10-06-26 How Do We Write Our Family Stories? with Nicole R. Fleetwood
| Season 2 Episode 7 | That Part by 45 Lemons
We asked the Black women in our lives a simple question: If you could talk about anything on a podcast, what would it be?
Nicole R. Fleetwood chose writing our family stories.
In this episode of That Part, verta and Naa sit down with cultural historian, curator, professor, and MacArthur Fellow Nicole R. Fleetwood for a deeply personal conversation about family, memory, history, and what it means to tell the stories that made us.
In her forthcoming memoir and cultural history, Between the River and the Railroad Tracks, Nicole traces her life growing up in a multigenerational Black family in the Midwest. Writing it required her to wrestle with a question many of us know intimately: how do you honor the people you come from without avoiding the difficult truths that are also part of the story?
Together, Nicole, verta, and Naa talk about the different versions of the people we love, the stories families carry across generations, the things we inherit without fully understanding where they came from, and the freedom that can come from claiming our own perspective.
They also make room for something harder: the possibility of holding compassion for someone who caused harm without erasing the harm itself. Of allowing joy and sorrow, love and anger, tenderness and truth to exist in the same family story.
Because our histories belong to us. And sometimes telling them begins with giving ourselves permission to hold all of it.
Content note: This episode includes discussion of sexual assault and rape. Please take gentle care while listening.
Video Version: https://youtu.be/euxu7BpEXEg?si=BFywuZnmi666_Yds
Learn more about Naa & Verta here:
Email: thatpart@45Lemons.com
Website: www.45lemons.com/thatpart
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