Twenty-nine years and four and one-half months—that’s how long my father has worked for the United States Steel company. My grandfather gave them thirty-five years.
I will never forget that after he died they tried to deny my nana the benefits that were rightfully hers under his pension plan. “There was an interruption in service,” they said, that rendered his service less extensive. They called it an interruption. We called it World War II. We won, after a while. Perhaps they grew tired of denying benefits to old ladies whose husbands had been at Normandy in ‘44.
So I’m worried right now, because I know that they’re mean sonsofbitches. They don’t care that my grandfather worked for them. That his father worked for them—that a huge part of my family depends on them. Because they sold the coal mines Friday—they gave up holdings they’ve held since 1907, when they wrested control away from the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, and sometime before that, when the DeBardeleben family ran out of guts and cash.
Twenty-five years is a big payoff for a company man; there’s a huge vestment of pension. Thirty is even bigger. Thirty doubles what you get at twenty-five. So what is going to happen at twenty-nine years and four and one-half months? We don’t know yet. We don’t know.
I’m worried. I’m real worried. Let’s say it this way, and most boys know it, or feel it—maybe it’s just part of the clay-rich dirt we have in the South—that they are less than their fathers. I feel it. I feel it all the time. I feel every day that he gave me things he could never have; every day of my life.
His father tried to give it to him. My dad was just a little too young—like I was—for college. Then he met my mom. They got married, and he went into the mines—just in time for me a year later. Because of family. To take care of me and my momma. Just like my pop went to the University of Alabama right after the war, and just like my dad tried to make a go of it—I almost botched it, but it worked in the end.
So I hesitate sometimes. This year I got a big award. The biggest we have at our school. It was for writing a paper for our most prestigious society. I get published and get a real-life citation and books with my name in them and a big plaque with my name on it and a five-hundred dollar check, to boot.
Over thirty years ago, my dad worked for the law firm that writes the checks.
It was 1970, and United States Steel was under a hell of a lot of fire. They were accused of discriminating against black folks in hiring (shhh: they were). So they hired the best to defend them. And my dad, thinking about law as a career, hit the books for them.
Thirty-three years later a man from that law firm is smiling white teeth at me, patting me on the back—he’s making a speech about me—and I know the man, because I’ve read about him, and read stuff by him. He used to clerk for Chief Justice Warren Burger. He runs the the local branch of the firm my father works once worked for. And I hate this kind of Faulkner problem.
I don’t want to do better than my father. I want to surpass him in every way. I never, ever want to be anything he could not be. I am all the things he could not be because he made it possible. Whatever I am—I’m worried. I’m worried that those sonsofbitches might try to bilk him out of his pension. Even if they do, it’s alright—he put me in a place where we can figure it all out.
We can do it together.
Caveat: One of the best songs about daddies I’ve ever heard is Young Master Sunshine Photogenic 1982’s “West Georgia.” A better song has never been written with so much loss and love and grit in it; I listen to it everyday, and those ten good Christmases fill me with all the hope and failures of our rusted, perfect South.