Here's one of my father's favorite jokes:
This hotel chambermaid gets on the elevator with her cart full of cleaning supplies. After the doors close, she realizes she has to pass gas and decides to take advantage of the empty elevator to do so. The smell is awful and she sprays pine scent to cover it. To her horror, the doors open before she arrives at her floor. A drunk enters the elevator and immediately grimaces, saying, "Whew!!!" "What's wrong?" the maid asks. The drunk answers, "Smells like someone shit a Christmas tree!"
My father, Don Louie Deskins, Sr., probably did not learn that joke in classes he took during the semester he attended the University of Virginia.
He told me once that he took a train from Man, West Virginia, to Charlottesville to go to school. They assembled the freshman class for orientation and were addressed by the student body president, who informed them that while they were attending "Mr. Jefferson's University," they would dress with a white collared-shirt and and necktie, not in denim and flannel, "like some hillbilly." He looked around to discover that all of his classmates wore white shirts with neckties; he alone was clothed in denim and flannel.
He could be a dandy, though, especially for a farm boy who had grown up in Mingo and Logan counties in West Virginia. I borrowed a pink cashmere sweater that he had once worn in high school. He told me he had to whip several members of the football team to wear that sweater.
He was born during the Depression, the fifth of seven living children of Robert Lee Deskins and Bertha Tate. They were Junior, Harold, Jack, Eldon, Daddy, and his sisters Awayn and Niawana.
He was the descendent of colorful characters, to be sure. His maternal grandfather, Colonel Fawsburg Tate, who was not a colonel but had been named for one, had been sheriff of Knott County, KY, and may have murdered a man. He married his wife, Sarah Ann, and fled her father's wrath by living on a Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. Daddy's mother, Bertha, named her two daughters for childhood friends from that time.
Bertha loomed large in my father's imagination. Her husband had lost his leg after it was crushed between two coal cars when he worked at the company store for Winco Coal at Winco Block. He didn't lose it immediately, but eventually had to have it amputated. Such was his prowess with women, apparently, that he "took up" with a nurse at the hospital during his stay there. The story was told that Bertha dressed her children in their best clothes, packed their bags, and took them to the woman's house. "If you take my husband, these come with him," she said. The nurse declined the offer.
Lee, as he was called, died of a heart attack at the age of 41, when my father was just 10 years old.
Bertha did what any savvy woman of the period would have done, if she had mouths to feed. She remarried a man named Pat Moore who owned a furniture store in Man, West Virginia, and packed up the children who were still at home and moved from the farm in Mingo County.
My father loved music. I remember him singing always when I was a child: "Paper Doll," "In the Garden," "Why Don't You Love Me," and "The Little White Cloud That Sat Right Down and Cried," by Johnny Ray. He had joined the band when he began attending Man High School, first playing the alto horn (the "peck horn," they called it) and then a proper "French" horn. He told me he had never seen any instrument before then other than a fiddle or banjo, and the organ and piano at church. He recounted to me more than once playing the solo from a piece entitled "In a Persian Market." It came time for the concert and the boy who sat second chair behind my dad pretended he was playing, too. Daddy just quit playing and sat his instrument in his lap, letting everyone see who had really been playing the sounds they heard.
His mother had wanted him to go to school when he graduated, to become a doctor. The one semester at UVA was enough to disabuse his medical notions and he enrolled at West Virginia University to study mining engineering. Then came another war, this one in Korea, and Daddy enrolled in the Air Force. Yet instead of heading to Seoul, he was sent to Kaiserslautern, Germany, where he worked in radio and communications. He also capitalized on post-war German life, living off-base in a house he rented cheaply, hiring a German couple to cook and clean for him, dating German women, and going to Oktoberfest in Munich. He learned German, put on thirty pounds, was promoted (and perhaps demoted), and returned home.
He dated women back home, including one he was so serious about he became engaged to her. In fact, he was with this woman when he met Dora Leigh Bassham. She attended high school with his sister Niawana. He broke the engagement and began seeing the woman who eventually became my mother. The two went to Mother's senior prom one month and were married the next. She was 17; he was 25.
It was 1956 and they stayed married for the next 58 years, though God only knows how. My mother quit college when she got pregnant the first time and they raised five children together: Don, Jr., called "Dusty" by most of us; Mark; Sandy Jo; Sarah; and me. I'm the baby of the family, following my twin sister by five minutes. He used to tell people that he had five kids because he'd read that one in every six children born was Chinese, and he didn't want a Chinese baby. It's remarkable to me at times that the same two people raised all five of us. I love my siblings, but we all turned out differently. I half-expect to piss one or more of them off just by writing this.
My dad worked primarily in coal, eventually becoming a preparation plant foreman, a "tipple boss" in the common parlance, as in "he cusses like a tipple boss" (which Daddy did) and "he has an ass like a tipple boss" (which he did not). They moved from Logan County and refer to that exit as the children of Israel undoubtedly remembered the Exodus in the years that followed. They were awhile in Richwood and then landed in Herndon, in Wyoming County, where they lived when I was born.
They came to Raleigh County when my father took a job for Eastern Coal at Affinity. He built the house that I grew up in from the foundation up, taking my two older brothers each day after work and school to complete a portion of it. When the basement was finished, we all moved in, and the house became my father's project for the next 40 years. The kitchen was in the basement until just a few years ago, something that never struck me as odd but seemed to perplex others. He tiled one hall with slate he brought from work.
Once he moved to Raleigh County, he was loathe to leave, even for a short time. The phrase "a man's home is his castle," could well have been written about Daddy. He resented family for infrequent visits, yet rarely traveled to see them.
As a consequence, we took few vacations growing up. My father seemed to resent being bound by plans, even when he had made those plans himself. The two vacations I remember taking both began when he announced at dinner that we were to go pack: we would be leaving for the beach that night. We would arrive with no reservations and were likely to leave just as abruptly when he'd had his fill of the place.
Likewise, he was likely to promise trips to the swimming pool or shopping, only to change his mind as the day progressed. It was really maddening as a kid, but I understand that impulse more now.
To say my father was an imposing presence in the house would be a great understatement.
We never ate anything my father disliked, so the only time we had beef stroganoff, my mother's favorite meal, was when he was away.
He had smoked from age 8 and my childhood memories are filled with Kent cigarettes and King Edward cigars. I was burned by both on multiple occasions, quite unintentionally, while playing at his feet.
He taught us that education was the most important thing there was, but got angry that my mother bought so many books.
He wasn't great with money, though no one ever went hungry. His standard farewell when anyone left the house was, "Don't go off mad and hungry." In my experience, children of the Depression tend toward ascetic frugality or extravagance, and my father was certainly of the latter camp. We drank Pepsi colas like they were water and we frequently ran shy on room under the Christmas tree, as it piled higher and higher with gifts. He would spend any extra money that came his way on steak and shrimp for everyone and he was generous, to a fault. There was real joy in his eyes over the years as he bought me saxophones and guitars and whatever else I came begging for. I'm not the only one who has needed and received his help as adult, either.
He worked second shift when I was small and then took a job in Pike County, Kentucky, that kept him away during the week. As a consequence, I didn't know him well as a small child and probably lived mostly in fear of him for a long time.
He could be a very angry man and his physical presence was intimidating. When I was bullied in junior high school, he thought nothing of calling the bully's dad and threatening to kick his ass. He also sent me to school with a "monkey fist" — a steel ball bearing wrapped in rope.
He took a great interest in my drug education program. He called me to the living room one day where he sat in his recliner. He told me I was likely to see "dope," his word for all drugs, at school. Then he asked, "You know I'd break your goddamn neck if I ever caught you doing that shit, don't you?" I never tested the veracity of this statement.
He was a lifelong Republican, though rarely showed favor toward any sitting politician. While he certainly was conservative, I think he was more of an iconoclast than anything. The state, and certainly southern West Virginia, has always voted Democrat, and a Republican in Logan County might as well have been a Whig or Know-Nothing. He owned guns, but thought that there should be limits on caliber and magazine sizes that were sold. He thought it should be illegal to burn the American flag, but was opposed to both invasions of Iraq. He watched Bill O'Reilly but thought creationism shouldn't be taught in school.
Daddy was one of the most irreligious people I know. He certainly wasn't an atheist. He'd grown up Methodist and "back-slidden," as they say. We spent a good deal of my childhood praying for Daddy to get saved, and he landed on the prayer lists of a dozen churches or more. I suppose all of Daniels Missionary Baptist Church knew he was going to Hell for about a ten-year period. He had a conversion experience of some sort when I was in high school, though the effects seemed to wear off in time. He'd been a Freemason, though was not active during my life, so I suppose he was a believer of some sort, probably of the Thomas-Jefferson/Egyptian-Illuminati/Benign-Hallmark-Greeting-Card-Deity type.
He did love the celebration of Christmas, primarily because he got to see his family. When asked what he wanted, his standard reply was, "Seven smiling faces." That number increased as the family grew. He also read a poem every year called "Annie and Willie's Prayer," a story about a cold-hearted millionaire whose heart is changed at Christmas. In recent years, there wasn't a dry eye in the house when he read it.
Part of his aversion to religion undoubtedly stemmed from his love of science, though in this, as in all areas, he has a rather mixed legacy. On the one hand, he firmly believed in a 13.7 billion-year-old universe and that human beings evolved from lower life forms. On the other, he held that aliens had built the pyramids and that the ancient civilization of Atlantis had been destroyed with a nuclear weapon. He would deny being superstitious, yet he refused to give or accept knives as gifts and would return a borrowed blade opened, so as not to severe a friendship.
If Daddy believed in sin, he thought the worst one was not working for a living. He despised those who failed to support their families and thought government entitlement was a plague in Appalachia. To my knowledge, he never missed a day at work. He valued himself largely — too much so, in fact — by the work he did.
He said he hated cats and shot at them with a BB gun, though he never seemed to hit one. He also kept a slingshot on the porch that he used to shoot at bluejays, but only because they chased away other birds. He claimed to hate the dogs we kept as pets, too, thought the first time I saw him crying while sober was when he had to put down our schnauzer, Pepper, after the animal was hit by a car.
He was a near-reckless driver. I've ridden in the car with him when his speed exceeded 95 m.p.h. and seen him outrun police cars to avoid a ticket. He managed to succeed in this until his old age began to diminish his eyesight, and he wasn't as good at spotting Smoky hidden in the bushes.
It was hard to know what to believe that he told you, not because he lied exactly, but because he was larger-than-life at times. Some of it was poor memory, some of it exaggeration, and some of it might be true.
He said our first ancestor with the Deskins' surname was an Indian baby who was called "Deer Skins," after being wrapped in such and left on a white family's doorstep.
He said he was named for Don Chafin, the villain of the Battle of Blair Mountain, and that Chafin had bought him a suit when he graduated high school. He said his middle named was taken from the song "Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis," though the attending nurse misspelled it L-O-U-I-E on his birth certificate. He also said he was born at home because he wanted to be close to his mother.
He said he circumcised himself when he was a teenager.
He loved children and was uncanny with babies. When I brought my son Griffin Louis (spelled correctly this time and middle-named for both his grandfather and Louis Armstrong) home from the hospital, he was passed crying from one set of arms to another, but hushed the moment Daddy held him.
He was flawed, like all of us. Some of his flaws I can talk about and others I can't, partly because they are too hurtful to those left behind and partly because I do not know the statue of limitations on certain acts and don't wish to incriminate friends and family. I don't believe in sentimentalizing someone's life, but I'd prefer to stop at inflicting pain on the living.
He drank. At times he drank a lot. He wasn't an alcoholic, because he'd never been to one of those meetings. I've seen him wax nostalgically, spew vitriol, go driving, and abuse others while under the influence. He drank primarily cheap vodka, imagining that the smell was undetectable. He kept bottles under his recliner, in the garage, and behind the seat in his pick-up truck, but I probably only saw him take a drink two or three times in my life. I have seen him passed out in the floor, however, and I've also seen the blue lights of a police car in my parents' driveway.
He was a racist. Of every piece of my father's legacy, this one troubles me more than all the rest put together. He wasn't actively racist, I don't guess. He wasn't a Klansman or anything, though perhaps that was because he wasn't much of a joiner. He watched All in Family faithfully every week and failed to note the irony which the show intended. He even occasionally called himself "Archie Bunker." He used the word "nigger" casually, and the newsworthy misdeeds of any person of color were attributed to race.
Yet, I've never seen him be unkind to any African-American person. He was always warm and genuinely friendly to black friends of mine and never said an unkind word about them. I papered my bedroom walls with posters of black faces growing up, from Prince to John Coltrane, and he never protested. Perhaps he remembered hiding Nat Cole and B.B. King records from his own intolerant mother. He was also very supportive when I went to Africa during college and listened to me talk for long periods about the importance of the African experience in American music.
I've engaged in many long arguments with him about this topic and I'd like to be able to say that he was a changed man. He wasn't though. He was a complicated man who probably grew over the years in this area. It would be too easy to say he was a "product of his time." Racism exists at all times and that's just an excuse. Yet it was certainly not his defining trait.
If someone asked what that was, I'd say, "Being a Deskins." In our family, that's shorthand for thinking for yourself, being hard-headed, and doing your own thing in spite of public sentiment or the wishes of others.
When I was little, I remember Daddy telling me that if I was walking behind a group of a hundred people and the road split in two, and 99 went one way and one person went the other — follow that one person.
It hasn't always served me well, but I suppose I am likely to pass the same advice to my son. I'm certainly not "brave" in any conventional sense. I don't go thrill-seeking or volunteer for dangerous work. On the other hand, I'm not afraid of bucking convention, of being my own person, and of thinking for myself. I suppose that is Daddy's greatest legacy to me.
The first time he seemed small to me was just three years ago.
My mom had called my up and asked if I could drive him to Haymarket, Virginia. He'd purchased a wheelchair on eBay but the shipping would cost more than the chair itself. "What's wrong with his chair?" I asked. "Nothing. He just saw one that was like his on sale for $500 less on eBay." "Is he going to sell his?" "No, I don't think so." There are about eight powered wheelchairs at their house right now because of this logic.
The trip began very warmly. I was going through a difficult personal time and wasn't in the mood for any argument. I told my mom that if he said a word about my tattoos, I'd turn the car around and leave him in Raleigh County. Instead, he began recounting his own childhood, friends he'd known, and changes he'd seen in his life that he could never have anticipated. It was exactly the sort of thing I needed to hear to clear my mind and think about my own life.
Then about an hour in, he said, "One thing we'd never have imagined was that we'd have a Muslim for president." Ugh. That quickly, all the warm-fuzzies evaporated. I told him that President Obama wasn't a Muslim, he was a Christian, and that it didn't matter anyway, because the Constitution didn't say we couldn't have a Muslim president, and since when did he get religious anyway, and if he was religious he would know that Augustine distinguished between the "city of man" and the "city of God" and that Luther wrote it was better to be ruled by "an honest Turk than a dishonest Christian." Daddy countered by quoting Fox News. It was a long drive.
We picked up the chair at an elderly woman's condo. She lived alone, no one came to see her, her kids lived far away, and she needed the money. She was doing alright, but it was a sad place anyway.
On the way home, Daddy asked to stop at a restroom. I pulled over at the first rest area, parking in the handicap spot. He surveyed it and said, "Let's go to the next." I was puzzled. "Why?" "Because I can't make it to the door without the wheelchair." The distance was about 200 feet.
In that moment, I realized just how frail this man was that I had feared all my life.
I used to joke with friends that Daddy was too mean to die. I was wrong.
Don Louie Deskins, Sr., died peacefully in his sleep on January 27, 2014 around 1 AM.
He smoked, drank, worked in the mines, and lived an all-around hard life. He had suffered three heart attacks and had quadruple bypass surgery. He spent his last few years using a wheelchair and an oxygen tank.
I am now 41, the same age his father was when he passed away and the same age Daddy was when I was born. I've now become a father at 41 and Daddy was twice 41 — 82. I'm not sure of the significance of all that numerology, but it reminds me that we are all connected, for better or worse, and that we all belong to one another in some way.
My father was a very complex person. He was a bigot and he was big-hearted. He was tender and he was hard as nails. He was coarse and he was worldly. He was rational and he was illogical. He was mean-spirited and he was generous. He was strong and he was weak.
Whatever legacy he has lives on most in the family he has left behind. We love you, Daddy, very much, and will miss you.
