Recipe for a Black Father by Murgatroyd Monaghan
2024 Honourable Mention
Find the photo of the finished product in your dresser drawer. This is all you have to go on. The photo and your early childhood memories are your only references for how this recipe will turn out. If you are not an experienced baker, observe other Black fathers in your neighbourhood until you acquire a taste for them.
Collect your ingredients. Take money from your classmates’ backpacks to be able to afford them. Don’t go to the local grocery store; they hire people to follow you around there. Send your white mother instead. Explain to her why you need her to go. Take ten deep breaths into your mixing bowl when she says you’re overreacting.
When your mother doesn’t come home with everything you need in a father, take the rest of the ingredients from what you can find around you. It’s easier in your house to find crack than carrots; bullets than broccoli. That’s okay: vitamin content is not as important in a father as the ability to protect.
Don’t stir. You’re making a father, not a batch of cookies. There’s no spoon in your house without dope residue anyways. Sprinkle your questions all over the dough. Transfer to Tupperware. Find a lid that almost fits. Shake until it threatens to blow.
Turn your questions into violence. Knead the dough with your fists until it’s a consistency you don’t recognize. If it frightens your teacher, add flour to whiten. If it falls apart in your hands after a night of drinking, add water. Get used to the way the dough feels safe and strong in your hands.
Transfer the dough to a tray. Bake it until it’s brown. Then browner. Then black. Take it out only just before the fire alarm goes off. Confuse the fire alarm for sirens. Feel familiar panic in your stomach but be soothed by your father’s smell. It isn’t fear, it’s only hunger. The smell is how a father tells you he’s ready. You will never feel ready. Learn to smell readiness and be afraid.
Remove the tray from the oven and see a stretcher covered in blood. Do not let anyone cover the lump of father with a white wax sheet. Pick it up with both hands. Burn your fingers. Scream. The father will crumble in your wounded hands.
Cry in front of your mother. See her shrug. Watch her cigarette smoke curl into the range hood. See it erase your father’s smoke. Hear her coughing drown out the sounds of the sirens. Feel the cold from her anger whiten your palms where they were burned. Choke when she tells you you’re overreacting. You barely knew him, she’ll say. Anyway, he had it coming.
Scrape the remains of your charred questions from the metal baking sheet and drown them in cheap beer. Take the batteries out of the smoke alarm. Learn to use your mother’s drugs. Straighten your hair. Tuck your lips between your teeth to thin them. Trade your Nikes for Vans. Go to the grocery store for baking soda and be amazed when nobody follows you.
When you develop allergies to sirens, to anger, to tears, note all of this for all future father recipes. If you still can’t breathe, it’s probably anaphylaxis. Attempting to bake a father often triggers new allergies. You can easily replace these ingredients with drop of sterile water; white powders; Brillo screens; a glass pipe; a flame.
Eventually, you will be allergic to everything. You can look for replacement ingredients in other men, but as soon as you smell their Blackness your fire alarm will go off. Self-treat your new allergies with every drug you can find.
Go to rehab or don’t, depending on the budget you have available for your next attempt. Try adding therapy to taste, but remember that your breaths were all in the mixing bowl. Suffocate. Never find out if your mother thinks you had it coming or not.
Wake up in a hospital bed. This is the fermentation process. Be patient. It is essential, in order for the dough to rise.
Repeat the kneading and rising process as many times as necessary. There will be many more hospital beds. Sometimes your mother’s fists will do the kneading, sometimes others’, sometimes your own. Sometimes just the memory of fists will be enough to deflate the dough. Patience. A good father can’t be rushed. As long as there is still dough, embrace the darkness again and rise, rise, rise.
Feel powerful when your mother scoffs at your curls and says, “you look like him.” Your heart is the oven. This time, you don’t need anything but a mirror. The scent of readiness will grow on your breath. Turn up the heat. You will light everything on fire. You will fill the house with the smoke from your nostrils. Now you have everything you need.
Remove the tray from the oven and offer it to your mother with pride. The words from your blackened lips will burn her. She will hear sirens and imagine death. Her anger is only fear. Show her that the sound is only the fire alarm; tell her that you have replaced the batteries.
At your mother’s one-year clean date celebration, bring a mirror. Produce the father-photo from your pocket. Stand together, the three of you. Your mother has never cooked a meal in her life; she doesn’t know a good recipe when she sees one. But you are not your mother. When you smile, everyone else in the little church basement can see that your attempt looks just like the photograph.
Write it all down on cue cards. Begin your own recipe book for passing down to the next generation. Begin to experiment with broccoli instead of bullets; carrots instead of crack. Note that this smells just like your Black father too. Write this down on another cue card.
Your father cannot be contained in a recipe book, or a broken heart, or an urn, or a healthy stew, or a gentrified city block. At community potlucks, at vigils, at clean-time celebrations, at graduations, close your eyes and smell every Black father. Write a cue card recipe for every one of these situations. Hand out recipes to kids who look at themselves and feel too Black. Hand out recipes to kids who look at themselves and feel too white. Teach the next generation to cook. Help them acquire a taste for their own stories.
Cook liberally for every man, woman and child in your neighbourhood who is ever hungry. Grow old. Feel wanted. Feel healed. Feel Black. Feel loved. Feel safe.