WestSide Press Books

Buy Dear Dad: Reflections on Fatherhood

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Mon, 7 Dec 2015 13:15:00 -0600

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:20:00 -0500

Dear Dad: Reflections on Fatherhood

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:40:00 -0600

Father—a child’s first hero, a key universal figure for us all. A father’s impact is both profound and lasting. Good or bad, our experience with our fathers helps shape our lives. Good fathers lie at the foundation of the success of future generations. For those who have known the love of a father, nothing is comparable.

Neither does anything compare to the pain of those who have suffered fatherlessness. There is hope to be found, within these pages, both in the lasting impact of the men who chose to be a vital presence in the lives of their children, and in the remarkable resilience of those once fatherless children who found life, success, and reconciliation, despite their father’s absence.

Inspired by John W. Fountain’s essay for National Public Radio’s This I Believe series, Dear Dad is a compilation of true narratives written by some of the nation’s finest journalists and writers, assembled for this project by Fountain, himself an award-winning journalist who has been a national correspondent for the New York Times. Men and women from various walks of life and generations, they are black, white, and Hispanic. A good number of them have written for a number of the world’s best-known news organizations—the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Time magazine, and others.

All of them write herein about the impact of fathers or fatherlessness upon their own lives at a time when a national initiative and even President Barack Obama have sounded the clarion call for responsible fatherhood amid a continuing crisis of paternal absenteeism. But there are no victims in this collective psalm, only victors.

"Difficult” does not begin to express the nature of fatherlessness, and it becomes clear as the reader progresses through this volume that for those who must grapple with the situation, it becomes necessary to incorporate and somehow turn this misfortune into some kind of wisdom—a different endeavor for each of the contributors to the book. The general reader will be captivated, and encouraged, by the stories herein.

This is a book you can’t put down. The quality of the writing, and the contemplation that led to it, is top-notch. In some ways, this is a how-to manual: How to overcome. How to succeed. How to live on. How to be a better father. How to forgive our fathers, even how to love, remember, and honor our fathers.

Dear Dad is for everyone who has a father, for everyone who has lost one, loved one, or longed for one, for everyone who happens to be one, and for everyone who longs to be a better one.

Excerpts from Dear Dad:

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:30:00 -0600

The Father in Me

Lee Bey

The Dream

I walk into the kitchen. My father is there, dressed for work; the afternoon sun, shining golden through pattern of the kitchen windows.

“Daddy,” I say.

“How you doing, Chip?” he said, calling me by the nickname my mother gave me.

“I miss you,” I tell him. “We all miss you.”

* * * *

  My father was Lee J. Bey. He loved us all. My mother, Lula; my older sisters, Claudette and Deneterius. Our relatives. When I was a small child in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he’d pack our kinfolk in his car and bring them over to our house. The food, the laughter, the music. And my father, handsome and funny, holding court over it all.
   My father and I were the only males in a house full of women. We were virtually inseparable. Unless I was at school, or running the sidewalks with my friends, I was with him, picking up the tricks and lessons of manhood.

   One lesson I learned: Don’t back down from a fight. Another: Don’t take no mess. When I was about three or four, one of my aunts brought an unruly and disrespectful boyfriend to a party we hosted. My father wound up throwing the man out the door and down the front steps of our house at 7327 South Kimbark. On his way to the pavement, the boyfriend cleared eight wide wooden steps (plus the concrete first step), hit the ground, and broke his ankle.

When I was twelve, I punched out an older bully who tried to steal a ride from my bike. My father smiled when he heard about it. “Sometimes you have to show people,” he said.

He wore his manhood without much bluff or bluster. “You can’t tell somebody you are a man,” he used to tell me. “You are. Or you aren’t.”

I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to be a man.

* * * *

“How’s your mother?” my father asks.

“She’s sad,” I say. “She took it hard.”

“I know."

The Kiss

My father's friends drank, smoked and cursed. They fixed cars and figured stuff out. I was an honorary member of this closed society, even when I was as young as four or five. They called me Chip or “Lil’ Bey,” gave me 7-Up or Canada Dry. I couldn’t have been happier. From my father and his friends, I learned about fraternity, politics, and sometimes, women.

When I was about eight, my father and his oldest brother, George, and I went to see their friend Jimmy. We got there and while the men were greeting each other, Jimmy’s pretty wife pulled me aside, kissed me smack on the lips and told me I had pretty eyelashes. Oh, I was a man, now, I mused to myself.

I silently reveled in the kiss on the drive back while my father and uncle recapped the visit. Then, my Uncle George said with disgust: “Why his wife always want to put her lips on somebody? I didn’t let her kiss me.”

“Me either,” my father said. “To tell you the truth, don’t nobody know where her mouth been.”

Oh no! My eight-year-old imagination conjured images of Jimmy’s wife eating out of garbage cans, kissing brick walls in dark alleys, and licking jelly off the floor when nobody was looking. I couldn’t swallow for the rest of the trip home.

“You okay back there, boy?” one of them would say.

“Ummm hmmm,” I grunted, not wanting to swallow, unable to spit and afraid to tell them that Jimmy’s wife had got me.

Passings

When I got older, my father and I didn’t get along. In seventh and eighth grade, I barely studied and was disruptive in class, got poor marks. During a parents’ conference, he noticed that my seat was separated from the rest of the class.

“My son is sitting in the nigger seat,” he told me. “Nigger” was a curse word in our house, reserved for the black person who refused to behave, who refused to achieve. The remark was meant to sting. It did. I got admitted to a top public high school in 1979 but was still a horrible student, which caused more problems between me and my father...

Dear Dad Excerpt II:

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:29:00 -0600

The Truth at Last

Nichole Christian

Years after my daddy died, I finally laid down my superhero image of him too. Two decades after spreading his ashes, facts I’d never known about Daddy began to surface and collide with the fiction I had cherished as a child. It turns out Daddy was more human than I could ever see.

It’s funny to me now the way I once romanticized a man I knew so little about. And sometimes I cringe, thinking of the many nights, the many ways I prayed death upon my mother, while forgetting and forgiving Daddy, who’d gone AWOL first.

He had ducked out of their marriage not long after doing the honorable thing and marrying my pregnant mother. By the time I was fourteen, they were both dead, departing one after the other—first her (by a drug overdose), then him, with just nine months between them.

Through it all, Daddy remained golden to me because he was the one who bothered to come around. My mother had parked me at her parents’ house while she divided her time between getting high and her stints in jail for petty robberies. I never understood how he knew, but Daddy always managed to show up when she was at her worst. The more he showed up, the more people swore they saw him in me: his eyes, his chin, his highbrow humor. Daddy bought me Underoos—Batgirl and Wonder Woman—before anyone on the block had a pair.

I saw E.T. on the big screen, with Daddy at my side. He plied me with buttered popcorn, while I pretended not to see his little brown paper bag or to smell the stench seeping from it every time he raced it up to his lips. One parent playing the part here and there was better than none at all. Even now, I smile at the memory of Daddy bopping up the street, sing-calling the nickname he created just for me. “Cola, Cola,” Daddy would sing.

In my childhood eyes, the precious moments he’d given me seemed the measure of a man worth worshiping. I was content with the things I knew about my father. That is, until many years later when I myself became a parent and started sifting through the details I’d one day tell my daughter. I wanted to be able to share with her the good stuff, a way to understand why I was so proud to be Daddy’s girl. I wanted to pour the details into a letter for her to read someday as I’d done with so many of the tales about my family and our struggles.

The year she turned three, I called Uncle Raymond—Daddy’s brother—looking to flesh out a story I’d heard bits and pieces of that had always made me proud. Daddy had been a soldier in Korea, so the story went. I had seen a grainy old photo of him once in what looked like a soldier’s uniform. I had imagined him a decorated soldier in the war who had been too torn up to tell his story. Uncle Raymond, I had decided, would give me the facts.

“Daddy was in the war, how long?” I asked Uncle Raymond over the telephone.

Uncle Raymond’s voice went silent. I could hear him take a quick breath. It should have been my clue that I had just stuck the key into Pandora’s box...

Dear Dad Excerpt III:

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:28:00 -0600

Dad’s Lesson:

Life Is About Now, Not Then

Donald A. Hayner

n the morning, I say good-bye to my dad from inside the clean and cheerful confines of the nursing home where he lives. It’s an assisted-living home for Alzheimer’s patients. Mornings are always best. His thoughts are clearest. We’ll sit together, or walk through the gardens outside. I often find myself studying his face. Some days, he looks old and remotely recognizable. Other days, he looks like the dad I remember as a kid, the same guy I saw walking across my high school athletic field thirty-three years ago.

I was a sprinter on the track team, practicing starts, when I heard a teammate say, “Who’s this? Some Olympic scout coming to check me out?”

I looked up and saw my dad. Why wasn’t he at work, I wondered. He was wearing a business suit and trench coat. He was short, built like a bulldog, with a marine’s crew cut and an all-business walk. He gently motioned me to join him.

He didn’t say why until we were inside the family car. Then, he told me my brother was dead. He had committed suicide in his college dorm room. As he drove me home, I looked out the window, away from him, and cried. It was a short ride. I think it was raining.

Walking inside our house seemed a lot different now. My mother was devastated, crying in my brother’s room, lost and bewildered. Friends and family came by, all offering various explanations of my brother’s death. I mostly just stayed in my room.

At one point, I remember my dad sitting in a living room chair. Here was a man who was always fearless, a tough guy who worked in the steel mills for thirty years. As he sat talking, his chest suddenly started to heave with waves of grief from deep inside.

That was the first time I saw him cry.

My father had his share of hurt in life. When he was twelve, he and his brother were rescued from a second-story window as the family house burned down, killing his father. His brother died in Casablanca in World War II. And now he had lost a son...

Dear Dad Excerpt IV

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:25:00 -0600

Absent but Always Present

Monica Fountain

y father never went on a school field trip. Never came to a football or basketball game where I was shaking my pom-poms in what he still jokingly describes as my little “bobtail skirt.” He didn’t attend the school musical or the play I wrote in high school. When he did come to the school, he usually wasn’t there for me.

Instead, he was helping a single mother get her wayward son back in school. Or he was fighting the local powers that be, protesting to get more black teachers hired for a school enrollment that was increasingly black and a school staff that was stubbornly white. He was often marching off to school board meetings or rallies and organizing the community for another civil fight. Or he was protesting the number of black boys being expelled and suspended—my father’s days and nights filled with meetings and causes and prayer.

My mother was the one who registered me and my brother, Ed, for school. The one who was there for parent-teacher conferences and field trips. She was the one in attendance on Senior Night at football and basketball games, though like my father, she also sometimes stood in as parent for some child at church or one whom she knew from our small-town community. I shared my parents, especially my father. He had scores of son sand daughters, though in actuality my mother gave birth to just two: Ed and me—six years younger. We were PKs, preacher’s kids. My father was pastor of the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church, the largest African American church in our town of 30,000—and arguably the most influential church.
It was largely my dad—the Reverend William H. Copeland, Jr.—who made it so, a caramel-complected slender man whose politics and hands-on liberation theology were shaped in a Jim Crow Louisiana and in the faith of his father, himself a Methodist preacher.

Dad had a sometimes raspy voice that when he stood in the pulpit on Sunday mornings, when it was buttered with the spirit, thundered as he preached. It was the same fire of righteous indignation that I later recall hearing in his voice when there was some injustice he sensed, some new cause to battle, some compulsion or call to help someone in need.

And so his presence in one place meant his absence in another. Such is the calling of a preacher, and also the burden of being a natural-born PK.

The Real Thing

I can’t say that I knew where my father was when I was singing “Oklahoma,” back in high school or even as a pom-pom girl that time when the batteries went dead on the tape player during a dance routine—and “you dropped the bomb onnnnn meeeeee” suddenly fizzled across the gymnasium—creating one of my life’s most embarrassing moments. I just knew he wasn’t there and that I don’t really remember expecting him to be there, though with my mother ever present, I never remember feeling deprived by Dad’s absence.

Dad’s job was to help others. That much I understood, even as a child...

Dear Dad Excerpt V

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:24:00 -0600

Papí

Rosa Maria Santana

y dad was a mystery to me. When I was a little girl, he was an intriguing and charming mystery. As I grew older, he became a more perplexing, sometimes painful puzzle. The faded picture of the two of us that I have kept for all these years says as much.

In it, I am three, wearing a red ruffled dress, white socks, and black shiny shoes. My dad kneels next to me, pointing at the camera, trying vainly to get me to pose with him. Instead, I stare at him. Years later, I stare into that grainy snapshot while also searching the pages of my mind over a lifetime of memories for answers to the mystery man and to what caused the picture-perfect daddy and daughter to divide.

As a little girl, I called him Papí. I adored him. As I grew older and spoke more English than Spanish, our relationship became more strained, more distant. I stopped calling him Papí. Instead, he became Dad. I became, in one sense, daddy’s grown-up little girl, left with more questions than answers.

Back in elementary school, I did my homework in the dining room, where I cherished my bird’s-eye view of Papí in the living room. After a long day of work, Papí would lie on his stomach while watching TV. During commercials, he’d turn over on his back and rub his tummy. In those moments sometimes, I’d sneak up on him, then suddenly jump on his big belly as if it were a trampoline. I was only six or seven years old, but he acted like I weighed a thousand pounds. He’d yell in Spanish: ¡Ah! ¿Qué andas haciendo? ¡Ya para! Translation: What are you doing? Stop it!

Sometimes, his choice words were a bit more colorful, but he was always playful. I’d giggle uncontrollably. His reaction only encouraged me to keep jumping.

When I was a little girl, I remember him laughing a lot, his laugh resounding like the thunderous crash of waves against ragged rocks. That sound could fill a room as easily as the scent of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. His laughter was just as reassuring as cookies–a favorite comfort food of mine. I remember him smiling, enjoying food, savoring a good joke.

But as I grew older, something happened. Papí changed. He grew more withdrawn, with pronounced mood swings that I did not—could not—understand as a child, or even later as a teenager. This much I did understand: The twinkle in his eye faded. His boisterous laugh disappeared. He disappeared. And we grew apart.

By the time I was a teenager, our relationship had suffered too many missed conversations and opportunities for father-daughter intimacies. It was precious time and moments made irrecoverable by the years that passed by as school and a career in journalism carried me far from home, farther from Papí.

Bad News

My older brother’s voice was frantic over the phone. Was I sitting? He wanted to know. I was. I was at work, writing a story on deadline on my first week as a reporter with a newspaper in Texas.

My brother’s voice quivered. In the background, someone sobbed uncontrollably.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He blurted it out. No preliminaries: Dad killed himself. Dad killed himself…
His news made me numb.

Dear Dad Excerpt VI

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:23:00 -0600

Never Too Late

Sylvester Monroe

San Francisco (June 2000)

s baseball games go, the San Francisco Giants’ 18–0 rout of the Montreal Expos at Pac Bell Park last month was about as good as the national pastime gets. Barry Bonds splashed a homer in the big pond, and even the pitcher hit a grand slam. But as great as the game was, the feats on the field paled in comparison to what went on in the stands. That was the first and only baseball game I have ever been to with my father.

I grew up believing my father had been lost and presumed killed in the Korean War. When my maternal grandfather wouldn’t let him marry my pregnant mother, a high school senior at the time, the nineteen-year-old prospective father joined the air force and landed in Korea just months after I was born.

Soon after that, my mother also left their Mississippi Delta hometown and headed north to Chicago. For a while, she stayed in touch with my father’s family, but after a time she lost touch with them completely. Except for my mother’s memories, all I had of my father was a 5-by-7 sepia-tone photo of him in his air force uniform and another snapshot of him in his high school football jersey, No. 33. I wore that number during my own short-lived high school football career.

Call of a Lifetime

I was a twenty-two-year-old cub reporter at Newsweek magazine in Boston when, out of the blue, I got an amazing telephone call from my mother in Chicago. “Are you sitting down?” she began.

“I just ran into your father’s sister. She says he is alive and living in Northern California. He’s been there for the last twenty-some years. Tried to find us, but didn’t know where we were.”

It is difficult to describe what I felt at that moment. I did not whoop and holler. I did not cry. I did not do or think anything. I simply tried to comprehend the true meaning of the revelation: Your father is alive. It wasn’t easy.

The thing I’d dreamed, talked, and thought about all my life was a reality. My father—Kittrel D. Peoples—was alive and well. Still, it was weeks before I could even pick up the telephone to call him. What would I say? What would he say? What if I didn’t like him? What if he didn’t like me? As happy as I wanted to be, I was also afraid that meeting the real man might tarnish the spit-and-polished war hero image I’d carried of my dad for so many years.

After an awkward first coast-to-coast long-distance phone call, we did talk from time to time. But it was six more years before we finally met. It happened at my dad’s oldest brother’s home in Richmond during 1979, when I was on a journalism fellowship at Stanford University. After a huge bear hug from this stranger who looked like an older, darker version of myself, we sat down to find common ground...

Dear Dad Contents

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:20:00 -0600

About the Book

Prologue

Reflections

An Open Letter to a Father: Dear Dad

John W. Fountain

Dad’s Lesson: Life Is About Now, Not Then

Donald A. Hayner

The Truth at Last

Nichole M. Christian

Cutting My Son’s Hair: A Priceless, Intimate Moment

John W. Fountain

Through a Picture Window

Stephanie Gadlin

I Know, I Hope, I Wish

Mario D. Parker

Ode to a Southern Father: For Daddy Luther

John W. Fountain

Reconciliation

The God Who Embraced Me

John W. Fountain

My Leading Man

Hamil R. Harris

Open Letters to Young Black Men: A Plea for Life

John W. Fountain

An Open Letter to a Troubled Young Man:

Lessons on Manhood

John W. Fountain

Strictly My Father

Teresa Sewell

Never Too Late

Sylvester Monroe

I’d Rather Have You

John W. Fountain

Redemption

Lip Gloss, Hot Sauce, and a Father’s Loving Thoughts:

An Open Letter to a Daughter

John W. Fountain

Where Were You?

Vincent C. Allen

Absent but Always Present

Monica Fountain

A Presence in His Absence

Lolly Bowean

Flawed, Fallible, but Still My Hero

R. Darryl Thomas

Tupac Is Alive: A Father’s Angst for a Son

John W. Fountain

My Daughter, My Treasure

John W. Fountain

101

Revelation

A Letter to a Professor:

My Tribute to a Journalism Dad

John W. Fountain

105

Papí

Rosa Maria Santana

109

A Tribute to a Father Not-So-Tough-as-Nails

Joseph A. Kirby

115

An Open Letter to a Father: A Plea to a Wayward Son

John W. Fountain

121

Finally, Peace for a Son

John W. Fountain

129

Making Me Whole—Memories of Grandpa

Anne Valente

146

The Father in Me

Lee Bey

151

If I Had Had a Father

John W. Fountain

158

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Buy Dear Dad

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 20:34:00 -0600

Dear Dad About the Book & Prologue

noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 20:33:00 -0600

About the Book

This project was inspired by my essay for National Public Radio’s This I Believe series and is itself a compilation of true narratives written by a group of journalists and writers I assembled for this project. Men and women from various walks of life and various generations, they are black, white, and Hispanic. A good number of them have written for some of the nation’s best news organizations—the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Time magazine, and others. All of them write in the pages that follow about the impact of fathers, and fatherlessness, on their own lives. This comes at a time when the focus of a national initiative and even President Barack Obama have sounded the clarion call for responsible fatherhood amid a continuing crisis of paternal absenteeism.

Fatherhood is a subject that deserves our attention. A key component of that critical socializing agent known as family, “father” is important to us all.

So what better time than this—than now—to lend to and perhaps spur the national dialogue on fatherhood, to raise to the light images of the best of our fathers, and also examples of some failed or flawed fathers, with the hope that from each may be gleaned a more perfect model to which all fathers might aspire? And there seems no better way to examine fatherhood and to extract lessons from the past in the hope of creating a brighter future than to follow the reflective journeys of writers who remember their fathers lovingly, poignantly, vividly, at times longingly, even sometimes with disappointment.

Through the prism of our collective lens, these mini-memoirs recall time we spent with our fathers, or in some cases, the lack thereof. And each seeks to provide insights on the best of fathering, if not also hope for the millions of American children who today face growing up in homes with no father present.

What we present here are hardly religious sermons. They are instead stories steeped in journalistic craft, stories that resonate deeply on the universal themes of childhood, family, struggle, love, and loss, offering a kind of collective case study. They are stories that I—that we—believe have the potential by the power of intimate narrative not only to help others understand the impact of fatherlessness but also to help mend those most wounded.

These stories are not black, or white, or brown. They are not singularly male or female, nor are they solely American. Rather, they are transcendent stories about the human condition, about the human spirit and the universal longing to feel connected to who we are, and whose we are, to that critical figure we all know as father and to the lasting lessons our fathers taught us, by their presence, or by their absence.

In some ways, this book is also a tribute to fathers, a celebration and remembrance of those men who have graced our lives with paternal love and guidance, whether or not they were our natural fathers. It is a tribute to those special men who had the courage, faith, and fortitude to withstand the storms of their own lives and yet remain resolved to produce, protect, and provide for their families.

This book is for everyone who has a father, for everyone who has lost one, loved one, or longed for one, for everyone who happens to be one, and for everyone who longs to be a better one.

And finally, this book is for everyone who longs to make peace with one—a gift to all good fathers past, present, and future, and sealed with a prayer for them all.

John W. Fountain

PROLOGUE

In the absence of my father, I have longed at times in my life for affirmation, for the steadying hand on the shoulder; for the paternal love that is reassuring, establishing, uplifting, grounding, life-giving—only to find none. This deficit in my upbringing was devastating.

I am the son of mostly de facto fathering, of the pieces and particles that fell from the cloaks of men who filed past my life, men whose paths crossed with mine or with whom I walked for a time. But I cannot say with certainty whether it was the case that those men closest to me would not or could not promote me, or whether they never fully embraced or fully esteemed me, at those particular times in my life. What I can say and what I do know is that as a result, for much of my life I felt fatherless.

Strangely, perhaps—and at least certainly this was unexpected—I eventually found solace and healing in my reflections as an adult upon the frailties of all fathers, including my own frailties as a man; in the forgiving of those men whom I deem to have in ways failed me; and also in my own journey of fatherhood and my willingness to provide paternal nurturing and substance to my own children and even those who are the seed of other men. I have found strength and a measure of healing in my earnest desire to be a better father and a better man than my own natural father and to learn as I travel this course from the mistakes of others and those I have made myself.

Still, there is a hole, a feeling of emptiness, in a certain place in my heart, a place that was meant to be filled with a lifetime of memories made with my father. I suspect there always will be. And yet I have found strength in the presence of an Eternal Father, and in that good gained from even the imperfect men I encountered from boyhood to manhood. And though I remember not the joy of my own father taking delight in me, now I do know and embrace the joys as well as the responsibility of fatherhood.

And there is a part of me—the little boy in me—who finds in me the kind of father he always wished he had. That has always been my endeavor, my promise to myself as a little boy, a promise I intend to keep until my last breath.

Someone once advised me during one of life’s inevitable storms not to "despise the process." In other words, the sometimes painful struggles of life and their accompanying heartaches and sufferings can ultimately create in us a heart that seeks to heal and help others. I have come to believe that as we pass through our sufferings and survive them, the lessons learned through our own healing can ultimately serve a greater purpose: the healing of others, the mending of broken hearts, perhaps even the healing of a nation.

* * * *

This project incubated during the years of hurt and eventual healing from the paternal desertion I experienced in my own life. It was, in fact, an essay I wrote in 2004 for National Public Radio’s This I Believe series about the absence of my father and what “saved” me, and ultimately the responses that subsequently poured in from around the country from people of all walks of life that led me to consider writing more on the subject. That piece appears in this collection along with several others I have written over the years, in some cases as narrative, and in others, as poetic essays or letters.

The responses to the NPR essay—moving and deeply contemplative—touched me and reaffirmed the depths of the impact of fatherlessness, but even more, they affirmed the need of many others for healing. One of those responses was from a gentleman on the East Coast who said he had heard the essay and wondered if I might send him a few pictures to accompany the NPR podcast, which he had played for a Christian group of mentor-educators who frequently encountered young men and women growing up without a father. I strung together a series of photographs from my childhood, including the only picture I have of my biological father—a faded portrait frozen in time of a smiling man with his hat half-cocked and the swollen lines of alcoholism beneath his eyes and in his gaunt cheeks. I arranged that photograph and also a few of me, as well as some accompanying video clips, coordinated them with the NPR podcast, and sent it along. I understand that the Christian group continues today to show the clip, which has become a tool for training.

I also show the five-minute video clip, mostly to groups of youths and to church men’s ministries. It is part of what the saints at my grandfather’s Pentecostal church would call my “testimony.” And without fail, after having shown the video, the responses pour from the mouths and eyes of those for whom the words of that essay strike a chord, particularly from males, regardless of age or race: a teary young man in a Baptist church in Kentucky; a man driving in his car along a city street; students in a university classroom; or homeless men and women at a Thanksgiving gathering inside a Chicago shelter.

Not long ago, while speaking at that shelter run by a Christian ministry, I showed the video clip. Soon after the closing prayer had ended, a fortyish, burly man with a round brown face approached me and began to share how much what I had said had touched him. He had, in fact, been moved to tears. He, too, had grown up without knowing his father. Then one day after he became an adult, he finally met him. Sometime later, he and his father got into an argument, he explained as I listened intently. They argued, he said—he and his father. Then it happened.

“He shot me in the mouth,” he said matter-of-factly before melting again into tears.

On one side of his mouth, he bore the scar to prove it. But what I understood as we stood there was that his scars and his pain ran much deeper. I also understood that they would be eternally his to carry, were there no hope of healing.

I explained to the brother that day that there is a father who is infallible and loving. That He is a father who, though He be of spirit and invisible, and not of flesh and blood or tangible, is a father no less. That this Father I have found is able to comfort, console, and embrace his sons and daughters with a love and peace far beyond human understanding. He is a father who stands with one foot in the beginning of time and the other in eternity. He is a sovereign Father who allows our earthly fathers to choose to be good fathers, or not. And He is a Father who also finds no shortage of means by which to care for those of us who find ourselves paternally abandoned or disconnected, sinking for what seems like the last time in deep consuming waters that encompass our souls. He is God the Father. God, my Father. God, our Father.

In constructing this volume, I searched my mind and experience for stories of other writers I have met or known through my work as a newspaper journalist for more than twenty years. Mostly, they are people with whom I had shared over the course of our friendship bits and pieces of my childhood experiences. I began to make calls or send e-mails to inquire whether they might be interested in contributing to this project. Before too long, a group of writers emerged.

There is Nichole Christian, formerly on the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press, whom I met first when I was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and later worked with when we were both staff writers at the New York Times. There is Sylvester Monroe, formerly a Newsweek and Time magazine correspondent and newspaperman, at one time senior editor at Ebony magazine. There is Rosa Maria Santana, a former Chicago Tribune colleague and writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. There is Mario Parker, a correspondent for Bloomberg News; and the Washington Post’s Hamil Harris. There is my good friend Vincent Allen, a career U.S. marine, pastor, and founder of Agape Ministries in Stafford, Virginia. There is my friend and former journalism colleague Lee Bey, formerly a reporter-columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. There are fifteen other writers, not including myself, whose stories appear in this volume. I am grateful to all of them for pouring a piece of their souls onto these public pages.

Most important in my selecting of these writers, as has been the case with those people I have chosen to write about for more than two decades as a newspaperman, is that they each have a story to tell. But in this case, it was equally important that the subjects, in the vein of the Black Church’s oral tradition of testifying, be able to tell or to write their own stories in their own resonant voices, using the vehicle of narrative writing. Also, rather than to seek to tell the stories of the rich and famous or notable, and in doing so, to risk—at least in my view—the element of “celebrity” taking precedence over the story, I felt led to focus on the stories of somewhat ordinary men and women. In this way, I hoped to provide a common access point for ordinary people to examine the issue of fatherhood and fatherlessness through the fabric of their own unique cultural experiences.

* * * *

For anyone who has ever known the agony of fatherlessness, there is no need to delineate its effects. Nor is there any quick prescription for healing—no clear-cut cure for the hurts suffered due to the lack of paternal nurturing and love. And for those who have known a father’s love and presence, the impact is in many ways immeasurable. In America today, millions of boys and girls, U.S. Census figures show, live in homes absent their biological father. In far too many cases, they live without any semblance of this figure so essential to our emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. There is no greater issue confronting our children, our communities, and our country. Collectively, the writers in this volume know this well.

The stories here are real.

Some writers in this volume wrestle with the absence of their fathers while growing up—with paternal desertion, with paternal neglect, abuse, or dysfunction, or with the emotional disengagement of their fathers. Others deal with the loss of their father’s mortal presence due to death or incapacitation. And others fondly recall the fathers they dearly love, the making of memories with them, and the learning of lessons that will endure for a lifetime. For among these stories are moving tributes to good and faithful fathers and to all men who choose to be a good and present influence in their children’s lives.

There are stories here of good men who chose to be good fathers, not only to their own children but also to their communities. There are stories of reconnection, stories of reconciliation, redemption, and revelation, stories of healing, and of triumph—stories that also speak so clearly to the importance of mothers and grandmothers, who for many of us were our saving grace.

In this volume, there is the story of the father who died months after his drug-addicted ex-wife succumbed to an overdose, leaving behind a child with a million unanswered questions; the truth leads to an unraveling of the hero she had always believed her dad to be, but it also provides the thread to longed-for answers, to peace and resolution about the man she only thought she knew. There is the story of the granddaughter who finds within a bullet hole in a basement wall a window to the past and memories of a loving grandfather. There is the story of the young black boy who loses his father, and his discovery of their eternal connection, of the paternal lessons that can endure for a lifetime, of that bond that indeed transcends even death. There is the absentee father and the impact of his cold disconnection on a little girl who found through his absence the drive and motivation to rise beyond her circumstance to educational and professional heights, and ultimately consolation. There is the story of the little boy who found more consistency in a drill sergeant than in his alcoholic father. There are the stories of invisible fathers, stories of paternal heartache perhaps more than any one soul should have to bear. There is my own story, the story of a father who died drunk and the story of my own search for solace and reconciliation and my discovery of a God who embraced me. And there is the story of the father and son, separated by years, miles, and the unknown through no fault of their own, and the fateful telephone call that led to their reunion and a baseball game where they, both as men by then, would mend their ties.

This is not a “bash fathers” book. Nor are the stories tell-all exposés. But you will find no perfect men.

There are also no victims here in our collective psalm, only victors.

In some ways, this is a how-to manual: How to overcome. How to succeed. How to live on. How to be a better father. How to forgive our fathers.

We write with the understanding that so many boys and girls across America each day face through no fault of their own the void left by fatherlessness. We set down our words with the knowledge that so many men still have the power to heal by charting a new course in fatherhood. We write in hope of reversing that curse often passed down by the absence or complete failure of fathers. We are also fully aware that even as we breathe, we shape the histories of our own children’s experience with father—or mother—and ourselves are subject to human frailty. We write to encourage good fathers who feel undervalued and underappreciated to stay the course. We write to celebrate fatherhood.

Our hope is that others may find somewhere in these pages a guidepost—at least a beacon to reflect light on their own paternal pasts.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that others might find in our stories some measure of healing. But one can hope.

For anyone who has ever felt like a fatherless child, that is our hope as we write in the pages that follow, reflecting with deep sentiment on these two simple words: “Dear Dad.”

John W. Fountain

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noreply@blogger.com (John W. Fountain) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 10:53:00 -0500