My boy is beautiful.

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I write this to remind myself. I remind myself because I am a hard man. I am a hard man because at some point in my life I chose to be. I can be intolerant, quick to anger, unforgiving, and therefore, seemingly irredeemable. I fear my hardness.

I am past fifty, and my musculature, like my mind, is losing its flexibility. It’s more prone to fatigue and injury when exercised and slow to recover from exertion. I am hard because I sometimes believe I have seen too much, felt too much, and I have made the choice not to feel anymore.

My legacy is of broken men, each of whom, at one time, had to transform their own legacy and in doing so transform themselves and the inheritance of those to come. Each man failed.

But my boy is beautiful. My boy is beautiful in spite of me. He moves with languid grace, which underscores a quiet, peaceful stillness in him that seems unshakable.

My legacy is of broken men, each of whom, at one time, had to transform their own legacy and in doing so transform themselves and the inheritance of those to come.

Beautiful, not perfect; Alex can be rude, insolent, and subject to wild emotional swings and failures of decorum and logic. Beauty, however, isn’t pretty. It isn’t a superficial modifier. It demands we participate. It embraces rather than rejects.

It’s a jangling phrase we hear that we transform into song. It’s that which inspires us to toast with and drink from the cup of trembling. It’s the heavens leaving. It’s a synthesis—if only momentary—of the internal and external forces that threaten to tear us apart.

I have four children now, but Alex is different—to me. It might be that I see him as being so because he’s my oldest. I never thought I’d overburden my firstborn male. I’m the youngest of three, and I’ve watched my brother and father stagger and fail under that load.

I know this isn’t the case for all fathers and eldest sons. I never thought it would be for me and mine, but there he is, my Alex, alone, fixed in primogeniture, set to receive an inheritance from his hard father. The estate bequeathed to Alex is a troubled one. His father is a troubled man.

And I often feel that because I have not completely freed myself from what my father left me, I will always endanger my son. I feel I cannot help Alex. I cannot protect him from us.

*

In mid-June of 1995, my wife, Michaele, and I found out that she was pregnant with our first child. We were driving north on I-95 near Madison, Connecticut, when she said that she was “late.”

“Do we have to be somewhere?” I asked. She turned to me, baffled. We were returning to Boston after having signed a lease for a Brooklyn townhouse for $1,500 a month—three times what we were currently paying. She’d recently received her degree in social work and, having given up on theater, I was about to start an MFA program in fiction writing. Neither of us had jobs in New York, and three months sober, I was having a protracted bout of the heebie-jeebies.

We’d been told by her family and white friends that our children would be beautiful. Physically, they’d be a combination of the exotic and the familiar. Metaphorically, they’d represent the reconciliation of the races. They’d be concrete proof of peace: tan skin, light eyes, that good hair. The gene pool of the muted Black and unexpurgated white.

It was lunacy, but the only conclusion I could afford was that they meant well. I had neither time nor space to think any more on it. None of the practical considerations frightened me. I could always bang nails, haul trash, wash dishes until I found steady work.

As for my alcoholism, I’d had what I believed at the time was the lifting of my compulsion to drink. I knew I wouldn’t pick up. If anything, impending fatherhood had validated my choice to stop. What I didn’t know was whether I could be present and intimate enough to provide the tenderness I imagined a child would need. I didn’t know if I could learn how to give or stand receiving affection from a child.

While driving, I went silent and wondered what would happen when my child would need me to hold still long enough—soften enough—for him to be able to love me. As we sped north, I tried to script a narrative that would depict and explain the reasons for my condition and by explaining, give us some relief.

I believed that children loathed me, that they could sense some- thing wrong and couldn’t stand to be in my presence. “Babies hate me,” I used to say—sometimes as a boast. My friends would dismiss this claim until they saw me enter a room in which a happy toddler was playing and see the child stop and look away. Or other times, when someone would give me an infant to hold, it would scream. After repeated instances, I decided that it was best to avoid them.

I stayed away from older children, too. People were incredulous that I refused to be a coach or tutor for Black city boys. “You have so much to offer,” they repeated. I suppose, from what they saw, it made sense. I was young, seemed educated, and allegedly came from circumstances similar to those I was supposed to mentor.

I resisted, however, because I knew what they saw was only the mask of normalcy. That cover had a dual purpose: not only to keep people out but also to keep me in. I imagined what I could offer was eyeless, mute, and if culled from the deep, pressurized dark, it would soggily pop in the light and free air.

*

We drove on, and I thought about how growing up, I’d identified with epic heroes, not the anodyne good ones but those whose inner pain couldn’t, in the end, keep them from doing right, even if the people they tried to save did them wrong. Those who grieved yet acted estimably.

But I hadn’t a cross or crown, spider strength or cosmic power. And while I knew that I was waiting for that battle from which I’d never return, I could only communicate this to others with a blank affect and proxies from the ancient world.

It had scared my mother, this blankness. I think this is why she used to call me a cold fish. I suppose I was, but not entirely for the reasons she suspected, namely that I possessed some inherent trait that made me distant: shy to some, aloof to others, alien to most.

If she could’ve asked—and I could’ve answered—the reasons for my remove, I would’ve told her that the risk of allowing someone to get close enough to touch me always surpassed the rewards. Intimacy was dangerous. Neither of my parents were physically approachable anyway. I didn’t trust either of them near me.

My mother, just beneath her skin, housed a palpable rage, and my father’s cheeks were pocked and rough from ingrown hairs. He smelled like an empty beer-can- turned-ashtray. Sometimes he’d forget about the lit cigarette he was holding. He wore polyester. His belly was large, his arms were small, and his hugs were insufferable.

Even when they were together, they seemed divided: the Northern urban dreamer, the Southern rural pragmatist. To him, her migration from Hampden Sydney, Virginia, to Boston must have seemed like one that belonged to an earlier generation. In him, she found a new Negro: educated, urbane, and comfortable around white people. One look at his lone, dark face in his Brighton High class picture tells you. He hadn’t much of a choice.

I never saw them being kind to each other. My early understanding of the two dichotomized them, segregated them into distinct Black American traditions: he, Du Bois, she, Washington; Locke and Hurston; the new and the old; white collar and blue; the talented tenth and those they were charged to uplift.

It, of course, wasn’t—still isn’t—that neat. My folksy mother’s tastes were rarified and cosmopolitan. She pushed us into the wider pluralist society that she couldn’t, without anguish, enter herself.

My father, for all of his altruism and cultural literacy, never moved away from his hometown. He kept us in the same house in which he grew up and, like his father, left us there. His expeditions were to the small jazz clubs in and around Boston.

If she could’ve asked—and I could’ve answered—the reasons for my remove, I would’ve told her that the risk of allowing someone to get close enough to touch me always surpassed the rewards.

When he was home, the television was always on, the house in disrepair— one dead Pontiac in the yard and another dying in the frost-heaved driveway. He was, simultaneously, honky-tonk and erudite—beer in hand, quoting Emerson to his children while watching The Munsters or candlepin bowling on TV.

My mother was hot and didactic. She drank Heineken and got angry. She was a screamer. My father was pensive and Socratic. His Millers made him wistful. Unless Yastrzemski hit a homer, he rarely raised his voice. My older siblings have memories of our parents being unified. They recall Sunday afternoons spent driving through the suburbs house hunting. I remember fracture—uneasy dinners, grim Christmas Eves and Christmas Days, rages at dirty dishes by her, and his sudden escapes into the Boston night.

I don’t remember where my brother and sister were, but at 8:57 p.m. on a Sunday, I was on the couch with him watching commercials, waiting for The Six Million Dollar Man to come on. I could always tell when my father was enjoying himself: he’d smile a dopey smile, recline, and stretch his arm along the back of the ratty sofa.

Nothing better than to spend quality time, buzzed, in front of the idiot box with your boy offhandedly commenting on a plotline, making fun of this character’s hair or that one’s nose or how that supporting actor had once been a film star: “What a fall.”He was free to do this because he was seldom part of the bedtime ritual, which wasn’t much of a ritual at all.

There was only a time when the lights needed to be out. His visits to my bedside were usually prompted by his need to share an idea he had on his way home after an early night at the lounge. Beer- and-cigarette-aroma lullabies. My mother, exhausted, would simply tell us to go to bed.

During the teaser, my mother came in. I had been hoping she’d forgotten me. Perhaps there’d been an unannounced referendum on bedtimes. What I wanted was for my father to outrank her. I wasn’t quite seven, and my mother and I already had an unspoken and uneasy truce between us. I reminded her of my father. I looked like him, spoke like him, and seemed aloof like him, too.

She stood between the TV and us, hip jutted out to one side, one hand on it, the other gesturing vaguely to the doorway. My mother could always summon a look of great fatigue combined with supreme exasperation—taxed, heaped, vexed—which declared that all you’d said and done, were going to say and do, was part of a burden that would someday break her. Then I’d be alone and What would you do, count on him?

I started to get up, but he said, “It’s okay. Sit down.” So I hovered above the cushion, waiting for her to hiss, “Get upstairs!” She did. And not yet the hardheaded boy I’d later become, I started to oblige.

“You can stay,” said my father. She laughed. I started to go. He pulled me back onto the couch. She grabbed a wrist and pulled me up toward the door. He stood and grabbed my other arm. They both pulled—a silent tug-of-war—to Steve Austin’s theme music.

Then he was on her: his arm around her neck, locking his wrist with the opposite hand. Her eyes bulged. He dragged her out to the porch, left her there, stunned, gasping, then came back in and bolted the door.

He went back to the couch. I went out to the hall and closed the French doors that separated the spaces. I watched my mother’s face in the window go from flat to a wicked grin as though she were planning his quick demise or she were the one inside. It faded, though, her disconsolate face framed by the night.

I let her back in, and she paced about on the linoleum, stopping only to stare down at me. I thought she might slap me or crash through the glass, tear the television plug from the wall, then storm out. Or stand over him, arms folded, daring him to do it again. Instead she knelt awkwardly, rubbed my arm once, and asked me if I was hungry.

My mother, when she wanted, had a warm, honeyed voice that could charm most children and creditors. I, by this time, was almost inured. I shook my head.

“You sure?” she sang.

I nodded.

“Cold fish,” she whispered and stood.

*

The first time I’d seriously considered fatherhood was on my twenty-first birthday. I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, trying to gain state residency so I could enroll in the university for in-state tuition. This was proving difficult.

I hadn’t been able to find a place to live, so I hadn’t an address, so the months I’d spent there had been a waste of time. I should’ve been entering my senior year, prepping for either graduate school or some profession. I was, however, on my way to being a crazy hobo.

I’d been trying for the last three years to get sober, but every time I went for more than a week without a drink, I’d enter what a psychologist later would call a fugue state: a type of dry brownout. I’d come to in a different city, but rather than sleeping on a bench or a strange floor, I’d be walking down a street and snap back into consciousness.

Some friends had rented a house and given me space in a portion of the unfinished basement where I was supposed to stash my belongings, but I often slept there on my duffel bag. My girlfriend—I still find it unbelievable that I had one—found me in my hovel, gave me flowers, and announced, “I was pregnant.”

I stood and inhaled deeply, puffing out my chest, and rubbed my chin as though I had whiskers. I wanted to display confidence and thoughtfulness to her—a strong but gentle patrician demeanor— something I’d only seen in movies.

“What do you want to do?” I asked calmly in a quasi-baritone and looked at her with a soft intensity.

She looked back as though I might be insane. “I was pregnant.”

Autumn came and I was sleeping outside some nights. I admitted I was beat and limped back east to Boston. The next nine months—a strange gestation of sorts—I tried to convalesce. I spent my days driv- ing a taxi, my early evenings going for long runs, my nights drinking and writing very dark, very bad poems. When I could sleep, if I had dreams, they were of my dead child.

Michaele and I met in college. I was a sophomore. She was a senior. She graduated. I dropped out. We eventually started dating on my twenty-second birthday, and a year later moved to the East Village together. After four months I had a crack-up, mended, and enrolled at Hunter College. I worked in a restaurant, did well in school, and began, at least superficially, to legitimize myself.

*

Two years later, Michaele was “late” for the first time. She woke up feeling nauseated. We were at her grandfather’s country house. Her mother and sister were there. Looking at them—having them look at me—I heard Langston Hughes’s poem “Mulatto” in my head: “A nigger night / a nigger joy / a little yellow bastard boy.”

Although, of course, this was an inversion of the slave master–slave woman coupling. I wouldn’t take responsibility for appropriating the text. Instead, I fixated on that bastard and willfully ignored all the raped Black women at least one of whom was my ancestor.

I couldn’t stay in the house with them. I felt dread, and I couldn’t help but show it. I was a stereotypical young Black man. All of their suspicions about me would be confirmed. I had brought Michaele low. I grew up in a world in which many white people and many institutions still believed in the notion that the innocence, purity, and honor of the white woman needed to be defended.

But I also grew up in an alternate world in which the same was said for the Black woman. And there was no greater injury I could cause my mother, my sister, my sisters than to be with a white woman—or even to try to be with one.

I went outside and twisted shamefully in the winter wind. “What?” she’d asked, had always asked, and would continue to ask for a long time after. I could never fully explain that unlike hers my actions didn’t occur in a vacuum. White and Black people were always judging me for them.

And I would never be judged fairly because those actions would always be wed to centuries of inherited truths. She only obliquely understood what it was to represent something—her family, perhaps—most likely herself. But she would never understand what it was to represent a people—millions of people.

Contrary to what Eliot wrote, every moment wasn’t “a new and shocking valuation of all we have been” but rather an inescapable proof of the predetermined belief in what you are. The content of my people’s character, and therefore my own, was already known.

I knew that I would not, could not, be a father. One of the few things I could plan was my next drink, even though that tended to be a chaotic, Byzantine endeavor. I hadn’t any notion of the future, no sense of who I’d be or what I’d do—or if I’d be alive.

And though I was sure—most of the time—of where I’d been, I could only obliquely apprehend what it had cost me. When I wasn’t drunk, I was dissociative. When I wasn’t psychologically and emotionally removed, I was suicidal. When I wasn’t despairing, I was enraged— a rage that could keep me up for days.

And when I did sleep, I’d gnash my molars to what would eventually become jagged stumps. And when all these states were combined in my mind and body, I would run through the streets as fast as I could for as long as I could.

If I slowed, I’d be flogged by the whip of sensations and images that even to this day when it cracks makes me want to throw myself in front of a bus, jab a steak knife into my eye. Drink. There’s a rapist in the bathroom. There are junkies in the alleys. There’s no heat. There are marauding cops.

And there’s nothing to do but flee as though escaping perdition or howl as though hunting salvation. Then that feeling of being lifted—saved. Then no more memory. No images, no pain, just weightlessness and the wind on my sweat and tears.

There’d been a hurricane that summer and a lot of tree fall. I went to the woodpile, picked up the ax, and began splitting logs. I tried to imagine our child: how and where we’d raise it. I thought of the strange and cruel places I’d been, all the fucked-up shit I’d heard from the mouths of people who just as soon would praise me, would say they loved me.

How ill-equipped she and hers were to deal with me. How I’d introduced a permanent racial apparition that would, as long as I was around, haunt their house and point to their ignorance, their exclusionary practices, their privilege, the bigotry in the people, art, institutions, and legacies they valued. They would have to finally confront the myth of American meritocracy.

And when the Spike Lee film was over, the Bob Marley song faded out, the James Baldwin book closed, I, in all my terrible flesh, would still be there.

I continued swinging, wondering if I could produce a shard that would half blind me; how easy it would be to miss the balanced log and drive the ax-head into my shin; how some beast could emerge from and drag me into the wood: anything other than going back into that house as I was. Then it occurred to me that we were finally in our proper places: they, inside by the fire; me, outside, laboring in the cold.

I worked faster, swung harder, sent the split wood flying apart. At some point, her mother stuck her head out, I’m sure to tell me that I’d done enough, but I ignored her. I’d thrown my coat onto the ground. She asked if I was cold, and the sound of her voice riled me.

“No!” I grunted. I felt that if she didn’t go into the house right then, I’d throw a log through the window. She did, but I still wanted to throw it, and when Michaele came out, I would tell her I was leaving.

Even growing up in their midst, I’d never really considered marrying, living with, or even dating a white woman. I found no inherent quality to them, nothing special about their visage or carriage. What I knew but couldn’t as a boy articulate was that if I ever did fall for one, it wouldn’t be worth it. It wouldn’t be worth it for me. For them, I couldn’t say.

For me, white girls, women—and I don’t really care for anyone’s self-serving, revisionist history—have always invoked lynching. That history—oral, written, visual—has had a profound influence in the shaping of my, and I assume others like me, sexuality. It is another aspect of our diasporic pact—tacit and implicit—that we will not forget, and one to which we will never submit.

It’s a reminder of how cheap my life can be, how corrupt, cruel, and ambivalent the empowered are. It kept me perpetually vigilant. Though while knowing vigilance might afford me metaphorical readiness, it provided little protection in the world of men.

But my arguments against being with Michaele, against the possibility of there being an us, were all the by-products of my being tumidly invested in a cause. And as Baldwin tells us, “causes are always bloodthirsty.” I didn’t have their privilege, their power, their ownership of value, of morality.

But victim or not, despite what I’d witnessed, endured, and the empirical proof I had that my world—our world—was fucked, despite that we were probably doomed either to split and then regret or go forward and suffer, I loved her. I loved her more than anyone I’d ever known. I chopped wood and repeated a mantra—I love that girl. I don’t care—which over the last hour became “She loves you….”

I saw her in the doorway of the redwood house, propping the screen door open with her hip and shoulder. The smell of new ash. Smoke billowing out of the chimney. What could she have seen? Brown man, bare-armed in the red dusk. Steaming, ax dangling to one side. What could she have thought? It didn’t really matter: faith. She loves me—yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

She wasn’t pregnant. The nausea was due to a stomach bug, and her period commenced soon after. She seemed relieved, and I pretended to be as well, but privately I was crushed. I knew then that I wanted to be a parent with her. I trusted her. She made me believe that there was something in this world, this life, that was, perhaps, if we continued to love each other, within our reach—a condition that countered, outstripped, and, more importantly, outlived fear, rage, and sorrow.

And I wanted to raise our child in love. My responsibility, my privilege, was to act as if we could live The Dream, within The Dream in which there was no place for my fear and anger—no matter who or what had caused it. To live in a land to love and be loved I knew began with forgiving—everyone. So, first, I went to see my father.

______________________________

Excerpted from The Broken King © 2025 Michael Thomas. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.