The Gorge

I remember the sun high in the sky behind a film of clouds. My dad and I were rounding a bend, carrying our fishing gear down the road into the gorge, when we saw, maybe fifty yards away, a man lying face down on the rocks beside the river. Dead as gravel.

He lay on the riverbank where he’d landed: hundreds of feet precisely below the steel walkway of the Driving Park Bridge overhead, named for the avenue it carried. It seemed most likely he’d jumped. The gorge was good for that, three hundred feet deep and available to all, cutting through a teeming urban mix of industries and homes, the steel arc of the bridge crossing high above the bouldered river, car tires buzzing across the bridge’s serrated steel deck. We walked closer. The dead man was sprawled as if he’d fallen hard onto somebody’s bed. I remember him as a white man, but I’ve no memory of his skin, only that he had straight, dark hair, hanging loosely from his prone head, his face pressed into the rocks. He looked as if he was taking a nap. If he’d aimed for the water, he’d missed. Or the night had been too dark to tell. Or he hadn’t cared.

If anyone had called the police, they hadn’t arrived yet. Nor did we see anyone else around, fishing or otherwise. It was my father and I and a dead man down in the gorge on the rocks beside the river, where we two stood carrying our fishing rods and our satchels of tackle and our steel bait bucket of live minnows, the design where you lift up an inner metal sieve to make it easier to grab the wriggling one you want.

I do not remember if we turned and left out of respect or dread, if we notified police when we climbed out of the gorge, if we stayed and fished, if we walked closer to see or do what we could. I wish I remembered, but I don’t. I do remember, though, what my father said aloud, to no one in particular, as we stood staring at the dead man with his face pressed into the stone beside the water:

“That guy would want to kill himself here when we want to fish.”

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Every spring in Rochester, New York, when the spawning trout and the big silver bass ran up the Genesee River from Lake Ontario, my father would lead me with our spinning rods down the steep service road into the gorge beneath what was then called the Driving Park Bridge. We’d descend between the walls of seeping shale all the way to the base of a spectacular three hundred–foot waterfall, where tons of plummeting dull-bronze river hammered the boulders at the very bottom. Down there, in the roar and mist of the torrent, we’d cast into the foamy pool that swept downstream, drifting our live minnows with the current, flirting with the monstrous fish we knew had pushed upstream toward the barrier of the falls.

The gorge took twenty thousand years for the water to carve, and it was the one place where I knew I needn’t fear my father. By the time we parked at the edge of the steep bluff and began unloading our armloads of fishing gear from the car, the Louisville Slugger baseball bat I kept hidden beneath my bed with a fantasy of crushing his head amid one of his rages seemed worlds away.

We’d start the long descent on foot down the service road toward the river, and we’d round the first curve, and the massive canyon of red rock and greenery would open up in front of us, and sometimes my father would stop right there and stand overlooking it, saying nothing. He’d put his hands on his hips and he’d stand there surveying it as if he were the first man on Earth. It was the first wild place I ever knew. There were blue heron and red foxes down there in this shadowed trench of forest and riverbank, right in the middle of the city, and it was too fantastic, it was surreal, this wooded chasm with the big cliffside factories chugging far above and the cars humming overhead on an eighth-of-a-mile-long bridge that seemed built on air. My father would stand and look down over this scraggly green remnant of the way the land used to be, and sometimes tears tracked their way down his cheeks. He was the first man I ever saw cry, and he did it openly and often, without a trace of shame, like a child who knows when to welcome being fully taken by the world.

Thing was, you never knew exactly what might possess him. He’d have us rolling on the floor laughing with him at his made-up songs and ridiculous stories. And then a few minutes later, over a heaping dinner of fried fish and potatoes and green beans, one of us kids might timidly announce that we had had enough to eat, and everything would screech and pivot, upended, in an instant.

“May I be excused?” I dared to say, keeping my eyes toward my mother.

But my father’s eyes were on me. “Don’t want your fish, eh?”

“I’m full.”

“You’re full.”

Silence.

“I go out and I catch fish and I bring it home for you. And you’re full. You just can’t be bothered with me, can you?”

I felt my leg shaking under the table.

“Can you?”

“Warren.” My mother’s voice, to him. “Warren.”

And then, somehow, I got away.

That’s the way it was with my dad. I loved him. I still do, decades after his death. He was brilliant and so vulnerable as to seem without skin, force-marched through a world that could neither sate his mind nor shield his mercilessly exposed heart. The tide could turn like this at any moment with him. I’ve now long known, as an adult, that his ailment began with his mother, a mentally ill woman who, when he was a toddler, held his favorite toy truck where he could see it and then crushed it with her heel while he watched. But all I knew as a child of five or eight or ten was that one moment with him we were all breathing easy, falling over in laughter, rolling in the good times, and the next moment, eyes blazing, he was setting my entire world aflame and I was slamming shut the fire doors inside my own skin.

Worse, I already knew that I was as flimsily skinned as he was. I wept at practically anything. Things that seemed to barely register with other people—say, a stranger’s frown—brought me to tears. If a teacher raised an eyebrow, I fell apart. I’d hear my mother explain to perplexed adults that I’d “had my feelings hurt.” It was a perfect description because, for me, having my feelings hurt was an outright physical thing.

I can remember being about six years old, standing one day next to the French doors in the foyer of our duplex on Columbia Avenue, when my father swept past me on his way out of the house. He stopped, looked at me with his eyes flaming, and flipped off a quick cut, something to the effect that he knew I wouldn’t want to go with him, but he didn’t care because he didn’t like my company anyway. I stood there, trapped in the glassed-in room, and I felt the hurled evil enter me like a cluster of flung pins. Every cell in my body hurt, a million tiny parts of me all suddenly stabbed. For me, that was what it meant to “have my feelings hurt.” To live, like my father, with my insides forever exposed to little waves of murder.

I loved going down into the gorge because it meant protection. I never asked my father, but I think this was what he loved about it too. Being in the gorge felt like being ushered into a giant, roofless cave, an open trench exposing the world that underpinned our city. It was older than any other place I knew as a child. Way down in there, with the walls of oily shale rising hundreds of feet on either side of us and the waterfall roaring like some wet bear-god, so that we had to practically shout to hear each other even though we were just a few feet apart—way down in there, the world we’d come from couldn’t hurt us. Couldn’t touch us. And my father couldn’t hurt me, either. And we both knew it. For both of us, the upper world was drowned when we went down into the gorge. All that was left was for us to fish as if our lives depended on it.

I kept the Louisville Slugger, black with white engraved letters and logo, stowed under my bed at night as insurance against my father’s wild fury. I learned the terms “paranoid” and “delusional” from my mother quoting my father’s psychiatrist. “He’s sick,” explained my mom, Marguerite, a registered nurse at the time who worked wards at mental hospitals as well as at general ones. That was her phrase, “he’s sick,” years before the divorce, when the swashbuckling but fragile man she’d married still inspired compassion and loyalty. But at a certain point I’d had enough. Once, he hauled off and kicked me, hard, in the ass, for my not mopping our finished basement’s linoleum floor properly. Another time, he leaned over me and quietly snarled that he was onto my plans to hurt him. His enraged ambushes, along with my compulsion for gizmoing, were why I eventually rigged a battery-powered bicycle horn on my closed attic bedroom door at night.

I had a plan: I’d wait, buried beneath my sheets, upon hearing my father's car pant into the driveway after his customary long hours as a pharmacist at one of several drugstores, en route to the dream he and my mother would later realize in opening Rochester’s first Black-owned drugstore, Warren’s Pharmacy. Every night, lying in the dark, I mentally rehearsed the smooth motion I’d make as he climbed the stairs: my hand gliding underneath the bed for the bat, how I would dive like a hawk with it down the stairs to my parents’ bedroom on the second floor if he were to loom over my mother with just one more threat about the men he imagined she traded for his women. I could almost see it: how he would hunt me, tracking me up the stairs to my room, how the white hallway light would burn his shape into my doorway, how I would square up, greet his tall glare with one whistling arc of my Louisville Slugger, send his skull rattling into the bleachers. I thought of my going to bed as bait, a decoy, like a favorite fishing lure: jointed, wounded, barbed.

There is a snapshot, taken by my mother, of my father, my older sister, Patty, and me one Christmas in our beige house with blood-red shutters on Harvard Street in Rochester when I was nine or ten years old and at the height of my plans to spatter my dad’s brains against my bedroom wall. In the picture, the three of us are kneeling together in front of the Christmas tree, a fat seven-foot Scotch pine, our family’s usual choice. There are gifts everywhere in the background, including my brand-new black-and-red Rollfast bicycle parked in front of the fireplace. My father is in the center of the photograph, an arm around each of us two kids, and we are all grinning, in the middle of one of the happiest moments of our lives. My sister and I had awakened early and lain in our beds quivering with excitement before finally being called to plunge down the stairs to the wrapped chemistry set and the record player and the thick, pulpy new books that opened into Mowgli the wolf-child’s jungle and little Laura’s house on the prairie. There would be no school for days and days, and we would play with new gifts and roll in the snow for hours at a time, and our mom would make deep-fried corn fritters to dip in syrup. While Patty and I tore paper off of big boxes and screamed thank-yous, our mother and father stood in their robes, grinning like drunks, intoxicated with how happy they had made their children. It was as joyous a day as my sister and I ever knew.

But what stays with me most about that Christmas photograph is how our father was leaning way over to one side, like a bowling pin mid-topple, his eyes closed, smiling as if to dear Jesus, practically swooning in the hold of the moment: Christmas Day on the thick carpet of a roomy three-story house with us two beaming children in his arms. In the picture, all three of us grinned with our mouths open. We may have been saying “cheese,” or singing a Mitch Miller song, maybe a carol from the Holiday Sing Along with Mitch record that played incessantly in our house at Christmastime—the album with Mitch on the cover wearing a Santa hat—to which we clapped and bobbed our heads to the “thumpity-thump-thump” refrain to Mitch’s jumpy arrangement of “Frosty the Snowman.”

In that picture I see a man euphoric on the rush of family, a man condemned to never be able to get enough of it, a man who even when he joyously yanked his kids up against his own skin on Christmas morning could gain only a flashing moment’s relief from a life sentence of insecurity and fear.

Sometimes I wondered how my father—constantly impaled as he felt he was by the wicked designs of scheming friends and sadistic children and even the occasional conniving dog—managed to even keep himself alive. His paranoia was mythical. In our family, tales of my father’s episodes were handed down like forest legends. I heard from my mother how when toddler Patty was denied some request or other, she had snapped, “I don’t like you!” at my father, and how he had stumbled away and wept, taking days to recover. As a small child I had heard, from my parents’ bedroom in our first house on Columbia Avenue, my father cursing the name of a jaunty and popular fraternity brother he took to be plotting to outshine him: “Thompson!” I’d hear my father bark, through the wall, again and again to my mother late at night as his bare feet thumped the floor of their bedroom. “Thompson!” I didn’t know what this man Thompson had purportedly done, but what I heard through the wall was evidence enough for me at age five or six. For days I trotted through our house eagerly repeating the chant “Thompson!” until my mother made me stop.

“Surrounded by assassins” was my father’s phrase for summing up his life as the target of others’ resentments and plots. It was as if the expression was his trademarked brand: he hissed it aloud to himself all the decades that I knew him as his son. Patty, three years older than me, knew that branded phrase of his as well or better than I did. “Surrounded by assassins” was our dad’s verbal talisman: both a warning to himself and a proudly defiant acceptance of his world, as if to say, “You can’t kill me. I will.” It’s the kind of outlaw suicide pact that some of we noncompliant Black men make with a society that craves us chiefly as feared and punishable loners. It’s a strange kind of heroism: dying on a hill made of yourself.

I know it well. So do many others. It goes with the territory when your society casts you as a captive, as a creeping servant, and as a result demonizes your human potency. For some Black Americans, including me, the gut reaction to that suggested neurotic gig, as jazz icon Miles Davis might have said, is, “You can’t fire me from mainstream respectability, motherfucker. I quit.” The outdoors is a natural place to seek something closer to fairness: for me that has included tundra and peaks and rivers from Alaska to California to Montana and beyond. Hiking in grizzly bear country or scaling a peak with eight feet of snow beneath your feet is hardly risk-free. But, unlike the perils within our societal compound, no one’s thumb is on the scale. The difference is liberating.

My father’s defense against vulnerability was preemptive paranoia. My defense against my own self-perceived weak constitution in this human world, as it’s turned out, has been a lifelong physical refusal to vomit. Literally.

My no-puke training began one night when I was about eight years old. It is an image I can still close my adult eyes and see. It was night, and my mother and I were seated across the table from each other in the kitchen of our house on Harvard Street, just the two of us in the avocado-green breakfast nook with the pull-down kitchen lamp glowing above us like a fake moon, hanging by its unreeled cord from the ceiling. My father was away, and my mom and I sat in the light, beaming at each other like lovers. I felt happy beyond belief, almost inside out with rapture, like being out on a date with an all-powerful angel.

Maybe my father was working, busting tail at one of the three pharmacist jobs that kept him on an exhausting schedule while he and my mother labored and saved toward the dream of opening the drugstore. Maybe he was out with one of his women, the ones he was fond of introducing to my sister and me on long Sunday drives as if we were supposed to guess at what the two of them were up to. For me, on this particular night with my mom, everything felt lightened by his absence.

My mother, almost as if to celebrate, had made a kind of picnic for us at the table, laying out plastic deli containers of fun foods we rarely ate for dinner, including potato salad—one of my favorites—that had a sharply sweet taste to it, and Jell-O. She dished out the cold treats with spoons, and I dug in as if shoveling them off of a paper plate at the beach, chomping and grinning. I knew, I could just tell, that she had a loving scheme at work here: to help me make the most of this pocket of joy. It was as if she were some kind of fairy fight doctor, feverishly working on me in the corner of the ring between rounds to seal the cuts with kisses, massaging me against the fact that at some point later that night, maybe past midnight, he was going to come back.

It had been a couple of weeks since he and I had had a run-in. My mother’s festive table of picnic food, and the way she sat back and smiled at the happy little clearing we’d made, felt to me like a secret meeting of sprite sweethearts, a moment stolen from under the monster’s nose. I loved her all the more for it. When I hear old people, wizened couples who have been together for sixty years, recall the moment they knew they were in love, I think they are talking about something like that stolen night when I shared a table of potato salad and Jell-O with my mother.

We finished eating, and I went happily upstairs to my room to get ready for bed. But then my stomach began to hurt. Claws dug into my belly. The pain grew worse and worse, a big hand wringing my gut to what felt like the ripping point, and I tumbled downstairs in my pajamas, crying, to tell my mother that I felt sick. But then I suddenly couldn’t talk and I had to run, had to run to the powder room, the little half-bathroom beneath the first-floor stairs, and I fell to my knees in front of the open toilet and I hung my head and it all thrust itself upward and out. The hurt came up through my throat like a bitter fist. My body wasn’t mine anymore; it was a tunnel for hurt, and the hurt did what it wanted with me, it forced me open from the inside and it thrust forth sourness and pain while making me kneel there. And then my mother was with me at the toilet, cradling me, murmuring tuneful little promises while I crouched and threw up, blaming herself for having trusted delicatessen potato salad.

That was sixty years ago. Except for one virus on one night in my thirties, I have not allowed myself to puke since.

What I learned at age eight in our powder room on Harvard Street was that I had no protection inside. None. That night, brought to my knees by my own insides, I learned it for sure. And I knew from watching my father that he didn’t have any, either. But we both knew a place that overwhelmed that problem.

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Three hundred feet down in the gorge, a quarter-mile downstream from the cloud of mist at the base of the roaring falls, my father and I would cast near one wall of the Rochester Gas and Electric power plant, where water-driven turbines beneath the river’s surface generated electricity that helped to power the city. Mostly we caught silver bass—what they call white perch in other parts of the country—biologically a perch, not a bass. It’s a shiny nickel-scaled fish with flat sides and a profile like a finned football. Silver bass ran in the thousands through the deep pool at the foot of the falls where we fished, and for freshwater panfish they ran big: sometimes two or three pounds. They fought hard when hooked, burrowing down with their flat bodies to use the swift current against us. And they tasted good too, with a sweet flakiness to their white flesh, at least in the years before the city’s sewage problem turned the river a stinking green.

I can still remember the day I caught my first really big silver bass. I was about six years old, standing on the rocks back from the water as my father insisted, watching my red-and-white plastic bobber float with the current toward the wall of the power plant. Suddenly, the bobber shot straight downward into the murky water, where it hung barely visible, maybe three feet down. My father shouted at me to pull. I did, and something unbelievably strong pulled back, bent my little Zebco spincast rod nearly double, and I pulled and reeled and backed up, stumbling on the slick rocks, while my father called out instructions. Somehow a few minutes later a huge silver bass came thrashing up onto the wet rocks at my feet while my father grabbed it by the gills, and other fishermen watching nearby started hollering about the little kid’s having hauled in a big one, a couple of pounds at least. I stood shaking in ecstatic disbelief at what I had done, caught a big one, the words boiling through my head while my father hoisted my fish and grinned at me. “Now you’re talking!” I think is what he shouted to me over the roar of the falls. “Now you’re talking!” I felt, maybe for the first time, like his son.

My father fished practically his entire life, beginning as a young child when his mother dumped him off on her older sisters at the family homestead in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts while she went off to work the East Coast playing barrelhouse piano. It’s a story I heard later, as an adult, from both my mother and my father: how some of his mother’s sisters looked after little Warren for their younger sibling Gladys, his mother, but they were merciless, people who lit into children first and asked questions later. By the accounts I heard, they showed their sister’s boy little love, and they worked him like a servant around the big farmhouse and its acreage of fields and woods. Soon my father was fleeing the farmhouse at every opportunity to hike the distance down through the pine woods to a small lake, a half-mile long, jagged wedge of clear, deep water where he would fish and sometimes sleep out alone on the high, bouldered point at the lake’s deeper end.

I know the place. I led my sister there to scatter his ashes decades later, up the long, dirt-road drive, finding the start of the faint trail behind an old vacation house, through the damp, ferny woods to that huge rock on the water. My father took me there when I was a child, led me in through trails, and I fished it alone as a teenager in the summers I spent with my Great Aunt Weesie, short for Louise, my favorite of his mother’s sisters and one who didn’t figure in his upbringing. Over the years, I hiked the mile and a half around the lake more times than I could count, and I gave its hidden inlets and shoreline thickets my own names: Fish Cove, Perch Park. I would hike in at dawn when the mist hovered and the water lay dead still, and I would fish straight through until dark, eating peanut butter sandwiches I had made the night before, before finally stuffing my day pack with all the perch and bass and bluegills I could carry and making my way by flashlight back through the woods and along the unlit road to Weesie’s little frame house, just up the hill from the Robinson homestead. She’d be waiting, watching TV or reading, sometimes snacking on her favorite, Friendly’s coffee ice cream, and I lived for the moment when she’d clap her hands and yelp as I opened my fish bag.

“Oh, gosh! Bruce! Look at what you’ve caught!” She’d beam in the fluorescent glow of her kitchen, her elegant brown face suggestive of the Cherokee blood reputed to run in the Robinson clan, her long gray hair braided down her back. “Yup, you sure can fish, honey,” Weesie would declare with her matter-of-fact chirp. “Just like your father.”

When, as a child, I discovered my father’s big polished-aluminum chest of old fishing lures in our basement, I felt I’d unearthed some priestly collection of deadly little conjure-sculptures, an arsenal of killer charms. The chest was the size of a hefty breadbox, and it opened into a succession of segmented cork-lined trays that seemed to unfold forever. Into its dozens of matchbox-sized compartments were crammed a jangling army of fishing plugs, all retired and apparently forgotten by my father, the likes of which I’d never seen. The lures were smooth and much heavier than they looked, molded of thick steel and plastics so weighty they felt almost surgical. They had grotesque features: paddle-like downturned metal lips, flaring fins, gizmoesque propellers, bug eyes, leering spatula mouths, all the better to dive, swerve, churn, and generally mimic the panic of something agile and edible in the water. They came in brazen reds and algae greens and glassy clear plastics, and soon I came to know many by name: the Heddon Sonic minnow with its sleek transparent body decorated with jagged lightning stripes; the burbling Jitterbug, which spluttered across the water’s surface as if on its last gasp; the faithful Flatfish, whose deep-water hula moves could be counted on to tempt fish when all else failed; its cool cousin the Lazy Ike, whose easy shimmy came up just shy of the Flatfish’s raw eat-me-baby undulation. As a child, long before I ever tied any of these lures onto a line, I fondled them in our basement like miniature barbed figurines. Tiny dancers armed to the teeth.

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The embattlement of being Black began to matter to me in 1963, at age eight, when we sold our gray duplex on Columbia Avenue on Rochester’s west side, home to most of Rochester’s Black and brown communities. The births of Patty’s and my younger sisters, Nancy and Susie, had now rounded out our family to six, and we moved to the more prosperous and utterly white east side, where my parents had bought a larger house: a beige four-bedroom with blood-red shutters. In our old neighborhood on Columbia, us kids ran the skin color gamut from Black to brown to pink, and we mostly played together and got into trouble together and got along. Most of us were also racist by reflex. The ultimate insult among many of us Black kids, for instance, was to gleefully shriek the insult “Black! Black!” at a Black friend, followed by peals of putatively innocent laughter from all of us. Many of us took for granted the glossily wicked American ethic of lighter being better, with “high yellow” light-skinned Black people being the understood neighborhood royalty. But it was also understood—including by me and my lifelong best friend, Mark, who is light tan to my deep brown—that the real-life matters of friendship and fun and who we liked playing with followed none of these racial rules. It was all, as today, a set of bizarre mental gymnastics for reconciling the socially legislated with the human.

On Harvard Street in 1963, every household in sight, and beyond, was white. It was in front of this seemingly gigantic newly purchased house of ours that, for the first time in my life as I recall it, on a warm day when I went out with my baseball and glove, a white kid walking his bicycle on the sidewalk scowled and called me a “nigger” to my face. I stared at him; it was as if I’d been teleported to another planet. I stood there, looking at this Martian neighbor who had just called me a name with which he meant to be mean, meant to assign himself as better. I didn’t yet know that this encounter was the beginning of the rest of my life.

Between my mother’s and my father’s careers, we were now solidly middle class. We had a generously outfitted house twice the size of our half of the old duplex, with a finished attic (where I lived, either rewarded as the only boy or deliberately given a break from my father or both), three other bedrooms, and a finished basement with knotty pine paneling and a workshop brimming with my father’s tools and gadgets (which I would inherit after the divorce). Our mother hired a pleasant, efficient woman, Mrs. Fraction, to come and do all of the ironing; my memory can still smell her cigarettes. Each of us kids had our own assigned chores. Some of our old Columbia Avenue friends may have thought we were now rolling in money. Comparatively, maybe we were. From the strained nighttime fiscal conversations I overheard, my parents didn’t think so.

Despite my father’s fierce eloquence and public flamboyance—crushing others’ arguments with his gift of parsed persuasion, ruling the drugstore named for him from the raised pharmacist’s platform at the rear, running as a candidate for the Monroe County legislature (as a Reagan Republican) and losing, swashbuckling with his leather jackets and other indulgences offered to him (and by him to us kids after we were grown) by professional shoplifters—he was, in effect, the fifth child in our family. Our mother, Marguerite, was the authoritatively responsible adult.

She was from Toledo, Ohio, the daughter of the aggressively normal Charles and Mabel Peoples. They were kind, smart, and responsible, if not flamboyantly eccentric like some of my father’s clan. They owned their trim white house on Avondale Avenue in Toledo, along with an adjacent row of garages, one of which held their late 1950s white and aqua Chevrolet Biscayne and my grandfather’s workshop and tools, and the rest of which they rented out to neighbors for extra money. Their house always seemed dim inside to me, but it was lively with visitors and fragrant with my grandfather’s pipe tobacco, Sir Walter Raleigh in the orange and black can. Our maternal grandfather, Charles, whom we called Poppy, once had ambitions to be a dentist but instead became a lifelong postal carrier when no dental school would accept a Black applicant. Mabel, whom we simply called Grandmother, was a quietly powerful, loving, and sometimes stern woman. My mother’s fenced row of cultivated roses at our Columbia Avenue house—I remember passersby stopping to admire them—looked as if it was straight out of Grandmother’s well-ordered yard in Toledo. The numerous handwritten inspirational poems and sayings our mom taped to the walls throughout our house—one was “Intelligence is like a river: the deeper it is, the less noise it makes”—seemed a tribute to our grandfather Poppy’s original written poems, including his long poetic tribute to his faithful bunk and footlocker as a soldier in World War One.

While our mother tolerated and compensated for our father’s riotously childish needs and infidelity for as long as she could, she surrendered to no one. She was a social justice leader in Rochester, helping to run a citywide voter registration drive for Black citizens and supporting the political campaigns of racially progressive candidates. I may not have survived my childhood without her.

For me, though, Becket, home of my father and his people, became my soul home by the time I was a teenager. I remember an afternoon in a stand of woods near the little lake: my father stood and pointed his finger from tree to tree in the same solemn, measured way he flicked tiny multicolored capsules into vials at the pharmacy, identifying the differences for me: an ash, straight and limbless as a stake; a white birch, its lined bark scrolled like decaying sheet music. It was as if he were dispensing potions. Same when he led me to the massive rocky point on the lake where he had fished as a boy. He and I peered down at dark bass that hung motionless in the depths. His unspoken message was as loud as a shotgun: Pay attention. What’s here will keep you alive.

After my having heard, as a teenager, the story of his going hat in hand to every bank in Rochester for a loan, finally needing the intervention of Uncle Lloyd (an influential Black local attorney we affectionately called “Uncle” but who was a close family friend) in order to open his own pharmacy; after my having heard through the wall, as a child, night after night, his bare feet thudding on my parents’ bedroom floor as he cursed real and imagined plots to stymie him; after my feeling him, and myself, burn beneath the glare of uniformed white men with guns on their hips; after all of it, I looked at my father, at the long days we spent in the woods and in the gorge, and I understood something that nobody, Black or not, had actually said aloud to me: being a Black American meant needing to find a place, any place, where the world’s true rules of balance still applied. Without that you are lost, whether in lies about yourself or in false maps of the world.

If you’re a Black American, especially a smart Black American who expects to be treated with respect, anger comes with your citizenship. You’re angry when white strangers try to talk their idea of Black-talk to you, and you’re angry when white men pat their hip pockets in front of you as if they’re afraid you’re going to try to lift repayments for slavery out of their wallets, and you’re angry when salesclerks and receptionists give that little start, that tiny flutter of surprise they try to hide, when you make a professional-sounding request in perfect English. Your own you-ness is invisible to them. You want to punch yourself into their vision, jump feetfirst into their eyes with your shoes on. And sometimes, to keep your own pipes from bursting, you need to be able to go limp, to surrender to something, but only to something you can trust. Wood, water. Anything that people didn’t make.

By the year I moved up from my Zebco spincast rig to a bona fide Garcia Mitchell open-faced spinning outfit and learned how to properly work a live minnow—my father had an impossible up-and-down circular motion to his retrieve that I’ve copied but never mastered—he and I would often catch two dozen or more heavy silver bass on a good day in the gorge. We’d descend to the riverbank at sunrise, trying to beat out the other early risers for the best spots at the downstream end of the pool, and we’d fish until late morning, by which time, with luck, we’d have silver bass doubled- and tripled-up on my father’s long steel chain stringers, two or three fish tethered to each big safety pin clip.

But you never knew what would hit you. You’d be working your minnow, getting a nice pumping drift, and anything might boil up and grab it: channel catfish, largemouth bass, huge rainbow or brown trout on a spawning run up from the lake, red-eyed rock bass with their fat bellies and sweet meat, strawberry bass, a freshwater drum we called sheepshead, big walleyes. You’d be standing there in the roar and the mist, nearly forgetting the rod in your hand, until—Bam!—something big tried to take you down the river, and you’d be playing the fish, trying to read its fight before you could see it, feeling for the telltale staggery tugs or the dull jerks or the driving dives that might give it away so you could call out “Silver!” or “Channel cat!” or “Sheepshead!” before the fish rose to view.

And then there were the Sea Monsters. That’s what my father called them. They were the fish we never saw, the ones that were too big to turn, too strong for us to hope to bring in. In my early years, I never even hooked one. It was as if they knew I was too young and they aimed, instead, for my father. And even he rarely hooked one. When he did, I knew it. I’d hear him bellow an “Ohhhh-HOH!!” over the roar of the falls, and he’d be off, hooked to an underwater train, his rod bent double, the drag of his reel whizzing like a dentist’s drill while the massive, unseen fish stripped out line. My father would half-run, half-clamber along the bouldered shore, following the fish toward the dreaded point of no return: the bend in the river where, once around, the fish could surge into the main channel of the rapids and be gone. I’d watch my father try to hold on, bracing his rubber boots on the rocks, grinning, while the fish bulled for freedom, pulling my father around the bend until I couldn’t see him. Then I’d wait.

I knew how it would end, how it always ended. My father would reappear a few minutes later from behind the boulders at the bend, gleefully sheepish, holding his rod with its snapped line, shaking his head. And as he approached me, he would always shout the same refrain over the sound of the water: “Too big! Too big!” That last part, his final happy shrug, the “Too big!” was the part I loved best. I loved the sweet hopelessness of it. I loved that these monsters—fish? sea dragons?—were too big to bring in. Years later, after seeing a few of them actually landed, I learned they were usually gigantic carp, twenty or more pounds. But in those early times, what I loved was that they were uncatchable. I loved that we were in a place where unknowable things swam just beyond our reach.

On days when the fish lay low and our minnows and even worms failed, we’d dig into our tackle satchels and pull out lures like the ones I’d discovered in my father’s big aluminum chest, the chunky plugs and flashy spinners and heavy spoons and fluorescent plastic grubs, each of us making our own gamble on one lure or another, watching each other’s casts and retrieves out of the corners of our eyes to see who chose best. When one of us struck pay dirt and reeled in a keeping-sized fish, the other would pretend to barely notice, while fiercely doing the mental math to figure how to make adjustments without looking like a copycat.

Not that we were the only ones fishing. The gorge had a shifting cast of characters. There were the regulars, like Pete, a twitchy dark-bearded white guy with a scratchy voice who fished full-time, it seemed, with heavy tackle for big trout and salmon. There were the snaggers, cheaters who showed up during the fall salmon run to impale massive chinook and coho spawners by yanking gigantic, weighted hooks through the water, until authorities finally outlawed it. There were families, sometimes groups of a dozen or more, who built driftwood campfires and ate their catch right there on the bouldered riverbank, sometimes talking among themselves in languages I didn’t understand.

And there were the young Black boys, eight or nine or ten years old, who came down to the riverbank without a grownup, sometimes alone and sometimes in groups. Often their clothes weren’t new and trim like mine, but older and frayed. Some of them had the hard look of the kids who the rest of us Black kids, back on Columbia Avenue, used to call the bad boys: the kids who ran late at night and threw rocks at cars and who acted up with, it seemed, nobody to tell them to stop. The boldest seemed everything I wasn’t: nervy, tough.

The kids clambered down the rocks, sometimes carrying old fishing rods, sometimes improvising what tackle they could from saplings and discarded fishing line on the riverbank. Sometimes they stood to one side of us for a while, eyeing my father and me while we cast with our shiny, expensive tackle. Sometimes they walked straight up to us. Sometimes a kid would turn his face up at my father.

“Mister, you have a hook? You have a worm?”

Sometimes my father gave them what they asked for, or he instructed me to. Other times he shook his head no, or even turned his back. Whenever he said yes to any of them, I felt a prickle of jealousy. I figured that when they turned their faces up at my father, they needed something more, a whole lot more, from this straight-standing Black man than a hook or a night crawler. I thought they must have looked at my father, with his spare spinning rods propped against a rock behind him, and wondered how many empty rooms he had in his house.

There I was beside my father in my clean clothes with my shiny fishing tackle, a softy of a son who had never fought for a thing that he owned. I thought I ought to feel lucky, and I wondered why I didn’t. I wondered if one day my father might want to trade me in for one of these kids who put their bold questions in his face, who needed something and dared to ask.

I remember one particular warm Sunday afternoon in spring, the kind of day when every kid wants to be outside. Instead, my mother had dressed me up in my cardboardy church clothes: a stiff blazer and sharp-creased slacks and a clip-on tie—with a little silver tie clasp monogrammed with my initials, BJ, which was the only dress-up thing in my wardrobe that I actually liked—and she dragged me to the annual May Day pageant sponsored by the local chapter of Jack and Jill, a national organization to which we belonged that serves as an advocate and channel for Black upward mobility. The May Day pageant was at a church in the Black neighborhood where we used to live, and as far as I could tell it had nothing whatsoever to do with the May Day of the workers of the world. The church altar had been turned into an improvised stage draped with banners and crepe paper, and the aisles were filled with kids dressed in bumblebee costumes and butterfly outfits and choir gowns, all being shepherded by parents through seemingly endless rounds of giggling skits and uplifting songs. For an hour or more, I stood amid all of this with my mother—my father was nowhere to be seen—and I wondered why she was doing this to me.

And then—I’m sure I’m exaggerating the memory, but this is what I see when I remember—the front door to the church suddenly opened, leaking the news that it was warm and sunny outside. And, unbelievably, my father walked in through the church door, pushing his way toward us through the crowd, dressed in khakis and an old shirt. He made his way to us, and he looked at me as if my mother wasn’t there, and he exclaimed, as loudly as if we were already outside, “Let’s go fishing!” Just like that. In the midst of the harried parents and the singing bumblebee children. I don’t remember if he and my mother had words. But the minute I saw my father walk into that church, I knew I was as good as sprung. Twenty minutes and a quick change of clothes later, my father and I were in the gorge. Walking down into the heavy cool air where the walls of shale bled water. Dropping into a time before we were angry.

But eventually, we always had to go back up. And I knew that when we did, the world would ease its teeth back into us. Soon—whether in our smooth-riding station wagon or at the dinner table or upstairs that night in the attic—my dad would turn on me again like a wheel and there would be nothing that either of us could do about it.

So, we delayed leaving the gorge for as long as we could. We shifted our fishing spots, added or removed weight from our bait rigs to drift at different depths, started talking about leaving long before we actually broke down our rods. We squatted on our heels and packed our gear slowly, hanging on, the way some moviegoers linger and read every mouse-type credit at film’s end, wanting to stay in it. We gutted and scaled our fish in the river, running our thumbs hard along each spine to clear the body cavity of innards and clotting blood, and we flung the entrails like soggy boomerangs far out into the swift current to be swept away.

Finally, with nothing else left to do, we hoisted our stringers of dead fish and started the climb back up the service road toward the car, swinging our work from our chains, smiling like two assassins.