I was around 8 or 9 years old. My mama would take me to the big Easter dinner her family would host every year. Everyone was there. From the oldest to the youngest.

My cousins were the only reason I liked going to these get-togethers. There was one my age and her two little sisters. We gravitated to each other as soon as I arrived, every time. Their daddy, Ricky, was my mama's favorite cousin, hands down.

Before any of them came along, their mama was holding me as a baby when she told Ricky she wanted one. He told her he could show her better than he could tell her.

And he did.

So there we were, the four of us together again. At the time, this particular Easter felt like any other Easter. Now, it's the only one I can remember almost minute by minute.

This was my mother’s mama’s side. This side of the family had nice houses, huge plots of land, and secrets kept so tight-lipped that there are some I won’t tell to this day.

On this side, I had a great-aunt that stood out from everyone. Aunt Bobbi. She spoke with southern grace, never had a hair out of place, looked and smelled like money. Tailored clothes, a perfect fit. At one point she had matching cars with another family member, just because she wanted to.

Easter and Christmas time were when the biggest get-togethers were held. Tables lined up with ham, turkey, macaroni and cheese, butter beans, perloo rice. The men would group together and talk about the news, the weather, and whatever else they saw fit. The women would talk about the men and the newest gossip, whispering, followed by “bless her heart.”

Now, “bless her heart” could be genuine or it could be the coldest sarcasm, so deep you’d get chills.

Welcome to the south.

While I was playing outside with my cousins, Aunt Bobbi called us all over, holding something behind her back. One by one, she handed us each our first pocketbooks.

They were beautiful. Pastel colors, dainty, and I was still admiring mine when one of my cousins opened hers and squealed. She pulled out two shiny quarters. Fifty cents. We all started digging in our purses in surprise. My cousins jumped up and down like we had won the lottery.

I pulled out one and fished around for the other when Ricky’s middle daughter asked me where my other quarter was. I looked in after not feeling it and smiled, telling her I had found it. With that we ran off to continue playing, our imaginations unlocked due to these new bags. We were ladies now.

Only, I lied. No matter how hard I searched for it, the other quarter was not there. On the outside the day went on and everything seemed fine. On the inside, the quarter stayed on my mind. I remember thinking, ‘Did she give me only one because I’m half?’

Half.

It’s not the big things that make children realize they are different. Rather the small things, so minute you could miss them if you aren’t watching closely.

On the ride home I told my mom about it. She told me it was likely just a mistake. It may have fallen out somehow. Those are the words she chose, but her body language didn’t show she believed them.

She had this thing where her leg would start jerking if she was madder than hell, and I can assure you, she was. Face red, body tense, jaw tight, and that leg was jerking. The ride after that was mostly silent.

We stopped going to those events for the most part and although she loved her aunt, the visits and get-togethers became few and far between. I felt like she held it against them far more than I did.

It was a few years later when she told me about this particular aunt offering her a full college scholarship to abort me. She stated the obvious, that yes, I was different. And yes, there were people that truly did not want me here. They were willing to pay handsomely to halt my arrival. In my mother’s mind, the quarter belonged to a much older story.

I always appreciated her telling me the truth. Some people will think she handed me armor too soon, but I don’t think so. Having a child of mixed race opens you up for conversations you wouldn’t have had if you’d followed the “rules.” Adoption or abortion was common in situations like this. In the south, it still is.

She never wanted me standing in somebody’s face smiling like a fool while they secretly wished I had never been born. I never confronted the aunt, and I’m not sure if my mom did. All I know is Aunt Bobbi passed away after a long life never knowing I knew. She also never had any children of her own.

Now that I’m older, I realize it was just a quarter. I don’t hold ill feelings about it. This was just the first time I realized I was different than everyone else. I can’t say it was intentional. I can’t say it was an accident.

If it was an accident, that's unfortunate. Because it didn't feel like one. As an adult, I'm only connected with one person from that side. One person that sought me out, stayed, and kept up with me, my life, and my children.

One cousin. Ricky's daughter. The same one that questioned where my other quarter was.

Love y’all. Mean it. ♥️

Let’s erase the magic.

I am a mother of five. A grandmother of two. I have been married for 25 years to my high school sweetheart. Life is good. Military life. The house, the cars, beating the odds. At least that’s what people see. What’s been shown.

But who is behind the writing? Who is living behind the smile?

Jennifer. Without the literary distance. And there are things about Jennifer I have never told you. Things it took me a long while to tell myself.

Everything I just told you is true. It is also the kind of truth writers are very good at telling. The kind that leaves out everything that hurts.

Read more

My aunt Sheri was Southern tea—so sweet you would almost think you were drinking syrup. She made the best macaroni and cheese, second only to mine. She would sit on her bathroom counter, legs crossed, and do her makeup before her cocktail-waitress shifts. She was Daisy Dukes and inappropriate jokes.

She was a single mother of two babies, and she made a way however she had to. She wasn’t short on options when it came to men, but she didn’t bring any around her kids until she met the man who would become my uncle. After a few years, she stopped working while he provided. She stayed home to cook, clean, and raise the kids.

It seemed like a dream until it became a nightmare.

I often tell my family and friends that God will always give you a way out. Sometimes you’ll see it and take it. Other times, you’ll recognize it long after the opportunity has passed you by. The latter is the worst kind of realization. You discover that the door was wide open in front of you, but by the time you notice it, it’s closed.

There were times I begged her to leave. I offered to come get her. I offered to transfer her medications. She could live with me. It would cost her nothing. She knew she had somewhere safe to go—and a way to get there. He worked during the day. We had hours to sneak her out, either before or after his lunch break.

Part of her was afraid to leave, while another part of her didn’t want to move as far away as Washington State because her son still lived in the small town she was in. But he was an adult with his own job, renting a place with a roommate. He supported her leaving. Still, she never accepted my offer.

There were full years when she disappeared from my life. She moved away from her home state. Slowly, her closest friends were pushed out. Visits with family halted. She doted on her husband online even though that wasn’t the reality offline.

She would complain to me about how bad it got. I took time off from work to drive to get her since she was too scared to fly. She stopped responding just as I was about to hit the road. This happened a lot. Sometimes it was days, sometimes months. Then she would reappear.

I did the only thing she would allow me to do from thousands of miles away. I called her all the time. I texted her constantly. I encouraged her to eat. She gained weight. I reminded her to take her medications. She became strong enough to start driving again after a long period when she had stopped altogether. I spoke hope into her when she had very little left.

The phone was our lifeline.

I wasn’t saving her overnight. She wouldn’t let me. I was trying to keep her alive long enough to choose a way out.

If you’ve ever wondered why someone doesn’t “just leave,” or why the people who love them don’t simply rescue them, I hope this gives you a glimpse of reality. From the outside, people may ask, “Why didn’t someone just call the police?”

I did. I also called adult protective services. One refused to investigate and the other said she told them she was fine.

Distance made the isolation easier.

My aunt’s world became smaller and smaller. Over the years, everyone learned to walk on eggshells around her husband, because if he became angry, we risked losing access to her completely.

At this point, he had stopped working to care for her full time. He took her phone, severing our tie completely.

Later, one of my aunt’s cousins moved in to help care for her. She kept Sheri fed and clean as best she could, recorded what she was seeing, and showed the footage to a home nurse who did nothing and eventually stopped coming.

When she had to return to her own family, she sent some of the videos to me and warned me not to approach the house. My uncle was still enraged that I had called in a welfare check.

My uncle had well-known racial biases. I’m mixed. He kept an expansive collection of firearms. I had my own children depending on me. Recklessly putting myself in harm’s way wasn’t just a decision about me.

I was cautious but still determined, and when I finally stepped into the room she was in, the skeletons fell out of the closet. I was let in by my cousin. I had always been his favorite, and that trust was the only reason I finally had a way in. That, and my uncle’s unexpected days-long hospital stay. The perfect storm.

My cousin shut the door behind us. She turned her head quickly and looked at me, squinting.

“Jennifer Blunt.”

That was the first clue she was still in there. In a body that had given up on her long ago. My cousin crumpled into himself against the door as tears started flowing down his face.

I was pissed.

For her, I smiled. I talked with her. Jogged her memory. She couldn’t believe I was standing there. She requested KFC chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, Mountain Dew, and the big Reese’s cups—not the small ones. I went and got it all. I tried to feed her, but she said I was moving too slow and made me set it beside her so she could shovel the food in.

There was a smell in the room that couldn’t be denied. One of those smells a quick cleanup doesn’t hide. I got a peek under the covers and saw another story. She had been changing her own briefs and tending to her most basic needs, which should have been impossible because her limbs were weak, contracted, and contorted.

There was almost no weight left on her, which didn’t make sense considering how quickly she was eating. She could roll over slightly, but only to one side. Her head shook uncontrollably. She could not sit up or stand.

My cousin stepped out. I had a quick moment to let her know what was going to happen from here. I whispered it so the camera in the room didn’t pick up on it. All I needed her to do was say yes when my help came in. She asked me who the help was. I told her she would see.

I finally understood why my cousin had encouraged me to come, only to change his mind once I was already on the way. He knew exactly how quickly things would escalate once I laid eyes on her. He knew I wouldn’t be blaming one person, but everyone who walked in that door and walked out leaving her there like that.

I left her room and asked my cousin to meet me on the front porch. I told him this was it. We had to report this to police and get an ambulance on the way. He told me no. He had done it this long and he was just going to see it through.

Done what? See what through?

I tried to reason with him and told him she wasn’t near death. She was still aware. She knew things, remembered things. We had to save her. He got frustrated and repeatedly told me to just leave it as it was and let it play out. I asked him if he was sure that’s what he wanted to do.

“I am sure, Jenni. That’s my final answer.”

Cool.

I told him I’d be back with items to clean her up and more food. Instead I went to the police department to show them the videos I had recorded of her condition with my Meta glasses. I had gotten them solely for this reason.

I explained the situation to an officer. I told him I had called them before but she told them everything was okay and they left. I needed assurance that when they came in they were taking her out of there. If it didn’t work this time I knew I would never see her again.

When I showed the officer the video, he immediately sent other cops flying to her house. He assured me it didn’t matter if she said yes or no this time, in this condition, she was going. I gave him my information to call me when she was en route to the hospital so I knew where she was going and could meet her there.

When the officer called me back, he said that when he entered my aunt’s room, she looked relieved. He said she kept repeating one word and he didn’t understand why.

I did.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

We had been in communication months before and with me living across the country we talked and texted all day, every day. Until her husband got home. She would then hide her phone until he returned to work the next morning. Our texting would resume.

I made sure she ate, took her medicine, and spoke life into her month after month while she shared with me the hell she was going through. She went from 85 lbs to 140 lbs.

Then all of a sudden our communication went dark—radio silent. I would text her occasionally trying to check in. I’d call, no answer. Until one day her husband texted me back.

“She can no longer use a phone.”

I sat with that text like a brick in my chest until I couldn’t take it.

I had to know if she was okay.

I called adult protective services and shared with them the texts my aunt had shared with me. They told me the evidence I had was now too old for them to check on her. They were not going to write down a report until I threatened legal action if I found out something was wrong and they didn’t check on her.

The lady grumbled as she wrote down my grievances.

Two weeks later I got a letter in the mail stating that they would not investigate, so I called in a welfare check.

It was 11 p.m. my time in Washington—2 a.m. in North Carolina. My anxiety had completely taken over and I had to know. When the police called me back they told me they asked her if she was okay. She said she was fine. Her husband was in the room with her caring for her.

I thanked them and hung up.

Her husband called me immediately after and told me I would never see her again due to sending the police to his home in the middle of the night.

“Wanna bet?”

This was my mother’s only sibling, her only sister, and I felt my mother pushing me from the grave. There wasn’t a force on earth that was going to stop me. If I had to walk through hell to get to her, I would withstand the fire.

Sheri wasn’t just my aunt. She was like a sister to me. The things I couldn’t tell my mom, I could always tell my aunt. We were thick as thieves and when I became pregnant at 15, she knew before I did.

I threw up twice that day and she immediately said “you’re pregnant.” I denied it and told her I was just sick. She found out many months later she was right. I gave her the honor of naming my first child.

I babysat for her while she worked as a cocktail waitress at the round Holiday Inn in Charleston. She’d come home, lay out her money on the floor, and slide me my payment while we laughed and talked about the night. She was my best friend growing up and we definitely argued like sisters.

Now that I was in Washington with no help from the people I’d called, I had a house to sell and a relocation to focus on. Every day I prayed, “Baby, just hang on. I’m coming.”

I moved to Houston and got things situated there. I was closer now and reached out to connect with one of my cousins, who I found out was now living in the house with her and her husband.

He told me it was bad and she didn’t have long. He had no idea how I could get into the house because her husband was against it. Her husband had an arsenal that made it very dangerous for me to come there.

Still I prayed, “Baby girl, please hold on.”

I could hear my mother’s voice telling me to get to her sister. I made it my mission. No matter the cost. No matter the danger. I told my cousin when I get there, I won’t be alone. He knew exactly what I was coming to do and he welcomed it.

When I found out I was moving to Germany, I couldn’t wait any longer. My friends told me not to go. Something could happen to me and it wasn’t worth the risk. Family who had been forced out told me to be careful. They had been there to help care for her until it got to be too much for them. They were sickened by what could be going on now that they were gone.

Neighbors weren’t allowed in. Family wasn’t allowed in. Cameras were in every room and they could be watched remotely. One person had been allowed in two weeks before I got there and I had no contact with that person.

The day had finally come. I prayed the whole way to Camden, SC to see my family before I made my way to NC. I needed their push to go and explained everything to them.

My angel great aunt told me I needed to be on my way.

I mustered up the courage to call my aunt’s husband to ask if I could come help take care of her. He happened to be having a medical emergency himself at this exact time. The neighbors were going to take him to the hospital. He told me this emergency would require him to be in the hospital for days.

I contacted my cousin and told him I was on the way. He told me it wasn’t a good time. That didn’t matter to me. The whole way there, I was thanking God for removing my biggest hurdle. I was going to get in that house. My uncle texted me to say it was okay for me to go but that I wouldn’t like what I saw.

I stood outside my car and breathed for a minute. Two Halloweens earlier, I had been there as she decorated. I took in the fact that the wait was over. My heart was racing. Whatever was on the other side of that door, I was about to find out. I knocked. My cousin let me in and walked me to her shut bedroom door.

No turning back now.

As I stepped into the room, she looked at me like she’d seen a ghost. Her eyes widened. She used every bit of her strength to let me know she’d been waiting for me.

“Jennifer Blunt, I knew you’d be the only one that could save me.”

I maintained a poker face and smiled as if nothing was wrong.

Everything was wrong.

She was skin and bones.

“Hey baby. This is your last night in this bed. I have a cavalry coming and you’ll never see this room again.”

I wish I could tell you I was overreacting.

What I walked into that night changed both of us forever.

Not my biological father.

My dad.

You already know I was missing an entire family line on my biological side, but what you don’t know yet is that I wasn’t without.

He came into my life when I was six years old, and he wasn’t the only one. His entire family walked into my life with him.

Through him, I inherited a wildly free aunt. An uncle who was always around and would do anything for me. Another uncle who paid me well to babysit my little cousins. A grandma who was drop-dead gorgeous, hosted the best Christmas parties, and whose husband I swore used to be in the mafia. He just carried himself that way. And sounded like it.

I had great-aunts and great-uncles who always made sure there were gifts for me under the tree at those holiday gatherings, even though some of them only saw me when they came into town for moments like those.

A couple of years later, I gained a baby sister.

And closest to my heart, a Bulgarian great-grandmother who escaped the Holocaust and repeatedly told me she couldn’t give me the details of how because I wasn’t old enough.

Even when I was well into my twenties.

With children of my own.

I share no DNA with any of them except my sister, but you cannot tell them that. I am their daughter, granddaughter, niece, and cousin. Blood may be thicker than water, but in this case, it truly wasn’t. They followed my dad into my life, locked the door behind them, and threw away the key.

Growing up with him was badminton lessons at my favorite park. Pizza night every Friday when he got paid. Frankie’s Fun Park weekends just to ride the go-karts. Ryan’s Steakhouse, where you’d run into no fewer than three of your classmates and their families.

But he also gave advice that could only have come from the life he lived before us.

“CYA. Cover your ass.”

“Never do anything illegal. If you do, keep it to yourself. You won’t tell on yourself. If you have to tell someone, tell me. I won’t tell on you either.”

“I might have been born yesterday, but it wasn’t last night.”

“I’ve already spent eight years in prison, and I don’t want to go back. But to protect you or your sister, I won’t hesitate.”

He took my Tupac CD once because he felt I shouldn’t be listening to that kind of music. He played it loudly in his car every day when he came home from work.

He taught me how to cut my steak, sit up straight at dinner, and keep my elbows off the table. Once I started getting in trouble as a preteen, he told my mom she could quit her job while he provided so she could be home with me.

He did body work on cars and painted them as side jobs to make extra money. Every time he had that extra money, he made sure we all enjoyed it.

He was the Christmas cabin in Tennessee. AC/DC on the radio. He would talk to me endlessly about what he was working on at the house, explaining step by step things I wasn’t interested in. We went to drag strips to watch cars race and sometimes I would sit in the car in defiance, refusing to get out.

Any time I got angry, I would remind him that he wasn’t my real dad. He has told people I said things to him he wouldn’t allow a grown man to say.

He and my mom were best friends throughout my childhood. Sitting outside together at the fire pit talking for hours. She loved to watch him work on cars and would help him wet sand them. They got married after she turned down two proposals. The third time he popped the question, he told her it was his last time asking.

She said yes.

He was far from perfect and had some troubling years. None of that erases the fact that he was present. Still, I spent most of my adolescence disliking him. When my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal breast cancer, I was a teenager. I told myself and God that the day she passed away would be the day I would never speak to him again. I meant it with my whole heart.

If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.

When she did pass away, I moved across the country, just outside of Seattle, Washington. I escaped my hometown and went as far across the map as I could.

My dad booked a flight and came to visit every year. He sent Christmas gifts to all my children, including the one who wasn’t born to me but became mine anyway. It didn’t matter what I felt. I had a dad I could not push away no matter how hard I tried. I planned to bury both parents when my mother died—and he simply refused to let me lose him.

Years before that, when I was sixteen, a drama teacher discovered I could write.

The first play I ever wrote was given a cast of classmates and performed at my school for a full audience.

My dad was there.

I was invited to a college to read my work for people far older than me.

My dad was there.

I spent Saturdays with my drama teacher and Philip Simmons, writing about him too.

My dad was still there.

Then I disappeared from all of it.

The play I wrote was supposed to do one thing: keep me from failing drama. Instead, it opened a door I would spend the next twenty-five years running from.

It seems I spent most of my life running from the things that refused to let me go. And while I chased the ghost of my biological father, my dad chased me. All I had to do was look behind me. Beside me. I’ve never once wondered where he was. He was always right there.

My phone rings every time I write now.

It’s the same person every time.

My dad.

Love y’all. Mean it. ♥️

What he was charged with in the 90’s would have likely put him behind bars for decades, at least. At the time, there was only one way out of situations like his, and his name is Andy Savage.

I called him Loophole Andy. If he was your lawyer, you’d walk away with your freedom, but not your money.

My father walked away with his freedom.

My mother used to say, “I don’t know how you can be so much like him when you’ve never been around him.”

She meant my mannerisms. My characteristics. Sometimes she’d even tell me there was a coldness in me that could have only come from him.

I’d met him before. Our relationship didn’t begin until my twenties. Since then, we’ve lived together. We’ve traveled together. We’ve taken daily walks through the park. We’ve shared dinners. We even discovered we ordered the same meal at the same restaurant and left the same tip. The only difference was our steak temps. He orders his medium. Mine is medium rare.

We’ve spent enough time together that I should know him.

But I don’t.

I’ve only ever met the man he wants me to meet. The real man never seems to arrive.

To me, he is a man who exercises every day, drinks his coffee, keeps up with local news and politics, and plays sudoku. Every so often he calls to remind me he’s getting older and wants to make sure he can live with me before he dies. Then he says his “fortune” will become mine.

I’ve always believed people can change. For a long time, I thought he had. In his old age, I thought maybe he’d become like Jimmy.

He is mostly honest when I ask him questions. Brutally honest. But there’s something dark that settles into the room when you sit with him. It’s never just the two of us. His demons always seem to pull up a chair.

There’s a reason he can’t sleep with the light off, he deadbolts his room door, and he still looks over his shoulder even though he lives across the map from Charleston. What’s after him doesn’t need transportation.

When I ask him about the rumors I’ve heard, he doesn’t deny much. He tells me I’ll almost certainly find more siblings someday, but he has no information about them.

He has endless stories about the time at the motel. Some of them involve people who, according to him, never made it home. He’s told me things my mother always questioned were true—with gruesome details.

It’s not the stories that make me believe he hasn’t changed. It’s the smirk that accompanies them.

Some stories will have to wait until the day he’s no longer with us. He’s still my father.

My siblings never spoke about him until I was an adult. Once, I told my sister that my mother always said the best thing he ever did for me was stay out of my life.

Without hesitation, she told me it was true.

She told me what it had been like growing up with him. Violence. Paranoia. Danger. Fear. My siblings have no memories of him that they look back on fondly.

People escaped my father.

We all have dimples—one more prominent than the other. To this day, I cannot tell you a single time they’ve appeared during a story about him.

None of us have his last name.

He didn’t grow up like this. He grew up in California with his stepfather who was in the military and treated his mother well. He came from a well-respected family in Charleston. They aren’t known for what he became. They are known for public service, business, and the family name they spent generations building. They tried to help him more than once. Eventually, there was nothing left to do but let him go.

When they cut ties with him, our connection was severed too.

I don’t blame them. Looking back now, I understand they were trying to protect what was left of the family. But we were children. We lost grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, holidays, stories, and history before we were old enough to understand why.

This was our inheritance. Not just the absence or torment of a father.

The absence of an entire family.

I took this picture because I wanted to know that the ghost I’d spent my life chasing was real. Once I understood half of me was missing, I needed proof that he existed outside of what I was told about him. This was one of the heaviest pieces of my story to carry.

Thankfully, it wasn’t all of it.

I didn’t grow up fatherless. I’ve had a dad since I was six years old. For as long as I can remember.

You’ve met these two men exactly as I did. One through stories, siblings, and rumors. The other through ordinary moments. Driving the car when I saw my biological father. Opening the door when my siblings showed up. Sitting quietly in the background, never asking to be introduced.

I’ll refrain from calling him my stepdad anymore.

He’s my dad.

We were once in a gas station when a woman told us we resembled each other. “Same nose,” she said. We laughed and laughed when we got in the car. He said, “You know what they say, baby. Feed ‘em til they look like ya.”

He was not perfect. He was always present. He still is, fourteen years after my mom’s passing. The greatest thing my biological father ever gave me wasn’t his presence.

It was the chance for another man to raise me.

Now let me introduce you to him.

Bunchie’s name rearranged the room without him ever stepping inside.

I wasn’t scared. My mother had told me countless times that Bunchie was her favorite. Although I had never met my brother, she’d told me he was funny, charming, and respectful.

When I stepped onto the porch, Mike was smiling.

“Hey, Jennifer,” he said, happy to see me, joking around like always.

Then I looked at Bunchie.

“Do you know who I am?”

I hesitated. “You’re my brother.”

He smiled as I took in everything about him. He was clean-cut, dressed well, and something about that night made me realize my father’s world didn’t end with him. My brothers were part of it. Inheritance isn’t always pretty.

My brothers looked like money.

I remember thinking I resembled Bunchie more than I did my other siblings. Maybe it was just the fact that his skin was lighter, since I am the only mixed sibling. He was quiet. He was tall.

I expected someone connected so closely to my father to be loud. Bigger than life. Flashy. Instead, Bunchie seemed comfortable saying very little. He didn’t seem interested in proving who he was to anyone. Everyone already knew. There was a quiet confidence about him.

Mike was in good spirits, but Bunchie’s face had settled into something more serious. His eyes were red. As a child, I didn’t think much of it. As an adult, I suspect he was under the influence of something. Even so, he didn’t seem disconnected. Nothing about him seemed out of control. If anything, he seemed ready. Not looking for trouble, but prepared for it if it found him.

He asked me how I was doing.

“I’m good.”

He leaned down just a little to get a better look at my face.

“You sure?”

There was something different about the way he asked it. Not casual. Not polite. Like the answer mattered. He wanted to know if I was being mistreated. If someone was hurting me.

I looked at Mike. He was talking to ease the tension, but for the life of me I can’t remember what he said. Bunchie was intimidating in the calmest, softest way. I was intrigued by him.

I told him everything was fine.

He hadn’t come just to meet me. And I got the feeling that if my answer had been different… everything else would have been too.

Bunchie told me to let him know if anything ever went wrong. I told him I would. Mike pulled out his wad of twenty-dollar bills to slip me a few, as always. I told him I couldn’t accept it. He said that was fine—he’d put it under the doormat and I could get it before school the next day.

I went to bed smiling. Just knowing someone on that side of my family cared. My siblings cared.

It was the first time I realized there was a hierarchy I didn’t understand then. I do now. Bunchie’s name carried weight and his presence changed the rules.

I didn’t know it, but it would be the only time I’d ever see him.

I cherish the memory because, in so few words, he made me feel like I mattered enough that the night couldn’t end without him checking on me.

It’s all I have left of him.

A while later I told my mom I understood my father’s lifestyle was dangerous. I knew she was only trying to protect me, but I still wanted to know who he was. I still wanted to meet him, and eventually I would. She nodded and walked out of my room, quietly shutting the door behind her.

A few minutes later, the door cracked open. Without saying a word, she slid something across my vanity and quietly closed the door again.

I got up to look and couldn’t believe what I was looking at. The same ring I’d thrown into the woods over a year ago. There was no way she’d gone back into those woods and found it.

Somehow, she had.

For years, I knew my father through everyone except my father. He never showed himself. The people around him did.

We connected on our own when I was in my early twenties. He knew where I’d lived, who I babysat for, and could describe specific details from my childhood. He said he’d driven past me playing outside numerous times, and I didn’t have a clue.

This didn’t erase his absence. It complicated it.

I let him talk about everything before I had my own questions. I’d finally been able to sit and talk with the man behind all the stories. What surprised me wasn’t what he hid.

It was what he admitted so matter-of-factly.

Cruel, I thought.

My mother said this to me more than once and I hated hearing that. This was my dad. No, the best thing he could’ve done was be there, so I thought. She felt she couldn’t tell me the whole story but told me never to hold against my father what happened between them as it had nothing to do with me.

What she did tell me was that they met when she was walking home from high school. She was 18, in her senior year, and he had a Porsche. They would drive around, laugh, talk, and she’d met his mother. She specifically remembered the dashboard lighting up.

But now I had questions. A Porsche? How? Questions she’d managed to coast through my childhood without answering were suddenly coming at her all at once. Over time, I gathered that my father was a millionaire but not the kind with stocks, an investment portfolio, and bank accounts.

The kind with big black bags stuffed with cash. The kind with barrels of product buried in the ground. Money hidden in walls. Product hidden beside it. Protected by fear. No one dared try to take it from him. A man with the biggest empire of its sort in Charleston, but one I could never be proud of.

Allegedly.

My mother told me she tried to make it work. She brought me around him for a while, but the more time she spent there, the more his life revealed itself.

He had lied about his age by twenty years. He was three months older than her father. He had multiple children with multiple women. One of my brothers is only four months younger than me.

She told me about the time a woman kept riding by the house my mother lived in with her parents. The woman made a wrong turn, ending up in my grandparent’s ditch.

My grandmother came outside with a cigarette in hand and tapped on the woman’s window to ask her for a light. The woman barely cracked her window enough to slide a lighter through. She told my grandmother she hoped she knew that my mother was pregnant with a black man’s baby.

My grandmother told the woman she was aware and she had called the proper authorities for the woman to help her out. The woman sat there shaking while my grandmother waited, right there, for emergency services to arrive. While finishing her cigarette.

Another time a woman rammed my mother’s car from behind, pushing her through the red light with me in the car. She was terrified. An ambulance happened to be driving by and stopped to help.

During one of our few talks about him, my mother gave me a ring. We were outside by her fire pit. Cool breeze, crackling wood. One of those Carolina nights where you can smell the marsh and pluff mud.

She placed it in my hand - a big diamond solitaire ring with a 14k gold band. My father gave it to her when I was two, asking her to save it until I was older. She’d held onto it for more than a decade. She wasn’t sure how he came about this ring, due to his line of “work” but said I could take it to a jewelry store to verify its value if I wanted.

“Try it on, see if it fits.”

I did and it did. I wore it for a few seconds before I took it off and threw it as far as I could into the thick woods behind our house. She was surprised but not upset. I didn’t want some ring from a man I didn’t know.

My heart was cold toward him, but my siblings—his other children—were always just a random knock at the door. My sister. My brothers. I knew them long before him. Whether through one of their mothers or on their own, they always found me. As an adult, I realized who had been giving them the address all along.

Even after we moved, it didn’t matter. There’d be a knock at the door. Sometimes it was my sister, Cheri. Sometimes it was my older brother, Mike.

Somehow, my father always knew where I was.

One night there was another knock. I was already in bed, but I wasn’t asleep. My stepdad answered the door. A few moments later, I heard him tell my mom it was too late for me to go outside. She agreed and walked to the front door to tell Mike I had already gone to bed. My bedroom was close enough that I could hear the voices.

Instead she said, “one moment.”

She quietly closed the front door and came back inside.

I heard her tell my stepdad, “No, Bunchie is here.” She opened my bedroom door and told me I needed to go outside. No explanation. No discussion.

The rules had changed.

I knew Bunchie was my brother, but I’d never met him before.

As I walked through the front door and stepped onto the porch, only one thought kept running through my mind.

Why is Bunchie such a big deal?

I was 12 years old when my stepfather pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store in Charleston. He ran inside to grab a few things. I chose to stay in the car.

That’s when I saw him.

The man behind the counter. The moment I looked at him, something happened. Even now, I struggle to explain it. It felt like an electric current ran through my body while I was staring at him. I didn’t recognize him and when he glanced my way, we locked eyes for a split second and he looked away again. When he looked back up at me, the electric feeling got stronger.

He looked away again. My stepdad got back in the car and I immediately told him “I think that’s my dad.” My stepfather wasn’t sure he heard what I said and asked me to repeat myself so I did. We had a silent ride home, only a couple of minutes, but when we got back to the apartment my stepdad sent me to my room and immediately went to talk to my mother.

It wasn’t long I was waiting in my room. Wondering what I did or said wrong. Confused by a feeling I had never experienced over a man I didn’t even know. My mom walked in the room and sat on the edge of my bed and questioned me. She wanted to know what made me say what I said in the car with my stepdad.

There was no way I could put into words what I didn’t understand so I told her what happened. I was looking at the man and was overcome with a feeling that felt like I was being shocked or something. She listened intently and she was quiet long enough for me to feel the silence in the room. I didn’t notice she was holding something in her hand until she placed it in front of me on my bed. A picture.

“I don’t know how the hell you knew that was your father, but you are right.”

It was a picture of the same man I saw in that convenience store. I flipped it over. His name was written on the back.

Intuition.

It wasn’t just that I recognized him, which seemed impossible. It was his double take looking at me. He knew exactly who I was too.

That was the first crack. Over the next couple of years I learned more about the man I thought worked at a convenience store. He didn’t really work there. It was one piece of a much larger story.

My father inherited businesses and property from his father. One of them was a motel. Not the kind most people picture. This one rented rooms by the hour instead of the day. In Charleston, people called it a quickie motel. You can draw your own conclusions about what kinds of business that brought through. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what any of it meant.

It started with a neighbor.

I babysat for her from time to time, and one day she asked me a question that seemed simple enough.

“Who’s your dad?”

I answered with the name written on the back of the one picture I had. The look on her face changed immediately. There was a pause. A hesitation. A carefulness that hadn’t been there a moment before.

Over the years, other people asked me the same question. And every time I gave the same answer, I got the same reaction. It was all in the eyes. The measured words. The look that seemed to say they knew something I didn’t. My answer was only two words, but those two words consistently produced the same expression on the faces of grown adults. The only way I can describe it is fear.

It was never their words that told me the story. In fact, not one of them ever did tell me. It was their faces. Long before anyone explained who my father was, I learned to watch what happened when people heard his name. The story was never in what they said. It was in what they didn’t.

I started noticing a pattern. The elephant in the room was becoming too large to ignore. I went home with questions.

Why did people react like that?

Why did these people who knew my mother not know my father’s name until I said it?

And once I did, how did they all seem to know exactly who he was?

Who was he really?

What wasn’t my mother telling me?

I was about to find out.

That’s not entirely true.

By the time the stranger entered the story, the cracks were already there. But the man who finally forced Jimmy Goff to look in the mirror had never met him before.

The night the reckoning happened, Jonathan gave my grandfather an American flag after returning from a tour in Iraq. Jimmy was speechless over the gift. Still. Teary-eyed. I was surprised seeing tears well up, but he held strong and didn’t cry.

I could tell he was deep in thought all evening. It seemed to me like he was hurting, and even though I was back around, I felt he deserved that conviction. I still do. I don’t regret those years of silence and absence at all. In fact, I wish I’d done it sooner.

He was staring into his glass of bourbon, smoke from his cigarette hanging in the air, shoulders slumped.

You blink and your grandparents start to look old. It seems it happened overnight, even though you’ve watched every smile line and wrinkle develop through the years.

My grandfather was getting old.

He turned and locked eyes with me. My eyes were already on him. I didn’t break my gaze. He didn’t break his.

Jimmy told me his truck had broken down one night on a dark road. Just him and the cicadas. No cell phone, no street lights, no protection. As he leaned over trying to figure out how to fix it, he felt something cold and familiar pressed against the back of his neck. I imagine it was similar to the kind Jimmy kept by his front door. The one I was told not to touch since I could walk. That was firearm safety in the 80’s.

He put his hands up and a man asked him what he was doing on his property.

Terrified, he explained that his truck had broken down. He told the man he was on his way home. He would get it fixed and get off the man’s land. The man thought about it for what seemed much longer than it probably was and decided my grandfather would go home that day.

When Jimmy turned around, he looked up to see a black man. The stranger helped him get his truck back on the road and shook his hand before he left.

Jimmy lost sleep that night.

The irony wasn’t lost on him. He had been at the mercy of his self-proclaimed enemy. Vulnerable.

My grandfather said that was the moment things changed for him. He saw himself in a man that looked nothing like him. He would’ve reacted the same way if someone were on his property. Same gun. Same question. But he received help and wasn’t turned away.

After a long pause, Jimmy said, “that man could’ve ended me.”

No hesitation, I said “he could’ve.”

But what I thought was ‘would you have?’

Jimmy didn’t stop there.

He talked about my biological grandmother. He talked about things he’d said that should’ve never been said. He talked about mistakes that had followed him. Things I’d never heard. It was like he’d been carrying it around for years. Decades.

A lifetime.

Tears were flowing now. Not from me, from him. A man I had never seen cry. Not the kind of tears people cry when they're caught. The kind people cry when they're finally honest. Grandma Tootie hollered from the kitchen for him to stop. I told him we should cut the conversation. He got stern with both of us saying no, dammit, he needed to get this out. So we listened.

That’s when I realized he wasn’t just apologizing to me. He was grieving. A long life spent hating a race of people for no reason. Something he was taught as a little boy. Only to find out he was wrong. Dead wrong.

The apology was real. The tears were real. The regret was real. And so was everything that came before it. I will never know who that stranger was. And that stranger will never know he handed my grandfather a mirror.

Regret is the heaviest thing a person can carry.

I was at his bedside years later. Death didn’t beat my Buick to Jimmy, but we didn’t have long. The bill had come due.

He could barely talk anymore. Skin and bones. Before then, I’d never been in his room while he was in it. I sat on his bed as he laid there. He recognized me, for sure. I knew this was our last talk, but he had already gifted me every word he could say while he could still say them. There was nothing to go over. I told him I loved him and to hug my mama for me.

He whispered, “I will.”

He passed a week or two later.

I went to visit his property earlier this year. The house was destroyed from squatters ripping copper out of the walls. The land was overgrown. One old confederate flag license plate sat rusting outside the garage.

There was a sign inside written on cardboard. Someone who was there to see the destruction before me. It read “this was a good man’s home.”

I smiled at that.

Was it?

I spent years trying to figure out which version of Jimmy Goff was real.

In the end, they both were.

He learned late that the line he’d drawn between people wasn’t nearly as real as he thought. I already knew because I’d lived on both sides of that line, whether a blessing or a curse. My grandfather spent his life limiting himself to one.

Half.

Love y’all. Mean it. ♥️

It was triggered by my last visit to their house. Grandma Tootie and I were in her bedroom talking when I noticed all my daughter’s framed pictures on a writing desk in their bedroom. Privately displayed where she could see them. I asked her why they were all there. I had an idea why but I wanted to hear it. If you want to cut me in half, make it swift. She told me my grandfather wouldn’t let her put them in the living room with the other grandchildren’s photos. I shot back “because she’s black?”

She said she told him it wasn’t my fault, and he was just holding onto hope that I’d turn it back around for the family. Turn it back around? I told her it was nobody’s “fault”. With that I grabbed my keys, told her I loved her, and left.

Drown in him then.

For a few years I went on with my life and rarely ran into him. My aunt would host the family holiday get togethers and he would be there.

She would tell me things like “Daddy said you’re such a good mother, the way he saw you handle the kids on Thanksgiving.” Didn’t care. “Daddy’s happy to see you.” Didn’t care. I moved around him at family events and made sure the tension was so thick and unspoken he dare not try to cut it. I never made eye contact and never let his presence stop me from walking the room. He could sit in the corner. He needed to.

I had been married to Jonathan a few years by then. My mother and aunt lived on the same property on John’s Island. One afternoon we pulled in with three small children in tow, our four-year-old, our two-year-old, and a newborn.

As soon as we arrived I saw the truck parked in front of my aunt’s house. My grandfather was sitting on the open tailgate, staring at the ground and swinging his feet like a little boy waiting to be picked up.

I ignored him and went inside.

Immediately, I asked my mom why he was there. I don’t even recall if my mom told me why because Jonathan had so many questions. He asked me why he looked sad. I told him it doesn’t matter, he’s racist. Don’t talk to him.

Now he wanted to know why hadn’t he heard me talk much about my grandfather? How did I know he was racist? Again, why did he look sad?

I brushed him off by repeating the most important fact. He. Is. Racist. Just leave him there.

I went back to talking to my mom. The next thing I knew I was at the screen door watching Jonathan across the field at my grandfather’s truck. Talking to him. Smiling and laughing with the one person I had sworn I’d never speak to again. Crossing enemy lines.

Traitor.

“He’s not racist. He talked to me, was kind, and invited me to his house. We should go.”

Hell no, we ain’t goin’.

A week or so later, on the drive, I finally told Jonathan the truth. My grandfather had been the most important person in my life. It was easier to erase him than admit he had let me down. He ruined my perfect view of him by not seeing me, fully. I warned him. Don’t give him a chance to hurt you too. Jonathan kept driving.

I remember hugging Grandma Tootie for a long while and breathing her in.

Jonathan stayed up all night talking to my grandfather. I took the kids to bed. They kept talking. I remember thinking one N-word and this trip is over. One racist joke. One slur. That was all it was going to take.

Only thing was, Jimmy never said it. The same man who had used that word like punctuation my entire childhood never said it around Jonathan.

Growing up, he hadn’t used that word toward me. But if he was watching a boxing match and the fighter he’d bet on started losing, he’d let it fly.

Around Jonathan, not once. In fact, I never heard it again after Jonathan either.

We’d visit and they’d talk for hours. It became their thing. One night he told Jonathan he liked him more than both his daughter’s husbands and regretted giving away his gun collection before Jonathan came along. He would’ve really liked to save him one to give him.

Jimmy would get up early, pull out enough venison sausage for everybody, then spend the morning hauling my kids around the land in a trailer attached to his lawnmower. They’d come back filthy, happy, and begging for another ride. They formed quick bonds like him and I once had.

Even after Jonathan joined the Army, I still went. Mostly for my grandmother.

One of those nights, my grandmother mentioned she’d better get to bed. I told her we ought to drive to North Carolina instead and visit her daughters.

She laughed. “Jennifer Nicole.”

It was after midnight. She was scared to ask. I wasn’t. She bet Jimmy would surely say no. I wish she had bet money. He said yes…but only under one condition.

She packed a bag, slid her pearl-handled .32 into the glovebox (the one condition) and we rode off into the night.

Whenever Jonathan could get to Jimmy, he would. They’d watch Clint Eastwood movies until my grandfather fell asleep talking.

It was the last time they saw each other that’s burned into my memory.

I did not change my grandfather. He loved me because I was blood. I just happened to be black too, but I was the exception to the rule.

Jonathan wasn’t.

That night in the living room it was just me, Jonathan, Jimmy and Tootie, talking. My grandfather grabbed a cigarette and lit it with the quick spin of his zippo lighter. He got some Evan Williams in him and stared into his glass of bourbon while the ash built up on his cigarette. The only way to tell he was deep in thought.

At the time I wondered what he was thinking. I know now he was staring at the man in the mirror. He looked directly at me and we had the only deep conversation we ever had. I’d never heard him apologize to anyone and I thought, he’s apologizing to me?

Five minutes into that conversation, I realized this wasn’t an apology.

This was a reckoning.

Love y’all. Mean it. ♥️

But Jimmy adored me.

And I mean that. He could never bring himself to say no to me. Not once. After 9 months of telling my mama she couldn’t bring me home, he folded. I had been earthside for one day. My grandmother was in love with me. My mama was packing me and my stuff up, one day shy of having to give me up for adoption. Her little sister was over the moon, excited her niece got to come home. And Jimmy…he was cooking a feast. When asked what the special occasion was, he told people his granddaughter was coming home that day.

My first pet was a horse, a gift from him. He taught me how to shoot. How to fish. How to grow food. How to spot a good tomato before it was ripe. How to smell when the rain was coming.

He taught me how to take care of the cows in the field, even though he never actually made me do the work. He made sure I had the best health insurance, the best clothes, and the biggest first Christmas. His sun rose and set on me.

He was Lucky Strike cigarettes, Evan Williams on the rocks, Solitaire, Randy Travis on the radio. A pool shark. A retired boilermaker. He kept a stern facial expression, but I could make him smile. He was my first best friend and came with unlimited piggy back rides.

That was real.

But I told y'all I'd be honest.

Jimmy was also mean as a snake. My grandmother called out of work one day because she wasn’t feeling well. She was outside tanning when she realized her job could ride by, see her out there, and think she lied, so she went inside. My grandfather told her since she was always so sick she may as well lay on the couch and die. What he didn’t expect was that she did exactly that, that same day. A blood clot made sure those were some of the last words he said to her. I was two years old.

After that, my mother moved us away. She never intended to stay with her father.

But, I’d still go back and visit. I had a step grandmother in no time, and this woman was an angel. In fact, she’s the only grandmother I remember and I was more fond of her than Jimmy. When I would go to his house I chose to spend all my time with her.

She was embarrassed by the Confederate flags. Ashamed of them. Every trip to the grocery store she’d complain about the sticker on the back of his truck. She didn’t want people to think his views were her views.

She’d hang clothes on the line and I’d cover my face with my shirts when they came back in, breathing in the smell of summer. She made my meals on time every day, kept the house spotless, and dishes were done immediately after dinner. We had a bond so deep that she is the reason I figured out angels sometimes entertain the devil. She’s the reason I realized my grandfather was cruel.

He would call her “fatty” like it was her name. I never saw him show affection towards her. I remember her being scared if he started drinking before 6pm because the mental abuse would last longer for her if he got drunk sooner. He drank himself to sleep every night and the more liquor he got in him, the more he had to say. Being married to him was an endless humiliation ritual for her. “Get me another drink fatty. That’s all you’re good for.” And she’d pour another one.

He’d force her to play cards and degrade her whether she won or lost. He’d tell cruel jokes about her around family and some of them would laugh, uncomfortably. She wasn’t the only one. He was hard on women. Hard on children too.

I can not tell you why I seemed to be the only one in this bubble of protection around him.

I sat with that for a long time as a child. Tried to hold both things at once - the grandfather who put me on a pedestal and the man his own wife had to arm herself against. I told myself I could keep them separate. That I could love the version of him that loved me and just…not look at the rest.

But you can't.

Because the thing I had to learn - the thing that took me years - is that just because he wasn’t evil toward me didn’t mean he wasn’t evil.

He was nice to me. That was real. But his niceness to me was never the whole story. I just wasn't looking at the other people in the room. I wasn't asking what it cost them to stand where I was standing. I felt comfortable as a child, so I let myself believe comfort was the truth.

It wasn't.

Babies grow up. And the older I got the more I felt compelled to challenge him. Part of it was rebellion, but most of it was realizing I was the only one in his life that could challenge him, stand up to him, break him. And as a preteen, watching how he treated this woman for so long, I wanted to break him. In half.

I stopped talking to him. When I came to visit, I’d only talk to my grandma. It was years later when my grandmother told me something that severed the tie completely between my grandfather and I.

Our conversation ended with me telling her words I will never forget.

I told her the next time I’d see that man would be when he was in a casket. I promised her that, grabbed my keys, and left. Cut it off clean. First silence, then absence.

Except, promises tend to be broken. And mine broke years later in the most unlikely way, through the most unlikely person.

But that’s a story for next time.

I spent most of my childhood believing my grandfather hung the moon. Then I got old enough to see who was standing in the dark.

Love y’all. Mean it. ♥️

When my mom found out she was pregnant with me, she was 19 and just graduated high school. She loved horror movies, skating at Stardust, and going to see a local band play. She had a best friend that was crazy funny and loved Rod Stewart. They’d smoke jays together & write each other letters I still have.

My mama’s mama was a Patsy Cline fan. My mama was a Chaka Khan fan.

She had wild curly hair, somewhere between red & brown. Covered in freckles. She had an infectious smile and wit so quick, you might miss the joke and catch it later while still thinking about it.

Finding out she was pregnant with me wasn’t a shock to her. I’m not sure how she went about telling her parents, but I would bet on the fact that she didn’t tell them the truth. I was planned. My mother and father had a discussion about conceiving me before I came along. It wasn’t the best decision because neither of them were in a position to bring me here, but it is the decision they made.

Her parents didn’t take it well. My grandfather was raised the backwoods way, and he didn’t believe in mixing races. My grandfather’s sister was raised the exact same way, but her plan was to adopt me. Her views were different and she wanted me to stay in the family. She was told she’d have to be married before that could happen. Her anniversary falls in October, a few days before my birthday. A sweet reminder.

My mother’s aunt on her mama’s side had a different offer. She would pay for my mom to terminate the pregnancy and pay her way through college. Now, I only know that because my mother told me. I was in my preteen years when she revealed it.

Riding home from a family event, she let the story flow out. I knew this aunt. I’d been to her house. She’d be first to smile and talk to me at family events. I think back and wonder why my mom told me these stories so young. It never felt intended to hurt me but more so served as a warning.

That was the thing about my mama. Even if people changed, she told me the whole truth. Things I would’ve never known, stemming back to when I was in her womb. She taught me the skill and burden of hypervigilance at a young age. Some gifts come with weight.

She taught me to watch people, watch their body language, listen to what they say, and hear what they don’t say. Maybe not a direct lesson, but a lesson nonetheless. She made sure I never walked into a room blind, as soon as I could understand enough for her to take off the blindfold.

Through my adolescence, she worked full time, paid a home babysitter, and rented the cheapest apartment in the best public school district she could afford. She positioned me where I could get the best education she could give me and made sure I was drowning in books.

She insisted I had to be smart and often reminded me:

“Beauty is skin deep, but ugly is to the bone.”

She was Saturdays with the windows open to air out the house, deep cleaning, Otis Redding, Whitney Houston, or Toni Braxton in the CD player. Dinner cooked every night. Sundays with a pastor on the tv, because we weren’t going to church but she wasn’t going to let a Sunday pass without the Lord in the house.

She was Marlboro lights, sweet tea, and lawn chairs with something good to read outside in the sun. She was the kind of best friend where you could pull up to her house at any time and you were welcome. She was loyal, funny, and superstitious.

And when her little sister ran into the hospital room and yelled “daddy said you can keep your baby” she didn’t hesitate.

I was hers. Adoption was off the table.

She filled my shelves with books, my head with stories, and my eyes with the truth. And I think that’s where this story really begins. With her.

Love y’all. Mean it. ♥️

Charleston raised me. The Deep South raised me. Black culture raised me. Country white people raised me too. None of it was simple. All of it was real.

Nobody really knows my full backstory, and honestly, I’ve never told it because it’s complicated. Of course it is.

I’m mixed. My mom kept me in the city, but I spent many summers with the white side of my family in the Deep South. Very country areas. Trailers. Dirt roads. Crowded houses. Farmland. Muscadine wine and apple pie moonshine. Jars of sweet pickles and tomato sandwiches with tomatoes out of the garden. And yes, there were confederate flags around me growing up. Flying in the yard, in the houses, on the garages, tattoos, license plates. You name it.

And no, I am not in support of the confederate flag, nor the history tied to it.

We are talking about my mama’s daddy’s side, specifically. Hardworking people. Country people. Imperfect people. People carrying their own pain and struggles. Military ties. When I look back now, I can see the dysfunction. I see the things that weren’t healthy or perfect. As with any family.

But what’s difficult to explain is that I was fiercely protected from ALL of it by this same family. Fiercely. I can say that with even more certainty now knowing some of the family members were not protected which saddens me.

I was the first black child in the bloodline. I was never in harm’s way. Never physically abused, no emotional or mental abuse, never molested. I was never even yelled at. If I walked into a room, every face lit up. I absolutely, undeniably felt like I was the favorite.

& I know some of them might come into the comments and say, “we never saw color.” But that wouldn’t be true. They absolutely saw it. They talked about how beautiful my skin tone was, how pretty I was, how smart I was. They’d compare their arms to mine to see if they did enough tanning to be darker than me. I was made to feel special everywhere I went, every time I went.

Which is part of why racial issues as absolutes became layered for me later in life. When the world started trying to hand me rigid definitions about identity, hatred, and belonging, it didn’t fully match the childhood I lived.

A few months ago, I went back to visit the woman who almost became my mother. My great aunt, my grandfather’s sister. When I was in my mother’s womb they weren’t sure if she was going to be able to keep me because of my grandfather’s views.

At least ten years had passed since I hugged her. I didn’t remember her being so short. Time had gone by, but the love was still solid. And one of the things that hit me hardest was the house. What I remembered as a huge home, I realized as an adult was just a tiny place.

Love has a way of making small places feel enormous when you’re little. I walked in and only two people were there, my great Aunt & Uncle Billy who was planning to adopt me along with her. (He finally took out his nipple piercings.) Within thirty minutes four different generations were in that space just because I showed up, no notice.

I know this story might make some people uncomfortable because it doesn’t fit neatly into what people think they know about race, family, or the South. But it’s the truth. I am aware that this isn’t everyone’s experience and it wasn’t my full childhood experience but on my mama’s daddy’s side, I was loved loudly my entire life.

I’m sharing this because I think stories like this deserve room to exist. Two things can be true at once. That’s all I’m sayin.

Love y’all. Mean it. ♥️

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You don’t have to do anything. But if you do, I see it. And I’m grateful.

Jennifer

P.S. Paid or free - both count. Just get them in the door.