The Old Man x Me
I had been sitting on a draft of this for months. I didn’t know where to begin, really. I decided to get on with it, the story about the old man and me, without pretense, because I’m a brave person. I’ve been hoping for reconciliation with someone who is essentially gone. I had to do it without him somehow. There were things I didn’t share with peers or adults when I was a kid. I didn’t know how to tell anyone, at 12 years old, that Ma had a nervous breakdown and Pop was schizophrenic. I hid out at school, stunned, kept to myself, and my transistor radio listening to Off the Wall.
There’s a meaningful line in The Hate You Give, a coming of age film about a young black girl going through it and coming into herself.
“ If you need to talk.” Her father says to her. “ Then you talk.”
A few years ago Pops moved into an apartment in North San Rafael. It was my first time seeing his new place, a complex at the end of Smith Ranch Road. When I arrived he was laying in bed in the dark; his place stuffy and a bit cluttered because he has limited mobility. I opened a back door to a patio area to let air in, drew the window blinds for light. He slowly got up on his walker, shuffled to the front room, and sat down in his recliner next to me, wheezing in his labored breath. He has several health issues: congestive heart failure, edema, and hypertension among them. He said he let another IHSS aide go recently because they called him a terrorist.
“Pop, that doesn’t make any sense.” I said.
“What do you mean?” He asked. “I’m not a terrorist?”
“No, Pop, no you’re not.”
That’s been his thing for years, moving from one place to the next with his unsettled spirit. He goes through a process of befriending, then hustling his neighbors and when they withdraw, he becomes paranoid and isolated. Then he gets obsessed with moving to a new place as if that will fix his life. The cycle begins again.
He told me he was waiting for the Veteran’s Administration to assign a live-in aide to him. Live-in? He’s not capable of living with other people because one has to be considerate to do that. Telling me that was a kind of ploy and maybe, I might even step up and take him in myself. After my experience trying to support him during the pandemic, I’m not going to do that. He wore me down, defying everyone to shelter in place, seeking allies in trash people. At that time, alienated from his neighbors, he was obsessed with moving to another place in a new development up on Cresta Road.
I tried everything I could to intercept, to get him to just stay put. He fought me; his paranoia and delusions a fixed state. It was like a game of cat and mouse. He would go on about the amenities at Cresta Road - the gym and a pool, a BBQ area. The kind of spaces he couldn’t navigate anymore. Maybe he’ll meet a nice lady, he said, and invite her over for dinner.
“Pop….I think that ship has sailed.”
“You think so?”
That’s all in his head, possibility, not reality, which he doesn’t exist in. He exists somewhere else. He doesn’t see himself or the state of his life as it truly is. If one does, they have the capacity for change. Another fantasy of his is going back home to Michigan for a family reunion / picnic on the 4th of July. Such romanticism he has about bygone days and traditions; things he wants another chance to experience. The last time we were in Michigan together was in 1998 for Grandma’s funeral. A ritual of fancy black sedans and roses in procession to the cemetery, a choir, and repass with family seated at the front of the dining hall. A lifecycle celebration sending Grandma, in her favorite blue dress, on home to glory. How beautiful black folks are in blue, smiling under a blue hat, strolling on by in blue suede shoes.
During the pandemic Pops was motivated to run around in circles with his walker, sitting alone at a shuttle stop, in search of someone on the same reality he was. One time, we got in a squabble outside his building over his antics. He fought me on everything from managing his bills and rent, to the Power of Attorney he had revoked out of spite. I still get email notifications for credit card applications that will go nowhere, but he keeps trying.
“Keep fuckin with me, Pops!” I shouted after he went AWOL during shelter in place . “I’ll put your ass in conservatorship!” I was serious. I later cross-checked only to learn that, in California, you have to petition the court and prove a person with assets or real property is incompetent in order to get them into conservatorship. The broke are generally at the whims of the state, unless family intervene.
“You can’t tell me what to do! You’re a fascist!” He yelled. “Bye!!” with that intonation the old timers say bye, like it’s 1960 before the Freedom Train left the station.
“Mr. H., your daughter is trying to help you.” I heard a neighbor lady say as I punched the pedal and drove off, fed up with his wack ass. I do a great impersonation of the of the old man: “And another thing…”, “ I said NO! “, “All that good stuff….” and “ 82nd Airborne, Paratrooper Division, Special Forces.”
He liked to brag about the former, from his years as an Army reservist. He came to California to train at Fort Bragg and the Presidio as a Green Beret paratrooper, another word for a mercenary or an assassin. How would that have possibly worked out in social situations? Hey! I’d like you to meet my dad, the mercenary. To me, that’s a hardcore dude like Bill Duke in Predator or Commando. Pops had scuba gear and studied karate earning a brown belt, that I can remember. On top of his gung-ho life, he was a student at USF, the Jesuit University, which probably saved him from being conscripted to Vietnam. It’s also possible that he failed the psych test.
Pops couldn’t sustain an IHSS aide for more than six months and he’s been through many, two I hired myself. Ms. Anita and Samuel lasted the longest precisely because they were black. I had to be strategic with IHSS, scanning the roster for black names. The nightingale kumbaya care provider can be too gentle and soft, as they were trained, which can be a cultural impediment. I needed someone who could put their foot down from the embodied soul.
“I’m the wife he never had, darlin’.” Ms. Anita said. “He gives me any shit, I’m givin’ it right back. You know I don’t play.” She didn’t either. Pops got into it with her one time and she blew up my phone.
Text: “Lisa, you better come take your daddy to Kaiser or I’m gonna kick his black ass!”
Damn! I left work, drove out to Marin, scooped him up, and out of her way. Anything Ms. Anita needed, I obliged because I was grateful for her. She prepped meals, cleaned, did his laundry, and kept him company allowing me to work and manage my own life.
“Why are you so disrespectful?” I asked Pops on the way to Kaiser. “You better apologize to Ms. Anita!”
“NO! I’m not doin it!”
There’s also a generational component with the old man. He’s old school. He liked 1960s action stars like Lee Marvin and Steve McQueen. If an IHSS aide didn’t know who Woody Strode, B.B. King, or Richard Roundtree were - men Pops identified with - they would be unlikely to connect with him. He’ll talk a person’s ear off about Spartacus and Shaft.
“Remember that one scene with Woody in Spartacus? He was a bad ass dude back in those days. Yeah….a black man in Hollywood. It was real racist then, too. You know Woody played football? But when Shaft came out - that was something else! I had the soundtrack to that, too. You remember that, Tiks?”
( Sigh ). “Yeah….Issac Hayes.”
“That’s right. Issac Hayes.”
Doctors, psychiatrists, and social workers have all empathized with me because Pops can be a hard case, incapable of compromise or reason. One time I stopped by, we fought through his front door. My sense was that he had an accident and was too proud and embarrassed to answer. This is not unusual with the prideful old timer. They get to a point where they stop opening the door.
"No! “ He barked. “Come back another time!"
"Pop, I drove all the way out here." I said, looking down, kicking rocks at my life. “Alright...did you have an accident? Let me help you out then."
"I said NO, Lisa! Go away!”
The old man will do that, put up a front while he stews like greens in his own shit. I had to accept that there will be no peace and reconciliation between us, not in this life anyway. Since that day, I had to come from a place of estranged compassion. I felt like Sisyphus with him, doomed to eternal struggle, pushing up against his fractured mind. I had to accept that and step back for my own well being.
I’ve always been haunted by the person I look like. When I was a kid, he was a brute prone to chaotic behavior and violence as his mental health declined. He started wearing military gear, as though he was preparing to go back in time. Maybe he felt capable then. Whenever he drank, he was worse. An early childhood memory I have is Ma driving through the city in the rain, in the middle of the night, after he crashed his car. Back then, Pops had a cream-colored, black interior Karmann Ghia convertible. He always wanted to be a cosmopolitan action man, like James Bond, but black.
After the Karmann Ghia, my folks bought a 1968 prismatic blue, black hardtop Mustang from a couple who bore a striking resemblance, in style, to Elvis and Priscilla. We had that Mustang for years until Ma grew weary of it getting hot wired and stolen out of the carport several times. No more cool cars after that. The next was a basic beige Buick sedan, the car I used for my driving test.
There were still moments of connection and joy in my childhood: holidays and surprise birthdays, picnics, puppies, and camping trips. Dancing around the living room barefoot to Soul Train and Creedence Clearwater Revival. That time was interrupted when Pops’ mind left him. After that our relationship became something else.
His unraveling began around 1976, the Bicentennial Year. That was a period of red-white-and-blue together - clothes, motifs, interiors, hats, cars, and mugs. Mayflower go-go dancers and Star Spangled apple pie. Those around me, particularly my Black Panther uncle, were thumbs down. To him the Bicentennial was a celebration of the Man, the System, and the Pigs. The same year, Patty Hearst, an American heiress turned revolutionary, was on trial in the city for taking up arms with the SLA and betraying her class. Citizen Kane, one of greatest films ever made, was based on her grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, who owned the San Francisco Examiner.
Unfortunately the revolution didn’t really work out for Miss Patty.
By then, Ma had endured Pops abuse for several years and had enough with him. Sister and I, at times, witnessed that abuse. What does that do to a kid? Well, it messes your head up, developmentally and emotionally. It is very hard to come through that as a child and not let it affect other relationships. I didn’t trust black boys or men for a long time until I learned to separate them, as people, from Pops. Love and friendship helped me to believe in them again. Ricardo was one.
“My people are your people.” He said. I was struck how sweet that was, the way he acknowledged that, laying in bed. I ended up driving Ricardo to the airport to catch a plane back to Pittsburgh, PA and the sister he loved, who wasn’t me.
“Why are you being so cavalier?” He asked. “Why don’t you fight for me?”
“Ricky, I’m not fighting for someone who doesn’t love me. C’mon, man.”
We’ve been friends for years since, throwing caps of endearment on Facebook, particularly during football season. Ricardo played in high school, his swinging dick period that lasted into his 30s. As an older man, he’s Hotep-lite, although he’s still down for the occasional slice of pizza or chicken wings. A sound artist and musician, he frets about going bald, despite his Brian McKnight-Silver Fox transformation into middle age without really aging. Ricardo is good people and a dear friend.
Pops had one girlfriend who reminded me of Lola Folana ( adults to me then, I referenced through those I saw on TV variety shows and in movies ). Lola lived in the Alemany Projects, off the 280, and had a son about my age. We would play with his Lincoln Logs set while our folks hooked up. Being a child who lacked deception, a “good girl”, when we got home, I ratted Pops and his pretty lady friend out. I didn’t understand why Ma was so mad.
When things fell apart, Pops wouldn’t leave the house in Bernal Heights, so we did. He said he was the king of something or other and refused. We left him on the front porch, carrying on and talking shit as men tend to do when they’ve been rejected. Years later into young adulthood, I saw a version of him through Alonzo in Training Day, when desperation, deceit, and consequence collide; the complete fall of a man. I was moved by how Denzel channeled Alonzo’s humanity.
We left Pops alone in that two bedroom house with no one else to blame but himself. Ma was afraid to fight him over it and eventually it was lost to foreclosure. We moved to a one bedroom in the Mission where we lived for about a year. We were driven out by a strung out hippie who nearly burned the building down in a wiccan ritual gone wrong. The following year, in 1977, we moved across the Bay to Berkeley. Leaving friends in the Mission and Bayview behind, I was out of sorts. There was no Doggie Diner, no Golden Gate Park, no Chuck E. Cheese roller disco night, and no Woolworth’s pizza. What is Edy’s? What the fuck is Iceland?
Ma probably made the right decision moving to Berkeley at the time, a gentler place to raise kids. I had rowdy Mission-Bernal Heights friends in the city; several of whom got into Cholo and Filipino gangs by middle school. They sure were cute in their hoodies, derby jackets and Ben Davis chinos, dragging a tortoiseshell comb through one’s thick hair, sliding it fluidly into his back pocket. A 1970s brown Disney prince in the city. There was a paucity of babes like that in Berkeley. Then I discovered the rosebud, slang I made up for anyone who liked like Leif Garrett.
In 1978 the world as I knew it as a kid, blew up. Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk were assassinated by Dan White, a city supervisor. I remember Diane Feinstein making the announcement to a chaotic huddle of reporters. There was a 24 news cycle around White’s arrest and subsequent trial. The same month, Jim Jones had lured his congregants from The People’s Temple in the Bayview to a compound in Guayana, where he forced them to commit suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. I remember an illustrated magazine cover of the Kool-Aid Man, bodies dangling over and around the pitcher, a jungle landscape in the background.
In 1979, when I was 12 years old, between Pops pestering late night calls, the lack of support then for abused women, and the struggle of raising two mixed kids on her own, Ma had a nervous breakdown. She was taken to Napa State Mental Hospital for observation where she stayed for several weeks. Sister and I could have been placed in foster care, but Ma was committed and somehow got through it. It’s because of her that I’m a bonafide lady. Life can be hard on the good who love black girls unconditionally.
She could have packed it in and gone back to New York, where she had family support. She was reluctant to tell me why she didn’t. I knew part of it was fear of judgement. The women of Ma’s generation carried the burden of separation, of being a single parent, let alone one with two little girls in tow. The absence of a man seen as a kind of failure of womanhood, particularly to her predominantly Italian and WASP hometown. A Norman Rockwell pastoral place with a diner and white picket fences, where Mary Tyler Moore owned a farm.
“I was raised that if you made your bed, you lie in it.” Ma said. That sounded like an old-timey Northeastern metaphor. I made my bed and I lied in it! Top of the world, Ma! …as the brokenhearted go down in flames with their bed.
The things I struggle with now are rooted to that time and the years that followed. I have an awful response to stress, struggling to reconcile myself to it. I go right to anger or rants outlining every detail of the perceived betrayal, mistreatment, or conflict. Humans have such an emotional response as a self-defense mechanism. Apparently I carry a form of childhood PTSD. That’s great, flawed me.
I’ve been trying to work this out through therapy, to find a pathway to better emotional regulation without drugs, alcohol, or anti-depressants. Holistic and straight edge is the way! I’ve been on that since my 30s. My mind unfortunately is hurt-wired from childhood. Years later, Ma’s own woes manifested into a kind of behaviour disorder. She tried to ignore herself through playing casino slots, which got progressively worse and self-destructive. Eventually she had to tap out, $ 60,0000.00 in debt, and start over.
There were layers to Ma, beyond her years with Pops, burdens and wounds from her own experience. As a child during World War II, her family would ration staples, bundles of flour and sugar, wrapped in butcher paper and tied with twine, to send to relatives in Italy as the country collapsed under Mussolini. Nonno, my grandfather, was old world and sexist. He didn’t agree with a woman being educated or working, that her function was in the home as a wife and mother. He refused to pay for Ma’s college education, so she opted for secretarial school, on her own, in Manhattan. I still have a stack of letters Nonno wrote to her, all in Italian, between the 1960s - 70s before he passed away. I have yet to go through them, apprehensive as to what clues and memory might fill in the blanks.
There’s always been a conundrum about racial identity in this country because of slavery. Ethnically I’m both black and Italian, but I don’t use the term bi-racial. I’m mixed and mixed is black, which is a generational thing. Lisa Jones, writing about identity and the census, got me when she said she checked the box that counted her with black people. I’ve done that ever since because Lisa had a righteous point - on applications, medical forms, and drop-downs: African-American. Black, not of Hispanic descent.
The weight of our experience with the old man exacerbated disagreements with Ma until the year before she passed away. All I wanted was for her to stop hurting herself, which is all addiction does. She kept tossing coins into a gaping hole, like hit after hit, shot after shot. I stopped talking about relationships, love and break-ups, because she would compare my experience to hers, as if she wanted company in her disappointment. She lost the capacity to be supportive; became bitter and cynical because she didn’t believe in love anymore. Pops was the love of her life until he turned bad. It can mess a person up when someone they love becomes a brute. They check out, embracing their wounds through distraction.
I never had a father in the conventional sense. I just happened to come through a facsimile of one. Pops was estranged from my late childhood through adolescence. Visits were usually disconnected and awkward because he didn’t go through life with me after 1976. He couldn’t grasp me as a person he raised because he didn’t. It’s still a trip when he does notice a change, like a new tattoo on my upper arm. I became someone he never anticipated or could have imagined - maybe a better version of himself.
I’ve tried every which way to forgive him, but I can’t seem to find the way. I resent him more for how he treated Ma than my sister and I. She was a good person and a good mother. Both are the saddest things I carry, have always carried. I don’t have much to share about Pops other than what I know of his story. I got my smile, freckles, and black existence, from him. We never did another father-daughter thing after 1976. He wasn’t at my high school or college graduations and only met two exes, both good dudes, that I can think of.
In my 20s, I once threw a mug, the closest thing I could get my hands on, across the room in a rage after he went behind my back and asked one of my friends out.
“I’m your daughter not your fuckin pimp! Get out of my life!” I had no contact with him for several years after that. Thereafter being distrustful of him, he never met any of my homegirls again.
I had to make something out of my story, so I chose to. I was here after all and we all have to do something with that. I was determined to be a person, not smudged out. I got my education, worked and traveled, living beyond the tragic partnership I came from. I learned other languages, had relationships and a life abroad, and expanded my awareness of the world. I became an oppositional force to the little hurt girl I once was. That little hurt girl became a young woman living in Antigua, with long dreads, wearing a bias-cut, yellow-green dress, burnt red lipstick, adored by a tall, handsome man who followed me to Mexico. I know that’s right, Ms. Sassy Girl.
As an adult, I became Pops’ primary advocate and rescuer. Family back east didn’t want to be burdened by him, so I was on my own. They would do that church people thing, where a question sounds like an investigation:
“ So, how is Brother doing? I see. Is his rent paid? He got food in the house? That’s good. Well, I’m praying for you both, niece!” Brother is Pops’ family nickname.
My relatives are all Baptist and Pentecostal people, except my Uncle Victor, the former Panther and a socialist. Most worked for Ford Motor Company or the University of Michigan. The church is a such part of the culture and community around Ypsilanti, it’s routine for family to gather at a buffet restaurant after service. Someone will critique a particular dish offered ( How’d ya’ll make that? What you’d put in it? Hmmm.. ) yet simultaneously decline to cook and clean up after a gang of people in their own house. I can appreciate that.
It’s a tradition that the first born, particularly the daughters of men, have a responsibility to the aging parent. Isn’t that based on the parent being a parent? I had a choice, but then I didn’t simply because no one else showed up. I understood. Pops could be a bad trip vortex; talking without saying a thing. His lack of good judgement made him a target for the nefarious and shady. The more complex and potentially destructive mess he got into involved The Junkies.
On Xmas Day, 2013, I stopped by to visit. I thought that was the kind thing to do, to stop by once a year during the holidays and, somewhat superficially, chop it up for awhile. The Junkies were a trio of white, middle aged, strung out trash. I arrived to find a lady sleeping on the couch, two cats, and two grown ass men hanging out in Pops’ small, one bedroom apartment.
“ Hi, Tiks. This is my friend John.” Pop said, introducing me to a scrawny, pasty man. “John this is my daughter, Lisa. Tiks was her nickname when she was little.”
“Nice to meet you, Lisa.” John nervously shook my hand. “This is my wife Melissa and my friend Will. Your dad is a really nice guy.”
It didn’t take me long to figure out something was wrong. Pasty John, did most of the talking in a jitter cadence, feigning an attempt to seem casual, normal. Hmmm. Too earnest and anxious. He’s hiding something. I also thought it was odd that Melissa didn’t say much. Women who don’t speak up, as if yielding to someone or something, are a red flag to me. I was cool and polite when I left. When I got in my car, I called my sister.
“Nina, I think Pop is in trouble.” I said.
“ What’s going on?” She asked.
When I got home, I called Dan, the manager of Pop’s building, whose number I kept on hand in case of an emergency. Dan had no idea the junkies were squatting in Pops place, but he did hear about a trio of homeless addicts who were targeting the elderly between Novato and Fairfax, either for a place to stay, or scamming them out of money.
Motherfuckers!
Other than the intel Dan provided, he was a coward and refused to check on Pops and risk a confrontation with them. I called Novato PD and the officer I spoke to knew about the junkie cons too, from other elder abuse complaints. Officer O’Connor said it had been a challenge trying to track them down, as they were constantly on the move around the county, and had no proof to arrest them. O’Connor suggested I meet him and his partner at Pops’ apartment early the next morning to get the squatters out. That was how I spent Boxing Day, the day after Xmas.
First thing, we huddled in the apartment complex parking lot. O’Connor advised that they couldn’t just bust in like the cavalry. The squatters had their civil rights and could only be ejected by the legal tenant of a unit or the property owner.
“What? Are you serious?!” I asked, incredulously. “They’re junkies squatting in his place.”
“ I know,” Office O’Connor said. “But that’s the law unfortunately.”
The cops and I went to his door and I coaxed Pops out. Given his state of mind, reason doesn’t really work with him. He might say some shit like, “They’re my friends!” like they’re in a friendship circle on Sesame Street. I had to finesse him for his own safety.
“Pop, if you don’t get these people out right now, you’re going to get evicted. They’re in violation of your lease.”
‘Okay.” He said, flatly.
He turned and went back inside, “Sorry folks. My daughter said you all have to leave or I’ll get kicked out.”
At the sight of the cops, the junkies scrambled. The cops checked their IDs as they made their way for the door. Unable to prove bad intent, the cops couldn’t arrest them outright. Will, the big one, moved real fast out the door, a clue to me that the asshole probably had a warrant somewhere. I thought maybe he functioned, more as less, as muscle for Pasty John. As he and Melissa collected their cats and pet crate, Pasty John turned to me and started yapping.
“ Lisa, you’re a good daughter looking out for your dad like that.” He said. “You did the right thing, in the context of the situation, if it was me, I would…..”
I exhaled, my arms folded tightly over my chest. “John…I’m going to tell you one time.” I said. “Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out.”
After the cops and junkies left, I went off on Pops with a heavy dose of righteous indignation:
“WHAT THE FUCK WITH YOU?!! Trash people all day! That’s fuckin it! No more overnight guests! Lockdown! My whole fuckin’ life with your shit! They were going to jack you for your SSDI money! You’re a goddam fool! I should put you in a home!”
“I said NO! I’m not doin’ it!”
Communication between us is never mindful or restorative. There is nothing to restore. Whenever Pops gets into some shit, I try to remediate the bad, and get him back to baseline. That’s the best I can do. The old man sat there and took his talking to. He had to because I saved his ass - again. Maybe that’s a kind of love or something vaguely like it. I don’t know.
After the universally tragic we simmered down, Pops’ neighbor Shana came downstairs. I asked for her help cleaning his place to remove the smell and energy of trash people. I paid her for her time, too. Shana and Pops had a low-key IHSS arrangement. She was close by and didn’t have to commute anywhere, so she helped him out from time to time. The junkies had been around for weeks, waiting for Pops monthly SSDI to drop. Although Shana questioned what was going on, she never said a word or called anyone. She was on survival thinking that comes from fear, which keeps people trapped in passivity and inaction.
“Shana, if you ever see anything going on with Mr. H. that seems off to you, or people like that coming around, you don’t need to be afraid of anyone. You can call me.”
“Yes ma’am. I am so sorry, Lisa.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.” I said. “ It’s all Mr. H’s shit, it always has been. You’re a nice lady. Thank you for helping him out.”
Exhausting, that’s how I would describe Pops as a person.
In my memory, I try to keep him as the handsome, functional young man he once was, like Sidney or Marvin. I have a photo of him at a dinner party, wearing a sharp cobalt blue suit and patent leather dress shoes, smiling and holding a single rose. Another photo, taken by Ma, sitting on the front stoop of our building in the Fillmore, with his big smile, squinting toward her and the sun. He was a person then with extraordinary potential, well-educated, but he lost his potential and did very little with his education. He fell to the streets and was transient for a long time. He re-appeared when I was around 15 and I didn’t have a connection to him anymore; he had become a kind of unknown.
Later in life, the only energy he put into anything was pestering the social services that sustained him. The mentally ill sometimes run on a distorted self-perception that they know better than anyone, insistent that they’re on the side of right, disruptive in their demands. Pops could get abrasive and inappropriate when frustrated, even when helpless in the emergency room.
“Don’t talk to me like that.” He grumbled to an attending. “I’m not a child. I’m a man. I have two college degrees. I had a beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters.”
I sat there quietly, the attending having no idea what the straight story was. If I did, he would just escalate. Nope. Be cool and let him get treated.
As he declines now, he gets timelines and periods in history, mostly those that affected black people, mixed up. He’s scarred by some of his own experiences at the hand of time. We are a hurt people historically and generationally, no doubt about that.
Through all of the challenges with him, I appreciate having come through him and to be black. That is a gift I have never lamented, such a burden as it is, wrought with existential dread, at being born in America. It came with a whole lot of stuff, socially, historically, and politically; a tricky trap Twilight Zone to navigate. I grew up with The Pointer Sisters in Car Wash and Chaka Khan in Rufus. Lynne Whitfield and Alfre Woodard in For Colored Girls…. I read Lorraine, Nikki, and Malcom before I found punk and ska. Then I became Super Black Girl Magic Punk. I was on the lookout for other girls like me, but I wasn’t afraid of being on my own either. I never have been.
I know where Pops is coming from, but I’m unable to reach him and guide him toward a sense of peace. It’s as if he doesn’t want it, has no idea how to access it. Forgiveness is one thing, forgiving himself, that’s another story. That’s on him.
His life has included messy crack headed and alcoholic ex-girlfriends ( the obliterated soul tends to attract other obliterated souls ). The most highly functioning people around him have been physicians, caseworkers, and care providers. His apartments have all been sparse with donated furniture, utensils, and appliances. Framed photos and ephemera, like a kind of altar, to the life he once had.
Ideally, somewhat romantically, I want to remember him with compassion. That he was still a person, who fell from life and grace. I don’t know where his schizophrenia came from ( does it in fact come from anything? ). There may be a clue in family lore, that his biological father wasn’t Finley, a man I never knew, but only heard about. Ma told me Finley didn’t belong to him. Whaaaat? So that meant, likely, that his biological father was another man in Alabama. A black mystery. The story goes even deeper when a cousin told me that’s Pops is part Choctaw, the descendant of a woman who was my great-great- ( great? ) grandmother. That would explain his high cheekbones and that he could never grow a full beard.
“ You can find her in family records in Lowndes County.” My cousin said, a family genealogy hobbyist. “Her name was Eileen, I think. Ellen maybe? Something with an E.”
Lowndes County is where Pops was born. I do know that Doc, his maternal grandfather, was a sharecropper and moonshiner. Another missing link, Sister found through a DNA test, that we’re genetically linked to the Ewe people of Benin-Togo and about 54% Italian. It’s possible we could be descendants of the Clotilda, a schooner illegally carrying enslaved people that was scuttled and burned in Mobile Bay, around 1860, to cover the crime.
Before the Civil War began, the transport of Africans across the Atlantic had been banned by Congress through the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, passed on March 2nd, 1807. By then, slaves were considered not only property, but a domestic commodity to breed like livestock. There were 110 human beings on the Clotilda - men, women, and children.
All these clues, compel me to visit Lowndes County and dig through county archives. I may find some answers there or I may not, but I’m curious. Pops’ birthplace is about 40 minutes from Selma and not far from the Equal Justice Initiative monument, a brutalist installation, dedicated to all the souls taken by lynching.
Like peas in a pod, the old man and me. The country we were born into, has been brutal and wicked; often without conscience and void of morality. Somehow he still believes in America, which I challenge given the outcome of his life, in part due to the obstacles that he was confronted by, things that broke him down. He can’t grasp the brevity of what’s going on now, so I try to explain it to him:
“Wow.” He paused. “It’s like the KKK all over again.”
Yeah, something like that - the Annihilator dressed up in a navy blazer, white shirt, and red tie. What an affront it is to bring that shit back. I am so tired. I don’t put my hair up anymore, a natural blowout protest. Fifty foot Queenie! I imagine an ancestor from the Clotilda, dressed in white, seated behind me at the edge of Mobile Bay at sunset, combing my hair with care, because she understands that which I was given.
I plan to take the old man’s remains back to Michigan and the family plot. From there, I’ll scatter some of him back into the red earth of Lowndes County. It would be a kind and compassionate gesture, I think. How sad it is to have only lived briefly, then not much at all after that. We do what we can with what we got and eventually we reach the end of the line.
“You have to make your peace with God now, Pops.” I tell him that often. “You don’t have much time.”
“Hmmm.” He said. “Yeah, well…I’m workin’ on it. Love you, Tiks.”
That’s all I can really hope for, is that he receives the message.