When I was a child, my mother often admonished me to have good manners. I never really thought about it until one day my fifth grade teacher scolded a misbehaved classmate by saying, before the entire class, that he would never become a mature man without good manners. The teachers' tone was cutting and though it missed its intended target, Joe Collins, the rascal that was caught trying to peek under Barbara Brooks' dress, the words sliced deep into my subconsciousness.
Later that day, I looked up the definition of the word "manners" in the dictionary. The dictionary described manners as "socially correct behavior." I remember immediately thinking of my father and concluding that he wasn't a mature man because he didn't have the good manners. Even at ten years old, I knew that abandoning your responsibility as a father by walking out on your son was not socially correct behavior.
I was born in Chicago, Illinois during the Baby-Boom era. To this day, I have no recollection of ever being in a room with my father. Although, my mother and this man was married, he vanished before my brain formed a lasting image of him. It is highly likely that this man held me in his arms and rocked me back and forth. He probably even changed my diaper or at least bottle fed me. He might have even went a step further and expressed to his friends and family that he had a son, and his son's name was Richard O. Jones. My phantom-father, Mr. R. B. Jones, a Mississippian, may have had other children in Mississippi and/or other parts of the world wondering there he have vanished... I'll never know. But what I do know is that my mother was a strong independent minded woman and wasn't about to take orders from anybody. Unbeknownst to my father, he had married, what was to become know as a strong black woman who was 20 years ahead of her time. And unbeknownst to my mother, she had married a man who would rather disappear and never see his son again rather than put up with a wife that he could not control. So the phantom, did what phantoms do best, disappeared.
As I grew up, I couldn't help but notice, there were many other children in the neighborhood that had father that didn't know how to disappear nor were their mothers know how to be strong black women.
