The house I grew up in, in Hartford, Connecticut, is itself like a ghost in my body. My father is a ghost in the house. Whenever I visit from Pittsburgh or New York—the two cities I live in now—I have to crouch down inside myself, a psychic form of protection. The physical distance isn’t what creates the layered ghost effects. It’s that the distance between the realities of then and now, and the life I lived and the one I dreamed up and pried my way into, sometimes collapses when I’m inside the house trying to be the good daughter. It’s not simply that I have gone far from home. That’s a very American story. I’m not sure what kind of story this is.
§
I awake first to the sound of my father’s shoes moving back and forth from my parents’ bedroom to the bathroom, and then his voice outside my room, my name pounding out of his mouth. I turn despondently in my bed and then feel his entry into the room, the tug of the blankets from my sleeping body, now cold and exposed to the day; in winter, the hiss of steam from the radiators and the promise of warmth. Sleepily I wake and shower, shove my books into my knapsack. My bus to school is at seven and my father works the first shift at his job so he, too, must arrive by seven. He drives me downtown to the bus stop where I am the first of my lot to arrive. I stand alone freezing in the dim light waiting for the other kids, watching the insurance workers hustle off to cubicles and offices in dark suits. This is the way of things every weekday until I turn sixteen.
I never think of those predawn hours without thinking of Robert Hayden’s short poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The last two stanzas, in particular, are reminders of what is difficult to know about anyone’s heart.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
I imagine the father in Hayden’s poem as being mostly unlike my father. Instead of driving the cold out, he yanked me into it. I was incidental to the morning’s activities, not the focus of them. Yet, still, there was an intimacy in the proximity of our individual maneuverings and, somehow, a quiet, indirect care. What did I know of this man at all who said almost no meaningful words to me my whole life, who never said “I love you” out loud, and who managed his emotions primarily through rage and inflexibility?
On the day my father made my half brother Greg live in a storage shed, no one felt powerful enough to stop him. The storage shed had once been a handmade clubhouse built exclusively for me to do whatever children do with their friends in such structures. My father had noticed that I was always trying and failing to build one myself with scraps of wood I scavenged from neighbors’ trash heaps.
Greg, a Vietnam veteran, had been kicked out of his apartment after spending all his money on cocaine. Dad was unrelenting, “No drug addicts in the house! I don’t care!” Instead, Dad told him that he could live outside in my old clubhouse if he wanted, behind the garage. Dad and I had built that clubhouse in a single inspired afternoon with plywood, screws, and brackets that he’d purchased from the local Ace Hardware. It had little protection from severe elements, though we had taken the care to shingle the roof so it didn’t rain or snow inside. In the summer heat or especially in the icy Connecticut winter, one might be better off in a homeless shelter. In this refusal of Greg’s need for help was also a refusal of his existence, or a stabbing at it. This was, as I understand it now, one of those paradoxical violences that said, you can stay but you can’t stay. From one angle it appears as if a family member is getting some necessary assistance—at the very least, he’s not sleeping in the gutter. Cock your head in another direction and see an aggressive disdain for perceived weakness, and the severe punishment of being left outside in the cold while the rest of the family toasts their toes at the mouth of the fireplace, gorging themselves on roasted chicken and sweet potato pie.
My father—his name was Andrew, but he was called Andy by everyone but my mother—was a man who engaged in earthly activities only. He didn’t pray or read books or talk about horoscopes or love. He had rough hands and wore a wedding ring tight around his third finger until death. He seemed extra large like to me, but now I know he was no bigger than many other men—5’11” and 158 pounds at eighteen when he was drafted into the Army. One of 909,000 African American men to serve in the Army in World War II, fighting in the war was the thing that had happened to him in life, but he never talked about it. He didn’t tell any stories about the past. This might be the strangest thing about him—that everything for him was present tense. But his body was a past body. My father’s body, and bodies like his, were just regular bodies, yet forever bound up with the Mandingo fiction and being boiled into a stew for fucking the master’s wife upon her calling. An invasion of my imagination when there was simply a presence: He was huge! He was a monster! As a grown man, my father was mostly body, mostly fat that looked like muscle, a body with a single, sometimes visible scar on his thigh. A scar I saw when he walked around in his white Fruit of the Loom underwear.
Before my mother, my father was married to another woman, whose name I can never remember. She gave birth to two sons—Greg and Andrew Jr., the oldest of my father’s spawn. By the time I was born they were already adults with mysterious, devastating lives. Greg returned home from the Vietnam War addicted to painkillers, which transformed into heroin addiction that he tempered with cocaine and alcohol. When Greg came home from the war, he moved to Connecticut to be close to my father, who seemed not to care. Andrew Jr. lived with his wife and two sons in Jacksonville, Florida, near where our father had previously set up his life with his other wife after World War II. Andrew Jr. went on a walk one day when his boys were teens and never returned. Bruce, my brother closest to me in age, had been adopted by my parents as a young boy before I was born. By blood, as they say, he’s my first cousin, my mother’s sister’s son. But Helen had enough kids already, eight at the time, and lived in a cramped three-bedroom apartment in what was then the black projects in Daytona Beach, Florida. Likely overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies, she let my childless parents have Bruce. What could be lovelier than the gift of a child, a son?
So many hours I’d spent lying on the living room rug with my legs resting on the sofa, listening to my Let’s Pretend Fairy Tale records. In The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs, a baby born with a birthmark on its face is destined to marry the king’s daughter. The king hates face marks so he sends the baby down the river in a box, probably hoping it will just die. The baby lives because a miller and his wife find it and raise him as their own. Because it’s destiny, the boy ends up marrying the king’s daughter anyway, but in another sadistic murder attempt, the king sends the boy into hell to retrieve three golden hairs from the devil’s head. If he does this, he can live happily ever after. The fairy tale ends as fairy tales do, with a little retribution for the evil king who couldn’t just let the boy be.
Maybe it was a warped blessing that Dad made Greg live outside. Bruce, on the other hand, was subject to our father’s rage inside the house, which meant that, like the boy who married the king’s daughter, it was difficult for him to position himself out of my father’s long reach. When my father beat him, as he did sometimes, it was with a ferocity that would make an onlooker think that it wasn’t about Bruce at all, but something inaccessible to our father, something out of his control. Toni Morrison writes that when violence is a response to chaos, it is “understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton or incorrigible.” The taciturn nature of my father meant that no one had access to whatever trajectory of chaos may have produced his targeted violence. Yet, I can imagine a connection between being born a black boy in the 1920s American south, fighting an American war decades before the US government recognized post-traumatic stress disorder, and returning to a country that disparaged black soldiers. Chaos was likely within and outside of his body. You’ve seen a beating, haven’t you? You’ve witnessed a person lose the self inside of an attack mode, grunting and escalating, as if to say “I can’t stop”? I make no excuses for these brutalities. Everyone in my family was shaped by the contours of these actions, even if they were infrequent. I am trying to understand something about the protections afforded me, the shape of those protections, and what they allowed for in my own body and being, despite the inability to extend those protections to someone I love.
Obviously, no happily ever after happened for Bruce or any of the sons. Bruce, now in his late fifties, lives in his old bedroom at the house in which we were raised. He makes minimum wage as a janitor for a motel, most of his income skimmed off for child support. Greg lives and works at the VA Hospital, but often slips back into the addiction that overtook his whole life. We don’t know where Andrew Jr. is. In an alternate fairy-tale ending, the daughter becomes the quasi hero of the story and replaces the son. I was the one in my father’s eye. I was the one he took on Saturday strawberry-picking expeditions, hoisted onto the bar to feed pickled pigs’ feet, beer nuts, pork rinds, and grape soda; the one he took to work at the dry cleaner’s for the whole day and to whom he gave money to play miniature golf while he pressed clothes in the summer heat; the one on Sunday-afternoon drives to the country store where he could buy fresh clams (“cherrystones,” he called them); the one he took to jai alai and taught how to bet and how to win and with whom he split the winnings when I picked the right numbers—our private experiences, always just the two of us, me a protégé in the ways of a man’s world, or this man’s world.
Technically speaking, or speaking on the evidence we had then, I was a girl and Bruce, Greg, and Andrew Jr. were boys. I don’t know if my father knew this explicitly in his mind. It could be that my being technically speaking a girl made my father treat me differently from the boys. Or it could be that things melted down in his brain gender-wise because I, like him, liked to work, and none of the sons appeared to. I was only ten when I started my first moneymaking business, shoveling snow for the neighbors. Bruce was seventeen by this point and didn’t have a job of any sort; he wasn’t able to keep one until he was almost fifty years old, even though Dad, who worked two full-time jobs, had once gotten Bruce one of those pension jobs with the city. My father might have treated Bruce more brutally than anyone because this son was not biologically his, and he resented having to be responsible for him especially because he was kind of a fuckup. Maybe my father wanted to do one thing right with one of his kids, and I was the last one. I’m just speculating, really. I have no idea.
§
The house held a fissure from which little spikes of violence could rise up, piercing any otherwise placid scene. It could have been something to do with the architecture of the house itself. The first floor of the structure was meant for communal living. It was comprised of a dining room, a living room, and a kitchen, positioned in adjacency in the shape of a square. The dining room was separated from the kitchen and the living room by two doors, and the kitchen was separated from the dining room and the living room by two doors. It was enclosed, its own separate place, where whoever was inside doing the kitchen work was usually alone. Instead of a gathering space, like in the images of black family sociality that permeate our desires and our narratives, this space and its appliances made the kitchen a work space only, filled with machines that enabled duty.
But all the doors in the house were nearly always open. This made any chase a good one. If you were running from someone who wanted to do you harm, you could run through the rooms in a circle, closing and opening doors in order to either block your pursuer or escape into the other rooms. Further, there were two sets of stairs: one leading to the basement and one leading to the three bedrooms and the bathroom upstairs. Stairs, obviously, motivate punishment in the form of a shove or a struggle to throw another person down. The location for the most pronounced violence, of course, is the basement, perhaps because it’s underground and attackers, though we might think of them as insane, are not insane. They think about, however obliquely, the fact that screams are more difficult to hear by others outside of the house from down below in the cellar. Like some horror movie, this is where my father took Bruce in order to beat him.
My mother had chosen brown and pink as the colors for our kitchen. This had always struck me as an underwhelmingly garish choice. It gave the kitchen a mustardy feel. It was a color palette that made the small, tableless room feel smaller. The kitchen is where my mother once had to wrestle Bruce’s hands from his girlfriend’s neck as he tried to strangle her. The girlfriend responded by squirming wildly to get out of his grasp and swinging her fists at his face, scratching and clawing. They had been fighting all morning and we had all heard it. But when the sounds of their voices became louder and tighter, hitting the air like bullets, my mother and I rushed in from wherever we were to see about the matter. My brother was a young man at this point—maybe twenty, and I seven years younger. I did not approach the scene, knowing that my brother would not hesitate to fling me into the wall, but I screamed for them to stop. My mother yelled, “Get your hands off of her!” and lunged, thrusting her body between theirs, daring them, it seemed, to accidentally put their hands on her. It worked. She broke up the fight, as no one in our family would dare— even accidentally—strike my mother. It was a risk too great as it was she who singularly held us together. It was she who paid all the bills, organized our summer vacations, made birthday cakes, purchased Christmas gifts, brought us to family reunions, tended to our curfews, bought the food and made all the meals, cleaned the house, etc. It was she who had taken my brother to the barber and braided my hair, she who read to us in the evenings and purchased puzzles and games that lit up our minds. She knew when the right time to purchase a new car was and if we could afford it. She knew when we were too sick for her care and needed a doctor. She is what one might call a “good woman,” a suffering woman, a woman constrained by obligation. It was not a model that appealed to me.
§
I have always been a girl and a boy at the same time. Everyone saw me that way even when they didn’t admit it out loud or to themselves. My mother told me a story of when she worked as a day-care teacher about a four-year-old who refused to recognize himself as a boy. He’d stand in the girls’ line for recess and play with the other girls in the make-believe kitchen. When instructed by the adults to line up with the boys, he’d refuse and exclaim, “But I’m a girl!” to the dismay and confusion of the adults around him. I don’t know why my mother told me this story exactly but it had the effect of making me aware of the disjuncture between the way others named my gender and what I felt was true. Toni Morrison writes that another response to the perception of chaos is naming. I implicitly understood the need for the adult world to recognize and name me as a girl, but I resisted, insisting on wearing pants and T-shirts all the time, playing only boys’ games with guns and race cars, and felt awful and ill at ease in the dresses I was forced to wear to church. These dresses were probably my first indication that there is no God. There were other indications, too, like how certain women in church would become possessed by the Holy Ghost and get into a fit right in front of everyone. I was embarrassed for them. I also thought they were faking. God, if there was one, I was sure, hated fakery. He’d be interested in expressions of the truest self.
One night, my father came home late and drunk and pissed on the kitchen floor. He couldn’t find the toilet. Years later when I was a teenager, I returned home late from a high-school party and puked while sitting on the toilet peeing. We had one of those toilet-hugging mats that people had in the 1980s. The mat was soaked in my vomit. In my drunken teenaged stupor, I threw the mat out of the window. It landed on the bulkhead doors to the basement positioned directly under the bathroom window. I left it there and stumbled on to bed. My father and I breathed the same air. We walked along the same precarious rope. We were simultaneously very weak and very strong. We were gentle with each other. We built things together: the clubhouse, of course, which was the center of play and scheming for me and my neighborhood friends, and also go-carts with braking systems that sent me racing down the hill faster than any boy. He taught me how to make a kite out of newspaper and tree branches. When we flew the kite, I was awestruck by the heights it soared to and that we had made the thing at all. How could we make a thing like an airplane? The morning after the vomit incident, my father raged around the house. “What the hell?!” he bellowed, barrel-chested, until the moment when I said that it was me and that I was sick and feverish and accidentally let go of the mat while trying to clean it. If my father was the type to hold my head, he would have. But instead, he deflated and said “O,” as if “O” was a kind of release.
The thing about my father is that I could often smell him. Like, I could smell the different persons inside of him. These aromas included after-work sweat, hair pomade, beer, green aftershave from the plastic bottle, cigarettes, dry-cleaning fluid, soap, stale cloth, and toward the end of his life, a smell I had never smelled before and have not since. To me, it was a death waft. In actuality, the rancidness was my father’s body. The cancer was getting at his blood and bones from the inside, which made it so that he was almost too weak to walk. He could make it from bed, across the brief corridor, to the bathroom and back. Once as he was doing so in his thin robe, frail and hunched toward the floor, the robe fell open slightly and I glimpsed a mash of dark genitalia. The image has stayed with me as one of ghastly vulnerability. As a graduate student, I lived an hour away and returned home often to drive him to get blood transfusions to relieve him from extreme anemia. He walked slowly, one hand on my shoulder to stabilize his body, down the stairs, to the car, and into the hospital. The temporary relief offered by the transfusion was good motivation to take those painful, meticulous, and breathless steps.
He could no longer bathe himself. No one else in the family, including, or especially, my mother, was willing to do it. This is the stew that filled that house. Sometimes it didn’t smell like a body at all, but a warning. We all smelled the odor. There was no avoiding it. But we never spoke of it, just as we all knew my father was dying and never mentioned that either. He himself refused to accept this fact of death surely coming. He did die, of course, and in the wake of it, my mother disposed of all the furniture in my old room where he had been bedridden. She disposed of everything that belonged to my father. In fact, on the evening of his funeral, the only thing that remained of him in the house was a drawer filled with spare change, a half-drank bottle of rum, and his wristwatch. Greg took the watch and Bruce and I split up the money.
The consequence of any new distance is another sight, noticing released from the bounds of a microcosm, the bounded vision of the close-up. What happened in my childhood home, I realize now, was a kind of trickle-down violence. And, though that violence escaped me directly, it had its hands around everyone’s neck. Do you remember when regret was not present in the body? Do you remember the little feelings of everything in your whole being welling up? Childhood is this wild experience of sensation and newness, the past so brief it’s barely behind you. Adult persons’ emotional expressions seemed to shoot out from nowhere and were terrifying in both their chaotic arrangement and their stark brightness. Those church ladies’ perennial hysteria, for example, the way they leapt up off the pew benches as if possessed, weeping and hollering, in a seeming coming together of despair and ecstasy.
It’s only in retrospect and years after my father’s death that I can understand anything at all about being raised by one ostensibly good Christian woman and one mean atheist man. I couldn’t see that goodness and badness were both ropes in a tangle that allowed for a wolf inside me to grow and that this was the real goodness. When my brothers were being beaten or locked out of the house, I would cry and wish my father dead. It’s a weird thing to then be forced to hang out with him on Sunday afternoons, being free and eating all the burgers and candy at the bowling alley. There we were, the two of us, entering the building, him with his dad-sized bowling ball case and me with a slightly smaller one, grey like his. There we were, sidling up to the cashier in slow motion, like guys about to make a sweet deal with a guy who usually doesn’t make deals. Our usual lane is reserved. There I am, all the darkness blocked from view, my interior feeling lit up like life is a cherry pie.
I am a wolf? Yes, I am a wolf. My father is a wolf mouth? The father is the whole structure of the house and we live inside of him. The wolf child scratches out of the father’s mouth house. I hold my brothers in my own wolf mouth, but only temporarily.
§
One afternoon Dad told me that we had an outing, that I couldn’t go swimming with my friends in the circular above-ground pool next door. He didn’t say why, but I was pissed. I was thirteen by then, long past the time when I would go shirtless with dad in his station wagon to the gas station and stand freely pumping gas. I wore a shirt now. I wore a girl’s bra maybe. But we had that other history. That history at the gas station when I was almost a boy. I sulked in the passenger seat after being strong-armed away from the pool and my friends. When we turned a familiar corner into Keeney Park where the black golf course was situated, I recognized the shortcut to the liquor store, what we in Connecticut call the “package store,” where my father got his beer. He pulled over on the side of the wooded road and said, “It’s your turn.” “What?” I asked. “Your turn to drive,” he said. I switched places with him in the giant, brown Buick sedan, the back seat piled with plastic bags of beer cans he returned at the store for five cents a pop, and upon instruction pressed my foot solidly onto the brake pedal. Exhilarated, my hands tightened around the steering wheel and, ever so tentatively, I lifted one hand to shift the car into drive and pushed the gas pedal with a slight force. Some fathers would have taken their kid to a parking lot, but not mine. Instead, we were inside of the park where cars would occasionally stream gently along, like on a Sunday drive. Some fathers would have taken their son on this journey, but mine took me. After this day, I was always my father’s driver, which made me an excellent driver. He also taught me how to change a tire, how to check and change the oil, and replace spark plugs and worn belts.
Being treated like a boy by my dad saved me from the years I was recognized as a girl. There was another man, a charming one, who befriended my mother at the day-care center where she taught. I like charm to this day. But this guy was charming so that he could have access to little-girl bodies in ways that fractured their very selfhood. I was one of those girls. And the fractured selfhood happened to me, though no one at the time knew about it. Dad hated the charming man with a passion. Whenever he entered any room, my father would storm out. The charming man loved spending time with me too and would create opportunities for us to be alone; but this is a story for another time. For our purposes here, I needed rescue.
This gift of the ability to drive and the subsequent driver’s license enabled my ability to get away. Suddenly, I was free. I made myself no longer available to the man who fractured souls. I realized escape was in my own hands, and escape I finally did. Eventually, I escaped into the larger world, far from our small home in the small Connecticut city that no one would call “a destination.” I drove to Manhattan with friends and purchased a long, black coat like I’d seen in teen movies.
We browsed the Fiorucci store and went dancing at Danceteria and Palladium. I drove to Watch Hill, Rhode Island, where I spent a glorious long weekend with friends at their rich grandmother’s house—just us teenagers dancing around the kitchen to The Big Chill soundtrack. The car was more than transportation. It was more than symbolic, though it was that too, the way that the experience of driving was a window. And through it, I saw myself on the other side of that window. When I graduated from college, I boarded a Greyhound bus and moved as far away from Hartford as I could possibly imagine, to the West Coast, a place I’d never been to.
I write to you now from a quiet locale, a secret beach just on the southern coast of Spain where we can glimpse Africa through thin low-hanging clouds in the distance. I am positioned on a stone balcony where I’ve hung freshly washed underwear to dry in the late-afternoon sun. People pour in now from the beach, the shore, toward the parking lot or the inn, positioned, as it often is, up some bank or above what would be dunes. When evening approaches, it does so with very slowly fading light, encouraging leisure as a primary occupation. Heat lifts from your body, breeze insouciant, and there, pulling on the recesses of the throat-thought, the figure of the father emerges like a nagging dream. My body, however, is my own.