Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You
by LUCINDA WILLIAMS
Legendary rock, folk, and country music singer Lucinda Williams has been nominated for 17 Grammy Awards and has won three. She was named “America’s best songwriter” by Time and one of the “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time” by Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, her memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, was published by Crown-Penguin Random House. With the original manuscript written entirely by hand, her book tells many stories about her life, including her youth spent in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with her family. Featuring prominently in the book are her mother, Lucille Fern Day, her stepmother, Rebecca Jordan, and her father, Miller Williams, whose papers reside at the Ransom Center. A poet, editor, critic, and translator, Miller Williams is also remembered as the country’s third inaugural poet. He read “Of History and Hope” at President Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration. “There are many times I was wishing he was with me to help me; to be able to answer questions,” Lucinda said in an interview with Seth Meyers in 2023.
Excerpts from DON’T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU: A MEMOIR by Lucinda Williams, © 2023 by Lucinda Williams. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
I bonded with my father in a way that I might not have if my mother had been more stable, if she’d been more available to me emotionally. When my mother would be really bad off— yelling, screaming, cussing, throwing things at my dad or at the wall—he would take us out to play Putt-Putt or to see a drive-in movie, anything to get us out of the house. He took on the role of what a mother would, in those times. Despite this, I didn’t grow up hating her, or feeling any kind of resentment, because of my dad saying, “It’s not her fault. She’s not well.”
Recently, my sister, Karyn, and I were looking at some old family pictures and out of the blue she brought up a memory of us playing Putt-Putt. I could not believe it. She’s four years younger than me, but she had the exact same memories of playing Putt-Putt with my father. That was a very powerful moment for me.
Much of my music is about my life, so it’s like a story that keeps being lived and told, written and sung. —LUCINDA WILLIAMS
I’m seventy years old and I’m still working through a lot of this. I’ve held back from talking about my childhood over the decades of my life—I’ve written songs about it instead—because I think I came to think of it as normal. “Okay, my mother is freaking out and yelling; my dad is in a bad mood today.” I could tell that everybody was trying. And that seemed normal, the trying.
I still remember one of my favorite photographs of my father and me. I’m about two years old. We’re standing on the front steps of our house, and it looks like we were getting ready to go to church, or we had just come back from church, because he’s got his suit on, and I have a little dress and a little jacket on. It just has such a sweetness and innocence to it. The two of us are just on the front steps together. You can see we had this special bond. I had been so sick, and by the time I was born, my mother’s mental illness had started to rear its ugly head, so my father was taking care of me more and more.
Now that I’ve read a lot of psychology books and been through extensive therapy and self-education on mental illness and dysfunctional families, I realize that I didn’t have any way to recognize or deal with this trauma that happened to me. Kids will end up blaming themselves. All of that energy goes somewhere. You’re the little kid sitting in the locked closet, thinking and feeling, “What did I do that was wrong?” But then my dad was saying, “It’s not her fault, she’s not well, you can’t be angry at your mother.” What was I going to do with all that sadness and confusion and anger?….”
My mother and my father were a good match on the surface of things and in the substance, too. She loved all the arts and was very supportive of my dad’s passion for writing. Around 1961, we were living in Baton Rouge and my father was selling refrigerators at Sears, Roebuck, while trying to find teaching jobs in science. But what he really wanted to do was write. One night my mother and father went to a reading by the poet John Ciardi, who had done a famous translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy among other things.
After the reading there was a reception that they were not invited to, but people were too polite to kick them out. My mother went up to Mr. Ciardi and shook his hand and in the spur of the moment she said, “There is another great poet in this room tonight and you didn’t even know it? He said, “Who is it? How could I not have known?” And she said, “His name is Miller Williams. He’s my husband.” My father was embarrassed by my mother’s forwardness, but Mr. Ciardi asked my father to send him a few poems. Then a month later, after my dad had not yet sent them, John Ciardi sent him a letter saying, “Dear Mr. Williams, You were going to send me some poems —P.S. Tell your wife I like her way of going.” This would prove to be a major turning point in my father’s life as a writer. John became a mentor to my father and one of his lifelong best friends. I think I inherited some of my mother’s fortitude that was on display in her willingness to go right up to Mr. Ciardi.
Lucinda Williams’s discography includes 15 studio albums, one live album, two video albums, and 25 singles. In 2014, she released the album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, on her label, Highway 20 Records. The album and lead track were inspired by her father’s poem, “Compassion.”
About the Miller Williams Papers at the Ransom Center
The Miller Williams papers include correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, proofs, diaries, clippings, and printed material belonging to the American poet, translator, editor, and teacher Miller Williams. In 2009, Williams received the Porter Fund Literary Prize Lifetime Achievement Award, among many others during his lifetime.
Compassion
by Miller Williams
Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.
© Miller Williams