In a box in my parents’ dining room sits a stack of five-by-eight-inch index cards with photos and profiles of important black historical figures. At every meal during Black History Month, they’d set a card up at an empty space at our dining room table and we’d spend the meal talking about the person profiled in a tradition they dubbed “Dinner Guests.” Some people save a place for Elijah; we saved a place for Shirley Chisholm. The conversations always centered around achievement rather than overcoming. In what I would later realize was a stunning bit of narrative alchemy, my parents taught us black history lessons that weren’t remarkable because of all the oppression they involved but because of the extraordinariness of the black people at their center. This would prove to be dramatically different from the rest of reality, which is, let’s be honest, an oppression-fest.
On our first date, David and I went to a charming little Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, the kind that was designed within an inch of its life to project homespun warmth and familial charm. And it worked. We talked for four hours about the best dinners we’d ever had, about the boisterous, convivial parties his aunt and uncle threw at their home, and about my parents’ Dinner Guests tradition. He recommended to me the poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo, which begins “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” I now know that we were setting an intention for ourselves, for the way our lives together would play out, and the places that we would find comfort, belonging, and transformation. But we didn’t know that then. All we knew was that we liked to eat and we liked to talk and we wanted to keep doing those things, preferably simultaneously, for a long time. Which is as good a foundation for a relationship as any.
As I prepared to bring David home to meet my parents for the first time, I thought of the empty setting at their table that had once held space for Dr. Charles Drew and Gwendolyn Brooks. David was in Baltimore for a conference, and my mother had told me I should come down and bring him over, even though it was Valentine’s Day and it was snowing heavily. “But it’s Valentine’s Day,” I said. “Won’t you be busy?”
“We don’t have plans, boy! We’ve been married thirty-six years. I’ll make spaghetti.”
My mother welcomed David into the house and asked if he had enough time for a tour of the family photos. He said yes, because I hadn’t warned him how many family photos there were. She ushered him into the dining room. On one side of the table my parents have hung a painting I’d commissioned of my mother’s grandfather N. A. Smith baptizing her uncle in a river. Opposite that painting hung two photos of the slave cabin where N. A. Smith was born. “This is where we begin,” my mother said.
This was my second time bringing a boyfriend home. Soon after Jay and I moved in together, my mother called and demanded that I bring him down for Thanksgiving so she could meet him. This was a reasonable request that, naturally, sent me reeling with anxiety. I had never brought anyone, of any gender, home. So a boyfriend introduction at a large family dinner seemed, frankly, beyond the pale. But I will do anything within my power to please my mother—and it didn’t seem practical that Jay and my parents would just never meet for the rest of their lives—so I agreed. Before we ended the call, my mother said, “Oh, and Martin is coming, too. I just thought you should know.”
Martin is my cousin. He’s twelve years older than me. He’s always been very good-looking, macho, and cool. I guess it runs in the family. For a while, Martin existed largely as an idea, a character in our family story that was oft referred to but rarely seen. Right after high school he went into the military. He served in the Gulf War and then was stationed in Europe. Afterward he came home, got married, had two extraordinary daughters, and continued to serve the country for over a decade.
Memories of him float in this half-light that seems fantastical. During the Gulf War, when I still lived at home, I remember we would occasionally get souvenirs from him. Not like cultural artifacts, just “I’m thinking of you” stuff. Like once he sent us a VHS copy of Die Hard. Could this be right? If so, awesome. But I remember we were told we couldn’t play it because it was full of sand. I don’t know if that was actually true or whether that was just something my parents said to keep us away from an R-rated movie. I prefer for the sand to be real; I imagine it pouring out of the cassette case and filling up the room, a billion particles from across the sea bearing the message “Yippee-yi-yo-ki-yay. I miss you. Love, Martin.”
Anyway, Martin was back in the States and my mother wanted to give me the heads-up about him coming to the same Thanksgiving dinner as my new boyfriend. I didn’t really understand the issue, so my mother launched into a long story about someone else’s controversy. My favorite kind. Apparently, when we were all kids, one of my brothers remembered Martin saying something homophobic about me behind my back and had carried the memory with him, at some point relaying it to my mother. Hearing this, now far into the future and irreparably gay, was embarrassing, which is a strange emotion to have about the whole thing, but this plotline made me feel like a bit of a rube.
The night before Thanksgiving, I talked with my mother on the phone again. She said, “I called Martin and I told him, ‘Listen, Eric is bringing his partner and it’s a man and that man is white and you just have to be cool, okay? Just be cool!’ ”
The next afternoon, Jay and I caught the train to Baltimore. When we arrived, I texted my dad, who said he was parked outside. Every time I go to Baltimore, my parents have new cars, and I realized as we walked out of the train station that I had no idea what I was looking for. I told Jay to just look for my dad. He said, “I’ve never met your dad,” and I was like, “Just use your imagination.”
We eventually found my father. He is warmth, he is authority, he is a preternatural rootedness. He hugged me and shook Jay’s hand and we drove amiably for the five minutes it takes to get from the train station to my childhood home.
At the house, my mother answered the door, petite, with smooth skin, cheeks just a bit rosy from the heat of the kitchen. A light dusting of flour sat atop her busy sweater and also on a scarf holding her hair back. I am always surprised for a moment when I see my mother. She looks exactly the same way I’ve always remembered her. How has she not aged? Does time stop in this home? I marvel at her whenever I see her.
My mother gave me a hug—heart to heart, she always says—then hugged Jay and then turned around and went upstairs. “Come on up!” she said to me. “I need you to stir the gravy.” My dad pulled Jay aside and told him that he’d be helping grab sodas from storage. Fifteen seconds in and we’re put to work.
When my brother Stephen brought his girlfriend—now his wife—home to meet our family, everything was very different. I could tell he was tense because he told me over the phone, “Don’t make any racial jokes.” His wife, Kathleen, is also white. Stephen has never been one to shy away from the edge, comedically, so this was a surprise. I teased him, “You know that racial humor is my bread and butter. Or, I should say, my fried chicken and Kool-Aid.” He was less than amused. I promised to bite my tongue.
When they arrived, though we were on our best behavior race-wise, Mommy and Daddy were extreme whirlwinds of activity. My dad’s charm was up to an 11; he was making jokes with Kathleen and running around remodeling the house (that’s what he does when they have guests; he built a deck during dinner). Meanwhile, my mother had me drag out all her scrapbooks and led Kathleen on a tour of my brother’s youth. Everyone was just vibrating with excitement and anticipation. It was like in Beauty and the Beast when Mrs. Potts warbles, “It’s a guest, it’s a guest, saints alive and I’ll be blessed!” The silverware danced, we toasted to the enduring power of love, and, like in Beauty and the Beast, no one said the N-word.
There were no scrapbooks at Thanksgiving, just gravy to be stirred and sodas to be put in the fridge, and a house that seemed eerily empty. It’s a big house and I knew it was full of people, but I felt disconnected. Jay had been swallowed up by unpacking more soda than we’d be able to drink in a week; my mom was upstairs changing. My uncle was in the living room watching TV. My aunt was in the kitchen waiting for me to relieve her of gravy duty. My youngest brother, Jeffrey, was sleeping. And Stephen and Kathleen were at her mother’s house and weren’t coming.
And just as soon as I realized I felt adrift, everyone converged, like the dinner bell at Golden Corral had been rung. My mom, my dad, my youngest brother, my aunt, my uncle, my boyfriend, and me. With an empty chair right next to me. For Elijah. Or Martin, whoever got there first.
We were just commencing that period of life when the last of us who had been defined in the family system by being children were now undeniably adults, and that kind of thing always takes some getting used to. Roles realign, stories shift, people must reintroduce themselves. So, we were all strangers for a moment, peacefully making a new world at a table. Reaching over each other. Having polite conversation. Filling up our plates. As a family, we were sometimes quiet, sometimes funny. We didn’t mind silence, even though most of us were talkers. We had the easiness that comes from knowing the same stories and knowing which parts you’re supposed to say at what time. I often wonder who the audience is for those stories, the ones everyone gathered has heard every year, the ones most of us lived through. Maybe they’re not for anyone outside of the circle. Maybe the telling is the metronome by which we set the beating of our hearts.
When I think of our family at that point, I think of the ease, the placidity. Which is why the frenzy around Kathleen had been so remarkable; a potential in-law had been a new story for our immediate family and we had all still been learning our parts. Thanksgiving dinner with Jay, with its comfortable disjoint and frequent pauses and my low-level anxiety, was more normal. It felt good to be home.
Then the doorbell rang. Martin.
Martin came lumbering up the thirteen stairs from the front door to the dining room and filled the frame. He’s jacked, with a shaved head and light green eyes. He’s unmissable. He sat down next to me. I didn’t speak. Should I introduce Jay? I wondered. I think process of elimination will let him know which one Jay is. But one never knows.
Martin had already eaten, so he was just there to keep us company. The meal continued at its comfortable, herky-jerky pace. I nervously shoveled food into my mouth and prayed for silence. Martin pulled out his phone and started scrolling through memes. I like memes. Should I talk to him about memes? Jay and my mother started talking to each other, so I shifted in my seat so I could ear-hustle their conversation and listen for land mines. Martin started telling a funny story to the rest of the table. I tried to will my other ear to listen in to that. Was I expecting something that would offend? Maybe. I really didn’t know. Everything that was being said at that moment was totally new for me and potentially dangerous.
I couldn’t really make out what Jay and my mom were saying to each other, but no one had stormed off in a huff, so I guessed that was a good sign. And I couldn’t really tell what Martin’s story was about, but when I looked back at him he was brandishing a hunting knife to punctuate a point and everyone else was laughing. I decided to accept it all as a new normal.
When it was time for Jay and me to leave, Martin turned to Jay and spoke to him for the first time: “Jay, you’re part of the family now, so you should know we’re crazy.” Which just floored me. This macho vet, this stranger from the desert, was supposed to be the liability, and he was the first person to refer to my boyfriend as part of the family out loud.
Martin then looked at me. His eyes shot up to my closely shorn balding head. “You and Jay are rockin’ the same haircut. You oughta just shave it off. You’re not fooling anybody. If you’re bald, you’re bald.”
His face pulled into a mask of incredulity as if to say, “Who has time to hide who they are? In this economy?!” And then he went back to looking through pictures on his phone.
I hadn’t wanted to go home, because I felt like a liability, a story that came with a warning label. As I rode the train home with Jay, I realized that my parents had replaced the flurry of activity that surrounded Kathleen’s arrival with a hug for Jay and an invitation to get to work as an offering of normalcy. The scrapbooks had stayed put away and my mother had instructed everyone to just be cool. They were expending the same amount of energy not to put on a show. As if to say, “This is home and you’re welcome here as you are.” I think it’s important to note that that takes work: family doesn’t just happen; welcome isn’t a neutral state. We have to tend to these things.
And that’s what Martin did, too. With his invitation to Jay, with his too-true aside to me, with his presence itself, he offered a gift of not being a guest, but rather a member of the family.
I must admit, I’ve never taken the photographic tour of my parents’ house that my mother commenced when David came over on Valentine’s Day. How often does one ask for explanations of things that they should just know about through the osmosis of family history? I knew the people in the photos and I could call to mind most of the anecdotes that they’d provoke, though I could never do it like my mother. My mother has the memory of a griot. Our family’s story spills out of her, spontaneously and authoritatively, a life force all its own. She has spent a lifetime piecing together the threads of family tales, anecdotes, controversies, mysteries, and secrets into a cohesive, growing whole. This isn’t something I take lightly. The stories of black life in this nation and prior to this nation have never been as well kept as the stories of white life. We inherit a narrative that is full of sand. There are so many on the outside who want our stories, our histories of achievement, erased, so we have to save the space for them—in ourselves and in our midst.
“This is where we begin,” she said to David, pointing at the photos of the slave cabins mounted on the dining room wall. She doesn’t mean this is the start of the family—she’s researched farther back than that, as much as she can with the purposefully spotty records of slaveholders and kidnappers. She means these cabins are the first words of the story.
N. A. Smith, my mother’s grandfather, was conceived in slavery but born in freedom. It’s a sentence I know by heart, as every year we celebrated his birthday as N. A. Smith Day, the day our story began. This is the start of our America. I mouth the words along with her as she tells David. I am struck by the gift she has decided to give him and by the welcome she is sharing with this person, this stranger, this white man who also happens to be the person that her son loves.
She led him into the living room, taking care to give the background of every photo—family vacations, class photos the subject was not interested in sitting for, wedding candids, the painstakingly restored images of black people in sepia tone and formal wear: N. A. Smith, his wife E. P., and their children. Free. Arching toward the future.
We rounded the living room, pausing at every bookshelf and side table, dozens of frames on every surface, and then down a hall back to the dining room. She ended on the other side of the dining room, with the painting of N. A. Smith baptizing his son in a river, a painting that I’d commissioned based on a photo that was nearly one hundred years old.
At dinner, my father—the most encouraging person in the world—chatted with David about his ministry, his plans for a future church, and his ambitions. Then my mother and I got to talking about memorable funerals we had been to and made ourselves cry from laughing and then cry from crying. We told the same stories over and over, retracing the lines, committing our existence to memory. My mother pulled out some scrapbooks and David was an enthusiastic audience. It reminded me, all of it, of so many dinners that had come before. There were moments I would look at David animatedly talking to my parents in the warm light of the dining room I’ve eaten in my whole life and I’d fall out of time. All of this was new, but also so familiar—in both meanings of the word.
Every family’s story is a tale of becoming, sometimes through oppression, sometimes through achievement, and sometimes simply through the current of time. We were born grasping after freedom, in a house that could not hold us; every day we get closer and closer to our destination, until our features come into view. Soon, everyone further on down the family line can see us from their seats at the table; we’re coming home.
Set a place for us. We’re hungry, we have so much to talk about, and we’re coming home.