Oh, how sad it was to learn you grew up in a home without your father. The severing may have begun during slavery. Or maybe, blame the sixties, when black men were denied opportunities to care for his family, and the government made it plain and bullhorn clear that we will feed your wife and kids, we will pay their rent and utilities, but we will not pay for lazy n*****s to eat free off the backs of hardworking white Americans. Men hate failure. A black man used to be a man. A man’s job is to provide for his family. When a man cannot provide for his family, his ego dies. Killing the man. So Papa, always baby steps from utter failure, laid his hat in somebody else’s home—so the song goes. And never came home.
