Growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, you knew what everybody knew. Black boys were big, strong, and docile. Black girls were domestic and kind. Either way, we were expected to work in the cotton fields without question, reservation, or revolt. When I was a child, Negroes flocked to the fields like obedient puppies to perform mind-numbing chores. Conditioned to inequality by violence and a lack of education, we accepted racial disparity and learned to fake contentment in a hateful and segregated America.
The racial war in Shreveport in those days wasn’t the only war going on. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered the war just two months before I was born. It seemed to me the entire world was fighting while I grew up. World War II killed more people, cost more money, damaged more property, and affected the lives of more people than any other war in history. It also foreshadowed my own journey. Life was a battlefield, win or die.
Shreveport is located on the Red River in the northwestern part of Louisiana, three hundred miles northwest of New Orleans. In the 1940s, it was a quiet little city where everybody upheld the values of the times. That meant laid-back attitudes, obedient personalities, stagnant minds, and fearful hearts. Negroes in Shreveport were quarantined as if they had a contagious disease. To protect white folks, every facet of the city was segregated—restaurants, movie theaters, parks, hotels, and public accommodations. Negroes accepted it because whites had strategically subjugated their innate strength and character to keep them forever in darkness.
Blacks lived in a small area of the city in filthy, old, rundown houses near the railroad tracks, or in dirt road shanties in the woods. There wasn’t much of a future in Shreveport. Too many young men got convicted of crimes, real or imaginary, and sent to the State Penitentiary at Angola. Too many more were lynched, burned alive, or beaten to death, their bodies tossed into the nearby Red River.
It was a terrible time. It was a terrible place. Young black girls had babies at an early age because white men raped them and then refused to acknowledge the crime, much less support them. My greatest fear was that one of my sisters would be raped, and I was always on the watch for their safety. Hatred fueled Shreveport. I often had to run from whites who tried to beat me up. I was chased with a stick, a bat, guns, and chains. My body has a lot of reminders of the violence I knew as a child. My nose was broken three times and my teeth were knocked out. I limp to this day because, as a child, I was stabbed in the leg with a railroad spike and an ice pick by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
One of the white men in the general store demanded I call him Mister and, when I refused, I had to fight him and three of his friends. Two of them wrestled me down and one hit me in the back of my head. I have a scar where he busted my skull open. It turned out to be a blessing, because I didn’t feel any pain after that, not even when the fourth one jammed the railroad spike into my leg. I bled so much they must have thought they killed me, because they all got scared and took off.
My mother pulled the spike out when I got home. She told me, “It doesn’t matter what happened. We all God’s children.”
I wasn’t so certain.
In fact, as a child, I never understood why black people put their hope in God at all. We were taught to believe that one day, in the twinkling of an eye, God was going to come and take us to glory, where the streets were paved with gold. No more crying in the midnight hour, no more pain and suffering, no more disappointment, no more hatred, no more killings. I wasn’t the smartest of children, but absolutely nothing in Shreveport led me to believe this was going to happen any time soon.
For that reason, it took a lot of courage, in that spring of 1942, for my mother, Julia Metcalf, a young Negro woman, to have me out of wedlock. Whites scorned her for her sin of fornication. Her own people compounded it by ostracizing her. The real problem was her messing around with R. D. Williams, my father, a man with a terrible reputation for living off women and having babies all over Shreveport.
R.D. was Mama’s greatest weakness, the invisible man who impregnated her by night and disappeared from our lives by day. His “Harry Houdini” act eventually led to the birth of five children, four girls—Pat, Barbara, Penny, Faye—and me. I was the eldest, Richard Dove Williams, his only son.
I never understood my mother’s attraction to my father. The world may now see me as a famous man in control of his destiny, but no one knows how much my early life defined me as a child, and later, as a husband and a father. Back then, it was customary to name a son after his father, so my mother did. As early as I remember, I hated my name because my father’s love did not come with it. My name was a constant reminder of what I did not have and could not earn. It would always remind me of the man who left me alone, who abused my mother, and who put me way behind the starting line in the race of life.
As a child, I struggled to understand why my father didn’t want me and why he didn’t love me. Even now, those questions remain, and I am rarely comfortable with people, or within myself, regardless of the respect I have gained. When I was a child, my mother understood how much pain my father caused me and tried to make up for it. In the bedtime stories she read to me, she made sure I knew Richard was a king’s name. She told me it meant “lionhearted.” It took a long time for me to accept my name but I had to, to become what I believed I could be. I knew I would need a heart bigger than a lion’s to make something of myself, a heart at least as big as the world that hated me.
My father publicly admitted I was his child but never made even the slightest effort to forge a bond between us. His presence in town was tantalizing—a father so near and yet so out of reach. As much as I tried to accept that, his rejection created a breach that would last for the rest of our lives. Yet, every child wants to love his father, and back then, I was no different. When I was in the third grade, I started pretending he lived with us. One rainy day after school, I stood in front of the building in the rain for over an hour, waiting for him to pick me up. He never came. After a while, my mom showed up carrying a homemade raincoat for me.
“Sonny, why are you standing here in the rain?”
“I’m waiting for my daddy to pick me up.”
She touched my wet head tenderly. “He’s not coming. Let’s go home.”
I struggled to love my father but grew to hate him even more as Mama continued to let him come over and make babies inside her. She used to say she was accustomed to a big family. After my last sister, Faye, was born, I confronted her.
“Mama, why do you let him keep doing that to you?”
She answered angrily, “That’s not your business, Richard.”
To me, it was. Something inside me needed to know why she allowed him to use her over and over again. I kept questioning her. Her response was always the same, her face turned away, curt and angry.
“It’s not your business, Richard.”
Every day of our life was a struggle to hold on to hope, a struggle to live. R.D. never got better. He never helped my mother or me or my sisters. It took a long while, but finally my mom saw that. One day when I questioned her, she seemed to take it more to heart, and answered sadly, “I don’t know why I let him do that to me.”
In time, she realized R.D. had no hope of ever changing. He didn’t want us and we didn’t need him. My mother was all the strength we needed, the backbone of our family. To this day, she is my greatest hero. She taught us the importance of sticking together. She created special bonds with each of us. As time went on, I began to treat the very idea of having a father as a figment of my imagination. He wasn’t real. Neither was his love.
It’s always been ironic to me that I was born on Valentine’s Day, because for many years love was my most elusive quest. Throughout my life, I have tried to understand why it was so important to find someone to love me. My mother and sisters surely loved me, but I always felt something missing. It was something I would not find until I fathered my own children and had a family of my own.
That was when my life truly began.
There are many who think me a fierce, dominating, and controlling parent. Perhaps. Or perhaps I just know what it is like to grow up without a father’s love and support and, in that, see the reason why being a husband and father has been the most important and all-encompassing role of my life.
Raising my children, fighting for them and protecting them, gave me the utmost love, pride, and satisfaction. Without doubt, of the many places I have been, and the many jobs I have done, the opportunity to be a good and loving father will always be my greatest joy and most solemn blessing.