The One Who's Gonna See You Through

By John Steven Welch

GJ's family is an anomaly. Samuel, his uneducated strongman father, respected for his brawn and violent aggression, acts as a conscientious, nurturing single parent, rearing his infant son in the 1950s when men were not their children's primary caregivers. Despite his father's typical Black masculinity, he intuitively understands his son's emerging gay nature as innate. GJ's mother, a child of Black middle-class privilege from the neighboring suburbs, is an absent parent, primarily engaged with living the rooming life, consisting of drink and abandon.

GJ's young life progresses, and he is thrust forth into circumstances both familiar and violently surreal, from typical bullying to standing as the principal witness in a murder trial to defend his father. Colorful characters like wild Uncle NapPo, the seemingly unflappable Miss Carrie, and his father's employer, the curious Mr. Blu, inform him of life's complexity.

The wide-eyed boy grows into his teens and twenties and is altogether victimized, loved, and enlightened, leading him to experience the full range of gay life. GJ learns the culture and codes of Washington’s insular Black gay bar scene as the teen partner of a man in his thirties. As GJ starts to relish his gay existence, becoming more confident with his gay identity and his family's unconventionality, he continues to question himself, fighting self-doubt and consternation about fitting into Black respectability norms or the mainstream world. GJ's adult existence and early professional life extend into the integrated world of Dupont Circle gay bars and Georgetown professional offices, where he finds the love of his life and soulmate.

The One Who Gonna See You Through is a work that bridges the commercial/literary divide. The gay interracial theme here is seldom explored, and the absent mother/loving father configuration brings a different lens to this work. The approach to story in The One Who Gonna See You Through sets the more familiar trope of the angry, Black, homophobic father aside and abandons the more well-trodden storyline of steadfast single Black motherhood. By story's end, GJ recognizes that his father's early and invaluable acceptance of difference laid the foundations for the happiness and realization he has experienced as a gay man throughout life. He resolves within himself that he must finally accept his legitimacy as both a Black man and an upper-middle-class one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662938610

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The fabric is old and fragile. Are you sure you want to wear this suit? I have some lovely fabrics just in, and we have time to create a whole new garment for your special occasion.

No. I really want this one if possible. I know it is threadbare, but it means the world to me, and I want to have it as close as possible on my special day.

All right, Mr. Boils, we’ll try to accommodate your wishes, it’s going to take delicate stitching and replacement fabric, but we’ll do what you want.

I have every confidence that my tailor would rise to the occasion of reviving Daddy’s aged suit with new life.

A chalk mark on the shoulder, a request to turn three quarters left, a flurry of pins pushed into my right sleeve. As the tailor fits and reworks Daddy’s old suit to my new purpose, I take stock of the person before me in the shop’s 3D mirrors, and the past alive within him, always informing knowledge of self.

It is 2014, and at age fifty-four, I smile at the idea of my own fragile mortality in late middle age. The interwoven threads strewn across my life path, like the fabric of Daddy’s suit now, have often required careful stitching and replacement cloth along their journey.

I am GJ Boils—a healthy, still somewhat youthful man, but far enough away from the veal of genuine youth to delude myself I am young. Yet like my need for closeness to Daddy’s well-worn suit, I cannot let go of the memory or feel of youth.

Do I live in my past more now than ever? Am I that past always? An abandoned son? A soft boy? A poor, urban black youth?

Who escapes the ravages and joys of their past? Surely, most people embrace an envisioned future, a living present, far more than what has gone before. Yet for me, the past is never crowded out of mind or soul by present or future. It is omnipresent. I am always untangling and reconstructing the threads of youth or adolescence to understand the fabric of my essence now.

Without such unrelenting processing, the greatest demons of the past wreck confidence, destroy the mature self. So I travel the channels of my interior in the hope that such exploration will free the soul of doubt or pain embedded there. Travel with me.

PART ONE

EMERGENCE

CHAPTER ONE

Daddy was arrested. He had been taken to the police station on V Street, walking distance from our S Street house. When we arrived, I was visibly wrecked, having witnessed Daddy’s handcuffing and him being led away from me and possibly from our life together, forever. The desk sergeant at the V Street neighborhood police station looked down at me while Uncle NapPo and I stood before his tall desk. He asked how old I was, and I said ten. He told us that Daddy was in a holding cell awaiting completion of his charging paperwork and the arrival of lawyers, both Daddy’s public defender and the city’s attorney.

I bet you would like to see your daddy now, wouldn’t you? the sergeant asked.

Oh yes, please! I answered.

Daddy was in a wide cell that had yellow bars. No one else was in his cell, and there were no other cells near his. When Daddy saw the officer leading me into the space, he stood and walked toward the bars. We held hands through them, and Daddy looked down at me in his quiet, loving way for a long moment, saying nothing.

When we breathed again, reassured by each other’s touch and presence, I said, Daddy, I brought your cigarettes, and pulled a half pack of Pall Malls from the pocket of my shorts, with a book of matches inside the cellophane on the cigarette pack.

Daddy took the pack, yanked out a cigarette, and lit it.

GJ, you listen to me. I don’t know what we going do right now, but we going to stay together. You stay close to Uncle NapPo, and tell him he can’t be on no bottle while I’m locked in here. I’m worried with what happened that them damn social workers gon’ come by and snatch you up, and once they got you, it be damn near impossible to get you back. No point trying to get your momma back home right now, you know she been in her roomin’ time for months now, and if they see her the way she must be by now, they really will want to take you away! Stay right under Uncle NapPo, you hear, till I can get some time out of here to talk to somebody for you. Don’t let nobody take you to the country either, to your granddaddy, ’cause Daddy just don’t know if they want to keep you and me together after all this. You and Daddy gonna come through this, you hear, GJ? We gonna come through.

* * *

On evenings when Daddy let me, I sat and watched what he called the five-o’clock rush from our tall, gray wooden steps. Lincolns, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Cadillacs, and Chevrolets flowed past our block going north from downtown. I learned they were returning to the black Gold Coast up Sixteenth Street, or across the city line to their suburban worlds. I saw white men and black men, white shirts and big ties, full heads of hair or bald patches, and billowing cigarette smoke inside enclosed compartments that whisked them pass my Fifteenth Street life, a blur in their peripheral vision.

I always liked it when the light at R Street forced the lanes of cars going north to stop. Then I could observe the white men, the ones who didn’t live on my block or in my world, for a longer moment. Watching them pleased young eyes. I loved their complexions and freckles; the fullness and weight of their hair and its different colors—its flow when quick hands pushed it off their foreheads or fingers combed it effortlessly; their eyes whose colors were hypnotic; and the freshness of their shirts or suits even at the end of long days. Like the many beautiful church objects that moved me whenever Mother took me to Mass—chalices, vestments, window mosaics, the stations of the cross statuary—white men brought a visual sensation. I had no words to describe this effect and certainly no maturity to understand it. It was a pleasure of which I made no sense. I did not want to look like them, act like them or be like them, but I was compelled to look at them. The reasons were an inexplicable jumble. I did know that experiencing visual delight from church objects—and the white men—as I did was probably wrong. Best to keep it inside.

* * *

As we open on my early life, Daddy was forty and Mother was thirty-five. They married in 1963 after a courtship begun years prior when both worked at a hospital during the 1950s. Mother said Daddy worked on the first through fourth floors—cleaning and collecting, and turning colored women’s heads.

Who that tall, stop-you-in-your-tracks one, always moving through here? the colored girls asked each other bemusedly while gossiping over lunch.

Lord, why ones like that don’t make the money, make something of themselves?

Girl, at least he got a job. Child, let that man take my money! one said as the whole table went up in a whoop of laughter.

On a bus one afternoon, Mother took matters in her own hands and decided she would find out about the janitor, Adonis. Daddy said he was sitting in the middle of the bus, and out of the blue, this tiny woman alighted on him like a butterfly on his shoulder, smiled, and started talking like she’d known him all his life. Daddy said he chuckled under his breath at this itty-bitty woman, so bold, wanting to make her way with him.

I entered their story, at least in my recollections, around age five in 1963. My name is GJ, short for Gregory John, the nickname my father used that stuck for life with anyone from my family. I knew already that everyone related to Daddy called him Mack rather than his first name, Samuel. And the family called Uncle Nat NapPo, a play on his middle name Napoleon and a joke about his hair being straight instead of nappy. Mother was Tike to her family. Nicknames were so common among black folks where I grew up in Washington that when somebody official, usually the law or Social Services, came looking for people and said their real name, folks didn’t know whom they meant.

Daddy and Uncle NapPo grew up with their mother’s younger siblings on a bacca (tobacco) farm in North Carolina. Their grandparents were mulatto and partially Creek respectively. They had thirteen children in total. Papa Tam’s white father owned the land he sharecropped. His official designation as tenant farmer, or sharecropper, when he was actually the colored son of the landowner was born of laws deeming miscegenation illegal, as well as strict social codes demanding that the races be kept separate. In such instances in the South, where a colored person had a relationship to an existing white person or family, their biological ties remained unacknowledged officially to protect the social acceptance of the white family.

Mother was born and grew up in Glen Galos, Maryland. Her father, Damson, a meticulous man in dress and manner, blue-black and full of love for Catholicism, worked her entire childhood at the US Department of Labor in Washington. He was celebrated for never having missed a day’s work in forty-one years. Her mother, Elkie, was a homemaker and mother to five children. She did, however, in her later years, take out-of-home employment at the Glen Galos Sanitorium, which had opened next to their property.

In spite of her petite stature, Mother’s personality was larger than life. She was ever the questioning child, the girl with the big laugh and dare-me-to-do-anything spirit. She was fun-loving to a fault—devilish and fearless. Mother was that in-your-face kind of girl by nature. The girl’s nemesis, her only sister, Josephine, was coquettish and pretty by contrast. She was pleasingly colored, like a cross between a lemon and the flesh of a cantaloupe, in an age of colorism. Mother was blue black-like her daddy, loud, and always in need of attention. She repelled her father, and his remove made her all the more desirous of his attention.

Mother’s people had long ago been influenced by Catholicism to embrace education, hard work, honesty, and faithfulness. They steered clear of the city’s lures: drink, smoking, free love, free cussing, gambling, and godlessness. Though they did not feel morally superior to city people, they did view themselves as stronger black people, people more fully armored against the ills of the city—and indeed life—than many of the poor souls who found themselves bedazzled and vanquished by their post-World War II black life in Washington, DC. They had worked in the city for generations but never lived there. They knew its black life as they knew their own outside it—as people born to a place, who belong there, do. Washington, DC, and their safe space around it were symbiotic—conjoined in enabling the survival of their own kind of prosperity.

Sitting on the tall, gray wooden steps of the three-story brick roomin’ house where I lived on Fifteenth Street NW between Corcoran and R Streets, I started figuring out something about our tight-knit block. We had people with money on our block, people with no money, and others somewhere in between, all thrown together like different-size polka dots on one of Mother’s dresses.

On my side of the block, the west side, at the northern end closest to R Street, there were five two-story brick houses, all immaculately kept, each owned by a black family. People at that end of the block were well off compared to folks at my end. Their kids went somewhere else to school. They had black daddies with book learning and desk jobs and generally high yellow mommas who acted just so.

I once heard Miss Ida going up the stairs in our roomin’ house. She said to the man with her, Damn Negroes at that end of the block think their shit don’t stink. They won’t speak to me.

Where the nice row of houses ended a third of the way south on our side of the block, there was a wide alley, and across it were seven three-story houses running down to Corcoran Street. Nobody who lived in those houses, including ours, owned them. We folks rented, managed, stayed with kin, or something. At least four of these houses like ours were roomin’ houses, with unrelated men, and rarely a woman, living in each room of the house. The other houses at our end are full of kids, either with a single mother or several single mothers who might be relatives. Daddy said they got paid for all those kids. On the east side of our block, there was one freestanding apartment building that stretched all the way from the corner of R Street to Corcoran Street.

Our block teemed with what folks called good mens and bad mens; no-good womens and good ladies; and no-count sons and trifling daughters. It was my primer in social acceptability and class difference, in what people valued and didn’t in my black world.

The apartment building across the street had many younger women, like Miss Yvette, who stepped out each weekday morning. They had proud, straight backs and sturdy legs; beautifully coordinated skirts and blouses or shirtwaist dresses; and Mia Farrow pixies or Suzanne Pleshette bouffants, styled for black tresses. They were going to their government jobs as secretaries and clerks at the federal agencies around town. All had high school under the belt, typed well, and some had a bit of college.

Everyone on the block knew a permanent federal government job was choice. Making it from GS 3 to 7 or 9 was a career well spent. It brought respectability and class mobility as one advanced through insteps of grades, then on to new grade levels altogether. For those who got through, it was a stable, legitimate pursuit. Our block’s young black women, like many all over the city, flowed from high school graduations to clerk-secretary status, and they often remained at federal agencies their entire working lives.

Some of the men on our block were similarly employed, finding their way in the nine-to-five alphabet cities of federal agencies usually as janitors, gardeners, maintenance men, boiler room engineers, elevator operators, mail room employees, and the like. The low-level government men didn’t see their work lives as thankless or dead ends as they often heard better-off people declare. They were proud of the stability offered by a government job and by their ability to hold one.

Still, within this group, a few harbored longings to move on to something else, to become someone more. Odds for their significant advancement were poor once these men became heads of households, but many of these black men held on to the hope of a better career even if they didn’t have the opportunity to make a better one. Conversely, the so-called no-good men of the block just lived, working a day here or there to stave off the man, get another bottle, throw a goddamn big-ass house party, and/or hit another crapshoot in some roomer’s hovel. These men didn’t do kids, fidelity, or responsibility. They were bad asses.

Less than ten blocks south of our block was the elegant white world housed in the Mayflower, the Statler Hilton, and the Hay Adams. These were spaces where Daddy worked sporadically as a kitchen man or janitor and by which we often took walks in spring or summer. An equally short distance north was the hot, black world of Fourteenth and U Streets, with soulful amenities like the Pig N Pit, Ben’s Chili Bowl, People’s Drug Lunch Counter, Booker T. Theatre, Scurlock’s, Jarvis Funeral Home, and Portner Place where Uncle NapPo lived.

Our roomin’ house was a microcosm of the block’s low end. Miss Carrie lived in the room behind ours on the first floor. She was an older lady who was close to us—comical and wise. Miss Carrie didn’t have kids, a man, or relatives in Washington. Nobody came to see Miss Carrie, and she didn’t care. She had day’s work as a maid even at her age. Miss Carrie was never going to tell, but everyone on the block thought she was fifty-five or sixty.

Sometimes in the late afternoons, I saw Miss Carrie huffing her way up those tall wooden steps to our roomin’ house from my summit on the top step: wig slightly turned, rolled stockings above the knee slipping, pumice-colored sweater falling off one shoulder in the haze of summer heat, snuff bulge on one side of her mouth, and an overused floral handkerchief in one hand. Miss Carrie’s maid’s uniform was bright white, and somehow to my eye, it never showed dirt, sweat, or wrinkles.

Miss Carrie said as she approached, GJ, I got right lucky today and caught my bus on time.

Miss Carrie didn’t have anybody to get home to on time, but she always wanted to get home. Daddy liked Miss Carrie because he could rely on her not to make trouble and sometimes keep an eye on his quiet five-year-old. Daddy said Miss Carrie was from somewhere in Mississippi, came here with her husband, and the city ran away with her. She lived the roomin’ life when she was younger, mother to nobody’s kids, drinking, cussing, being with the mens. They said she ran herself so hard that she finally ended up in detox at Freedman’s Hospital a couple of times before she came to herself.

I didn’t know much about the men who lived on the second and third floors in the rooms above ours. The only other roomer I had any sense of was Miss Ida. She was what folks in the neighborhood called a bad woman. She liked to drink. She liked to curse. She demanded to be seen and heard. And she loved men. Miss Ida was reddish brown, with masses of freckles wandering over her face, neck, and arms like flocks of migrating birds. Her being was playful, and her body was ample and pear-shaped. Men wanted Miss Ida, and she loved company, as Daddy said.

He had mixed feelings about Miss Ida as a tenant. She all right. She’s a nice person, pays her rent, but the men she keeps company with, they can be trouble. Ida ain’t no working girl. Everybody knows she just likes the fun with men, and doing her day’s work, then more drink and fun.

The other people on the upper floors were all men. I never knew what kind of work they did, and they never seemed to stay long as tenants—long enough for you to learn a name or to start to sense a person, but not really long enough to get to know them. What I did learn about the upstairs men was they were Daddy’s job. The amounts they drank, the way they partied, and the company they kept were things Daddy was expected to keep a check on for the owner of the property, Mr. Blumenthal—or Mr. Blu, as Daddy and I called him.

Daddy always said that when he was growing up, he wanted to be a prizefighter. His people thought he would be good at it. He was great with his fists and kept that propensity for violence and aggression as an adult. Daddy had