How being Black in America almost killed me

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee was in the middle of writing his first book when the unthinkable happened. At 38, a massive heart attack nearly took his life. That near-death experience forced him to reckon with the toll his reporting has taken on his life, including the years he’s spent chronicling gun violence involving Black men in America, as well as his own family’s history marred by slavery, lynching, and even murder.

“What I was feeling was death,” Lee says of his heart attack. “And that moment changed the book certainly, changed my life, but changed the way I view the violence that I had been writing about. I had been writing about bullets. But this blood clot in my heart was just as violent.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Lee sits down with host Al Letson for part 1 of a very personal conversation about the moment Lee thought he might be dying, the many challenges of being a Black journalist in America, and how his brush with death redirected the focus of his new book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America.

This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: So this is your first book. I should say that as a journalist, you’ve been on this beat for a while. Obviously we know each other. I’ve been following your work for a minute, so how did it turn into this book?

Trymaine Lee: No. The earliest seeds of this book were planted when I was just an intern at the Philadelphia Daily News in 2003. I was covering a case of a young brother who was 17, 18 years old, and he got shot in the back of the neck during a robbery. So some other guys tried to rob him for his Allen Iverson jersey. They ended up shooting him and he ended up being paralyzed. And I found my way into the hospital and this brother, despite being a quadriplegic, he couldn’t feel anything from the neck down, was so hopeful and so optimistic, and he told me that he had dreams about walking again and he’s like this hopeful bright light in the midst of what was clearly like a very dark moment for him and his family. But as he’s talking, I looked across his bed and I see his mother there, her eyes welling with tears and both realized that he would never walk again. And then she started to tell the story of what it would take to get him home. She said, “We need a new ramp. We need an ambulance, a van. We need a wheelchair. We need new outlets.” And they’re just a poor family from North Philly. And this idea of the great cost. Obviously he lost his mobility, he lost a certain kind of future, but also there was this financial cost.

And so I started to think about this idea of nobody cares about that young brother or young brothers like him, but maybe you care that every time a bullet hits flesh, we’re all paying a price somehow some way in a literal dollar amount. And so I had this idea that I was calling Million Dollar Bullets, and so I had Million Dollar Bullets in my head and I pitched it. Everywhere I worked I was trying to pitch this story and I just couldn’t get it done. Until many years later in 2015, a book agent had approached me and said, “Listen, if there’s ever anything you want to do, come talk to me.” And so I pitched the idea and then it just made sense. The timing was right. It was right after Trayvon and Michael Brown, and so we were grappling with how violence is heaped upon young black men in particular, and there was all this gun violence and Freddie Gray, all this stuff was happening and it just felt like it was the right time. Now the book changed dramatically from those early seeds, but that was the beginning.

I’m listening to it to the way you describe it, and it broke my heart. Literally we’re in this interview and I’m trying to piece my heart back together because it is just so sad to me that we as journalists have to think about angles to make people have empathy for, in this case specifically for young black people. We have to think of an angle and say to you, well, this bullet economically costs you money and maybe you will care more about the economics of this bullet and want to stop this stuff because clearly you don’t care about the people that are being impacted.

That’s right. This idea … And you and I both know this well, the gut-wrenching exercise of humanizing our people, humanizing our people. Finding ways where other people, white people, white society might connect, might have some compassion for the violence that we experience every day, the literal violence, but also the systemic violence that keeps this whole thing together. It’s a terrible dance we have to do, but we have to do that because things are as they are, not as we want them to be.

Right. Absolutely. That’s the work itself. It is what it is. And for people called to do it, that’s just the burden you have to carry. But still sometimes you just pull back a little bit and it’s like, “Wow. I have to make an economic case in order for this to matter to the general public.” Which is just wild to me. So you’re putting this book together, it’s your passion project and you’ve been working hard on it, and right after you turned in your first draft, life took a turn that you just did not see.

At the age of 38, I had a heart attack eight years ago this past July, and it was one of those moments where in the midst of it actually happening, I wasn’t clear it was a heart attack, but I was clear my life felt like it was ending in that moment. For a few days, walking to the train … I live in New York and I was walking to the train and I feel a little pressure in my chest and I thought it was one of those times where I was just a little more out of shape than normal. I’m a former athlete and I usually stay in shape, but it was one of those times where I had been out the gym for a while, and so I didn’t think much of it.

And then the day of the heart attack earlier that day, I went to have coffee with a friend of mine at work and I walked down the steps to meet her and I felt like I was going to pass out. And so I said, “I’m going to go to the clinic at 30 Rock at NBC just to get checked out.” And so I go in there and they listen to my heart and they put a little EKG thing on me and they said, “You know what, the left side of your heart is a little enlarged. At some point you should go see someone. A cardiologist. But it’s not like you’re going to go home tonight and drop dead.” Verbatim.

Wow.

I’m not going to drop dead. Then later that night I go home and my wife was cleaning the bedroom and so I was on the sofa sleeping and she woke me up and I went to the bedroom three minutes after I laid down this enormous pressure in my chest. The world was spinning, cold sweat, nausea. It felt like my entire body was breaking down, and in fact what I was feeling was death. I had a blood clot in my left anterior descending artery that was starving my heart. And that moment changed the book certainly, changed my life, but changed the way I viewed the violence that I had been writing about. I had been writing about bullets, but this blood clot lodged in my heart, lodged in my artery was just as violent.

Before we go to the book, can you just talk to me about the weight of the heart attack and how it played out with your family. I just want to hear about the personal journey through that. So we’re at that age where … I was talking to a friend of mine recently and I was like, “We’re at that age where if you have kids, they’re still needing your guidance. If you have parents, they now need your guidance. Work is crazy, the economy is going nuts, you’re feeling crunched and you’re just trying to get through the best you can, and then something like this happens.” I’m sure it has to change your perspective about life.

It sounds cliche to think that in that moment I was thinking about everything that I would miss. My daughter, who was six years old at the time, was this beautiful little inquisitive girl who is like my buddy to this day. She’s turning 13 this summer and to think about not …

Yeah, man. Take your time.

To think about not being able to walk her to school. The science project. She wants to be a journalist like us. So talking about the five W’s and having little conversations with her and seeing that she’s beginning to piece an understanding together and that I would miss that. It brought me to my knees in so many ways, but it also coming out of that, that I did survive, that I did live, it was an opportunity to live more fully and more honestly. And so in the beginning it was like, “You know what, let me get physically right because it’s going to take more than that to get me.” Definitely going to have to hawk me down.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

I’ve been through enough. I said, “You know what, I’m getting on this bike.” I started to meditate. I started to really be just mindful. But it also forced me to engage with a weight that I had not fully unpacked that I was carrying because my six-year-old daughter was asking me tough questions. How and why? And with no family history, no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol I had the misfortune of some soft plaque just breaking off and the clot filled this place. But there was another weight on my heart that I had never fully engaged with. As a journalist for my entire career operating on the edge of death and survival, black death and survival in particular, and a family history packed with early death and violence I had to engage with that in a way that I had never expected to fully. And so again, re-engaging with how I’m living, the idea idea of mortality also though.

There was a moment was freeing in a way that though every night for years I went to sleep not knowing if I would wake up. And that was scary a little bit because it was like I started traveling again for work and I was like, “I don’t want to die in this hotel room.” Or if my wife had to go to work, I don’t want to die, my daughter comes in the room and finds me. That was one side. But the other side was this clarity that we know tomorrow’s not promised, but it truly is not promised. So how are we going to live? After that wave of a few years, I can honestly say that I haven’t experienced stress in the way I understood it before. I ain’t worried about nothing now. I’m really truly not. Come on now. So I feel free of some way where it’s like, man, it’s going to come at some point hopefully far down the road, so I’m going to do everything I want to do. Man, I’ll be fishing every chance I get. I’m chilling. I’m going to Martha’s Vineyard right now. Last year was my first year. I ain’t grow up with nobody going to Martha’s Vineyard. Give me the finger sandwiches.

You going do it.

How you pronounce this? Let me get some of that please. So as scary as things have been, honestly, there is a freedom, and I think in the reshaping of my life and the reshaping of my understanding of life and death and the reshaping of the book, there is something … I think clarity is the word. There’s a clarity now, man. With the story I was trying to tell in my life.

A filmmaker that I know has a movie. It’s a movie, but it’s like four hours long. It was on PBS. But the title of the movie, it was based off an African proverb That was, you never know how alive you are until there’s a lion in the room.

That’s right.

When I go through stuff … Recently, one of my kids was really sick and it was really scary and he was in the hospital for almost four months. And that saying, I felt it. I felt it so deep. I understood it before, but when you are sitting in the room and you feel like death is on the other side you know there’s a lion in this room, and I got to squeeze life and get everything I possibly can out of it because we are not promised tomorrow. It is like you could walk outside now and it all be gone, or the people you love be gone and what did you do in the meantime?

And we are not promised the nightfall. We are not promised that.

No. So one more question about the family stuff. How did you explain this to your daughter? Because six is that age where they are beginning to understand life, but I don’t know if they truly have an understanding of death at that part. They understand life in the terms of life is good, mom and dad are here, we get to have fun, we do this, we do that. A little bit of sense of self maybe, but the idea that it could all go away is so foreign at that age.

Well, two things. I think one, I don’t think most adults understand mortality because we don’t live as if it’s going to end. We don’t. And even when you have a proximity or a proximal relationship to death, you’ve experienced it through people and that’s a certain kind of pain of that loss. It’s hard for us to understand that we might not be here one day. That’s harder to fully conceptualize. And before I get to my daughter, I want to say one thing that was a moment. So the whole time … I just want to backtrack a little bit.

Yeah. Please.

So the heart attack happens and for about 10 minutes it feels like I’m separating from my physical form. This crazy … I can’t even explain how it felt, but I’m separating myself. And then it passes. Then the ambulance comes, the MTs, they take my vitals, they say, “Everything looks pretty good to us. Do you want to go to the hospital?” And I said, “My daughter has camp in the morning.” And this is how men … This how we … I said, “My daughter has camp in the morning. My wife has a trip. I’ll wait into the morning to get to the hospital. I don’t want to inconvenience my family. You’ve been in the hospital. I don’t want to have my baby in the hospital and my wife.” And so all night long I’m tossing and turning on the sofa with a 98% blockage in the main artery giving my heart blood.The next day we dropped my daughter off at camp and I go into urgent care. I don’t know why I’m going to urgent care, but I’m doubled over across the street. Bro, I tell them what’s going on. They said, “Yo, go to the emergency room now. What are you doing here? Get there.” So we get there and they’re still like, “You look so young.” They’re not sure what’s going on. After seven or eight hours, they finally take a blood test and find troponin, which is a compound or protein that’s released if you have heart damage. They said, “We think you might’ve had a heart attack. We’re going to prep you for the cath lab tomorrow.” So mind you, I still haven’t gotten in the cath lab yet. So they’re like tomorrow. And then fortunately my cardiologist, who is my cardiologist today said, “You know what, let’s get you in there now.” And so I’m on the table, there’s a big screen over my shoulder and they’re threading whatever it is through my wrist in the vein. And he’s tooling around in there and he pulls it out. He said, “You are a very lucky man.” He said, “You almost had a complete blockage. I put two stents in there to clear it.” And he said, “Where’s your wife? Let’s go talk to her.”

And in that moment I started to smile because I was like, “Yo, your boy was almost out here.” I was so happy because I had had a heart attack. I survived it though. So I’m actually feeling pretty good, literally dodged one. But then the next day … And there’s another one of those moments that I get choked up thinking about, it’s my wife, my brother, my sister, my mother, and we’re all in the room. And I made a joke to my wife. I said, “Man, you almost became a thousandaire.” And then I was like, she almost had to collect death benefits from me, and I broke down sobbing like a baby in my mother’s arms because the reality was, again, all of that crashing down on you, how close of a call that really was. And then my family would have to collect benefits on me.

So I’m in the midst of all that, and I still have this precious, beautiful little girl, this little smart little girl who she had been watching me in Ferguson, Missouri. She had been watching me in Baltimore. So she’s attuned and we have real honest conversations, as honest as you can possibly be with a six-year-old. And I was trying to explain that what happened to daddy’s artery is like a pipe with some gunk got stopped up and it almost stopped my heart. And that wasn’t good enough for her. Because she was already starting to ask about God. She started to ask about Jesus and religion a little bit.

And I’m trying to be honest, like baby, I don’t know. I don’t know. Here’s the story. Here’s the thing, and we’re tapping into something bigger than ourselves, and I’m trying to … But with this, it really forced me to acknowledge what was bearing down in my heart. The stress of telling these stories of black life and death and survival and the spectacle of death. But also a family history going back a very long time to realize what we’ve inherited. But we never fully process as a young journalist running and gunning and hanging out and drinking. And when I was single, we’re dating and we’re moving around and we’re hitting the deadlines. And then after that we’re hanging out. Never fully engaging what it means to carry this specific kind of weight that black people in this country have had to bear. The violence certainly of the bullet, but the systemic violence that is necessary, that is a requisite for these ecosystems in which we experienced that other violence to actually occur. And so it blew my mind in that like, yo, what almost killed me was being black in America and that changed everything.

I think as we turn to talk a little bit more about the book, that being a black journalist, especially in the time that you’re talking about in the time of Ferguson, in the time of Trayvon Martin, that reporting on it carried a weight for black journalists that I don’t think we talk about enough. I don’t even think we really acknowledge it. Because here’s the thing about acknowledging that working in journalism is that as a black journalist, this is just the truth. You have to be better. You can’t talk about you’re having trauma about this or that or the other thing. You have to just do the job because you talk about that type of stuff you’re not going to get work, you’re not going to get the jobs.

You’re not going to be able to keep doing the reporting that you feel is important because nobody does this type of reporting because they want to. We do it because we’re called to do it because we see Mike Brown and we see ourselves, we see our cousins, we see our brothers, our sisters, all of that. When I see Breonna Taylor, Breonna Taylor looks like she could belong in my family. So for me, it’s like I got to tell that story because if I don’t, who will? So you’re drawn to it, but you also experience the trauma of it in a way that you can’t talk about really, except with other black journalists. And then we tend to not talk about it publicly because again, we want to get the job.

I remember as a very young journalist, there was the Jayson Blair case, Jayson Blair, young black journalist from New York Times, who was perhaps one of the most fabulous plagiarists of all time back. He was saying he was in Oklahoma-

Talk about setback.

He was saying he was in Oklahoma and was in the sports department and it was just a mess. And there was this ripple effect I remember, a chilling effect of what it means to be black. Now are they going to see us like that? And other people saying the kinds of jobs that we were taking, some people didn’t want the so-called ghetto beat, which meant you were covering urban affairs and black life in cities. But I think for some of us, that’s the reason why we’re doing this, is to not just shine light in dark spaces to remind the world of who we are and tell our story because no one loves us but us. And that’s the bottom line. No one cares about us. We’re still grappling with the negro problem in this country. And so the weight that comes with of navigating these white newsrooms, it’s like the plantation. And every day we have to walk into the big house with our nice clothes paid for by the plantation and convince them that what’s happening in the back corner of the plantation matters. That every day when it rains people are getting sick because stuck in the mud and every day it can’t get the kids to school because the school, they got the hole in the roof because y’all haven’t … And they’re like, “Hmm, I know some black people back there, and I don’t know if that’s true.”And then you got to go back to the plantation and they’re like, “Man, you’re looking real clean. I see you in the big house. Look like you eating well.” And you’re like, “Yeah, my grandma and them from around here. Y’all know me.” I’m trying to tell them. So this dynamic.

It is not just the dynamic of having to code switch and leave a part of you behind to go into this space and specifically be able to advocate for the stories that you’re trying to tell outside the space, it’s also coming to the space and them looking at you like … I don’t know.

I don’t know. And you’re right, we haven’t fully talked about it. And all of us who as black journalists who tell these stories, who are mission-driven, who are purpose-driven, who our North star is telling the whole truth about how we experienced this country, there is also this assumption or this perceived bias. Because we understand the experience so well there has to be a bias. We have to have some jaundice vision because we see it too clearly. And so you have to be so good. You have to be so sharp, and you can’t make any mistakes because you will find yourself without a job. No. It’s a lot, man. But especially then, because there was this emotional heat of the moment, but there was also this fire. So we’re engaging with America tearing at its threads and what it means to value black life. And people say, enough is enough. And how do we cover that through the mainstream lens has never been easy. And I’m not sure we figured out a way to do it, except for to go out there time and the game and tell the truth.

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