Canadian Football League - The stone thrower: a daughters lessons, a fathers life

A Daughters Lessons, a Fathers Life

JAEL EALEY RICHARDSON

THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS
TORONTO

Copyright 2012 Jael Ealey Richardson

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systemswithout the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Richardson, Jael Ealey, 1980

The stone thrower : a daughters lessons, a fathers life / Jael Ealey Richardson.

Includes bibliographical references.

Issued also in electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77102-220-0

1. Ealey, Chuck. 2. Football playersCanadaBiography. 3. Canadian Football LeagueBiography. 4. Black CanadiansBiography. 5. Richardson, Jael Ealey, 1980 Family. 6. Fathers and daughtersCanadaBiography. 7. Black CanadiansRace identity. I. Title.

For reasons of privacy, the names of some individuals have been changed.

Editor: Janice Zawerbny

Cover design: Karen Satok

Cover image: Courtesy of author

Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,

a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,

390 Steelcase Road East,

Markham, Ontario L3R 1G2 Canada

www.thomasallen.ca

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of

The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last
year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario
Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada
through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

12 13 14 15 16 5 4 3 2 1

Text printed on a 100% PCW recycled stock

Priinted and bound in Canada.

For my father

Being a Negro in America is not a comfortable existence. It means being a part of the company of the bruised, the battered, the scarred, and the defeated. Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan... It means being harried by day and haunted by night by a nagging sense of nobodiness and constantly fighting to be saved from the poison of bitterness. It means the ache and anguish of living in so many situations where hopes unborn have died.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

MAYA ANGELOU

F OR MOST of my life I have felt watery like an ocean, my sense of self disoriented and bottomless, my blackness lost and out of place in a country known for cold winters, covered in whiteness. And I dont know how I got here, to this place of uncertainty. I just know it has something to do with my father.

Every time people ask me, where are you from, I give the same answer: I was born here. Im Canadian. My parents are American.

But where are they really from? they ask me.

I was never sure how to answer that, up until recently. I wasnt sure how to explain my history. I knew about slavery and the Underground Railroad. I knew that Harriet Tubman was the Moses of our people, that she brought thousands of slaves to safety on a metaphorical railroad where the final stop was the Promised Land of Canada. I knew about Martin Luther King Jr. and his faith-dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. What was missing, however, was a clear understanding of my family historythe factors that influenced the life I know in Canada, starting with my fathers arrival here in the seventies.

Everything I knew about my fathers story was made up of what I had read in old newspaper articles in my parents basement, and what I had heard about him on television. It was based on assumptions I made from my fathers interviews about his time in professional football. My father and I had never spoken about what went on behind the well-known events of his story. He didnt like to talk about it. When asked direct questions, he was unapologetically elusive.

I didnt know where my grandmother was born or how she got to Portsmouththe town where my father was raised. I didnt know anything about his life in the projects. I had never been to his hometown for a visit.

I wanted to know what happened to my grandfather. I wanted to know about my fathers friends, his struggles as an adolescent. I wanted to know about the boy I had never met in the picture on my grandmothers side table. I wanted to understand why my father came to Canada, and why he chose to stay here. I wanted to understand why I have never felt black enough.

In America, where my mother and father were both born, blackness is measured in bloodthe tiniest drop determining your connection to a history of disadvantages. In Canada, blackness is measured, not in blood, but in appearances and associations. People often say to me: Youre not really black; because my mother looks white; because I have curly hair and fair skin; because Im not from a country directly connected to the Caribbean or Africa; because I am friends with too many white people. In the summer of 2008, when I found out I was expecting my first child, I needed answers and resolution.

When an invitation arrived that same summer, inviting my father to his high school reunion during the towns homecoming weekend, I finally got my opportunity. My father asked me if I wanted to go down to Portsmouth with him. I tried to be like him when I respondedcalm and collected. Even though inside I was flooded with excitement.

In Portsmouth, my father would open up for the first time about his childhood, and as he did, I would replace assumptions I had made about him as a child with observations formed from deeper, richer insights. I would learn things I never knew about my family through the stories of people who knew my father before I did.

In the months that followed the trip to Portsmouth, I would also discover things about American history and the civil rights movement that would deepen my understanding of black history. I would begin to resolve my doubts about whether or not I was black enough and what it meant to be Canadianreflections that would influence my new life as a mother.

We bumped over a set of train tracks in Portsmouth, Ohio, in August 2008, when the air was sticky-thick like molasses. My mother was quiet; my brother and his son peered out the window in silence as my father drove across the tracks and into his old neighbourhoodhis eyes focused on the road ahead of him. But I looked up and watched those train tracks disappear in the rear-view mirror for as long as they let me. I imagined the distant rumble and a rush of wind from a story I heard my father tell reporters when I was younger.