In Praise of Virginia's Daddy (photo left)
I'm the one whose father made midnight Friday pizza runs. He also teased and taunted my brother, sister and me through raucous games of Pick Up sticks, brought us Sweet Marie candy bars from his pre-dawn Sunday golf games at Niagara Parks in Canada. He cleaned up vomit soaked pjs at 2 am, proudly signed each and every report card and sent all of us off to college. My first dance was standing on Daddy's feet. Years later, he gallantly "gave me away", and danced with me at a wedding he knew was a mistake. When time proved him right, he never said "I told you so".
No, we were not raised by a single father. My mother was a full and active participant in parenthood, but this is not about her. This is about my father, a man who was always there for us. Sometimes he wasn't physically present. Snowy Buffalo winters forced him on the road, with his dusty, canvas tool bag, in search of work, but we always knew he was coming home. I don't know how or why we knew, probably because my mother knew he was coming home.
My father laid brick. Hard, honest, ordinary work, but we kids thought it was anything but ordinary. He worked for big construction companies and small ones, with two friends, even formed one of his own--Sloan Masonry, back in the '50's when the idea that a black man and two white men could go into business together was pretty much unheard of. They couldn't get enough work to sustain Sloan, but my father, Dave and Ray remained friends --apparently, another odd occurence.
Piled in the car on summer Sunday evenings, we would gape out the window as Daddy pointed to sparkling new schools, sprawling hospital wings, sleek, modern churches and tracts of ranch-style homes he had "built". He told construction tales about each one, some funny, others harrowing (or at least it sounded that way to us). I still hear his voice when I'm home and drive past St. Rose of Lima church or the Maryvale school.
My father didn't plan to be a bricklayer. He wanted to be a doctor, and served in the Army Medical Corps during WWII, (spending more time cleaning kitchens than wounds). After discharge, even with the GI Bill, medical school was beyond his grasp. Somehow, undertaking presented itself as an alternative. Frequently he pulled out his diploma from the Atlanta School of Mortuary Science. "I can do your hair," he would tease my mother, my sister and me, "if you lie down." He cracked up every time he said this. We did too. But Daddy had too much life in him to spend his days with the deceased. He discovered that being a mortician was not even a poor relation to being a doctor, so he learned to lay brick, like his father and his older brothers before him. The proudest day of Daddy's life came when my brother graduated from medical school.
My father believed in learning, for himself and for us. I learned a lot from him: how to properly water a lawn, make oyster stew, drive a nail straight, and grate fresh coconut. He taught me to believe in myself and be proud of being smart (like him), to laugh, deeply without reservation, to think quickly, respond decisively, and cleverly (I can go from dead sleep to a wisecrack in six seconds flat). He taught me that to have a friend you have to first be a friend and that character, not race was what I should be concerned about. He taught me how to be comfortable around men, how to hold my own ground, and not be intimidated by them. He taught me how to live, love, give and trust. I thank him for these lessons.
I don't know where my dad learned to be a father. His father died when he was a small boy, leaving my grandmother to raise him, his four brothers and one sister alone in rural North Carolina. I'm not even sure he planned to be a father, but he certainly learned somewhere.
Don't get me wrong. My dad was not a saint. He was a good man, which is not an oxymoron. He didn't think what he did was remarkable. He loved his wife and children and he showed it. He did what he was supposed to do, the right thing. When I was growing up, my cousins and childhood friends lived more or less like we did. Everyone's father lived at home, went to work, and grumbled about fixing broken bicycles. It was all I knew. My father was smart, funny, wise and strong. I thought so then, I think so now. I took Daddy for granted, he was always there--like air. Wasn't I supposed to? I was thirty before I fully comprehended that my father's extraordinary, involved, loving presence in my life made me unique among friends and acquaintances.
John Lafayette DeBerry II died in 1984. I still miss him every day, but I also feel his presence sometimes in a passing shadow or a fleeting thought. And every now and again his presence is as real as he was. On a visit with my mother a few years ago, I brought her some clippings and reviews of our latest book because I knew she enjoyed them. She directed me to the den and told me where to find the scrapbook. “I had to get another one,” she announced. My puzzled expression told her I had no idea what she was talking about. That’s when she informed me my father had bought it when I embarked on yet another of my many careers--plus size modeling. “I fussed at him for getting such a big book,” Mom said. “He told me not to worry. You would fill the pages.” Two years later my father died, and my restlessness with being told what to wear, where to stand and how to look, led me briefly to the business side of modeling, before I found my way to writing novels. “But your father was right anyway,” my mother said. “You filled it up and last month I had to buy a new one.”
Until that moment I knew nothing about the scrapbook and the faith it showed my father had in me, but I didn’t have to---I’d felt it my whole life.
So whether he gave us a good foundation or left us standing on shaky ground, a father's influence on his daughters is undeniable. For one of us Daddy is a lifelong reason to give thanks--on Father's Day or any old Tuesday. The other still works at feeling good enough, at believing that being disposable is not her birthright although it was her father’s legacy. Because in the best of times or the worst of times, at the core of who we are as women...and how we perceive ourselves, is the very first man in our lives--our father.
