Michael Datcher's dream is surrounded by 'Fences'
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Michael Datcher has a dream.
He wants to be the model father, the kind who stays married and dotes on his children and settles down in a house with a yard surrounded by a picket fence.
If Datcher, 33, had not been given up for adoption when he was born to a 16-year-old rape victim, then adopted by a single mother and raised in inner-city Los Angeles, his dream might come off as corny, even chauvinistic.
Instead, it makes a poignant theme for this L.A.-based journalist, poet and community activist's new memoir, "Raising Fences: A Black Man's Love Story" (Riverhead Books, $23.95).
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The "love story" alluded to in the title is twofold. Datcher has learned how to truly love and commit to someone else. But he's also learned how to love himself.
The fact is that Datcher grew up around far too many black kids like himself, kids whose biological fathers were absent physically, emotionally or both. Kids who modeled themselves on the wayward, hardened, seemingly fearless brothers who held down street corners all day and fathered children indiscriminately.
Datcher wanted to grow up to be a better man than that. He also wanted to be better than the images he saw in films and on TV.
"Black men have the worst public-relations problem in the world," Datcher said last week during a telephone interview from Detroit. "Somehow, some way, the humanity of black men is not as respected as the humanity of others. It's really sad."
His memoir paints a complex and not always glowing portrait of a man who has noble goals and lots of love to give but is still capable of hurting himself and others.
Datcher's visit to Seattle happens to coincide with the opening week of the film "The Brothers," a romantic comedy featuring four relatively sensitive, successful black men who have picket-fence dreams of their own but stumble in the relationship arena.
"Raising Fences" also attempts to redefine what it means to be "hard," which for young black men means being tough, unflinching in the face of racism, the police, women, your peers.
"What's hard is being vulnerable," Datcher says now. "What's hard is telling the truth. What's hard is not running away."
"Raising Fences," published earlier this month, comes at another particularly discouraging time. The married Rev. Jesse Jackson, the child of a single mother, recently admitted that he fathered a child out of wedlock with a mistress nearly two years ago. Will the cycle ever be broken?
Datcher almost landed himself in the same boat, despite his lofty vision of fatherhood. A good student who immersed himself in black culture at the University of California at Berkeley and went to graduate school at UCLA, he nearly became the kind of man he despised.
When a casual grad-school girlfriend told him she was pregnant seven years ago and that he was the father, Datcher, by then in his mid-20s and attending UCLA, lost it. He withdrew from friends, school and his girlfriend.
He'd spend whole days in his L.A. apartment numbing his disillusionment and anger with malt liquor and gin. The picket fence was falling down around him.
"It's official now," Datcher writes, reflecting on the day the news really hit him. "My dream is dead. A woman I do not love is having my baby. I'm going to be just like every other (expletive). A stereotype, making black babies out of wedlock. I hate myself."
The baby girl was born in 1994; a blood test in 1995 revealed that Datcher was not the father after all. The news was disconcerting.
But Datcher would have a second chance to fulfill his dream.
He went on to meet and marry a fellow writer, Jenoyne Adams, who has joined him on several tour stops to promote her own first novel, "Resurrecting Mingus."
Datcher seems to have found his soulmate, someone just as intellectual and opinionated as he.
She is "someone who can deal with me, quite frankly," he jokes.
He has discovered - surprise, surprise - that marriage is hard work.
"Even when I'm exhausted, I have to keep in mind that she has needs, too," he said. "The requirement of personal sacrifice when you're trying to make a marriage work is at a really high level."
Datcher also is nurturing a writers workshop he started in a mostly black section of L.A.
Every Saturday at 7 a.m. when he's at home, Datcher takes a group of three black men from the workshop to the beach. There they hold hands in a circle, pray, read Bible verses aloud and bare their souls.
"People walk by and think we're crazy, you know - four black men with baseball caps and all of that," Datcher said. Datcher says the group allows him to share with black men in a way that he missed out on as a child, when there was no male figure at home.
But is "Raising Fences" only for black men? Datcher says no.
"Although the book is about a black man, so many people of all races have issues with their fathers," he said. And everyone can relate to the dream of a perfect family.
In each city he visits, Datcher holds a more intimate reading and discussion at a local's home, inviting friends and friends of friends. This "Living Room Tour" is an effort to reach people who don't normally attend readings, he said.
When Datcher finishes the tour, he plans to finally build that picket fence from his fantasies. He and Adams recently moved into an "urban cabin" in Windsor Hills, south of L.A., a place that has wood floors and a lawn out front.
"It's almost surreal," Datcher said. "I've dreamed about this for such an incredibly long time. This is the place where the physical meets the symbolic."
Tyrone Beason's voice message number is 206-860-1598. His e-mail address is tbeason@seattletimes.com.