Father Figures
Baby
I remember walking into a big white room with a feeling of old things. Relics. Keepsakes. Items collected over hundreds of years that had more importance than anything in any other room I’d ever walked in.
I’d been to Big Mama’s house a hundred times but I had never been in Big Mama’s room. If her house was the oldest place I had ever been in, her room felt ten times older.
Big Mama was my my mother’s grandmother. Her father’s mother.
Jefferson Davis McKnight, Senior lived 7 houses down the street from his mother, Big Mama. His brother and sister lived a few blocks away.
Big Mama’s house was the most ornate and cared for by far. The combination of old people stuff and smell of general warmth made me quite at home in her house when my Grandad would take me there while he brought her dinner or took her trash out.
But somehow Big Mama’s room felt larger than her house that day my mother walked me into her room to say goodbye. The room felt extraordinarily oversized because all of Big Mama’s children were standing there looking over her. I remember going to hold her hand that had always offered me that piece of candy she always had ready for me. There was no candy and she was weak.
Big Mama laid there in her bed while everyone in the room stood still. Motionless. Sad. Distraught. Scared.
Big Mama was the center of these folks world and you could feel their tension. Emotionally and financially, she was their rock.
Except for the man I knew as Grandad. The man I knew to be Jefferson Davis McKnight, Senior.
While everyone else stood around my grandfather was running around getting medicine and fixing pillows and turning the television on and off.
At this point my grandfather was retired from his factory job and long past his days of playing baseball for NCR. At the age of 65 he was caring for his mother while his siblings weren’t sure where to stand in this big room.
During the Great Migration my grandfather’s family either got the train in Dayton or continued on to Alliance. They stood out because they were tall and thin with dark complexions. Big Mama’s house would fill up with these giants coming to pay respects.
That house felt smaller when all of the giants were there, but that room with Big Mama felt huge to me.
But only Big Mama and Grandad had presence.
Then, I heard the title had never heard before. A name. A box. A definition. A description that forever connected me to my grandfather. The man who always had a Big Mac and smoked cigarettes and drove a big car and exemplified the height of responsibility and structure was asked to do something.
I don’t remember what that something was but I remember who they asked to do it.
“Baby.”
Baby?
“Who was ‘Baby’”, I thought to myself as I watched my grandfather, Jefferson Davis McKnight, Senior answer. “Baby, get this” and “Baby, get that” was coming from every mouth in the room except for mine and my mother’s.
Grandad was Baby.
Jefferson was Big Mama’s youngest born so was the ‘baby’ and in the emotional depth of those last days for Big Mama the siblings reverted to the most familial connections they had.
Grandad was, had been and would always be “Baby” and I couldn’t have connected to him more.
My older siblings never called me Baby but I was the baby in every way. They made fun of how spoiled I was and then continue to spoil me more.
Baby treatment for certain.
From the time I was out of diapers until I was around six I went everywhere with my grandfather. From the bowling alley to playing the numbers I saw everything from his viewpoint. He bought cigarettes, a carton of milk and eggs and then we would go back to the house where he’d watch baseball and smoke. And drink a bottle of Pepsi.
That was everything.
Everything.
Two neighborhoods away was where my mother’s mother, Gammy lived. Grandad and Gammy had separated decades before I was born but their houses were less than two miles apart.
Gammy and her husband, Gampy, lived in an elaborate home on a prestigious street. Gampy, a retired police officer, had a fancy car and fancy van that they used to travel the world. Gammy and Gampy had three sons together and their grandchildren were all my age. They had sleepovers in the upstairs rooms decked out just for the grandkids.
Gammy was the best grandmother ever. As sweet as sugar with a heart of gold. Her sister, Aunt Margaret, was my favorite person in the world. My friends loved coming with me to visit Gammy’s house. Every kind of food or dessert or snack was an ask away. They had dogs in the back yard the house always smelled like flowers. It was like Disney World.
Grandad’s house was on a very nice block with some nice houses.
Grandad and Juanita, his wife, had the small grey house on the corner. There were some flowers on the side. His simple sedan was under the carport. There was TV to watch baseball. in the living room across from the piano where Juanita taught lessons.
There was a guest room I could stay in when I stayed over and one bathroom everyone shared. There was a small stove and a small refrigerator and a small table.
Gammy and Gampy always looked happy. They always had smiles on their faces. But I remember Gampy asking why I didn’t want to come and stay the night with all of the other kids. He wanted me to like him. I could feel it.
I didn’t dislike him. There was nothing wrong with that house.
But the place with the quiet giants was where I felt at home.
I was the baby.
When I was 15 and learning to drive, the car I wanted most of all was my oldest brother’s Nissan Maxima. Power windows, sunroof, digital radio. Perfection.
The only other new car in the family’s was Grandad’s new Lesabre. Quite the opposite and the base model. It wasn’t even a soft top. It was a perfect box.
The one unique thing about it was that it was lilac. A grayish purple. Where nothing stood out about my grandfather, the color of this car was bold. I’m sure this had nothing to do with anything, but Lilian — Gammy, his ex-wife, my grandmother — her favorite color was purple.
Unfortunately Grandad didn’t get to drive his new car much. He had to come live with us. Fifty years of cigarettes had him coughing up the only advertisement I’d ever need to not smoke. Ever.
In need of a car to drive, my mother suggested I ask Grandad to borrow his. Without hesitation he grabbed his keys from his nightstand and handed them to me with a smile and a cough. My mother pretended to be surprised and I fell for their entire act.
Not much later my grandfather died.
The car was sold. A 15 year old with a late model Lesabre had drug dealer written all over it.
I was totally fine with that.
I remember how Grandad took care of Big Mama and I realized how his looking after Big Mama was his way of taking care of everyone. That was his peace. Being Baby was his quiet space. Taking care of me was his quiet space.
He was content.
That was his happy.
Chickens
My father and his father could not have been more opposite. Artie Marcellus Henderson was a retired postal worker and upstanding member of the church. Artie and his second wife Winnie travelled the Midwest doing good and giving heartily for the benefit of the church.
Amen.
My father took care of Artie like Grandad took care of Big Mama. He was the baby, too, but no one ever called my father baby.
My father had the responsibility of making sure his father and stepmother made it to and from church twice a week. Eventually he moved his father into the house next to ours when Artie. got too old to live alone after Winnie passed away.
Artie lost his driving privileges the night he got into an accident driving home and giant rock was just sitting in the middle of the street. The giant rock was ten feet to the side of the road.
Living out in the country with no car isolated Artie from his church, his friends, his life. I know this was a way of caring for him but that must have been painful. I also don’t know if that extraction was needed to prevent Artie from giving the church every nickel and dime he had.
Every night my mother would make an extra plate for Artie and one of us would take it over to him. I would knock on the door and he would thank me and I would walk back home.
Artie was a stranger.
I don’t know that he ever really recognized me. And I had no connection to him. Every now and then he would ask me to come in to fix the television or find his glasses. Sometimes he would ask for Winnie. Sometimes he would complain that he hadn’t seen my father in weeks when my father was there the night before.
If Artie had been Grandad I would have stayed there all night asking why Uncle Willie and Aunt Mary called him Baby and what position he played in baseball.
I didn’t know Artie. I didn’t know that I didnt know Artie.
I would mostly see my father’s side of the family at family reunions.
My father and I were strangers so that wasn’t a surprise, but my father seemed to be just as much of a stranger to his father.
As long as I can remember my father had a well paying engineering job at Wright-Patt, but I loosely he owned an appliance repair shop with his brothers. As I got older I learned the shop did less repairing and more bootlegging.
Artie was serving the Lord on Sunday morning and Russell was serving liquor on Saturday night.
Eventually my father “retired” and built a house in the country just outside of town. Old farmland connected to the Black suburb.
In the city I assumed people quietly respected my father because he was Artie’s son. I had no idea he lived another life before I was born.
But I never understood how we ended up in this house in the country.
“My Daddy wanted chickens, then your daddy wanted chickens,” my Aunt Donna told us one evening.
If Aunt Margaret was the fun Aunt on my mother’s side, Aunt Donna was the fun Aunt on my father’s side.
There’s an old photo of my father and his brother’s behind a bar. Sitting at the bar is an older man who favored Artie but I never knew who he was.
“Your father idolized my father,” Aunt Donna explained. “And Daddy loved Russell because he got things done.”
Her Daddy was Uncle Clarence.
My mother bring up Uncle Clarence’s name sparingly, but the context was rarely positive.
“Yeah, I’d catch Daddy out in the streets where he wasn’t suppose to be,” Aunt Donna shared with a wink a stare. “But that was Daddy.”
Artie was no saint, mind you. But his misdeeds likely happened within the church community. Uncle Clarence tended to his exploits throughout Columbus and Dayton.
My father followed in the footsteps of Uncle Clarence.
“Daddy always wanted one of those big old house in the country,” Aunt Donna said with a confused smile. “With a farm and animals and whatever.”
“So Russ did, too,” my mother laughed knowingly.
Artie and I were strangers, but our commonality was my father having little connection to us, but put nothing above our well being. My father took care of his father without making Artie my mother’s burden. My father came to every game whether I played or not.
I wish Uncle Clarence had lived in the house next door.
My father probably did, too.
