Between Fathers and Sons: An African-American Story – by Eric V. Copage

THE KENTE CLOTH

I couldn’t remember the last time I had cried. As a six-year-old, I didn’t know what had hit me when Mom passed away. Dad explained it by saying Mommy loved me and my brother and sister very much, but God had called her back. God had called her home. Mommy was happy, Dad had said. She was a brown angel. She was one of the twinkling stars at night. I had no tears back then, just confusion. Why had God called her back? Why had He taken her away from me and my infant brother and sister?

But now, stationed before Dad’s open grave on this hot, overcast day in late August —the air a damp attack to my forehead, my armpits, the nape of my neck, my back—I felt my knees buckling from the numbness of grief; I tried to stifle the great sobs erupting from my chest as I watched the casket lowered into the ground.

When we all turned away from the grave, heading to our cars to go home, the mourners huddled around our family, offering their condolences. I stood next to my grandmother, who wrapped her arms around Ida and Douglass, standing side by side in front of her. I felt the warmth of my grandmother’s shoulder against mine and an increasing press of flesh and souls of our relatives, Dad’s friends, Grandma’s friends, my sister’s and brother’s friends and their parents, my friends and their parents, and teachers and neighbors. Yet, though friends and family embraced me on all sides, I felt alone. I felt as if I had crossed some boundary or, more accurately, had been pushed blindfolded and falling into a perilous frontier of the unknown.

Suddenly, a pair of hands – fingers heavy with gold rings – engraved images of a spider’s web, four-headed crocodiles, and an abstract filigreed pattern – clasped my hand and guided me out of the crowd trying to comfort me. I instantly recognized those hands; they had given me change for many a candy bar, ice cream sandwich, and cupcake ever since I was in elementary school.

“I was devastated to hear about your father,” said Blackmun, the convenience store owner in our neighborhood. No one knew for sure how old Blackmun was. Because his trim mustache and goatee were generously flecked with gray, as was the receding tide of close-cropped hair on his head, some people guessed he was in his early fifties. Yet, he had the body build and usually carried himself with the vitality and agility of a much younger man. At times, however, he seemed frail and infinitely old, his mental clarity questionable and subject to “spells.” There were even those in town who referred to him – well out of his earshot – as “that crazy brotha, Blackmun,” an eccentric but harmless “old fool.”

Blackmun himself was mum on the personal details of his life. What was truly odd about him, and what I remember most, was the uncanny feeling I and many others often got when he talked about black history – how the African queen, Nzinga, outsmarted a British official or the bloody Nat Turner slave rebellion, for instance. Blackmun’s accounts were vivid and full of minute detail – how enslaved Africans sought a place close to the cotton field to relieve themselves during up to 15 hours working on blazing humid days, the acrid smell of blood as a whip lacerated human flesh to the bone, the forbidding patches of darkness shifting in the moonlit forest while traveling on foot towards a stop on the Underground Railroad. It was as if Blackmun recalled them from first-hand experience – from memory – rather than something he had read in a book.

Today, at the funeral and burial, Blackmun wasn’t wearing one of his many dashikis, but rather the regulation funeral attire of a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. A kente-cloth stole draped his shoulders, however.

Blackmun put two comforting hands on my upper arms as I faced him and looked into his eyes. “I admired your father very much. As much as I know he is a loss to you, he is also a loss to the neighborhood. To our town. His passing is a loss to all of us. He told me he had been looking forward to seeing you become a black man,” Blackmun added.

A black man, I repeated silently to myself. Those words again! I wished I could figure out what Dad and Blackmun meant. I thought about the black men I’d grown up with, that I’d seen on the streets, in movies, and on television. I thought of the black men I’d read about in newspapers, magazines, and books. I thought of Dad. Do I have to do anything special to become a black man? I wondered. Does it simply happen when I reach a certain age, I asked myself, and was I about to reach that age? Do I have to walk a certain way or talk a certain way to be a black man? Does it depend on the clothes I wear – a uniform I slip into once I graduate from a particular grade? Or was it simply having experienced a loss or a deep enough pain? Did I become a black man carrying Dad’s casket down the church steps? Above all, what is a black man? Right now, I didn’t feel much like any kind of man at all. I felt insignificant, like the fading echo of a very small child.

I looked at Blackmun again and, for the first time, really noticed the kente cloth he was wearing. Blackmun had a wide assortment of kente cloths—all vibrant with reds, greens, blues, golds, and blacks, all woven of the highest quality silk. Every year around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the school superintendent would invite Blackmun to the schools in our town to talk about the meaning of the cloths and symbols on other African fabric, jewelry, and artifacts. As I pondered the cloth hung around Blackmun’s neck, he began to lift the stole over his head and carefully began handing it to me. There was ritualistic deliberateness to his movements as if he were handing over a sacred object. But as I watched the cloth arch over Blackmun’s head and down past his face, I noticed the colors of this kente were dull, the fabric dirty, frayed, and moth-eaten. There were even stains from – blood? Grease? Coffee? I couldn’t begin to imagine what. Why was he handing me this nasty, raggedy old piece of cloth? Why was he wearing it at my father’s funeral?

“I know your father would have wanted you to have this,” Blackmun said, holding the kente cloth in front of him, waiting for me to take it. I was baffled and a little repelled by the gesture. From my perspective, it was as if he was offering me a mushy, half-eaten apple. It was a revolting and – well, kind of a crazy thing to do. I reached for the cloth with reluctant hands.

“Take care of it,” Blackmun continued, ignoring what surely must have been a look of disgust on my face as I warily drew the cloth towards me as if it were contaminated. “Keep it near you, always, even if that nearness is only in your heart. Any problems, any problems at all, feel free to call on me. Or, if you just want to talk, stop by. Remember, we’re in this together.”

When I returned home, I threw the kente cloth over the inside doorknob of my bedroom door and shut it. But that night, after I got into bed and turned out my nightstand lamp, I gazed for a long time at the cloth, trying to figure out why Blackmun had given me this stained and tattered fabric and why Dad would have wanted me to have it. Night dulled the cloth’s already faded colors, except where it

was illuminated by blades of moonlight slicing through my partially open Venetian blinds. The kente cloth rippled ever so slightly in response to the faint breeze coming from my open window. Bits of the material’s geometric patterns seemed to begin a barely noticeable dance in the interplay of darkness and light. A soothing rhythm soon enveloped me, and I felt myself drifting off to sleep. And in that sleep, I had a dream.