AN OBITUARY

I didn’t know my father before he died, and I didn’t care, really, until I learned of his death. Even then, I wasn’t allowing myself the emotional space to mourn. Why should I cry over the death of someone who abandoned my family and me? I was wrong to think this way. I’m sorry. As tough as I like to seem, I am actually a sensitive man. I felt the weight of my father’s absence at every turn of my youth – father/son nights, prom, graduation, etc. My mom, for her part, loved me dearly and well enough for me to mature as a (somewhat) balanced adult. Despite her enduring love, I could not fill the gap left by my father, not fully, because I am a product of two people not one. I’ve grown with this chip on my shoulder. It still hurts when I carry my load in life.

One of the great ironies of my life is the music I make. I’ve been writing poems and reciting them since I was 11 years old. By my mid-20s I was recording my poems to music and performing them to live audiences. No one on my mom’s side makes music or has my level of enthusiasm for it. Music is in the fabric of my life, but no one in my household was cut from that cloth.

That’s when I started to think about my father again. I have two heirlooms of his. One is a picture of my mom and him standing together. He was tall, dark, slim, and well-dressed, smoking a cigarette, smiling as cool as can be. This picture is how I came to understand my blackness, my smoking habit, and my way with people, especially women. The second heirloom is a vinyl album, called “Eddy Wilson Y Su Tren Latino.” My father sings on this album; he has a solo called “Angelitos Negros.” The song was first published in 1948, written and performed by Antonio Machin, Spanish-Cuban singer and musician. Machin derived the song from a nineteenth-century poem by Andres Eloy Blanco, a Venezuelan poet and statesmen. In the 1960s, the song was popularized by Roberta Flack. Perhaps on the song’s 30^th anniversary, my father, with the help of producer Eddy Wilson, created an operatic version of this Latino classic, and I have the good fortune to possess the album.

I go back and forth with this. Part of me is still mad that my father left, and that part wants to reject the song and what it means to me. The other part, an evolving version of me, thinks it is SO F****** COOL that my father was on an album and that he sang so beautifully. Every part of me, however, knows that my passion for music – specially, its creation and performance – comes from this man I never met.

So, here I am, working through the perils of my past, at last proud of the man I am and the man my father, through no effort of his own, made me. After decades and decades of life, I realize that I have a choice about how to feel about my father’s absence. Though it weighs on me, my back has broadened, and my shoulders have filled out. I can carry both the sadness of a bastard and the joy of my music, both I see as extending from the same root. Herein lies the irony. In Blanco’s poem, the narrator laments that “No hay pintor que pintara Angelitos de mi pueblo” (there are no painters of little angels from my town). Presumably, the town was a black town, and the painters only painted the beauty known as whiteness. Well, I paint angels in my art, and they’re almost always black. The first little black angel, in fact, is my father, the man who gave me a gift that no other influence in my life could give me.

For that, my father, I forgive you. May you rest in peace.