Grady Hendrix
speaker
39 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Grady Hendrix’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It was a doctor I've known for a long time, and she was telling me about her OB rotations in the 90s and, you know, really harrowing stories, the kind of, you know, war stories that just left my jaw on the floor. And at the end of our interview, she said something that really stuck with me. She said, you know, I've been in the room for... I don't know, close to 90 live births.
And she said in every single one of them is a goddamn miracle. Something happens there that we don't have words for. And that really stuck with me and was kind of what I wanted to capture. Yes, it's horrifying. Yes, it's painful. Yes, it's intense. But this is everything. You know what I mean? This is where we all start. You know, there are two people in a room and then there are three.
Yeah, so I'm from Charleston, South Carolina. I've done some research down in the Sea Islands. I helped someone write a book many years ago that had some hoodoo in it. And I just kept researching because it was this amazing tradition. You know, voodoo and hoodoo often get confused, but they're very different.
I mean, voodoo has gods involved and the loa, and hoodoo is very much about medicine and root work and charms and healing. And and so it was this tradition that I worry is going to get lost. And it's a really intense part of sort of that Sea Island, you know, South Carolina going into Georgia tradition. It's so regional and so of those islands.
It was a form of resistance. You know, Dr. Buzzard, who was a really famous root doctor, he would, when someone's son got drafted, he would mix up a tea for them and have them drink it. And what people figured later is the tea had gunpowder in it that would give them some cardiac arrhythmia.
And so they'd go into their physicals and flunk their physicals and not be sent to usually Vietnam or Korea. So, you know, there was this really amazing other element to it where there was a really real world political edge to it.
Oh, I mean, I think that's something that haunts a lot of these women for the rest of their lives. You know, reading Ann Fessler's book, talking to a few people, you know, you're a kid. You can barely make decisions about what to wear. And suddenly you're being told you need to sign these papers and you have no choice. And these girls were not told their options.
They were not told, you know, their legal rights. And I think a lot of them, I mean, I know a lot of them are haunted by guilt for the rest of their lives. And I've seen people reunite with their kids after being sent to a maternity home. And it's incredible. It is really incredible. The healing that's there and how something feels completed is mind-blowing.
And I've seen, on the other hand, women who never saw their kids again. You know, it didn't necessarily ruin their lives, but it was always a shadow that hung over them for decades. And the fact that we did this on such a wholesale level as a society, and like you said, what made my jaw drop was how much we hated these girls.
I mean, newspaper editorials about how Alcatraz should be turned into a home for unwed mothers, newspaper columnists calling these girls sick and unnatural, and no consequences for the men. I read a lot of books of resources. I found one. Social Worker Manual, a handbook from 1974 that mentions unwed fathers in one sentence. And that's it.
You know, it's funny. I thought about this a lot, right? I write horror novels. I mean, I write entertainment. And in writing this, I was like, well, who are my bad guys? Who are my bad guys? Like, well, it can't be the witches. I mean, the witches are scary, but the witches are also offering knowledge and liberation. And then I thought, well, is it the people running the homes?
And I thought, no, you know, the people running the homes were really convinced they were doing what was best for these girls. Is it the girl who's got pregnant? No, of course it's not these girls who got pregnant. Some of them were date raped. Some of them were molested. Some of them just didn't even know what birth control was or have access to it.
It's one of those stories where there isn't a villain. There are just a lot of people who were really convinced that they were right. And That conviction did so much damage to so many millions of people.
Yeah, I mean, I think we're all told as teenagers, even as adults to some extent, here's the path. Follow the path and everything will be fine. You won't have to worry about anything. And I think most of us know that that's just not true. And then I looked at these witches who were sort of the counterpoint to that. And what really inspired my witches was less...
sort of Wicca or paganism and much more. I sort of found the voice of the witches in political action literature of the late 60s and early 70s, which was a group known as Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, all these groups that said, we are at war with the mainstream because the mainstream is leading us down a path of destruction.
And all these groups have these same internal debates, you know, Is violence justified? How far can we push things? If we're at war with the mainstream society, what does that look like? What are we allowed to do? And I think it's one thing to say, hey, I'm going off to join the Liberation Army.
I think it's another thing to say, I'm never going home again, and I will live under an assumed name, and I will be on the run for the rest of my life. You know, it's scary. So, I mean, I think these girls are presented with two... choices, and one looks very scary, and the other looks very safe, and they're both equally dangerous.
man, they're everywhere. You know, I mean, the world is, one of the reasons I write horror is because it's about the world around us. It's not about space or another planet or a fantasy world or the far future. It's usually about the here and now and people around us. And good God, there's so many stories, you know, if you're just willing to listen.
And then once you add in that, like, you can make it not boring by throwing in a vampire or some witches or a werewolf or two, I mean, I wish I could keep up with how many books I want to write.
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