around, a cigar-puffing patriarch who’d sit in his recliner with a newspaper open
on his lap and the evening news blaring on the television nearby. His demeanor
was nothing like my father’s. For Dandy, everything was an irritant. He was
galled by the day’s headlines, by the state of the world as shown on TV, by the
young black men—“boo-boos,” he called them—whom he perceived to be
hanging uselessly around the neighborhood, giving black people everywhere a
bad name. He shouted at the television. He shouted at my grandmother, a sweet,
soft-spoken woman and devout Christian named LaVaughn. (My parents had
named me Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, in honor of her.) By day, my
grandmother expertly managed a thriving Bible bookstore on the Far South Side,
but in her off-hours with Dandy she was reduced to a meekness I found
perplexing, even as a young girl. She cooked his meals and absorbed his barrage
of complaints and said nothing in her own defense. Even at a young age, there
was something about my grandmother’s silence and passivity in her relationship
with Dandy that got under my skin.
According to my mother, I was the only person in the family to talk back to
Dandy when he yelled. I did it regularly, from the time I was very young and
over many years, in part because it drove me crazy that my grandmother
wouldn’t speak up for herself, in part because everyone else fell silent around him,
and lastly because I loved Dandy as much as he confounded me. His stubbornness
was something I recognized, something I’d inherited myself, though I hoped in a
less abrasive form. There was also a softness in Dandy, which I caught only in
glimmers. He tenderly rubbed my neck sometimes when I sat at the foot of his
reclining chair. He smiled when my dad said something funny or one of us kids
managed to slip a sophisticated word into a conversation. But then something
would set him off and he’d start snarling again.
“Quit shouting at everyone, Dandy,” I’d say. Or, “Don’t be mean to
Grandma.” Often, I’d add, “What’s got you so mad anyway?”
The answer to that question was both complicated and simple. Dandy
himself would leave it unanswered, shrugging crankily in response to my
interference and returning to his newspaper. Back at home, though, my parents
would try to explain.
Dandy was from the South Carolina Low Country, having grown up in the
humid seaport of Georgetown, where thousands of slaves once labored on vast
plantations, harvesting crops of rice and indigo and making their owners rich. My
grandfather, born in 1912, was the grandson of slaves, the son of a millworker,