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

by Sampson Davis

  How would they combat the experiences their children receive at sub-standard schools where their brains get stuffed with profanity and hallway violence instead of math and reading? Pop certainly couldn’t figure that one out.

  When I was young, I heard him many times warn my older siblings away from the bad influences. I guess he wished his children could shut the world out, as he eventually taught himself to do. But like the hardheaded teenagers they were, they stubbornly defied him. My brother Andre remembers Pop urging him to be in by midnight. “Nothing good happens in Newark after twelve o’clock at night,” Pop would warn him. My brother admits that he didn’t listen. He thought he had the right to hang out in the streets with his friends until morning if he wanted to.

  By the time I was approaching my teen years, Pop seemed to admit defeat. For him, life in our house appeared to be torture. In the waning years of their marriage, my parents attempted to curb the altercations by moving to different areas of the house. I long believed that the way they carved out their domains contributed to the way that Pop sequestered himself. He was the breadwinner, and the house was Moms’s responsibility. That sharp division of duties ended up contributing to the emotional distance between the kids and Pop. When my dad was in my mother’s territory, he walled himself off.

  Music served as his emotional getaway. Although he couldn’t read music, he had a load of natural talent and would sit in the living room and play his favorite songs on his guitar. He loved spirituals and down-home rhythm and blues. He has a beloved collection of albums, some of which are older than me, from his favorite artists including Glenn Miller, Nat “King” Cole, the Mills Brother, and his beloved Dixie Hummingbirds. For him, music was a gift and he loved every moment of it. He could drift for hours, playing his guitar and singing his favorite tunes.

  When I was little, he joined with some other gospel musicians to form the Holy Righteous Gospel Singers. Dressed formally in matching black suits, they performed at gigs throughout the Newark area. I saw him perform once at a local Baptist church. He was the lead bass guitar player. He stood tall and dignified, and I remember feeling so proud of him. My father dreamed of one day earning his living as a performer.

  Even as a youngster, I could tell from Pop’s unhappiness that he envisioned another life for himself. But what I didn’t know was that from the time I was a little boy, he had begun to shape a secret life, chasing after the satisfaction he thought he was lacking. I learned this only recently from my stepmother, Thelma. When I asked Thelma to help me construct Pop’s biography, she filled in many of the details of Pop’s life that I never knew about.

  Pop met Thelma in the summer of 1977, when I was four and Carlton was only a baby. They were introduced by a neighbor of ours who asked Dad to give Thelma a ride back to her place in Queens. From the beginning of their relationship, Pop never hid the fact that he was a husband and father. But he and his wife were so incompatible that they lived in different parts of the house, he told Thelma, and his house was too chaotic for him to be happy.

  He asked for her phone number. Though unsure, she gave it to him. “I’m not interested in a married man,” Thelma told him at first. “With what I’m going through right now, I’m not interested in anyone.” At that time, Thelma was helping her family cope with the ordeal caused several years earlier when her husband killed a seventeen-year-old, her oldest son’s best friend, in the lobby of a Brooklyn housing project. By then, her husband was in prison, serving five to sixteen years, and she was in the process of getting a divorce. Thelma, who was twelve years younger than Pop, simply wanted to focus on healing herself and her family.

  But Pop put his mind to pursuing her, and for Thelma, it felt good to be treated with dignity and sweetness. Although they didn’t see each other often, since they lived an hour apart, he never stopped calling and telling her how lonely he was for her. He had been praying for someone to come into his life who would appreciate him for him, he told her.

  As Pop began to open up and let his feelings out, Thelma began to let her guard down a bit. “It’s not your average man who prays to God for someone to come into his life,” she told herself. She could sympathize with how he had struggled with marital problems but hadn’t yet left the relationship. Her husband had been a drug user and a womanizer, but with six kids to support, she never seriously considered leaving him. When Pop told her that all he wanted was some peace and happiness in a relationship, it struck a chord with Thelma. It was something she, too, craved.

  The two started an experimental courtship, although Thelma continued to be unsure of whether she was doing the right thing. Thelma even remembered a day when she got to meet Pop’s youngest boys. Pop, she said, one day put me, Andre, and Carlton into the car and took us to a mall to meet her, although of course we were too young to understand what was going on.

  Their budding relationship wasn’t so much sexual as it was a source of comfort for the two of them, Thelma said. It wasn’t long before my father told her he loved her. But on one point, Thelma remained firm: If Kenneth Davis wanted her, he was going to have to wait. “I’m not even going to think about marriage until my youngest daughter graduates from high school,” she told Pop.

  So my father settled in for a ten-year wait, always wooing Thelma back whenever she attempted to break it off. “If you end our relationship, I have nothing to live for,” he told her once. “I love you and I don’t want to lose you.”

  I must admit, learning these raw facts about my father’s infidelity has been painful for me. Yet it makes sense. Now I finally know where my father’s love and attention were going. In essence, he left me to fend for myself after his soured marriage caused him to head off in search of love.

  For years I felt alone. That doesn’t even sound logical—I had both parents living with me, yet I was alone. But my mom and dad were busy battling their issues and going through their challenges. I learned to stay quiet and not add any fuel to the fire. Their volatility shaped me. I would stay away from the house for hours when I was a boy, simply because I didn’t want to go home and say something that might cause a fight. I spent those years wishing for my ideal dad. I yearned for my parents to be in love. What child doesn’t? As I grew older, I stopped fantasizing and realized it wasn’t going to happen. I blamed myself at first and thought it was a mistake that I had been born. Then I forced myself to move on and learned to depend on myself. Yet there is a piece of me that will always be empty.

  As I learn the story of my father and Thelma, a side of me is happy for Pop. Everyone needs happiness to sustain them, and obviously he wasn’t getting the love he desired at home. He needed it and Thelma was there. I understand. Yet I wish that my father had been there for us in the same way that he was there for Thelma. It baffles me that Pop put his needs ahead of ours, not recognizing that his children had the same needs and desires he did.

  I also learned from Thelma that she played a key role in helping Pop learn to cool his head and quell some of the violence in our home. In fact, she may have been the angel who indirectly saved our lives. Pop, she said, had told her how my mother’s hot temper could provoke him to rage. He confided to her about an episode when he had held a gun to my mother’s head and had to force himself not to pull the trigger.

  Thelma, who still lived with the memory of the violent rampage of the man she divorced in 1980, detected the danger in Pop’s words. She worked hard, she told me, to counsel my father through those urges. “Get rid of the gun,” she insisted to Pop. “Don’t even think of hurting her.” It was Thelma who suggested that Pop go to a quiet room or leave the house altogether. Again, her story fit like a missing piece into the puzzle of my childhood, seeming to explain why my parents’ arguments became less explosive in the later years as we saw less and less of Pop.

  Pop finally moved into to an apartment in 1985. Two years later, Thelma moved in with him. She had kept her promise, waiting until her youngest daughter graduated from high school. A few months later, they had a s
mall church wedding and a reception at the home of one of Thelma’s relatives.

  I was fourteen at the time, and ambivalent about going to the wedding. Who wants to see their father get remarried? I didn’t know what I would say or do at a wedding where my father would be marrying another woman. But I got dressed and waited with my brothers for my uncle Buddy to come get us. He never showed up. I never found out why. Years later, I would see the pictures of their wedding day. Thelma wore an off-white dress and headpiece; Pop looked happy in a black tuxedo.

  I remember seeing my older cousin Anthony in the pictures. As a kid, I wasn’t privy to “grown folks’ business,” but I now know from Thelma that she had traveled with Pop on several occasions to meet his family in South Carolina, even while my parents were married. Anthony, my father’s nephew, was one of many relatives who had known about their relationship for years and cheered them on. It was Anthony who drove my dad to his wedding that day and stood at his side. “This is long overdue and I want you to have some happiness and peace in life,” Anthony told my dad.

  In talking to some of my dad’s relatives, I’ve learned that they knew how tumultuous my parents’ relationship was. Pop apparently had shared his side of the story regarding the turmoil going on inside our house. They knew about the fights and violence and seemed to think my mother was at fault and that my father deserved better. They admired him for sticking it out as long as he did.

  Pop retired in 1991 and set about making his long-deferred dreams a reality in the years that followed. He and Thelma bought some land in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in the late 1990s, moved back to the South that my father had missed so much. When the property sales manager asked him what amenities he wanted in his new home, Pop replied only that he wanted “a refrigerator with an ice maker.” And when he opened the door of his modest but gleaming new home for the first time, freshly made cubes were waiting for him.

  With Thelma, Pop started indulging his love of travel. They signed up for bus tours of nearby sights, and he took his camera along to snap moments that he wanted to remember.

  He enjoyed spending hours at a local bookstore, buying discount books about different countries of the world and their history. He loved shopping for CD versions of his favorite music. In his later years, he pursued the things that brought him joy.

  In October 2001, he had to make a sad return trip to Newark. My sister Fellease had died, at age forty-three, of complications related to HIV. Andre and I handled the funeral arrangements, and I paid for the funeral. By then I was a full-fledged physician. I had noticed earlier that Fellease was showing some symptoms of HIV. Unable to kick her drug habit, Fellease had gotten lost in the culture of drugs and contracted the disease through unprotected sex. It devastated me to be called to the hospital to identify my sister’s body. The heartbreak I felt over her death is only intensified today, as the number of black females with HIV has mushroomed into a deadly epidemic.

  Pop was at the wake, and he gave me the kind of half-hug that I had grown used to. I don’t remember him crying. But that would have been out of character for him. In earlier years he had made it clear to Fellease that he disapproved of her drug arrests, the way she begged for money, and how she disappeared for days at a time. I think he was silently heartbroken that he had lost a child, like so many families had around us. But, as usual, it went against his personal code to express his feelings to us.

  I made sure that my mom, Pop, and Thelma got tickets to attend the Essence Awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 2000, when George, Rameck, and I received an award from the magazine. It was a glittering night, with Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, and Hillary Clinton in attendance. It felt great to be included with stars like Danny Glover and Michael Jordan as award recipients. The standing ovation we received felt so intoxicatingly fabulous that I promised myself the Three Doctors would be back real soon. Pop was quiet that night, but all smiles. He didn’t say much, but I could tell that he was proud.

  I could also tell the event was a moment of reflection for him. Maybe he was questioning his absence in my life? We never spoke about it, but his face gave away the fact that he was thinking about something serious.

  That was one of the last times I saw him in good health. As I said my goodbyes and the limousine I had booked for my family took them back to New Jersey, I couldn’t predict the battles my father would face over the next few years. He was diagnosed first with prostate cancer, and successfully underwent radiation therapy. Then diabetes started to destroy his eyesight, which he took extremely hard. Slowly, he found himself unable to read or play the guitar.

  But the cruelest diagnosis was yet to come. Pop now suffers from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, two diseases of the brain that lead to dementia with loss of memory. Slowly, he has become detached and unable to process the details of his world.

  Pop fractured his hip in April 2005, and hasn’t walked since. When I visited him in North Carolina in March 2006, I saw that Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s had conspired to take away his awareness and ability to communicate. Earlier that month, Thelma had made the difficult decision to place him in a nursing home in Garner, North Carolina, just a few miles from the retirement nest they had shared.

  I’ve never held any resentment toward Thelma. She made my father happy. As I’ve watched her care unselfishly for Pop, I’ve grown to admire her even more. She stays in touch with me and keeps me abreast of my father’s health. “You’ve got to take care of your people when they’re in a place like this,” Thelma said matter-of-factly, as she arrived at The Laurels of Forest Glenn for her daily visit with my father. She has made sure his room is neat and color-coordinated in blue and white.

  I visited him not long after he moved to the nursing home, and was surprised to see how painfully thin and fragile he looked. Even before I arrived, I had pretty much given up on the idea of posing any questions for this book to him, knowing his physical state. His gaunt, weakened appearance let me know that my hunch was right.

  But Pop surprised everybody by talking a little.

  Do you remember the 2000 Essence Awards? we asked.

  “I was on cloud nine,” Pop responded.

  What do you remember about your mother, Anna?

  “She would whip me,” he wisecracked.

  To break through the haziness of Alzheimer’s, we brought pictures and music in hopes that Pop would respond to them. He seemed to enjoy listening to a CD, An Anthology of Big Band Swing, 1930–1955, with some of his favorites: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton, and Louis Armstrong.

  He was most enthralled to see an old publicity photograph of himself and the Holy Righteous Gospel Singers. He gazed at it for a long time and murmured to himself, lost in his own world. It was an oddly familiar feeling for me to be back on the outside, on the other side of the door.

  But music, once his escape, is now Pop’s doorway back to lucidity. He talks in fuller sentences when he’s discussing music. The gospel group picture seemed to open up a speeding train of clear thought for him. He sang a few lines of an old song, “Cotton needed picking so bad,” in a voice that was clear and strong.

  But as the hour drew later, Pop began pulling away. It’s what typically happens in the evening, Thelma said. I watched as he fiddled constantly with his hands, buttoning and unbuttoning his shirt, becoming increasingly disoriented. I recognized from experience that what Pop was doing was called “sundowning,” the term for when a patient becomes increasingly restless and agitated at the end of the day.

  Eventually he held his head in his hands sadly, as if disappointed he couldn’t make sense of things anymore. I lifted my once strong father in my arms and put him to bed. He couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds.

  When I visited the next morning, I rolled Pop in his wheelchair down the hall to a large airy room where a few volunteers were holding a devotional service, singing spirituals. Pop looked frail that morning, with a faraway look in his eyes. He
seemed unable to comprehend who I was or what was going on. But he tapped his foot in time to the music and inclined his head silently toward me, as if I was the sunshine and he was just drinking it in.

  As the vocalist sang, “Lord, I can’t even walk without you holding my hand,” tears quietly dropped from Pop’s eyes. Aunt Amelia had said that he used to cry, as a boy, at the heart-tugging beauty of a gospel song. I could see in that pure moment that her memory was true.

  I took Pop back to his room and kissed him goodbye.

  As much as I wish our story had been written differently, I still feel the need to spend time at my father’s side during his declining days.

  I’m still collecting information as I continue my conversations with my family about my father. My brother Andre doesn’t dispute the fact that Pop struggled with affection. He rarely heard Pop say “I love you.” Yet as the years have passed, Andre has become a father himself, which helped him arrive at a new appreciation for Pop. “I see the love now,” Andre said.

  Andre pointed out to me that our father was nearing sixty when we became teenagers. Just like me, Andre looked wistfully at the backyard two doors down from us when our neighbor Mike was out there playing with his father—but later he realized the two men weren’t the same. “As I got older, I realized that Pop can’t do that. He’s a much more senior, mature man,” he said. Pop, he realized, had other strengths. “He gave us that hardwork ethic. He taught us to be honest and hardworking. Just get out there and do the right thing, even though it’s hard.”

  Today, Andre finds a lot in Pop’s fathering style that is worth copying. With a laugh, he even admits that he’s been known to borrow that same “Nothing good happens in Newark after twelve o’clock at night” line that Pop used with him. “I’m trying to use the example he set. I’m trying to hold up that bar by being the man of the house,” Andre said.