My mother always slept in the passenger’s side during those long road trips. I was told he did not notice the tractor-trailer swerving lanes, obviously lacking rest or experience. The crash was an intermingling of steel and blood on the side of Interstate 85. I had been at home watching cartoons that Saturday morning; a teenage neighbor was hired to baby-sit me for the weekend.
The shattering news of their death was first given to my Aunt Glenda, then she to me. It made sense that Glenda was told first. She was an adult and my closest family member. I had no siblings. She was my mother’s only sister, a member of my father’s church and one of the few family members (thankfully) who did not interpret my father’s dedication as harsh and unyielding. He would spend hours upon hours shut up in his upstairs study, preparing sermons for Sunday service or discourses for various religious seminars and organizations. My mother was often found sitting by the fireplace crocheting or listening to old Jazz records waiting for him to emerge from his study. He would come down late in the night and I would hear them whispering in the dark. My memories never included exactly what they were saying.
My father was not born in the United States but rather in Ethiopia, in the city of Addis Ababa. His birth mother (I never knew her name), died during childbirth, and his father (I never knew his name either), died just one year after of “unknown causes.” An American family of “dignitaries” (as they liked to be referred to as) also lived temporarily in Addis Ababa. The wife, Karen Rose, occasionally volunteered at the orphanage where my father was sent after his father’s death.
Karen, my grandmother, took a liking to my father, preferring his smooth Hershey chocolate skin, curly hair, and almond-shaped eyes to the other young children in the orphanage. He was a happy baby, smiling often, displaying his lifelong premature laugh lines. The Roses eventually adopted my father at the age of four and moved back to the United States, Washington DC.
Upon adoption, they shortened my father’s more formal African name to Arun to ease in his acclimation to American life and culture. They didn’t have any other children, and by the time I was born, my father had isolated himself from his family so much due to his staunch religious beliefs (The Gospel According to Arun being one of his favorite books) and his refusal to practice Law, my mother was the only family I knew my father to have.
From pictures, you would think that my mother and father’s families shared many things in common since they were both white. In reality though, my mother was born into a poor family in the Northern part of North Carolina—a stone’s throw from the barrier islands that made up the Outer Banks. The town she was raised in, Kitty Hawk was made famous by The Wright Brothers who had made their first airplane flights there in 1903. At that time, Kitty Hawk had 3,000 residents and 99% of them were white. The majority of the town lived modestly but were not considered poor. My mother was a part of the 4% below the poverty level.
For most of her childhood, my mother lived in moldy unclean trailers, her parents working odd jobs (cleaning boats, cleaning large oceanfront vacation homes) to sustain the family, while my father lived in a large meticulously kept brick home in an expensive and prestigious part of Washington DC (Georgetown). His father (Christopher Rose) maintained an impressive title working for the United Nations and had held several leadership positions within the Peace Corps. Christopher, who was known throughout Washington DC and New York for his stand on equal rights and programs to aid in peace relations with African nations, possessed several advanced degrees and awards of achievement. Many times I would hear family members refer to my father as “just like his old man,” or “chip off the old block.” I imagined that Christopher was also a strong man. I never really knew though, I had no frame of reference.
My father met my mother while studying at The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill). My mother had gone on a full scholarship to study education and my father was studying Law. I heard it told many times as a love story—the highly intelligent African student (anomaly) met his southern small town white princess. Lillie was drawn to my father’s tall stature and engaging personality; she loved to listen to him, his voice powerful and intoxicating. She often said she knew from the moment she met him that he would be somebody special one day. He was so different from the boys she had grown up with in Kitty Hawk. He loved her innocence and naivete. They spent every minute together. Him talking about his dreams and hopes for the world; her listening—the physical representation of those hopes glued to his every word. He was strong in opinion, desire. Lillie was not, but with him, she did not have to be; he was enough for them both. My father, known for being an overachiever, completed a Law degree and a PhD in Divinity at UNC-Chapel Hill.
It was while finishing his last year at UNC that my father began questioning the religious teachings of his youth. He would tell me many times that his parents, who were Lutheran in name only, sent him to Sunday School to learn about God and the Bible and it was there that he learned the most about religion. Growing up though, he never questioned his father about why he had sent him to Sunday school when his daily actions belied his claim to believe in God. It was not until that last year of school that he finally decided to “open the book” and “look closer at what God was really telling him.” Therefore, after he completed his PhD, he decided to take the money that his father had given him as a graduation present and move his new family to Charlotte. It was here in Charlotte that he brought his new take on Christianity and religion to the masses. His acceptance was slow, but at the time of his death, his teachings were gaining attention and his congregation growing incrementally.
From family accounts, I had heard that others felt he would hold his titles over them, feeling that this superior knowledge gave him the right. Maybe he was much like Christopher in that way, taught to give excessive importance to the acquiring of station and prominence. I never thought of him in that way; he was brilliant, sparkling like the radiance of the sun. For a young boy, you did not realize shortcomings and errors; you did not see any of those things. All you saw was a man dreaming to make the impossible, possible. I saw someone who others respected, who they looked up to and admired. I remembered looking at him, his Sunday sermons full of fire and luminosity. I would always remember him like that. Even after he died, his image always stood tall, erect.
After the sudden death of my parents, I went to live with my Aunt Glenda and her two sons, Andres and Christian. Their house was not far from the house I grew up in. It was two streets down in the same town. In the eyes of those who knew closely the demographics of town, the two streets that separated my aunt’s house from the house of my parent’s might as well have been oceans from each other, separating one social class from another. Overall, though, it was as easy a transition as possible for a ten-year-old boy who had just lost both of his parents in death. The house was a small modest brick residence surrounded by other small modest brick residences. There were three bedrooms; I moved into the room with my oldest cousin Andres. To accommodate our new arrangement, Glenda bought us rusty bunk beds (from a yard sale). My cousin Christian (the youngest) was still wetting the bed, so I preferred to sleep in the room with Andres. If Andres minded a new roommate, he never let on.
Andres took the top bunk and “graciously” gave me the bottom bunk. He would often keep me up at night, annoyingly shifting his body weight against the decaying metal bed frame. The corroded metal would clang together producing an overwhelmingly bothersome screeching sound. To my knowledge, it seemed that Andres was oblivious to these sounds, often accompanying the screech with his own orchestral reverberation of loud intense snoring. In the mornings, Glenda would wait for us boys in the dated, but-homey kitchen with a fresh offering of orange juice and undercooked eggs at the breakfast table. She would give me a knowing look; she saw my heavy eyelids and blood-tinged eyes.
During these nights, I would stare at the ceiling counting imaginary sheep per Glenda’s instructions. That never really produced anything except invented stories in my head that resulted in even longer periods of insomnia. On one particular day, Andres having snored relentlessly the night before, I came to the breakfast table moody, despondent and in desperate need of TLC. Glenda noticed, giving me two runny undercooked eggs instead of my usual one. She was always chipper in the mornings, for what I could never really wrap my head around.
“How was your sleep last night Jeremy?” Was her upbeat greeting.
She had gotten into a habit of singling me out in the mornings