Ripple Effects
You know how when we were kids and we’d throw rocks in the river or lake or see a fish jump or a rain drop hit a puddle and a ripple effect would instantly take place. Remember how it was small at first but as the energy moved the ripples got bigger and bigger?
Now that you’ve got that visual in your head, I want you to imagine the rock or the fish or the rain drop being racism…lemme tell you how those ripple effects caused an immeasurable loss for generations (four of them now and counting) of my family.
Once upon a time…oh wait this isn’t a happily ever after story. I digress sorry. If you’re read Nigger Baby, then you know that my grandfather was allegedly horribly racist prior to my existence. I now say allegedly because as I’ve reflected and spent more time in therapy the racist experiences I had as a child were never with him.
Per my grandfather’s 1974 directive, my father stayed away. He stayed as far away as he possibly could and I spent decades wondering if he would die before I ever laid my eyes on him in person as a result. I’ll be honest…I can’t even entirely blame him. I mean as a woman of color myself, if a cis gender white man who had or who could easily get mafia connections told me to stay away I probably would too. That being said a heavy price has been paid for his absence.
Like myself and probably most of you, my father belonged to a family. He is someone’s son, someone’s brother and someone’s uncle. He is someone else’s father too. His decision to stay away from me and my mom also meant my grandparents, uncles, cousins and own brother were also forced to stay away. None of us even got a choice in the matter.
That first ripple my grandfather created cost me my father. The second ripple my grandparents, the third my brother, the fourth my uncles. Then when I had children of my own, it cost my father his grandchildren, it cost my uncles their great nieces and nephew, it cost my brother his only nieces and nephew. The price has been so heavy: grands, uncles, cousins, memories, family history, great aunts and uncles and on and on.
It added to my identity crisis because I mean look…
Growing up in my white family of origin and not seeing myself reflected in any of the faces I knew the best was hard. It got harder and harder as I got older. Turns out, learning who I looked like would also wind up being a painful reality.
After nearly 20 years, I told the fattest lie of my life and actually wound up speaking to my father for the first time ever. A couple of years later, my grandfather (who I actually never got to meet) put me in touch with the woman in the middle. My beloved grandma, the late great Candace Virginia.
I was 18 or 19 the first time we talked and I met her just before my 21st birthday. She died that same year. From our first meeting, till the day she died was not even 6 months. The influence she had on me in that brief time caused me to name my firstborn after her.
I can’t help but wonder sometimes would I have been able to feel safe embracing my Blackness sooner if I would have had my father’s side of my family in my life early. I wonder if connection, proximity and exposure to this side of my family from jump would have helped counter the self-loathing I had. Maybe it would have eased the hateful racist remarks that my maternal family continue to make to this day. I wonder where I’d be today if I would have had my grandma in my life for the whole of it up until her passing.
To be fair, my father is still a knucklehead. He’s no more attached/involved/connected to my brother than he is to me. The last time he and I REALLY talked he was still in his feels over my having “forced” my way into “his family” and something about just the thought of my name has done nothing but cause him pain. I have no way to know for sure would his involvement in my life (and maybe even subsequently my brother’s too) been different were it not for my grandfather’s racism. What I do know though is trauma and pain are real. I’ve experienced trauma and pain from my maternal family’s racism so I know my father has too.
I’ll never know would things have been different “if” and I try not to focus on the if any longer. Would my grandfather have made the call that he did if he was able to pause and consider the long reaching implications of his decision…maybe. That being said, the “rock” he tossed into the lake that would be my existence created ripple effects I’m still recovering from more than 25 years after his death.
Originally published July 25th, 2020 and updated today.