Love & Whiskey

This story starts in Singapore, but to understand how I got there, you really have to start in LA. By the time I was born, my parents had become leaders in the evangelical Southern Baptist church, studying under the cofounder of the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference. My dad’s past as a bigtime Motown writer and producer was behind him. Parties with the Temptations and the Supremes morphed into hundred-person Bible studies in the living room. Famous artists still came by, but now it was because my father was their minister. My mother was the bestselling author of relationship books for women with titles like Liberated Through Submission and Your Knight in Shining Armor. They were drawn into their church’s strict interpretation of scripture. Their pastor was a proud male chauvinist who preached that women should only wear dresses and skirts, never pants. From a young age, that didn’t sit right with me—I couldn’t figure out why on earth God wanted me to wear a skirt in the middle of winter. I’ve been wired from day one to challenge everything.

When I was fifteen, my parents had another baby. My mother felt she’d made mistakes with me and my sisters. She wanted a fresh start with her youngest, but I was constantly pushing back on everything. And so my parents gave me an ultimatum: conform to the rules of the house or leave. I left. I was saying no—no to the rules I didn’t understand, no to women being subservient to men, no to being someone else. Just no. My mother watched me walk down the driveway. I think we both understood that living in that environment would no longer work for me, but it was still heartbreaking.

This was in 1992, less than a year after Rodney King was brutally attacked by the police. I moved to Jordan Downs, one of the housing projects in Watts, dropped out of high school, and spent several years in homeless shelters.

The last shelter I stayed in was Covenant House. They helped you get a job, save your money, and get on your feet. My first morning there, the staff helped me put together a résumé and sent me out into LA to pound the pavement. I went to a bunch of different places, handed out my résumé, and did some interviews. One was for a job as a server at BB King’s Blues Club. I walked in, interviewed, and was offered a job. You were supposed to be twenty-one to work there. I had just turned eighteen, but I only got a few questions about my age before management soon forgot about it. They saw someone who carried herself with the confidence of an adult, not a homeless teenager. I got three more job offers by the end of the day.

From then on, my confidence only grew. I knew I would be all right. I took a second job at Camacho’s Cantina as a hostess, and I started saving up.

In addition to my restaurant jobs, I got an unpaid internship in PR. Back then, you’d send out a press release, see who picked it up, and watch someone run with the story. But I thought PR could be more experiential. It just seemed to make sense that if you took the products someplace where the press was already going to be—for example, filling the greenroom where a celebrity would be interviewed with an artist’s paintings and sculptures—then a natural conversation with the press could follow. I reached out to celebrities I’d grown up calling aunt and uncle to introduce me to entertainers who might allow me to do this.

Today we call that brand integration, but at the time, it didn’t really exist.

I pitched it to my boss, who didn’t fully get it. But if you can execute it, go for it, she said. So I took it to two clients. They were hesitant, but they knew what the PR firm had been trying wasn’t working, so they were open to giving this idea a try. After successfully placing their products a few times, both clients came to me and said, Listen, we’re not going to stay with this PR firm. We’re going to go somewhere else. But if you ever decide to start your own firm, we’ll go with you.

I was still a teenager, but suddenly I had two clients. After an initial trial, each offered me $5,000 dollars a month to take on their accounts—the same amount they’d been paying the other firm. By age nineteen, I’d established FEW Entertainment and had ten employees. My dad even helped—he had a mostly unused office for his nonprofit, Black American Response to the African Crisis (BARAC), that he let me use to set up my headquarters.

FEW Entertainment’s clients were happy, but within a year the business started to falter. I knew how to do PR, but I didn’t yet know how to run a company. I made the hard decision to let go of every employee, although I didn’t completely shutter the company just yet.

Those years were ones of turmoil, marked by a lack of hope. I tried to take my own life twice by the time I was twenty. I remember tubes down my nose and charcoal being pumped into me to pull out everything I’d taken. The second time I thought, All right, God, so I tried to take myself out twice and you’re not allowing it, so how about I figure out why I’m here?

In one of my mom’s books, she challenges women to make a six-month commitment to put an Under Construction sign on themselves and figure out who they are without being in a relationship. That idea resonated with me. I’m going to be under construction, I thought. For six months, I did nothing but go to work and read. I cut out all TV and radio. I read the Bible every day and read some sixty other books, anything that seemed like it could be helpful.

In that six months, and for years after, God worked his own charcoal in my spirit. I found this truth in the Gospel: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In other words, wherever your focus is, whatever you give attention to, that’s what grows. I’ve lived by that and focused on my strengths ever since.

I stayed in California and worked earnestly to build a career and life that sustained and nurtured me. By twenty-five, I had become the co-owner of one of the top restaurants in Los Angeles. Chef Gerry Garvin (now G. Garvin) wanted to open his own restaurant and needed help on the business side. One of my former employees suggested me to him. Although my fledgling company was barely surviving, I had enough work that by the time Gerry contacted me, I had built strong credibility in the industry, and very few knew of my company’s challenges. I advised him to focus on his catering business, which had attracted a lot of celebrity clients, while I put together a business plan for him. I became a minor shareholder and the business manager, and I oversaw the successful, celebrity-filled launch of G. Garvin’s Restaurant. It quickly became the place to go in LA.

In 2003, I was getting my hair done once a week at a great salon. I tried to keep my head down and avoid taking in the celebrity and local gossip. I’d bring a book or spend the time on calls with staff or payroll in order to avoid chitchat. The only thing my hairdresser ever talked about was her only son, who sat just a little lower than the angels in her estimation. She never got involved with celebrity gossip. Hair and her son were her only topics. One day she had my head in the wash bowl and leaned over and said, I’ve been watching you all these weeks. She liked that I ran a business at such a young age. You have to meet my son.

It took her over a month, and four attempts, to finally convince me to give her my number. Then, she had to convince her son to call me, which took another month of relentless appeals. I met your wife, she told him point-blank.

This must be the Second Coming, I said, when I realized who was calling.

Keith burst out laughing. You’ve been talking to my mother, he said.

Our first conversation lasted for hours. Before meeting up for a date, I asked God to let me know if Keith was the right person for me and to close the door if he was the wrong one. I knew, from our first conversation, that Keith was it for me. He was absolutely the right door.

We didn’t even have that much in common. His parents were divorced. Mine were marriage counselors. He likes to think things over for a long time. I’m eager to make a choice and follow my gut. I often think and act in the same motion. But we respect each other, we work well together, and most importantly, we love each other.

I believe who you partner with in life is one of the determining factors between success and mediocrity. I wouldn’t be where I am without Keith. I was a whole person by the time I met Keith—perfectly content with going to the movies alone, sitting by myself in restaurants, and loving my life. Keith was a whole person as well. Our relationship is not one of two halves making a whole. Our marriage is one multiplied by one to equal one. Folks often describe me as a strong, independent woman, but that’s not exactly right. I am a strong interdependent woman.

I also started to see my parents in a more nuanced light through Keith’s eyes. People had always talked about how important my dad was, but as a kid, I never got excited by his music; I couldn’t relate to it. Growing up in his house was a little like growing up in Orlando and being utterly unimpressed with Disney World. When Keith and I got serious, though, I brought him home to meet my family.

He walked in the door and looked around at the gold and platinum records that bordered the walls of the entire living room.

Did you forget to tell me something? he asked.

I’d never mentioned it. I never thought to! He asked me what songs my dad had produced, and I couldn’t remember any beyond You’ve Made Me So Very Happy, Love Child, and Still Water (Love).

When I got home, I got a text message from Keith with a link to my father’s Wikipedia page. You should know more, he wrote.

We got married nine months after we met and considered moving to San Antonio, Texas. I always knew I was Southern at heart and wouldn’t live in California forever. But Keith was an executive at Sony Pictures Entertainment. LA was home. So we compromised and found a community in Old Agoura, about thirty miles outside town. It’s like time froze there. Our neighbors had cattle and dozens of horses, and chickens crossed the roads. We had a dream home with enough room and stables for four horses, a lifelong dream of mine. We called it Serenity Ranch.

For years, our life was wonderful. I built an investment company, and Keith and I became real estate investors. I wrote two bestselling books and traveled the world.

But nothing great ever comes with ease. My father passed away in 2012. Following a decade of fertility treatments, in vitro, and unsuccessful adoption and surrogacy attempts, Keith and I came to terms with the idea that the family we’d long dreamed of might not be our purpose in this life. I named my investment company Grant Sidney, Inc., after Grant Edward and Sidney Elisabeth, the kids’ names we’d chosen early into our marriage. The push I felt to mother and nurture found fulfillment in my niece, Brittany. We were her respite from a very tough world for a teenager. Whatever tools she needed in life to succeed, she knew she could come to us and we’d supply it without ever asking a question. We loved Brittany—an audio engineer and animal lover—as a daughter, but my work with Grant Sidney was often so all-encompassing that I didn’t have the time to spend with her that I wanted.

One of the companies Grant Sidney invested in was struggling. I tried to help its founders turn it around, but it was a stressful experiment. In June 2016, after a year of nonstop frustrating moments, Keith invited me to join him last minute on a business trip to Singapore. I jumped at the chance for a break. For better and for worse, the trip turned out to be much more than I bargained for.

EACH MORNING during our time in Singapore, Keith and I would take the elevator to the twenty-first floor of the Grand Hyatt to enjoy breakfast in the club lounge and pick up a copy of the New York Times international edition, which runs about two days behind the version Americans see. Donald Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Hillary Clinton would soon clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, and both parties seemed to be intentionally creating a greater divide among the diverse population of America than I’d ever encountered in my lifetime. We wanted to stay connected with what was going on back home.

On our second day, the top-floor lounge was crowded with Keith’s colleagues and their spouses, all bent over their morning papers or iPads. As Keith returned from the buffet with a hodgepodge of smoked salmon and miniature dumplings, I leafed through the paper, pausing to read a below-the-fold headline that grabbed me: Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave.

A photograph of Jack Daniel, the real-life whiskey maker behind the brand, and his leadership team accompanied the article. Jack wore a white hat and mustache and sat slightly right of center. He’d ceded the center of the photograph to a Black man with a steadfast gaze, a tilted hat, and a distinctive mustache of his own.

My eyes went wide.

Babe, babe, what’s wrong? Keith asked. Is everything okay? I flipped the paper over and showed him what I was reading.

The article, bylined Lynchburg, Tennessee, began: "Every year, about 275,000 people tour the Jack Daniel’s distillery here, and as they stroll through its brick buildings nestled in a tree-shaded hollow, they hear a story like this: Sometime in the 1850s, when Daniel was a boy, he went to work for a preacher, grocer, and distiller named Dan Call. The preacher was a busy man, and when he saw promise in young Jack, he taught him how to run his whiskey still—and the rest is history.

The distillery, home to one of the world’s best-selling whiskeys, the article continued, was trying to tell a different, more complicated tale. Daniel, the company now says, didn’t learn distilling from Dan Call—but from a man named Nearest Green, an enslaved person.

The photo caption suggested that the man in the picture could be one of Nearest’s sons, but no one knew for sure.

Keith and I were genuinely stunned. I didn’t know a lot about Jack Daniel’s at the time; my drink of choice tended to be Colonel E. H. Taylor or Blanton’s. But I knew from nearly twenty years in the hospitality industry that the Jack Daniel’s brand was owned by a public company named Brown-Forman, valued at $22 billion. One of the most successful products and ubiquitous brands in history originated with an enslaved person. And now it was giving him credit on the world stage!

We rode the elevator back to our room, wondering aloud whether there could be more to this story still waiting to be discovered. After that, our morning quickly turned into the hustle and bustle of our normal life. I put on my daily gospel playlist, listened to some Kirk Franklin, CeCe Winans, and Fred Hammond, and began answering emails from business partners and employees back home as Keith dressed for a long day of meetings.

But that photograph stayed with me. I wanted to understand who that man was.

The only photographs I knew of from that era depicting white people surrounding a Black person were of lynchings and beatings—images with a very different meaning than this. Photography in general was not that common, either, especially in a little town like Lynchburg. To this day, there are only a few photographs of Jack Daniel. But photographs of Black people were even rarer. Even more unusual, the photograph was of such good quality! Critics as far back as W.E.B. Du Bois have noted that the average white photographer does not know how to deal with colored skins. But in this image, the viewer got a real sense of personality and presence from the mystery man in the center.

I did some cursory digging online. There was almost nothing out there on Nearest Green beyond a thin, brand-new Wikipedia page with a reference to Jack Daniel’s Legacy, a biography from 1967. The article had been out for a couple of days in the States, but so far only news aggregation sites had picked it up, regurgitating the same story.

I just knew there had to be more to this. I remember thinking, This is going to be a story people remember.

IN 2016—the same year I read that New York Times article that changed my life—Jack Daniel Distillery celebrated its 150th anniversary. Ownership had changed hands over the years, passing from Jack Daniel to his nephews Lem Motlow and Dick Daniel and then to Lem’s sons, Reagor, Robert, Hap, and Connor. These four, nicknamed the shirtsleeves brothers for their hands-on approach to their work, sold the company to Brown-Forman, a wine and spirits company based in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1956. Reagor stayed on as president and then eventually moved to sitting on the executive board, but the family remained heavily influential until Reagor’s passing in 1978.

Jack Daniel, with his top hat, tailcoat, and shoe lifts (he was only five foot two) was a walking PR campaign in his day. He’d enter a saloon and put down a silver dollar for every person there and dare them to give his namesake a try.

I make the best whiskey there is, and I’m going to prove it to you, he’d say. This drink’s on me.

Channeling that spirit in the 1950s, Jack Daniel’s embarked on a forty-year ad campaign of black-and-white photos and simple, heartfelt ad copy centering the people who made the whiskey. Nelson Eddy, a Nashville-based managing partner in the public relations firm that manages Jack Daniel’s media relations, has been the brand’s historian for close to forty years—and an expert on all things related to Jack. Ask him a question, and if he didn’t know the answer, he’d consult the Jack Daniel’s archives in Washington, DC, and comb through their wealth of material by hand.

One thing Nelson kept encountering was people who didn’t realize Jack Daniel had been a real person. They thought he was a figment, a brand persona, like Betty Crocker. And they tended not to know—at least until they came to Lynchburg and took the distillery tour—that what really distinguishes Tennessee whiskey from other spirits is the process of charcoal mellowing, where the whiskey is slowly filtered through charcoal made from sugar maple trees to remove impurities prior to going into the barrels for the aging process.

In March 2016, Jack Daniel’s media relations team had emailed Clay Risen at the New York Times. With your expertise on both whiskey and civil rights, the email read, I wanted to reach out with a story that has gone largely untold.

The message was written in the warm, homespun style that has been the signature of Jack Daniel’s marketing copy for decades. It was pitched right after Black History Month in 2016. Clay could tell the story had potential. As someone acquainted with the spirits industry, it seemed familiar to him, but it was definitely not a story he or anyone else in the whiskey world knew well.

The last line of the email was key: Jack had learned his distilling skills from Nearest Green, an African American slave who continued to work as a master of the still house after he was freed. That term, master of the still house and its modern incarnation, master distiller, is a title that commands respect in the whiskey world. It doesn’t have a standardized definition like master sommelier but rather a know-it-when-you-see-it quality within the industry. It conveys deep knowledge about distilling and a responsibility for making a brand’s whiskey consistent and reliable.

While Nearest was master of the still house, he was responsible for making Jack Daniel’s taste like Jack Daniel’s in every barrel. Nearest’s sons went to work with Jack after Nearest stopped working, the email continued, and several of Nearest’s relatives still lived in the area. The families have been closely connected ever since.

The pitch was the best idea for a Black History Month story Mark McCallum had ever heard. Mark was the executive vice president at Brown-Forman and responsible for stewarding the brand. Jack Daniel’s is one of the most iconic brands of all time, he later told me. His job was to not screw it up. They thought they were the cleverest white people in the world, pitching this Black History Month story, Mark said.

The article was supposed to be a historical human interest piece. Instead of running shortly after Black History Month and being a PR win for Brown-Forman, though, the article ran in July. Its eye-popping headline became a hand grenade in the culture war of the summer of 2016. Oh my God, Mark McCallum said, after reading the piece. Why did they choose that headline?

In retrospect, he realized that he had been naive. An Australian, he’d been in the States since 1997. I’m not claiming ignorance to the racial tensions in the US, he said, but I don’t think I was as alert as I would have been had I been more immersed in this country. Mark realized that the feel-good piece could become an abject disaster for Jack Daniel’s as a brand and Brown-Forman as a company.

The Hidden Ingredient and Help From a Slave phrases took hold in readers’ imaginations, and as people shared the story on social media and it was picked up by other sites, public perception of what it was about was amplified by the facts. People interpreted the story in so many different ways. The day the article was published, a commenter wrote, The ‘whole’ story of America never seems to be in the history books because white affluent WASP males always seem to control the presses. The next day, another user commented about the jaunty way [the Black man was] wearing his hat! Look at the expression on his face! That’s a man who has DEEP thoughts.

Others immediately misinterpreted the article to say Jack Daniel was an enslaver who’d stolen the recipe, hidden Nearest’s involvement, and never gave him credit—a story that persists online to this day. "Enslavers like Jack Daniels profiting from the bodies and minds of enslaved Africans in America is part of the larger white supremacy narrative of denial, forgetfulness, myths, and erasure, one user wrote. Another commented: It is not clear to me why Daniel, who was hired by Call as a boy, would have owned slaves."

There was plenty of positivity in the comments, too, but it was hard to see among comments like, Let’s SMASH all the Jack Daniel’s Bottles, The Cynical Me says this is just PR for the brand, and Nearest Green had no more to do with putting Jack Daniel’s on the map than Jack Daniel did.

I couldn’t blame people for jumping to conclusions. They were right, after all, that the contributions of African Americans have been systematically erased from the history books. They were right that companies often exploit stories like Nearest’s for good press.

But this felt different to me.

ON OUR way home from Singapore, on a short stopover on a nearby island, Keith and I got a call that stopped our world. Our niece Brittany had died in a motorcycle accident. A driver had been blinded by the sun and never saw Brittany on her bike—she never even slowed down. Brittany had just turned twenty-six.

Just a few weeks earlier, Brittany had come over to our house. While she and Keith sat in the kitchen chatting about life, her current struggles, and the lessons she’d recently learned, I sat one room away working on my computer. I overheard her tell Keith I’d always been like a second mom to her and how much she appreciated my love and how I was always there when she needed me.

That should have beckoned me to her, but instead, I continued answering emails and strategizing about next steps for my investment— in retrospect, things that could have waited until later. Now she was gone, taken from us all far too young.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d never cried so hard in my life. Devastated, Keith and I prayed for Brittany’s parents: my big sister Tracey and Brittany’s father David. Then Keith held me tight. I’d never experienced such a senseless loss of a young person. I’d only been to three funerals in my entire life—my grandmother, my father, and a close friend. Keith was inconsolable, too. After a while, he walked onto our hotel balcony, stared out toward the sea, and doubled over, releasing the loudest cry I’d ever heard from my husband.

We flew back to California, where I threw myself into planning Brittany’s celebration of life. I went over to Agoura Bible Fellowship, a gorgeous location with a small church and a lot of outdoor space.

Is there any way that we could do a memorial here? I asked.

Memorials are almost always kind of last-minute, but this was huge in scale. The folks at the church didn’t even blink. They were incredibly kind and part of our beloved community. Of course, they said.

That’s how I met Stephani Ross. Born and raised in Elgin, Illinois, she worked full-time at Agoura Bible Fellowship. Stephani and I worked together to throw a great party, a real carnival—complete with a popcorn machine and snow cones, sports, and soul food. I wanted it to be about all the things Brittany loved. The church was packed, and several hundred people helped us lay Brittany to rest. I had no time to think, let alone cry.

A COUPLE DAYS LATER, I saw an unopened Amazon package on my desk with the copy of Jack Daniel’s Legacy I’d ordered, its old-timey brown cover nestled in packing materials. With all the planning over, that was exactly what I needed. I’m the type of person who’ll throw myself into work and let grief catch up with me later.

I settled onto my big round leather couch and started reading. It was the first time in nearly a month I’d allowed myself to think about anything other than Brittany. Being transported to nineteenth-century Lynchburg felt like a much-needed escape. Within a few pages, I found myself totally immersed in Jack’s life and Nearest’s world.

Uncle Nearest is the best whiskey maker that I know of, the Reverend Dan Call told a young Jack Daniel when he introduced them. Jack Daniel’s Legacy painted a picture of a relationship between colleagues and a mentor and mentee working hard, exhausting hours together. Distilling was truly skilled labor; the difference between whiskey that was good to drink and whiskey that was unpalatable and full of unwanted by-products was one of chemistry, timing, instinct, and know-how. After long hours at the still, Nearest played his fiddle on the porch and Jack danced.

When Jack established his own distillery later on, Nearest’s sons George and Eli went to work for him as still hands. George and Eli Green were known for their strength. They challenged each other to lift barrels of whiskey, rest them on their knees, and drink from them. This was an epic feat, considering a whiskey barrel weighed more than four hundred pounds, and Eli earned the nickname Samson in the process.

When I learned that Jack’s birthday was September 5, I thought that was a cool coincidence. That was my birthday, too, and it was coming up soon. Then I read toward the end of Jack Daniel’s Legacy that September 5 was really Ben Green’s birthday, and he had assigned it to Jack because no one knew when Jack was born. As I’d later learn, he got Jack’s birth year wrong by two years, but his logic about the month and date were sound. Family lore said that Jack was born in the fall of the year, so Ben decided to give him the birth date of the only guy who ever set out to write a book about Uncle Jack—himself.

I was a little bummed that Ben had assigned Jack his birthday, but as I continued to read and discover so many similarities between Jack and me, I was drawn to the connection.

I really like this guy! I called out to Keith as I read.

Who? he called back from the kitchen.

Jack, I said.

Jack who?

I’d been so immersed that Keith didn’t know what I was reading. I started reading excerpts aloud, sharing my discoveries about Jack Daniel.

I was drawn to Jack’s story, personality, and seemingly innate gift for PR. He seemed sincerely warm, but I sensed a strength that he’d forged by leaving home so early. I connected with him as an entrepreneur who began very early in life, without parents to help guide him.

Jack’s distillery had brought him great success in life, that was for sure.