The Us That Never Was

"My wanderings had at last betrayed me, because for the first time in my life I had seen one of the secret sources of my father's misery." - Ben Okri, The Famished Road

I wondered: how much danger could there be lifting a pen to write about the first time--and now last--that my father, my younger sister, and I all shared a meal together. In fact, the word "danger" should seem inappropriate applied to such an innocent event but for me it isn't. The reality of buried truths raised suddenly into light is like a scalpel driven solely by an intent to slash, irregardless of whether or not a healing follows. And within the dim corridors of such an observation dwells many dangers indeed; chief among them perhaps, the horror of a man glimpsing his image in a shard of truth's mirror and discovering he is--or at least that some fundamental segment of him remains-- as yet, a lost and broken little boy.

It goes without saying that the simple ritual of a shared dinner is commonplace in the lives of most families, but I do not really know that my father, my sister, and I could accurately be described as a family. It may be more correct to say we constituted a unit within my father's version of an extended patriarchy.

He was a man who had married several times (from what my mother told me) all but one of those unions concluding with the death of his chosen spouse, the circumstances of which were never discussed with me. In between and during those four marriages, he helped himself to an unknown number of mistresses. My mother, at the time a thirty-five-year-old widow with four sons and five daughters, was one those mistresses. Thirteen years later, during the second year of marriage to his fourth wife, my sister's mother joined the uncharted society of lovers for Mr. Willie Moore, my father.

In other lands and times, the word mistress would have been inaccurate to describe the women with whom my father had his extramarital relationships; it would have been more proper to think of my widowed mother as wife number six or seven, and my sister's mother as wife number ten or eleven, whichever the case might actually be. But in such times and places these numbered wives were understood to have a definite social and sexual status within the patriarch's self-populated community. Sexual pleasures may have been claimed in private but the relationships and children they produced were celebrated and respected in public. Savannah was not such a place or time when I was born there in 1957 and grew up there in the 1960s and 1970s. Neither my mother nor I ever enjoyed the lush freedom of open acknowledgement, the warm security of being fully claimed. I grew up somewhere along the outskirts of my father's affection and attentiveness. I was a secret that his other children--four girls I was told, no other boys--sometimes glimpsed from the corners of the their eyes or the next street over, and possibly from the depths of some obscure socially obligatory shame that allowed them a small sense of superiority. When no one else was looking, a smile or a frown might pinch my father's mouth when brooding over the rapidly growing reality of my presence. He lived with one name; I grew up with another.

I was nine years old when I learned he was my father. I was thirty-five when I learned about my younger sister. In both cases, he left it to someone else to deliver these revelations. My mother had simply said I could call him "daddy" if I wished, to which I responded without thinking, "What the hell for?" And promptly received a back hand charged with lightning against the side of my head. Well, getting slapped did not solve anything but it did begin an association of pain and mystery with a man who until then, had simply been a guaranteed source of $3 or $4 every month. A generous friend of the family. Now he had introduced a word, "daddy", to go along with the cash. This complicated the fact that in school I'd always filled in forms requesting my father's name with the word "deceased." How could he be so rude as to suddenly rise from the dead and distort my fantasies of a great black soldier father who had died in battle? Why callously convert my mother's image from that of a matronly saint to something so painfully different?

And the news, at age thirty-five, that I had a younger sister? That came from Clora, my stepmother, the woman to whom my father had been married for two years when my sister was conceived by someone else. The surprise of this was not so overwhelming as before because I had had time to learn a little about the worlds we men create for ourselves. By that time, I had traveled extensively, known a diversity of lovers, married, lost several children to horrid circumstances, divorced and died and resurrected myself several times over. I could be described as worldly or cosmopolitan but still did not appreciate learning that I had an adult sister living in the same city where I'd been living as an adult man for six years. In voicing my frustration, I told my father with restrained intensity that if for no other reason, he should have told me about my sister, and in fact all of my kin, years before because he did not know who or what I might feel like bringing to bed in the middle of the night. I impressed upon him that he knew nothing about my sex life and had no idea how lawless my lust could become during those times I was not wandering through fields of meditation on spirituality or literature. His still handsome brown face nodded that I was probably right. I sat smugly inside myself feeling impotently victorious.

After learning of my sister's existence, I made it a point to contact her. We met one afternoon at a restaurant for lunch, where we did not hug or cry but did share some personal history and genuine laughter. Having different mothers, it was not surprising to discover we did not look alike, though I took note she was much lighter in complexion than our father or myself. I wanted mostly to know that she had not been psychically scarred so deeply that she felt no joy in being alive, for if she had been, I had already given myself the task of healing her. To my astonishment, it turned out that, like me, she was much older mentally than she was chronologically and enjoyed a wisdom rarely found among the hippish-hoppish personalities of her generation. I gave her a picture of our father, something she did not already have, and copies of writings I'd had published in various journals. My name, I explained, had been given to me by angels in a dream and it meant "one who loves God in all things." She did not know that our father's birthday was coming up soon, or that he would be eighty-two years old, which meant he had been fifty-nine when she was born. I made a joke that his excessive horniness was probably the reason my own sexuality is relatively calm during my life as a born-again bachelor. We did not laugh very loud.

We then decided we would cook a special dinner for his birthday, surprising him, our unknown siblings and the tribe of grands and great grands, of whom I knew but with whom I was not acquainted. I promised to make a gourmet meat loaf with ground turkey sausage, mushrooms and sweet corn. My newly-found sister promised to make the birthday cake. She was, she said, good at things like that. However, on the day of our grand event, we had both been working so hard on our jobs that neither of us had the energy to cook anything. Instead, we made a stop at Kentucky Fried Chicken and picked up a carrot cake from Krogers Grocery Store, then drove to my father's home. We helped Clora first clear then set the table. My father delivered grace in one of his most moving deacon voices and we all, for the first time ever, sat down for a feast.

None of his other children were there on their father's 82nd birthday. None of the numerous grandchildren or great grands, none of my unknown nieces, nephews, cousins or brothers-in-law. And Clora sat down but did not eat because she had just come from a restaurant with an uncle who was visiting from out of town. I refused to ask myself why my father had not gone to eat with them because the answer was already too clear. Part of it was the fact represented by my sister's and my own presence. The other part was all of those things which I shall never know that my father had done to bring grief and misery into the heart of this woman who chose to stay with him despite the hurt of doing so. Even then, I could see her smiling around her sorrow, and was grateful for the grace that allowed her to welcome at her table children belonging to her husband but not her or any of the other women he had married. I had been born eight years before he knew her; my sister had been born two years after they married. What I found extremely odd was that she felt so much like my mother, and her mature sun-colored face looked like an older golden version of my sister's.

We began to eat. The more cruel side of my mind schemed against the better intentions of my heart. I had brought food and drink for the purpose of celebrating my father's birthday and allowing all involved to enjoy the gayety generated by such occasions. It was my purpose as well to irrefutably establish my and my sister's tangled bloodlines. Suddenly, however, what I found myself doing was bitterly weighing the difference between our characters. Mine and my father's. Suddenly everything about him was maliciously wrong. He spoke wrong, he grew old wrong, and, worst of all, he ate fried chicken wrong. At first, I noticed only that he was far too loud, sounding more like three ill-mannered children eating instead of like a single grown man. And I was offended, on behalf of everyone present, by how close he held his face to the plate, and by the fact that both of his hands seemed to simultaneously reach for more food while shoveling endless amounts down his throat. I couldn't help recalling Richard Wright screaming in Black Boy that the preacher was going to eat all the chicken, despite the fact that I had bought more than enough. And I remembered a woman telling me once that she had known how I would make love by observing how I ate my meals. I didn't believe her but the thought came to me as I watched my father eating and I was stuck with it.

Before his retirement, he had been a construction worker, a lumber jack, and a builder of roads. Something in me always envied as much as I admired his physical virility expressed both in occupation and sexuality. I felt at times as though he had created me solely to serve as a testimony on his behalf while proving a witness against myself, against my validity--as a man and spiritual being. But in this situation requiring some slight social grace, the tables were turned in my favor. He had had his trees to fell and roads to construct; I had attended my six colleges and universities. He had fathered an uncertain quantity of children; my twin girls and two sons had died as infants but I had, somehow, successfully answered a strange calling to help repair other men's lost and shattered sons. In his church he was a deacon well-respected for his faith and kindness; in mine I was a mystic known for interpreting dreams, numbers and verse. Common to both our faiths was a belief in love as a fundamental spiritual principle and active spiritual law; yet none of us sitting at the table on that day seemed overwhelmingly aware of this.

I rarely thought of these things, but I did as I watched my father eat and judged him as something greatly inferior to me. It was easy to maintain sufficient anger to sustain this judgment; I had only to consider certain moments during adolescence when the world's cruelty struck so deep within my soul that it exploded like a weightless mirror and I told myself that only he--my father--could possibly put it back together again. So I whispered that word: "daddy." And I waited to be saved. And the sound of your voice father never did find me, nor heal me, nor trick me into believing everything would be all right. Nor were you always cities or states away from where I was--merely on the other side of the same town living a life too complicated (I imagined) to accommodate mine.

So I watched him eat and I judged him. I toyed with the notion of how shamed my sister must be feeling to experience first-hand his crudeness. I was about to announce that I had lost my appetite when something awful occurred to me. I preferred to believe it couldn't be true, but true it unquestionably was: more than eating like someone who had forgotten his manners, my father was, in fact, eating like a man who was much hungrier than he should have been. I swallowed whatever was in my mouth and thought back to the fact that my stepmother had gone out to eat with her uncle, and recalled also the sparkling cleanliness of the kitchen. Clora did not trouble herself cooking for this man who had not troubled himself to honor and respect their wedding vows; the painful arthritis that had crippled his hands and legs would not have allowed him to do very much for himself. I looked again at the quiet Mona Lisa smile on Clora's face. Yes, she had accepted embarrassment and abuse, then let time exact revenge on her behalf.

My father ate like a man hungrier than he should have been. My judgments deflated rapidly into a pile of meaninglessness. I was confused by the stupendous glare of this sudden realization: that in the absence of virility he had made himself into a victim of the callousness he had made someone else suffer. This knowledge--that my father had been literally starving--would have been easier to accept coming from an essay by James Baldwin writing about his father or even from one of Darryl Wellington's dark spiteful poems, but it did not come from any safe excursion into literature. It came dripping blood and despair out of my own very real life. Perhaps this was just but I didn't care any more about justice; I knew only that I was in the presence of merciless tragedy, that I was a part of it and wished frantically that I were not. I knew that I both loved and hated him but desired love should be the stronger of the two. Then I heard his voice. Looked up to see him smiling across the table. He held up both hands, as though cradling in each a memory of the infants my sister and I had been long years ago, then said, "I'm just so happy to see both of y'all here, at the same time, all us together."

Those words tore me like wet paper into a dozen shredded useless pieces. He was nearly overwhelmed with joy; I could see it. I was nearly devastated with rage; he could not see it. Exactly where was the "all of us" that he saw gathered so happily together? In fact, the vast greater number of his mythological "us" were nowhere to be seen. And if it was so thrilling to have "us" there, why had I been the one who had to arrange it all instead of you? These words burned against my skull like lasers but avoided my tongue. I convinced myself that that specific truth didn't really matter. It was much too late to kiss these lies and make them better.

What concerned me then was seeing him trapped in a cage of pain that he had constructed--out of what unkind steel? Out of selfishness? Ignorance? Fear? Victimized oppression? Unbridled lust? I would never know because I could never live his life in the same way he had and whatever notes he'd taken on the more intense moments of his existence were not points of knowledge he would ever share with me. What concerned me then was the fact that I did, despite the charges of malice or negligence or anything else, I did love him but could not make my way in that terrifying hour towards any possibility of helping him.

The moment I became aware of his suffering should have been the exact same moment I went to battle to alleviate it. But I didn't. I allowed some barrier of horror from the past and terror in our present to stop me. Nor did my father ever speak of his agony, but smiled blindly at the lie stinking between us. That single second of silence and non-action articulated for me what some psychologists call the father-son dilemma. Until then, I had not known it cut so deeply into the flesh of my personal reality. Exploring its full depth, however, would prove impossible because six months later my father would die, and his funereal would mark both the second time my sister and I occupied the same room as he, and the only time all of his children--the "us" that never was--would gather in unison around him.

As I write these words, listening to danger and my soul clashing swords, I recall meeting a man on Broughton Street, downtown Savannah, one bright Saturday afternoon while waiting for a bus. He was a ship's engineer, from Israel, who had been thrown off his ship for drunkenness. When he saw a cross hanging around my neck and the symbol of an ankh on my cap, he asked me to pray for him. So I did. Not because I believed myself qualified to do so but because he had requested it. He was so deeply moved that he sobbed loud enough to frighten me and to make passersby stare as they hurried away from us. Then, In front of all those people shopping and walking up and down Broughton Street, out of pious gratitude he kissed both my hands, my left cheek and my forehead. Each time his lips touched me I could hear in the distance the sound of an exploding grenade and my father screaming silently in the blood-filled trenches of his heart. That man was a stranger whom I knew for all of fifteen minutes and whom I have not seen since, yet his lips of tear-stained gratitude are something I often remember. I knew my father for all of thirty-six years--when I look in mirrors the brown eyes that shine tears at me belong to him--and I cannot recall either of us kissing the other once.