So he did the convenient thing. He lied to both, denying all the rumors and telling each girl she was the only one in his life. He ran a good game until the day he came home from college and bopped into his living room, where he found Arlene and Sharon sitting on the couch waiting for him. They weren’t smiling.
They had a joint announcement to make. “We’re both pregnant and you know you’re the daddy. Now what you gonna do?”
My dad’s face fell. Muttering something like “I can’t handle this,” he ran back outside. It was a fitting preview for how he would handle the duties of fatherhood.
This story of how Dad got ambushed by his two pregnant girlfriends in his own living room has been confirmed to me many times. It’s like my own personal legend, proof that I arrived gift-wrapped in scandal.
I know that my mom, Arlene Hunt, had dreams of marrying my father when she was in high school. He was a college boy, and quite a catch. His name was Fred Jones, which he later changed to Alim Bilal after he joined the Nation of Islam. Neither of those names really mattered to his relatives, who have called him “Bobo” since he was a kid because he was bowlegged. My father aspired to be a chemist and won an academic scholarship to Assumption College. Determined to make sure his future would include her, Mom held on tightly to my dad, especially after she started catching glimpses of Sharon hanging out at his house with his mom and siblings.
My mom, who got pregnant at sixteen, insists that I was a planned child. According to her, she and my father tried for two months to conceive a baby as a way to get my mom out of a new high school that she hated. This was during Mom’s junior year, at a time when her mother moved the family out of Newark to Plainfield, a working-class suburb that my grandmother had picked about half an hour away. Mom missed her old school, where she and her friends were popular for the parties they threw. To her mind, having a baby was a ticket out of dull Plainfield High. Although she still thought like a kid, Mom was impatient to act like a grown-up.
She continued to run into Sharon at her boyfriend’s house, so she questioned my father about her. “I’m not serious about that girl,” my dad always told her. But the rumors started to mount when the two girls started taking classes from three to six P.M. every day at Central High School, the area’s after-school program for pregnant girls in the early 1970s. Mom heard the whispers: Your boyfriend’s messing around with that girl. She’s having his baby, too.
When confronted, my dad denied the rumor. So my mom, never shy, took it upon herself to call Sharon Jenkins and get some answers.
The truth broke Mom’s heart: My dad had fathered Sharon’s child as well. Mom’s heart would get trampled again in coming months as my dad began a drug addiction that would cut short his college career and cripple him for decades. In time, she’d turn to drugs herself to cut the pain and disappointment she felt.
But for the moment, she was pregnant and coping. She initiated a strange but practical alliance with my dad’s other girlfriend. “These babies are going to need to know they’re brother and sister,” she insisted to Sharon. “I don’t want to look up twenty years from now and see them coming in the door saying they’re in love with each other. We need to raise them like family.”
Sharon agreed that they needed to stick together. And that’s how it happened that my father found his two girlfriends lying in wait for him when he came home from college.
I was born on May 1, 1973, at Orange Memorial Hospital. My half sister Quamara arrived eighteen days later.
It ended up working to Sharon’s advantage that she was so friendly with my dad’s mother. As a result, baby Quamara was always welcomed at my dad’s house, where she was lovingly fussed over.
Quamara also ended up getting to enjoy more of my father’s attention than I did during our youngest years. After I was born, my dad seemed to declare Sharon the ultimate victor in the girlfriend wars, and the threesome moved into a studio apartment together. But Sharon remembers the arrangement didn’t last more than four months. She’ll never forget the day it ended, when my sister was about a year old. My father had closed himself off in the bathroom for an unusually long time. “All right, I’ll be out,” he shouted after she banged on the door.
Finally the door to their tiny box of a bathroom swung open and she could see him sitting on the toilet in an undershirt and boxers, eyes glassy, his face serene. He was slumped back with a hypodermic needle sticking out of his arm. She knew he dabbled in drugs, but she hadn’t realized how bad it was until that day. Sharon screamed out of shock. My dad, she thought, had so much going for him. She never thought he’d be the type to throw his life away like that.
She cried. And then she threw him out.
Not long after that, Dad was arrested for armed robbery. He was in prison before my second birthday. He wasn’t there when I took my first steps. He didn’t hear my first words. My dad missed all those milestones because of his addiction.
Still, my mother regularly brought me to the prison to visit him when I was little. She seemed hell-bent that he fulfill his fatherly duties, although he couldn’t do much more than hold me on his lap and talk to me during our short visits. Dad did several more prison stints after that, ranging from eighteen months to two years. I grew up thinking the prison was his home, that my dad lived in a faraway kind of dormitory.
When he wasn’t locked up, he was prowling the streets of Newark, searching for a fix or a way to pay for one. Mom always knew how to track him down, and she would call him up with a taunting tone in her voice: “Come over here, let your son spend time with you. He needs to know who you are.” During the times when he managed to hold a job, she went after him aggressively for child support. She never got much. It burned Mom up inside that Sharon never had to bother with court-mandated child support. Although Dad didn’t support Quamara, either, my dad’s mother doted on her, babysitting her frequently and buying her necessities and gifts. She even outfitted my sister’s bedroom, buying her an elegant silver-and-white daybed and dresser.
My mom loudly complained to my father’s mother about the blatant favoritism she was showing to Quamara, which did nothing to improve the situation. The keepsake baby photo of Quamara and me dressed in matching red velvet outfits and smiling doesn’t give a hint of the full-scale feud my mom was engaged in.
I was too little to know all of this. My childhood memories are happy, even though my dad wasn’t around.
I didn’t question his absence. In my world, daddies were kind of an oddity anyway. It was the rare kid who had one in his life.
In fact, I didn’t hunger for my father at all as a child. My mom did a great job of filling that void, so I never realized how important it was to have a father, or what I was missing out on. She kept me dressed nicely, and took me everywhere with her. In the pictures I see, I’m always wearing nice clothes and a bright smile.
My mom had two distinct personalities. She had a doggedly practical side that insisted on personal responsibility, causing her to loud-talk my father constantly about his shortcomings as a parent. This is the side of her that pushed on until she got her high school diploma in 1973 and landed a well-paying job at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in 1976.
She won’t forget the day a scientist there told her, after a conversation with me, that her preschool-age son was “going to be somebody someday.” My mom believed the same thing, and she always let me know firmly that she expected the best from me. With her Bell Labs paycheck, we moved into an apartment that she decorated nicely. Even without the benefit of steady child support, Mom made sure I had the toys and clothes I needed. One memorable year, we went to Disney World, where she bought me one of my most prized possessions, a Mickey Mouse phone.
Mom knew how to handle her business, although she often had to cart me along while handling it. We spent a lot of time together, at the Laundromat, running errands and paying bills. Just like any good mom, she made sure I ate all my food. She put a home-cooked dinner on the table every night, and wouldn’t let
me get up from the table until I had cleaned my plate. Once, I remember, she cooked lima beans, which I despised, and she made me eat every last cold bean, which was pure torture. But that was the kind of household she ran, strict but loving.
Then there was the other side of her, the side that loved to party. She was a young woman, after all, and still looking good. Many nights, our apartment was crammed with people and full of good music. She trained me to go to bed promptly at nine. In the morning, I would wonder about those funny-looking cigarettes sitting in the ashtray wrapped in E-Z Wider paper. I later realized it was marijuana.
She loved to dress up and go out. Mom sometimes even partied with Sharon when they were both young mothers, leaving Quamara and me in the care of my mom’s younger siblings while the two of them went out clubbing.
On weekends, when Mom needed a break, she never hesitated to drop me at her mother’s house in Plainfield. When we get together as a family and reminisce, as we often do, we all laugh about it. I remember our routine so well. She’d drive up in front of my grandmother’s house unannounced and motion for me to get out of the car and walk up the stairs to the front door.
“Ring the bell, baby!” she’d call out to me, her foot ready to hit the gas pedal.
And in a flash she’d drive away, the instant her mother or one of her brothers or sisters opened the door.
My relatives inevitably would groan that Arlene had pulled another fast one, but they never truly minded. I might be the most frequent uninvited guest their house had ever seen, but this was one place I was loved warmly. I never felt abandoned when she dropped me off there. After all, it had been the first house I had ever known.
My grandmother had seven children, and I called her “Ma” just like they did. Most of my relatives consider me her eighth child.
Ma knew I needed stability in my life, and she provided it. I remember a lot of laughter and good times while I was there. My uncles and aunts would pile into the house on weekends, to play card games like Tonk and Spades, and just to spend time together.
Ma ran a child-friendly house, where it was normal to sit in the living room playing family games until way into the night. Monopoly was our game of choice during my early years. We’d put on the top records of the 1970s, and my dance moves often served as the featured entertainment.
My grandmother, who worked the night shift at the post office, expected her kids to be hardworking and self-sufficient. All her children learned to cook, clean, and sew, even the boys.
She wasn’t happy with my mother’s occasional bouts of irresponsibility, and they often argued about it. My uncle Sheldon remembers one day when he watched from the house, openmouthed, as my mom sped up the snowy street with me in the car. She was driving so fast that the car spun out dangerously. Sheldon didn’t want to rat on his sister, so he didn’t mention to Ma about the unintentional doughnuts we were doing in the car. But, according to my uncle, I was so alarmed that I ran in the house and tried my best to file a report of the incident. I was just a toddler, so I spun myself around and around in a circle, saying “Mommy, Mommy,” until my grandma got the picture.
This was the second most important place in my universe, and it was yet another place in my life where there was no husband in residence until Ma married a man we called Hook. He was a heavy drinker at times, but he was a nice guy and an extremely good cook. After he arrived at Ma’s house, our evening meals got a lot more memorable. Unfortunately, a few years after Hook and Ma married, Hook was killed by a city bus one winter morning. I hurried home from school that day, getting off the bus at the same stop where police investigators had spread sand to clean up his blood. Hook’s death was tragic. He had really shared the responsibility of running the household and he’d given Ma the companionship she deserved. His presence was a short-lived blessing in our lives.
Before she met Hook, Ma had married and divorced. But I didn’t suffer for lack of a male authority figure when I was at her house. If I acted up, all Ma had to say was “Uncle Rasheed’s gonna get you.” I’d straighten up in a second.
My mom’s brother Rasheed served not only as my disciplinarian, but also as one of my biggest childhood inspirations. Although my mother and two of her brothers converted to Islam when they were in high school, my uncle Rasheed took it the most seriously by far. He didn’t smoke or drink, and he made a point of staying far away from drugs.
He felt the Muslim faith helped him focus his life, giving him some structure and a reason to resist the negative influence of the streets. He had a bootstraps work ethic that fascinated me. He seemed to know a little bit of everything, from car mechanics to carpentry to photography.
“Where there’s no vision, the people perish,” he used to say, and it was clear that Uncle Rasheed had a strong vision for his future. He did what others feared to do, launching several successful businesses in Newark and Plainfield without support from anyone. Just watching and listening to my uncle taught me that I could achieve any goal I wanted if I set my mind to it.
Uncle Rasheed’s father—my grandfather—had been an alcoholic, and he and Ma divorced when their children were young. Uncle Rasheed understood a boy’s need for a male mentor, perhaps because he didn’t have one when he was a child. My uncle’s strained relationship with his father, Raymond Hunt, had come to an abrupt end one day in an abandoned photo studio.
Rasheed was about nineteen at the time, when his father called him to let him know about a place with photo equipment that had gone out of business. Rasheed, who planned to launch a photography business, arranged to meet his father there. My uncle invited his girlfriend along to see the place and meet his father.
But as Rasheed walked through the seedy building, looking to see if there was anything worth salvaging, his father disappeared with Rasheed’s girlfriend into a room and tried to touch her sexually. The alcohol had warped his judgment to the point where he saw his son’s teenaged girlfriend as a possible conquest.
Once the girlfriend told my uncle how she’d had to break free from his father’s advances, Rasheed shoved his father, ready to fight him. That moment severed any hope of a possible connection with his father.
As a boy, I had the distinct feeling that most fathers were free-floating men who weren’t connected to anybody. They didn’t have to shoulder responsibility; that was the mom’s job. They didn’t have to take their kids for haircuts, pick them up from school, or sign them up for sports. Dads lived in far-off places and maybe you might run into them occasionally. That was the scenario at my own house, and at Ma’s house, too.
Ma had been quick to divorce Raymond Hunt, the father of her oldest four—Rahman, Rasheed, Venus, and my mom—after it became clear he was an alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job. Actually, a lot of his problems were likely related to his mental illness, which he medicated with alcohol.
She then started a live-in relationship with Theodore Green, the father of her three youngest children, Vikki, Sheldon, and Nicole. He wasn’t exactly an attentive dad, either. He, too, was an alcoholic, and his children remember times when their father came home so drunk that he knocked the front door off its hinges while fumbling his way inside. He was, as my uncle Sheldon puts it, the kind of father you strive not to be like. Although he battled with alcoholism, there were a lot of good things about him, and his children loved him.
To this day, my aunts and uncles tend to shrug off the fact that they grew up without stable fathers. Ma, the most sensible matriarch you could imagine, trained her children not to waste their time worrying about people you can’t fix. The Hunt motto, instilled by Ma, is not to wallow in problems but to do something about them.
My aunts and uncles considered me lucky, even spoiled, because at least I occasionally got invited to my father’s mom’s house. That was way more of a fatherly connection than they had experienced.
My mother always sounded bitter when she talked about my father’s family. “Your father’s no good. And your grandmother doesn’t love you,” she wou
ld say. I didn’t know what to think, but I had to admit some of the questions she flung at me touched on awfully sore spots. “Why don’t they invite you to their Sunday dinners?” she’d ask me. “Why didn’t they call you for Christmas?”
Just when Mom had me convinced that Dad’s family didn’t like me, they’d call and invite me over. I felt a confusing sense of dread whenever we were in the car heading to Dad’s mother’s house. It was something I couldn’t explain. I wanted to visit them, despite Mom’s complaints that “they don’t treat you right over there.” But I did feel that I had to be on my best behavior when I was their guest, although other kids on that side of the family were allowed to do whatever they wanted.
Whenever I spent time over there, I felt out of place. I didn’t recognize many of the faces, although Quamara seemed to know everyone. Everybody seemed to belong except me. Just the act of inviting me seemed to be a big enough concession. They didn’t work too hard to reach out and make me feel welcome once I got there.
I didn’t know if I was entitled to feel this way, or if I was letting Mom’s rants get to me. But my sister’s mother, Sharon, assures me that she observed big differences in the way Quamara and I were treated when we were young.
Sharon remembers one day I was visiting, sitting well behaved on the couch, when Quamara told her grandmother, “I want some ice cream.” Even though there wasn’t any in the freezer, my father’s mom scurried to the corner store to buy some for her precious grandbaby.
When she came back, my grandmother handed Quamara the promised ice cream, but she didn’t offer me any. It wasn’t surprising to Sharon, who had noticed the unequal treatment before. But this time, she decided she was going to take a stand.
Before Quamara took a bite, Sharon asked, “Does your brother have any ice cream?”
Quamara shook her head no.
“So what are you going to do about that?” Sharon quizzed her.
The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers Page 19