His giant toothy grin would slant his eyes into oblivion when he got a chuckle about something. He never laughed out loud, not really, but you could see the laughter that bubbled underneath his surface, usually with one long leg crossed over the other, him perched back comfortably in the chair. It was a mischievous smile, one of anticipation of you discovering the joke that was entrenched in something he had just spoken. Or perhaps it was a question he had just asked you of a scientific nature, one that he knew you didn’t know the answer to. And yet in his knowing, you could see a deep satisfaction building expectantly until he answered his own question and you as the recipient discovered his ability to uncover some mystery of the universe.
“Hey Granddaughter,” he would say with a squint of his eyes as a smile pushed upward, one hand cocked over the rounded arm rest of the sofa’s end where he sat. A silver ball point pen rested in his front pocket and his traditional gold link wrist watch around his wrist.
“Yes, Papa?” I would indulge him, anticipating the question before he spoke.
“Hey Granddaughter, what is Avogadro’s number,” he would pause and his eyes would glint with laughter as he waited.
“Umm…6.23. No, hold on. 6.2314…. No. I give up. What is it? I can’t remember exactly.”
I would reciprocate the smile and act as if I hadn’t been asked this same question from him a hundred times before.
“It’s 6.02214 times ten to the twenty-third power.” And then his smile would melt for just a moment, with pursed lips and with a clench of his teeth just after the roll of the last word on his tongue, he would sit back in pure satisfaction. He followed by a tilt of his head toward me and he’d look over the rim of his glasses, for a fleeting moment with a look of serious instruction as if to say, what do you think about that Granddaughter? Then in predictable fashion, that grinning of his eyes would erupt from his giant smile. All the teeth and all still his own, I would add. It happened this way almost every time I’d visit with him.
Papa loved to share his research or facts of science, although most recipients weren’t keen on hearing his monologue from the Encyclopedia Britannica that he had memorized from his earlier reads. It was quite unfortunate that he never had many conversationalists who could bounce back off of him – who could spar with him and ask reciprocal questions. There weren’t many people in his circle who had studied DNA sequencing or genetic testing afterall. He became especially intrigued by forensics and the use of DNA for solving cold cases during the last decade or so of his life. But it was only in the television programs he would watch and then tell mom and I about when we were visiting with him.
There was no connection in the real world for his exploration of science. He had a plethora of facts in his mind. Throughout my childhood it was said that he had something of a photographic mind. I’m not sure if that was the case or not and I don’t believe that is a clinical diagnosis. But he was full of information and could recall numbers and facts in a spectacular way. The beauty was, there was also self-taught understanding behind the rote facts that were photocopied in his mind. He could logically piece them together in comprehension. And he hadn’t sat in a classroom since his middle school years.
If only his literal mind had enabled him to clear through the faulty processing of his brain, he could have more functionally used learning and made it count. Had real opportunity for exploration been offered to him, what a force for education or teaching he may have been.
Donnie, Judy, Jan and Joy. One son and three baby girls in a sibling group of eight total were his biologically. But he was father to all of them and they would call him so. Before he was married to my grandmother, she already had four children – Deborah, Terry, Robin and Dane. Donnie, Judy and Jan all had very similar physical traits – including the lighter hair and skin of the Raffield side, while there was a sharper tip on their noses. Mom, the baby named Joy, had darker hair, more like her mother and her older siblings, with a more rounded tip.
Those family secrets that are covered over for the majority of one’s childhood sometimes come in bits and pieces as we move over into adulthood. I realized this one afternoon while I was sitting in Mom’s bedroom.
“So Mom, you’re telling me that he isn’t really your dad,” I sat across her bed like an interviewer wanting her to start from the beginning, inquisitively wanting to know how I had gone twenty- something years not ever having known.
“Well, he is my dad, Sunni…but no, not biological,” she looked back at me without completely committing to the conversation.
“I mean, I know. He’s my papa…but did you know? I mean when did you know this,” I sat at attention waiting for her to explain.
She started, “yes I knew,” and then she stopped folding the shirt she had in her hands. Sam and Sarah walked through the bedroom door to join us.
“What ya’ll talking about,” Sarah wanted to know, plopping down across the bed with a big pop of her hand across my behind.
“Girl, stop,” I pushed her away, annoyed at her continual silliness. “About Papa,” I answered her question and shifted my eyes her way and then bounced a glance over at Sam.
“Oh,” Sarah said with a raise of her eyebrows, propping one arm underneath her head.
Mom looked around the room as if to say, seriously, are they ganging up on me? There haven’t been very many things in the life of us three Fletcher girls that we haven’t almost simultaneously known in sync. No secrets between the three of us. And mom has always been part of that tight circle of sisterhood as well, but she knows she never fares well by asking one of us not to tell the other two. It’s an unspoken pact that we’ve written into our sister law. We have known each other in and out and this was of no exception. It had been discussed prior to us bringing it to her.
Sam had sat down on an upholstered stool, in front of a fluorescent glare beaming off the makeup mirror. It sat atop a vanity in the corner of the room. She turned around, a pair of tweezers in her hand, our topic of conversation stopping her from ensuing on her eyebrow plucking.
“I knew when mama and Gene told me,” she continued sensing that we weren’t going to let her off the hook. “I was sixteen. They both sat me down and told me,” she said.
“Wait,” Sarah interrupted her, “MeMa and Gene both?”
Mom finished her thought, “yeah. They told me that Gene was really my father.”
I wanted to know details, like how? What was their posture, body language? How did this come up? Out of the blue and why then at sixteen?
Sam piped in, “so Gene…you mean Aunt Robin’s dad?”
Sarah added, “well it’s Uncle Dane and Uncle Terry’s too right?”
I looked over at Sarah, the youngest of our trio, “wait, how did you know about Gene Griffin?”
She shrugged her shoulders, “I don’t know. Maybe Sam told me…or a cousin” she questioned her own memory for a moment trying to remember.
Sam moved over to the bed, but mom was still busying herself picking up clothes off the floor and walking in and out of the bathroom.
They told her together Papa wasn’t her father. But she told us it hadn’t mattered to her. He was the only father she had known and she loved him.
I wondered though how she felt in that moment. She was sixteen. Did it take her days to get past it? Had she suspected it already? Was she angry, unbothered? I didn’t know the whole story.
That was the day I realized that Papa wasn’t my bloodline, that I in fact hadn’t been on the Raffield family tree after all. Instead biologically, I was connected to a man whom my grandmother had been a mistress to. Gene, this illusive man whom I would never meet, had several other children with his wife, his “real” family, but very obviously at some point in time, MeMa and Gene still had a connection. He was never a part of any of any of my mother’s sibling’s lives, not really.
After mom was told the truth, Gene wanted to take her shopping for a formal dress she needed for her high school prom that was quickly approaching. She resisted and so my MeMa took her instead. Gene insisted on paying for it however.
She never told her father, Papa, about that experience. She never had that conversation with him. In all the years that would pass after, Mom never let on even once to her dad that she knew she wasn’t his biologically.
For me, this wasn’t really a crucial piece of information. Sure, it was a bit shocking I suppose that I hadn’t known up until that point, but it wasn’t some life shattering moment where I became undone that mom hadn’t told me or that Papa wasn’t my blood relative.
It didn’t matter and it didn’t change my connection to him in any way. Our relationship wasn’t traditional. Having a grandparent that isn’t neurotypical looks different than the stereotype of grandparents with their grandchildren. He never took me fishing or met my friends growing up. I never rode down back roads in his truck or to town for candy. I never spent the night with him and my grandmother. He didn’t know about my life really. But I knew in his way, the only way he could, he loved me.
He would often slip a twenty-dollar bill into my hand and say, “here ya go, Sunni Joy. Go buy you something,” with a sparkle in his eye.
He had blue eyes with a continual sparkle that was so telling of the soul that was wrapped deep within his 6’1” exterior. Kindness was worn by him at all times and it emanated from every word spoken and every action. He was gentle, forgiving and jovial. I never remember a single moment that I saw even a hint of anger dot the expressive lines of his face, never furrowing brows or down turned jowls of scoffing. Never once did I hear him say an unkind or unsavory word about someone else. If he did ever utter a remotely derogatory insinuation about another man, it was with great discretion and I can assuredly say, they deserved it. Even in those conversations, as I can recall, he would choose to not interject and his silence was speaking more volumes of another’s character than any words he could have contributed.
Many visits were made down those backroad two lanes to his old white shiplap house that had been painted over more times than one could count. It sat on a city side street in the middle of a short block of homes in the south side of Fitzgerald, Georgia. A small city in the southwest portion of the state, one can find free range chickens pecking and scratching around on front lawns as you drive through the residential neighborhoods.
“How odd and unrefined,” I would always think, “chickens shouldn’t roam free all over a city.”
Those free ranging Burmese chickens that roam freely all over Fitzgerald are a little reminiscent of him in some way. Chickens running freely across perfectly manicured lawns and pecking just beyond the pedestrian sidewalks. The rudimentary elements one would find on a farm living within the civilized and developed confines of a bustling small southern city. As beautiful and majestic as one might consider a Burmese rooster, with his striking orange and yellow feathers that pop against the coal black ones, still he doesn’t seem to fit. My grandfather was much the same. He seemed out of place in a way.
White or ivory button-down shirts, maybe with a pen stripe, and almost always with rolled up sleeves paired with brown or navy dress slacks was his style. It appeared he was dressed and ready for the office, and yet in his profession earlier in his life, he was mostly a painter for new and existing construction, and especially commercial painting. My mama has a pair of his paint-splattered and smeared brush-stroked white painters pants that she will never part with. They are without any value, next to her own sentiment. But, his everyday slacks always had pinch-pleats in the front and neatly iron-pressed pleats down each leg. Never a boot or a tennis shoe, but instead only wing tip shoes with the tiny shoestrings – a leather brown pair and a pat-n-leather black pair. When they would wear, he would purchase a new pair just like the one before. This was the everyday attire of this great man, at least during the thirty years that I knew him. He dressed for whom he felt to be on the inside, a man of sophistication and knowledge.
The chest of drawers in his bedroom was littered with neatly placed prescription bottles and books that he held as precious treasures. A bottle of classic Old Spice aftershave could be found there, and most often an additional pair of specs. No matter which season of my childhood or adult life, I remember his bedroom always seeming nearly the same. He lived with two different women during my lifetime, but in each house, he had his own little refuge – full of his personal things and trinkets, cards given to him by grandchildren or church family that had been tucked into the crease of the mirror glass and the gaudy wooden frame that sat atop the dresser. An Olan Mills photo from the early nineties of his current wife and himself placed in a wooden frame hung on the wall adjacent to his bed. There was always a small bookshelf donning at least one set of encyclopedias and books on everything from the universe to molecular science. I remember his handwriting. I can see it now in my mind scratched across torn pieces of scrap paper that held addresses and telephone numbers that he needed for quick access. And of course, there was always a bible and a concordance.
Papa’s red flushed cheeks just below his resin framed glasses were framed with silvery and white hair pushed back neatly with a comb on the top of his head with his special hair tonic. I remember when he came to live with mom, just shy of his last year and a half of life, that the bathroom in her then small home, always smelled of classic Ivory white soap. It was the very same little house on Westaok Circle that I had purchased just before Conner was born and which she had since purchased from me. It would be the home of his last physical residence on earth. The only soap gentle enough for his fair and freckling, characteristically Raffield skin, which canvassed in part glimpses of his past. There were at least two tattoos that I can remember, one a fading and blurred army green-colored anchor with an American flag waving in the background on his right forearm. My guess is that it had been etched there when he was only a very young man, perhaps during his short service in the navy.
His legacy is one that has an undercurrent of incompletion – at least by man’s standards. You see, he was greatly misunderstood by many and the desire for learning that breamed at the seams of his brain was never truly discovered, like an unrefined lump of gold never having been polished over to uncover its brilliance. Never a formal education, never a white-collar profession, never a scientific publication. At the surface, he was a man of limited means, untaught and who lived in a meager home, often on the dilapidating side of town.
I confess there were many times that I didn’t understand him either. The phone would ring and I or one of my sisters would see his name – Angelo Raffield – pop across the caller ID of the cordless phone, and I would sort of exhale and roll my eyes, especially if he had just called earlier in the week. I knew it was likely I was in for a talk on science and as a teen, I had no time for that.
He was only fifteen when he enlisted in the US Navy. And that was only because he fudged his age, by asserting he was actually sixteen. Soon after, less than a year as a matter of fact, he was medically discharged from the service. That was the beginning of a lifetime of mood stabilizing drugs and many inpatient stays in the veteran hospitals. When his medication needed to be re-dosed or he didn’t take it appropriately, there would be episodes of mania. Mom and her siblings would be called and he would be taken for a short inpatient stay. After the dosages were regulated, all was well and he would return home. Just as agreeable and giving as before.
He was just that – a giver. To the church especially, and even to scattered scoundrels whom we surmised took advantage of his good will. I think he believed in their need, but I also believe that even having known they may not make the best use of the funds that he would write out of his checkbook, still he gave. I don’t think he concerned himself so much with their follow-up to his generosity, but more on his response to their spoken need.
“Dad, why do you let them take advantage of you,” I would hear his girls ask. I remember seeing him shake his head at their scolding, but can’t now recall much of his defense back to them in words.
“They don’t need your money,” they would quip, “they can work and you need that money! You’re on a fixed income.”
Truly, he encompassed the tenets of the often misused and cliché phrase, “he has a heart of gold.” In his case though, it was true.
We would be sitting around the small round dining table in his home, the t.v. blaring loudly for aging ears on the other side of the half-wall that divided the dining area from the living room. There were pictures of Jesus all over the walls around us or angels with inspirational quotes hung in frames. There was always a plastic cookie container full of box cookies and a silk floral arrangement in the middle of the table, that had been covered over by a thick and tattered tablecloth. The clutter caused me a bit of claustrophobia, but the place was homey enough. His girls were concerned that he was being taken advantage of. But it seemed this was just his nature. It gave him purpose to be able to help rescue.
In 1999, Mama was going on her first mission trip – medical missions to the little island country of Jamaica situated in the Caribbean. She had been a nurse for several years and a team comprised of church members from Trinity United Methodist, a couple of physicians, a pharmacist and several nurses were going to offer medical care to the impoverished on the island. Many Jamaicans would wait for prescriptions or samples given by these medical teams each year and that would be their only healthcare until the following year when another team arrived.
“I’ve got de shooga,” the patients would tell her in their accented dialect. Sugar or diabetes has been a growing problem in Jamaica for decades and those without health insurance are far less likely to have it managed. The medical team would leave the patients with a six-month supply of insulin in an attempt to cover their meds until the next team landed.
“Daughter, I want you to come down here. I want to give you some money for your trip.”
Papa called her the week before her flight.
“Dad, I don’t need any money. I’ve got what I need,” she insisted back to him.
“Nah daughter, I want you to have it,” he was adamant, and he ended up winning out.
She struck out on her day off in Sam’s candy apple red Ford Mustang. Our family car was in the shop for some repairs, so mama was making the drive down in my sister’s car. Driving that two hours alone to his home, she told me she felt just like a seventeen-year-old girl who was going to pick up some money from her daddy as she made the short trip in that sports car. Even though she didn’t need it, something urged her to go and take those three hundred dollars from her dad. A glimpse of what might have been perhaps, had things been different, maybe a longing for more of that protection and rescue that comes from a father to a daughter, but also a reflection on what was and what she just appreciated about where he was now – where their relationship was.
I imagine the windows down, her chocolate curls whisping in every direction around the frame of her face, and all the anticipation and excitement of what was coming the following week when her plane would take off for the Carribbean. A week with friends, doing what she was created for – nursing, on an island. It was exciting. I remember being ecstatic for her those years she joined the team.
Papa hadn’t been a typical father, not even a very present one in her early years.
“Mom, what was he like when you were little,” I asked her.
“He was kind. Always kind. He never spanked us girls, but he would threaten to get after Donnie with his belt when he would terrorize us,” she told me. “We would go and stay with him occasionally and he would load us up and take us to Burger King or somewhere like that. He was always kind and loving to us when we were with him. Us girls would play while he would be outside working under the hood of a car or doing something else out in the yard.”
Considering in the 60s and 70s, divorced fathers often weren’t very present in their children’s lives. Men’s roles were different and it was accepted that the children were almost always with the mother. Add to that, the mental illness that wasn’t managed, nor perhaps could it have ever been completely. After he was observed talking out of his head and babbling on and on about gouging out his eyes because they were offensive and causing him to sin, he was committed to psychiatric evaluation and later diagnosed with schizophrenia and later still re-evaluated to have bipolar disorder. His break during active duty led to his discharge from the navy years before he became a father, and then years of trying to manage his mental illness with alcohol, and then one broken marriage.
In his manic state, his mind took a figurative teaching from Jesus about the seriousness of sin in our lives and how we are to continually remove it no matter the cost, and it caused him to contemplate a very literal act. The scripture in Matthew speaks of plucking out one’s eye if it offends (or causes sin), since it would be better to lose only one part of your body rather than the whole body that could be cast into hell. I never saw, not even once in my life evidence of a schizophrenia diagnosis. And he was later re-diagnosed with the other label. His medication gave him incredible functionality. Manic eposides occurred, but I only ever experienced that in his very long winded and one-sided telephone monologues on science.
As I ponder, this all raises the question to me now – how might his life have looked differently had he not struggled with the mental challenge, the brain default, or was it a chemical imbalance? Faulty wiring or inappropriate synapses within his natural, physical mind? Too much or too little serotonin? Who can really know? The brain is much too complex for even the science that he was so enamored by to be able to answer questions such as the like, not in completion at least. Neurologists have their theories of course, they practice with medicine to stabilize their patients, but will testify themselves that the human mind is endlessly unfathomable. And also, how would his path have looked differently had he had money, accolades, prestigious titles, or a formal education?
His late wife, June, had an eye for practicality and less for the aesthetic. She had handwritten scripture penned out on flash cards, and you would find them push pinned or taped on many open areas on the walls – perhaps on the mirrored medicine cabinet in the bathroom or just above the toilet. And sometimes there were many displayed across one wall, all in different colors and with different verses of the bible written by her hand. There were dollar store trinkets for the changing seasons, like a teddy bear wearing a red Christmas ribbon tucked on top of counter space or the refrigerator.
Grandma June, as we called her, was a kind lady whom we grew more affectionate of over time. She wore long skirts and blouses sometimes tucked, sometimes not, with lots of costume jewelry to adorn her fluffy build. She had salt and pepper curled hair that she would tease into place and was colorful both in personality and appearance. A little bit eccentric and a lot a bit audible, she was of the holiness denomination and her faith was rooted deep in the Pentecostal church. She kept Papa’s girls in the know with his health. Because his girls were his advocates more then than earlier in his life, he was medicated appropriately and he was stable and grounded for many years. Mama says she saw him most happy and settled with June and during the season they shared.
Before they married, he wasn’t strong in faith or the church. I can’t recall ever having known when his faith journey started. I’m most sure when he was a boy and through the encouragement of the aunts that raised him after his mother passed. He was a strong believer – a Christ follower who loved the bible during the last quarter of his life. I remember as a young girl that he would pull out the bible edition of the Trivial Pursuit board game and ask me questions on the cards, most of which I didn’t know then. He, in his quiet spirit, impressed on me that God was to be honored and loved.
Because he accepted Jesus as his Lord and made that choice, the imputed righteousness of Jesus, or “rightness” before God was given to Angelo. All the limits on his body, mind and spirit due to sin and brokenness on the earth were removed from him just like the impurities from gold in a fire. That is what happened when he stepped out of this earthly realm and into the heavenly one, and that is a legacy!
Why is it that we choose the paths we do? And why do some seem to have easier paths with which they are presented? That is a question only the omnipotent God can answer and is a subjective one at best. What we may see as easier, may not be for the person walking the path. I look at my Papa. I look at this man – Angelo Verdane Raffield – and wonder if at the end, that last week before he was really sick, if he had regrets. Obviously, I would think we all will. Even now, in the beginning of my second half of life, I look back with regret. Did he wish he had given more? Did he wish he had been a better father in his children’s early life? Did he wish desperately that he had treated someone more kindly, not had a bar brawl as a young man, not drank as much, etc., etc. I don’t know the deep mind of him. Hopefully, he had reconciled all regrets, forgiven himself and moved on.
And then I think about this man – what I learned by observing his life and do now learn in reflection from looking back at his life. Would any of the above – differences in opportunity by man’s definition or financial or educational success, have made any equitable difference? In the place that it really matters – in eternity? And I can answer that with a firm no. In eternity, and I know this more as I read God’s word, the spirit of a person matters exponentially more than the brain – the spiritual man versus the natural man. One exists forever, one turns to dust. There is much talk in the bible about God using the weak things of this world to shame or confound the wise or the strong. My grandfather’s brain may have been limited by mental illness, but his spirit was not condemned by any infirmity.
Paul, the apostle and writer of the letter to the Corinthians reminded those in the church at Corinth around the year 54 BC of this truth:
For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.
I Corinthians 1:26 – 29
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=I%20Corinthians%201%3A26-29&version=CSB
Even in his quirky and often inconvenient conversations, even in his inability to be like a real grandfather, I still loved him the same as I would have had any of the preceding been different. I still loved him the same even after knowing that he wasn’t in fact my biological grandfather. And I live now with a bit of regret of my own that I didn’t take more opportunity to know him more deeply, to spend more time, ask more questions, to be more patient.
Robert Frost, the renowned poet, penned that “two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry that I could not travel both, and be one traveler, long I stood, and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth.”
His poem, The Road Not Taken, brings vivid glimpses to my mind – eighth grade English, Mr. Thompson’s class. He had each of us stand at the front of the classroom and recite it for our classmates.
The poem continues by unraveling the weightiness of the decision that the traveler must make. He weighs the differences and similarities of each path that can only be captured as far as his eye could see before there was a bend in one or the other. Which to take?
He chose the “one less traveled by,” and then proclaimed as a closing to his verse, “that has made all the difference.”
Angelo took the road less traveled just by choosing faith – faith in Christ for his salvation and future home in heaven. He had an ongoing infatuation with many scientists, particularly Stephen Hawking, a giant in quantum physics and cosmology. One thing he would always follow-up with when speaking of Hawking, I vividly remember was, you know he doesn’t believe there is a God? He would ask more as a statement, nodding his head in disapproval. I could read what was on his mind, as he pursed his lips and sort of grimaced with a squint of his eyes, clearly marveling at this brilliant physicist’s inability to see the Creator of this universe he had devoted a lifetime of study toward.
I am eternally thankful that like Frost penned in his classic prose, in the human condition that his poem undercurrents, when faced with the choice, my grandfather made the better one.
Yet he knows the way I have taken;
when he has tested me, I will emerge as pure gold.
Job 23:10
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2023%3A10&version=CSB
Mining Beneath the Ordinary 