He spanked me if I failed to finish everything on my plate in the half hour he allotted for each meal he spanked me for being constipated he spanked me for watching Sesame Street, because Black and white children played together on it. Not uncoincidentally, nearly every early memory I have of my father involves letting him down in some way. This was my father’s idea, and over their brief courtship he persuaded my mom of its merits. My parents married not for love but because they believed they would have smart children together. I came into being through a kind of homegrown eugenics project.
And I, as a result of being his child, was more superior still.
But at home, he recounted the glories of the Old South, cut Black children out of my storybooks, or painted over their faces. Being an educated man, with a Masters from a northeastern Ivy League university he’d attended on scholarship, he was careful not to share his opinions with just anyone. More than a hundred years after the Civil War, my father actively mourned its abolition and raged over integration. He was the only person I knew, growing up in Miami, who defended slavery. He believed in loyalty to blood, by which he meant our Mississippi Delta ancestors. The older I get, the more I search backward, as though if I could know everyone who led to my father, who made him who he is, I would know him, too. Sometimes I have felt that if I could just reach down far enough into myself, I would find the answers: what he wants, what he fears, what he loves. I have loved my father and I have feared him, and I have lain awake in the dark late at night worrying what it means to have half his genome inside me, but I have never understood him.
Family sought against tormentor. they wrong free#
Eventually they will do whatever my father wants, just to be free of him. Otherwise, maybe tomorrow morning, but probably this afternoon and quite possibly this very hour, he will ring them up again and start shouting. If he’s angry about something-and he usually is-upon arriving at work, he’ll pick up the phone and call around until he finds someone with the power to rectify the problem. He eats breakfast if the scale permits and then he puts on a suit and drives to his law office. He wakes before dawn, weighs himself, goes for a walk or a jog or rides his stationary bike.
Thirteen hundred miles from me, still down in South Florida, my father is going about his day, and I can imagine it.
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