Compassion's Nappy-Headed Kids

A Black Eyed Story

Gordon Parks’ Photodocumentary of Black poverty in America: | The Fontelle Family. Harlem 1967

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Well, obviously, the problem with all of us nappy-headed kids was our lack of testosterone lying about Nada’s (my mama’s) house.

All the news outlets told us again and again: the problem with Black children is their lack of fathers. As if we were all hatched from eggs or something. As if none us had never ever seen an actual Black man in our whole miserable blackety-black lives. As if Black men had gone extinct in the 80s and we were all on the hunt for the rare one hiding in the bushes. As if… as if… as if… our gaggle of blackety-black uncles—blood and honorary—didn’t count. Nor did our grandfathers or big brothers.

According to the statistics, our demise and ruination was completely due to the lack of our mothers’ pheromones to keep a man around. Not just to her lack of ability to keep him around, but her lack of skills to lay it on him so good that he stayed stuck with us – and gladly!

According to the stats, the problem was the glaring lack of all of our mamas ability to bewitch, bother and bewilder our menfolk so good… so good… until each of them felt compelled to put a ring on it.

That was the problem.

It wasn’t the lack of equal pay for Black women’s labor, or the lack of childcare, or the lack of healthcare, or the lack of after school programs, or that pesky little gas crisis that hit us all upside the head in the late 70s and 80s and made it hard for Black mothers to keep a full tank of gas in her car so she could get back and forth to her little job. And it certainly had nothing to do with the numbers of our “daddies” going to prison jumping from the thousands and thousands to the millions. Or that They (and you know who They are) invested more in building prisons for us than building schools for us. Obviously, none of those things were the problem at all. 

The problem was Black women didn’t know how to keep a Black man and therefore didn’t know how to be a good woman and therefore didn’t know how to make a family work. Because… because (and this is the kicker, y’all) because she didn’t know how to be holy and submissive and therefore didn’t know how to be blessed enough to do right by God. 

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Gordon Parks | Untitled. Chicago 1950

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The experts must be right. It’s all because Black women with their sassy hips swaying, necks wagging, tongues cutting, were immoral. Unhallowed were there names. Their every step an abomination. According to the experts, my mama and her kind were not cursed but wicked creatures who refused to turn their necks toward God and repent. 

Now, it didn’t matter that out of all of us, our mamas—single, married or otherwise—attended more church than the lot of us put together. It didn’t matter that they prayed unceasingly or loved thy neighbor’s nappy-headed kids as much as they loved themselves. It didn’t matter that Their statistics showed that my mama and her kind each knew Jesus personally and that Jesus himself called them his friend in return. 

And I don’t know if They had read their bibles as often as my mama recited hers out loud to us and so we knew that Mary too had been pregnant and single. We also knew that Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s real daddy. We knew that Joseph vanished like our daddies did after a little while and never made nary another appearance in his son’s story—not even at the cross. We knew that not only did Mary manage to raise up “a good man speaking well” seemingly all on her own, but so did Thomas’s mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois. We knew that Moses had only a river of women to thank for his life – first the insolent midwives who refused Pharaoh’s order, then his mother, then his sister, then the Pharaoh’s daughter and then his wife. And let’s not forget that as far as we know, Hagar raised Ishmael singlehandedly with God’s blessing when Sarai—his mother by all legalities—refused to do so. 

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Gordon Parks | Untitled. 1952

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But obviously, the problem with all of us nappy-headed kids was the lack of a Father-knows-best kind of presence in the home and between our mother’s legs. In other words, our mamas were having too much sex and not enough. It didn’t matter that Psalm 127:5 says:

Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

…in the King James if you’re a straight and narrow, bible-thumper kind of believer – and that it says:

Don’t you see that children are God’s best gift? The fruit of the womb his generous legacy? Like a warrior’s fistful of arrows are the children of a vigorous youth. Oh, how blessed are you parents, with your quivers full of children! Your enemies don’t stand a chance against you; you’ll sweep them right off your doorstep.

…in the Message if you’re a more modern, off-the-beaten-path, prodigal-child kind of bible reader.

None of that matters.

Your pro-life missive doesn’t matter once those children make it from embryo to cradle.

The blessing becomes a burden if that daddy ain’t under your roof – it doesn’t matter if he can’t bring you the pot to piss in and surely can’t build you a window for you throw it out. All he needs to be is there and all of the earth’s problems with us nappy-heads will be solved. 

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Gordon Parks | Donald & Carrie Beatty w/ Their Son. Columbus, Ohio. 1950

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One summer, Nada got serious for once and for all and got herself a man that could be a real father to us nappy-headed kids. This would be her third, and this one wasn’t her usual high-yellow, light-skinned pretty boy who drove a Cadillac like the last two. This one was gonna be her “Old Man”, ‘cause he, indeed, was old. Old as Methuselah according to her good friend Sharon who even said, “Nada, what you want with that old man? He’s old as Methuselah.” But Nada shrugged and grit her teeth and did the dang thing and said, “I do.” 

So Jimmy, old as Methuselah, with his wood-paneled station wagon that was ancient as a covered wagon, rattled on over and moved in that summer. And every morning we pretended to be exactly as They expected – a happy family. 

Jimmy would make us a big pot of oatmeal every morning with raisins and cinnamon and sugar. For years after, I couldn’t stomach the smell of oatmeal, let alone look at it, let alone taste it. But for an entire summer, we all dutifully took our spoonful of American medicine, washing it down with concentrated OJ. 

And every night, Nada made us dinner and we ate it when all the other kids in the neighborhood ate as well. I remember my friends being astonished when the sky first dimmed and sun first dipped and one of them said, “I gotta go home and eat dinner,” and I said, “Me too,” and they said, “since when?”

Well, since Jimmy. But I didn’t want to even mention the man’s name. I didn’t want anyone to know that he was really there sitting at the head of our table, old as the trees, old as the pavement on the streets, old as the cracks in the sidewalks. He was really there telling us to hold hands and bow our heads as he gave the blessing. 

My God! We hated him, or maybe we just resented him, but we sure did feel a kind of rage every time his voice vibrated the airwaves, and every time his car engine coughed and coughed and sputtered before humming into being. And every single time he took a breath we wished the man death. 

That summer, our peevishness and pettishness seethed and simmered as we watched our mama grow as old as him. We watched her fade and curl up like old wallpaper and we knew we had to rescue her from such a fate.

We understood that Jimmy’s only role was to lift the blame of our impoverished existence from our mama’s shoulders to his. But of course—of course—it could do no such thing. Of course, now the problem with us nappy-headed kids wasn’t the lack of a man to mold and shape us but the lack of a man with a job, a pension, a plan. None of which Jimmy had. And so Nada was back at square one again, only now, her failure was evident to the whole neighborhood due to Jimmy’s raggedy old chariot parked in the driveway, leaking oil and transmission fluid, making our home an eyesore which it had never been before. 

But even though Nada’s exuberance was sagging and her sprightliness dimming (for it had been a long while since we’d seen a lively game of spades played at her table and even longer since we’d put on a record and rolled up the rug to dance in her living room), she was still hopeful. And even though old Jimmy’s fear of God was as oppressive as a thousand plagues, a tiny flame still flickered within.

Lord help us, our mama still wanted the marriage to work it’s redemption over her poor choices. She still wanted to beat Their statistics. And well, we—her five nappy-headed children—pitied her. After all, she was our mother and we loved her. So we ate Jimmy’s oatmeal and bowed to his prayers and pretended the whole summer long. Which was as long as the marriage would last, until—for reasons unknown to us nappy-headed kids—Jimmy was asked to pack up his “shit" and go. 

And once again we were free. Scarlet letter “F” free. Part of the problem with nary a solution. A fatherless house like a snail without a shell—until Nada decided to try to be a good girl once again. 

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