Our Father: The Prodigal Son Returns

1. THE SKUNK CREEK INN

These men lie in wait for their own blood; they waylay only themselves! (Proverbs 1:18 NIV).

What seemed like a scene from one of our favourite movies, Sam Peckinpah’s western classic The Wild Bunch, was about to become a reality. However, there were no stunt men, only a bunch of black youths pretending to be hit men. We were not men in black but young black men caught up in a web of gangs, guns, drugs, sex and violence that would change the course of our lives forever.

I armed myself with a .38 automatic fully loaded pistol with an extra clip, while my 12-gauge lay on the ground beside me. Snakeman had his finger on the trigger of his sawed-off shotgun. Chuck, who liked hand-to-hand combat, outfitted himself with a pair of brass knuckles and a lead pipe wrapped with black tape. Dotson was partial to knives, so he carried a large one.

Snakeman positioned himself at the side of the building facing the front door of Skunk Creek Inn, while I knelt towards the rear of my car. Black Goat, as everyone called her, was the best camouflage in the dark night. Chuck and Dotson crouched at the side of the building facing the inn. There was no way out now; we were in too deep. What started out as a typical Friday night of hanging out, hustling girls and money for a midnight snack, was about to turn nasty.

It was a hot summer night, and as usual we had decided we would work up a little sweat indoors. Skunk Creek had a reputation for the best live music and attracting Colorado’s finest women. We roared up to the club in Black Goat. As usual, I parked her a few meters from the front door, a no-parking zone, but I always got away with it.

By this time, the place was packed with a long line of students and locals waiting to get in. All eyes trailed us as we walked past the party hopefuls with our duster coats hovering around our knees and our fingers protruding from our sawed-off woollen gloves. The night’s bouncers greeted us with the usual arrogant nod.

Snakeman, Chuck, Dotson and I made our way to our usual spots where we could check out the scene and look at the night’s eye candy. My position was always on the landing, where I could see the action around the bar and the dance floor. While Chuck and Dotson got a close-up view mingling through the crowd, Snakeman was milling around looking for his next victim, usually an unsuspecting white student just out to have some fun.

It was especially packed that night. A popular band from Denver was performing with two guys whose talent was so large they would end up playing with the mighty Earth, Wind and Fire. Their presence attracted a larger than normal crowd. Unknown to us, some soul brothers from Denver had entered the club looking to muscle in on the night’s crop of girls, even though it was clear that many were spoken for. They were easy to spot because we knew all the regular black guys who hung out at Skunk Creek Inn.

Snakeman’s school brother from Denver told him about what they had planned for us, so we made sure we always knew where they were and what they were doing. Another brother told us they were packing guns. What nerve, we thought. This was our backyard.

Snakeman decided to play a little head game with one of the Denver boys to see whether they really had the guts to try to muscle in on our territory. We had decided it was time to teach these rookies a lesson. We walked outside and waited.

It seemed like an eternity.

Finally, they began to stroll out. As we were about to pounce, someone in the crowd yelled, That guy has a gun! Somebody call the cops.

As we scrambled to get out of there, Snakeman convinced two girls to come with us. We jumped into our car with the girls sitting in the back seat and Snakeman riding shotgun.

After driving around for a while we pulled into a 7–11. A couple of minutes later, a cop car pulled up next to us. Our hearts were beating like conga drums, but we carried on as if everything was fine. To my surprise, they asked if we were with the Buffaloes.

Playing college football in Colorado definitely had its privileges. As we mouthed a loud Yes, one of the cops leaned over and peeked into the back seat. You boys stay out of trouble now, he said. Had those cops seen our guns, I probably wouldn’t be here today to tell this story. Those cops never saw those guns because they lay quietly underneath the girls in the back seat.

That night I had a sense we had experienced some kind of divine intervention.

Listen to evil voices

They will lead you

To wrong choices.

2. IN THE BEGINNING

He will turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to the fathers (Malachi 4:6 NIV).

My biological father abandoned our family and left for California before I was two years old, leaving Mamma with me, my three brothers and sisters to raise by herself.

The New Oxford Dictionary defines a father as a man who gives care and protection. The word parent is from the Greek word meaning to protect. When I think of the word protect I think of making someone feel safe and secure, which is one of the main responsibilities of parents, especially fathers. I don’t ever remember feeling secure as a child. I could never understand why we had no father.

I wasn’t fatherless at birth; however, my father neglected me even while Mamma was pregnant. He had abandoned her emotionally, causing me to feel her pain and shame.

I was born on March 28, 1949, in Gainesville, Texas. According to my birth certificate, my father was William Hardy Smith, age 26, and my mother’s was Dorothy Lee Smith, age 21. The birth certificates list them as Negroes.

It showed my father’s occupation as labourer and my mother’s as housewife and that my father served in the U.S. army and received an honourable discharge. The certificate says William and Dorothy were the parents of two other children, my oldest brother, William Hardy Smith Jr., and my older sister, Peggy Jeanette Smith. Although my birth certificate listed my father’s name, he was a father in name only.

I never really knew why our father abandoned us, but many black fathers left the south and went to places like Chicago, Detroit and California to find work. However more often than not, they would also find other women, which led to starting new families and leaving the other family behind, as in our case. Now as an adult and having studied the situation it is not so mysterious. The simple fact is that a black man was hard pressed to make a decent living at the time in the segregated south. This was compounded after World War II when men like my father who had put their lives on the line to fight for their country, came home only to realize that they couldn’t even sit at a lunch counter or use the same washroom as their white counterparts, so they upped and left for greener pastures, and sadly the destruction of the black family was a negative by-product of this.

Apart from my state of fatherlessness, there were many other things I didn’t understand as a child growing up in the fifties and sixties in small-town Texas. I knew at a very young age that white people considered us inferior. We couldn’t eat with them, live with them, go to the same school as them. We couldn’t drink from the same water fountain. In fact, we couldn’t even order our ice cream from the same parlour window.

Even though I didn’t understand why things were that way, I understood that being black and living in Texas meant you were second class and second rate. It meant you were not as good as a white kid. At the time, I accepted that as the truth. It was just another hope breaker. Most white kids had fathers, but many of us black kids didn’t, and in the fifties, even though more black fathers stuck around than today, absentee fathers seemed to be the norm rather than the exception.

Mamma finished high school, but like many of the black moms who were single, she worked as a maid for a white family. Most of her friends had jobs as servants for white families or as maids in motels. Mamma worked for a white family that owned a clothing store in town called California’s. It wasn’t a place where black people could afford to shop, but I know these people really seemed to like Mamma. I remember them being happy for her when she got married but sad when she had to quit when we moved to Huntsville.

They had two boys a little older than William and me. They would often give Mamma their slightly worn clothes. To us this was like getting brand new stuff. They fit William perfectly, but unfortunately for me the clothes were too small and the shoes too tight. Mamma cooked and cleaned, and she would often bring home leftovers, which we looked forward to getting. The first thing our eyes would search for as she walked through the door was something wrapped in tinfoil.

I really don’t know how Mamma did it, but in many ways it seemed we were better off with her as the sole provider than we were after she remarried.

Gainesville was and still is a small town, and even at an early age I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to move to a big city like Dallas or Fort Worth. Another thing about living in a small town like Gainesville was that we could walk or ride our bikes from one side of town to another to visit friends.

We often took shortcuts through white neighbourhoods. However, many times angry whites chased us, hurling both racial insults and, sometimes, rocks. A group of older guys would go through these white neighbourhoods on purpose, enticing the white kids to chase us back into our territory, where a gang of black kids would be hiding out, ready to retaliate with rocks and bottles.

Once some angry white kids chased me, and I hurried over a brick wall to escape. As I ran I could hear gunshots in the distance. At the time blacks weren’t allowed to be buried in the same cemetery as whites. How ironic that I would be coached as a professional football player in 1979 by former Green Bay Packer great, Hall of Famer and living legend Forrest Gregg, whose wife’s parents are now buried in the same cemetery as my grandmother.

My best friend in Gainesville was Roger Sherman, who lived next door. He had a bunch of sisters and several brothers. His mamma’s name was Tootsie. Mamma and Tootsie had once been good friends. I don’t know what went wrong between them, but I know Tootsie had a son by a man Mamma dated.

At that time, we were living in an upstairs flat owned by Miss Simpson. We used to hang out a lot at Roger’s because he lived in a house with a big yard. I had a huge crush on one of his sisters.

I remember the first time we moved into a house. Even though it was rented it was nice having our own yard because it meant I didn’t have to go over to someone else’s house, which gave me more time to play outside.

There were some advantages living in small towns like Gainesville and Huntsville. Everyone knew you and who your Mamma was. It was like having extra eyes watching you. A lot of times I heard, I’m going to tell your mamma on you, boy. There was much more of a sense of community because we knew all of our neighbours, and everyone sort of looked after each other.

In the fifties and sixties, both Gainesville and Huntsville were segregated, but I remember playing with some white kids, folks in our neighbourhood everybody called white trash.

Butch was one white kid who was hard to forget. It wasn’t only because he played with us; he also had an unusual handicap. He had no legs and used his arms as his legs to get around.

While we were outcasts because of the colour of our skin, Butch was an outcast because of his handicap. Even though he was considered white trash by some of his white peers, being white still meant he had many privileges we didn’t have. While it was okay to play together outside, there was no way we were allowed into his house.

It was easy to figure out where the coloured folks lived in Gainesville and Huntsville. It was where most of the houses were dilapidated and you could find lots of kids playing on the streets, many dirty with snotty noses and hair that hadn’t been combed.

The one thing I can say about Mamma, she always kept a clean house, even though it was only a step above a shack. Every weekend she would make us help her clean up the house. Some of us would sweep while the others dusted. We also had to clean up our rooms, make our beds and take turns doing the dishes. She taught us how to iron, which I still do today.

Mamma liked nice things and really liked to decorate, so she kept the house looking good, especially the living room. Even though we didn’t have a lot of clothes, we were always clean, and our hair was combed. When we were little she used to wash us in a tin tub using the stove to warm up the water.

To be honest, it seemed we got along better than some of the kids who had a daddy. But insecurity and hurt over not having a dad followed me everywhere, and so I built up all kinds of defences to protect myself, like pretending to be tough and not to really care that I had no father.

Where I grew up, there were lots of mothers and grandmothers. They acted as the matriarchs. It wasn’t that lots of men weren’t around. There were just very few fathers who represented any definition you would find in a dictionary.

More often than not, the one providing the care and protection in a family was the mother or the grandmother, and in many cases the provision too. It was not unusual to see children in the same home who had the same mother but different biological fathers.

Mamma did her best to be both mother and father to us kids. Mamma wasn’t mean or anything like that; she just made sure we knew who was boss. One thing I know for sure—we didn’t talk back to Mamma or swear or use God’s name in vain, because Mamma made it real clear she would knock us out, and when she talked like that, we knew she was serious.

She wouldn’t hesitate to put her foot down, as well as our pants, when necessary to teach us respect. I laugh when I think of some of the whippings I got from Mamma. According to her, most of my whippings were because I always had to have the last word. I remember one time I decided I would run to avoid the switch. She chased me around the neighbourhood for several hours until I wore her out. Then she got my sister Peggy and my older brother William involved in the chase until I wore them out too. I finally stopped running, but before going home I sought sanctuary from Miss Simpson, the lady who rented Mamma the one-bedroom flat over her garage.

She was like a second grandmother. She would often babysit us until Mamma came home from work or when she went out dancing with her friends. Rumour had it that Mamma was quite a dancer. I didn’t like it when Mamma left us there overnight, because Miss Simpson made us go to bed early, usually on a pallet on the floor. I always had a hard time sleeping because she had this big ole wind-up floor clock. I would just lie there counting every tick, and on every hour there was this big gong.

She also had a swing on her front porch. When I was about six, I was swinging with a girl named Debra Manuel. When we got off the swing, I asked her to play an adult version of show-and-tell. We were just about to start when I heard Miss Simpson’s feet on the dusty road coming toward us. In my haste to cover up what I had done, I got a very sensitive part of my anatomy caught in my zipper. Miss Simpson freed me, but the bad news was that she told Mamma.

That evening it took a long time before I eventually got the nerve to head home. Mamma went on as though nothing had happened. She made dinner as usual and finally got us three boys and one girl in the same bed. I fell fast asleep. Then all of a sudden I felt this sting across my behind. There was Mamma with her big leather belt, administering perfectly aimed and timed licks to my butt. All I can say is, when she finished with me, my X-rated show-and-tell with Debra Manuel was over.

At eight years old I decided to run away from home. After packing a few things in a bag, I figured I would head for Tulsa to live with my Aunt Sally. I had spent a summer with her and her husband, Uncle Timothy, in Tulsa when I was five. Rumour was they wanted to adopt me because they had no children at the time.

My plan was to hitchhike and maybe hop a train like a hobo. I hadn’t gone too far before William and Peggy caught up to me, riding their bikes. Mamma was waiting at the front door, and after she gave me her special medicine, I never tried that again.

There is no way I could stay out past midnight. Mamma would come looking for me. I couldn’t come home wearing some fancy new shoes or gear either. I can’t say I had the fear of the Lord at that age, but I sure had a healthy fear of Mamma, and so did the rest of us.

I remember one time some of my friends and I went into town. This was one of the highlights as a kid because we could look at all the stuff and daydream that maybe Santa would bring us some of these nice gifts on Christmas if we were good.

Saturday was a big day in Gainesville, and everybody headed for the five and dime or Kresge’s downtown to buy something special. I can’t recall why, but we let Dwight tag along with us that day. I also remember that spinning tops were the in things at the time. As usual we didn’t have any money, and we didn’t want to wait for Christmas to get our tops. We went around to several stores until we found one where there was only one person working.

There were at least five of us plus Dwight, so a couple of the kids distracted the lady who was working there while the rest of us helped ourselves to some tops. When Dwight saw this he started to cry, I’m gonna tell Mamma! He wouldn’t shut up, so we got nervous and quickly hurried out of the store with the tops.

I figured if the woman saw us we might go to jail, and if not Dwight was going to rat me out, and Mamma, who was my Supreme Ruler at the time, would