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

by Sampson Davis

  “I remember that he would come home and we’d have to be quiet if he was really tired,” Andre continued. “But now that I’m a father, I get it. I know exactly how he felt. Sometimes you go to work and you’re bombarded by life’s everyday hassles and you get home and you don’t intentionally mean to alienate your kids and you’re not trying to—but you’re really dog-tired.

  “I get it,” he repeated.

  In August 2006, Andre, Carlton, and I took a trip together to Raleigh to see my ailing father. Thelma prompted our visit by telling us that our father often asked when he would see his sons.

  I arrived in North Carolina on a Friday evening. Andre and Carlton had taken the morning flight from Newark to Raleigh and already were at Thelma and Pop’s home. When I landed, I called Andre to let him know that I had made it in. He told me that they were at my father’s house and had brought Pop from the nursing home to spend some time there. This was a surprise. It was the first time my father had left the nursing home since being placed there after his hip fracture. I quickly gathered my bags and made my way to the house, fifteen miles away.

  The door was open and through the screen door I could see everyone laughing and talking in the living room. Any outsider would have thought this was the perfect family.

  I opened the door and took in the scene. Sitting in the living room were Thelma and my brothers; my stepsister Clarise; Andre’s twelve-year-old daughter, Angela; and Andre’s fiancée, Makeba. And then there was my father, sitting in his recliner, looking more peaceful and at ease than the last time I saw him five months before. The scent of a good meal was in the air. They had stirred up some black beans, rice, and fish. I was starving and sent my niece on the mission of preparing a plate for me. I ran around the room giving everyone a hug.

  Finally, I found myself in front of my father. I reached down and embraced him. He was sleeping but quickly woke up. Looking at me, he began to smile. “You got your boys here,” Thelma told him happily. He replied with an affirmative, “Yeah, my boys.” I sat down next to him and we all talked for hours, trying our best to draw in Pop when we could.

  As the night came to a close, we had to take my father back to the nursing home. Given his condition and the need for round-the-clock care, it was impossible to keep him home for the night. As we moved him from his chair to the car, he let us know with all his might that he disapproved of leaving. Looking up with all the energy he could muster, he began to repeat one word. “Why? Why? Why?” I took this to mean that he didn’t want to go back and he wondered why we were making him go. After all, it had been years since we had come together as a family. It felt so complete for us to gather in one place. This, I thought, is what we missed out on, that feeling of completeness. That wholeness where you know everything is okay because you have the most important thing within your reach—your family.

  The weekend sped by as we barbecued, played cards, listened to music, and on TV watched football and saw Tiger Woods win his fourth championship in a row. It was a great mini–family reunion in so many ways, and yet a rare event for the splintered Davis clan.

  Surrounded by my family, enriched by the newfound ancestors I had uncovered, I realized there was no sense in holding on to cancerous feelings. Pop’s lack of involvement through the years had caused our family to disconnect, but there was nothing stopping us, his sons, from changing that legacy.

  Thelma told us that through his haze and pain, Pop often asks, “Where are my boys?” Wasn’t that the exact response I had craved from him as a child, when I wished my dad would reach for me when he walked through the door?

  More then ever, time together matters, I thought. If it feels good to be together now, then is rehashing the past worth it? Silently, I let go of my resentment and pain and let them float away.

  Like Rameck and George, I wanted this book to address my unanswered questions. Yet I knew in my heart that my Pop wouldn’t be able to answer them. Even if he had been healthy and whole, I don’t think he could have handled a heart-to-heart discussion about being a tuned-in parent who is fully involved in his child’s life. That wasn’t the way his generation was raised and I knew it.

  But if I’ve learned anything from my father’s life, it’s that he was a product of his environment and yet he was determined to follow his dreams.

  I think that gives me permission to pursue my own dreams. That’s the reason I have dared to share my story: in the hope that it will lift today’s fathers to a new awareness of how the simple gifts of their attention and affection affect a child for a lifetime.

  Chapter 3

  SAMPSON

  What It Takes

  IVISIT CLASSROOMS ALL THE TIME, and I’ve been keeping an un-scientific poll of the kids I meet there.

  “How many of you don’t live with your fathers?” I ask bluntly.

  Inevitably, more than half raise their hands. Sometimes it’s nearly everyone. Often a student will pull me aside to share every detail of his or her father’s last visit, holding on to the memories tightly.

  It’s obvious to me even before I ask the question which ones will raise their hands. They’re the ones not-so-silently screaming for attention. The ones who interrupt my anti-violence presentation with outbursts, the ones slouching in their chairs, the ones who can’t keep their hands off the kid next to them. The undisciplined ones who remind me of myself when I was a little boy in the same boat, hungry for guidance.

  On one particular spring morning, I was at Peshine Avenue School in Newark, talking to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders about making smart decisions.

  “I practice emergency medicine, like on the show ER,” I explained. “I’m born and raised here in Newark. I went to Dayton Street School and University High School, right around the corner.”

  Every day that I report to the hospital for work, I tell them, I have to treat someone who ended up hurt and bleeding because he didn’t know how to work out a disagreement.

  Then I launch into my presentation, starting with the story of a nineteen-year-old arguing with his eighteen-year-old wife about the care of their child. The disagreement ended when she pulled out a shotgun and shot him in the chest. On a slide projector, I show a picture of a surgeon with his fingers in the husband’s chest, attempting to save his life.

  I figure I might as well start out with a domestic violence scene. It’s something I witnessed as a child and I’m sure many of these kids have, too. To stop the cycle, somebody’s got to speak up, even if it means pushing into the private world of these schoolchildren. So I do.

  My presentation is part of a program called Cops & Docs, created a few years ago by Dr. Duane Dyson, a physician who was born and raised in East Orange, New Jersey. He wanted to shake kids up by sharing the grim realities from emergency rooms and urging them to take a moment to think before they act violently. He thought of this outreach program and gave me a call. How could I refuse? I jumped at the chance and have been a speaker for the Violence Prevention Institute for several years. I deliver the majority of my lectures with my friend Hashim Garrett, a victim of gun violence. At fifteen, he was paralyzed after being gunned down by boys he thought were his friends. We believe in preventing violence before it happens. One good reason is that it saves money; it can cost $34,000 to incarcerate someone for a year, and as much as $322,000 for a hospital to treat a gunshot wound to the torso. Although many students have told me at the end of my presentation that they will never get involved in gun violence, our in-school prevention program still battles for funding every day.

  I have only two sessions to get my point across to each group of young people. So I go for the full shock treatment, bringing along a bag of surgical and emergency equipment. While we’re talking about the nineteen-year-old with the bullet in his chest, I show the kids the scalpel I would use to make an incision between his ribs, and then the intimidatingly huge rib spreader that lets me gain access to the heart and major blood vessels.

  “You can hear the ribs as they dislocate.
It sounds like Rice Krispies—snap, crackle, pop,” I tell them. Some kids act disgusted. Good, that lets me know they’re listening.

  I tell them that the first organ a doctor would see is the patient’s lung. By quickly moving it aside, I can see the heart. My job is to find the hole in the heart, or in the vessels coming off the heart, and determine whether it can be repaired. Although this technique worked on the patient in the slide show, too much time had elapsed since the gunshot blast occurred. By the time we restored his heartbeat in the ER, he was brain-dead due to lack of oxygen. My final slide shows the husband in a hospital bed on life support. This is the picture I use to drive home my point that, ultimately, his relatives were faced with the hardest decision a family can make. They chose to pull the plug and end his life.

  “It was all the result of domestic violence. All because he and his wife were not able to resolve their differences.” Now with them fully drawn in, I drive home the facts: Two lives are lost in the United States every hour because of gun violence. By the time I finish my presentation, two people will have been murdered. Most of the gun and knife injuries are split-second decisions stemming from anger, hatred, and an inability to resolve disagreements. I deliver the next point with a stern face: “Do you think this young father would have chosen death?” I’ve yet to see the toughest, biggest, strongest patient look me in the eye and say, “Doc, let me die! I’ve done wrong in life and deserve to die.” Instead, the patients of violence cry out in pain, despair, and fear.

  My patients’ cries, along with my own life’s journey, have inspired me to travel from one school to the next with a simple goal: to reach young people before they reach me.

  Another one of my slides is of a teenager who took part in a fight that resulted in gunfire. I don’t show his face. Instead, I show the eighteen inches of intestines and the kidney he lost when he got shot by a bullet.

  “This is the stuff they don’t tell you when you join a gang,” I tell the class. “They don’t throw their arms around you and say, ‘Listen, dawg, this could be you. You could be wearing a colostomy bag and not be able to go to the bathroom anymore.’”

  By now, I’ve got everybody’s attention, even the squirmy ones. “You want to be a gangster? This is it,” I say, holding a catheter high and explaining that it goes into your private parts while you’re in the hospital recovering from gang-related gunshot wounds. “This is true G right here.”

  When I am done with the theatrics, I bring the message home. “The key thing I want you to remember is this: Just like your mouth can get you shot, your mouth can save your life. Be mature enough to say, ‘I don’t want the problems. You go your way, I’ll go mine. It’s all just a big misunderstanding.’”

  This is the stuff that fathers need to be saying to their children.

  That’s what I think to myself as I pack up my laptop and equipment and head to my next school. These kids need to hear these messages—over and over until they truly sink in.

  Fathers used to be expected to share the load of child-rearing. But no more. Now the idea that a dad should be accountable to his children seems as optional as having a burger without cheese. When I listen to the radio on Father’s Day, I hear countless people call in to shout out their mothers: “My mom had to be my father, too, because my daddy wasn’t there to raise me” is the story told by caller after caller.

  The three of us see evidence of the absentee dad trend everywhere—on the job and in our work with the Three Doctors Foundation. For me, it’s so rare to see a child show up in the emergency room accompanied by both parents that I’m tempted to snap a picture whenever it does happen.

  When he speaks to students, Rameck often mentions the comic books he used to read in which superheroes lived in the Hall of Justice and the supervillains had an alternate universe. In their underworld, bad behavior was rewarded and good works were despised. Rameck sees a real parallel with poor urban neighborhoods, where smart students can be criticized for “acting white” and ex-felons get honored with a welcome-home party when they get out of prison. “Why do we celebrate the bad in our community?” Rameck asks his audiences.

  He might as well add “nuclear families” to his list of things that we’ve rejected. Parenting has gone through its own mutation, and we’ve arrived at a point where it’s normal for a mother and father to view themselves as adversaries rather than members of a unified team.

  I remember taking part in this mistaken way of thinking when I was a boy. After Pop left, when I was in middle school, I remember that my friends and I sometimes ganged up on a kid who stood out simply because he had two parents at home. We would ridicule him and call him a “daddy’s boy.” He had what we didn’t have—a father. And for some reason, we felt the need to tease him about it. It was our way of dealing with our discomfort from coming from single-parent households.

  As we got older, we became even more vicious. “You think you better than us?” we’d taunt him. It’s the way we coped, to soften the blow of fatherlessness. Eventually, we convinced ourselves that there were advantages to living with just a mom. If our mothers worked outside the home, it gave us freedom to run the streets. Having a dad at home would be a drag, curtailing our ability to hang out at will.

  Imitating my friends, I became full of bravado, standing on the corner acting like a gangster because it was expected of me. But that supertough exterior, I’ve learned, is a defense that ends up stripping young men of their ability to feel emotion. I’ve come to believe it’s just another factor that keeps us from creating close relationships, with women and even with our own children.

  Rameck, too, grew up with what he now realizes was a warped view of fatherhood. Taking care of children was women’s work, he believed, and fathers didn’t need to be involved on a daily basis. He rarely saw any exceptions to that rule. It shocked him when he heard, while we were in college, about a childhood friend who had taken his four children on a vacation to Florida. Somehow, Rameck just couldn’t picture this friend, a tough guy with plenty of street cred, splashing in the pool and having a great time with his kids. “Wow, he’s not as macho as I thought he was,” Rameck remembers thinking.

  But as time went on, more of Rameck’s friends became dads. And he couldn’t help but notice that not all of them chose to neglect their children. Several of his longtime friends, guys he truly respected, were changing diapers, making funny cooing noises to their son or daughter, and generally acting as if being a father was the greatest thing ever to happen to them. Seeing these friends transform themselves into doting dads jolted Rameck into realizing he’d been brainwashed from an early age.

  Unless you have your eyes shut to reality, it’s not hard to see why kids in poor communities are programmed from birth to accept the single-mom phenomenon. It’s no wonder so many of us grow up with no idea of how to collaborate with a partner to raise a child.

  I have a friend who managed to unlearn a lot of that kind of thinking. Let’s call him Tyrone. Like a lot of my friends who grew up in Newark, he let the streets select his values instead of choosing them for himself. He sold drugs, got arrested, survived being shot, and became an unwed father, all at an early age. He broke up with his longtime girlfriend when their daughter, Angel, was just three.

  Yet it was easy to see that underneath Tyrone’s street swagger and thug exterior was an affectionate father who absolutely doted on Angel. At first, the stories he shared with me reflected how hard it was for him to be apart from her. During one of their visits when she was very little, she stunned him by clearly pronouncing the word “refrigerator.” He had never heard her say a word that big before. Tyrone got so excited, he carried her through the house pointing at things to see what other words had been added to her vocabulary. I could tell that it devastated my friend to miss out on his daughter’s everyday discoveries and growth.

  But later, as she entered her “tween” years, Tyrone started complaining about his daughter’s behavior. One day, when she was eleven, he got a call
at work saying she had run away. He gathered a posse of family and friends to search the neighborhood. Police found her in a park eighteen hours later, still angry after a disagreement with her mother.

  Tyrone blamed Angel’s problems on her mother, who had moved them two hours away from Newark, to Pennsylvania. They had an old familiar routine of baiting each other constantly when they spoke on the phone. “Bring Angel down here so I can see her,” he would demand. “I can’t,” she would respond, without explanation. “You’re just stupid,” he’d yell. Sometimes the two argued so violently that he would slam down the phone and not call back or see his daughter for weeks.

  But then Tyrone woke up. Part of Angel’s behavior problems, he realized, stemmed from the fact that her mother was so drained by the responsibility of serving as Angel’s sole caretaker that she was acting more like her daughter’s friend than a disciplinarian. Although he believed his ex-girlfriend was making a big mistake by not setting firm rules for Angel, he sympathized with how easy it was for an exhausted single parent to fall into that trap. When Angel was seven, he spent a year as her custodial parent, and he’ll never forget how hard it was to manage everything from her hair to her meals to her homework.

  It’s time to make some changes, he told himself. It’s time to step up and become a bigger presence in Angel’s life. Her mother, he could see, needed some backup. “As a father, I think there are things you can do to make the mother’s life a lot easier—even if you don’t live together,” he told me. “You don’t know what she’s going through on a daily basis.”

  He also knew that he needed to convince Angel that he would listen to her problems and help her solve them. Hitting the roof about her running away wouldn’t help, he realized, biting back the urge to be angry in those first moments after the police reunited them. “I needed to make her understand that she doesn’t have to spaz out and run off,” he told me.