Grinding Gears: The Continuing Education of a White Father to Black Children

The car lurches violently forward, once…twice…then shudders into silence. The dashboard lights are alight, and Mo sits behind the wheel, shaking her head in exasperation.

“I’m not getting it,” she says, her voice shaking. She sounds like she did a long time ago as a foster child. Frustrated. Scared. Pissed off.

“You’re fine,” I say. “Take a breath. Put in the clutch.”

She sighs loudly, steels herself, then pushes her left foot down to the floor.

“Is it in neutral?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, giving the stick a shake, making sure the tell-tale play of neutral was evident.

“Ok. So, try again. Restart the car.”

She turns the key, and the forgiving old Volvo is cheerfully revived, unhurt and unhindered by the numerous stalls.

“Put it into first,” I say.

She hesitantly manipulates the gearshift, as if it were poisonous, or something icky.

“Don’t be afraid of this old box, Mo,” I say. “You aren’t going to hurt it just by shifting. This thing is a tank. Now…give it some gas and start releasing the clutch…not too much! You’re revving the engine too high. Just a bit. Find that spot where the car begins to move…”

The car starts to crawl forward, and there is hope. But then come the big, bone-rattling lurches, and the eventual engine stall.

“You suck!” shouts Shay from the backseat.

“Not helpful Shay,” I respond. “It’ll be your turn soon enough.”

Mo is getting to the point of giving up. Her arms are limp across the wheel, and she’s staring out through the bug-flecked windshield, breathing hard through her nose. Dusk is setting in over the parking lot, and a bloated sun has found the cruel spot between the low cloud deck and the horizon, making us lower the sunscreens and squint into the west.

The world of a 15-year-old is not one I’d want to revisit. I remember how dire everything seemed. Like, EVERYTHING. Everyone was trying so damn hard to figure out who they were, where they belonged. New friends were made as easy as old friends were let go, all based on whatever group they, or you, were trying to be a part of. Cool kids became dorks, fat kids became jocks, awkward kids became “hot…” Everything was just a random Mad Libs of sweaty, hormonal nonsense. And I admit, I’ve had very little patience for it when the girls bring it up. I’d forgotten how hard it can be, usually rolling my eyes at the very notion of the importance of 15-year-old life. It all seems so damn silly. Vapid. Empty. Inconsequential.

But this…this shit is different. Trying to navigate all this from a COVID-19 distance, relationships formed and lost over text message…these kids can’t stop being 15. It doesn’t take a break. And in many ways, because their world is so much smaller in this pandemic, it’s been a lot harder. The friends they actually do get to see they see too often, and nerves are growing thin. It’s completely natural and understandable, but it is a strain that we non-coming-of-age-during-COVID folks cannot really imagine. The stress on our kids right now is incredible. I know that I have been trying a bit harder — well, a LOT harder — to understand why they’re disengaged from the family and on their phone all the time, and why they are short with us, and why I’m such an asshole simply for existing near them.

I’m kidding…kind of. I know I’ve raised my voice to meet these behaviors, sometimes loudly, because we are ALL frustrated. And just DONE with it all. I dare one single parent of a teenager, right now, to say they have not had an interaction with their child they are not proud of. I DARE you. Because if you haven’t lost your shit on your kid during all this over some dishes in the sink or piles of clothes on the floor or them just looking at you wrong, you’re a damn liar.

“Try again, Mo,” I say. “You’ll get this.” There is no tachymeter on the Volvo, so there is no visual aid to say when the RPMs get to X, slowly release the clutch. This whole thing is by feel.

And she’s just got to feel it out on her own.

“You just have to keep trying.”

Every Tuesday night during the summer, the park down by our house has free concerts. The acts vary between country singers and classic rock cover bands and old lady a Capella groups. It doesn’t matter; it’s an excuse to get out of the house, go get some ice pops or barbeque from the food trucks, sit in a lawn chair and drink a few beers. The kids get to run around, throw frisbees, guffaw over something they all saw online, whatever. Since it is outside, we feel fairly confident that it is COVID-safe, so long as we keep our distance from other parties.

A few weeks ago, Mo and her neighbor-friend were walking ahead of us, camping chairs under their arms, headed down toward the park to watch a band play. Cars and trucks were slowly passing in both directions, looking for spots along the suburban street to park. Amy and I were keeping our distance, letting the girls go on ahead as they cackled about God knows what. I saw a big, red truck roll slowly up to the girls, the passenger window rolling down as it approached. I saw a young man lean out the window — maybe mid-20s — and shout something. Then the window rolled up amidst wild laughter and the truck sped off. Mo’s arms slumped, and her eyes went to her feet. Her friend immediately put her arm around her, said something into her ear, and they picked up their pace toward the park.

When we caught up to them, Mo hesitantly admitted what they boy had said.

“Black Lives Matter, bitch!”

We asked if she wanted to go home, but Mo said she didn’t want to. We continued down to the park, found a place to sit, and listened to the band. On any other night, Mo would have run around, asked for a few bucks to get ice cream, and otherwise would have just acted like any other kid in that park. But that night, she walked cautiously, wedged between her sister and her neighbor friend, glancing furtively around…looking for that truck.

She was terrified.

We left after two songs.

Mo is not a political person. She cares about cheerleading and hopefully getting back to school. She cares about getting McDonalds for lunch, a boy she has a crush on, and ridiculous (but oh so important!) drama floating around her friends.

But she cannot escape the politics of her melanin. Her very skin is political, whether she likes it or not. There is no pause, there is no hiding. And in this political environment, in this part of the country, it is brought front and center to her all the time.

Sometimes it’s overtly racist, like the Truck Man. That’s the easy stuff. But sometimes it comes from friends at school in backhanded ways: “You’re the whitest Black girl I’ve ever met!” or “why do you like country music?” or “I wish I had your hair, mine is just normal” or million other things that cut. These jaw-dropping comments come when she least expects it. And they sting. She tries not to let on that they do, but they do sting. She’s very much aware she has the darkest skin tone of anyone on her cheerleading squad — or pretty much any group she’s a part of — and does not like the team pictures. Not because she’s the only Black girl, but because photographers cannot manage to capture her along with the lighter-skinned kids. She almost always comes out darker, blurrier, than her teammates.

“I don’t even have a face in this one,” she said once while looking at the line of girls, picking herself out within a nanosecond. “All you can see is my teeth. God, I hate being this dark.”

Her high school mascot is the Rebel, which until only fairly recently, wore the gray Confederate uniform and waved the Confederate flag (the removal of which many people around here still bemoan as “P.C. bullshit”). Like the other Black kids in school, she is supposed to just swallow it and shut up.

This champagne-colored 1988 Volvo 240 DL sedan has been in my family for years, as only a Volvo can be. It has 320,000 miles on it (that we know of…the odometer was broken for a while, so we aren’t entirely sure). Standard 4-cylinder, 5-speed transmission. Power steering, but that’s about it. Crank windows. Air conditioner barely [doesn’t] work. My brother asked if I wanted it for the girls, that his kids didn’t want anything to do with it, and I said yes. My dad had bought the car for my younger sister back in the mid-1990s for her to drive in high school. She drove it for a number of years then gave it to my older brother. He’s a car guy, and to his credit, he’d kept it up.

We were that family. The family with Volvos. I can’t remember a time our driveway wasn’t darkened by one of those sturdy wheeled boxes.

I was excited to be the third of the three Welch siblings to own “Champagne.” I just knew the girls would love this car — this classic — as much as we did. It was a kind of family totem. Sturdy, uncomplicated, safe…almost pretentious in its unpretentiousness. It was our kind of car. And the history of it! Why wouldn’t they be excited to inherit this Welch car? Why wouldn’t they be excited to inherit this heritage?

When I pulled into the driveway with it and tried to explain how cool it was…it, to say the least, fell flat.

After they stared at it in mild disgust for a while, I explained to the girls how both their aunt and uncle had owned the car, how it had been in our family for years, how cool it was that now we owned it, how amazing it was that it was still running (Volvos run forever kids!), how awesome it was their uncle had given it to them, and how no one in their high school would have anything like it.

At last, Shay said, “Think of all the Welch farts trapped in that seat.”

We have a very, very old clock in our house. It’s one of those miniature grandfather clocks that sits on a shelf that must be wound every so often with a key and the motion of the pendulum set. The thing still works, keeps perfect time. I inherited the clock from my grandmother, who apparently had inherited it from her great grandmother, to whom it had been a wedding present in the 1840s. Her parents had given it to her the day before she and her new husband had left West Virginia for Missouri in a covered wagon.

So yeah, one could say it’s a family heirloom.

One day Shay asked why I kept it wound, why I didn’t like to let it run down. I told her the covered wagon story, about who all had owned it. About how all those people had listened to that same tick- tock, tick-tock in their homes. For some reason I felt that since it was passed down to me, I had an obligation to keep it going.

Mo stared at the clock and said, “Our hairdresser knew our bio-mom and bio-dad. She says Shay looks like our mom and that I look like my dad, but I’ve never seen a picture of him, so I don’t know. I wish I knew what he looked like. That I knew where I came from, too.”

What I didn’t tell her about that clock is that it may have once been wound by slave hands. I didn’t know how to tell her that. I don’t know how I’ll ever tell either of them that.

I had two reasons to make sure the girls learned on a stick shift out of the gate: 1) they can’t [easily] dick around with their phones while driving a manual transmission and 2) if they can drive a stick, they can drive just about anything, which could prove useful in a jam. I also knew that if they learned on an automatic first, they’d never even bother learning stick. So, I insisted they learn on the Volvo, or they wouldn’t learn at all (a hollow enough threat, but it worked).

Mo eases the car into first, and for the first time, it does not stall. I see her grin…just a little. “Good job! You did it! Just putter around in first for a few minutes,” I say. She rolls slowly through the darkening parking lot around lamp posts, feeling good, the engine wheezing in low gear. “Go ahead and put it into second,” I say. She doesn’t put the clutch down far enough, and the gears grind. “Put the clutch back in!” I shout.

A few weekends ago, in the middle of the night, Mo came down and woke Amy (I of course did not hear a damn thing, so I snoozed comfortably away).

Mo couldn’t sleep. She was scared. Every noise she heard made her sit up in bed, searching the dark for intruders.

The last time Mo did this she was 7 years old and still a foster child. When she came to our home, she was so scared to go to sleep that I’d have to read to her for over an hour, hoping her eyes would finally close so I could sneak out and finally go to bed. Sometimes she’d hear a creak of my footfall and sit straight up, scream, and I’d have to do it all over again. On more nights than I can count, I’d bargain with her to sleep on the cold floor outside her room, so she’d feel safe enough to drift off (she’d wanted me to sleep with her in her bed, but being a foster child, this was not allowed). After a few months, she outgrew her nightly terror, but still slept fretfully.

Now, that old fear was back.

Amy walked her into the family room and had a long talk with her. Mo had been shouldering a lot lately. She had broken up with a boyfriend (ugh) some months before but had remained friends with him. Since then, he, along with a number of her other friends, had become deeply involved with an uber-conservative evangelical church (not uncommon here in the Texas Panhandle). They’d told her she was going to hell for not being “born again,” that Donald Trump was the savior of Christianity, that being gay or trans was a damnable sin, and that our Episcopal church was nearly Satanic in our acceptance of “those people.”

They told her that Black Lives Matter was beyond ridiculous. When she tried to say that she didn’t really know much about the BLM movement, but that she had experienced racist things that had deeply affected her, they laughed it off. They show her memes of dangerous-looking Black kids doing violence against White kids, using them to demean, discredit, and mock her nascent views.

“See?” they say, “Black people hurt White people too!” or “if Black people would follow the law, they wouldn’t be getting hurt. All Lives Matter.”

Things like that.

Mo doesn’t really know how to feel about it all. She’s never really bothered to form a formal opinion on the matter. But their dismissiveness, their cavalier attitude toward what she knows is beyond political to her, that affects her actual life, is a punch in her gut.

These were her friends.

These were kids she thought loved her.

These were kids that not two years ago were ready to fight for her when a kid called her the N word down at the park.

Now they’re laughing at her.

Kids are constantly trying to “play adult.” At 15, they are trying on their parents’ proverbial suits, seeing how they feel in them. Parroting their views. They don’t really understand what they’re saying. They root for politics like they do football teams. Blind fans. Easy to get on board with. No thought required.

Mo doesn’t know how — or even if she wants — to fight with these kids. She knows it seems wrong in her gut, but she’s a lot like me. Once someone told me “I’d walk 10 miles around a lake to avoid swimming across it for fear of making a wave.” So, she usually waves it off, tries to change the subject. She’s come to me before, asking for advice of what to do when she’s being ganged up on by these “friends.” I advise her to tell them that if she doesn’t want to talk about that stuff, then they shouldn’t make her, and if they can’t respect that, then they’re going to lose her as a friend.

She says she understands, but ultimately my advice is kind of weak.

Mo has now shifted into second gear, and she’s feeling good about it. She’s relaxing behind the wheel. I tell her to put it into neutral and come to a full stop. She does.

Mo looks around and says, “well, maybe…maybe this car is kind of fun.”

“Good!” I say, “I thought you might think so!”

Mo sits for a second, the car idling, the sun now hidden behind the purple High Plains horizon, the colors in the sky growing cooler. She smiles contentedly.

Then lets loose a CRAZY loud fart. Long. And deep.

“MO! Seriously?!?” I shout.

“I’m adding to all those old Welch toots. It’s my seat now.”

“Yes it is young lady.”

We are forming a new heritage. Not through blood or antebellum clocks…but apparently through old Volvos and farts. I suppose it’s as good a heritage as any. Better even.

Shay starts to belly laugh, and we all follow suit. “Good thing the windows are open,” I say.

We putter around the parking lot for a while, practicing stops, starts, downshifting to slow down, etc. We find a little incline, and I tell her to stop at the top.

“Try to get into first,” I say. “If you roll back some, that’s okay, but you need to practice starting on a hill.”

Mo revs the engine and lets up on the clutch. We lurch forward, but she finds purchase and gets it going. “Good job!” I say. She then shifts to second, and the gears grind.

“Sorry!” she says.

“That’s ok,” I say, “sometimes you gotta grind it to find it.” She’s grinning widely now, confidently going wherever she wants to go, getting used to — and maybe even liking — her “new” Welch car.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“What happens if I’m at a stop light, and it turns green, and I stall trying to go? What if the truck behind me starts honking and gets mad?”

I saw her fingers clenching the steering wheel, her anxiety raising at the thought of that red truck behind her, honking. Yelling.

“Fuck ‘em.” I said, to her surprise. “Just let them honk. Take a breath, put in your clutch, restart the engine, and ease into first. Leave those bastards in your rearview mirror.”

“Okay,” she said, giggling.

“And if you have to grind them gears honey, you grind ’em. You never have to apologize.”