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Chapter 2 Bringing Up Daddy A Black Feminist Fatherhood Mark Anthony Neal My wife, Gloria, and I were heartbroken. I was at a conference in Houston when she finally got through to me by cell phone to tell me the news that all potential adoptive parents dread. Folk privy to the adoption process are all too familiar with the possibility that at the last hour, a woman, who months earlier agreed to give her unborn child up for adoption, will take one look at her newborn baby and change her mind. My wife and I had kept our impending adoption a secret from just about everyone, including parents, close friends, and even our then four-year-old daughter, for that very reason. So here I was alone, on the brink of tears, walking through an FAO Schwarz toy store in Houston, looking at the toys and stuffed animals I wasn’t going to buy for our newborn daughter. I was also relieved. Camille Monet, as we had planned to name the newborn girl, was to be our second adopted child. My wife and I had talked for some time about adopting a second child, but the reality was that I wasn’t looking forward to having another baby in the house. The often-prohibitive cost of adoption conspired to keep Misha Gabrielle our only child, as I looked forward to giving her all of the love and support that comes with being an only child (as I was). My ambivalence about adopting a second child caused me to revisit my hesitancy to adopt four years earlier. My wife and I were among the millions of couples whose difficulties with conception meant hours of testing, manufactured copulation, and the prospect of costly in vitro fertilization, none of which guaranteed that we would become pregnant. Though I had resisted (ignored really) my wife’s suggestion that we consider adoption, I finally relented and agreed to take a “look see” at the process . Adoption was always a last resort and one that I was prepared to be just 31 32 Mark Anthony Neal that, as we waited for the research around in vitro fertilization to improve to the point that it was more of a viable option for us. In our early thirties then, my wife was unwilling to wait and in one tear-filled episode finally convinced me that adoption was our only option. At the time I guess I was like so many Black men, who viewed the process of getting a woman pregnant as an affirmation of masculinity—think of how many Black men describe their kids as their seeds—particularly in a society that has historically denied us the fullest expression of our masculinity. Thus the idea that I couldn’t produce “seed” somehow meant that something was wrong with me, that I was less than a man. As Thaddeus Goodavage rhetorically asks about the impact of adoption on Black men, “How does a Black man, already disaffirmed and demasculated by the wider society, affirm his own manhood when he cannot create, produce, or sustain anything, even children?1 As long as we didn’t adopt, I could always say that our childlessness was a “lifestyle choice.” My visions of fatherhood, and manhood for that matter, were naturally influenced by the Black man I called “Daddy.” Old-school in every sense of the word, from his Georgia-bred slowness and assortment of Old Spice bottles, to the way he counted his money (in the dark while my mother and I slept), I can’t say that my father taught me anything about fatherhood other than the fact that a good father—a good man—put in a day’s work and provided for his family. Legal scholar Nancy E. Dowd observes that “The most critical way of proving one’s masculinity is by being an economic provider, and it is precisely in that respect that Black men are denied the means to be men in traditional terms.”2 And that was indeed a mantra for my father, who most of my childhood trekked three hours back and forth to work every day from the Bronx to Brooklyn, where he worked 12-hour days, 6 days a week, as a short-order cook and dishwasher at a combination drugstore and grill in Crown Heights. On most days, Daddy was out of the house before I woke and didn’t get home until I was fast asleep. Save Friday and Saturday...

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