Author Note
When, in 2013, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I knew what it meant—he’d soon forget what he’d done or said to me over the years. In fact, he’d need my sympathy, perhaps my financial assistance, as his memory faded away. For a long time, I had wanted us to hash things out, to speak honestly about how we had hurt or disappointed one another over the years. But Daddy’s mind left like a dream at dawn. And now the encounter could happen only in my imagination.
So that was where I went. I saw, in my mind, my father leaning over a legal pad, writing, as best he could, something very private, very painful that couldn’t wait another day. I imagined him ancestral, though still in the flesh, such that he knew and understood everything about me. And I imagined him unashamed. I wondered what he’d say if he could stare into my heart. This book is his response, his desperate plea.
My father grew up in a time when black children meant nothing to America. Most of them, including him, didn’t have a birth certificate. Their care, their education, their self-worth was optional. Whether they lived or died was insignificant to the state. For the most part, their existence centered around work and church. And even the church taught them that they were “wretches” and “sinners undone,” black children of Ham who, without a forgiving God, had no hope in this life or the next. Children of my father’s generation were taught that dreams were a waste of time. Schooling happened only when there was no labor to be done, and that wasn’t very often.
This is the world that shaped my father’s consciousness. In his old age, he retired from his job as a mechanic, and the state informed him that he needed a birth certificate in order to draw social security. He told them he never had one. They responded, “Get a birth certificate form and make it up. If you don’t know your birthday, just choose a day.” I was horrified at the arbitrary nature of his life. Only then did I understand his harsh, insensitive demeanor. In some ways, he envied the life he had provided for his children. He, too, had wanted knowledge, travel, enlightenment, but such was laughable for a dark black boy in the 1940s. So he hoped for me. Yet my freedom angered him. It made me question his world, his convictions, his God. After college, I wanted nothing to do with his idea of manhood. He wanted no parts of my fluidity. We were never united in our hearts again.
Yet once Alzheimer’s took Daddy’s mind and softened his boldness, I discovered a man who was more than a field plow. He wanted what I wanted—to mean something to the world, to make a difference in someone’s life, to be admired for the man he was. But we never achieved that mutual clarity. So this book, this record of a poor black father’s appeal, is what any dying daddy might say to his son. More than anything, I want readers to reconsider the capacity of our fathers’ hearts. Many of them were handed so little, yet we expected so much. They gave more than they had, but less than we needed. They were burdened with a notion of manhood that destroyed so many sons’ lives; but they didn’t know another notion to teach. In the end, many destroyed themselves, too.
If they’d been allowed to dream, they might’ve expected sons who were not carbon copies of themselves. They might’ve imagined boys in all their glory, dancing before the world without shame. They might’ve granted a queer son permission and affirmation to be himself—regardless of the world’s reaction. They might’ve known that some spirits come into the world to disrupt normalcy and thereby create space for the despised and rejected. And they might’ve understood, finally, that every son is an eternal blessing.
If they’d been allowed to dream.
November 12th, 2003
Dear Isaac,
For a life like mine, there is no redemption. I wish I was old. Dying ain’t so bad if a man is old, but when he’s my age—sixty-two—it’s a sad and pitiful thing. If I was eighty, I could die in peace. Eighty’s a good dying age. But a man in his sixties should still have his strength, his good senses. My strength is practically spent. Every day, cancer consumes a little more of it, leaving me to wonder when it’ll run out altogether. My mind, however, is still with me, so I should say some things while I can.
It’s been...what? Ten, fifteen years or better? After your mother died, days passed into years.
I’m not long for this world. My days of grace are far spent. At the end of a life, memories are clouded. But perhaps with what I’m about to say, you will know why I did what I did. Whether you forgive me or not will be up to you.
You should know that, during the years between us, I became a reader. I know this sounds funny, since you never saw me with a book, but in my darkest hour, your mother encouraged me to give it a try and, finally, for once, I followed her. I was horrible at first, mispronouncing words and skipping ideas I couldn’t understand, but after a while I got the hang of it and became pretty good. Reading was something I could do alone, so I stuck with it.
I’m still in the house, our house, where everything happened. Not much has changed. The brown velvet sofa, worn and ragged, still sits against the wall like an invalid staring into nothing. The console TV went out years ago, but I never got rid of it. Instead, I put a flat-screen on top of it. It looks funny, really, this shiny new thing sitting piggyback on an ancient thing, but with no one to impress, I rarely think about it. Your mother’s high-back chair, where she sat many evenings reading Ebony magazines or romance novels, rests where it always did, opposite the sofa, facing the living room door. I imagine her there sometimes, thumbing pages and nodding or frowning or laughing out loud.
Most memorable perhaps is the little oval kitchen table where we shared most of our meals. It reminds me of her and you and us. I don’t eat there. I take my meals in the living room, something I would never have done when you were a kid. But most days I’m good to eat at all. Cancer strips one’s appetite and energy so completely. Yet every now and then I can swallow a few morsels, enough to live another day and finish writing what I want to say to you.
Let me start with this: love wasn’t a requirement of men in my day. It wasn’t a man’s achievement. In the sixties, when you were born, love was a woman’s passion, a mother’s hope. Fathers had far different obsessions: food, shelter, clothing, protection. My job was to assure you had these things, and I did that.
Truth is, the world changed faster than I could. When I was a boy, we knew what a boy was. There were signs—agreed upon signs—that left no one confused or unsure. Girls had certain features; boys had others. It was simple as that. Yet you came along and muddied my clarity. You loved hugs and kisses; you wept at the beauty of things; you frowned at trucks and baseball gloves. But you were a boy. My boy. And I meant to correct whatever had gone wrong in you.
I need to start at the beginning if you are to understand everything. Yet the beginning isn’t your beginning. Or even mine. It’s ours.
Slavery did a number on black people. We haven’t survived it yet. The institution is over, but its aftereffects still linger. We try not to think about it, our time in bondage, but it shapes who we are. I’m convinced of this. We worked for free for four hundred years while our self-worth went down the drain. We learned to despise ourselves—not white folks—because our failure, we think, was having been captured at all. And we know that some of our own people participated. We know that. We’ve never forgiven them either. Perhaps that’s why some of us hate us. When they look in the mirror, all they see is contempt for someone unforgivable.
I can’t remember when it started, but, as a little boy, I recall wanting to be someone else. Granddaddy used to comb my hair like he was mad at it. This some wooly shit, boy! You sho got some nappy-ass hair, he’d mumble until he tamed the wild bush or cut it off altogether. I remember seeing white boys in town and watching their hair wave easily in the wind, and I wondered why God hadn’t given me that. A few Colored boys had soft curly hair, but they were light skinned. We were dark. Black dark. All Nigga, Granddaddy liked to say.
Because of this, we lived lives of desperate hope, afraid that white people’s disapproval equaled our destruction. Everything we did, whether we were aware or not, we did with white people in mind. Our life’s aim was to make them believe we had value and worth, so we spent our nights trying to figure out what they liked, then spent our days trying to do it. We still haven’t pleased them, and truth is, we never will.
You’ll think I’m crazy, but I met Death several months ago. I didn’t see her, but I sensed her. I felt something brush my arm, like a cool breeze, and saw my whole life flash before me. When people say this, it is true. Everyone I ever loved I saw in my mind, and I knew it was time to say goodbye. But Death didn’t rush me. She lingered there, with the scent of sweet perfume and pork-seasoned collard greens. I liked that aroma. It reminded me of Grandma on Sunday afternoons. Anyway, I told Death, “Just give me a minute. I’m writing something important to my son.” Her fragrance waned, so I believed she’d granted my request. Perhaps this was all in my mind, but it felt real to me. I didn’t fear her. I told her I would be ready soon—if she would let me finish what I had begun.
November 13th, 2003
I was born a slave, Isaac—almost literally. My grandfather raised me, and his father had been a slave until age eighteen. That’s long enough to shape one’s way of thinking and pass it along for generations. Even after freedom, we were not free. We were lynched and beaten and mobbed and raped and burned out and stolen from and cheated and denied and degraded and humiliated and insulted and belittled and disrespected so much that we believed white folks were God’s chosen people. They had everything we wanted, it seemed. Even poor whites. At least they could go to town and be served. We had to watch our backs everywhere we went. We were never safe in this country. Can you imagine that? A life where you and your family are never safe? Sunrise is a torture because you never sleep. Not that deep, snoring kind of sleep. People died young back then—forty and fifty—because, as the expression goes, there was no rest for the weary. And we were the weary. We were field hands, tillers of the soil, whose mirror image was the dirt itself. We took pride in working because it’s what we knew, what we did best. We never believed we meant much. I see that now. We even buried one another without tombstones. No need remembering one whose only achievement was a decent spring crop or a house full of hungry children. Save that money and repair the roof. That’s how folks thought back then. That’s how we’d been taught to think.
We loved each other—if love is respect. Yet respect wasn’t what you and your generation wanted. You wanted something you could feel in your heart, and I didn’t know what that was. My generation had never had it. Granddaddy or Grandma never kissed me or read to me or touched me lovingly. I don’t think Granddaddy could read at all, although Grandma could a little. The only time Granddaddy touched me was to whoop me, and I mean he whooped hard. A whoopin is different from a spanking. A spanking happens on your behind; a whoopin happens all over you. And when Granddaddy got through with you, you’d have to get somewhere and sit down. But he loved me. I understand that now. His behavior was simply the way of black parenting. Every child I knew was beaten senseless. Elders were callous and unfeeling, as if afraid to love us. Slavery had left them that way.
Granddaddy was worst of all. Nothing moved his cool, dry countenance. I rarely saw him laugh and never saw him cry. He approached life as a test of endurance, so each day he handled chores and disappointments as if trying to show God he was unbreakable. But his breaking point would come.
My favorite person in the world was my brother, Esau. I cannot tell you the way I loved him. He was a year and a half older than me, and he was my hero.
Growing up in Arkansas, we used to lie in bed together, whispering about things. Well, I’d whisper while Esau listened. He wasn’t much of a talker, but he seemed to enjoy hearing me, so I always had something to say.
“Where do stars come from?” I asked one rainy night.
I knew he wasn’t asleep. When he slept, he made a soft, grumbling sound, like an old electric fan.
Suddenly, he turned toward me, rubbed my course, kinky hair, and said, “They’re God’s thoughts.”
“God’s thoughts? Wow. He’s got a lotta thoughts.”
Esau chuckled quietly.
“What do you think God thinks about?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Probably us.”
“Us? You think God knows us? Out of alllllllll the people in the world?”
“God knows everybody, Isaac. And everything.”
I loved how Esau rubbed my head. His heavy hand massaged my scalp sensually, like a loving God might do.
“God knows what I think?”
“Yep.”
“And what you think?”
“Yep.”
“And what Granddaddy and Grandma think?”
“Yes, boy.”
I heard Esau’s slight irritation, so I hushed and let his hand nurture me. Then I asked, “What do you think about?”
At first he didn’t answer, but then he mumbled, “Mom. Dad.”
His voice trembled. I didn’t want him to cry because I would’ve cried, so I tried to change the subject, but Granddaddy yelped from the other room, “You boys take yo ass to sleep, hear me? Don’t make me come in there after you.”
That ended our talking, but Esau rubbed my head until I went to sleep. The older we got, the less he did it, and the day he stopped altogether, my joy disappeared.
November 14th, 2003
Today is a bad day. I’m sick as a dog, but I’m trying to write anyway. I don’t want to run out of time before I finish, so I’m pressing on with what little strength I have.
Back in the country, we never had electricity. Just coal oil lamps and an icebox. Not a refrigerator but a literal icebox in which a block of ice cooled churned butter and eggs. Everything else we canned or smoked. Food was better back then, but it was hard to come by. And because we had very little money, we had to grow our own. We made two dollars a day pickin cotton, and, as children, we never got the money. Granddaddy got ours and did with it whatever needed to be done.
One year he saved enough for an operation. He had a pain in his side that couldn’t be ignored. I recall a doctor coming to our house and telling Granddaddy to get the operation or the undertaker. If it wasn’t for your uncle Esau and me, he would’ve chosen the undertaker.
The doctor brought his instruments to the house and sterilized them with boiling water and bourbon. Granddaddy refused a hospital room but submitted to the procedure in his own bed. There was no anesthesia back then—not for poor black folks. Grandma put Esau and me outdoors when everything began. Said she didn’t want us upset by Granddaddy’s screaming. But Granddaddy never murmured a sound. Just one soft grunt, the doctor said, when he reached inside him and pulled out his appendix. Other than that, he stared at the ceiling as if daydreaming. When the doctor finished, he told Grandma to make the old man rest a week. Said the recuperation was critical to his fullest healing. She nodded but knew better. When we reentered the house, she made us sit in absolute silence as the sun went down. Granddaddy slept like a dead man.
Next morning, he dragged himself to the breakfast table. Esau and I shuddered; Grandma exploded.
“You can’t be up, man! Doctor said you gotta stay in bed the rest of the week. Take yo butt back in there and lay down!”
Granddaddy didn’t move. He blinked a few times and asked, “Is we havin breakfast or not?”
“I ain’t cookin nothin till you get back in that room!”
“Then I’ll cook it myself.”
He rose slowly, clearly in pain, till Grandma conceded. “You bout the hardest-headed man alive, Abraham Swinton! Don’t know why I fool with you! You ain’t got no sense!” and on and on till eventually she hushed her fussing and put breakfast on the table. No one looked at Granddaddy during the meal. We kept our eyes on our own plates, wondering who in the world gets up the morning after an operation like that, prepared to go to the field.
“You ain’t doin no plowin today, man!” Grandma insisted. “And I mean it! I’ll fight you if I have to. Don’t intend to bury you this evenin.” He must’ve taken her seriously. We repaired fences instead.
November 16th, 2003
Feeling much better today. It’s cool and rainy, but every day’s a blessing in my condition. Yesterday, the doctor increased my paclitaxel-cisplatin, so I feel better than I have in a long while.
I started school at age six, although I didn’t go regularly. It was 1947. Education was a luxury most poor Negro kids in Arkansas couldn’t afford. Not monetarily, but timewise. Only when it rained, and it had to rain hard, were we guaranteed a few consistent days. One or two kids went all the time, but not most of us. We were always behind, always missing homework and failing tests. Miss Ima Briars, our teacher, had the nerve to scold us! We would’ve done better if we could’ve. We had to work: picking cotton, chopping beans, cutting wood, hauling hay, plowing fields... You name it. It had to be done. Knowledge could wait—or so our people thought. We had the mindset of ignorance. We simply didn’t know any better. We weren’t unintelligent; we were just desperate to survive. We thought eating every day was a big deal, and many times it was. Without money or most other resources, black families did what they had to do to keep food on the table.
By ten, I had learned to read, but just barely. Esau never learned. He wasn’t good in his books, but he was great with his hands. Granddaddy looked at him with an approving sort of gaze. I envied that. He didn’t look at me that way. Even now I wish for it, and Granddaddy is long gone. But my point is about education—or the scarcity of it. We owned no books except a Bible. Granddaddy had his own—his Bible—which we weren’t allowed to touch. He thumbed it most nights, but certainly didn’t read it. Perhaps simply holding it revealed what thus saith the Lord. I don’t know. I heard about other books but saw only the ones the white school threw away to us. Most were filled with racist bullshit that did us no good. Miss Ima talked of famous white people like Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I remember those names because they sounded funny to me. The only black writer she ever mentioned was Paul Laurence Dunbar, but we never read his work. At least not the few days I attended. Truth was, we needed basic ’rithmetic and writing, just enough to get by, and that’s what we learned.
Esau only went a year. He could spell his name, but that was about it. And since Granddaddy couldn’t imagine what he’d do with more knowledge, he let him stay home and work. But Grandma insisted I go. “Somebody in this family gotta get some learnin,” she said. “Cain’t all be ignorant.” So I was the chosen one. This was no compliment, mind you. I had to do homework after we did field work. Yet believing that education would give me a better life, Grandma urged me on. She was right. The ability to read, even a little, would later save my life.
After fourth or fifth grade, my schooling is a blur. I never did well because I missed too many days. I was smart though. Miss Ima said so. She said I could really be somebody—those were her words—if I came more often, but that never happened. I probably went once or twice a month. More in the winter, less in the spring. After eighth grade, I stopped altogether. “That’s enough,” Granddaddy said casually one evening. “Too much learnin make the boy lazy.” Grandma protested. She wanted a high school graduate, but Granddaddy wouldn’t have it. “This boy gotta learn how to work better, woman. Readin ain’t gon feed him.”
“It can!” she declared, but Granddaddy had dropped the matter, which meant it was closed. I never went to school again.
Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, I’d pass the old schoolhouse and recall Miss Ima teaching times tables or reading passages from her favorite books. She’d shout as if preaching, as though her emphasis made her instruction divine. Sometimes she’d quiz us aloud on various topics, and if we didn’t know the answer, we’d be in trouble. We sat perfectly upright, our hands clasped and resting on our desks, praying to know whatever Miss Ima might ask. She was a little woman, but she didn’t play when it came to education:
“What is fourteen take away nine?”
We’d say, in chorus, “Five!”
“And what is five times six?”
“Thirty!”
“And what is thirty times eleven?”
Some of us would hesitate at this level, but our silence only inflamed her fury: “I said, what is thirty times eleven! ...
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