He believed in loyalty to blood, by which he meant our Mississippi Delta ancestors. The older I get, the more I search backward, as though if I could know everyone who led to my father, who made him who he is, I would know him, too. Sometimes I have felt that if I could just reach down far enough into myself, I would find the answers: what he wants, what he fears, what he loves.
I have loved my father and I have feared him, and I have lain awake in the dark late at night worrying what it means to have half his genome inside me, but I have never understood him. Eventually they will do whatever my father wants, just to be free of him. Otherwise, maybe tomorrow morning, but probably this afternoon and quite possibly this very hour, he will ring them up again and start shouting.
If he’s angry about something-and he usually is-upon arriving at work, he’ll pick up the phone and call around until he finds someone with the power to rectify the problem. He eats breakfast if the scale permits and then he puts on a suit and drives to his law office. He wakes before dawn, weighs himself, goes for a walk or a jog or rides his stationary bike. Thirteen hundred miles from me, still down in South Florida, my father is going about his day, and I can imagine it.
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