This story is dedicated to the spirit of my father Jack Kirkland, a steel mill worker in Pittsburgh. It reflects the epigenetics of my particular family and the humanity of all families.
Family Constellation therapist Mark Wolynn once said, “Just as we inherit our eye color and blood type, we also inherit the residue from traumatic events that have taken place in our family. Illness, depression, anxiety, unhappy relationships and financial challenges can all be forms of this unconscious inheritance.”
This same principle can be utilized for the history of chattel slavery, trauma, and systemic racism in America. That historically inhumane system can still be found in the American prison systems today. It has left hurtful and paralyzing residues of trauma, passed on from one generation to the next within African American communities.
Long-term collateral damage and ongoing psychic wounds deserve to be healed with Radical Self-Care and the emotional resources for personal as well as collective well-being of African American communities. Wolynn teaches that “traumatic memories are transmitted through chemical changes in DNA.” We need to understand the conscious and unconscious inheritance of terror and systemic racism long-term.
I grew up in the 1950s right outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a town called McKee’s Rocks. McKee’s Rocks was a large Italian community with smaller pockets of old-world European immigrants. It also held Gypsies, Jews, a Chinese family, and small pockets of Black people who had migrated from the South and its terrors. I was born into one of those Black families who were from the same place where they were owned, a plantation based in Evergreen, Alabama. The journey north was headed by my great-grandmother Sally and her husband William Liddell in the late 1920s.
They were part of the great migration of formerly enslaved people, Black people looking for more freedom and less terror. They were running—running hard for their lives, leaving all their possessions but for what they could pack and what they wore on their backs. Likewise, my father’s family got there on the same emotional journey, migrating from Alabama, running for a dream called Pittsburgh.
My father, Jack Kirkland, was one the first African American men to be hired in the steel mill near our government owned low-income housing. We called them the “projects” and it was the first time that we had an indoor toilet. We lived by the sounds of the steel mills: the sirens of the steel mills were the background of our lives. We always knew when the work shift started and when it ended. Being employed in a steel mill was an important event for a Black man in those days of the 50s and 60s.
My dad was a chronic alcoholic and wounded so deeply that he lost all of his social compassions by the time I was born in 1953. He rarely ever smiled and when he did, he was usually drunk. When he did smile, it was a smile of shame, rage, terror, and pain, and he never understood the complexity of trauma and depression that co-created his pain. Today he would have been
classified as depressed, but no one talked about trauma and depression in those days, and no one talked about a man being deeply sad, especially a Black man.
He was naturally traumatized by simply growing up in Alabama in the 20s, 30s, and 40s where lynching and terrorist attacks were as common as the air he breathed. Every working day right after he clocked out he could be seen rigidly walking with lunch bucket in hand to his mother’s house to start the daily after-work-drinking-binge that would last for hours. His mother, Grandma Vassie, ran a speakeasy out of her apartment to make ends meet, a common activity in our community. He was a man who was bonded to his suffering and chronic depression, both a sexual addict and classic workaholic.
On one occasion, he accidently cut his finger off at the mill and his boss had to force him to leave. Terrified that he would not be able to return, my father was convinced he could still work with the loss of his finger and needed no medical attention. He was known to be a hardworking man, always on time and never late for work while always late being a father.
Every payday my mother sent me to Grandma Vassie’s house to ask him for money. The eighteen dollars taken out of his check was never enough to make ends meet on my mother’s disability check she received for having a stroke. My dad always had money for drinking, gambling, and women, and nothing for a daughter in need. I remember sitting for hours in a room filled with drunken Black men, watching dollar bills fall out of his pocket, silently overwhelmed as I waited for him to simply notice I was there. There were no words then for children of alcoholics.
My dad lived by a different definition of manhood than the general population of poor white men, even though both groups have been historically silent about depression. He carried an extra layer of shame as the grandson of slaves. It was not acceptable to be a Black man and it was never safe. One could be killed at any time and for any reason: impending death or the possibility of death were norms for Black men in Alabama.
I understand now why my dad responded to life as he did; he was profoundly disappointed with it. He was always afraid and brokenhearted. His medications were alcohol, work, women, and anything he could do to take the edge off the rage and terror that walked with him every day. I suspect he was an incest survivor because he acted out sexually. His entire world reflected terror, the same terror seen in the eyes of his drinking buddies.
My father was one of my first sexual perpetrators along with several of his drinking buddies. Sexual abuse within my family is another story to be told. It was not unusual for these men to ask or act like I was their “woman” instead of a young girl in elementary school who looked just like her dad. I was called Little Jack as my father peed in front on me on the side of the street. When shopping for school clothes, he would not hesitate to steal in front of me. One time I even saw him be arrested for stealing. Another time when he tried to steal a necklace in a store, I started to cry and asked him if Jesus would do that. He stopped, although he was angry. I would end up holding his hand to cross the street because of his drunkenness. I was my dad’s little mother, parent, child, and a sexual object.
His sadness usually took on the faces of rage, violence, resentment, and coldness, often coldness with detachment. At some time when he was growing up he accepted the message that said men are not considered real men if they showed their feelings and allowed themselves to become vulnerable. Somewhere and at some place shame taught him, a little colored boy, that it was too dangerous to be real and human.
My father grew up with a mixed and confusing message. The historical message was that my dad was a descendent of people considered only three-fifths human in the early development of this country. How could he ever be a good-enough-man? An energetic ceiling was placed on his humanity. He was not shown how to own his own devastation as a human other than acting it out in destructive ways. Sexism and objectified women were often forms of medication.
He internalized these messages as part of his core self. My father was not raised to see life as passion and dreams to be pursued. His life was about survival and his future held no real meaning. He lived never knowing when his life would end based on the color of his skin. He knew he would never be good enough nor did he expect it. Along the road he managed to internalize enough illusion and oppression that he believed the myth and messages of the shame. He was what he thought he was, and he manifested those thoughts every day.
Many of the men in my family were alcoholics and they were depressed, violent, and deeply sad like my dad. They took out depression and sadness on their families. They were the first terrorists to whom I was ever exposed. When I was a little girl pretending to sleep, I heard them come to my grandmother Bessie and cry in the wee hours of the night about racism and the N-word. They shared with her their fears and the most vulnerable parts of who they were, only to rise in the morning detached, cold, and smiling a smile only drunk men can show. Once again, they were men and men had to stay strong by any means.
It all came together when I was a teenager that something was critically wrong with the men in my family, and my family in general, when my cousin Jean was beaten to death by her husband James. Death-by-beating was never attached to her death, and it was said she “just did not wake up” that morning. We sat in church, a church where James was the deacon viewing Jean’s body, and still no one could really name what had happened. We knew she had been beaten to death after having many bloody beatings. We could never name my cousin James’s depression and mental illness, even after a thousand times hearing him cry in the late hours of the night and seeing him rise early in the morning cold, detached, and smiling that smile those drunk men do.
Sometimes I wonder how it would be if we had known how to hear our men with deeper attention. I wonder what it would have been like if they could have named their depression, their terror, their emotional pain, and their addictions. I wonder how things would have been if they had the opportunity to experience a kind and gentle compassion from a society that saw them as invisible and less than. I wonder how their lives would have turned out if they had known how to define their own dreams and passions outside of addiction and violence. I wonder how it would have been if the women in my family would have been empowered not to co-sign onto the insanity.
I miss the father I never had. I miss having a safe father. I still fantasize how it would feel to have a father be proud of me. I forgive my father for the many days I had to be his mother. I forgive him for the sexual abuse because I am too worthy to carry such a huge resentment. I forgive him for shaming me and for never saying the word, “love.” I forgive him for never hugging me and for never making it safe to be his child. I forgive him for his coldness and the embarrassments. I forgive him for that smile.
I forgive myself for the many men I tried to make become my father. I forgive myself for being attracted to the many men who were just like my father. I forgive myself for the many years of depression and self-abuse, thinking and acting that I was less than human.
In the legacy of my father and the people of my family, I intentionally promise to remember that all little boys and girls are worthy of deep attention, respect, and kind compassion for their sacredness and divine spirits.
