The bell inside the front door of apartment A1 at 2525 Bedford Avenue would ring loudly when the door was slammed shut.
I know this because — in a very Pavlovian way — I can still hear that bell ringing in my darkest moments.
I’ll never forget the days when I was 6 years old. It was 1992 and there I stood on that dark red carpet in front of the front door. My mom, dad, brother, and I lived in a roach-infested, two-bedroom apartment in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
My father had just sprayed cologne on his neck to leave the apartment. The way he carried himself, he had so much swagger and confidence.
“Dad, can I go with you, please?”
Often my mom would chime in to advocate on my behalf, “Jordache just take him with you for a little while, while I take care of Jeremy.”
“No, Madi. I’m just going up the road to come back,” he replied.
“Just let the record play and then switch off the power, when the record is finished,” he continued.
The heavy metal door would then slam shut behind him, causing the bell inside the door to ring loudly for a few seconds. Although he was leaving, the sound of the reggae music that was still pouring out from the industrial-size speakers in our living room was not leaving with him.
I remember going to my room to be alone and deal with my sadness. This pattern went on for many more years and the continued rejection gradually became too much to bear. The sound of him leaving had happened so often that I no longer heard the bell. Instead, a question ringing in my mind.
Why doesn’t he want to hang out with me?
Neville Louison Sr. is a quiet man; his movements however, are loud.
He steps around the apartment so quietly that I am always startled by the sound of his deep voice, but his impact on my life has and will continue to reverberate well into the remaining years of my life.
It has taken me three decades to heal from the emotional abandonment of him leaving me again and again. It has taken me just as much time to fully grasp the impact of the greatest gift that he has ever given me.
My father has this cool confidence. Cool like a pleasant breeze on a summer night. It’s this cool confidence that gave him the courage to leave his small island of Grand Roy, Grenada, one of the least populated islands in the Western hemisphere. In the 1970s, millions of people had immigrated from the Caribbean islands to NYC. My father was one of them, and like many, he made a home for himself in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
It wasn’t long after that that my dad met my mom: a beautiful olive-skinned Puerto Rican woman named, Madeline Silva. It’s A classic Brooklyn love story — like something you might see in a Spike Lee film.
My mother had spent most of her formative years in Brooklyn and then a few more years on the island of Puerto Rico until my grandparents divorced when she was a teen.
By the early 1980s, my mother had made her way back to Brooklyn where she was attending Stony Brook University on Long Island.
His quiet confident cool draws my mothers gaze from across the room. Reggae music sizzles out of the stereo in a way that makes your hips sway, gyrate, and dip.
My mother leaned towards her best friend, Judy.
“Who is that cute guy with the black corduroy pants, moving his hips so nice in the corner by himself?”
“I call him Jordache because I always see him around the neighborhood wearing the Jordache Jeans brand,” Judy laughed. “Don’t worry Mads,” Judy continued. “I’ll introduce you to him if you behave yourself.”
Taking a swig of his beer, he asks her to dance.
Maybe it was the way his dark skin shone, the fluidity of his hips, the attraction of their African blood, or the rhythm of the music, but it was at that moment that their love story began.
After 3 years of dating, my father proposed to my mother in my grandmother’s living room.
He didn’t drop to one knee or make a grandiose proposal or anything like that. He just simply stated, “Madi, we must get married.”
My mother did not hesitate to commit to the guy she had gushed to Judy about all those years prior.
“Ok, Jordache.”
Every time they tell me that story, I can hear Beres Hammond begin to croon, “what one dance can do…” – that is one of their favorite reggae tunes.
If you have ever lived with or in the vicinity of my father, you’ve likely been jolted out of your sleep by the buzzing of the amplifier being switched on.
By the mid-90s, our family had expanded to four children: Andy, Jeremy, David, and Sarah. My parents and their four children lived on the first floor above the building’s garbage room. As a result of the trash below us, our apartment was terribly roach-infested, but the cheap rent enabled my parents to save money for a house. We were poor but we were rich in love.
Our block felt like the Carribean United Nations. There were folks from each of the thirteen sovereign island nations and twelve dependent territories. Each island having their own unique sound, flavor, and style.
My mom was the Puerto Rican ambassador. Since she was the only Borinqueña on the block, folks would call my mom, “the Puerto Rican lady with the four kids.” She kept us close to her at all times. We were inextricably bound together.
There was a strong sense of community on our block. Everyone called my father the mayor. Mainly because he was the unofficial disc jockey. DJ South as he is known locally built his own sound system in my bedroom — the one I shared with my two other brothers.
One closet had his DJ booth which included black turntables, grey amplifiers, black headphones, and a red extension cord. Everything connected to the two large speakers in the living room. Somehow he still found a way to neatly organize all of his clothes and belongings.
This was the stereo that woke my Black ass up. Every. Single. Weekend. At 7 am.
“Early to bed and early to rise, does make a Black man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” my father would say. My brothers and I would roll around, grumbling in our bunk bed. I’d be rubbing crust out my eyes, scorn stitched into my brow, while my dad fired up the speakers. It was surreal every time because I usually wouldn’t see him for the entire week. And yet, all of a sudden, there he appeared before us. Crouched down, calmly strumming through his records.
When did he even get home?
“I go play that record,” he’d say when he finally found the record. He was always rummaging for the same record anyway: Bob Marley & The Wailers’ 1979 record, Survival.
As the needle dropped on the record in the closet, the record begins to scratch as the sound blasts from the living room. The raspy soulfulness of Robert Nester Marley’s voice welcomes you to the album.
“Little more drums,” Bob says.
DJ South’s set usually began with the Bunny Wailers “one drop” drumbeat blaring from our living room windows.
Bob’s voice returned to the track to lament, “So much trouble in the world…”
“Remember son, life is about survival,” Dad chimed in as he increased the volume to an even more obscene level.
“Survival,” he said. “Survival.”
Boy, did I want him to shut up. But no matter how much I tried to drown out the sound, he just kept on doing his thing. Eventually, I just lay there silent and angry, staring at the ceiling.
“So much trouble in the world…” Bob sings.
As a thirtieth birthday gift to myself in 2015, I decided that it was time to learn more about my Grenadian roots. It was a season of healing for me and the island was calling me, so I booked my flight.
When I landed on Grenadian soil for the first time, it had been four decades since my grandfather’s untimely death and my father’s escape to survive.
Grandpa, as I would have called him, didn’t live long enough for me to meet him. Lewis Pierre was murdered at the age of 44 in St. George Grenada in September 1977. The body was never recovered.
My father was working on a cruise ship on the nearby island of Trinidad & Tobago on that day. He was nineteen.
He was selling oranges for five cents in Grenada and that hustle was no longer sufficiently providing for the family. As the eldest of his mother’s children, he had left his home two years prior in search for work.
My grandmother and grandfather were effectively neighbors in the late 1950s. He was a Fishermen and in his 44 years of life, he fathered at least six children. Four of them with his wife and the other two children with my grandmother. My father and his brother, Joseph Cadore.
My grandmother’s family was growing and she would move to the nearby village of Grand Roy, where she raised her children, a stone’s throw away from the sea. My grandmother and her three children lived in a small two-room abode.
My uncle Joseph, who we call Uncle Wayne, is one of my favorite human beings. Since I was a child, he would always drop by to infuse his fun, rebel energy into our apartment. The moments with him were short but we loved to roughhouse with our strapping uncle. What I love about him most is that he chose to be around.
Uncle Wayne is different from my father. He is broad-shouldered, gregarious, talkative, and bald. Despite their noticeable differences, I’ve always admired their close bond.
Always up for an adventure, Uncle Wayne had accepted my invite to accompany me to Grenada. He was beaming with pride to show me around his hometown.
Uncle Wayne picked me up in a beat-up grey 4×4 vehicle with a barely functioning CD-player. That was our mode of transportation for the week.
With a joint hanging from his lip, Uncle Wayne drove us to every corner of the island. A man of the people, he stops to talk to everyone, either greeting them with a boisterous “Hello/Hey/Something” or by the double toot of his horn. I am convinced he knows most of the 100,000 people that live on the island — if not all of them.
During one tour of the island, we stopped at the home that my grandfather, Lewis Pierre, had lived. The yellow two-story home that he built with his own two hands was still standing on the mountain roadside.
My aunt Jenny, who I had never met previously, was living in the home. As I was inquiring about the family history, Aunt Jenny brought out her father’s documentation in a blue tin cookie canister.
I slowly opened the blue canister of his life and pull out the contents.
I gave the documents a quick glance to begin to put together a timeline of his life.
I read the words, “Lewis Pierre born March 18, 1932, to Camilla and Joseph Pierre,” on his birth certificate.
My great-grandparents have names, I thought to myself.
My senses were alive. I was looking at my grandfather’s face for the first time in my life.
“Wow, I look just like him!”
The questions in my mind begin to swirl like water beneath a geyser. However, I remain focused on listening to Aunt Jenny’s every word.
After sitting with the documents for a time and asking a few more poignant questions, I returned the tin canister to Aunt Jenny. I almost don’t want to let the canister go. It held so much information about my life that I may never learn more about.
We said our goodbyes and I began walking back to the car with my mind continuing to swirl with questions.
As we pulled away from my grandfather’s home, Uncle Wayne turned up the volume on the music in the car. The questions in my mind are now rumbling even more loudly as Love African Style by The Mighty Sparrow plays in the background.
“I love to see when Black people make love,” Sparrow sings.
We slowly make our descent down the curvy mountain road. With the sun beating down on the gravel road beneath our tires.
“Now I’ll take you to where me and your father lived,” Uncle Wayne says.
“Wait, you didn’t live there with your father?” I asked. “I thought you guys were neighbors?”
“No. We’d have to walk for hours to get a piece of small change from him, every now and again.”
The geyser of questions in my mind have now erupted and are shooting into the sky. I can only imagine the jagged rocks pressing into their bare feet, the sun beating down on their little heads, and the sweat soaking into their clothing. I wondered what they were talking about. I wondered how they were feeling on their long journey to their father’s house.
Why didn’t he want to hang out with me?
Suddenly, I was transported back to 1992, grappling with my own brokenness behind slammed doors. Except now it feels as if there are two little boys on that dark red carpet. Me and my dad grappling together. I can hear that bell ringing again. I wanted to reach out to my inner child. He needed an explanation.
“Neville,” I said. “He didn’t know how to be a Dad and hang out with you because he never had a Dad himself to hang out with him.”
I was then reminded of this unfortunate truth: broken men tend to produce broken men in the absence of healing.
I see those two Black boys, my Dad and me, much differently now. I’m deeply overcome with sadness to understand we both have experienced this deep pain at the neglect of our fathers.
Immediately one of my Dad’s favorite records by Jimmy Cliff comes to mind, and the words begin to make more sense to me. It’s like I’m hearing them for the first time.
Many rivers to cross…
I felt more connected to my Dad and found my brokenness in his brokenness.
Many rivers to cross
And it’s only my will that keeps me alive
I’ve been licked, washed up for years
And I merely survive because of my pride
“No wonder he played this record so much,” I thought to myself.
The song defines his journey.
The details of my grandfathers final moments in Grenada are limited to his official documents and hearsay accounts.
The death certificate issued ten months later in July 1978 mysteriously states, “Lewis Pierre came to his death by drowning in the parish of St. George and that no person or persons are liable for prosecution.” The hearsay version is that Lewis was thrown off a cliff by a man who was defending his step-daughter from him. Both the official documents and the hearsay accounts leave me with enough hesitation to no longer pursue any additional details of the life and times of Lewis Pierre.
In 1986, less than a decade after “no person or persons” were held to account for my grandfather’s murder, my father would have his first child.
Like many men of his time, my Dad was not overly engaged in my mom’s pregnancy. But he did request that his first-born son carry on his name, Neville. On a Wednesday morning in late January at 5:29 am, I was born — the first-generation American male of my ancestors lineage.
There were many rivers to cross in those early years for my mom and me. Dad didn’t know how to be a father, a husband, or an American – three roles that he had zero experience with. I guess we were all trying to find our way in those days.
Most nights after mom and I did homework together, I would wake up to her sniffles. She was crying. At some point, mom and I had learned that my father had fathered two children with another woman. He lived with his other family just a few blocks away. This tore my mother apart as she was dealing with her own responsibilities. While my dad was an outstanding financial provider, Mom was raising four children without help from her husband. She was a full-time NYC public school teacher and getting her Masters degree in English at Brooklyn College.
When my father did come around, they would argue constantly. I wished for years that he would leave for good so that I could no longer see my mom suffer through their relationship.
I now feel as if I suffered the consequences of my grandfather’s decisions. Neville was emulating Lewis’ behavior, leaving yet another Black boy yearning for time with a Dad who didn’t have the tools to deliver.
As I went through puberty and I grew into my adult years, my anger for my father also matured. I falsely believed that this anger had fueled my success, but in actuality, it was widening the gaping hole in me that my father’s absence had left behind.
The brokenness that had been birthed on that dark red carpet had hardened. I was no longer a boy. Instead, I was the “strong,” “resilient” man that had found his way in America without his father. I made a vow to myself when I was thirteen that this generational cycle of fatherlessness would end with me.
In my father’s absence, I developed my own criteria on what I believe it means to be a man. I would lose myself in books, magazines, mentors, coaches, and closely observed the good men my mom had placed in my life to help guide me. None of those books or people could replace my Dad’s quiet calm cool but they helped provide me with a solid foundation to build on.
At the age of 28, the same age that my father had me, we began to reconcile our relationship. On a quiet Sunday at my parents’ home, we both found ourselves at the dining table eating corn porridge. Mom had just left for church and there was no music playing yet. We both found ourselves quietly eating at the same time that morning. The table was silent except for the sound of our spoons clanging against the bowls. After years of silence on the topic, I muster up the courage.
“How are your sons?” I asked.
Not understating my question, he asked if I was asking about my siblings.
“No, your other two sons,” I sheepishly retorted back.
After taking a moment to gather himself, he stood up to take a walk to his liquor cabinet, and came back to crack open a bottle.
We sat at that dining room table for hours. Just two broken men named Neville exposing their hearts, wounds, and lack of understanding to the other. It was Sunday filled with words that had been previously unspoken and that I’ll cherish forever.
Later on that evening, my Dad asked me to help him fix a doorknob that was in slight disrepair. As he took a knee to unscrew the doorknob, he looked up at me with the glossy eyes of an aging man who had a few drinks.
“Son,” he said. “After today’s conversation… your daddy can now die a happy man.”
These were the words I thought I’d never hear as a little boy. Through his slurred speech, I could hear the sound of a Dad’s tender love for his son.
It’s a moment not many men get the opportunity to have with their fathers.
When I reflect on that moment, one of my Dad’s favorite records Tender Love by Beres Hammond comes to mind.
“First let me welcome you to my little world that was so torn apart. In case you don’t know, I’ve gotta tell you this. That all along I thought this world had no heart…” Beres sings softly.
The two little Nevilles together at last. This is our song now, in a musical language we both can understand.
You’ve been guiding me through the music all along, Dad.
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