“Maybe things were different for white folks,” Jacob says. Jacob at one point describes a white woman wearing a shirt that says “My daughter is a lesbian because she’s supposed to be” and wonders at how a parent could be proud of having a queer child. Jacob says he equates queerness with femininity and sees his sons sexuality as running counter to tenets of masculinity.Ĭontributing to Jacob’s struggle to accept Isaac is what Jacob calls a set of rules that come with being black that he says Isaac disregards.
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“Men don’t do that! Women do that!” he yells at the way Isaac cleans his mouth with a napkin. “Boys don’t kiss other boys in my house!” Jacob says when he sees Isaac making two action figures kiss. There’s a persistent effort to reconcile the son he’s created with an inherited legacy of masculinity Jacob describes as “power” “influence” and “godliness.” Yet, it is that understanding that works to fracture his relationship with Isaac, who is gay and doesn’t behave in a way that Jacob understands. Jacob’s understanding of how men, particularly Black men, should behave, he writes, comes from the stoic and hardworking disposition of his grandparents, who raised him. Many of them were handled so little, yet we expected so much.”Ī central motif and source of conflict across the book’s 300 pages is the idea of masculinity and how that idea is or is not upheld by characters. “More than anything, I want readers to reconsider the capacity of our fathers’ hearts. “This book, this record of a poor black father’s appeal, is what any dying daddy might say to his son,” Black writes.