Saturday morning at the hotel I woke up at 4:30, sobbing. My thoughts were like a filing cabinet in a tornado. I needed to write.

I didn’t want to wake up Cameron, so I wrapped myself in a blanket and went into the bathroom and shut the door. I sat on the tile floor with a pen and paper, and the words just starting flowing. I wrote a poem and then sent it in an email on Cameron’s laptop (you can read it here). I waited until Cameron got up before I called my dad to see if he got it. When he called back to say he had read it, he was a mess.

He was already emotional because he had been sorting through videos that he thought I would like to see, and there were lots of memories there.

“I realized I have a lot of treasures in my house,” he told me on the phone, “but they are only treasures because of you.” At that we both cried.

We checked out of the hotel and went to his house for one last morning together. Cameron got out his tools and went right to work fixing my Dad’s brakes. He didn’t mind leaving my Dad and me to talk together inside the house while he worked. He has been amazingly supportive through all of this.

My Dad put on a tape of an television show from the ’60s of my great-grandfather, Dorson Charbonnet, in which he was interviewed regarding life in Louisiana during the turn of the century. I watched in awe. I had come only looking for my father, and here I had found generations of family members! I now also knew my great-grandfather, what he looked like, what he sounded like, what his mannerisms were. I will be able to identify him when the resurrection in Paradise occurs!

Dad used to host a childrens’ television show on PBS in the 90’s, and he wanted to show me a tape of it. He popped in a tape and continued to rummage around. A Barney video came on.

I watched it for a minute, confused, and then asked, “Why do you have a Barney video?”

He didn’t look up from what he was doing.

“Well, I used to dress in a purple suit and sing songs for the kids on TV. It was pretty popular for a while.” Then he turned and looked at me, totally straightfaced.

My mind came to a screeching halt! My Dad is BARNEY?! The shock was audible. We locked eyes for several seconds, and I scanned his face for clues that he was putting me on. If he was serious, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I mean, if he really was Barney, I guess I could accept that. At least he’s not Darth Vader!

Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and asked with some hesitation, “Are you joking?”

He grinned, “Yeah.”

Hysterical laughter gripped me so severely that I staggered around outside in the driveway for several minutes before I could pull myself together well enough to repeat the story to Cameron.

It was a hilarious joke, but my reaction to it was probably intensified by the rollercoaster of emotions we had all been through this week, and, although our visit was about to end, the ride was not even close to over.

Grandma Betty called at the house that morning, and my Dad held the phone up to my ear so I could eavesdrop on the conversation. He told her that Cameron was fixing his brakes.

“Could you ask for a better husband for your daughter?” she asked him. I smiled. I was proud she approved of my choice.

The night before at her house we had had a discussion about race, and she told me about a song she had written in 1967, and then she said, “Looking back, I realize that I wrote it for you.” She recited it for me and it goes like this (reprinted with her permission):

To each of me
to love within the reach of me
and if this love can teach to me
why each of me, in turn,
should torture so the soul of me
and tear apart the whole of me
within life’s play, each role of me
must speak to me … must learn
that blackness and the white of me
are just the day and night of me
are not the wrong or right of me
can’t you see — there’s got to be
some answer to this planet’s pain
my microcosmic world — insane!
if only I could make you see
it’s here to see — just look at me
there is within me all of you
from distant lands — the whole of you
the dreams, the heart, the soul of you
if only you could see
that black and white are part of it
my brown is at the heart of it
and blending was the start of it
and someday it shall be
that blackness and the white of us
will be the day and night of us
and not the wrong or right of us
then we’ll be free!

She gave my Dad a cassette recording of that song along with some others that she had performed on a television show in the ’60s. We had listened to it in the car on the way to go dancing. Her voice was delicate and well-developed, her singing was animated, and her lyrics were deep and often witty. I felt embarrassed that I had given her some of my lyrics to read. My writing seemed pathetic next to hers.

It was while listening to her sing “To Each of Me” in the car that the significance of her statement, “I wrote this for you” began to hit me, and hard. I am the ’someday’ that the black and white of us are free!

My voice broke when I told her on the phone the next day, “I realize I am the first one in your family to be totally free. I have never experienced racism. No one ever judged me based on the color of my skin.”

“You’ve broken through the barrier,” she said. “You are the arrow that got shot outside the circle. You escaped, and for that I am glad. I feel like you are my chance to be reborn.”

I told her that having it easy had not made me a deeper person, that her lyrics reflected a depth that mine did not have.

She told me not to feel bad about that. “It’s just that, by the time I was your age,” she said. “I had experienced a lot more than you.”

My heart was sickened by the injustice of it all, but, at the same time, I felt grateful. She was right, I had been rescued.

After we hung up, my father and I spent the rest of the morning on the sofa, talking, laughing, crying. He played his guitar and sang to me. He showed me the guitar he had built and said, “Someday, when I’m gone, this will be yours.” What a disturbing thought!

“I hope that never happens,” I told him.

In a few short days we had forged an unbreakable bond. The more we get to know eachother, the more we realize we have always known eachother. He is me, and I am him. So when it came time to finally leave and he said those words to me, “I love you,” it was the most natural thing in the world to say it back to him.

I love you, Daddy.