Why Fathers Cry at Night

A LETTER TO MY DAUGHTERS

Ever since I was a child and discovered his framed “Marriage Counselor Accreditation Certificate” tucked inside a Sexual Intimacy in Marriage manual in our garage, I have wanted to speak to my father about marriage. Now, as an adult, I wonder did he and my mother ever hold hands. How did he court her? Did he dance with her and then help her with the dishes? Did he make love to her in the kitchen? Did she rub his scalp after? How did they love is the question I’ve contemplated asking during those times when my own love life was discomfiting or in peril. I’ve wanted to know more about the woman he had a child with, the woman who was not my mother, his wife. I’ve wanted to ask him did he love her, too. When my mother, fed up, finally moved out, was their marriage better? Did she date, did he? Why didn’t they ever divorce? As I stand on the ledge of the unraveling of my own coupling I have so many questions for the man who made me, but I’m too afraid to ask.

This book began as a collection of love poems. But somewhere along the way, I began pondering why I was writing about the thrill of a red-hot glance on a spring afternoon, or the parting of butterscotch lips, or the irrepressible hopelessness of losing a lover. Because I wanted to and I could were not good-enough answers. The art, you see, cannot be just for the sake of the art. There must be a greater good, something meaningful, something significant. And that led me here to both of you, the two greatest loves of my life. The daughters I’ve cherished… and let down… and hoped to one day find the courage to tell about what I know about how to love… and what I don’t—which is a lot. All the things I wished I could have learned from my mother and was too afraid to ask my father are between these covers. Think of this as less a rule book on romance, more a testimony of devotion and dolor… The way I love is not on trial here, but if it were, this would be my opening statement and closing argument. Which, of course, means you would be the judges. Caution: The poems and letters and thoughts here will not tell you that I have it all figured out (I sure as hell haven’t), but they will show you how much I’ve enjoyed the trying. And they will explore the moments of disappointment that have shaped me, and how each failure has nearly destroyed me. And they will reveal my discovering that I didn’t need to understand love, I just needed to believe in it. This is all to say that I just want you to know how I have loved so that you may know what it looks like, so that you can believe in it too.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

PORTRAIT OF NEWLYWEDS: 1967

THE HEAVY WEIGHT OF FATHERHOOD

THE GOSPEL TRUTH

A LETTER TO MY FATHER

When I write, I listen to jazz music. Mostly, Bebop and Hard Bop because of the soulful rhythm and tempo. It’s dance-like, but not dance. There are no words to distract me, and it’s just enough groove to keep my head nodding, my butt in the chair, and my pen moving to the blazing melody. While I was writing The Crossover, I happened upon an album by jazz pianist Horace Silver called Song for My Father. This was apropos because when I think about that novel, it was a song for you. A letter of hope for us. An inadvertent plea for you to be proud of me. Let me explain.

Memory can be harsh. Unforgiving. When I look back on my childhood and young adulthood, I do not remember hot dogs and soda pop summers. My tongue was never sweet on cotton candy because there were no moonlit carnivals. I remember craving your touch, some small ritual of precious contact, like a drop of water in noonday heat. Time was money, smiles were seldom, our home was serious business—book publishing—with little time for little things like card games or Ping-Pong or talking. Your conversations were instructions: Mow the lawn like this, rake the leaves like that, and when orders come in, make sure you take down the message verbatim. When you travelled to some church to preach about Black Liberation Theology, or some conference to speak about Teaching the Culturally-Particular African American Child, I’d simultaneously miss my father and feel rescued from the prison of words you kept me in.

You see, growing up, I don’t recall seeing you without a book in your hand—at the dinner table, watching PBS, on your way to the bathroom. I still have this image of you sitting in your favorite chair in the family room, the evening news on, and you writing a sermon or editing a column. Books were your best friends, and you tried to make them mine. Read the dictionary. Read the encyclopedia. Read the dissertations. There’s a friend of mine named Penny Kittle who runs an organization called BookLove and as much as I love and support the important work she is doing, the twelve-year-old in me cringes when I see those words together because it was not that.

You were driving us to our family’s annual African Heritage Book Fair in Harlem, to host workshops and panels, and to sell books—many of which I’d become familiar with because you’d made me read them—The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, the Heinemann African Writer Series, Crisis in Black Sexual Politics by Nathan and Julia Hare, Lucille Clifton’s latest poetry collection, Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters by John Steptoe. It didn’t take fourteen-year-old me long to realize I could simply read the jacket, the introduction, and the last chapter of some of the less interesting books—The Egyptian Book of the Dead—and know enough to recommend it to a customer (or respond to your impromptu quizzes). The last thing I remember is being hungry and asking when were we going to eat, and being ignored, and you talking to Mommy about one of the speakers cancelling at the last minute and her assuaging your frustration with her plan to do a second African folktales reading. And, then I fell asleep. And you did too. At the wheel of the red Mercury Thunderbird. The car flipped over a dozen times, and we landed upside down. In the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike. You roll-called and checked to make sure everyone was okay. When you got to me, I was simply proclaiming what everyone was thinking, when I uttered Dayum. The next words out of your mouth pretty much summed up my childhood: KWAME, WATCH YOUR WORDS. Now crawl out and get all the books. We’d just been in a major accident and your concern was that I not curse, and that I somehow get out of the overturned car and gather the books from the trunk that were now strewn out all over the turnpike. But, here’s the thing, nothing about that exchange, or your instructions, seemed strange. This is how we were. Who we were.

We made it to the bookfair, and people came, and we sold books, and we laughed, and we ate (never behind the book table, because it wasn’t professional), and went on about our family business, never speaking a word about the accident on the Turnpike that left me bruised, outside. And a little on the inside.

You’ve heard me speak about the tyrannical state with which you led our household. You’ve read about my complaints growing up under the rule of such a stern, bookish father. And no doubt, the words in these pages will reveal how I saw you and Mommy love. Or what I didn’t see, and how that has impacted me. Memory can be hard. But, when you really peel away its tough skin, you begin to see the layers to love.

After college, when I wanted you to publish my first poetry book, you said No, that poetry would never sell. When I told you I had started my own publishing company, and that I needed seventeen hundred dollars to get my first book back from the printer, you lectured me on making bad decisions then wrote me a check for seventeen hundred dollars. As an adult, we talked maybe once every month or two. Our phone conversations consisted of you telling me everything I was doing wrong, me growing angrier and more eager to hang up. And then came The Crossover.