dream sequence in the movie Baby Boy. In the scene, Yvette, crying, bruised, and in the throes of sexual passion with Jody just moments after he punches her in the eye, imagines herself laughing with her son’s father, visiting him in prison, and then, dressed in black, standing hand in hand with her son as the two of them gaze at her first love’s body lying dead in a coffin. The connection was so powerful, particularly that scene; when we’d filmed it some three years earlier, I’d been hyperemotional, as the entire movie in general and the fight and dream sequence scenes in particular were unfolding in front of the cameras just as I was still processing my own personal drama with Mark and our volatile relationship. Watch the scene closely and you’ll see the physical manifestation of my anxiety; I’d lost at least ten pounds during the filming, mostly from the stress of acting out what I’d just lived through. My clothes look like they’re resting on a hanger, I’m so thin.
The first non–family member I called after Mark’s mom told me he’d died was John Singleton. “The dream came true,” I said, sobbing.
“What do you mean?” John asked.
“My son’s father was killed and I have to go to the funeral with my son.”
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Marcell was nine when I took him by the hand, walked him to his father’s casket, and helped him say his final farewell. He was too young to understand the full implications of what was going on; all he knew was that he would never see his father again, and his mother was extremely upset. As I sat in the pew sobbing, Marcell, ever the comforter, ever my protector, rubbed my back, doing his best to soothe me. I wiped my tears as I listened to the choir sing Mark home, then turned toward Marcell to give him a reassuring look that I hoped would say, “Mommy is okay, and I appreciate you looking after me.” But when I looked in my son’s direction, something in his hand caught my attention: it was a beige rubber band, the same color, shape, and length of the rubber bands Mark, an office clerk, loved to play with. He used to fashion them into huge rubber band balls, and kept them all around him—at work, at his apartment, in the car.
“Where did you get that rubber band?” I whispered to Marcell as he pulled on it and slung it between his fingers.
“I found it on the floor right there,” he whispered back, pointing at the floor beneath the pew in front of us.
When I took Marcell up to the coffin to see his father for the last time, he had that rubber band in his hand. “Do you want to put it in there with your dad?” I asked my son as he peered into the casket.
“Yes,” Marcell said quietly.
He tucked that rubber band into his father’s hand, and we slowly returned back to our seats.
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I’ll always miss Mark, my one true love, but his absence was much more acute for my son, particularly after my father died, leaving him without a male figure in his life, burning out his joy just as he matured and the fire of adolescence and hormones built up. By the time he started high school in 2008, he was shutting down—refusing to talk, angry, depressed, smoking a lot of weed. I’m a fairly liberal parent; I believe most things are okay in moderation. But I knew my son, who was using marijuana to numb his pain of not having a father around, was overdoing it. He was missing the guidance he craved as he was becoming a man, though my father pitched in as much as could from afar. There are no two ways about it: boys need their fathers. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I depended on his basketball coaches to step in and instruct him on how to tie a tie or how to dress for specific occasions or how to comport himself as a sportsman and gentleman on and off the court, no matter how much he picked up from his friends who had dads in their homes, Marcell needed more: he needed his father to show him how to walk this earth as a black man.
The impact of not having a father around came to a head in high school, when, finally, the questions, along with the anger, started flying.