single Friday and we go to Grandma Vina’s house, where there is always a huge collection of family members. My father’s family is a sports family, with football games, college and professional, held up like holy moments. But it doesn’t really matter. Football, baseball, basketball, golf for goodness’ sake, tennis, hockey. You name it, my uncles had the stats on it. But nothing was like the weekends of football and my Grandma’s poor man’s gumbo—gumbo without the seafood, only chicken, in it.
Now and again in these moments I think of Paul, Monte and Jasmine—and Alton—whose presence is far less predictable. I wonder, though briefly, what that feels like, to watch me disappear each weekend with my found father. But with no answers, no guide, mostly I just bathe myself in these loud, Southern people who look like me and who dance like me and slowly and slowly, I begin to feel like one of them, feel like a Brignac.
I learn to look forward to things I’d never before considered, like Christmas, Thanksgiving and birthdays. Coming up in the Kingdom Hall meant we never celebrated these things; they’re not in the Bible and we took the Bible pretty damn literally. I used to go, as a fourth grader, to school with my Bible and my Watchtower. I would read aloud from them to my classmates and I never, never felt like I was missing anything by not celebrating Christmas because being in the Kingdom Hall made me feel special, anointed. But now I am with another group, Catholic people, and they love God and they celebrate and eat food and laugh and cuss, although they don’t exchange gifts because who has money for gifts? But the love fills us to overflow.
Eventually, Gabriel, who could always find some low-level job no matter what, gets a car of his own—a gold-colored Lincoln Town Car, and we’re really off and running then. He does things my mother never could, my mother with her job piled on job, shift piled on shift. But Gabriel has the time and more, the heart for me and my now early teenage friends. We pack his car with our bodies and our stories and he drives us to movies, to pizza, to wherever our 13-year-old hearts desire. He never tells us we are too loud although surely we are too loud.
But it isn’t only movies and friends and family and football. Gabriel is deeply invested in his healing and one day he says, Come on, and we jump in the car and drive into the San Fernando Valley, the real hood part, Pacoima, and we pull up to a church and get out. Come on, my father tells me, and I follow him down into a room where a small group of men are meeting.
There was never a time in my childhood that I can recall when people did not call me an old soul, and maybe that’s why my father thought I could handle being in his 12-step meeting. Or maybe because, like me, he always wanted a road dawg with him. But while I remember how overwhelmed I was by men talking about things they’d done that had hurt their families while they were struggling with addiction—their absences from family life was a repeated theme—and I remember my father talking about hiding, how he never wanted his family to see him high, what I recall most thinking about was that the honesty was life-giving. As I attended these meetings over the years and after I spent time working as an adult counselor myself, I wondered: Why are only individuals held accountable? Where were the supports these men needed? Men talking about broken dreams and no jobs and feeling hated by the world and being beat up by police.
But more than anything in those first years, the meetings make me closer to Gabriel, closer to my father. We go for an hour and I listen to men tell their stories and cry and I watch them hold and support one another and then my father finds some small spot to eat—there was a Filipino place he loved best—and we process his life, our life, what it means to build and be in a relationship together.
I’m not here to take you away from anyone, he tells me more than once. I’m just here to add to your life in a way that’s good and useful. I believe him. I lean into him, my spirit does. Children so rarely get to see adults be so honest and open and accountable in a way that is grounded, not reactionary. I could not name it then, how these conversations left me, but they start to change me, begin to commit me to being the same.
Still, it isn’t all intense meetings and talk of failures and sobriety. It is also many weekend barbeques at the park where my dad and his brothers play baseball. They’d formed an adult league, uniforms and all, and during the season, we all go and cheer them on and eat. These are the moments I love the most, the moments when the animosity between siblings falls by the wayside, and they only happen when my father is present and well, I am told. When he is absent, the games are, too.
But when he is present, we make time in the park, and the siblings, not all from the same father, come together. The first two girls who hadn’t been raised by Grandma Vina, the girls who were children of my grandma’s rape, even come. My father is the third child and the first child of her choosing. My grandma had been a mistress and my father was the only baby from that union. The next set of children were born after her marriage to a man no one speaks of anymore, a man who was abusive, physically and emotionally. My Grandma coddles these children, even now, perhaps trying to soothe the wounds their father caused, while Barbara and Lisa seethe in the background, their father the white man, their father the rapist.
When the anger boils over, as it often does, it is Gabriel everyone goes to. Gabriel is Switzerland or maybe the original idea of the UN. He processes with them, pushes them to forgive, to choose love. He uses his thin brown body and his big beautiful heart as salve, as medicine. With Gabriel any one of them, any one of us, can appear unmasked and unafraid and he pulls us close. He tells us he cherishes us. Makes us feel things will settle and be all right. Look at me, he says. He reminds us love wins. And for me, a girl from a home of little verbal expression and even less physical expression, I start to know a freedom I hadn’t realized I needed. I start to feel something like home in my own skin and sinew, bones and blood. I want this never to end. To go on and on. To forever be the normal I know. Only nothing is forever.
And as it was three years before, it is my mother who tells me. A week maybe more has passed and I cannot reach my father and this man who has called me daily, this man who has never missed a weekend, is suddenly a ghost. I make calls, my mother does too, and then one night she sits me down on her bed.
It’s your father, she says. He is going back to prison.
And in the room where my mother once told me that I had a new father, the room where she has now told me I have lost my new father, I collapse. I know prison had been part of Gabriel’s life, but it had not been part of the life we shared together. Our life together was about healing. I have no concept of my father this way, captured, in chains.
And my father, gone but still present, a space in my heart. I don’t understand, I sob to my mother. She tells me it’s true. She tells me my Grandma Vina is the one who confirmed it.
Mom had called and called in this age before the ubiquity of mobile phones and after three weeks, maybe four, she got Grandma Vina. And in these days, long before the influential determined that our criminal justice system needed reform, all we have is the shame of it, we who are families. There are no support groups, no places to discuss what is happening. I don’t even learn—although I guess—that he is reincarcerated on a drug charge. But I don’t ask. I don’t know to ask.
It will be more than a decade before I meet the advocate and scholar Deborah Small, who will say that this is a nation founded on addiction—the production of rum and other alcohols, tobacco, sugar. And now, she will say, they put people in prison for it. Prison was not always the response to drug use, she will say to a me who is grown and able to process what became of a man I loved.
But when I am a girl, a teenager heading into my junior year in high school who is crying in my mother’s bedroom, I only know one thing. If prisons are supposed to make society more safe, why do I feel so much fear and hurt?
In 1986 when I am three years old, Ronald Reagan reenergizes the drug war that was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon by further militarizing the police in our communities, which swells the number of Black and Latinx men who are incarcerated. Between 1982 and 2000, the number of people locked up in the state of California grows by 500 percent. And it will be nearly a quarter of a century before my home state is forced, under consent decree, to reduce the number of people it’s locked up, signaling, we hope, the end of what will eventually be called the civil rights crisis of our time. A generation of human