Happy Birthday Song for My Father 8

Had my father continued to age in his body of flesh and bones, he would be 93 today. His spirit continues to nourish me and lift me when I face mountains that seem too steep to climb. I love the legacy he left me and take great joy in the sharing stories about him involving friends and family. He was so much to so many! Years ago, I had an essay published in Fathersongs (Beacon Press 1997), a gem of a collection of essays on African-American fathers edited by Gloria Wade Sales.  I know this is overlong for a web publication, but I offer it today as a birthday song for my incredible father. Reg, as I promised on your day of crossing over, we continue to love you and will never stop. Happy Birthday, Dad.

A Line of Storytellers

I could fall asleep anywhere when I was a child. If I was tired I could curl up in the corner of a stranger’s sofa, doze off leaning against an overstuffed arm chair, cat nap in the back seat of a car, or snooze, chin couched in hand, at my school desk. Sleeping, then or now, was rarely a problem for me. That is, I could fall asleep anywhere if I was tired. If I wasn’t sleepy, my eyes stayed open, and my mind concocted all kinds of tales. I saw mythological beings in the cracks on my walls, and landscapes in the shadows on the ceiling. Most of the time I could amuse myself with the scenery of darkness until, minutes or hours later, I dozed off to sleep. But for some reason, on this particular night, I would not fall asleep.

My father ran our house. What he said, went. My mother was ever present and certainly had some skill as a negotiator, but my father’s temperament, or more accurately temper, my father’s height and the lightening way his growl could catch you at your throat and squeeze tight your windpipe before that sass you were planning to say got all the way out of your brain and onto your tongue, as well as my father’s undeniable intelligence, which over the years has mellowed into a wide swath of salt and pepper wisdom, made him the absolute ruler of our domain. When my brother and I suggested that the democratic principles which he espoused should be a part of our household, my father explained the idea of a dictatorship. Then he put the notion of benevolent in front of the idea of dictatorship. Then he put his name in back of that to complete the thought. The world needed democracy, but our home was a dictatorship and he was the dictator. There were no votes. There was only the possibility of getting a hearing. I believe this is where the idea of benevolent came in. Which is to say that bed time was bed time. You didn’t pout. You didn’t whine. If you had anything negative to say about it, you could scream your head off, as long as it was inside your imagination. If you wanted to stay up more than five minutes longer, you could forget about it. Bedtime was bedtime.

This night it was past bedtime. It was way past bedtime. I went to bed as told, without voiced complaint. I had been in bed for what seemed hours. I had gone over my day and planned the upcoming weekend with several variations in the way it could go. I had spent time reconsidering the possibilities of finding a real pathway to Oz, the imaginary land I went to live in whenever San Francisco realities left me feeling lonely and abandoned. I had gone over some of the characters I would meet were I to find the particular sewer cover, windstorm, or hot air balloon that would carry me to that wonderland. I decided that even though TicToc had a nice sense of humor, he still didn’t seem to be all that warm a friend. I definitely felt like Ozma had a lot more going for her then the very rotund and obviously recycled tin man. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to transform a particular paint crack in the wall from a foreboding witch into any number of more peaceable ideas, an upside down flower, a tree by a river, a horse. The crack obstinately insisted on remaining a scary witch. I turned my back on her and looked at the slats under my brother’s bunk. I counted them frontwards and then backwards and then frontwards again. I counted up the number of friends I had, less than five, and then the number of almost friends. I counted the people I wanted to be friends with until I realized that I was still wide awake. My older brother was fast asleep, but my parents were not. They were playing jazz albums in the living room. Someone was visiting and all the adults were laughing and having a good time, a much better time than me, lying in bed, eyes opened, toes wiggling, and heart racing. I had a dilemma. I was bored, a painful hazard of childhood. I was bored and ready for action. It was time to get up! But then, bedtime was bedtime. Bedtime was absolute. Bedtime was inviolate.

What could I do? I got up. I mean I had done everything I could do to make myself fall asleep, and everything had failed. I got up and went into the living room. I was depending on my little girl cuteness, and the presence of company, to save me from too harsh a rebuke. I was a sickly child and my getting up because of problems breathing or a low-grade fever was not unusual. As soon as I reached the living room door my mother began to make a fuss over me. Was I sick? Did I feel alright? What was the matter? The matter was that I could not sleep. Being awake seemed more fun. Being up very late, which was then and remains today one of my favorite pastimes, seemed full of enticing possibilities. “I can’t sleep,” I muttered hoping that my soft voice and doe eyes would charm my father once again. “I’m not tired. I tried to fall asleep.” I kept the stream of words trickling out of my mouth as I crawled into my father’s lap. It worked. He did not rage. Instead he held me gently expecting, I am sure, that a few minutes resting against his rumbling chest would cause me to doze off and get my “sweet little girl” reward of being carried back to my bed.

But I stayed awake, wide awake. Time passed and I was still wide awake. This would not do. Bedtime was bedtime. It was way past my bedtime. My father carried my very awake and quietly protesting self, back to bed. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and began to tell me a story. It was a story about a little girl who wouldn’t go to sleep. I began to join in the story telling. It wasn’t just one night that she wouldn’t go to sleep. No it was a lot more, it was days and days. She wouldn’t go to sleep for weeks. My father added details. I added color. He created plot turns and turned her mischief into drama. Finally, I believe, the little girl fell into a dead sleep right in the middle of the sidewalk on her way to or from school. I don’t remember how she escaped her predicament, but I remember being relieved that my father and I had gotten her home safely. She found her bed, and from that day on she went to sleep when she was supposed to go to sleep. In fact, she looked forward to bedtime and sometimes went without being told. When we finished telling each other the story my father leaned down and gave me a kiss and told me it was time for me to go to sleep. Our smiles were moonlight on the shadows in the room. The witch on the wall turned into a starburst as I snuggled under the covers and he stood up.

“But what about our story?” I remember asking.

“I’ll type it up,” he answered hovering in the doorway, well aware that I was trying to stall his exit.

“Really?”

“Goodnight,” he laughed and closed the door behind him. I must have fallen asleep a few minutes after that.

Now the promise to type our story was a serious promise. After all, my father was a writer, a real writer. He had a room with a desk, a big black Royal typewriter, and shelves and shelves of books. Sometimes people paid him for his words, which proved to outsiders that he was a REAL writer. He shared his workroom with my mother who had an easel, never quite dry oil paints, and finished and unfinished canvases all over the walls. My mother was a real painter. I was an ordinary child. I drew for fun. I wrote in school and it was fun. I wasn’t a painter and I certainly wasn’t a writer. A few days later, as promised, my father showed me our story. He had typed it up and added even more details. It was wonderful, and it was written by him and me.

After that we didn’t write together. He went about in his very adult world which included working, battling with the world and his family, and writing until close to dawn more days than not. I was in my child’s world which was often lonely and full of the quiet pains that many children, especially children of color, carry and do not share with their parents. I mean why, what can adults do about it anyway. I grew into dance and drama. I was going to be one of the great Negro actresses of the stage. I was going to be one of San Francisco’s first Negro prima ballerinas.

My father continued to write, publishing a story here and an article there. My head became incredibly hard at the same time as my body became quite shapely. In that period, I also mastered the act of not hearing what I did not want to hear. I became a teenager, and an inevitable gulf came between my father and I. He bridged the gulf with letters. When I protested his decisions over MY life, my father wrote to me. He wrote his reasoning, he wrote his concern, and he wrote his love. I can’t truly say I appreciated all of his logic at that time. But I appreciated the work, the effort of page after page after page of thoughts pointed at me, crafted for me.

In time I began to write too. I left home and wrote long letters back. I had lovers and wrote letters full of gush and passion and poems full of sugar and thorns. I got into arguments, and when I couldn’t get through to someone I wrote. I remembered the power of words. I remembered the magic of language. I remembered my father’s letters. And when I had a little girl, I remembered the story that he and I wrote together.

I never planned to be a writer. I planned to be a dancer and actress. My mother was the painter. My brother the photographer, and briefly, film maker. My father was the writer. Years later writing swallowed me up like the ocean taking a cast-off soda bottle, breaking it into pieces and smoothing out the edges until it became jewels to return to the sand. Years after that I learned to swim in words, learned to breath under the water of their weight. And then, I became a writer too. And now, I am my father’s daughter, a story teller come down from a line of story tellers.