Norse By Blood American By Birth Patriot By Choice Shirt, hoodie, tank top
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Norse By Blood American By Birth Patriot By Choice Shirt, hoodie, tank top
by Reagan Jackson, Derrick Wheeler-Smith, and Gregory Davis
In honor of Father’s Day, three community members share reflections on fatherhood.
A Father’s Day Reflection: Tribute to Gene Jackson
by Reagan Jackson
For most of my childhood, our official song was “Just the Two of Us” — the Bill Withers version, not to be confused with the Will Smith cover. I liked that my dad and I had a theme song. My parents divorced when I was two and so my life until the age of 18 was spent alternating homes between Denver, Colorado and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and later Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, between summers and school years, weekends, and holidays. Any time our song came on the radio when we weren’t together I would think of him with nostalgia for our shared summers of grill smoke, bike riding, and diving for pennies in his apartment complex pool.
One of our favorite things to do is to take a road trip. We would often leave in the middle of the night at a time my dad called 0 dark thirty. He never set an alarm, just woke up on his own. Bleary eyed, I would recline in the passenger seat, place a pillow beside the window and bury myself in a blanket, the soothing roll of the highway lulling me back to sleep. I would wake up in another state in time to nosh on Burger King French toast sticks and boxed orange juice. Dad kept a purple felt crown royal sack full of coins and I would be tasked with counting out forty cents for the tolls in Illinois and Indiana and finding decent music on the radio. Though we did a lot of singing. I learned an entire canon of Ray Charles songs interspersed with Oscar Brown Junior and the occasional Kahlil Gibran poem. And there were stories and jokes. On these trips, with a highway stretched out before us, were where we came to really know one another.
We have family in Iowa, Ohio, Tennessee, and Georgia. Elementary school road trips were one continuous game of slug bug. Sometimes we would stop in Indianapolis to visit my godfather Mr. McClure. James McClure was my father’s sixth grade teacher, a short, dark-skinned man with a close-cut silver fade and matching well-trimmed beard. He told stories about the unruly boy my dad had been. He was the one to introduce my father to the Episcopal church. Dad was never a good Baptist, said he didn’t have the clothes for it — they were too poor to dress well for church and Black people would talk about you. The Episcopal church was th
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