Black Fathers

Joe McCann on the experience of race, identity, and fatherhood.

My father, Barney Nkomlopoku Barnabas, was a paranoid schizophrenic. When a student of geology at the University of Strathclyde, he suffered a monumental breakdown. He stripped off all his clothes and ran naked through the campus. I always wonder about the white person who found him in this state. My father was very tall, seemingly menacing, and Black like midnight. From Dar es Salaam. They were kind to him. If this incident happened today, my father would have been plastered all over social media and labelled as a Black, mentally unstable terrorist. Thank God for the 80s.

I only learned of my father’s mental illness when I was in my thirties and not yet a dad myself. Barney had never been around much. He disappeared when I was six months old. Whenever I hear that old Bruce Springsteen song Highway Patrolman — the lyric “Man turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good” — it reminds me of my dad. Now the song is speaking of a wayward brother, but still. Obviously, things are more complex than that.

I am now a Black father myself. In Scotland. My son, Atlas Marlowe, is a magnificent specimen. Atlas is something of a marvel. Half-Hungarian. He was born in The Royal in Edinburgh, the first McCann to be born on this coast. When my wife, Virág McCann-Tóth passed him to me and I held him in my arms for the first time and thought, “Anyone who harms a baby must be evil.” It was an odd thought, one I did not expect to have, but I knew that as a biracial kid, Atlas would face some trials in life.

With my own son, I can’t imagine ever leaving his side unless I had to. Atlas is something of a marvel. He walks and talks, and you can’t quite believe this beautiful thing standing in front of you belongs to you. As a Black father, I am naturally overprotective to the point I drive everyone around me crazy. In my own childhood, I ended up in the hospital at least twice. Once I shared a bottle of bleach with my brother; another time I stuck a fork in a socket and was blown halfway across the room.

With Atlas, up until very recently I followed him around every step — even he was sick of it. I am trying to do better. I just don’t want to see him hurt. He’ll face a world that conspires to hurt him from the get-go. He is fair-skinned and has a quiff (where is the afro like Daddy, little man?), yet I know people will see his Blackness on him. I want him to embrace it but to be wary. I want people to see his Scottishness on him too.

There has been more than one occasion when I have been out with Atlas, and I can see people thinking he can’t be my son. You can see them almost reaching for their phone and hitting up X to say, “There was a strange Black man trying to snatch a white child down by the playground. Parents beware.” A few weeks ago, as I was dropping something off at Atlas’s nursery, a white man — another parent — stopped me from stepping inside the building and told me, “I can’t let you in here.” A couple of mothers behind me shouted the man down and told him my child was inside. He relented.

Growing up in Scotland of course this was not the first time I faced racism. I remember being in a pizza shop, Alberto’s on Maryhill Road. Behind the counter was a man named Dino. He stared at me and kept staring. He then asked me very casually, “If your mum’s white and your dad’s Black, does that make you half a nigger?” He laughed. I did not have an answer for him.

The racism I faced growing up didn’t vanish with time; it simply changed shape. It is currently a terrifying time for people of colour in the UK. The anti-immigration rhetoric being espoused from mainstream parties has divided and put people who look like me in danger. Now, we’ve always been in danger, but there was once a politics of respectability that cloaked and protected us. We now have politicians of immigrants telling those who came after them that they do not belong. It’s absurd and pandering to people who will never like anyone who is not 100% white. Last summer’s riots and the mainstreaming of ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric have only sharpened the stares I feel on the back of my neck when I’m running around with Atlas or we are playing football. The goings on in Falkirk were devastating. 

My father faced horrific discrimination himself. My gran, whom I dearly loved, fled the house when my mother introduced my father. She said to get that Black bastard out of the house. Yet my gran was my fiercest protector when I was growing up. She’d battle anyone who threw a racist comment my way.

I met my father only once. I was seven. We made arrangements to meet at Buchanan Street Bus Station. He brought gifts, delicately wrapped in years of no contact — an apology of sorts. I can’t remember much of what he said. When he left, he hugged me and went back to Africa. I always liked to think of him as an adventurer, off in some far-flung land, searching for his sons.

I spoke to my father a few times since Buchanan Street and shared a few letters. He had remarried and had more children of his own. His life had settled. He was being treated. His career as a geologist was flourishing. I think about him often in my own career. I am writing two plays now about Black men and their Black fathers. Whenever there is a storm of a day, I want to reach out to my father to ask him how best to deal with my son, Atlas.

Barney, my father, passed away in 2019. Prostate. We hadn’t spoken in almost ten years. I got a call from one of his daughters — a half-sister — about his death.

“These things happen,” one white friend of mine said.“Well, you did not really know him, so why does it matter?” another asked.

I know he’s gone, and I know I did not know him, not really but still.

I like to think he’s out there. My father. An adventurer from Tanzania.  Still looking for his son.