Michelle Miller Explores heritage in novel, Belonging

By ReShonda Tate

Throughout her childhood, CBS News National correspondent, Michelle Miller had two burning questions – who is my mother and where do I really belong?

The questions haunted her growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s, followed her as she became a reporter and anchor on WWL-TV, New Orleans’ first lady, cohost of “CBS Saturday Morning” and a CBS News national correspondent. Miller admits that she grew up loved. Her father, a prominent Black surgeon and Compton City Council member and her grandmother, known affectionately as BigMama, made sure of it. But what she didn’t have was a mother’s love and she always wanted to know why.

Her usually loving father, turned cold whenever she pressed him about the woman who had given birth to her and left her in the hospital nursery.

In Search Of Answers

Miller was born in a deeply segregated Los Angeles in 1967, the product of an extramarital affair between her Black father and her Latina, mother who presented as white.

Young Michelle was bused to wealthy white schools as the city tried to integrate, further obscuring her own mixed-race identity. When she was twenty-two, and her father was dying of cancer, he urged her to find her mother, whom she’d only met once when she was nine - a surprise meeting that her father engineered that didn’t end well.

Writing Her Story

For years, Miller’s yearning to see how she fit in sat on the back burner. That changed in the summer of 2020, when the country was rocked by racial turmoil after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of white Minneapolis policemen.

Because Miller had covered racially charged incidents, a senior producer at CBS told her, “I want you to bring this perspective to what we’re seeing now,” she said.

That push caused her story to pour out.

“It was like God touched me,” Miller said. “It wasn’t unusual for me to share parts of my story, … but it has to be relevant. It was so relevant to this...

She told her story on “CBS Mornings.” Within an hour after the show went off the air, Miller said, “a pub lisher from Harper Collins contacted her to write a book.

A collabora tor, Rosemarie Robotham, pushed her beyond her usual still of writing short pieces for television, and urged her to dig deeply to share her emotions — something that journalists are taught to shun in favor of dispassionate reporting.

Not An Easy Task

The toughest work, she said, came when she was writing about her encounters with her mother, including a tense session when Miller introduced her to Miller’s husband, former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now National Urban League president, and their two children.

“This book is the story of one woman’s search for herself,” Miller said. “In the context of my mother’s early abandonment of me, and my coming of age in the racialized crucible of my American homeland, it is a search that has involved the painful work of constructing an identity that is authentic and purposeful, healed, and whole. Perhaps, as my father suggested when he urged me to explore the unknown, this is the task we must each engage—to find our lives. We are each, after all, born to a quest whose starting point is set by the providence of where our star is cast, and we must place our feet upon the path where we awaken, and follow it home.”

Even though she was never more than civil to her daughter, Miller promised never to name her mother. In the book, she is called Laura Hernandez; Miller doesn’t know whether her mother is still alive.

She has moved on. “There are circumstances at birth,” Miller said. “You do not need to have them define the person you can be.”

BOOKSIGNING

Harris County Cultural Arts Center

13334 Wallisville Road

Houston, TX 77049

Saturday, July 29 · 3:15 - 5:30pm

Tickets via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ belonging-by-michelle-millertickets- 663448431117? aff=oddtdtcreator