my mother, and three weeks after the tacos and tears with Alton, I meet Gabriel for the first time. We make plans, a date, and I watch out the window until I see him walk up to our broken iron gate. He rings the bell and I am the one who lets him in. I am left breathless when I see him; we look exactly alike.
We don’t stay in the apartment long. My mother and he do not hug. She is not a hugger. But they are cordial. After five minutes we leave. We get on the bus and head to the movies, although what we saw is gone forever from my memory.
He does not have a car yet. He rides the bus to see me. We ride the bus to our date. I am awkward with Gabriel the whole time, unsure of what to say, how to act. It makes no difference to him. He hugs and kisses me throughout the day, the way you might do with a newborn baby, which in a way, to him, I am. I accept his affection, but do not return it. I am not yet comfortable with this new father in my life.
Gabriel tells me he lives in a home for sober adults. He tells me right away he’s in recovery from crack addiction. I know about crack. Everybody uses it, it seems like. At least in my neighborhood where there are no playgrounds, no parks, no afterschool programs, no hangout spots, no movie theaters, no jobs, no treatment centers or health care for the mentally ill, like my brother Monte, who had begun smoking crack and selling my mom’s things and is already showing signs of what we would much later come to know as schizoaffective disorder.
But without health care beyond LA County USC hospital, we can’t know about my brother. We only know that crack filled the empty spaces for a lot of people whose lives have been emptied out. We are the post-Reagan, post–social safety net generation. The welfare reform generation. The swim or motherfucking sink generation. And, unlike our counterparts on Wall Street, where crack is used and sold more, we don’t have an employee assistance plan.
Later, when I am home, none of my siblings will ask me how it went. Did I like him? What did we do? I have shared everything with these three people: Monte, Paul and Jasmine. Secrets, fears, rooms, triumphs, disappointments. They all eventually tumble out of us. But not this one. This story is tucked inside a world only I live in.
And then one day after I meet Gabriel, my mom and I get into a terrible argument. I don’t recall what I say or do, only that I am angry at everything and everyone and I am talking back to her and she slaps me hard across the face. My brother Paul intervenes immediately. He takes me in his arms and he holds me. It seems like hours. He holds me and rocks me, my six-foot-two, 180-pound muscle-bound brother.
You will always be my sister, Paul whispers to me.
You will always be ours, he says.
A week after the movies comes Gabriel’s graduation. My father’s graduation. He’s been in a Salvation Army drug and alcohol treatment program. My mother is the one who takes me to it. We do not speak during the ride, but she has made sure my face is clean, my clothes are neat. Her daughter is presentable. We arrive at the Salvation Army, which is a church and also the sober living house where my father resides. My mother and I go to the graduation. I see my father for the second time. He is one of nearly 20 men who will be celebrated.
His large, almost unwieldy family—my family now—have gathered and no sooner does he rush to greet me, to scoop awkward me up, than so do they. I am awash in their kisses, their hugs. There are uncles, two of them that day, and three aunties. My father is one of ten siblings. This is your grandmother, Gabriel tells. She is small, short like me, five feet two, and her name is spelled Vina, but it’s pronounced Vi-KNEE. I don’t know why.
But Grandma Vina comes from Eunice, Louisiana, and her father was white and her mother was Creole. She—my new grandma—has long gray hair down to her butt, although she wears it brushed back into a bun. She is wearing sweatpants and sneakers and a t-shirt. I will learn that she is a Scorpio and that family is everything to her, her proof of life, of meaning. I will learn she cusses a lot, has a fourth-grade education, and my father was her first son and the first child of her own choice. She had two daughters before him but she didn’t raise those girls. I will learn that my aunties Lisa and Barbara were the products of rape.
A white man got her, my father tells me once when I ask why Auntie Lisa and Auntie Barbara always seem so angry.
A white man got Grandma Vina, and she was very young, he says. She couldn’t raise them girls. That’s all I know, he says, and we never speak of it again. No one does.
These pieces of family history and harm that never heal, that pass on generation to generation.
But I love my new grandma immediately, as soon as she smiles wide as the ocean and says, Well, well. Look at Ms. Brignac, after giving me the biggest hug of all hugs right before Darius, my father’s only other child, joins in. He is 20. I am his lost-and-found sister. We look at each other. We pause for a moment. We hug.
My father’s family is a cash-poor family, unlike my mother’s. My mother’s family is middle class. The only reason that we are poor is that my mother got pregnant young, which violated Jehovah’s Witness rules, sex outside of marriage and all that. They shun her and for years she will work and work to get accepted back into the Kingdom Hall, back into love. She sort of makes it, eventually, over years, but never in enough time to climb back into middle-class safety.
But my mother’s family, my mother’s world is nowhere to be found in this Salvation Army, in this church, in the rows and rows and rows of pews. Just this new world and I feel like an astronomer who has suddenly discovered a new planet. But a planet without Paul without Monte without Jasmine without Mom without Alton. A planet without the me who exists alongside the people I live and fight and love with.
I don’t know how to sort my feelings, which is why, with no other choice, I set them aside. And soon enough, when I am in the presence of Grandma Vina and my father and my uncles and aunties and Darius, they stop occurring to me. I am officially two Patrisses. My mother’s daughter and my father’s daughter, which don’t quite add up to one whole child.
But on this day, I don’t concern myself with that. I listen, instead and intently, as my father gives a speech about having his family back. He talks about healing and he talks about our right to it. As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters.
But what is consistent in this moment—and all the moments that will follow that I am in 12-step rooms—is that I will learn there is something radical and beautiful and deeply transformational in bearing witness to public accountability, accountability before a community gathered for the sake of wholeness.
And on this day, in this hour, my father is humble.
My father apologizes.
Have I ever heard an adult apologize?
Did Alton ever say sorry for leaving us, for us being hungry? Did GM ever apologize to him or the hundreds of others whose lives were entirely disrupted by its closure—with no plan for what they could do next to support themselves and their families, no plan to continue a life with dignity? But here is Gabriel apologetic and public and I have no context for it. My mother is secretive. Ours is a home where grown folks’ business is grown folks’ business. Gabriel is public. Even in the moments of shame. He always returns to truth and honesty. He talks to the audience but I know he is really talking to me, talking to his family. He praises us. He thanks us for not throwing him away, for staying by his side when he went to prison, which is how our society responded to his drug use.
Later, when I get home no one asks me, How did it go? What was it like? Who else was there? I don’t remember any conversation at all, as though there wasn’t this whole universe growing just outside our door. I remember going into my room, going to sleep, getting up the next day and heading to school. And everything was everything.
From this point onward, Gabriel is immediately and continually