my mother sent me this story that she wrote about my grandfather. she wrote it a few months ago but felt it pointient to send it out to friends and family today as we cast our votes to help change our country and our world
mark

My father was an alcoholic. He lost everything but the love of his family. His last remaining sister refused to believe his illness was alcoholism – it’s dementia she would argue. Somehow I think she knew better but just found it too difficult to face the truth - her favorite brother had succumbed to our family disease, alcoholism. Of my father’s nine siblings, six suffered from extreme alcoholism.

My father lost his identity. He lost his love of self and resorted to living outdoors. This was his choice. He refused to live with any family member or me. My Mother and I rented a room for him stocked with non-perishable foods and set up barely used accounts for him in eating establishments. In severe weather he came indoors. When hungry, he would eat. When approached about living outdoors, he would reprimand me for being wasteful with money. When questioned about his thinness he would explain that for medicinal purposes he was on a liquid diet.

My mother left their 38-year marriage because she realized my father’s drinking was killing her. She told me when I was a wife and mother that she simply could not believe the proud and hard workingman she loved disappeared into some other world. She believed he would return. Her own health failing, she came to the conclusion that if she stayed around much longer she would not be alive to witness his return.

Both orphans of a sort, my parents married during the depression. Elementary school dropouts, they were proud, and smart people. They were knock out dressers and considered “the” progressive couple in their small African American community. My father worked for years as a master machinist. He led a Boy Scout troop for nearly fifteen years and mentored many a young man to adulthood. His sister, his defender, often bragged that my father was the first black man she had every known to have a checking account.

Although short, squat, and dark skinned with a wondering left eye, his impeccable wardrobe, near perfect diction and carriage compensated for physical flaws. Tall, erect, and beautiful, my mother was the antithesis of my father. He said he married my mother, four inches taller than he in flats that she never wore, because he did not want short children. The children came 15 years into the marriage. By then the descent had started.

My father was what they used to call a “race man”. A “race man” consistently strives to promote positive images of black people, carries himself with dignity and strives to bring positive change to the black community. It was the failure of one attempt after another to become the “quintessential race man” that led to his breakdown.

With only a third grade education, he would often tutor our next-door neighbor in high school chemistry and physics. A voracious reader, he could enter any conversation on just about any subject and have you convinced he was an expert on that topic. He successfully installed a central heating system in our home and hand crafted my bedroom set. Everyone thought he could do anything but, though a man of immense talent and ambition; he started one business after another, only to see each one of them fail.

His street life caused me much angst. After a sleepless and stormy night of thinking about him sleeping on hard wet ground I went looking for him. Once again I tried to convince him to make use of his room. With a five year old grasping my hand and a newborn strapped to my chest I begged him to go indoors. We argued and attracted the attention of the police. They came to rescue me only to be the brunt of several expletives by my father telling them to arrest me for harassing him. At the age of 70 he was still incorrigible.

One day I received a call from his landlord. He warned me that my father was in bad shape and I had better come to see about him. I found a very weak man, glad to see me and anxious to follow my every directive. His days of living outdoors were over. He died six months later from esophageal cancer.

When I went to empty his room, I found magazine articles and newspaper clippings on Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, Sharp James, Al Sharpton, and many other African American leaders of the second half of the 20th century neatly stacked. Passages were underlined. Notes were written in the margins. Notebooks of graph paper with calculations and mechanical drawings and a worn Spanish primer were there as well. These were not the possessions of a man suffering from dementia. What happens to a dream deferred?

He has been dead for nearly 25 years. On the occasion of his death, my aunt gave me a beautifully framed print of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson. She wanted my family to be ever mindful of my father’s role as mentor and teacher of young men. My father would be so proud of his grandsons. They’ve confidently seized the opportunities for success denied him.

As I follow closely the ascent of Barak Obama I often think of my father. Even after Iowa, he would have argued vehemently about the impossibility of a black man become a presidential candidate. He would be so happy to be proven wrong.
linda epps