I grew up in a world without fathers.

That statement sounds either ominously dystopian (by way of Octavia Butler or PD James) or mighty pretentious in what I would probably define as distinctly Southern, since that is how I am sometimes prone to labeling myself. I’m prone to seeing the world and my experiences as scenes from a black and white independent feature and I’ve got that In A World…voice-over guy in my head reading that line like it’s from the greatest story never told.

I met my biological father for the first and only time about 11 years ago, so, for me, the idea of fatherhood had been defined by an absence, a void.  My father wasn’t a working dad who presided at the head of the dinner table or tossed whatever ball was in season at the time in the backyard.  My father simply wasn’t around, not that there’s anything the least bit simple about it.  He existed in a couple of random anecdotes from my maternal grandmother who helped raise me.  Whenever she made mashed potatoes, she always reminded me that they were his favorite dish or sometimes I would catch her watching me and she would say that I moved like him as if my love of creamy rich Southern spuds or the expression of my pre-teen nervous energy could be attributed to a genetic factor.

My mother rarely mentioned him before I turned 18 and even now, over thirty years later, what I’ve pieced together from her, barely more than a name or a few discernible traits, still fail to transform him into a man of substance.  Much like the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, my father is “a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe…one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.”

Of course, when I thought there was something truly unique about him and our story, I came across The Invention of Solitude by author Paul Auster, who wrote of his own father, after his death, in similar terms.

He ate, he went to work, he had friends, he played tennis, and yet for all that he was not there.  In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man.  Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well.

Auster had known his father.  He had seen the man engaged in all of those routine activities.  He had the proof of his senses to substantiate his father’s existence, although, he notes that the man was “incapable or unwilling to reveal himself under any circumstances.”  I would argue that Auster’s father did reveal something of himself, of his own accord, by his mere presence, whereas, my father had devoted himself to a strict, religious adherence to the creed of his invisibility.

I first laid eyes on him when I was seven or eight years old.  Rummaging through a collection of old photographs and family documents, I found myself face-to-face with this yellowing couple from their wedding day (Valentine’s Day, 1969). The visage of the woman looked nothing like my mother, the woman I saw everyday, but I was familiar with this earlier incarnation of her, this powerfully revolutionary mix of youth and wisdom, so common among the Black counter-cultural generation.

But he was the one I couldn’t understand. I immediately grasped the context of him, standing next to her, he had to be my father because this was from their wedding and I knew, or at least on some level, I could appreciate my inevitable presence.  I recreated myself right then and there, from the two of them, as they were in that frozen frame.  So much of me came from her – she was all I had ever known – but suddenly, I lifted trace elements and features from him, grafting them onto myself then.  I was the good doctor Frankenstein and the monster.

But I wasn’t him, was I?

What kind of question is that?

Classical overtones, mythic and Shakespearean, to be sure, but somehow also a common query for a young Black boy coming of age in the late 1970s and early 80s, the kind of question that sets him on to gaining an advanced degree in fatalistic pre-cognitive analysis? By my pre-teens, I knew what the data said about Black boys raised in homes without fathers. We weren’t likely to graduate from high school, attend college, or become gainfully employed productive members of society. The prognosis was that I would probably not make it to 25 years of age without having been arrested and incarcerated at least once for either a drug-related offense or a violent crime. Just the facts, right?

It’s no wonder I retreated into more speculative inquiries full of metaphor and metaphysical matters that wouldn’t touch me like the prying eyes and bleeding hearts of society.  So, I let that photo recede deeper into the past.  I rarely talked or thought about him and what he meant.

* * *

By the time I reached my early to mid 20s, I began to understand how he had inspired me to become the exception to all of those well-documented rules and notions about young Black men. I recognized, however faint and indirect, his influence over me and the life I was constructing for myself, but I didn’t want to acknowledge his hand in my identity. I sought, instead, power over him.

I started a novel (Finding Father) with the more literal (and obviously literary) intention of creating my father from the jig-sawed fragments I had collected as a child, pieces that would hardly constitute anything approaching the hard fact of bone, the sinewy strands of muscle and certainly not the detailed features of the flesh.  I assumed that if I could take those bare elements and charge them with a creative spark then I might be able to breathe life into the man.  From there, I figured I might even track him down and compare the two, the real versus the imagined.

The story I began is driven by a son’s headlong rush towards a personal reckoning – the arrival of his own child – and the questions regarding the type of father he will be.  So he reaches out, across the years and the great divide, to his own absent father, initiating an odyssey, a meandering Southern Gothic road trip with apocalyptic confrontations as they soar towards the bright light of truth and consequences on makeshift invisible wings.

The dark truth was the novel had less to do with a creation myth; it was my attempt to destroy him. I longed to be some kind of Black Oedipus, without the benefit of blind rationalization that comes from not knowing that the man on the road that he slays happens to be his father. I would take command of my own prophetic destiny, bringing the two of us to that fateful roadside encounter, where we would know full well our identities and exactly what was to result from that confrontation. I was going to lay him low, right there in black and white. And I imagined him reading those words, the account of that tragic deed.

* * *

By the time I found myself in the midst of this willfully mythic re-creation, even though I was living on my own, working and devoting as much of my free time as possible to writing, I had, for the first time, a male role model, a stepfather. My mother remarried at the start of my junior year at the University of Pennsylvania. I had not been able to attend the wedding, but I shared a moment of silence with my off-campus housemates the afternoon of the event. I was happy for my mother, but uncertain as to what this would mean for me. What need did I have, at this point, for a father?

Pops, as I soon dubbed him (thanks to his comforting resemblance to Pops Staples of the Staples Singers), quietly and unassumingly became the presence I didn’t know I needed.

Less than six months after their marriage, he drove me back to school (from Cincinnati to Philadelphia) and watched my first intramural basketball game, following a significant period of rehabilitation after a freak subway accident nearly stole a limb or two from me. He was my mother’s proxy; there to decide whether or not I was ready to actively compete during the season, and I found myself playing harder, not only because he was reporting back to my mother, but also to impress him. I found myself wanting his nod of approval or his firm handshake, which he gave freely and often.

During my post-collegiate working years in Philly, he visited me often, coming on several occasions without my mother to stay for weeklong vacations. I took him to work with me, cooked for him when I got home, spent time in Rittenhouse Square people watching with him. He was, is and always will be my Pops.

* * *

Therefore, the desire fueling Finding Father was losing the necessary oxygen to sustain itself. The literary conceit still held some sway over me because it played on the surprisingly strong instinct in me to be the kind of father that my own had not been for me. I dreamed, and actively set those dreams and longings down, of assuming the role of father to a son of my own. The book was to be an alternative/revisionist take on not just my father, but the history of his relationship with my mother and a what-if scenario involving my fictional preparation for fatherhood. The problem was I happened to be nowhere near that stage in reality, and there were no likely prospects on the horizon, plus with Pops stepping in as he had, there was even less emotional motivation, so after 12+ chapters with incomplete notes scattered hither and yon, Finding Father faded to black.

* * *

Despite all that, my father – the flesh and blood version of him continued to walk the Earth. Towards the latter portion of the 1990s, my mother and Pops returned to Asheville for a funeral and had a chance encounter with my father.

Pops reached out to me. He told me that he wasn’t even aware, at the time, that he was being introduced to my father, and he expressed his sadness over the fact that he couldn’t pass along a more detailed impression of the man, but he offered to travel back home with me to meet him, if I wanted.

I didn’t take him up on the offer, but about ten years ago, it was my mother who set me on course for an inevitable meeting with my father. Over a decade after that incident, she informed me that there was a notice in the Asheville Citizen-Times about my father concerning a recent arrest. As soon as I got off the phone with her, I fished out my laptop and ran a search through the state’s records. It turns out my father had a few previous run-ins with the law. All of a sudden, I was a kid again, wondering, worrying that somehow, some way, this would be my eventual path.

* * *

I had always been haunted by the climatic confrontation between Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) and his regal father Mark (Paul Scofield) in Robert Redford’s Quiz Show.  As Charlie admits to his involvement in the game show scandal, he defensively offers a rationalized desire to strike out on his own in some way. It was, he pleads in high Shakespearean fashion (As You Like It), “an ill-favored thing…it was mine own.”  But, his papa sternly reminds him, “Your name is mine.”

All my life, I had carried his name like some boogeyman, a reflection that would reveal some crucial aspect of my identity, if it was ever discovered.  As I prepared, finally, in my mid-30s, to marry, I took one of the first significant steps to inoculate myself, removing a fundamental link between us, by changing my name. It started and ended with such a simple stroke of the pen, a severing of ties and a rebirth.

“Your name,” I countered, “wasn’t mine. Not anymore.”

* * *

I entered into marriage bearing nothing and no one other than myself, while my intended came with two young children (four and seven at the time of our wedding), an ever-present ex-husband and a seemingly endless set of former in-laws who weren’t quite ready and/or willing to go quietly into the night. On top of all that, we came from such different cultural backgrounds. She was a New York transplant in the Midwest, a self-identified cultural Jew from an extended family without a single divorce in her immediate line, prior to hers. I, on the other hand, was a Southern Black Catholic, a forever practicing progressive Jesuit, with no idea about how to raise a couple of white kids who would never call me Father.

And I wondered sometimes, would anyone ever see me as a father?

I stumbled across an insightful personal essay by Michael Chabon (“William and I”) in his collection Manhood for Amateurs that discussed the pitifully low standards for fathers and fatherhood in modern society. What does it say about a society when a father like Chabon can be out at the market with his young son in one hand, while unloading his basket with the other hand, only to be looked upon by the female customer waiting behind him in line with overwhelming praise. The woman follows up her undue attention with an unsolicited comment: “You are such a good dad,” she says finally. “I can tell.”

This anecdote kicks off Chabon’s comical observations about himself as a bumbling parental figure and some obvious yet pointed social commentary about why he would receive such attention whereas no one would waste a second glance on his wife given the same situation, let alone feel it was worth bestowing a word praise on her.

Everytime I read the essay though, I wish I could appreciate the wry humor of the premise, the Seinfeldian critique of this little nothing moment that actually rises to the status of meaningful reflection, but I can’t because I don’t exist in that situational moment, not in the way Chabon does.

I can recall packing our youngest up in the car and take her with me to the neighborhood Starbucks where I worked when I need to get away from the blank walls of our home. We entered and right away, I watched the full human host of our caffeinated patrons scrambling to figure out the “who is he, and what is he to her” dynamics of our relationship. No one ever makes the initial assumption that this sandy-brown haired child could be mine, and yet, if our races, and not our genders, were reversed, people would draw the conclusion that she was my adopted child without breaking a sweat, and baptize me in the sanctified fountain of Liberal grace.

You see, no one outside our immediate community sees me as a father.

And of course, there were darker moments too. A midnight screening of a new release that I took our older child to, at that point they had possibly just crossed over into their teens, and they already had the more dangerously mature look of a high school age kid. We sat on a bench together waiting to enter the theater, watching others wandering about, as they surreptitiously eyed us. I could hear the amber alerts going off in those urgently concerned gazes.

I sit, ramrod straight with my child’s head on my shoulder, quietly defiant, knowing that I can do nothing else, even though some part of me wants to flee. This is what it means, to step in.

* * *

Maybe, even after all this, I was too bold, just like my father. 

He walked away and, by writing about him, I had hoped I was reversing the order, birthing him, shaping him, and altogether fathering him, as he should have done for me.  And too, maybe, like my mother, I wasn’t satisfied with the idea of him, which explains why I hadn’t yet followed through on this act of re-creation (word made flesh).

Not like Jacques Cormery, the protagonist of Albert Camus’ posthumously released incomplete manuscript The First Man, who makes a pilgrimage to the square of French Remembrance where, in a large journal he finds the name Cormery Henri and a notation reading, “fatally wounded at the Battle of the Marne, died at Saint-Brieuc October 11, 1914.”  And then, a caretaker leads him along a row of gravestones to the one belonging to Henri.  Confronted by the dates on the marker (1885-1914), Jacques realizes that his father was twenty-nine years old and that he, at forty, is older than his father was at the time of his death.

* * *

Death, it seems, brings writers to the brink of existential investigation.  Here is where I return to Auster and his memoir.  He found himself remarkably composed when news of his father’s death arrived.  He was married with a young son and resigned to this final stage in the life cycle.

One day there is life.  A man, for example, in the best of health, not even old, with no history of illness.  Everything is as it was, as it always will be.  He goes from one day to the next, minding his own business, dreaming only of the life that lies before him.  And then, suddenly, it happens there is death.

But death led him to a realization: his father had stepped away and left no traces. Digging into the dirt of my father’s past forced me to face my own mortality, and gave me the reason I needed to finally step to him. Besides his public arrest record, I found out, again through my mother, that my father and his two brothers had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had also claimed the life of their father (my paternal grandfather) back in the mid-90s. Having just entered my 40s, my mother and wife formed an effective tag team urging me to have routine prostate exams.

My conception of my father shifted in a decidedly more complex way. I was now linked to this man and through him I likely carried a predisposition that could kill me and there was nothing I could do about it. Having maintained a healthy active lifestyle (no red meat, marathon training for 15+ years) would not offset this inheritance. I wanted to have a face to connect with this emerging reality.

With my mother’s help, I finally arranged a visit. I drove back home to Asheville with my wife for a long weekend. As soon as we arrived, after a brief phone call, I found myself, at long last, face-to-face with my father at a treatment facility for veterans dealing with substance abuse. I stepped before him, giving him no notice or chance to back away from the encounter. He looked into my face and eyes with no sense of recognition.

As he crossed the lobby coming towards me and I squinted, searching for some reflection of me in his face and then some hint of that face of his from the wedding photo I’ve carried in my memory for the last 30+ years, all of those lessons on etiquette slipped away and I truly was punch drunk with my guard down and out for the count.

I went blind, the kind of blindness that I would describe now as a paralysis, where my eyes failed to register any significant detail of his face or the surrounding space. He was just an approaching shadow. In hindsight I redesign the interior adding institutional furniture, a few other bodies huddled together on the couches and chairs, no doubt engaged in their own awkward exchanges. On either side of me stood my wife and one of his cousins who had helped me to arrange this visit.

There he was. I could see him wondering, searching for some meaning in our faces. I wanted to see some recognition in his eyes. I wanted to see him put it altogether, so that I wouldn’t have to say anything at all. I had rehearsed this meeting too many times to count, but I had never been able to come up with a brilliant twist, a shocking quip, that would elevate the exchange to something mythic or even the level that it would be worth hearing coming out of someone else’s mouth in the film based on this moment and our overall story. Secretly, I’ve always wanted that big screen treatment because I’ve never been able to hear anything in his voice and I suppose anything from another voice besides my own would please me.

I gave my name, my first name, because we no longer shared a surname. My last name is mine own; it belongs to me. I changed it legally before I got married, so that my wife could take it and it would be ours. I didn’t tell him that, not at first. I just repeat my first name, and he realized who I am. I look down and watch as my hand extended. He took it and then clumsily me, into his arms and I didn’t know how to respond. I stiffened, gave him two quick pats on his back and separated from him. I introduced my wife, but she and his cousin, they receded into a state of invisibility as he ushered me to a spot away from the main lobby where we sat side-by-side in the whispered intimacy of prayer.

I imagine my grandmother frowning. Nana, I’m sorry.

What did he say? Much like I recreated the environment, I found that I also had to fill in certain gaps here as well. Of course, we’re talking about canyons, whole voids of time and experience. I didn’t ask him where he had been for all my life, and he didn’t try to answer that question either, but he talked, on and on, as if this was the start of a new episode of his televised biopic and he was summing up the previous installments. Or maybe he was rebranding himself in the hopes of winning my loyalty. This is what it’s like to see the spin game in real time. It is a surreal experience.

And it is strange that we should be strangers with this fiction between us – like father, like son – even though, in that brief moment, we are exactly alike, struggling to make a suitable first impression.

* * *

What I bore was a burden of an entirely different kind. It was the genetic impact of what I realized I carried within me. Less than two weeks before our meeting, he had buried his older brother, the latest victim of our heavy legacy.

It is so strange for me to read the words “our legacy” and hear myself claim it so readily. So much of this story, my story is about denying him or asserting my self as if all that matters, but this predisposition, this inheritance of mine, comes from him and there’s no way I can excise myself from it. I can’t unmake him or recreate him and save myself in the process.

Thank you, Father.

Don’t mistake that last comment as a sentiment spoken in anger. I bore no ill-will. That was the first thing I took note of as we stood before each other. It was an unseasonably warm February day. I felt a certain anxiety in my wife sitting in the passenger seat next to me on the way to the meeting, but a stillness had overtaken me. One way or another, I knew this chapter would be over for me.

And, was it everything I imagined or had written in that early draft of Finding Father?

Let me say that I am nowhere close to the writer who would have astutely drawn the scene up and found it to be much less than anyone would have expected. Anti-climactic overstates the reality. I heard him speak, a rush of words, like he was throwing everything into this one conversation, 40+ years, selling, re-branding it for me, as if I could be hoodwinked into buying this new version, wholesale.

I can’t say I listened to him or even saw him all that clearly. Maybe I saw too much, the critic in me peeped through the special effects, the myth and magic of what he was supposed to be. He was just a man, too full of nothing but words.

* * *

He is dead now. I received a call from one of his nieces, the daughter of his youngest brother, at the time still-living, the lone survivor from his generation of our legacy. She is a few years younger than me, and she said she wanted to reach out, first to invite me to come to the funeral and second to extend a hand, an acknowledgement that there is more than just this dark legacy. I listened to her. Her words were imploring and heartfelt. I declined to attend the funeral, but left the door open for another connection; maybe later, away from the maddening crowd of vaguely familiar faces. I also offered my condolences to her for her loss because I could hear, in what she said about my father that he meant something to her, and I was glad (and of course sad) for her.

I remember though, the year before, when he called me on Father’s Day, a couple of years after our meeting. His voice bearing words, more words. I caught myself wondering if I should call him back, and smirkingly asking myself if I should wish him a Happy Father’s Day. Would he take it as a joke? Would it be funny?

He called a second time that day, while I was grilling for my wife and children. I didn’t answer and he left no message this time. I think he understood. I was letting him know not to call me again. That chapter had finally been written and laid to rest.

More essays in this memoir as literary mixtape will be forthcoming.

Stepping In (To Fatherhood) received one of ArtsWave’s 2024 Black and Brown Artist project grants, with support from the City of Cincinnati, Duke Energy, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Fifth Third Bank, Greater Cincinnati Foundation, Macy’s, Walter C. Frank, and Peter and Betsy Niehoff.