by Sid Holt
Daddy died a month after Prince, in May 2016. I switched off “Sometimes It Snows in April,” versions of which I had been listening to constantly, and spent the days following Daddy’s death trying to listen for that country. I was trying to find that blues, wanting to know what songs he had sung in the choir, thinking about which were his favorites, wondering if we could have the choir sing one at the service. I wanted my own songs, too, something I could sing to myself to help soothe and release and make sense of things before the visitors started pouring in and I knew I would need to plaster some happy on my face. I rambled in my memory, my few little records, scrolling through my iTunes, trying to find a stick pin in a junk drawer. Asking myself that question so many of us ask ourselves every day—What would Beyoncé do?—I put on Lemonade, preparing for the funeral visitors, cleaning the kitchen and the bathrooms and the living room with “Daddy Lessons” floating through the house on repeat. The song, a reflection on a black girl’s Southern-tough raising, narrates the lessons a Daddy, “with his gun and his head held high,” gives to his daughter before his death. He tells her to take care of her mother and sister, and to shoot whenever trouble comes to town. My Daddy had definitely said “shoot,” too, and I know one time for sure I should have followed that advice. It was the Mama in me, the nonviolence, the city sophisticate, the talk and stick it out, that had made me take more from men than I should have. It’s always been hard to parse which of the country lessons and which of the city lessons I should adhere to and when.
I tried to think of some gospel songs, the kinds that make you holler and cry and reach for God when all those voices rise up together. But I didn’t know any such songs offhand because I’m a heretic and also a cultural Christian fraud—perhaps even a Southern fraud because of this combination of spiritual and cultural heresy. Mama never made us go to Sunday service, only Sunday school, because she didn’t believe fidgeting children should be bothering grown people trying to get the Word. As a child, I read the Bible like I read all other books, hot with King James for thinking he could challenge me with his long-ass book, determined to show him I could read any book cover to cover. The old people at church always said there was magic in the Bible, and I tried to unlock it, sneaking and skipping to Revelations to see who was going to hell in the end. On the phone with her friends, Mama said Daddy needed to get in the Word and maybe he’d stop drinking and drugging and ho’ing. I was confused about how the Word was going to do that for Daddy. Bible men were a mess, constantly being smote and swallowed by fish and cheating on their wives.
At seventeen, I got baptized so I’d be eligible for the church scholarship. Three older black women surrounded me like the witches of Macbeth as I tried to sneak to the car after Sunday school one week. They explained that the deepest understanding of the Word comes after you get saved. Don’t you want to set a good example? Don’t you want to be saved and not burn for eternity? Mama did believe in hell, so I thought maybe I should get saved so I wouldn’t burn. And so I could be eligible for the scholarship. I got it, but then I felt like a fraud because I thought I hadn’t been saved long enough to cash in on Jesus, even for school books.
Mama taught us to fiercely question race, class, gender, our status as Southerners—but she did not want us to question too loudly in church, where she had faced rampant patriarchy and sexism over the years. She was no Bible scholar, but she scoured it for things to help her deal with Daddy, combining its teachings with what she learned in Al-Anon and Overeaters Anonymous, generating her own New Age Christianity before it was hip. This spiritual study and practice helped her suffer the most insufferable humiliations. I thought her marriage trapped her. But she stayed, she said, because the quality of our lives would have been severely diminished if they had divorced. She had not been confident that Daddy would have supported us and feared being plunged into poverty with two little black girls. At the height of his addiction, she managed to keep the lights, cable, and phone on with her substitute-teacher pay, and the violin lessons continued uninterrupted. Still, Daddy once hotwired Mama’s car; another time he pawned our instruments. We had discovered they were missing after we were dressed and greased and headed out the door to play a concert with white people for white people. I’m not sure what Mama prayed for during that time, but I know in those last years with her and Daddy, bitterness and Daddy’s perpetual incorrigibility had made her too tight to pray right for anything. If she was praying, it wasn’t reaching the Lord the way she intended. After he died, she told me she stayed because the Holy Spirit never moved her to leave.
• • •
Granddaddy Jack’s wife, Grandma Lula Mae, had welcomed Daddy when he came to Memphis in 1972. At ninety-eight, she still remembers every time she opened her door to her husband’s progeny from other women—she told me she welcomed them all when they showed up on her doorstep. I imagine “welcomed them all” is a euphemism born of temporal distance and dementia. Daddy called her Mrs. Rose, and he reigned as her favorite outside child. When he had his own country child, he brought the baby to Grandma Lula and Granddaddy Jack’s house all the time. Mama eventually put two and twenty-two together and confronted him about it. Mama never said who gave her the math, but Daddy figured out the clue-giving snitch and grumbled about her the rest of his life. Mama often wondered aloud how Mrs. Rose must have felt being put in the position of harboring an outside child. Our brother, whose mother Daddy met in treatment, was nearly two when Mama found out. She told Daddy not to tell us until she was ready.
Eldest children, especially eldest girls—especially eldest Southern black girls—know things they shouldn’t, try to be double agents in grown folks’ fights, and never know that they can’t win until it’s too late. So when Daddy showed my sister and me a picture of a big-headed little toddler boy at a drum set and asked us who he was, I responded without hesitation: “our brother.” Curious about the outside child, I became Daddy’s accomplice. With Daddy, I snuck to my brother’s kindergarten graduation and sat across from my brother’s mother at a Pizza Hut afterward. I was sixteen, and she offered me a car, a Jeep, a country Trojan horse from the outside meant to aggravate the fragile stasis inside. When Mama found out and asked me why were we sitting up at some restaurant like we were a family, I said the woman hadn’t done nothing to me, heaping a hurt on Mama. I wasn’t grown enough then to know just how fundamentally untrue that was.
But I wanted to forge a relationship of some sort with my brother. Our meetings felt like a betrayal of Mama, and they were a country secret I kept well into adulthood. Later, when I was a mother, I coordinated, sometimes clumsily, the times when my brother, my daughter’s uncle, would come to her birthday parties, and the times when Mama, her grandmother, would come. Once I messed up, and my brother and my mother were at my daughter’s birthday party at the same time. Mama told me she didn’t have to come next year.
• • •
I didn’t mess up any more timing; over the years, I became a better country accomplice. Four years or so back, Daddy was clearly drinking again, slurring his words and laughing so hard at his own jokes that he might have shook the earth if something deep hadn’t interrupted that joy. I consulted with my siblings. My brother confirmed that he couldn’t help but notice Daddy’s inebriation the last couple of times he had seen him. My sister, home from Japan and living with Mama and Daddy, said she had spied discarded beer cans on the back porch where Mama never looked. I thought he was going to die. I scheduled an intervention with Mama, my sister, and Daddy at my house. Through tears that came from nowhere I told them I wanted them to be happy, together or apart, trying to fix it all right there at the dining room table. Something calmed down after that, and I didn’t see him drunk anymore. As a reward, I sometimes gave him whiskey when he visited.
He had been my accomplice, too, in the way daddies can be on their best days. My daughter’s father, DeMadre, loved him. He always begged Daddy to tell him a story about “a time they whupped the white folks’ ass.” From
San Francisco, DeMadre came to the South in the late 1990s after having been wooed by the LeMoyne-Owen recruiter on an HBCU college tour, and I met and started dating him in my second year of college. He wanted to know about the country just like I did. When he would visit us, Daddy would tell a story about when he and his brother borrowed a white boy’s bike with no intention of giving it back and rode it until dark and kept it the next few days, too. “When did you give it back, Daddy?” I would ask on cue. “Shit, when I felt like it,” he would say, and we would try to fill up the world with that small bit of laughter in the context of all that repression. DeMadre, himself an outside child with one other “whole” brother, a fraternal twin, had a fraught relationship with his father. He looked to Daddy as his own. Daddy was an example of the possibilities for outside children, and daddies with outside children.
One August, on the day our daughter turned fourteen months old, DeMadre called my father and asked him to come pick up a two-wheeler he had let us borrow. Daddy was the first on the scene to find him. He talked to the police, and made sure they got DeMadre’s body out after he shot himself. DeMadre had called Daddy so I wouldn’t find him when I got home. In his carefully written note to me, he said I should tell Daddy that he loved him.
At DeMadre’s Memphis memorial, somebody whispered that the coroner had to identify him by his dental records because he had used buckshot instead of duck ammo. I didn’t think this could be true, but everything was so unsure then. I couldn’t shake that nightmare vision out of my head. I finally told Daddy and asked him to tell me the truth. Daddy replied like he had been called to death scenes for terminally sad outside children all his life: “Naw. He jus’ had a li’l hole in his head.”
DeMadre died about a week before school was to start. I was entering the second year of my master’s program at Memphis, preparing to teach my own class for the first time, and starting some fieldwork—and I was scrambling to find care for my still-nursing toddler. Daddy changed his work schedule to keep my daughter on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings that year. Each morning, he took her for a breakfast of grits, sausage, eggs, and toast across the street from where I had moved into student family housing. My daughter had walked on her first birthday but quickly decided walking was overrated. Daddy held her hand and made her walk baby-bowlegged around the family-housing playground until she felt confident enough to do it on her own. She was running in no time. He gave her sips of coffee at those breakfasts, too. “In the country, babies always usta drank coffee to get ready to pick cotton,” he said. You never could tell if Daddy was serious.
When Daddy went to theology school and got a degree, started reading the Bible more than I had as a little girl (and for seemingly religious rather than vengeful purposes), joined Mama’s church and three of its choirs, began leading the Nurture for Baptists group, took over leading the holiday family dinner prayers, and became assistant superintendent of the Sunday school on the fast track to take over as superintendent—I didn’t know if he was playing a major joke on us or if he had seen his life flash before his eyes. He had grown up in church, but, by all accounts, he had hell in him as a child, despite his baptism.
If Mama’s faith had been on a steady utilitarian hum, Daddy seemed to now be really in search of God’s Word and the truth and the light. In his truck I found spiral notebooks full of scripture notes. Mama used to say she wished all that Bible and church would make him a better husband. He was a complicated country contradiction.
• • •
Mama was temporarily devastated when I eloped, but Daddy was delighted. He found the whole thing amusing. It had been ten years since DeMadre’s death, and after suffering through raggedy partners that I had refused to marry in the interim, Daddy was glad to have a decent and official son-in-law with whom he could talk shit and fix shit.
The January before Daddy died, it had gotten down to forty-two degrees in my husband’s and my house, and Daddy couldn’t figure out why. We had been ordering parts for the furnace, swapping things around, waiting for other parts to come in, and nothing was working. He thought it might be the valve and brought one in from the truck to change it. Our valve was old and stuck, and he insisted on turning the large cracked red wrench himself to take it off. He was tired and had been moving more slowly, as I had commented several times. He said he was all right. But watching him try to get the torque on that thing was torture. I joked, “I been working out, you know, I’m pretty strong,” and my husband nearly jumped in at one point, equally tortured by the sounds of work coming from Daddy’s body. But it finally gave, and he quickly got the other valve on. We went to test the system again, sure we had it fixed. It didn’t work. “Aww, gotdamn,” Daddy said. We trudged back up from the basement. He was so disappointed, and I was far sadder for him than I could have ever been about the cold. He said he’d be back the next day after work.
Exhausted and frustrated that night, Daddy dreamed of his grandmother Rosie Robinson, whose surname her daughter Celia Mae inherited, which Celia Mae gave to Arthur because she was not married to his father, Jack Rose, when Arthur was born. Daddy gave the name to my brother as his first name—a reverse junior. In the dream, Daddy was with his older sister and saw Big Mama—as he called his grandmother—on top of a hill, looking as young as ever. He was scared of Big Mama, subconsciously goading his sister into asking a question that might have earned him a dream whipping. “Big Mama,” she had asked her up the hill, “why’d you discipline him so?” Big Mama responded, “Because the Lord showed me.” He awoke with the answer to the heating conundrum, a temporary solution while we waited on a new circuit board to arrive, and told us about the dream over whiskey in a warming living room after he got the system going.
The next week, he went out and bought Mama all new appliances. They still had the avocado green stove from when they had moved into the house in 1976, and the oven hadn’t worked in months. The refrigerator door had never closed properly since they switched the side it opened on to accommodate Mama’s left-handedness. And the washer had been flooding the kitchen whenever it felt like it. You could hear the steam whistling out of Mama’s ears as she fumed about the money he had spent as well as the fact that he had not consulted with the person who most uses the appliances. He also hadn’t measured the space for the refrigerator, and as a result, Mama repeatedly referred to it as “the big black dick in the living room” until they swapped it out. Mama, the practical one, had never owned a new car or had a car note, and Daddy had been telling people he was going to get rid of her aged clunker and buy her an Impala. It was the car he had when they had first met. He didn’t get to buy her the Impala.
• • •
Prince was gone and a month later so was my daddy, but the world did not care—not one bit. It continued on unbothered, the zodiac clicking right on over to Gemini and reminding me that I was still alive, even if Daddy and Prince weren’t, and I would have a birthday soon. Mama and I were sitting at my dining room table planning the funeral program. I asked her if she knew Daddy’s favorite song. She didn’t know, she said, mentioning that she liked “Come Ye Disconsolate,” but that she ain’t want nobody messing up Donny and Roberta. I wondered if I could sing it, but I wasn’t going to have her mad at me because she didn’t think anybody but Aretha and Luther and one of the Temptations could really sing. Funerals are for the living.
Daddy had a blues all his life that I couldn’t begin to know, though I had so desperately tried to understand it as his first-born and accomplice. He sang in three choirs at the church; surely there were songs. What were his favorite songs to sing in the choir? What were his go-to shower songs, or caterwauls, as Mama and my sister would call them? What songs had he stolen away and hummed and moaned in the quiet?
I put on my ethnographer hat and went back to the CDs that I had found in the truck. There was the first album my brother’s jazz-fusion band released. A specially burned prerelease of my husband’s hip-hop EP. B. B. King’s greatest hits. Disc 3 of Prism L
eisure’s essential jazz collection. The 2010–2015 St. John Missionary Baptist Church—Barron Street, not Vance Avenue—Gospel Choir anniversary CDs. A 2011 St. John Missionary Baptist Church—Barron Street, not Vance Avenue—Male Chorus CD. And CDs with Mama’s left-handed writing on them: three annual compilations she made for everybody she knew at Christmastime with both secular and Christian songs; the soundtrack to The Preacher’s Wife; and a compilation of women singing gospel songs with Whitney and Aretha. There was a CD I had burned for him years back with Bobby “Blue” Bland, B. B. King, and some Lee Williams spirituals on it.
Daddy had given me a list of requests for Bobby “Blue” Bland. “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” was first. Then there was “I Wouldn’t Treat a Dog (The Way You Treated Me),” “Steal Away,” “Three O’Clock Blues” with B. B. King, “I’m Too Far Gone to Turn Around,” “You Did Me Wrong,” and more. When I first saw the list, I thought it was mighty narcissistic of Daddy to be having the blues with all he had done to Mama. But listening to that music in the wake of Daddy’s death some ten years later, I was compelled to consider for the first time the shape of Daddy’s hurt—and his right to it. He had hurt Mama and the rest of us, but I had not given him space to hurt, not about anything, really, beyond a stubbed toe. His upbringing in Jim Crow Mississippi with disappearances and violences and the concomitant beatings from Big Mama Rosie. A missed scholarship opportunity because a racist counselor hadn’t turned in a form. His visit to Memphis that was only supposed to be a stop on the way to St. Louis that turned out to be an entire life and abrupt death. His guilt about what he had done to Mama, or to us. His mama’s death, the only time I saw him cry, and all the other people he loved who had died or gone missing. Having to tell his daughter about the hole in her child’s father’s head. And those women who weren’t Mama. I wondered if Daddy was thinking of them when he listened to Bland sing:
