Disobedient

I was my father’s daughter. Then I brought home my child.

By Francine Parham

I was the good daughter. I obeyed when my parents spoke; especially my father. I grew up in a family where doing what you were told was not just expected, but required. There were consequences if you disobeyed.

In December of 1987 I returned home for winter break from college. I was a junior at Purdue and hadn’t been home in over a year. It was expensive getting from West Lafayette, Indiana to upstate New York and, in truth, I liked being away. I did not have to follow the rules at school. I was having fun, too much fun.

I flew home and my mother picked me up at the airport. We chatted in the car about nothing in particular, and when we arrived home my brother, Oscar, helped me carry my bags in.

Everyone was home — my three sisters and two brothers. I was not thinking about them. I was thinking about my father.

My mother opened the front door and my father, who had been in the kitchen, came out and for moment he looked confused.

I did not look at him as I walked through the door but I could hear his voice.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“His name is Christopher and he is my baby,” I heard myself say to my father. “He is mine — my child.” My father just looked at me.

No one spoke.

Oscar Parham, Sr. was a provider. That’s how he demonstrated his love for his children. He often worked two jobs to take care of us, and sometimes a third one if he could squeeze it in on the weekends. He only knew hard work. We wanted for nothing materially.

He was the son of a sharecropper and his mother picked cotton in the fields of Virginia. He was the youngest of seven children. He was the only child of his parents’ who went to college.

My parents were teachers, a noble profession with little pay. We were expected to perform in school. They expected nothing less from us, especially my father.

Only years later did I realize how much I was my father’s child. I was the oldest of his six children. He even named me in the hospital when I was born — after a model in a French magazine. My mother said she was okay with it.

There were times in my childhood when my father and I were inseparable. In high school, he dropped me off every day as he headed to his school. He also picked me up after school in his Corvette. We talked a lot during those drives. Sometimes he drilled me about how I was doing in school. Sometimes I just looked out the window listening to his rhythm and blues music.

He would hold me up to my siblings as a model of hard work: I went to school, came home and studied. I caused no problems and had friends that he and my mother approved of. I worked hard to get good grades. My father often told me I was smart, but I felt that wasn’t the case. I would hear him sometimes tell my sister, “If you had Francine’s gumption combined with your smarts, they couldn’t stop you.” She was the smart one. I had to work hard to gain his approval. My father was happy as long as you got the results he thought you should.

We stared each other down for what seemed like forever. I had not taken my coat off because I was afraid he would tell me to leave. I had been told to leave before, so I expected this. I left home, came back and learned to keep my mouth shut.

I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. So I stood there as he began to speak.

Christopher was a year and a half old. I had hidden my pregnancy from my family. I planned to complete college and only then tell my family that I had a child. But my plans fell apart when my mother happened to call me at work when I wasn’t there.

Tanya, my supervisor, told my mother that I had taken Christopher to the pediatrician for a checkup. When I returned Tanya told me that my mother had called and what she had said. I said nothing. My mother didn’t call me for three days. I didn’t call her either. We talked almost every day even if only for five minutes.

I spent those three days trying to figure out how I was going to cover up what Tanya told her. I had never lied to my mother. Finally, on the fourth day, my phone rang. I knew it was her.

“Francine, I heard you had a baby,” she said.

I told her I had and then I started to cry.

“This is not the time to cry, Francine,” she said. “You now have someone to take care of. It’s not just you anymore.”

Then she said, “I’m on my way.”

She arrived a week later and embraced Christopher. She had only told my father that she was going to visit me, just to check in. She asked no questions.

She did tell one person about Christopher — my brother Oscar. And even then she kept the secret for months. “Momma only told me about Christopher on the day you brought him home,” my brother would recall.

Now, as my brother passed my father heading to the living room, my father grabbed his shoulder as he walked by. My father almost lost his balance when he saw my brother holding a baby. My father would later say that he thought it was my brother’s child.

I didn’t know until years later that my sisters had gathered at the top of the stairs peering down as my father began to speak.

“Well your life is fucked up now,” I heard my father say. “How could you be so stupid?”

I said nothing. We had all been called stupid at one time or another. We were used to that.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

I said nothing.

“How are you going to take care of a baby?”

Again, I said nothing.

My sister Nikki, who was then 17, would later tell me how confused she was. “We saw you as you walked in from the top of the stairs, but Oscar was holding a baby,” she said. “We didn’t know who the baby belonged to and thought it was Oscar’s baby. We thought that maybe you were keeping a baby for him.”

“I was 15 at the time and remembered saying to Nikki, I think Francine has a baby,” said my sister Lisa. “Wow.”

Little did they realize that as they made their way down the stairs they also would be subjected to my father’s anger.

I finally sat down. My two sisters and brother were now on the couch side-by-side beginning to listen to my father’s diatribe.

My son was stumbling around the house playing and laughing with my youngest brother. My mother was in the kitchen.

“When you get up in the morning, you can go back to school but you’re leaving the baby,” my father bellowed.

That was it. He was done. He had made a decision that, as always, I was to follow without question. Then he went to bed.

That night as lay in my bed I could not sleep. I had decided that I needed to do something. But the problem was, I had spent all my life doing not what I wanted to do, but doing what he told me to do. I was living his dreams, his hopes and desires. I was doing exactly what he wanted me to do, and being who he wanted me to be.

I didn’t even like college, but it was my escape — just as it was his from his family, a long time ago.

The following morning I packed my one large suitcase, preparing to leave. I was leaving, as my father instructed me to do, but not without my child. I was determined not to allow this. I was lugging my suitcase down the stairs with my coat wrapped around me when I heard a voice behind me. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going back to my home,” I told my father. “I’m going back to Indiana.”

“You can go,” he said, “but the baby stays here.”

As a child I would have not said a word and more than likely complied. But this time it was different. Before I could think, I said defiantly, “No I’m not leaving my baby. If I go, Christopher goes too and if I stay he stays too.”

I waited for something to happen, but nothing did. My father had no response. He simply lifted my suitcase and took it back to my room. I followed because Christopher was in the room. I didn’t know what to expect. He set my suitcase down without looking at me and went back to into his bedroom. I closed my door and he did the same. I heard nothing. The house was quiet and so was my son. He lay sleeping through it all.

Later that morning and for remainder of the week I was at home, it was as if nothing had ever happened. We celebrated Christmas. We ate a lot. My father played with my son, sang to him and made him laugh. We all laughed, even though only two days earlier my house had been filled with tension and anger.

But something had changed: I was willing to accept the consequences for not following his rules, his expectations. For the first time in my life, I had spoken up to the father I had always feared but whose approval I always wanted.

I felt I had become an adult in my father’s eyes. In an unexpected way, I think my father tried to guide us in the right direction. He just didn’t always know how. He believed that if he made all the rules, we would succeed. He always said that he had seen much more than we had. He knew better.

He would often say, “I’m not telling you what someone told me, I’m telling you what I know.”

In the end, I took Christopher back to school with me. He went to daycare while I worked and went to class. Two years later I graduated, went to graduate school, and then, when I began to work, my parents, who had grown close to Christopher, volunteered to have him live with them so that I could begin my career. I came home every month, if not more often, until he graduated from high school, all the while living with them.

My father never scolded me again. Sometimes he would jokingly ask, “Any surprises for us?”

“Nope daddy,” I’d reply.

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