by Tayari Jones
My exact words should be I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to guilt-trip you. But it’s heavy, Georgia. You don’t know what it is like in here. And trust me, you don’t want to know.
I went to the library and pulled up the article and the photo one more time. You wore a smile on your face and my ring on your finger. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before.
Love,
Roy
Dear Celestial,
Didn’t you get my letter last month? I said I was sorry. Maybe I didn’t make it plain. I’m sorry. So write back? Even email is fine.
Roy
Roy O. Hamilton Jr.
PRA 4856932
Parson Correctional Center
3751 Lauderdale Woodyard Rd.
Jemison, LA 70648
Dear Mr. D,
I don’t suppose that this is what you pictured when I came to you and asked for Celestial’s hand in marriage. There I was, all serious, trying to do things the right way, and you said, “Her hand is not mine to give.” At first I thought you were kidding, but when I determined that you were serious, I tried to backtrack, pretending it was all a joke, but inside I was mad and embarrassed. I felt like I was eating with my fingers when everyone else was using a knife and fork. Her hand wasn’t yours to give, like you said. But at the same time, I needed to approach you as a man to another man. I was asking if I could be your son-in-law.
I am very close to my own father. Maybe Celestial shared with you that technically he is my stepfather, but he is the only father I have ever known and he has been a positive male influence. I am his “junior” in every way. But he doesn’t know much about the world I was living in in Atlanta, even though his sacrifices made it achievable. Big Roy has always lived in one small southern town or another. He didn’t finish high school, yet he provided a secure home for our family. I respect my father more than anyone else in the world.
I came to you because we have a lot in common. We are both immigrants to Atlanta, if you know what I mean. You’ve been there longer, and I’m just off the boat, but our backgrounds are almost the same. You are rags to riches and I was rags on my way to riches. Or at least that’s the way it felt at the time. With my present condition, who knows what will happen to me. But when I asked for her hand, I was seeking your blessing, as her father, but also as a mentor. With Celestial, I was punching above my weight, and I guess I was hoping for a clap on the back, but I ended up feeling like a dummy.
And maybe I’m a dummy for writing this letter at all.
Mr. Davenport, Celestial has not come to Louisiana to visit me in two months now. We have not had any significant arguments or disagreements. I was expecting her in September, but she didn’t show. She sent word that she was having car trouble, and I expected her the following weekend. But I have not seen her at all, nor have I received any correspondence. Mr. D, I’m hoping that you will speak to her on my behalf. I know you will say that I should reach out to her myself. Trust me, I have tried.
When you sent me away, you said that maybe I didn’t know her well enough to marry her. This is why I’m turning to you now. I obviously do not know her as well as I thought. You, on the other hand, have known her all her life, and maybe you will know what to say to her to bring her back to me.
Please tell her that I understand that being married to an incarcerated man is a major sacrifice. I am not accustomed to asking for things. I have worked for everything I have. I wouldn’t have been bold enough to show my face in your house if I hadn’t put in the effort. In my current position, there is no work that I can do to win her love. There is no work I can do to convince you, as her father, that I’m worthy. Before, I had my good job and my gold cuff links. What do I have today? Only my character. I know she can’t wear my character on her left hand, and I know it doesn’t pay bills or father children. But it’s what I have and I believe that it should count for something.
Thank you, sir, for reading this. I hope you will consider my request. And please do not share this with Celestial or her mother. Let this please stay between us as men.
Sincerely,
Roy O. Hamilton Jr.
Franklin Delano Davenport
9548 Cascade Rd.
Atlanta, GA 30331
Dear Roy,
I am pleased to hear from you, as I think of you often. My wife fancies herself a “prayer warrior,” and she pleads with the Lord for you on a regular basis. No one here has forgotten you. Not me. Not my Gloria. Not Celestial.
Son (and I use the word deliberately), I think you are misremembering our exchange when you came asking for Celestial’s hand. I didn’t refuse you. I merely explained to you that my daughter is not my property. I almost chuckle to remember it. You came here as proud as a peacock’s daddy with that velvet box tucked in your jacket pocket. For one bewildered second, I thought you were about to propose to me! (That is meant to be humor, by the way.) I was glad to see that you were serious in your intentions, but I didn’t think I should see the ring before Celestial did. I could tell that your feelings were a little bruised when you left that day, and frankly, that was a positive development. You said in your letter that you are not accustomed to asking for things, and that was apparent, not from your gold cuff links (Authentic! Who knew!) but from the sway in your walk. You were not asking me for her hand (and I still assert that it wasn’t mine to give). Instead, you were telling me that you were marrying her—and she hadn’t even agreed. I surmised that your strategy was to get on your knee, whip out the ring (and I assumed it was a whopper), and announce that she had won the marriage sweepstakes. I was honest when I said that you didn’t know her very well if you believed this approach would be successful.
Here is an anecdote from my personal history: I proposed to Gloria three times before she said yes. The first instance was, admittedly, a bit awkward as I was encumbered with my first wife. Gloria is a refined woman, but these were her exact words: Hell no. The second rejection was kinder: No, not yet. The third time I wasn’t down on my knees—neither literally or metaphorically. I presented my modest token and asked her to share my life. I apologized for my transgressions. I laid myself low. I didn’t involve her father and I didn’t ask her best friend to help me make the scene right. I took her hand, telling her the truth of my soul. She answered with a nod. It wasn’t this hooting and hollering and jumping up and down you see on TV. None of this proposing via billboard or at halftime at the Rose Bowl. Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.
All that said, I’ll speak to Celestial about why it is that she has put her visiting schedule on hiatus. In the spirit of disclosure, I admit that I was not aware of this until now. But I must make it clear to you that I cannot speak “on your behalf.” I can only talk to her on behalf of myself, as her father.
I hope you will not interpret this as rejection, because that is not my intention. You are a part of our family and every one of us holds you in highest regard.
I feel obligated to tell you as well that I will be sharing your letter with Celestial. I am her father and I cannot collude against her. She is the joy of my world and my only living blood relative. But I can tell you this: I know the sort of woman we have raised her to be. Her mother was loyal to me, even when I didn’t deserve it, and I feel confident that my daughter will be no less steadfast.
Please write to me again, son. I’m always glad to hear from you.
Sincerely,
Franklin Delano Davenport
cc: C. G. Davenport
Dear Celestial,
By the time you get this letter, Mr. D will have narced on me. I hope that you’re not upset that I wrote to him. I’ve felt close to your daddy since the first time he invited me to that big house (I always think of it as the Mothership), back when you and I were feeling each other out. I’ll never forget it. It was cold outside, but Mr. D wanted to sit out on the wraparound porch. I was freezing, but I didn’t want to be a chump. I was ready to tell him that my intentions were honorable and all of tha
t, but he didn’t even want to talk about you. I got there, sat down, and he promptly started rolling a blunt! It was crazy, I felt like I was on Candid Camera. Then your old man said, “Don’t act like you don’t smoke. I can see it in your eyes!” Then he whipped out this tall fireplace lighter and damn near singed off my eyebrows, blazing me up. I took a hit with him and it was like Welcome to the Family.
Celestial, you know I have a thing about fathers.
That’s the real reason that I’m writing. I planned to send you another letter begging you to come visit. But for one thing, I’m sick of begging. You’ll come see me when you come see me. That’s what I got between the lines of your daddy’s letter. You’re grown and nobody can make you do anything you don’t want to do (like I needed somebody to tell me that).
I’m writing to you now because something has happened that has my head all messed up. I know that you’re on “hiatus,” like your daddy said, but what I’m telling you is burning a hole in my pocket. I got to tell it to somebody, and Georgia, the only person I trust with it is you.
You remember the last day we were together and I carried you to down to the stream to hear the bridge music? I planned to tell you then and there that Big Roy wasn’t my biological father. I lost my nerve, but I had to eventually come correct because it wasn’t fair for us to be talking about growing a family without you knowing about a genetic joker in the pack. I wanted to do what was right, although I know I should have told you before we even got married. I started to bring it up a couple of times, but I could never make myself spit it out. We fought hard over it and that particular disagreement led up to the predicament that I find myself in now. I have to confess that although I apologized to you for not telling you sooner, it’s not until now that I see how it feels to not know somebody that you think you know.
Forgive the cliché, but I hope that you are sitting down. You might want to pour yourself a glass of wine because this will blow your mind. Not only is my Biological incarcerated in this very same prison, he is none other than Walter, the Ghetto Yoda.
This is how I found out: As you know, a brother with my verbal skills is in high demand in prison. I can write letters, decipher documents, and even do a little jailhouse lawyering. By a little, I mean a little. But I can do better than most (my Morehouse education at work—Benny Mays would be so proud). Anyway, I was doing some work for Walter and I happened upon his face sheet and there across the top was his full government name: Othaniel Walter Jenkins. There is only one man in the world with that name, but there once were two. Before Big Roy made me Roy Jr., I was Othaniel Walter Jenkins II. My mother kept Othaniel as my middle name for the sake of history, I guess.
When I saw the name, I knew it was him. Remember what he said to me when I first got moved into his cell? “Us bowlegged brothers got to stick together.” And he looked at me to see my reaction. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but he was pointing out the family resemblance. You know, they call him my pops, but I thought it was some prison shit. People make families in here, and Walter did look after me like I was his own.
Let me back up. This is the story that Olive told me: She said that when she was sixteen, she finished high school in Oklahoma City, hopped on the Greyhound with the intention of living in New Orleans. She had taken a typing class and figured she was qualified to be a secretary. On her way through, she met my Biological and got sidetracked in a little town called New Iberia. She was almost seventeen and he was thirty or something like that. He wasn’t married, but he was a father many times over, so Olive stressed that I should be careful when I meet girls from Louisiana, Mississippi, or east Texas. (When she said that, I pictured him Johnny Appleseeding all over the region.) Long story short—he took off and left her broke and pregnant. But you know Olive wasn’t going to go out like that. She stayed in New Iberia until she was ready to pop, then she went off in search of her man. She went all over town, leading with her stuck-out stomach until sympathetic old ladies gave her whatever little information they had. Finally, someone at the butcher’s told her that somebody said he was in Eloe, working at the paper mill. (Mama said she should have known it was faulty information since it involved the word work.) When she got to Eloe, Walter was long gone—but she hit upon the three things she says a woman needs: Jesus, a job, and a husband.
And as far as Olive was concerned, that was all the story that I needed to have. For me, that was all the story I required. I had Big Roy, and everybody in Eloe knows me as Little Roy. Why would I feel compelled to chase down some rolling stone?
Well, sitting there, it was like that stone rolled right upside my head. When library time was over, I went back to my cell. Where else I was going to go? Not like I could go sit under a bridge and think. When I got there, he was using the commode. Life ain’t right, Georgia. I find out the man is my Biological and he’s standing there with his dick in his hand. (Pardon my French, but this is a story that must be told in full.)
He finished his business, turned to look at me, and read me like a newspaper. He said, “What? You found out?” I told him about the face sheet, and he said, “Guilty as charged,” and even smiled a little bit like he had been waiting all his life for this conversation.
I wasn’t even sure what it was that he was “guilty as charged” about. Was it that he was guilty of being my father or guilty of not telling me? He was over there grinning like all of this was good news, but I felt like a sucker.
He asked for a chance to tell his side of the story, and that’s what he did. You have no privacy in prison, and let me tell you, these dudes in here gossip like bitches. Walter was talking loud, like he was saying his Easter speech. His version was not all that much different from my mother’s. They met on the run—Olive from her father and Walter from a woman (or the woman’s husband, to be precise).The scene is the colored section of a Greyhound bus. Fifteen hours is a long time to be elbow-to-elbow, and by the time they passed into Louisiana, my mama was gone, head over heels over head. Walter sweet-talked her into staying with him for a while in New Iberia. (At this point he said, “I was a pretty nigger in my day.” He actually said that.) Olive and Walter literally shacked up. In a shack. Running water was the only amenity. Anyway, it was a matter of a couple of months before she got pregnant. Like any pregnant girl, she wanted to get married, and like any trifling motherfucker, he ran off and left her. When he was telling me this, he switched into Ghetto Yoda mode: “When a woman tells you she is having your baby, your first mind is to get the hell out. It’s like if the house is on fire. You don’t think to escape, you just do. It’s human nature because you know she is asking you for your whole life. And a man don’t have but one life.”
It was bullshit and I knew it was bullshit, but something about his little soliloquy stuck in my throat like a fish bone.
Celestial, I think it was because I know I wasn’t there for you when you told me the test was positive. I said, “What do you want to do?” What I did was the same as leaving town.
Anyway, Walter saw me sitting there snuffling back my thug tears and he tried to defend himself, swearing up and down that he never beat my mama, never stole from her—even though her pocketbook was right there on the chifferobe. He said it wasn’t even personal, that he had left other women with big bellies. That this was the way things were then. But I wasn’t thinking about him, Celestial, I was thinking about you and what a piece of shit I am. This is the truth.
I was sitting on the bed, having my own private come-to-Jesus, while Walter was getting more and more agitated. He said, “You think it’s a coincidence that we are in this cage together?” He said his buddy Prejean, who is from Eloe, told him who I was, and he checked me out on the sly. He said, “They say that fruit doesn’t fall far from any particular tree. But I didn’t know which tree you fell from, me or your mama’s.” Then he said that he saw me and decided that all I got from him was “bowlegs and nappy hair.” And then he paid good money to get me moved to his cell before I was beat up any more t
han I already was. He said: “Admit it. Things got better for you once you moved in with me. You got to give me some credit.”
Celestial, I want to be mad at him. He left my mama like a two-dollar trick, but he would have been a terrible father to me in my real life. He wouldn’t have sacrificed to get me to Morehouse. Still, I have to give him the credit he asked for. If it wasn’t for him, I could be dead by now or at least a lot worse off. Walter isn’t the Don Corleone of the prison, but he is an old head and people stay out of his way. He didn’t have to take me in, but he did.
It’s complicated. Last night, when lights were out, he said, “I can’t believe she let that nigger change your name. That’s disrespectful.”
I pretended like I didn’t hear him. To say even one word would be a crime against Big Roy. He made me his junior with more than his name. He was my father, or should I say he is my father. But Walter is my old man in here.
This world is too much for me, Celestial. I know I said I wasn’t going to do any begging in this letter, but I will ask you once more. Please come and see about me. I need to see your face.