A Letter to My Brother in the Year He Becomes a Father

Eric Solomon
9 min readMar 24, 2021

After a Conversation between Fern and Dolly in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland

You left home as soon as you could…. I never said this to you before and maybe I should have. You know when you were growing up you were eccentric to other people. You maybe seemed weird, but it was just because you were braver and more honest than everybody else. And you could see me when I was hiding from everybody. And sometimes you could see me before I saw myself. I needed that in my life. And you’re my sister. I would’ve loved having you around all these years. You left a big hole by leaving.

— Dolly to Fern

Little Brother,

I never said this to you before and maybe I should have. You are not our father; you are not our father’s father or his father before him. You are your own man; you make your own choices, and your new son will be his own man too. Perhaps I shouldn’t even call you little brother. Do you remember when you became taller than me? Five years between us, and still, you tower above me. You once said you always looked up to me and our big sister. But now, we must both look up to you. Do you remember when you became a man, when you grew nearly a foot above our heads?

Brother, there’s so much I want to tell you about what it meant to me to grow into manhood in our home state: Mississippi, father of waters where the capital city has no water, paradoxical killer of dreams and cradle of culture, state of unbelonging. But I can only tell you what I know of the landscape, of the people who move across it, what I remember. When I watched Nomadland, I saw you in the son seeking his father’s advice as he prepares to become a new father. And I saw our father in the nomads, how he spent months in a boarding house after our parent’s divorce, how out of misguided pride or stubbornness he chooses not to call me, how you and he go through cycles where you don’t speak to one another, how he now lives a life of near total isolation. I saw our father in Bob Wells, the heft and bulk a contrast to tender eyes full of grief. I saw him in his inability to know his son, in his knowledge of someone lost that cannot be replaced. Do you remember how many times our father threatened us with his death, holding over us the possibility that he would kill himself and “then what would we do”?

Brother, do you remember when you were afraid to leave home, when what was outside frightened you, when at twenty you wanted to close off the world around you? I saw in you something you did not see in yourself for I had already seen it in myself: the anxiety and fear and grievance and manipulation that shaped our understanding of manhood from before we knew who we were. I never said this to you before and maybe I should have: I see now how far you have come. And I know this to be true: we are not the inheritors of the mental instability of our forefathers. There are genes you cannot change, but there are patterns you do not have to repeat.

Brother, know that different is not to be feared. Pay attention to your son — have dreams and expectations for his life — but allow him the sacred, protected space in which to fashion his own becoming.

Brother, do you remember the jingle we all sang growing up to spell our home state, how the “s” was always the “crooked letter,” bent? Did you hear the uncountable times I was called sissy? Did you know how my meandering walk gave something away that I didn’t even know about myself, how others saw in me something I didn’t yet see in myself?

Little brother, I remember when you were learning to walk, I spent hours on the swing set in our backyard. Your legs barely beneath you, I already longed for flight. Swinging, suspended between sky and earth, I can see the red lanyard around my neck attached to the plastic Walkman cassette player. Inside, Bette Midler’s voice sang to me through headphones loud enough for me to hear but quiet enough to keep her as my secret. Do you know what it was for me to be a secret, to hold a secret? To feel as though every gesture, every word gave something of myself away to those who would not understand. When I did come to know, do you know what it felt to hide, to shrink myself within the limited imaginations of those in our home state who could only see me as weird, different, eccentric, who whispered “one of those” in registers loud enough to be heard? Brother, know that different is not to be feared. Pay attention to your son — have dreams and expectations for his life — but allow him the sacred, protected space in which to fashion his own becoming.

Brother, after you learned you would be a new father, you asked me, “Have you read Between the World and Me?” You are becoming a white father to a white son. You seek advice on how to raise your son in a state — in a nation, in a world — that continues to warp too many white people’s minds as it destroys black people’s bodies. You were named after our father and I after our father’s father, both men loving in their way but flawed and imperfect products of ways of thinking and being that seeped into the brownish-Cypress-tanned water we drank growing up, corroding us from within no matter how much we have tried to break away. Know this, each word and each act can remove the embedded bias that we must strive to unlearn. This re-education is deliberate, intentional, necessary, and ongoing. It is not enough to say that we are not like our father — that we are not like the men who still populate the white cul-de-sacs of our Mississippi. Know this: your son must know other ways of being, for intergenerational white supremacy is a cycle that must be confronted and broken through education and anti-racist ways of being and acting.

Brother, do you remember the way our father casually spoke words of such harm that would render other men walk-on characters in a performance he would always inevitably lead? Do you understand now how it shaped us to hear racial epithets spoken with such flippancy? Do you know how it shaped me to hear “c*cksuker” uttered with such force as to define the whole of one man’s existence through one sex act? Brother be careful the words you say for your son will hear them. Beyond words, model actions that advocate the full equality and humanity of all. Challenge yourself to become an accomplice in the struggle. Remember what Coates tells us: “Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe” (60). Brother, rebuke and denounce any association with the identity of the hateful tribe. Do it more than once. Do it over and over again so your son will see how to be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic in a world that we know will teach him otherwise. This is not just a rethinking of ideas but an active restructuring of social relations. Take responsibility for showing your son a different world. “One is responsible to life,” James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time. “It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come to which we shall return” (339).

But brother, know that in this “terrifying darkness” the goal of fatherhood cannot be perfection. You will make mistakes. Model those for your son as learning and growth opportunities. But know that if you teach your son that he is no better than any other person or living creature, he will be one with the world around him and not against it. He will know injustice when he sees it; he will know right from wrong, love from hate, and he will activate his imagination in the service of those who are unlike him as much if not more than those who look like him, think like him, speak like him, love like him. I don’t know how else to say this: neither you nor I nor he are or will ever be any better than any other person because we are white. I know you know this to be true. Help him to know this in the marrow of his bones from the moment he draws breath and looks up at you with eyes of unyielding devotion.

I’m not any braver or more honest than most people, and I am not a father. I can only speak to you as your brother. I’ve never said this to you before but maybe I should have. I wish I had been around more for you. In my own becoming, I disappeared from yours. That one’s on me. The older you get, you’ll know that there are those for whom parenthood is the choice, those for whom the settler’s life is the way, those for whom staying in one place is a life well led. Then there are those who roam, those for whom there are no good-byes but only see-you-down-the-roads. There are those of us who must disappear from time to time, who seek recalibration away from the ties meant through tradition and custom to root us in one place. There are those for whom belonging is not defined through location or person, privilege or comfort, zip code or tribe. Brother, in this year that you become a father and in all the years we have yet to share together, know that when you need me, I may be far but not out of reach, obscured through distance but not out of view. In the new dad land in which you will soon find yourself, know that you will always be the little brother on the other end of the walkie talkie asking his older brother if he copies.

I copy. When we followed our mother to her biopsy appointment last summer, you asked if I remembered Alexander Supertramp, the invented name of the late Christopher McCandless who became famous after his death in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Sean Penn’s film adaptation of the same name. “You remind me of him,” you said. A deep thinker, wanderer, curious intellect, committed advocate, and haunted soul, “McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul” (183). Brother when you said this to me, you knew that McCandless did not survive his Alaskan adventure in self-reliance, and I have wondered for some time after we talked what message you were trying to send me in comparing me with McCandless. I think now I understand: you too have seen beyond my pretenses, have seen me in a way I cannot always see myself.

There are many interpretations of whether McCandless intended to return from Alaska or not, but I believe he did intend to come out of the wilderness. After reading Tolstoy, McCandless wrote in his Alaskan journal found after his death: “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED” (189). Dear brother, in this year you become a father, I am beyond happy to share this new journey with you. Time and experience have taught me that I would leave a big hole by leaving.

I have been to the inner country.

I have returned.

I have chosen to stay.

Love,

Your Big Brother

“My dad used to say what’s remembered lives.

I maybe spent too much of my life just remembering.”

- Fern, Nomadland

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Eric Solomon

Writer. Professor. Creative spirit. Originally from Leland, MS, birthplace of Kermit the frog. ericesolomon.com https://twitter.com/eesolomo