My sophomore in college, I lived away from home for the first time at a college located a mere 300 miles away from home. The summer before this milestone in my life, my father died of Hodgkin’s Disease six months after he was diagnosed. May 29, 1994.
He was a tall man, 6’6” to be accurate, who was respectfully known as “Joe,” a nickname given him, although I don’t know by whom, for his handy ability to fight like the prizefighter Joe Louis. As legend goes, he only fought in his adolescent years to fulfill his role as big brother and protector to his younger sister and brother. To me, this image of my dad is unfathomable. He was the gentlest man I knew and have known since. I was born well after his prizefighting days. For 20 years, I knew him as my father “Joe” Green, whom I affectionately called “Daddy.” It’s not an usual name, but for me, the name is accompanied by vivid memories that will sustain me until I am able to see him, I believe, again.
By most people’s standards, I am no little girl. At the age of 10, I was taller than the average soccer mom thanks for my father and my 6-foot mother. I was the youngest of three and a little girl—his little girl. As a little girl, thanks to Daddy, I would always find myself in my bed at night, even though I had fallen asleep on the couch in the kitchen while watching television. Once in bed, it was guaranteed that every night, around midnight, we would hear his size 15 feet drag on the hallway carpet as he checked all of the doors and windows one last time. An ex-boyfriend used to joke with me about dragging my feet on the carpet, but it wasn’t until this year that a friend made the connection that maybe my affinity for carpet, a rarity in my new home of Brooklyn, New York, where most inhabitants favor hardwood floors, was because of my memories of Daddy’s nightly journey up and down our hallway.
During any long day in the milder-temperatured, day Daddy was guaranteed to be spending his time in one of four places: Number one: in our backyard, a piece of land that by today’s standards would be large enough to build another home on. When he was in the backyard, I would bring him my special brew of southern, sweet lemonade in a plastic tumbler from our collection. They were colored blue or yellow, but were clear enough to show the pile of sugar at the bottom. Our backyard was a place of escape for Daddy to play with his “toys” of scrap metal, broken bikes or box fans that lacked a red or blue wire or just a touch from Daddy’s informally-trained, mechanically-minded hands. He gained his fortune from other people’s trash. He was a garbage man and long before the term “sanitation engineer” became more politically correct; he took pride in his work, often rising before the sun, or as the family said, “with the chickens,” to go to work early enough to wash his truck. He even made the newspaper once because he was the model worker. From his respect for the job, I learned to take pride in work, no matter what the job.
Number two: at his mother’s house every Saturday. My mom used to say of my grandmother Roxie’s weekly trips, “Who needs to go to the store every Saturday? She’s just gonna pick it up and put it back down.” I think my father took my Grandma Roxie out of the unspoken duty that a black man has to his mother, rather than her necessity. It’s one of those things that “you just don’t understand” as the popular 1990s phrase went.
Number three: helping the neighbors with whatever handy job they were tackling at the time. Most of the time, he was at Mr. Harris’ house, helping him saw something just right or allowing Mr. Harris to borrow a tool from his healthy collection. Daddy never charged them for his time or service, nor did he “expect” a returned favor. Mom would talk about Daddy’s free services to the neighbors, as if it was a bad thing, but to me, it just showed that you can’t put a price on everything. He did it because he enjoyed it and I believe because it was what he thought he was supposed to do as a good neighbor.
Number four: at the scrap metal yard, selling either cans or spare metal from other treasures he had discovered in his daily adventures around the city. If he were in the mood for my company, he would allow me to tag along on any of these adventures. It would just be him and me in his ’58 turquoise Chevy pick-up, with the glass windows down and our elbows similarly hanging out, his out the driver’s window and mine out of the passenger’s window. I knew where almost every scrap metal yard was in town and enjoyed the warm welcome the scrap yard owners offered Daddy when he would roll the truck on the big scale and we debarked. They knew, as well as he did, that he would have some good stuff to weigh. In my twenty years with my dad, I was always amazed at how he would come home with enough to financially sustain the family between paychecks. He wouldn’t only sell scrap metal, but return soda bottles for the deposit or long before it became respectable, he and my mother would spend Saturdays cutting people yards all across the city. From his silent example, I learned that a real man is one who accepts his responsibilities, no how difficult the situation, who puts his family first and who can “diversify” his modes of making an honest dollar.
During my high school years, in the summer and fall, my dad would sit on the highest bleacher in some of the hottest gyms in Texas to watch me play volleyball. He would gesture like he was diving for the ball. I would count on him for a big smile when I looked up to the top of the stands for support. He continued to play along with me from the stands into my days of playing volleyball in college. On cold fall and spring nights, he was often the only supporter to sit in the stands to watch my high school soccer team play. He won an award for the best team supporter one year. He was there on a cold night in March when I sprang my ankle trying to stop a ball from going out-of-bounds. I don’t remember exactly how I landed, but I remember that I landed in the wet trenches on the downside of the soccer field. My ankle was hurting, but I knew I had stretched a ligament too far once I attempted to walk and fell to the ground again. Daddy didn’t run to my side immediately. He gave me the chance to get up on my own, I think because he wanted more than I did for me to be able to get up on my own. In the end, he was there to help me off of the field. Because I wanted to, we even stayed to watch a little more of game after my spill. It was so cold that my ankle stopped hurting after awhile.
For four years of high school, Daddy would pick me up in his burnt orange 1973 Monte Carlo. I could have easily ridden the bus, but of course I was too cool for that. For the first two years of high school, when I couldn’t decide to keep playing the flute or to focus on sports, Daddy could be depended on to take me and my teammate Ericka from our junior varsity volleyball games to the football games just in enough time to play in the half-time show.
I remember when I started college and Daddy took me to open an account at the teacher’s credit union in the small city where I would live for the next five years. He was so proud to put $400 in my account. On that day, and for the next two weeks in which I spent all of it on regular trips to Eckerd’s with my college roommate, I felt like no other student could have been so lucky. At the time, I didn’t know much about the value of money because he had always taken care of me, my mother, brother and sister by whatever honest means necessary whether by selling cans or hosting a hearty garage sale.
While in college, a hole formed in the muffler of my Dodge Shadow. Although my hometown and my college town were five hours apart, by the time I finished classes for the day, my muffler had been mysteriously replaced and shined like new. Even before college, he always supported me. He survived on an eighth grade education after he had to drop out of school to help his mother after his father died, but I can still remember his voice saying, “Did you get your lesson?” in that Texan, country dialect. I would go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in English, but to me, my dad’s jargon was one that I would always respect.
The summer of 1994 ended any chance of having new memories of my dad. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease and decided, this time, to keep it a secret from us. He had battled cancer before when I was in elementary school in the late 70s. From what my mother told me, he detested the way chemotherapy treatments made him sick, so I guess that’s why this time he decided to self-medicate. Being the simple person he was, he did not know that cancer treatment had advanced in the last 20 years. I remember the faint, white patches that began to appear on his checks. He would simply apply a little petroleum jelly as if the change was taking place from the outside in. He began to lose weight and his 356-pound body supported by his 6’6” frame began to somehow look a slight bit shorter. My mother called me home from college that summer because as a nurse, she had seen many people in their last days and recognized the symptoms as his breaths began to deepen and slow and as he began to sleep more. As my mom entered my room that morning, she woke me up with the words, “It’s time.” The man who rose before the sun for 55 years now lay in the bed for almost the entire day. It was selfish of me, but for twenty years, my dad was the strongest person I knew. I could not accept that he had changed and secretly resented him for making the decision to let the disease run its course this time.
My mother and I never discussed it, but until she called me home, I purposely stayed at school because I did not want to see my dad in that state. As my father became sicker and unable to take Grandma Roxie to her weekly grocery excursions, she became more absent. Every Saturday my father had shown up for her to “pick it up and put it down” but in his last days she was unable to comfort her son as he surrendered willingly. I understood it to be more of a selfish reason on her part, but Daddy never spoke ill of her.
On May 29, 1994, I cried on my dad’s chest as I asked him, “Why didn’t you just go to the doctor?” I don’t remember what he said because I was crying too hard to hear him. I was there when he took that last, deepest breath. It was cloudy day, just shy of rain. There was a gloom in the air. I cried uncontrollably as I listed to Aaron Hall’s “The Truth” CD repeatedly on the boom box that Daddy bought me a few months earlier, when he appeared to be well. “When you need me, oh when you need me. When you need me, I’ll be right there,” Aaron sang. His words seemed the most appropriate. “Don’t be afraid. Ain’t no need. Ain’t no need.” The words from that CD were comforting me as I continued to cry so much I could hardly breathe.
As an adult now, I know that I was beyond fortunate to have such vivid memories of my father, especially in a time where most people who look like me do not know their fathers so intimately, if they know them at all. My twenty years as my daddy’s youngest of three are years that I cherish today and will continue to appreciate for the rest of my life. Because he was different, I am different. I have chosen to appreciate life, work and purpose. When I call my dad “simple” I mean it in the best possible terms. He was comfortable—content enough in his life to be a country boy from Texas. He had an 8th grade education but helped to rear three college graduates. He educated people on how to be neighborly and showed his family, his friends and most importantly, me, how to work with the circumstances that God gives you. I guess he decided to give into the disease because he had done what he came here to do. There’s a real strength in deciding sometimes to give into what is trying to take over you. Sometimes by giving in, you really win. Some breast cancer survivors are survivors because they let go of part of them that is “diseased”; in return, they get their whole selves back. Amputees can decide to allow the removal of an arm and in return they gain arms big enough to embrace their new reality. That’s what I learned from Daddy’s decision. I often think that maybe he inventoried his life and was able to check off most of what he believed he was put here to do. Marry the love of my life at 19 and stay faithfully married until my death. Check. Raise three children who know that there is no excuse for them to not “get their lesson.” Check. Give my children and wife a stable, safe home. Check. Leave my little girl with the belief that hard work is not out-of-date; that people are put here to do what they can for the next person; that there men in the world who will honor themselves, their families and fellow man and do it effortlessly.
As an English major, I have read more than my share of poems about fathers, but none my sentiments into words more than the words Dylan Thomas wrote to his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Hugh Green went gently into that good morning, but before he left me, he instilled in me a belief that other great men like him exist.
Kimberly Green is a currently a teacher in New York City who is aspiring to work as a writer. She is originally from Austin, Texas.
