Mom, Dad, College, and Me

I am the seventeenth or eighteenth, possibly even the nineteenth, child of my father. But who’s counting? Certainly, he’s not. I don’t know much about his relationships with all his children—in fact, I don’t even know all my siblings—so I can’t fully assess the level of his irresponsibility. I do know that I am a number to him.

My father was born in 1948, in St. James, Jamaica. He dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to become a mechanic. This is not uncommon in Jamaica—the price tag on high school tuition is exorbitant. There are no “true” public high schools in the U.S. tradition. My dad moved in to his uncle’s home, and by the age of fifteen he knew everything there was to know about a car. He saved until he could open his own business, and when he finally did, things were good. He was making all the money he needed.

Then came the women. By the age of twenty-three, Dad had four children, three of them born in the same year. This did not hurt his reputation among his friends. Indeed, to my knowledge, my father is well respected by everyone who knows him, except for his children. He has never lived with any of us in a stable household. All we could hope for while growing up were sporadic visits from him. Some of us were luckier than others.

Like many Jamaican men, my father wasn’t expected to be a nourishing parent, but he was expected to support his children financially, which he did. He never completely neglected us, and he saw to it that we were taken care of. He even gave some of our mothers businesses—usually bars—so they could make a living on their own.

Before I was born, my father told my mother that he did not want his child to be born in Bellfield, a rundown country area in St. Mary’s Parish that had one street lamp. He paid for the move and supplied her with rent money each month. My mother, who was born in 1966, was a bartender who left school in the eleventh grade because her parents could no longer pay for her education. My mother’s brother wasn’t even able to go that far and is illiterate to this day. Things were much tougher for their generation.

When I was a baby, Dad visited every other day and stayed over some weekends. The visits didn’t last long, however—he and my mother were “on and off” for the first couple of years of my life, and then they were “off” for good. While my father didn’t want me growing up in the countryside, my mother didn’t want me growing up in Jamaica, period. My first memory of my mother is of her leaving for America. I was three. She left me with my aunt and older cousin, but she called often enough that I didn’t feel abandoned. I heard her voice more frequently than I heard my father’s, despite the fact that he lived in the same parish as I did.

I didn’t see my mom again until she visited me when I was seven, but the visit was brief. She could not afford to be away from her job in America f...