Under the baobab: Shared moments lead to understanding our fathers

Like many men, my father and I spent a great deal of our lives somewhat estranged from each other. My dad and mom fell in love when they were both teenagers. After I was conceived, they planned to marry but Dad’s mother objected. Underage, they were forced to wait. Their plans and passions were overcome by World War II. Dad went off to fight fascism, leaving Mom to fend for herself in the factory. He made a career of the Army.

Dad met someone else and married. They had four daughters. Mom married a man she stayed with for nearly 50 years. She once said that her first true love was Dad. Unlike her I did not love him. I felt abandoned and resentful. However, I didn’t totally lose touch with him or his family. During a trip to California after leaving voter registration work in Mississippi, I stayed with Dad and his family in Fort Ord. It was our first opportunity to talk man to man. I saw it as my chance to ask all the lingering questions for which he had no acceptable answers. We fought. Yelling and screaming about everything — politics, family relations, but especially the ongoing Vietnam War. I left his home prematurely, wondering why I had bothered to come there at all.

Years later my oldest sister contacted me. Her younger sibling, Dad’s middle daughter, had passed. I went to visit. Dad and I stood together on a hillside at her gravesite. He told me how she had died suddenly and broke his heart.

“You are not supposed to bury your children,” he told me. I only half understood. We cried in each other’s arms. It was the beginning of a new relationship between us.

He began telling me stories about his life, which was strangely like mine, filled with the wanderlust that curses and blesses Black men in America. He told me he had left the South after seeing his best friend lynched. He went to war to fight fascism, as I had left home to fight racism. We both had left sons behind, yet another curse of our family.

Years later, after Dad joined the ancestors, I stood on another hillside having buried my oldest daughter, who had just passed from a pulmonary embolism. Then I fully understood Dad’s sorrow. Salted tears dried in my eyes. I was holding in my arms the miracle known as my grandson. I realized that Dad was never so blessed as to hold his grandson.

I understood that it is not the quantity of time that you spend with your father that matters, rather it is the quality of those moments shared in love, understanding and patience. My grandchild exists because I was there, and Dad was there, and all the men and women who came before us were there. We exist because of the struggles of those who brought us life, who nurtured aspirations and planted hope. We owe them our lives.

June in Happy Valley

The Juneteenth Committee, the Center for the Performing Arts, the NAACP, the Happy Valley Adventure Bureau, and the Borough of State College planned a Celebration of Juneteenth at the MLK Plaza on Saturday. It featured the Marching Cobras, Joy Marie, Bilal, DJ Temi, myself, Terry and Isaiah Watson, Carmin Wong, the Unity Church Praise Team, NW Eazy, Nathalia Velasquez & Home Planet, Terri & Morgan Parker, Aneeaus Smith, the Double Dutch Swing Squad, and Yannick Morgan, Jasz and Jeff Morgan.

State College began Pride Month with its annual parade and festival hosted by Centre LGBT+. After the parade, the large crowd proceeded to Sidney Friedman Park in a sea of rainbows and flags to listen to Grand Marshal Marinette Pichon, Mayor Ezra Nanes, Centre LGBT+ Executive Director Cat Cook and others.

Happy Father’s Day. Happy Juneteenth. Happy Pride Month.