The tracksuit you sent me in 8th grade didn’t fit, but it smelled like you. Or like an 8-hour day of soccer runs in a Dade County park, packed up into a FedEx box, mailed to New York. I was not fond of this gift, the Jamaican flag polyester, parachute-swishing athletic gear. It showed you didn’t know me. And that I would struggle to know you. Like many failed relationships, we had our own trope.
This might have been a quiet request to be like your older son, or like you, who had tried to play professional soccer (with some success). I am a hooper, and I wear it like the worn-tongue Nike high-tops I had on when I received your parcel. I was relucantly trying out for the track team, so that part was right.
It wasn’t your first self-promoting gift to me. (By the way, this is not the proper way to give a gift. A gift should be about the receiver’s true wants and about the giver’s near overwhelming need to come as close to that want as possible, even with parent and child.) When I was in the 4th grade, you sent me a letter with your headshot — a portrait you had chosen for an Essence magazine competition for Black bachelors — an enclosed a letter about how you’d felt cheated out of your just recognition because of your shoulder-length locs. I have grown shoulder-length locs now, as well, and can attest to their beauty. They shape my face well and I knew the style would when I saw your angular cheekbones in that 1992 photo. Your beard rounded against the slope of your jawline, still strong, and your eyes were deep set but holy and wide. At the height of your powers, you were handsome. I am handsome too, though not in the same way because I have inherited my mother’s womanly cheekbones and her lips. Your nose and ears became mine, and they are some of few inheritances that make me a Ricketts.
I hear you are sick, the flesh sucked out of your frame to wherever your next stop is. I hear your room was tossed, disheveled, like a man alone and unable to care for himself. There are orders of care you always resisted, but with those came delinquency and neglect of your health. They don’t know what you’re saying now. I haven’t for some years, but hesitated to diagnose you.
Except in my writing, which I knew you lurked. In my writing, I called you all types of crazy, a coward, delusional, rigid, misogynistic, broken. You cursed me on the phone, reminding me I was my mother’s child by naming me a pussy. “So what of your contributions?” I said.
There’s not enough time to see you before you vanish. I seek to handle your remains, the piles of papers that blanketed your nights, the empty bottles, the plants.
I have questions for you that the shuffling of your affairs won’t answer. For my odyssey, I’ll chase your dreams into the ground, hoping some seed.
There was the compost barrel in your tiny lot in 1994. You had put something back into the land and grew another plant. Was that cannabis? There was another son, not biological, who you clung to, and he did to you. He seems lost. What did you tell him about us, your loin-babies?
Were there secret women? An Asian one? Another Black one? You had some reverse eugenicist streak in you that hoped the Rastafari could re-populate the race, undo some of the Euro-colonial project that had left you and your mean parents so damaged and at odds. You wanted to blend other cultures with hybrid vigor, you told me. How far did you get?
I’ll make my way to you, but I don’t know whether you can satisfy the love I’ve never experienced from a man I call my father. We will have to do with your husk what you couldn’t and find belonging.