Another Black Boy, Another Senseless Murder—When Will It Stop?

Pace University Football Player Danroy Henry, Jr.

By NICK CHILES

When will it stop? Another innocent black man killed by the cops. This time it was in Westchester County, New York, on the campus of Pace University. This time it was a football player, Danroy Henry, Jr., age 20, a junior business major and cornerback, out celebrating with friends and teammates at a local student hangout after a game during homecoming weekend. Gunned down. Just hours after having a pleasant post-game dinner with his parents at a campus pizzeria. They send their son off to party with his buddies and they never again see him alive. It breaks my heart. Of course, the accounts of the cops are in direct conflict with the accounts of the eyewitnesses, who say the young black man did nothing wrong. It seems like I’ve been reading this story for the entirety of my life. It gets written at least once a year, in some grief-stricken corner of the U.S., as a family cries out “Why?” and a squad of police officers shrug their shoulders and cloak their department in a shroud of obvious lies, as chronicled here in the New York Times.

Over the last couple of years, these stories have taken on a new meaning for me, a new urgency. Up until then, while my outrage was always pure and my disgust palpable, the details themselves were usually somewhat abstract. The menace was not something I carried with me. Yeah, I was a black man in America and understood that at any moment I could be staring into the dark muzzle of a cop’s service revolver. But I was young and imbued with the baseless invincibility and arrogance of youth. You know—who gonna check me, boo? And then, seemingly overnight, I became old and settled, a dad who spends most nights checking homework and watching soccer practice. Encounters with angry cops seemed as distant as the New York City bars and clubs I used to hit decades ago—though even that calm surrounding me was still probably baseless delusion.

But everything changed when my son started driving. Now he was out there in the world, a large black boy/man with swagger and a quick temper, a big brown magnet for police aggression. Suddenly, all those stories of black men gunned down rushed back like horror-movie monsters, haunting me in my dreams, waking me up in cold panics if I still hadn’t heard his car pull into the driveway. When I read the story of Danroy Henry in the New York Times a few days ago, I could feel a numbness slowly spreading over my limbs. Just hours before, I had received a text from my son, my own freshman engineering major and defensive lineman, informing me that he had returned safely to his Pennsylvania campus after a weekend spent hanging out in New York City with his football buddies from Lafayette College. Talk about hitting home. I realized that a campus only offers the illusion of safety. A campus and its surrounding towns still employ plenty of officers with service revolvers. My son is still a large black boy/man with swagger and a quick temper. The eruption at Pace is a reminder to me: A parent of a black boy/man in America never rests easy.

The Henry Family at Danroy's Memorial.

We must continue to cry out loudly, all of us, when the Danroy Henrys of our world meet such outrageous ends. Black men who made all the right choices, who did everything we asked of them, everything a young man in America is supposed to do. Snatched away. Stolen from us. Danroy was one of our princes. Gone. We can’t ever grow tired of the protest. We must close our eyes and step into the shoes of Danroy’s mom and dad, Angella and Danroy, Sr., allow ourselves for a moment to imagine that Danroy is ours. Let the rage wash over us. Let it propel all of us to form a chorus whose collective voice acts as a shout into the ear of every police officer in every city, every cop in a small town or on a college campus. If you take our boys from us, we will make sure that you are forever tormented by the vision of an angry mob, pointing a finger at you, calling you what you are. Murderer.

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About Our MBB Contributor: Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestselling tome The Blueprint: A Plan for Living Above Life's Storms co-written with gospel legend Kirk Franklin. Nick also writes for several publications including Essence, where he frequently pens stories about fatherhood and manhood.  

With Catastrophe Looming, Let’s Hand African American Boys a Book

"In My Mind," by ZOBEL

By NICK CHILES

Have you ever spent time in a kindergarten classroom? The kiddies are unbelievably cute, with their bright eyes, big sloppy grins and all-around eagerness to please. But the thing that’s most striking about them is their excitement about learning. It’s like they know they are about to be handed the keys to unlock all the mysteries that swirl around them, the secrets to this vast and perplexing world that has confounded them for the first five years of their lives. If the class is diverse, you will notice that there is no gender- or race-specificity to this excitement. The white girls are just as excited as the black boys who are just as excited as the Asian boys who are just as excited as the black girls. Ask a question and most every hand shoots up to answer, each throbbing with an impatience to show the teacher—oh, the magical, beloved kindergarten teacher—how brilliant they are.

I was reminded of my forays into kindergarten land—both as a parent and as a longtime education reporter for a New York City daily newspaper—when I came across a set of statistics about black boys that were the most depressing numbers I have seen in a very long time (or at least since election night). Clearly, for black boys, some kind of poison invades their system soon after kindergarten. That kindergarten light in their eyes is snuffed like a candle. According to the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP):

• Only 12 percent of black male fourth graders performed at or above proficient levels in reading. (White males at the same grade level are at 38 percent proficiency.)
• Only 9 percent of black male eighth graders perform at or above the proficient level in reading. (For white males it is 33 percent.)
• Black males score an average of 104 points lower than white males on the SAT in reading.
• In 2008, black males ages 18 and up only accounted for 5 percent of the college population, while black males make up 36 percent of the prison population.

These statistics are so scary that they should be accompanied by a horror-movie soundtrack—the screeching violins that tell you Jason or Freddy Kruger is about to devour some comely blonde. These numbers point to a community whose very future is in peril, to an entire nature whose decline is spelled out with every unimaginable percentage. Less than one of every 10 eighth graders is a proficient reader? Really? If we don’t reverse this trend, all of our children and grandchildren will be grappling with its effects for much of this century and beyond. 

If we are going to halt the American slide into second-class-country status, we all must focus on this national crisis.

As the parent of three high-achieving children, I am convinced that the solution to this catastrophe is so simple that it almost brings tears to my eyes. The solution is a book. If we can develop a love of reading in these boys in the early years of their academic development, the arc of their entire lives changes, curving away from failure and disappointment and directly to success and achievement.

A book is inoculation against many of the dangers that a boy will face as he bobs and weaves his way through adolescence. I saw it happen with my own son, now an 18-year-old college freshman and engineering major. Once he latched on to reading as a little boy, his verbal and language skills soared, carrying him through those painful middle school years and the conflicts with teachers, adolescent idiocy, regrettable peer groups, and a raft of distractions. In high school, when football became a huge priority, he learned—while so many of his peers didn’t—that without performing in the classroom, he wouldn’t even get a chance to perform on the field. It was the rock-solid foundation he got through reading that sustained him, that buttressed everything he did in the classroom and on the all-important standardized tests.

Getting a child to enjoy reading is like handing him a winning lottery ticket, over and over again, every day of his life.

But, Lord, I know it’s not easy. I have gotten that message loud and clear with all of my children. The distractions that explode around us like land mines are almost impossible to stave off. Television, cell phones, texting, the Internet, those damn video games. The video games are fascinating, thrilling, addictive, toxic. Whenever I sat down with my son and allowed him to draw me into NFL Live or one of the boxing games on his Xbox, I marveled at how life-like and exciting the games were—and I thanked the Lord that nothing like that was around when I was his age, otherwise my life might have gone in another direction. As I write this, I just realized that my 11-year-old daughter, who is downright addicted to books—so addicted that we sometimes have to remind her to put the book down for a moment when she is crossing a street or walking across a parking lot—is entering her fifth straight hour playing some street racing video game on my wife’s iPad. It’s a Sunday afternoon and she hasn’t looked at a book yet. When I asked her why she was sitting on a throw pillow as she played, she grinned sheepishly (without taking her eyes and fingers off the screen) and said that her butt had started to hurt from sitting in the same spot so long. Yes, addictive and toxic.

But we can’t give up; we can’t let the distractions win. We have to keep reminding ourselves that if we can lure that 7- or 8-year-old boy into the pages of a book, where he might discover a world as transporting and magical as the images in that video game, we have just placed him squarely on a path to adult accomplishment. We have changed his life. This is about as close to a guarantee that we parents will ever be given. Let’s not blow it. The future of an entire nation is in our hands.

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About Our MBB Contributor: Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestselling tome The Blueprint: A Plan for Living Above Life's Storms co-written with gospel legend Kirk Franklin. Nick also writes for several publications including Essence, where he frequently pens stories about fatherhood and manhood. 

Candy Apples, 12-Inch Subs and Quarter Waters: 3rd Graders Lunches = One Step Closer To Type 2 Diabetes

By NICK CHILES

I was pleased to see that the class trip was a big hit. My daughter Lila’s third-grade class had hit the Salvador Dali exhibit at Atlanta’s High Museum in full 8-year-old curiosity mode. They bounced around the cavernous rooms, wide-eyed as they took in Dali’s unique and whimsical view of the world. They had studied him in class; now they were seeing the real thing, close enough to touch (but keep your little hands off!). A painter who could put the Christ child, floating rhinoceros horns, a waterfall and a lovely portrait of his wife all in the same painting was clearly a genius in their eyes. The High Museum made it extra fun by creating an audio-tour that was narrated by Dali’s “mustache.” When the third graders put the headphones on and heard the silly, French-inflected voice that was supposed to be the painter’s mustache, they all broke into giggles. Nothing like seeing giggles coming from 8-year-olds in an art museum.

I was one of two class chaperones, meaning I had to help the teacher and the other chaperone, a grandma, keep 20 8-year-olds moving along the exhibit at a brisk and coordinated pace. Yeah, right. Certainly you’ve heard the expression “herding cats.”

When we reached the end of the exhibit and the kids had to regretfully hand back the audio kits, we announced that it was time for lunch. They were happy. And that brings me to the point of this here diatribe.

We sprawled out in the museum’s courtyard and handed the students the lunches they had brought from home. I was having a great time eating with my little Lila and sharing our impressions of the tour. Then I heard a whole lot of giggling and loud exclamations to my right. I looked over and saw that one little boy was struggling to put away a mammoth 12-inch sub sandwich.

“That’s too big!” one little girl said, pointing at him and laughing. “You can’t finish that!”

I agreed with her, shaking my head and wondering what form of dementia would move a parent to send a child to school with a sandwich that was bigger than my forearm. But it got worse.

A chubby girl (yeah, I know, a little mean, but I’m just keeping it real) sighed and looked down at her lap. What stared back at her was a feast that could have fed half the class, no exaggeration. The girl had about eight sandwich quarters, cut up and stuffed into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. She had a large bag of potato chips. And she had three large containers of those cheap, sugar-water-with-food-coloring bottles of liquid that we used to call “quarter waters” when I was little because they only cost a quarter. She had finished the pink one; now she was looking down at two blue bottles, wondering if she should crack open another. But it got worse.

The girl sitting next to her, who also was a bit chubby, was wrestling with a large red candy apple, covered with nuts. I don’t know about you, but I still have nightmares thinking back to those post-Halloween candy feasts as a child when I had to figure out how to eat a candy apple without losing several molars. The idea of handing one to my child in the morning and telling her to eat it for lunch at a museum…well, I really am unable to understand. I checked in with her a few minutes later and she had shorn off the top layer of hard, sticky, red lacquer—much of it of course winding up on her hands and face—leaving the abused, browning flesh of a sad little apple. But it got even worse.

Sitting next to me was another little boy. He wore glasses and he also was a bit chubby. I will call him Raymond. Raymond was steadily making his way through a giant chocolate Twix bar. When I say “giant,” I mean one of those 8 ½ x 11 candy bar sheets that you see near the check-out counter at the CVS and wonder to yourself under what circumstances any person would ever need to eat a pound of Twix. Well, I found out the answer: apparently when you send your child on a class trip. 

Michelle Obama would have had a coronary.

We hear a lot of grousing in this country about the poor health of our children, and how we are hurtling scarily toward a day when like half of the population will be suffering from Type 2 diabetes. We shake our heads and wonder how we got to this point. Well, on that recent afternoon at the High Museum, I got a little glimpse at the root of the problem. My wife has written here at MyBrownBaby about how unhealthy and plain bad school lunches are, and how Congress needs to get off its behind and get a Jamie Oliver-type Food Revolution going in all of our schools. But we can't just blame Congress and schools for feeding our kids crap. Nope—some of this has to fall squarely on the parents' shoulders.

I feel compelled to add one more fact: all of the children with the ridiculously inappropriate lunches were African American. Of the 20 kids in the class, about 8 are black. The rest are a little model U.N. of white, Latino and Asian. But only the black kids had the bad stuff. And, I might add, the black kids were the chubsters. Come on, people, we gotta pay more attention to what we are feeding our children! So many of us fight so hard to keep off the bulge as we get older. Let’s not put that burden on our kids before they even learn their times tables.

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About Our MBB Contributor: Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestselling tome The Blueprint: A Plan for Living Above Life's Storms co-written with gospel legend Kirk Franklin. Nick also writes for several publications including Essence, where he frequently pens stories about fatherhood and manhood.  

A Tribute to Two Classics: Sonny Rollins and My Dad

Sonny Rollins

By NICK CHILES

Recently I had the precious opportunity to pay tribute to two old black men, both fabulous in their own special ways. I’m talking about the legendary saxophonist, Sonny Rollins, and my dad, Walter Chiles. On the spur of the moment and at my wife’s urging, I decided to treat my 77-year-old dad to a trip to New York City to catch Sonny’s concert at the Beacon Theater, where he was joined by a host of famous jazzmen to celebrate his 80^th birthday. Dad and I were both geeked about this rare opportunity to catch a legend, perhaps one of the last times this famously solitary figure might be playing on an American stage. I was also giddy about the chance to take a rare road trip with my dad. It’s weird how we find ourselves at this place—I go off to college, start a family, fill up my life and days with grown-man responsibilities, and then look up and realize three decades have passed and we’ve never really taken a trip together. Now I’m middle-aged, Dad is old, and we’re both thrilled about something that, on its surface, seems so mundane: a road trip. 

As the plane approached the New York City skyline for its landing at LaGuardia, I was so grateful for this time together that I almost wanted to pinch myself.

We enjoyed a nice meal at a comfortable Mediterranean restaurant, the kind of solid reliable joint you find on practically every other block in Manhattan. Then we made our way over to the Beacon. We were a bit disappointed that, among the several thousand people cramming into this Upper West Side landmark, we could probably count the number of African Americans on our four hands. It’s a sad statement about how the stature of jazz has plummeted in the black community. Indeed, the fact that I was able to secure very good seats (through Ticketmaster, no less!) to this monumental event just 10 days before the concert spoke volumes about the lowly place jazz now occupies in the American consciousness.

But the house was full and Sonny did not disappoint. A bit hunched over, moving across the stage a little more slowly—the New York Times said “he called to mind an Old Testament prophet”—Sonny played for two hours without stopping. He still had his chops, sliding easily through some of the more challenging and pleasurable pieces in his long, impressive songbook. One by one, he brought out some of the most talented jazz musicians in the business to join him on stage, players like the sweet-toned trumpeter Roy Hargrove, the funky bassist Christian McBride, the nimble guitarist Jim Hall, 79, and the legendary Ornette Coleman, 80. A rotating dream team, one would leave and another would come on.

Sonny is the last of our iconic jazz greats, a monumental figure in the history of this sensational American music form.

He was right there during the creation and burnishing of bebop, the audacious style that gave jazz its swagger, and he’s still going strong, producing fabulous music across an unbelievable eight decades, starting in the 1940s. The rest of the bebop pantheon has passed on—Bird, Coltrane, Monk, Miles, Dizzy, Roach—leaving Sonny all alone, a solitary man with the magical tenor sax. (One of Sonny’s most famous recordings was a session he did with Coltrane called Tenor Madness.) I felt privileged to be a witness at the Beacon, a part of American history just by my membership in the audience. It’s perhaps what it would have been like to sit there at one of Mozart’s last piano recitals, or one of Louie Armstrong’s final trumpet solos. I’m not predicting that Sonny is going anywhere anytime soon, but he plays so seldom in the jazz-indifferent U.S. these days that there’s no telling when he might be back. Audiences in Europe and Japan have a much better chance of seeing him. 

During the concert, when Sonny brought out the great drummer, Roy Haynes, who is amazingly 85 but looks 50, my dad leaned over and said, “He played with my trio in the Sixties.” 

My dad, Walter Chiles, keyboardist

And that’s another reason why this trip was so special to me. While Walter Chiles never achieved the fame and stature of Sonny Rollins or Roy Haynes, he had quite a fabulous music career himself. He’s now content to be the minister of music at his Atlanta church, writing original pieces for the gospel choirs that he smoothly takes through their paces on Sundays. But if you sit him down and get him going, Dad will spin amazing tales that will have your bottom jaw bouncing on the floor. 

Dad’s first bit of notoriety came with the trio known as Chiles & Pettiford. They were keyboards (Chiles), bass (Pettiford) and drums. They played and they sang, their unusual interweaving two-part harmonies drawing rave reviews, particularly after they recorded an album on the Blue Note label called “Live at Jilly’s,” Jilly’s being the nightclub owned by Jilly Rizzo, Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard. It came out the year I was born, 45 years ago. At Jilly’s, Dad played with artists like Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Mingus, Roy Haynes and even Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon (Johnny fancied himself a drummer, while Ed thought he could sing the blues). These artists would sit in with the Chiles & Pettiford trio on a whim—entertaining a crowd that sometimes included heavyweights like Miles Davis and Sinatra. Once, when Sinatra was preparing for a big concert date, he asked my dad to help him practice. Every day for a week, Dad would take the elevator up to Sinatra’s vast penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park and they would practice for hours at a time, with few breaks. Frank was all business.

Me and my dad, the coolest cat on the planet

The Sonny Rollins concert was fitting for me and my dad, kind of closing a circle. One of my most vivid memories from my late teenage years was when Dad and I traveled over to Manhattan from our New Jersey home in 1985 to catch Sonny’s free solo concert in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The line was so long that we couldn’t get in, but we joined about 40 other people who listened to Sonny from the sidewalk outside the garden, our faces pressed against the iron fence to catch glimpses of him as he roamed the grounds, sending wonderfully sweet notes out into the hot New York summer night. (His album from that night can still be purchased.) This is when my love of jazz was permanently stamped on my DNA, a gift from Dad. 

So here we were, exactly 25 years later, back in the city to see Sonny. I caught a glimpse of Dad’s face as Sonny played. He was transfixed and happy. So was I.

Graduation Day—The Little Boy Grows into a Man

By NICK CHILES

Our world is in such a shabby state that it is a little disconcerting to imagine sending a child out into it right now. But that’s exactly what we are about to do. Our little boy, now almost grown into a fine young man, is walking across the stage today to receive his high school diploma. I know it’s a cliché to say, but it really does not seem like 18 years since I held that wrinkled little body in my hands for the first time. But alas, the years slip by us, filled up with the joys and wages of an exuberant life.

As I’m sure many of you know all too well, successfully guiding a black boy through 18 years of an American childhood is not a simple task. The challenges are so numerous and come from so many directions that sometimes you feel like a guerrilla fighter in the jungles of America’s streets and schools, sprinting for cover with your precious cargo in tow, never knowing from where and when the next round of fire will come your way. The challenges only accumulate with each year:

• keeping him away from the bad kids…
• making sure his teachers understand his sometimes excessive exuberance… 
• trying to lure him into a love of reading…
• protecting him from the teachers who are afraid of black boys…
• getting him to understand that his standard of measurement isn’t his sullen homies in the back of the room but the girl in the front row with her hand up to answer every question…
• applauding his accomplishments on the athletic fields but trying not to let his accomplishments on the athletic fields go to his head… 
• making sure he continued to understand that accomplishments in the classroom were more important than the ones on the athletic fields…
• girls…
• the dangers of the streets…
• girls…
• the ugly stereotypes the world harbors of large, scowling black boys…
• girls…
• being safe and smart behind the wheel…
• stepping out each day with a measure of kindness and grace…

I found myself talking to him about the world he will face much more often over the last few months, trying to cram in as much as I can before he is gone. And while I have been neurotic over the last few years about his whereabouts at every moment, particularly when he started driving, I’ve also noticed that I’ve slowly been easing up about that in recent months. After all, in just two months he will be off to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. I had to start letting him have a bit of the freedom that will soon be his, so that he can learn how to make good decisions on his own, decisions about time management, about appropriate and inappropriate behavior, about how to treat other human beings, especially young ladies, about how he carries himself. 

Of course it’s not easy to let go of the neuroses, to stop watching the clock and calling him every hour to see where he is, to stop doing the occasional location checks by driving around and making sure he’s not lying to me, but ultimately I had to do it for his own good—and also for my own good, so that I could be confident that I was sending a child out into the world who would be able to cope with all the hell and bullsh*t that will be thrown his way.

The boy has gotten so big. At 6-1 and 275, he sometimes looks monstrous to me. He informed me last week that he just tied his high school’s record in the bench press for his weight group. His arms look like two big hams attached to enormous shoulders. Since he will be playing defensive lineman at Lafayette, responsible for tossing aside blockers so that he can grab those little running backs and quarterbacks and fling them to the ground, the size makes sense. But I must admit that I DO miss the little boy, the one that I could toss onto the bed like a giggling and squealing stuffed animal, the one who used to lug around his collection of action figures in his own shoulder bag, the one who was so outgoing in our old New Jersey neighborhood that the other adults on the block started calling him “the mayor.”

But I think that little boy isn’t totally gone. All of those little boy fragments are still in there somewhere—just covered over by layers of muscle and facial hair and black boy swagger. Every once in awhile, when he’s running around the house—making the walls shake!—playing with his little sisters, laughing and giggling about something, I still see flashes of the little boy. And it makes me smile to know that he’s still in there. Hopefully he always will be.

Congratulations, my boy. Go out there and slay the world.

About Our MBB Contributor:Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestselling tome The Blueprint: A Plan for Living Above Life's Storms co-written with gospel legend Kirk Franklin. "The Blueprint" debuted No. 15 on the New York Times Bestseller's Hardcover Advice List this week. Nick is also a featured writer in the June 2010 issue of Essence, where he frequently writes about fatherhood and manhood.  

The Joy of the Parenting Do-Over

By NICK CHILES

One of the unequivocal joys of parenthood is re-living some of the most exciting events from our past through the eyes of our children. Essentially we get to have do-overs. Kids give us an opportunity to perfect something we might have screwed up when we were kids. Of course, this isn’t always a good thing—in the wrong hands, that chance to re-do your high school football years through your son or your stint with the high school drama club through your daughter can quickly morph into the worst stereotype of the controlling, monstrous helicopter parent, pushing your kid into situations and activities where their main motivation is keeping you happy, rather than enjoying and expanding themselves. In the right hands, the do-over can make you and your kid two very happy (and proud) campers.

I thought about this recently when we were trying to decide where we would go for our family vacation this summer. Traveling is the area where the do-over is probably most sensibly applied. After visiting some fabulous corner of the earth, we get to go back and experience those first-time joys all over again through the eyes of our kids. While I was leaning toward my favorite city in the whole world, Paris, as a vacation destination so that I could show my kids why I love it so much, my wife wanted to go somewhere she had never been before. In front of us was a fundamental existential parenting dilemma: When we have kids, do we put our own lives and desires on hold for their sake, or do we continue to plunge with abandon into that crazy stew called life?

Of course, most parents will answer that we do both, that having kids shouldn’t mean our lives end, that we need to be fulfilled as adults in order to be good parents…yada, yada, yada. That is certainly the ideal, but we all know it’s not always that simple. Even in the area of family vacations, if we are always striving to explore new frontiers, our kids won’t get to see some of our favorite places until they’re adults and go on their own. So repeats are going to happen; going back to places we’ve already been, doing things we’ve already done, is always going to be part of the parenting contract. What we all seek is some sort of balance—adding enough new grown-up adventure into the mix that we don’t lose our edge and become parenting robots with no conversation at the dinner party that doesn’t involve little Johnny.

In our case, we put the issue up for a family vote. Three options on the table: Paris, London and Puerto Rico. Everybody got one vote, like a true democracy, with no special consideration given to the people with the biggest bank accounts (clearly not the kind of democracy we been practicing lately in the U.S.!). And we didn’t allow any lobbying before the vote. Not even whispered conversation. Interestingly, the children all picked Paris, while Denene and I both voted for a place we had never been (London in my case, Puerto Rico in hers). So we tried for some new adventures—and they dragged us into a repeat. Oh well, Paris here we come. Maybe next time we’ll try American-style democracy—lobbying, scare tactics and influence-peddling will be fully encouraged.

About our MyBrownBaby contributor: Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nick Chiles is the co-author of seven books, including his latest, "The Blueprint," written with gospel superstar Kirk Franklin.

Home Made Love: Nick's Easy Like Sunday Morning French Toast

My baby is the grill master, okay? Ribs, chicken, fish, vegetables, Cocoa Puffs—whatever Nick cooks over charcoal always comes to our dinner table perfectly crisp, insanely juicy, and super flavorful. I mean, The. Boy. Is. Bad. (And plus, everything tastes better with a little smoke on it, and definitely when someone else is cookin'—I'm just sayin'.)

But dig it: Nick also has quite the special gift when it comes to breakfast foods, too. Home made waffles, bacon, grits, biscuits—when your boy wakes up and starts knocking around pots, pans, and the waffle iron? Right—everybody in the house gets really emotional. There's lots of fist pumping and jumping around and stuff, and when he calls us all down to the breakfast table, we do lots of happy dancing. We put our backs in it when he whips up his Early Sunday Morning French Toast, which is, in a word, amazing. Usually, he holes himself up in a corner of the kitchen, next to the spice cabinet, and, like some evil scientist, tosses together a potion of cinnamony, sugary goodness to dip bread into before he splashes it in a hot pan full of butter. Ha' Mercy. But Nick very generously figured out his Early Sunday Morning French Toast recipe so that I could share it with you. *Inserting pictures of you doing the happy dance here!*

Nick's Easy Like Sunday Morning French Toast

Ingredients

6 slices bread
2 eggs
2/3 cup milk
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon gttround nutmeg (optional)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon sugar
sprinkle of salt

Directions

Beat together egg, milk, salt, desired spices and vanilla.
Heat a lightly oiled griddle of skillet over medium-high flame.
Dunk each slice of bread in egg mixture, soaking both sides. Place in pan, and cook on both sides until golden. Serve hot.

About three servings.

Invasion of the Personality Snatchers… Or, Hurray, The Teenager is Here

By NICK CHILES

It is something we parents can’t help. We look at our children, at their personality quirks and quivers, and we can’t help playing the game of projecting them into the future, like the sci-fi movie “Jumper.” What will she be like when she’s 30? How outgoing will he be when he’s 21? What kind of mother will she be at 35? Will he be able to survive in the workplace at 25?
If you are living in a household with growing girls, as we are, you sometimes scare yourself to death by asking, What will she be like as a teenager? In other words, Will my sweet little girl turn into a monster in just 4 or 5 years?

I was moved to do the Personality Projection Game recently because of changes I’ve noticed in my oldest. Changes to the good, in fact. Changes that hearten me as I look forward to going through teenhood two more times with the girls after the boy is on to college next year. When the boy was 13 and 14 and 15, I would mourn the loss of the personality he had possessed for most of the previous decade. Gone was the engaging, personable, funny, irrepressible little 6-year-old whose ebullient personality was so over the top, who was so outgoing and fun-loving that our neighbors on the block where we used to live in New Jersey took to calling him “The Mayor” because he wouldn’t hesitate to march up to any stranger and start the charm offensive. Back then when we did the Personality Projection, we easily imagined the boy as the first black president, or maybe a senator or CEO.

But then the early teen years came. They snatched the smiling social butterfly away in an instant and replaced him with Surly Boy. This kid was full of grunts and scowls and grimaces. Smiles were rationed like beef during wartime. He wasn’t a lot of fun to be around—which was on purpose, because he preferred to spend most of his time around his friends, anyway. During these years, I was afraid to even play the Projection Game—but when I slipped up and let my mind wander in that direction, I’d wind up pegging him as perhaps a future corrections officer (he's my boy, so I could never allow myself to think inmate).



Well, after those years of life with Surly Boy, I’m pleased to report a promising development: after the boy turned 16, we noticed glimmers of The Mayor returning. The sense of humor was back, as was the smile and the charm (sometimes). He didn’t even seem to mind spending time with the family. The Projections have started to get good again. Perhaps all will be right with the world, after all. Lesson learned? Perhaps we shouldn’t freak out too much about those early teen years. We should expect a (hopefully) brief invasion of the body snatcher, knowing that the sweetness will likely come back.

These are soothing thoughts as I notice the 10-year-old girl start throwing scowls around a little too much for our tastes. Uh oh, we can’t help but think. How bad is she going to be at 14? Will she even acknowledge our presence at 15?



And we remind ourselves: Trouble don’t last always.

About Our MBB Contributor:
Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of six books, and the editor-in-chief of the travel magazine, Odyssey Couleur.

Don’t Stare Too Hard: Of Wives and Hair

By NICK CHILES

When your wife changes her hair, it has the effect of an earthquake in the house. And if extra hair was added, or hair was cut, or color changed, we’re talking something like 8.0 on the Richter scale.

This monumental event hit the Chiles household recently, and we’re still trying to put all the furniture back in its place.
For my girls, it’s all happy happy joy joy, like getting new clothes for one of their dolls. That’s because, in their minds, Mommy is a giant, walking baby doll anyway—her hair is there for the combing, her nails there for the painting, her outfits there to be picked over.

But for the husband? New hair is a terrifying yet exciting development. First of all, what happens if you like it too much? Just like you don’t want to get too attached to goldfish because they’re just gonna die soon, you can’t grow too fond of a particular hairstyle because she’s probably already plotting and planning the next change. And of course you can’t show your displeasure at the change, because you are then saying, I don’t like your hair.

It’s like a huge relationship Rubik’s Cube—the whole thing is perhaps too confusing for our male brains to puzzle together.
This is the trauma I faced when my wife popped up with the new hair. Walking on eggshells for days. Scared to look at it too close, too much. You know—don’t stare directly at the sun. Show too much excitement and she starts thinking, What does it mean that he likes my hair so much? Is my husband that superficial? I am not my hair!

But of course the alternative is worse. Show too little enthusiasm and you can kiss goodbye any hopes of running your hands through it later when the kids are sleep. (Oh wait, I’m tripping: I’m talking about a black woman here. ‘Bout the only thing my fingers would be passing through are the loose strands on her old ratty headwrap.) What, you don’t like it? she will ask, as she clutches her arms around her torso in horror. And as all husbands know, you never get a second chance to give a first impression. Your very first reaction to the new hair is the only very first reaction you will get, so it better be good. As a matter of fact, knowing that she was going to the hairdresser to get a brand new hairstyle, I decided that I couldn’t leave this crucial first impression to chance. I started practicing it in the mirror. The eyes are key when you’re working with a woman who has been reading your expressions for the past 15 years. If you can’t sell the eyes, it doesn’t matter what’s happening with the mouth.

You’re toast.

As it turned out, I liked the hair. A lot. And that started getting me worried: first, as I already said, that she would be disturbed if I liked it too much—after all, that would mean I didn’t like it before; and then, that I would become too attached and it would all be over in a week when she decided she didn’t like it anymore.

No, when it comes to hair, the safest position is casually disinterested interest. Or perhaps casually interested disinterest. You get the picture—smile, nod, tell her she looks good, and keep it moving. No slobbering.


For the record, it warms MyBrownWifey's heart that MyBrownHubs loved the hair, particularly since it's styled in a way I've never styled it before. Want to know why I changed it? WANT TO SEE THE NEW HAIR? Head on over to DOVE.COM to read my blog post about it, and check out the picture Nick took for the MY BIO page.

Teenage Car Traumas: A Dad Loses Control

By NICK CHILES

Nobody told me it would be like this. Sure, I knew that when my teenage son got his license and we put together enough pennies to get him something with four wheels and a running (hopefully) engine, that I would lose a certain amount of control over the boy’s movements. After all, up to this point, I was the official Dad Taxi, responsible for carting the boy to and from football practice, and the job, and his friend’s house, and even to and from the mall or the movies with his girlfriend of the moment.

I complained bitterly about my taxi duties to anyone who would listen:

I’ll be glad when this boy can drive himself because I’m tired of being the taxicab!

Just when I thought I could rest for the evening, the boy needs another ride somewhere!

Little did I know how much and how quickly I would yearn for the Dad Taxi days. With stunning rapidity, I have discovered how much my life has changed with a teenager who drives. I knew in an abstract way that his mobility would cause me worry because of all those horrible stories and statistics of teenage driving fatalities. We live in a county in Georgia that has horribly deficient, practically non-existent public transportation, with no plans that I’ve ever heard about to rectify the situation anytime soon. So for a teenager to hold a job or do anything outside of the house besides travel to and from school, there has to be a car involved. This necessity leads to the troubling inevitability of teenagers having accidents. It seems like every year, a teenage boy (or girl, but it’s usually boys) at one of the local high schools perishes in a crash. So there’s always that worry in the back of the mind. But that’s not even what I’m talking about. What I didn’t expect was how disconcerting it would be for me to know that the boy is out there in the world, doing whatever it is that he is doing from moment to moment, and there’s barely a damn thing I can do about it.

At first I was Inspector Gadget, peppering him with questions about his movement, checking the football practice schedule on the school website several times a week, frequently eyeing his work schedule at the pool where he’s a lifeguard, trying to catch him doing something he’s not supposed to be doing or being somewhere he’s not supposed to be. I even caught him lying a couple of times, much to his chagrin and embarrassment—his boy told him that I was like a CIA agent. But recently something dawned on me: no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible for me to know where he was and what he was doing every second of the day. And with that realization came another one: if I couldn’t know what he was doing at all times, I was going to have to chill out a little about his whereabouts or else give myself a stroke. I was going to have to have a certain amount of trust in the idea that we did a pretty good job raising him, instilling values and judgment and decision-making skills, and from this point, just weeks from his 17th birthday, it was pretty much up to him to make his way safely in this world.

Of course, I was haunted by the memories of how much my life changed when I got wheels as a teenager—memories of things I did that I shouldn’t have been doing. My momma might be reading this, so I won’t go into further detail. (It was nearly 30 years ago, so I’m sure I would get all the details wrong. Okay, Ma?) But I guess I turned out alright after all, and those teenage days, even the crazier ones, all contributed mightily to my path and the choices I came to make over the years.

So as I watch him load his lineman’s bulk into his Jeep and take off with a wave in my direction, I know that we have crossed a major milestone in the parent-child relationship. Without control over his movements, I have relinquished a great deal of my authority. It is now in his hands, the power to make his own path. All I can do is sit back and watch. And breathe another deep sigh of relief with the sound of his squeaky brakes pulling back into the driveway.


About Our MBB Contributor:
Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of six books, and the editor-in-chief of the travel magazine, Odyssey Couleur.

Summertime, and the Living Isn't So Easy

By NICK CHILES

One of these days I need to ask my parents if they felt the same way about the summertime as I do. I remember long hot days of fun stretching out before me in an endless string. Something tells me they have a different recollection.

I say this because we are in June, which means I am now in the midst of my annual spewing of nasty curses directed at that bizarre invention known as summer vacation. (In case you didn’t know, down here in the South, our kids get out of school in late May.) My new definition of summertime is a cruel string of endless days that seem designed to prevent grown folks from ever getting any work done because we are forced to spend most of the day either batting away bored children buzzing around our heads like pesky mosquitoes in search of blood, or we are forced to spend most of the day shuttling our young ones to and from camps whose start and end times seem to have no relationship to any grown folks work schedule I have ever come across.

My wife and I have tried on a daily basis to cram a simple idea into our kids’ heads: just because we work from home doesn’t mean we don’t work, and just because YOU are on summer vacation doesn’t mean that we are also some kind of vacation that allows us to play Scrabble with you at 2 in the afternoon. The idea doesn’t appear to have breached the hard protective covering of their brains.

Every year I smile when I hear some genius on the radio point out that the school schedule we use was created a century ago when most kids had to work on the family farm during harvest season and couldn’t stay in school. That’s fine information, but it doesn’t appear that knowing such a thing has compelled any education official to make any attempts to change the school schedule. So we are stuck with summer vacation, and parents like me who work from home are trapped in a world of bored kids and inconveniently scheduled camps. (To say nothing of the disturbing fact that most kids lose like a half semester’s worth of learning during summer vacation. But no, let’s not worry about such minor trifles like knowledge oozing from their brains like a leaky faucet during each day of summer vacation.)

Oh, and don’t get me started on the subject of the summer bedtime schedule for the young people. The whole topic has me in such a state of bewilderment that I am surprised I can even finish writing this piece. It makes no sense at all how these reasonably rational children could suddenly conclude that because it’s summer vacation, they can just go to sleep whenever they want to. You wouldn’t have even wanted to be there to see my reaction the night when my 7-year-old started crying because we announced that she had to go to bed—at 12:20 AM! Homegirl was dead serious. And one last thing—why the hell is the Cartoon Network still on the air after midnight anyway?!

Okay. I’m done.

Have a great summer.

The Sun Always Rises: A Gift to Mothers

By NICK CHILES

Like an all-powerful deity, she hovers over our lives from the very first breath we take. She feeds us, nurtures us, becomes irreversibly imprinted on our souls. Before we have the power to select or to resist, she becomes our lifelong muse.

As a writer, I take the idea of the muse very seriously. The ancient Greeks knew what they were talking about when they created the goddesses of artistic inspiration. It is the force that pushes me to tap the keyboard, to keep the words flowing, the thoughts brewing. Without a muse, my screen is blank. I am nothing.

But the power of my motherly muse has always extended beyond the computer screen. One day it dawned on me that her power actually had no limits. It was elemental to my life. In essence, since the day I was born, everything I have ever done has been with the sole intent of pleasing my mother.

And I don't think I'm all that unusual. I think most of us, if we step up to our reflection and grapple with the truth, will admit that she continues to compel us, no matter our age or station in life. When the game is over, the curtain is drawn, the award is presented, she is the first place we run. The glory of accomplishment isn't real until we share it with her. Even if it's just a thought deep in the recesses, an impulse that we don't immediately act upon, it's there: I need to tell my mother.

So what it all means is this: she is the Earth's most powerful force, the humanly equivalent of the Sun, providing the planet's inhabitants with the energy to keep this thing going. If we could trace the source of human triumph, the key to our greatest discoveries, our most remarkable victories over the mysteries that confound us, the cord would lead us all directly to Mommy.

This is not to say that each of them are perfect—surely there have been mothers over time in need of a few maternal remediation classes. But that proves the enormity of her power—even when she is bad at her job, she casts a monstrous shadow. The bad mother creating the bad person is one of the most enduring of our well-worn crime narratives.

But, oh, when she is on her game, when the mom goddess is a maestro directing her charges to greatness, it is like a gift to every one of us. Inspired by the motherly muse, that boy grows up to find a cure for AIDS, that little girl grows into the greatest writer of a generation. And of course when that superstar wide receiver catches the winning touchdown pass, we all know the first person he will thank.

But let me not get too abstract here. I tend to get a bit carried away when the topic is moms. I am still amazed by the influence mine has over me, 43 years into my time here. By now it has become clear to me that the influence never wanes. Even when I am not thinking about her directly, her words, her voice, her conscience, her wishes, her dreams, are directing my actions, moving my feet to walk into my child's room to have that serious talk, pushing my hands to help the old lady load her groceries into her car, forcing my fingers to fly over the keyboard to finish that great book proposal. I couldn't shake her even if I wanted. She occupies a part of my brain, resting sometimes, prodding at other times. So I have begun to think of us as a team, my mother and me. We have been confronting every challenge for the past 43 years. Kicking ass together. No matter how many more years we have together on this mortal coil, I know that she will never be gone from me. I will never be without my muse. To you, mother, I say thank you. I love you.

And to the rest of you mothers out there, as you accept your Mother's Day gifts and smile until your face hurts, know this: You are the most important person in every one of our lives. You are the Sun.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

With love,

MyBrownBaby

DADDY'S LITTLE JOCKS

By NICK CHILES

There were many joys I expected from having little girls, but I didn’t expect this one. I knew that if I played my cards right, if I managed to show my little girls just a fraction of the love that I felt in my heart, I could potentially be on the receiving end of some serious little girl adoration. But I never expected that I would be overseeing the rise of two little girl jocks. Over the past year or so, it has become increasingly apparent to me that my 9-year-old and 6-year-old daughters are gifted athletes. And what has caught me even more by surprise is the crucial role that daddies play in nurturing the athletic impulse in their daughters. I would even go out on a limb and say that in most cases the dad is probably the most important ingredient in turning little girls into top athletes.

I must admit that I get more of a thrill from watching my girls excel on the soccer field than I ever got from my own athletic conquests, or even from watching my son destroy opponents on the football field (he’s a defensive lineman, so destruction is very much part of his job description). While I expected that my son would probably be an excellent player, I had no such expectations when it came to my daughters. Perhaps some might ascribe this to some latent daddy sexism, but that would be too simple. A more apt reason would be ignorance. I didn’t really have much of an idea what went into the creation of a female athlete. I grew up around active sisters and a mother who was formerly a high school basketball player (though this was back in the 1950s, when they apparently didn’t even allow the girls to dribble, according to my mom—they could only advance the ball by passing it), but none of them ever really made sports a priority in their lives when we were younger. What’s becoming clearer to me is that most girls and their mothers will never make sports a priority without a significant push from dad. Unless they were serious jocks themselves, many mothers don’t seem to envision their daughters spending hours on end every week sweating and running and shoving and even bleeding out on a playing field. There needs to be some other presence, some additional impetus, to push the girls off the default position. In the case of most of the female athletes I see around me, that impetus is dad.



Very often, especially in the early years, we may be the only real advocates in the house for the girl as athlete. My wife Denene is clearly not sure about the future of this whole sports thing for her daughters. She didn’t play sports herself growing up and I can tell that she has no idea of the sacrifices and sometimes pain that goes into turning your body into a finely tuned instrument. At least every few months she and I face off in an intense argument about Mari and her sports participation. Mari is at the stage where others are recognizing her potential and trying to push us into committing even more of her (and our) time and energies. I know that as she and her younger sister Lila get better, the demands will only get worse—to the point where we will be forced to make some tough decisions about where it all leads. At times I grapple with self-doubt—Are we pushing her too hard? Is the time too much? Is her body in danger of breaking down (she had to stop track because of a pain in her left knee)? Would she be better off maybe trading in the cleats for ballet slippers? I never faced any of these questions with my son—the assumption was always that we all would keep pushing until someone else decided that he couldn’t go any further. But things are different with girls. I live with the ever-present fear that one day my wife will wake up and decide all this sports nonsense needs to end. And I suspect my daughter herself likely won’t be weighing in on her sports future until she’s well into adolescence—when I am trying to gauge whether I might be pushing her too hard, her response is usually to look into my eyes and tell me that she wants to do whatever I think she should do.



It’s astounding how closely their on-field personas mirror their personalities off the field. Mari is disciplined, cautious, intense and thoughtful—the kind of girl who will watch the clock as we are driving to practice and ask me every two minutes if I think she is going to be late. On the field she is a precise athlete, able to command her body to do what she wishes by the force of her will and her precocious powers of concentration and discipline. When she ran track as a 7-year-old for a local—and nationally regarded—track squad that had several runners who were among the tops in the country, she was usually one of the first to perfect some new technique the coach was trying to teach. This made her a natural for the long jump because, while every other 7-year-old would step over the line on the take-off, Mari never faulted. She was too exacting to make a mistake like that. And boy does she have heart. I was amazed the first time I realized that noise I heard while she ran around the track at practice was my little daughter crying because of the pain. But not once did she ever stop. On that day I don’t know which one was bigger—my enormous pride or the lump in my throat. She moved from track to swimming to soccer, where her discipline and attention to detail has helped her in one short year go from a beginner to an all-star and member of the traveling team.



Lila the younger is the wild child, the bold, brash warrior who will run over anyone who gets in her way. Soccer is the only sport that she has played thus far, but every time I watch her I am stunned by her fearlessness. Mind you, this is a little girl who can summon tears at home if she decides that someone is looking at her too hard, who is so tender-headed that she starts screaming when my wife just reaches for the comb. But on the soccer field she turns into a little brown bulldozer, running through anyone who gets in her way, using her speed and agility to stay away from anyone trying to catch her, utilizing her smarts to stay two steps ahead of the other team. At six, she is outplaying girls two years older than she is. My little girl is fierce.

When I read all the studies that reveal the huge impact sports has in helping girls develop a positive self-image and more self-confidence and having them delay the start of sexual activity, my conviction is renewed: I need to make sure they get a chance to run and sweat out there for as long as possible. And I’ll be right there on the sidelines, holding the towels and the water bottles, and cheering my girls on.

About Our MBB Contributor:
Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of six books, and the editor-in-chief of the travel magazine, Odyssey Couleur. He's an avid sports fan, and can be found most weekends on the sidelines of football and soccer fields throughout the suburbs of Atlanta, GA, cheering quite loudly for his brown babies.

Yes We Did: PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

By NICK CHILES

How do I even begin to understand the unfathomable? It is as if I have been told that gravity is a hoax, that the solar system is an optical illusion. James Baldwin pondered the evidence of things not seen; I ask if we have witnessed the impossible.

Seventy-two days have passed since the earth moved. My television at this very moment is flashing the image of two earnest white co-hosts with bright Colgate smiles telling me to stay tuned to find out the favorite foods of the new president. No detail about him is too minuscule. I have heard the name often enough in the 72 days that I should have had enough time to start getting used to the sound of President Obama. But on the other hand, those 72 days are swamped by the last 43 years—the 15,859 days that I have lived as a black male in America. Across the breadth of those 15,859 days, my world had been constructed to contend with insignificance. That was the atom that propelled me, even when I wasn’t aware. My life, my strivings, my victories, had been a subconscious scream: I matter. I count. I am relevant. From the shadows, my posture had been defiant, determined, angry—always angry. A hundred years ago, in The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois asked: Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? But am I to believe that in the space of two months, 72 days, I have gone from irrelevance to center stage? From the shadows to the spotlight?



That is the indecipherable hugeness of Obama. We have no way of knowing what it means when the earth tilts on its axis. We can’t know what will result when the sun never sets. A black man, an unrepentant member of one of the world’s most infamously powerless minorities, today is to become the most powerful man on this planet. I can not imagine what that will mean for me, for my son, for my girls. I look at the beautiful Obamas, at the tall, elegant, sexy wife, at those precocious giggly little girls, and I see my own family. I watch my daughters, ages 6 and 9, dash hither and yon through the halls and off the walls of my home, and I have no difficulty conjuring images of Malia and Sasha flying down the corridors of that big white house, twists flying, smiles wide, worry free.

On this day, not just America but the entire world steps off a cliff into the unknown. Children—black, white, yellow and brown—gaze into the face of this man and perhaps a cell deep inside them transforms, mutates, begins to blossom into greatness, forever changing their path. Older folks—black, white, yellow and brown—stare at his visage, take in his unsinkable confidence, and for the first time believe that perhaps that promotion is within their reach, maybe they can start that new business after all.

I have heard reports from other black men that already they have seen a change in their place. In the boardroom, their opinions matter just a little bit more now. In staff meetings, their competence is a tad more credible. Their presence is welcomed rather than tolerated. They are significant.

Since the presidential runs of Jesse Jackson, black people amongst themselves have pondered the possibility of an unspoken unity among the brown people of the world, the probability that world leaders in Arab and Asian and Latin lands would receive an African-American president in a very different way than all those white presidents. We got a small confirmation of that when Jesse went to Syria in 1983 and convinced the Syrian president to release Navy Lt. Robert O. Goodman, Jr., who had been shot down over Lebanon while on a mission to bomb Syrian positions in that country. When Jesse announced that he was going over there, the American media was savagely critical and even mocking. President Reagan was upset and tried to stop him. But Jesse went anyway. And when he came back with Goodman at his side, white America appeared not to understand what had happened. How did Jesse do that? But we knew—for black folks, it was just a little taste, a tantalizing appetizer, of what the world might be like if there was, indeed, a black president. A global, non-white diaspora, buttressing and embracing its own.

Already, the rest of the world is acting differently towards Obama. Turning him into an adored global icon—even in white countries. Promising to take some of those Guantanamo prisoners—after repeatedly telling the Bush administration that there was no chance. Lt. Goodman all over again.

So yes, there is hope. There is pride. There is glee. And there is a big scary unknown, the proverbial uncharted waters. This is the most troubling moment for America in almost a century. Our needs are so great that there is no room for error. But these needs have also produced an unusual, unexpected result: unity. Obama has an approval rating of 80 percent. That includes Republicans and Independents alike. For the nation’s first black president.

Unbelievable.

Unfathomable.

Electrifying.

About Our MBB Contributor:
Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of six books, and the editor-in-chief of the travel magazine, Odyssey Couleur.

Yeah, I Ate The Cookies—And?

By NICK CHILES

Like many children of the 1970’s, I had my visions of fatherhood formed not only by my own Dad but by the fatherly icons that marched across my television screen every week. Characters like James Evans on Good Times, Mike Brady on The Brady Bunch, Tom Bradford on Eight Is Enough, even that knucklehead George Jefferson on The Jeffersons. They were strong, (sometimes) decisive, and they were undoubtedly the Alpha Males of their households. As Alpha Male, part of the deal was that no one messed with their stuff—their favorite chair, their newspaper, their prized collection of fill-in-the-blank. Sometimes there would even be a show constructed around the hilarity that ensued when one of the kids messed up their stuff. When dinnertime came, in the words of Chris Rock, they always got the “big piece of chicken.”

I just knew that when I eventually became a dad, my household would surely be an exact replica of these TV standards (though I’m sure I hoped the house looked a lot more like the Bradfords’ on Eight is Enough and a lot less like the Evanses’ on Good Times).

Cut to December 2008 and the actual, real-life version of the Chiles household. We are somewhere in the early evening of Wednesday, December 3, in the kitchen, about four feet southwest of the kitchen table. I am making my way away from the refrigerator when I find myself staring at the snarling, irate visage of my lovely wife, (the talented creator of this website, known to me as MyBrownWifey) who is clutching a bag of Pepperidge Farm’s Snickerdoodle cookies, the delicious cinnamon-spiced favorites of my 9-year-old daughter.

“Who ate Mari’s cookies?!”

With the cookie crumbs still visible on my t-shirt, I fight off my first impulse in this situation, which is to shriek like a little girl and run from the room in terror. I even manage to fight off my second impulse, which is to blame my teenage son. (When confronted with the mystery of suddenly missing food, you can’t go wrong blaming the 16-year-old.) But then I get a flash of James Evans, standing proud and strong in that old tired-looking kitchen on Good Times. Surely James wouldn’t run from the kitchen, shrieking like a little girl (or like his son, Michael).

I square my shoulders and look MyBrownWifey in the eye. I summon the ghost of George Washington and, in my deepest baritone, I say, “I ate the cookie.” I see her eyes narrowing, so I feel compelled to add, with more mumble than baritone, “But I only had one.”

As I make my way up to my bedroom a little later on, trying to understand why the scene in the kitchen has left me a bit queasy, as if my testicles have shrunk a few inches, I see that my side of the large king-sized bed in our spacious master bedroom is being occupied by the lean, wiry little body of my 6-year-old daughter. In the sitcoms of the 70’s, one of the TV children in such a situation would have scurried from the bed in a flash, horrified to be caught so conspicuously enjoying the comfort of Daddy’s favorite spot. In the real-life Chiles household of 2008, my darling little Lila casts a skeptical eye up at me, making not even a minimal effort to get the hell up from my spot. Her facial expression says it all: “What?”

When I tell her, with that same baritone, that the “What” is that she needs to move her narrow behind from my spot, she rolls her eyes and proceeds to scoot over maybe six inches, as if that should be enough to satisfy me. MyBrownWifey manages to pull her gaze away from her laptop (Hey, the care and feeding of this blog is more than a full-time job!) long enough to suggest sweetly to her youngest that perhaps she might want to move over a bit more so Daddy can lie down.

Right here is where I give you the point of this whole exercise. With each passing day, it has become much clearer to me that I ain’t James Evans. Not even Tom Bradford. I don’t know when was the precise date that it occurred, but the household has changed quite a bit for the modern dad. One day we woke up and discovered that not only were our households no longer our dominions, but we were lucky if we could get hired as manservants or court jesters up in these joints. The rulers of my world are the tiny people who march into our bedroom in the mornings and tell us they are ready for breakfast. Mom is the queen who bestows them with greatness, the warrior who defends them to her last breath and the handmaid who takes care of their every need. I am that dude who busts into the room just when the show is getting good to tell them they have to go to bed.

What am I going to do about this? What can I do about this?

Nothing.

I know they all love me and adore me and all that, and this is what counts, I guess.

As long as I stay away from their cookies.

About Our MBB Contributor:
Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of six books, and the editor-in-chief of the travel magazine, Odyssey Couleur. He loves Snickerdoodles, and occasionally eats them while watching football—when he can commandeer the TV from his brown babies.