Once I was old enough to think about it, I decided my father had to be a drug addict. The strong pull of heroin or cocaine was the only thing I knew that made men disappear into the comedy of Cops. At thirteen, what could I know about why relationships broke down, what could I know of men who leave but want to stay? I didn't know how easy it was to erase a man's history and didn't realize how crazy I was for scrapping his to create one for him that fit my ideas. I never imagined him as bad as the neighborhood man I saw beat a woman with a baseball bat. We were a group of about eight playing football in a field when the screams interrupted us. None of us were older than eleven, and all just stood silent as he tried to twist the fat end of a bat around her body. We could hear it thump against her shins, her arms. She protected her head until the police carted him off, but no one suggested he wouldn't be back. Those women weren't weak, but they stayed. I made him a drug addict in my head, because while I knew beating a woman was bad, I also knew the men who did it returned. Some of these men lived in the homes of my friends. It seemed to me that only drugs could drive a person to disappear. Drugs—the only problem no woman in my family tolerated. In my head my father's frame was the one I saw carting off the neighbor's television and stealing anything, tied down or not. When the phone rang, for years I expected it to be him calling from prison. I knew no one in prison. Still, everything evil enough to drive my mother away from a man became a synonym for my father in my head, and I believed this enough to reject my own name, Reginald Dwayne Betts, without thought or question. I believed it until the crispness of steel cuffs slipped over my wrists.
It took a nine-year prison sentence to convince me that my name was Reginald Dwayne Betts. In legal documents, suffixes don't carry as much weight as in real life. Reginald Dwayne Betts and Reginald Dwayne Betts II could easily be the same person. The official record usually made no distinction. When I landed on the first few acres of land that housed a collection of cells, which I'd call home, I understood that my name wasn't Dwayne. Every identification card and court paper I'd been given said Reginald Dwayne Betts, and there wasn't a thing my family could tell me to convince me that I wasn't him.
In prison I learned in less than a week that love comes in letters dropped on your cell floor by an indifferent guard. Before the cuffs settled around my wrists, I was thinking of my mother. Not thinking about my name, but what I would tell her. If there was an explanation for the gun in my hand, or my hands gripping the steering wheel of that forest green Grand Prix that still smelled like new leather. I could hear behind her tears, could sense this feeling that I'd failed, grown into the body of a man from whom someone had tried to save me. The official charges made the pronouncement for her, and I never wondered if she'd think it was her husband who was arrested. I never wondered if she'd cringe at the question of whether she had a son named Reginald Dwayne Betts. My full name was known to her from the very beginning, but still, in every envelope that had her careful print, she wrote clearly Dwayne Betts.
My father's name is Reginald Dwayne Betts. The etymology of Reginald is complex. It comes from the name Reynold, which comes from the Germanic name Reginold. Reginold is the combination of two words, ragin and wald, the former meaning “advice” and the latter “rule.” Many sources shorten the meaning of Reginald to “king” or “ruler.” Dwayne comes from the Gaelic dubhan, which means “little and dark.” Various places assign “king” and “mentor” as the meaning of Reginald. When my parents named me, I don't know if they had no idea what Reginald or Dwayne meant. After I went to prison, I had to carry both names. Each letter I received said Dwayne, while the men around me, they called me Reggie, Dwayne, Shahid, Young Music, or Frog. A collection of curious nicknames that didn't name me, but told a story about a place and my relationship to it. Shahid, given to me when I was a seventeen-year-old boy in a prison full of men aged fourteen to seventy, with everyone under thirty looking for some kind of conversion; Young Music, the vision of a friend who said I favored Musiq Soulchild. I learned to listen for the names, and decide what the names meant as I heard them. When the officers called out “Betts,” before a crowd of men awaiting mail or while passing my cell waving an envelope, the meaning was clear.
I spent months thinking about mail, about the fine print that could cover a page and tell me the truth about what some woman felt about me. The letters were always from women, from my mother, my grandma, Aunt Tricia, and the occasional letter from a random cousin or one of my little sisters. My father's mother wrote me twice a month for years although she hadn't touched my face since I was a very small boy. The type of love you find scribbled in arthritic print pushed me. Yet still I dedicated whole letters to ranting about my lack of visits, about how I didn't need them. How it took hours to travel to the closest prisons I was incarcerated in at various times: Sussex, Southampton, Coffeewood, or Craigsville, Virginia, and a full day to drive to Pound, Virginia, the mountain site of Red Onion State Prison, the super maximum-security prison where I spent a few months when I was eighteen.
My father started writing after the judge sentenced me to prison. The careful script of his letters laced with a meaning I couldn't understand. Page after page, with only a hint of who he was. I learned his birthday after the sixth or so letter, never learned his high school or if he went to college. There were just scatterings of his soul, between what I considered ramblings. He talked about why things didn't work out as he planned, and how my life arced in the direction of a prison because he wasn't involved. He never told me that he was locked up when he wrote me that first letter.
When I walked into my cell for the first time at Sussex 1 State Prison, I'd been incarcerated for nearly four years. I'd been transferred from Red Onion State Prison, the fifteen-hour drive in shackles and cuffs still deep in my bones. My father showed up in the chiseled lines on my cellmate Pop Spratley's face. I watched Pop fold his 250-pound aged body around a desk made for a boy in grade school. Pop sat at that desk for hours, penning letters to his family, letters that averaged fifteen pages. He'd been in prison for nearly twenty-eight years and was the first man I acknowledged who had a name remotely fatherly. The entire prison called him Pop Spratley, and by the time I met Pop Gray, the second sixty-year-old man I'd share a cell with, I realized that Pop wasn't a name that just came with age. It was the respect earned beyond the violence and pain.
My father showed up in the eyes of the other young men around me. Sometimes I'd know more people with sentences over thirty years than under it, and I saw my father in them. We were all straitjacketed by a past that echoed with the screams of dead men, or women crying because they'd felt the harsh edges of our knuckles. All of us had wronged a woman somewhere, sent her away crying with our child in her arms, or we had just left.
I confronted my father in these men. His face in the center of an argument on who'd win the college football championship. The things I should have said to him, but didn't, the reason why Marquise and I split the tiny square that was a pack of Ramen noodles in half so that it could feed us both.
And still I stopped writing him. I don't remember why I stopped writing. I ripped open his letters with the same excitement that I greeted all mail, only after I read what he wrote there would be numbness. His letters persisted through my stops at a jail and three prisons. Four years’ worth of periodic letters that said nothing of who he was, but plenty about what he wanted. He told me that he was manic-depressive and wanted to get back with his wife, my mother, whom he hadn't seen in nearly twenty years. How was I to deal with his collection of reasons for him and my mother to be together still? My mother left him before I remember walking. I couldn't imagine what he had done, and yet he wanted me to understand him. He never told me his birthday, just how much he loved my mother. His anger shared time with this love, seethed through his lines. He wanted me to know he felt wronged, wanted me to understand about streets he ran.
The night I stopped writing him, I called a cell, with a window spanning an arm and a half horizontally an
d a hand vertically to look through, my home. The sliver of night I could see, seated on the bottom bunk near the toilet, was black. One moment I was reading a letter from him and the next I was standing above the toilet setting every word he'd ever written me on fire. It took eight minutes for the smoke to clear from the cell after the letters burned and he became a presence that was there and not there. I never got to know my father through his letters, never forgave him anything because I never learned what it was that I should forgive. I met my father in the stories of men whose eyes were dimmed by the pain they caused, and although I learned to love them, to treat them as family, I couldn't figure out how to translate that into a conversation with my father. I walked around seeing myself in the eyes of the men around me, just like I saw my father in their features, and no matter how much I wanted it to, the practicing of forgiveness didn't lead to words between a dad and his son.
In eight years, I never awaited the letter of a man, never wondered if an uncle, brother, or running buddy would show. Receiving mail was a ritual, the way I'd let it sit on my bunk for a moment before opening it, being careful not to tear the envelope too much. This was a ritual about women, about getting love from the place it most often came. All the men around me knew it too, got caught up in it. We were like dogs that spent their days waiting for the mail carrier. In isolation, I'd drape a sheet over the cell door and read the letters I'd receive as if it were a date. Men would hold off on reading their mail until they made themselves something to eat. Once I understood the ritual, I knew it was a way to mark time and measure love; less accurate than the sundial, it was what we had. And we used it to usher meaning into our lives, to form a backdrop to who was getting out.
Weekends are different. The wait isn't for the letter, but the body that is the letter. There is less waiting on a weekend. The pattern so slow to form that after a while it seems less a prison-wide dance and more what the few who prepare for the social do. On Saturdays, I would wake up and make sure I was the first to shower. I wanted to have everything out of the way. If I went to breakfast, I'd make sure my meal was light, show a little generosity and give my eggs away to a friend. People who knew they weren't getting visits found some activity to fill the day Summertime left the basketball courts packed with sweating men, left the track swarming with thinkers and those nodding from the effects of the drug IV of choice. The weight pit would be flooded with bodies, headphones on the ears of some to aid in the oneness with the moment that balancing four hundred pounds of steel on your shoulders gave you. If I saw a man on the weight pile, I knew he wasn't waiting for a visit. He couldn't pray to hear his name called over the shouting, the banging of dumbbells and barbells.
The wait is longer on Saturday and Sunday. No fifteen-minute window after count when you can expect your mail. The bodies that the weekend brings travel long distances, then are stuck in lines until your name is called. So the waiting starts early. The first year at Southampton found me up and ready by ten, mapping out my aunt's trip because I knew exactly where she had to go. It took around fifteen minutes for her to get to my mother's house and another thirty for them to finish talking, add two hours to get to the prison and twenty minutes to get processed, and I figured that if she left her house by seven, I could expect them around ten. The problem was she left exactly when she wanted to and that could be seven or twelve.
Southampton had long tiers full of cells, and you could wait for visits in relative privacy. Augusta Correctional Center was different; it was a prison of pods, rectangular units with forty-four cells each. Aunt Tricia once got to Augusta with ten minutes left in visitation. I'd long given up that she'd arrive with my mother that day and was in the pod doing push-ups. She was so late that I couldn't take a shower or throw on the pants I only wore to the visiting room, so I went with what I had on. That's the day that I was cured of the weekend wait. My mother and aunt were sitting across from me, neither noticing that I smelled like seven days in the heat with no toilet. They just eased on into the conversation asking how I was doing. The stains on my shirt no more noticed than the fine creasing that usually greeted them. It cost two dollars’ worth of food to get a man to sweat over an iron and press your state blues until lines jumped from the fabric.
I learned the visits weren't about visits, and the mail wasn't about mail. The visits and mail were about the quiet time when people called you by names you recognized. In a visiting room or in a letter, Trigger became Junior with the care of a magician hiding a nickel under your palm. You'd never know how it got there, but would leave with the sense that it had been there all along.
Although I didn't realize it, after I came home I was still searching for the nickel hidden under my palm. I hadn't written my father in years, hadn't spoken to him in over a decade. One day he called the law office where my fiancee worked. I imagine he said, Hello, this is Reginald Betts. My woman would have responded, “Who?” I'm sure silence followed as he repeated his name slowly, like I do. This time, though, he said it all, Reginald Dwayne Betts. He wouldn't have said that first; like the legal system, people don't refer to suffixes. They talked. And then he and I talked. If it hadn't happened to me, I would have said it was straight out of a movie: My meeting him at her office, and he looking at me with my eyes.
In a way it was like the visiting room. He called me son and I expected to hear it, although I never called him anything. I made talking a circus act where I never initiated words because I didn't know if I should say Reginald or Pops or what. Still, we talked occasionally for a while, and then we talked on a regular basis.
The last time I called him, he picked up the phone on the third ring. It was nearly February, and the air bit like it should in the first month of a new year. The Virginia Department of Corrections had released me from its roll of inmates almost two years earlier and I'd heard my father's voice as a man for the first time just thirty days ago. He knew I was out of prison and I knew he lived ten minutes from where I worked, but we rarely spoke. I stepped out of Hart Middle School, and the wind whipped, hard and certain against my black parka. I dialed his number because I no longer knew how to avoid dialing his number. When his voice sounded in the wireless earpiece draped over my ear, I responded, “Dad.” There was question and answer in my voice. This day full of the twenty-six years I'd been living on the planet was the first time I'd called this man who shares my name Father, Dad, or any other affectionate term that hints at our biological connection.
When I called my father Dad for the first time that late January day, nearly two years after I'd been released, I was finding a name I never looked for. My release made the rituals of visits and receiving mail a backdrop to my life; it changed the role I played in that particular drama. Suddenly, I was the one sending letters to prisons, getting letters stamped with red ink that marks it as coming from a correctional center. The situation had changed. There were no prison bars between us, and I was, in a way, continuing the conversation I stopped long ago. When the letters went up into blue flame, I had no intention of talking to my father again. And even as I began to recognize the threads of his story in the men I did time with, recognized it in the tales I told about myself, I still had no intention of searching him out. Still, when the opportunity presented itself, I called him. The air was empty the first few times, as we had no words.
Someone told me to tell my father I love him each time I speak to him. I have never told my father I love him. I did call him Dad. I spoke with the hawk at my skin that day, January's air telling me that some days might feel like May but it was still winter. I remembered the conversations I had while gripping steel bars and screaming out into a tier of tired men. We were all tired and angry, but there was love. No one ever said it. Your friends would just send you a meal when the letter with the money didn't come, or send you a cup of wine when you found out somebody died. I never told my father I loved him, but I called him Dad. He understood that having a son call you by a name that only he can use was like getting a visit.
&nbs
p; My African Sister
FAITH ADIELE
THE FIRST TIME I VISIT my father's bungalow at the University of Nigeria, I perch on a vinyl settee in the parlor and drink milky tea while my father rambles on about the student riots, the military government's Structural Adjustment Program, his college years with my mother, what he recalls her saying about the family farm in Washington State—never a pause for me or anyone else to speak.
Meanwhile my stepmother, another stranger, flits about the room, dipping forward with black market sugar and tins of Danish biscuits, slipping coasters under our cups the instant we lift to sip. From the darkened hallway comes the slap of flip-flops and giggles.
“You have children?” I ask politely, as if this were a question for a daughter to be asking her father, casually, as if it were not the question I've traveled halfway around the globe to ask. My bag bulges with shiny American goods: books and toys, watches and Walkmans, scarves and perfume. No matter their age or sex, I've got it covered.
WHEN I WAS NOT QUITE TWO, my father, a graduate student from Nigeria, received an urgent summons to return home. He left forty-eight hours later, clothes and books scattered across the floor of his rented room. He was to attend to family business, scout-out job prospects, and come back. Though my parents had split, and my mother was raising me alone in Seattle, her Scandinavian immigrant family having thrown her out for bearing a Black child, they maintained relations for my sake.
“I want you to know that this is not a good-bye,” he wrote to us from a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, nervous about reports of ethnic and religious tensions awaiting him. “I shall look forward to our meeting so long as we are all alive.”
It's All Love Page 23