good question. It's an amazing question.

Alison Stewart: Paul, thank you so much for calling in. We really appreciate this. This says, "In 1920, my 19-year-old grandmother eloped to Florida with her first cousin. She got pregnant and had an abortion before eventually coming home to New York. I always thought the whole family knew this until a few weeks ago when I was talking about my scandalous grandmother and found out that I was the only one she'd ever told."

Nichole Hill: Whoa.

Alison Stewart: Whoa. All right, people. People have laid down the gauntlet. Give us a call, 212-433-9692. Call and tell us a family secret. We're talking about the podcast, Our Ancestors Were Messy. Also in the podcast, it's interesting because you mix media. You really do it the old-fashioned, almost like a serial-- I don't know how to describe it. The sound of a serial--

Nichole Hill: It is like an old-timey radio drama.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. Oh gosh, my brain--

Nichole Hill: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Radio drama, yes. Tell us a little bit about how you decided on that plan.

Nichole Hill: This is my deep, deep love of old movies and any kind of old art. I wanted to be able to bring that in and to immerse people in the time. I wanted people to picture themselves back in the-- this story was taking place in the 1890s and '80s, and so I just thought it would be really fun. It's meant to be a comedy as well. I thought it'd be very interesting to have Black history told in a comedic way. That's part of the comedy.

Alison Stewart: All right. Let's talk about the first episode. You discuss the first families of Washington, D.C. Who are they?

Nichole Hill: They are the wealthy Black elite. Most cities had a class of somewhere around 400 people, or that's the number that people often said, of wealthy Black citizens who had either been left inheritances from former slave owners, or they had found some way to make money on their own. Wealth is relative. They weren't necessarily millionaires, but they were this class of people who felt very charged with being very respectable, interacting with power, and finding some way to better the conditions for the Black race at that time.

Alison Stewart: What values did they have that were important?

Nichole Hill: They really did value, above all, this principle of lift as we climb, so the idea that we need to be improving ourselves in every step of the way, we need to be thinking about how to make things better for our race as a whole. Now, they were very snobby and had a lot of rules about respectability and behavior and decorum and were brutal if you stepped outside of those rules as any Victorian-era upper class. This is like an old-money type of vibe is what they had. A lot of the respectability politics that we don't like now originated with them, but they were doing what they thought was best to improve the conditions of the Black race immediately following slavery.

Alison Stewart: Who did you read about in the first families that caught your attention?

Nichole Hill: I used to live in D.C. on and off for 20 years. There were a lot of local names like the Cardozas and the McKinleys that caught my eye. Of course, Frederick Douglass, who is just doing all of these incredible things but also all over the gossip columns, one of the most prominent and visible members of the first families. He's everywhere, as is Mary Church Terrell, who is so judgy.

Alison Stewart: Everywhere. She's everywhere.

Nichole Hill: She's everywhere. She's so amazing. I read her diary, and it had this account of a woman's home. She's just dragging it just like, "Oh, this upholstery." I was like, "Mary."

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Anna calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Anna. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Anna: Hi. Thanks so much. I will try to be brief because this is a very long story. Years ago, my father grew up in Sweden. His family is all from Sweden. We were visiting there and learned, again through a long chain of events that I can share if you have more time, that his paternal grandfather, my dad's mother's father, had a child that no one ever knew about. Somehow supported this child who was born to a single woman, lived-- honestly, this is an area of Sweden that now is fairly in the middle of nowhere, so I cannot even imagine how in the middle of nowhere it was at the time.

She was German and followed him to Sweden, somehow raised this child. He supported this child, and no one in the family ever learned about it. My dad was just very happy that actually my grandmother died before we learned about it, again through an odd chain of events, because he knew that she would have been devastated to know that her father had hid this from the family.

Alison Stewart: Wow. Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Noah from the Bronx. Hi, Noah. Thanks for calling All Of It. Will you share your story with us?

Noah: Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my call. My story is about my paternal great-grandfather, who emigrated to the United States from Ireland. We were always told that he was a respectable businessman when he came to the United States, when in fact he was, actually, part of the Irish Republican Army. He was a wanted man who was at one point one of the most sought-after bounties in the UK. In order to emigrate to the United States, he had to disguise himself. He got fake documents and went to London dressed as a little old lady and boarded a ship to come to the US.

Alison Stewart: That is a good story.

Nichole Hill: Wow.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I love our listeners. They got good stories.

[laughter]

Nichole Hill: Yes.

Alison Stewart: We're speaking with Nichole Hill, host and podcast called Our Ancestors Were Messy. That's the name of the podcast. Listeners, if you want to share your messy family secret, we want to hear it. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Your first episode is about Lulu? Is it Lulu Francis?

Nichole Hill: Yes, that's right.

Alison Stewart: She's a little bit of a socialite. Can you give us a description of Lulu and the family she comes from?

Nichole Hill: Lulu is the daughter of a man named Richard Francis, who had been enslaved in Virginia, and then after emancipation had become a barback and risen through the ranks and was given responsibility of the restaurant in the Senate. Through that job, he was able to acquire wealth and buy property, and so he became a member of the first families. His daughter, Lulu, was raised as a member of the first families. The papers don't give a ton of information about who she was, and historians haven't.

Because she was a regular person, there isn't a lot of detail about her. What I could find, the Washington Post wrote about her and they called her the Belle of Colored DC. Then based on some of her exploits, we're able to tell that she has a mind of her own. She's not afraid of courting controversy a little bit. Part of why I have a guest there is so that together we can imagine what she would be like when the history and the details fail us.

Alison Stewart: Now, did she fall in love?

Nichole Hill: She does fall in love. She does fall in love with one of her father's employees.

Alison Stewart: Oh, wait, wait. If she's the Belle of Colored DC, she can't fall in love with one of her father's employees. That's just my pearl-clutching. I don't know.

Nichole Hill: [laughs] Therein lies the problem for the first families, and we imagine for her father, Richard, because this employee of his is an aspiring barber who does not come from wealth. The papers just outright call him poor. That would not have been the kind of match that the first families would have wanted to see for the Belle of Color DC.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about Our Ancestors Were Messy with its host and producer, Nichole Hill. We've got you on the line as well. Got a lot of calls. Oh, [crosstalk].

Nichole Hill: Wow.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Tamara, or Tamara, rhymes with Camara, from Seaford, Long Island. Hi, Tamara.

Tamara: Hi, there. Thank you for taking my call. I had a grandfather who passed away, but he got hurt in the war way back when and ended up in the VA Hospital in San Diego. Grandma was up in Seattle, and she was with child number three, so she couldn't go and see him down in San Diego. Grandpa was anxious for a little more than what he was not having, so he asked for one of his nurses to participate, and she said, "Not without a ring." He married her. He was there and had his time with her.

Grandma got down there, and the nurse comes out and says, "Mrs. H?" Two ladies stand up, and she goes, "Mrs. M.H?" and two ladies look at each other and say, "That's me." Well, Mrs. H number two looked at Mrs. H number one, turned around, walked out, had the marriage annulled. She didn't know she was pregnant. 50 years later, we get a phone call saying, "I'm your uncle. I'm your brother," and we got a new member in our family 50 years later. He later, after that, had his name legally changed to his father's name. He went from a single child in and out of orphanages and foster care and one failed adoption to having a family of over 150 people, all from the same two people.

Alison Stewart: That's an-- [claps].

Nichole Hill: Wow.

Alison Stewart: I'm just giving you applause for that one.

Nichole Hill: [unintelligible 00:17:39]

Alison Stewart: That's incredible.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because I think in your podcast, I listened to this morning, and you spoke about how there were cautionary tales in some of these. The woman that you talked about was a cautionary tale for Lulu. Who was that?

Nichole Hill: Her name was Lucinda Seaton.

Alison Stewart: What happened to Lucinda?

Nichole Hill: Lucinda, much like Lulu, was the belle of color DC but in 1850, so 30 years before the Lulu saga begins. She fell in love with somebody who was outside of her class. He was a blacksmith. They move to a middle class neighborhood out of her upper class life. They're making things work for a while, but then he's tragically killed and she has to make a living on her own. It doesn't really seem like the first families or her family stepped in very much and helped her financially. Maybe they did, I can't really tell, but I know that she had to take on a couple of different jobs to survive.

I don't think if Lulu had known about that story, I don't Imagine that she would have wanted that to happen to her. Maybe people would have warned her that if you pursue a man who does not have financial means, if something were to happen to him, you might end up having to work a bunch of jobs and live outside of the life you've become accustomed, like Lucinda Seaton.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Lenora from Tappan online too. Hi, Lenora.

Lenora: Hi. How are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing okay. I'm excited to hear what happened.

Lenora: My brother, at 17, and his girlfriend, at 15, got pregnant, got married, had a very successful marriage, had 12 children. Take a breath, 12 children.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Lenora: Then 20 years or so later, my sister did a genealogy study, put together a family reunion, and it turns out that we're cousins with his wife, like fourth cousins. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: What? [laughs] Oh my goodness. Wow. You know what? I'm going to just going to let that sit in for a minute. Let's talk to Marcia from Manhattan. Hi, Marcia. Thanks for calling All Of It. Wow.

Marcia: Thank you. Thank you. I'm looking at my family tree and all these things after I found out that my father was an identical twin and he died. His brother came to visit and we wanted to tape our family history. He starts talking, and he let us know that our name is not Andrews. It was changed. His father-- when his mother's husband died, she remarried a very waspy judge in New Orleans, King. Somewhere along the way, they changed, I guess it was my great grandfather's name, to Andrews. I never realized that we had this whole lineage, going up into England, of Jewish and Sephardic. There's Moyes in the name and I just thought we were Scottish.

Alison Stewart: What was your last name might have been or would have been?

Marcia: Levy.

Alison Stewart: Levy? There you go. Thanks for sharing that story. Nichole, what's your new episode going to be about? I want to know what the next one is.

Nichole Hill: The next episode, we're leaving D.C., we're going to the Wild West. We're going to the frontier at the turn of the century to meet with an aspiring frontiersman who is also a lover boy. His name is Oscar Micheaux. He gets into all this trouble trying to find a wife, and when he finally finds one, he gets into it with her father. Their back and forth leads to the creation of Black Hollywood.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's exciting. What are you hoping that people take away from Our Ancestors Were Messy?

Nichole Hill: I hope that when people hear these stories, I hope that they're entertained and that they feel that Black history is multifaceted and something that they'd want to explore beyond the harder parts of it and the more traumatic parts of it. There's also a lot of stories about experimentation, exploration of the country and identity. Most of all, I hope that people feel a little less alienated from themselves because they are able to see that their ancestors were people like them, who made mistakes like them, but who also pursued their dreams and goals. Didn't let that stop them from going after a better future for themselves and for their family and for our country.

Alison Stewart: The name of the podcast is Our Ancestors Were Messy. I've been speaking with its producer and host, Nichole Hill. It's available on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for being with us, Nichole. It was a lot of fun.

Nichole Hill: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to the callers. Wow, wow, wow. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Thank you to the callers. Seriously.