Jonetta Rose Barras - Whatever Happened to Daddys Little Girl?: The Impact of Fatherlessness on Black Women

Contents

for Umoja Shanu,
Afrika Midnight,
Jasmine Malika,
and my mother

Authors note

Sandra Jackson, Helen Minor, Jonathan, and Milton are all pseudonyms used by request. In most instances I intentionally withheld the names of my siblings, hoping to accord family members some measure of privacy. All other names, dates, and episodes that appear in this book are real and accurate, based on my research and interviews.

Acknowledgments

I am eternally grateful to: Washington City Paper and its editor, David Carr, for believing in me and allowing me to write the essay from which this book evolved; Meri Nana-Ama Danquah who, with patience and love, helped me craft the book proposal and later read the manuscript, offering words of encouragement when I doubted myself; my literary agent, Victoria Sanders, who eagerly and aggressively fought to move the proposal from idea to book and guided my entrance into the world of the published author. Thanks to Stephanie Tade who helped usher the project to its completion, keeping my anxiety attacks to a minimum. Landing at One World/Ballantine with such an incredibly talented publisher/editor as Cheryl Woodruff was a dream come true.

Thanks also to the psychologists and other experts whose knowledge helped me extend and properly frame my thesis regarding the impact of fatherlessness, particularly Audrey Chapman, Gayle Porter, Maxine Harris, Wade Horn, and David Blankenhorn.

Thanks go also to my friends around the country who have given me decades of support, but especially those who assisted with this project: George Miller, Roy McKay, Judith Scott, Olive Vassell, E. Ethelbert Miller, Jerome Meadows, Michael Rogers, Brooke Stephens, the folks at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, particularly the staff in the Sociology Division who assisted me in my research, Jonathan at La Tomate in Washington, D.C., who opened the restaurant to me and my ragtag band of fatherless women; Christine DeCuir and the good people at the New Orleans Tourism Center; the management of the Plaza Hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans; and my friends at Vertigo BooksTodd and Bridgetwho culled their shelves for related materials.

My heartfelt thank-you extends to my daughter Afrika, and to Ivory, Tonya, Meri, Misty, Judith, Helen,* Sandra,* Jerome, and Milton*; they opened their lives for my exploration. Without knowing exactly how I would handle their suffering or their souls, they displayed an enormous amount of courage and trust. I grew because of their immense generosity.

*Pseudonyms

Most important, Id like to thank Russell for being there.

Introduction

By the time I was eight years old, I had already lost three fathersBill, John, and Noel. Each one abandoned me. Each one wounded meemotionally and psychologically. At an age when I was supposed to be carefree, brimming with happiness and laughter, I frequently felt a deep sadness, an abiding loneliness. Nothing seemed powerful enough to permanently soothe the agony I felt. I had no well of wisdom from which I could draw to communicate any of this. Consequently, the personal narrative I wrote, through actions and thoughts, was laden with grief. What could I do to cope with the loss of these three men?

A girl abandoned by the first man in her life forever entertains powerful feelings of being unworthy or incapable of receiving any mans love. Even when she receives love from another, she is constantly and intensely fearful of losing it. This is the anxiety, the pain, of losing one father. I had had three fathers toss me aside; the cumulative effect was catastrophic.

It was a potent tragedy begun even before I knew my name, one from which I was unable to escape for years.

Despite the weight of this reality and its seemingly intractable nature, I tried to grapple with it, failing more often than succeeding. I didnt understand the reason for my anguish. Then in the late spring of 1988, I received a telephone call from New Orleans asking me if I would be willing to meet my biological father. After spending an afternoon with my father, I began, instinctively, to make a connection between the poor choices I had made and the years this man had spent outside my life. It would take nine years before I could fully understand or articulate what this first encounter with Daddy had unleashed inside my soul. Of course, I went on with my life. But my heart and head held tenaciously to one burning question: How had his absence affected my life?

Three years after meeting my biological father, I began to have difficulty with my own teenager, who appeared destined to replicate my experience; she was acting out in ways that defied her nature. She became a foreigner to me. I became xenophobic in response, fearing her future more than I feared her behavior.

I woke up one morning asking myself what had created the change in her, what caused the misdirection? Asking that question about her life made me reflect on my own; what had caused my own misdirection? What was causing it still? Was there any connection, I wondered, between the challenges my daughter was facing and those I faced?

Even then, I saw life as a series of concentric circles. I knew that none of us escapes our own history.

Still, no matter how feverishly I searched, I could not find the common center for my daughter and meuntil 1995. That year, things began to come together. Maybe I had grown enough to understand. Maybe I had prayed so many years, the universe had decided I deserved some answers. I cant say for sure what finally put the pieces in place for me. This wasnt an epiphany; it was an incremental awakening.

That year1995plans were afoot for a Million Man March. The Nation of Islam leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, aided by the Reverend Benjamin Chavis and others, decided to bring one million men to the nations capital. The organizers had asked women to stay away: The event that October was to be a mans thing, a day of atonement for their failure to be the leaders of their families and their communities. Some women, mostly feminists, were angered by what they perceived as an attack against them. They blasted the event as the prelude to a return to patriarchy. Hadnt black women also faced myriad forms of discrimination and sexism? Hadnt they stood shoulder to shoulder with black men against white supremacy? Why now should they be cut out?

I reasoned, however, that there are occasions when men must be alone together, to confront themselves and each other: to celebrate their successes, analyze their failures, chastise misbehavior, call for improvements, and ruminate on the question of what constitutes a well-integrated manhood. In an essay that appeared in the Washington City Paper, Aint Nothing But a He Thing, I endorsed the march.

During the writing of the essay and as excitement began to build surrounding the march, I began to reflect deeply on my relationships with my fathersBill, John, and Noelother men in my family, and the men I had married and divorced. The need to understand this tangled web of emotions was made urgent by my own daughters decline. I sensed her desperation, and I recognized the aura of unworthiness beneath her bad attitude.

Underscoring the march was a five-year national fatherhood movement, which aggressively advocated the involvement of men in the lives of their sons. Young boys and men were being handicapped by the absence of their fathers, movement leaders said. Farrakhan and Chavis echoed this sentiment.