They say the drum does not know
the name of the hand that beats it.
But the son knows. The son always knows.
And hear this, for it is the turning of the whole story.
Now the hand knows too.
Begin where every good story begins,
in a house where rain announced itself
loudly on the zinc roof,
with a boy pressing his ear to his father's back,
listening to that voice from the inside,
deep rolling thunder moving through bone,
and thinking, so this is what safety sounds like.
This is what God must sound like
to the ones He carries.
Let me praise the man properly, as a son should.
My father, engineer and artist in one body,
a man whose hands could build a thing
and whose mouth could make a whole room laugh,
teller of tales, keeper of the gift of speech
that he passed down to me like land.
My father, watcher of the long road,
who returned from far journeys
with a bag that opened like a small treasure house,
biscuits, gifts, the smell of elsewhere,
and a doorway suddenly crowded with sons.
My father, who stayed behind in Nigeria
and fought for our survival with both hands
while an ocean sat between him and everything he loved.
A man does not do that for strangers.
A man does that for his own.
And yet. Every true praise-song tells the whole truth,
or it is only flattery, and flattery is a broken drum.
There was a night. I was nine.
The mathematics would not enter my head,
and your frustration became a storm
that forgot whose sky it lived in,
and a boy was made to speak a word against himself,
again, again, until the word crawled beneath his skin
and made a home there.
Failure. In my own small voice.
Father, i must tell you what that word built.
Towers. Degrees stacked like sandbags,
research posts, companies, machines that think,
a life spent running from one sentence,
Lagos to Texas to the very edge of space,
and the word running with me the whole way,
for no distance unsays a word.
Hear me. No tower unsays a word.
But listen now to how the story turns,
for it has turned, and i was there,
and i tell it as a witness tells it.
The son found his voice, after twenty-three years.
The mother, keeper of all the family's rooms,
carried the matter gently to the father.
And the father, grown grey in his labors,
could not sleep.
Hear that and understand the man.
He could not sleep.
An old lion pacing the night,
troubled that a wound he could not remember making
had lived so long in the body of his son.
And in the morning he wrote to me,
and i will carry his words to my grave
the way i once carried his thunder in my ear.
He wrote, you are the pride of my life.
He wrote, please forgive me, Onome,
and he translated my own name back to me
as if handing me my inheritance a second time.
Onome. Mine.
He asked to pray a father's blessing over his son.
He said the devil is a liar,
that no weapon fashioned against me shall prosper,
speaking scripture the way our house always spoke it,
as bread, as shield, as native tongue.
And i answered him as a son answers,
with the truest thing i know.
Father, no one is perfect.
We are all living life for the first time,
you included.
You included, daddy.
A man raising five sons with no manual,
no rehearsal, first take, every day, for decades,
on wages that finished before the month did.
And still we were loved. And still we were fed.
And still every one of us grew
into hands that build and hearts that feel.
Let the record of heaven show it plainly.
The man did well.
So here is what we did, my father and i,
and let every son and every father hear it.
He put down his guilt.
I put down my word.
Two men, setting their loads down
in the middle of the road,
straightening their backs,
looking at one another
for the first time without weight.
The scar stays. The sting does not.
The storm is forgiven. The thunder remains,
for the thunder was always love,
love that sometimes lost its language,
as love in hard countries sometimes does.
And one day my own children
will press their ears against my back
and hear that same deep rolling,
the inheritance of his voice in my body,
and it will only ever say,
you are mine, you are made of triumph,
you were never, never a failure.
They named me Onome.
My father himself wrote out the meaning.
Mine.
A man cannot be a failure
whose father, at the end of the long night,
reached out with both hands and claimed him.
The drum knows the hand now.
The hand knows the drum.
And the music they make together, at last,
is the music they were always meant to make.
I was always the son.
I am still the son.
Your son.
Your pride.
Your own.
— tachi