Raising Fences, Raising Questions
Michael Datcher’s novel, Raising Fences: A Black Man’s Love Story recently featured on the Today Show’s Book Club, is an intriguing twist on both the love story and the memoir. Datcher’s biography recounts a noble journey of one black boy with problems so poignant, yet so common to many black, male, American children. He is fatherless and without proper male role models; thus, he has to figure out what manhood means through his own childhood and young adult logic. To exacerbate matters, he stutters, which only serves to burden him with another disadvantage to overcome. In that the novel ends positively, Datcher survives some very challenging experiences, such as his involvement with a cult-like religious group. Most intriguing questions, about what it means to be a man, how one should serve God, and the transformative power of love are raised by Datcher’s novel. And some of his answers are very challenging, indeed.
In his interview with Matt Lauer and Terry McMillan on the Today Show, Datcher speaks of his growth to manhood as a time of feeling lost until he finds his future wife, Jenoyne. The building self-revelations that occur through his growth in the novel end up being subordinate to, even unbalanced by, the influence of finding the love of his life. He doesn’t seem to get it together until a loving female influence comes solidly into his existence. Does this mean, then, that a fatherless black male’s manhood is to be found ultimately in his relationship with women? Was Datcher incorrectly assigning more strength to the influence his father would have had on his early male development? In the end, he was as a child and is as an adult largely molded by grandmothers and girlfriends. A summary of the text is in order to provide hopefully a few answers to some of these questions.
The story begins with Datcher making arrangements with himself to find out who his father is. He shows us the impact of finding out that this man’s identity is sealed, which is only trumped by a more horrible revelation he receives once he gets older. His relatives tell him that he is a product of a rape and that his mother could not handle raising him. He had actually been adopted by what he thought was his mother. Only a child who is product of a rape or who is adopted can truly experience the depths of despair, worthless and/or confusion that must be present when you have no biological parents to confirm that they loved and desired your existence in this world. Datcher is not a man to recover easily from these revelations. Rather, he tries to salve his wounds through maintaining a tight-knit “crew” of young men in the neighborhood. They begin a business to make a bit of spare change for themselves while they try to find a recognizable path that leads to manhood. Datcher matures in many respects and develops athletic and academic abilities that enable him to attend the University of California at Berkeley. His college years are the “2nd half” of his life thus far; he takes the experiences of his childhood and attempts to both apply and work through them as an adult. The best part of this time in his life is that he learns that some possible paths for his life, being a husband and father—about which he is particularly obsessed, will not, in fact, kill him if he experiences them.
The novel imparts its story episodically, at times in the present, at others during various points in his childhood. Datcher’s begins the search for himself while searching for his birth records and finding them sealed. The absence of confirmation that he was indeed “a live birth” (as stated on his birth certificate) with a mother and father, initiated a life of obsessions for him. Datcher says he was “obsessed with being a husband and father” because these were so absent in his life. A question raised by the novel is whether or not the development of obsessions or compulsive behaviors is perhaps a product of being without the same gender parent? Datcher remains so obsessed with fatherhood, responsibility of child-care, and being a husband that he propels himself into these positions prematurely.
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For a young black man to be concerned with not creating unplanned children with women to whom he is not married should be considered especially laudable. But even the greatest of concern sometimes cannot prevent an unwanted pregnancy. You can imagine that for a man like Datcher, such an event would be devastating, and indeed this turns out to be the case. Who among us has not had that moment of weakness when we throw caution to the wind and just push that contraceptive aside? Up to this point, Datcher has been a sentinel, always practicing safe sex and not trusting his future to his girlfriend’s birth control pills. Unfortunately, yet predictably, Datcher engages in unprotected sex at the sensual, persistent urging of his girlfriend, Camille.
Far too many men of all races choose to shirk their parental duties when they impregnate women; Datcher is not one of these, and he presses on in assuming his role as a father in the face of open hostility from Camille and her family. In the midst of “baby-mama drama,” he still provides financial support and love to his child; yet, he and Camille cannot find ground on which to develop their relationship. There is no love between them, and this is key. A question raised and answered by the novel is whether or not a family unit can be created and sustained without romantic love between the adults involved? The answer for Datcher is a resounding no. What other conclusion could he come to having sprung up as a person from the ground of a fatherless home?
It could be this imbalance in the home—the lack of a father’s love complimenting a mother’s love—that leaves a vacancy in Datcher’s heart and soul. Such a void is easily filled by illusions, which for this reader explains how such a thoughtful young man could be subsumed in a cult-like religious group, “The Church of Christ.” After all, God is the ultimate father, a concept with which Datcher grapples. This section of the text exposes a tension between definitions of manhood and fatherhood that are different than the previous ones. Here, manhood has taken on a stronger ethnic identity because the author can for the first time interact with a variety of responsible, intelligent, healthy and growing black men in Berkeley, California where he is attending college. He develops friendships with students and others which add positive aspects to his developing definition of manhood. He learns another means of expressing pride in himself as a black man through his political awakening.
Yet, on the steps of the University of California at Berkeley, it seems that these experiences are not enough; he seeks more in the Church, but the Church infuses the influence of Caucasians into the mix. Their introduction into the manhood mixture causes Datcher’s closest black friend, Absalom, and he to separate. The demise of Datcher’s friendship with Absalom is truly heartrending. It is also one of the most universal experiences of the text. If we are blessed to have friends in our lives, then we have all experienced those times when our personal paths of growth lead us, sometimes violently, away from some of them. Often these separations are over misunderstandings, or they encompass our individual inabilities to stretch that extra bit to accommodate the choices our friends make. We see them hurting themselves, as was the case with Absalom’s assessment of Datcher’s involvement with the Church of Christ.
A mark of the strength of the Church’s influence on Datcher was his “parting” meeting with his male friends. He calls them together to announce that in his effort to be more devoted to God the Father, he was making changes in his life and in the types of influences he would allow into it. Regrettably, one of those influences was his tight-knit group of friends. Of course, such a break with what had been a significant support group proves to have a very negative affect—Absalom is forever lost to him. During their last phone call, Absalom says, “I’ll never accept that damn Church! Got you leaving your friends. Why you gotta leave your friends to follow God? Man, show me that in the Bible. Where’s it at, Michael? Pull out your Bible right now and show me that a man’s gotta leave his friends to know God!” The answer to this question, which Datcher discovers, is that God does not make this requirement. Nor does He require perfection and ultimate devotion. God requires us to be the best of ourselves and to think sensibly about what that is for each of us individually. He requires balance, which is eventually restored in Datcher’s life through separation from the Church and the entrance into his life of what would become his wife, Jenoyne.
The ultimate question, can a true and perfect love really heal all wounds, is answered at the book’s conclusion. Datcher’s obsession with being a father and husband is laid to rest in Raising Fences: A Black Man’s Love Story. He finally does become a man and puts away childish things.
Melissa Kemp is a College English Instructor at Bauder College in Atlanta GA. She is a freelance writer and poet. Originally from Roanoke, VA, she has resided in Atlanta for the last five years.