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MICHELE NORRIS: The real revelation was that I discovered that she had spent time in the late '40s and early '50s working as a traveling Aunt Jemima, Dressing up in a hoop skirt and a head scarf and doing pancake demonstrations in small towns. She had a six-state region. And she would travel to these towns and set up at county fairs or in the local grocery store and demonstrate how to use a product that was fairly new at the time, pancake mix, you know, add water and an egg and mix and instant pancakes.

And I didn't know that she had done this. And I didn't know because my mother didn't talk about it. Her sister didn't talk about it. I had a hard time-- I just couldn't picture it. I mean, my grandmother was very active in the community. She was someone who was very well known. She founded a senior citizen center that still bears her name in South Minneapolis, the U-Meet-Us Center. So the picture that I had in my mind of my grandmother just did not comport with someone who was dressed up in a hoop skirt and a head scarf.

And the more that I learned about her, the more I became sort of fascinated by what she did. And I realized that she was doing things that few women did in 1950. She was working. She was traveling. And she was making money. And she also, I discovered, was serving as an ambassador. Because, when I discovered new stories about her, it was like she was talking to me from the page, and she was describing to the reporter how she viewed her job. And there was no hint of shame when she talked about this.

She said that she was proud of what she was doing. She was discovered while she was singing in a choir, I guess, and she would sing gospel songs when she served pancakes because she wanted the customers to know that she was a Christian. But she would also work hard to know-- and so that they also knew that she was well-spoken. She talked about meeting children in these towns that she knew had never seen a Black person, and so she decided to use her role to elevate her race.

And I think, over time, my mom and her sister and some of her other relatives who have also made this discovery have come to see this in a different way as we've learned more about her. It's not just, you know, the anecdote that grandma was Aunt Jemima. Grandma was Aunt Jemima who did interesting things with her time and, with that position, to try to benefit people, which is what she did later in her life, in her work at U-Meet-Us.

SPEAKER: You also did a fair amount of research actually in, I suppose, today in the food business there called equity characters, whether it's Betty Crocker or whether it's, you know, Captain Crunch or whatever. Except, obviously, Aunt Jemima is loaded with all sorts of history and, frankly, negatively loaded.

MICHELE NORRIS: The history of Aunt Jemima is an interesting one, and that she is a completely fictional character. And this whole sort of myth and storyline around her was created and very carefully spelled out in a series of very popular and highly successful ads with lovely illustrations and a lot of text. So they read like little stories, like little novellas, and they told you the story of Aunt Jemima and her famous pancakes and her work on the Higbie plantation.

And, in these ads, they created this sort of strange slave speak, you know, lawze L-A-W-Z-E.

SPEAKER: And like a patois.

MICHELE NORRIS: Yeah, exactly. The sort of strange slave patois, that they would write out phonetically. And that would be part of the ad. And the company is, you know, has moved forward. But it's what do you do with a character that drags around that kind of baggage? Because there's a lot of it.

SPEAKER: And what do you do with that character if you're shopping for pancake mix? Do you ever buy Aunt Jemima at home?

MICHELE NORRIS: You know, I hadn't thought about it. And, as it turns out, one of the ironies of life, I have young children and they love pancakes. And my son in particular, his favorite food is pancakes. He would eat pancakes morning, noon, and night if he could. And he, in particular, loves Aunt Jemima pancakes. And he likes the mix because it looks like a little person that's on the table. And it looks like her hands on her hip. And, you know, he just really likes Aunt Jemima mix.

And I find myself arguing with him in the store like, you know, can we just not buy this right now. I'm just in the mood where I'm kind of not wanting to have to look at Aunt Jemima while I'm trying to figure this out. And I can't tell him what I'm trying to figure out.

SPEAKER: When will you be able to tell him?

MICHELE NORRIS: Well, with the publication of this book, it's time to sit down--

SPEAKER: I was going to say.

MICHELE NORRIS: --and talk to him. And I don't plan to tell him that he should be ashamed of what his grandmother did because I don't see shame in that. And I also don't want him to get the message that people who do things in their life that might be seen by others as menial should be looked upon with any kind of harsh judgment. I don't want him to get that message.

And I particularly don't want to give him that message in our family and particularly as a young Black man because we stand on the shoulders of people who had to do things at times in their life that may have been viewed as demeaning. And we are where we stand today because of their time and their sacrifice and their grit and their hard work. But I also want him to understand that it is OK and that some times appropriate to stand up to any effort, to define him through images that are forced on him. And so it's sort of a complicated message for a 10-year-old little boy. But I'm going to make sure that we get that one right.

SPEAKER: We live in a very confessional culture, getting more and more so with Facebook and YouTube and everything else. And it has been that way for a generation. And the generation of your parents seems to have been the opposite. And that's why I think you chose to call it the Grace of Silence. But, if there is grace in silence, how do you balance that, what we respect to keep quiet about if it's painful versus what we drag into the light and get from doing that?

MICHELE NORRIS: You know, I think-- this confessional culture has perhaps swung a little bit too far, but I see silence as almost like a two-sided coin. There's grace in the silence that they exercised in choosing not to talk about their frustrations or the pain in their life and pass that on to their children. So their path forward would be uncluttered by the pain of their ancestors. I understand that. I honor that. And I think that I have benefited from that.

But I think that the silence that I'm calling for by the time I come to the end of this exercise is to sit down and ask questions and then sit back and listen to the people around you to make sure that you really hear what they might be trying to tell you or what they might be willing to tell you if you have the courage to ask them about their lives. The core question at the heart of this book in the end is how well do you really understand the people who raised you and how much do you really know about their lives.

And it might be difficult to get them to tell you the full story, but it's worth the effort. In some ways, we as children, even adult children, can be complicit in that silence. Our parents tell us what they think we need to know, and we're only interested in knowing so much. And, in many more cases, I hope after reading this book, people will decide to push past that.