Brandi Collins-Dexter - Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future

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For Dad

Reflecting on the Will to Keep Going, Even When Shit Gets Hard

I still havent gotten my drivers license. Ive tried. Ive even gotten pretty close once. Then, I took the entire bumper off of my husbands Pontiac Sunfire. But Im an excellent passenger, and I love a good road trip. Directions? I got you. Music and entertainment? I got you. Drink uncapped; snack unpacked and placed directly in your hand? I got you.

I have so many memories of being in the car with my dad. We would take all sorts of road trips. He hated planes, which was funny since my mom was a flight attendant. But he loved to travel, and he always preferred a car. My mom said that as soon as he could, he put me in the back of his car, and we drove.

He would play one of the mixtapes we used to make together for our fantasy radio station, W-JAMES-AM. There was no W-BRANDI-AM, which meant there was no Madonna, and most of the music was at least a decade old. But it was great music. We would sing along to the eclectic mix of old songs. My mom said I could sing before I could talk. Just strap me into the back of a car, and I would start making up gibberish in tune with whatever was playing on the radio.

Our road trip playlist included America, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Three Dog Nightthe perfect companions for highway driving. A lot of those songs we played were about the freedoms of being out on the open road, heading to some named or unnamed destination.

My favorite road trip was one we took from Chicago to Syracuse to see my grandmother. We were with my uncle Williamor Uncle GI Joe, as we used to call him. He had been in the military as part of the medical staff that served in Vietnam. So he wasnt a GI, but the nickname stuck. He always traveled around with all of his things, moving around like a soldier with no safe place to call home. My family attributed his quirks to the things he saw and experienced over there. I wouldnt know. He came back before I was born, so I dont have a pre-Nam frame of reference. But he has a fun sense of humor. Or maybe a dark sense of humor would be more apropos.

For a while, Uncle GI Joe even drove a camouflage car. But by the time we took our road trip in the summer of 1992, he had upgraded to a big, clunky white car. In my head, it was an 80s-era Oldsmobile Cutlass. It looked like that anyways, so now its canon.

We took off on I-90, heading east. He had a cassette player in the car. But he only had tapes of the Soul Stirrers, the gospel group Sam Cooke performed with before he went solo. I sat in the car with my feet up, windows down, listening to the dulcet melodies.

My dad and uncle spent the trip harmonizing to their favorite songs and talking about old memories. Like one of the many times my uncle got married. He would talk about what a crazy bitch wife number X was. As we glided, or clunked, down the concrete highways and asphalt roads, I sat stretched out in the back with a book. I dont remember which one, but likely it was something from the Sweet Valley High series. Or The Vampire Diaries.

We kept the windows down to let the air circulate freely. Im not sure Uncles car had an air conditioner anyways. Every so often, the old white car would start smoking when it overheated, so we would pull over at a rest stop, and he would fill up a gallon jug he kept in the back with water. Then hed pour the water into the radiator. While we waited for the car to cool down, I looked through the key chains or various tchotchkes in the shop. If I saw one I liked, Dad would buy it. Then wed get back in the car and continue heading east. In hindsight, its a good thing we didnt blow up. Thank God for roadside rest stops. And water.

We made a bunch of pit stops on the way to Syracuse. First was Niagara Falls, because I had never been. We stayed overnight at a motel that couldnt have been more than $25 a night, and we ate at the greasy hole-in-the-wall diner next door. You know the kind of place, where the waitresses are in their fifties and call everyone hon, and dont bother to write down your order because they have it memorized. You cant have a good road trip unless you stay at a sketchy motel, get called hon by a waitress, and end up with a key chain or cheesy piece of memorabilia. These are the rules; I didnt make them up. I still make my husband abide by them to this day.

That was the year A League of Their Own came out. The movie is a fictionalized account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. It was, and still is, one of my favorite movies. I saw it three times in the movie theater, and I dragged my dad with me at least one of those times. The movie ends in Cooperstown, New York, at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. I wanted to see it in person, so I begged my dad to add a stop on the way. It wasnt really along the way. It added a few hours and an overnight motel stay, but he and Uncle GI Joe were game. When we got to Cooperstown, it was like walking into heaven. Until I saw the womens baseball exhibit. It. Sucked. There was, like, one original baseball uniform and a bunch of pictures.

My dad wanted to make a short stop at the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, so we stopped there, too. A lot of our road trip stops tended to be sports related.

Sports are his life, and so, by proxy, our life, too.

To fight for the right, without question or pause. To be willing to march into hell, for a heavenly cause.

ROY HAMILTON, THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM (THE QUEST)

In April 2020, my dad was supposed to be inducted into the New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame. We were all excited to support and cheer him on. In 1970, as a standout shooting guard and team captain, he led the New Mexico State University mens basketball team to its first andas of this writingonly NCAA Final Four appearance. By 2020, he had already been inducted into the US Bank/New Mexico State Athletics Hall of Fame, the Corcoran High School Alumni Hall of Fame (Syracuse), and the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame as a player. And as a coach, he had been inducted into the University of Illinois Chicago Athletics Hall of Fame.

So one would think that by this point, he would have been jaded about this stuff. But ever since receiving the invitation, he had been excited. Hed had his speech written and music planned out months in advance, and we were excited to be together as a family. Even my husband Davids parents were driving in from California. As the realities of COVID-19 began to set in, it was looking less and less likely he would be able to get to the Hall of Fame ceremony. But up until the last minute, he kept his plane ticket, hoping the United States would get a handle on the pandemic. Finally, we got word in Marchthere was no way the ceremony could go forward. Dont worry, were set for April 2021, the facilitators of the ceremony promised.

In early summer of 2020, my dad went in for what everyone had said was a standard procedure to address the early stages of prostate cancer. We were told when caught that early, the five-year survival rate for most men with local or regional prostate cancer is nearly 100 percent. COVID-19 was in full swing by this point, but we werent too worried about what was an in-and-out procedure. He didnt even stay overnight.