The Fire This Time by Randall Kenan

Author:Randall Kenan [Kenan, Randall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781685890025
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

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When we visited my father, Harry, in prison, I had no clue as to why he had been locked up. I knew he had had a serious drug problem, and I knew, in those days, that he possessed what had been euphemistically called a Bad Attitude. Perhaps I did ask, and maybe I was told “Vehicular manslaughter,” or “Shut up. None of your business.” The latter was probably the case.

Truth to tell, I enjoyed the few hours’ trip to Whiteville more than the awkward meeting in the prison yard—all barbed wire and hurricane fences and men (mostly black) in drab, matching duds. This did not look like the prisons I had seen on TV, and none of the men looked especially dangerous, certainly not my daddy. My grand-daddy owned a massive station wagon, which to me, at the time, could have been a ship. There was a rumble seat in back; I could have spent hours back there, oblivious to what the grown folk were talking about, watching the world recede, backwards.

Harry struck me as a nice enough fellow, a big, handsome guy with a beard upon a broad and generous face, a big gap in his front teeth so that when he smiled he made you feel good. Deep voice. He enjoyed Gilligan’s Island, so we had something to talk about. The fact that he had a wife and a child didn’t really register with me until a few years later, when I would visit them and get to know them. The connection between Harry and me I found hard to define. When my schoolmates said “My daddy,” they clearly meant something different from what I meant. On the one hand there was something almost fun about having a father who could be seen as a piratical ne’er-do-well—which was how he starred in my imagination; but on the other, I understood the notion of a certain shame, but even more a regret, a loss, something broken.

That broken feeling was even more pronounced with Clara, who birthed me. Away in Brooklyn, with a husband and two children, she would write me every so often, the letters addressed to “Master Randall Garrett Dunn” (her maiden name; mine until majority). She would visit when she came down to see her family once or twice a year. I always thought she looked like Diana Ross, only better. And she seemed to have a stronger Southern accent than anyone I knew in Duplin County.

To say that our relationship was broken would be too presumptuous. It would presuppose some foundation that was never truly constructed. The older I got, the more estrangement occurred. Missed connections. Misunderstandings. Misreadings. Misfirings. Much missed. Resentment. Indifference. Many things child psychologist Melanie Klein could have a banquet delving into.

One day you look around and the world is somehow different. You have not arrived at the place you set out to achieve, and yet you have arrived somewhere, somehow. The familiar looks foreign and the foreign looks familiar. All that went before has not passed and all that is past remains.

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