An Excerpt from the Memoir
THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S DAUGHTER
My father was the first mountain I ever met–a dark towering pinnacle of jagged bluffs and menacing crags that loomed so high and foreboding he eclipsed my sun. I grew up in the shadow of his summit under thunderous clouds and moiling rages that punctuated almost every moment I ever spent in his presence.
He was a Black man, a casualty of the Jim Crow South, which left him with lifelong resentment stoked by countless indignities and acts of violence indelibly imprinted upon his psyche. His memories, culled and compartmentalized in a brain that functioned like a hard drive with infinite gigabytes, held him hostage throughout his life; unleashed by frequent alcoholic binges, discussions on race or religion, or the most innocuous and unwittingly spoken keywords.
Take the word rice for instance. When I think of rice, which I don’t often, I think about it as the first food I learned to cook on the stove top as a little girl. But to my father the word rice incited recollections of abuse and humiliation, although his fury never got in the way of his appetite for it. rice conjured up my father’s memories of his own father, who worked in a Louisiana rice mill during the Depression. A skillful farmer, my grandfather was also an itinerant worker who traveled between Texas and Louisiana to support his wife and ten children. One of his responsibilities at the mill required him and the other men to transport hundred-pound bags of rice across an open field of sun-bleached grass with a railroad track running through the middle of it. The workers, all Black men and boys, transported the sacks of rice on dilapidated dollies and hand trucks, but mostly on their backs. It was backbreaking work made easier by the absence of the train, but then there were days when a train would cut through the field, temporarily delaying the commerce of rice deliveries. As a boy my father sometimes accompanied my grandfather on these transports and it was there that the word rice came to mean something more than a breakfast food or dinner staple.
My father often told the story of a particular white train conductor who made sport of the men by stopping his elongated train on the tracks, blocking their delivery route for hours. The conductor was positively giddy as he watched the men bake under a blistering sun, their water supply running low. He taunted them, too.
“Y’all niggas gettin’ a lil’ thirsty? Come on ovah here and lemme piss on ya’.”
Once the conductor had satisfied his appetite for power and amusement, he continued on his way, easing the train down the tracks, impervious to the deep-seated hatred he’d fomented in no less than three generations of Black men. My father never forgot the face of that redneck conductor with his oily, dirty brown hair sticking out of a greasy, blue-striped conductor’s cap, a red bandana, limp with filth, tied around his bulging neck. He remembered the conductor’s countenance from his fat, red sweaty face, right down to his bulbous cauliflower nose blooming over thin lips which were the portal to an open mouth bearing brown teeth and vacant spaces where teeth should have been. That conductor became one of my father’s many childhood monsters, all of whom were white.
It wasn’t until I became an adult that I realized the profound clarity of my father’s recollections as the telling of this and many other stories never deviated in detail. They weren’t just stories, but a lifetime of traumas that turned his memories into a tinderbox, igniting a fuse to an explosive conflagration from which he never recovered, suffering each recollection as if it had happened yesterday, and not in decades long past. And we, his family, would become the collateral damage of his holocaust.
Much like the word rice, cat was another word that could send my father into an angry diatribe teetering on the edge of madness. For him cat conjured up images of Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line with his entrée into Major League Baseball in 1947. Like most Black folks, my father was with Jackie in spirit, vicariously living each cracking homerun, stupefying grand slam, and his Cheetah-like speed when he stole impossible bases amid hostile throngs screaming racist slurs. Enraged, my father also shared the indignities the “Colored Comet” endured, like when black cats were let loose onto the field, delaying the game until the feral felines could be captured and removed. Hence, the word cat became as incendiary as the R word; so much so, that when my father’s first grandson came home with a stray kitten, the entire family held our collective breaths, shocked when the boy was allowed to keep the cuddly feline, aptly named Midnight.
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My father was a big, tall man with fists the size of baseball mitts. As he grew older his thinning hair no longer concealed a huge scar at the crown of his head. The scar was about the size of a silver dollar and blistered with dark keloids. He’d gotten the injury as a boy of eleven- or twelve-years-old when he was thrown from a horse he’d been forbidden to ride. From the looks of it the injury appeared as if it might have killed him, but unfortunately it didn’t. He grew up and went on to join the Army during World War II, married my mother, moved to San Francisco, opened his first photography studio, and started a family.
I’ve often wondered if the horse-riding accident resulted in undiagnosed brain trauma that possibly altered my father’s personality and temperament, putting him on the pathway to his narcissism and brutality; but family stories, including those from my grandfather, reveal that my father was just born that way, a brooding boy filled with infinite contempt, which made him an incorrigible whom my grandfather felt duty-bound to bring into submission. The methods my grandfather employed as a means of disciplining my father were shockingly medieval and far removed from the kind, gentle old man I knew as Daddy Steve.
There is a well-known story, another of which my father often told, that occurred when he was around fifteen years old. While I do not remember the infraction my father committed, he recounted that my grandfather made him strip naked and hung him by his wrists with ropes from a beam on the ceiling of their front porch in full view of all of the neighbors. My grandfather then proceeded to administer an overseer’s beating, whipping him with a leather strap as the audience gathered, my father screaming with every lash. While there are no reliable timelines as to how long this torture lasted, all descriptions I’ve ever heard indicate that it was intermittent. My grandfather would whip my father for a while, pull up a chair and talk to him about the error of his ways, looking up at his son who hung naked, sobbing and embarrassed all the more because he had urinated on himself, and resume the beating. I’ll never know whether or not my father learned any lessons from this corporal punishment and others like it, but I do know that his shame, commingled with his increasing malevolence for the people and times in which he grew up were significant to his evolution as the psychotic maniac who stalked and nearly killed me, while simultaneously destroying all the potential and promise of our black middle-class family.
Ironically, whenever my father came to the end of this shocking tale, he always finished with the same coda, “My daddy made a man outta me,” like he was actually proud of his draconian ushering into manhood.
How is it that my grandfather didn’t become one of his childhood monsters, too? As much as I loved my grandfather, it was hard not to see him as one of mine.
I imagine that somewhere in the back of his mind, my father rationalized that similar treatment of his own children would mold us into women and men who would ultimately thank him for his stellar parenting style. And so, he commenced in similar fashion, with violence and degradation, resulting in one daughter becoming shamefully promiscuous, another daughter descended into manic depression and suicidal ideations for decades, and his only son dead before his time, drowned in San Francisco Bay at the age of seventeen along with his best friend.
Over the years, through intense therapy, spiritual strengthening, and the reclamation of my dreams, I have transcended the life I was born into. I understand that my father’s life was not the story of a dream deferred, but the story of a dream, while realized, went horribly wrong along the way and became a nightmare; resulting in the permanent dismembering of our immediate family unit.
My story documents my metaphorical escape from a house on fire; and as I promised my father many years ago, I would write about him one day and tell his story and mine. Everything. Leaving no stone unturned.
This memoir is the fulfillment of that promise and I am duty-bound to write it because in my story, I survived, I thrived, and most importantly, I lived to tell.
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Image: Copilot/Adobe AI remixed