Fathers Day Image and Reflections

I’m a lucky man. Not only am I a happy husband, but I’m also a son, a father, and a grandfather – three degrees of kinship running concurrently.

Since this weekend is Hallmark’s other big holiday, the one which lags far behind Mother’s Day, I want to honor dads in this week’s post.

It’s natural that for most of us, our wives, daughters, and granddaughters are the flowers in our families, and we’re the gardeners, the guys who hoe the rows and plant the seeds, taking care of business. Nita will probably challenge me on that one as I don’t actually like yardwork or gardening, and it’s taken both our paychecks since the get-go of our marriage to keep our household blooming. Nonetheless, I contend that the recognition of dads takes a backseat to honoring moms, which is OK. I’m sort of glad no one expects me to wear lipstick.

The big black and white picture at the top was taken in 1950. My granddaddy Orland Todd is holding me. Yeah, I’m the baby with the Michelin Man arms. My 30-year old dad Frank is the guy under the cap on the far right, not long returned from two years in Europe during WWII. The other folks are my brother John, mom Betty Lou, and Uncle Jimmy.

The top side photo was taken two months ago and is my dad again, now at age 95, son Todd, and his son Jackson, age four months, and me again, some 65 years after the Michelin Man photo up there.

The next image is son Ben and his new daughter Violet. We all gathered for Ben and Meredith's wedding in April, a time when he said "I Do" and got not just a beautiful wife, but two beautiful daughters.

The photo under that is of Ben, Todd, and I in our Confederate duds at a parade a couple of years ago on Fathers Day weekend. The guys clearly have inherited their dad's proud nose. Sorry, boys, but thin has never been my strength.

Fatherhood in the McBee Novels

Now to the Civil War novels: One of the themes in the McBee war saga is fatherhood. As it is for many men, John McBee’s entry into parenthood doesn’t unfold according to a well-thought out timeline. If you’ve read Tangled Honor, you know that pretty much just the opposite happens more than once to McBee, in spite of his good intentions. I’m trying to keep the unpredictability and importance of fatherhood in the second McBee novel, Redeeming Honor.

I’m especially making an effort to highlight McBee’s dilemma in regards to his man-servant Levi, who may or may not be McBee’s son, or is perhaps his half-brother. The truth of who is Levi’s father is one of those unanswerable questions from the times before DNA and paternity tests. That uncertainty is overlaid with the apparently not uncommon forced sexual compliance of young Negro slave women, one of the more disgusting facets of the South’s “peculiar institution.” McBee is confronted with the constraints of the day in how white men treat their black (or half-black) man-servants, blood relative or not.

During the Civil War the white sons of officers often served as aides-de-camp to their fathers. McBee is not so lucky. As a forty-year-old captain, he has the services of an enslaved twenty-year-old man, who may be a related, but could not be acknowledged as such, and cannot even be publicly afforded such common courtesies as were offered to white civilian teamsters, laborers, and lowly privates in uniform.

The wall of separation was high and not to be scaled. Maybe such situations didn’t bother Southern officers until the end of the war brought about the dissolution of slavery, but I’m still wrestling with it.

One of the most interesting challenges in writing these books continues to be finding ways for John McBee and Levi to develop a relationship that is more than master and slave, yet does not endanger either man by crossing the deep abyss between the races. All in all, I think the 1860’s must have been very vexing times.