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I have a recurring dream about my father and me, one of the few welcome dreams I have about him. We’re both in our late thirties, though he’s fitter than I remember him ever being. We’re at Fenway, out in the right-field bleachers, several rows behind Ted Williams’s red seat.
I can see the bulge of a cigarette pack in his shirt pocket. Our square faces and hairless arms are similar. I haven’t, since I was a boy, wanted to resemble him, but in the dream, and for a brief time after waking, I don’t mind looking like his son.
The stands are empty. No game, no batting practice, but we’re watching something. It’s bright enough to be day, though it feels like night, like late August. An unseen ball clatters against the hard plastic seats. My father bounces down the rows, using the benches as stairs. He’s light and agile—moving as I’d never seen him. I know he’s going to collect the souvenir for us. He disappears. I wait.
I spent a lot of time at Fenway growing up. There’d be a bustling in the house, and my brother, David, would tell me to get my glove. At first, I’d think the two of us were going to play catch in the street, or our father was going to take us out to practice grounders and flies. But if my father told us to “bring coats ’cause there might be a chill,” I knew we were going to Fenway.
We would drive there in my dad’s Catalina, which was the color of amber ale, with chrome bumpers and door handles. I don’t know what model year, but it had that Pontiac nose and a black vinyl roof that looked like close-cropped hair. My father never seemed to worry about traffic. He’d ease along shoulders or speed down side streets to find a parking spot. If he couldn’t find one, there was always some secret lot he knew of, or an old buddy’s gas station nearby. He always tried to get “closer.”
I was four when I went to my first game. It was the only time I remember walking to the park. It was a hot and hazy Saturday afternoon. My father, brother, sister, and I travelled east along the Charles, cutting over to Beacon and eventually making a left on Lansdowne. Over the hot asphalt, through the smell of sausage grease and sharp and sweet green peppers and onions. In the Monster’s shadow. The silent net above. The calls of venders—“Git ya hats here, git ya yeah-ya books!” Through the turnstiles and tunnels. That bright sun at the runway end, the growing collective murmur, and then—out.
We sat in the lower grandstand just outside the overhang’s shadow. The P.A. announcements were like instructions from one of Charlie Brown’s teachers—“Wah, wah, wah”—but I could feel it in my belly, not my ear. The Red Sox took the field. They were playing Milwaukee. Roger Moret pitched—though I might be combining multiple memories—and we lost. But we didn’t lose to the Brewers at home that year, and Moret never started a game. Does it matter?
I was used to seeing the players through the center-field camera’s lens—a Saturday-afternoon game with a homemade Italian sub on my lap and a cold glass of grape Funny Face. But in person the colors were brilliant. Our RCA CRT console never came close to reproducing them: Yaz’s sharp red “8”; the players’ high, bright stirrups and white socks; the teal walls; the emerald-and-pine double-cut grass. All of the black was blue.
I didn’t know what to do, so I watched my father. Someone would get up, get on, or get out, but he’d take his time scoring the at-bat. He’d go half the inning without recording anything, then quickly draw those stat glyphs which I still love studying. Most of the day, he sat, smiled, and enjoyed the sun, even when the Brewers scored or the Sox failed to. If an ump made a terrible call, he’d grumble “Hey” or “Come on.” But, regardless, it seemed as if he couldn’t have been happier.
We went to Fenway often that year. We usually sat on the first-base side—sometimes grandstand, sometimes box, sometimes those bizarre, wrong-facing seats out by Pesky’s Pole. It was always the same: for the first three innings, my father ignored the venders and ignored us. There was only the game. Before the fourth, he’d ask, “Hungry?,” and then there would be hot dogs, with long squirts of French’s yellow, and Sprites, never Cokes. I’m sure he’d have a beer, but I can’t picture it.
There were rarely more than a few Black people scattered in the stands and, of course, very few on the field. If I think quickly, there aren’t many that come to mind: Tommy Harper, Reggie Smith, George Scott, Cecil Cooper, Fergie Jenkins, Moret. The Sox’s owner, Tom Yawkey, was still a force back then, a man who was thought to have said, “Get those niggers off the field,” and who didn’t roster a Black player until 1959. “Get those niggers off the field” meant keep those niggers out of the stands, too.
But there we were, Black. Back then, it seemed that the white/Black ratio was five hundred to one. My father was a generation removed from Jim Crow; our great-great-grandfather had been born a slave. My father wasn’t physically intimidating. I doubt that he could fight. And yet wherever he was he moved through the throng—white, Black, or other—with a jazzy defiance. He appeared to live easily within the “wider society.” Fenway should have been terrifying. But, in those days, it wasn’t.
I remember that first time, when the game was over, my father got up and led us through the crowd. He had a way of zigzagging into open spaces without cutting anyone off. Up the stairs, through the tunnel, down Lansdowne and Brookline, across the square, west down Commonwealth—to the Charles. I tried to look at everything and to keep up, too, and I didn’t do either well. At some point, he stopped, threw down his cigarette, then lifted me over his shoulders. From up there, I watched: on the left, Storrow Drive’s slow, mirage traffic; straight ahead, on top of the red brick bottling plant, the dormant Coca-Cola sign; to the right, the picnickers, sunbathers, and orange-silver river, which we followed home.
With my father, being Black around white people meant—felt like—one thing; with my mother, it was another. Both demanded politeness, precise vocabulary, flawless enunciation, immaculate public personae, and respectful private ones, too. But my mother insisted that there would be no holes, no stains, no off-brands. No dirty fingernails, funky pits, or nappy heads. “Don’t leave this house looking like a street urchin,” she would say.
She was quick to anger and judgment, and her rules could seem arbitrary, stifling, and conformist, but later I realized that they didn’t have anything to do with becoming white and upper middle class. Neat and clean hair didn’t mean we couldn’t use picks with fists or folding red-and-green handles.
There were threats everywhere, real and imagined. Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, the Gerber Baby—it required constant vigilance on her part to keep those things from doing us harm. Her hope for us was humble. Again, crossing over wasn’t assimilation or integration. It was choice: the freedom to choose.
My mother’s migration from Hampden Sydney, Virginia, to Boston seemed of another generation. In my father, she found a new Negro: educated, urbane, and comfortable around white people. One look at his lone dark face in his Brighton High class picture tells you—he hadn’t had much of a choice.
My older siblings have memories of our parents being unified. My brother recalls Sunday afternoons spent driving through the suburbs, house-hunting. I remember fracture: uneasy dinners, grim Christmas Eves, and my father’s sudden escapes into small jazz clubs in and around Boston. I never saw my parents being kind to each other. My early understanding segregated them into distinct Black American traditions: he, Du Bois, she, Washington; the new and the old; white-collar and blue; the talented tenth and those they were charged to uplift. It wasn’t that neat, of course.
My father, for all his altruism and cultural literacy, never moved away from his home town. He kept us in the same house in Allston in which he grew up, and, like his father, he often left us there. When he was home, the television was always on, the house always in disrepair. He was, simultaneously, honky-tonk and erudite, quoting Emerson while watching “The Munsters” on TV.
We didn’t go to games in ’73. My mother worked. He didn’t. I was too young to attend camp with my siblings, so I stayed home with him. A typical day began with me memorizing passages from the Western literary canon. I’d been reading since I was three, and my favorite book was “The Monster at the End of This Book,” narrated by Grover from “Sesame Street.” I’d sit with it until I heard my father stir. He wouldn’t talk to me if I read children’s stories. The only picture books he’d acknowledge were the encyclopedia and Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaires’ books on Greek and Norse mythology. Sometimes I’d study them on the living-room floor while he sat on the couch, watching game shows and smoking. Midmorning, he’d quiz me: “Spell ‘ankylosaurus.’ ” Or “Jurassic” or “Cretaceous.” He’d ask me to list the gods and goddesses by name, rank, and dominion.
Occasionally, he’d read me works of antiquity and romantic poetry, and ask me to recite passages back to him. He wasn’t cruel. He never hit or scolded me. He would correct my grammar and syntax, sharpen my elocution, and ignore my failures of logic. When I grew frustrated, I hid it, because I couldn’t bear it when—even though it was always an aside—he’d tell me that I was “acting like your mother.”
After lunch, he’d drink beer. He’d let me take the last sips of each glass. “Take it easy,” he’d say. “Go slow.” Never enough to get drunk, but enough to love and hate it.
I do remember feeling special around my father. He seemed proud when I could recite Pliny the Younger or Longfellow, or finish the dregs of his afternoon beers without showing any effects. And it seemed a reward when he’d take me with him to the Ramada Inn lounge, where I’d perform long division for his white pals and his mistress.
As I grew older, I watched him drink and smoke and cheat on my mother, all without explication. Being with him was both freeing and burdensome. He never told me how to think or feel about anything—including himself. He left that up to me.
He moved out when I was eight. When he came for Sunday visits with us, he’d stand on the front porch and survey his childhood home: the failing window and door trim and suicidal gutter; the wild, shapeless hedges; the black rosebush. My mother’s contempt for him was severe, and she defended the house from him with it: moat, wall, and turrets. As the months passed, he’d wait on the path, then the sidewalk, then in the car. Then he wouldn’t show. I think he lived with his mother until her house burned down. After that, I think he lived in his car.
Sometimes he’d call and speak directly to us, one by one. I would try to figure out where he was calling from. I’d listen for traffic, other voices, jukeboxes. Cocktail sounds. When he finally showed up—if he managed to get out of the car—he’d be leaning against the grille, looking down at the tarmac, smoking nervously. He wouldn’t even acknowledge us until we were well into our drive and he was sure that we wouldn’t verbalize whatever resentment we might have had.
We saw him infrequently. We’d go out to dinner, maybe bowling, but rarely to a game. He’d appear. No bustle, just my mother sometimes spitting, sometimes drawling, “He’s here.”
The Red Sox, in 1975, lost the greatest World Series ever. The ’76 team finished third; in ’77, they tied for second. In ’78, they blew a fourteen-game lead over the Yankees. We went from middle class to working poor to wards of the state. We’d been attending an exclusive private school on scholarship. When my mother could no longer afford the reduced tuition, she falsified our address and snuck us into a school in Newton. When my mother couldn’t pay the redlined mortgage, we had to flee our home. We moved from our foreclosed house in Allston to two short-stay rentals in Newton and eventually to public housing in that affluent suburb.
The only time I went to Fenway was with friends and their fathers. It was all wrong: the wrong food, or the right food at the wrong time. And they were white. With these escorts, the park felt oppressive.
We were still going to school with some of the richest families in the state. There, we were too Black for most white people and too white for most suburban Blacks. I was starting to understand, deeply, what class and race really meant.
Boston let Fred Lynn and Carlton Fisk go, but they still had Yaz. The white boys I knew only mimicked white players, and most Black boys rooted for other teams. I wanted to pitch like Dennis Eckersley and hit like Jim Rice. The racism of my team and many of its fans was undeniable, but I still loved the Red Sox. And though I was often detained and harassed by cops and sometimes even civilians, I still loved my city.
But it was starting to hurt my head and roil my guts to consider anything I loved alongside my father. His friends and mistresses were white. So were his team and his town. He’d bemoaned Nixon but said nothing about Shirley Chisholm. And though he loved jazz more than any other music, he listened to it sweet, not hot. He didn’t seem to understand, or even care, what those artists had suffered to make it—what his ex-wife and children suffered every day to make it. It seemed that he saw them, and us, just as any white man would.
By the time I was twelve, I didn’t need anyone’s father. My friends and I could go to Fenway on our own. We’d leave immediately after school and head inbound on the D train. We’d pool our money: three dollars and fifty cents for bleacher seats. We’d usually have enough for food but could rarely get more than two hot dogs for three guys and a small soda each.
We’d cheer and stomp for our Sox. Our most important job was heckling the enemies in the visiting bullpen. We had standards: no swearing and no family jokes. I once told the Yankee closer, Rich (Goose) Gossage, that he looked “more like an ugly duck” than anything else. Gossage was famous for his hundred-mile-an-hour fastball and his handlebar mustache. I yelled in my best Bostonese, “Hey, Rag, give that poor squirrel his tail back!” My boys howled. Gossage jumped back, got a ball, and cocked his arm as though he were going to bean me. I yelled, “Go ahead, Rag! My baby sister throws harder than you!” His pen mates laughed. So did some of the Sox. He pump-faked, pointed at me, then at all of us. He smiled. Perhaps he respected that we weren’t throwing beer at him or talking about his mother.
The ragged seventies ended and the authoritarian eighties began. Suddenly, there were rules, and not much interest in adolescent Black poet-philosopher kings. Even in my liberal suburban school, things changed. Teachers and administrators were impatient. I didn’t “forget my homework”; I was accused of not doing it. If my math teacher couldn’t decipher a “2” from an “8” in my homework, it wasn’t sloppy penmanship; it was that the concepts were beyond me. My “concerned” teachers noted that I appeared “distant,” or “lacked enthusiasm.”
Almost every white person I knew—teacher, coach, friend, or parent—was impossibly obtuse. They either didn’t know I was Black or thought my goal was to be white. I couldn’t explain to them how insane that was. When I tried to write critiques about Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams, instead of helping me formulate my arguments they’d say, “I don’t think you understand his poems.” My classmates didn’t get why everything for me was so freighted. For them, everything vital—beautiful or horrible—was going on over there. Anything that made them really look at themselves and how they, and especially their ambivalence, affected others was like a television program one might pay attention to for a moment and then click past.
By the time I started tenth grade, which in the Boston suburbs was the first year of high school, I was at my sixth school in five years. I was trying not to drink, and struggling with what would much later be diagnosed as clinical depression. But in the eighties, at least for poor Black teens, there was no such thing. The more I tried to explain, the more alien I felt. And of course I couldn’t explain it. I hadn’t yet turned fifteen, and I couldn’t speak like Dr. King, or write like Toni Morrison. I damned sure would have tried to dismantle the master’s house, but I was lacking most of his tools.
No one could see that I was sitting there with more than two hundred years of Black American literature and thought. I didn’t have anyone to talk to except white people—my teachers, my friends’ parents. And they believed that one could use “The Fire Next Time” to solve the race problem. Even I knew that the people who wanted me dead or in jail weren’t going to be told what to do by a book, and certainly not a good one. I just wanted to know how those writers lived and wrote so much rage and love and joy and beauty without blowing up or falling apart.
My friends and I got older, got jobs, got pocket money. It was the summer of 1982, and now we could go to night games. My friends, who were white, started smuggling in nip bottles and pinch-hitters. Baseball didn’t matter. The game was something going on over there. It didn’t occur to them that I couldn’t get caught with drugs and alcohol. I couldn’t use drugs or alcohol.
Going to Fenway was becoming dangerous for me. I was vulnerable to stares, taunts, and threats. It was bad in the park and worse outside of it. Everyone seemed white, and every man other than the fathers and the very old seemed belligerent. If I was singled out—called any number of racial epithets—my friends wouldn’t help. They never ran; they froze.
Sometimes my friends pretended that they hadn’t heard the word, or asserted that it hadn’t been directed at me. I had imagined the men who blocked my path and stared down at me. I was “paranoid,” too sensitive, a drag. They refused to believe that Brookline Avenue was perilous, that walking past the Cask ’n Flagon was stupid, and that any plan to stop in Kenmore Square was suicidal. If, later, anyone admitted to the earlier danger, they spoke of the group’s danger, not mine. I was their “equal.”
Their parents started giving them money for the grandstand or even box seats. I couldn’t afford either. I went to a few day games—makeups for rainouts—with a couple of different friends, still white, but working class, and not afraid to fight. They’d get stoned, and we’d sit in the sun—more a day at the beach than at the ballpark. But I was O.K. with that. And I would’ve kept going with them, but they started talking about girls. Or I started listening. They’d probably been talking about them for a while.
Girls didn’t frighten me; the results of interacting with them did. Even my standing next to a white girl could be seen as a criminal offense. Lynching was real. And standing near one of the few Black girls at our school made it seem like we were at the altar. Most of my friends had started to date, and if they saw me speak with anyone but my sister they’d ask, “Dude, are you into her?” I had no idea what that meant. I didn’t want to. When I thought about a girlfriend, I’d hear Catullus evoking Sappho. I’d see Sappho “paler than glass.” And I’d feel “a little short of dying.”
I didn’t want to grope someone or gag her with my tongue. I just wanted to talk to someone. But I knew I couldn’t talk to anyone about anything, so I decided that I would listen. I just wanted to be there for someone in need.
Someone, though, couldn’t be anyone. I was an aesthete with O.C.D., and I had standards.
At the end of the summer, I decided that I could fall in love with Stephanie. She was appropriate. She was a teacher’s daughter, athletic, a good student, cute—perversely all-American. Everyone thought she was “great,” unlike the cross-eyed, gap-toothed beauties whom I privately favored. She wasn’t Angela Davis or Roberta Flack. But she was brown-haired and brown-eyed and, in the warmest months, had vaguely Mediterranean skin.
I met her beside the high school. She was walking with two other girls, both white and clearly privileged. But Stephanie was unnaturally interested and kind.
I had just leaped from my father’s moving car. We’d been on our way to the Barn, a sporting-goods store, to buy some back-to-school sneakers.
My father seemed happy to be with me. He’d picked me up on time, asked me if I wanted to grab a pizza. “Yeah, but later,” I told him. And for once he didn’t ask, “Don’t you mean ‘yes’?”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him, and I didn’t know why we’d been apart, what the big deal had been. He asked me where I saw myself going to college. When I listed Boston University, his alma mater, he told me I could do much better than that. When I reminded him that King had gone there, he stuck a cigarette in his mouth and shrugged. I knew he was trying to be, in his way, supportive, but I wanted more. I wanted him to tell me not where to go but, rather, where I might go and why.
It was the age of Reagan, the beginning of neoconservatism, conformity, materialism, pastiche. I wanted to ask my father about being Black. I wanted to ask him about thought and being Black, about sports and being Black, about girls and being Black. I wanted him to confirm that, even though it was all rigged, if I were smart enough, good enough, thoughtful and gentle enough, I would be O.K. I wanted him to tell me that, though teachers could disregard test scores and coaches could ignore stats, their actions could never define who I was.
I wanted to tell him that I’d been reading Malcolm and listening to Marley, and that I had a vision of our country’s future and my place in it. All of my thoughts on Black liberation, power, art, and beauty were in my head; I’d never spoken them to anyone. I wanted to tell him what it was like to have a partial understanding—even a juvenile one—about who we are, where we’d been, and where we must go. I wanted him to know what it had been like in all those white schools among all those white people and all the white cops who’d put their hands on me, who’d terrified and hurt me, who’d threatened to kill me. I wanted him to know what it was like when the suburban, bougie Black parents and children whispered that Thelma’s kids weren’t really Black. I wanted him to know that I was part of a long line, from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, and so at home in my Blackness that I could write a poem like Phillis Wheatley or Amiri Baraka to anyone and for any reason.
But I stammered and could offer only sentence fragments. I got frustrated with myself, then angry, which I’m sure he felt was directed at him, because he tensed and closed. All I could do was whisper, “I’m so angry,” and hope that he didn’t see a petulant teen but, rather, a young, gifted, and Black man full of rage and love.
But he was the reason I choked and stammered.
My father wasn’t Black—at least not Black like me. He had nothing for me. He stayed still and silent, and in that vacuum everything rushed from me to it. And it was so apparent to me that my father had no love for me, and I was ashamed I’d ever thought that I could for him. Then all I seemed to have inside was rot and fire.
I opened the car door and jumped. I remember sitting on the curb with my head in my hands. I was concussed and had bruised ribs, three dislocated fingers, and abrasions along my elbows, forearms, and knees. I must have been knocked out by the fall. I looked up. He was standing a few paces away. He held a cigarette in one hand and a matchbook in the other. He looked terrified.
He sighed as if he were about to say something, perhaps calmly shame me for my behavior. I was, after all, a Black boy on the street of a wealthy white suburb. I’d just publicly lost my mind and was sitting in the gutter while his shit-box car idled nearby.
“What do you need?”
“I need you to go.”
“Will you be all right?”
“Does it matter?”
He tried to be cool and light his cigarette but was trembling too much to strike the match. This made me hate him.
I screamed, “Go!”
He got in his car and left.
I gathered myself and started walking.
Two blocks later, I saw Stephanie—so open to my projections. When she smiled, I thought it was because she realized I saw a pain in her that her friends never would. I felt how she would eventually break my heart. And that was a hurt I could hold. ♦
This is drawn from “The Broken King.”
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