An African American Life

Intro: 

Welcome to The Table podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture brought to you by Dallas Theological Seminary. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Welcome to The Table. We discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Darrell Bock, Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. And our topic today is An African-American Life and my guest is Milyce Pipkin, who brings all kinds of credentials to this operation today. First of all, she's an intern at the Hendricks Center. She's wrapping up her internship at the Hendricks Center this semester, and has been on campus how long? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

It's been about six years. Took a leave of absence for one year. But, yeah. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, it's a typical story. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

It is. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. But we're going to discuss her life which has a lot of twists and turns in it, and a part of it we've gotten to know Milyce at the center. One of our goals in the podcast is to help humanize various spaces. By which I mean, in a lot of the theoretical discussions that go on and the debates that happen, sometimes it's worth it to put a face or a name of someone you know or are familiar with to the space to help understand kind of the dynamics of what's going on. So that's kind of our intention here. I'm going to start in the middle of your story, and then we're going to go back. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Okay. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Let's talk about your professional life a little bit. Tell us once you emerged into the labor force, which I understand, 16. Did you have a job before you were 16 at PBS? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I didn't. That was my very first job. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

It's your first job. Okay. So you began working as a broadcaster. There's an irony here that Milyce texted me on today when we were getting ready to film, and that is, "I'm used to being on the other side of the microphone. I'm used to asking the questions, not answering them." 

Milyce Pipkin: 

That's right. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So I promise to be merciful. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Thank you. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Okay. But let's talk about you ended up at PBS. Now, it strikes me as already unusual that you would choose a job with the Public Broadcasting Service. So how did that happen? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

It's so interesting because, Dr. Bock, I was a 16-year-old kid, who had just transferred in from North Carolina to Alabama schools in Mobile. Because I was already ready to graduate at that point with all of the required courses, I was just taking electives at that point. So one of the electives was a television broadcasting class. And what happened was one of the instructors decided to utilize me as talent. So he had the Mobile County Public School System open up an opportunity for me, and I actually worked for the Mobile County Public School System, producing 30 and 60 second spots promoting the schools. And I was doing that with my product being aired on public broadcasting at 16 years old. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

That's amazing. So it's already an interesting start to the story. But let me ask you, this is a technical question, for people who aren't familiar with broadcasting, I mean, they know who the anchor is and they know that there are cameraman that allow them to see what's in front of them, and that there might be a director who's directing the shots. But what does a producer do? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Well, the producer is the person who's behind the scenes, who's gathering information, coming up with storylines and ideas, and then they go out and they put the show together. And so for me what that looked like as a high school student, going up through my career is I actually started out going out looking for story ideas, putting them together, writing, basically being a reporter in high school. And so that parlayed me into broadcasting because a local television station hired me right out of high school. I ran the cameras with the 6:00 and 10:00 o'clock news for one of the television stations. And after doing that, I was able to go into radio. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

And from there, and I'm just really skipping some hoops to get us to where we want to be, I did radio for a local radio station, urban contemp, number one in the market. I became their news director. I began to produce my own talk show on the AM side, and it was called The Sunday Magazine. And then that parlayed me into a television program called The Sunday Magazine for the Fox station. So I've had a very unusual path in broadcasting, that it's evident when you look back over my life, you see nothing but the footprints and the fingerprints of God. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Interesting. So, how common is it for people to be moving, for lack of a better description, across formats, across platforms? I mean, I'm familiar with people who start in radio and stay in radio, start in television and stay in television. But it sounds like you kind of hopped and skipped around. Is that fair? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

It did. And you know something, we would be remiss if we didn't zoom in and focus on this. This was not a usual path for people to take or make in life. And it came with a lot of challenges. I was told when I wanted to go into television that I didn't have a degree, so I didn't have the credentials. When I, in fact, saw others who were able to do that. They just didn't look like me, they look more like this. So I set out to make education a very important part of my factor going forward in broadcasting. I did get into radio, and even in that there was a challenge because I was told working for the urban contemp that I couldn't have my name, Milyce, on-air. And so that led to me having to come up with a name to be on air that white people could remember. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

So I was like, okay, Milyce, I'm going to go on the air and I'll be Milyce. No, you can't. That's hard. White people won't remember that is what that program director told me. I said, "Well, what about CC? That's a nickname." He said, "Nope, there's already a CC at another station. You'll just confuse viewers and listeners." And I said, "Well, that just pretty much leaves me out. No another name to use." He said, "Just go up a letter in the alphabet, Dee Dee." I said, "That's going to sound dingy." When you're a pretty person, you don't come off dingy to people. I'm not being facetious or boastful, but I'm just saying. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

So he said, "Dee Dee." And I said, "Well, I don't like that." He said, "Dee Dee will be Sharp." And I said, "I'll do it if I can be Dee Dee Sharp." So Dee Dee Sharp became an air personality for radio. And then that person was able to make some moves by the grace of God to do television. So my point is, it's unusual to go from 16 years old doing PBS to behind the scenes doing local television, to behind the microphone during radio at 18, 19 years old, back to doing television at 20-21. Those things are unusual paths for broadcasting. Anybody in it would tell you that would be very unusual. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. Interesting. So you had this, for lack of a better description, this other persona that was created for you, really, to assimilate you to larger cultural context, et cetera, and that became part of who you were. Behind this interview, by the way, just to let people know is, Milyce has written a biography that we are working to try and get published. We'll see what happens. But it's an interesting ... I mean, it is her life story and her life stories interesting. This is why we're doing the podcast as well. And so the premise of the book is, you are these two personalities. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

And you are constantly going between who you were as the broadcast person, which was a pretty, I'll characterize this, pretty stable-looking, straightforward person who anchors on television, and then there was the reality of what was going on in your life, which was a completely different story. Almost a schizophrenic kind of story. So we'll get into the details, of course, as we move along, so you ended up ... If I remember correctly, you had another job, not in broadcasting that you also were doing. Were you doing that alongside the ... Were you doing two jobs at once or was this a separate job? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Are we talking about AWARE of the television show? 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Yes. Eventually, I had an opportunity to meet, this is an interesting story, I had an opportunity to meet the reigning Miss America when Debbie Turner took over for the other ... I forget her name now, but everybody knows the story. And so when I went to go meet Debbie and to do an interview with her for the radio station, I met the producer who was getting ready to launch this television show called AWARE in Pensacola, which was about 60 miles down the road from Mobile. So I auditioned along with about 50, 60 other people and was chosen to do this show called AWARE with Dee Dee Sharp. And so through a series of events I ended up producing, helping to produce and actually serving as talent for that show for 30 years. We just wrapped that show up a few years ago, and it's in what we call reruns. So what was happening is in my television career as I became a news anchor and a news reporter, I would fly back to Pensacola once a month and work on your- 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So you were doing Mobile in Pensacola at the same? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

At the beginning. But as my television broadcasting career launched itself and I would end up in markets like Charlotte, North Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, even Montgomery, Alabama, I would fly in to Pensacola once a month. So I was like having a full-time broadcasting job and a part-time .... A full-time broadcasting job and a part-time broadcasting job. I'm confusing myself. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

You're two people in one body already. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Which one is talking? 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Exactly, right. I seem to remember, I may remember this incorrectly, that you also worked for the police department or whatever. Am I right about that? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Yes. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

You already sound busy. Okay. So how does that flow into the mix? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

What actually happen is anyone in broadcasting, and you have had some background in this, is if your contracts aren't renewed to stay at the television stations, then you need to do something else. And as a single parent by then with two children, I had gotten to the point where maybe they just needed some stability. So when the ABC station in Montgomery went bust and laid everybody off, I found myself in a situation where I was unemployed and had just bought a brand new home to stabilize my kids. By the grace of God, the governor at that time, Governor Don Siegelman, his office called and they said, if there was anything they could do, they would help. And so I said, "Well, I just need to look for a job opportunity." 

Milyce Pipkin: 

So I got an opportunity to actually work for the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, John Knight, as his representative for public relations. I also got an opportunity to work for the governor, as the Alabama Department of Public Safety's public representative. And I've also been public representative for the Mobile County Personnel Board under a number of jurisdictions serving as their mouthpiece. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So this was between, we haven't been following a chronological sequence here, this was between the job that you had in Mobile at ABC, I take it, and the pickup at PBS. Am I right about that? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Was what was happening was as I started from the PBS station, and was able to progress and then go to the radio station, become Dee Dee, began to get my own TV show, began to report an anchor for various television stations up and down the East Coast. When I would find myself unemployed, I would have the opportunity to do public relations work, because I knew how to speak on both sides of the microphone. So that's how this would parlay. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So you were doing two jobs at once at that point because you still have the PBS thing that was rolling in back- 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I was. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

And you were going back- 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I was still. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So you were two people, living in two cities, with two jobs? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Yes. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

It gets very confusing. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Very confusing. Raising two children. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Raising two children as a single mom. Okay. So I just wanted to make your professional career clear. So you were at PBS how long? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I was with PBS altogether probably over 40 years of my life, most of my life, because I started at 16. And I don't mind telling anyone, I'm 54 by the grace of God now. And so most of my life has been spent on public broadcasting, and that's educating people and making them aware. And how ironic now that God has me here at Dallas Theological Seminary, earning master's degree in education, where again, I'll be making people aware of God. So on one hand, I was telling the news of the World, and the Lord has provided an opportunity now for me to tell the good news of the kingdom. I thank God for them. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

That's great. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

There's been a lot of dysfunction in between. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Well, we're almost headed there. I'm just trying to paint the picture. When did your time at PBS end? What year was that? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I officially left my television show in 2020. I was replaced. They loved the show, but it was time for them, I guess, in some regards to change the host. In that time, I've had a really horrible car accident, and I know we'll get to that. But that may or may not have had something to do with it as well in that I did suffer a brain injury, TBI. And so by the same token, I have not been able to do what I used to be able to do well. And so in some regards, it's sad to see the show go as far as I'm AWARE with Dee Dee Sharp, but I'm glad to see the show go on, AWARE, with whoever the new host is. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

I see. Actually, relatively recently, then that you did this. This question I haven't asked you before. So when did you move to Dallas? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I moved to Dallas about ... This is 2022 in this interview. I moved here about four or five years ago, about five years ago with my husband. I met my husband in my apartment complex. He was a wounded soldier of 34 years in the military. He's a big character. Roy Pipkin, met him. He is a 34-year disabled veteran, kind of met him and limping on one foot and couldn't walk on the other. I cook very well, so he couldn't run from it. Fell in love and we got married and long story short, he's from Louisiana, and I'm from North Carolina. So it was like, where do we go? And he gave me the choice Louisiana or Texas and I was like, I'm definitely ... I love Louisiana. I'm not knocking you. But Texas was the way for me to go. And it ended up being like all God divine plan for me to be here. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So just to keep the multiple city perspective in front of us. You had moved to Dallas, but you are still working for PBS in Pensacola, Florida. Okay, that's not Mobile to Pensacola. That's Dallas to Pensacola by plane. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

There were days, Dr. Bock, when I would do a complete week as a news anchor, morning news, leave the TV station, catch a flight, fly to Pensacola, and do my television show that night. Get up the next morning, fly back to the to where I lived, pick my kids up from their nanny, and go home and be mom for the rest of the weekend until it was time to go back to work. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

And you were taking classes while this was- 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I earned a master's degree in Human Resources Management. Yes, yes. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Okay. Well, I almost want to take a commercial break and let everybody recover their strength. Okay. So that's kind of the core professional part of your story. Anything that we've left out of the professional part of this? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

You've got it all. 30 years as a news anchor reporter, 30 years with my own television talk show for PBS. Yes. Second master's degree coming down the pipe, single mom. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Now, one of the reasons I wanted to do this is because I'm familiar with your entire story, including the way you grew up, et cetera. And so we want to start there and work through that part of your life. Moving in this direction, I just want to say, in hearing your story, it's amazing all the experiences that you've had in your life. And yet, I also know from the African-American context that I have, that the kind of story that you are about to tell is not that atypical of life as an African-American woman in the South. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

This is true. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So let's start at the beginning. Let's talk about your family and your early family life. And so that's about your dad, mom, siblings. Go for it. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Yes. Again, I thank you, Dr. Bock, for your heart to know that there is a story behind a story that's for God's glory. Yes, with my life, it's been very, very, very difficult to function in the dysfunction of it. I started off as a young girl just like everyone else with a mom and a dad. My parents ended up divorcing. My father ended up just kind of leaving off the scene. And there in the midst was my mother and four siblings. There was a lot of struggle in that. My father, basically, I hate to say because no one wants to dote on their father, but for the lack of any other word, we were abandoned. My mom struggled to try to do what she could for us. My siblings ended up in foster homes and I ended up with my grandmother and my great grandmother. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So what that meant is, is that you had siblings who were cared for by other family members, and then you had siblings that were cared for by the state. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

All four of my siblings ended up with a state. I was the only one who ended up with my grandparents, my great grandmother and my grandmother. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

And the divorce took place, how old were you in divorce happened? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I was about five, six. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Okay. So most of your childhood was spent without a dad. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

That's correct. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. And you said abandon, I mean, did he totally disappear basically or ... 

Milyce Pipkin: 

No one knew where my father was. My mom did not talk about him much. She struggled with trying to, at that time, she said, get the military to help her with childcare and expenses and things like that. So for no other reason, we would have to believe that my father just really walked away. Left my family. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Interesting. And just, you mentioned the military here, he was in the military himself. Is that right? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Yes. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Some of these questions sound like I'm a lawyer, I got you on the stand. I don't mean that. Anyway. So he came out of the military and in the biography that you write, you talk about, for lack of a better description, kind of anger management issues that he had out of his own background that contributed to the situation that led to the divorce. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

My parents did go through a lot of domestic violence and that was part of the issue. So at the end of the day, they ended up separating, and my father ended up going in another direction, which we didn't know where he was for years. That caused the split from my siblings and I. My grandmothers, my great grandmother and my grandmother, maternally, raised just me as I knew my siblings were in foster care. I call these women in my book, great grandma Moses and grandma Ruby. That's not their names. I changed their names to protect them. They're deceased, of course. But by the grace of God, they instilled in me the importance of education and valuing things that at that point had been left to caution to the wind to whatever. My siblings didn't have that opportunity. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

So you will read the story and you'll see how they ended up being the ... Basically, what happens to a lot of African American families when you end up in the system, when you don't have parents, and they were there for two or three years. And so in some regard, I feel like I had an opportunity by the grace of God to go on with my life, even though there was a lot of dysfunction going on in my life. People have to understand that when you don't have a very good base for a foundation, then you're going to be making decisions and coming up with rationales that someone who might have had some of those things won't understand. They won't understand survival decisions. I call them supersonic survival buttons that we push on our lives. You wouldn't understand that unless you had my experience. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

So my heart goes out to and I've dedicated the book to my three brothers who are still with us today. And of course, my sister is decease. We found out later that my father was alive and well, and living with my stepmother, who had a child who was the same age of date back to the same time that my parents would have been divorced. In fact, she probably was born about six months after my parents divorced. That caused some friction and some issues later in life. But at the time, it was just coming to terms with we're being raised in a situation where we don't have what we need to be a family anymore. I don't want to say my father's all to blame for that, because my mother ... You'll have to read the details in the book, because I'm sure my mother had some blame in this. But I'm saying my family suffered dearly as a result of divorce, abandonment, neglect, and those things equate to abuse, and it's very difficult to overcome some of those things. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

This may sound like an odd question. I mean, you were so young when this happened. And you're actually dealing with multiple say, divestments. I mean, it's such a wrong word. But the point is, not only were you losing your family and your dad, but your siblings were being divided up as well. Did you all as you were growing up ever get back together? I mean, what was that like? Or did you lose contact with siblings as well because of the way in which the parceling out of your family took place. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

We never got a chance to live as a family again as a result of that. And you must understand we were like typical children with a father in the military. Our father was our hero. He came home. We took off his boots. We looked up to him. He was taller than life. He was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. My father was like really the giant. And when he was gone, when he left, it was like, who is that person now? And so we didn't have that. And my mother was this sickling woman, she struggled with kidney stones, kidney failure, she was a very sickly person and didn't have the wherewithal to raise five kids by herself. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

And so as my siblings ended up in the foster homes, four of them, an older sister, who was about 16 and then we were like stepchildren coming down to me, till about five and six, when they were in those spaces and places, they weren't being loved. And they will tell their own story about some of the abuses that they suffered in those spaces and those places. It's very difficult even now with some of the successes that I've experienced to look back. And I'm still faced with the hurt of having to see how they live now. And there's only so much you can do to help your family or to instill in them what may have worked for you because it may not work for them. And so I've had to deal with them looking at me and saying, well, you were lucky. And that hurts because I knew I was blessed. But it came with a lot of work. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

My story is one of racism. My story is one of sexism. It's one of overcoming abandonment issues. It's one of having to be a product of divorce, and then being a person who's divorced. It's one of having to suffer through being a single parent, being homeless as a young girl. And even down to, I say it like this, how can you tell a story about everybody else's woes and what they've done if you can't be honest with what you've done and the things that you've done that weren't right? And so that's where we land as a teenager. I've got this situation where my father has remarried, I have been able to reconnect with him, myself and one of my brothers. The other three siblings were out of foster home and living with my mother. But by then we had a chaotic situation. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

My sister was, for lack of a better term in the streets, as they used to call it. The streets were raising her along with my eldest brother. He ended up in prison. She ended up getting killed later. And my little brother ended up kind of struggling, never did get a GED or graduate from high school. So you just had me and the middle brother. And he and I kind of stuck together. We ended up with my father and my stepmother. And that was a very difficult thing, too, because you look at this young woman married my father, 20 years younger than him, and yet she just inherited teenagers. And so that was a struggle. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

She could have been a sister as opposed to stepmom. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

In fact, she and my sister were like two years difference. Yeah. And so it was very difficult to navigate that. I remember her sticking up middle fingers behind my father's back, and just doing other little things that were very childish and very hurtful to me as a young girl, because I needed my father and I needed her, especially in the wake of having lost the two grandmothers who had raised me. So the story is one of constant loss and constant divisions and constant confusion. And like I said, you're just left to abandonment. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, there's no set location in your life. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

There's nothing like that. And so I end up in this situation where as I'm in high school and these people are seeing things in me and allowing me to work for PBS and do all these other things. Behind the scenes, I'm going home and it's like terror. Because I'm the redheaded stepchild with three other siblings, younger siblings. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

It strikes me, listen to your story, I mean, I've read it and we've talked about it before, but this is kind of the first time we've sat down and talk through kind of the whole of it all at once. It strikes me that your job other than keeping quite busy and off the streets, was it a refuge? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

It was a refuge. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Yes. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

I mean, that's how it strikes me. This is a world that's stable and I know what to expect from it. That kind of thing. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

But even in that, it was unstable. Broadcasting is a very unstable career choice. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

It was relatively stable. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Yes. Well, the thing about broadcasting for me personally, is at least with that I could utilize my talents in order to make a living. And then what happened is because even as a little girl pretending that I was an on air talent, and then having those things begin to evolve as a young teenager, and then into my adulthood, it just became something that I could earn a living being a broadcaster, being a news anchor, being a storyteller, which I do very well and you'll read that in the book. You'll see that in the book. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

It isn't like broadcasting is an easy space to be employed in. I mean, it is ... My understanding, I started- 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Very competitive. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

It's competitive. It's challenging because you're constantly being asked to look at areas for which you may or may not have background. You've got to turn it around pretty quickly. I mean, you don't get a chance- 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Time is money, deadlines. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, deadlines, and you're constantly moving from one thing to the next. It isn't like you get to sit and ponder what it is you're going to do. I mean, I've been interviewed many times where someone does the interview and said, yeah, I've got to go back to the studio and wrap this up. There's just not much time. I mean, the time pressure is pretty intense. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

But when you look at all of those things, and you haven't even hit on some of the others involved, when you look at all of those things, it's easy to get caught up when you go to work. You don't have time to think about all that dysfunction going on at home. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

It's distracting. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

This job over here it's got enough distractions going on. You don't have time for it. So, yeah. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So in that sense, it's a refuge. And even though it's a little bit unstable, it did give you a routine to be working on that pulled you out of the trauma of your ow everyday life. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Right. But it became its own personality. It took on its own life, if you will. And that life, I would never tell anyone that it was pretentious, because I don't think it was ... It very much me. But it was an opportunity for me to be and do a job that paid me well, and then still go home and try to deal with the off air and the behind the scenes dysfunction in my life. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

I'm going to use another metaphor that you can comment on. It may or may not be accurate. But it's almost like flipping a switch. You had to I'm here on this mode now. And then I go home, and I'm in that mode. And you're constantly moving back and forth between the two. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

That's true. And that includes divorces. When you don't have a stable life as a child, you may or may not make good decisions for yourself going forward. I mean, I didn't have the equipment to make those decisions. So I ended up in a very physically abusive marriage that nearly took my life. And so I'm a survivor of domestic violence. I was able to get out of that marriage. And I married again, very quickly, about a year and a half before I could get divorced good. Again, when you marry, you marry forever. Right? 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

And here, I found myself in a second marriage, where it seemed as though that husband was still in love with his first wife. So I went from physical abuse to a sort of psychological abuse. And then I said, "Lord, I'm done. I won't marry any more until you show me who this man is." And that lasted about 18 years. And I'm reminded of the woman who was crooked over in the Bible for 18 years, she was sick and ill, and the Lord healed her. And I think that's what happened kind of in my story of redemption with my husband now, because I wasn't married to those men. I'm married to this one. This my husband. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Well, the other thing that strikes me as you tell your story is, as you go through these various experiences, you're ... I don't know the chronology well enough to know when your family stopped being there to take care of you how your grandmother and great grandmother were when they were no longer parenting you or there for you. But it certainly is the case with your siblings that none of you had any kind of support. You were literally on your own. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Literally, we were on our own. My mom tried. But my mom worked and she tried to go to school to be a realtor. She really didn't succeed at any of those things. And so in her absence, my siblings were kind of left to their own. And you know you don't leave children alone. Read the book and you'll find that something happened there that caused them to go into the foster homes. Anyway, the long story short of it is that they ended up and I ended up in a situation where dysfunction reigned, and it reighed in my life for years until the Lord ... I call them heaven on earth experiences, supernatural encounters with the Lord, who allowed me to turn my life around by the grace of God, and as they say, put my feet on solid ground. And I'm here seminary now. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So let's walk through some of this. I think we've got you up to your college years. We've done in your professional life and we've done your childhood. Let's walk through your college years as you're in. And as you noted, you started working at 16. So you're going to college and working at the broadcast station at the same time. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

That's right. I didn't do it very well. I got accepted to the University of South Alabama where I thought I wanted to be a nurse or physical therapists. I didn't know I really wanted to do television. Television was just such job, it was an opportunity. And so I worked at the local television station, the NBC affiliate, full-time running cameras for the 6:00 and 10:00 News. And I went to school from 8:00 to 12:00 and worked at the television station from 2:00 until 10:30 at night when they said good night, everybody. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

And then I took the radio job, and I worked from midnight until 6:00 a.m. And I was Dee Dee Sharp on the air in the quiet moments of the night. And so there were weeks and months of literally no sleep, failing classes. How I did it, why even tried, I'll never know. I just think I thought I need it because the television station wouldn't hire me as an on-air talent. I thought I needed the radio thing to become a good on-air talent, and I needed school in order to advance. And so I had all these things going at me at the same time and wasn't doing any of them really well. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Interesting. So are you single during this time? What's happening through that element of your life? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Through some of that, I was single. And I met my first husband. And he was in the Coast Guard. And I was struggling. I had had a car accident with a car and I didn't have insurance. And so they were suing me, garnishing my wages, and I had to take on a part time job. I know people say, I don't believe one person could go through all of this, but I promise you, this is my life. So I had to take another part-time job working at Big B Drugs, if you knew what that was, working at a pharmacy. And so I was working the job at the television station and I was working at the job at the radio station. I quit school and began another job a Big B Drugs just to make ends meet. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I met this guy and he came up and he was like, "Hey, you know what, I love you. If you marry me, I will put you through school with the military. And when you get through school, you can put me through school, and then we'll get a divorce." And at the time, with the struggling of being homeless in my car at times, before I got some of these jobs and opportunities and before I could get some of the money and make ends meet. And then when I would lose the money from being garnished and didn't have the money and was sleeping on the floor and things like this, marrying someone who was in the military seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. So I call it a pact. It was a marital pact. I didn't love him, I made it very clear. In fact, standing before the justice of the peace, I was crying, saying I don't love him and I don't want to marry him. But when you don't have God in your life, you make decisions that are not godly. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So it was a search for a kind of stability. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

It was. And so that marriage didn't last, as I mentioned, and about four and a half years of physical abuse and divorce. And out of that was born a child, a little girl who's now grown woman and has her own kids. So that was in and of itself a struggle because I never been a parent before and it didn't know how to do it by myself. Married the second man in my life about a year and a half after I divorced the first guy and thought I was in love again. Yeah, through a series of events, found out that he was or it seemed that he was still in love with his first wife. Through that, another child was born, my son. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

And so I decided, you know what, I think I can raise these two kids by myself. And so for 18 years, I was just a single mother. I worked the two jobs, AWARE in Pensacola and I worked full-time as a news anchor, wherever that job led me my contract. And that's why I mentioned some of those markets, Charlotte, Columbia, Charleston, Mobile, Montgomery, Alabama. And so that was how I made a living for them and how I made a living for myself. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So the Pensacola thing was pretty consistent but everything else was inconsistent. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Yes. Very much so. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Interesting. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Very interesting. And throughout all of this time of flying back and forth over at some of the weekends and doing the Pensacola show called AWARE with Dee Dee Sharp, and then going and being on the air as a news anchor as Dee Dee Sharp, and all of this stuff that was going on, no one would have known all of the other things were going on behind the scenes. Coming home when your husband's left and all of his belongings are gone. And he's leaving, he's abandoned you like your dad did. And yet, you got to go on the air and, hi, I'm Dee Dee Sharp. You don't know what just happened to me today. Because viewers don't want to know all that kind of stuff unless it's like gossip. They don't want to know. They want to see you show up. Come on the air. Do the news. Do your job. Tell me what going on in the world around me and move on. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So two questions leap to mind. We've kind of covered virtually everything now. One is, does anyone that you're working with, are they aware of any of this? Or is Dee Dee Sharp the person who's at the station and Milyce is the person who has this separate life? And then the second question I have is, and this is for people listening, particularly if you're pastors or in churches, and that is thinking through ... I often ask this question on our campus, which is, do we pastorally prepare people who are ministering in churches to, one, be sensitive to and aware of the kind of situations that you're describing? 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

And then two, are churches in a position to be of help? Or does the person have to go through their life doing the best they can negotiating that space on their own? So I guess what I'm asking in a backhanded way is your Christian story, which my understanding is that your initial impulses for Christian faith came from within your family, and then it moved into a direction where it kind of took hold. So put that all together for me if you can. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Easily. Easily. Number one, no. People at work were not aware of the double life. They saw Dee Dee Sharp show up. Some of them would learn that there was a person called Milyce, and that was certainly who got the check at the end of the day, was Milyce, because that's who cashed it. The church, as far as I'm concerned, I look at this and I say there were spaces in my life, where the church was kind of an up and down thing. My parents, when I grew up, did not go to church on a regular ... We just prayed over our food. That was about it. We had a beautiful white Bible that sat in the Fourier open to the 23 Psalm, and it was not to be touched. So that's all. We just looked at it. It was beautiful. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

When my parents separated and I ended up with my great grandmother and my grandmother, my grandmother was a staunch Presbyterian and my grandmother was a Jehovah's Witness. So I went from this, I called her Grandma Moses, I went from my great grandmother saying, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, three and one. And then I'd go to my grandmother, who I call her Ruby, [Rubily 00:42:46] because she had two personalities, so it seemed. But my grandmother was like this Jehovah's witness who said, the Trinity doesn't exist. Not Father, Father, Son, she's confused. So I grew up confused. But yet I was in the church all the time. Jehovah's Witness, you're in church on Sunday, then you've bible study at your home on Tuesday. And then we had church again on Thursday. And then we were out in the field on Saturday. So I'm just being churched all the time through the Jehovah's Witnesses- 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

By getting two very different messages. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Two very different messages. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Oh, my goodness. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

And so that caused a lot of confusion. And when I got to be a teenager, and my dad and my stepmother weren't going to church, either, I was like, no more of that stuff. Because at that point, church was stringent. Jehovah's Witnesses, you don't get to, I'm not trying to dote on the religion, but I'm just saying, you don't get to celebrate birthdays. There was no Christmas at my house with my grandmother, there was just like just, you can't do things. You can't participate in sports, you can't do this, you can't do that. So it was like, this is too stringent for me. I don't want to have anything to do with religion. So when I got to be a teenager, I was like, don't talk to me about the church. I don't want to know about all that. Because I can't have fun. I can't live life. I can't enjoy myself. I can't even have a birthday. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

So even in spaces when I met people who were, they weren't just religious, they were God-fearing people. There's family in my book, my best friend from college, I call them the Glories. But that's not their name. That's their name in the book, because they were glorious to me in my life and helpful to me. They had offered at one point for me to live with them, but I was like, no. If you're going to make me go to church, and I'm not going to be ... I don't want to have anything to do with that. So what in essence it did, Dr. Bock, it made me land in this space, married to a man with a pact, and this man was an atheist. He did not believe in God at all. So I went from all of that to marrying someone who doesn't believe at all. And then when I divorced him and I married the second guy, he was Catholic. And so my thing is, I really never, ever had like that stable, Christ-centered faith that I needed in my life to be the person that God planned for me to be as a woman of God. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

I actually wonder how many churches, even well-intentioned churches would be prepared to understand the world that you're living in, and also understand even how to begin to think about ministering and being of help. And so I think that's a challenge for the church. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Well, what I see right now in the church is I see there are a lot of women who are like me, some of them are unchurched at this point for some of the same things I just told you. So I think what has to ... I don't have the remedy for it. But certainly, in this book, as I'm writing about Aware: A Journalist's Journey to Find Divine Purpose Out of Dysfunction, I'm looking at Aware 2 to look at how the church could have helped. It would have certainly helped me to know my identity. And identity in Christ is very important for person. You need to know that you're created in God's image. And then you need to know that you're beautifully and wonderfully made. And you need to know that God has never left, he will never leave us. He's always there with us. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

These things became freeing for me. Reading Romans 6-8, it was freeing for me to learn that God loves me. He loves me so much, he gave his son for me. These kinds of core Christian, I just say, it's just things that people need to know to be free of sin, to be free of the lives, they may have lived to be able to live a life for God. It's important for them to know these core values of being a Christian. And I think some of those things were lost along the way. I didn't have an identity. I was Milyce, I was Dee Dee, I was a daughter who was abandoned, I was always all of the sin. I've never been identified as a person who could be a saint and I never saw myself as that. And so I was one of those persons who would put it off. Well, when I get right, I'll come to the Lord. You don't have to do that. You can come now. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So the obvious question with all that is, how did it happen that God invaded your life? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Read the book. No, I'm just kidding. I will give you my heaven on earth experience that I've told people and hopefully we have time. It's very quick. I was, in my eyes, a successful news anchor in Charleston, I'm sorry, in Columbia, South Carolina. Was fast moving up the ladder to become maybe a major ... I'd been in Charlotte, which was like a big market, but I wanted to be in the bigger markets. And I was on the fast track to do that. Went to work one day, as work would have it, you never know what you're going to do in a course of a day as a news anchor. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

You get the assignment in the morning, right? 

Milyce Pipkin: 

You get an assignment in the morning, and you don't know what you're going to do. You don't know whether you're going to be in a helicopter doing marijuana eradication, or whether you're going to be somewhere busting down a door to some raid. I mean, you just don't know what you're going to be doing. And so that day, I just went to work beautiful November day, just thinking I was going to go cover story. Ended up on a rural road with my photographer who was, you've probably not thought about this reading the book, but he was a seminary student who had dropped out of seminary. And here I was, I'd never met this guy before. He was a new employee to the station. This was our first time working together. And I was telling him how I had felt a call to go to seminary. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

So we're in the car having this conversation about seminary and God and why we're running in this kind of thing, when all of a sudden, another car out of the blue just came over, whipped into our lane, spooked my driver and caused the car to flip. The news van is flipping in the air. Some people say six times, some witnesses say eight. All I remember is seeing the windshield of the car onto the ground. The ground is through the windshield and then flipping back up in the air. And in that time, I screamed Jesus. I was, "Jesus, Jesus." I knew not to call my father. I knew not to call my mother. There was nothing they could do. They hadn't been able to do anything before. But I called on the name of Jesus. And in doing that, some ideas started coming to me and I'm going to be able to slow it down for you. But for me, it was very quick in that car as this car is just flipping and banging up against the concrete and going back up. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

So this is happening while you're spinning around in the air. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Spinning around the air in this car accident. I said, "Lord, is this how you going to take my life? I don't even know the driver of this car. He's a stranger." And just as quick as that thought came to me, this thought came, that's your brother in Christ, you know him. And so I begin to bargain with the Lord. Well, I haven't even done everything I need to do for my kids. I'm a single mother. I haven't gotten their insurance straight. And just as quick as that thought came, double indemnity, the kids are going to get paid twice over for your debt. I went, "Oh, my gosh." I said, "Lord, thank you. Thank you for everything you've done. Thank you for all the places I've been. Thank you for all the people I've met. And thank you for all the things you allowed me to do." 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

This is the proverbial, your life is passing before your eyes. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Flashes. Just like people say, I saw the flashes, nothing was all going. But I knew enough to just be thankful, be grateful because at any moment, it could be over. A semi-tractor trailer could hit us. We're going from a two-lane rural road into a major car accident where we're flipping up and down from one side over to the other side, through the median and everything. In that time, as I'm just thinking God in this hallelujah, take me Lord moment, I remember hearing a melody, this angelic choir singing to me three words, God's got it. All of these different voices and all these different melodies and all of these different tones and I just begin to be encased almost like it just encircling and camp me. And I just got caught up in that moment. It was good. It was all good. Take me. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Just then I remember the car ending up on the side of the road headed in the opposite direction and the driver of the car saying, "Dee Dee, Dee Dee, we got to get out. Dee Dee." When I came to, I saw smoke, I began to panic because I realized this isn't a dream. This isn't hallelujah. You just survived a car accident, you got to get out of here. And so I panic, I tried to get out. They say I jumped through the passenger side window, rolled down the hill through a ditch, got up and ran down the road. The only thing I remember now is I remember a woman and a man, two Caucasian, they were married, running. They were paramedics from Shaw Air Force Base. The accident had happened right in front of the facility. And they were running behind me and I remember them coordinating how they were going to get me. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

She was on the radio, "Black female running southbound down to 20 ..." Whatever the highway was. And I remember him telling her, "I'm going to pass her and I'm going to bring her back to you. Get ready to catch her." I remember they were coordinating it. And so that's what they did. And they got me to the ground. And when I got down on the ground, I was just flailing because I was making angels in the sand. I was talking to God. Because I was telling him, "I heard you. I heard the angels. Thank you." And they said, "Ma'am, stop flailing. You've got a gash to your head and you're bleeding. You need to calm down and let us help you." And they didn't know that I was trying to talk to God. I'm doing angels in the sand saying thank you because I'm not supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be out of here. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

So long story short, I ended up at the emergency room on the gurney bed, and I'm looking up into the lights and I'm crying. And I'm just saying, "God, I can't believe I'm here." My head is just throbbing, throbbing. And I'm saying, "Did that just really happen? Were there angels really singing to me?" Just then, this maid was walking up and down the hall. She walked into the room and I thought, gosh, I survived the car accident for this crazy woman who'd been walking up and down the hall to come in here now and kill me. But she didn't. She stood over me and she was crying. And she said, "Ma'am," she said, "I don't know why you're here. I know I cleaned up this room 30 minutes ago, and it's time for me to go home and get off this clock." 

Milyce Pipkin: 

She said, "But the Holy Spirit told me to come in here and tell you something. I don't know what it means but I gotta be faithful to the Lord." And she's crying. And I'm like, what is she going to say? And she said, "The Holy Spirit told me to tell you, God's got it." The same three words from this woman in the flesh I'd heard spiritually in that van from those angels singing those words to me, testifying that God's got it. And so that is what put me on my path. I told the Lord that if he allowed me, I wasn't bargaining with him, I just said, "If you allow me to, I will do what you have for me to do." I'm in seminary. I'm learning the Lord. I'm doing what he allowed me to do. And I'm telling my story for his glory. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

In my culture, and I can't speak for all black people, but we're often told to get over it, to be strong, to not tell the past. We're told to forget it. To do this is seen as kind of snitching or whatever in the culture, in my culture. But I'm saying this, if someone's not willing to step up and say, hey, I had a really tough life. This is something indicative of a lot of black women. We have to overcome so many things, to be so many things to so many people that we can oftentimes end up splitting who we are when we don't know who we are. And so that was what was happening to me. And that accident that day took away Dee Dee Sharp, and it set the stage for Milyce to walk back in. And that's what's been happening over the last few years of my life. That accident happened over 10 years ago. And here I am a living testimony of God's goodness and his grace. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

I've had similar experiences at least three in my life like that, that I have no doubt in my mind, God is, he exists, he is good, he is merciful, he is grace and we are blessed as Christians to have a relationship with Him. And whoa is the one who doesn't know that. So our job, Dr. Bock, is to go out and help people in these spaces and places who don't know who God is because they don't know who they are. They don't have an identity. And I think the church gets could do that by sometimes we tend to tell the stories, but when we've got really great spiritual leaders of a church, we'll find that their whole life has been a testimony of God. And so they may have challenges, I'm not saying they don't because the Lord says we will have trials and tribulation, but either they're not telling the dirty stuff or they don't have it detail. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

So somebody has got to be willing to say, hey, I'm a testimony. I'm not an expert. But as Dr. Burns here at Dallas Theological Seminary told me years ago, Dr. Lanier Burns, love, love, love him. He said, "Milyce, you don't have to be an expert, just be a witness." So I'm just a witness. The biblical narrative is full of dysfunctional stories. We know that. But that's God's story. And he tells us that through that he is able to work through our lives and give us a testimony for him. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

Exactly. Well, Milyce, our time is gone. In fact, it's more than gone. But that's fine. Thank you for the gift of sharing what God has done in your life and with everything that ... All the trauma, et cetera. We've called this A Life of an African-American Woman because as I've said, your story and elements of it are unique, and certainly the intensity of it, it's pretty intense. But the kinds of things that you've been through are not atypical. I think it helps all of us to understand how a significant portion of our community lives and what they go through and ask the question, how can we as people who are ministering to neighbors, who are called to love neighbors, who are called to care about neighbors, how can we best, one, be aware of what's going on around us? And then two, think about what it takes to step into that space and try and care for people who, in some cases, have been left totally on their own? And so thank you for taking the time. 

Milyce Pipkin: 

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. 

Dr. Darrell Bock: 

We thank you for being a part of The Table. We hope you'll join us again soon. 

Outro: 

Thanks for listening to The Table podcast. Dallas Theological Seminary. Teach truth. Love well.