ESSAY 

1994: A Father, A Daughter, and The Long Road Back

August 16, 2026

It was a warm summer day in June, and I knew my father had arrived before I saw him.

At the time, Dad drove an old red van with dual exhaust pipes that gave it a distinctive rumble, one I had heard enough times to recognize without having to look outside. I remember hearing the van pull up in front of my grandmother's house that afternoon, followed by the sound of the driver's-side door closing after he got out.

What I expected to hear next was the cowbell.

My grandmother had a wooden gate at the front of her property, and attached to it was a cowbell that announced anyone coming into the yard. There was no way to enter quietly. You opened the gate, and the bell rang.

I waited for it, but the bell never rang.

Dad remained outside the gate, never to cross that threshhold again.

****

I was sitting in my grandmother's living room, although I can no longer remember exactly where everyone else was when he first arrived. I remember the room itself much more clearly. The television was in front of me, and behind it was a mirrored wall that reflected the afternoon light coming into the house. Between the living room and the outdoors was a small enclosed porch area, another threshold you had to cross before entering the house itself. From where I sat, the combination of light and shadow allowed me to see outside without being easily seen from the other direction.

I could see my father.

I could also look toward my grandmother's bedroom, where my mother, my grandmother and, as I remember it, several of my mother's sisters had gathered. They were quiet. My grandmother did the talking.

My father had called from outside to announce that he was there. He had driven down from Chicago to my grandmother's house to try to talk to my mother, who, days before, had left our family home and taken my two younger sisters with her. I had made the trip south myself because I wanted to see about my mother and understand what was happening.

Now Dad was standing outside beside that red van, talking from the other side of a gate he never crossed, while my mother remained inside the house.

She did not speak to him.

I remember sitting in that living room trying to make sense of what I was watching. Why wasn't anyone letting my father in? Why wasn't my mother going outside to talk to him? Why was my grandmother speaking for her?

Something was happening to my family, and although I was technically grown at twenty-two, I did not understand it.

What strikes me now, more than thirty years later, is the peculiar vantage point I occupied that afternoon. My father could not see into the house well enough to know that I was watching him, but I could see him. From the same place, I could turn my attention toward the bedroom and see the women gathered there. For those few moments I occupied a position from which I could observe both sides of an encounter whose participants could not—or would not—see one another.

At twenty-two, I thought that meant I could see what was happening.  I know differently now.

Eventually my father left. I watched the red van pull away, then got up and went into my grandmother's bedroom. I wanted an explanation, and I went directly to my mother to get one.

Why was this happening? Why was she treating Dad this way?

Her answer was immediate:  Mind your business.

****

I’ve carried those words with me for years, although I don't think I understood how deeply they had lodged themselves inside me. At the time, they felt like another exclusion from a family crisis that was already reshaping my life. My mother had left with my two younger sisters. My father was devastated. I was confused and angry with both of them for different reasons, and now I was being told that whatever was happening between them—and affecting us—was none of my concern.

The marriage may not have been my business. The rupture of our family certainly felt like it was.

I left my grandmother's house shortly afterward and went across the street to stay with one of my aunts. I did not feel welcome there either. Whether anyone intended for me to feel that way is something I cannot know and no longer need to determine. What I know is how I experienced those days: I felt displaced, emotionally and physically, and I was ready to leave.

I was also supposed to be at work in Chicago. My employer advanced my paycheck, which gave me enough money to buy a plane ticket. I flew first to Baltimore, where a man I had dated in college helped me find somewhere to stay briefly, and from there I returned to Chicago and attempted to resume my life.

There was very little about life that felt normal.

Dad had become sullen and depressed. He would sometimes corner me to talk about my mother, revisiting what had happened and what he was feeling, while I was still trying to understand my own feelings about the same events. 

My younger sisters moved between my parents, and I watched their coming and going with growing frustration. I believed they needed structure and discipline, and I believed my father was allowing behavior that should have been addressed, so I began trying to address it myself.

Looking back, I can see that I was attempting to mother my sisters. At the time, I thought I was responding to a problem that no one else seemed willing or able to manage. I did not understand that I was stepping into a role that did not belong to me.  That distinction seems obvious to me now. Certainly, it was not obvious then.

The instability continued for more than a year. I worked. I tried to function. I drank more than I should have because drinking offered temporary relief from emotions I did not know how to carry. My sisters continued moving between households, my father continued struggling with the dissolution of his marriage, and I became increasingly angry about what I perceived as the absence of order around me.

Then came the radio. I was sleeping on a sofa bed in what was essentially the side porch of my father's house, a space connected directly to the kitchen that afforded me almost no privacy. One day I came home from work tired and already irritated. My younger sister was cooking in the kitchen with a small clock radio turned up much louder than I wanted to hear it.

I got up, went into the kitchen, grabbed a pair of scissors and reached for the electrical cord while the radio was still plugged into the wall, thinking that would stop the noise. My sister put her hand in the way, and I cut her finger.

There was enough blood to make both of us panic, and the wound was deep enough that we eventually ended up in the emergency room, where we spent most of the night while doctors stitched her finger. Dad was not home when it happened, and in the peculiar reasoning available to me at twenty-three, I told my sister not to tell him.

There was, of course, no realistic way to conceal an emergency-room visit and a bandaged hand from our father.  When Dad learned what had happened, he told me I needed to leave the house.  Even now, writing that sentence is difficult.

****

For years, I understood his decision through the anger I was carrying at the time. I felt scapegoated for a family disorder I believed my parents had created and then failed to manage. I thought my sisters were being allowed to move between households whenever they became unhappy with the expectations of whichever parent they were living with, and I believed my father was tolerating the resulting chaos because he was afraid of losing them.

Whether that accurately describes everything happening inside my father's mind is not something I can claim to know. It describes what I believed.  What I know is that when he told me to leave, I experienced it as another abandonment.

At that moment, I decided I wanted nothing to do with any of them.

A woman I knew from my college days became the person I called when I needed somewhere to go. She was an administrator who had also become something of a mentor to me, and she offered me a room in her condo. The arrangement included my occasionally helping with her children when work required her to stay late. Dad's youngest sister helped me move my belongings from his house.

For many years I remembered that primarily as the place I moved after my father put me out.  I see something else now:  A lifeline.

That change in perspective has become important to me because, looking back across the intervening years, I can identify other moments when help arrived at precisely the point when I needed it. Sometimes it came through another person, and other times, it came through an unexpected opportunity or circumstance. At the time, however, I tended to concentrate my attention on the person or the solution itself. If someone helped me out of a crisis, I trusted the person. If a door opened, I focused on the door. Once the immediate danger seemed to have passed, I often behaved as though God had brought me that far and was now returning responsibility for the rest of the journey to me.

I did not understand the hierarchy of trust I was bypassing.

The room in Hyde Park solved an immediate problem. I needed somewhere to live, and somewhere to live appeared. But the household I entered had its own complications that I only came to understand after I was living there. As the atmosphere in the home became increasingly uncomfortable, I felt an old pressure building again:  I needed to figure out what came next.

During my stay in Hyde Park, I took up company with a young man who had been, for a time, exactly what I thought I wanted. Neither of us was looking for a committed relationship. We enjoyed one another's company, had things in common and spent time together without requiring the relationship to become something else.  Eventually, however.  I began articulating a desire for relationship and partnership, and gave him an ultimatum.  His response? He genuinely did not want more because he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of a relationship.  This crushed my heart, and ultimately led to a relationship with the man I would marry in 2001.

****

At 53 I can look back at the woman I was at 23 or 24 and admit that I am not sure she knew what she wanted. What I recognize much more clearly is how desperately she wanted stability.  That distinction matters to me and to this story.

Over time, I have begun to recognize a pattern that extends far beyond Hyde Park. Again and again, instability around home created an urgency in me to act. I wanted to get ahead of whatever might happen next, to locate the next place, the next relationship, the next solution before the present one collapsed completely. The discomfort of not knowing what would happen became almost indistinguishable from the danger I believed I was trying to escape.

While I was traveling that road, my father was traveling one of his own.

Since beginning the work on Black Men of Measure, my conversations with my Dad have allowed me to understand those intervening decades in ways I could not have understood while we were living them. After my mother left, Dad continued to throw himself into his business. The financial position my parents had spent years building deteriorated substantially as the marriage and their shared affairs became increasingly difficult to resolve.

Then, in 1997, Dad slipped and fell while working in one of his buildings. By then, I had moved from Hyde Park to the far south side, living with my then-fiance and our newborn daughter.  I packed her up and visited him at the hospital.

His injury required surgery and introduced additional physical problems. Even from a hospital bed, he worried about the business and what needed to be done. He later re-injured himself and underwent another surgery that brought complications of its own. When we talked about that period, he described those physical setbacks as among the experiences that forced him to reconsider how he was living.

I hear surrender in that story, although I do not know whether Dad would use that word himself.

****

He also encountered situations involving my mother in which closure depended upon cooperation he could not compel. There were financial matters that required signatures. There was an attempt to initiate divorce that went unanswered. Whatever his wishes, he eventually had to confront the fact that doing everything within his power did not give him power over another person's choices.

The more Dad told me about those years, the more familiar parts of his story began to sound.  To my surprise, I learned that he, too, had experienced housing instability.

During one conversation he began counting the different places he had lived, telling me about addresses and the people with whom he had shared space along the way. I remember listening to him and realizing that while I had been moving through homes and relationships trying to establish stability, my father had been moving too.

I had imagined our roads as separate.  But they were not as different as I had assumed.

Eventually Dad arrived at the home he has now, through an arrangement he worked out with his younger sister. They share a multi-family building she owns while maintaining separate apartments. What moved me when he described their arrangement was its simplicity: they found something that worked, negotiated the terms and made a home possible.

****

By the time I learned many of these things, I had already begun thinking seriously about writing a book about him.  Ironically, I arrived in this place while laying the groundwork to write one about my mother.

I had begun developing The Feeling of Home, a book through which I hoped to explore my mother's life and migration from Mississippi to Chicago, along with the family that emerged from that journey. But I encountered a problem. There were questions my mother did not want to explore with me, and there were parts of the story I could not understand without also confronting the parallel life of my father.

An opportunity to participate in an archiving fair in 2025 gave that parallel story unexpected momentum. I already had photographs from Dad's side of the family, so I decided to center my table around the project I was beginning to imagine. People responded immediately to the photographs. They recognized something in them. They wanted to tell me their own stories.  The project began to feel real.

I also began looking for a way to do it without Dad.  Not too long after the fair and a failed attempt to gather information on Dad remotely, I reached out to Aunt Sharon, hoping she might be able to provide the family histories and details I needed. She reminded me, gently, that she could not always recall those kinds of details. My father, on the other hand, could.  I already knew that. Dad's memory is remarkable.

What I did not want to acknowledge was that there would be no way to write the book I was imagining while bypassing the man at its center.  So I wrote him a four-page letter in the spirit of the late singer Aaliyah, in which I had things to account for. There had been difficult exchanges between Dad and me during the intervening years, including an occasion when I had lashed out at him based on information from my mother that I later came to understand differently. Whatever Dad had done or not done, I knew what belonged to me.

I apologized.

I asked for his forgiveness.

I told him about the book I wanted to write and asked whether he would work with me.

Then I waited.  Weeks passed before a text from Dad appeared on my phone:  Call me.

I did.

****

What began as research became conversation, and conversation gradually became something I had not anticipated. I thought I needed my father's memory. I did. I thought I needed his stories. I did.  What I did not know was how much I needed my father.

The man I encountered through those conversations was not identical to the man who had been frozen in my memory decades earlier. He had lived another thirty years too. He had lost things, endured things, reconsidered things and learned things. He was still Dad, still unmistakably himself, but he had arrived at ways of understanding his life that I had not yet reached.

One of those ways was what Dad called Divine order.  He explained it to me. I heard him. Intellectually, I understood what he was saying, but my heart was somewhere else.

I have been living through another period of instability, once again involving home, and the familiar machinery inside me has been working overtime. When home becomes uncertain, some part of me immediately begins looking ahead. I want to know what is going to happen, what I need to do, where I will go and how I can prevent the uncertainty around me from becoming something worse. Basically, how to get from the uncomfortable and prickly side of the chaos to the other, more settled and stable side.

For years I interpreted that tendency as competence. Some of it is. I know how to solve problems. I know how to organize, plan, locate resources and act decisively.  What I have only recently begun to understand is how often those abilities have also functioned as a defense against not knowing.

Every time God intervened in my life, I frequently accepted the intervention without continuing to seek His direction. If a person appeared at the right moment, I began trusting the person more than the God I believed had sent the help. If the immediate problem was resolved, I could convince myself that the difficult part was over and I could manage what came next.

In other words, I kept taking my eye off God.

****

Over the last several months, as the situation in my current home has become increasingly difficult, I have felt the old impulse to solve it. There have been people I could call and offers of help I could pursue. I have talked to a few people when I needed to, including my oldest daughter, but I have deliberately resisted turning the situation into something everyone around me has to help me manage.

I have not even told Dad.

Instead, I have been trying to do something that does not come naturally to me: I have been talking to God and leaving space around the things I do not yet know.

This morning, after my devotional, a thought settled on my heart with a clarity I was not expecting: We spend far too much time trying to mind God's business.

I began to weep, because suddenly, I understood what my father had been trying to tell me about Divine order.

For most of my life, I have treated uncertainty as though it were an emergency. If I did not know what was going to happen, I wanted to find out. If I could not find out, I wanted to construct the most likely answer. If another person's choices affected me, I wanted to understand those choices, anticipate their consequences and determine what I needed to do before those consequences reached me.

What I did not understand was that my responsibility had boundaries.  I am responsible for my choices, my conduct, my preparation, my honesty, my apologies, my boundaries and my stewardship of whatever has been placed in my hands. I can respond to what happens to me without assuming responsibility for everything happening around me. I can acknowledge another person's choices without believing it is my responsibility to understand or correct them.

There are questions I may never be able to answer because the answers do not belong to me.

****

That realization returned me, unexpectedly, to my grandmother's living room on that warm summer day in 1994.  I had been sitting in perhaps the best observational position in the house. I could see my father outside. I could see my mother and grandmother inside. I could hear what was being said and notice what was not.

I am a photographer. I have built a practice around observation, around recognizing details other people may overlook and understanding how where I stand changes what enters the frame.

But a frame has limits.

In 1994, I occupied an interesting vantage point, but I could not see everything happening inside the people who occupied it. I did not know everything my parents had said to one another before my father arrived. I could not know everything my mother was thinking while she remained silent. I could not know everything my father carried back to Chicago when he drove away.

I could see what was in front of me, but I could not see around the corner.  Perhaps much of the intervening thirty-two years has been an attempt to compensate for that limitation.

I watched. I analyzed. I tried to understand motives. I tried to establish order when circumstances became chaotic. I stepped into responsibilities that were not always mine. I sometimes mistook God's provision for a sign that I should presume to know what was supposed to happen next, and at other times placed more trust in the person through whom help arrived than the person could possibly carry.

I am beginning to understand what I have come to think of as a hierarchy of trust.  People matter. Relationships matter. We are responsible to and for one another in very real ways. But no person, however loving or well-intentioned, can occupy the place in my life that belongs to God.

Not my partner, not my mother.

Not even my father.

Dad has never asked me to place him there.  If anything, the gift he has given me in this season of our relationship is that he keeps pointing beyond himself.

****

My father is not a perfect man. I have no interest in making him one for the purposes of this book. He has made mistakes. He has hurt people and been hurt by people. There were years when I needed distance from him. There were years where he maintained distance from me.  And there are things about his choices that I may always understand differently than he does.

Through it all, however, he is still my Dad.  And I love him and respect him deeply.

And when I look at the man he has become at 78, I see someone who has spent decades learning that he cannot control the people he loves simply because their choices affect him. He has prayed for his daughters. He has prayed for our family. He has even prayed for my mother. He has learned, in ways I am only beginning to understand, how to care deeply without assuming that everything he cares about belongs in his hands.

Early in our conversations, Dad stopped me one day and told me that Black Men of Measure was going to be a massive success and that it would touch a lot of people.  I immediately began imagining what success meant, and fixated on that, to the degree where I overwhelmed myself and ultimately ran into a rut.  I understand now that I was doing what I have so often done: receiving one piece of information and rushing ahead to complete the rest of the story myself.

I don't know what success will mean for this book.

I don't know whom it will reach or what someone might recognize in these pages. I don't know whether a reader will see my father, their own father, themselves, or God.

I know only what belongs to me:  I have to tell the truth.

****

Months ago, when I confessed to my partner that I was struggling to understand the point of this book, he told me that the book would write itself. As an author, I understood what he meant, but I could not yet understand how literally those words would come to describe what has happened.

I had been reluctant to bring God into Black Men of Measure. Faith seemed to sit outside the scope of the book I thought I was writing. I was interested in my father's life; his accomplishments; how he performed his role as husband, father, son, brother and community leader; his experiences as a Black man and the historical circumstances through which he had lived.

I wanted to take the measure of him.  What I had not considered was that the person doing the measuring would eventually have to account for where she was standing.

This essay is a departure for me because I am more comfortable observing than being observed. I am a photographer. I like my position behind the camera. Even in writing about the process of researching this book, I have tried to center my father's voice.  But I cannot tell this part of his story without entering the frame myself.

The daughter who watched him from inside her grandmother's house in 1994 is the same daughter listening to him talk about Divine order more than thirty years later. She has changed. So has he.

We left that year on separate roads, although I am beginning to understand how often those roads mirrored one another. We both encountered instability. We both tried to construct order. We both discovered, in different ways and at different times, the limits of what even capable people can control.

Somewhere along the road he journeyed, my father learned where stewardship ends and surrender begins.

I am arriving there now.

****

I think again about that afternoon in 1994, about the sound of Dad's van pulling up, the afternoon light in my grandmother's living room and the cowbell hanging from the wooden gate.

The bell never rang.

My father stood outside.

I sat inside watching him, believing that because I could see both sides, I understood what was happening between them.

After he left, I went looking for an answer and was met with three words:  Mind your business.

For thirty-two years, as the words echoed, I thought they meant one thing.  This morning, they became something else.

There are things that belong to me, things that belong to other people and things that belong to God. Knowing the difference does not erase what happened in 1994, nor does it excuse anyone's choices. It simply releases me from the impossible task of having to understand and manage all of them.

I am deeply grateful that my father and I lived long enough to find our way back to one another.

He is not perfect. Neither am I.

He is a man who has done some things, lived some things, lost some things and learned some things.  But he is my Dad.

And as far as earthly fathers go, he is a bright star that has led me back to God.