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Dear ____________: I haven't heard from you in more than 20 years, not since that rainy spring day when my mother and I called you from a drugstore phone booth to ask you for money. You had been woefully negligent, and we desperately needed the cash. I was so happy that we were calling you; as my mother talked, I imagined you finally marrying her and rescuing us from poverty. Maybe, I thought, we will even have our own telephone and a big house with a backyard.

But the sudden tremor in my mother's voice and her fury snapped me from my daydream. I couldn't hear you but, I would learn later, you were accusing her of lying; you were saying that I was not really your son, that you would never give her or me a "near-nickel" again.

My 8-year-old mind wasn't quite sure what a "near-nickel" was, but I recall it sounded completely out of reach - like you. I didn't know what to feet at that time, but I do remember thinking about the few moments we had spent together: riding in your tractor - trailer truck, playing pool at your house, going to the barbershop and on the shopping trips to buy my first watch and, later, my first bicycle.

While most other children in my neighborhood also lived in single-parent homes, I never, even at that young age, felt that this was the way things were supposed to be. At least other children seemed to see their fathers once a week, or the fathers actively participated in their lives.

I'd have to push my envy away when I heard boys call their fathers "Dad" or "Pop," or even by their first names. I didn't know what to call you, so I never called you by any name.

You can't deny that your blood runs through me deeply. I have your light-brown complexion, your reddish facial hair, your lips, your height and, according to my mother, some of your ways. I am, I suppose, an extension of you and you of me.

Your absence gave birth to an unbearable pain, so I did many things to avoid facing the monstrous reality of your absence. When teachers would ask at the beginning of each school year, I would always give a different name for my father, depending on which television who appealed to me. One year it would be "Michael," as in Michael Brady of The Brady Bunch; another year it would be "James," as in James Evans from Good Times. Of course most of my teachers knew what was going on, but they never put me on the sport.

My frustration and resentment were often transferred to my mother. At first I kept those feelings to myself, but later I controlled her, falsely accusing her of driving you away. She, in turn, took out her bitterness on me - with belts and switches, with extension cords and her bare hands. If she couldn't confront you, then I was an easy enough target.

I realize now that my mother was no child abuser. She was a young woman forced to raise a strong-willed male child alone after a man had emotionally decimated her. I recall my mother, as she spanked me into obedience, her voice a plea, "You gonna be good? Huh? Your gonna be good?" She was preparing me for the cruel world. It was left to her to outline as best she could what was expected of me out there, but we never really discussed her feelings about you or your absence.

Back then, my child mind had no idea what was driving my mother, so I mentally distanced myself from her as best I could. I was an only child who was floating somewhere in limbo - "emotionally homeless" as bell hooks puts it - between your irresponsibility and my mother's reactions to it.

When I played baseball and ran track, I looked at other boys' proud fathers and wished you were there to cheer me on. I wanted to talk to you about sex because my mother's conservative mores forced me to fumble around for answers. I needed you all the times I got into trouble at school or with the police and my mother resorted to getting some other man - a cousin, a neighbor, anyone - to scold me,

My high-school years were lonely, but I found a new political awareness at Rutgers University - until my ouster (I was quite a militant student). Next came a near-nervous breakdown in my early twenties, as I tried to make sense of my manhood and my place in the world.

I've been homeless, a womanizer and a woman abuser, a careless lover and a financial disaster. I've hurt and pushed away so many people. How could I allow anyone to get near me when my experiences said closeness among human beings does not exist?

I truly needed you, a man, to tell me what I was doing wrong, to tell me how I could do things better. I needed you to show me how I, a Black boy, could survive in a world that, when it paid any attention to me at all, seemed doggedly determined to annihilate me.

Without a real father, I had to fabricate the male-bonding thing from the sports world and popular culture. I imagined I had brothers, older ones and younger ones, or that I was playing major-league baseball with teammates that I could routinely hang with before and after a game. And I worshiped the imaginary father who took your place.

Somehow, thanks to God or whatever higher spirit exists, I have survived without you, My childhood dream of becoming a write is being fulfilled, and I've learned to look out for myself.

The reason for your disappearing act still escapes me. You were already in your thirties when you impregnated my 22-year-old mother, and your were doing well financially, as evidenced by the cars I saw and the homes you owned in New Jersey and down South. I know that a father is so much more that loot, and you deprived us in ways that winning a million-dollar lottery ticket could not have made up for.

Nevertheless, my mother did a remarkable job. Other men sometimes paraded around, attempting to move in and live off my mother, but she would always say, in obvious reference to you, "Once you wobble, you don't fall down."

As an adult I never sought you out, but I was exhilarated a few years back when my mother said that you had asked about me when she saw you at a bus stop. When I told her I wanted to see you again, my mother was annoyed, but three weeks later, she saw you again and gave you my number in New York City. I waited for your call. Days and then weeks passed. In the interim, I imagined our meeting. Sometimes I would say Hey, it's good to see you again, and at other times I would kick your ass for leaving us hanging all these years. But the phone call never came, reminding me that you thought I wasn't worth a "near-nickel."

At times, I would somehow rationalize your absence, but I cannot deny that you are my father, that we are connected by blood and flesh and bone and history. I've tried to bury my love in the recesses of my soul - along with the hate.

I have to believe that at some point in your life you have felt what I feel. I also believe that, wherever you are, you can at least understand this: If I hate you, then I hate myself, and I am so very tired of despising parts of who I am.

What you may not understand is that I will rectify this hatred no matter what it takes. And I pledge to myself over and over again that I will never abandoned a child the way you abandoned me. No child, and especially not a child born in the ghetto, deserves to be left to wander in this world alone, Nor should his mother be forced to be mother and father.

I can't really say what this letter may do for you, but it is therapeutic for me. I've needed to say these things for a very long time. Whether or not you actually read these words doesn't really matter much. The point is that I've gotten this off my chest and maybe some father somewhere will think twice about his relationship with his son. Or his daughter.

Even if I do not speak to you for the remainder of your life or mine, today writing this letter has helped me eliminate my bitterness toward you. I cannot make you accept me. This has been a long battle for me, one that started in my heart and has worked its way throughout my being. Like the church-goers who "get the spirit," I feel good real good, about myself and about possibilities of one day becoming the man I wanted you to be.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group