I am now at the age where my father calls me brother when we say goodbye. Take care of yourself, brother, he whispers a half beat before we hang up the phone, and it is as if some great bridge has unfolded over the air between us. He is 68 years old. He was born in the throat of Jim Crow Alabama, one of ten children, their bodies side by side in the kitchen each morning like a pair of hands exalting. Over breakfast, I ask him to tell me the hardest thing about going to school back then, expecting some history I have already memorized. Boycotts & attack dogs, fire hoses, Bull Connor in his personal tank, candy paint shining white as a slaver’s ghost. He says: Having to read the Canterbury Tales. He says: eating lunch alone. Now, I hear the word America & think first of my father’s loneliness, the hands holding the pens that stabbed him as he walked through the hallway, unclenched palms settling onto a wooden desk, taking notes, trying to pretend the shame didn’t feel like an inheritance. You say democracy & I see the men holding documents that sent him off to war a year later, Motown blaring from a country boy’s bunker as napalm scarred the sky into jigsaw patterns, his eyes open wide as the blooming blue heart of the light bulb in a Crown Heights basement where he & my mother will dance for the first time, their bodies swaying like rockets in the impossible dark & yes I know that this is more than likely not what you mean when you sing liberty but it is the only kind I know or can readily claim, the times where those hunted by history are underground & somehow daring to love what they cannot hold or fully fathom when the stranger is not a threat but the promise of a different ending I woke up this morning and there were men on television lauding a wall big enough to box out an entire world, families torn with the stroke of a pen, citizenship little more than some garment that can be stolen or reduced to cinder at a tyrant’s whim my father knows this grew up knowing this witnessed firsthand the firebombs the Klan multiple messiahs love soaked & shot through somehow still believes in this grand blood-stained experiment still votes still prays that his children might make a life unlike any he has ever seen. He looks at me like the promise of another cosmos and I never know what to tell him. All of the books in my head have made me cynical and distant, but there’s a choir in him that calls me forward my disbelief built as it is from the bricks of his belief not in any America you might see on network news or hear heralded before a football game but in the quiet power of Sam Cooke singing that he was born by a river that remains unnamed that he runs alongside to this day, some vast and future country, some nation within a nation, black as candor, loud as the sound of my father’s unfettered laughter over cheese eggs & coffee his eyes shut tight as armories his fists unclenched as if he were invincible