Dear Pops,
Now that’s a nickname I bestowed upon you ripe with memories. I remember asking myself what your contact name would be in my phone. I remember creating your contact entry. I remember storing your cell phone number in mines. Finally! After twenty plus years, I had this series of digits I could dial at any moment putting me in direct contact with you. Before all of this, no phone number existed. Our contact and correspondence were infrequent even when I was still very young; however, they virtually stopped as I aged. The memories of you holding me as an infant practically faded away without a trace.
I lived. I learned. I went from infancy to adulthood with no tangible memories of my father, a third of my clan, and one half of who I am. It’s truly amazing how so much of you lives inside me despite us never sharing time and space together. Guess that’s the true wonder of genetics. But I knew once I had your number, new memories could be formed and stored away in the most sacred space of my mind. It’s the area where we are led to ask the very question which often gives our lives meaning - “Who am I?” But maybe while we were here, I should have been asking, “Who are you?”
When I saved your phone number, I chose the name “Pops.” I did so because I believed that was the most appropriate name for you based on our relationship. “Dad” would have misrepresented the truth. You simply had not earned the title and what comes with it. It’s an odd thing, how keenly aware you become of the words you use for your parents when you grow up without one. In hindsight, you weren’t deserving of the nickname “Pops” either. Still, thanks to my mother, I did not find you loathsome enough to give you a less complimentary name like “Deadbeat,” “Disappointment,” or worse, “Lee.” I could have chosen your first name, often a telltale sign a child is justifiably scorned. Lee was the name you built your trailblazing career upon. The name that beamed brightly off theater marquees on both coasts and across the pond. The name of a visionary artistic director whose dream was producing and directing stories of the Black experience and beyond for the stage. You were Lee to your colleagues and peers, and you were Kenny to family and close friends. But “Pops,” you could only be my Pops. Until. Until I found out you weren’t.
You were “Pops” to me for a little over 11 years. Truth be told, I seldom called you “Pops” in your presence. The name was more of a projection - a simple, single-word summation of what I hoped you would become to me and my wife - “Pops.” To your grandkids - “Grandpops.” I imagine it meant a lot to you to hear me say the name. I would usually do so on holidays because, for some time, it was the only gift I could bring myself to offer you. I was supposed to be your gift, but instead, you left me to be unwrapped halfway by the industrious hands of my mother. There’s another half of me that is just now being peeled apart. I’m learning more about me in your death than I did during your life. The confusion is excruciating. The pain from abandonment is one you learn to live with. It was always going to remain a scar, an indication of a healed wound. All wounds heal, and so will I. It’s just a shame we won’t be healed together.
You were a man of mystery and surprises. Outside of the Polaroids stored in some antique furniture back home, your face escaped me for a painstaking number of years. You ever sit and think about my face at 10, 14, 18 years old? They said you had grey hair in your 20s. I got my first strand at 19, maybe 20. Genetics is a trip ain’t it? You popped up via handwritten letters periodically. Your handwriting was/still is atrocious. Thank God for computers now. The last message I read though, was typed. You had typed the words “Philadelphia,” “Temple,” and “professor.” It was early summer, 2008, a summer I would be spending on Temple’s campus. SURPRISE!
As much as I wanted to spend time with you, the timing was not right for me when I first moved out there. But God answers most prayers on His time, not ours. Nevermind what time was missed between us. I used to wonder if we shared similar tastes in Black 90’s sitcoms. I wanted to see how you reacted to watching TV fathers like Uncle Phil (RIP James Avery) and Carl Winslow (Reginald VelJohnson). I wondered if you ever worked with either of them like you and Mom did with Sheryl Lee Ralph, who I only knew at the time as Dee Mitchell. I know you had to have loved Moesha! You probably saw Brandy’s character in a number of the young people you coached and directed at Temple University. The same young people, to my surprise, who bestowed upon you a familiar nickname - “Pops.”
That surprise fucked me up. I mean, you owed me that. Nothing in life is given. “Earn your keep,” is what we teach our children. But our children deserve love, a parent’s love. A relationship with our parents is typically the foundation for learning how to connect with and treat others. Our connections to others, starting with our parents, helps to make us whole as people. There is not a life on this earth that doesn’t share the desire of community and connection. Without your presence growing up, my village was incomplete and my foundation cracked. All my life, I simply wanted one thing from you - a relationship to call our own - one filled with inside jokes, shared customs, cherished memories, and nicknames. You were supposed to be MY “Pops.” That was my name for you and no one else’s. Even as your only child, I still had to share you.
You know great men don’t always make great fathers because what makes them great often makes them unavailable. If we are honest, the greatness a man exudes, while awe-inspiring to the masses, often supersedes the man’s responsibility to his family. Society will forgive a failed father as long as he produces anything worth marketable consumption. Diminishing a man’s duty to fatherhood in exchange for his worldly contributions is rooted in patriarchy; consequently, women are held to a far higher standard when it comes to motherhood. Who else will raise the children of great men? We tend to forgive a father’s absence in his child’s life as long as that man’s professional accomplishments are notable. A mother is not afforded the same luxury. Take the woman you married as a prime example. You and she were trained and recognized actors. You shared stages and dressing rooms with revered names in Hollywood, including Laurence Fishburne, Ving Rames, and Avery Brooks. My mother, your wife, helped you build Crossroads Theatre Company alongside Ricardo Khan. Even after you left, my mom became one of Xerox’s highest-ranking regional sales manager in Northern New Jersey. And she did this as a Black woman in the 90s, a trailblazer in her own right. Since Xerox, she became a stockbroker, an insurance agent, and a high school history teacher, among other professions. Despite her obvious talents and inspiring resilience as a single parent, did you ever wonder what dreams she deferred to uphold patriarchy and prioritize motherhood over her personal pursuits? I have been thinking about those ‘what ifs’ in my mom’s life a lot lately. She devoted her entire self to motherhood while you gave yourself to the theatre. And everyone was so grateful that you did - from your classmates at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, where you deepened your knowledge of theatre and art history, to the cast of The Colored Museum, who you took to Broadway and London’s Royal National Theatre, to your students at Temple, who loved you so much for your mentorship and your magnetic energy for the arts.
I am not saying these things because I hate you. Although I am hurting, this letter is truly an act of love. I never faced the pain and shame of abandonment with you, and for that, I am sorry. We should have gotten to this ugly truth far sooner in our relationship. I wonder if such a conversation would have brought you some much-needed peace. You deserved love just as much as I deserved yours. I hope your soul knew that before your body gave up.
See, as much as you loved theater, I believe you were so enthralled with your work because you wanted the theater to love you back. You wanted to be a black man who was accepted, and more importantly, respected, in a historically white world. It is why you were so adamant about directing plays with an all-black cast playing traditionally white characters. You never wanted to be known as a black director, just a director who happens to be black. This type of post-racial acceptance is usually reserved for transcendent figures who reach the pinnacle of success in their respective fields. Such heights are traditionally confirmed by an accolade from a historically white academy such as The American Theatre Wing or The Broadway League. So in 1999, I wonder how you felt when you learned Crossroads - your theatre company that just so happened to be black-owned - received the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, the first and I still believe only African American company to receive that honor. I wonder if that love and validation you so desperately sought out ever returned home with you at that moment? White validation never leads to self-acceptance, for black men, for any person honestly. Your love for acceptance demoted your love for yourself to the role of an understudy, seldom on the receiving end of a standing ovation from the internal audience of your mind. I know exactly how that feels too. Guess we were journeying through life together all along.
Our journey towards self-love and self-acceptance would guide us toward what bell hooks calls “lovelessness.” In her book, All About Love - New Visions, hooks assures us that lovelessness is not the final destination on the journey towards love - love for yourself, love for others, love for work, etc. Instead, lovelessness is a necessary detour we must bravely drive towards and through if we want to experience the fullness of love. Learning to love is riddled with painful lessons, no different than learning any other new skill. Yet, as people, especially as men, we have such a low pain tolerance when it comes to love that we quickly and repeatedly give up on it. A man will willingly subject himself to extreme dieting and strenuous workouts for years to develop and maintain a chiseled body. Still, all it takes is one heartbreak to keep that man from being vulnerable again with a romantic partner for the rest of his life. As men, we will never honestly know love if we do not know vulnerability and pain.
This letter is one of my greatest acts of vulnerability. In essence, it is a love letter to you, my father, and to me, the child who longed for his father’s love. In All About Love, bell hooks proclaims, “Getting in touch with the lovelessness within and letting that lovelessness speak its pain is one way to begin again on love’s journey.” As painful as it was to write you this letter, I now only want to look forward, hop back in the car, and continue down the road on love’s journey, as father and son.
Love you Pops!
Your Son
