Don't Cry for Me

by Daniel Black

My father grew up in a time when black children meant nothing to America. Most of them, including him, didn’t have a birth certificate. Their care, their education, their self-worth was optional. Whether they lived or died was insignificant to the state. For the most part, their existence centered around work and church. And even the church taught them that they were “wretches” and “sinners undone,” black children of Ham who, without a forgiving God, had no hope in this life or the next. Children of my father’s generation were taught that dreams were a waste of time. Schooling happened only when there was no labor to be done, and that wasn’t very often.

he envied the life he had provided for his children. He, too, had wanted knowledge, travel, enlightenment, but such was laughable for a dark black boy in the 1940s.

my freedom angered him. It made me question his world, his convictions, his God.

I want readers to reconsider the capacity of our fathers’ hearts.

Many of them were handed so little, yet we expected so much. They gave more than they had, but less than we needed. They were burdened with a notion of manhood that destroyed so many sons’ lives; but they didn’t know another notion to teach. In the end, many destroyed themselves, too. If they’d been allowed to dream, they might’ve expected sons who were not carbon copies of themselves.

some spirits come into the world to disrupt normalcy and thereby create space for the despised and rejected.

love wasn’t a requirement of men in my day. It wasn’t a man’s achievement. In the sixties, when you were born, love was a woman’s passion, a mother’s hope. Fathers had far different obsessions: food, shelter, clothing, protection. My job was to assure you had these things, and I did that.

When I was a boy, we knew what a boy was. There were signs—agreed upon signs—that left no one confused or unsure. Girls had certain features; boys had others. It was simple as that. Yet you came along and muddied my clarity. You loved hugs and kisses; you wept at the beauty of things; you frowned at trucks and baseball gloves. But you were a boy. My boy. And I meant to correct whatever had gone wrong in you.

Slavery did a number on black people. We haven’t survived it yet. The institution is over, but its aftereffects still linger.

We try not to think about it, our time in bondage, but it shapes who we are. I’m convinced of this. We worked for free for four hundred years while our self-worth went down the drain. We learned to despise ourselves—not white folks—because our failure, we think, was having been captured at all. And we know that some of our own people participated. We know that. We’ve never forgiven them either. Perhaps that’s why some of us hate us. When they look in the mirror, all they see is contempt for someone unforgivable.

Granddaddy used to comb my hair like he was mad at it. This some wooly shit, boy! You sho got some nappy-ass hair,

All Nigga, Granddaddy liked to say. Because of this, we lived lives of desperate hope, afraid that white people’s disapproval equaled our destruction. Everything we did, whether we were aware or not, we did with white people in mind. Our life’s aim was to make them believe we had value and worth, so we spent our nights trying to figure out what they liked, then spent our days trying to do it. We still haven’t pleased them, and truth is, we never will.

My grandfather raised me, and his father had been a slave until age eighteen. That’s long enough to shape one’s way of thinking and pass it along for generations. Even after freedom, we were not free. We were lynched and beaten and mobbed and raped and burned out and stolen from and cheated and denied and degraded and humiliated and insulted and belittled and disrespected so much that we believed white folks were God’s chosen people. They had everything we wanted, it seemed. Even poor whites. At least they could go to town and be served. We had to watch our backs everywhere we went. We were never safe in this country. Can you imagine that?

We took pride in working because it’s what we knew, what we did best. We never believed we meant much. I see that now. We even buried one another without tombstones. No need remembering one whose only achievement was a decent spring crop or a house full of hungry children. Save that money and repair the roof.

We loved each other—if love is respect. Yet respect wasn’t what you and your generation wanted.

when Granddaddy got through with you, you’d have to get somewhere and sit down. But he loved me. I understand that now. His behavior was simply the way of black parenting.

Elders were callous and unfeeling, as if afraid to love us. Slavery had left them that way.

Knowledge could wait—or so our people thought. We had the mindset of ignorance.

We weren’t unintelligent; we were just desperate to survive. We thought eating every day was a big deal, and many times it was. Without money or most other resources, black families did what they had to do to keep food on the table.

After eighth grade, I stopped altogether. “That’s enough,” Granddaddy said casually one evening. “Too much learnin make the boy lazy.”

I’ve told myself, over the years, that we didn’t know any better. We were taught what to think—not how. There is a difference, you know. It never crossed our minds that we were destroying someone’s life.

From my folks’ example, marriage was having babies and raising them together. I didn’t know anything about love. I certainly hadn’t seen it—mutual affection between adults—and I wasn’t sure how it worked, but I liked the way it made me feel—warm inside, worthy of life. The way a man is supposed to feel with a woman. And I never wanted that feeling to end.

I realize now that I loved her because she liked me—not because of who she was.

There are no do-overs in this life. Either you get it right or you wish you had.

People rejoiced as if something wonderful had happened. They didn’t fear Death; in fact, they treated her like an old, personal friend. There was no terror, no uncertainty of things. People sang songs and tapped feet in rhythm as the preacher spoke of Heaven as a man’s just reward. I find it funny that, at funerals, all dead people go to Heaven, regardless of how they lived. Perhaps this is black people’s way of rewarding themselves simply for having been black and survived—even for a while.

I hoped you’d love me just because I was your father.

Now I see why you and your mother read so much. It makes you think, makes you see things you can’t see, and that was my problem. I had all kinds of opinions, but I couldn’t see a damn thing.

I needed some assurance that you were a boy, a real boy, and that I wasn’t a total failure as a father.

She didn’t touch me in those days; she didn’t want to be touched. She wanted to be respected, and I didn’t know how to do that. This might sound ridiculous to you, but it was true. Treating a woman as an equal wasn’t even biblical, so I had no idea what it meant. It was inconceivable, really, laughable to the majority of America. Men and women. But your mother wasn’t laughing.

Hurt is worse than anger, you know. Anger dwells in the head, then fades. Hurt lingers in the soul. It rearranges your feelings without your permission. It blinds you.

Hurt is hard to forget, especially from a mother. And healing is never easy for black men.

I had worked too hard, sacrificed too much, paid too many bills to be a complete failure. So I never apologized. But by not doing so, I became what I feared. That’s what I discovered during those dark days. Pride really can kill a man. Actually, it makes him kill himself. He justifies his errors and creates his own righteousness in his mind. Grandma used to say, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is death.” It’s true. Men of my day were right because we said we were right. Our word was law and everyone else had to follow it or be punished.

I began to conceive things I’d never thought of before. Like what it really meant to be black—not just look black. I discovered I hadn’t loved being black; I had accepted it because I couldn’t change it. I had not embraced it as a gift, had not seen it as divine. Neither had Malcolm at first. But as he read and studied black history, his self-love sprouted and became the basis of a new, affirming self. Now, I wanted to know what he knew.

The day I finished the book, I read the last sentence aloud then closed the cover slowly. It had opened my eyes as if, my entire life, I’d been asleep. I’d never known I could decide how to live, how to be in this world. Never knew I had the right. My people had submitted to life, and dealt with it the best they could. We didn’t question God’s ways. We simply accepted things and swallowed hard. No one asked, for instance, if I were happy as a child. It’s not that they didn’t care; it’s that they didn’t know they could care. We didn’t think we were supposed to be happy. We were Negroes, after all, Colored people who were glad simply to be alive.

Feelings were irrelevant. They had to be. There was no time in our stressful lives for emotions. Of course we laughed and cried and got angry like anyone else, but not for long. We were stoic and serious 90 percent of the time.

Manchild in the Promised Land.

I’d never been to prison and hoped never to go, but when brothers got locked up and used that time to strengthen their minds, I was proud. They were pimps and drug dealers, but they were also black men who didn’t understand that the system was designed to destroy them.

The Color Purple showed me that what we’d once called a man was actually a monster.

adults are always wrong about children’s emotional capacity. Children don’t carry the weight of history, so their capacity for heavy things might be greater.

The more I read, the more I saw myself. Knowledge is a funny thing, Isaac. It informs by exposing. It shows you precisely how much you don’t know.

Maybe things were different for white folks. Perhaps they enjoyed the privilege to be whatever they wanted. But black folks had rules and restrictions we were supposed to abide by.

Fear governed me back then. Men of my time were mean and hostile because we feared losing power.

Feminists in the ’80s declared that “manhood” was a socially conceived idea. It was an oppressive notion. In some ways, they were right. We had nothing if we didn’t dominate others. We knew we could lose everything at any moment. Liberal women and gay men told us we were about to. Their freedom disturbed our self-worth—black and white men alike. That’s why we lived in fear.

If we were going to be men, we’d have to do so on different terms. But we didn’t know any other terms, so we sat and sulked in smoky bars and tension-filled households, waiting for women to break. Many fools are still waiting.

Silence isn’t always quiet though. It troubles a man’s soul, forcing him to admit what he’d rather forget.

When people die, she said, they want to leave unpleasant memories behind. Such remembrances are heavy and irrelevant in the afterlife, people think. Plus, they make travel through the universe difficult. But this is not allowed. Everything the heart has ever known must accompany it into eternity. Regardless of the pain. Only then can a person see God. A whole heart is Heaven’s requirement.

“Every man needs a li’l mercy every now and then. Know what I mean?”

“Take care o’ yourself, my brother. Ain’t nobody else gon do it but you,”

“We just did love different back then.” “Yessir. I know.” “Love didn’t have nothin to do with feelins. It was hard work and sacrifice and makin sure chillen knew how to mind. Didn’t have much to do with what you felt about ’em. Or what they felt about you.”