The Man of Many Fathers

Chapter 1

The Doo-Doo Green Cutlass Supreme

There’s no honest way to begin this book about fatherhood without first talking about my mom, Joyce. Two of the most important tools I possess as a man came from her: compassion and toughness.

They say a scent can remind you of someone. Something as simple as a flower, a summer breeze, the smell of baked cookies. I can’t have a hot dog without thinking of her. I love eating those diced-up bits of multiple animals encased in a pork sleeve and seasoned with all types of carcinogens outlawed by the EPA and USDA because they make me feel closer to the woman who raised me.

My early memories as a child are of me being a latchkey kid in Memphis, Tennessee. My mother had separated from my father in early 1979, not even a year after I was born, and left him behind in New York City to head to Memphis to pursue her graduate degree and be closer to her family in her hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi. My earliest memories as a child do not include my father. It was just me and my mom and me watching her trying to make things work.

My mother was tough and afraid of no one. In undergrad, she had been among the first wave of Black protesters at Delta State University who organized sit-ins at the president’s office demanding better conditions for Black students on campus. She would then take this same tenacity over to Florida A&M University as a grad student.

I always looked forward to breakfast with my mom. When she ate, her mind slowed down. I could see the problems and stresses leave her as she sat and enjoyed her food. A good meal was her departure from this world for a moment. Breakfast was also when we talked the most.

But some mornings we would be late getting out of the house, so we’d have to get creative about breakfast and the car would double as a kitchen table. My mother had a 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. It was doo-doo green with white bucket seats and a custom ragtop white roof to match. This was the age before center consoles in cars, so there was a full three feet of open seat between me and my mother. This is where I set up our breakfast spread. Some days we would eat plated foods like eggs or waffles, but we soon discovered one food in the house that’s the simplest and most efficient: the hot dog. I would lay out four slices of bread, and on top of each I would place a piping hot, freshly boiled hot dog. Motor vehicle laws dictated that a kindergartener should be in the back seat, but since I was in charge of assembling the hot dogs for her, I got to sit up front. These days were the best.

After my mother dropped me off at school, she’d work long hours in administration at Memphis State University by day, then go straight to grad school at night. A regular babysitter was a luxury that came and went like the wind, and most of the family members willing to chip in for free were an hour away in Mississippi, so if my mother was tight on money, she’d leave me home alone after school—with one instruction. “Don’t answer the phone, don’t answer the door!” she’d say to me, the kindergarten student.

Next to the phone was a list of “emergency numbers,” which was just a list of coconspirators ready to speed over to the house and meet my needs to keep me from being swooped up by child protective services. At the top of the list was Olivia, one of my mother’s college friends. She came over to the house often. The rest of the people, as far as I could tell, were a mix of coworkers and church members. As the old African proverb goes, “It takes a village to keep a single mother from losing her child to the system.”

Like most latchkey kids, I was saddled with making my own dinner sometimes. By first grade, I was well versed in the preparation of franks and beans, pot pies, TV dinners, waffles, bacon, cold-cut sandwiches, and of course, the good old-fashioned American hot dog. I learned how to use a stove before I learned how to shoot a basketball. I wasn’t a full-blown chef or anything, but my mother gave me enough skills to know that she didn’t have to worry about me ever starving to death in her absence.

I never “missed” my dad per se during the Memphis years. When your first memories don’t include a father in the home, you do not know that you’re missing a father in your home. Sometime when I was in the first grade, my father left his job in New York City at WCBS to become the news director of a Black-owned radio station in Birmingham, Alabama. Closer to me in Memphis, he made the three-hour drive to visit us about once a month.

Just because your father is far away doesn’t mean he can’t touch you. My father was a tall man, about six foot three, with a deep voice that could shake paint off the walls and huge hands that, when raised to the sky, could eclipse the sun and the moon.

I remember one day, my mother was on the phone with him and trying to slice an orange for me at the same time. She was taking too long, so I snatched the knife away from her and told her that I could do it myself. I insisted.

My mother handed me the sharp, serrated steak knife and took a step back. She grinned. I’d watched my mom slice an orange many times. How hard could it be? I knew how to hold the knife just fine. What I hadn’t paid attention to was where my mother placed her other hand while holding the orange. My thumb was under the blade and as I sliced down into the orange, I sliced my finger wide open.

White meat dangled from the open wound. I screamed as blood streamed out of my thumb and down my arm. To make matters worse, stinging acidic orange juice raced inside the cut to replace the blood that was streaming out of it. While getting a paper towel, my mom handed me the phone. “Your father would like to speak with you,” she said with a sly grin. As soon as I put the phone up to my ear, my father did not disappoint. His voice rattled my brain and shook the earwax free in my ear canal.

“Goddamn it, boy! Didn’t your mother tell you to wait? Now look at you!” he screamed. “You don’t know everything yet!”

His words rattled me down to my core like an acoustic earthquake. The shockwaves from the booming bass in his voice created pure shock and awe. He hit me with the ferocity of a baseball manager yelling at an umpire who’d missed a call. When your child messes up, parenting usually boils down to either “Scold, then comfort” or “Comfort, then scold.” My dad’s strategy somehow was “Scold, then scold some more, then comfort a week later.”

His booming voice was more than enough to make me forget that I probably needed stitches. I was crying now, not because of the pain but because I knew I was in trouble with my father.

Conversations like this encouraged me to stay on my best behavior because once a month, I knew the boogeyman was going to drive over from Birmingham and I didn’t want to be on his bad side that week. And for the most part, I was a good kid. But try as my mother might to keep me that way, there’s only so much a single mother in grad school can do on her own. The phone calls and occasional visits from my dad helped, but none of it was enough to stop me from slipping into an addiction to a drug called freedom.