This American project of mine is an effort to pitch the idea our country is still growing up. It attempts to pitch the idea there is enough America for everybody. Arguments about CRT and wokeness and model minorities echo the arguments about know nothings and those pesky foreigners of an earlier era. Our past can teach us so much about our present and point the way to our future.
A good story should entertain, but it can also illuminate. I hope my tale of the Thomas family does both. I want others to see America as my ancestors saw her when they stood on the outside looking in. A shining city on the hill.
I’ll do another excerpt from their story and then get back to work. There is simply too much swirling around in my head at the moment to nail just one topic. I’ll have it sorted it out by my next post in two weeks. This is from Dee’s moment in the spotlight. I hope you enjoy.
Anyway, gentle reader here we go.
Abigail Hadiya
Chapter 3 Ecclesiastes 3:4
Asia Minor
Erskine Hawkins
Momma is wise. Or maybe she just knows what to say to me. Anyway, her Leahisms serve me well. They give me understanding. That’s important in this complicated, uncompromising thing called life.
Some she borrows from loved ones.
Like Ada Mae’s exhortation life is not a dress rehearsal. Live it like it counts. One of Ada Mae’s pastors said that in a sermon. All of us Thomas boys are familiar with it. Momma told me that not long after she met Jennifer.
Others I don’t know where they come from. Maybe from plain old living. Something else she told me once not long after she met Jennifer is perhaps my favorite Leahism. She said, “baby sometimes in life you’re lucky enough that what you want is what the good lord knows you need. If you pay attention, you will know those moments by the miracles occurring in your life, big and small. Oh, they have the look and feel of coincidence, but take them for what they are. They are miracles.
Jennifer Hon was a miracle who felt like a coincidence I met while swimming down Peachtree one sultry July day in 1995, walking wounded towards where I didn’t know. Sure, I was headed back to the office, but I was lost. Up popped Jennifer, and my life gained direction. From a nineteen-year-old.
My life filled with miracles big and small. And we made a miracle named Abigail Hadiya and she is my biggest miracle of all. Four inches taller than Jennifer you can see both of us in her. She has her mother’s eyes and leanness. She is brown like me with a black girl’s wagon and what Momma calls about a foot and a half of glorious thick kink on her head. I loved watching Momma teach Jennifer how to work with it. And I loved teasing Jennifer about her struggles with her baby’s hair. Most days Dee pulls it back in a ponytail and goes about her business.
She has her mother’s incandescent imagination and my math mesmerized mind. For me she represents the miracle that is America, big and small. Our little Blackenese. She lives in a multi world; multilingual, multi-cultural, multicolored. She approaches her multi world with a singular purpose. She loves her family, friends, and country. She is as American as America has ever been. She lives in an America ever restless and changing. Our little miracle Miss Abigail Hadiya Thomas.
Auntie Qi is a profound influence on Dee. Qi loves flowers. She says she paints dragons for pay and flowers for love. Love of China and as a remembrance of home. At times Americans are too loose and frenetic for her. She can retreat to the canvas and imagine herself amongst the azaleas dotting the mountains in Hubei and Guizhou provinces.
Dee, Jen, and I are glad when Qi finds herself in these moods. She has granted us three lovely paintings of the azaleas and their mountains over the years. Qi and Grandma and Grandpa Hon have gifted our daughter with a love and a sense of things Chinese. Not just the languages for she is fluent in Cantonese and speaks passable Mandarin, but a Chinese perception of the world.
We want her to have this. We want her to know China and what it means to be Chinese. Her life is lived primarily in a Black space. It is important to us she understand all sides of her world.
And hasn’t that always been America. The many turning into the one. I imagine we are no different than an Irish Italian couple at some point in the past trying to raise a mixed child in a new world different from the old one they grew up in. Anxious for Miss Abigail to embrace her heritages while allowing Dee to lean into her America.
Her boyfriend is a white dude named David. His family migrated here from South Africa. He’s two years older than her, a foot taller, and a pink toe through and through. I don’t like her having a white boyfriend. Just the racist in me.
Dee teases me. “Daddy, I got me a white man.” Pisses me off. She knows it does. And she knows it’s nothing I can do about it.
Grandma Thomas told Dee if I give her a hard time to let her know. Momma said, “I’m his mother and he better leave you alone about David or I’ll get him. I told him that boy treats you good and that’s more important than what color he is.”
“Adrienne, can you imagine Momma going all Dr. King on me. I told her oh so next you going to say you want your grand baby’s boyfriend to be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. You know she told me I was being old fashioned. Talking about the world is changing. All that trash she used to talk about you better not bring a white girl in here. Why are you laughing so hard?”
Adrienne is doubled over with laughter. I grab her. I don’t like how much she is leaning. We don’t need you to fall off this rock.
“Dee’s got it like that.”
“That’s the same thing Momma said.”
“You forget I lived with you. I can hear her saying it. You know I know how she can fuss. And you don’t want that. Not about her granddaughter. Especially not as long as you took to give her one.”
“Yeah, Jennifer loves it. She’ll tease me, talking about Dee’s got her a white man, eh. And Daddy tells me you’re fighting a losing battle son.”
“Well, what do you expect? Jennifer’s her mother. She’s going to take up for her daughter. Somebody’s got to defend her from your crazy butt.”
“I got her good one time. Jennifer and Dee were both going in on me about him. David had just left, and I said I’m glad he’s gone. Dee got mad enough to cry. Jen jumped me saying that’s your daughter. If she brings a blue man in here who treats her right you need to be okay with it, eh.”
We were standing in the den. I went in the kitchen, and I brought back bananas for everybody. I said peace offering. We peeled them together. I waited on them to take a bite. Then I said, “Well I never,” pretending to clutch my pearls and shouted, “cannibals.” Dee yelps Dad Dee and almost spits her banana out she’s laughing so hard. Jennifer just stared at me. She looked at Dee and said, “go get Daddy a Ho Ho out the cabinet Dee so he can be a cannibal too.”
Adrienne shakes her head and says, “You are bold.”
“You’re right. Jen comes over and whispers in my year you just got yourself a month off, eh. Your dang uncle gave her that idea.”
“That’s my girl.”
“Quit siding with them.”
“Why not? They’re on the right side. You know you’re wrong.”
“That’s my daughter,”
Adrienne gives me this bemused look. Check this out little cousin. Who am I?”
“I don’t know, who are you?”
“I got me a white man!”
“I’m going to push you off that rock.”
Love is a beautiful thing, but loving your oppressor not so much!