The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers Read online

  THE BOND

  THREE YOUNG MEN LEARN TO

  FORGIVE AND RECONNECT

  WITH THEIR FATHERS

  THE THREE DOCTORS

  SAMPSON DAVIS, M.D.,

  GEORGE JENKINS, D.M.D.,

  and

  RAMECK HUNT, M.D.

  with Margaret Bernstein

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York 2007

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2007 by The Three Doctors LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

  Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis, Sampson.

  The bond: three young men learn to forgive and reconnect with their fathers / Sampson Davis,

  George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt; with Margaret Bernstein.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-1011-9144-6

  1. Davis, Sampson—Family. 2. Jenkins, George—Family. 3. Hunt, Rameck—Family. 4. Fathers and sons—United States—Case studies. 5. African American physicians—Biography. 6. Physicians—United States—Family relationships—Case studies. I. Jenkins, George. II. Hunt, Rameck. III. Title.

  HQ755.86.D37 2007 2007022947

  306.874'2092396073—dc22

  [B]

  While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assume any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Dedicated to the memory of Kenneth Davis, Sampson’s father,

  in hopes more of us will discover our father’s stories.

  Miss you, Dad!

  —SAMPSON

  For Alim Bilal…

  To a man whose dreams were snuffed out way too early, but who had the courage and strength to reignite them. Your courage and strength has inspired us all.

  I love you, Dad.

  —RAMECK

  In honor of my grandfather who passed away, Robert Williams.

  —GEORGE

  Contents

  Introduction

  SECTION ONE: GEORGE

  Chapter 1: GEORGE JENKINS

  Chapter 2: GEORGE JENKINS, SR.

  Chapter 3: GEORGE

  Chapter 4: GEORGE

  Chapter 5: GEORGE

  SECTION TWO:SAMPSON

  Chapter 1: SAMPSON DAVIS

  Chapter 2: SAMPSON

  Chapter 3: SAMPSON

  Chapter 4: SAMPSON

  Chapter 5: SAMPSON

  SECTION THREE: RAMECK

  Chapter 1: RAMECK HUNT

  Chapter 2: ALIM BILAL

  Chapter 3: RAMECK

  Chapter 4: RAMECK

  Chapter 5: RAMECK

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  THE BOND

  Introduction

  THE THREE OF US grew up in a world where it seemed normal for men to abandon their children. Fathers weren’t important in our lives at all.

  For us and for a lot of the kids in our Newark neighborhood, Father’s Day was never a big deal. We hardly knew when it fell, and rarely celebrated it when it occurred. To us, Father’s Day was “kind of like Rosh Hashanah,” as Rameck puts it. “It seemed like a celebration for other people, a day that belonged to another culture.” To this day, George remembers the humiliation of having to ask a classmate how to tie a necktie because his father wasn’t around to help him learn. And Sampson knows firsthand the destructive lure of the streets and how valuable a father’s steadying influence would have been when times got tough and he found himself out there.

  Our dads weren’t our heroes. In many ways, they were the guys we hoped we’d never be like. So fatherhood and the crucial role it plays in the lives of children and families weren’t important to us as kids, because we didn’t know any better.

  We do now.

  Not having fathers left gaping holes in our lives. George rarely saw his father after his parents split up when he was a toddler. Rameck’s father was hooked on drugs when Rameck was born, so he spent his time either locked up or out on the streets searching for a fix. And Sampson’s father moved out when he was still a child, leaving Sampson’s mom with the job of rearing a houseful of kids on her own. It was inevitable that we tripped in these holes every day of our lives. Rameck forced himself to sign up for Pop Warner football because it was something he thought boys were supposed to do and was so embarrassed that he didn’t know how to put on his shoulder pads he quit football instead of asking for help. Sampson ventured out into the streets in search of male role models because he couldn’t get his emotionally distant dad to pay attention to him. He allowed friends to hustle him down the path of crime and easy money, until he found himself locked up in the juvenile detention center for a summer. And George had to gulp down his pride many times to ask friends to help him learn even the simplest tasks such as how to shave.

  In our world, it was our mothers and grandmothers who had to do the heavy lifting of parenting. They fed us, clothed us, hugged us, and fretted over us. As we grew, they tried their best to drill positive values into us, lecturing us to go to school and stay off the streets. Though they tried, they couldn’t teach us everything we needed to know. It was an exhausting job to raise us, and it was scary watching them get worn down by poverty and stress.

  In many ways, we ended up replacing our absentee dads on our haphazard journey to manhood with one another. In high school and college, we pooled our limited knowledge and shared our strengths. Together we figured out many of life’s mysteries, from how to treat women to how to pick out a graduation suit.

  But while this is a book about the profound emptiness of life without a father, it’s also a book about hope. While we explore how vitally important fathers are to a child’s development, we also celebrate that it’s never too late to connect with your father. In these pages, we speak frankly about the sense of loss that the three of us felt as fatherless kids, and we explore a lot of questions most fatherless children ask: Why did you leave me? Did you ever wonder if I was missing you? Did you miss me? Was I on your mind? Why didn’t you call more? Why didn’t you send for
me? We also explain how as adults we made a conscious effort to create relationships with our fathers that we didn’t have as children, and how that connection has changed us and our fathers.

  This book is written from a male perspective. Although we know that fatherless daughters struggle with their own issues of loss and compensation, this is our story, so we focused on our own feelings and experiences to illuminate the points we want to make.

  You’ll find that this book is divided into three distinct sections, so that each of us can explain our own relationship with our father. In Chapter 1 of each section, we share our experiences growing up without fathers. In Chapter 2, you’ll hear from our dads themselves as they explain what went wrong in the father-son relationship. One thing we realized through the process of researching and writing this book is that although these men contributed half our DNA, we knew precious little about them and their history. We were stunned to find that all three of our fathers share common traits that account for a great deal about their inability to be devoted dads.

  We resume our own stories in Chapter 3, letting you know where we stand emotionally with the information we’ve gleaned about our fathers. In Chapter 4 you’ll meet real people who have impressed us by taking a bold stand to stop the cycle of fatherlessness in their own lives. They’re people who didn’t have fathers in their lives as kids, but they were smart enough to decide not to pass on the pain to another generation. We admire these people and want to banner their success so more people can learn from it. Little by little, one victory at a time, is the best way to put an end to this harmful trend.

  In the final chapter of each section, we offer ideas that you can put to work immediately to help reduce the harm being done by absentee dads and to welcome these missing fathers back into their children’s lives.

  Remember, this is a book of hope. We refuse to give up hope that things can change. Thousands of young people who read our first book, The Pact, told us that positive friendships have the power to push a young person to success.

  Once again, we’re putting our faith in friendship. We believe there’s no stronger force for change. We’re confident that our nation’s men are strong enough to put other influences aside and live lives in which children come first. That’s where they have always belonged.

  We believe a new era is possible, and that adults can successfully band together to form a bond and to wash away the crippling legacy of absentee fatherhood. It can happen, if we wake up and voice the hard truth to one another that it’s a heartless thing to deprive a child of a father who should rightfully be a protector and a cheerleader.

  We compare it to a quest. And there are tasks that must be completed to be a healthy, complete man. First you must teach yourself to succeed. Then you must teach yourself to become a father, even without a role model. And last, if you can find it in your heart, forgive your father. In the coming chapters, we will provide our best advice to you on how to achieve all of these goals.

  Every time we see one of our friends break through the baggage of his past and become a loving and loyal guardian of his kids, it energizes and excites us. These are the good guys who prove that change is possible. Watching them, we know the truth: There is unrivaled joy in being a father who provides the stability and attention that encourage all children to soar.

  SECTION ONE

  GEORGE

  Chapter 1

  GEORGE JENKINS

  The Beginning

  THERE ARE a thousand things I’d rather do than venture out of the tiny comfort zone that my father and I have created. I haven’t seen my dad, George Jenkins, Sr., since my graduation from dental school in 1999. He and I have always been friendly but distant: he lives in another state, and we’ve never really connected as father and son. My lifelong strategy has been to not think too deeply about our relationship, to keep from actively resenting him.

  It was my mom’s firm desire to rear Garland, my older brother, and me in a stable environment that led her away from her short-lived marriage to my father. My mother disapproved of my dad’s heavy drinking during the time we lived together as a family in my dad’s hometown in rural South Carolina. One day when I was a toddler, Mom abruptly packed our bags, grabbed my hand and my brother’s, and led us to the bus station. She delivered Garland and me to her parents in North Carolina to take care of us, then headed to Newark, where we eventually joined her after she landed a job.

  I don’t think I’ve seen my father a dozen times since we got on that bus.

  As a child, I convinced myself that I was cool with my dad’s absence. After all, hardly any of my friends had a father, either. As a grown man, I know better. Yet when we decided to write this book, I stalled, switched gears, and finally stopped writing altogether. It was hard to grasp how deeply I had buried things and how unwilling I was to disclose them. Not having a full-time father, I realized, made me vulnerable in ways that I would rather not announce to the world.

  My mom, Ella Jenkins Mack, was a twenty-three-year-old single mother living in Rahway, New Jersey, when she met my father. At the time, she was on her own, caring for baby Garland. My parents were introduced by my father’s sister, Rosa Lee, who lived down the street from my mom. My parents hit it off from the start: my mother was intrigued by handsome George Jenkins and his engaging conversations. He had been to college and seemed knowledgeable about so many things. As they spent time together, going to movies and parties, Mom thought they would make a good couple. Within a year, they married, in 1972. My dad returned to his native South Carolina to run his father’s country store, and Mom and Garland soon followed him. I was born in 1973, not long after they moved.

  The marriage didn’t last long, which is why I have almost no memory of living with my dad. He had a drinking problem, and my mom got fed up quickly. They had little money, the electricity often got cut off because he hadn’t paid the bill, and my father refused to let her work although she longed to bring in extra income. After I was born, her patience with him wore even thinner. She didn’t want to raise children in an unhealthy environment.

  When my mother asked my father if he would consider going to Alcoholics Anonymous, he irritatedly replied that he would drink as long as he wanted to. He would quit, he informed her, when he got good and ready.

  There wasn’t anything left to discuss after that for my determined mom, born into a large, close-knit family who worked hard to build a good life for their children. She couldn’t see how we were ever going to find the good life if we stayed with him. That was the moment she realized it was time to “giddyup,” as she puts it.

  She packed a trunk and a suitcase with our stuff. It wasn’t much to carry, she says with a laugh, because we had so few belongings at the time. And that day while my father was working at the store, she took us to the bus station. I wasn’t quite two years old. Garland was three.

  Our mom never looked back. She says she felt wonderfully free at that moment, even though our future was uncertain.

  We headed for her parents’ home in Warrenton, North Carolina, a small country town about fifty miles outside of Raleigh, where Mom’s family welcomed us. It was a comfortable refuge, filled with loving relatives, but I didn’t know what to make of all the changes. “Where’s Daddy?” I asked Mom over and over again.

  After a few months, Mom headed north to Newark, where she knew she could find a job. She also knew that her parents could watch us full-time until she carved out a stable life in New Jersey. Mom was gone for an entire year, but she visited us often. She always had a hard time tearing herself away when she had to return to work. It broke her heart the day she realized I had started calling her sister “Mommy.”

  My dad never came after us. When I was young, I felt he never sought us out to make sure we were safe. We could have been hungry or homeless. It seemed like he didn’t care.

  In 1977, when I was three and Garland was four, Mom showed up triumphantly, ready to move us north. She had been in such a tremendous hurry to pick up her
babies that she got a speeding ticket along the way, in Virginia.

  She moved us into an apartment in the Stella Wright projects on Muhammad Ali Boulevard in Newark. Mom was working in a factory back then, and a friend at work happened to mention that he knew someone who was looking for kids to babysit. That’s how Mom met Willa Mae, our loyal and longtime babysitter who lived just a few blocks from us. “She was an angel. God sent her to me,” my mom has often said, declaring it one of the luckiest moments of her life when she met Willa Mae.

  Although Willa Mae lived in a notorious housing project nicknamed “Little Bricks,” I have only the warmest memories of my time there. I loved going over to her apartment, where her daughters helped care for us. I remember sitting on the couch next to Willa Mae, keeping her company while she watched her soap operas. She always kept boxes of chocolate and strawberry Nestlé Quik in the cupboard, and I used to drink so much of that flavored milk that I’m sure I’ll have strong bones for life. (Now that I’m a dentist, I don’t recommend such sugary drinks, though.) Willa Mae was like a member of the family. Mom could lean on her. She would take us to the doctor or dentist if we had to go, and once she even kept us for an entire week when Mom was sick.

  The Stella Wright projects were noisy all night long with music blaring and basketball games being played at all hours. The hallways smelled of urine. Mom had no intention of living there for long. After a while, she took an office job at Chubb Federal Insurance and went to work every day determined to save enough money to move. Within three years, she had enough stashed away to buy into a co-op apartment, which was just across the street but seemed like a different world. The windows of our new two-bedroom place in High Park Gardens overlooked a peaceful, attractive yard landscaped with grass and flowers. Hardworking people lived in our building on Quitman Street, and they didn’t party all night. But I had a constant reminder that I hadn’t moved very far. Every time I looked out my window, I could see the Stella Wright high-rise. The projects blocked out the rest of the view and served as my daily backdrop.