The Last of Everything

by GOODW.Y.N. (Nicole Goodwin)

“I don’t need you, WHY ARE YOU HERE?”

When my daughter was about six, she started asking questions about her father. Determined not to undermine her curiosity about her patriarch, I was willing to answer any and every question I: A. Thought I had the answer to and B. Thought that her little six-year-old mind could handle. Kids are as fragile as the truth and twice as easy to get upset by it. I didn’t want to be like my mother who rarely answered questions about my father, or her past with him when I was a child. I didn’t hear the truth about him until I was at least 16 or 17 years old. And even then, the truth stung me, like an old war wound that aches in the winter; that pain was a sign that I had always run from, but now choose to confront. About my biracial father, about my biracial daughter’s Caucasian father, and about African American myself.

After my brother was sent away from our house, I was treated poorly, especially by my stepfather. He was always bold enough to openly antagonize me all the time, but it had become even worse after my molestation, which forced my brother to be sent away. I had always thought this was because next to my brother who was the lightest of the kids in the house—with hazel eyes and light beige flesh-colored skin, was me and my mother both of tawny complexion.

I didn’t nearly have the incredible almost—Caucasian features my brother had though. No, my features are now what they have always been African, two large brown eyes, with a wide nose, and full lips. But I felt that I was light enough to make my stepfather cringe with hatred and disgust. My mother did little to protect me from his wrath and for years I hated everything, including myself, my mother and every dark-skinned black man I had ever met, because they only served to remind me of my stepfather and his abuse. I was wrong though on that account. I had served as a reminder but it wasn’t nearly as complicated as that. Or maybe it was underneath the surface of what had angered him the most. “Shadism” has a sneaky way of rearing its ugly head—without most Black or White folks even noticing. But that wasn’t what my mother told me.

Whenever my mother talked about my father it was always in bits and pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle; depending on whatever mood she was in determined whether or not I would get a straight answer from her, or if I would most likely get the runaround. Most of the time I wouldn’t get anything out of her; she would find a way to deflect the question or just completely ignore me. Sometimes though, she would just give me little scraps of information always talking about how fair-skinned he was and how gorgeous he looked. No name, no number, no address, or anything solid. Just small, vague nuggets of physical characteristics. This ordeal was a constant torture that always left me feeling empty in the end. It was like sitting down to dinner and trying to make a meal out of nothing but chicken bones. Sometimes I really think that my mother took some perverse enjoyment out of keeping his identity from me.

One day in particular sticks out in my mind most of all though. I remember when I was maybe six or seven years old, asking her something pertaining to him one day and she just shouted at me, “You have no father, God is your father!” I look back at that moment now and wonder. I am not sure if I had just gotten on her nerves about him, striking at a hurtful chord like a cat pouncing on the keys of an old, overworked piano. Kids do things like that without even trying or understanding what feelings they manage to provoke in themselves or others. Then again, maybe I am just blaming myself for her shortcomings like lack of patience. I really don’t know. What I do know is how I felt at that moment. Something small had died. Maybe it was hope, because I felt so broken inside after that. Since I was so unloved in that household of hers that could only mean one thing logically. If there was a God and he truly was my father, then he, too, did not even love me, because he was the one who chose this life for me in the first place. I knew then that my curiosity was a curse. I never asked her another question about him.

As the years waned on, my mother started to volunteer information about my biological father, at around age nine or ten she brought up a story about her past with him. I found this to be strange, but I couldn’t help but listen. I had told myself as I had gotten older that I really didn’t want to hear about him, that I was only giving her a sympathetic ear for her guilt. In truth though, I do believe that there was a large part of me that wanted to know more about him. But those desires had to be repressed due to my mother’s outburst years before. So I played along with the stories, not allowing myself to believe a word she said. She said that my father and she had an apartment on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. The place had been so small and they were so broke that they had to keep me in a drawer to sleep.

“Wait, you mean a dresser drawer?”

“Yeah.” She said as if this was a common occurrence.

“So, I was in the drawer, with nothing for my head, just in there?”

“No, you had a pillow and a blanket.”

“Oh, wait, what if someone closed the drawer on me?”

“No one did.”

“I know, but someone could have.”

“But nobody did.”

“I know but what if…”

“Neecole, nobody did!”

And with that, the subject was closed yet again until another time would come when she was either motivated or forced to tell about our obscured past on Knickerbocker Avenue.

One of my favorites though takes place a little before I was born. By then I had learned to listen quietly and attentively.

“One night your father and I were sleeping in the bedroom and I had a dream that he was getting married, except it wasn’t to me it was to another woman. That dream woke me up and I smelled smoke. I woke him up and realized there was a fire in the building. I ran out of the house, banging on everyone’s door so that we could escape out the building. Everyone got out and no one was hurt.”

“Wow mom, you’re a hero!” That was and still is the only time that I have been proud of my mother because she not only saved me, and my father but a whole apartment building. I don’t remember if she said if my brother or three other sisters were living with us at the time. I had always pictured it just the three of us. One big happy family. But that never came to pass. From what my mother had said he did indeed marry another woman while he was seeing—and well, impregnated her. We never spoke about him again after that. I had been too hurt to inquire and she was too hurt to say anything more. I suppose that equivalent pain and disappointment should have drawn the both of us closer to each other but it didn’t; it only served to drive us further apart.

Looking back though, I wonder how much of the things concerning the relationship with my father was real or not, it's hard to decipher what the truth is really when you’re that young. My mother has always been prone to lies and omissions when it came to anything concerning her misdealings and evil deeds; I’ve learned that from her over the years as well. I suppose the best example of this would be when she finally told me why my stepfather treated me horribly for all of my childhood and for practically all of my adolescent years, after we left Brooklyn to live in The Bronx. One day when I was seventeen my mother and I had one of our long talks that meant nothing at all. That was until she opened up the oyster that was her heart and let me have the pearl that lay inside.

She had been two-timing my father with my stepfather and vice versa, going back and forth between the two of them like a confused yo-yo. One day my father showed up while they were at a picnic and took me without her knowing. I suppose my stepfather hadn’t known that she was seeing another man—let alone him, because he was livid to find out. Needless to say, I was returned to her and stayed with her ever since then. I was only three years old when my father and I laid eyes on each other, and to be honest I don’t even remember that encounter, not one shred, not one second, not one bit. My mother had not only succeeded in keeping my stepfather, but also banishing my father from me. Till this day I could never forgive her for that.

Some months later I had gone to replace my social security card and discovered that his name was placed in the father’s section of the application information they had in their system. Larry Tinley it read. I had never known my father’s name before, and now here it was. I approached my mother about the subject, just to see if she if it was truly his name or not. Maybe I just wanted her to admit it—what she kept from me for so long, to my face. That she really was torturing me about my father and enjoying it profusely for over a decade. All she said was “Yeah, that’s his name.” I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that she didn’t even flinch. She must have read it on my face because her next question was “You never wanted to look up your father?” All I could do was reply “No.” And I never did, despite how much I wanted to, just out of fear or respect for her. I was and still am such a fucking liar and a coward.

My curiosity towards this shitty situation was never quenched though. Had I been right all along? Can my stepfather’s hatred towards my father be attributed to shadism, in ways so covert that it didn’t even occur to any of them? Was my father’s lighter skin color a constant reminder of something my mother held away from my stepfather, like awe and admiration? I saw it when she looked at my brother, even after she found out that he molested me there was that so much worship in her eyes for him, just because of his skin tone and eye color. I think about those things now even when I look at my child, simply because I stayed with her father for those four few months—which were four months too many in my lifetime. Did I do it because he was Caucasian? Am I as obsessed with whiteness as my mother was? Do I look down on black men because I was trained to do so, as my mother and her mother, and her mother may have been?

Both of my parents were from the largest slave states in America—my mother was from South Carolina, and my father was from the North. My daughter’s father was from Colorado. It isn’t that farfetched to believe that he had never met a black person until he went into the Army. He was in it for seven years before he had met me. I had just turned twenty-one and he was twenty-seven. I had heard about him though before I met him. The First Sergeant got in front of the whole company and announced that a new soldier had come to the Bravo Company. The funny thing was that when he had gone to Arms Room, he tried to sign out a rifle in “civies,” which are better known as civilian clothes. Everyone including me thought this was funny because he should have known better. That’s like being a black man walking around without identification in New York City. There are some things in life you just don’t do unless you’re looking for trouble.

By the time I did meet him face to face I thought the worst of him. He was a short, ornery white dude with a lot of attitude. This, folks, did not make him attractive one bit. I don’t know what changed that around, maybe it was the fact that we got stuck on guard duty together one day. It was a cold wintry night in Friedberg, Germany and while everyone else was having fun that weekend we were stuck together sitting on a plastic blockade, waiting for relief of some kind. I forget the things we spoke about. I forget the reason he looked at me the way he did. I remember though, how his blue eyes sparkled at midnight under the glow of the moon and those naked stars. I remember the feel of his lips against mine as I sat there bewildered and wide-eyed after he said, “I just needed to do that. I felt like I had to do that.” I swear right then and there I loved him. And I never thought that I would love anyone else. He was the second however, to teach me a valuable lesson that sticks in my mind just like my mother did. The lesson is: When someone tells you who they really are, whether it is through words or actions, letters or numbers, body language or tone—no matter how they do it, believe them. Believe them the first time around.

“I don’t need you, WHY ARE YOU HERE.”

Those were the words that killed my love for him; those were the words that ended our relationship and began me on the journey called motherhood that I have been on alone for almost nine years now. It all started, weirdly enough, because of how “expediently well” our relationship was going at the time. By “expediently” I mean closed-off, by “well” I mean poorly. We weren’t communicating like we used to when we had first started going out; all of our impulses to be with each other, to get to know one another, had died. There was no room for curiosity or discovery. All there was between us was sex. Not even love-making, just pure no-holds-barred, fucking! And even that wasn’t fulfilling to me anymore.

“I don’t need you, WHY ARE YOU HERE.”

Instead of saying anything however, I just kept my mouth shut. I calmed up tighter than my mom did when it came to her sad love story with my dad. I just shut down and kept down, not coming up for air. He knew this, saw it on my face, and tried to get me to talk.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I said daydreaming, staring at the smoke coming off his incense. I looked back at him and saw the fear in his face.

“Won’t you please talk? Please say something?”

“Nothing, there’s nothing wrong.” I said flatly.

This was my revenge. There were so many days and nights where he was angry, he was tired, he was upset and he banished me from his sight, sending me back to my lonely little room located in the barracks across the street. This after pleasuring his body, this after putting up with his taunts and his sideways glances. This, after seeing the love in his eyes boil over into hatred for no apparent reason. I remember the fire in his eyes then. It wasn’t a hot flame of love, awe, or admiration. It was a cold flame, and I took it. I stayed and took that abuse because I thought that was what people in love did for each other. But in the end, I was tormenting myself now. I hurt myself with my own silence, more than I have hurt anyone else, including him.

“I don’t need you, WHY ARE YOU HERE?”

The night he had said those words was a tragedy to me. One of the biggest in my life, it was right up there with not remembering my dad. No one had ever spoken to me that way even my mother who I swear till this day does not love me, nor did she ever. But to hear it come out of someone’s mouth, especially if you were in love with that person, pure heartlessness. I had pieced together the clues to what happened before I got to his apartment. He was in the Motorpool—which a large garage, being lent out on a mechanics’ detail—a job, for another sergeant. He and the sergeant had cross words. Now here is where it turns out to be a “he said, he said” moment. The sergeant claimed that he had thrown a large steel wrench at him and he claimed that he just threw it. But being that he was of lower rank he was the one who was severely reprimanded. That’s how it works in the military. When I heard the news I rushed over to see him. I tried to get him to talk about what happened what we both knew was going to happen to him. But he didn’t. I don’t remember what I said to him to make him so angry. I don’t remember what he said that made me feel like I was nothing. All I remember was this.

“I don’t need you, WHY ARE YOU HERE?”

Right then and there something inside of me snapped. But instead of exploding I imploded and all of my feelings shut off caving in. I was numbed to the core. And still, I managed to stay, saying that we should sleep on it, and we did sharing the same bed that night. I tossed and turned feeling the sting of tears spouting from my eyes. I moaned in great pain. I saw myself lying beside him from above and managed to ring out an ounce of sympathy for him rather than myself. He was like me but in reverse almost. He had been separated by his mother. He had an evil stepmother who instead of protecting him from his father abandoned him to her devices. He was broken, sad, lonesome. I see that now. But when I had woken up the next morning to the glowing rise of the sun I realized I was something he was not. I was not careless enough to be that cruel. And with that came my monologue about how “I couldn’t stand to be treated this way anymore,” then came my tears, and then came me leaving him for good. It was over. But in the end, had we ever really loved each other at all?

Was it love that kept me with him, or the need to value something based on skin? Did he ever love me or was it just fascinating to fuck a black chick? When he looked into my brown eyes, did he see himself even once, or was it just “jungle fever?” How can two people of different races ever know if they love each other or not? I didn’t have the answers then, when I was a child. I didn’t have them when I fell in love with him. I don’t have them now to render to my child when she is old enough. All I know for sure is that I will tell her this:

A broken person should never fall in love with broken people.