Dear Father, Dear Son

by Larry Elder

  “It was around that time I met your mother and—”

  “Wait a sec,” I said. “Didn’t you room with Thurman first?

  “Oh yeah. How did you know about that?”

  “Thurman told me.”

  I got to know Thurman when I moved to Cleveland two years earlier to practice law. We became close friends. Until I lived in Cleveland, I had no idea that Thurman and my Dad once lived together.

  My colorful Uncle Thurman is my mother’s youngest brother and father of two daughters. Like my mother, he left the family’s Huntsville, Alabama, farm and moved to Chattanooga. Thurman soon moved again, part of the largest voluntary migration of a racial or ethnic group of people in American history. Between the years just before World War I and after World War II until around 1970, some six million blacks moved from the agricultural south to the industrial north. One uncle moved to Detroit, another to Chicago, and another ended up in Washington, D.C.

  Thurman also left Chattanooga to “go up north” to Cleveland. Within days, he found a job, one that lasted until his retirement almost thirty years later, with General Motors.

  Until my life intersected with Thurman’s when I moved to Cleveland after law school, I only had vague memories of him coming to L.A. once or twice to visit my mother. And I saw him a bit during the summers I spent on my grandparent’s farm in Huntsville.

  I learned that he not only met my father before my dad met and married his sister, but Thurman actually roomed with Dad for almost a year.

  “You know your Uncle Eddie introduced them,” Thurman said. “But I knew him before he met your mom. Me and your dad shared a room together. Eddie arranged it.”

  I’d never met anyone who knew my father, let alone someone Dad knew before he met and married Mom. The stories were fascinating.

  “What was he like?” I expected Thurman to say Dad was ill-tempered and difficult to get along with, and that living with him was a regrettable experience.

  “He was the hardest-working, most straight-ahead man I ever knew. He didn’t play.”

  Thurman said Dad worked like crazy, treated people fairly, and saved his money.

  “How long did you live with him?”

  “About a year. When you live with someone that long, you pretty much get to know him.”

  “And what did you think of him?”

  “Your father would have five dollars when most motherfuckers didn’t have a dime. And he could dress! Pair of two-toned shoes, the best hats, had a pocket watch. He didn’t go out that much, but when he did, man, dude was sharp. Never lied. Never pulled any shit. And he was funny! Could tell jokes without stopping for two hours.

  “He had one of those fancy cigarette holders. He’d go into his pocket and take out a silver cigarette case. Pull out a cigarette and tap it against the case. You know, like they do in the movies. Then he put the cigarette in his holder. And slo-o-o-owly light the cigarette. Style! You know I mean?”

  Once, when Dad was asleep, Thurman snuck in, went to the dresser and took the cigarette case and the holder.

  “I wanted to impress a date.”

  He intended to return it before Dad awoke. On his way back to the room, Thurman patted his pockets. The holder was gone!

  “Shit! I retraced my steps. Went back to the nightclub. Nothing. I knew he would be pissed. Had a right to be. It was expensive—had carving and shit all over it. I tried to find something that night like it—only cheaper—and sneak it back before he missed it. But nothing was open. Well, he was mad, but told me to pay him a little bit every week and we’d be square. I did, and it was never mentioned again. He was the most you-treat-me-right-I’ll-treat-you-right-man I ever met.”

  He said Dad “loved children” and always wanted a family “because he never had one.”

  After I felt comfortable with Thurman, I told him that Dad gave me no money for college or law school, and that Mom complained about it.

  “Wait a sec. Who paid the house note?”

  “Dad.” Mom, when she complained about “her bills,” never said that she paid it.

  “Who paid the car note?”

  “Same thing. Dad paid for both their cars.”

  “Car insurance? Homeowner insurance? Utilities?” Dad, Dad, and Dad.

  “All that food he brought from the restaurant?” Dad always brought home bulk cartons of things like milk, eggs, bacon, cereal, potatoes, and fruits and vegetables.

  “Shit,” Thurman said. “The reason your mother was able to give you money for school is that he was picking up the back end.”

  I unloaded, and told Thurman about Dad’s treatment of my brothers and me, about my working for him at the restaurant, and about how he seemed cold and angry.

  Thurman shook his head. “That’s just his way. He had a hard-ass life. You ain’t looking at this thing right. Least I don’t think.”

  11

  “SOMETHING MADE THE MAN CLOSE UP”

  By now, so many people were going by outside, waving to Dad, and shouting out greetings that he suggested we go in the back for more privacy. I told him no, that I liked seeing how people felt about him. So we sat.

  “You know, I lived with Thurman, too,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  When I first moved to Cleveland, I stayed with Thurman and my Aunt Maggie for a couple of months while apartment hunting and familiarizing myself with the city.

  “You never did tell me why you moved there,” Dad said.

  Why? Like all my moves—college three thousand miles away from home, law school in Michigan, choosing Cleveland after school—I wanted to be my own man, make my own mark away from you. I didn’t want your input or your guidance. I didn’t want you violating my personal space. Despite your treatment of me, strike that, because of your treatment, I was going to make it and make it big. So … fuck … you. If you want to know what I’m doing and where I’m doing it, ask Mom.

  But I didn’t say that.

  “I don’t know, Dad. It just seemed like a good opportunity.”

  “Well, you know what’s best.”

  Jesus! All this time I’d waited to tell him how he screwed up, that he wasn’t going to screw me up. But I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to hurt him. He’d been hurt enough.

  “You know, a big Cleveland law firm made me an offer I just couldn’t turn down.”

  “Well, you gotta go where the opportunity is. I always tried to. That’s smart of you. Like I said, you know what’s best.”

  The first day I stayed with Thurman the phone kept ringing.

  “Shorty,” my aunt’s nickname for him, “phone for you.”

  An hour or so later, “Shorty, get the phone.” Then again and again.

  He’d pick up the phone and laugh, tell jokes, talk about work, and make plans. There were at least three more calls for him that evening, each time from a different guy.

  “Thurman,” I said, “you sure have a lot of friends.”

  “Not really. Just some dudes I know,” Thurman said.

  One “dude” lived down the street. They liked to work on cars together. Another guy was a former co-worker who left GM to start a carpet business. Another one, Bill, was a cousin. They had a love-nuisance relationship. When Bill left after visiting, Thurman would talk about how “slick” Bill tried to be, how he exaggerated his success and how he pretended to have more money than he had.

  “But I like to play dumb around him,” he said.

  Thurman refused to be outsmarted. My father wouldn’t have dreamed about keeping a friendship with someone like that. Dad would have called him “shifty” or “no-account.” But Thurman enjoyed trying to outfox Bill and seemed to genuinely like him. Bill made Thurman laugh, but not in the way Bill intended.

  I told Thurman that the only time my father ever received a phone call was when someone broke into the café—and the alarm company called to tell him. When the phone rang, and my mother said, “Randolph, it’s for you,” it was bad news. Bet on it
.

  “Thurman,” I said, “in one day, you’ve received more phone calls than my father has gotten since I’ve known him.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the man I knew. Your Dad liked to have fun. He didn’t like no fools around him, don’t get me wrong. But something made the man close up.”

  “Thurman said that?” Dad said, as he waved to a couple of pretty scary-looking teenagers in leather vests.

  “Yes. Was he wrong?”

  He just shrugged his shoulders.

  By now, Dad was on his third or fourth cup of coffee. I’d lost count. We had been talking for more than an hour. He smiled a lot, and spoke calmly. I no longer felt nervous.

  An old lady came to the window and smiled.

  “That’s Elvia. First person to walk in here. Been comin’ ever since.”

  She blew him a kiss. He laughed.

  “You were saying how you met Mom.”

  “When I was cookin’ up on the mountain—I came to town every two or three weeks to get a haircut. My barber was your Uncle Eddie. Eddie married your Aunt Juanita. Eddie introduced me to your mother, Juanita’s little sister.”

  Long before he met Mom, Dad and Uncle Eddie had become good friends. They liked each other and enjoyed the other’s company. Both were hard workers, driven, and ambitious. Eddie loved my father’s wicked sense of humor—even though Eddie was often the butt of Dad’s jokes.

  Eddie was one of the first blacks in the area to get a telephone installed in his home. Dad called him and disguised his voice.

  “Sir, this is the phone company.”

  “Yes, sir,” Eddie said.

  “We’re testin’ all the phones on your street, and I need you to say ‘hello’ into the phone.”

  “Hello.”

  “Uh-huh. Now I need you to set the phone down on a table and back away about six feet and say, ‘Hello.’”

  Eddie held the receiver an arm’s length away. “Hello.”

  “Now sir,” Dad said impatiently, “Please don’t waste my time, I’ve got lots of phones to check today. Put the phone down! Walk about six feet away and say ‘hello’ three times as loud as you can. And I haven’t got all day.”

  Eddie set the phone down and measured his distance. “Hello! Hello! Hell—”

  Aunt Juanita walked in the room to see what the shouting was all about.

  “What the devil are you doing?” she asked her husband.

  Eddie pointed to the phone lying on the table. “The phone man told me to do it.”

  “Oh, shhh, that ain’t nobody but Randolph making a fool out of you!”

  Dad envied Eddie’s marriage. Aunt Juanita “fussed over” Eddie and always kissed him when he walked in from work. She loved hearing him talk about politics and the stock market. They tried to have children, and then adopted a little girl.

  “Whenever I walked in Eddie’s home, everythin’ looked so nice. And that little girl was so happy. That’s what I wanted.”

  So Dad asked Eddie to introduce him to his wife’s sister.

  “I thought your Mom would be just like Eddie’s wife.”

  “Dad,” I said, “Mom’s nothing like Aunt Nita.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  My mother attended a black college called Talladega in Talladega, Alabama. She spent one year there before running out of money. But one year of college might as well be a PhD for a southern black woman.

  “When you went away to college for a year and came back, you were educated as far as everybody was concerned,” Thurman once said.

  Aunt Juanita never finished high school. She was in awe of her husband.

  “Your mother,” Dad said, “married ‘down.’ She never said that, but I know that’s how she felt. You know what it’s like to have your wife think that she should’ve done better?”

  No, I said to myself, I don’t.

  “But there must have been a connection. Or you wouldn’t have married her and she wouldn’t have married you.”

  He just stirred the black coffee.

  “What did you do on your first date?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “What did you think of her when you first went out? That she was attractive? That she was smart? You had to have a reaction.”

  “Well, I guess I thought she was pretty and all that, but I really can’t say what I thought about her.”

  “Well, that’s romantic.”

  He laughed. We both laughed.

  “Not exactly Romeo and Juliet,” he said.

  “No, not exactly.”

  “Well, Romeo and Juliet didn’t work out so well.”

  At first, he said, Mom enjoyed his sense of humor. But over time, she stopped laughing and started “just doin’ like this.” He rolled his eyes. “She was just puttin’ up with me.”

  He paused. “You know, I’m not goin’ to go into some stuff. You don’t need to know all this.”

  He said I have a good impression of my mother and a “wonderful relationship” with her, and, “I’ll be damned if I try to change it.”

  He stopped, stirred his coffee for a while, then continued.

  “Right after we got married, I asked her if she loved me. She said, ‘The only man I’ll ever love is my father.’ You know what it’s like to hear somethin’ like that?”

  No, I didn’t.

  I suddenly flashed back to riding in the car with the family. The radio was on and Dennis was singing along. We drove under an overpass. This blocked the radio reception and caused the sound to completely fade. So for a few seconds, a horribly off-key Dennis serenaded us, a cappella.

  “I used to wish I could sing,” Dad said. “Now I wish you could.”

  Kirk and I laughed. Mom rolled her eyes.

  I had forgotten about his humor. Between his eruptions, he was incredibly funny. Once he was holding a half-gallon carton of milk.

  “Here, Larry, put this in the refrigerator.”

  He was looking away when I reached for the carton. But when my hand was six inches away, he released it. I scrambled like someone possessed to grab it before it hit the kitchen floor and splashed milk everywhere. I managed to catch it just before it crashed. The carton was empty. Dad roared. Mom rolled her eyes.

  Another lady passed by the window and waved.

  “Mrs. Ramirez,” Dad said. “She lives in the apartment down the street. Has a son in the Army. Can’t stop talkin’ about him.”

  “Go home,” she said. Dad nodded.

  Eddie’s shop, the Green Light Barbershop, also served as the unofficial neighborhood town hall for black Republicans. Uncle Eddie once told me, “No Negro in the South with a lick of sense was a Democrat.”

  “Is that why you became a Republican?” I asked Dad.

  “No, I was a Republican before I met Eddie.”

  Dad was a Republican, and Mom a Democrat. It caused a lot of friction.

  Dad would say, “Democrats treat you like you ain’t got any sense. Don’t nobody owe you a livin’.” And, “It ain’t right to give people somethin’ for nothin’. I had less than nothin’. I know what that’s like. You get up and keep pushin’. Don’t nobody owe you a livin’. Democrats is ruinin’ the country with all this damn welfare.”

  Mom would say, “You can’t hold people back, and then say, ‘I’m sorry, everything’s okay,’ when everybody else has gotten a head start.” And, “The playing field isn’t level. Some people have been crippled by the system and you can’t say to them, ‘That’s just too damn bad.’”

  Watching Mom and Dad talk politics was like watching like a tense tennis match—except when it was over, nobody shook hands or patted each other on the back.

  Mom was a better and more informed debater. She read the Los Angeles Times and the Herald Examiner newspapers every day, and she subscribed to Time magazine. No one else in the neighborhood—that I knew of—subscribed to any newsweeklies. She’d quote Truman, discus
s the Monroe Doctrine, and watch the quadrennial political conventions. I loved watching the conventions with her.

  “Why do they wear hats and wave signs? What is a first ballot nominee? What is a delegate? Why do they always say, ‘The great state of … casts its votes for …’?” She patiently answered my questions. She had her favorite anchors and reporters: Howard K. Smith, Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite. We switched back and forth from one network to another, depending upon the anchor.

  For kitchen table debates, my mother’s one-year college education trumped the eighth-grade drop-out—at least in what my Dad dismissed as “book knowledge.”

  “That just don’t make good sense,” Dad would say when my mom argued for universal health care or what became known as affirmative action. “Democrats treat you like you ain’t got any sense. They think you’re too stupid to figure out how to get your own. Don’t nobody owe you a livin’. Give people somethin’ for nothin’, you’ll end up with nothin’ for somethin’.”

  During the primary elections, the polling precinct set up separate voting booths for Republicans and for Democrats. Our polling place was the house across the street. It had at least ten Democrat booths to accommodate our near-100 percent neighborhood Democratic registration. It had but one lonely Republican booth that almost nobody used—except Dad. With everybody watching, he would request a Republican ballot and walk directly to the Republican booth and pull the curtains closed behind him. The place got quiet as the neighbors watched the deviant black Republican. He didn’t give a damn. I saw that same little smile he wore when cooking at the grill.

  Then came Watergate. It changed things in the house for the worse.

  “I don’t see why this break-in thing is goin’ to cost the man his job,” Dad said.

  “What!? He lied about it, tried to cover it up, and got other people to lie.”

  “Lied about some idiots breakin’ in somebody’s office. What did they do there? Steal money?”

  “They broke into the office of the chairman of the Democratic Party.”

  “So what? What does he know that Nixon didn’t already know? Nixon didn’t send them in there.”