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A Life Spent Searching For Love From My Father
Who teaches us to grow into men who love themselves, and other men?
“Your honor, this is a case of young love gone horribly wrong.”
Those were the words that leaped from the lips of my Legal Aid Society public defender. They penetrated straight into the flesh of my 25-year-old body like splintering shotgun shells meeting an intended target. I sat in a courtroom, much like the courtroom my father had sat in years ago with my mother, not even old enough to vote, holding me tight to her chest as though she meant to shield me from the pain that was to come.
My father and I had one thing in common: We both lost our freedom by becoming property of the state at very young ages. He was 17 and I was 25 when we had to humble ourselves before a judge who would decide our almost predictable outcomes. I became just another of the 11 Black men to be sentenced to incarceration that day.
Growing up, I had all the things most would think represented a normal healthy American upbringing. I shared birthday parties with my cousins and classmates at the local Chuck E. Cheese or Burger King playpen. I had Nintendo Duck Hunt nights and the Home Alone Talkboy tape recorder — I even had the matching Dallas Cowboys bedding and curtains set. I performed in winter and…
