attaboys unspoken, and hugs not given. At the same time, my father sank into alcoholism.
Occasionally, late at night, without warning, the drunken wreckage of him would wash up on our doorstep, stammering, laughing, reeking, voice amplified by the booze.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Billie, open the do’! These my boys just like they is yourn!”
He was on his way home from drinking, gambling, philandering, or some combination of sins, squandering money that we could have used, wasting time that we desperately needed, sometimes just down the block from our house. As a parting gift, he’d drop by to bless “his boys” with an incoherent thirty minutes of drunken drivel, crumbs from the table of his paternity that I hungrily lapped up, time that would be lost to him in the fog of a hangover by the time day broke. It was as close as I could get to him, so I took it.
He spouted off about what he planned to do for us, buy for us. But the slightest thing we did or said drew the response, “You jus’ blew it.” We always seemed to blow it. I tried not to blow it
every
time, but no matter how hard I tried: “You jus’ blew it.” I came to understand that he had no intention of doing anything. The one man who was supposed to be genetically programmed to love me didn’t understand what it meant to love a child, or to hurt one.
To him, this was a harmless game that kept us excited and begging. In fact, although I couldn’t fully comprehend it at the time, it was a cruel, corrosive deception that subtly and unfairly shifted the onus for his lack of emotional and financial responsibility from him to us.
All I could do was lose faith in his words and in him. I stopped believing. Stopped begging. Stopped expecting. I wanted to stop caring, but I couldn’t. A heart still works even when it’s broken.
According to the stories folks told, Blow men had always been a grab bag—some hard workers, some hustlers, all smart—all the way back to slavery. My father had a smidgeon of each kind in him. The family traces its roots back to Southampton, Virginia, the same piece of land that produced Nat Turner and Dred Scott, who was actually born Sam Blow. In the early 1800s the man who enslaved Dred moved from Virginia to Alabama with his handful of slaves. That’s where my father’s family history picked up.
My father’s great-grandfather—who, someone told me, was a high-yellow mulatto man with a flowing mane of dirt-red hair—is said to have saved for many years to buy his own freedom, then to buy a few hundred acres to farm along the Coosa River near a town called Wetumpka, an Indian word meaning “rumbling waters,” just north of Montgomery.
His oldest child, my father’s grandfather, was a tiny man with big ideas named Columbus. The story I heard was that he ran afoul of white folk in Alabama. Some say he hid a ballot box when it appeared that a Klan-backed candidate for sheriff might’ve won an election. Others say he shot and killed a white man, but few people put much stock in that story. Whatever the case, the Klansmen—“white tops,” they called them—were after him. So he fled one night, leaving his young wife—a half-Indian midwife—and their young children behind. He quietly followed the river and its rumbling waters out of town and found his way to a swampy stretch of land two states over and about thirty miles south of Gibsland.
It would be two years before he sent for his family.
The way folks told it, Columbus began sharecropping a large cotton farm there in Louisiana and made a success of it—too much of a success, it turned out. They said that when he had earned enough money to buy the farm outright, the local whites “put a bad white man on him” who harassed and threatened him, and on at least one occasion tried to kill him, shooting into his house while the family was inside. He refused to leave, but his young bride didn’t have his fortitude. Fearing for her life and that of her children,
Occasionally, late at night, without warning, the drunken wreckage of him would wash up on our doorstep, stammering, laughing, reeking, voice amplified by the booze.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Billie, open the do’! These my boys just like they is yourn!”
He was on his way home from drinking, gambling, philandering, or some combination of sins, squandering money that we could have used, wasting time that we desperately needed, sometimes just down the block from our house. As a parting gift, he’d drop by to bless “his boys” with an incoherent thirty minutes of drunken drivel, crumbs from the table of his paternity that I hungrily lapped up, time that would be lost to him in the fog of a hangover by the time day broke. It was as close as I could get to him, so I took it.
He spouted off about what he planned to do for us, buy for us. But the slightest thing we did or said drew the response, “You jus’ blew it.” We always seemed to blow it. I tried not to blow it
every
time, but no matter how hard I tried: “You jus’ blew it.” I came to understand that he had no intention of doing anything. The one man who was supposed to be genetically programmed to love me didn’t understand what it meant to love a child, or to hurt one.
To him, this was a harmless game that kept us excited and begging. In fact, although I couldn’t fully comprehend it at the time, it was a cruel, corrosive deception that subtly and unfairly shifted the onus for his lack of emotional and financial responsibility from him to us.
All I could do was lose faith in his words and in him. I stopped believing. Stopped begging. Stopped expecting. I wanted to stop caring, but I couldn’t. A heart still works even when it’s broken.
According to the stories folks told, Blow men had always been a grab bag—some hard workers, some hustlers, all smart—all the way back to slavery. My father had a smidgeon of each kind in him. The family traces its roots back to Southampton, Virginia, the same piece of land that produced Nat Turner and Dred Scott, who was actually born Sam Blow. In the early 1800s the man who enslaved Dred moved from Virginia to Alabama with his handful of slaves. That’s where my father’s family history picked up.
My father’s great-grandfather—who, someone told me, was a high-yellow mulatto man with a flowing mane of dirt-red hair—is said to have saved for many years to buy his own freedom, then to buy a few hundred acres to farm along the Coosa River near a town called Wetumpka, an Indian word meaning “rumbling waters,” just north of Montgomery.
His oldest child, my father’s grandfather, was a tiny man with big ideas named Columbus. The story I heard was that he ran afoul of white folk in Alabama. Some say he hid a ballot box when it appeared that a Klan-backed candidate for sheriff might’ve won an election. Others say he shot and killed a white man, but few people put much stock in that story. Whatever the case, the Klansmen—“white tops,” they called them—were after him. So he fled one night, leaving his young wife—a half-Indian midwife—and their young children behind. He quietly followed the river and its rumbling waters out of town and found his way to a swampy stretch of land two states over and about thirty miles south of Gibsland.
It would be two years before he sent for his family.
The way folks told it, Columbus began sharecropping a large cotton farm there in Louisiana and made a success of it—too much of a success, it turned out. They said that when he had earned enough money to buy the farm outright, the local whites “put a bad white man on him” who harassed and threatened him, and on at least one occasion tried to kill him, shooting into his house while the family was inside. He refused to leave, but his young bride didn’t have his fortitude. Fearing for her life and that of her children,
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