But whenever he came, it felt like Christmas. It’s hard to explain the feeling of seeing this man to people whose fathers were a fixture of their daily lives. There it was, a tiny blue one near my tailbone. He said he was looking for a birthmark that he claimed all his children had. She remembers that when she reappeared, my father had stripped me naked. Then she handed me over to him and went looking for the restroom. She told him that she’d named her son Nicholas, after him, and even added his unusual middle name, Wimberley, to mine. “I have never seen a Black man turn that white,” she would say to me. His eyes got wide and his hands began to tremble and the hot coffee went all over the floor. It seemed he hadn’t picked up the envelope at the union hall in Southern California yet. Then he turned around and saw her clutching me, and it dawned on him that he was my father. The way my mom tells the story, he got to the restaurant before her and ordered some coffee. His ship had just docked in the Port of Oakland. One day three months later, the phone rang. She put a birth announcement into an envelope and sent it to the union hall in San Pedro, asking them to hold it for him. Nine months later, when I was born, he was still at sea. When the job on the island was up, my mom took her flight back to the United States. Eventually she signed on for a six-month stint as an ordinary seaman on a ship called the Bay, which was destined for Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean with a large military base. She joined the National Maritime Union, which represented cargo-ship workers. Then on a lark, she decided to go to sea. She had been married for a couple of years - “the only thing I kept from that marriage was my last name,” she said - worked on an assembly line, sold oil paintings, spent time as an accountant and tended bar in places including Puerto Rico, where she lived for a while in the 1970s. “The place where we made you.”īy 1983, when my mom reached Diego Garcia, she had lived many lives already. My mom told me this was called an atoll, a kind of island made of coral.
There were wisps of clouds and long trails of ships heading toward something large at the center. The book began with a postcard of a satellite image taken from miles above an inky sea. She would step on my mattress and reach onto a shelf to pull down a yellow spiral photo album that had pictures of when she worked on ships, too. To her, he represented an entire life she had given up to raise me. Before long, I would start to miss him, and it seemed to me that my mother did, too. My father never stayed for more than a few days. “Don’t listen to him, Nico,” my mother said.
He was rummaging through his bag, pulling something out - a tiny glass bottle. He got into our old Volkswagen Bug, and soon we were heading back down the highway to our home. I remember one day when we met him at the dockyard in Oakland. There was the smell of sweat and cologne on his dark skin. He had the beard that I would grow one day. From that height, I could work my fingers through his hair, black and curly like mine. But I just wanted to see him, wanted him to pick me up with his big, thickset hands that were callused from all the years in the engine room and put me on his shoulders where I could look out over the water with him. His stories were endless, his voice booming. It might have been Alaska sometimes it was Seoul or Manila. He would be visiting again from some faraway place where the ships on which he worked had taken him. There would be a meeting point somewhere outside a dockyard or in a parking lot near a pier. I remember the salty air coming across San Francisco Bay, the endless cables of the suspension bridges in the heat.
#I AM DA ONE WORDS WINDOWS#
Moments later, we would be racing down the highway with the windows rolled down. My mother would put on some makeup and fish out a pair of earrings from a tangle in the basket next to the bathroom sink. I slept in a twin bed in the living room, and I would start jumping on it, seeing if I could reach the ceiling of our mobile home with my tiny fingers. She would put down the receiver and look up at me. She would put out her cigarette, grab a sheet of paper and scribble down the address. Her eyes, just starting to show their wrinkles in those days, would fill with the memories that she shared with this man. I remember his voice on the other end of the line, muffled in the receiver against her ear. Somehow it was always my mother who answered the phone when he called.
#I AM DA ONE WORDS DOWNLOAD#
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