The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers

by Sampson Davis

  I wanted so badly to go home. Four long weeks would go by before that became a possibility. My father visited every day and assured me that everything would be all right. Pop made sure I had a lawyer who worked hard to get the charges against me reduced. We decided that I would plea-bargain in hopes of erasing the threat of a jail sentence. I felt like I fully had my father’s attention—just as I had in the hospital. But this time, I didn’t respond like an attention-starved little boy. Instead I wrapped myself in the hardened exterior that was helping me survive.

  During his visits, Pop attempted to reach me in his own way. “How are they treating you?” he would ask. “Hang in there.” I stood emotionless during his visits. None of it mattered because at the end of the visit I had to return to my miserable room. None of it mattered because so much had happened between the divorce and now. What could he say that would help me? He had had ample opportunity to say it years before.

  After every visit, I had to go through a strip search. I would be stripped naked, along with the other inmates, in front of correction officers as they searched my body for drugs and weapons. They checked every orifice. I had to bend over and spread my cheeks and lift my testicles to ensure that no illegal products were being transported. The things I experienced at the detention center seemed too heavy to bear. I felt a rage building at my father’s long-term, lightweight approach to my problems.

  His concern seemed to come too late. After all, by not investing in my life, he had unintentionally assisted in steering me to this outcome.

  Originally, prosecutors wanted to charge me as an adult, and if I had accepted the first plea bargain offered, I would have faced ten to twenty-five years in prison. But my lawyer managed to make sure I was charged as a juvenile. When I walked into the courtroom to enter my plea, I looked behind me to see my mother and father standing there, firmly in support of me. The judge suspended my sentence and gave me two years’ probation. I was free to go.

  I knew I was lucky. If I had been eighteen, my story would have been written differently. I could have spent years in prison. Often, during those awful weeks in detention, I thought over my mistakes. I had to get my life together. I promised myself as I left the juvenile facility that I would never return. And I didn’t. From that point on, I stuck with Rameck and George and made my way to college without any more run-ins with the law. Years later, I would serve as a medical expert in that same court building where I once stood accused of robbery. I would also run into the same police detective who questioned me at the police station. He was so touched by my accomplishments that he hugged me.

  But as I pushed into the unfamiliar world of college, the first in my family to do so, I started to realize that, although I love my parents dearly, their crisis-management style of child-rearing hadn’t prepared me for any aspect of the life ahead of me. I hadn’t heard enough advice about self-discipline, study habits, male-female interactions, nothing.

  I felt as if I was on my own to make it to manhood and I was set up to fall because I didn’t know what I was doing. After my time in the lockup, I suddenly realized that those stumbles were the magic events that prompted my parents finally to look up and give me their full attention. Whenever I got sick or got in trouble, that would bring them running to my side.

  But this kind of stepping in after the fact can’t possibly produce the best results. In fact, I think it can even cause some kids to decide that if acting up is the only way to get their parents’ attention, then that’s what they’re going to do. I know I felt this way. I sometimes did wrong on purpose, just because I knew my parents tended to react, rather than take action ahead of time.

  It never occurred to them to take a stand to keep the violence and crime outside from spilling into our home and becoming a part of our everyday living. They didn’t find ways to keep us kids busy, to prevent damaging influences from creeping in and taking over our idle time. I’m sure my father noticed my personality abruptly changed in high school. But he never said a word, only offering the same mundane questions as always.

  I’ve had to learn much of what I know about being a man through trial and error. I’m still struggling to learn how to express my emotions with women. Really, how would I know anything about that? I never saw my dad open up. All I had to go on was the input that friends offered on how to treat women. I’ve had to be deprogrammed. The guys I hung with drew a lot of their information from music videos and from one another. When they’d say things like “She’s a ho” or “I got to hit that,” that’s how I thought it was supposed to be. As a child, there was no place I could turn to see a healthy example of how a man and woman relate to each other, except if you want to count the fantasy world of TV. I had to figure it out for myself.

  My parents’ battles affected me for a long time. I’d get in an argument and immediately be ready to fight because I thought that was how you handled it. One of my last fights was in college. About six of us were hanging out in a friend’s room when a drunken student, surrounded by friends, walked by and called us all bitches and faggots and tossed in some cheap racial remarks, too. I jumped to my feet and exploded out of the room. No words, just a handful of fingers wrapped into a tight fist. I must have punched three guys, while taking a few punches myself. One guy I hit spurted blood from his mouth and nose as he held his battered face in his hand. The next day I found myself in school court. As I sat in a conference room in the student center, waiting to tell my side of the story, I knew my school career was in danger. I had to face the dean of students who sat behind a long desk, flanked by two other administrators. When I leaped into the fight, I never thought the outcome would be so grave. After all, the other guy had started it. But that didn’t matter. I had injured the guy; I was the guilty party. To my relief, I got off with a sentence of probation and one hundred hours of community service.

  One of the questions the dean asked me was “How could you have avoided the fight?” I answered truthfully: “I don’t know.” “Did you ever think of simply being the one to walk away, rather than add fuel to the fire?” he asked.

  It was a lightbulb moment for me. Walking away hadn’t even entered my mind. Even though Reggie had preached the same message much earlier, I had forgotten the lesson. I had been conditioned to think that if someone disrespects you, then you must make them pay. This school official had no idea what my life had been like. But he helped me reclaim those old memories when Reggie had taught that it’s always possible to resolve an argument without fighting.

  Kids naturally imitate their parents. But when they don’t get any direction at home, it sends them out into the streets to discover how to act. It’s who you bump into while you’re out there that changes your path, for better or worse. I was luckier than most. I was blessed to have found Reggie, who helped me build up my mental armor. Although I didn’t resist all the pressures I encountered, he planted a seed that helped me plot a path to college and out of harm’s way. I have no doubt that Reggie’s classes gave me the discipline, desire, and determination that helped me get to, and through, medical school. It changed my life that God added him to my stable of influences.

  This is a dad’s job, but in so many homes, fathers fail to perform it. For some reason, many of them don’t realize how important they are. A simple conversation signals to a child that “you’re important to me.” Other people can say that to you all day long, but if a father hasn’t done it, then you’re missing something.

  Sometimes when men reach the age of fatherhood, they forget how it feels to be a child who is hungry for Dad’s attention. And the cycle repeats. But I remember how it feels to be that child. The feelings are still as vivid as the days when I stared across the backyard at Mike and his father playing basketball, wishing my dad and I could have that kind of affectionate interplay.

  I don’t mean to come down harshly on my parents, and I don’t think of their style of child-rearing as a failure. I just don’t think they knew any better. They did the best they could. Especially as
I started heading toward college, stepping through doors my parents never entered, I understood that they didn’t know how to advise me. And I’ve always tried to let them know that I appreciated what they did do.

  My story may sound as if my mother wasn’t able to give me much, but I realize in hindsight that when she stood by us through the divorce, she became a role model who taught me to stand strong. I’ve had teachers and professors tell me I wouldn’t make it. Police officers who predicted I would return to jail. A judge who emphatically told me to bring my toothbrush next time because I definitely was going to be sent away. I remember many meetings with teachers or the Seton Hall bursar when I had to challenge my grades or ask for a few more months to pay the tuition. I stood alone, probably looking like an easy target. But having seen Moms stand up to men who would turn off our utilities and pick aluminum cans off the street to help pay my tuition, I knew what fortitude looked like. By being both mother and father to us when Pop left, she showed me the true power of parenting.

  A big piece of me is satisfied that I made it past my obstacles, but I can’t help but dream about how my success would have been even more undeniable if I had had my father at my side. When I think about Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, I feel sure that having a supportive father coaching and cheering them on helped them become powerhouses who felt comfortable and confident on top of the world. Their fathers helped turn those boys into men who are unapologetic successes. Only a fraction of children in poor neighborhoods get that kind of hands-on fathering.

  And because the problem of absent fathers has become so common, it’s also become widely accepted.

  And it shouldn’t be. Children are precious, and you can’t turn them loose on the streets and hope they’ll turn out okay. Kids need someone to speak for them. I know from my own experience how tongue-tied a child feels when expressing these heartfelt thoughts. The subtle hints I dropped in my cards to Pop didn’t work. “Dad, I need you to spend more time with me” sounds like a simple statement, but when you’re a child, it’s almost impossible to utter those words. I can attest to that.

  After my father left, there were times when he seemed to show that he was sorry by picking me up and taking me out for a bite to eat. Those moments reinvigorated me and let me hope that maybe we could have a bond. But they were few. There is a part of me that will always be missing, a part that is uncompensated by everything else I do in life. It is a sentence that begins and has no end. You have only “My father was ______.” What do you do with that? How do you fill in the rest of the sentence? I was always a curious kid and demanded to know things, but these are some questions that don’t have answers. My sentence will always be a fragment. Only one person could have completed it. And now it’s too late.

  Chapter 2

  SAMPSON

  Kenneth Davis, Sr., as Told by Sampson

  WHEN WE ORIGINALLY envisioned this book, we planned for each of our fathers to have his own chapter, to tell his life story in his own words.

  By the time we got around to writing it, however, my father wasn’t able to tell his own story. Two unforgiving diseases, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, have overtaken him, stealing his ability to communicate.

  So it became obvious that the next best plan would be for me to research my father’s life. I knew from the outset that it would be a journey for me. But I never could have predicted how what I learned would shake up my world by illuminating a passionate side I never saw of my silent Pop. Now I know that my father was a puzzling man who could cry out for affection and companionship, and at the same time withhold those same precious things from his children. I’ve learned that his explosive relationship with my mother caused him to deliberately divert his emotions elsewhere, to another woman, starting when I was a small child. And I’m sobered immeasurably by the knowledge that his “other woman,” now my stepmother, worked behind the scenes during my parents’ fiery marriage to save our lives from being shattered by a gunshot.

  All this was news to me. The Pop I knew was present physically for my early years, but an absentee father nonetheless. We didn’t talk much. If we had, I’d probably know the name Friday Davis.

  But I didn’t recognize the name when an ancestry search led me to it. Friday Davis was my Pop’s paternal grandfather. The instant I saw his name for the first time, on the 1900 census, it felt as if I had discovered a box of jewels. Although census documents are pretty sterile, it’s clear he was a man to admire.

  I wish that I had talked to Pop about Friday Davis, back when I had the chance. Born in 1850, Friday was a child when slavery ended. But he made the kind of strides that showed real grit and character, at a time when it was hard for blacks to find a financial toehold in the South.

  The first record of him shows up in the 1880 census. He was living as a widower in South Carolina, rooming with a non-relative and working at a Georgetown County sawmill. By 1900, he had remarried. He and his wife, Hester, had a farm and nine children. Their firstborn son must have been a shining prince in their eyes, because they named him accordingly. Prince Davis grew up to become my grandfather.

  Years later, when the 1920 census taker came knocking at his door, Friday Davis was looking back on a long and productive life and didn’t mind saying so. Yes, he owned his own property in Johnson, South Carolina, he told the census man. Yes, he was the head of his household, at age seventy. And when the census taker asked if he could read and write, he answered yes both times—something few ex-slaves could say.

  I love seeing the strong thread connecting the Davis men in the public record. The 1910 census shows my grandfather and his wife, Anna Pope Davis, living in a house next door to Friday and Hester Davis. It’s not hard to imagine the profound impact that the father must have had on the son. These men, both farm owners, obviously didn’t fear hard work. The rhythms, struggles, and unpredictability of farming shaped their lives. Both had large families and were heads of households, not men who shirked their responsibilities.

  By 1920, my grandfather, Prince, had ventured out from under his father’s wing, relocating to another South Carolina county, perhaps with the idea of duplicating his dad’s success. He and his wife, Anna, did well for themselves, establishing a tobacco farm in Hemingway, a piece of property that remains in my family to this day.

  This is where my father, Kenneth Davis, was born on December 12,1926. He was the baby of the family, the last of eight children, although only six survived.

  Just like I used to think there was no place on earth better than our house on Ludlow Street while growing up, I know that my Pop felt the same way about his beloved family farm. Everything in his rural, insulated world revolved around the growing, curing, and selling of the all-important tobacco leaf. Behind their house, there was a tobacco barn and a smokehouse and beyond that, a barn. It was a nice-looking farm, dotted with pine and mulberry trees, and yellow plum trees that gave the kids—Leroy, Mildred, Persena, Joe, Olin, and baby Kenneth—something to snack on.

  Pop’s mom was a brown-skinned woman with a slight build and a sparkling personality. She lived to be almost one hundred, and I got a chance to meet her during my first summer trip down south when I was five. I was too young during that visit to have many memories, but a yellowed newspaper clipping shows that my popular grandmother thoroughly charmed a reporter sent by the Weekly Observer in Hemingway to chronicle her ninety-second birthday party in 1974. At the party, my grandmother recited a poem, “There Will Be No Tears in Heaven,” which she had learned in school as a child. “She used so much expression, you would think she was a graduate of a school of dramatic art,” the captivated reporter wrote. My grandmother was a loyal churchgoer and never spent a day in the hospital. “The diminutive woman, who weighs only 96 pounds, appears ageless,” the article said.

  My grandma’s contented outlook and good looks didn’t give a clue to how difficult her life must have been. My grandfather died in 1935, when he was about fifty-three, leaving her widowed with six children. My father wasn�
��t even ten years old at the time. It’s a theme that echoes eerily through George’s and Rameck’s stories, and mine: Not a single one of our fathers got the chance, as a boy, to bond with his own biological father.

  My dad, being the baby of the family, soon had everyone in his close-knit family looking out for him, since his widowed mom now had the responsibility of managing the farm by herself. His biggest fan in the household was his new aunt, Amelia, who had just married his older brother Leroy. Pop adored Amelia and loved being the center of her attention, a story that Aunt Amelia, now ninety-five and remarkably lucid, loves to tell. “Take me with you,” he’d cry out whenever he saw Leroy and Amelia getting in the car to go shopping or visiting. He especially loved going to Amelia’s mother’s house, and often begged to be taken there to spend the night.

  “No, you’re too little,” his big brother would say, giving little Kenneth the brush-off so he could spend time alone with his bride. But Amelia was a pushover for Kenneth’s whining, and in time she taught him to climb into the car and hide before the couple left. “When we’d get way down the road, Kenneth would stand up,” she remembered with a laugh. “My husband would say, ‘Oh well, it’s no use to turn around.’”

  Aunt Amelia said that my father eventually “adopted” his big brother Leroy as his father figure. “All during his life, if he had anything he wanted to talk over with a father, he would call my husband,” she said. “Even after he got married, he called my husband to talk about important things.”