In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Lee Hawkins, 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigative journalist, and podcast creator, about his book I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free (Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers, January 2025). Hawkins shares how questions that haunted him during childhood led him to trace his family’s lineage and to explore the effects of Jim Crow segregation across generations. He explains how the core experiences of Black people from slavery onward have shaped critical aspects of their physical well-being and mental health, and he offers a pathway that fosters greater understanding. An edited version of the conversation follows, and you can also watch the full video at the end of this page.
Why did you write this book, and for whom?
I was very curious about my family’s history from the time I was a little kid. Also, I was profoundly impacted by the Roots miniseries based on the book by Alex Haley. I saw it as a very young boy, accompanied by my parents.
At that point, I had a lot of curiosity about my father, who was raised in Jim Crow Alabama. Initially, I didn’t know that Alabama was a state where African Americans lived through a form of apartheid.
I just knew that my father had a very difficult relationship with Alabama because he never spoke about it. The burning question of my childhood was, “What happened in Alabama?” When Roots aired, I began to wonder when and how my family came to America and how my experience as a little boy related to that.
What’s missing in our culture today as Americans is the allowance for complexity.
Everyone is curious about their relationship to this country. I’ve loved this country from the time I was a young kid. My curiosity as a little boy led me to become a journalist and fueled my hope of studying my family history one day and getting answers to my childhood questions.
By the time DNA testing for family history and genealogy became prevalent, I had built skills as an investigative journalist. I took a test through Ancestry.com, which helped me begin to understand my family’s origins. From there, I established that there was content for a book. I had to determine what about my family’s story I could bring to the world so that others could see this piece of the American experience and learn something from it.
My father was very curious about his history because previous generations wouldn’t speak about what happened in Alabama. Every generation kept secrets from subsequent generations. That needed to stop with me, and we needed to finally get to the heart of the story. So I wrote the book for myself, my father, and Americans, as well as for people all over the world who are interested in American history.
This is not an academic book. This is a book that really delves into the history of and tells a very nuanced story about one Black American family’s experience. I thought it would be of great value to people who may have sat through history classes and learned about slavery and Jim Crow but who had never been able to study how slavery and Jim Crow affected individual members of their family and a family through the generations.
You had a very complicated relationship with your father.
My father was my best friend. I don’t want to speak on behalf of everyone about the father–son dynamic in the Black American family, in families of color, or in the immigrant experience, because everybody has a different experience.
I was born in 1971 on the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, just seven years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My father enlisted in the Air Force to serve this country in a system that didn’t even recognize him as equal to White people. He served his country despite that. My parents were determined to give their children the American dream. That determination included hypervigilance about watching over their children and making sure their children acted like adults. The goal was to protect them from the possibility of being killed by the police, by White supremacists, or by one of our own, because the homicide crisis in our community is very real.
I observed my parents’ hypervigilance when I was growing up, but I didn’t understand it. I thought they were just paranoid. Yet when I explored the history, I learned that both of my father’s grandfathers were murdered in Alabama, and my grandfather was murdered in Alabama. In every generation since 1837, a person has been murdered in my family on either side. Much of the time, the murders were related to land and livestock. The fact that we were very entrepreneurial people was something we paid a dear price for in many cases.
The fathers of both my grandparents were killed when they were young. Neither one of the White men who killed them was brought to justice. Even if my grandparents never opened up in depth to my father about what happened to their fathers, he understood vicariously from the reality of America, Emmett Till, Alabama, being chased by the Ku Klux Klan as a 16-year-old, and all the other situations he witnessed. All those situations informed his next steps when he went to Maplewood, Minnesota, to raise his son. We were in a predominantly White community, but I had a father whose mind was very much still back in Alabama, even though it was a time when Black Americans were integrating suburbs all over America.
We talk a lot about the Little Rock Nine but not as much about the thousands of Black children who were going into these schools and oftentimes facing hate speech and being chased home. When we fought back sometimes, we were the ones who got in trouble. We would go home and get whipped by our parents for getting in trouble at school. These very complicated dynamics were the foundation of my relationship with my father. However, the reason he was my best friend was that although he punished me and thought he was protecting me, he also showed me a tremendous amount of love.
My father was omnipresent in my life, which is counter to the false narrative that Black men are not present in their sons’ and daughters’ lives. I knew my father. I knew my great-grandfather and my grandfather on the maternal side. They all played huge roles in my life. There was never a time—not one time—that I could ever truly say that they didn’t love me. Yet two things can be true at once, and we have to allow ourselves to look at situations in very complex ways.
What’s missing in our culture today as Americans is the allowance for complexity. I see a parallel between my relationship with my family and my relationship with my country. I had to tell the truth of the story and be honest about my family and my country as well in order to process a lot of what I dealt with as a kid. I needed to understand why I was beaten with a belt, why it was wrong, but also how that tied into the whippings that my ancestors endured during slavery. And I had to learn about those ancestors and actually study their lives in order to understand why I was socialized as I was.
Do Black men today have more of a vocabulary to talk to their children than your father’s generation did?
Black men still struggle with talking about our trauma or the mental health issues that are related to our experiences growing up.
For example, many people returned from World War II in body bags. We were trying our best to honor the men and women who did their best to free the world and to make the world a better place. But there was a national consciousness about not showing sadness—not crying and not grieving—and not talking about the deaths. There was national stoicism.
I can remember the Greatest Generation, people who made such a profound impact on my life, like my uncles who were World War II veterans, and how closed off they were. They were closed off not only about their experience in these wars but also about the experiences they had in the cotton fields of Alabama. They were also closed off to the fact that they were not treated as poorly overseas as they were when they came back to this country. Those were things I had to read books about; I didn’t learn them from family. My father’s generation, the baby boomer generation, was a little better than the Greatest Generation. While my father hid a lot initially, he became extremely open when I began researching and writing. He was one of the most open people I’ve known in my life.
Today, the situation is better. Black men are beginning to talk a lot about the way history impacts us and our mental health. In order to be strong for our community and for our families, it is critical for us to look at mental health not through the prism of going to the gym and maintaining ourselves but through our mental and our physical well-being.
It is a conversation that’s happening in our community. You often need a therapist to be able to fully heal from that. I was born on August 28, 16 years to the day since Emmett Till was killed. That was the environment that I grew up in. That was the consciousness that my family had as they raised me.
Talk about your dad’s many pairs of highly polished shoes.
One of the great things about this story is that it brings people into a narrative that isn’t shared often. I am a Black man. I am a heterosexual Black man who was raised primarily by Black men. My mom was in my life, and I have strong matriarchs in my life. Yet I was raised by my father primarily. My grandfather and my great-grandfather also had roles in my life. This narrative of Black men is not necessarily that prevalent in literature. The story about my father teaching me to shine my shoes from a very young age and being hypervigilant about making sure that my appearance was as strong as it could be is a powerful one because my grandfathers were the same way.
In many ways, pride in my appearance is part of my personal brand. Whenever I go somewhere, someone says, “Oh my God, you’re always dressed so impeccably.” It’s not necessarily because I’m that concerned about what people think. It’s more about the way I was reared. When I review family pictures from the 1900s that I was able to obtain from relatives, that’s what I see—people who were very dignified, elegant, and well-dressed. I believe that was a form of protest for my family. When viewing old records, I saw that under the slave codes in certain states, there were actually laws that prohibited Black people from wearing a certain quality of clothing and cloth. You could get 39 to 100 lashes for dressing too well.
While writing the book, I interviewed my father about his childhood. He said, “You know what it was, Son? I had hand-me-down shoes from my brothers. And some of those shoes were not in great condition. I did my best to keep ’em up. But when I put myself in a position when I got out of Alabama, that was the first thing we did: make sure our shoes were always new and always polished, so much so that they could sing.”
My father was victimized, but he was not a victim. He would never call himself a victim. He came into the world a man, and he left the world a man.
Later on in the book, my mom said, “Your dad has lots of shoes and ties. It would be great if you could go in there and take some of them. Maybe you can wear them—in your interviews and stuff.”
I went into my dad’s closet, and I saw rows of beautiful, beautifully shined shoes. In a way, that was a reflection of the childhood trauma my father had experienced and also the beautiful dignity he demonstrated. It’s important to look at the hard aspects but to also celebrate the beauty of coming out of the experience that my father had.
There was never a time when my father was a victim or took a victim mentality. My father was victimized, but he was not a victim. He would never call himself a victim. He came into the world a man, and he left the world a man.
That’s what this book really tries to capture. Perhaps one of the hardest things to do as a writer is to tell the truth about the brutality and the struggle yet also show how powerful my family really was. I wanted to describe the omnipresent pressure that I felt to redeem the sacrifices of previous generations.
Talk about food and ‘the deadliest vestiges of the slave food diet.’
It’s important to point out that not all Black families had the experience that I had. But I know there are many that did. If you come from a family that descended from slavery and Jim Crow in America, it affected everything, including our diet and our last names, and, in some cases, still does.
Despite having all the trappings of the American dream, each New Year’s Eve, my parents would prepare a dish called “chitterlings”—pork chitterlings, or “chitlins,” as some people call them in the Black community.
Chitlins were considered a “Black food,” a food that was part of our heritage. Every New Year’s Eve, we ate chitterlings to honor our ancestors, who were actually force-fed these pig intestines by the enslaver family. They’d eat the best part of the pig and give the scraps to the enslaved people.
My family thought, “We’re going to celebrate this and make ourselves eat this and think it’s part of our heritage.” Yet it wasn’t until I explored the history and started studying that I realized the origins. It didn’t come from the African side of our experience. We followed the plant food diet in West Africa. It came directly from the European side of the enslaver experience.
Yet the key is that White and Black families in the South ate a very high-fat, high-sugar, high-carb diet. That fueled my own sugar addiction. My sugar addiction was also fueled by all the stress I dealt with as a child. Sugar was a form of escape for me and for my father. It wasn’t until later on, when I started to study adverse childhood experiences, that I understood that people who endure adverse childhood experiences often soothe with any number of addictions.
I’m very honest about different definitions or characterizations of Black maleness, from toxic masculinity to the struggle for our authenticity, and what we’re expected to be against the reality of who we really are.
I come from a very Christian family, and my father and mother tried their best to live righteous lives. It would’ve been unfathomable for them to turn to alcohol or drugs for escapism. It’s not that those who do can’t be righteous, but for my family, it didn’t fit the narrative of who they wanted to be. My father used food as his escape because that was something that was socially acceptable. It was the only thing that would put a smile on our faces amid our many different and painful experiences.
What do you want people to take away from reading this book?
The ultimate success for me is bringing people into this experience and this sliver of American life that has not been extensively written about. Once again, the reason I emphasize being a heterosexual Black male, and I hope that’s OK for me to mention that, is because that experience is not as prevalent and prominent in the literature we see.
I’m very honest about different definitions or characterizations of Black maleness, from toxic masculinity to the struggle for our authenticity, and what we’re expected to be against the reality of who we really are. A successful book is one in which people are able to do the hard, difficult reading that this book requires, to see a part of the American experience that’s not written extensively about.
Also, the book can change people’s perceptions of the effects of paddling children. Currently, corporal punishment is legal in schools in 17 states in America. Black children are paddled at disproportionately higher rates, as are Hispanic students and students with special needs. But it affects students of all races.
I would like to see more awareness concerning the effects of corporal punishment and childhood trauma. Even if people think they’re helping their children, the effects can hardwire children to develop anxiety and to have that fight-or-flight system on an ever-present, all-time high as adults.
Most people who paddle their children are doing so because they believe they’re doing a good thing for them; they love their children. This book will help people understand the effects they may not have considered previously.
I also want to reach people of all races who may have experienced corporal punishment, who have had violent childhoods perhaps, and who feel guilty about not confronting it and about not calling it abuse. Being a victim of corporal punishment is not your fault. It doesn’t mean that your parents didn’t love you. It also doesn’t mean that you should be part of another generation that keeps secrets.
It’s not your burden to carry. Talking about your experience and confronting the people who harmed you is powerful. I want people to feel able to give themselves permission to do whatever they need to do to deal with the hard parts of their childhood.
One of the big successes for me with this book would be to have as many people—of all races—as possible read this book. As a result, they would have a better understanding of American history—history that was not taught, and often cannot be taught, in a textbook. This book is universal in that way. By reading it, I hope people understand that we need to confront the dark parts of our history, families, and upbringing to really come out on the other side.
Watch the full interview
