My Father’s Legacy
by Greta McGee
I carry the weight of being someone’s only home, the North Star they use as guidance crossing borders. Baby girl, my father says to me unsolicitedly, everything I do is to protect, support, and defend you. You are my purpose. No one tells you how to be someone’s purpose.
My father is and has been a son, a parent, an adviser, a traveler, a nomad, a man, a Black man—unwelcome in its own right—, but never an immigrant. Until now. You may not, however, identify him as such. He rejects such a dirty word. Africans, he’ll say, I don’t like nothing ‘bout they asses. Yet he has, once again, found himself in a country that regards his “kind”—the kind whose skin is that of bittersweet chocolate—with a language for others, for outsiders. I, his only daughter, desire not to associate this realization with feelings of sorrow or pity, yet struggle to find a word that encapsulates both without injuring a Black man’s pride.
. . .
Presently, my father rents an off-the-books room from Alberto—an old Italian man who runs the bar on the ground floor of the building my father resides in. The room is a part of a suite made up of three small studios and a communal bathroom. My father has no kitchen and no centralized heat. Instead, he uses a small electric plug-in heater he’s stationed in the middle of the room for warmth and perches his perishables in a grocery bag on his windowsill, the outside chill acting as his refrigerator. Every few days, he travels by bus and then foot to a large grocery store that sells its produce at discounted prices. A pre-diabetic, he’s restricted himself to a specific diet of well-crafted salads packed with vegetables, legumes, canned sardines, canned tuna, multi-grain buckwheat cookies, and oatmeal. The moment he comes back to his room he preps his oatmeal in a mason jar that will sit overnight soaking in concentrated apple juice, freeze-dried raspberries, and various unsalted nuts. With limited storage space, he has no needs for excess kitchenware. He keeps a handful of utensils—two forks, two spoons, two knives—, three variously sized Tupperwares to craft his large salads in, a mason jar for his overnight oats, a two-pack of dishwashing sponges, and a small bottle of dish soap. The room easily accumulates spiders and cobwebs. My father sweeps the floors and walls with a broom with insect repellent sprayed on its bristles to keep the crawling creatures at bay. As he sweeps, he recounts the days he would assist in his grandfather’s barbershop in Tuscaloosa, Alabama sweeping up discarded hair with quick, intentional strokes.
From my father, I learn the art of getting by, of survival. How to stay under the radar. How to scavenge. How to exist in a temporary space. These are the skills I’ve come to associate with him. Even in his work, my father will transform ordinary objects from their traditional usage into something the body can interact with in a new manner. I still remain uncertain on how exactly one learns transformation in this a way. I wonder what quiet feels like in these transitory spaces.
When I come to stay with him for the first time in years, in his excitement of my arrival, my father decides I need hangers. You gotta have hangers, he insists. You know what we’ll do, them nice ass stores ‘round here, at the end of the night, they toss out all their extra hangers. Imma go pick some out for you. The next night he returns with a plastic clear trash bag full of discarded hangers and places them before me to receive, like a pet bringing home a prized dead animal for their owner. I do not have the heart to tell him I find it futile to settle into a place I know is temporary. Instead, I hang the empty hangers in the closet and leave them unused.
. . .
My father was raised in small towns. Communities. Even as an illegal alien in a provincial, predominately white town, how he has managed to settle into the small-town etiquette is so foreign to me. He walks around town waving and shouting hellos to bar owners and clothing store employees. People he is only acquainted with stop him in the street to catch-up and shake his hand. I can’t help but wonder, if slight alterations were made to my upbringing, might I possess my father’s same charm?
My father was born into a white vs. non-white world. A world built on white supremacy, in which he, a Black man, remains undeceived by the tricks and trades of a system rigged against him. My father was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1957. He is the second of four children. I’d once been told that there were almost five, but it didn’t make it past delivery. At two-and-a-half years old, my father moves to Erie, Pennsylvania. He goes to a Catholic school a two-mile walk from his house. Every other school closer to home had rejected the young Black children my father and his siblings once were. His grandmother lived through slavery. His grandfather was a Pullman Porter—one of the highest honors a Black man could hold at one point in history. His father, a chef in the United States Navy. His mother, a civil rights activist. Born forty-three years later, I will never understand Blackness the way my father does. Having citizenship in two countries, I may never understand illegality in the context my father is currently experiencing it.
Everything in my father’s world falls back to white supremacy. Recognize the many layers of illusion that prevent a clear view of reality, he says to me with a grave seriousness. The white man created words to confuse. The same white man that killed, raped, enslaved your ancestors, and still doing it. Ask yourself: If non-whites acted the way dogs do, you think white supremacy would be happy? Through his father’s hands, during a drunken outburst, white supremacy split apart the tissue in my father’s calf with an ashtray so deeply he saw the white of his bone at the age of eleven. His father’s alcoholism was that of all Black men who’d found freedom on an army base, away from the racial tensions of the South. My father can’t even remember his father ever saying I love you to him as a child. A truth he’s attempted to assuage by stating it was simply a part of a Black man’s limitation back then—the dividing line between fatherhood and intimacy. Yet another double-edged sword of white supremacy. It’s just like Neely Fuller said, ‘in the world of white supremacy, we exist in a prison yard.’ In life you’re either predator or prey, girl. Remember that.
By twenty-one, my father learned a crucial truth of the system: you could work within it but you were never above it. Operating in the confines of what we have, he calls it. These white people see them little Black babies and start talkin’ bout how cute they are. But what you think happens when them niggas grow up? They become threats, that’s what. Just look at George Floyd! They stood on that nigga’s neck like he was nothing, like he was an animal, my father shouts frustratedly over green tea and a limonata. On my eighteenth birthday, my father gifts me A Compulsory Counter-Racist Codified Word Guide by Neely Fuller.
. . .
My father has always had a plan. A role. A purpose. I’ve never met someone so sure of themselves. My father is always on the lookout for the next person to contribute to his main objective, constantly assessing who has the upper-hand at any given time; who can contribute what when. The man has decrypted the concept of relationships, turned them over, ripped them open and analyzed the insides. A relationship: a cost-exchange equation made up of two people with separate basic needs. In a successful relationship, each individual addresses the other’s need. Yet, the moment one individual fails to address another’s need, everything falls apart. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had relationships universally broken down for my comprehension. The detrimental misconceptions. The real goal. How to determine ones wants and needs, and address them accordingly. How to assess if a relationship is a ‘good’ one. All recited to me for my young mind to soak up and store. To my father, I am an asset and a disciple. I have a hard time imagining my father experiencing any of the allure of new relationships—that bubbling optimism when one feels they may be on the precipice of making a true connection.
I’ve witnessed my father lose everyone over time. In his own manufactured story, my father is incapable of being his own antagonist. Villains enter his orbit and disrupt his livelihood. He bears no responsibility to his own downfall. The clients that screwed him over; the women that betrayed him; the family that abandoned him.
I imagine that within my father is a balloon filled with a magical anger and an undetectable hole, and every so often, when the past is drawn out to the forefront, wisps of anger hiss out. Anger towards the places, people, and things that have displaced him. Anger at all that has led him to where he is (both literally and figuratively) not meant to be. I used to want to diffuse him of this anger. I am working on not falling victim to false hope. Sometimes, however, I worry he’s lonely. I worry, as we inch toward the end of his lifespan, that I will be the only one left he can rely on, not out of love, but guilt.
. . .
My father harbors the belief that all of a person’s weaknesses can be revealed by observing their body—the way it moves, the way it makes up for the strength it lacks. All he has to do is observe a person long enough and he’ll name every weakness present. I can’t help but wonder what hidden weaknesses my body has revealed to him without my consent.
To the outside world my father presents himself as a perfervid mighty bull, but I see him as he truly is. I witness his weakness. I witness the silent physical pain he is in. I have been doing so since girlhood. Presently, I do this observing in the inner sanctum of his rented room we currently inhabit together. I pass my father on the way to the communal bathroom as he comes from a shower and see the purple cystic pimples that sparsely decorate his back. We get dressed for the day on opposite sides of the room. I bear witness as my father sits down and squeezes his legs into biker compression shorts, followed by calf compressions, then long compression socks, and finally soft knee pads. First, he compresses the leg where he had full reconstructive knee surgery after being injured playing football in college. Then, the leg with the sickle-shaped scar curving his knee from the ashtray that tore into his skin as a child.
In the evening, my father commences his exuviating routine. Setting himself down onto his chair with an exaggerated weary grunt, he proceeds to pull off each compressive apparel one-by-one. First the knee pads, then calf compressions, the biker shorts, and lastly the socks. The pressure on his legs all day leaves his skin temporarily branded with the hexagonal patterns of the material and pruned from the slight restriction of blood flow. There reaches a point in the night in which the entire town turns in. It is at this point my father will change into a night dress resembling Scrooge’s gown in A Christmas Carol. Unveiled and bare, it is only in this room that one can see the bow-legged nature of his legs—the way his knees kiss each other—and all the various scars and age spots across each of his limbs.
From my father, I learn what it is to be masculine. The first menswear I don on my body come from my father’s closet, handed down by his calloused hands—smooth as obsidian rock and soft as a bonsai tree petal. His Giorgio Armani cologne is the first I spray onto my neck. In this form, I make believe myself transformed into something as androgynous as a Ken doll. At the age of fifteen, my father is the first person to buy me men’s boxers. He waits outside the Supreme pop-up store in Soho, in a line that goes around the corner onto Spring Street, for hours. Later that night, he comes and hands me three pairs of brand-new boxers—bright white soft cotton with the red and white elastic band. Without knowing it, my father is the first person to affirm my desire to be genderless, a fluid entity.
. . .
My father holds the past close to his chest. He draws it out in conversation and urges me to remember, to reminisce. Aye, aye Greta, you remember when…You remember that…Where were we when…Remember going to…. Remnants of the past can be found slipping out of Manila folders and worn FedEx bubble packages or tucked away in the books he carries with him as he moves from place to place. Four by six snapshots of him and I from back when. My oversized, shaky writing in letters I gave him in youth. My elementary school essay on “my hero.”
Remembering the first day he held his baby girl and promised himself she would always be his first priority.
For the first time, I watch my father succumb to sleep. The same man who, throughout my childhood, went days without sleep, now falls victim to his own corporeality. The build-up of sleepless nights seems to have exposed some susceptibility to a more fragile state of being. He lulls himself to sleep remembering. Remembering a time his daughter told him everything. I listen to the even, throaty breaths coming from the other side of the room. It is one of the few times I can breathe in the confines of this space we share.
One morning, awakening from a night spent in memoriam, my father tells me he had a nightmare that he got a phone call from the police saying that something terrible had happened to me. He woke up calling out for me, asking what time it was. It makes my heart ache thinking about how much he loves me. It must be suffocating him. It suffocates me.
. . .
While we live together in one room, I reveal the ache left by the last girl to break my heart to my father over dinner at the Mediterranean restaurant up the street from his apartment building. I cry quietly over a finished plate of chicken shawarma and rice. He reassures me. He listens. For two hours, my father is a dad again. He hugs me and says, I love you so much baby girl, you know? I know, I tell him.
At the time, my father is in a long-distance relationship of three years with an old college flame reignited. They speak of their relationship as if it were something foretold. In their youth, my father had been shot down and stood up by this woman who, decades later, he would encounter serendipitously walking the streets of his old college town with his best friend from ‘back in the day’. His girlfriend tells him cheekily, the universe saved the best for last, to which he’ll roll his eyes pretending not to enjoy such a sentiment. He immediately counters, No, no, no. You just finally realized what was good for you.
Around the other women in his orbit, my father keeps his affection to himself. I watch him as he continues to reap the downfalls of assuming an emotionally-defensive version of himself. Yet, in my presence he doles it out in large, indigestible portions expecting me to return the favor. Only to discover that I am my father’s daughter—distributing only momentary glimpses of affection and only with people not desperate enough to beg for it.
My father’s girlfriend confesses to me in private, However jaded, you may be the only one to keep him in line. I fear myself the only real kryptonite to my father’s bullish demeanor. A knowledge that has, overtime, taught me that being someone’s true weakness is nothing to be proud of. I fantasize having the guts to tell him that I am not his absolution, his get-out-of-jail-free card.
My father is worried I am going to leave him. I dwell over how to tell him I am.
. . .
I am seated on my father’s bed (a deconstructed bunkbed with the top used as storage space for his many pairs of shoes) when he says to me, Babygirl, I’m not blind. I know you’ve suffered. He is seated at his desk that has been pushed up against the end of the bed. I hold a breath in and blink in rapid bursts to avoid spilling any involuntary tears; to resist confirming what he already knows: that there are not many things I can keep hidden from him.
To my father I am a past, a present, and a potential future. It assails me with guilt that I am not daddy’s little girl anymore. My father is no longer bolstered atop a pedestal for my eyes only. It seems that he is the only one that feels the true heartbreak of this downfall. I may never find another person to encourage me the way my father does. Is it supposed to be that way? He wants so much from me. It hurts to think about. Is it supposed to? It hurts to know that someday my father will be gone and I will likely never experience such encouragement again. It hurts to know that someday my father will be gone. Who will stand immovably in my corner then? Who will see my suffering without needing to be pointed in the right direction? One rainy afternoon, both of us inside, my father reminds me why I exist. We made you to be a legacy to us, he tells me. Is it supposed to be this way?
. . .
I fear my father has sculpted me throughout my impressionable years mistaking it as “facilitating my growth.” In my youth he’d say to me, You hurt, I hurt. You bleed, I bleed. When I start self-harming at sixteen, I used to wonder if somewhere thousands of miles away my father was bleeding too. How unsettling is it to think that the foundation of your own molding had been set before you ever had a say in it.
You need people, my father presses. For someone who assesses their relationships meticulously through a cost-exchange analysis, my father reminds me of this relentlessly. My father wants me to need him the way I used to. Back when it was considered dangerous for me to use the stove alone and I needed to be accompanied to and from school. Back when life was like clothing I had to wait to grow into. Back when I was weak.
Sat facing me, the midday late spring warm breeze wafting into the room, my father shouts, You can’t keep acting like you don’t need nobody! A tear slowly trails down my cheek. Another. I cry for the wrong reasons. I cry because he’s right. I want to not need others. I want to not need the way he does. It pains me to admit that my father and I are alike in this way. We need. We need beyond the capacity of the people in our lives. I watch as people leave my father to break free from the pressure of his needs. I sit with him in this small, under-the-table rented space as he unloads his anger around being left, being hurt. It weighs down the air in the room, so much so one can only breath half-heartedly. I feel the way my father needs me and I can’t tolerate it, so I leave him. I leave the man, who in my departure angrily shouts, I am the one who twelve out of twelve times would rush into a burning building to pull you out of harm’s way and any other perilous situation, and I’d do these acts without hesitation. I leave anyway. I abandon my father like all the others before me as he becomes someone too burdensome to bear.
What will happen when, I, my father’s legacy, is all that is left of this man? Will all my anger transmute into remorse? Will I learn how to take a deep breath? Or will the combination of perfunctory lungs and a broken heart cause me to lose my breath all together? Will I be doomed to a life constantly gasping for absolution?
Someone once told my father he was a ‘must have’ for this world. I contemplate my father dying in this small town in Italy. I try to think of all the people who might notify me. The list is short. I wonder how much it costs to fly a body overseas.
Nowadays, as I go through life in his absence, I wonder if this is how the world will feel when he’s no longer in it.
. . .
My father believes he knows me better than I could ever know myself. He makes a point of not letting me forget it. He’ll go, You forget, I got years on you girlie. You can’t fool me. You think you slick, huh? Perhaps he is not the first parent to think such a thing. I seem to lack an understanding only he can give me. If you ask him, I probably lack quite a few things only he can give me.
My father says to me, You don’t know what you want, who you are. You confused. I mean, hey, experiment all you want. I ain’t got no problem with that. But that’s what it is. You’ll see. You say you always gonna be gay? Ha! We are hitchhiking from the town basketball arena to the commercial mall when he launches into this monologue. The bus routes had been altered due to a religious holiday. It’s summer in Italy. Beads of sweat tickle the back of my neck as my father tells me biology is pre-determined. I will never not be a woman, because biology has made that decision for me. I fear that no matter what I may do to shed my womanliness, my father is right. I will never exude the masculinity my father does. No matter how many times I call women bitches with his same inflection. No matter how many shirts and sweaters of his I don on my body. Not even if I showered my female figure in his entire bottle of Armani cologne. I fear my father is always right, even when he is wrong.
I don’t believe my father deserved a daughter. Instead, he got me. He was simply not equipped to nurture a woman. Not the man who’d said to me in the midst of us lugging groceries from the discount supermarket to the bus stop half a mile away in the June heat, Back in my day, I would be that nigga running up on my prey. In my world, y’all just bitches, you ain’t shit. There’s dudes and there’s hoes. Two genders. And women, women don’t hunt. That ain’t in they nature. What kind of woman can come from a man like this? And if not woman, what am I?
There lies, in some alternate parallel timeline, a version of myself. Younger. Still in college. Sat at a table in a locally-sourced coffeehouse listening to Gil Scott Heron’s Your Daddy Loves You, and tearing up thinking about how one day she wants it to be her father-daughter dance song at her wedding. I seem to have lost touch with this version. Time has swept her up and placed her at an insurmountable distance from my present self. One night, each of us in our respective twin beds, my father wonders aloud what happened to us. We use to talk about things, he laments to the cramped, unlit studio. I pretend I’m asleep so that he can mourn his daughter in a moment of silence that lasts until the next morning.
When I tell my father over the phone that I’m trans, falsely protected by the distance I’d put between us, he replies with a vexed sigh, not this bullshit again. You were born my daughter and you will die my daughter, you hear me? I hang up and try to cry, but the tears never come.
. . .
A year after I leave Italy, I meet my father’s girlfriend for lunch. She is in town for a few days with her son. We get a table in a rustic back area of a French bakery on Centre Street. Fake vines with synthetic blue and white flowers drape the walls. We catch up over a overpriced salad and an embellished tuna sandwich. She has since “left” my father, yet they still spend hours on the phone with one another. I am not irritated by her compliance. I understand how hard it is to leave my father.
I, too, often speak to my father’s ex-girlfriend on the phone. She has become somewhat of a maternal figure to me. We check in every few weeks. She celebrates my successes. She gives me relationship advice and listens to me lament. At lunch we talk about my father between bites. She tells me how he’s doing in my absence. She tells me he replays the day I left to her for hours on video call, sifting through it granule by granule. She’s kept the fact that she is in contact with me a secret from him. She tells me she wishes she could just tell him off when he begins to spin his series of events. I have become just another villain in his story. She tells me he’s lost a significant amount of weight. That he can barely afford to feed himself well. She pulls out her phone and shows me a selfie he’d sent her recently. His cheeks are hollowed out. It looks as if someone has taken a melon baller to his cheek meat. His eyes are barren staring at the camera. There is a price to my leaving. I look at this snapshot of my father and question which of us is paying that price. I realize that being left looks the same on us.
. . .
Like my father, I haven’t been able to forget the morning I left. There was a soft chill in the dawn of that July morning. My father wakes up at five a.m. wanting to reminisce together. The past is an anchor for us both, weighing down every step forward. Like my father, I can’t stop remembering. Unlike my father, I don’t want to keep remembering. I want quiet. I want peace. I want a new slate so desperately I cry about it alone in bedrooms and bathrooms. This upsets him. My refusal to indulge him is unfamiliar to us both. A spark of defiance flares in my chest. He pushes back. I stay my ground. He sucks his teeth and aims his classic retort in a stalemate, Forget you then. A nostalgic smile perks up on my face as he turns his back to me. My father doesn’t know it, yet he still has me remembering. Remembering a time when we were two best friends and he’d throw this retort my way and I’d giggle at his youthfulness.
I leave my father over a TV show. Nah, if you don’t want to talk, if you “tired,” then you don’t need to be doing nothing else but going your ass to sleep, he says. I tell him he’s absurd. I tell him that I’m an adult. You may be an “adult,” but I will always be your parent and you my child. I tell him that those days are over. I tell him I am no longer a child, no longer his “child.” I tell myself this. I tell myself I could walk out right now because I am not a child. I ask myself, what is really stopping me? I tell myself I can leave. So, I do. Oh? You wanna go? Fuck it, get the fuck out then, my dad shouts as he gathers all my clothes, shoes, and books tossing them carelessly into my large blue suitcase. He pulls open the door to our room. The old door knob clangs against the wall. In his light grey and white striped night dress, my father lifts my open suitcase and throws it out into the hall. Get the fuck out then you wanna go so bad.
I’ve imagined my father’s funeral on several occasions, but I’d never pictured the last time I’d see him. I knew it would come eventually, I just simply couldn’t fathom it.
The last time I see my father he is seated back at his desk angrily writing in his abnormally tiny, meticulously neat handwriting. My luggage is spread open in the hall. Some of my clothes have fallen out and are dispersed randomly across the floor. The door knob is cold in my hand. It is then I realize I’m doing it, I’m leaving him, and my father is transformed back into a hardened, stubborn yet so loving, smart, radically truthful Black man. He’s transformed back into my daddy. That is who I am leaving. My daddy. Goodbye, I say softly before closing the door.
It is six a.m. on the dot when I finish packing my suitcase in the hallway. I pay a cab two hundred euros to take me to Venice, where the nearest airport is. I can’t cry. I wonder when it’ll come. The pain, the grief, the realization of my actions. On the highway toward Venice, my cab driver asks me where I’m coming from. Oh, I’m running away from home, I tell him.
Fin
