Reginald Dwayne Betts. Photo by Mamadi Doumbouya
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Blood History
The things that abandon you get remembered different.
As precise as the English language can be, with words
like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination
of sounds that describe only that leaving. Once,
drinking and smoking with buddies, a friend asked if
I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have
dismissed him in the way that youngins dismiss it all:
a shrug, sarcasm, a sharp jab to stomach, laughter.
But he said longing. & in a different place, I might
have wept. Said, once, my father lived with us & then he
didn’t and it fucked me up so much I didn’t think about
his leaving until I held my own son in my arms & only
now speak on it. A man who drank Boone’s Farm and Mad
Dog like water once told me & some friends that there is no
word for father where he comes from, not like we know it.
There the word father is the same as the word for listen.
The blunts we passed around let us to abandon the English
language. Not that much though. But what if the old
head knew something? & if you have no father, you can’t
hear straight. Years later, that same friend asked about
longing, wondered why I named my son after my father.
You know that’s the kind of shit turns the rest of your life
into a prayer no dead man will answer.
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Reginald Dwayne Betts is the founder and director of the Freedom Reads. A poet and lawyer, he is the author of four books. His latest collection of poetry, Felon, was awarded the American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. [For more about Reginald Dwayne Betts, click here.]
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William H. Johnson. Man in Vest. Smithsonian American Art Museum