Nigger in the Window

African American Review, Spring, 1996 by David Wright

"I am too," Two shot back, his face a fist. "Tammy ain't the first girl to go off and get pregnant. Plenty did and do and will. If she's going to have that baby, it's because she wants to have that baby. But that don't mean you got to have the baby, too." Two's face unclenched. "You're always talking about getting out of here, going to college and shit. Well, you ain't going nowhere with a wife and kid. And you certainly ain't helping neither one of them being another nappy-head niggah hustling dimes in the Flats."

Darryl put his face in his hands. Listened to the rain drumming on the awning and falling all around. Two's help had been little help at all. Even Two didn't understand Darryl anymore.

Within ten days, Tammy Stillman had resumed menstruating and Darryl breathing. But what a long ten days. Darryl had decided in those first few days to marry her, despite what Two had said. He just couldn't abandon his own child like that; he refused to walk in the footsteps of his father, his real father. Darryl decided that he would leave school and hire on at the Phillips Refinery. (Jack Mitchell probably knew someone who could get him on.) Later, when the child was older, he could go to college.

It became a pretty thought: playing catch in the park, teaching his boy - it'd be a boy - to ride without the training wheels, hunting butterflies behind deserted Booker T. Junior High and bringing them home in a jar for Momma. Darryl could imagine it, he almost fancied it, and he was a little disappointed and sad in that part of his heart he had opened up to his new baby boy the day he found out that the baby didn't exist.

Cameron Frederick Young. That was his father's, his real father's name. 1013 Locust Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri. That was his father's, his real father's address. Darryl stands up with that remembrance. He crosses to the chair facing his bed and sits, turned sideways, legs hanging over the arm.

After his scare with Tammy, Cameron Young became an obsession with Darryl. In his everyday thoughts, Darryl sang his name like a litany. Cameron Frederick Young: dad that never was, always will be. Was he tall? Was he muscular and athletic? Darryl had no idea. He had nothing, only curt descriptions given by his more, who spoke about Kansas City like an unlived nightmare she'd rather forget and who always evaded the subject of Darryl's real father with a fiery and forced indifference. Darryl also had the black-and-white, army I.D. photo that he'd found in his mom's things; but it dated back at least nineteen years. And of course, he had the address, but it dated back nearly as far.

Growing up, Darryl had sent a few things to that address: a letter when he was seven and had just learned to form simple sentences in school, a Christmas card the year his mother married Jack Mitchell and they moved to Fitzgerald, and just two years before, when Darryl was seventeen, an invitation to his high school graduation.

He'd been certain that Cameron Frederick Young wouldn't come. Darryl wasn't even sure if the ancient address was still good (although he imagined it was, because none of his earlier correspondence had ever been returned). Darryl had sent it anyway, just to let his real father know that it was okay, that things had worked out anyway. Not to worry.