I draw a circle, and this circle I draw is the shape of absence. Empty space inside the circle, space I call "my father." The man who fathered a name: Ernest Allen. After ten years of marriage, this man and my mother separated when I was two years old. To be more accurate, I should say that my mother left him when she could tolerate him no long­er, and from that time forward I had only scattered encounters with him, spectral touches. A ghost of a man whose name and blood I inhabit.

My mother and I lived in Chicago, as did my father's mother Inez and his stepfather, George Blocker, while my father lived hundreds of miles away in Kentucky with his new wife. My immediate elders constantly reminded me that my father was a bad man, a selfish no count who had nothing to offer me. As my step-grandfather George put it, "He's just a no-good bastard." There was the suffering he had caused my mother, evils which my mother remained largely silent about. There were large sums of money that he borrowed from my grandpar­ents, tens of thousands of dollars which he never repaid. Also, talk of tax evasion, scams and hustles, and other illicit activi­ties. By their testimony, he was a mobster, a front man for organized crime. But the nature of his evils was never revealed to me.

And my father certainly fit the image of a mobster. He would pop into town wheeling a brand new El Dorado, Lincoln Continental, or Cadillac with whitewall tires, leather seats and dashboard, and power locks and windows, customized items in those days. He was a tall, thick man with an arrogant grin and disposition. In the one photograph I have of my father, he strikes a pose which says, "World, you're so damn lucky to have me." My father, my dad, my pop, Mr. Mackdaddy, Superfly, A‑one Hustler, trickster, the Man himself.

But he was real to me only as a physical presence, skin and muscle. I knew little about his origins, only that he was the product of a brief encounter between his mother, a naive country girl fresh to Chicago from South Carolina, and a streetwise Mr. Allen, first name unknown. His maternal grandparents raised him as their own. In face, he was named Ernest after his grandfather. His mother, Inez, bore a second child, Grace, perhaps from the same man, perhaps not. Grace, my father's sister, my aunt, lived in Chica­go, but I had virtually no contact with her. When she succumbed to cancer, I did not attend her funeral, and today I don't have a single memory of her.

I last saw my father in the flesh some fifty years ago when I was twelve. He came into town and drove his new big car to the Southside ghetto and the courtyard building where I lived with my mother. I got inside the big car smelling of new leather, and he drove us downtown to see a martial arts movie. Like all black kids in those days, I glorified Bruce Lee, and I told my father that we would be seeing a Bruce Lee flick.

"No," he said. "This can't be a Bruce Lee movie. I've seen all of his movies."   

He was right; it wasn't a Bruce Lee movie, but I was only mildly disappointed. Movie done, we got back in the big car and drove back to the apartment. There in the living room he showed me a few karate moves he'd learned in the army.

“This is your hammer,” he said. He made a downward chopping motion with his right fist.

Interesting given that to me he looked like The Hammer, ex-NFL star and actor/producer Fred Williamson.

Karate demonstration done, my father promised to send me a genuine Chinese silk robe. (He never did.) And before he left us, I recall him sitting at our kitchen table and asking my mother, "Do you still love me?" My mother fanned about the kitchen, girlish and flirty, but I don't remember her response.

In the weeks following his departure I saw my first Bruce Lee movie, and I invented a new father, my flesh‑and‑blood own growing dim in my daily thoughts, and the deceased Bruce Lee growing ever brighter. Bruce Lee was the man I wanted to be when I grew up. Afterall, a father should command admiration, respect, reverence. My father did not seem deserving of any of these things, did not seem worthy of the very title itself, "father." Whenever I acted up, cut the fool, clowned, my mother would admonish me, "You're mean and selfish, jus like yo father."

As I became a teen, contact with my father became non‑existent. No phone conversation, not even the occasional visit. Every few months or so my grandmother would phone me and say, "Your father was just in town." Then in the weeks before my scheduled graduation from college for my Bachelor of Arts degree, she informed me that he would attend the commencement ceremonies. He did not.

Nor were there any other father figures in my life. My mother never remarried or got engaged. My maternal uncle died in a California car crash many years before I was born. My maternal aunt had four children but had never married, none of her mates visible or present. My maternal grandmother and my maternal great aunts all experienced multiple marriages to shadowy difficult men. Men such as Andrew, my great aunt Beulah's ex‑husband, a retired railroad man who traveled the country and visited Beulah several times a year. A smiling, pleasant man, and a snazzy dresser in the styles of the forties and fifties, he was almost deaf and rarely spoke a word. And my mother's one older male uncle and one older male cousin were more interested in running the streets, drinking, and bedding women, than caring for their own children. Well, to be fair, my Uncle Sam, Beulah's male sibling, fathered only one child that we knew of, and this occurred in the Philippines during his service as a soldier in the Second World War.

I knew other fathers, men in the neighborhood or the dads of my friends. I wish I could tell you that these men became my surrogate fathers. They did not. They were remote figures who I observed from a distance, black satellites whose lives orbited my own but never came into direct and significant contact. But I did find a father figure in Mr. Bishop, my seventh and eighth-grade teacher, perhaps the first educator to have a strong impact on me. Mr. Bishop made it clear that he cared, that developing the minds of black children was his prime objective in life. He instructed you under the threat of physical punishment, and he was honest, quick to say "bull shit" to any kid who was in fact trying to bullshit him. And he would take a boy, such as myself, outside the classroom, and frankly ask him in a Virgin Island's accent, "Man, what's yo fuckin problem?" Mr. Bishop predicted that I would become a poet―or a gigolo―a prophecy that I laughed at.

“I ain’t gon be no poet,” I said. As for a gigolo, I didn’t know the meaning of the word.

At age twenty‑eight, I got my chance to be a father when I started dating and eventually married a single mother, Denise, who was raising a two‑year‑old daughter, Joy. For the next five years, I was the only father she knew; according to Denise, Joy’s biological father had committed suicide in a Texas jail before she was born. This girl became my best buddy in the world. I am telling you about the pure joy and pride and felt when she called me "Dad." I am telling you about the joys of parenthood, making her laugh, answering her ques­tions, having her in my public company, carrying her on my shoul­ders for a ride through the streets, helping her with homework and attending school functions, reading to her at bedtime, my voice mimicking fictional characters, and the bonds of family: my wife, myself, and our child, our daughter. Of course, I had doubts about my parenting skills. Was I too strict? Too lenient? Did I create a union of two that excluded my wife?

The marriage offered the further advantage of a new father figure, Martin, my father‑in‑law, a hardworking father of two and migrant from the South who was in his early fifties, and who had lost part of the first finger on his left hand to a farming machine back home. According to Denise, he had been a poor father to her, and a poor husband to his own wife‑‑both emotionally and physically abusive, a hard drinking alcoholic who became belligerent and violent when under the influence. But he had worked hard to become a better man, and a supportive grandfather. Nothing in the world meant more to him than his granddaughter, my stepdaughter. Perhaps—I sensed―he saw her as a second chance. He wanted to right the wrongs with Denise. Although he was often a difficult man to be around, he and I got along and enjoyed each other’s company. We often played one‑on‑one basketball―he was a skilled shooter and would beat me nine games out of ten, though I was twenty years younger—watched Chicago Bulls games on TV, discussed this and that, or involved ourselves in other meaningful activities.

But the holy union between me and his daughter was doomed from the altar, two emotionally needy people who married for all the wrong reasons. (I never loved her and only married her because I didn’t want to move to New York alone. Perhaps she loved me, but she also thought that marrying a “normal” person like me would bring stability.) She was an alcoholic, and I was mentally ill. After three years of marriage, during a manic episode, I left my wife and began divorce proceedings, meaning that at age seven my stepdaughter had now lost two fathers.

People often ask me if I ever think about my father. I respond, "Not really." But over the years their inquiries have raised some troubling questions. More often than I care to admit, I find myself thinking, "How can a man have a son and go about his life as if his son doesn't exist? Surely he must wonder about me." Perhaps in some strange way he was trying to protect me from his lifestyle, or even from becoming like himself, trying to set an example, role-modeling through absence, silence, and negation. This speculation came to a head when I was in grad school. I decided that I needed to track him down and have a conversation with him.

I brought this news before my mother: "I'm planning to look up Ernest."  Immediately, she grew hostile, near tears, and said, "Well if you do, don't ever speak to me again." Then walked away from me.

Later, after she calmed down,  she would explain that she saw my plan as the ultimate act of betrayal, for she had sacrificed herself for me, cleaned white folks' homes for thirty years, helped me with homework, bought me books when she could afford to do so, worried over me during my asthma attacks,  and done whatever else it took to keep me safe and sound, make a better life for me than she’d had.

When my grandmother Inez died in 1996, my step-grandfather George did not notify my father, refused to tell him about his own mother's death. In her final years, my grandmother had fallen victim to Alzheimer's and dementia, and my grandfather had stopped allowing my father to call or visit her. I often wondered how my father felt, shut off from his own mother, know­ing that she was wasting away. The great tragedy here is that my grandmother truly loved him, her son, despite all. I often saw the love in her face when she talked about "Junior."

My grandfather refused to heed my mother's request that he notify my father about Inez's death. However, some six months later, he discovered that someone else had told my father that his mother was dead. He grew belligerent. He blamed my mother, insisting that she had been the person who’d contacted my father, although a few weeks later my mother learned that one of my grandfather's neighbors had passed the word to my father, thinking it the right thing to do. Still, my mother and my grandfather stopped speaking to one another and never spoke again.

When my mother was alive, I often found myself hounding her for information about my father, trying to get her to raise the ugly past, hoping to make sense of it all. When, where, and how did they meet? Did he give off any red flags? What was his father like? How long was he in the military? And how was he towards her as the years went on? Was he ever violent? Was he ever arrested? Did he actually become a criminal? And I asked, "Didn't you know he was a jerk when you married him?"

What she said in response surprised and shocked me.

"He was a good, decent man,” she said, but then he got involved with the wrong crowd."

I had always viewed my father as a bad seed, either corrupted from birth or the pressures of a big city ghetto, a familiar story. But no.

I turned 50 in 2012, and I decided to send my mother a recent photograph documenting my passage to a new stage of life.

She called me on the phone. "The older you get," she said, "the more you look like your father." What surprised me is that she meant it in a good way. I was slowly inheriting my father’s good looks, The Hammer.

We went on to have a conversation about a familiar topic: why is my personal life always such a mess, especially when it comes to women and money? One bad decision after another.

To my surprise, she said quite matter‑of‑factly, "Maybe you should go see your father. If you think seeing him will help, see him."

Even though I now had her blessing, I never made any efforts to find my father. With each passing year, I became more and more convinced that reconnecting with him would do me little good and that it would also indeed make light of all my mother’s hard and diligent parenting.

Then, at some point, a writer friend said to me, “I find it curious that for you your father is out of sight out of mind.”

“Fuck him,” I said. “He obviously has never given a fuck about me.”

“You’re missing out. You should be writing about him. Lots of good material there.”

I said, “That doesn’t interest me in the least.”

“Well how about this: I think you should reach out to your father. As corny as it sounds, I really believe that we all need closure. If you don't speak to him, you'll be haunted for the rest of your life."

That was the word, closure, a term so often bandied about in our society. But perhaps the word, cliché and all, has the crucial element of truth. Closure? How can I achieve closure when it comes to my father? One must first open a door to close it firmly shut. There are many doors I have yet to open. And one must step past the threshold of the door into the unknown, uncertainty. You put one foot on the ground, and your heel leaves a half‑circle in the dirt, the sign of lack, incompleteness. Only the full circle closes and contains.

The old slave spiritual asks, "Will the circle remain unbroken?" I answer, "Yes."

I draw a circle, allowing the song of the circle to spiral both backwards and forwards in time, extending out to my father and his father before him and his father's father and the fathers before them, and my mother’s father and grandfather and great grand. The song of the circle also encompasses the father I became in the year 2000 at the start of the new millennium, and it includes my three other children and my unborn grandchildren and great grandchildren. Now, peer into this circle and see black space and bright lights, infinite and eternal stars, a black universe of fathers.