I grew up in a small suburb outside of Seattle, Washington. A painfully white place. My neighbors had the metaphorical white picket fence. The dad next door always wore his penny loafers when he mowed the lawn. There wasn’t a lot of Blackness where I come from.
From a young age, my family constellation was different. I grew up with two unrelated godparents who, having respectively decided not to have their own children, loved me like their own. Bobbie, my godfather, was my one Black parent.
As part of my gender transition, I legally changed my first and last name. I took my godfather Bobbie’s surname: Lyons. When I asked him what the name Lyons meant to him, he responded with this poem:
Stand over here. Don’t move back. We’re the ones we choose to have our back. Not the first or the last. But this too will pass. Have you ever wondered? Is it really that deep, the name, Lyons, or, is it that heavy with struggle or pain of joy sustained just hearing that name? Sustain your own self, your own gains?
Stand over here. Don’t move back. We’re the ones we choose to have our back. We gather as family to celebrate life in the beginning, and in between all our trials and tribulations of everyone’s flights. Some end too quickly and no one will ever forget because as a Lyons you leave your hefty heart for many to share and give as gifts.
Stand over here. Don’t move back. We’re the ones we choose to have our back. It doesn’t matter if you’re big or small but what matters, you get up when you fall. I’m not your daddy, not your mother, not your brother or your sister. I’m a Lyons standing over here waiting my turn to change the fear. Gather around me if you like but this is my flight. I will be the best and will reach new heights of love, pain, and hardship that will continue to shape my life.
Stand over here. Don’t move back. We’re the ones we choose to have our back. I’m not perfect but we are perfect in the eyes of our lovers. They see us as we are, not the way others want us to be. We are caught in between finding out who we are today.
Stand over here. Don’t move back. We’re the ones we choose to have our back. It’s people who make our name. They are artists. They are musicians. They are Kings and they are bitches. They are black and they are white. They are gay. They are queers. Questioning everyday who they want to be, today.
Stand over here. Don’t move back. We’re the ones we choose to have our back. We are many, but really, we are one. But oh my god, we are a force.
— Bobbie Lyons
My Italian godmother called me one day recently. Distraught. She said something had been eating away at her. Why had I relinquished the Easton family name? Did I do it to hurt them, she asked? Did I do it to reject the family that birthed me — the family that raised me?
No, I said. I did it to honor my Black father. One of the men that raised me. It seems there is a lot of patriarchy tied up in last names. It shook my family that I let go of Easton, the name bestowed upon me by my white father.
When I changed my name from Easton to Lyons, it wasn’t to reject my family. Nor was it to reject my whiteness. It was to honor. To recognize the ways I’ve been fathered — fathered by a Black man. Black men in this country don’t get enough credit for their labor, for their parenting. And I can tell you firsthand that Black parenting is not the same as white parenting. No, no, not at all.
I changed my name to pay respect. Family, you see, is about more than just biological connections.
My white parents put food on the table, gave me an education, helped me with my medical bills, and made sure there was always a roof over my head. I am grateful for that. My white parents gave me privilege in many forms. My Black father didn’t have access to the same socioeconomic opportunities that my white parents did. He struggled more to make ends meet. He faced systemic racism in periods of unemployment that prevented him from being hired. Things my white parents would never have to deal with. He faced adversity, constantly, and he kept going. He kept fighting. Resilience, yes, this is what our Lyons name is about.
My Black father loves poetry. Maybe it’s where I got my penchant for words and creativity. Every wall of his house was covered top to bottom in artwork. When he read his poem to me over the phone, my eyes filled with tears.
“Stand over here. Don’t move back.” His words resounded inside me.
If the inauguration this year was any indication, with the powerful reading of a poem by Amanda Gorman, Black poetry is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps some things are just easier for us to reckon with in poetry.
My mother taught me that we should love everyone the same, regardless of color, and that color didn’t matter. She thought she was helping me by teaching me to be “colorblind.” But the problem with that is that color does matter. To ignore color is to erase. As a young child, Bobbie taught me about color, about his life — when growing up in Indianapolis, Indiana, still meant segregation and hate. You can’t erase the heads we turned when Bobbie and my brother and I walked into a rural country store together. The looks. The world sees color. You can’t erase Blackness. I won’t erase his, not this Black History Month, not any day.
When Obama was elected, I wept tears of relief and joy. A Black father in the White House. I knew something about a Black parent in a white house. How the worlds collided.
Bobbie got in trouble sometimes for being too loud, too much, too profane, too real. He always told it like it was around the dinner table. My penchant for speaking my truth, I got that from my Black father.
This Black History Month, I wish to honor not just my Black father, but all Black fathers. He has always had my back. He’d believe in me even when years of addiction and mental illness ripped my life apart. He’d pick me up on the side of the road when my white parents were at the end of their rope with me. I didn’t know when I was little how much I’d need his wisdom, his strength, his words.
My white dad, as much as I love him, couldn’t prepare me for life as a queer transgender man. He couldn’t understand, possibly, the first time I got verbally accosted in public for taking up space. The white men at the next table over who laughed at me. The stranger on the street who spit at me. The constant daily battle of trying to exist in this world as a human who doesn’t fit the dominant white, straight, cisgender fairy tale.
It was Bobbie I called. It was my Black father I needed to talk to and ask, “How do you deal? Does it ever get any easier?”
“You just hold your head up high, Danni. You can’t take it all in.”
When I learned of a young bipolar man like me being gunned down by the cops and killed, I texted my Black father for solace.
He responded woefully, reminded of those he’s lost to police brutality. He reminded me my odds are better with the color of my skin. We swapped a solemn, “I hope this never happens to you.” My eyes shed a few tears and I moved on with my day.
There’s a narrative (or perhaps the absence of a narrative) in our society that suggests Black fathers are absent. Mine was far from absent. Today, I’m lifting up the voice of one who raised me. Who taught me how to fall down and get back up with grace in a society that constantly wants to erase you. He is where I get my resilient spirit. In a society that tells us that we are too much, or not enough, I stand for and with my Black father today.
Bobbie didn’t have the money to give that my white family did. But what he gave to me was love. True, unconditional love. The kind of love that lets your children fall down and stumble and tells them you’ll love them no matter what as they walk through this world. He never wavered, not even when my life was upended by mania and heartache. He just accepted me, loved me, and saw my inherent good — no matter what. He loved me with open arms in all my states. There is a steadfastness to his love.
I’ve read a lot of stories of Black children with white parents. I don’t see a lot of stories of white children with Black parents. That’s why I’m writing this. Family, race, love — in 2021, there are many constellations. My family is white; my family is Black. And here we are, standing. We won’t move back.
And if you’re reading this, Bobbie, I love you to the moon and back. Thank you, forever, for being Black.
Thank you for standing with me in this gender transition. For loving D for who he is. And for reminding me the world can be cruel, but I can and will choose love. You, forever, have always had my back.
Happy Black History Month. Today and every day, may we honor the Black parents who raised us.
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