The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers

by Sampson Davis

  To this day, I feel there are repercussions from not having a father that handicap me. I’ve been taken advantage of by people claiming they want to be my mentor. I crave guidance and direction so much that it has left me vulnerable. It’s a stressful way to operate. I feel unprotected and sometimes just plain lost. I later found that research shows conclusively that children without fathers are less confident and more anxious when placed in unfamiliar settings. I didn’t need a university study to tell me this. It was my reality and it still is. To this day, I’m constantly looking for approval, feeling unsteady in the workplace. And, unfortunately, that kind of support tends to be in short supply.

  Not being confident also made me a late bloomer when it came to approaching women. In high school, I had a steady girlfriend, and she served as a security blanket. I didn’t have to put myself out there on the dating scene and face rejection. But when I got to college, I decided it was time to solve this problem, the same way I had willed myself past all my other obstacles. I paid close attention to Sam, watching how he easily started conversations with the most beautiful women in the room. “Stop limiting yourself,” I told myself. “Take a risk, get out there and introduce yourself.” Change came slowly.

  It shocked the life out of me when Cash called me during freshman year to ask me to come to his wedding. “What are you talking about?” I gasped. I convinced myself that he had to be joking. I hadn’t even mastered the art of asking a woman out, and here he was getting married? I didn’t go to the wedding. I regret that to this day, but honestly, I couldn’t fathom the idea that Cash, my peer, my oldest friend, had popped the question to his girlfriend at age nineteen.

  He’s still happily married, and he and his wife just had their fourth child, little Malcolm. Cash’s success at being a husband is a prime example of something I’ve long noticed: My only friends who are happily married right now are the few I know who were raised in a two-parent household.

  It’s the most valuable perk, I believe, of growing up in an intact family. For Cash and Al and Anthony (who are married, too), the necessary skills to be part of a satisfying partnership come easily. They can take for granted a gift that all of us don’t possess. I’m still confounded by the mystery of how to make a long-term relationship work. As I steeled myself to break into dentistry, I’ve had to create a don’t-mess-with-me zone. That mind-set helped me crash through career barriers and kept me moving through adversity, but it doesn’t help in my relationships with women.

  I never got a chance to see how to treat a lady every day, how to compromise, how to make a relationship work while raising a family. I never saw a man and woman work out even the smallest problems such as when he wants eggs, bacon, and waffles and she wants cereal.

  So many people like me, reared without fathers, have been deprived of knowing how to behave in a relationship. It’s like an intangible, invisible heir-loom that fatherless children will never inherit.

  To this day, it affects me. Ever since college, I’ve had so many demands on my time and attention that it makes my head swim. I’m even busier now, with a full-time job in dentistry plus the travel and community responsibilities of our work as The Three Doctors. I’ve never figured out how to give a girlfriend the attention she wants while handling the rest of my business effectively.

  Once I had a girlfriend I liked a lot. She caught my attention at a book signing. A former track athlete, she looked like a walking sculpture of perfection to me. Her father was a dentist and she was considering going to dental school so it seemed we had a lot in common. Not long after we met, she took an interest in decorating my apartment. It could use a little sprucing up, I admitted, so I gave her my credit card. First, she bought curtains for my bedroom, something I’d been too busy to do. She even installed them. I loved it. Then she started walking in the door with new salt and pepper shakers, oven mitts, candles and towels and shower curtains. Just bags and bags full of new stuff. Okay, I dug the candles, but suddenly things seemed to be happening without my permission. I’m really not a color-coordinated, salt-and-pepper-shaker kind of guy. Things had gotten out of control. I started getting itchy.

  She lived about an hour away, so we tried to see each other on weekends. At first she seemed to understand my career demands and took it in stride if I couldn’t make it. And I pushed myself to go see her, even when I was dog-tired. But after a while, I couldn’t keep up the pace. There were weekends when I felt so worn out I just wanted to chill. She let me know that I wasn’t putting as much energy into the relationship as she expected. A few more missed weekends and she got mad and blew up. It’s a cycle I know very well. Typically, my relationships start, hit full bloom, and then flame out, all within about four months.

  Women, I’ve learned, want to be my number one priority. It bothers me that I haven’t figured out how to deliver the attention they want and still keep myself afloat. At first, when a girlfriend objects to my busy schedule, I manage to put out the fire by ignoring my other duties and focusing on her. But I can’t keep all the balls in the air at the same time, and her complaints get louder and louder. So I shut it down.

  Can a relationship feel more natural and less like hard work? I have no idea. I’ve taught myself to master a lot of things over the years, but I’ve never gotten on top of this dilemma.

  But I’m trying to teach myself to grow. Right now I’m in a situation that seems different from all the others.

  My new lady has been a friend of mine for eight years and only now are we cautiously moving to the romantic stage. And it strikes me that it’s our bond of friendship that’s giving our new relationship its durability. She’s already irreplaceable to me because she’s stood by me for years and been such a good friend. The way I feel about her reminds me of the way I feel about Sam and Rameck: I’m going to take good care of this relationship because we have a history of being loyal to each other. There’s nothing she can do that will push me away.

  Being with her makes me think that friendship is what’s missing from a lot of modern-day hookups. When you head straight to the bedroom, then that’s a fragile bond that’s too weak to withstand the inevitable disagreements. But when you become my friend, you’re more precious to me than anything.

  I’m still a juggler, frantically trying to manage my many priorities, but I’m holding this budding relationship in my hands much more delicately. I’m trying very hard to make it work. If this one doesn’t work out, I don’t want it to be my fault.

  Is this love? Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve never had a relationship last long enough for me to even consider buying an engagement ring and popping the question. I have told a girl “I love you” before. Yet I’m not sure I meant it. This is the kind of thing I dream of asking a father about. “How did it feel when you fell in love? How did you know she was the one?”

  The thought of voicing these questions out loud makes me feel even more foolish than the day I asked for help tying a tie. These are the kinds of things that a son learns from a father. And when the father is missing, the lesson goes unlearned.

  One of my college friends, Dax, got a letter from his dad in 2003 that shook him up. At the time, Dax had been dillydallying around in a long-term relationship with his girl, Candice, getting all the benefits of a live-in girlfriend without progressing to a true commitment. His father’s letter told him, with all due respect, that good women like that don’t come along every day. “I see how much effort you put into your career. You have to value your relationship the same way and put the same amount of effort into it,” his father wrote. The gentle but frank letter made Dax stop and think. What’s the right thing to do? He pondered it, then went and bought a ring. Today he’s been married two years. It takes a real man, he realized, to make the responsible choice, instead of giving in to all the outside influences that emphasize sex without commitment.

  Only a few months after Dax asked Candice to marry him, his father was diagnosed with brain cancer. He held on until the wedding, when he flew to St.
Thomas to serve as Dax’s best man. By that point, the tumor had stolen much of his ability to speak. He passed away shortly after that. Dax treasures those wordless moments he and his father shared as Dax crossed an important threshold in his life. By then, his father had done his job admirably. He didn’t have to speak a word.

  Since I became an adult, I’ve visited my father only once. In 1997, I volunteered to ride down south with a dental school friend from South Carolina, because he had to drive to Charleston to handle some paperwork related to his dental license. My dad picked me up and drove me to his home, where I spent half a day with him. He took me to meet some relatives and showed me where his store had been. Fragments of memories started stirring for me. I knew that I had been there before, although I couldn’t remember much about it. As always, it was a pleasant visit but nothing lasting came of it.

  Once I saw my paternal grandmother’s picture. It shocked me to see that I look just like her. But to this day, I know almost nothing about her. Family history is important—people get strength from the things that happened in their past. When I was in dental school, I could have used some strong stimuli like that to keep me going. But I know so little about my father and his family. I don’t even know my father’s birthday.

  My dad and I enjoy occasional talks on the phone. I never have a problem opening up when we chat. Anyone listening to our conversation would think that we have a real relationship. We tell each other we’re going to keep in better contact, and then we hang up. But he doesn’t follow through, and neither do I.

  I have my own opinions about what a real father is supposed to be, and this isn’t it. A father is supposed to sacrifice himself for his child. His willingness to do that should be so powerful that it latches the two of you together inseparably. That’s what I’ve missed out on, that sense of sacrifice that lets me know I belong to my dad and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for me. Not having it is what robbed me of my confidence and what continues to hamper me. It’s tough to even think of advancing our father-son relationship without that foundation of security for it to rest on.

  Over the years, it seemed as if the space I had reserved for him got filled by the people who were substitutes for him—like my mother and Shahid, then Sam and Rameck. By the day I finally donned a cap and gown and proudly placed the initials DMD after my name, I had no place left in my heart to put my father.

  Now that I’ve forced myself over all the hurdles in my way, I just don’t want anyone to make the mistake of thinking that my father had something to do with the success I’ve experienced. So I admit that I have put up a wall between us. To my easygoing father, everything probably seems fine. But for me, it’s an oddly superficial feeling to have the outer shell of the relationship but not the bones. For me, the building blocks of our relationship are missing. And there can be no true bond without it.

  Chapter 2

  GEORGE JENKINS, SR.

  The Beginning

  IF YOU WOULD have told me when I was a young man that my son and I would have grown up to be this distant, I wouldn’t have believed you. I always pictured myself having a close relationship with my child—much closer than I was ever able to have with my own parents.

  When I search my soul honestly, I have to say there were several reasons why things turned out this way. But more than anything else, it was sheer geography that robbed me of my closeness with my son. I’ve spent most of my adult life in a rural South Carolina town called Woodrow. It’s a humble little place with just one main street, Highway 441, running through it. The population is about ninety percent black, and families have lived here for generations. I was born here on February 3, 1942, and today I’m still living in the home that my family built. Once my wife departed, taking George and Garland with her and leaving me with an empty home, I wasn’t in a position to travel up north often to visit them. If only George and I had lived closer, I feel certain that things would have turned out differently. I know that we would have spent time together and created the kind of memories that he ended up missing out on.

  George is my only child and I am proud of him. I also admire the national reputation he is earning. I think The Pact tells a wonderfully original story: He and his two classmates had such a tight friendship that they kept one another from falling by the wayside.

  Yet it was painful for me to read his book, and to see my role in my son’s life reduced to just a handful of paragraphs. And unflattering paragraphs at that.

  I can’t deny that I haven’t been the most attentive and affectionate of fathers. It’s not something I’m proud of. However, I didn’t have much of a road map to follow.

  My parents weren’t married. In truth, the facts behind my birth probably set a lot of tongues to wagging in my small town: My mother, a widowed schoolteacher, was having a baby. And the father of her child was the well-to-do married proprietor of the town’s general store. This sort of news was totally out of the ordinary back then, and especially among the town’s black professional class. I notice that today, this type of thing has become much more accepted.

  My mom, Rosa Lee Blanding Jenkins, chose to give me the respectable last name of her deceased husband, Henry Jenkins, who had been a businessman and farmer. But I’m sure that my arrival had to be an inconvenience. What was she to do? She was already a mother of six who worked two jobs, as a teacher and also keeping afloat the little store that her deceased husband had owned. She didn’t have time to care for an infant. So when I was just a few weeks old, she shipped me off to another town, deep in the South Carolina woods, to be cared for by a friendly couple. I lived in the home of Annie and David Dennis until I was old enough to attend school, and I almost never saw my blood family during those early years. I thought the Dennises were my family, because when I opened my eyes every morning, that’s who I saw.

  I cried buckets when Mr. Dennis died, when I was about six years old. My sister, who was married to the embalmer who handled Pop’s body, spoke to me sharply that day. “What are you crying for?” she asked. “That’s not your father. Elijah Prince is your father.” Yes, I knew that Mr. Dennis wasn’t related to me. But that didn’t stop the feelings I had for the old man, the first that I knew as a father. A few years later, my mother would pass away before I had a real chance to bond with her. The Dennises would forever be the parents I felt the most love for when I was a child.

  When I was old enough to attend school, I came back to Woodrow. I lived with my mom and finally got to know my six brothers and sisters. They were all much older than me, and most of them had married and gone out on their own. My sister Dorothy, a recent college graduate, was the only one still living at home. Eventually she married and left, too, and then it was just my mother and me. It was the only opportunity I would ever get to live with a biological parent.

  I remember my mom as a busy and very businesslike lady. During the precious few years we had together, she taught me to read and write very well. And at night, when she closed the little country store that she had inherited from her husband, she would turn it into a math lesson for me. Together we would count the coins. I’d do the pennies and nickels, she would count the larger coins. But she didn’t lavish a lot of attention on me. She was just too busy, with her jobs and the backbreaking work of keeping a household running. Back then, that’s how parenting was done. Your parents would tell you what to do and they’d be quick to chastise you if you didn’t do it correctly, but they wouldn’t go overboard showing affection. Love was like an unspoken thing. I didn’t understand it then, but I understood it later. And eventually I would see that it would influence my own parenting style.

  Back then, of course, schools were segregated, so I went to the local school for colored children, a four-room building where several grades were taught in the same room. In those days, blacks had to support their own schools financially, and when there was no money, the school shut down. And that’s exactly what happened. By the time I completed fifth grade, my school ran out of funds and had to close
its doors. It’s the story of my life: I had to leave my mother again. This time Mom took me to Sumter to live with my uncle, Charles Blanding, and attend school there.

  I came home for Christmas break when I was eleven, in 1953, and I found that my mother was terribly sick, so much so that my sister had taken over the store. Mom was bedridden, weakened by diabetes and heart disease.

  One night during that holiday break, I was minding the store with my sister when my mother’s brother, my uncle Charles, walked in the door and delivered the news: He had gone in to check on my sleeping mother and found her dead. I was devastated. In that fatal, fateful instant, my childhood was gone. Earlier, as I bounced from one house to another, my rearing had always been left up to chance. But I always could maintain a slim hope that one day I would know how it feels to be enfolded in a mother’s embrace and know that softness. I longed for softness, to combat all these hard knocks.

  But from that point on, what happened in my life was up to the Good Master and me.

  My sister Lanie stepped in to become my guardian after Mom died. She wanted me to continue with my schooling, so she enlisted the help of my biological father to send me away to a school she had heard about, in Camden, South Carolina. Mather Academy, a boarding school for Negro children established by the Methodist Church, had a great reputation. My father agreed that it would be the right thing to do, and he paid my tuition.

  Elijah Prince and I weren’t strangers to each other.

  As I grew older, we would see each other occasionally. We both knew that we were father and son. But we never really talked about it when I was a child. My father was one of the most powerful men in Lee County, with a lot of important business holdings. In addition to his store, he owned a big farm on which he grew corn, peanuts, soybeans, and tobacco. A major employer in our community, he oversaw a team of men who farmed his land. Some summers, he would hire me to work in his fields. It gave me a chance to see him every day, although he always treated me impersonally, the way a boss handles an underling. I understood that. My father needed to command respect from his workers, and he couldn’t afford to give me special treatment.