Brothers (and Me)

by Donna Britt

  A born giver, Mom’s first, most heartfelt offering to us was the protected, carefully observed early life she’d missed. We chafed under her laserlike attention, unaware that for a certain, scalded seven-year-old, love and attention would forever be indistinguishable.

  For years, I assumed that my protectiveness of my kids resulted from Darrell’s death. Recently, I’ve wondered what science has begun to ask: Could parents’ traumas be absorbed by their children’s DNA? I inherited Mom’s round nose and gift for drawing. But what about her need to give? When I was a broke single mom, my sons had the most gorgeous (if discount-store-purchased) clothes; years later, a doctor treating Skye for a digestive problem marveled at how faithfully I prepared fiber-rich fruit for him, saying, “I wish someone cut up mangoes for me every day!”

  For years, I wondered why Mom never stopped reminding me of when I was three and she swatted a housefly. I’d blurted, “I love you Mommy because you can beat up any old fly!”

  In her first seven years, she felt no one cared enough even to kill an insect for her.

  My father’s first years were quite different, except in one key way: he, too, longed for parental attention.

  Born in Manakin, Virginia, in 1920, Daddy was the only son among a brood of four born to Thomas Sheridan Britt and Addie Snead Britt. His father, a brickmason, moved the family to Gary when Daddy was five. My serious, hardworking grandfather soon divorced my flinty grandmother. Yet he stayed close to his family, even building them a new brick home after his marriage broke up. Maybe he was as scared of my grandma as I was.

  Imagining my father as a boy was never easy, and not just because I had few childhood photos and fewer discussions with him about those years. By the time I knew him, whatever boyishness or playfulness Daddy might have had was gone. He was a man, a strong, silent one with whom it was hard to talk about anything. Daddy’s reticence and clipped responses to every question—“Yep,” “Not really,” “Um-hmm”—thwarted most inquiries. Mom loved questions, sometimes revealing too much. Dad revealed nothing. At some point, I stopped asking. I decided that men, unlike boys, were mysteries.

  I did ascertain that my quiet, athletic father was close to all three of his sisters as a child. They adored him. His imposing mother was equally smitten, so my father had four females catering to, encouraging, and supporting him. His father, however, seemed less enamored of him. Long ago, Daddy told Mom one of his earliest memories: Being assigned at age five to read road signs on an overnight family car trip. Little Elwood took the responsibility seriously, fighting to stay awake so as not to miss anything important. “He was so proud of having done a good job for the father who seemed so hard to please,” Mom recalled. “It was something special, pleasing his dad.”

  Mom, who’d never stopped seeking her absent mother’s love, could relate. So could the daughter who’d expectantly awaited her Daddy’s thumbs-down verdict at the dinner table.

  When Mom finally left Children’s Hospital, Nana and Mom-Mommy told her she was “going home.” But rather than returning her to Mom Stevens’s, they drove her to the two-story Media home Nana shared with Mom-Mommy; her older daughter, Mae Batipps; Mae’s husband, Percy; and their five children. My mother had already met Mom-Mommy’s half sister. Visiting her once with Mom-Mommy at Mom Stevens’s, Mae had invited Mom to brush the wavy hair that fell to her waist. My mother instantly fell in love with her.

  So it seemed miraculous that the new home she awoke to on Christmas Day 1932 not only had electric lights, an indoor toilet, and running water. Aunt Mae lived there! So did Mae’s children: Virginia (“Din”), Mae (“Sis”), Percy Jr. (“Pop”), Francis, and Donnie. Nana told Mom’s cousins: “This is Geraldine, Dote’s daughter.” And that was that.

  Suddenly Mom was happy in ways she couldn’t have dreamed. Because Nana and Theodosia held outside jobs, she became one of Aunt Mae’s boisterous brood. For the first time, someone treated her like a daughter. The house was warm, the food delicious, Uncle Perce played hymns nightly on the piano. At bedtime, Sis lined up the smaller kids like toy soldiers, marching them upstairs, counting, “One-two-three-four!” Marching in time, Mom felt she belonged.

  It was at Mae’s house that Mom finally felt comfortable calling the woman who’d borne her “Mother.” Mom-Mommy surprised her by confessing her own trepidation each time she’d visited her at Mom Stevens’s, saying, “I never knew how you’d act toward me—if you would run toward me or just look at me.” Mom hadn’t realized how obvious her resentment had been toward her mother, how angry she’d been that Mom-Mommy hadn’t visited more, so she might have told her about the inedible food, the hitting, Mom Stevens’s surliness.

  Finally loved and protected, my mother allowed herself to wonder, Why didn’t my mother want me? An adult would find answers in 1920s culture and conventions: society’s merciless scorn of unwed mothers; Mom-Mommy’s unspoken bitterness that her daughter resulted from a rape by a man who never acknowledged his culpability. But Mom was a child. A child’s first, best reason for any mistreatment or lack of love is “something is wrong with me.” Some children never believe anything else.

  Maybe that’s why it wasn’t until adulthood that my mother believed she had earned her mother’s approval. Ask what she feels changed Mom-Mommy toward her, and Mom doesn’t hesitate: “I had children.”

  Today I can see how Mom’s unwavering devotion to her children—dedication which Mom-Mommy had been unable to show her—gained her mother’s respect. I also see how freely my grandmother gave my brothers and me that which Mom never stopped craving: her full and loving attention.

  Each summer, my brothers and I gleefully joined Mom at the Amtrak station to await our grandmother’s arrival. Scanning the length of the Capitol Limited, we screamed Mom-Mommy! when we spied the lustrous woman whom bellmen rushed to help with luggage stuffed with gifts and chilled packages of the pork scrapple Daddy loved. Wrapping me in hugs, she’d listen spellbound to my breathless stories and encourage my drawing and singing and self-regard. Always, Mom-Mommy would take me downtown or to the mall to buy me shoes and dresses, sometimes more costly than Mom could afford.

  My brothers and I were the human correction fluid with which both Mom-Mommy and our mother painted over the past. Mom bestowed on us the sheltered childhood that had eluded her; Mom-Mommy lavished on us everything she hadn’t been able to give her own daughter. Without knowing it, my “perfect” grandmother taught me what could happen when a less-than-perfect parent didn’t give her time, love, and attention to her child: Mom could happen. A lifelong sense of unworthiness could happen.

  I learned well enough to know that when I had kids, I would never let it happen.

  By high school, the youth who would become my father was over six feet tall, popular with girls, and a skilled forward for Gary Roosevelt High’s basketball team. Though treasured by his sisters—stunning Hortense, bubbly Marian, and baby Maurice—young Elwood knew that no one cherished him like his doting mother. His father may not have been as captivated by him, but he taught Daddy to lay bricks—an invaluable skill in an industrial town—and eased his son’s entry into the bricklayers’ union.

  Daddy was studying architecture on a basketball scholarship at the historically black Florida A&M University when the United States entered World War II. Joining the navy, he spent much of his stint playing basketball for the military on the blustery Aleutian Islands. He was twenty-five when he returned home and began assisting his dad on bricklaying jobs.

  On a warm March day in 1946, Elwood was intrigued to see a cute stranger in a stylish Eisenhower jacket walking toward him with a friend. The petite woman was so impressed by him, she surreptitiously dumped the ice cream cone she’d been slurping into the gutter before smiling at him. She didn’t want to look babyish.

  Temple University graduate Geraldine “Gerri” King had just been hired as a dental hygienist at Elwood’s high school alma mater. After three years with Aunt Mae, Mom had moved in with Mom-Mommy. She finall
y left Media when Mom-Mommy’s new husband showed no interest in having a stepdaughter underfoot. Gary, so close to exciting Chicago, seemed a promising place to start over.

  After six whirlwind weeks, Gerri and Elwood decided to marry. Having just fled the mother whose love she still questioned, Mom did what people fleeing the past often do: attached herself to someone certain to re-create the anguish she longed to escape.

  But any woman might have been drawn to Daddy. As a child, I used to stare at his black-and-white wedding day portrait. With his custom-made suit and knowing smile, he was as handsome as a movie star, radiating a suavity that spoke of cocktails and jazz, not bricklaying and bills. Yet his coolness wasn’t just in his gaze and the drape of his clothes. Daddy’s chilly emotional temperature—the natural detachment that magnetized and exacerbated her lifelong sense of inadequacy—also fascinated Mom.

  But what inspired my popular father to marry a vivacious near stranger? Studying his old portrait, I’ve looked for answers—and found more questions. Nothing about the five-by-seven photo suggested the domesticity she was seeking. Did the small portrait seem bigger than Daddy because hope still filled out its subject? Because glamour was even more becoming to him than the responsibility he clearly embraced?

  Did it explain why family life so rarely pleased him?

  As a four-year-old, I’d jumped into his arms each night when he arrived home from work, dusty from brick mortar and cinder blocks. But by the time I was ten, my brothers and I feared him. On Saturdays, we dreaded waking to the sight of his rangy form looming over us, yanking open the drapes and booming, “Want to help with the lawn?’ ”

  Do you think any of us replied, “Not really”?

  For years, the person who’d mattered most to Daddy—his father—had demanded one thing from him: physical labor. Is it surprising that work was all he seemed to want from us?

  That was difficult for my brothers; it felt punishing to me. I was an affectionate girl, and my father just wasn’t demonstrative. His mother and sisters had freely given him warmth and attention; he never learned to reciprocate.

  The older I got, the more I avoided him. Bounding into Daddy’s arms turned to backing away from a man who couldn’t offer himself—not his protection or directives but him self—to me. By yesterday’s standards, Daddy was a good father. He came home straight from work and relinquished his paycheck. He was there, even if we seldom found him generous or engaging. Being there, I know now, may have been the most he could give.

  In May 1946, two young people took their vows before a Baptist preacher in my grandmother’s living room: a quiet groom smitten with a girl whose upbringing ensured that she’d work as hard to please him as had every other woman, and a quick-to-laugh bride as enamored of her groom’s height and handsomeness as of his emotional reserve. They both sensed the other would provide what they’d been raised to expect. In retrospect, the answer to my childhood question—why were these two together?—was obvious:

  In all the wrong ways, they were perfect for each other.

  Decades later, it makes sense that a woman hidden as a child and whose husband made silence an art form would blurt attention-grabbing truths. Concealed and tamped down for years, Mom now makes sure that everyone acknowledges her.

  I was an adult before I saw how famished she was for validation, and how responsible I felt for filling the holes abandonment had gouged in her. Yet I recoiled from her neediness, even as I absorbed what childhood had taught her: love should be stated, repeated, and then underlined, by both the giver and the receiver. For all my fretting about giving to men, she was the first person to whom I couldn’t give enough. The holes were too deep.

  But my mother’s emotional voraciousness made sense. What was my excuse? I’d had a warm home and a mother who loved me—everything she lacked.

  I had a daddy, too. The first man whom I ransacked my imagination to please was also the first whose muted responses left me starving. When I found Mom crying in the laundry room, I knew he was the cause—though she could just as easily have been weeping about her frustrating mother. But I adored Mom-Mommy. My connection to Daddy was already slipping.

  In 1999, my father died after his car was struck by a train that had briefly stopped at an East Chicago railway crossing during a snowstorm. According to my aunt, two cars had crossed the tracks when the train started moving; Daddy’s didn’t make it. A decade later, I was searching for some papers in my office when I came across a box of unfamiliar memorabilia. Looking through it, I realized, This was Daddy’s! Mom must have given me the box after his death; in my grief and shock, I’d stuffed it in a corner and forgotten about it.

  The box was full of Donna stuff: Announcements of my induction into my college honor society and of my sons’ births; holiday and birthday cards I’d sent to him as a college freshman and a grad student; columns my father had snipped from the Gary Post-Tribune during my syndication. There were photos of me as a bride, a young wife, the doting mother of toddlers Hamani and Darrell and of baby Skye. Daddy, I suddenly understood, had treasured every valentine, announcement, note containing news from college (“Guess what? There’s a new local paper here and I am the art editor!”), correspondences in which I’d asked for money (“Sorry, Daddy, but I need a LOT this time… $45”), and milestones in his grandsons’ lives. A letter from my first year of grad school informed him I’d gotten an A on my first paper and thanked him for his “cash donation to the Starving Daughters of America fund.” I told him of the dates of Michigan football games he might want to attend, and in 1976 I reminded him of the importance of sending my $10 weekly allowance so I could purchase copies of my résumé, adding, “I’m glad we got to spend more time together this vacation. I feel that I know you now better than I ever did when I was living in the same house with you (isn’t that ironic?).” In another letter, I wrote, “I hope you enjoyed the articles I sent you…. I really am trying to make you proud of me.”

  Studying the letters and snapshots so many years later, I felt inexplicably sad. Why wasn’t I thrilled to discover that I’d had a more profound connection to my father than I recalled—and that I had never stopped trying to deepen it? I’d meant enough to my “distant” Daddy for him to save every card, photo, and note I sent him. And my missives to him indicated that he’d written me back more often than I’d given him credit for. Why had I forgotten? I wondered if Mom had inadvertently shaped my memories of him. I’d been her sounding board, the child most acutely attuned to her hurts and needs. Had absorbing her disillusionment exacerbated my own? Or had my lifelong impatience with Daddy’s silences blinded me to the depth of his love? The box’s contents suggested I’d been a more caring daughter than I’d realized—and that my father had been more interested in and proud of me than I had allowed myself to remember.

  I was unaware of that on the afternoon in ninth grade when I spent an hour in front of the mirror, practicing a disdainful sneer to employ when he demanded a beneath-me chore. The first time I used it, Daddy hissed in a Clint Eastwood whisper, “Wipe that look off your face or I’ll wipe it for you.”

  I wiped. From then on I stared at the floor when Daddy irked me. Looking away, I felt sure of one thing:

  I would never, ever marry a guy like him.

  Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll(ing Papers)

  Left to right: Darrell, Mom-Mommy, Bruce, Steve, and Donna, Christmas 1971.

  It’s 1965 and we’re at the dinner table, our interplay as choreographed as a waltz: Steve blusters, Daddy simmers, Mom critiques, Bruce and Darrell joke. When Darrell asks, “Why did the elephant paint his toenails red?” the answer—“To hide in the strawberry patch!”—makes Mom crack up in a way we’ve never seen, gasping, crying, tumbling from her chair. We’ve barely recovered when Steve, whose hair in this era of basketball-sized Afros is a tennis ball’s fuzz, laments, “I wish my hair would grow.” Suddenly we’re howling, convulsed to hear the cocky household tough admitting a flaw. I would never love Steve more than at th
at moment. Or at least until a decade later, when he screamed at us his certainty that everyone wished that he, and not Darrell, had died in that ditch. Again, I was undone by his vulnerability—and by the fact that I had wished exactly that.

  It was Christmas Eve 1961, and at age seven, I was too nervous to sleep. Mom had banished us kids to bed in the back of the house while she and Daddy got ready for Santa’s arrival.

  Sniffing out an opportunity to tease Bruce and me, Steve, twelve, threw Darrell a “go along with me” look. “You better go to sleep,” he said. “I know this boy who couldn’t sleep on Christmas Eve and he accidentally saw Santa put the gifts under the Christmas tree!” Emboldened by our shock, Steve widened his eyes dramatically. “He was lucky Santa didn’t see him,” he continued, “or he would have taken his gifts and gone right back up the chimney!” Shaken by the boy’s close call, Bruce and I retreated under the covers of our twin beds. Darrell and Steve left for their room; Bruce instantly fell asleep. I stared at the ceiling, still too agitated for slumber. Sliding out of bed, I crept to the door, where I heard Darrell whisper excitedly, “Let’s get Donna’s coat!” Steve, too, sounded thrilled: “Yeah, she’s gonna love it!” Puzzled, I returned to bed.

  The next morning I found a beautiful black wool girl’s coat with a real fur collar under the tree. I was confused by everyone’s insistence that Santa—who I still wanted to believe was real—had brought it. But something else bewildered me more: the joy I’d heard in Steve’s voice at the thought of my happiness. Steve must love me! Pondering this staggering thought, a more shocking realization followed: I loved him, too! But how could that be? Cataloging his many sins, I knew I couldn’t stand him. So it had to be one of life’s tricks: you loved your brothers, no matter what.

  God knows I did. Nobody influenced me more, especially when it came to giving to men. For years, I had no one but guys to give to. Like a baby duck imprinted by the first creature it saw, I extended my early, unthinking love for my brothers to men in general. Be Dirty to Donna Day had made me permanently wary of girls, but no amount of teasing from boys could make me enduringly wary of them. Bruce, Darrell, and Steve—very dissimilar boys—ensured that my first gift to very different men would be the benefit of the doubt.