But I was still me and the alley was not my natural habitat. My default position was sprawled across the bed staring at the ceiling or cataloging an extensive collection of X-Factor comic books. This never cut it for Dad, who insisted I learn the wavelengths of my world. In the quiet chaos of my room, everything was certain. I’d be thumbing through the origin of Beast’s feral blue coat or Jean Grey’s telekinesis. And then my father would suddenly loom, a shadow in the doorway of my Eden.
Get outside, he’d tell me. This is your community. These are your people.
So I’d gather myself and meet Bill at the alley toting the world’s ugliest game. I double dribbled, carried, hacked. My shot was swatted into gutters. I might get off two dribbles before the pickpockets went to work.
Back at home, Bill would catch me daydreaming and punch me in the arm, hoping I’d finally rise up and swing out of rage. But mostly I squealed and fell to the ground.
It was about that time that Bill started eyeing all of Tioga’s honeys, scheming on ways to make me a man.
Yo, why don’t you holler at Terra, Bill said, raising his eyes suggestively in the exaggerated way he borrowed from Ric Flair, a vestige of the boy still under his toughening skin, which made me groan. Shorty’s phat to death.
Of course I’d noticed that all the girls around me had begun to hourglass. When I caught my first whiff of hair permed, pulled back, and tied with a red ribbon; of brown girls in teal dresses fluttering in the Sunday wind; of single mothers regal in Jordache, I thought of nothing else for days. There was too much of Dad in me, but never quite enough. I was debilitated by fear in the presence of girls, and that fear concealed a bedrock belief that I had nothing to offer or worthy to say.
So there was Terra, rocking the mushroom bob, her hips tapering down to her calves like the angles of an ice cream cone. She did not smile or laugh. She rarely talked and ran with older dudes, and this was horrifying. When in her area, my tongue swelled in my mouth. I went dumb and blind. I would slump my shoulders, stare at the ground, and wander home. Straight up the steps I’d flop on the bed and fall through sheets, box springs, and floors. Fall through green and gold leaves, until I arrived in a world where the rules were reworked. Terra floated across an ocean of pastel, until she stood before me, her lips parted with wanting. I reached out to close the distance, and the world shook and quaked. Big Bill was standing over me, punching me in the arm.
He must have taken all of this personally. He believed in the Coates’s diaspora and his role as deputy patriarch. The kids were scattered across the area. Malik was out in East Baltimore. John in Randallstown. Kris and Kell off to the Mecca. But when we gathered under the roof of Tioga, Bill implanted himself on the throne. He would lead us to a matinee of The Last Dragon or keep score for a tournament of Summer Games. At night Tioga creaked and moaned. Bill would pass out hammers and joysticks to battle the burglars of imagination.
He assumed our weight, even if we didn’t ask. I think it gave him a grander sense of self. But he was heir to even more than he could articulate. In those years, we looked at Dad, and misunderstood so much. On the side of my mother, we had cousins who were Americans. They cavorted out in suburban Columbia. They played Little League on sprawling well-funded fields. Their fathers were veterans, unbittered by Vietnam. They talked up barbecue, lug nuts, and golf. Their houses were detached. Their streets had names like Dove’s Fly Way and Evergreen Road. They hung Christmas lights and had bathrooms where towels and washcloths matched. We were the same as them, and yet Dad had marooned us in this almost ghetto.
But Dad was unapologetic, and there were larger forces in play. Here we were in the throes of a second Maafa—or maybe an extension of the first. All around us the old order of black fathers was tilting toward disgrace, trading in their honor for wine and dice, and leaving in their wake legions of boys, dizzied, angry, and confused. But Dad resisted the heathen call, parted the stagnant lake of fallen knights, and reached for his blade.
To be Conscious Man was more than just the digestion of obscure books that happen to favor your side. It was a feeling, an ingrained sense that something major in our lives had gone wrong. My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.
He was not humorless. One winter he tossed out our green couch and didn’t buy another one for four years. Bill would fume over the lack of furniture, but when friends and family would come past, Dad would look over the empty space and say, Oh hey, Gary, have a seat on our new couch, man. It’s leather.
Some Sundays he’d watch football with me, the two of us lying on that empty stretch of floor. He’d cheer for the Eagles as they whipped on my beloved Dallas Cowboys and I’d switch sides.
Son, you aren’t a real fan if you switch.
But even here he was not free. In the days when there were no other black quarterbacks, he loved Doug Williams, rooted for him in Tampa Bay. Then in the winter of 1987, Williams, now with the Redskins, came hobbling off the bench in the Super Bowl and my father stood in front of the TV shaking his fist, yelling Go, Dougie, go! Williams smoked Denver for all of us — four touchdowns in one quarter — and became the first brother to raise the Lombardi Trophy. Dad glowed when Williams’ dark hands wrapped themselves around the prize. And Dad didn’t even like the Redskins.
But he looked at everything through the lens of his people. He’d read the prophecy of Marcus Garvey — and my father believed. Dad took up that call, the charge to make Garvey’s kingdom real, and to us, he was unbreakable.
But he was also unbearable. In the late ’70s my parents bought a house on Woodbrook Avenue. In 1979, my father went away to Atlanta University for grad school in library science. My mother, barely thirty, would sit on the bed and cry.
Dad was working on his own version of halaal. He was always dangerous when given too much time to think. At varying points he banned white flour, white rice, sugar, and all meat. Before, he’d made ice cream and cookies adorned with peaches. Our treats were raisins and peanuts and carob brownies. He served whole-wheat pancakes with honey. Fish became the family treat. But I was allergic and would break out in hives if they brought too much of it in the house. By the time we moved to Tioga, Dad had loosened up, forced into compromise by the practicalities. Sugar and poultry were back. Ma would bake carrot cake from scratch and barbecue chicken legs.
But when Bill moved back in with us, he was used to steak, ribs, sausage — the regular fare when he lived with his mom. Once he looked on as Ma prepared a pack of Leanies — hot dogs engineered for vegetarians.
This isn’t a hot dog, he helpfully pointed out to my mother.
In this house, it is, she replied. You want something different, go buy it yourself.
Bill and Ma had all the distance you could imagine. She was his stepmother, but that sort of technical phrasing — along with half brother, and half sister — was never allowed in my house. Still, Bill was a loyalist to the core. Dad would leave the crib for days, off to do the math on a forgotten historian, track down the copyright for a book, or persuade someone to donate their papers to the Mecca. Dad was great about the grand vision, but he often left details to others; and while Bill lived on Tioga, my mother often had to work to keep him in check.