Working With Daddy

Every boy craves acceptance by his father. Not to be loved, per se, but to be accepted. I am no different. I craved this acceptance until the day my father died, and for many years afterwards, before coming to terms with it. There is no longing now. No anguished wanting; no heartrending insights; no work left undone. There is only the dull groaning for what might have been had we been two different people, of different mindsets, with different opportunities.

The America my father grew up in was not the America of my youth. I was born in Chicago, on January 5th, 1967, during the height of the Black Power movement.  My father was born February 2nd, 1925, in Pearl, Mississippi, in the heart of the Jim Crow south. He was the seventh of eleven children in a family of sharecroppers. Although it was the middle of the roaring twenties, for blacks in his part of the south it was no all night party. By the time of my father’s birth, the Ku Klux Klan had reached a membership of 4,000,000 members. Sharecroppers, like my father’s family, were bound to the land; unable to leave until they had paid off their debts for stock and seed; tethered in a form of legal slavery by the laws of the land. Blacks were forbidden by law to look whites in the eye. They were forbidden to gather in white only places, and to drink from white only fountains. They were denied a white education, and kept from voting in elections by the local white authorities; for blacks who forgot the rules, there was always the Klan.

I never learned much about my father’s life in Mississippi. Like most men of his generation, things to do with his past and his feelings he kept mostly to himself. As I grew up, I learned that he had been born on a cotton plantation. He had picked cotton at the age of three. He lost his father, the man for whom I am named, and of whom I am the spitting image (according to my father) at the age of thirteen, to white supremacy. My father had also raised his siblings, though he was not the eldest, and had cared for his mother until the day she died.

Decades later, when I was thirteen years old, I went to work with my father. Although he was not supposed to, (because he had had several heart attacks by then) he went to work anyway in a brickyard to make money to care for his family. I went to work with him because we needed the money, and because my father was trying to cure me of my supposed laziness and incompetence. It was 1980. We lived in a duplex on the south side of Chicago, the one my mother lives in to this day, the home that would finally be paid off two years after my father’s death.

I had nothing but love for my father. He had done many great things by the time I was thirteen. My father had started working at the age of eight, raised three families, learned navigation, broken wild horses, been jailed, and gotten his general equivalency diploma. He studied law on his own every morning, and also the Bible—though not often in that order—and had even acted as his own legal counsel once, and won, against an experienced attorney. My father only had a second-grade education... He was a wise man, a violent man, and very, very uncompromising individual. My greatest frustration throughout adolescence and my early twenties was that my father would not let me love him. “You’re my son, he once told me, “I’m not your son! I don’t have to get along with you, you have to get along with me!” and so the walls grew up between us, and so did the distance…

Working in the brickyard was backbreaking labor. You were stooped over for hours at a time, and you often worked longer than eight hours. There was only one reason why a man would take a job stacking bricks. It broke your body, but you did it because you needed the money. I almost didn’t get to work in the brickyard. I was visibly too young to be employed by the company and it was illegal to hire me. It was also dangerous, with all the heavy equipment moving around, but this was Chicago, and if you knew what to say and how to carry yourself, you could get away with just about anything. My father told them I was sixteen and the man let me work because my father had a good reputation. He knew my father had a lot of mouths to feed and two incomes stacking bricks could keep the seven of us from going hungry. “Just keep him from being seen, and out of the way of the heavy machinery!” the foreman said, “…We can’t have him getting hurt, and we can’t be looking out for him, so you’re going to have to keep an eye on him. …If the cops see him, or if my boss says he has to go, then he’s out of here! I’m sorry, I know what you’re up against, but I’ve gotta look out for myself too!” the foreman then told me how to behave in the brickyard and what to do when they called out an order, or moved the heavy machinery. He left my father and me to our tasks, and my father taught me how to bust the bricks apart, and how to stack them.

We had only one hammer that first day, so the going was slow. My father complained constantly that he would have made more money by himself, and that I was slowing him down. I can still picture the sympathetic looks from the other workers. I felt comforted by them because they validated my feelings that my father was being unreasonable. At one point, a man offered to lend me a hammer. “Naw!” my father responded, “…We got what we need right here.” I remember the look of shame on my father’s face when he turned back to face me, his back to the man. “You see, I could’ve took that hammer from him, but then I would’ve owed him a favor.” he confided.

As we struggled to break, clean, and stack five thousand bricks passing back and forth our only hammer, I remember feeling ashamed by the looks from the workers around us, and by the look on my father. Once I saw how the work was supposed to be done, I realized that I didn’t really need a hammer. I picked up a brick, slammed it into the side of another brick, and loosed the mortar from it. I practiced this a few times, bashing my finger a couple of times, but then I got pretty good at it. My father was watching me to see what I was doing; he thought I was playing. I showed him I could break the mortar off without using a hammer. He told me to forget about it, but I had cleaned so many bricks trying to show him, that he let me do it my way, and he used the hammer.

We had fallen too far behind. My father was working furiously, but we had only stacked a thousand and a half bricks. One of the other workers asked if we were going to be able to make our quota by the end of the day. The guy who offered the hammer before, offered it again, and my father reluctantly accepted it. I was upset by the charity, but I was glad that I would finally be getting my own hammer. I had realized by then, that it was twice as hard trying to clean bricks with a brick because you had to hold it up to break off the mortar, and the bricks got awful heavy. I also kept bashing parts of my finger whenever I started to get tired. My father and I decided to race each other as the day started to wane and after a little more than an hour, we had stacked thirty-five hundred. The foreman called the day early and we packed up our things in a hurry. My father returned the borrowed hammer and we stood in line while the foreman inspected the stacks and paid out the money. When it came our turn, my father sent me away to gather all of our things.

My father got paid out, and I was excited to learn that we had made so much money! Being a child, forty-seven dollars and some change was a lot of money to me, back then. I was also under the impression that I was going to get to keep all the money I had earned. My father did not say much except that we had done okay, and that normally, he stacked five thousand all by himself. He said he had lost out by having me work for him, then said goodbye to some men, and we left. We walked down some long, dirty streets to the bus stop. We were covered in dirt and mortar dust. We got onto the bus and no one wanted us to sit by him or her because we were so dirty. I was very embarrassed. My father told me sternly not to be ashamed of being dirty because I had worked for a living. He held onto the money during the long bus ride home. He was glad that I had come to work with him, and he asked me if I felt proud to have earned my own money. A man on the bus overheard him and engaged us in a brief conversation, telling me to listen to my father, and don’t ever be ashamed “…‘cause you’re dirty from workin’!” He asked me how old I was, and if I was proud to be working with my old man? I told him I was. When we got home, my father paid me five dollars for all of my labor, even though I had earned more than fifteen; I complained. He threw me two more dollars, called me “ungrateful”, and told me that I wasn’t getting more than that because he had a whole family to feed.

Our time in the brickyard was the closest my father and I ever came to bonding. A couple of weeks later, I would quit working with my father and I would meet the man who would change my life forever—Richard Briggs—my martial arts instructor. My father would write me off completely for years, declaring that I had found myself another father. Many years later, in a deeply heated debate, my father and I would reconcile our differences and forge a peace that would last the last four years of his life.

From the time I met my instructor, and for the next ten years, my father would greet me with a mixture of belligerence and contempt. The person responsible for preserving my love for my father during those hellish years was my martial arts instructor. At its worst, my father and I would go to bed at night for months, believing that we would be killed in our sleep by the other person. I would eventually drop out of high school due to pressure from my father, even though I had taken first place at my school on the citywide tests for three years running. I would lose my scholarships to the Art Institute of Chicago because, without the support of my father, I couldn’t afford the train fare and materials to attend. In the end, I would be kicked out of my father’s house at the age of eighteen because he feared that if he didn’t force me to fend for myself, I would never amount to anything.

As a young adult, I would continue to visit my father and he would continue to demean me. I never cursed him or was disrespectful; I practiced civil disobedience. I would complain to my instructor about my father’s failings as a father and my instructor would frustrate the hell out of me by always choosing my father’s side. “All I know, my instructor would say, “…is I never had a father. You’ve got to love your father no matter what!” My instructor was crucial in helping me to understand my father through the life and times my father had lived. And during that three-hour debate, where I finally confronted my father and told him how much I respected him and wanted to live in peace with him—the debate my mother tried to stop from happening, because “You don’t talk like that to your father!”—the debate where I put everything on the line, and won back my father’s love—my instructor’s words would be the reason my father finally decided to make peace with me.

...When my father died, my instructor would be seated next to the casket as a man in a top hat and tails that the mayor of Chicago had sent to the funeral, read official condolences to my mother and family.


The last words I would ever hear from my father have become the joy of my life whenever I think of my relationship with him. I called him up to tell him I was coming to Chicago to see him one last time. He spoke to me tenderly but seemed a little disoriented. He was dying of cancer and it had advanced to the point where he was in unabated, agonizing pain. I told him that I would see him on Saturday, but he asked me to come on Friday instead, if I could make it. I told him I couldn’t make it on Friday, but I would be there on Saturday. Three times he asked me to come on Friday and three times I told him I couldn’t make it until Saturday. He paused for a while, and then he said, “…Okay, well, I love you, and I’ll see you on Friday!” He died that very Friday in exactly the manner he had always said that he wanted to die. I was leaving Madison, Wisconsin to catch the bus to Chicago when I received the message that he was dead…

Every boy craves acceptance from his father. It is truly a blessing when he finally gets it.