5 Things I’ve Been Thinking About/Doing

Sorry it’s been so long since I last posted something. I’m so grateful for those of you who still read this blog. I can see that there’s a steady stream of visitors everyday.

Here are some things I’ve learned/done/or am working on since the last time I’ve posted (which was back in January, yikes!)

1. I’m trying so hard to learn to be patient with my writing. I believe in our click-of-a-mouse paced world, we all want to hurry up and finish something and sent it off. I’ m learning to be okay with this NOT being the case for my writing.

2. My editorial internship with The Root will conclude at the close of April. I can’t believe 5 months have gone by so fast. I’ve learned a number of things that I know will enrich my flirtatious relationship with journalism.

3. I’ve been thinking a lot about Father’s Day. My daughter turns 7 this year. Though the journey is hardly over, I can’t believe it’s been almost 7 years.

4. I’ve learned to be grateful for everything I have. It’s so easy to complain but it’s really amazing to wake up with a sense of purpose and to do exactly what I wanted to do since I was a little boy.

5. I’ve been tweeting. You can follow me @abdulali_. There are lovely film strips from 1988 of me, compliments of my Uncle Martin.

Installation #9

Good Things Come In Twos

This year, all I want for Father’s Day is a nice twelve hour nap. No cards. No fancy dinners. And definitely no telephone calls. When I wake up, I’ll go through my file cabinet and take out some folders. Skip through some photos of my daughter and let silence fill the air as I reflect where did all the time go?

Two days before Father’s Day, my daughter will cross the stage trading in her kindergarten status for a numbered one. The other day, she bit my finger to demonstrate that her two front teeth are coming loose.

On a cosmic level, it’s only right that her graduation and father’s day should fall on the same weekend. After all, we’re in this together: treading unfamiliar waters. For her, she’s moving toward first grade and reading harder books. I, on the other hand, am balancing how to help her read those harder books and work on my first book (not to mention work and graduate school). 

Like clock work, she asks me to rub her back before going to sleep. Dead tired, I tell her to wait up for me— as I hurriedly go to finish the dishes, sweep the floor, look over her homework (making sure her letters are curlicued), wash out a uniform for the next morning, try to forget about writing. And before you know it the sun fades and there she is fast asleep.

Increasingly, I suffer from insomnia. I attribute it to being a writer with an active mind. On those nights, I wake up at odd hours to make sure the door is locked or to check if the apartment is at the right temperature. I watch her chest move like an ocean under a knitted blue quilt. She likes to hug up against the wall as if she’s a pillar keeping the walls steady and balanced. I pull a piece of cover over her arms. She wiggles her nose. My chest aches, I sometimes want to wake her up just to ask if she’s okay? Whether she’s having a good dream? Did she go before getting in bed?

I decide against waking her up. I turn off the lights and trip over one of her toys. Before I can swear at my highest octave, I stare at one of her drawings on the refrigerator. I marvel at how perfectly she drew me: bespectacled, a book in hand, just the two of us holding hands moving . . . somewhere, together, the way it ought to be.

 

Abdul Ali is the editor of Words Matter.

Installation # 8

Looking at all of the mixed kids today, one would never guess that back in the day, we kids were an oddity.  I was born in Cambridge, Maryland in 1969 to a married black woman and a married white man.  Needless to say, they kept their relationship under wraps.  Neither of them were happy in their marriages but were too afraid to leave.  When I was born, my mother ended the relationship with my biological father.  As far as she was concerned, she and her black husband were the proud parents of a 7 lbs., 9 oz. baby girl, that happened to look not so black and my biological father could stay unhappily married to his white wife.  Mom was afraid to let the world, or at least the Eastern Shore of Maryland know that she and a white man produced a bi-racial child.  People just didn’t do that in Cambridge.  No mixing of races.  Yet, whenever we were out as a family, it was quite obvious that some race-mixing took place.

As a kid, God forbid that I questioned my color whenever I was around my parents and other family members who didn’t look like me.  Relatives would tell me, “You look just like your father’s grandmother”.   “You have hair like your grandfather on your mother’s side.  He was from New Guinea, you know”.  I always looked like someone in the family…who just happened to be dead…and there were no pictures (evidence) to prove otherwise.  See where I’m going with this?  It’s not like I hadn’t figured it out, but I respected that it wasn’t a topic to bring up, so I kept it to myself.  When my mom finally told me about her relationship with my biological father, I was not shocked, to say the least.

All throughout K-12, me and another girl were the only two bi-racial kids in our school.  I identified as black, she as white.  Every so often, we were questioned about my blackness and her whiteness.

Now, whenever I visit my hometown, it’s like it caught up with the rest of the world…multi-culti people everywhere.   My how time and a little bit of progression change things. 

Fast forward 30-35 years.  I’ve gotten over the stigma of growing up a mixed kid.  I know who I am.  I know that recognizing all of me doesn’t take away from any part of me.  I live by that train of thought and I’ve become quite comfortable with myself over these 40 years.  I’m also divorced and the mother of a beautiful 6 year-old girl. 

“Mommy, why are you white and I’m brown”?  I would get this question all the time, starting when my daughter was around 3 years-old.  “I’m not white”, I would counter.  “Well, you aren’t brown”.  Damn quick child of mine.  “Mommy, why don’t I look like you”?  I knew that I would have to have the “race talk” with her.  Oh, how I wanted to avoid it for as long as possible, but I knew that was an unrealistic expectation in the world we live in.  I always wanted my child to value people for their actions and deeds; not make judgments based on the color of their skin.  I wanted my child to love herself because she is worthy and not get caught up in the color game.  We get so consumed with light-skinned, dark-skinned, good hair (whatever that is), long hair, and all this other stuff that is a part of our history but completely takes away from who we are as human beings.  How do you say all of this to a child who is aware of her surroundings but also naïve?

So the explanation begins.  “Black is black, is black, is black” (big shout to Jungle Brothers and Q-Tip).  While talking to my child about color differences and its beauty, I am aware that I am molding my child to be a black woman in America.  She is going to be reminded of her race and gender all the time.  At times, those reminders are going to be fueled by hatred and bigotry.  Can I help her become strong enough to deal with that?  Yes, I can.  “Look in the mirror”, I said to her.  “Touch your brown face, feel your thick hair, look at the sparkle in your dark brown eyes.  You are perfect.  And so am I.  Daddy, Grandma, Mom Mom and Pop Pop are perfect too”.   “What about my black grand pop and white grand pop in heaven”?  “Yes, baby, they are also perfect”.

Our conversations about race and color have become very common over the last three years.  She knows that I am half-black and half-white for what it’s worth and it’s no big deal.  Why should it be?  We love to stand in front of the mirror and look at ourselves together.  She knows that the blood of her parents, grandparents and ancestors run through her.  She likes her friends because they are nice and tell funny jokes.

Recently, my daughter brought home her kindergarten journal  called “All About Me” that she created during the school year.  In it, she wrote sentences and drew pictures about her family, friends, and herself. 

“When I grow up, I want to be a teacher”. 

“My favorite colors are pink and purple”. 

“I like to play until dinner is ready”. 

“My DS is light pink and sparkly”.

 “I am brown and I am happy about it”. 

Yes I can.

Joy Adams works in Higher Education and lives in Maryland with her daughter, Camille.

Fixing Daddy, #7

Fixing Daddy

He tips to the thermostat, adjusts

it to heat the house before

she awakens, decides what to make

for the first of four meals

he’ll prepare that day.

An alarm only he can hear

summons, and he’s by her bed,

rolling the insulin vial between

his hands like a lemon, warming

the clear fluid before she’s allowed

to inject it.  He hovers until the last

spot of drawn blood is wiped away. 

I watch him wire himself to her

piece by piece, give her a dose

of something at three-hour intervals

until the pain she can’t recount is his,

until her oxygen-starved breath

has him fighting for his own, until

he’s a self sacrificed—never mind

that he wrestled death for 5 long

months, pinned it just last year.  “Relax,”

I plead, “Beck and call is your order, Dad,

not the doctor’s.”  “I’m not an invalid,

James,” Mama assures.  He won’t

loosen the wires, only knows how

to tighten them, ensure his snap

to her every move—doesn’t see 

his heart wink, fool him that he can

fix her.  I believe no less when mine

signals the same, tells me I can fix

him, bring back the foot stomping

in his full-bodied laughter, the fun

Dad I once knew. 

“Let me do it,” he protests, his voice

calling up mine at six, learning to do

something hard, knowing I need help,

but turning it away until I break.

Carolyn Joyner is a DC-based poet and writer.

Father Forgive Me, installation #6

“Father forgive me, we got some issues.”- Jay Z

            It was a few days after my father’s 50^th birthday, and I still struggled with what it meant to call the man who’s name I carry dad.  I climbed into the dust and cracks of my black leather seat and headed to his apartment. The truth is I had no gifts.  Over the years, my own mistakes had taught me that a man can wrong every one close to him with what he can do with his hands, and spend the rest of his life trying to redeem himself only to fail.  And yet whatever forgiveness my dad needed I’d held it back. I’d become a master at using distance to push away hard truths like I wanted a father to teach me how to throw a left hand, how to rumble in the streets even when afraid, how to multiply fractions, choose the ripest watermelons.

            My father lives in the kind of place people call rough, a neighborhood where young black boys can be seen posted up on corners through all hours of the day trafficking death; where police officers suspect you first – suspect you of drug dealing, of being a felony waiting to happen, of just be wrong, in the wrong skin, on the wrong block, with the wrong intentions – before anything else.  Each time I bend the corner to drive up his street part of me is thankful I’ve never rested my head in a place so heavy with violence, with bootleg schools and so many folks who seem to suffer from the want of more.  And then I catch myself recycling stereotypes, catch myself forgetting the stories of the folks I know who live on these streets, catch myself forgetting my father.  This is why I drive to see the man who bought Similac for me as a child, who left the possibility of a college degree to be a father, the man who lost woman he says he still loves in the insanity of a DC street and those hard 80s: he reminds me of what it means to be a survivor, and what it means to grasp the kind of redemption that never appears in newspapers or television.

            In my head I’m thinking I should have brought a gift, but know it’s too late as I turn the corner empty handed. My first trip up the street I didn’t notice the bearded man standing on the stoop talking to the younger cat. I drove past him standing on a nearby stoop twice, his bear thick and a grayish white reminding me on Frederick Douglass but not reminding me of the man I know as dad.  As I drove past the second time he walked to the curb, and I could see his eyes, see that clear hard look of knowing something the world is just catching up too. He walked towards my car as I slowed, “Son, you didn’t recognize your old man did you?” And this is the thing, ever since the day I first walked into a county jail, ever since the day I first greeted a generation of black men behind bars, since the day I walked out of a prison for the last time as inmate, I’ve been searching for my father, and even on that day, just in the wake of his 50^th birthday, I was still trying to recognize him.

            “Pop I miss you, God help me forgive him I got some issues,” Jay Z rhymes on his track “Momma Loves Me.”  I should have told my father I missed him.  Told him that in this life measured by the breaks that we’ve both lived through it has taken me this long, nearly thirty years, to recognize that you don’t judge your father by his successes or failure, but by what people remember.  And I miss the gaps in my own memory, the spaces where a thrown football should be, where a whooping should be – where his hands calloused from work and danger tucking me in at night should be. I realized I’m chasing memories, something new to define my dad by. I thought about my little brother, and how at 50 years old my father was doing a better job by him, as a single father, than he’d ever done with my sisters or me.  I realized that today he was the kind of father I’m trying to be.  He once told me that if anything ever went wrong with my wife and me it was my fault. “Son, if something ain’t right, it’s your responsibility to fix it.”  He tells me personal responsibility is a standard to live by, and when my son is old enough to get it, I imagine me telling him this same mantra. When I walked up to the spot on the curb where he stood, I gave him a hug. Asked him to let me buy him a drink, figured brown liquor has always been good for burying hard memories and planting new ones.

R. Dwayne Betts is the author of the memoir, A Question of Freedom. And most recently, an award-winning collection of poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm.

Installation #4

My father has many sayings.  For example, when my siblings and I were growing up, he rarely allowed us to watch TV, but when he caught us watching something he would always say the same thing:

 “Why are you watching the TV?  Instead of watching the TV, you should go to your room and study so you that one day you can be on TV, so that others can watch you.” 

The more I think about it, the more it seems that my life is merely a constellation of his eccentric little sayings.  Another of his favorite sayings was “second place is first loser.”  He often said this whenever I came home with a second place trophy, or if I told him that another student had performed better than me on a spelling test.  At the time I thought he was cruel – I, like all of my peers, had been raised in a culture that attempted to emulate the narrative arcs of our favorite sitcoms.  My father was supposed to hug us after our failures; he was supposed to assure us that all would be ok as the credits rolled.  We had no such luck.  In retrospect, however, it was all for the best.

My father is a hard working man.  He had two primary jobs when I was young:  in the winter he cleaned trailers and during the summer he sold ice cream from decommissioned postal service trucks that he had purchased from the government.  He expected us to accompany him to each of these jobs, so we spent the winter picking up the refuse that he blew out of the trailers with his leaf blower, and we spent the long summer months presenting him with cool little packages of ice cream as our customers demanded creamsicles and ice cream sandwiches.  We worked in shifts, but we never had an opportunity to play.  In the winter we read in the car as our father drove us to the trailer depot, and he made us return to the car so we could read even more while he waited for the trailers to unload their goods.  In the summer he converted the back of each ice cream truck into a mobile bedroom.  There was an old beat up mattress we would recline on between shifts, and a stack of books by the freezer.  My father expected that we would each finish a book by the end of the day.

I learned how to be an American from my immigrant father.  I still remember one of the proudest moments of his life – the day he became an American citizen.  We spent the morning reviewing the pledge of allegiance together, and the preamble to the constitution.  After the ceremony, he showed me his certificate with tears in his eyes and said “you must work hard to deserve this.”

I’ve been working hard ever since.

Tope Folarin is the 2010 Carol Jean and Edward F. Newman Fellow.  He comes to IPS from Google, where he managed public affairs and public relations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Tope holds a Master’s in African Studies and another Master’s in Comparative Social Policy from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He graduated from Morehouse College in 2004 with a BA in Political Science.

Installation #3

Photographer Leslie Sinclair watching his daughter Marion ride a tricycle. This is Marian’s first trip to her father’s homeland, Havana Cuba. Sinclair and his family now reside in Geneva. He’s one of my favorite photographers living.

Installation #2 (Fatherhood Series)

 

The tools in his truck rattle when we go over the slightest bumps. Dad and I might be cruising some street in D.C., Maryland, or Virginia. We might be on our way to a service call or on our way back from meeting a potential client. Dad’s a self-employed master electrician/electrical contractor. He’s 6-foot-1 and might be considered athletic if it wasn’t for his paunch. His hands are rough and strong from the nature of his work. I once watched him lift a hammer, like Thor, to drive a six-foot metal spike into the earth. This was after he’d upgraded the electrical service of a house, and was splicing the ground wire to the spike.

At 6-foot-2, I fall short of such a man, who believes a man’s pride is his hard work. And because of it, this man from Trinidad and Tobago made a life for his wife and three kids in the U.S., where he emigrated to when he was 20 years old. Because of hard work, he was the foreman on a job at the U.S. Embassy in Russia. Hard work and its rewards kept his family fed and off the streets. A way he put it once was no man’s hands have time for foolishness. So you can imagine how he regarded my aspirations of wanting to be a writer. Though he supported them financially, dad mistook those aspirations for passing fads. And when they weren’t, the unprofitable writer’s life only affirmed his suggestion that I pick up a “real” craft.

So now I’m riding along with dad as a helper, after being laid off as a staff writer for a newspaper. At 29 and still living with my parents, how do I measure up to a man — who, at 28 — had a successful business, was a homeowner, married (now going on 34 years), and a father? One day, while on the road, he asked if I was still writing. At the time, I didn’t know he’d nearly read every article I wrote. Or that he rode around with several copies of the paper in his truck to pass out to his friends and customers. When I tell him I couldn’t stop if I wanted to, I remember the poem I wrote for his 50th birthday; how he had it neatly folded in the top draw of his nightstand, next to his gold watch and expensive cufflinks.

Alan King is an award-winning poet and a writer residing in the DC Metro area.

Fathering Words with E. Ethelbert Miller

Egberto Miller walks to the subway carrying his lunch. My mother has taken the time to fix him a good meal. I will remember the exchange of small brown paper bags more than hugs and kisses between my parents. When we moved into the St. Mary’s Housing Projects, we lived on the seventeenth floor; my mother would watch my father walk to work from the bedroom window. Behind her would be an unmade bed. The outline of my father’s body was still trapped against the sheets and blankets. My father never overslept when it was time to go to work. He never dragged himself out of bed. He was up and in the bathroom washing his body before you could even talk to him. This is why I believe he never dreamed. His eyes never had that soft, hazy, distant look. His eyes never looked tired. When you work hard everyday you don’t look tired; you are tired but you never mention it. There are no excuses.

I wonder what my mother thought about my father always sleeping? No time to really go anywhere. What was she thinking while bending over the stove? My father is sitting at the kitchen table. He props his head up with his hands. He is waiting for his meal. Years from now I will recognize this pose. It’s the picture we get from the loser’ locker room after the World Series, the Super Bowl or the N.B.A. finals. It’s defeat after making an error, the ball going in and out of the rim. A foot touching the line in the end zone. Or worst, the referee or umpire missing the call. Yet there is something heroic about my father. It took many years for me to realize the simple beauty behind how he ate his food. The care that he gave to even the most mundane task.

Just before I went off to college, he printed my name in the inside of a new typewriter case, his block letters so beautifully even. I looked at my name each time I took the typewriter out.

Excerpted from chapter two of Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer by E. Ethelbert Miller.
*Posted with permission of the author.

Fatherhood

 

 Almost two years ago, I wrote an essay for The Root about my twin struggle to be both an artist and a good “single” father. This may well be one of my most celebrated pieces. I got invited on NPR with Mark Anthony Neal to discuss my experience. So, now I thought that for Words Matter, I’d create a space, leading up to Father’s Day, for anyone to join the conversation about fatherhood in all of its many textures and colors and arrangements. This is something new for Words Matter, doing a series.