My phone is vibrating. It’s Allen, a close friend over a lifetime I haven’t visited much in the past fifteen years because he moved to Louisiana. I let the call go to voicemail, assuming he’s seen the CBS story and that a well-wishing message is enough.
“David,” Allen says, “it’s been too long, but we need to catch up. I’ve got something important to share. Give me a call soon as you can.”
Allen and I were family friends who bonded like college roommates. I knew his wife growing up, our wives and children were friends, and he is familiar, like a comfortable coat, and we’ve been through things together, golf trips, co-owning mediocre businesses, serving on the city council together, searching for our professional calling.
Allen was struggling work-wise in his late thirties at the same time I was struggling in my early thirties, and we talked about how we battled providing the status-quo stability our families needed while our residency on the fringe made us topsy and turvy and a bit too unpredictable at times. We were slipping, yet more trying to hide it—cats hiding behind chairs with tails sticking out.
I see you.
A friend who hoped to help me get out from behind that chair asked what I needed. A fresh start, I’d said, out of the small town I grew up in, away from my adopted family, my painful memories. He told me about a sales job in construction, with a focus on schools and government projects. It was based in Louisiana.
No, Kent had said, and she was right. The job wasn’t for me.
But I’d thought of Allen, good in sales, knowledgeable about construction, and his wife had an uncle in Baton Rouge, where the job was based.
One month later, Allen and his family moved from Oxford to Baton Rouge, and he started work in this job I’d referred him to. I haven’t seen him more than several brief moments in the past decade and a half since, since several years later we moved away from Oxford, too, before coming back home to Oxford thirteen years later. Our few happenstance visits were good, but such run-ins yield only so much opportunity beyond sharing niceties: “You look great,” or asking about family, like “What are your children doing these days?” and sharing professional highlights, like “I’ve signed a new book” and “I’ve joined a new company as a partner; we’re developing commercial warehouses,” punctuated by hugs—right hands clasped, pulling in for a shoulder bump.
Allen’s message says it’s important, so I return the call.
“Hey, David,” Allen says, “I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m calling.”
Yes.
“I haven’t read your book yet, but congratulations, I’ve heard it’s good.”
Thank you.
“There’s something else, though, that would have made another good chapter in your book, had you known.”
Okay.
“Remember that job someone shared with you, the one that wasn’t right for you, so you passed it along to me?” he asks. “Well, I’ve just figured something out something crazy related to that. Your birth father was Lloyd Lindsey.”
Yes. I’m listening.
“You know, St. Francisville, where he lived, is in the Baton Rouge area, and that was my first territory,” Allen says. “One of my first clients in that job was the West Feliciana school district, where Lloyd Lindsey was the superintendent. They were ready to build a new elementary school and library, and I landed that construction project.”
You’re joking.
I’m pacing a circle around the couch in my den.
“No, I’m not,” Allen says, “but it’s even crazier still. Lloyd, your father, became a close, close friend those several years we built that school. We had a lot in common the way you and I do, and we hit it off. He mentored me, as a friend. A father of sorts. His favorite role. Lloyd loved books, and I never left his office without a book he’d given me. Today my bookshelves are filled with books that your father gave me.”
“You’re telling me that I passed on a job, shared it with you, and in that job, you developed a relationship with the father I didn’t know, not by name, not by location, and that had father–son mentor qualities?”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Allen says. “David, you are so much like Lloyd Lindsey. You are practically the same person. I should have figured it out just by meeting him. But who could have imagined that?”
Not me. I’d searched for my birth father since 1990, the year William was born. I’d held my son in my arms, the first blood I’d ever met in person, and looked into his eyes, wondering where they came from. Nearly thirty years later, accessible DNA testing led me to my birth father, and his family—my family—though by the time I got there, Lloyd Lindsey Jr., my father, was already gone.
Lloyd’s widow, Marsha, who welcomed me as blood family, recalls him saying at some point, “I wonder if I’ve got a child out there somewhere,” after a friend of his was contacted by a son who’d made the connection through a DNA test, but not long after he’d fallen, suffering brain damage and dying days later, and I never got to meet him.
“They say Lloyd never met a stranger,” Allen says, “so I don’t want to read too much into how he treated me. Maybe he treated everyone that way. But when I’d sit in his office, he’d talk to me about how to treat others, and how to pursue purpose in life. He wanted happiness for me, like a father wants for a son.”
I wipe away tears.
“It means so much that you, my friend, got to know my father, the father I’ll never meet.”
We pledge to get together soon so Allen can share more details about his relationship with Lloyd, then hang up. I take a seat on the couch in the den and lean my head into my hands, closing my eyes.
I speak, in my head, to my birth father, as I speak to William.
Did you talk to Allen, wondering if it was me?
No answer.
Are you there?
Yes, says a voice, in familiar strong tenor.
I’m startled.
More than two years have passed since I learned the identity of my birth father, since I met and bonded with his family, now mine, as if I’d known them all along. I’d viewed Lloyd as the father to my half-siblings, uncomfortable claiming him as fully my own. But Allen got to know Lloyd, as a friend, as a father figure. Perhaps I can know him, too, I’m thinking. I wonder if it can be like with William—Lloyd is there, if I’m willing, if he’s needed.
“Don’t leave me,” I say, with a child’s innocence.
I’m here, I hear my father say, as if comforting a student hurt on the playground. I’m here, and after so many conversations with my late son, William, it seems practically normal, hearing the trusted voice rise from within, hearing a voice that I’ve never before heard yet immediately recognize.
There’s only one way to know someone we’ve never met. It’s if we are them, in part, at least. That’s why I’ve not once shed a tear over never having met Lloyd Lindsey Jr., my biological father, who was born in 1944 and died in 2009, at sixty-four. When I’m told by those who knew him how it breaks their heart that we never met, that I’ll never get to know him, I smile. “I’d love to have met him,” I say, “but I can assure you that I know him.”
My father, his son.
They’ll smile. How sweet. And it is sweet—yet. They don’t understand, they can’t understand unless they’ve come to know a critical person they’ve never met because that person lives in how they walk, talk, cross their legs, process stress, connect with others, and think. DNA replicates more than eye color and posture, after all. It also involves hand-me-downs of heart and soul, fear and hope, and faith—essences of humanity. For those who know their parents from birth, it’s there, too, of course, the unmistakable inheritance of self, in everything good and challenging that makes us. It’s just that years of relationship can dull the wonder and awareness of how those who made us live within us.
My adopted father was afraid of guns and never took me hunting.
My biological father loved hunting, bird hunting in particular.
I love hunting, bird hunting in particular.
My adopted father was nervous in crowds.
My biological father believed he could win the crowd.
I believe I can win the crowd.
My adopted father backed down under pressure, like in the workplace.
My biological father bowed up under pressure, like in the workplace.
I bow up under pressure, like in the workplace.
Such characteristics sprung from me as a teenager, seeding a restlessness I battled for more than five decades of life as I grappled with knowing this person inside me, who dares to stare out the window; who believes he can be at once both the one in charge and the nurturer doling out nurture and encouragement; who holds court at a party, delighting the crowd, until he doesn’t, going on a bit too long; who can hit a stage and own it as if he belongs there, compelled to tell and share stories that let others know they can go and achieve what they want and deserve. It’s only now I understand that I went searching for my father, when all I had to do was find myself to know him. The identification of my father in me frees my trapped spirit, as if a kite has broken loose from its tether on a windy day, soaring to heights not possible before.
———
I’ve been standing for more than an hour, intimately embracing dozens of people I barely know or am meeting for the first time who speak to and welcome me as if they’ve known me all along. Most, once they reach me, wipe tears away, and periodically, I do the same, unable to swallow so much emotion at once, already intoxicated on the potent engagement and connection pouring from the people.
The line formed after I gave a short talk to the 150 or so gathered about how family inheritance isn’t always about money, and I’d heard an encouraging voice telling me to Wow ’em, just as he’d have done. I remain the main attraction, like I’m the primary greeter at the funeral of a loved one, except it’s me who died, and it’s me who is back to life before them. “Praise be to God,” says a man in his early eighties. “Lloyd was my best friend.”
A woman in her seventies steps forward, the next in line, looking deep into my eyes before scanning across my body head to toe as if I’m a barcode.
Beep.
Ready for the transaction.
“I declare,” she says, “spittin’ image, you are.”
I sign her book.
“For Elizabeth,” I scribble, “we may come and go, but the love of friends never dies.”
I look at my inscription, puzzled. I’ve never met this woman before. We’re not friends.
Why did I write that?
I give her a hug.
I brush her tears from the shoulder of my shirt.
“Never thought I’d get another glimpse of Lloyd Lindsey,” she says.
Next.
“My goodness,” a middle-aged woman says, wrapping hands around my elbows and standing back at her arms’ length so she’s got me framed as a portrait. “Your daddy. He was my headmaster in middle school and high school. He was my favorite person in the whole world. He’d be so, so proud of you.”
“That makes me happy.”
“I ’speck you know what he meant to people around here,” she says, giving another full-body glance.
“I’m getting an idea,” I say.
It’s a warm Wednesday evening in St. Francisville, Louisiana, the quaint, mossy town along the Mississippi River where they pray over toast and toast over prayer. Thanksgiving is tomorrow, but tonight I’m the main dish, visiting the local independent bookstore, The Conundrum, to talk about and sign copies of Dear William. I was in uptown New Orleans the night before, at Octavia Books, but St. Francisville is my adopted hometown as of this night. It’s filled with hundreds of folks who profess love for me, even though I’ve only been within the city limits twice before, besides the one time in my early thirties I rambled through here alone, drawn like a magnet, looking for something. But I’d kept driving then, unsure why I’d stopped in town with a feeling, and now I’m still fuzzy on most of these people’s names.
The two-hundred-plus or so books the store had in stock have already sold out, and I’m signing most of those with a Sharpie in between the tears and stories, but if I didn’t know better, I’d swear this was Lloyd’s event.
“His boys”—my half-brothers, Tim and Lile—“got a lot of Lloyd in him, but you got more,” says a middle-aged man.
Lloyd, who wore round, wire-frame glasses, a mustache, and a jacket, blue shirt, and bow tie to work, was taller than me, standing six-foot-four, while I’m six-foot-one, but our long narrow feet are the same—only his were longer. Hudson has those feet, and Mary Halley has those feet.
Lloyd had a bigger-than-life personality to match his size, they tell me.
He never met a stranger.
He told quite a story.
A friend to all.
An advocate for the less fortunate.
A little loud, especially if drinking.
Quite a character.
Nothing I haven’t heard before. Nothing I haven’t known for most of a lifetime. Only, I didn’t have a name. After five decades, I’ve finally learned—his name was Lloyd. He was a bit like me. Or, the other way around.
When I found my birth father four years before, his family and friends had shared anecdotes and stories about Lloyd, like how in college at LSU, fraternity brothers at Sigma Alpha Epsilon called him the “Senator” because he worked the room loud and in charge. He was a late bloomer in school, not reading until elementary school, yet he flourished as a school superintendent on his terms, a champion for the school, the students, and the teachers. Lloyd and Marsha lived with their three children on an inherited small farm at the Louisiana border with Mississippi near Woodville. His father, Lloyd Lindsey Sr., was a basketball star in college at LSU, and later a real-estate developer by passion and success but a school superintendent in Baton Rouge by trade. Lloyd followed his father into education, becoming a superintendent of a county’s public school system by the age of fifty.
“When this door opens in the morning,” he once said at a faculty meeting, the day before the start of a new year, “I want you all to remember that this school is like a business. I know these students come here for free with tax dollars, but if we’re to become a great school, we must treat the students and parents as customers. Give them the best we can offer, the same as we’d expect.”
Had the schools been a business, requiring investment beyond charity, Lloyd and family would’ve gone broke, since he’d frequently pay for a student’s mother’s medical treatment when she was hard on cash, or loan money he didn’t have to a father out of work, knowing he’d never get repaid—another year without a Lindsey family vacation.
I hear the stories and think of Kent, who endured so many years of my trying to help folks I had no business helping, because we didn’t have the money to spare, me trying to be the protector when it wasn’t my place. She thought I wasn’t thinking clearly, worrying over others when we needed help. Still, I felt compelled to give money to the reporter who wanted to take the job in another city but didn’t have funds to make the move on $42,000 a year. “Here’s the first month’s rent and deposit,” I’d said, handing over an unsolicited check. Miss America, the reporter, and too many others to count—and it’s not something to brag about, because often it was a betrayal to Kent and my family, sharing what we didn’t have, and it was a betrayal to myself, seeking the feedback of appreciation that came with such gifts. But I always meant for the best outcome, unsure of where the need, or desire, came from.
The crowd has filled this tiny bookstore because Tim, Lloyd’s middle child of his three after me, and therefore my half-brother, and his wife, Laura, a native of nearby Woodville, Mississippi, asked their friends and neighbors to come. So did Lile, Lloyd’s oldest child of his three after me, and his wife, Libby, who live in nearby Baton Rouge. Lile grew up in town and never met a stranger, and Tim is a local physician, a community pillar, known on every corner; Laura’s the same. So, if they announce, “Our brother is in town for a book signing,” people will come. All the people will come, for Tim and Laura, and to get a glimpse of Lloyd, who died unexpectedly in his mid-sixties in 2009 while acting school superintendent. One day he’s walking the halls, talking to students and parents, and the next, he’s gone, after merely attempting to change a light bulb in a high crevice, as life happens.
As life unhappens.
Tim has plenty of Lloyd in him—height, stubbornness on something he strongly believes in, community passion, his ability to engage one-on-one and make you feel as if you are the only one who matters in the world in that moment. Ruthie, Lloyd’s youngest, carries forth our father’s ability to dream, and to help others dream. Lile, the oldest (not counting me), has some of that, too. But it’s me, Lile says, the firstborn, who’s the “most like our dad, by far.” They say it’s the mouth, how it looks, and my loud voice coming from it that can captivate the room initially, but tire it eventually. They say it’s my obsession with helping so-called underdogs, my posture in a room, or a chair, and my knack for repeating things to make sure everyone knows what I want when they’ve long since heard me. That’s why the crowd is lingering so long, I’m told, on this eve of giving great thanks. They wanted to get a glimpse. Seeing is believing, after all, and here stands a living piece of a man these folks loved dearly, who departed abruptly like a warm shower turned cold in an instant, and they want to be close to some of the warmth now brewing in this bookstore.
“Can you please say for me, ‘Well, Ida, we’ll have to see’?” a woman asks. I do, and she sniffles. She and her husband stand close, and she embraces me, as if she’s known me for years, and I embrace in return, as if I’ve known her, too, because I feel like I do. It’s as if they are my friends, in part, and this is my community, in part.
It’s not all DNA, of course. There’s no denying the impact of nurture. The adopted house and family I grew up in were full of untruths, for instance, and I repeated those learnings until it broke me and I began a journey of unlearning. To survive. But very little of who I am, from speech, to posture, to walk, to drive, comes from my family according to law.
I lived with my adopted mother and father from the moment they got me from the Baptist home for unwed mothers in 1965 at three months old until I moved down the street into a dorm at the University of Mississippi as a college freshman. Still, nobody has once compared me to either of them. Most everyone who meets me who knew Lloyd Lindsey Jr. says, yep, there he is, right there—a whole lot of Lloyd.
The line has reached an end; the last person approaches as if she’s in a hurry after the long wait. She didn’t get a book—they sold out fifteen minutes ago—but she stayed in line to say hello. I cap the Sharpie I’ve signed with while meeting and greeting for an hour like I’ve joined the church and the congregation is welcoming me home.
“I’m hungry,” says the woman, appearing in her early seventies, “and my husband keeps messaging me question marks, wondering how much longer. He’s hungry, too. But I couldn’t get out of here without asking you one important question.”
“Okay,” I say, smiling. “I won’t give you a long answer, because I’m hungry, too. Very.”
“Of course you are, Lloyd was always hungry,” she says, “looking toward the next meal.”
Same.
I assume she wants to know how it feels to have never met the man whose DNA I carry and have passed along, but no, she’s looking at my feet.
“Can I see the bottom of your shoe?” she asks.
“Excuse me?”
“Can I see the bottom of your shoe?”
“Uh, well, which one?”
“Doesn’t matter. Either one.”
I don’t want to show her the bottom of my shoe, either shoe. For a good reason, I try to keep the bottom of my shoes out of sight.
I give a crooked half-smile, hoping to change the subject.
“Why do you think I waited in this line all this time?” she asks, waiting.
I give in, turning sideways, placing my left arm on her left shoulder, lifting my right foot behind me, and holding it in place with my right arm.
“Aha!” she shouts. “I knew it. I just knew it.
“Here’s the thing, Mr. Magee . . . or should I say, Mr. Lindsey,” she continues. “I was a longtime teacher in the high school when he was a headmaster, and Lloyd was a good friend. I always knew when he came down the hall because he walked heel first, heel first, clap-clap, clap-clap. I asked him how he got that funny walk. He told me he was born with it, nothing he could do about that. But it wore down his heels, and you could see the heels of his shoes worn down to nubs. It was strange how he’d grind down the heels of his shoes. But one day, I noticed his heel was normal and asked him about it. He said he’d found a cobbler to put rubber soles on the heels of his shoes so they wouldn’t grind down. You could still hear him coming, but his shoes lasted longer.”
I look at my heel as I drop it back to the ground, remembering why I wanted to hide the soles of my shoes—the leather heel of my loafer purchased within the year has already ground down more than a quarter of an inch, displaying like a raw, open wound.
“Well, that’s a little crazy,” I say.
“More than a little,” she says.
“People have been making fun of how I walk since junior high school,” I say. “My father—my adopted father—used to ask me why I walked that way, and he’d try to give me walking lessons. I was embarrassed by it as a teenager. I never knew where it came from.”
“Well, now you do, now you know. And now you know why I waited for so long. I needed to tell you how to fix your shoes, just like Lloyd. You need rubber soles added to the heels, son.”
I nod, and she turns to leave, giddy at her finding.
We get one shot at this life, and I missed Lloyd, my father, in my shot. I’ll never get to meet the one who most prominently impacts me, down to thoughts, yawns, and leg-crossing patterns, but knowing his friends and community is knowing him. Of course, I wish we’d met in this life. I do, but my questions are no more, and my pursuit of tangible identity is no more, because I’m feeling him, as me.
After all, I am him, in part.
In this moment, in this town, I’m claiming Lloyd Lindsey Jr. as my father. No asterisk. In this moment, I’m escaping the conundrum that’s plagued me for a lifetime—the absence of a father I’m willing to claim. I’m nearly fifty-six years old, thanks to a birthday in two days, and it’s time I leave the searching boy behind, for someone instead, a man, who knows who he is, who knows from where he came, flaws, strengths, and all.
I close my eyes.
Dad?
A tenor voice calls from a distance.
“David.”
I listen closely.
It repeats, louder.
“David.”
I open my eyes, startled, and from across the room, I see Lile, my half-brother, walking my way, calling my name. He’s holding a trash bag and picking up empty cups and napkins left by the now-departed crowd.
“Man,” he says, in my midst, “what an event. I sure wish Dad could have been here.”
I smile.
“I’m betting he was,” I say, and he looks at me eye to eye, smiling in agreement.
“I’m sure of it,” Lile says.