An American Marriage(22)

Celestial, you know I have a thing about fathers.

That’s the real reason that I’m writing. I planned to send you another letter begging you to come visit. But for one thing, I’m sick of begging. You’ll come see me when you come see me. That’s what I got between the lines of your daddy’s letter. You’re grown and nobody can make you do anything you don’t want to do (like I needed somebody to tell me that).

I’m writing to you now because something has happened that has my head all messed up. I know that you’re on “hiatus,” like your daddy said, but what I’m telling you is burning a hole in my pocket. I got to tell it to somebody, and Georgia, the only person I trust with it is you.

You remember the last day we were together and I carried you to down to the stream to hear the bridge music? I planned to tell you then and there that Big Roy wasn’t my biological father. I lost my nerve, but I had to eventually come correct because it wasn’t fair for us to be talking about growing a family without you knowing about a genetic joker in the pack. I wanted to do what was right, although I know I should have told you before we even got married. I started to bring it up a couple of times, but I could never make myself spit it out. We fought hard over it and that particular disagreement led up to the predicament that I find myself in now. I have to confess that although I apologized to you for not telling you sooner, it’s not until now that I see how it feels to not know somebody that you think you know.

Forgive the cliché, but I hope that you are sitting down. You might want to pour yourself a glass of wine because this will blow your mind. Not only is my Biological incarcerated in this very same prison, he is none other than Walter, the Ghetto Yoda.

This is how I found out: As you know, a brother with my verbal skills is in high demand in prison. I can write letters, decipher documents, and even do a little jailhouse lawyering. By a little, I mean a little. But I can do better than most (my Morehouse education at work—Benny Mays would be so proud). Anyway, I was doing some work for Walter and I happened upon his face sheet and there across the top was his full government name: Othaniel Walter Jenkins. There is only one man in the world with that name, but there once were two. Before Big Roy made me Roy Jr., I was Othaniel Walter Jenkins II. My mother kept Othaniel as my middle name for the sake of history, I guess.

When I saw the name, I knew it was him. Remember what he said to me when I first got moved into his cell? “Us bowlegged brothers got to stick together.” And he looked at me to see my reaction. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but he was pointing out the family resemblance. You know, they call him my pops, but I thought it was some prison shit. People make families in here, and Walter did look after me like I was his own.

Let me back up. This is the story that Olive told me: She said that when she was sixteen, she finished high school in Oklahoma City, hopped on the Greyhound with the intention of living in New Orleans. She had taken a typing class and figured she was qualified to be a secretary. On her way through, she met my Biological and got sidetracked in a little town called New Iberia. She was almost seventeen and he was thirty or something like that. He wasn’t married, but he was a father many times over, so Olive stressed that I should be careful when I meet girls from Louisiana, Mississippi, or east Texas. (When she said that, I pictured him Johnny Appleseeding all over the region.) Long story short—he took off and left her broke and pregnant. But you know Olive wasn’t going to go out like that. She stayed in New Iberia until she was ready to pop, then she went off in search of her man. She went all over town, leading with her stuck-out stomach until sympathetic old ladies gave her whatever little information they had. Finally, someone at the butcher’s told her that somebody said he was in Eloe, working at the paper mill. (Mama said she should have known it was faulty information since it involved the word work.) When she got to Eloe, Walter was long gone—but she hit upon the three things she says a woman needs: Jesus, a job, and a husband.

And as far as Olive was concerned, that was all the story that I needed to have. For me, that was all the story I required. I had Big Roy, and everybody in Eloe knows me as Little Roy. Why would I feel compelled to chase down some rolling stone?

Well, sitting there, it was like that stone rolled right upside my head. When library time was over, I went back to my cell. Where else I was going to go? Not like I could go sit under a bridge and think. When I got there, he was using the commode. Life ain’t right, Georgia. I find out the man is my Biological and he’s standing there with his dick in his hand. (Pardon my French, but this is a story that must be told in full.)

He finished his business, turned to look at me, and read me like a newspaper. He said, “What? You found out?” I told him about the face sheet, and he said, “Guilty as charged,” and even smiled a little bit like he had been waiting all his life for this conversation.

I wasn’t even sure what it was that he was “guilty as charged” about. Was it that he was guilty of being my father or guilty of not telling me? He was over there grinning like all of this was good news, but I felt like a sucker.

He asked for a chance to tell his side of the story, and that’s what he did. You have no privacy in prison, and let me tell you, these dudes in here gossip like bitches. Walter was talking loud, like he was saying his Easter speech. His version was not all that much different from my mother’s. They met on the run—Olive from her father and Walter from a woman (or the woman’s husband, to be precise).The scene is the colored section of a Greyhound bus. Fifteen hours is a long time to be elbow-to-elbow, and by the time they passed into Louisiana, my mama was gone, head over heels over head. Walter sweet-talked her into staying with him for a while in New Iberia. (At this point he said, “I was a pretty nigger in my day.” He actually said that.) Olive and Walter literally shacked up. In a shack. Running water was the only amenity. Anyway, it was a matter of a couple of months before she got pregnant. Like any pregnant girl, she wanted to get married, and like any trifling motherfucker, he ran off and left her. When he was telling me this, he switched into Ghetto Yoda mode: “When a woman tells you she is having your baby, your first mind is to get the hell out. It’s like if the house is on fire. You don’t think to escape, you just do. It’s human nature because you know she is asking you for your whole life. And a man don’t have but one life.”