Ode To My Father

Ode to my Father

As my consciousness awakened to know and recognize people
I was introduced to my Father.
He was a man I feared for the most part, over six feet tall and a well built man. I don’t remember him laughing or having a good time much, he was mostly a serious character, seemed to have a lot on his mind most of the time.

A wife, six kids and most of them a year apart could have been part of it so now as a man I can understand but then I was just a bit standoffish towards him because he wasn’t the cuddly type.
He was a worker for his family, but he played hard also when he played.
He was a known gambler who I hear tell was a very good one also.
As I grew up I don’t know that I really got to know him like most kids would know their dad, I can still see him most of the time sitting in his easy chair watching television with a pipe in his mouth.

We had two horses, some livestock like Pigs, chickens and the like and we lived at one time on a sort of farm, with adjoining land on the side and back. One of the horses was named Dolly who was a washed up Clydesdale but she was a kind riding horse for us kids.
The other was called Nightmare and it was a wild horse that would buck anyone off who tried to ride him.

My dad was the reason we had such things in a time when a lot of black people didn’t have as much.
He surely made certain along with my mother that we had what we needed, not everything we wanted, but what we needed.
I remember times when my mother would leave him and take all the kids because not one wanted to stay with him, and I really think it affected him in ways unexplainable. But my mother always went back and there he sat in his chair looking at television with his pipe and wouldn’t even look at us as we piled back into the house.

He was a good man but a bad one also; he had his good days and bad days. My Father was an only child and I think having six helped him make up for his loneliness as a child.
He ruled the family with a stern hand and some these days would call it child abuse. He would punish the boys at times with a bull whip, and other times he would use his hands.
I for one learn to be good quickly after having a chunk of my side taken out by that whip, but my brothers were a different story and we went through some very harsh times with him and his punishing ways.

I did say at times that I hated him, but I really never did. I loved him very much no matter what, he was my Father.
We moved from our farm setting to the city when I was still in Elementary and my Father got a new job at a Bomb making factory, or better said the body of the bombs.
As I entered the ninth grade my Father had got sick and died he left six children and a wife to survive alone and it was the hardest time in my entire life. He got cancer from the factory he work at along with a lot of other men but nobody knew at the time that it came from there.

We just chalked it up to the cigarettes he smoked and the pipe.
It was a life changing time for me, I suddenly had to be a man and be strong for my mother and other siblings.
I remember at his funeral there weren’t that many people there and that wasn’t a big surprise because as I said before he was a loner.
The funny thing is, I couldn’t even cry. I just looked at him quickly and went back to my seat.

When it was all over and they buried him in the ground I looked into the sky and made up my mind that I wasn’t going to be like him, I intended to be a better father and a better person.
I also made up my mind that I was going to be someone that will be remembered for being a person who brought something to this world.
I he could only see me now, six grown children, a Black President, and a world of hope and belief that everything will eventually turn around for the better.

If he could see Black and white intermingled together into a beautiful world of love and every other race color and creed getting along with each other as one, I don’t think he would believe it.
He wasn’t a believer in hope but I was blessed enough to live long enough to see this world change under God’s Eye. “Amen”