INTERVIEW WITH TAMIKA PALMER

BY SARAH MONDESIR Senior Marin School of Environmental Leadership

A K E. P R A I S E. S L A Y.” - BREONNA TAYLOR

I started a business called Flavor Profiles. With it, I created a Storytelling Cookbook to honor and celebrate the lives of black women who have passed away due to police brutality. Throughout this time, I realized the importance in sharing who these women were over merely what had happened to them. I used this as motivation to create a book that would provide a common understanding for the causes of one’s joy and one’s suffering. The project entailed reaching out to many Black chefs, cooks, and influencers known for their cooking. In using something that brings people together, it created the space to share and uplift the experiences of Black women. Food not only connects people but also creates occasions for great memories to be shared among friends and family.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Breonna Taylor’s mom, Tamika Palmer. I realized with the story of her daughter, and with the story of countless others affected by racial violence, I had the opportunity to honor them by sharing who they were before their deaths — to share and respect their careers, their passions, and most of all their stories. They deserve that.

What was your daughter like growing up?

Tamika Palmer: As a young girl, Breonna was just always so full of life. When she was younger she just loved being around her friends, riding her bike and playing video games. She was just kind of an all-around have-fun type of girl. She just loved being outside, anything that had to do with the outside she wanted to do it. Whether it was at the beach or bike riding, she wanted to be outside. Which is funny because we’re from Michigan, so we get winter early. So summer and spring was her thing, she loved to be out there.

Was she a part of any after-school programs?

Tamika Palmer: She did a little bit of everything. She played basketball for a little bit, then she decided she wanted to be a cheerleader and so she did that for a little bit. Then she did dance. She tried anything and then moved on. Breonna also did a lot of after-school work. Something that she was constantly doing was helping kids with disabilities because a lot of them would be in the classes that she took, so she would help and do stuff with them as well.

Do you think that’s where her love and passion to help others stem from?

Tamika Palmer: That helped. It all really started with my mother. My mother had diabetes and so Breonna would love to go and try to stick my mother’s fingers so she could test my mother’s blood sugar and help give her insulin. So ever since then I thought she’s going to be a doctor. She loved to do that though, she looked forward to doing that so I think that just started and progressed on.

What do you think is your most favorite memory with your daughter?

Tamika Palmer: I think that my first one would have to be when she was probably about three years old and we were having Christmas at my dad’s house, and every Christmas we would always have get-togethers and play games and do all these things, and so they were singing karaoke, and so my dad said, “Breonna, what do you want to sing,” and she says, I want to sing “My Last 2 Dollars” (by Johnnie Taylor), and it’s hilarious because it’s a blues song, so everybody is like, “You don’t know that song.” And she was so little, but she got the mic, and she was literally singing the song word for word, because my mother loved the blues, so she would always sing it, like she loved to be around my mom a lot, and so everybody is looking like, “Why do you know this song little girl?”

Did she grow up in a household that was just always involved with music, especially blues?

Tamika Palmer: Breonna loved music. Well, first of all, she thought she could sing, which is hilarious, so the thing about her was she could listen to all kinds of music, so she listened to blues a lot with my mother, and my dad loved jazz so she listened to that, and she just became her own person. She loved a lot of R&B (rhythm and blues), so she loved all kinds of music.

What is something you would always find your daughter doing?

Tamika Palmer: Swimming She loved to swim, so we were always going out to the beach, going somewhere to swim. We went out of town and stayed in hotels—“‘make sure we got a pool,”—and

As Breonna’s mother, how do you want us to remember your daughter?

Tamika Palmer: Just full of life and to have her life just cut short was devastating. She had so much to do and so much going on still, and I think that not just me and my family were cheated, I think the world was cheated, because she was destined to do great things. And so, I just want people to remember that. She was definitely on that path, and she was doing the work to be a part of that life, and be a part of that community to continue to help people, and build people up.

What was Breonna’s favorite holiday, and what did that day look like to you and your family?

Tamika Palmer: She was a lot like my mother when it came to the holidays. She loved all the holidays, but Thanksgiving and Christmas were her favorite holidays…because it allowed people to get together, cook together, and play games together.

What were some of Breonna’s favorite foods, and what are some things your family would cook a lot throughout the holidays?

Tamika Palmer: Her favorite thing: she loved fried chicken. She don’t care if you fried it, she loved fried chicken— fried chicken was the top. Then she loved chicken alfredo, and I’d be like, ‘Breonna you should be able to make this by now,’ and she would just say, “It’s just better if you do it.” But yeah, she loved to just congregate and bring food and people together. She could bring people together like nobody’s business, and it’s funny because I always think, I don’t know where she got that from because I’‘d always be like, ‘don’t invite people to come over.’ It would be so funny, she would have a whole thing planned by the time I get off of work, I’m like, ‘who told you to do that, I don’t want those people here,’ and she would say, “Everybody is family.”

What are some foods that you would make on special occasions? What did you find yourself making in the kitchen, and for your family?

Tamika Palmer: Chicken. She loved chicken, so anything with chicken, chicken alfredo. I love spaghetti and pizza, so we just kind of just bounced around a little bit, but there was always something going on.

Was there anything that she didn’t like?

Tamika Palmer: Ooh, so when she was younger, I love spaghetti. So by the time she was a teenager she couldn’t stand it. She loved steak, she loved tacos, but let me tell you, when she really didn’t want to eat something it was spaghetti. She loved cereal, like she was eating cereal like nobody’s business. She would say, “Oh I’m going to eat this while you cook.”

Tamika Palmer: Oh sometimes I thought Breonna was lazy. Breonna would go to the grocery store and she would get all the stuff for you. She would plan the whole meal, but she wouldn’t want to cook it. Even when she lived on her own she would bring the stuff to my house like, “Can you cook this?”

What is something that you would like people to know about Breonna?

Tamika Palmer: Breonna knew how to bring people together, and I think that this cookbook will be another way for people to come together. And she loved to bring people together, and she loved to be around food and games, she was very family-oriented. Again, she did not get that from me, she was just like that. You know I say this all the time, I hate that this thing happened to her, but I don’t really know another person who could’ve brought the world together the way she did.

How has your daughter impacted you. How has she inspired you?

Tamika Palmer: So for me, previously I was a really private person. I didn’t really do social media, I definitely wouldn’t have stood in front of a crowd of people and start talking and be that kind of person. So just knowing what happened to her and just being the voice of reasoning—she gave me a voice and so many others gave me courage that I didn’t realize I had. I have come to learn some things through this as well.

What is one of the most important things your daughter has said?

Tamika Palmer: “Wake, Praise, Slay.” Get up and get to the day. Get to the money, get to the day, and get to the goals. She would make a plan and it would have to be executed. She cared about how she looked, she cared about how she carried herself, and those things were important, so was being positive, and successful. Everywhere around the house, she would have this plastered.

— Tamika

With Breonna do you see any significance to her being a Black woman?

Tamika Palmer: She definitely lit a light to Black women being the most disrespected. Especially with the way they tried to tell her story, in the beginning, to later find out all these things that were said about her weren’t even true, so I just think that it was her time. We had all the Rosa Parks in the world, we had all of these other women in this era. I think along the way we started to be forgotten again, and I think that’s where Breonna came in.

What do you think needs to change?

Tamika Palmer: Accountability. There has never been real accountability … from the people who continue to devalue our lives, to act as if we don’t hold the same value in their world, which is crazy. We work just as hard, if not harder, to get the same degrees, to get the same jobs, and to live in the same spaces. And until they start to hold people accountable to that, things will never change. People will continue to feel as if they can do and say whatever they want to us without being held accountable. This has to change. The policy is changing all around the world and all that, and that’s fine, but until we hold these people accountable, it’ll always be the same. In ten years we will be fighting for a new Breonna.

What is the role that young people need to take?

Tamika Palmer: I think that young people are in the best position that they ever been in to get the change that we need. I think this is their time, this is a time where so many people are willing to listen, so many people are willing to identify and say, Hey what is happening is wrong. We have more alliances than we ever had so I definitely think that the younger generations need to take this torch and not let people devalue them. There will always be people telling them that they’re too loud, they need to stop, or that fight has been fought, but we’re going to continue that fight until everything ends. This is their era. Breonna could be me, you, and you. This our day, this is our time.

What is a message that you may have for the youth?

Tamika Palmer: Keep going. Remember that it’s not easy, it’s not fast. It is long, it is tiring. It is all of these things but, in the end, it will definitely be rewarding.

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