Back, from left: Charles Whitaker and his father, Andrew Whitaker, Jr.
Front, from left, Charles’s sons Josh and Chris Whitaker

Paean for Our Fathers

By Charles Whitaker

It has become a rite of passage for me and my coterie of middle-aged male friends, as one after another, each of us is called upon to deliver eulogies for fathers laid to rest. But rather than maudlin reflections, these loving farewells ring out as tributes to an overlooked generation of strong and steadfast black family men-a species too many people believe is extinct.

Yet for my friends and I, fathers who married our mothers, taught us to ride bicycles and drive cars, coached our little league teams and stood as of models of responsible manhood were the norm.

Decades before people were oohing and aahing about the example that doting First Dad Barack Obama is setting for brothers who need to step up to the paternal plate, fathers like mine and those of my friends were establishing in our minds what it meant to be a good dad.

We’re not talking about men who were wealthy, sweater-wearing Cliff Huxtable-types. Our dads were postal workers and garbage collectors, guys who toiled on assembly lines and drove eighteen-wheelers. They were men who did back-breaking work-often in the face of intractable racism-so their sons would grow up to be college-educated, suit-and-tie-wearing “children of the dream.” They were guys who, like Chris Rock famously said, got the “big piece of chicken” at dinner, not because they demanded it, but because they deserved it.

My dad always bristled every time a camera zoomed in on some athlete on the sidelines of a big game and the young man would smile, wave and mouth “Hi Mom!” into the lens. “Don’t any of these knuckleheads have fathers?” Dad whined, painfully aware of his lack of parental status in a society where too many black men equate siring children with being a father.

It is a sore point for me and my friends that men like our fathers, who were practically obsessive in their dedication to family, are so often ignored as we focus on the paternal pathology that is rampant in the black community. Maybe we overlook them because their numbers are too scant to be statistically significant. But maybe their numbers are scant because we fail to acknowledge that, amongst the legions of absent and/or abusive black fathers, is a corps of do-right dads who raised a generation of do-right dads.

And so it falls to us, the men who benefitted from the sacrifices of a previous generation, to sing the praises of these fallen and too-often forgotten heroes so that our sons and daughters-and society as a whole-acknowledge that even in times of widespread black family dysfunction there were and are proud, dependable black dads.

Charles Whitaker is Director, Academy for Alternative Journalist, Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Santa Fe Railroad Blues

By Sam Greenlee

My father ran the road, the Santa Fe, all the way from Chicago to Los Angeles. The Santa Fe Super Chief that he considered the finest railroad line in the world, working his way up the scale: dishwasher, bus boy, waiter and finally Manager of the bar car. He had that rolling gait that railroad men share with sailors, one foot firmly planted before the next one moved; to roll with the sway of the train as it hit the curves, moving swiftly on down the line.

He would regale us with tales of the movie stars he served, who eschewed the slow moving propeller planes of the time: Sinatra, Gable, Grable, Edward G. Robinson, Judy Garland, James Stewart, et al, moving into Chicago’s Union Station, traveling first class to transfer to the Twentieth Century Limited to New York. He loved the road and loved the trains and his companions, members of the all-Black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

They were stalwart men, among the elite of the >sporting crowd,= well dressed, urbane, worldly, and quietly proud of their skills. They carried themselves as the well-paid skilled workers they were. George Pullman knew what he was doing when he recruited the best and brightest black men from across the country to serve his passengers. They did it superbly, and my father was among the best of that group.

They are dying now, those vibrant men, and the service on the train has suffered from their absence. They gather once a month for lunch, in diminishing numbers, to talk about the good old days when they ran the road!

Best known for his novels, The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969) and Baghdad Blues (1976), Sam Greenlee is a controversial writer and political activist. His work has always faced opposition because of its confrontational style and troubling imagery, but it has also attracted a large audience of activists, rebels, and radicals. Greenlee makes commercial publishers nervous; in fact The Spook Who Sat by the Door was first published in England when if failed to find an American publisher, but it went on to sell over one million copies and was printed in six languages. A film adaptation of the novel-about a black CIA operative who decides to use his training to organize a national black revolution-was withdrawn without explanation after a promising opening at the box office in 1973. Greenlee alleges that the film wassuppressed by the government in collusion with the film’s distributor, United Artists. Visit his website.

Completing the Circle of Fathers

By Alan Miller

Like millions of diverse baby boomers who were raised by single mothers, I had no idea who my father was during my childhood or early manhood. When asked to reach out to him, I refused, responding, “Why should I?”

Over the years, my grandchildren asked nagging questions, “Why not? Do we look like him?” They hounded me for answers. I wanted to know myself. But pride and hurt kept me from reaching out to him for answers.

Then fate intervened. My wife, Kathleen, searched the internet and located my father in McMinnville, Tennessee. She gave me his telephone number. After working up the courage over several days, I called him. I was 55 years old when I first spoke to my father, who was 78.

We had a very cordial half-hour introductory phone conversation. I was very happy that I hadn’t allowed myself to prejudge him harshly. Nor had my mother painted a negative picture about him. He was aware of me and was expecting to meet me one day. He said he hadn’t abandoned me, sending money for my care during his time in the Army. He was aware of my accomplishments as a poet, playwright and in the corporate world.

A week later, while attending the National Progressive Baptist Convention in Nashville, my wife and I rented a car and drove to my father’s home. Nervous at first, I met my father, Eunice Johnson, an African-American man with blue eyes, on a sunny February morning. His Cherokee Indian ancestry is evident in his facial features and family history, tracing his mother and grandfather to the fair-skinned great-grandfather who built Brown Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in the early 1900s.

During our three-hour meeting, I met my new sisters and brothers. I was able to understand my purpose in life and feel connected to another African-American male.

Three years later, my entire family traveled to see my father in McMinnville. We drove down Johnson Road that stretches for miles and ends at the church with the attached centuries-old graveyard that contains the remains of slaves, slave owners, overseer and Johnson family relatives. Now my children and grandchildren have memories of meeting, talking and seeing my father.

They also saw my father’s commitment to maintaining the debt-free family church, acres of property, and a diversity of people living on his property and within the family.

Before we departed, the family gathered around him as he sat in his easy chair and took the usual smiling family picture. Later, my father, my son, Marcus, and his son, Jaylin and I took a separate picture and gave thanks.

We stood on my father’s front porch laughing, hugging and promising to stay in touch. As I looked down the dirt road toward the church, it came to me that we had completed the circle of fathers.

Alan Miller is the owner of A. Miller Group, a diversity marketing and publishing company. The poet, playwright and contemporary artist lives in the Atlanta area with his wife and daughter. His books, The Spirit Within and The Secret Meaning of Wisdom, will be published in early 2010, with an accompanying contemporary art exhibit.

During the Vietnamese cultural ceremony on his wedding day, Olivier offers tea to his new in-laws, Mr. Thuong N. Tran, and Mrs. Chau T. Nguyen, thanking them for having raised and taken care of his new bride, Trangdai, until that day.

My ‘Boat Father’

By Olivier Glassey-Tranguyen

I proposed to my wife on a Christmas Eve, shortly after I was introduced to her folks. She called me ‘the bravest man on earth,’ who dared to ask for her hand in front of her entire family only hours after I met them.

So when everyone gathered in the living room to open the Christmas gifts, I held the small green bag close to my chest, anticipating my turn to offer her my prized Christmas present. The most important decision of my life was neatly wrapped in there, but for the moments leading to my turn, it felt as if that decision was floating in the air.

Colorful wrapping paper flooded the floor. At long last, in the green bag, my spouse found an engagement ring. I was expecting either yes, no, or maybe. But she said, “Ask my Father.”

I did, and the paternal blessing was granted. At our wedding a year later, Ba (“Daddy” in Vietnamese) took me on as his first non-Vietnamese son-in-law.

I was born and raised in Beuson, Switzerland. My ancestors never left the picturesque Alps of Valais. My own father imparts the respect for all human beings in their diversity. My homeland nurtures humanitarianism. My education shows me the failures of colonialism.

Still, I was ill-equipped at first for a multi-ethnic marriage. Ba, too, had to move beyond the apparent cultural clash to accept a new son from outside the Little-Saigon universe which his family has called home since their arrival in America. Ba deserves all of my gratitude for welcoming me into the family kernel, a gratitude that actually stretches back 34 years to 1975 Vietnam.

1975. In April, the Vietnam War ended. In June, Ba was taken away to the gulag. In September, my wife, Trangdai, was born, without her father. Several years passed till Ba was temporarily released from the gulag, only to be pushed into strenuous non-paid labor and house arrest. When he was threatened with re-consignment to the gulag, Ba decided to escape by boat.

Thirteen times he tried, thirteen times he failed. On the fourteenth attempt, he dodged the coastguards, affronted the sea, survived the Thai pirates, landed at Bidong refugee camp, and eventually made his way to the United States. He worked hard, sent letters and packages to his stranded family, addressing a word and a gift to each child. In 1994, the family was reunited. His children were born a second time, for it feels like growing up again when everything is so different, and even the word ‘father’ takes on a new meaning.

Ba had served his country in his youth, had faced the most treacherous dangers in the human experience, and had striven to sustain himself and his family. Yet he has never received the official recognition of a hero. Still, he is our hero, he is my Ba. Today, his wife, five children, and three grandchildren thank him for the sacrifices he made. And if I have met the most delightful of his offspring, I owe it to his courage.

[Author's Note: The phrase "Boat Father," while alluding to the more common term "boat people," was coined by Trangdai Tranguyen to insist on a more intimate relationship to the refugees who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. She elaborates on this phrase in her bilingual poetry book, X-X₁: Songs for a Boat Father, published in 2004.]

Olivier Glassey-Tranguyen studied physics and mathematics at the University of Fribourg in his native Switzerland,  and received a Stanford Graduate Fellowship to pursue graduate training in 2000. There, he met his wife, Trangdai, in 2005. His immediate aspiration is to join her in publishing babies.”

Left, Leonard Jones (aka PopPop nad Sonny); and Ralph Ricardson, Jr.

To Sonny:

By Ralph Everett Richardson, Jr.

Right on the cusp of the Reagan/Crack Era, I was growing up in Philadelphia with my brother. In the early 80’s, Father’s Day was a day that we always celebrated, but one that I never connected to consciously, or psychologically. As a young child, I never understood its depth, its scope, or its emotional landscape. At least I don’t think I did.

Until now.

When I was a kid, every year we would always celebrate Father’s Day, but not for our father. Me and my brother, Tony, would come together with my Grandmother Kathryn,  my Aunt Marsha, my Uncle Larry, and my mother, Diana. Once in a while, we would order Chinese food from across the street at Muy Fong. But, more than likely, my grandmother-with the help of her youngest daughter, Marsha-would cook up something marvelous for the special man in our lives. And my mother, no matter what, could be counted on for dessert.

This special treatment would all be for my grandfather, Sonny. To me and my brother, he was The Abraham, The Moses, the strong Biblical archetype in our lives, a very strong  Sonny, the one who raised me and my brother, who groomed us, who showed us how to tie a tie-along with my warm, generous, and beautiful grandmother.

After being dropped off at their doorstep at a very young age, Tony and I were fed, clothed, and given unconditional love. We were given this without a second thought, without emotional tyranny, without strings attached.

But even with all of this, I never thought about Father’s Day in a positive way…or a negative way. It was, I guess, more like Memorial Day or Presidents’ Day for some, except you don’t get an extra day off from school. Father’s Day was something that you just did because it’s on the calendar, more analytical than emotional. Maybe, because the man that I modeled my adult behavior after (hard working, responsible, and loving-and don’t forget about being funny as shit), was more concerned about working three jobs to keep a roof over our heads and ample food in the fridge than celebrating a day that he thought was a natural function of life.

Now, as I come upon this Father’s Day, my first time being a father, I look back at my joyous childhood, I look at my family,  I look in the deep, sparkling hazel eyes of my son, and see my big, strong, glorious grandfather. This weekend, I am going back to Philadelphia with my son and my wife. This weekend I will go back and visit my grandfather. And on my first Father’s Day, with my first child, I say to Leonard T. Jones, Jr., my grandfather, my pop pop, my “Sonny,” I love you!

Ralph Everett Richardson, Jr., is a Producer/Director. To learn more about his latest film, go to www.sexdrugsandcomedy.com He is looking forward to his first Father’s Day.

Fred Taylor, left, and son Terence Taylor

Father and Child Reunion

By Terence Taylor

A few years ago, my father apologized to me, out of the blue.

He pulled me away from my niece’s graduation party and walked me around the block while he apologized for belt-whipping me too often for too little reason when I was young. He apologized for overreacting so badly in my twenties when I told him that I was gay that responded by cutting him off for almost two decades.

He apologized for not being there for me when my partner died of AIDS. He apologized for not telling me I had an older brother who he’d denied until my brother tracked him down recently. And he apologized for any other bad blood that might have passed between us.

As a child I’d hated my father and lied to myself that I didn’t, said I loved him because the Bible said I must, but didn’t like him. I’d spent ten years in therapy to get over the damage he’d done before my mother moved us away for good when I was fifteen. The last thing I’d ever expected from him in my lifetime was an actual apology.

I’d already learned to forgive, if not forget, rebuilt the self-image my father had destroyed, and I had let go of any old anger. I’d finally understood that what he did to me had been done to him. No one in his family considered it out of place or excessive. They always wrote it off to family temper, and I still ride my rage to this day. By the time my father apologized to me we’d developed a loose, easy relationship that felt real and natural, as it should be.

It hadn’t been easy for either of us.  After decades apart, I’d grown to genuinely love my father, but I don’t think I ever loved him more than I did that day.

Before he went back to Texas I told him that what made it especially important after our history was the work we had both done to get here. We’d wanted a real relationship enough to work at it slowly for years, to compromise, to re-learn the other and accept who was really here now, not who we’d been to each other in the past.

A week later he admitted he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. I’d suspected something when he started his apology with, “I want to say this in case my plane crashes on the way home…”  His emotional earnestness had been atypical, and I’d been sure only fear for his future or mine would have prompted it.

Fortunately, there has been a happy ending, and a new beginning. Treatment put his cancer in complete remission, with plenty of time to continue our conversation. The worst he has to live with is the consequences of having bared his heart to me, and my “new” big brother in Lawrence, Kansas. We’re all alive and well and grateful to celebrate another Father’s Day with phone calls and earnest exchanges of,  “I love you,” all around, hard-earned and truly meant.

Terence Taylor is a novelist living in Brooklyn.  He writes horror stories, but doesn’t blame his dad for that or anything else anymore.

Stephanie McGhee; her stepfather, Arthur; and her father, Dale, at Stephanie’s college graduation

The Right to Love

By Stephanie McGhee

My father didn’t meet the love of his life until he was 40 years old. When he finally did, it took (as my father tells it) only a few months for the two of them to realize that they would be great together.

They have been great, for 32 years. People who know them consider them a model of a decent relationship. They are in sync, inseparable, have loved, comforted and honored each other, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. They are precisely what marriage is all about, and last October the two of them finally did get married. They waited so long to make it official because, until then, they weren’t legally allowed to do so. My father and his partner are gay.

The ceremony took place in California. It was a quiet one, something they simply wanted to get done before the November elections when, they worried, Proposition 8 would pass. It did pass, and was recently upheld by the courts. And so gay marriage is banned in that state-except for those that, like my father’s, took place during the window of time when it was legal.

What a strange thing to grandfather in. It feels like a trivialization, a lowering of marriage to the same level as, say, pension plan contracts. The night before the ruling, my father wrote to me, “Tomorrow Arthur and I will find out whether we’re still married. When I think about it, I get a little anxious. I don’t know why, because our relationship is not going to be changed one way or the other. But I guess I just want to win.”

Believe it or not, I’ve never been asked what it is like to have a gay father and stepfather.  I know people are curious; I can tell by the looks on their faces when I mention it.  Maybe they think the question would be politically incorrect. Or maybe far too personal, too sensitive.

If they did ask, I would say there is little about my father’s homosexuality that has made him different from a straight father, except in one important way. When I was growing up, he tended to keep his family life separate from his gay friendships, his involvement in gay politics, even his feelings about his orientation.  In fact, he never explicitly said to me that he was gay until I was in my twenties.

His delay was probably to be expected. He’d spent the first part of his life keeping his homosexuality secret and separate. Why risk the possible disgust and rejection of the people he loved? Coming out of the closet didn’t mean he could automatically walk away from the ingrained habit of secrecy and separation.

I understand this, however, and as a result, a sometimes painful emotional barrier existed between him and his children, siblings and parents.

In many ways, I consider my father’s personal struggle and progress to be about integration of his homosexuality into his other relationships. It follows the exterior struggle of gay rights as not just about political equality but about the right to integrate one’s sexual orientation into life and society, and to have it be seen as natural part of the entire person.

I look at the last 50 years of the struggle and feel hopeful, because I see steady progression toward that social integration. How many of us can imagine the marriage debate happening half a century ago? A quarter of a century later, my father’s and stepfather’s relationship was legal and acceptable in (albeit gay-friendly) San Francisco, but was never openly discussed by them or the people I knew. A don’t ask, don’t tell policy.

Today, in the (yes, liberal) New Jersey town where I live, my children can say they have gay grandparents. Gay and lesbian friends and neighbors take vows, even if those vows are not legally recognized. They have children, and the straights among us are perfectly happy for them.

Yet among these liberals, while there may be an acceptance of homosexuality-even gay  and lesbian parenting-there is not always an acceptance of the idea of gay marriage.

This disturbs me. Marriage is about far more than legal rights. If it weren’t, then the offering of civil unions in its place would not be necessary.  Marriage is a communal blessing of a spiritual bond, a commitment to love, family and society.

By refusing gays and lesbians the right to marry, we are saying that they are not allowed to feel that love, create that bond.  They are relegated to the struggle and emotional pain of keeping their love for each other separate from their love for family and community.

In the end, love is our most basic expression of life, and the chance to express it is our most basic human right. That is what my father wants to win. And that is what I want for him.

Stephanie McGhee is a fiction and creative nonfiction writer and mother of two living in Montclair, NJ.

Left, John Copage; and Eric V. Copage

The Zen of Overcoming

By Eric V. Copage

Shoes.  Black shoes.  Wingtips, with heavy soles.

Those shoes belonged to my father, John Copage, who was a Los Angeles real estate broker and investor when I was growing up in the 1960s. I remember the sound of his shoes reverberating off bare walls and hardwood floors of houses he had just purchased.

Even before I was eight years old, when he and my mother divorced and he alone raised my little brother, Marc, and me, (after the divorce, our mother disappeared forever from our lives), I would accompany my father to his properties.

I took for granted his remarkable journey to the middle class from his hardscrabble beginnings. When my father was a year old, his father died of a stroke.  My dad grew up in gang-infested Chicago neighborhoods “on relief” as they called welfare during the Great Depression, with his elder brother and single mother.

Part of the reason I took for granted what I now consider a noteworthy achievement, especially for a black man before the civil rights movement, was that he himself never made a big deal of it.

He told tales as around the hearth entertainment about the rats in the house in the Italian neighborhood where he and his family spent the first eight years of his life, and of picking up Italian so he could walk through that tough neighborhood without being attacked. A black person speaking Italian so startled his would-be assailants that they’d look at him, perplexed, then exclaim “Amici! (Friends!),” and let him pass, he said.

When they moved to a black neighborhood, he prided himself on getting along with all the street gangs there, such as the Four Corners and the ‘Sippi Boys, while belonging to none of them.  To me, cocooned in the suburban comfort of a rabbit named Wiggles, piano, fencing and gymnastics lessons, and camping vacations to Yosemite National Park, his stories were exotic-like listening to tales of Pirates of the Caribbean.

But more important than entertaining me with colorful stories of his rough and tumble youth, he seeded my childhood with the belief that I could accomplish anything.

Every night until I became too old for my dad to tuck me into bed, he’d recite  in  sonorous, resolute tones this prayer: “Dear God: thank you for giving my son, Ricky, a strong mind and a strong, healthy body.  Thank you for making him successful in everything he does.  Amen.”

Psycho-Cybernetics and the Magic of Believing were among the many books on self-improvement on his bookshelf.  I remember him dropping our phonograph needle on garish green or red vinyl records, from which issued confident male voices delivering instructions for self-hypnosis.

My father told me more than once that, “Your thoughts determine your life’s experience.” But most of all, it was my recollection of his living example of perseverance that got me through some of the toughest times in my early 20s when I moved to New York City.

I named both my son and daughter after my father. And until they were old enough to be embarrassed by me tucking them into bed, I recited my father’s prayer to them before kissing them, saying “Nighty night” and turning off the light. I hope they will continue that tradition when they have children.

Today at 84, my father has the stamina of a man half his age. After the death in 2006 of his wife of 30 years (he still refers to her as his Soul Mate), he decided to remain in their condo located just outside of Los Angeles. During an e-mail exchange when I thought I recalled that, after his wife’s passing, he briefly flirted with the idea of moving to a retirement home, he quickly corrected me: “To consider living in a retirement home would be completely out of character for me,” he wrote.

My father has big plans. He recounts with relish how he is tinkering with his new real estate blog, and planning on building a health center in the desert, which would be based on the book on nutrition he is writing.

Recently, my dad sent an e-mail message to me about a friend of his who suffers from emphysema. My father is determined to do his best to help his friend.

“At one time in my life, I was diagnosed as having emphysema,” he wrote, “but I overcame it.”

But I overcame it.

I closed my eyes and let those four words hover before me for a moment. “Yes,” I thought. “That pretty much sums it up.”

Eric V. Copage, a former editor at the New York Times, is the author of several books including the novella, Between Father and Son, and  the best-selling and award-winning Black Pearls: Daily Meditations, Affirmations and Inspirations for African Americans.

Father and son, both Allison Burnett, before the father’s death at age 47.

Father’s Day

By Allison Burnett

When I was just a boy, I watched my dad,
Still young, but already dying of thirst,
As, buffeted across a snowy lot,
He caught his boot and fell, hands out, head first.

We’d broken bread together (funny phrase,
I know, but that’s exactly what he said;
A thing we rarely did back then, and now
We never do, now that he is dead),

And, breaking bread, we’d talked of loneliness,
(His for my mom and mine for I forget).
To wash it down, he broke his word and drank,
And, as he did, my heart began to set.

The sun did, too. The sky unpacked its snow,
And I began to pray that he would rise and pay;
Instead, he darkened with the room, and I
Ran out of reassuring things to say.

At last he paid the check, but, as he did,
A girl I knew from school called out my name.
I said, “You go ahead without me, Dad.”
I walked to her, to my eternal shame.

We laughed and flirted heartlessly, as he
Emerged without a hat into the storm.
I manned the window sill and watched, as though
Mere vigilance might keep him straight and warm.

He made his way behind the scrim of white.
But then the wind rose up; I feared the worst
And touched the trembling window, felt the cold,
And saw his fall begin — hands out, head first.

A paltry fact: I’m at that window still.
I cannot fathom why I let him go.
I wish that I had bundled him, or me,
Or us, and made a difference in the snow.

Allison Burnett, the son, is a poet, playwright and novelist. His father, Allison Burnett, was an eminent biologist and poet who worked in the civil rights movement and whose involvement in working to integrate the University of Virginia movie theater brought death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Allison the son named his son Allison as well. www.allisonburnett.com