Fathers on Saturday

 

saturday afternoon, after taking a nice hot shower

and getting into my long, black sundress with the pink flowers

and pinning my braids back before opening the back door

to let the kids outside.

my niece and son like each other for the most part;

i’ve observed my niece speaks for the both of them

and my son just tolerates it

since he’s not much of a talker,

and no doubt this can be troublesome

since she likes to voice her opinion first before giving any chance

to explain any reason;

and she likes to ask questions and give her philosophical point of view;

she’s like my sister when my sister was sixteen;

you wouldn’t have wanted to know my sister when she was sixteen—

or any of her friends.

at sixteen, they knew everything, and it reminds me all the time,

listening to my niece talk

and make my son cry.

she always knows how to turn what feels like an okay day

to just an aggravating damn day, in less than a second.

it was never this bad until today. today i was inside making fruit salad

for a cookout after letting them outside, and out of the summer heat

my son comes lagging into the kitchen

with his head down and arms pinned to his sides.

he does that whenever he doesn’t want anybody to see him crying,

but i know when he’s crying; he’s so quiet at times

i forget he’s even in the house, but he sniffles when he cries—

today—because there was nothing to talk about

and my niece hates silence, 

so she asked him where his father was

and asked how could he not know where his father was

and her father said boys without fathers were gonna grow up

and be bad fathers

and she heard kids without fathers were called bastards

because a bastard was a kid who didn’t have a father.

i can remember my sister telling me that a long time ago;

it made me feel bad too;

but i got over it—

because if i was a bastard, she wasn’t any less of one;

she might’ve known her alleged father,

but the same person had signed our certificates with nothing

but a thick squiggled line in the part labeled: Father.

but my son couldn’t make that argument

because my sister got married and then had a baby.

my niece’s father told her that’s how it happened

and she described the wedding, like she was there.

and her father said my son didn’t have a father and i wasn’t married

because i’d lied down with some clown

who isn’t being a father to his son.  this wasn’t the first time

i’d heard my sister’s husband talking bad about us,

needless to say how much i can’t stand him.

my patience for him just drained after he whined to my sister

about me not putting him in sports

and signed my son up to play league football,

nearly getting him killed on the field.

my son made the soccer team

and that kept my sister’s husband’s mouth shut

for a little a while.  until one day he found something wrong

with my son’s color and said there was no way

my son could have a black father with skin that light

and hair that straight; that’s probably why i was stuck on my own

with a child to raise cause i had messed around

with some white man, thinking he’d marry me.

i’d definitely messed with a white man

because my son’s last name sounded too white,

more than white, it sounded european.

and to not even give him my granddaddy’s last name—

the name that had granddaddy’s sweat and blood on it—

so i could give him some deadbeat white man’s name—

and what was his father?

what kind of name was that anyway,

was it italian or something?

that’s how i eventually had to talk to my son about his father

because my niece had heard her father say how much he swore

my son was half white, and those were the end of my son’s days

of wanting to be a famous black soccer player,

because she just had to tell him that was impossible

because he wasn’t even fully black,

because she heard her father say

auntie didn’t like black men.