It’s sad but in our communities, it’s not just children who need role models. Fathers do, too.
Chapter 4
SAMPSON
Learning to Be a Man
IF WE ARE TO BELIEVE society’s stereotypes, it’s highly uncommon to find a black man taking care of his children. It’s as if such men are a rarity, an animal on the brink of extinction. “Oh my God!” we’re trained to think when we happen upon a brother at the library with his kids or at the supermarket buying groceries with a baby in the cart. “There’s that rare species, the black man taking care of his children!”
But George, Rameck, and I know many men who are loving, attentive fathers. Many of these men lacked a father’s guidance in their own lives, but they’re diving in and trying to figure out the puzzle for their own children. I respect them deeply for serving as role models to me, and for sharing here the joy and rewards they find in being there for their child.
REGGIE
Although I still look up to my mentor from the cemetery, Reggie Brown, I don’t get to spend much time with him anymore. He no longer lives in New Jersey.
In 1988, Reggie had a tough situation on his plate. He and his wife appeared to be heading for divorce, and her employer wanted to relocate her to Pennsylvania.
As a father of two little girls, he weighed his options. He could stay in the Newark area with his lifelong friends and family. There, he had two security-guard jobs that paid decent wages, and he also ran a martial arts school in our Dayton Street neighborhood that he was devoted to keeping alive after Wu-Chi’s death. Or he could move to Pennsylvania, where he knew no one and had no job prospects. He didn’t think his troubled marriage would last much longer. Still, “I had two daughters and I couldn’t leave them fatherless. That was out of the question,” he said. “So I decided to drop everything and start over.”
To Reggie, it seemed as if God rewarded him, helping him find a job the day after he arrived in Pennsylvania. Reggie got hired at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in suburban Philadelphia, and since then he has moved up the ladder. “I kept getting blessed. I was an officer at the prison for only a little over a year when I got promoted to a corporal,” he said. His martial arts training paid off. Reggie became a defensive tactics instructor and physical fitness coordinator for the prison system. Today he supervises the prison’s canine unit, and the job has provided a level of financial stability that Reggie, who didn’t go to college, never envisioned for himself in Newark.
He and his wife split up soon after the move. “Even today, it brings tears to my eyes to remember that day when I left. The look on my daughters’ faces was like, ‘We’re not going to see you again?’ I reassured them that wasn’t going to happen. I was going to be there. I made that commitment,” he said. “I didn’t run from my responsibility. I paid child support. The girls spent summers with me, and every year I took them with me on vacation. Even today at every holiday family function, they’re there.”
His older daughter, Aliyya, now twenty-three, said her father’s constant attention helped boost her self-esteem as a little girl, and strengthens her today as a single parent. She won’t forget how Reggie used to move aside the living room table so he could teach his girls how to punch and kick in self-defense. “Most of my friends can’t stand to be around their fathers. I’ve always known that my dad’s kind of special. To this day, he still makes sure we have everything we need,” she said.
To Aliyya, it’s been a disappointment to grow up and find that all men aren’t cut from the same cloth as her dad. Her two children don’t see much of their father, who lives in another state. But Reggie keeps two car seats in his garage for outings with his grandkids and has stocked his house with toys and clothes for them. “My kids have fallen in love with their Pop-Pop. I knew they would,” Aliyya said.
Reggie remarried and now has a preteen daughter. He’s very popular at her school, not only because he regularly chaperones field trips but also because he brings the canine unit in on Career Day and lets the dogs entertain the kids. He believes firmly that “young people shouldn’t just see Mom going on these school trips, or only moms volunteering. They need to see fathers in there, too.”
Part of what gave Reggie a sense of how to perform as a parent is the great memories he has of time spent with his father when he was a boy. He remembers coming home from school to find notes from Dad, telling him and his brothers to meet him at nearby Weequahic Park. There, he’d happily lie on a blanket and do his homework, while Dad grilled hot dogs. Sometimes they’d spend long, quiet hours fishing at Asbury Park.
But his parents didn’t get along, and they fought stormily whenever they drank. One day, completely out of the blue, his father walked out on his wife and seven children, and didn’t come back. His mother stayed in bed and cried for four days straight without getting up. Reggie, whose family for years had squeezed into a three-bedroom apartment in the projects, remembers feeling hopeless. “We’re never going to get out of this hellhole,” he thought to himself. Reggie’s dad paid child support and stayed in touch, but his day-to-day absence was hard on his kids.
The way Reggie’s parents handled their conflict taught him that there had to be a better way. “I didn’t want to be like that,” he said. “The important thing is you can’t put the kids in the middle. If you and your spouse are having problems, you still have that responsibility to stay in tune with your children because it’s not their fault.”
That’s why Reggie has never lived farther than a half hour from his children, and why he makes it a priority to spend time with them and to be openly affectionate. “I’m in a business where anything can happen. In prison, people get killed for no reason at all,” Reggie explained. “I never leave my family without kissing them and saying ‘I love you.’”
MAURICE
With sex being one of the main things we were taught to pursue as teens, it’s not surprising that many of our childhood friends became fathers. Some are responsible dads, some are not. One of Rameck’s longtime friends is a guy we’ll call Maurice, who has a dedication to fatherhood we all admire.
Rameck remembers envying Maurice when they were kids because he had an intact family: three brothers, a mom, and a father who came home after work every night. But Maurice insists that the grass wasn’t any greener over at his house.
Maurice’s father was one of those distant dads who didn’t interact with his kids when he got home. He drank heavily, smoked cigarettes, and cursed in front of his sons. And he had a short fuse, as evidenced by the day Maurice got in trouble in kindergarten for saying a curse word. When his father found out, he backhanded his son so hard that Maurice fell backward off the bed, rolled across the floor, and hit his head hard against the closet door.
“You shouldn’t be hitting me for what you’re teaching me,” Maurice thought to himself. Although it’s a boy’s first instinct to imitate his dad, Maurice realized at an early age that in more ways than one, he wouldn’t be copying his dad’s behavior anymore.
Maurice’s parents separated when he was a teenager, and his mother took his father to court for child support. His dad had always been very critical of his boys and quick to tell them when they weren’t acting manly enough. So it came as a big surprise to Maurice when his father quit his job to avoid paying child support, and moved from New Jersey down south. Maurice couldn’t believe his father’s behavior. “For all those years he was so hard on us, at the end of the day, he was a coward,” he said incredulously. The two haven’t spoken in more than six years.
Maurice was a bright kid. He excelled in math and wanted to go to college, but he couldn’t solve the puzzle of how to pay for it. Dejected, he resorted to joining the largest industry recruiting black youths in our neighborhood at the time. “When I didn’t go straight to college at age eighteen, I started selling drugs instead. I always carried a gun. What are you gonna do? It’s a cycle,” Maurice said. He got in a shoot-out over a drug deal and got arrested for shooti
ng a guy in the foot.
Today, Maurice views the year he spent in jail as a blessing. “I believe in God and where he leads me is where I’m supposed to go,” he said. “Most people think jail is a negative thing, but I was very reckless when I was younger. Thank God I only shot the guy in the foot. I didn’t kill him. God gave me a slap on the hand and said change your ways, and that’s what I did.”
When he got out, he got a student loan and went to a technical school. From there, recruiters helped him find a job that paid for his associate’s degree in computer science.
He landed a good job and things were going smoother than he ever believed they could when he unexpectedly became a daddy at age twenty-seven. It was a pure case of two people being irresponsible. The baby’s mother meant nothing to him; she was just a girl he had met when he drove up next to her at a red light and asked for her number. They dated occasionally for about eight months. “It was basically a sexual relationship, no real commitment.”
Knowing he didn’t have real feelings for the mother, Maurice asked her to get an abortion. She refused and clearly resented him for even suggesting it. That moment sealed their fate. From that point, they would always be adversaries in the raising of their child.
Maurice knew that if the baby was going to be born, he wanted to be a good father. Since the baby’s mother didn’t have much money, he bought two of everything—cribs, car seats, a wardrobe—and took a set to the mother’s house. It was there that he found out she had married another man two weeks before the baby was due, and she planned to put the new husband down on the birth certificate as the baby’s father.
When the new husband walked in, angry words were exchanged. “I said some things I shouldn’t have said to try to hurt her in the way that I was hurt,” Maurice said. “She called the police. They arrested me that night and put a restraining order on me. I was not allowed to be at the hospital when my daughter was born.”
Maurice immediately went to court to seek custody. A paternity test proved that he was the baby’s father, which overruled the mother’s insistence that Maurice wasn’t the father because he hadn’t signed the birth certificate. To Maurice, it seemed his ex-girlfriend’s point in marrying the other man was to assert that Maurice didn’t have any claim to the child. The baby’s mom and her new husband divorced shortly after the baby was born.
Eventually the court awarded Maurice joint custody, with visits every other weekend and on Wednesdays. “I wanted more time than that but her mother wouldn’t give it to me,” he said. “Basically, everything I’ve had with my daughter, I’ve had to get a lawyer and go to court for it.”
The situation with the baby’s mother grew so aggravating that many times Maurice wondered why he put up with it. He’d seen other men walk away from their children when things didn’t work out with the mother. But somehow, he just couldn’t see himself causing a child the pain of growing up without a father. His daughter needed him, he was convinced. When she was two, it alarmed him to see welts on her naked bottom. “There’s nothing a two-year-old can do to deserve to be beaten like that,” he knew. As his little girl got older, teachers sent home reports that she hit and fought other kids at school. He knew there was a connection, and wanted nothing more than to bring the little girl into a home that was loving and violence-free.
But he and the girl’s mother continued to battle. He kept trying, unsuccessfully, to draw the judge’s attention to the mother’s instability. She was evicted three times from apartments in the first years of his daughter’s life. Eventually she moved into a women’s shelter, which pushed Maurice over the edge. He fumed to Rameck: “I own my own house, my daughter has her own room here. There’s no reason my child should be in a shelter.”
Finally, the parents agreed informally that Maurice would keep their daughter while the mother got her life together. Maurice now had control of their daughter’s life, and was shouldering the full cost of rearing her. But the arrangement had one flaw—his daughter’s mother had no intention of returning the $600 a month that the child support enforcement agency was still taking out of his check.
“Take me to court—I’m not giving you anything,” she taunted him. Maurice felt helpless. “This went on for months. I didn’t want to go back to court. I had been eight or nine times previously. Each time I had to pay a lawyer thousands of dollars and I only got a little piece of what I wanted.”
After nine months in the shelter, the girl’s mother managed to rent an apartment and got back on her feet, so the parents began sharing custody. Once again, Maurice noticed the ill effects of the mother’s influence on their daughter. The girl, now four, again seemed more violent. It also appeared that while visiting her mom, she regularly spent the night with some kids who touched her inappropriately.
Maurice had little faith in the court system, but after two months of praying and fasting, he gave the courts one more try. This time, the judge listened to his recitation of the problems and awarded him residential custody. The judge also told his daughter’s mother to take parenting classes.
Maurice estimates that over the years he spent at least $15,000 trying to get full custody of his daughter—and he’s definitely not wealthy. “Just imagine if I had been able to put that money in her college plan,” he said.
His daughter still has angry outbursts, and he’s learned it’s a slow process to change a child’s habits. If she doesn’t get her way, she’ll push, shove, and hit. Maurice, who remembers getting beaten as a child just for having the wrong facial expression, believes there are better ways to discipline a child than spanking. He’s come up with softer ways to get his point across, such as giving her a time-out, warning her she won’t get dessert, or telling her she has to go to bed early without a bedtime story. Because his daughter is very independent, even threatening that “you won’t get to wash your own face today” is a good way to persuade her to change her behavior.
“I can’t stop the influences she gets from the other side of her family,” he said. But over time, he can see the results of giving his daughter a healthy routine, with lots of attention, exercise, and a regular bedtime. During summers and on weekends, they go on adventures to the zoo, parks, the beach, and live shows. Maurice takes pride in giving her experiences that he hopes will bloom into happy memories when his daughter grows up. “When we were children, we probably did that kind of stuff three or four times in our entire lives,” he said. “As she grows up, she’ll have a better appreciation for things.”
AL-TEREEK
One of my first friends to get married was Al-tereek Battle, who wed his college sweetheart not long after he graduated from Rutgers. As I watched Al-tereek exude happiness in being a husband and a dad, I couldn’t help but think it was a pretty impressive feat for a guy who didn’t even meet his biological father until he was eight.
If you ask Al-tereek, now thirty-two, how he prepared himself to be a father since he didn’t have one in the home, he’ll answer that he had to teach himself. He observed and followed the lead of the strong men in his life: his older brothers, his coaches, the staff of the local boys’ club in his hometown of Passaic, New Jersey.
And what was his best source of inspiration? You won’t believe his answer: television.
The TV was the center of the household during Al-tereek’s childhood. It was a huge color television that dominated the living room, “the big floor-model joint with the knob that you pull out,” he remembers with a laugh. He sat in front of it religiously to watch all the family-oriented shows of the 1970s and 1980s, like Family Ties, Good Times, Little House on the Prairie, and Happy Days.
His family didn’t at all resemble the nuclear versions he saw on TV. For one thing, he was chilling with his mom’s boyfriend while watching his favorite sitcoms. His father wasn’t in his life at all. As a little boy, when Al-tereek finally got up the nerve to ask his mother why his older siblings didn’t look like him, he learned that he had a different father. He went to North Carolina to meet his fat
her a few years later with a child’s heart full of hope that they could start a relationship. But nothing happened. To this day they’ve seen each other only a handful of times.
Al-tereek much preferred the fathers he saw on the screen, so he latched on to those images. “I pulled a lot of positivity from what I saw on TV,” he said. “When I was growing up, all the TV shows used to deal with family. I was getting a peek into how life should be. I guess I merged those images into my life. I told my mom when I was little that I was going to get married at age twenty-five, have a son and then a daughter. I knew that was what I wanted.”
Talk about the power of visualization. Sure enough, that’s almost exactly how his life unfolded. At age twenty-six, he married Tynicka. Two years later, they had a son, Jai, and two years after that a daughter, Bobby Marie.
Al-tereek has shown me it’s possible to work through all the baggage of childhood and have a successful marriage, but it’s definitely work. Although Al-tereek’s mom was his biggest inspiration, he also feels that being raised in the household of a strong single mom had its downside: he never learned to compromise. “My mom’s rule was the law,” he said. “When there’s no father, there’s no second opinion. So you end up thinking one-sided, and you go out in the world without a complete skill set.”
The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers Page 17