I didn’t show for graduation. I took on my father’s aversion for ceremony, and had only a year of ties to Woodlawn. I dismissed senior prom from the day I came to Woodlawn. The year would be a trip of unfortunate business — there was no time for flowers. But then this girl Ebony, and this silly compulsion within, clouded my logic and I could not see. Plus, as always, I missed the intricate signs, the hints, and head fakes, the looks when I was not looking. I did the math too late, and by then she’d taken up with another dude. Man, listen, he was straight Christopher Williams, the sort of pretty boy who pulled strictly redbones, until he heard Mike G, got on that blacker-the-berry shit, and came to the other side. Of course, I wasn’t that far off, but when I saw them walking the halls, it felt wrong as Winnie and Kirk McCray.
I stopped calling after that. What did it matter — I was on my way, stepping out of the world and into my next self. My mother demanded proof, suspected another scheme ending in the repetition of the twelfth grade. She knew her child, and in some way could not believe that the saga was coming to an end. Until I brought the diploma home from the principal’s office, opened the hardcover vinyl folder, and placed it in her hands, she did not believe. When she saw it, she just half smiled, no big hug, no inspiring speech, just happy to see the end.
I had the vague sense that something different was afoot. Dad ambushed me in the brown Honda Accord, our third one, because Ma had crashed up the other two. We were driving from the new office. Dad turned down Wabash, pulled into a tiny shopping mall, and parked in front of Kmart. Dad owed me nothing, except fatherhood and that was how he always carried it. My father never apologized for one minute of parenting. He didn’t start there in that parking lot, and yet he talked in a manner that was less sure.
Son, he told me. I have begun another relationship. I am in a relationship with Jovett. Me and your mother thought you should know. I love Jovett and your mother very much. We all thought you should know.
He asked if I had questions, how I felt, what I needed to say. I have never expressed anger with my father, to my father. Fear clouded every word. But here was an open shot. I could have yelled, stepped out of the car, slammed the door. I could have run away for a week, told him I hated him like white kids I’d seen in movies. Here was the chink in his armor, the flaw which had always been theory finally confirmed. Even the general falls down, though it must be said, fallen is not how he saw himself at the time. Still, I did nothing. I said nothing, just nodded my head and listened until it was time to drive away.
CHAPTER 8. Use your condom, take sips of the brew
When I was young, my father was heroic to me, was all I knew of religion. His word was the difference between pancakes and oatmeal, between Speed Racer and yard work. Every trip to the Food Barn was epic. We’d hop out of the car, and I’d try to shut the door in rhythm with him, like on detective shows when they meant business. He was heroic because I was a child, because my worldview didn’t extend past Lode Runner, Train 9, or Warren Moon’s rookie card. The first time Dad beat me, I was six and the subject of my first-grade teacher’s phone calls home. In those days, all the kids anyone cared about got beatings. But that black leather belt, folded on my parents’ bed was still terrible, and this was my clearest illustration that fatherhood was dictatorship, that its subjects were at the mercy of a tyrannical God.
By the time I hit Lemmel, my appraisal of Dad depended on the year, how I woke up, the number of hours I’d worked in the basement. There were days I would have wished him into nothing, so that I could be free to relish in dumb shit with all the other laughing, orphaned boys. There were others, when I looked around and saw that, though the birthright of every child was a manned fortress, we lived in unnatural times. All the guardians had fled their posts, and here was mine, his hand on his sword, his armor glimmering in the light of moons. Now he sat in his car, across from me, unveiling his true face, unveiling a tangled humanity that made all my foibles look elementary.
In his mind he was righteous, and still wedded to the old Panther idea of free, unbound love. He did not speak to me in shame so much as struggled to display himself to a child. But Dad was obsessed with the world as he thought it should be, and his ideals were a bright light, blinding him even to his beloved. So the losses my family took were not spoken, and, as we rejected Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth, we were swaddled in a great cloak of alone. Even the most mundane act — refusing the Pledge of Allegiance, sitting mute for the flag — pushed us farther down the path of resistance and alienation from the rest of the world. He didn’t acknowledge this truth because the superseding truth was that he was right about it. He wouldn’t bend to the will of a backward world and wouldn’t allow us not to bend either. I was sure that everyone else my age was frolicking in pagan October masks, eating hamburgers and pie à la mode, backstroking through a lake of Christmas presents, while I meditated among stacks of tofu and books. Even after I got Conscious, I felt I’d been robbed of time, that I had been isolated from a series of great childhood events. In my father’s house, values ripped us from the crowd. Dad called it enlightenment. But to me it just felt lonely.
My mother had fallen out of step with the world she once knew and looked sideways at her family’s everyday values. Even without my father, she would have been a dissident, cracking wise in the corner at reunions. But Dad could not come to even that sort of détente. And so with each new revelation he laid upon our family — no meat, no Thanksgiving — she grew further apart from her peoples. Once we drove to Columbia for a family portrait with all my maternal uncles, aunts, and cousins. My grandmother stood in the back, proud matriarch who’d battled her way up from Gilmore Homes. The photographer was gregarious and white and late. I could feel the sharp edges of Dad’s painted smile.
Afterward, everyone went for dinner, everyone except us. I had cousins who’d been off to Germany, who I hadn’t seen in years, but I just climbed into the car, sulked in the back, and looked out the window at the highway dark. We were halfway home. Dad was frustrated because the photographer had been late. And then he popped—
Son, do you know how many black photographers there are in Baltimore, struggling? Why am I driving all the way to Columbia to help out the other man? I’m sorry, Son. They’ve gotten enough of my money for one night.
His logic cut through my anger, and the sense of it left me reeling for weeks. But I still just wanted him to let it go, if only for that evening.
This was how my mother was walled off from everything, her own past, her family, choices about her present. Every bold idea took us further out. From our very names, my mother had so much to explain to the world — and now this — a man out of pocket, with his woman’s insane blessing. She buckled in shame, and the thought of explaining this one, of going out into the world smiling and claiming the high ground, was too much.
She knew that this was the reality for so many women, but she was robbed of even the cover of fake ignorance. She was ashamed, and the fact that things were not public was little help. You must know that my mother was hard as hell, would beat children like a street fight, and then drill us on long division. But Ma was of her time and that giant sect of black women, who, rendered fatherless, would have gone barren before staging a repeat.