His wife wasn’t happy that her husband had stepped out on her, fathering a child with another woman. She didn’t seem to approve of me, nor the occasional overtures that my father made toward me. My father, who subscribed to the newspaper, knew that I enjoyed reading the comics, so he let me know that he was saving the funny papers for me. I would drop by his house every once in a while to pick them up. But his wife did her best to humiliate me when I stopped by. When I would ring the front doorbell, she would tell me, in a pointed voice, to come around to the back door—as if she were a white woman and I was the hired help. This was her way of putting me in my place. It hurt to be treated like this. From that point, I vowed that if I ever got married and had children, I would make sure they had the emotional security of knowing they belonged to a family.
I felt orphaned and lonely as well at Mather Academy. There were so many adjustments to make. Having grown up under rigid segregation, it was my first time ever seeing white teachers. I was immersed in a college preparatory environment, and expectations for the students were high. It was a tough course load, and although I didn’t excel in all my classes, I discovered how much I enjoyed foreign languages. Latin and French were my favorite classes. Inside the halls of Mather Academy, my country accent eventually faded away. I learned to speak more crisply, to say “going” instead of “gwine.” I tried to fit in. In my senior year I applied to colleges, as I saw my peers doing. I got accepted to Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, and I proudly enrolled there in 1959.
But quickly, the luster of the college experience wore off. I felt as if I were in a foreign land and that I didn’t belong. I looked the part of a country hay-seed, with holes in my shoes, and I was struggling to afford necessities. After I finished my sophomore year, I found myself impatient to have a wad of dollars in my pocket. I had been working since childhood, picking cotton, peanuts, or tobacco, and I knew that I could easily find a job. I was a grown man and I was hungry to start living like one, with a car and some nice clothes. I was tired of being broke and of living in the South, where black men were relegated to menial jobs that paid little. Also, I was acutely aware that there was nothing tying me to South Carolina anymore—my sister Lanie had moved away. I was ready to make my exit, too.
So I dropped out of college in 1961, telling myself that I was just taking off a semester, and headed for Kansas City, where Lanie had moved. She had met a guy in the service there, and they had married; they invited me to stay with them. I arrived in November and promptly had my Southern sensibilities attacked by a brutal Midwest winter. I found a job at a grocery store, and every morning at four-thirty I had to go through the teeth-chattering ritual of catching a bus across town in subzero weather.
Before long, I was ready for a job change. My brother-in-law worked at a railway terminal in Kansas City and he let me know there were openings there. Just getting the job was a test of my endurance: I waited in line from eleven A.M. to five P.M. to get hired. When I finally made it to the front of the line, all they asked me was if my back was straight and strong. The job was to move mailbags with heavy stuff inside like Sears, Roebuck catalogues. I was hired on the spot, and I ended up working there for four years.
At that time, the Vietnam War was going on. I opened my mailbox one day and there was a draft notice waiting for me. I was seeing a doctor then for a stomach ulcer, so I asked for a note confirming that fact. Still, I didn’t think a lousy ulcer was enough to keep me out of the war. So before I was scheduled to report for induction, I took a week of vacation from my job to hang out and party. On my final night of freedom, a friend came over and we had a great time listening to music on my stereo till the wee hours.
The next day, I got up and couldn’t find my doctor’s note anywhere. Resigned to the fact that soon I’d be carrying a rifle and stepping through rice paddies, I reported to the army induction center and got in line. I stepped up halfheartedly when they asked if anyone had a medical reason why they could not serve their country—but I wasn’t very confident because I couldn’t find that blasted doctor’s note. The induction officer was nice enough to call the doctor’s office to confirm my stomach ulcer story, but the doctor was out that day. The sergeant told me sternly, “Jenkins, I’ll give you one hour to find that note. If you’re not back here by ten A.M., you’re automatically a soldier.”
I sped home and looked everywhere. The minutes were clicking by. Just before my time was up, it occurred to me to think, “What was I doing when I last had the note in my hand?” I searched near the stereo, and there it was, buried under some albums. I’ll always consider that a moment of divine intervention. I put the note in my pocket and rode back down to the center. I carried it to the sergeant and handed it to him. It wasn’t long before he announced, “Mr. Jenkins, you can go home.” I didn’t stay to ask any questions. Black men were getting killed left and right in that war. We could see it in the newspaper and on the nightly news. For some reason, God had blessed me with a reprieve.
Now, after surviving that close brush with fate, I had absolutely no desire to go back to work on Monday. So I took another week of vacation just to celebrate!
I admit I was running pretty wild back then, in my twenties. When I would get off work, I always looked forward to letting off some steam by partying with friends, listening to music, and having a few drinks. The thing that settled me down was when my sister Lanie and her husband started having problems. In 1967, she made up her mind to leave him, and she asked me to move away with her. Lanie was my only blood relative in Kansas City. When I thought about her trying to get reestablished in a new city, I thought I better go along to give her moral support. She had two daughters to raise.
She and I headed east, to check out the cities where our siblings were living. First we visited our brother Bobby in Washington, D.C. Lanie didn’t like it, and decided to move back home to South Carolina. But I loved the excitement of the big city, and I wasn’t ready to give it all up and go back to farm life with its dull days of backbreaking work. I decided to head for Rahway, New Jersey, where my sister Rosa Lee lived.
I lived in New Jersey from 1968 to 1972. I found a good-paying job at Esso Oil and started to become more settled and stable. It was a sobering period in U.S. history, a time when blacks bonded together to demand change, and when assassination bullets flew. I think the social climate affected me a lot. The nation was making a sharp turn, and I took note of the fact that serious change was needed in my life, too. I was in my early thirties, and no longer full of youthful immortality. I took an interest in an attractive neighbor of Rosa Lee’s named Ella, and started thinking about giving up the bachelor life.
She was a smart young lady with plenty of common sense. A lot of young ladies I had met seemed frivolous by comparison. She was in her early twenties, but mature beyond her years. We could talk easily and for long hours. I enjoyed being in her company.
She had a baby boy, whom I accepted without question and treated like my own. I paid for his diaper service and bought the formula he needed. I wanted to be in her life. I asked Ella to marry me in 1972, when I was about thirty years old.
Around the same time, I got word that my father was gravely ill with leukemia, and that he wanted me to open his store back up for him and to keep it running. I quit my job without hesitation and moved back to Woodrow in the winter of 1972. A few months later, I married Ella and moved her and Garland down south to be with me.
My father lived until 1976, in the house behind his country store. I’ve told a lot of people that I wouldn’t trade those four years I got to spend with him for anything. Finally, we had a chance to talk and interact, and I could see what type of man he was. As he trained me in the way he wanted his business to run, I realized he was a deeply principled man. During that time, it was common for shop owners to take advantage of poor black customers, but he refused to cheat people. A tireless entrepreneur, he believed in working long hours, but he also had a good sense of humor that made the time fly.
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At the same time that I was carving out a first-time relationship with my father, my own son arrived. George, as it turned out, was born during one of the worst snowstorms in South Carolina history. He was born on a Wednesday at a hospital in Sumter, about sixteen miles away. The hospital discharged his mother that Friday, but the doctors wanted to keep George for observation. As I drove Ella home from the hospital, snowflakes started falling from the sky. And it snowed and snowed, for two days straight. This being South Carolina, there was no equipment or salt available to clear it from the roads. The snow kept falling, creating a huge impassable barrier between us and our new baby. People couldn’t even get out of their driveways. So we had to wait what seemed like forever to welcome home little George. I believe that the doctors were ready to discharge him on Saturday, but we weren’t able to get there until Tuesday.
After George was born, I made it a ritual to close the store at a certain time in the afternoon every day, to come home and spend an hour or two playing with him. I loved throwing him up in the air and catching him, and he loved our game, too.
Once we had a real emergency with him that could have been tragic. George was a toddler at the time, just starting to walk. My two young nieces were supposed to be taking care of him, but somehow he got hold of a costume-jewelry ring, a good-sized one. He put it in his mouth, of course, and it got lodged in his throat.
Someone from the house ran to get me at the store and told me that I better come quick. In a matter of minutes, we were in the car, making the long drive to the hospital in Sumter. My sister Lanie drove, and I jumped in the backseat with George, who was crying. It must have hurt bad, having a ring like that stuck in his windpipe. I was afraid that the thick ring would block his air passageway, so I stuck my finger down his throat and searched for it as gently as I could. It wasn’t easy; George was sputtering and crying, and the ring was wedged pretty far down. We were halfway to Sumter before I finally touched the ring and eased it out of his throat. I was so relieved that he didn’t choke on it. It seemed like a miracle.
I used to drink some when I lived in New Jersey, mostly on weekends. When I returned to South Carolina, my drinking picked up quite a bit. My brother-in-law operated a juke joint in Woodrow, and I would hang out there after work instead of going home. I started staying out late and drinking, the way I did when I was single. I guess I convinced myself that I wasn’t doing anything wrong because I wasn’t chasing women.
But when I would get home, I would be accused of all kinds of wrong-doing. I couldn’t understand back then why my wife was so disapproving. I realize now that my thinking was pretty clouded by alcohol.
But even in my hazy state, I knew something was amiss one night in 1976 when I got home and the house was totally quiet. It’s a funny thing; I could feel deep inside me that something was wrong the minute I pulled up in front of the house. I walked in and saw right away that a few things were missing. I walked into the kitchen and found that Ella had fixed me a full dinner and left it on the stove.
My family was gone, without a word. I had no forewarning, no nothing.
I went to both of my sisters, who spent a lot of time with Ella, and neither seemed to know what was going on. So I decided to take a week’s vacation in Washington, D.C., in order to swing through her hometown in North Carolina and talk to Ella face-to-face. But as I drove through North Carolina, it occurred to me that maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to Ella’s family’s house. As I mulled the situation over, I convinced myself that I was the victim. After all, she hadn’t told me she was leaving or where she was going; I wasn’t even sure she and the boys were in Warrenton. Also, her parents were sure to be angry with me. As I drove, I considered the possibility that my presence might create a stormy situation. In the end, I opted to drive past Warrenton without stopping, and I headed for Washington, D.C., for the week.
That was a very, very hurtful period for me. At first I felt anger, and then I felt pain. I wished that Ella had told me what her plan was. I felt that I deserved a chance to talk about what was going on in her mind, and maybe we could have saved the marriage. But the way it went down, I was defenseless as well as helpless. I didn’t know where my family was, until a child support notice arrived from the State of New Jersey more than a year later.
Those first years after she left, I drank even more heavily. I didn’t contest the divorce when the papers arrived. I felt like a failure, to an extent. There had to be something I wasn’t doing right.
And that really colored my thinking over the next years, when it came to having input into young George’s life. Since Ella left when he was just a little boy, George seemed far out of my reach in New Jersey during the critical child-rearing years that followed. Although Ella’s disappearance had hurt me, I certainly thought she was a fine mother, and I admired the good job she was doing with George and Garland. I didn’t want to confuse George by intervening and possibly contradicting the principles she was raising him by. And I’m glad I didn’t. I think he turned out very well. She did a wonderful job as a single mom, and I’m not sure that I could have contributed anything that would have helped him turn out any better.
It’s not that I didn’t want to be close to him. But I didn’t want George to be confused about his loyalties to Mom versus those to Dad. Whenever I visited, I wouldn’t impose any values on him because I didn’t want to undercut anything she was teaching. I thought it would be better if Ella called the shots, since she was there with him and I was here.
I remember feeling kind of awkward with the boys during my earliest visits. Even though Garland is not my son, I’ve always strived to treat the two of them the same. I was so mindful of this when I visited that I purposely tried to avoid situations where I would pull George to me and leave Garland out. In retrospect, I probably overdid it and ended up withholding affection from both of them when they were young. Then, as they grew older, George and Garland seemed to act like macho little men when I would see them. As a result, I didn’t reach out to the boys with a hug or a kiss because it seemed they would just shrug it off. I wasn’t an affectionate father, not at all. To tell you the truth, I never even contemplated whether I was doing it right or wrong. The question didn’t even occur to me. But it wasn’t a lack of love. I guess it was just history repeating itself.
I tried to visit the boys regularly at first, and sometimes stayed two to three weeks at a time during those early years, but after a few years I couldn’t afford to keep it up. When you operate a general store in the country, you don’t earn a lot of money. That’s why I had to close the store in 1977 and get a job. I worked a couple of odd jobs around my hometown, but nothing too stable until I got hired in 1991 at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina. I still work there today, setting up rooms and moving furniture for events. It’s part-time work that doesn’t pay much, but at least it’s steady money.
I never felt that I could afford to pay monthly child support, and Ella didn’t hound me for it. The way I handled it was that I wrote out a check to Ella at the end of each year, after I totaled up my business expenses, adding in my share of extra income derived from our family farm. Sometimes I could mail only $300 to her, other times it was $500 or $600. When I got that first notice from the State of New Jersey, it demanded that I pay her $300 a month, but there was no way I could afford it. I wasn’t even bringing that much home per month—at the time I was grossing only $300. I had to get a lawyer and pay him to get the amount reduced.
Likewise, I couldn’t afford to visit much, and I couldn’t send for George and Garland to come see me. After Ella and the kids left, I moved in with my oldest sister and rented out my house. Those were fairly lean years for me, and my work schedule didn’t have a lot of give in it. I didn’t have anyone who could have watched the boys while I was working, which meant summer visits just weren’t feasible. I had dreams of spending time with my son; I had a glove and a softball and baseball that I must have kept twenty years, waiting to play catch with him
. But that day never came. The miles between us became a barrier that I couldn’t figure out how to surmount.
I admit that I should have done more during his childhood. I should have stayed in better touch. But my dependence on alcohol continued to grow, and as a result, my other priorities seemed to fade into the background.
For twelve years after Ella and the boys left, I used alcohol as my preferred means of escaping reality. But in 1984, God managed to get my attention and break that habit. I developed a life-threatening case of liver cirrhosis. My doctor told me bluntly that I would get better and that my liver would regenerate itself if I would just stop drinking. I was finally ready to hear what I had long known—it was time to give up the booze.
That afternoon, I stopped by the liquor store, bought a half pint of vodka, and I took a good sip of it. When I got home, I did a little soul searching. I sat the bottle on top of a linen closet in the bathroom, and decided to go a week without drinking it. Sure enough, I made it through the whole week, and I felt good about what I had done. So I decided to try to make it through an entire month.
Ten years later, that vodka bottle was still sitting there, untouched, when a friend came by to help me fix my washing machine. He asked about the vodka in the bathroom, and so I gave it to him. I had been alcohol-free for a decade. I’ve never looked back since that day. I did it cold turkey, just me and the Good Master above.
The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers Page 5