Love you, Dad

I first read James Baldwin seriously in graduate school. I must admit, though, he scared me to death. His honesty and vulnerability on the page were a bit too much. I preferred the elegant mask of Ralph Ellison. Emotions hidden behind reasoned argument and so-called sophistication. I knew what roiled underneath the surface of my smile. I was wounded. And I did not have the courage or the will to confront the reasons why.

Baldwin struggled with the wounds deposited in him by his father: the fights, the cruelty, the broken mind and heart, the man who told him he was too ugly to be loved. In doing so, he detailed the primal wound that moved him about: a father who failed to love him because the world—a world organized without him in mind—defeated him daily. The defeat and rage that inevitably followed spilled over, drowning some, but touching all within its reach. Baldwin wrote,

“Between his merciless children, who were terrified of him, the pregnancies, the births, the rats, the murders on Lenox Avenue, the whores who lived downstairs, his job on Long Island—to which he went every morning wearing a Derby or a Homburg, in a black suit, white shirt, dark tie, looking like the preacher he was, and with his lunchbox in his hand—and his unreciprocated love for the Great God almighty, it is no wonder our father went mad.”

No matter what Baldwin wrote about race or democracy, this constant picking at the scab of his relationship with his father frightened me. I had to contend with my own nightmares—with the father, who with a simple glance, could make me cry, with the man who unknowingly deposited fear in my gut.

I smiled when I typed the word, unknowingly. The word carries with it a journey from wound to understanding, with love as its throughline. Time, as indifferent as it is, has softened my judgments. The man who raised me, who wounded me, who wanted the world for me, who loved me the only way he knew how, is my father. And on this Father’s Day that possessive pronoun means everything: he is my dad, the man who made me who I am today.

I have written about my father, telling and retelling the story in order to possess the wounds (and, perhaps, to be released from their vice grip) and to engage in that daunting task of self-creation. I have spent so much of my life running from him, literally and figuratively. But in these last few decades I have come to understand him, to witness his own vulnerability, to see the shyness that hides behind his bravado, and his unwavering love for his family.

He was barely twenty-one years of age when he married my mom and took on the responsibility of a family. My oldest sister is severely disabled. My mother, a young teenager at the time, contracted rubella during her pregnancy. My sister cannot walk, talk, or see. She wasn’t supposed to live past the age of twelve. She is now sixty-two years old. My dad sacrificed his dreams to take care of her and us. Plotted and planned. He was the second African American hired at the Pascagoula Post Office. Worked in the Mississippi heat, left belts rotten with sweat on hooks. Ate the same lunch for over thirty years, rotating between a bologna and ham sandwich with cheese. He never took a vacation (spread out his days to take one day off a week) and endured the insult of the office (when his natural instinct was to beat the hell out of somebody) because he had four mouths to feed.

Bills had to be paid. When he came home from work, he didn’t say much, and we avoided him. I can understand that now. Responsibility isn’t an easy burden, especially when you are growing up with the children you’re raising. He spent many nights counting the bubbles on the popcorn ceiling. Figuring out how to rob Peter to pay Paul. And we knew nothing of his thoughts. Only distance and quiet, unless a storm raged.

Today I watch my dad with his daily routine and habits. You can hear him coming as he shuffles his feet, making his way to the kitchen, opening the blinds, setting up his coffee, going outside to feed the feral cats and raccoons, taking care of his fish (I call him Mr. Green Jeans). It is his ritual to begin every day, a morning prayer of sorts.

Like clockwork, he wakes up at 2am every day to change my sister’s diaper. Mom isn’t as strong as she used to be: her battle with cancer left her a bit weaker. So, she cannot tend to my sister like she did all these years. Dad helps. He changes my sister, I think, four times a day. There is a rhythm to how they care for her, how they have shouldered, together, the responsibility for their baby from the moment she took her first breath.

My father loves me deeply. I know that now and, if I am honest, I knew it then, too. He could’ve walked away from us all. He never did. No matter what happened or how difficult life became. I have a sense of what he had to overcome (his wounds and heartbreak) to love us the way he did. He dreamed that we would escape the confines of Moss Point and soar. He told us that he wasn’t our friend: that his task was to prepare us for a world that wasn’t friendly—that if we could survive him nothing could shake us. He did not want us to make his mistakes. He didn’t do this with hugs or affirmations. Stern discipline and unyielding expectations were his means.

On this Father’s Day, I write about you not because of some concern about wounds and self-creation (Baldwin’s concern is not my own here) or out of an effort to confront my own fears, but simply because, without you, I would not be here. I have always wanted you to be proud of me, daddy. I’ve tried to live up to what you poured in us. You have been a shining example of what it means to be responsible for the ones you love and the sacrifice that love demands of each of us.

On this day, I celebrate you. I lift you up to the heavens for being an example of a beautiful, powerful, loving, vulnerable, ever-evolving Black man. My father. My daddy. I love you.

~