Ep. 339 Trymaine Lee - The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Trymaine Lee joins Shifting Culture to talk about his new book A Thousand Ways to Die and the true cost of violence in America. Known as a griot of Black survival and death, Trymaine has spent decades reporting on the lives and communities most affected by gun violence. But when he suffered a sudden heart attack at just 38, he was forced to reckon with the weight of the trauma he had carried in his body and in his family’s history of generational loss. In this conversation, Trymaine traces the roots of America’s cycles of violence back to slavery, systemic racism, and disinvestment, showing how those forces still shape families and neighborhoods today. He also shares how identity, mentorship, and joy can disrupt the cycle, and why nothing stops a bullet like dignity, opportunity, and love. This episode is heavy, but it’s also filled with hope. Because as Trymaine reminds us, there may be a thousand ways to die, but there are also a thousand ways to live.

Trymaine Lee is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy award winning journalist and MSNBC contributor. He’s the host of the “Into America” podcast where he covers the intersection of Blackness, power, and politics. A contributing author to the “1619 Project”, he has reported for The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A Thousand Ways to Die is his first book.

Trymaine's Book:

A Thousand Ways to Die

Trymaine's Recommendation:

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• 10:52 [Ad] Everyone wonders about death. Few talk about it. That’s where we start.
• 11:40 (Cont.) Ep. 339 Trymaine Lee - The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America
• 26:23 [Ad] The Balance of Gray
• 27:10 (Cont.) Ep. 339 Trymaine Lee - The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America

Transcript

Trymaine Lee: 0:00

And this is why the violence hurts so much, because young people should have the opportunities to grow up in communities filled with love and not violence. Parents shouldn't worry about burying their kids, right? All the potential that we're losing because of violence, all the economic costs that we're willing to pay while an entire industry is getting rich off the bloodshed, right? And these guns never disappear, right? But this is about planting the seeds for that fruit tree to bear fruit, right, and bear nutrition and sustenance, emotional, spiritual, psychic sustenance for the generation behind us.

Unknown: 0:42

You Hello

Joshua Johnson: 0:48

and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, today I sit down with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tremaine Lee to talk about the true cost of violence on black life in America. Tremaine has spent years documenting the lives lost in communities reshaped by gunfire, poverty and systemic neglect. He's described himself as a griot of black survival and death, a storyteller carrying out not only the weight of individual tragedies, but the history and the structures that make those tragedies inevitable, that work nearly broke him at 38 Tremaine suffered a sudden heart attack, the kind doctors call a Widowmaker. It forced him to confront how much of that trauma, grief and generational violence he'd been carrying in his own body. Out of that reckoning came his new book, 1000 ways to die, a sweeping history that ties slavery, systemic racism, disinvestment and mass incarceration into the cycles of violence we see today. But this conversation isn't only about death. It's also about survival, about Black joy, about the power of family and mentorship to interrupt the cycle. Here, he reminds us that we can't just focus downstream on each violent act. We have to look upstream at the systems of poverty, sickness and neglect that make violence so pervasive. This is a heavy conversation, but it's also a hopeful one, because, as Tremaine says, there may be 1000 ways to die, but there are also 1000 ways to live, and if we choose to invest in one another, we can plant seeds of resilience and love that Outlast generations. So join us. Here is my conversation with Tremaine. Lee Tremaine, welcome to shifting culture. It's an honor to have you on thanks for joining me. The pleasure is all mine. Joshua, thank you for having me. Yeah, you know this heart attack that you had at the age of 38 it's a powerful start to your the story you're telling and the aftermath of the conversation you had with your daughter, Nola. Take me into that moment and take me on to the what was happening for you. What did you realize that was put on you, that this heart attack came about?

Trymaine Lee: 3:00

Yeah, so I was 38 years old when this heart attack happened to me. I had no warning signs, no family history for a few days before that day, when I was walking to the subway, I felt a little pressure in my chest. And the actual day it happened, I was going down to meet a colleague for coffee, and I had to stop myself, and I said, If I don't sit down now I'm gonna pass out. I just felt this. Something felt really off. And so I went to the health clinic at my job, and I go in there, they take a look at me, you know, they put a little EKG on my heart, and said, You know what, the left side of your heart is a little enlarged, but, you know, at some point, go see a cardiologist. And then she said, I'll never forget these words. I can still hear them today. She said, Don't worry, it's not even like you're gonna drop dead tonight or tomorrow. So I go home, my wife is cleaning the bedroom, so I lay down on the sofa. She wakes me up around three in the morning, and as I lay down, and maybe five minutes later, I feel like this volleyball or beach ball expanding in my chest, the world is spinning. I'm nauseated, I'm sweating, and I don't think I realized that it was death crushing down on me in that moment, but I definitely felt like I was trans. I was something dramatic was happening. I mean, I had never felt that feeling before, and then I remember my wife standing in the doorway looking at me on the phone, calling 911, and maybe 15 minutes later, the paramedics arrive, and at that point it had passed. The worst of that nauseated, washed and sweat, world spinning feeling had passed. And the EMTs come in and they check my blood pressure. They say, your vitals look good. Do you want to go to the hospital? They're asking me. And in that moment, I did something that so many of us do, and I think as men, especially, my daughter, had camp the next morning, my wife was supposed to travel the next day for work, and I didn't want to burden everyone with sitting in the hospital with me all night, not realizing that I. A heart attack. And the majority of people who die from a heart attack die within that first hour after it happens. And so all night long, I'm tossing and turning, and then in the morning, we drop my daughter off at camp, I go into urgent care and I tell them, I say, Hey, I've had this it's like, go to the hospital now. Like, get out of here and go to the hospital. Mind you, we're at around 9am at this point, six hours later, we go to the hospital. Another couple hours of you're young, healthy, we're not sure, until finally, around five o'clock, 5pm they do a blood test, and they find a troponin, which is a compound release when there's heart damage. They said, I think you might have had a heart attack, but it still doesn't even end there. They're like, okay, don't eat anything tomorrow. Tomorrow, the cardiologist will see you, and we're gonna get you in the cath lab. By the grace of the grace of God, my cardiologist, who was still my cardiologist today, said, You know what, let's get him in here now. So we go into the cath lab. He's threading the catheter in my my vein, in my wrist, and there's a big screen over my shoulder, so I'm laying down. He's threading the thing through my my artery, my one vein, and he's tooling around, and then he pulls it out and says, Uh, where's your wife? And I was like, she's out there. He's like, You are a very lucky man. He's like, you had a heart attack. You had a blood clot in your left anterior descending artery. That's a widow maker. We put two stents in your in the vein to clear it, and in that moment, the biggest smile came across my face, because I almost died, but I didn't. So I had this moment of like, this elation that I survived the next day, my mother, my brother, my sister, everyone comes up and we're in the hospital room, and I made a joke to my wife. I said, you almost became a thousandaire, right? Joking that she would have to collect death benefits. And then it was like I was laughing, and I was like, oh my goodness, my wife almost had to collect death death benefits for me. And I broke down in tears, sobbing in my mother's arms like a baby, because I'm a journalist who has covered the intersection of race and power and violence and politics. For a very long time, I felt I understood death in a certain kind of way, but until death comes upon you in a certain a certain fashion. It walks upon you the way it walked up on me. It changed. It changed a lot for me, including a book I was writing on violence at the time. But it changed everything.

Joshua Johnson: 7:30

I mean, you've described yourself as a griot of black survival and death. So what does that mean, bearing that mantle and bearing that burden of being the storyteller that tells the story of black survival and death.

Trymaine Lee: 7:44

Yeah, no, that's a weight that for me, I've always felt like it was my North Star and my mission. I'm here to shine light in dark spaces. I'm here to humanize community. I'm here to amplify and live voices that are often overlooked, and when it comes to reporting on Black Death and survival, I can remember as a very young reporter on the streets of Philadelphia and New Orleans, and I used to have in my desk in my office, I'd have, like, the police scanner over my shoulder, so I would hear certain codes, and I would run out to the scene, and certain codes meant, you know, death or violence or shooting, and I would get out to the crime scene, and I would find a young black man often that looked just like me, like when I'm not at work and I'm in street clothes. We're wearing the same sneakers, we're wearing the same jeans, and it was almost like a Groundhog's Day experience of experience people that look just like it's like dying 1000 deaths over and over again, but it also there were these moments, these tender moments of capturing the last moments of people's lives or their memories of their family, even in that grief, being able to again, I hate that. I have to humanize people, but humanizing black people, especially delivering that humanity for them. And so it's a burden to bear. But also, until my heart attack, I didn't fully understand how I was carrying and packing all of those moments inside of me until it manifested physically. So that violence that I was capturing, and all that death and survival and near misses came down on me in a way that changed me, in a way, in the way I thought about this. Because after my heart attack, my daughter, who was six years old at the time, was asking me, Daddy, what happened? How did it happen? And I tried to explain to her, like the artery situation and some soft plaque broke off in a clot, but the reality to be honest about what was bearing down on my heart was all that black death that I was covering as a reporter, but also a long family history of gun violence that has shaped us in some pretty profound and dramatic ways that I had still been relatively arms length with some of these stories, until I had to reckon with how I almost died early.

Joshua Johnson: 9:55

For you as a journalist, I mean, you're putting this on over and over. Over and over again. But as you lay bare in your book, this is happening to the black community all the time, that the cost of violence and gun violence in America is weighing on people over and over and over again, and it's crushing a community. And one of the things that you said you wrote this book to lay bare the cycles of violence, gun violence in America, and the seeming birthright violence of black people in America. I want to just go into some of that history. Where did it start to continue? When did it starts? Because to me, I'd love to stop these cycles of violence like I want this finished. I want it done, but we need to know where it came from and what we're dealing with. What's the history? So where did it start? Where did it come from? Why do we have these cycles of violence?

Trymaine Lee: 11:32

Yeah, so it's a dynamic, complicated issue that's also kind of simple at its very root. A lot of this is born from anti blackness, and when we go back to the very beginning, and this is one of the parts of the book that I had to end up shrinking a little bit, just because I could have spent the whole, the whole 272 pages speaking of the history of how this country is bound to the our original sin of slavery. But what many people don't understand, because we've all been taught in the same system that enslaved Africans were some natural byproduct of wars that were happening on the continent of Africa, and as labor needs grew, that Europeans just happened to take advantage of that, saying, Hey, you have all these extra people. You know, here we here we are. But in reality, the role of the gun was central. And as I mentioned, you can't untether the trade of humans without engaging the trade in guns. As gun technology was rising across Europe, regional powers were plying African leaders with guns to foment more war, to create more enslaved people. So these two things were bound together. They weren't just a natural byproduct. Slavery was not just some natural byproduct of surplus prisoners. It was the gun that was central to that. And so as black people are being pushed out of Mother Africa, dragged out of Mother Africa, with the muzzle a gun at their backs, here we are arriving in the western world to a system that, you know, it seems romantic now, there were plantations, and there were some good ones and bad ones. We're talking about concentration camps. We're talking about national human trafficking rings. We're talking about the rape and violence and pillage, as bad as we understand it to be, magnify that by 20, 3040, and so even as we're arriving and to maintain the system of slavery, the violence was central right, where white men were required by law, in some places to be armed in order to patrol the plantations. And they call them slave patrols, the earlier, the earliest precursors to the police department. And so the dehumanization that we experienced, and mind you, we think in a spiritual sense, and we think in a psychic sense, we're all bound to this. We're all bound to this. It's not just the rape victim that experiences the pangs of rape. It's the rapist forever bound to that. And so this entire system held together by great violence, requiring the dehumanization of people and the great exploitation of not just the people, but also the land, right? So again, this is all capitalism is also bound, bound within this. And it would also take the gun. And this is whereas this is the dynamics we're talking about here to free enslaved people. A war and rebellion were fought for this. But then, once again, during Reconstruction, after emancipation, where there was this moment where we were building a new nation of not just a new black nation, but American nation, where we upheld some of the promises that were laid out in the foundational documents that was all stripped away. And again, once again, we saw as federal troops left the south right and they let the south return back to its former hierarchy and white society and white supremacists worked to push black people as far back into slavery as they could despite those Reconstruction amendments that gave us birthright citizenship and the right to black men the right to vote, here we are once again with the gun reshaping American society, and so we go on from there, the migration black folks fleeing the Violence of the South to arrive in the north with the hope of opportunities and jobs, and there was some of that, but it was also a different kind of white supremacist primacy going on, a different kind of racism where there wasn't the reliance on black labor the way we saw in the south, but black folks were pushed into slum conditions and with red lines drawn around communities where they couldn't get insurance to live out elsewhere, couldn't buy or sell homes elsewhere. There were deeds of covenants where home sellers and home buyers agreed to never sell to a black person, create and mind you, as you're seeing millions of black people flooding from the south over a few decades, here you are in the north, in what will become the slum and get. Conditions and a policing built around that right. And so in these places where there is disinvestment and there is there is some opportunity, but there's a broad lack of access to quality health care and education and all the things that continue, we see gun violence permeating right. And in a response to the civil rights movement, one of the you know, biggest responses that we don't talk about is the modern gun rights movement, Brown versus Board of Education. 1954 after that moment, you see folks tying the gun industry and gun ownership to protection of freedom and whiteness and so and we start to get into the modern space we are now. And so it begins with the initial trade. It begins with the slavery. It begins in the maintenance of this system, and now we have these Super Lethal tools in the hands of folks who are already scrapping for for hunger and survival.

Joshua Johnson: 16:31

We're going to get into some some of these things what we see in modern today. But I want to know how did your family story intersects with this, and how did it become personal for you within your family, and you're carrying the weight of both the macro of what's happening there, but also in the micro and the personal in your family.

Trymaine Lee: 16:51

So I want to, you know, jump forward and then jump back a little bit. So when I, when I had my heart attack, I was writing a book about the true cost of gun violence in this country. So I thought to myself, You know what? People don't seem to care much about the young man or woman who was shot wherever, because there's some sort of innate criminality, or any kind of mythology we could paint around these folks, and some folks were involved, whatever. But I said, You know what? It's a little cynical, but maybe they'll care that every time a kid is paralyzed, we, the American public, are paying that. They don't often have private insurance, right? Public insurance, we're paying. Insurance were paying for that. There are all these costs of businesses leaving communities that are violent, homeowners deciding to take their money and tax dollars away from communities that they deem violent, let alone the cost of, you know, investigations and the court hearings and incarcerating people. So writing a book called Million Dollar bullets, right? The heart attack happens. My daughter asked me these questions, and I'm grappling with how I arrived at this moment. And I started to think about a bullet and a blood clot or different things, but both have this ability to shake and shatter a life. And so not only did I have to reckon with what I've been carrying, the stories that I've been telling and not fully addressing the trauma that I the secondhand trauma that I was getting from seeing the bodies, dealing with the grieving families and being young. So I'm trying to hang out and I'm drinking and I'm I'm pouring myself more into work. I'm doing everything but fully acknowledging the weight that I was carrying. And then I think about my family's experiences and how growing up, I always knew that my grandfather was murdered in 1976 big family. My mother is one of eight children that my grandparents had, and big, beautiful family with a big, gaping wound in it that has never healed, right? So I always knew about that and how it shaped the way we were raised, where my mother did not let us play with toy guns. She didn't like balloons popping. We were always kind of it was always there, the idea that life can be taken in an instant, violently. But then in my research and talking to family, the very first time my family experienced gun violence was in Jim Crow Georgia in 1922 my great grandparents were tenant farmers in Dodge County, Georgia. My grandmother was just a baby. Her older brother was 12 years old, named Cornelius, and one day he was sent off to run errands on horseback, and he ended up being shot and killed in a neighboring town, which was a sundown town. I always, and I'm, I'm a, you know, history buff. I'm into this to understand where we are now. So I'm into this stuff. I always thought, for some reason, that sundown towns were kind of colloquial, like you just knew they were. There were some bad folks over there who do not want black people there. This place of Fitzgerald in Ben Hill County, Georgia, codified it in the vote. They had all the local white laborers come together and they posted signs. I found newspaper articles talking about how this town posted signs saying tonight is seven o'clock in town square, all the white folks of the town, white men of this town, come in a vote to expel the negroes, and they voted to do just that. He gets shot and killed there. My family soon thereafter joins the great migration, and they first go to Philadelphia and then south Jersey, where I end up being raised. And in 1951 another of my grandmother's brothers was shot and killed, this time by a state trooper and reading the headlines from the newspaper, it's very reminiscent of the Michael Browns of the world, right troopers, gun kills youth. They end up in some struggle over a gun after he was stopped at the car lot where he worked after hours to think then that my great grandparents had lost one son in the rural south, and now they are in New Jersey decades later with a specter of violent. Still on their heels, they lose a second son, and in talking to my uncles and aunts, who are still they were five and six years old when this happened, they're young. They were young. They talk about how stoic my great grandfather was, and the church that they attended was packed with people to pray, and for the first time in that church, my uncle said he saw his grandfather weeping, and they were praying that Jesus would respond right, praying to God. A few weeks after that, this officer was killed in a motorcycle accident. Then after that, in 1976 My grandfather was murdered. My grandparents had an apartment in Camden, New Jersey, and they rented it out to they were wanting it out to a guy. The guy leaves a deposit. Disappears for several weeks. He comes back, want his money back. And my grandfather is like, you know, I'll see you in court. It's not refundable. That man came back and shot and killed my grandfather over $160 in 96 decades later, my stepbrother was shot and killed in Camden, a girl shot in the back of the head, so on and on. My family has carried this psychic burden and how it reshapes the way you raise children. It's not a stolen innocence, but the reality of just how fragile life can be on the edge of a bullet, whether it's a white supremacist in Jim Crow Georgia, whether it's a state trooper in the north, whether it's community violence, a girl shooting and killing my stepbrother time and again, and it's also in telling this story, two things kept coming back. One that I exist. I owe my life to an act of violence, because my grandmother met my grandfather in New Jersey after they joined the migration. And I think about the grandmother that I knew to her end years, she would say, I'm blessed by the best, right? She was a Jesus, loving church, loving woman, sweet as cotton candy, lovely woman. But I didn't realize then, as a boy, as a little boy, that she had to bury two brothers and a husband. I can I still to this day, and we've never had a conversation my grandmother, she was just, she I just, it's hard for me to even get my arms around the burden and grief that she carried silently for all those years.

Joshua Johnson: 22:55

Wow, wow. That brings me back all the way into your acknowledgements at the end of your book, and you're talking about your mother and your mother, your mother speaking identity over you, that you are somebody that you have worth, that you actually are not just somebody that's pushed aside. What does that do to communities, to combat some of this fear and violence and realizing the burden that that would take on a community to say that we're not safe, that there is not a place that we could go, that we live in fear, but to have somebody speak identity into you and living that out. How does that help? Yeah, society combat this violence.

Trymaine Lee: 23:37

That means everything. As we know, you can have good seeds in imperfect soil, and it makes it tough. And if you're not careful, as a black person in America, if you listen to media, and I'm part of it, if you listen to some history, if you listen to politicians, if you look around some of our communities the way some of us are living, the abundance. Abundant lack and the need and the fight at every turn to be seen as full humans and full citizens. If you're not careful, you can pull that within. You can internalize that and think there's something wrong with you, and there ain't nothing wrong with us, but the system and the machines around us. And so when you breathe and talk life and power and agency over a child, for me, when my mother would get down on me every single morning and say I am and I say somebody, I walked out the door as I'm somebody. And to this day, any room I walk into, I know I'm somebody, and it's not because of the awards, is because of the love of my family and love of community. And so I move a little differently, right? I'm an example of my people. I'm among the best of us, and we could all move in that in that space, because there are systems around us and trap doors set for us, including a gun industry that plays on the fear of us, because that's what this is. You need to arm yourself, because at some point somebody might be breaking in. It looks like me, somebody might be coming for your daughter, and they're making money off of that. So certainly there is, there's an esteem issue amongst some of us, and so put in certain positions, you're scraping to survive, right? It doesn't matter, right? You're scraping survive. But I think so this won't solve for everything, because, again, the machine is that as it is. But I think when we feel empowered and we know who we are, we cannot allow especially white supremacists. Everybody who is a racist doesn't believe they're white supremacists, even some of that friends and allies are white supremacists. Right? They believe there's something inherently off with us, and I'm here to say, ain't nothing wrong with us. And so the power of saying I am somebody and I am worthy, right? And I will move accordingly, and I'll make sure I try my best to be the best example for myself and my community, because I love myself and my people, again, that doesn't solve because the issue with gun violence, and the way we're impacted isn't because we hate ourselves, right? Sometimes there is some self loathing that we got from America, right? We were taught that some of us, but I think, I think it helps, because then we can start actively working to untether ourselves and untangle ourselves from some of this madness.

Joshua Johnson: 26:56

A lot of times, people go, Okay, there's this is one act of violence. We got to try to solve this issue downstream to this one act of violence. But as you you look at communities, you're seeing poverty, hunger, sickness, toxic environments, gun violence, mapping onto these same neighborhoods that it is actually a part of it, a system that's holding people into a place where they're receiving violence on multiple levels and multiple things. What do we do? And how do we move upstream and not just try to solve these little issues, but actually, like, what are the toxic things that are really feeding the system that if maybe we could get to those toxic things, maybe the dignity and respect and love for all people might show up.

Trymaine Lee: 27:48

I think, as much as we are shocked by the violence we see in this country and we abhor the violence that gun violence in particular inflicts on us every single day, we have to see the systemic harm that comes long before a bullet is ever fired, also as aberrant violence, right and destructive violence, when you have communities where the only thing they're training young people to do is turn down bed sheets if you're in New Orleans or Memphis, or if your role in this society is to fill a prison cell so that these poor white and black guards can guard you like overseers. You're playing this role in the cog when you see the lack of access to quality water and food, which is one of the biggest obscenities in this country, that we have hungry children, it's an embarrassment and a shame, right, that we have schools who are relying on tax on tax dollars to fund them, but people have been in generations of renting because they can't own home because of their story. They've never been able to accumulate any wealth because we were blocked from accumulating wealth. Right until we address those things, we're always going to see this violence. Because guess what, when you have communities where they are healthy and there are good paychecks, and there are parents, two parents there, who are able to feed and pour into their children without the stress and worry that they're going to lose their life or limb, those people aren't getting shot and they're not shooting and so I think we have to take seriously this notion that there is violence inflicted upon people that do great the great harm. But also, I think we need to all we need to see that we're all connected to this. We're all connected to this, that fear that you have in the suburbs of some encroaching, you know, mob, yeah, because you see those hungry people over there, you see how you know, you see how you know how precarious their lives are. And so I think we need to take the violence seriously, but also that we're all connected in this. And if, if we all could thrive, we shouldn't. We have this deficit base. We have an as we should have an asset based culture and society where we see the value inherently in people, and that we all benefit from that. But as of right now, because of the way our society has been shaped, and I say, in no small part, due to the commodification of people and resources, right? That we see ourselves in this fight alone, and if my family is doing doing well, or my community or my people, we all need to grow together. I think we'd have a healthier, happier community or a society.

Joshua Johnson: 30:10

If I'm looking at the big picture, it feels very daunting, like I feel overwhelmed, like nothing's going to change. But if I look at my at my community, if I look at my neighbors and look at the people around me, there are some things that we can do in our own communities, to to help in this space. What What are steps to to to organize, to get together, to say this community is going to be a community of care and belonging love for all of us. We're going to combat this violence and all the violence, the violence of poverty, the violence of sickness, the violence of these toxic systems. What can we do on a micro level in our communities to help build this grassroots movement that will see some change.

Trymaine Lee: 31:01

I think the first thing is to get rid of this idea that it has to be scaled. I think sometimes when we look at the enormity of the issue and the enormity of the hunger and the enormity of the violence, it gets so big that it does feel like a mountain that we could never traverse. But I think on the micro community level, I. Am a big fan of mentorship, so I'm a member of had been a member of Big Brothers Big Sisters, and I work closely with them. I was just inducted into the Big Brothers Big Sisters Hall of Fame, which is one of the greatest honors of my life outside of journalism. How can we take a young person and pour all of our knowledge and resources and consistency and care into in your community, and this goes beyond race, it's race and class, but specifically young black boys and girls need and I think they benefit when they're someone who looks just like them, who's pouring into them and loves them. But I don't think love has a color, right? So I think we should be pouring into young people in your communities. Is it through scouting? Is it through the school? Is it through the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program? Is there an opportunity to create in your small business an internship or fellowship? Because if we get young people early on right, and they have something that they want to hold on to, something to strive for, something to lose, but they also look around and see that people do love me and care about me, because we don't get that often, right? We don't get that in our communities, especially. Think about young guys, especially young men today, and you see a group of teenagers with the hoodies on, and again, I'm from the 90s, we had fades. Their hair is it's a lot of hair, and it's the hood, it's like, and we lump them into this, this group, and it seems scary. Those boys need love, right? And we're losing so much potential because I've spent time talking something, you'll be amazed at some of them, right? It's like this is and we're losing them, because no one is showing We're all scared of them. The church is scared of them. The business are scared of them. Sometimes their parents are scared that. Sometimes the neighbors are scared of them. But if we can get them young enough to show that, that they are loved. And so I think that's as micro as you can get. But it doesn't take a whole the whole you don't just save the whole city. You know what saving one young person does? That's a family line. That's children who are gonna be raised the same way. That's children who are gonna be loved. Hopefully there's a good paycheck somewhere around the corner for them so they can feed and go go on a vacation, take the kids fishing, go to Martha's Vineyard, do whatever, but we have to start, like with your neighbor or your neighbor's neighbor. You have to start in

Joshua Johnson: 33:24

the community. And what you're talking about is you're talking about a generational mindset, rather than just a a right now mindset that if we Yeah, one, if one child comes up, grows up, you see generations after that that will actually start to flourish, and you're going to see some some growth that we often don't think multiple generations of what's happening over and over. And I think

Trymaine Lee: 33:50

when you when you see huge, especially like you see it all over the world, but I think about like in the Middle East, an olive tree that has been there for 800 years, and people have been eating off that olive tree, right? Or some citrus in California somewhere. When you plant that seed, you might not be around when it finally bears fruit, right? You might not be around, but you plant that seed anyway for the generations to feed all that after you. And so that's the that's the mentality

Joshua Johnson: 34:18

you've also talked about, how your job isn't just to tell stories of death, but also of black joy and resistance. So what does Black joy look like in the face of so much violence today?

Trymaine Lee: 34:30

I think there, and this is can be a nebulous term, but when you see black people who are truly free and that they're not many of us who are truly free, but when you're free to be yourself and chase your goals, and I love when it's manifested in again, I like to fish. So I love some country stuff. I love when I see black folks out here camping and hiking, fishing. I love to see a generation of young people who are traveling together and they're enjoying the world. I think those of us who came up certainly before, you know, I was born in 1978 so I'm like in the 80s and 90s. There were so many precarious times. The war on the end of the Vietnam War is rolling into this in the ripples, and then the drug wars and the war on poverty, and then we were dealing with it felt like you couldn't move right to see young people harnessing their dreams in that way, and moving through the world, how you move through the world, not letting anything stop you, to where you're going to eat, where you're going to go travel, what you're going to do out in the woods. I love that. And because there's a, there's a, you know, a nation building spirit within us, where even when times were tough, because again, we're we see this with this current administration, a dialing back of progress, a dialing back of acknowledging history, a dialing back on freedoms of all kinds of people. And we're no strangers to that. And so in some ways, that black joy comes from when we were coming out of those violent 1920s right? And the bloody summer, the red summer, the red summer, when we're going through the Civil Rights Movement, we were still creating music and memories and culture and artistry and politicians trying to be voices for that. We were still doing that black newspapers were popping up, telling stories, not just of the progress, but also that Miss Johnson had a dinner party, right? Like, how do we. Embody the fullness. And so there are many moments like that when I just I love, especially with with young folks today. I love to see them unafraid to be themselves

Joshua Johnson: 36:27

growing up. I know that's you know, some things were kind of important to you, that you got opportunities for schooling. You got opportunities. You were able to be in the scouts. You're able to play basketball, football. You're being in these communities and teams with mentors and people pouring into you. How did that start to shape the way that you start to think and view and see the world and see black life in America?

Trymaine Lee: 36:55

Yeah. Well, first of all, you read the book. I could tell you read the book. So every everybody doesn't always read a book. So thank you. I really, really, honestly appreciate that in 1990 in seventh grade, I had the privilege and opportunity to go to the Milton Hershey School. And for those who you know aren't familiar, the Milton Hershey School was founded in 1909 by Milton and Katherine Hershey, the chocolate magnates. They couldn't have children of their own. So they started a school for poor white orphans, okay, poor white orphans in Dauphin County, Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was clear they started with like a handful of boys. Over the years, things changed and evolved, and they started admitting people of color and girls. It's the richest school in the country with an $18 billion endowment, but you have to be poor to get into it, right? You have to be needing to get to get into it. And so by the time I got to seventh grade, I'd already been, like, gifted, talented programs, and I was always already writing, and I was already kind of on my way and playing sports. But I was in a household with a stepfather who was battling with addiction. He ended up being incarcerated. There was just a lot going on. My mother, who I to this day, is like my favorite person, like, I love my mother is the kindest, warmest, most loving person in the world. Did everything she could, and in trying to do that, she got me enrolled in the Military School, which changed everything for me. Going to that school, I had all this potential, but things were still kind of in flux. You know, any there were any number of directions in my life could have gone after that, but going to the mount Hershey School, being able to be in the scouting program, they had free clothing, everything. Everything was completely free. It took the burden off my mother, but also I was around a bunch of folks, not everyone, but a bunch of people who truly did care about me, coaches and teachers who saw something in me and nurture that I can remember early on being part of the model airplane club. I'm like, I'm out here, and we were, we've spent our study hall building these huge remote control airplanes, and we'd be in there to a mixed group of kids in there. We're diffuse a lot. And we're like, putting this, it was a and we all flew. When I flew it, it's like, where I would have never when I was a kid, my mother had to work, I would come home by myself. From the time I was probably in second grade, which is hard to imagine, because my daughter's 13, and she can't go out the door by herself, right? But second third grade, I was walking to school by myself. I was coming home as a latchkey kid. Food would be on the oven. I'll be by myself for hours do my homework, right? I would so we so there was no time for sports and all this other stuff, but to be at the Milton Hershey School that freedom we talked about. So I'm arriving there feeling good about myself, and now I have the resources and opportunities, and now there are a bunch of adults. So my family poured a bunch of love into me. Now I'm around other adults who are pouring consistency and academics, and it was just I remember my my English teacher, coach. He was my coach, too. Coach Bueller. I write a, you know, poetry for class, and he had me come into the other class and read it like that kind of confidence. Oh, man, immense. Everything to this day, I owe a debt of gratitude to the Milton Hershey School and and I know what those kids are going through, coming from communities. And it's also half black, well, half white, I should say, half white, have black, Hispanic, Asian. So it's this mixed group of kids coming from all over Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and the country. And the work that they do is just amazing. So I owe such a debt to that school

Joshua Johnson: 40:12

that's beautiful. You know, Tremaine, this book, 1000 ways to die, I think, is just incredibly written. It's a important book that I hope a lot of people read, and we actually then take in the enormity and the cost of what this is after reading this book, and there's I mean for me, either I could become immobilized because it's too much, it's too much to bear, or I could actually just galvanize within my community and say, Hey, enough is enough. Like we're done with this. We're going to stop these cycles of violence. And so I really do hope that people just stay in their community, stop these cycles of violence pour into all people in their communities. So it's a great book. So if you just talk to your readers and the people who pick this up. What hope do you have for this book? What do you want this book to do for the world?

Trymaine Lee: 41:04

I think certainly this book is heavy. We're grappling with the, you know, the serious nature of violence in this in this country and in the community, right, and in historic violence. But it's also about great love, and this is why the violence hurts so. Much, because young people should have the opportunities to grow up in communities filled with love and not violence. Parents shouldn't worry about burying their kids, right? All the potential that we're losing because of violence, all the economic costs that we're willing to pay while an entire industry is getting rich off the bloodshed, right? And these guns never disappear, right? But this is about planting the seeds for that fruit tree to bear fruit right and bear nutrition and sustenance, emotional, spiritual, psychic sustenance for the generation behind us. And so I think as heavy as the book is, it's 1000 ways to die. There are also 1000 ways to live, right, and to pour into each other and love our neighbors, right? And nothing stops a bullet, like a paycheck and love, right, and opportunity. And so I just, I hope that's what folks take away. I think sometimes, you know, this isn't a book that's prescriptive, so I don't have all the answers, but I want to name a thing. I'll put a name on trauma, a name on the violence, right? Put a name on it. Shine a light in that dark spot, so people know what it is that there's nothing inherently wrong with that young man. There is nothing wrong with that young man. This experience is what shapes how he moves through this world. And so we can start disrupt that and show some love. I hope that's what our readers take away.

Joshua Johnson: 42:34

I hope so too. Two really quick questions at the end here. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you

Trymaine Lee: 42:41

give? Oh, man, keep going. Keep going. You got this. There's, you know, there they're going to be some stumbling bucks. It's like I joke with my mother. We say all the time. You know, life of me have been no crystal stairs. So at 21 looking at Hey, man, life ain't, life ain't no crystal stairs, man, but you stick with it, and you got this.

Joshua Johnson: 42:58

That's great. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend the

Trymaine Lee: 43:03

one, the one book that I read about a month ago is called James by Percival Everett. It won a Pulitzer Prize this year. It's a retelling of the story of Huck Finn, right Mark Twain's Huck Finn, where you had N word James in the original book here, put some respect on his name. His name is James. And it gives this interiority of a black man in that time. And you go through some of the same adventures. But it's the agency that we never agency and respect that we never gave N word Jim. His name is James. So I love that book. So I've been telling everybody,

Joshua Johnson: 43:33

read that book. It's so good. It's so good. I love it. Great. Recommendation. 1000 ways to die is out anywhere books are sold. So you could go out and get that Tremaine Is there anywhere you'd like to point people to how could they connect with what you're doing?

Trymaine Lee: 43:46

The one thing I would go to tremainely.com I'll have my tour dates. Everything's up there. I would go to bookshop.org support local, you know, bookstores, black owned bookstores, or just local bookstores, small, small mom and pop shops. They need us. So support them, and that's it. Thank you all very much. I really appreciate

Joshua Johnson: 44:02

it. All right. Tremaine, thank you so much for this conversation. It was illuminating. It was also heavy, knowing the systems that actually produce so much violence in our country in a myriad of ways, but also there is some hope that we could continue to move forward and break these cycles of violence. So thank you so much. It was a fantastic conversation.

Trymaine Lee: 44:23

Joshua, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Unknown: 44:39

You.