Episode 36: Melinda Doolittle: Listen, Wait, Respond
Transcript
Patsy: Hi, I’m Patsy Clairmont, and I’m a Boomer.
Andrew: And I’m Andrew Greer, and I’m a Millennial.
Patsy: And you are listening to Bridges.
Andrew: Spiritual Connections Through Generational Conversations
Patsy: Season Two is brought to you by Food for the Hungry.
Andrew: Meeting the physical and spiritual needs of people all around the world for over 50 years.
Patsy: Andrew, you’re gonna be excited because we’ve got a guest today that’s been on American Idol and made it way up toward the top, and she is on the top of my favorite people list because she’s got such a great heart. She’s a person who is gifted at building bridges of all kinds, and her name is Melinda Doolittle.
Andrew: Melinda is a wonderful friend of ours. I’m so grateful that she agreed to come by today. She communicates in so many different ways and beautiful ways, and she’s helping us find our own path in communicating in the conversations that we’re having culturally around race relations.
And we’re super excited to have her help steward these conversations with us because this month of February is Black History Month here in America, and we are going to be highlighting some of our favorite black voices, like Melinda’s, and just having an opportunity, a space, and as you often say, a space of grace, where we can come to the table together, seek understanding with each other, and hopefully turn out the other side with a little bit more…
Patsy: Finesse and thoughtfulness and love and relationship.
Patsy: Now, we cannot introduce ourselves and not talk about a bridge. So I have a bridge for you today, and it’s one you’ve traversed a number of times I’m sure and that’s the Korean Veterans Memorial Bridge in downtown Nashville. It connects two areas, a very diverse area and an area that isn’t as diverse, and there is a bridge there bringing things together. And that’s always the goal with a bridge. You’ve got one thing over here, another over there — how do we come together on the bridge? And we have brought in the perfect guest to help us bridge this conversation of not only diversity but unity.
Andrew: Melinda Doolittle. She is here with us today. Of course, she’s a friend of both of ours. We’ve both known you for a long time and have a lot of mutual friends, so you bring a lot of people together, but you also bring a lot of audiences together with your music of course. Many people will have first connected with you through the great conglomerate of American Idol but have continued with you through the years as you’ve continued singing but also sharing various messages.
I think of you as a communicator more than just a singer. I hope that’s okay.
Melinda: My day is made. That is literally the best thing you could’ve ever said to me, so thank you.
Andrew: Finally not just a singer in the seat, huh?
Melinda: I know. No, it just means the world to me, so hello, hi, thank you for having me. I am just overjoyed to see both of your faces right now. You guys represent just happiness for me, so thank you for having me.
Patsy: Well, you are such a joy to be with. I’ve been looking forward to this, and I know what you bring to the experience of interaction with other people, and I thank you for your deliberate heart for people, that you embrace them and you do so in many different ways. Not only are you an excellent communicator and a beautiful singer and an actor; you’re a comedian for heaven’s sakes. You are funny. You don’t even try and you’re funny.
Melinda: I just like to laugh. I just feel like we would get a lot farther in this life if we were able to see the humor in it, and so there are just so many things that happen in life. My mom has always been like, “Find the good. Find the good.” And for me that means find the funny. It’s just like find the joy in whatever you’re going through, and sometimes it’s a shared experience, a shared story. Whatever it is, we’re all going through it, and we just need to laugh just a little bit to get to the other side. That’s what gets me through.
“We would get a lot farther in this life if we were able to see the humor in it.”
Patsy: Well, we were talking about the difference in ages coming together, and we knew that you have quite an exceptional relationship with your mom.
Melinda: I do. My mother, it has been the two of us growing up my entire life. She and my dad were divorced before I was 1, and so it has literally been me and my mommy. They called her Doolittle, and I was Little Doo. I was always on her heels.
About four years ago, she moved in with me here in Franklin, and so we live together now.
Andrew: How’s that going?
Melinda: That is an experience.
Andrew: Are you laughing?
Melinda: I am finding the joy. How do I say that well? We still love each other, so that’s a step. We’re just learning… When she moved in four years ago, I was on the road most of the year, so just gone. And now we’ve had an entire pandemic, and we’ve been together so much.
Patsy: You should talk to my son. He would so get this conversation.
Andrew: A hundred percent.
Melinda: And she is an extrovert, so much so, and I am quite the introvert, so we’ve had to kind of… We’ve made up what I call Dark Days, which is Wednesdays, which means don’t talk. It’s all love, but in order for me to have the capacity for the rest of the week, I need one day where we don’t speak. And so like she’ll see me in the hallway and kind of do a head nod, and that’s it. Let’s not try. Not today.
Patsy: Maybe you shouldn’t talk to my son.
Andrew: She’s like, no dark days in the Clairmont house.
Melinda: It’s just one day though.
Patsy: One day I can do.
Andrew: There’s an element of love and understanding, right. I was thinking, I’m an introvert, though probably a lot of people think you’re extrovert like a lot of people think I’m an extrovert.
Melinda: They do.
Andrew: But I do recharge alone or in quiet. Well, I remember growing up with my parents. My mom would typically take us to school, and my brothers are older, so they were already out of the house when I was still needing to be driven to school and stuff. We would get up separate sides of the house in the morning, do our thing, meet at the breakfast table, maybe a peace sign, thumbs up, eat a little bit in the company of each other, go back, brush teeth, get in the car, drive. The first words she would say to me is when I was getting out at school: “Alright, love you. See you later.” I loved it.
Melinda: That’s beautiful.
Andrew: Isn’t it? And we were happy. We weren’t disturbed at each other.
My dad, he’d occasionally have to take me to school. He’d be singing while he was washing his hair from the other side of the house. He’d be like, “Hey Andrew, what’s going on at school today? How do you feel about your friends at school?”
Melinda: Oh dear, no.
Andrew: Oh dear is exactly right. But there is love and understanding, and he understood my need, I understood his need. So how have you all maneuvered the space together, when you’re under one roof, to gain more ground of understanding while being so close in proximity?
Melinda: I think, for us, we like to prefer the other. We’ve just had to have some kind of harder conversations on just, okay, what is it that you need to feel fulfilled in your week? What do you need? And she’s like, “I just want to be able to have a conversation and maybe watch a TV show together. If we could do that once a week, I’d feel better about it.” And then I said, “If I could have a dark day once a week.”
And so we basically have our days each week where we know we are just preferring the other. Like this is her extrovert day. She leaves her bedroom door open. Every time I pass it, she’s ready for a conversation. Only the one time did she find me crawling past her room, just trying to get to my coffee prior to the conversation. I just needed to get one cup of coffee in me. But outside of that, we worked really hard to just be like what is that you need from me, and I can give you that.
Patsy: Well, see, that’s building bridges, if ever I heard it. Generational bridges to bring us together because a lot of times it isn’t that she wants so much, and she’s willing to take much less than would be her nature just to make it work for both sides, as are you. So I think that’s great when you can come together in mind and heart like that.
Melinda: It’s pretty awesome.
Andrew: Yeah, and if you can culture it in this microcosm, right. In each of our houses, if we can culture that, of saying, “What do you need?” and us each inching a little bit toward that way.
What if we zoomed out? Do you think that’s possible culturally? With all the differences in the world and all the different needs in the world, how do we ask what do you need and do that in a way that works?
Melinda: I mean, here’s the deal. I hope it’s possible. I’m one of those people that lives on the edge of hope. I believe that anything can happen, and I believe that we’re capable human beings. We would just have to want it. That is the thing. Mom and I are both very, very capable of preferring the other, and once we had the conversation, we realized if I know that you’re going to give me a dark day, I can actually give you what you need. If I know that there’s some give and take and we’re doing this together.
And as humans, we’re all capable of it. I just think kind of recently we’ve kind of been about ourselves more than we are about like, well, what can I do for you? If I can do this for you, then there’s space for this to also happen. And we don’t have to agree on everything for that to happen, like none of that has to happen. We just are making space for each other, and there’s room for us all.
I don’t know how we start. I think that’s my thing. Do you guys know Carlos Whittaker? He is a dear friend of mine and a hope dealer, as he calls himself, and I love that because I try to call myself joy dealer. And so I’m like when joy and hope come together, we can do this. And there’s this corner of the internet that I think he and I have both found where conversations can happen and people are willing to understand each other.
I just had a conversation on my Facebook page about Betty White passing away, and I posted about it, and this person made a post like, “How dare you say that?”
Andrew: Because in the post, you said, “Rest well.”
Melinda: I said, “Rest well.” And the person was like, “Rest well? Why would you say that? Why would you say it like that? I don’t like what this implies.” And so I was very confused because I was like, I posted a picture and two words. Not sure how we got this reaction. How is this a thing? So I, at first, was a little upset with his response, and so I made myself wait before I responded.
Patsy: That’s a good bridge-building technique.
Melinda: Maybe wait. I did have to wait and then think like how would I want to be approached in this situation, and so I was just like, “I’m not sure why you would be upset with these words, but my meaning was this.” And I explained, “She’s worked so hard. I would love for her to rest well. And I hope that we can all just look at maybe understanding each other a little better when we’re making these posts and making these comments.”
Andrew: Assuming the best.
Melinda: Assuming the best out of people. Turns out that I got schooled because really I assumed that he meant bad things, and what he was actually saying was, “Oh my gosh, this can’t be.” Like he had just found out from my post that Betty White had died, and so what he didn’t like the implication of was her death, not anything that I had said. He had no problem with my words; he had a problem with Betty White dying. And I was like, Oh, same. Me too. And it was one of those things where we were able to have a civil conversation on Facebook, of all places, and actually get to the point where we were like, Oh, we actually agree. We were just saying this differently. That’s it.
It was such a moment for me to realize, first of all, we have this corner of the internet where we can have this discussion, and people had been kind of coming at him in the comment section, like “Why would you say this to Melinda? She’s a nice person.” They were trying to stand up for me. And so then I posted the rest of our conversation and showed how he and I came to the point where we realized we were saying the same thing basically, and people started apologizing to him for being… It was just a beautiful thing, and I feel like we’re capable. That’s why I feel like we’re capable.
Andrew: Well, the question “where do we start?”, maybe you’ve actually hit a little bit on that. If you’re seeking understanding, the first thing you did to show you were seeking understanding is you waited. You waited to respond. You let the initial reaction… We all have reactions, and I’m terrible at this.
We had a conversation yesterday, and I probably reacted rather than wait, listen, and then you have more ability to respond. Now, luckily, we have a foundation of friendship where I can still respond accurately later, but if we wait first, especially in the realm where we don’t know each other personally, so you didn’t know this gentleman, he didn’t know you, then that shows you’re seeking understanding. So you were able to craft a message that wasn’t directly attacking him or aggressive. Then y’all had a conversation. So maybe you just hit on a place we can start, and that is to listen, wait, then respond. Sleep on it. Someone always told me sleep a couple nights on any reaction with a lot of feeling.
Melinda: I can’t do that. I hear you, but when people tell me to sleep on it, I’m like, Maybe you can sleep on it. I am wide awake trying to figure this out. I am having this conversation 10 different ways in my head. We’re gonna need to address it.
Andrew: I’m gonna be awake until you…
Melinda: Correct. So I don’t know if I can sleep on it, but I can pause. I can pause for a little bit and kind of get my head together.
Patsy: And I don’t think we really know each other until we can sit in each other’s presence, till I can see your eyes and hear the tone of your voice, and experience who you are. I think that’s such an important part of relationship.
Andrew: Well, I’m not gonna ask you to sleep on it, but I am gonna say let’s push pause and we’re gonna come back to sit further in the presence of our special guest, Melinda Doolittle.
You’ve been listening to Bridges with…
Patsy: Patsy Clairmont, the Boomer.
Andrew: And I’m Andrew Greer, the Millennial. We’ll be back.
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Patsy: We’re back with our special guest, Melinda Doolittle, a bubble of joy, an ambassador of goodwill, and one who crosses bridges on a regular basis.
Melinda: Well, you know, we were just kind of talking about being in someone’s presence and how that helps the nuance of eye contact and really understanding someone, and I think I’ve probably learned that most with the racial conversation that we’ve been having over the last couple of years. I have learned that I don’t really want to have that conversation online, number one, but I want to have it face-to-face with individuals. It changes the entire conversation when we can be in a room together and truly just be honest and be like, “What’s your experience? And here’s mine.” And I think it has taken me further in friendships, in meeting other people.
I’ve had some friends where they’ve asked me to have coffee, and they want to talk about race relations, and they’re like, “Listen, I’m gonna be honest. You’re my only Black friend. I don’t know other Black people, so I am going to ask you all of my Black questions right now.” And I’m like, “Got it.”
Andrew: You’re like, “You buying coffee?”
Melinda: But it’s been awesome to sit with them because I know they’re ready for whatever answer, they’re willing to hear the answer, but I also want to hear their story. Like why am I your only Black friend?
Patsy: Yes. That’s what was going on in my brain. Why?
Melinda: Could it be just the area you grew up in? Could it be intentionally? We want to understand that so that we can get to a different place because I want you to have more diversity in your life just because it’s beautiful.
Andrew: Exciting, energizing, yeah.
Melinda: I don’t want to only just hang out with Black people. If I only hung out with Black people, I would not know that people put money in Easter eggs when they go on Easter egg hunts. I found a golden egg and made 20 dollars, and I’m like, What world is this? Thank you, my friends.
So I think there’s so much to learn about different cultures, different… I have to many Filipino friends, and I found this soup called sinigang that they apparently eat all the time, but it’s my first time. Changed my life. It’s the best soup I’ve ever had in my entire life.
Patsy: What is it called?
Melinda: Sinigang
Patsy: Okay, now there is a people that eat a soup called pho.
Melinda: Pho, Vietnamese.
Patsy: Oh my goodness.
Andrew: I loved everything about that phrase. “There is a people…”
Patsy: And I ain’t one of them because I can’t even say the name of the soup.
Andrew: But you like it.
Melinda: It is so good.
Patsy: I was introduced to it recently, and I’m beside myself that it’s taken all these years to get to pho.
Melinda: So close. No, there’s just this awesome beauty and diversity. I think one of the conversations I’ve had recently is with a friend that sat down with me and was like, “I want to have this conversation because I don’t see color.” And I was like, “Well, let’s start with seeing it.”
Andrew: Yes
Melinda: It’s beautiful. I want you to see it. Let’s see it. Let’s not negate the beauty of the diversity. That’s a beautiful thing. Seeing the differences is what makes it really awesome. It’s what means that we can have both pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie. See it, please.
Andrew: I know that’s nuanced for me.
One of our friends, the three of ours, Nicole C. Mullen, always said to me about when people would say something like, “Well, God’s colorblind.” I think we all know what they’re trying to say, but she’s like, “In fact, I think probably he’s not.”
Melinda: Possibly, since there’s so much color everywhere.
Andrew: Exactly. Well, and I even think like in children, color is so present. Whether it’s in nature and it’s a rainbow or it’s what someone else is wearing, they’re into bright colors and adventuresome palettes. And we raise them to desire that and to love that and to appreciate that. Why do you think there’s a disconnect between appreciating color in all elements of the world, but when it comes to people’s skin, what is it that has just kind of got us hung up from just loving it?
Melinda: I mean, we’re just in a fallen world. It just is what it is, and the fallen world, a lot of times, has to do with humanity, not nature. Do you know what I’m saying?
Andrew: Not design.
Melinda: We didn’t fall out with trees. I just think just by the nature of the world we live in and power structures and all of that, color has become how we identify humans and how we kind of rank humans and separate. Whereas in a rainbow, we like that it comes together, but a lot of times, we just kind of separate it when it comes to humans because we’re just different and we don’t understand it.
I think even sometimes I’ve had friends that have had a hard time understanding like I went to a high school where I was one of three Black people, and so we all were going to go out and go to a pool. So I was asking somebody could I use their sunscreen, and they were like, “I do not understand what words you’re saying. You can’t tan.” And I’m like, “I’m actually gonna tan faster than you. It’s gonna happen.” And so I made the mistake of getting stickers and going to the tanning booth with my friend to show her how I tanned but did not realize how fast it actually tans you, and so I had stars and hearts on places that I’m not gonna talk about here. But for months, because I burned and it stayed that way for quite some time. I wanted to show her we’re alike in this area sorta.
Andrew: Well, and where it comes to like let me not assume that you don’t need sunscreen; let me ask. So tell me about that. What happens to your skin in the sun?
Melinda: Exactly, just ask questions.
Andrew: So what is our responsibility… Actually, take it to just me. Let’s talk in just a conversation here. What is my responsibility? And so my context is American, white, and most of my basic needs are met, all of them, I would say. What is my responsibility in this conversation that we’re having culturally right now to either do better or just be someone who is wanting to seek out understanding?
Melinda: Well, first of all, that’s your first step, is to actually want to. I think education is key, and I think self-education is actually really helpful. I love having conversations with people of different races when they have questions; I don’t like starting from scratch for them. Like I don’t want to do all the work because then I feel like we kinda went back to what we’ve got to talk about, you know. So maybe do some research first, learn the history, and that’s easier said than done sometimes because history has kind of not completely been taught. So you might have to seek it out, but learn why things at least are the way they are right now and how systems work. And then, after that come and ask questions, like “So is this an actual experience that you’ve had? I read about this. Have you experienced that?” That is so beautiful to me. It goes so far for me to know you just tried. You tried. Then there are no stupid questions to me, none. If you’re just at least trying to learn and being like, “I did read about this. This part I don’t understand. What can you enlighten me on, or is this different for everyone or a personal experience for you?” I think that goes a long way.
And then just being a friend, like truly being a friend for no reason other than being a friend. I really enjoy my white friends that just are like, “You just need to hang?” And I’m like, “Yes, please. I just need to be today.” Just let me be. Let’s just hang out and have a good time today.
Andrew: It goes back to the humor, enjoying life and enjoying relationship with one another. There’s so much weight to these conversations, and I’m not saying that’s undo weight, but we can’t, as humans, carry… You could take this to the conversations around race we’ve been having, to the pandemic we’ve been working through. Humans, in my opinion, can only handle so much weight, so how do we balance that out? We just be together. I don’t know the answers, you don’t know all the answers, but we can be together and we can laugh about it.
And you know, I grew up with one Black student in a high school of 2,200 kids. Now, I grew up western part of Texas, so we were about split in half with Hispanic and Caucasian anyway, and yet I was naturally drawn to Black culture. I loved it. I love the music of it, I love the history of it, I love the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and the ‘60s and the ‘70s, and so I sought it out because I just had a natural… I can’t even explain to you totally what that desire is, except my parents grew up in Louisiana and have always been, at least I’ve talked to them about this now, they just grew up with the advantage of parents and contexts that weren’t necessarily seeing everybody as in some kind of caste system. There was a lot of celebration of differences.
My mom in New Orleans, some of the music she grew up around, the would play on Saturday mornings in our household to kind of wake up the house, so I almost wonder sometimes if some of that zydeco music and things that were being played on Saturday morning stirred up in my things.
“Humans can only handle so much weight.”
Melinda: I bet it did.
Andrew: But anyway, I don’t know what all that was to say except that humor, the ability to enjoy one another without having to have a heavy conversation all the time, is that a possible ingredient?
Melinda: Yes. For sure, if you’ve already cultivated friendships. Like you can’t just walk up to somebody and be like, “Hi, let’s have fun.” Do you know what I’m saying? You would’ve had to have cultivated some type of relationship.
I had a group of girls kind of get together during the pandemic as we were just talking through like so many things were happening culturally, and so we got together just as Black girls being like, Maybe we just need a moment to just be and to sit. And we realized that culturally most Black people or African Americans have been taught to find some sort of joy or laughter in everything. No matter what it is, we need to find it, we need to make it somewhat happy, just so we can survive it.
Andrew: And you have to produce it from within.
Melinda: We have to produce it from within, and so I think that that makes us just as a people just kind of fun sometimes. We just really like to find the fun in it. Even right now as everybody’s talking about omicron, Black people are like omarion. They’re saying an R&B singer, and we will not call it omicron. It takes everything in me to say the word right because I’m like, Oh, the omarion variant. And he has had to come out and say, “I am not a variant, dear people.” We don’t know how to just let it be, you know? And that just makes it fun.
Every culture probably has their thing that just makes it fun, and if we could maybe tap into that with each culture, I think it would be a beautiful thing.
Patsy: Andrew, I understand, word is out, that you do another podcast with a friend of ours. Tell us about that.
Andrew: Mr. Mark Lowry, who was a guest on this podcast. He’s my co-host for Dinner Conversations with Mark Lowry and Andrew Greer. We have a ton of fun talking about all kinds of topics around the table, and you can find them at dinner-conversations.com.
Do you know something that we both love a lot of, Patsy?
Patsy: What’s that?
Andrew: That’s books.
Patsy: Food
Andrew: That too. But I hear you have a book club.
Patsy: I do have a book club. It’s called Porch Pals Book Club, and you can find out more about the book club by going to patsyclairmont.com.
The Abide Bible Sponsorship Message
Patsy: “Shout out praises to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with joy. Enter his presence with joyful singing. Acknowledge that the Lord is God. He made us and we belong to him; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.”
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Melinda Doolittle singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea
Sing the song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won
Andrew: Alright, well, we’re back. That was the voice of Melinda Doolittle singing, and this is the voice of Melinda Doolittle speaking. That song, which is one of my favorite songs, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” but it’s very personal to the Black community. Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s one of the James Weldon Johnson’s poems set to music and has become, in a casual or traditional sense, the Black national anthem.
Melinda: Yes. It is the Black national anthem. It truly is. It is a song of hope, of faith, of reality, like we’re going through it. However, there's faith in it, like we believe that we will see better things. It’s also like “We Shall Overcome,” being like a song that Black people have sung for years and years and years and years, just to say like, Are we going through it? For sure. But is there hope? Yes.
It’s the thing I love about James Weldon Johnson’s poetry. It’s what I love about soul music. It’s why I sing soul music. It’s because there’s so much rooted in reality but also hope. Like you listen to a Marvin Gaye song like “What’s Going On,” and it talks about like, Oh, it’s a lot happening. However, we can do this. Or “A Change Is Gonna Come.” There are all these songs that are rooted in reality but still show hope, and I feel like kind of James Weldon Johnson maybe started that for us. I’m sure it happened way before James Weldon Johnson.
Andrew: Sure, but early 1900s is that context.
Melinda: Yeah, it put it into words and gave us a voice to say, “Sure, all of this happens, but in the midst of it, we still have a voice to worship, we still have a voice to hope, we still have a voice to go forward from here.”
Andrew: You recorded a record that’s called Lift Every Voice that is the songs or the poems of James Weldon Johnson, which I think is just beautiful. But in the last verse, which we didn’t play here earlier from that excerpt, says this of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” And also, I want to clarify, though it may be called the Black national anthem, this is not nationalistic in nature. This is a song that anyone can find their own story in because the story of pain, the story of struggle, the story of patience in our struggle I think is a human story, if we’re honest. The last verse says:
God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
You who have brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee
Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land
Patsy: Powerful.
Melinda: That’s my favorite verse.
Andrew: There’s so much in there. And to be honest, Melinda, when I hear Black people sing that and when I think of the history because of how acquainted I’ve become with the history just through research, not through personal experience. There is something motivating in my own faith and my own spirituality and my own life when I see a group of people who have been oppressed, which throughout history, there have been many groups of people who have struggled, and again, in our own way in our personal lives, we are oppressed, if you think about it, by human nature, then it has lifted my own eyes up. It’s been an inspiration, and I don’t wonder if that couldn’t be part of the lesson I learn as a white American is that there’s inspiration by observing that I can then apply to my own circumstances, though different.
Melinda: For sure. I think there’s something to be learned from people who it looks like have lost everything but are holding on to the most important thing, and I think that kind of can just influence what you do in moments where you feel like you’ve lost it all. What can you do? Who can you hold on to? “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears” — I mean, come on. He’s the God of it all. He can carry the weight of it all, we can go to him for it all, and I think it’s such a good testament when you see somebody who has gone through it and still comes out with those lyrics, that it can just remind you when you’re going through it, you got him still.
Patsy: There’s a lot of ways to begin to build bridges, and one of the ways you’re building bridges with food is to take a bridge right to the downtown area. Well, it’s actually not right in the downtown, is it?
Melinda: We do go downtown. I’ve been volunteering with People Loving Nashville for almost a year and a half now. I found them when I was home, when all of my shows just stopped, and I was just kind of having a reckoning with myself on like, What do you want to do? What do you want to do with this free time that you have? Don’t just sit here. I had organized everything that I could find in my house, and I was like I need to do something. And then I came to the conclusion that I needed to do something that was not about me because most of my days included me talking about myself, and I was getting sick of her, you know?
Patsy: I do know.
Melinda: And I was just like, Can I do something that is about other people? And so I looked up this organization, People Loving Nashville. I knew some people that were helping run it, and I just showed up for a camp cleanup. And what I realized is not only do they come in and do the work, but they actually create community. They build bridges between the housed and the unhoused To this day, some of my really good friends now are unhoused people on the streets of Nashville. I will go down on Broadway, and people will be like, “What’s up Melinda?” And they don’t know me from American Idol; they know me because I showed up at their camp.
It is maybe my happiest place I’ve ever been. I love it more than singing. I know I shouldn’t say that out loud, but here we are. I love creating community with people who have different experiences than I do. And hearing their stories, and they teach me how to make food. They will tell me when the food that we have given them is not seasoned correctly, and they will be like, “Honey, this needed gravy.” And I’m like, Good to know. Good to know. I didn’t cook it, but thank you.
It honestly is maybe the best bridge I’ve found for lots of different reasons. It’s an economic bridge in that we have different just places in the economy. It’s personally just different. We have different life experiences. I have so much to learn from them. I just had no idea the sacrifices that they’ve made, so many veterans, so many just amazing humans that have maybe come through the prison system, and the way the world is set up, not the world but our country specifically is set up, for them to try to re-enter into society is so difficult that they’re actually really trying and just keep hitting walls because we don’t have it set up in a way that helps them. And so it’s one of my happiest places.
Between that and I work with Timothy’s Gift, so I go into prisons and do concerts and everything, and I just… I don’t know. Those bridges are maybe my favorite ones I’ve ever experienced.
Patsy: Wow.
Andrew: There’s a level of humility in asking questions, when not knowing someone’s place of life with some of the unhoused people. Pretty quickly I have realized before that I’m only one, two, three steps. I mean, some of these are college graduates.
Melinda: Very close, yes.
Andrew: Yeah. This isn’t about education.
Melinda: Nope.
Andrew: It’s about circumstances in life that any of us could find ourselves in at any given time. The humility that’s produced through that, I think, produces some of that patience that we were talking about.
Melinda: Oh wow, yeah.
Andrew: With waiting to respond or maybe waiting to assume. You know what I mean?
Melinda: Yes, and wanting to actually understand their reason. You want to understand the reason. The more I hear people’s stories, the more I want to hear people’s stories. I want to understand why this happened or how it happened, and that translates to Facebook even. Like why are you coming at me like this? What may have happened to you? What did I just trigger with two words? What just happened here? Help me understand.
“The more I hear people’s stories, the more I want to hear people’s stories.”
Patsy: And I think the more you do what you’re doing, not just you but all of us, when we enter into that place of listening and hearing and desiring connection, that it really opens us up to not being judgmental.
Melinda: Yes, big time.
Patsy: Which is a really big stone that needs to be dismantled from walls that are built. And when the judgment stops leaving and there’s a part of our heart that’s moved when we hear where they’ve come from, what they’ve been through. And the injustices of this life.
Melinda: So many.
Andrew: I love that. I also love the way that you have helped sing to — you mentioned this earlier — but share music with those who have many silent tears, and those are prisoners. Tell us a little bit more about Timothy’s Gift, what that is.
Melinda: Timothy’s Gift is an organization that was started by a man named Ron Miller, and he started it because he saw a Dateline story about a guy named Timothy who was imprisoned at the age of 14. He was a part of a robbery, and two people died during that robbery. He was nowhere near them actually dying. I mean, he was in the home obviously, but the other people that were a part of the robbery even testified for him and said, “He was not a part of killing these people.” Even so, he was given life without parole at the age of 14, so he was in prison. And Ron just could not take it, and so he reached out to Timothy, started sending him letters, started visiting and saying, “How can I help you apply for at least parole? How can we help?” And he just visited over and over and over. Over a hundred times, he visited Timothy.
Within his visits, he was able to see the same visitors coming in to visit all of the people that were imprisoned, and he asked Tim, “Why do I keep seeing the same people every single time?” Same inmates, same visitors. And Timothy was like, “Well, only like 10 percent of people behind bars get visitors. People don’t come visit.” Whether it’s proximity, sometimes they’re in a prison three hours away from family. They’re not close enough. Whatever it is, they don’t get visitors. And Ron was like, “Nope, I don’t like it. Can I bring them visitors? Can I bring a concert in so at least they know that this group of people is coming to visit all of them? I just want to visit them.” And Timothy said yes because it was his first concert ever in life because he was in prison from the age of 14. So he was like, “I’d love to see a concert. Please bring a concert.”
And so Ron brought tours into prisons in Florida every year, a couple of times. He just brought his 25th tour. That’s the one that I was just on. And Timothy was granted parole back in 2015, I believe, 2015 or 2014, and for the first time, Timothy went with us into the prisons and gave his story. And to see the hope on the men’s faces when they saw him walk in the room, when they saw him purposely come back behind those gates and come in and say, “God sees you, he is with you, and he loves you. That’s the whole message. You have great worth.”
And that’s what we go in to do, and it is my favorite thing ever. The letters that we get come back and just say, “I felt free for two hours.” We just want to take them just to a place where they can see something outside of their circumstance for a couple of hours, and it’s beautiful.
Patsy: And there’s something about hope that re-instills dignity.
“There’s something about hope that re-instills dignity.”
Melinda: Yes. Yes, Patsy.
Patsy: Which is lost in the environment. It’s not supported. It’s not approved of even in many ways by actions and limitations, and so that’s a wonderful thing that is being done that’s, I know, making a difference because when hope enters a heart, everything changes. When dignity is restored, people rise up differently, and it changes their interaction.
Well, I can’t tell you about how happy I am because there aren’t enough words to express my appreciation of the way you reach out across bridges and touch people, and it is with your voice, with your words, with your singing. I mean, there is so many levels that you communicate on. I thank you for all that you do.
Andrew: You’re a joy dealer, a dynamic…
Patsy: Uh oh, watch out.
Melinda: I was like, What’s happening? What’s coming from the Millennial over here?
Andrew: Exactly. I got my TikTok handles going.
Well, we are extremely grateful for you, Melinda Doolittle, but we also want you to find her on socials. You can find out more about People Loving Nashville and Timothy’s Gift if you simply follow. Melinda, you do a wonderful job of expressing those stories through your lens and inviting other people into that story. Thank you for inviting us into your story today and to the different levels of it, and we’ll just keep talking.
Melinda: Love that.
Patsy: Bridges is produced by my co-host, Andrew Greer.
Andrew: And co-produced by my co-host, Patsy Clairmont. Our podcast is recorded by Jesse Phillips.
Patsy: And sometimes my son, Jason Clairmont.
Andrew: At the Arcade in Franklin, Tennessee. Jesse Phillips is also our editor and mixes our show. And our theme music is written by Kyle Buchanan and yours truly, and all of the instruments of the music were played by Kyle Buchanan at Aries Lounge in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Our transcripts are provided by Rachel Worsham. Thanks, Rachel, for all your work.
Patsy: If you like what you’ve been listening to, you can help us out by leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to our show.
Andrew: For more information about Patsy, myself, or to read transcripts and to listen to more episodes, go to bridgesshow.com.
Patsy: Catch you next time.