Head Rush

A love for Prince emboldened Jesmyn Ward’s father to defy the world’s narrow expectations of him.

FROM THE TIME HE WAS SIX YEARS OLD,my father wore his difference like his missing eye. His older cousin had shot him with a BB gun, and for years my father sported a patch before he was fitted for a false eye in his teens.

Something about the experience enabled in my father a different kind of vision. He began to draw. He drew through his childhood, through his adolescent years. Fantasy creatures and animals and portraits of his mother. He taught himself to pay attention to proportion and placement, to imbue lines with life. Sometimes I think about how my father sat in his room in his mother’s house, stared up at the thin ceiling while bundled against the Bay Area chill, and felt the creative impulse in him turn and growl and bark, frustrated as a chained dog, as his life choices narrowed under what the world expected from a poor black boy living in Oakland, California.

When he graduated from high school, my father won a scholarship to art school. He decided not to attend, to get a job instead, to help support his mother and his siblings. He was the man of the house. He spent his days and nights as a gas-station attendant. He went to drag races and ran with his gang. He dated carelessly, and had lots of girlfriends.

But he couldn’t completely mask his difference. His eye wouldn’t let him. He began to create an identity that subverted who the world thought he should be. He took up kung fu, and when he executed his forms, it looked as though he were dancing. He was as graceful as a bird taking flight. Then he began dating a beautiful young woman from Mississippi, where he spent summers with his family. A few years later, I arrived. At 20, my father became a father, and he learned that the world had even more stringent expectations for him.