Goldie Taylor's "The Love You Save"
Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.
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Like so many others have, I met Goldie Taylor on TV.
Goldie Taylor: The 67% African American population in Ferguson really doesn't speak to what's inside that population. That population compared to its white population is disproportionately young and under 18. You've got a number of people who don't have access to the ballot box. You've got a number of people who-
Melissa Harris-Perry: The consummate professional communicator. Goldie brings sharp analysis, keen insights, and deep empathy to her televised appearances and her journalistic coverage. She can tell a story. The author of multiple novels, Goldie Taylor's narrative voice is as memorable as her speaking voice, earthy and resonant.
Goldie Taylor: I am reminded of something else Baldwin said, "Once you realize that you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didn't do it." He wrote in The Parish Review. I wonder sometimes what I might have been, but for the puss and scarring of sexual violence and how it formed and defined and confined me. If suffering breeds perseverance and defines character, given the choice I might have traded endurance for a heart that beats evenly. Mostly though I want to love better.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Now. Goldie has written her most personal story, an unflinching memoir titled The Love You Save. The book details, the brutal journey of her childhood, marked by poverty, unkindness, and repeated experiences of childhood sexual assault. I sat down with journalist, writer, and survivor, Goldie Taylor. Goldie Taylor, this book is unblinking in its brutality. You don't sugarcoat any part of the abuse you suffered. When did you realize that you could, and you must write this?
Goldie Taylor: It was an evening in August of 2019 that I'd had this conversation with my granddaughter that evening. She didn't want to sleep in her own bed. I said, "You have a glorious room." I began to describe her bedroom and I stopped. I said, "When grandma was around your age, I didn't have my own room." I put her to bed. I thought about that last statement for a little while, and I said, "Where were you that you didn't have your own room and your own bed?" I said, "Because you were sleeping on Aunt Geraldine's floor."
As I began to remember and think about that time in my life and what triggered me having to live with my aunt, the story came rushing back. It wasn't like I'd forgotten it or just felt like I just laid it down somewhere. That night I decided just to write it down, just to articulate it for myself for the first time. As I got through a draft and called my daughter and I said, "I think I want you to read something." My daughter's 33 years old now, and she said, "Mom are you going to publish this?" I read it again and I said, "I think I have to."
It took about two weeks, but that essay landed in The Daily Beast. I didn't intend to write any more than the initial revelations of all the things that unfolded in my life around that time. It almost felt like I had to write it so that others could tell their story too, that it was safe harbor for me and safe harbor for other people who had survived similar circumstances.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I hear you saying the work that it does for others, but for you, why not leave the dirty laundry in the corner? Why pick it back up?
Goldie Taylor: I think part of my survival over the years has been my ability to compartmentalize, to put things away, to not cover them over, but simply live beyond them. That's what I believed until I began to put it down. What I realized is that I hadn't put it down really at all, that I'd been carrying it around like a winter coat. That and everything that came after it. That I personally hadn't dealt with my own myriad of trauma through life. That my mother hadn't dealt with hers and that her mother hadn't dealt with hers and neither her mother either.
That I had daughters who were living out their own lives on their own terms. There were traumas for them too. That if I could not reckon with my own, candidly, no matter what anybody thought about the story itself, that I had to put it down and begin to navigate those waters, then what could I expect for my daughters or for now their daughters? What I think I had to admit to myself is that if I couldn't, then this generational trauma would keep traipsing itself down our family tree for millennia.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm still not sure how one survives without that capacity to compartmentalize and dissociate a bit.
Goldie Taylor: It is a safety mechanism as a child carrying those kinds of weights, shames, embarrassments, feeling dirty. I remember in my teens and into my early twenties, I was an incessant bather. I think now looking back that I was trying to script it all off. While we took it away, it has its way of showing itself up in our lives anyway. It showed itself up in my marriage. It showed itself up in relationships with friends, with family, even today. While I thought I'd done a really good job of using those tendrils as things that strengthened me, that that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, I'd lived by that mantra.
What I figured out after putting it down and beginning to re-live and live again is that they don't truly ever stay where you put them. I wonder why I go to a friend's house and they've got these grand mirrors in their foyers or in their bedrooms. There's a mirror over the dresser. Normal things to have. I realize that the only mirrors in my house where the bathroom mirrors that came with it. That I never hung mirrors around because I didn't want to see the scars. That there was some shame in looking at my own body. While I thought I had put them away neatly, tucked them where they needed to be, they had a way of showing up anyway.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about your mother, who is all over this memoir.
Goldie Taylor: My mother was born in 1941, so that makes her turning 82 this year. We look alike. If you talk to us on the telephone, we sound alike. [chuckles] There are so many things about our lives that parallel. I think what I want people to know most about her is that my mother was a giving spirit. That she would quite literally give you the shirt off her back, run the last $2 in gasoline out of her car to get you where you needed to go, that she was the place that you went when you could go nowhere else. That's the woman that my mother became.
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Melissa Harris-Perry: We're going to take a pause here. My conversation with Goldie Taylor continues right after this. It's The Takeaway. Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and I'm still with Goldie Taylor talking about her new memoir, The Love You Save. At the core of this story is her mother.
Goldie Taylor: The woman I was raised with, was living in grief. Her husband had been murdered. She was raising these children on her own. She herself had been assaulted when she was 14, and she remembers the baby blue pantsuit she was wearing that day. When I talk about her and how our relationship has evolved over the years, I went from being the cared for to being the caretaker because she too had put these things away that she had disassociated, compartmentalized. Now, as she moves on into what should be the glory of her years, she's now living and reckoning with them.
Melissa Harris-Perry: You did spend some time with your paternal grandparents.
Goldie Taylor: Yes.
Melissa Harris-Perry: They were different than your mother's family. Can you say a bit about that?
Goldie Taylor: [chuckles] Catherine and Roy were living quite different lives than what we'd become accustomed to living in East St. Louis. My grandmother and grandfather were solidly middle class. They associated with the Grand Boule or the Guardsmen or other Black social organizations. They ate good food is the thing that I've remembered most. Fresh fruits were at their dinner table, I'd never seen that really before. We had canned peaches at home, but my grandmother didn't believe in canned food.
They were markedly more well off than we were. I got to see them every so often as a child. I would sit down for a holiday vacation or a week or so out of the summer, but just that little time away, I was getting an education from grandmother Catherine about the kind of life I should be living. To be selective about my friends. To not let my circumstance demand who I am. That school was important for many reasons. I felt loved and protected with them in a way that I didn't always feel at home.
At home, love sometimes meant a lot of war, cussing and screaming and somebody's fighting, and none of that ever unfolded in Catherine and Roy's home, my father's parents. I wanted to live with them, and I asked, I don't know, four, five, six times, "Can I just stay with you?" Every time, Catherine would ask about it, she'd get to no from back home, that I needed to come home. I looked up to them in so many ways. I was for all practical purposes their only living child because my father had been murdered, so they saw me as an extension of my father and cared for me in exactly that way. Getting to see behind the curtain a little bit, I think was just the kind of encouragement that I think I needed.
Melissa Harris-Perry: There are so many parallels in your story to that of Dr. Maya Angelou, can you talk about that a bit?
Goldie Taylor: Books were an escape for me, but before they became an escape, in terms of traveling to distant lands of the mind, they were an escape from punishment. They were an escape from household chores that were sunup to sundown, my aunt's house ran like a farm in the city. The scrubbing of floors, the vacuuming, to the scrubbing of pots, to whatever there was that children did because the children of the house took care of these things. There was always trouble around every corner. My aunt had quite a temper. If I was reading, no one would bother me.
If you had your face in a book, then you wouldn't be accosted. You could stay far away from trouble if you were reading a book, so I started reading these child craft books at the top of my aunt's stairs, these encyclopedias. When that wasn't enough, I was stealing school books from my older cousins, or my uncle Ross would bring me a paper back home. Before books became an avenue of self-education and curiosity, they were a hiding place.
There are, I think, a great many parallels in our lives, but I was lucky because there were kids who were so much smarter than the Goldie Taylor who aren't here today, who did not survive, cope and make it. I get emotional about the children that I knew coming up, who aren't here today to celebrate their own grandchildren or children. I don't want anybody to point to me and say, "You did X, Y, and Z, and that sets you out and apart." I want them to know that I was lucky. I think that's what Dr. Angelou would say about her life. That sure she made a couple of right turns, but by and large, she was lucky and she's from St. Louis too.
Melissa Harris-Perry: You started by reading a passage that ends, "I just want to love better," but I've always known you to be quite a love. Can you maybe end us here on the generation going forward? Tell me a little bit about being a mama and a grandma.
Goldie Taylor: I guess I never imagined that I'd be a mama again. [chuckles] I have three grown children all in their 30s, but I'm raising my baby's baby, and she's now nine. I'm in the carpool line, I'm baking cupcakes for school, and doing tennis on Saturday mornings, all of the things that I had no idea that I'd be doing in my 50s, but I am enjoying every moment of it. When I say that I want to love better, I want to give her better than anyone could have given to me. I want to give her better than I could give for my own daughters, but in turn, I want that love to be so strong that she's able to give it to hers and theirs.
I don't want to leave this planet with people believing that this set of traumas broke me. I had a friend of mine say, "Goldie, you should hate men, what you've been through." [chuckles] I'll go, "No." I think it made me love people more, to meet them where they are, and to know that all of us, it's broken in some way. With any luck, her pathways will be broader than mine. That her daughter's and theirs should be broader than hers. I think that's what I mean by love better.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Goldie Taylor, journalist, grandma, [chuckles] author of the upcoming memoir, The Love You Save. Goldie, it is always a joy to be with you. Thank you for taking the time today.
Goldie Taylor: Thank you so very much for this conversation, Melissa.
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