by Lisa Fenn
Your son,
Leroy
And there we learned what Dr. Christopher suspected: A mother’s love can revive a withered heart.
ON HIS TWENTY-THIRD birthday, as we continued working through his traumas, Leroy wished to relinquish his anger toward his father. He understood now how difficult it was to be an effective parent within the constraints of a teenage relationship. He was thinking differently about family and second chances. He wanted to find his father and hear his side of the story. So I set out to fulfill Leroy’s birthday request.
Leroy only knew one thing about his father: his name was Big Leroy. When little Leroy was three years old, Katrina’s brothers had beat Big Leroy with slabs of wood for allegedly raising his hand to her, and they told him never to show his face in the family again. But little Leroy didn’t know this. All he knew was that his father was absent for his own birthdays, his accident recovery, and all the times when his mother went missing.
A quick background check on Big Leroy turned up a slew of arrests for domestic violence, attempted felonious assault, and kidnapping between 1996 and 2008. We found Big Leroy on the lower west side of Cleveland, in a grimy apartment above a corner grocery store. He lived with his girlfriend and her two young children who slept on the floor. A pit bull snarled in a corner cage, and twice during our hour-long visit, a scrawny man in a white ribbed tank top and enormous pants bounced through the door to ask Big Leroy if he wanted to smoke a blunt. No one in the apartment acknowledged my presence. I sat on the sticky floor in a corner, listening as father and son made small talk about movies and video games. We learned that Leroy is the oldest of nine children, meaning he had eight half siblings of whom he was largely unaware. Big Leroy asked his son if he had gone to high school and where he was staying now. I remembered the valor of Leroy walking across the stage to get his diploma and stepped out of the apartment to gather myself.
As we drove away, I asked Leroy how he thought the visit went. “As I expected,” he answered. I asked if he’d grown up in similar conditions. “No,” he said. “That was better than some of the places me and my mom stayed.”
I could no longer contain my tears. “I’m sorry it took so long for me to find you.”
“It’s okay. I’m safe now,” he said.
I approached my next thought with extreme caution.
“Leroy, I know you have long struggled with the question of why you lost your legs, and I don’t dare try to answer that,” I said. “But do you think that had it not been for the accident, you might still be living in a place like that, with a potentially more difficult life?” I had wondered as much since my early visit to Laird Land, yet I feared Leroy would interpret my question as one from a privileged outsider trying to put a tidy bow on his pain.
“I was actually thinking the same thing,” Leroy said. “It’s unlikely anyone would have tried to help me if I had legs.” This was the closest answer to “Why?” that Leroy had ever found. And while we will never know why such a tragedy happened, Leroy’s acceptance of this severe mercy moved him to a place of peace, and then purpose: “I think I would much rather change this world than walk on it,” he said. “Now I have that chance.”
Leroy uncovered few details about where he came from that day, but he found something more important. He caught a glimpse of who he wanted to become.
LATER THAT SUMMER, as we were planning for Leroy’s college graduation in Phoenix, he said he wanted his father to attend. I, on the other hand, did not want Big Leroy to be present. I didn’t think he deserved it. Though Leroy had made peace with his father, I resented him for the things I saw during our visit. How dare this man bring nine children into the world and hardly know where any of them were? I thought. How dare he spend his days getting high while children slept on the floor? How. Dare. He.
But I bit my tongue. Leroy was the first member of his family with a high school diploma, and soon would be the first member with a college degree. I understood why he hoped his family would step up and be proud of him. So I set out to get plane tickets for his dad, his mom, his sister, and Big Ma. I scheduled Coach Hons to take Big Leroy to the airport and give him spending money before he boarded. I explained that drugs and weapons could not be taken onto planes. I also asked him if his state ID was valid. But on the morning of their flights, Big Leroy called me from the phone of a friend to say his state ID was expired.
“Does that matter?” he asked.
“Of course it matters! I asked you weeks ago if it was valid.”
“I guess I didn’t know what that meant,” he replied. He had four hours until his flight’s departure. I said there was nothing more I could do. But Big Leroy was not ready to give up. He went directly to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, where, due to his previous record of falsifying IDs, they would not renew his ID without a birth certificate, which he did not have. At that point, he said to me, “I’ll call you back. I know a guy.” An hour later, Big Leroy had miraculously secured a birth certificate and an ID, and when I asked how he pulled that off, he said, “Don’t worry about it. I ain’t letting my son down this time.”
Leroy’s family missed their connecting flight in Detroit because they were all at the food court when a gate change was announced—but I didn’t know this because none of them had a cell phone from which to call me. I stewed at the Phoenix airport for four more hours, hoping they had found their way onto the next plane, while at the same time hoping they hadn’t. I regretted my offer to coordinate their trip. By the time they arrived, I was ready to send them back.
Katrina, Keyiera, and Big Ma bunked with Leroy, while Big Leroy stayed at the hotel with me. During our first awkward breakfast together, he said, “So are you like a travel agent or something?”
I smiled. “Sometimes it feels that way. I am just here to do whatever Leroy needs me to do. He will always be your son first, but he is also like a son to me.”
“Well, I can tell you’re a real nice lady, and I don’t know who you are, but I’m glad Leroy has you.”
“Tell me something about yourself,” I said. He clenched his jaw mid-chew.
“You don’t want to know about me,” he said.
“Sure I do. There’s no judgment,” I said. He raised an eyebrow, and I immediately understood that I had in fact been judging him from the moment I met him. Showing more grace than I had, he let that go.
“When I was five years old, my mom left my brother and I in an abandoned building,” he said in a low, slow voice. “We went to the grocery store every day to steal our food. We hid pretty well, so no one ever found us, but now I wish they would have. We never went to school. I’d see my mom on the streets from time to time, but she never came back. I started selling drugs when I was nine years old to get some money, but I guess I was angry, because I started getting in fights too. I spent time in prison. Some of the things I did, some I took the hit. At least I learned to read and write a little in there. But overall, I guess I made some real bad decisions in my life.”
Shame on me.
I held Big Leroy’s stare and said, “You listen to me. You didn’t make bad choices as a child. You made the only choices you had. You were five years old.” Big Leroy looked away. I said it again. “You didn’t make bad choices. You made the only choices you had. The only path you were offered in life was survival.”
As we talked more, the details only grew sadder. I was softening toward this man, this person I had labeled an addict, a loser, and a bother. I had forgotten the lesson I learned on Big Ma’s porch—that men like Big Leroy were once sweet-faced children who were forced to fend for themselves. I had forgotten the lesson I learned four years earlier with his son—that when you give someone a safe space in which to tell his or her story, when you become a safe person to whom a story can be told, that space births compassion. And with compassion, one’s sense of self-worth can be reframed, and goodness can begin to grow.
Big Leroy said he was grateful for all of those who took care of his son, adding, “
cause I never been able to do nothing for him.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I told him. “This weekend you did one of the most important things a father could do for a son. You showed up. He needed you, you came, and you came proud.” A tear streamed down Big Leroy’s cheek. And then another. “This time you had a choice, and this time you chose to do what good fathers do.”
Big Leroy said it was the first time he’d cried since his mama left him for dead in that old house. He said he had never told anyone about his life before, because he didn’t think that could lead to anything good. But on that day, we found something good. We found connection. Big Leroy left thinking maybe he wasn’t the failure this world painted him to be, and I sat a while longer, stunned by grace and its power to offer hope to a touched and tormented soul.
LEROY GRADUATED ON a sunswept day at the Phoenix Art Museum. I wish I could say I surged with the same pride as I did watching his high school graduation, but all I felt was relief that we did not have to slog through another term. I wanted to bolt out of the auditorium before the dean noticed Leroy sitting in the back corner of the stage and decided to recalculate his grade-point average. But Leroy had achieved what his mind and his body could manage, and on that day, it was enough.
The greater accomplishment came not on the stage, but in a backyard, where Alicia’s family hosted a small graduation party for Leroy. On hand were the three families who had paid his tuition—three of the wealthier, more generous Americans one could meet—and they were joined by Leroy’s family, four of the poorer Americans one could encounter. I slipped into corners to watch them learn to make conversation, to ask questions, to listen to stories. Perhaps the most poignant words of the afternoon came from Leroy, as he blew out his candles and addressed the room.
“It makes me really proud that I have each of you in my life. It warms my heart that you gave openly and stuck your necks out there on my behalf,” he said. “You sacrificed for me even though I’m not the best student. But I have become a better person because you believed in me and didn’t give up on me when I made mistakes. If you hadn’t showed up in my life, my life would have been completely different. I want to tell you from the bottom of my heart that I love you, and it means so much that you came today to see me through another transition.”
We had banded together over those years to carry Leroy, just as Dartanyon once did. In doing so, we filled the gaping holes in Leroy’s heart with three foundational truths: You are never forgotten. You are wholly loved. You are worthy of celebration. This was Leroy’s real education—learning to let each person there into his life, receiving love from his newer friends, and making peace with his family. This was his Olympic-size victory, and it was golden.
Your money, your family, your security, your will, your future. Poverty takes a percentage of everything, indefinitely, until the cycle is broken.
—DARTANYON
CHAPTER 16
UNLIKELY FAMILY
One. Two. Three.
We couldn’t find her at first.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
We started at opposite ends of the row and headed toward the middle, counting the plots, shortly after Mother’s Day 2014. As I walked, I caught Dartanyon out of the corner of my eye, bent close over each stone, straining to read the engravings. He had spent most of his life searching for his mother in some way. Each day, scrolling through those few grainy memories from his childhood. In the crack house each night, wondering why she had left him alone in the world. On the wrestling mat, channeling all of the strength she left behind in hopes that she was watching from above. And later, in me, this unlikely woman God had dropped into the gap. Yet today was as close as this boy had come to his mother since she left him fifteen years earlier.
Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.
“She’s over here!” he shouted.
Section 34, Row 2, Grave 21. Coordinates of deep loss. A thick covering of dried lawn clippings blanketed the flat rose-colored marker, causing us to miss it the first time down the row. Dartanyon quickly dropped down on all fours, sweeping the stone clean with his hands. And there she rested: Juanita Keely Crockett. 1956−1999. Beloved Mother, Grandmother, Sister.
“Why aren’t they taking care of her?” he asked as he scraped dirt out of the letters of her name with his thumbnail. Through all of those lean, trying years, he had wished for his mother to be there to look after him. Today he returned, ready to look after her.
I was nervous to meet her, to stand before this woman who’d spoken to me so clearly five years before: Take care of my son. Periodically, when I stood at a crossroads with Dartanyon, weighing what to do and wondering if his challenges were simply too much for me, I would hear her plea again: Take care of my son. And then over time, her voice grew faint. Perhaps she did not need to urge me on anymore. Perhaps she knew I was all in.
I wanted to ask her how she chose her little boy’s big name and if he was nervous on his first day of school. I wanted to tell her how he became a young man who bronzed the London stage and finally aced that pesky English class last semester. Could she see that he had grown into his strong name with all of the tender grace and humble heroics she dreamed into him when she held him brand-new? And could she explain why I had been chosen to witness it all?
But I held back. I hushed my heart. Questions and answers were not why her boy had come today. No, he didn’t need to know any of that. He simply wanted to sit up under her, just as he did when he was six years old and she was braiding hair, her love a prism that defined his blurry world.
Watching Dartanyon, I gained a stronger sense of what that means—“to sit up under her.” To bask in the acceptance, in the wholeness, of knowing where you belong. I felt as though I was returning from a mission—from her commission—with a finished product of sorts. Juanita, here is your son. May you be proud of us both.
After some time sitting in the quiet, plucking the blades of grass around the edge of the gravestone, I asked Dartanyon what moments in his life he most wished his mother could have seen, other than every single day. “Probably my high school graduation,” he said. “I was the only one of her sons to finish. I hope that would have made her happy.”
I thought back to that ceremony, when this boy walked across the stage twice: Once for himself. Once for his best friend. “You don’t have to hope,” I said, and smiled up into the blue sky. “I know you made her happy.”
I said that I hoped my son would one day love me as much as he loves his mother. Dartanyon put his arm around my shoulder and said, “You don’t have to hope. I already do.”
Two mothers.
One boy.
Loved into a man.
Mission accomplished.
THERE IS A photo of my father sitting beside Dartanyon on the sofa, at my house. They are in front of the Christmas tree. Saxon is playing next to them, and my dad is smiling. He is sitting in the middle of a story that he began.
This photo reminds me that story pries open narrow minds and closes imagined chasms. Story is the grease and the glue. Story is the counterforce to intolerance. In this story my father began, our family narrative on race took a healing turn. My father found that when you learn another’s story, you can understand that person rather than fear him. Today, he looks not so much at people but into them—into their hearts, into the cores of their experiences—and he sees beauty. He may not be able to articulate this shift, but I can see it in the adoring way he looks at Saxon as he holds him on his lap. My father cares freely now. He smiles readily. He gives willingly. Only he is not thinking about any of that in the photo. Instead, he is caught up in this Christmas wonder, smiling contentedly between Dartanyon and Saxon, in a family that would have been vastly different had he not changed the order of it.
When Leroy and Dartanyon spend time at my home, they declare themselves my kitchen DJs. They’re still trying to teach me how to beatbox. Dartanyon cooks breakfast and sculpts play dough with Talia. Saxon whizzes through the house in Lero
y’s wheelchair. And Leroy lies on the floor, beside the crackling fire, staring up at the skylight. He says he is most at peace at my house, and I see that calm in his eyes—that is, until Dartanyon dives on top of him and wrestles him into a pretzel.
“It feels good to finally have a Hallmark family,” Dartanyon once remarked. He explained that “five o’clock dinners, a warm house, good conversation, and nobody drunk or high” marks such families. Then he added, “And in our case, blind and legless dudes. Every family should have a couple of those.”
In two years’ time, I essentially became a mother to four children of different races, ages, and abilities. It is not the family my husband and I planned. In fact, it is far better, far richer, than any we could have imagined. It is a family that reframed my understanding of what it means to be blessed. There was once a time I believed that blessings were things we possessed: stable jobs, good health, promising opportunities. I believed these were heaven’s rewards for living well. But I now understand that a blessing has less to do with what we have and everything to do with what we are able to give. I understand that blessings come from being part of a redemptive journey here on earth, in allowing God to work out the injustices through us. Blessings come when we walk alongside another to pick up the broken pieces and together restore the beauty.
I gave up asking Dartanyon why he started carrying Leroy. In the end, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter where they started or where they were going. It didn’t matter how heavy the load or how far the destination. All that mattered was who they compelled us to be. They moved me, and countless others, to be the ramps and the vision, the mothers and the fathers and the guides. They drew us out of safe spaces to become bridges across perceived barriers of race and class. They taught us about darkness and light and our ability to be the living difference between the two. They taught us that when we accept what we are called to do, we become who we are created to be. They taught us how to carry on.
