“This is a story about the search for answers in the murder of my sister, a sister that I never knew,” Fresh Air cohost Tonya Mosley intones over a call one Friday afternoon. Under other circumstances, this statement might conjure the specter of pulpy true-crime media, complete with Reddit conspiracy theorists and fan clubs. That description alone doesn’t capture the scope and sweep of Mosley’s new 10-part audio docuseries, She Has a Name, presented in Truth Be Told, her Webby Award–winning podcast strand. The project, distributed by APM Studios, is part memoir, part deep investigation into a forgotten Detroit and the life and death of Anita Wiley.
“There’s just not been a lot of storytelling around the ’80s and ’90s Detroit,” Mosley explains. “We have a lot of storytelling from the Civil Rights Era—the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s—but that time period, we’re just starting to grapple with what we went through in the ’80s and ’90s. And so I see this as a contribution.”
In this way, the city and Anita mirror each other. “She’s a mother very young at 14 years old,” Mosley says. “She dealt in drugs as a drug dealer; she also experimented with drugs herself.” Detroit’s—America’s—structures and biases are what Anita lived within, and what kept her missing for more than 30 years. “There are lots of systemic issues that allow you to see it so clearly,” Mosley says. “During the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in Detroit…she was a person that authorities probably would think [of] as a throwaway. I mean, these are not the people that we talk about when there are missing persons. It’s often very much that you have to have the perfect victim, the sympathetic character, in order to shed light.”
Mosley’s nephew and Anita’s son, Antonio Wiley, who was 14 years old when his mother went missing, participates in the episodes—a nod to the project’s origins, as conversations between the two family members are what sparked the idea. Mosley says neither of them fully anticipated the personal depths the undertaking would bring them to. “Through this search, my nephew and I are discovering other things about ourselves and each other,” Mosley says.
“Some of those things help us understand not only what might have led to my sister’s murder, but also what does healing look like?” Mosley adds. “What does redemption look like? What does absolution in the face of possibly not having answers look like? And how can all of those things be aided through storytelling? But less so do we give this type of excavation, this type of nuanced look at a person…for Black people like my sister, who had led a pretty unremarkable life—she died at 29 years old and never really had a chance to fulfill what her destiny was.”
Mosley spoke with Vanity Fair about She Has a Name, Detroit’s state of flux, and the intimacy of audio.
Vanity Fair: There is a certain voice in audio reporting—considering class, accent, regional specificity—that can often be left out on the basis of “clarity.” What were your considerations, then, when choosing how these voices were presented?
Tonya Mosley: I’ve been trained up in listening to voices for clarity and with the mainstream thought in mind. I really had to interrogate myself throughout this entire process of: Who is this for? And people that it’s for—for me—are, number one, Detroiters. It’s for everyone, but those are the folks I had in mind. And being even more specific, I was thinking about family members. One of the things you’ll often hear in audio, like, say, This American Life, which I’m a huge fan of, is that they will come back around to voices like the voices you hear on my podcast, to explain or to further make it clear to you. And there were many moments where I had to say, “No, I know this is clear to me. It’s clear to those who know people like this; the people who are these people.” And if I put the disclaimer on everything, or repeat back everything, what it’s signaling is: “This is not for you; I’m talking to white audiences.”
White audiences are smart enough to catch up. I think that we’re not giving them enough credit. Part of you getting used to voices and understanding voices is that you sit in it. To truly be immersed in something, you need to sit in it and not be the center. When we’re explaining things, we’re actually making you the center of another person’s story. Every single time you have the journalist parrot it back to you, it’s diminishing that voice.
As Detroit itself looms large in the reporting of this series, what do you make of the city and its future prospects?
One of the things that became clear in the making of this podcast is that Detroit is a different place than it was when I grew up and when my sister was alive. It’s gone through so many iterations, and right now it is on a high. It’s fulfilling, maybe, the promise that it made decades ago with the automotive industry. And it’s trying to rebuild itself after so much divestment. Which is why I think stories like this are kind of a mark in time. While it is all new, you need to know what was here before.
I kind of always knew, but it really became clear to me, that with the newness of Detroit, Detroiters feel displaced in it all. And part of why they feel displaced is because they haven’t had a chance; no one has actually stopped and acknowledged what happened to them—the survivors. You need to put things in stone, you need to orient history, and you need to have people feel like they’ve been heard before you can truly have them along for what is going to be the future. This is one little podcast in a bigger thing. But I think this is my contribution to a place that I love so deeply. A mark of a time and a place.
Did your journalistic background, coupled with the intimacy to the subject matter, cause any reevaluation of your own relationship to your profession?
This was a real test for me on walking the walk, because I’ve been talking about bias in journalism for quite a while. I was part of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford. This was in 2015, 2016, when we were all just starting to talk about implicit bias in newsrooms. Something that I learned during that research at Stanford is that an audience is willing to go along with you and understand where you—re coming from when you let them know what your biases are. So when they know this is my sister; I also grew up in this environment, in this community; and I’m challenging thoughts I already had about drugs, about the city of Detroit, about my own relationships with my family members—I am interrogating those things and I’m also reporting on them. It gives the listener a more holistic look, a truer sense than what we have been doing in the past, where we often—and even in the present—try to erase our identities as a way to move the story forward. I’m a Black woman and I’m talking about Black issues, but I’m supposed to pretend like this is not something that also impacts me. And in this podcast, I am saying these are the things that are impacting me, and by virtue it’s impacting you and lots of people—in our communities and in our world, in our society.
One of the sad things is, when you put my sister’s life all together, you almost can’t see it going any other way. After you listen to this, I think my hope is that people look at people like my sister differently, and their circumstances differently, because you get a deeper understanding and a deeper lens into what certain populations go through and deal with in their lives.
The title She Has a Name feels like a clear reference to the #SayHerName movement.
One hundred percent. For 33 years, she was “Unknown Woman 1987.” That was her designation. And she was a number within this cemetery. So to be able to put a name to her—not just literally her name, Anita, but also who she was, what was the life she led, what brought her to this. At the same time my sister went missing, there was a serial killer in Detroit that was murdering Black women and dumping their bodies all throughout the city. We went through and looked at reports from that time period. They were all classified as prostitutes and drug addicts; you never got to know who these women were. They were just throwaway people. If they did get anything beyond a news brief, which most of them didn’t, it was a sound bite from a family member. It really flattens people. It flattens the humanity of people. And it also separates us, that type of reporting, because then it furthers you away from understanding that these people are human.
We’ve heard from people who have already listened to it who say, “When I first read the description, I went into it thinking it’s going to sound exactly like the true crime that I’m really into.” And while it did give that, it also gave it from the family’s perspective, also a more nuanced and sensitive approach to it that brings the humanity to the victim. I think that often the challenge is, [true crime] becomes a voyeuristic space where we can dissect things not only for our own entertainment and pleasure, but also to kind of say to ourselves, This couldn’t happen to me. So what I want to do with this podcast is actually turn that idea on its head. For you to see yourself in Anita; for you to see yourself in me; for you to see yourself in my nephew, Antonio.
We also look at [true crime] as beginning, middle, and end. The crime happened; then you dig into what happened, theories; then you come to a conclusion; and then it’s over. That’s supposed to be “closure.” Now you’ve moved on. That’s just not how life really works. So that has been the challenge and also the most exciting part of this podcast. Actually, this is where it’s all just beginning. Now we have the answer, but what does that mean for us—for the rest of our lives—for the living?
You’ve had a long-standing relationship with audio storytelling, radio, podcasts. How does this series fit within your conception of your career and contributions to the oral histories of communities?
We have such a rich oral history. It’s how the word is passed. We do talk—the podcast space is flooded—but we’re losing that sense of oral history in many ways because we’re losing those connected points of community. Community now looks different. It feels different. We’re losing some of those oral histories that come from just being face-to-face. And I’ve really just been drawn to: What is the best medium to be able to tell and share the story? For this one, I felt like audio because this is a wonderful way for us to hear voices, sit in voices. There’s an intimacy there in the ear and in the heart. I always knew I wanted to go home, too, to tell a story. And I didn’t, of course, know that this was the story that I was going to tell. But I want to tell more Detroit stories. The stories of Detroit are often told through a very narrow lens of what people know about the city: Motown, the car industry, the divestment of the city. But who are these people who were left behind?
The name of the podcast is She Has a Name, but everyone who participates in it is having their name be known and their voices be heard. Public radio is getting better and wanting to broaden its scope, but it’s a very white space. And it’s a space that thinks about clarity of voice—how can it be understandable, and how can it be the most mainstream? And the voices you hear in this podcast are voices you just don’t hear every day because they just don’t have that platform.
I want to be a part of using what I know to help people tell their own stories. I think that’s the next step. Part of getting as close to the truth is stepping out of the way. So that means, number one, for younger journalists and also for everyday people to tell their stories. The floodgates are already open. So this podcast is going to be on my Truth Be Told feed. After this series is over, I’m opening up this feed for young creators who want to be able to tell their stories about the places that they’re from, whatever that looks like.
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