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

by Sampson Davis

  Pop is a self-taught musician, and Aunt Amelia remembers that his interest in the guitar began in high school when he and a group of teen friends started a band. In the 1940s, they performed throughout the community, going into private homes to play and sing. He loved gentle gospel songs and popular music, so much that sometimes he would cry from the sheer joy of singing, Amelia said.

  In 1945, near the end of World War II, he was inducted into the army. He was proud to serve his country. He cherished his photo album, filled with pictures he had snapped overseas in Japan, and I remember him talking happily about his army years. From what I gathered, my father loved the chance the military had provided for him to see the world.

  The army first shipped him to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he underwent eight weeks of basic training. My lonely Pop seemed to really struggle during that period. “Those eight weeks seemed like eight years because I wanted to go home so bad,” he once wrote in a neatly typed statement he titled “My Military Career.” “Entering the army, I was mostly homesick on Saturdays and Sundays for at least four or five weeks until I was stationed, then things began to get a little better when I began to know the fellows.”

  In the summer of 1945, Pop was shipped out to the Pacific. Later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing a swift end to the war. Pop’s antiaircraft unit and many other U.S. military regiments remained behind after Japan surrendered. Their new job was to occupy Japan and oversee the rebuilding of the country in the months following World War II.

  On September 13, 1945, Pop sent home a letter:

  Dear Mother,

  How are you all? I hope, as this leaves me, fine. Well, I’m learning to type a little if I didn’t take it in school.

  Don’t pay any attention to my mistakes because I’m not perfect.

  I went to Tokyo last Saturday and that is a wonderful place. I got a letter from Persena last week, and she said they were fine.

  I imagine you all are rich off the tobacco, how did it sell? Youshould see me now, I’m sitting behind a large desk with a typewriter at my disposal. (smile)

  I’m sending some money. Go ahead and spend it if you need it, and for goodness sake, don’t work too hard. I guess I will close now.

  Your son Kenneth

  My father, a private first class, served until July 1947, when he returned home to South Carolina at age twenty-one with an honorable discharge.

  When he came back to the family farm, his mother fixed a feast to welcome home the returning soldier. Back in the bosom of the family he had missed, my dad resumed his old social life. And like many black soldiers, he had to readjust to the rigid rules of the segregated South after experiencing more freedom overseas. A budding camera buff with a knapsack full of undeveloped film shot in Japan, he debated whether he should take the rolls to a local photo studio. He was eager to see the pictures he’d taken of Iko, a Japanese woman with a sweet smile whom he’d considered his girlfriend. But eventually he decided it wasn’t worth the risk. No sense in identifying himself as an uppity Negro to the white townsfolk, he decided.

  My father, a short, wiry man who carried himself with a military bearing, loved to dress in his army uniform for special functions. One day in 1948 he put on his carefully pressed uniform to attend a carnival that had come to town. At the penny-toss booth, a pretty little fifteen-year-old spied the handsome young man in uniform and spoke up about him. “I wouldn’t mind talking to him,” Ruthener Lawson remarked to her cousin. “I know him, that’s my friend. I’m going to connect you up,” the cousin replied.

  The cousin made the introductions, and shortly after that, Kenneth Davis came calling at the home of Emory Lawson, Ruthener’s father. This was a sensitive situation, one that Pop had to finesse. Ruthener was only fifteen, yet she was the backbone of her father’s household. Her mother had died when she was a little girl, and her father never remarried, so it fell to Ruthener to handle all the wifely duties around the farm. Also, Kenneth was seven years her senior.

  He courted her carefully, taking her into town on movie dates when he could coax his brother into letting him borrow the car. And when the car was off limits, he didn’t hesitate to walk the five miles between their farms just to talk to her. One Wednesday, when they were returning from the movies, he asked Ruthener to marry him. Moms was startled and stammered, “Well, I’ll think about it.”

  About a week later, Pop showed up to check on the status of his proposal. “Have you thought about it?” he inquired. Moms indicated that she was leaning toward saying yes, but she didn’t think her father would approve.

  The two of them cooked up a plan, and executed it that weekend. As usual, Moms went into town that Saturday with her sister to do the shopping, and Pop met her there. Quietly, they strolled away. Later that day, Pop drove her back to her father’s farm and dropped her off. For a year, they kept secret the fact that they had slipped away to Florence, South Carolina, and had gotten married.

  They still courted on weekends, and Ruthener continued to care for her father. In time, her father grew fond of Kenneth, who volunteered his time doing chores around the Lawson farm and also helped out by driving Moms into town to pick up items at the store. My Pop, in turn, respected Mr. Lawson and appreciated him for treating him like a member of the family.

  The two men’s growing affection for each other certainly helped the situation a year later when Ruthener’s bouts of morning sickness tipped her father off to the fact that she was pregnant with my brother Kenny. Fearing his response, Moms hastily told her father the truth. To her surprise, he didn’t fuss. “I can’t do anything about it, you’re married now,” her father responded.

  With the secret unmasked, Kenneth and Ruthener finally could live under the same roof. With his father-in-law’s blessing, Pop moved into the Lawson household, where Kenny and Roselene both were born. Sometimes, however, the young couple went to stay at my Pop’s family farm to keep his mother company.

  Pop got a job pumping gas and changing tires at a filling station. While he went about his day, he began to hear in his mind the same internal debate many Southern blacks were puzzling over during this period. “Stay in the South, where I’ll be relegated to menial jobs like this for the rest of my life?” With two babies already and the hope of fathering a larger family, he didn’t want to limit his income.

  “If we go up north, we can make more money there than we can down here,” he told his wife, who agreed.

  Most of Pop’s brothers and sisters opted to stay put, sticking close to the family’s Georgetown County property. His brother Leroy opened up a successful little store right around the corner from the farm that stocked all kinds of necessities, including rows of sweet treats. I remember during our occasional summer trips down south, he would give us candy and cookies when we came in the door.

  Studying my family’s geography in order to write this chapter helped me to realize how boldly Pop acted when he decided to come north. He faced heavy pressure from aunts and uncles who didn’t want him to leave. His South Carolina relatives, the center of his world, fretted about their baby leaving home. “He was too young to go off,” Aunt Amelia remembers thinking. And Ruthener was still a teenager! How would they manage with two toddlers? “They’re too young to be on their own in the big city,” Amelia insisted.

  But Pop did have one role model. His sister Persena had moved to New York a few years earlier. A single mom, she probably felt that New York was a place where she could start over and build a new life for herself.

  Her little brother Kenneth followed her lead cautiously. He came up north by himself, in 1950, to stay at Persena’s apartment and look for a job. He landed one at a New York store and started mailing money home to his family.

  As soon as he could, he sent for his wife to join him. Ruthener left little Kenny and Roselene in the care of relatives, and she headed north. They took an apartment in the Newark area after my father landed a job at the airport with Butler Aviation. She took
a job at a New Jersey box company, operating a machine that made boxes for stockings, shoes, and candy.

  Kenny and Roselene stayed safe in the sheltering South for several more years, bouncing among their parents’ relatives. Kenny remembers that at first they lived with Moms’s father, Emory Lawson, and got to tag along on many of the farm duties. Soon they were doing their mother’s old job feeding the chickens.

  After Moms’s father died, Kenny and Roselene shifted over to the noisy, child-filled home where Pop’s mother and his brother Joe’s family lived. To make them feel more comfortable, our grandmother, whom they called Ma-Ma, took them on a walk through the farm. “This is your very own tree,” she told them, picking out an apple or pecan tree for each. They could help themselves to its fruit, or just retreat to it when they needed some comfort. Sometimes those personal trees came in handy; Kenny and Roselene missed their parents like crazy. Uncle Joe had a lot of kids, and feelings could get hurt in a house with so many personalities.

  As those country months stretched on, my brother Kenny often insisted to his cousins that he hadn’t been forgotten. “My mom and dad are going to come and get us,” he would tell them while sitting on the porch gazing at the dirt road leading out of the property. “They didn’t just leave us.” But as he waited for word from his parents, summer came and went.

  Then, one morning when Kenny was about seven years old, he woke up and felt his heart rejoice without explanation. A little later, he looked down their country lane and could see a car in the distance, raising dust. “That’s Mom and Dad,” he confidently told his same-age cousin, Glen. Kenny was correct. “I told you they were coming!” he shrieked when his parents stepped out of the car.

  I wish more than anything that I had been born in time to witness those first triumphant years when my family was reunited in Newark. They had to have been the best years of my parents’ marriage. Kenny’s memories of that period are bliss-filled. He remembers family outings to the park, and Sunday evenings after church when Moms and Pop would embrace on the couch while he and Roselene parked themselves in front of the TV watching Bonanza.

  He remembers going to Christmas parties at Pop’s job, where he’d have a chance to sit on Santa’s lap. Christmases were great, he recalls: “I got everything I wanted.” After all the presents were unwrapped, Moms and Pop would teasingly blame each other for spoiling their kids rotten.

  Even today, Kenny talks with little-boy awe about the day that Pop walked with him into the neighborhood boys’ club, where my brother often participated in woodshop classes after school. As the instructor showed Pop some of Kenny’s woodworking projects, my brother could hear the other kids whispering, “That’s Kenny’s father,” with envy. “That was the proudest moment of my life,” Kenny declared. “He was a whole lot better than a lot of the other dads that are out there.”

  My parents welcomed four more children after they moved to Newark. My sister Fellease arrived quickly after Moms and Dad reunited. Ten years later, my parents resumed their childbearing streak. My brother Andre was born in 1968, I followed in 1973, and my little brother Carlton showed up in 1977.

  As the second set of Davis kids arrived, the economics of raising a big family on a little salary began to take a toll on my parents’ relationship. The attentive dad that Kenny and Roselene remember doesn’t resemble at all the reclusive guy that Andre, Carlton, and I knew. “To me, he was the greatest father alive. He was my friend as well as my dad,” Kenny told me. “Sometimes I feel sorry for you guys because you missed out on the good stuff. Y’ all weren’t able to see the love that Ma and Dad had for each other.”

  What happened to change my father’s outlook? His dreams must have been limitless when he took that job at Butler Aviation in the 1950s. He must have felt immense gratitude just to be hired, since it was essentially a guarantee that he wouldn’t have to return to South Carolina. Pop worked at Butler for thirty-five years. His job was to drive a fuel truck to the planes at the airport to fill the tanks with gasoline. He endured summer’s humidity and the biting cold of winter on Newark Bay, reporting to work at six o’clock every morning. He was never promoted to foreman, and to my knowledge he never complained about it. When I think of my father’s demeanor at work, I know it’s a testament to his upbringing. My Pop was just loyal. Considering that he’d come from the rural South, where logs in the stove heated the house and indoor plumbing was a relatively new advancement, he settled gratefully into his workaday life, happy to have a job.

  This was the attitude of many black men of his generation who flocked to the North. They had fled outright racism and had high hopes of being able to raise their families in a place where the chances of prospering were much better. In the 1950s, his generation could feel free to dream. But reality set in during the ensuing years, as black low-income ghettos started taking shape in the major urban centers in the Northeast.

  I think one of Pop’s main challenges was that the support structure he depended on in the South just didn’t exist up north. In the South, the extended family created an important safety net. They’d take in a needy relative and freely share their food, their resources, their values. Couples rarely divorced. Relatives and church members would feel free to intervene if a philandering husband needed someone to shake him up and tell him to act right. In the rural South, the community shaped the values of its people.

  But in Newark, the community was turning Pop’s world topsy-turvy by its relentless barrage of drugs, violence, and negativity, and I suspect that he didn’t know how to fight it.

  When Pop came in at night, he’d seal the world out, never even glancing across the street at the Dayton Street projects. Although my brothers and I knew all the faces and haunts in our neighborhood, Pop rarely socialized with any of the neighbors. The one day that he did stride across the street and walk into the projects sticks out in my memory because it was so out of the ordinary for him. On that particular day, Andre had taken the bus to school, something he typically avoided doing because rowdy boys from the projects usually started some mischief on it. And sure enough, before the bus ride was over, Andre got pulled into a slapboxing fight with some of the boys from the projects. Andre not only got a reprimand from the principal when he got to school, he was assaulted again on his way home by the same boys, who saw him alone and surrounded him.

  When our father got home and heard the story, he grabbed some friends to back him up and walked into the projects. He didn’t leave until he found out who had attacked his son. He left behind a warning not to do it again.

  But every day, in dozens of ways, his children were under fire from unhealthy influences, and Pop couldn’t possibly fight them all. He had worked hard to save enough money to buy our house in what was originally a stable area, but the neighborhood decayed around us. There was no safety net that could help him shield his kids from the violence and crime in our environment. In time, my fun-loving, down-to-earth sister Fellease, whom I adored, got hooked on drugs and resorted to a lot of risky behaviors. Several times, Moms had to find the money to bail Fellease out of jail. And my popular brother Kenny became a terror in his teens and twenties. Kenny drank heavily, acted abusively toward his girlfriend, and raised all kinds of hell at home. During my college years, Kenny suffered a traumatic head injury in a fight, ending up with permanent brain damage.

  After the accident, Pop stayed at Kenny’s side in the hospital and helped him through those angry months of rehabilitation when Kenny questioned why his life had turned out this way. Doctors told Kenny to prepare for life in a wheelchair. This was one time when the emotionless Pop I knew showed another face. He didn’t flinch from the tough job of being there to help Kenny deal with the fact that he couldn’t walk. He provided the shoulder that Kenny needed to cry on, and they forged a special bond during that time.

  Today, my brother has made peace with the events that robbed him of his independence and put him in a nursing home. When I interviewed him for this book, he had much to say. If throug
h some miracle he could rewrite history, Kenny said he would toy with the idea of erasing our family’s decision to migrate to the big city. “I wish at times I had been brought up like Pop. I would have appreciated things more. I figure if I had been left down there [in the South], I wouldn’t be in this wheelchair right now. I didn’t listen. I had to find out the hard way,” he said.

  “If I had stayed in the South, things wouldn’t have turned out like this, I wouldn’t have tried all that crazy stuff. Down there, I wouldn’t have been messing around. You didn’t have that free time on your hands. You had to help out. Me and Roselene, we had chores. ‘Finish your work, learn the Twenty-third Psalm, go to bed,’ that’s what Ma-Ma would have said.”

  Coming of age in Newark was a totally different story, Kenny said. He remembered feeling forced by his peers to demonstrate his manhood through violence and drinking. “It’s the city life,” Kenny believes. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do. If I hadn’t conformed, I would have perished. I wanted to be one of the boys.”

  In the 1960s and 1970s, when my parents were struggling to keep their kids off the streets, the concept of “quality time” hadn’t come into the nation’s vocabulary yet. Steering his kids past inner-city Newark’s land mines required skills and fortitude that Pop just couldn’t manufacture.

  Retreating behind a closed door was Pop’s method of coping, and without a doubt, it takes amazing coping skills to survive in a poor neighborhood. Sometimes I think that middle-class folks who frown on the behavior of poor people need to see for themselves what it’s like. It would be an interesting experiment to drop someone like that off in the ’ hood for a few months and see how they survive with no job prospects, no source of income, a houseful of mouths to feed, and a neighborhood bulging with addicts and criminals. How would they find someone suitable to marry when all the potential mates are addicted to drugs and alcohol?