Superheroes

October 21, 2021·43 min·4 clips

Dr. McElroy discovers her heroic grandfather had a secret son, devastating her grandmother who gave him hell until he died.

Host Sam Dingman opens the episode by connecting his own 16-year habit of wearing a large peace-symbol necklace to a revelation at dinner with his father: Dingman's grandfather was a pacifist who led his Congregationalist church toward racial integration, and two of his brothers had been jailed as conscientious objectors in World War II. When Dingman's father's draft number came up for Vietnam, refusing induction felt like honoring a family identity. This personal frame sets up two stories about inheriting values across generations. Grammy-nominated musician Hubby Jenkins, who has played with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Rhiannon Giddens Band, recounts growing up in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill with a Carolinian Black family on one side and a Puerto Rican family on the other, neither of which introduced him to traditional Southern music. His path into roots music ran through New York's Washington Square Park folk scene and the discovery that the banjo was a Black instrument developed on plantations -- a fact that fundamentally changed his relationship to American folk tradition and gave him a mission to reclaim it visibly in white festival spaces. He describes sitting with his grandfather's friends during a North Carolina research trip and learning for the first time that his entire paternal family had been known as the piano-playing family, something he had never been told. Jenkins discusses his practice of embedding history lessons in performances, including during the Ferguson protests, and describes confronting audience members who directed racial slurs at him with a deliberate rhetorical countermove. Playwright Dr. Jokey McElroy delivers a riveting live-performance story about her grandfather Jeff Washington of Sherman, Texas, who prepared for racial violence years in advance by placing Colt .45s on every surface in his home. In May 1930, when a white mob lynched, mutilated, and burned John Hughes in a festive public spectacle, Washington turned his property into an armed sanctuary where Black residents gathered for protection. He distributed guns to the men, the women cooked and sang hymns, and Washington told anyone who stepped foot on the property to be prepared to meet their maker. McElroy traces the complexity of this hero: she later learned he had cheated on her grandmother with a woman described as her opposite in every way, and her grandmother spent the rest of his life making him miserable for it. The episode explores how family identity is transmitted across generations and how inherited values shape the choices of people who may never consciously receive them. The tone is intimate, layered, and historically grounded throughout.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Family Ghosts