The summer of 1969 would be over 18 days after my birth, although Valentine’s Day is when it all officially began. That was the day my mother married my father. If this piece depended on a picture being worth a thousand words to fill the page, there would be little need to spend much time here.
Instead of pictures, I have a collection of broken verses about my father. No one ever sat me down and recited the epic prologue. I remember entering my Jesus year (33) and still not even knowing my father’s birthday. From my birth certificate, I know that he and my mother were both 19 years old.
Around that time, I used to carry one of my baby pictures in my wallet. A black and white photo that belonged to my maternal grandmother, my Nana. It was faded and the aged beige of the thick paper probably matched my early skin tone. I was no longer so light; my color was ripening quickly, and I was well on my way to becoming my mother’s little chocolate drop.
My mother, in fits of nostalgia at family gatherings, would tell the story of how I was the subject of confusion on the maternity ward, with my head full of soft beautiful black curls and that sweet gender blending look that newborns have. I was light enough to pass for just about anything on the racial spectrum. That’s my nephew, my dark, brown-skinned Aunt Eloise said, to a questioning soul next to her one day. I loved that story – in part because every time I hear or repeat it means some part of my auntie remains among us – but mainly because it was the first celebration of my race.
When I was eleven or twelve, I found a couple of photos from my parents’ wedding. I didn’t know either of the people staring back at me. Somehow, I had lived my whole life with one and without the other, but neither was familiar. I was drawn to him though. That aged print felt the same as the baby picture I would carry later and at 19, his color matched mine, but I had grown darker. I wondered about him. Was there a darkness to him?
For years, I had completed school forms and family reports and all I had ever given was his name, if that. What else did I know?
He liked my grandmother’s mashed potatoes. She would bake the potatoes, then open them up, scooping out the insides and mix them with whole milk and sour cream before restuffing the mixture back into the skins. If he came over for Sunday dinner, she made them like that for him. That’s how I remembered her making them for me as a child and always attacked them ferociously.
Before I found those wedding pictures, I used to walk around downtown Asheville with my Nana. She worked as a domestic, cleaning houses a few days a week in Biltmore Forest and other fancy neighborhoods. On her way to and from work, we would stroll through the Park and pay our respects to the downtown regulars, the host of other Black folks waiting for buses to take them to and fro. Being young and spirited, I would get ahead of her sometimes. I would turn before getting too far from her, and I could see her watching me. You move like your father, she might say. I would drop my head and start looking at my feet as I took the next few tentative steps, eager to see what she had seen in my gait. But as soon as my eyes caught on, I knew it was over. He was gone again.
look it’s downhill all the way from here (Everything But the Girl, Downhill Racer)
At 19, I nearly died.
During the summer after my sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania, I took a job working outside Philly’s urban core, which required riding the subway out to the end of the line and then transferring to one of the regional trains.
The evening of my first day of work, I had hopped from the regional train back to the subway and was ready to settle in at home. When I reached my stop in West Philly, I waded through the late rush hour crowd, pushing my way to the exit, but the doors snapped shut with me half in and half out of the subway car. I heard people yelling, trying to get the conductor’s attention. Others tried grabbing my backpack and inside arm, seeking to pull me back in, but my head and right shoulder were outside the door, and I would have rather lost my backpack, if it meant being free before impact. Back then, the doors didn’t bounce open immediately and without much fanfare, the subway started moving and gathering speed. I tried to pump my foot outside the car like I was riding a skateboard, but instantly recognizing that I wouldn’t be able to keep this up for long, my mind shut down before I hit the wall at the end of the platform. My body must have broken the death grip of the doors because I ended up on the platform.
I have a quite vivid memory of waking up there, after being sprung free, with the panicked expressions of so many unfamiliar faces above me. It was all a dream to me. I was at home, in bed, with all these people hovering over me, so I slipped back to sleep.
When I came to, I was in the emergency room, in the eye of a frenzied storm of doctors and nurses attempting to prep me for surgery. I’ve never been much of a joke teller, but I was so “on” in that moment, experiencing the same rush I figured stand-up comics feel onstage, hopefully without the physical trauma of smashing into a wall.
In the years since the accident, I go back, hoping to reconfigure the incident. Each time though, I know I am fictionalizing the details, getting further away from the actuality. I am usually not in my body. Instead, I’m standing outside it all, watching, re-directing the action. I see myself in the door and catch the inevitable movement of the train. I watch as my body makes contact with the wall and I hear the train screeching to a halt before returning to the station. Sometimes, the doors open and my body slips free or maybe a few of the less stunned passengers pick me up and carry me a safe distance from the edge of the platform.
Occasionally, I pivot away from the scene, bolt up the stairs, and burst into the soft light of the early evening. I know this version isn’t real. I might emerge into a completely different part of the city – beyond West Philly or University City, where I lived. Maybe I spin around and find myself in Olde City at Second Street, nearer to the river, the Delaware and the tall ships, but it doesn’t matter.
I run around until I stumble upon a phone booth and grab the phone book hanging from a cord. I flip through the white pages, zeroing in on the C’s, until I find my last name at the time. Clinkscales. There aren’t ever many in the listings, no matter where I’ve lived, but this time Wardell is there. He has a number and an address. I call, but he’s not home. I recite his address, committing it to memory. I forgo the subway, wave for a cab, but no one stops to pick me up. I race up the block to the nearest bus stop, but a succession of buses passes me by.
The thing is my father was never in Philly, and I know he wasn’t on my mind that day, at that exact moment. But I’ve preserved this fabricated memory and added it to the other fragments I’ve carried with me over the years.
I believe I’ve had more than enough of a character in search of a story. I wanted to find him first somewhere on the page, give him life before meeting him in the flesh. I considered the chance that I might not ever get to meet him at all. I might not be able to finish my portrait before one of us gave up the ghost. So, I resigned myself to the idea that he would be nothing more than a specter in my life.
Would I end up like Icarus freefalling from the sky after finding and rescuing Daedalus from the maze or Ulysses and Telemachus joining forces to reclaim their kingdom? Maybe God almighty and his forsaken son? Or in a bitter twist, would I end up like Marvin Gaye with my father killing me when we came face-to-face? What would our first moment together be like? Face-to-face. Hand-in-hand. The hard handshake. The impossible reflection.
I let my dream encounter drift to one like musician Jeff Buckley who addressed the curious nature of his own absent father.
They will accuse me of stealing from my father. They already stand in baited judgment, waiting for my first move, waiting to dump their loads of garbage upon me. ‘The only thing I ever stole from my father was a fleeting glimpse!!’
maybe I’m just like my father…too bold (Prince, When Doves Cry)
This is about what I’ve learned. Like when, and how, did I learn about being a Black man?
For years, in my mother’s house, I would pass yet another faded photograph. This one of my Nana’s grandfather. Solomon was his name and he was the first freedman in our family, although I’m not sure about the truth of that, because he was born in 1861, after the Emancipation Proclamation, but that doesn’t practically mean that he was free.
I remember the stories my grandmother told me and others I heard during family reunions when we gathered across the river on the land he helped acquire. Solomon is our Adam, our Moses and Aaron, our David. He is, I suppose, our Solomon too.
His testament is old and slowly dying. African tradition speaks of griots, the oral storytellers who pass along the heartbeats in rhyme, the histories of generations past. Is that my appointed task, my duty now?
For a time in my early-30s, when I first moved to Cincinnati, I lived with my mother, stepfather, and baby brother who bears the name of my grandmother’s grandfather, a grandmother he will never truly know in the flesh, not like I did. He has a grand name and a father raising him.
I was born again and raised by a village of Black women, in the bosom of every mother-sister-woman who nursed and fed and loved me. I was spoiled, that’s how our tribe put it. But it could be asked how do you learn about being a Black man in the folds of so many loving skirts?
Family history points first to my Uncle Henry who was a decade older than my Nana, give or take a couple of years, records being what they were for Black folks of that generation in rural North Carolina. Maybe I should mention too, the idea that it wasn’t until my Nana’s death in the mid-90s that we found out she was older than she had let on. In her case, the misrepresentation was a matter of vanity, pure and simple.
Anyway, Uncle Henry, as far as I can recall, never spoke about being a Black man. He was too busy living and doing everything he could. Uncle Henry was truly what you would call a Jack of all trades. He worked with his hands and the tools he kept in the trunk of his car. I can’t remember him talking about much of anything other than the wrestling matches he went to nearly every Sunday afternoon at the Civic Center downtown. Now, he could hold forth on Nature Boy Ric Flair and Chief Wahoo McDaniels and Andre the Giant. Good and evil. Black and white. To be connected to him, I watched as much wrestling as I could in between his visits to my grandmother’s when he would come around to fix whatever was broken. If there’s anything I regret, it’s not learning even a hint of what Uncle Henry knew about being handy.
I also have an uncle named Punkin. I used to fear him with every fiber of my being. That sounds funny, being afraid of a man named Punkin, but he was a career military man, one of my mother’s cousins who would visit my mother and my Nana when he was on leave. They would give me a warning, usually a day or two before his arrival, so that I could steel myself. Not that it ever mattered.
He would knock and then open the door. Soon as he would enter, he would start searching for me, usually resulting in him chasing me around the house. My little feet, no matter how fast they moved, could never get away from him. I would scream and cry and my heart would be ready to break free of its feeble cage. I fought him in my mind as he grabbed and swung me about. I hated him. Thankfully, I never dreamed about him. The living nightmare of his presence was more than enough.
He used that fear against me as I got older. He would bring his family sometimes and place his son and daughter in my care. They never felt like my cousins; they were my charges and if anything happened to them, I knew there would be hell to pay.
By the time I entered college, I had nearly forgotten about him. I had been away – first at prep school in Chattanooga and then my first two years at Penn – and missed seeing him, but those early memories had become lessons I could finally appreciate. Through that residue of childish fear, I could see that he had never hurt me, that he loved and was loved by every woman in our family.
The summer after my sophomore year, literally the day before my subway accident, I called my mother and at some point in the conversation, she passed the phone to Uncle Punkin. Thanks to all the distance and perspective, I felt emboldened enough to tell him how I had hated him for years, letting him in on just how vivid my feelings had been. Turns out, we ended up sharing a great laugh. Two Black men laughing at a child who had finally become a man. I told him, for the first time, how much I loved him and was surprised by how much I truly meant what I was saying.
Truly, truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing himself, unless He sees the Father doing it. For whatever the Father does, the Son also does. (John 5:19)
What are the parts, public and private, that constitute who I am? What impact has race, culture, politics and family had on my development? Why the hell am I so worried about this piecemeal construction, this Black man?
I ask these questions because sometimes it feels like my very life depends on the answers. The pat explanation for these feelings is that I live in Cincinnati where certain white people ask Black men like me what they can do to make things better when it seems to me they could just as easily ask themselves and leave me to my own questions.
And then there are the white folks who attempt to explain some aspect of Black culture to me (usually incorrectly) or say inappropriate or insensitive things in my presence and then, when confronted about the comments, apologize and ask me to call them out, if they continue to do so. Why is the onus always placed on Black folks to do this dirty work? Haven’t we historically done enough cleaning up, especially for people who still maintain some semblance of authority over us?
Some of us continue to bear this burden and responsibility. Back in the day, during my Jesus year, I went so far as to ask some folks, both Black and white, to take part in an informal survey. As part of an unpublished freelance feature (Anatomy of a Black Man), I requested respondents to tell me what kind of Black man they thought I was. It was quite an experience.
This response and its follow-up (from my dear friend Father Richard Bollman) deserved its own spotlight.
A trusting man: and I ask what is the basis of this trust, that somebody
Told you good news about yourself from the start maybe.
On time and ahead of time all the time. I’ll be here. Deal with it.
Three colors, or no color: this anatomy? Bone color, blood and spleen,
Strips of muscle. I could never do a course in anatomy,
Too intimate, getting to the inside of things.
In earlier days, an anatomy is a complete exploration of, all sides and
Keeping everything, the details of details. Moby Dick is an anatomy of
Whaling, so you have to put up with the deliberation and the slowness and
The inclusivity. An anatomy has to be inclusive. Is that the assignment
Now, but there isn’t room in GQ. Room in you?
As always, no chapter titles, no map, and even here, no list of
Recipients. Keeps me asking. Ready to
Read.
RB
There’s also this:
You are a Black man in Cincinnati and in the Catholic Church,
Neither one very easy places,
Nor are they just facts, like living in Bond Hill –
“it’s about seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard.”
Sunday,
RichardB
The Catholic side of me, sometimes feels like an unloved stepchild. How can he not when he must perpetually play second fiddle to the Black side? The Black man has so much on his mind, finding it damned near impossible to walk the streets and embrace the world with anything resembling a generosity of spirit.
I take comfort in knowing I’m not alone. Black men like me – the designated role players – are legion. I received a response from a good friend in Philly who flipped the script, proving that his story is mine, is all of ours. From Jeff, I learned the importance of two words in defining who we are.
Only and inconsistent.
The “only” Black kid in class. And still the “only” Black in the office (other than the secretaries). And often the “only” Black at the bar after work. Or the “only” Black at the reception in the evening.
All those “onlys” add up to a world of loneliness. One may be the loneliest number, but that’s only because “only” isn’t a number.
The inconsistencies he introduced into the equation were more intriguing though.
A white man swinging Muddy Waters to Led Zeppelin or even Mick Jagger to Nelly’s Country Grammar would be a sign of cultural curiosity and a praiseworthy effort to recognize the roots of music and their “somewhat” inferior contemporary manifestations. Black folks shoulder some of the blame for fostering the notion of these inconsistencies. We are just prone to label basketball as “Black” and hockey as “white” or fail to grasp that everything, both positive and negative within this society belongs as much to Black as white.
Before that informal survey, I found myself standing before a small class at a local Cincinnati seminary giving a presentation. The seven or eight students knew nothing about me other than the fact that I was Catholic and a Black man. By way of introducing myself, I asked them to describe the man before them. Imagine a fishing expedition in a tiny bowl with only one catch, but everyone’s too afraid to drop their lines. Tentativeness reigns because they can all see that the catch has the potential to snap their rods and drag them under.
They saw confidence and intelligence. Someone who was comfortable in their skin. An artist, possibly a musician. A teacher practicing black magic, thanks to the chalk dust maelstrom I had conjured while capturing their comments on the blackboard.
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind.
What they saw were the eclectic rings on my dusty fingers, a black leather blazer, a pair of seven-year-old Doc Marten boots that would never be black again and a head full of shoulder-length dreads.
Was it true, had we finally reached a time when a man could be judged by the content of his character? They had seemingly said so themselves. They had proof of an active mind but were fuzzy on the specifics of the body that enclosed it. Why did they refuse to see me? Had they not read Ralph Ellison?
I had to ask them what they saw to force them to finally drop their lines into those frightfully still waters. Why was it so difficult to get one of them to say they saw a Black man? They had to see it, him, I mean me, standing there.
It was obvious they were afraid of offending me. Drawing attention to what?
I have had well-meaning people say similar things when they saw me with my kids early on. Hippy-dippy types who, upon hearing that I was their stepfather, would say, we all looked alike. Really, I would think. There’s no way I, as the Black man I am, could look like two kids who, in no way, appear even remotely biracial. There’s something insidiously offensive in such good intentions.
When I look in the mirror, is what I see separate and equal, – the Black and the man?
I see my own reflection / There’s no escape / Do you think it’s wrong? / Do you think it’s wrong to love your own reflection? (David Baerwald, A Secret Silken World)
There’s no better way to close this out, than with a few choice words from my esteemed CityBeat colleague Kathy L. Wilson who saw more of me (and my Black manhood) in fleeting glimpses than I will probably ever recognize. Rest in power, Kathy.
Who Does He Hope To Be?
(I often desire my mouth on thee, tt):
Whispering
n2
dreadlocked curtains
yr
black
yarn
reminds me
of hair like
Raggedy
Andy
(what’s yr soul taste like, tt?)
Yr soft-speak
intellectualizes
filmstrips
in clips
digitalized
you’ve
realized:
to represent
(by street decree)
it’s high time
you brought yr own
Negroes
to the Playa’s Ball.
So
with Ringo’d
fingers,
you script/you scribe
sick inside
from subterranean homesick
Blues
traditions
and I wait for electronic
eyegasms
fingering conversations
– cum 4th –
like
Hunt’sTM
we spread
catch up all over ourselves
and it’s a Catch-22/this me & you:
we’re intellectual fuck buddies,
she whispered, parting dreadlocked curtains.
Funny,
I have My Baby Daddy
film festivals
starring you
as
My Genetically Supreme Being of Leisure,
my antithetical
ghetto/thug/king/big pimpin’/sippin’ on gin & juice/H-U-S-T-L-E-R
yr
anti-
ALL THAT.
The only stereotype/typewritten for you?
Artist.
Kathy Y. Wilson for Y2K2 Productions. Copyright 042502. I reserve the right to kick the ass of anyone reprinting, reusing or stealing from this document without my express permission. Deciphered while deciphering Lewis Taylor’s Lewis II.
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.
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