After he returned to me, I slept every night atop Daddy's broad back. He was a soft, wide man and miraculously he remained still throughout our slumber -- never rolled over, never pushed me off. How that sleeping arrangement came to be I do not know, but it felt as natural to me as play. Even as a little girl, I knew my father needed me. He was a sick man in near-constant pain from migraines and unable to work. He needed me to fetch his medicine, to make cool compresses for his aching head, to massage his temples with my small hands. And he needed me to help fill his days. He left the house only when it was necessary to go to doctor's appointments, to buy food, to cash his pension check. Otherwise, he stayed close to home, not bothering to strike up friendly conversations with the neighbors. My father felt out of sync with these men who walked out of their front doors each morning dressed in starched shirts and skinny ties, to civil jobs in government offices, their kinky hair kept low. He preferred to wear his hair in defiant waves like Cab Calloway, lie across his sofa bed dressed in elegant silky underwear, and watch daytime TV -- his ears perked for the sound of us school children walking home along Birchcrest Road, our high, pebbly voices drifting into his open window. Other days, he read hard-luck paperbacks by the light of a naked bulb stuck in an old, shade-less lamp as a transistor radio tossed the blues into the room. He might sometimes drive his sleek gray Cutlass Supreme Oldsmobile to Mr. Alfred's auto body shop, where he'd shoot the breeze. But by the time I skipped up the walkway, book bag slung across my shoulder, face flush from conquering a new cursive letter or the secret to multiplying by nine, he was standing on the porch waiting to greet me. Together we wound through our evening of dinner, cards, TV, close sleep. This is how Daddy remained alive for me all those years - by settling into a life of simple actions, slow movements, perpetual rest. Speed brought throbbing headaches and so he paced himself. When doing nothing still made his head hurt, he mitigated the pain with loose aspirin and later, sleep-inducing injections of demoral -- eking out as many extra years as he could to imbed himself, like a fossil, into my psyche. As a result, I formed myself out of the five o'clock shadow of his maleness. He hadn't always been sick. The migraines didn't appear until he was thirty-two. Before then, his hypertension was symptom-less, allowing him to spend his young manhood like many migrated southern black men - gratefully working over-time at factory jobs, eating neck bones and greens slow-cooked by big-boned women, playing hard every Friday night after payday. But I only knew Daddy one way, apart from a few old photographs and scattered stories about his past - as a doting father worn down by pain. It's the image I savor, the one I prefer. If he'd been a virile, healthy man when I entered his life who is to say whether he would've stayed at home, giving so much of that life to me?

		Shifting Through Neutral    Hardcover, 320 Pages    ISBN: 0060572493 Amistad / An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers    >> Buy the Book

		** My parents, Vy and JD, met at a raucous card party when Mama was twenty-four and the single mother of a five-year-old girl named Kimmie. She told him she was divorced. He didn't care one way or the other, liking how she played bid whist -- bidding high even when she knew she couldn't win. He took her again and again to roaming cabarets, where they slow-danced to Sam Cooke tunes -- doing the social as they called it -- while he sang into her ear of what a wonderful world it would be, causing tiny chill bumps to erupt down her neck. She was his kind of woman - high-class and good-looking. A woman who could transport him far away from a shameful childhood, a place where he once found a strange man lying across the doorway, satiated inside of his drunken mother. Vy could help him wipe away that haggard image from his mind - the sight of his Ma's flabby thighs, that bastard's dusty black ass. Vy could brush a coat of respect onto his up-from-the-south, hardscrabble Motor City life. At least that's what he envisioned, eyeing her in the amber light of the Twenty Grand Club, where she perched knowingly on a bar stool, puffing on a filter-tip, her long legs crossed just so. In my father, Mama saw a respite. She too was running from a ragged past: a teenage mother who left her as a baby on the steps of an orphanage and a father who six years later appeared, convincing his girlfriend-of-the-moment to go retrieve his daughter. That girlfriend raised Mama as her own child, even after my grandfather had moved on to other women. Years passed before Mama learned about her birth mother - a flighty gal with mental lapses who had three other wild children living on the east side of town in a bulging frame house. Children who, as they grew, embarrassed Mama in school, yelling her business out across the playground. "Hey, I know who you are! You my sister. We gave you away 'cause you too ugly!" They called her Trash Can Baby. Mama's adopted mother didn't exactly love her in the affectionate, lots-of-hugs sort of way, but she did teach her three key things in life: how to make money taking in other people's money, the importance of a king-sized bed and a love of pretty men. Her own father had been pretty. This she learned when they all lived together briefly, so briefly it was cruel, like witnessing a caterpillar as it undulates into a butterfly then seeing it squished under a sadistic shoe, wings wasted. What she remembered most about her illusive father is that he was always coming and going, coming and going. He wore a fedora. And he sang to himself constantly. In a beautiful voice that made his young daughter long for him even before he disappeared - a haunting and mournful voice of high, sad notes that quivered in a room after he walked out of it. When he left them he left completely, leaving no trace of himself behind. Not even a dent in the tube of toothpaste. Mama matured under the not-so-watchful eye of her adoptive mother, soon found a man as pretty as her father and had his baby. But the man already had a wife. It took Mama a few more years to find her own husband. Daddy, it turned out, was handsome if not pretty, had a good-paying job at the General Motors plant, and didn't mind a ready-made family. JD was a witty guy with sweet ways and smooth moves. Plus he could sing. How could she not fall in love? I only heard my father sing twice: Once, on the day that my big sister Kimmie left for good, he sang to me in a lilting falsetto that burnished my pain. And then again, much later, near the end. At his funeral, I couldn't bear the thought of a sentimental rendition of "Amazing Grace" or "Up Yonder". I chose that famous country tune by Ray Charles, Daddy's favorite singer, the one he named me after. When Ray cried out from the little boom box in the back of the funeral parlor room, "I can't stop lovvvving youuuuu, no matter how much I tryyyyy," his plaintive wail, the pleading for what cannot be and the resolve to accept it, to "live my life in dreams of days gone by," it made even Daddy's doctor weep.

		By the time they married, Mama was four months pregnant. Daddy was thrilled, so ready to grab on to something he could call his own. Mama too wanted 'a real family' -- to drown out gossipy whispers from neighborhood busybodies who called her a 'woman on the side' with a bastard child. But my parents' first baby was born premature and stillborn, the fetus falling amidst gushing blood in the toilet as Mama had a miscarriage. Horrified, she screamed for Daddy to come quick. He scooped the tiny life out of the water, cut the umbilical cord, felt for a pulse, found none. They dug a grave for him in the backyard, beneath the apple tree. That misfortune was like a pothole on a dark road. An old clunker could charge right through it but a new car, its axle untested, never rides the same again. Mama changed her mind about Daddy adopting Kimmie -- as though his paternity could no longer be counted on -- and out of hurt feelings he withdrew from his stepdaughter. Daddy wanted his own child but Mama thought it would be tempting fate to try again. They slid. She into mood swings inherited from that flighty gal of a mother, and he into deep doubts over what he could really offer her. Their fragile, new marriage imploded. She stayed depressed and he stopped singing. By their first anniversary, Mama had found someone else via phonograph records whose voice gave her chills, and both of them had sought other lovers. She returning to Kimmie's father in interstate roadside trysts and he falling for the sweet young clerk at the Social Security benefits office. In the midst of that mutual dalliance, I got born. As the early weeks of my life passed, Daddy noticed my eyes were just like Kimmie's, the color of a muted, blue-gray sky. He assumed I wasn't his, kept his distance. His headaches had begun but were no more than monthly ordeals that laid him out for a few hours at a time. He felt good, good enough to have other interests across town. He must have savored his situation at first - a high-class wife in one place, a sweet-loving girlfriend in another. But years passed, and in that time both the headaches and the thoughts of leaving us encroached. *** As my father increasingly drew away from us, Mama put Kimmie in charge of my care. In fact, I have no conscious memory of my parents during that time, as I thought Kimmie was my mother. Eight years old at my birth, she was still a child herself, caring for me with gusto and ignorance. My first memories are of playing Go Fish. "Do you have a two?" I'd ask, believing in Kimmie. "Nope, Rae Rae. Gotta go fish," she'd say. Into the pile of cards splayed across the carpet I'd go, looking for a two. We played and played away the years while Mama waited for her lover to come and whisk her away, us girls in tow. She waited and waited. And then, in 1967 -- during that summer when the smell of violence permeated our open windows as brown-skinned men with no jobs roamed the streets looking for excuses to release their rage while a heat wave bore down on their better judgments -- Mama lost her mind. She couldn't handle the responsibility of a not yet potty-trained child, a restless pre-teen, an unwanted husband and a looming race riot. She broke down and Kimmie was soon sent to live with her father, the very man who wouldn't come. On the day she left, I sat on the carpeted stairs of our house eyeing Kimmie through the banister, my pudgy hands grasping the railings, a jailbird in soiled underpants. She eased her thin arms through the spaces and hugged me, oval travel bag dangling off her shoulder, tears lining her eyes, swirled metal between us. And then my big sister was gone: a cool air hitting my legs, the door closing. Out of the echo of her disappearance, Daddy scooped me into his arms and carried me up the stairs. My face rested against his foreign one, the stubble from his unshaved chin tickling my wet cheek, rough and reassuring, the Temptations singing "You're My Everything" somewhere outside a window as he gently placed me on my parents' bed, where I would sleep each night between them as consolation. I was told Kimmie had gone to a mysterious place called Louisiana, where she had safe roads to walk and her own Papa to care for her. I missed her terribly and didn't understand why I couldn't be with her, as she was the only one who fed me affection and love alongside my buttery sweet oatmeal, the only one who shared my secret world of hiding places and the only one who kept me from being afraid of the dark. I wanted desperately to follow her to Louisiana with its multiple syllables and musical vowels, my body aching for the unknown highways that would get me there.