Poured Over: Anna Malaika Tubbs on The Three Mothers

“This is not just for us to say, ‘How interesting’ now we know three more people, it’s for us to say, ‘What can we do now that we know their stories?’” Anna Malaika Tubbs delves into the stories of Alberta King, Louise Little and Berdis Baldwin in our January Nonfiction Pick, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. Anna joins us on the show to talk about the importance of reclaiming Black women’s stories, motherhood and the lives women lead before they have children, the moments of joy she found writing this book, and much more. Featured Books: The Three Mothers by Anna Malaika Tubbs, Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, and In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens by Alice Walker.

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts.

From this episode:

B&N: How did this book start for you?

Anna Malaika Tubbs: I could go all the way back and talk about my own mom and her power and presence and her telling me the importance of mothers in our society and the treatment of mothers being a gauge for how that society will do, etc. But I won’t get into that too much. I’ll fast forward and say that when I started my PhD at the University of Cambridge, I was really inspired by other scholars who were correcting the ratio of black women and the ratio of their contributions and the ratio of them and our stories, specifically, two very important scholars, Margot Lee Shetterly, and her book, Hidden Figures, which became, of course, this blockbuster–the book itself and the research that she did to reclaim these narratives and make sure that the truth was being told about the brains behind NASA and Black women, and making it very clear that it wasn’t a mistake, that their contributions had been erased, but that it was an intentional erasure, because it didn’t necessarily fit. What we typically say are the leaders of our story and the heroes of our stories, and how that reclamation of that story changed everything, not only our understanding of these women, but of our entire country and our history. And I left that book feeling so inspired and infuriated and wanting to be someone who did something very similar. The second book that was really empowering for me was The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. And the claim that she’s making: that without understanding this crucial part of Black American history, you don’t understand American history…So I wanted to do something that was similar to both of these books. And I chose to focus on motherhood and this role that I believe is overlooked and unappreciated in our society, while also correcting the erasure of black women’s stories and using a hook that I thought would bring a lot more people to the story, which was, of course, Malcolm X. MLK, Jr. James Baldwin, we seem to never tire of books about them. But this way, I could add a new layer to it. And everyone would walk away knowing more Black women’s names.

B&N: You really had to do a lot of digging in first person source material.

Anna Malaika Tubbs: Yeah, absolutely. There was so much complication surrounding this project. Because while I was inspired by these two books that I mentioned, I had the challenge of not being able to interview the women who I was writing about. And I also only had records that were mainly kept by men. So even you know, that stack of books that you’re referencing, they’re written almost entirely by men. And so that perspective of even though small bits and pieces if the mothers are mentioned at all, they’re likely taken out of context or misinterpreted. So for example, with Louise Little, before my book, there wasn’t much out there about her. But if there was something it was completely inaccurate; it was said that she had quote, unquote, gone crazy, and how sad it was that she went crazy was institutionalized, and therefore her children were taken away from her. So even that kind of, quote, unquote, fact I had to investigate and say, from my perspective, as a Black woman, as a mother, I feel like there’s a little bit more to this story, and I need to figure out what that is. And in order to do that, I had to go to scholars who were experts in the men, I had to reach out to local historians and the various places where the women lived. I had to try to find birth certificates, land seeds, death certificates not only for the women, but for their family members. There were so many holes that I had to fill and kind of correct the narrative