25 Years After Friday, Remembering John Witherspoon, the Perfectly Imperfect Black Dad
With his slightly confused oldhead squint, Pops reminded me — and many others — of our own fathers
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The night we lost John Witherspoon, I heard the news from the woman sitting next to me. Her name was Regina King.
A bit of explanation here. Soon after HBO’s Watchmen premiered last October, I interviewed King onstage at a San Francisco event. There was no Wi-Fi in the theater, so the fact that she had arrived a bit late came without context; toward the end of the event, she dropped that context on us like a squid from the sky. “I wanna say a little bit of the reason why we started late,” she told the audience, mostly Black and Brown creatives who had come to hear her speak about her role as Angela Abar. “I gotta give him a shoutout.”
Her voice trailed off, then she turned back to me. “I found out before we came in,” she said, her voice cracking, “and you were so wonderful holding things down… but John Witherspoon passed away today.”
A muted chorus of groans rippled through the crowd. For a moment, I could sense all of us…
