Secret-Keeping

Secret-Keeping

Transcript for Secret Keeping (full episode)

It's 90.1 KZSU.

It all started as a pretty simple survey.

You know, what's your favorite food?

How did your family get along?

Did you have pets?

That's James Pennebaker.

I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Texas.

He's well known for his recent book, The Secret Life of Pronouns.

But decades before he became fascinated by pronouns, Pennebaker was studying health.

And one of the students who was working with me said, Oh, here's one, did you ever have a traumatic sexual experience prior to the age of 17?

This was in the 70s and 80s, and no survey had asked a question like this before.

The results were significant.

That one single question was most related to health problems.

I'd never seen anything so intimately related to how frequently they went to the student health center, the symptoms they reported.

He did another questionnaire with 24,000 participants and found the same thing, a huge connection between early sexual trauma and health problems later in life.

But Pennebaker wasn't convinced that he'd gotten to the core of the issue.

You always have to kind of be a little bit suspect when you get something that big and exciting and different, because it's hard to know how much to trust it.

And as I started to interview people, what I discovered was that people who had reported sexual traumas, by and large, had kept them secret.

They hadn't told anyone.

In some cases, this anonymous survey was the very first time that these people had ever opened up about what had happened to them.

And these sometimes were traumas that had happened, you know, years in the past, decades in the past even.

And later I ended up finding that it was having any kind of upheaval that you kept secret.

So, having a bad thing happen to you is bad for your health, and this is something we've known for forever.

But keeping it secret makes it even worse.

If, for example, I'm walking along and I see a good friend of mine having an affair with somebody else, but I don't want to hurt them, so I keep it a secret.

Even though nobody else knows about this, this is going to be stressful for me because normally, if I saw two people I didn't know having an affair, as soon as I got back, I would tell my friends, I would say, wow, this is really interesting, I wonder what's going on, why this, why that.

But if this is something that I can't tell people, I'll think about it more, I'll worry about it, I'll obsess about it, and it'll end up being a stressor for me.

And then it started to make me wonder, what if we brought people in the laboratory and had them write about or in some ways express a traumatic secret, or some kind of secret, would that have health benefits?

Pennebaker found that the process of releasing a secret has positive health benefits.

You don't even have to share the secret with another person.

Just the process of writing it down, putting it into words, can be helpful.

One of the beauties of language is that it helps us to work through things.

And so this is one reason talking about things is healthy.

It helps us to put things together.

This is State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Chelsea Davis.

In each episode, we pick a common human experience, like healing or obsession or crisis, and bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience.

Today, we're bringing you stories about secret keeping.

As we learned from Dr.

Pennebaker, keeping secrets can lead to health issues, and expressing those secrets can lead to health benefits.

Decades of his and others' research has shown this to be the case.

But does that mean that we should all share our secrets all the time?

Pennebaker doesn't think so.

Sometimes keeping a secret is probably a really good idea.

You've done something that is regrettable and terrible, but if you tell people, it could make things much worse.

This got us thinking.

When is secret keeping good for us?

When does it actually make things better, even create opportunities for a better, richer life?

When does keeping a secret open a door that could not be opened in any other way?

And then, when the secret is shared, does the door stay open?

This episode has four stories.

In our first story, we'll explore how sometimes secrets can bring strangers together.

In our second story, a young girl loses control of a deadly secret.

In our third story, a woman uses secrets to build a new life for herself.

Finally, in our last story, a Stanford freshman has already shared his secret with everyone, except the person it most affects.

In the 18th century, England and America faced a serious threat to the moral fabric of their societies.

Members of the clergy, popular artists and politicians all spoke out against a growing threat.

Masquerade balls.

When you get down to it, the problem with masquerades was that they allowed people to be anonymous.

And if you look at the complaints of the anti-masquerade movement, you see that they are not so different from our concerns today over the anonymity of the internet.

When people are allowed to be anonymous, they give in to all of their lowest impulses.

But does anonymity have to bring out the worst in us?

It turns out that there is another side to anonymity.

Sometimes it can foster intimacy, and keeping our identities secret can allow us to share deeply held secrets.

San Francisco artist Max Hawkins has created what he calls a collaborative nighttime experiment, known simply as Call in the Night.

It is a study on anonymity.

People sign up to be called sometime between 2 a.m.

and 5 a.m.

and are paired up with an anonymous stranger for a nighttime conversation.

The Stanford Storytelling Project recorded about 14 of these calls, and it turns out that most of the time the conversations are pretty mundane.

But then there was this one conversation that was much different from the rest.

For this pair, anonymity allowed vulnerability, and over the course of the call, they go from being complete strangers to sharing some of their most intimate thoughts and struggles.

We talked to one of the participants in this call, who gave us some insight into their transformation from hesitant and sleepy strangers to confidants.

The call has been shortened quite a bit, but it is edited to reflect her experience.

She will guide you through their conversation.

When I picked up the phone, there was this automated message that said something like, in a moment, you'll be transferred to someone.

And then there was a beep and then silence.

And I was kind of waiting for someone to say something.

And I remember my heart was pounding.

It was very startling just waking up, knowing it was some unknown person who I was about to be connected to.

Hello.

For a long time at the beginning of the call, we weren't there.

We hadn't established enough camaraderie to have a really meaningful conversation yet.

What was my last weekend like?

I, um...

What did I do?

Oh, I went to this crazy party in Cupertino with a bunch of NASA scientists celebrating the first human in space, which was pretty cool.

Celebrating the first human in space?

Yeah, it's this night, but I guess it's experienced all around the world.

Annually, it's called Yuri's Night, selling Yuri Gagarin.

He was like the first Russian in space.

I'm pretty sure we did that a while ago.

Oh, really?

No, I mean, like, we put a human in space a while ago.

Oh, oh, I thought you said you were pretty sure that you went to that a while ago.

Yeah, no, it definitely happened a while ago.

Yeah, we're a lot of cool people.

Nothing beats an astronaut.

So the commercials tell me nowadays...

What did you say?

That nothing beats an astronaut commercials.

Nothing what in our commercials?

Nothing beats an astronaut.

Easy commercials?

No.

Left times.

Ha ha ha ha.

So there was definitely a chunk of time at the beginning when it still felt kind of awkward.

This is someone who I don't know at all, so every bit of information they're giving me is totally new.

And because of that, I felt like my picture of who this person was kept kind of changing and morphing and deepening and then changing dramatically again.

And it's just because you're putting this puzzle together of who is this person.

Like when I just think Texas in general, I think very conservative, kind of cowboy-esque.

Do you wanna go back there?

Possibly.

I think he was interested in philosophy.

There's a stereotype with that as well.

They're always in their head and always thinking about super intellectual things.

What I can get with my dad is trying to, one of the things I've just been trying to explain to him, kind of what philosophers do.

Every now and then we'll get into conversations about, you know, maybe religion.

It's because that's kind of a big central issue in my family.

My mom and dad definitely have a fiat eye on it.

So sometimes if I'm coming up in the middle of it would have different viewpoints from both of them.

I felt like we connected strongly when we were talking about our parents.

My mom is from Maryland and my dad is from India.

So they're pretty, pretty odd pair.

By the devil.

That sounds like it could be a story of itself about just how your parents met and everything.

That sounds really cool.

Why are you just wondering, just asking that question?

Is that something you ever ask your parents?

I am like the interrogator of personal questions.

Yeah, so I know the story of how they met.

It sounds really scandalous the way that they met, but it wasn't what I explained.

But it sounds because my dad is a professor and my mom was a student in his class.

And they actually didn't meet when she was in his class.

That's why it's not scandalous because it was a big lecture hall.

And they re-met at another time, like after she had graduated, at a mutual friends party.

And she was like, oh, I was in your class.

And I guess she had had one of those crushes that you have on a young professor, I guess, when she was in his class.

But when they chatted at this party, he actually, he said how he wanted to ask her out, but he waited till he got home to check what her grades had been before he asked her out.

And then he was like, oh, okay, she's nesting.

Okay, I can ask her out.

That's funny.

How did your parents...

One of the questions that I've been asked is I don't actually know.

I've never, so my parents got divorced when I was kind of young, and so I've always felt like it would be odd to try and ask that question.

And so I never have, and I'm like, you know, what if I just never know?

What does your mom do for work?

She is sort of an entrepreneur.

She started a company that designs software models for insurance companies so they can assess the risk of natural disasters.

Yeah, so she's like, I mean, if you type her name in Google, like, you get a lot of different people, I think.

But if you type her name, catastrophe afterwards.

I'm guessing that that econ class helped out a lot.

Making these models.

Yeah, it did.

And my dad helped her a lot when she was starting out her company.

Working together, doing cool things.

Yeah.

Although that's one of their sources of tension now.

That was definitely a moment when I feel like we had reached enough kind of connection that I knew, or at least I thought based on how he was listening and talking to me that it had reached a point where I could share something.

He feels like she doesn't remember how much he helps.

And they've nearly gotten a divorce many times.

I think just the three of us kids were the reason they stayed together.

But now it's interesting because we all thought they would get a divorce after we went to college, but they haven't.

So I don't know what will happen next, I guess.

I felt a kinship with him in some way, you know, and wanted to, I don't know, signal that.

If I'm sharing something that gives a sense of, a sense more of friendship rather than just the small talk from the beginning, I can see why that would maybe open the conversation up a little more.

How old were you when your parents got divorced?

I believe I was eight.

What did your parents tell you about why, like why it was happening?

So, I mean, it's a fairly simple reason when it comes down to it, even though the problem story is kind of complicated.

I could hear in his voice that he was hesitant to say it, but that he decided to share it.

So, my mom is a lesbian, and that was kind of something, an identity she had struggled with, like, for a long time, through high school and college.

So, she had married my dad, and had me, and then my sister, and so living quite a bit of time.

But I guess she finally came to a point where she couldn't keep living that way.

I was really surprised.

Like, you know, that's something that you could never kind of imagine about someone, or like make up in your mind.

I felt really privileged to be there to receive that from him, and to be able to listen, and to then have a really interesting conversation about it.

How do you, like how did you take that?

I guess I was young enough where, like, oh, that makes sense.

She is attracted to women, and she wants to be with a woman, not a man.

But my dad was pretty set against it, more conservative in his religious viewpoints.

Then it was, like, thrown into this kind of conflict about, is what she's doing sinful, is what she's doing wrong, is, like, is it evil?

Which is kind of like a word my dad had used a couple times.

And so, then, just as a kid, I guess, I was just thrown into this a lot of turmoil and confusion about how to understand, like, my relationship with my mom.

And I love her.

And I don't think that there's, like, an ounce of bad will in her.

But it's not wrong, and why is my dad in the church he attends convinced that it is?

And, you know, what am I supposed to think about these things?

It was one of the, it felt like one of those late night conversations that I've had, where you're kind of falling asleep, and you have the lights off, and you're just chatting until you kind of get too tired to talk anymore.

But in this case, it was kind of the inverse, where we were kind of talking and talking and kept waking up more and more.

I don't think I did look at the time.

So it only kind of like, it snapped me out of it when the light started coming in the window, and he was saying he had sports practice.

Well, I actually need to start getting ready to get going.

Yeah, we've done the whole gamut here.

Thanks for sharing.

Yeah, it's been great talking to you.

Yeah, you too.

Would you ever want to do it again sometime?

Yeah.

I don't know exactly how that works.

I guess I could give you my name.

The whole time I didn't talk to you, I don't know your name either.

I know, I know I thought about that, but it's supposed to be anonymous.

You know, the thing is, better to keep things anonymous for a while.

But my name is ***.

Okay, I'm ***.

Maybe they can cut this out.

We talked for like three hours.

Really impressive.

I know.

Have a good day.

Talking to you.

Bye.

That piece was produced by Joshua Hoyt.

It featured music by Ben Sound, the Sugar Puck and Gansterers, and Revolution Void.

Call in the Night is the project of San Francisco-based artist Max Hawkins.

The two people on that phone call actually met up later, and the female voice that you heard made their story into a multimedia performance piece that premiered in New York City.

You can view it at a link we've posted on our website.

In our last story, we heard about two people who willingly shared their secrets and were able to grow closer because of it.

But what happens when your secret is unwillingly taken from you?

In our next piece, a young girl spends her life trying to outrun a lethal secret that comes back to haunt her.

Tess McCarthy has the story.

Early autumn, 1990.

14-year-old Ashley Hart lived with her older sister and abusive mother.

Her supportive father had passed away three years earlier.

He left behind only two things.

The first was a grieving family.

The second, a dream that his youngest daughter would one day attend Harvard University.

But once he was gone, Ashley's world didn't look so bright.

Her mother was verbally and physically abusive, which could lead to violent arguments.

On one fateful autumn day, Ashley and her mother started an argument that escalated fast.

No one knows exactly what happened, but eventually the police found her mother's body.

Cause of death, blunt force trauma to the head.

Four months later, Ashley Hart pled no contest to voluntary manslaughter.

Because Ashley was a minor, the court proceedings appeared only before a judge, not a jury.

Legally, Ashley's name had to be kept a secret.

The judge hearing the case was known for handing out strict sentences, but despite his stern reputation, he only sentenced Ashley to a year of juvenile detention.

Ashley walked out of the court with a light sentence and an open future.

Because she was a minor, only 14, she could choose whether or not to reveal her secret.

It was her right.

The county sheriff, however, violated this right.

He illegally leaked her name to the papers.

Ashley's darkest secret was plastered on local newspapers.

The sheriff, on the other hand, received no punishment whatsoever.

Ashley entered juvenile hall as her small town buzzed with a sensational story.

Eight months later in September, Ashley was released from prison.

She went to live with her paternal aunt and uncle in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

New town, new school, clean slate.

The judge's light sentence gave Ashley a chance to move on from her mother's death.

And here's the really impressive part.

She did.

At her new high school, Ashley thrived academically.

She was a top student.

In her spare time, she even tutored underprivileged kids in biology.

Then in her senior year of high school, out of 18,000 hopeful applicants, Harvard chose Ashley.

Her application was an incredible record of an orphan overcoming adversity.

The Boston Globe even featured her in an article on outstanding young people in the community.

Ashley seemed to have done the impossible and outrun her bloody past.

The secret that rocked her 14 year old life had given way to the life Ashley's father envisioned for her years ago.

Go.

But her newfound joy didn't last long.

After the Boston Globe published the article about her acceptance, Harvard received an anonymous envelope with newspaper clippings from Ashley's old case.

The envelope was accompanied by a letter about Ashley.

It described her as a manipulative personality, a con who had literally gotten away with murder.

Like the sheriff four years ago, this stranger revealed the greatest secret of Ashley's life.

She thought she could keep it hidden, but now her past was in full view of Harvard, her father's dream.

Harvard delivered the letter to Ashley at her high school.

The admissions committee had voted to rescind Ashley's acceptance.

The reason, material misrepresentations in her application.

Read another way, Harvard did not approve of the secret Ashley was keeping.

She immediately requested to meet with the committee, sure that she'd be able to change their minds.

They refused to see her.

Ashley's past had stopped her future in its tracks.

The news spread fast.

The Boston Globe and the New York Times snapped up the story, but this publicity didn't do Ashley any favors.

She had also been accepted to other top schools, Columbia University, Barnard College and Tufts University.

After this national coverage, Columbia and Barnard quickly followed Harvard's lead.

Soon, only Tufts had not responded.

Tufts president, Joe DiBaggio decided that Ashley never lied in her application and rescinding admission would be unfair.

He gave Ashley a second chance and she joined the Tufts class of 1999.

A sheriff and an anonymous tipster robbed Ashley of the right to keep her past hidden.

The secret should have been hers to keep, but two others deemed it theirs to tell.

Whether for public safety or dedication to the truth, they took Ashley's secret away from her.

And with it, any power she had over how her past would affect her future.

Today, she keeps a low profile and stays out of the news.

In fact, Ashley Hart isn't her name.

We changed it in this story to respect Ashley's ability to keep secrets today.

We don't know where Ashley is or what she's doing.

Maybe that's the way she wants it.

Maybe she's finally taking control of her own secrets.

That piece was produced by Tess McCarthy with help from collaborators, Alexander Muscat and Lilly Gill.

It featured music by Kevin MacLeod.

You're listening to State of the Human, and today we're talking about secrets.

So far, we've heard stories of people sharing their secrets with others, willingly and not.

We've seen how revealing secrets can dramatically change our relationships with other people, either to bring us together or push us apart.

But what purpose do secrets have if we keep them to ourselves?

In our next piece, we'll hear the incredible but true tale of a 19th century woman who used secrets to gain freedom, until she discovered the limits of those secrets.

All of the quotes you'll hear are taken from actual historical documents.

Producer Rosie La Puma is our narrator.

Our story begins with a farmer, a peddler and a cross-dressing pirate captain.

It was a cold December night up in New Brunswick, Canada in 1841.

Betsy and Isaac Edmondson were eagerly awaiting the birth of their son.

At least, Isaac hoped it would be a son.

Betsy was in her late thirties by then and had already given birth to six children, five girls and one epileptic boy.

In Isaac's eyes, they were all useless.

He wanted a healthy boy to help run their farm.

So when Sarah Emma Edmondson came screaming into the world, Isaac was screaming with her.

He entered one of his common rages, flinging things across the room and verbally abusing his wife.

Emma was only minutes old, but her gender had already failed her.

For more information, visit www.fema.gov So as Emma grew up, the only male adult that she's really exposed to was this abusive, angry father.

And over time, she started to begrudge men, all men.

She herself said at one point, If occasionally I met one who seemed a little better than the others, then I set him down in my mind as a wolf in sheep's clothing, and probably less worthy than the rest.

It got to the point where she saw all men as an oppressive force.

But even more than that, she noticed their unlimited power.

Again and again, she watched as the woman around her bent over backwards to do men's bidding.

Her greatest fear was ending up like her mother, trapped in a relationship with a wolf.

And yet, she felt there were no other options.

That would all change, however, with the arrival of a strange visitor.

Late one evening, when I was 13 years old, an old peddler man came along, weary with his burden.

The neighboring woods were not safe at night, so Emma's mother offered to let the peddler sleep in the house.

In return for the family's kindness, when the man left, he handed something discreetly to Emma.

A book.

Now, until this moment, Emma had only had access to one book her entire life.

The Bible.

She had read it over and over, and it had, on many occasions, served as a lifeline, providing hope of a future beyond what she could see.

But this new book, this secret token from a strange peddler, would prove even more important to her.

She slipped it into the pocket of her dress.

Later that morning, when she and her sisters were working far enough into the potato fields that no one could see them, Emma began to read the book aloud.

Fanny Campbell, the female pirate captain.

As the girls pulled potatoes, they took turns reading the book aloud to each other.

Emma immediately saw parts of herself reflected in the main character, Fanny.

Fanny was a noble looking girl.

She was none of your modern belle, delicate and ready to faint at the first sight of a reptile.

No, Fanny could row a boat.

Emma loved canoeing on the lake.

Fanny could shoot a panther.

Emma too was a skilled hunter.

Fanny could ride the wildest horse in the province.

Emma was responsible for breaking all the wild young colts on the farm.

Fanny could do any most brave and useful act.

Soon the sisters abandoned their work completely and sat down in the dirt to read and listen.

In the story, the brave Fanny Campbell disguised herself as a man and captained a pirate ship to save her handsome lover, William, from captivity.

All of the girls liked the story, but for Emma it sparked something much deeper.

Legend has it that when Emma read the passage where Fanny cut off her browned curls and donned a blue jacket, Emma tossed up her straw hat and cheered.

I could never again be a slave.

From that time forth, I never ceased planning my escape.

Yet four years later, when Emma was 17 years old, she still had not managed to escape, and her worst nightmare seemed about to come true.

Her father Isaac had decided that Emma should marry an abusive elderly widower.

No one knows exactly how she did it, but one thing is certain.

I took off unceremoniously for parts unknown.

Emma ran away.

But she didn't just run away from home.

She ran away from herself.

Emma took on a new secret identity, a male identity.

She cut her hair short and bound her breasts with strips of cloth.

Slim, muscular and 5'6, Emma was perfectly within the range of the average 19th century man.

To complete her disguise, Emma took the name of Frank Thompson.

Now, listeners, just know that the names get a little confusing here.

From now on, when I talk about interactions with other people, I'll use the name Frank.

But when I talk about internal thoughts, I'll use Emma.

Got it?

Cool.

So, Frank became a traveling Bible salesman.

Soon, Frank left Canada entirely to start afresh in the United States, fully adopting a new persona as an American man.

Frank worked a respectable business and made quick friends with the people she met traveling in new cities.

In December of 1860, Frank celebrated her 19th birthday in Detroit, Michigan.

In that same month, South Carolina seceded from the Union.

Frank's world was about to change.

War, civil war, with all its horrors seemed inevitable.

The great question to be decided was, what can I do?

Ten days after President Lincoln proclaimed the fall of Fort Sumter in 1861, Frank enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Infantry and was on her way to Washington, DC.

I thank God that I am permitted in this hour of my adopted country's need to express a tithe of the gratitude which I feel toward the people of the Northern States.

But would this vague so-called tithe of gratitude really have been enough to make Emma risk enlisting in the Army as Frank Thompson?

At this point, Emma had been Frank for about 2 years.

As Frank, Emma had found friends, respect, even financial security.

Frank's life was going well.

Well, Emma certainly might have felt tied to the United States as the location of her newfound freedom.

Remember that if the Army discovered Emma's secret, that would be the end of Frank Thompson.

She would have no choice but to re-enter society as a woman.

Not to mention there was also the normal risk of going into battle.

That would be the end of Frank Thompson and Emma Edmondson.

Despite all this, Emma chose to risk the security of her new life to fight for the Union.

But you see, what I think Emma wanted even more than security was adventure, just like her inspiration, Fanny Campbell, the female pirate captain.

Within three months, Frank and her regiment marched to Virginia, and she found herself in the first major battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Bull Run.

The morning broke bright and clear, bringing the two contending armies in plain sight of each other.

The first man I saw killed was a gunner.

A shell had burst in the midst of the battery, killing one and wounding three men and two horses.

The ground is crimson with blood.

It is terrible to witness.

The Union Army lost the Battle of Bull Run.

In the days and weeks that followed, Emma's hatred for the Confederacy grew.

Day by day, she watched Confederate soldiers tear her comrades apart.

She was powerless to stop it, just as she had been powerless to stop her father.

Now, the South took precedence in her mind as the oppressive force that threatened her own independence.

After the Battle of Bull Run, Frank began working as a nurse.

Now, despite what you might imagine, nursing was actually a traditionally male role.

At the time, soldiers would have been humiliated to know they were being tended by a woman.

But of course, being tended by Frank was no problem.

There was one soldier who became particularly fond of Frank.

His name was Jerome Robbins.

Wavy chestnut hair, bold cheekbones, dark, smoldering eyes, Jerome was dashingly handsome.

Frank and Jerome worked side by side in the hospital, whispering quietly back and forth as they attended patients.

Jerome wrote in his journal, No greater blessing at present could be mine than the society of a friend like Frank, fully appreciating the noblest sentiments that the heart should possess.

They discovered small coincidences linking them together.

Both had lived in Michigan before the war.

Both were deeply religious.

Both preferred reading and books to almost anything else.

After avoiding intimacy with any of her companions for so long, Frank felt as if she had finally found a real friend, a soulmate.

Frank and Jerome started going on long walks together, discussing life and war and religion.

Staying in character as Frank became more difficult as Emma's emotions became harder to conceal.

This was the first time that Emma had experienced the feelings of love and attraction.

But she still didn't trust Jerome enough to reveal her feelings.

If he betrayed her, she could lose all the independence she had gained for herself.

But everything changed the day Jerome confessed that he was already in love.

But of course, not with Frank.

His heart was set on Anna Corey.

Anna Corey, the only lady correspondent well worthy of the highest esteem of any who appreciates virtue and true nobility.

After Jerome told Frank about Anna, Frank excused herself claiming she felt sick and went to sit in her tent for a few hours.

Emma must have rocked back and forth on her heels as she considered her options.

By keeping her identity secret, Emma had built herself into an emotional fortress.

She felt like the fortress was key to her independence and source of her power.

But because of her mistrust of those around her, she never allowed anyone inside.

She was lonely in there.

And when she listened to Jerome describe his sweetheart, Emma realized that she wanted to be viewed in the same way.

He was the first man she had ever wanted to be a woman with.

Her femininity had failed her for so long.

Could it now be her saving grace?

The next day, Frank and Jerome went for another walk.

Jerome would write that evening in his journal, My friend Frank is a female.

Emma told Jerome about everything, from her abusive father to her life as a Bible salesman.

She put aside her emotional fortress by putting all of her secrets on the table.

This was her opportunity to put her mistrust of men behind her and reclaim her true identity.

But the reveal did not go as planned.

No one knows exactly what was said, but both of them left angry and disgusted.

Jerome did concede to keep Emma's secret, but the pair stopped speaking.

A few weeks later, Emma transferred to a regiment in Alexandria, far away from Jerome.

Now Emma was stuck.

She had finally learned to love a man instead of loathe him, and she knew that she could someday want to have a life as a woman.

But she was afraid of becoming Emma, and she was tired of being Frank.

So she rebuilt her fortress and took her secret identity one step further.

Within a year, she became a spy for the Union Army.

Emma's mission as a spy was to find the Confederate camp and estimate how many troops they had.

While we know from historical documents that she was commissioned as a spy, we can only trust Emma's account of what happened next.

I procured the dress and outfit of an Irish female peddler, together with a considerable amount of rogue, and a set of Irish phrases.

Now, just think about this for a second.

Emma was now in a disguise three layers deep.

To the Confederates, she was a female peddler.

To the Union, she was a male spy posing as a peddler.

And to herself, she was a woman dressed as a man, dressed as a woman.

To enter enemy territory, Emma had to journey through a swamp in Northern Virginia.

While crossing the Chickahominy River, she soaked both her disguise and her rations.

To make matters worse, she then caught a fever and began hallucinating.

For three days, she wandered aimlessly through the swamp.

After all her years of planning, of binding her breasts, of missing her siblings, of lying to her friends, Emma was back at square one, trapped and powerless.

I took great interest in carefully tracing each link in the chain of circumstances which had brought me to the spot whereupon I now lay, deserted and alone in that notorious Chickahominy swamp.

This is where her secrets had led her.

By the time Emma finally stumbled upon a white cottage, she was physically and mentally exhausted.

When she entered, she discovered she was not alone.

There, on the ground, was a dying Confederate general.

An enemy to the government for which I was daily and willingly exposing my life.

A male Confederate general.

This was the ultimate oppressor.

He was exactly the person Emma had trained herself to despise and distrust for years.

And this was her chance to take control.

She could have pumped him for information.

She could have left him to die slowly.

She could have killed him outright.

And yet, as I looked upon him in this helpless condition, I did not feel the least resentment or entertain an unkind thought toward him personally, but looked upon him only as an unfortunate and suffering man.

They were powerless together.

They were on completely equal terms.

Witnessing men's vulnerability in battle, falling in love with Jerome, acknowledging her own weakness in the swamp.

Through all these events, Emma had been a slave to the fear of becoming powerless.

A slave to this idea that becoming Emma would make her, once again, impotent.

Yet, if even this man, this general, could be helpless, then clearly no identity, no amount of secrets could truly protect her freedom.

Emma tended to the sickly man.

They prayed together in the tiny cottage.

She held his hand, as he died.

In this moment, female soldier and male general were powerless in human weakness, but powerful in their human solidarity.

So, yes, pretending to be a man would never be a guarantee of power.

But maybe that meant that returning to life as a woman wouldn't be a guarantee of powerlessness, either.

Less than a month later, Emma left the Union Army and Frank disappeared forever.

Emma continued to seek out her freedom, but this time she would do it without keeping secrets.

Emma Edmonds remained Emma for the rest of her life, but the ambition that had driven her to become Frank never wavered.

Emma briefly attended college.

She met a man named Linus Seale, whom history describes as meek and jolly, the exact opposite of her father.

They were happily married and Emma dragged him on various adventures around the country, to Missouri, to Michigan, to Illinois, to Louisiana.

She volunteered as a nurse, founded an orphanage and gave away large portions of the family income to the poor.

But Emma's culminating achievement, in my opinion anyway, was writing her autobiography.

In it, Emma recounts her journey from joining the Union Army through the end of the Civil War.

When I was reading the book though, I noticed something kind of strange.

The name Frank is never mentioned.

In fact, the autobiography is written so that an unknowing reader would never know that Emma had to cross-dress to do the things she did.

Her secret identity is nowhere to be seen.

We don't know for sure exactly why she did this, maybe to protect her superiors or perhaps just to avoid controversy, but I feel like it is strangely appropriate.

By keeping her cross-dressing secret from history, Emma wrote the story the way she idealized it, in a world where women didn't have to keep their gender secret to be independent, to be powerful.

This was the Fanny Campbell story for the new generation.

That piece was produced and written by Rosie La Puma and Shara Tonn.

It featured Rosie La Puma as the narrator, Eileen Williams as the voice of Emma and guest speaker, Justin Krasner-Karpen as Jerome.

The piece included music by Chris Zabriskie, Jason Shaw, Podington Bear, Gila Cudi and Christian Westergaard.

Today, our episode is about the secrets we share and the secrets we keep.

In our final story, a Stanford freshman tells us about the girl who single-handedly changed his life.

The twist?

He's kept it from her this whole time.

Hi, my name is Jackie Chan.

Not the Jackie Chan you're thinking of, though he does get that a lot.

You think, oh, do you do martial arts, or were you named after an actor?

Jackie's now a freshman at Stanford, studying human biology with the hopes of going to med school, but he wasn't always your classic overachiever.

Before high school, I was quite a rascal.

I wasn't the best student, but I got through through means of cheating.

For example, there was a semi-smart kid in my class, and I used to cheat off him.

And we'd get these together.

And Jackie wasn't just a rascal when it came to his studies.

I became a bully.

Jackie once reduced a student to tears, a student twice his size.

I kept telling him, like, bullying, you know, those young mama jokes.

I just kept saying that to him in homeroom, I guess, one time.

And I didn't know I made him cry after.

But something happened on the first day of biology class, freshman year of high school.

Starting that day, Jackie would radically change his life.

Just before class, he got into an argument with his friend Donovan.

Jackie couldn't remember whether a white flag or a black flag signaled surrender.

I thought a black flag meant you surrendered, and the white flag meant you won.

It became a big deal, and he was calling me stupid, retarded, dumb.

But then, out of nowhere, Jackie's lab partner, a girl he had never spoken to before, stood up.

Just all of a sudden, like, stepped in and said, Donovan, he's not stupid.

He's actually quite right.

This girl, we'll call her Catherine here.

For some reason, perhaps nobody has ever stepped up for me, or maybe it was a girl, but all of a sudden, I was really touched.

Jackie was infatuated with Catherine.

Her personality just really shone through, and she was beautiful to me.

So beautiful that, in that moment, Jackie came to a decision.

My biggest goal, at least, was to get her to look at me in a different way.

So, I started changing.

This is something that a lot of high schoolers say when they fall in love, that they'll change for someone, and not many people actually follow through.

But Jackie did.

Jackie began to focus more on his schoolwork, a lot more.

That was my first 4.0.

And that whole freshman year, sitting next to her, being her lab partner, I had a 4.0, and that really made me proud.

But I was still a loser, I guess.

This dramatic academic turnaround did not feel like enough for Jackie.

I was small, 105 pounds, and I didn't do any sports.

She was in on the cross-country team, she was on the track team, she was first chair violinist.

She was popular.

And she could sing well.

Without saying a word to Catherine, Jackie began to reassess his whole life by Catherine standards.

I was in our orchestra class, but you know, she was first chair and I was in the middle, second violins.

Didn't really work out, but I joined cross-country track and I started lifting.

Turns out he wasn't too shabby at track.

I got some state medals because of her and all that.

Jackie says it nonchalantly that he got state medals because of her.

But by senior year of high school, Jackie felt that Catherine had transformed him into a fundamentally different person.

He was no longer the Jackie who cheated, the Jackie who made a classmate cry.

Jackie wanted to tell her how much she had done for him.

But as the year drew to a close, he still hadn't managed to.

It had become a secret.

Perhaps this story is like my biggest secret.

Jackie had kept the secret for so long that by senior year, he wasn't even sure if she remembered that incident from freshman year at all.

She probably did this to everybody, actually.

She probably stood up for people, being torn down.

But, yeah, this was really special for me.

Special enough that he decided that he would tell her.

Decided that he would share the secret of how he managed to turn his life around.

The problem now, though, was that Jackie had spent so much time idolizing Catherine that the idea of actually approaching her, talking to her, seemed incredibly daunting.

I think from freshman year, I placed on her pedestal, where no matter how well I did, even if I was a state champion, just cross country, even if I got into Stanford, even if I did whatever, she would always be higher than me.

Nevertheless, Jackie knew he had to tell her.

After a few failed attempts, Jackie finally decided on the time and the place he'd come out with it.

I planned that day to be the last day after graduation, senior banquet.

This is the last time they would see each other formally as classmates.

I had everything recited in my head.

The day arrived, Jackie saw Catherine across the room.

She was 50 meters away, so I started walking towards her ready to tell it all.

In my head I was like, this is what you have done for me.

But two steps before I got to her, I turned to 180 and walked the other way.

When asked why he couldn't tell her, Jackie has a number of answers.

I couldn't do it, because I couldn't.

I just, I didn't have the balls.

I didn't have the balls.

I just cheaped out, squirreled out.

Although I appear stoic outside, and I would find it really easy to do this to anyone else, she really, I guess, makes me feel like Kelly.

She really, I guess, makes me feel like Kelly.

Makes me feel like Kelly.

I don't really like to share my feelings.

I don't really like to share my feelings, I guess.

I just squirreled out.

Although I appear stoic outside, I don't really like to share my feelings.

I would probably find it really easy to do this to anyone else.

I didn't have the balls.

I didn't have the balls.

Jackie says he didn't tell her because he lacked the courage, but as I talked to Jackie, I began to think it might be something a little different.

Maybe he needed this secret.

The secret kept him going.

This idea that if he worked hard enough, he'd be at Katherine's level and that someone like her could love him.

Throughout high school, this was his inspiration, the source of his work ethic.

I wonder if he had gotten an answer from Katherine at the senior banquet, any answer, would he have kept working as hard as he did?

We may not always talk about it, but in our heads, we all create our own visions for our lives.

And sometimes we have to keep them secret to keep them alive.

That's how Jackie felt in high school.

But speaking with Jackie now, his freshman year of college, it seems like his secret has served its purpose.

The secret has gotten him where he needs to be.

And finally, he wants to let it go, and he plans to.

This summer, I'll do my best to meet up with her.

Perhaps if she volunteered over at Cross Country as a coach, I was gonna go over there, perhaps privately and just tell her everything.

And finally, tell my secret.

Jackie's going to tell her.

He's set on it.

But then I wondered, how is it that he felt more comfortable sharing the secret with me and on public radio than with Catherine herself?

I guess it's something I've bottled up a lot.

And I feel like expressing it to even people, not her, it really helps me.

And it will help me, I guess, practice when I really tell her.

Regardless of whether Jackie does end up telling her, it doesn't change how he feels about her.

Like she has changed my life from probably going downhill to an upward trend.

That piece was produced by Dustin Dienhart and me, Chelsea Davis.

It featured music by Podington Bear.

Today's program was produced by Rosie La Puma, Eileen Williams, Will Rogers, Chelsea Davis, Claire Schoen, and Jonah Willihnganz.

Special thanks to James Pennebaker, Jackie Chan, and Justin Krasner-Karpen.

Thanks also to Preet Kaur, Joshua Hoyt, Tess McCarthy, Natacha Ruck, and Dustin Dienhart, as well as Christy Hartman, Nina Fouchet, and John Kleinman.

The music you heard during the introduction was by Puddington Bear.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Stanford Continuing Education, the Program in Oral Communication, and Bruce Braden.

You can find this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes.

You can also download them and find out more about the Storytelling Project's live events, grants, and workshops at our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Chelsea Davis.