over half a century of wondering

Daddy and Me

a tragedy I feel every day:

my daddy never found

the inclination and the words

to tell me clearly what made him who he was,

his actions shout to me of who he was:

a devoted husband who would do anything he could

for that half of him who loved him back,

a devoted father who worked his heart to the bone

as a principal of a rowdy junior high,

and who braved the South’s heat, before air-conditioning,

to teach math in summer school,

forty miles away from his beloved “cabin” in the Smokies,

a trip to the Old Swimming Hole every afternoon

after he got back from the valley’s heat and the students’ needs,

I know he loved learning,

the first in his family to go to college

escaping from Low Country, South Carolina

to the edge of the state, Furman, near mountains

and near another Carolina not so poisoned by slavery

as his family’s past, a reality that endured and lived all around him,

I know he used his body as a football player

so he could go to college,

take the ball and gain 

“two to three yards and a pile of dust,” he’d say,

and he also pulled the team together as its captain

defeating Clemson for the Southern Conference Championship in 1926,

yet who drove him and what held him back

opaques itself before my questioning,

Mother said she and Daddy never discussed parenting decisions,

never used words to describe their feelings for each other,

Daddy died around my fourteenth birthday

and I have spent over half a century

working to imagine his inner world, his feelings,

the intrapersonal is an intelligence

that allows us to access what can drive us,

I just don’t know for sure what drove Daddy:

what he ran from, what he ran toward,

the history of the Walker family, that I know about,

is of South Carolina, a state detractors 

can describe as “the pinnacle of conceit,”

and I have held copies of family wills in my hand

which distribute human beings to survivors,

as if those of African descent were but things,

like the furniture also in the wills,

I would love to know how Daddy dealt with that truth

I would love for him to have had time

to evolve away from the nightmare South Carolina can still live,

I would love to talk education with him,

for each of us has lived the world of the classroom,

the world of the early adolescent,

I would love for him to validate who I am,

and for me to know more clearly the battles he fought,

for me to know enough to appreciate better

what he gave the world with the effort of his life

one former student of his described Daddy

as welcoming every student to school with a hug,

that is the Daddy I would like to know better.

by Henry H. Walker

December 18, ’17