782: Family Dig

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. So, Nancy Updike has been a producer making stories here at This American Life, starting with our very first episode back in the 1990s.

And when Nancy takes on a big story, it is very exciting for me and the other producers here because nobody writes or reports a story the way that Nancy does. She just throws you in there with the people that she's writing about, and you're in so deep so quickly. And there's this just intimacy to it. It's got such a feeling to it.

And she has a new podcast. It is called We Were Three. She made it with her coworkers who make Serial. And today, on the show, I'm going to play you the first episode of her podcast, and you'll hear what I'm talking about for yourself. That's going to be the first big chunk of today's show.

And then after that, we have another story for you of somebody who is digging around in their family's past, like the woman who's at the center of Nancy's story. And just, let's just get to it. I think actually saying more about Nancy's story will not add to the listening experience of it. So here's Nancy Updike.

Nancy Updike

Rachel McKibbens and her dad, Pete Camacho, stopped talking and resumed talking many times over the course of her life. He could be generous. He could be mean and drunk. She learned how to be mean.

She left California, moved across the country. She loved him when she could, and she never wrote him off. She made sure her kids knew the good version of him. When COVID started, Rachel and her father were in a barely talking phase. But a few months in, he emailed her.

Nancy Updike

Infusion meant he was sending money.

Nancy Updike

She opened the email.

Nancy Updike

He sent $1,000 to her bank account-- an infusion. It saved the day. Rachel and her partner at the time, Jacob, ran a bar and restaurant in Rochester, New York. It was closed-- COVID. They were strapped. They had three kids at home, out of five. A year or so later, conversations with her father were very different. Her father was insisting that Rachel not vaccinate his grandkids, her children. He called it murder. When she pushed back, he'd ridicule her.

Rachel stopped talking to him. She didn't bother telling her father when she, her two youngest kids, and Jacob all got COVID in the fall of 2021. Even when Jacob went into the ICU for five days and the doctors told her to pray, she still didn't reach out to her dad for support. Four days after Jacob was finally released from the hospital and back home with Rachel and the family recovering--

Nancy Updike

A text telling her that her father had been dead for hours. She figured car accident. She knew he'd been driving a lot, looking for work. She called her brother, Peter Camacho, Jr.

Nancy Updike

Vaccinated people. Her brother believed that COVID vaccines weren't just dangerous for people who got the vaccine. Vaccinated people were dangerous to be around if you are unvaccinated, like him and his dad. They lived together. They'd been living together for years.

Nancy Updike

Until the last time, when he didn't.

Nancy Updike

Rachel was trying to take all of this in, trying to get information without letting loose on her brother, who was plainly grief-struck from having just watched their father die in front of him. But he was telling her he had watched their father die in front of him for days. He didn't take him to the hospital, didn't call 911, didn't call Rachel to tell her their father was so sick he could barely speak. Then another thought hit her.

Nancy Updike

Rachel stayed on the phone with her brother, heard him get into the car, the door slam, the engine turn over. She finally relaxed a bit when she heard Peter go inside the hospital and check in. He was 44 years old, 6 foot 4, 220. Never smoked, didn't drink, lifted weights. When COVID hit, he'd been on a cleanse.

He had health insurance through MediCal, California's Medicaid system. But Peter hadn't had a full-time job in years. He depended on his father. He didn't have his own bank account. His first text exchange with Rachel from the hospital was about money. He asked--

Nancy Updike

Meaning, how much was Rachel's then-partner Jacob's medical bill when he had COVID? She texted back--

Nancy Updike

Remdesivir and Olumiant was the combination that doctors had given to Jacob the week before. That's how Rachel knew about it. She had just been through all this.

Nancy Updike

Peter didn't like the guys at the hospital because they wanted to swab his nose for a PCR test to see if he had COVID. He told Rachel he thought the swab tests were a scam, that doctors got a $15,000 bonus for every swab they did that led to a positive COVID result.

Nancy Updike

Within three days, to Rachel's great surprise and relief, Peter told her he was on the mend. He went home to rest, and she made plans to go out to Santa Ana, California, where he lived and where the two of them had grown up. Peter asked Rachel a couple of times after he left the hospital whether their father's cause of death had been identified yet. She said COVID, even though she hadn't seen the death certificate, because it seemed obvious to her. And she turned out to be right.

When Rachel got to Santa Ana, along with one of her older kids, Peter asked them over the phone not to come in the house. Said he still felt too vulnerable because they were vaccinated. He believed, again, that vaccines make people shed the virus, and therefore, vaccinated people are especially dangerous to be around for the unvaccinated.

Rachel decided to give him some time. They would see him before they left. They could do it outside in masks in the backyard. She didn't push. He sounded tired. She wasn't surprised. After she'd had COVID, she'd barely been able to open a jar for a week. Rachel kept checking in via text and phone calls. She was handling the paperwork and details of their father's death. She was dropping off food at the front door. Food, logistics, love.

Nancy Updike

That's one of their last texts. Peter died a week after Rachel got to Santa Ana. She never saw him. A long-time neighbor found him. Rachel learned from the coroner that her brother had not made a quick, remarkable recovery and been discharged from the hospital to go rest at home, as she had believed. He had checked himself out of the hospital after 2 and 1/2 days against medical advice.

Nancy Updike

Rachel was dumbfounded by how much she didn't know about her father's and brother's last month of being alive. Everything was gone. All the answers she'd put off trying to get from her brother about why he hadn't asked for help for their father-- gone. Her brother's recovery-- fake, some kind of performance. She had no idea what he'd been thinking as he was fading away, what he'd been doing, instead of telling her the truth. And then Rachel made a discovery-- a record of Peter's final days. And she found out exactly what happened.

Nancy Updike

Part One, Black Box. COVID caught us while we were busy. Each person it found, and each family, was in the midst of their specific unfinished business, their pre-existing fault lines and disconnections. The fault lines are why I'm here. This is a story about a family and what COVID did to them, what it destroyed, but also what it revealed.

Rachel lived thousands of miles away from her father and brother, and she was used to stretches of relative silence with them. But those quieter periods were always part of a rhythm that swung back. Even an angry silence was never permanent. Now, the fact that she didn't have any idea what happened at the end, Rachel was tormented by this not knowing. The pain propelled her. She wasn't quiet with grief. She was vibrating with it. She had questions.

The first person she called after talking to the coroner was her and Peter's cousin. Rachel and her brother were only a year and a half apart, and the cousin was right around the same age, mid-40s. The three of them had grown up playing together. Her cousin seemed just as baffled as she was by Peter's death, by the fact that he left the hospital against medical advice.

She asked him a terrible question the coroner had asked her. Any chance this was intentional? Had her brother been suicidal? Rachel didn't think so, but she also felt like, what the hell do I know? She says her cousin said, no way. No way. Peter wanted to live. At the house where Peter and her father had lived, Rachel gathered up old photos and looked through them.

Nancy Updike

Rachel looked at a text from the cousin she just talked to. His last text to Peter on the day Peter died, he said, "Yo, Jax, please answer me, man."

Nancy Updike

Rachel kept scrolling up and up and up through the texts between Peter and their cousin until she was back in October, when Peter was still alive and was texting with their cousin about what to do about Rachel and Peter's dad, who was so sick with COVID at that point, he was having trouble lifting his arms. The cousin guesses that Peter's father might have myocarditis. Peter thinks maybe it's a bacterial infection of some kind.

The night before Peter's father dies of COVID, Peter texts his cousin and says, "Do you or your mom or anyone in your house have antibiotics?" A minute later, the cousin writes back, "No," and asks Peter, "How are you feeling?"

Peter, 20 minutes later-- "Definitely not well yet. A fever that keeps springing back to 103, agitating dry cough, and the squirts again. My dad has the same cough, only 100 temperature, and is shallow breathing, pretty fast. I'm thinking the fever keeps coming back because it might be a bacterial thing. The cough is [BLEEP] horrible--" I'm beeping that because he wrote "F" and then a bunch of asterisks. "The cough is [BLEEP] horrible because it waits till we lay down to go to sleep, and it becomes very itchy. And we can't go to sleep because of it. We end up coughing all night. So we're both very sleep deprived."

Cousin-- "Fuck, that's bad." Cousin, a few minutes later-- "OK, so tomorrow, I'm going to bring you guys [BLEEP]. I'm going to [BLEEP] you guys." Peter-- "Oh, man, bring it." Cousin-- "I will. I just got to run to the store tomorrow morning and buy ingredients and make it. I also have an immunity kit that I just ordered from my old job. Keeping it, like, behind glass in case of emergencies. It's time to break the glass." Peter-- "Sounds good to me. I'll tell Pops."

15 minutes later, Peter texts about him and his dad-- "We were already detoxing anyway two weeks prior, so I thought our bodies were just following through on its own. I mean, we gave up the bad food we were eating every day, even coffee. Coffee, dude. Yes, even that creamer. And then this [BLEEP] comes on. It's like we try to do it right, and then we get [BLEEP]." Cousin-- "Damn it, you guys were too clean."

Rachel saw, over the course of her father's last day, Peter describing their dad hallucinating, coughing, grunting, losing control of his bladder and bowels, Peter giving him vitamins and probiotics. The cousin dropped off a final round of soup on the porch in the afternoon.

Seeing how her father's death had unfolded was awful, how he'd suffered. But Rachel also read those texts, and everything Peter and her cousin wrote going forward with the helpless awareness of somebody watching a Greek tragedy, knowing what the characters don't, all the horror that's to come.

Nancy Updike

She saw the text exchange between her brother and cousin at the moment her father died. Peter-- "I believe he's taken his final breaths." And then a minute later-- "He's gone." Cousin-- "What? Peter, what?" Peter-- "I seriously don't know what to do now."

This is when Rachel saw herself enter the conversation, when her brother texted her that their father was gone. She saw in the texts how the shock of their father's death had opened up a window of opportunity with Peter. And in that window, Peter had texted her, and she'd convinced him to go to the hospital. Or, as he put it in a text to the cousin--

Nancy Updike

Their cousin texted back-- "Keep me posted."

Nancy Updike

Rachel and Peter's cousin didn't respond to my texts, letter, and phone message requesting an interview with him. I'm not naming him because of that, and because I don't want strangers harassing him over this story. Rachel hasn't spoken to him since she found the texts between him and her brother, and he hasn't contacted her.

Peter, in these texts back and forth with each of them, is clearly scared for his life. And I don't know what people do in countries that have a functioning healthcare system, but in the United States, a lot of us, maybe most of us, seek out advice from friends and family in the midst of a health crisis. The friends and family guidance is often supplemented by the internet, and then we're faced with a messy pile of anecdotes, jargon, and sales pitches to sift through.

That messy pile may be all a person has if they don't have a primary care doctor. Peter didn't. But he did live close enough to a decent hospital that he was able to make it in time to be offered possibly life saving care, at which point he began to worry. Can I afford this?

Peter's mistrust of the medical system revolved around money. In his texts with his cousin, even before he and his father got sick, Peter kept returning to the idea that he didn't believe in the COVID tests and treatments because people were getting rich from them. He believed there was a government plan that gave hospitals and doctors financial incentives to kill people and blame COVID.

Peter was afraid of the wrong things with COVID. He was just incorrect. But the overall idea that the US medical system is shaped by profit-seeking that is often at odds with good patient care, that's a fact. No one in America is wrong to be afraid of medical bills. In light of that reality and in light of Peter's earlier texts, it's a sign of just how scared he was when he texts Rachel from the hospital and says--

Nancy Updike

And it was hard for Rachel to accept, as she was reading through the texts, that only 40 minutes after he wrote that to her, when he finds out the hospital will be giving him a nasal swab, Peter's resolve starts to falter. And so Peter texted their cousin-- "They PCR'd me," cringe emoji. "Too sick to get up and leave." No response from the cousin. An hour later, Rachel texts Peter--

Nancy Updike

Peter writes back-- "I love you, too." An hour later, the cousin texts him-- "Did the test come back yet?" Peter-- "Positive, of course." Peter texts the cousin that he's just been given some steroids in his IV. It was an anti-inflammatory, dexamethasone-- an inexpensive generic, for anyone counting at home.

A month earlier, before Peter's father had even gotten sick, the cousin had texted Peter that, quote, "hospitals get a 20% bonus for administering Fauci's poison, remdesivir." Now, the cousin texts Peter-- "What was the steroid called?" And a couple of minutes later-- "OK, I just read remdesivir is not a steroid. Phew." Peter texts the cousin an hour later, saying, "Rachel said, 'If they want to put you on remdesivir, ask them to pair it with Olumiant. It's a game changer.'" No response from the cousin.

The cousin, 2 and 1/2 hours later-- "Fuck that. Do not take remdesivir. 54% chance it'll shut down your kidneys." Several hours later, Peter textes the cousin-- "They finally brought in a bag of remdesivir, and I said, I'll hold off on that. And he said, OK, that's fine. I had no problem with the nurse's assistants and the nurse, but as soon as the doctor comes and makes a decision, you know it's the [BLEEP] ones."

The cousin a minute later-- "No, no, no remdesivir." Peter texts him a photo of an IV bag. The cousin asks, "They're giving it to you?" Peter-- "No, I told them I'll pass." The cousin-- '"OK. I know you're tired, but keep an eye on those fuckers. Watch everything they're putting in those lines."

Nancy Updike

Peter texts the cousin a photo of his dad at that family funeral he told Rachel about. Their dad is hugging a relative who was vaccinated, as he'd mentioned to Rachel. He captions the photo, "the day my dad was killed." The next morning, Peter texts the cousin-- "Temp finally down, 98.8. Still on oxygen because my oxygen levels are weak." The cousin-- "I'm glad you're starting to improve. The sooner, the better. They won't have a chance to kill you."

Again, the cousin didn't respond to my interview requests. One of the things I know about the cousin, the very little I know from reading the full thread of his texts, is that he's a father. Two of the family members who live with him are in their 70s, and he worries about their health.

He's a man with multiple heavy responsibilities, who is also up late and early for weeks, worrying about his cousin Peter, checking on him. I also know from Rachel that about 10 years ago, the cousin lost another cousin, Jennifer, who was like a little sister to him after she went to the hospital.

Nancy Updike

And the whole family was crushed, Rachel and Peter, too. Jennifer was 32 years old, and Rachel says that for Peter, this medical error was one searing event in a lifetime of smaller moments that gradually transformed him from someone who had never trusted authority figures in general and didn't go to doctors-- he believed he could take better care of himself with exercise and nutrition than some doctor-- to someone who saw doctors and hospitals as dangerous, and later, as actively seeking to deceive and harm and even kill people for their own gain.

The day before he leaves the hospital, Peter texts the cousin-- "The doctor finally came down and asked why I won't take remdesivir. And he said, you're not vaccinated? And I said, that's correct. He said that's the only treatment we have for COVID and that my lungs are going to deteriorate with the oxygen they keep ordering for me if I don't take the remdesivir. I said I'll think about it. And he said OK and left." Remdesivir might have reduced Peter's need for oxygen. Concentrated oxygen can harm someone's lungs over time, especially if they've been damaged by, for instance, COVID.

The cousin texts back a few minutes later-- "Bull [BLEEP]. That remdesivir is going to deteriorate your organs, especially your kidneys. You've been pumping ibuprofen all week. He's just trying to scare you so he can get his 20% bonus for using remdesivir. That same doctor will tell you the vaccine is good for you, which makes no sense because now that you're confirmed that you have COVID and you're recovering, it seems like you'll have natural immunity for life. You won't need boosters. Just pray your oxygen level improves so you can get the hell out of there."

As Rachel is reading the texts, she keeps glimpsing these moments here and there over the last weeks of Peter's life when Peter acknowledges, this is COVID. But the idea of COVID is like a balloon that can't stay aloft. Peter texts a bit later-- "All I have to do is jog a little. I'll get my oxygen back up. Sitting in a hospital bed isn't doing anything, oxygen-wise." The cousin-- "Do the turmeric and mint leaf lung inhaling exercises at home. Yeah, you're not going to continue to deteriorate. He's a fucking liar."

A few minutes later, Rachel texts Peter, and they go back and forth about his oxygen levels and whether he has enough energy to eat and if he has a phone charger. Rachel asks him if he's heard an estimated timeline for them to discharge him. Peter texts, "They made it sound like soon, possibly today or tomorrow." Rachel--

Nancy Updike

I've talked to Rachel a bunch of times, and from what I've seen, she doesn't like to let untrue things slide. She really doesn't like it. But in her texts with Peter, I can see her trying hard to be careful with him, trying to encourage him, support him, tell him what she thinks is important in her big sister way, but not argue with him.

This deliberate withholding of her full forcefulness is part of their relationship. Rachel feeling protective of Peter is built into her earliest memories. He's been physically bigger since he was 15, but she's always been tougher.

Peter, later that afternoon, texts with the cousin and again brings up the idea that maybe this might be COVID. Peter-- "Can you look up safe treatments for COVID?" The cousin writes back-- "Hang in there. I'm checking frantically."

And then the cousin texts-- "Monoclonal antibodies, convalescent plasma, or ivermectin. The first two options are usually only given while in the ER. Once you're admitted, the protocol changes to remdesivir. They only treat the vaccinated with ivermectin, so that way, when they recover, they can say, see? The vaccine kept you from dying. Motherfuckers."

The evidence about ivermectin is now overwhelming. It's not effective as either protection against COVID or treatment of it. And while we're here, natural immunity for life against COVID is not a thing. And vaccines don't cause people to shed the virus.

But let's talk briefly about remdesivir. I spoke with a few doctors who've been treating COVID patients since the beginning in clinics and hospitals. They were unanimous. Remdesivir has revealed itself to be not actually a very effective treatment against COVID. It isn't harmful in all the ways Peter's cousin kept saying it was. That was remdesivir's strength. It was generally safe.

Studies did confirm its modest usefulness in some patients, but as one doctor put it, "Remdesivir was a tool we used because we had so few tools." Even the drug combo Rachel recommended-- remdesivir plus Olumiant-- one careful study showed patients who got the combo were less likely to die than those who got remdesivir alone, but only about 3% less likely to die.

For an advanced, severe case of COVID, there is no consistent game changer. So the medicine of COVID has been genuinely confusing. We can't know if Peter would have survived, even if he did stay at the hospital. But it was probably his best shot.

Two doctors I spoke with told me how important it was, in their experience, to just let a patient talk if they were reluctant to get treatment for anything. Don't try to convince them. Just ask them, what has this been like for you? Then listen. But the doctors were also frank about how often with COVID they didn't have time for that conversation, or energy.

Before COVID, they'd seen plenty of people who were afraid to be hospitalized, who didn't want specific treatments. But with COVID, those conversations were different. People weren't just reluctant. Many were hostile. Some got aggressive. One doctor said she had the experience over and over of patients she'd known for years seeing her in a mask and instantly distrusting her.

The doctors both said that simply asking if a person was vaccinated would often stop the conversation cold. And each person's reasons for not wanting a particular COVID treatment were bespoke-- their own tightly held bundle of beliefs and fears that were extra resistant to change. A doctor might be able to tease out and address the contents of that bundle fast enough to help the person, or they might not. Anyway, we know what happened this time.

When Rachel started reading through her brother's texts, she knew he had left the hospital against medical advice. She found that out from the coroner, but she didn't know how it happened. Now she saw. Peter texts his cousin at 3:30 in the morning--

Nancy Updike

That last part isn't in the text. It was Rachel venting her frustration as she was reading through all this again. She could barely contain her rage. By the end of this next part, she was sneering.

Nancy Updike

From the time Peter left the hospital, he lived another two weeks. All that time, Rachel was in a fog of coming to terms with their father's death. And she thought her brother was recovering, like most people who get COVID do.

But Peter was texting with their cousin about his blood oxygen level. A reading between 95 and 100 is considered normal. But on different days, Peter says he's at 80, 88, 91, 85, 93, 82, 90, fluctuating from OK, but on the low side, to worryingly low. Rachel had no idea. Peter didn't tell her, and she didn't press him. A few days before Peter dies, their cousin texts,

Nancy Updike

Peter's response 10 minutes later is garbled. He's describing his own actions, but it comes out sounding more like a transcript of leery half thoughts.

Nancy Updike

The roller chair is an office chair Peter is using to get around. In a few days, Rachel is going to find that chair in the kitchen, soaked with urine.

One last thing Rachael sees in Peter's texts is that she wasn't the only person trying to get him to seek medical help. One family friend was texting information just about every day about clinics he could go to, a nurse who would talk to him.

We also don't know what the cousin was saying to Peter in phone calls with him. And he did tell Peter in one text, after Peter told him his blood oxygen reading was 80, that Peter needed to go back to the hospital. Then Peter texted that it went back up to 88, which is still too low and should have sent him to the emergency room, but the moment passed.

Peter's neighbor was checking in and leaving food on the porch for him. Four days before he died, Peter texts the neighbor, "I was so exhausted looking at all that food." The neighbor writes back, "Dude, you should go to the hospital. Call an ambulance." Peter-- "Oh, [BLEEP] that."

Peter's last text to his cousin is a sad emoji about the death of the actor William Lucking, who starred in "Sons of Anarchy." The next day, the cousin texted, "How are you doing, Peter?" and got no reply. The day after that, he wrote, "Yo, Jax, please answer me, man."

Rachel told me once about her brother and father and COVID, that it was like they fell overboard during the pandemic and swam straight to the bottom, thinking it was the surface. When she finished reading the texts, she read them again. Her brain kept combing through them for weeks. She couldn't settle on any thought or any feeling.

Nancy Updike

Rachel is a poet. That doesn't really cover it, though. Rachel is a tractor beam. I can easily see how a person could hear her read her poetry at some event and then marry her four months later, which happened. I can understand a person wanting to tattoo her words on their arm, which also happened. A lot of Rachel's writing is about her childhood family-- her, her father, her brother.

The first poem in her first book is titled, epically, "I forget who I said it to, but I remember how afterwards they looked at me as though I had driven a steak knife through their mother's hand." The poem itself goes, "I love my brother. He had the exact same childhood as I did, but he doesn't get credit for it. He isn't the writer. I'm the star of the violence. I expose. My Peter, when he marries, I will be so sad. No girl in the world deserves him but me."

I see that poem, which I love, as a little box Rachel is daring her readers to open. Rachel's always seen her place in the world, in part, in relation to Peter, her younger and only brother-- her responsibility still, somehow. She hadn't lived near Peter in almost 20 years, but far away is still somewhere. It's nothing like gone. What do you do when you've lost something important? You retrace your steps.

Rachel remembers where she and Peter started, and now she knows where he ended. And she's going back over what happened in between, the things she saw because she was there and the things she's finding out happened later, out of her sight. What did happen in between? What life did COVID land in? That's next time in Part Two of We Were Three.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike. I'll just say, Episode Two, things get so complicated-- their relationship, the three of them. You can hear that right now, or I guess, after you finish listening to our show. You can get that wherever you get your podcasts. It comes from Serial Productions and The New York Times. Nancy's co-producer for the show is Jenelle Pifer. Her editor is Julie Snyder. Again, the name of the show, We Were Three.

[MUSIC - "SWEET OLD WORLD" BY LUCINDA WILLIAMS]

Coming up, family history that a family really doesn't want to talk about that much. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Family Dig, stories of people who take it on themselves to figure out the truth of what exactly went down in their own family, even if it was kind of ugly. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, "The Great Lie-Gration." So now we turn to somebody in this act who tries to excavate his family's past with very few clues to go on.

A few random things about this guy before we get started. First, he is a professional skateboarder, but not into being interviewed or speaking in public. In fact, at the beginning of his interview for our show, which was about something so personal and hard for him to talk about, he asked if it would be OK if he could close his eyes sometimes so that he could focus. And then he kept his eyes closed for the entire conversation. Reporter Gabrielle Emanuel talked to him.

Gabrielle Emanuel

Jahmal Williams didn't know much of his family history growing up. He knew his grandmother had come from Arkansas, settled in Boston. That was about it. They were always kind of vague about the past. But there was one fragment that stuck in his head.

Gabrielle Emanuel

The Freedom Riders-- activists who boarded Greyhound buses and rode them all over the South in 1961, Black and white people sitting defiantly side by side to challenge segregation.

Gabrielle Emanuel

Which Jahmal says was typical for his family. They don't like to talk about the past, even basic things. Like, he always wondered how his family ended up where they did, a neighborhood he sometimes hated. To Jahmal, it was just blank. Then his grandmother died, and he learned more. She was the matriarch of the family, super beloved. The funeral was held at a big church in Boston.

Gabrielle Emanuel

As she talked, she held up a Xerox copy of an old photo of Jahmal's grandmother. Jahmal had never seen the picture before. It looked like it was taken at a bus station. His grandmother's wearing a black dress, white feathery hat, triple string of pearls. It's just her and seven of her kids gathered around her. Jahmal brought that Xerox photo home. It seemed like it might have been clipped from a newspaper. So he pulled up his laptop and started googling her-- Lela Mae Williams.

Gabrielle Emanuel

The Reverse Freedom Rides were a wild chapter in history that had been forgotten. I got fascinated and started researching it a couple of years back. The Reverse Freedom Rides happened in 1962. They were a retaliation against the Freedom Rides by white segregationists in the South. They used the same weapon as the Civil Rights activists, the Greyhound bus, but they used it to send Black people North.

It's kind of like what's happening now with Republican governors loading migrants onto buses and planes and sending them to Democratic states. I thought, it's just like the Reverse Freedom Rides all over again. Some are actually being put up in barracks on the same military base. The goal today is basically the same as it was then-- to stick it to Northerners and make a political point. Here's one of the segregationists back then, Amis Guthridge. He was a lawyer from Arkansas who helped come up with the plan.

Gabrielle Emanuel

These segregationists lured people onto the buses with big promises of housing and jobs, said everything would be provided for if they went, and that President Kennedy himself would welcome them up North. They targeted people who might be seen as a burden-- poor families, people just released from prison, single moms with lots of kids, like Jahmal's grandmother. She was raising 11 kids in Arkansas. So they did get on a bus, but it wasn't the Freedom Rides.

Gabrielle Emanuel

Most people don't. I found out more from archives and old TV footage. There were stories about Jahmal's grandmother in there. And from what we can tell, here's what happened. Guthridge, the segregationist, personally picked up the Williams family in his station wagon. He drove them from their farm to the bus terminal in Little Rock a couple of hours away. He got them ice cream and root beer.

There was a quick press conference, and then they all got on the bus-- hardly any luggage because they'd been told everything would be provided up North. There's actually footage of the moment they got on the bus. There's no sound, so I'll describe it for you.

The kids have big smiles. They look excited to be filmed. They're chewing gum, waving out the window. As she boards, Lela Mae looks back over her shoulder. She looks beautiful, elegant in a strappy sequined dress and bright white cap. The video is just 29 seconds long, but Lela Mae looks ready.

After about three days on the bus, Lela Mae asked the bus driver to pull over. She wanted to change into her best clothes because she was about to meet President Kennedy. That's when she put on those pearls that Jahmal saw on the photo. But when she was dropped off near the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Kennedy wasn't there. Neither were the jobs or the housing. It had all been lies. What was there were some members of the NAACP, some people from a church group, and photographers with their flashes going off.

Gabrielle Emanuel

But it did answer a question he'd always had.

Gabrielle Emanuel

Jahmal grew up in a big public housing development in Boston. His entire family lived there. And now he knew why. His family was dumped up North far from everyone they knew. No jobs and had to figure things out. Jahmal's eyes were still closed at this point in the interview.

Gabrielle Emanuel

Nobody knows why his grandmother ended up on that bus, whether she was forced or tricked or chose it, thinking a move North would be best. It's been years since Jahmal first learned about the Reverse Freedom Rides. He told me he sees it differently now. His grandmother had a one-way ticket and no resources and somehow made it work. He's proud of that.

Gabrielle Emanuel

Like other things from their past, Jahmal's family doesn't talk much about this history. Sometimes, when things are traumatic, you make the choice not to go there. It's just not helpful. And sometimes, it's not even a choice. Jahmal's brought up the Reverse Freedom Rides a couple of times with his mom.

Gabrielle Emanuel

I've known his mom, Betty, for a few years. She was a teenager when she took the bus North. She wants to talk about it. She's really trying. But it's not that simple.

Gabrielle Emanuel

Sometimes, the past is something only the next generation can really look at. A while back, Jahmal was at home, sketching on a canvas-- he's also an artist-- thinking about the Reverse Freedom Rides, his grandmother, and his mom. And then his son, who was 10, walked in and noticed Jahmal was crying. Jahmal let him know it was OK. These were good tears. He says one day, when he's older, he'll tell them about it. They weren't activists on buses headed South. They were survivors on buses headed North.

Ira Glass

Gabrielle Emanuel, she's a reporter at WBUR in Boston. On our website this week, we have the news footage that she mentions in her story of Lela Mae Williams and her kids getting on that bus back in the 1960s in Arkansas. Plus, we have links to other stories that Gabrielle has done about the Reverse Freedom Rides, where she goes into more depth about this history and the Williams family. This story was produced by Lilly Sullivan.

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Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Miki Meek. The people who put together today's show include Elna Baker, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, who's also the music supervisor for We Were Three, Aviva DeKornfeld, Valerie Kipnis, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Charlotte Sleeper, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Anthony Almojera, Rana Awdish, Taison Bell, Trevor Bedford, Rachel Bender Ignacio, Jeremy Faust, Kristen Panthagani, Jason Salemi, Mark Shapiro, Ernie Dumas, Mary-Beth Brague, Gene Guill, Kristen Harper, and Clive Webb.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 750 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's videos. There's a list of favorite shows to try out, tons of other stuff. Again, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He explains why he never loads anything into the dishwasher this way.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - "HERCULES," BY AARON NEVILLE]