[Written in memory of my daddy. There's a YouTube video link of this conversation to watch after reading this at the bottom of this post/chapter] <3
“I think I ought to run away from home,” my father jokingly says as we sit on his couch that’s across from the TV stand he's had since I was a little girl.
“Where you gon’ go? What do you have in mind?,” I ask. I’m presently looking at this video thinking of the multiple phases I went through with my eyebrows. My eyebrows are pencil thin, dark, and have no real arch to them. My next phase will be thick ones like Cleopatra. I had just learned the magic of an eyebrow pencil and still didn’t do a great job with one. In high school my friend Dorishia had asked me why don’t I use a pencil to fill them in. I tried it and reported back to her that I didn’t like the way it looked. Years later I admitted that I used a #2 pencil because I didn’t know that there was a such thing as an eyebrow pencil.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll run away to Chicago,” my father responds. My father is from Egypt, Mississippi (a place that no longer exists) but moved to Chicago when he was around 18 or so. I’m sure he told me why once upon a time but I don’t remember anymore. My father would to tell me interesting stories when I was younger about his life in Mississippi including a time that he went through the front door of a little grocery store and the clerk/owner tried to shoot him but couldn’t find his shotgun in time. My daddy never offered to take me to Mississippi and he never talked of any kinfolk who still lived there. Most of our people migrated during the Great Migration just like a lot of people from the south.
“What we gon’ do in Chicago?,” I ask as I laugh in my signature high pitch giggle.
“Move in with your momma,” he says as he chews his gum. His voice lacks inflection which I didn’t know was needed to signal sarcasm. I turn my camera phone vertical to lay on his shoulder as I continue to record. I’m wearing a green and black jacket, a pearl/silver chain mix necklace, and am probably wearing Vans or Ed Hardys with skinny jeans since I’m going through my black rock girl phase.
“You like my momma?”
“I said move in with her.”
My father has intentionally skipped over the “like” word to emphasize that he would’ve said that if he meant that. My father is funny and very charismatic. He’s never met a stranger and is well liked. He chuckles and smiles often. He has perfectly straight teeth that have yellowed from decades of cigarette smoking. My father will later die from lung cancer. I don’t know that yet as I look at the black, plastic ashtray sitting on the coffee table with a half smoked cigarette leaning on the side.
“She’s got a three and a half bedroom.. She just moved.. She balling.” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said “she just moved” in my lifetime. My mother stays in one place for maybe 1-3 years. She pays rent the first part of her stay and then somehow just stops and manages to prolong evictions. I went through that process twice in the two years that I lived with her for 8th and 9th grade.
“That’s alright, that’s enough room for me. Who else stay with her?,” my father asks. My mother has had a variety of people stay with her, all for her benefit. She’s had boyfriends who paid her rent. Adult children who needed somewhere to stay for a short couple weeks or couple of months.. who paid her rent. Her sister’s kids.. she received money from the state. I know because I was there. 4 girls in 1 bedroom on bunkbeds. She got my social security check monthly that I received since my dad was retired.
“Just her.” Black Chicagoans tend to leave the ‘r’ sound out of words. We also speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE) which is a dialect also known as Ebonics. It is made up of a unique grammatical structure, pronunciation, and vocabulary. There’s been research done on it that talks about the different influences for this way of talking that were influenced by African languages and creole. Our Black English is spoken the same way around the US even if these people never met each other. AAVE has been categorized as speaking “ghetto”. People from Chicago tend to omit the R sound on top of this: “just huh (her)”.
“Where that loser at?” He’s referring to my mom’s boyfriend of many years. I liked Smitty. My mother met him when I was in my late teens and dated him off and on until he passed when I was 27.
“He ain’t there no mo.”
“Maybe I’ll call her up,” he tells me. I’m assuming on the flip phone he kept forever, refusing to upgrade with the times. My father has no intention of calling Freda. I’m happy in this moment and am just recording it because I love being with my father. I chew my gum obnoxiously, smiling into the camera, as I end the video. I miss my daddy.
Click here for the video!
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