1987
Night sky black. Daddy tall against the wind. I am five. Big girl, they say. There are six people in our house and tonight only two are going to the grocery story. Me and Daddy. Mine.
Night sky black. Store lights white. We hold hands. Then, as if by some premonition come too soon I turn toward Daddy and raise my arms. The gesture more prayer than command. “Up. Us.”
Daddy laughs, reaches for a hand instead. “You a big ole girl. What would it look like for a grown man to have your long legs dangling off him? That’s obscene.”
I am a smart girl. I learn a new word. Obscene: too much too big too long to be seen loving a big man whose chest is your pillow whose breath is your air whose smile shines bright and gravitational like the moon.
Does every girl memorize the first time someone said she was too much?
I don’t stretch my arms up again until the coroner wheels Daddy through our kitchen and out the door and by then it is too late. “Up. Us.” lost on closed eyes. No pillow. No air. No moon. No us.
1998
The only time Daddy ever swung a belt at me with rage was the night I let a boy whose name I don’t remember pick me up from an empty house. Lonely, only girls just want company. We seldom ask for clarity about the things people really want when they ask to “scoop” you. So when the boy takes off his shirt as if unveiling an aphrodisiac, I just ask to see his yearbook. “Show me your friends,” I say, the way latently queer girls be awkward with naked boys. Babies and fools, my Daddy would say.
I remember it’s time to be headed back that way since my parents will be home soon. Down the street from my house, I see the car in the driveway and Daddy on the porch, cordless phone pressed against his ear. In hindsight, I recognize panic in his face—the price of loving a Black child like air.
I ask the boy to drop me off down the street because maybe if Daddy doesn’t see him we can still go to prom together (a promise he’d made as he was peeling off his shirt). Daddy sprints off after the car like a man gone mad. He is shaking by the time he mounts the steps and takes off his belt. He yells at me and to himself as the leather slices skin: “…dropping you off down the street like some ho!”
Up the road Lexington, black women have been going missing and the word “prostitute” is thrown around. I’d never seen a ho dropped off but the leather tells me it is obscene: that which is too close to others’ fantasies of you; a grave misunderstanding of your motives, a devaluation of your will.
2006
I have climbed into the lap of a man who is tall like my own Daddy and that is where the similarities end. Baby in a lover’s mouth is the promise of Daddy sweetness with none of Daddy stress. A person who can give kisses without wondering if too much love will spoil you — make you a target in a country of men whose phalluses (both symbol and real) are always aimed at Black girls.
This is what I remember about choosing to drink Daddy love from the cup he carried. He had a Swahili name. He had an analysis of race on the campus that was trying to kill me. He cried. He had a notebook he’d covered in pictures of his daughter. I thought, this man’s arms are big enough to hold us both. I was wrong.
I snuggle into his neck to breathe his not-my-Daddy-ness into memory. It works. He is there still on my red sofa smelling like Kwanzaa and laughing, “I can tell you a Daddy’s girl, ain’t you?” All these years later, I wonder if he was saying, how obscene.
2012
My first girlfriend is born under the same moon sign as my father and that is where the similarities end. He is not dead yet, just disappointed that I’ve chosen to build an abominable life. The moment I realize she will never give me Daddy love is flooded in fluorescent light. We walk the mall, my toddler daughter’s chin tucked between my shoulder and my neck. We are brown and queer in Baton Rouge and maybe this is the reason I stretch my hand to her like Jesus saving Peter from his own fool self. Or maybe I know by now how hard it is to carry a girlchild (even a small one) by myself. Maybe I reach to steady us, the way many single parents in financial binds reach out for third legs. Maybe I reach because I know we will be over before Daddy takes his last breath and I’m not ready for this relief. She steps further than I can reach. The breach between us marks our love obscene: drought love and desert thirst are common for the kinds of people that Colonizer Jesus would rather burn than love.
2013 – 2014
The reason I will never not love my next girlfriend is because she pulled me into her lap on a post-Daddy summer day. She was on the phone as I hovered around her space, touching things in the small kitchen that I willed to be her body: refrigerator handle, cereal bowl, spoon… She absentmindedly reached for my wrist and tugged me toward her lap, legs spread wide to hold me. Was relief the flood as I pressed myself into her body as if it were rock on wind? I chose and choose to call this love.
Six months later, I climbed into the same lap and found it cold. I thought I could convince her to lend me Daddy love one more time if only I were close enough for her to remember my scent, so I climbed into the lap of the girl I’d grown to love long after she’d grown weary of trying to love me. Which is not to say that she made a poor decision. I was a mess. I was mean. I was unstable and grieving and more suited for a patient friendship than the dramas of new love. But I loved her and in thirst, I acted unlovingly by climbing into a lap in which I wasn’t welcome. My behavior is the definition of obscene.
2016
I have become the girl they think they know. Thirsty Black girl seeking Daddy long gone.
But I was a seeker of Daddy love while he was here and loving freely. He accused himself of my poor dating decisions, my thirst. I believe he knows now the secret life of appetite — the way our palates are shaped in the womb. The way my Daddy thirst is actually my mother’s, the way hers is actually American sub-citizenship. The way we are all Black girls living in a violent patriarchy without the legal or social protection of founding “fathers”— the O.G. Absentees. The way we be searching for Daddy love big and strong enough to stop the men with ropes and guns, sweet enough to rub salve on our wounds.
Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. Rekia Boyd. Mike Brown. Trayvon Martin. Jordan Davis. Aiyana Stanley Jones. Mike Newby. Tamir Rice. Sandra Bland. Gynnya Hope McMillen. This small list is metonym for threat. The names stretch as far and wide as stars across that first black night’s sky when I learned the love I needed was obscene.
And now with Daddy gone, the sky really is bigger. More ominous. Who will hold me in this night is the question I pose to 1,000 friends as I post obscene statuses on Facebook. Statuses that clearly say, “Up. Us.” Requests for cuddle parties, thinly-veiled flirtation… these days all my messages are raised arms and thirst, the most obscene thing a Black girl can possess.
A Facebook friend posts a Sprite ad in the comments of a touch-starved status. He posts from the home he shares with his wife and kids and I am willing to bet he has enough love and food there to sustain him through another red summer. I am willing to bet there are enough people to hold him if ever he feels threatened by the expiration date stamped on his own brown skin. How gross of you to raise your arms, his meme suggests. How obscene.
The thirst he called out is the only thing I choose to obey these days. Fuck the rest. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be a big girl. Nobody asked me if I was ready to walk. Nobody asked me if I could handle all the hashtags, all the acquittals, all my kinfolks’ fragility, all these systemic failings, all this homelessness, all this daughter all alone. Nobody asked me so I don’t ask nobody for permission to be a water witch. And fuck any critique of my dowsing rod that is not also an indictment of the desert.
It would not be reaching to call it all obscene.
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