Somehow it was always my mother who answered the phone when he called. I remember his voice on the other end of the line, muffled in the receiver against her ear. Her eyes, just starting to show their wrinkles in those days, would fill with the memories that she shared with this man. She would put out her cigarette, grab a sheet of paper and scribble down the address. She would put down the receiver and look up at me.
“It’s your dad,” she would say.
I slept in a twin bed in the living room, and I would start jumping on it, seeing if I could reach the ceiling of our mobile home with my tiny fingers. My mother would put on some makeup and fish out a pair of earrings from a tangle in the basket next to the bathroom sink. Moments later, we would be racing down the highway with the windows rolled down. I remember the salty air coming across San Francisco Bay, the endless cables of the suspension bridges in the heat. There would be a meeting point somewhere outside a dockyard or in a parking lot near a pier.
And then there would be my dad.
He would be visiting again from some faraway place where the ships on which he worked had taken him. It might have been Alaska; sometimes it was Seoul or Manila. His stories were endless, his voice booming. But I just wanted to see him, wanted him to pick me up with his big, thickset hands that were callused from all the years in the engine room and put me on his shoulders where I could look out over the water with him. From that height, I could work my fingers through his hair, black and curly like mine. He had the beard that I would grow one day. There was the smell of sweat and cologne on his dark skin.
I remember one day when we met him at the dockyard in Oakland. He got into our old Volkswagen Bug, and soon we were heading back down the highway to our home. He was rummaging through his bag, pulling something out — a tiny glass bottle.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“It’s my medicine, kid,” he said.
“Don’t listen to him, Nico,” my mother said. “That’s not his medicine.”
She smiled. Things felt right that day.
My father never stayed for more than a few days. Before long, I would start to miss him, and it seemed to me that my mother did, too. To her, he represented an entire life she had given up to raise me. She would step on my mattress and reach onto a shelf to pull down a yellow spiral photo album that had pictures of when she worked on ships, too. It told the story of how they met.
The book began with a postcard of a satellite image taken from miles above an inky sea. There were wisps of clouds and long trails of ships heading toward something large at the center. My mom told me this was called an atoll, a kind of island made of coral. “Diego Garcia,” she said. “The place where we made you.”
By 1983, when my mom reached Diego Garcia, she had lived many lives already. She had been married for a couple of years — “the only thing I kept from that marriage was my last name,” she said — worked on an assembly line, sold oil paintings, spent time as an accountant and tended bar in places including Puerto Rico, where she lived for a while in the 1970s. Then on a lark, she decided to go to sea. She joined the National Maritime Union, which represented cargo-ship workers. Eventually she signed on for a six-month stint as an ordinary seaman on a ship called the Bay, which was destined for Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean with a large military base.
The next picture in the album shows her on the deck of the Bay not long before she met my father. She’s 37, with freckled white skin, a seaman’s cap and a large fish she has pulled out of the water. There are rows of bent palm trees, tropical birds swimming across the waves. That watery landscape was just the kind of place you would picture for a whirlwind romance. But it turned out my parents spent only one night together, not exactly intending to. My father had been working on another ship moored off the island. One afternoon before my mother was set to head home, they were both ashore when a storm hit. They were ferried to his ship, but the sea was too choppy for her to continue on to the Bay. She spent the night with him.
When the job on the island was up, my mom took her flight back to the United States. My father headed for the Philippines. Nine months later, when I was born, he was still at sea. She put a birth announcement into an envelope and sent it to the union hall in San Pedro, asking them to hold it for him. One day three months later, the phone rang. His ship had just docked in the Port of Oakland.
The way my mom tells the story, he got to the restaurant before her and ordered some coffee. Then he turned around and saw her clutching me, and it dawned on him that he was my father. It seemed he hadn’t picked up the envelope at the union hall in Southern California yet. He was holding a mug. His eyes got wide and his hands began to tremble and the hot coffee went all over the floor. “I have never seen a Black man turn that white,” she would say to me.
She told him that she’d named her son Nicholas, after him, and even added his unusual middle name, Wimberley, to mine. Then she handed me over to him and went looking for the restroom. She remembers that when she reappeared, my father had stripped me naked. He said he was looking for a birthmark that he claimed all his children had. There it was, a tiny blue one near my tailbone.
It’s hard to explain the feeling of seeing this man to people whose fathers were a fixture of their daily lives. I hardly knew what a “father” was. But whenever he came, it felt like Christmas. He and my mother were suddenly a couple again. I would sit in the back seat of our old VW watching their silhouettes, feeling complete.
Yet the presence of this man also came with moments of fear. Each visit there seemed to be more to him that I hadn’t seen before. I remember one of his visits when I was 5 or 6 and we headed to the creek behind the trailer, the place where many afternoons of my childhood were spent hunting for crawdads and duck feathers and minnows. It was warm and almost summer, and the wild fennel had grown taller than me and was blooming with big yellow clusters, my father’s head up where the blooms were, mine several feet below, as I led the way through stalks. I remember having hopped into the creek first when a large, blue crawdad appeared, its pincers raised to fight.
I froze. My father yelled: “You’re a sissy, boy! You scared?”
His words cut through me; I forgot the crawdad. There was an anger in his voice that I’d never heard in my mother’s. I started to run away, beating a trail back through the fennel as his voice got louder. He tried to catch me, but stumbled. A furious look of pain took control of his face — I was terrified then — and I left him behind, running for my mother.
When he made it to the trailer, his foot was gashed open from a piece of glass he’d stepped on. But strangely, his face was calm. I asked if he was going to die. He laughed. He told my mom to find a sewing kit, then pulled out a piece of string and what looked like the longest needle I had ever seen. I will never forget watching my father patiently sew his foot back together, stitch after stitch, and the words he said after: “A man stitches his own foot.”
When he was done, he smiled and asked for his medicine. He took a big swig from his bottle before he turned back to his foot and washed it clean with the remaining rum.
Then he was gone again. That longing was back in my mother, and I had started to see it wasn’t exactly for him but for the life she’d had. On the shelf above my bed sat a basket of coins that she collected on her travels. We would set them out on a table together: the Japanese 5-yen coins that had holes in the middle; a silver Australian half dollar with a kangaroo and an emu standing next to a shield. The Canadian money had the queen’s profile.
Soon after my 7th birthday, the phone rang again, and we went to the port. We could tell something was off from the start. My father took us out to eat and began to explain. He had shot someone. The man was dead. He was going to be put on trial. It sounded bad, he said, but was not a “big deal.” He didn’t want to talk much more about it but said he was sure he could get a plea deal. My mom and I stared at each other across the table. Something told us that, like his rum, this situation was not what he said it was.
I got into the back seat of the VW, my parents into the front. We drove north to San Francisco, and then over the water and finally to the Port of Crockett.
“Thirty days and I’ll be back,” he told us several times. Fog was coming in over the docks like in one of those old movies. “I love you, kid,” he said.
He disappeared into the mist, and then it broke for a moment, and I could see his silhouette again walking toward the ship. I thought I could hear him humming something to himself.
Thirty days passed, and the phone didn’t ring. It was a hot autumn in California, and I kept on the hunt for wildlife in the creek, while my mom was busy in the trailer crocheting the blankets she liked to make before the temperature started to drop. It had always been months between my father’s visits, so when a year passed, we figured he had just gone back to sea after jail. When two years passed, my mom revised the theory: He was still incarcerated, just for longer than he’d expected.
But my mom seemed determined that he would make his mark on my childhood whether he was with us or not. On one of his last visits, he asked to see where I was going to school. She brought down a class picture taken in front of the playground. “There are no Black kids in this photo except for Nicholas,” he said and put the photo down. “If you send him here, to this la-di-da school, he’ll forget who he is and be afraid of his own people.”
My mother reminded him that she was the one who had chosen to raise me while he spent his time in places like Papua New Guinea and Manila. But another part of her thought he might be right. While I’d been raised by a white woman and attended a white school, in the eyes of America I would never be white. That afternoon, his words seemed to have put a tiny crack in her motherly confidence. One day, not long after her sister died of a drug overdose, my mother announced she was taking me out of the school for good.
We approached my next school in the VW that day to find it flanked by a high chain-link fence. Like me, the students were Black, and so were the teachers. But the school came with the harsh realities of what it meant to be Black in America: It was in a district based in East Palo Alto, Calif., a town that made headlines across the country that year — 1992 — for having the highest per-capita murder rate in the United States. A skinny fourth grader with a big grin came up to us and said his name was Princeton. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of him,” he said. My mom gave me a kiss and walked away.
Many of the other students had missing fathers, ones they had long ago given up on finding. It was my mother’s presence that marked me as different from my classmates. One child, repeating a phrase she learned at home, told me my mother had “jungle fever,” because she was one of the white ladies who liked Black men. “Why do you talk like a white boy?” I was asked. These might seem like no more than skirmishes on a playground, but they felt like endless battles then, and my constant retreats were determining the borders of who I was about to become. At the white school, I loved to play soccer and was a good athlete. But there were only basketball courts now, and I didn’t know how to shoot. The few times I tried brought howls, and once again, I was told I was “too white.” I never played sports again in my life. Labeled a nerd, I withdrew into a world of books.
It certainly didn’t help the day it came out that my middle name was Wimberley. “That’s a stupid-ass name,” said an older bully, whose parents beat him. “Who the hell would call someone that?” Wimberley came from my father’s family, and strange as the name might have been, my mother wanted me to have it as well. But where was he now? He hadn’t even written to us. If he could come visit, just pick me up one day from school one afternoon, I thought, maybe the other kids could see that I was like them and not some impostor.
One day when I was trying to pick up an astronomy book that had slipped out of my backpack, the bully banged my head against the tiles in a bathroom. My mother got very quiet when I told her and asked me to point out who he was. The next day she found him next to a drinking fountain, pulled him into a secluded corner and told him if he touched me again she would find him again and beat him when no one was looking, so there would be no bruises and no adult would believe she’d touched him. From then on the bully left me alone.
But the image of a white woman threatening a Black child who didn’t belong to her wasn’t lost on anyone, not least my classmates, who now kept their distance, too. A Catholic nun who ran a program at the school saw that things weren’t working. I had spent so much time alone reading the math and history textbooks from the grade above me that the school made me skip a year. Now the teachers were talking about having me skip another grade, which would put me in high school. I was just 12. Sister Georgi had a different solution: a private school named Menlo, where she thought I would be able to get a scholarship. She warned that it might be hard to fit in; and from the sound of things the school would be even whiter and wealthier than the one my mother had taken me from. But I didn’t care: At that point, I couldn’t imagine much worse than this failed experiment to teach me what it meant to be Black.
It had been five years since my father’s departure. In the mid-1990s, California had passed a “three strikes” law, which swept up people across the state with life sentences for a third felony conviction. My mom, who had retrained in computerized accounting, started using her free time to search for his name in prison databases.
It was the first time I saw her refer to him by a full name, Nicholas Wimberley-Ortega. Ortega, I knew, was a Hispanic name. I usually saw it on TV ads, where it was emblazoned on a brand of Mexican salsa. It seemed to have little to do with me. But my mother had also dropped hints that I might be Latino. She called me Nico for short and had taken, to the surprise of the Mexican family in the trailer next to us, to also calling me mijo — the Spanish contraction of “my son.” One day I asked her about it. She explained that she missed her days in Puerto Rico when she was in her 30s. But there was also my father’s family, which she remembered him telling her came to the United States from Cuba. In Cuba, she said, you could be both Latino and Black.
Menlo School became my first intellectual refuge, where I was suddenly reading Shakespeare and carrying a viola to school that I was learning to play. Four foreign languages were on offer, but there was no question which one I would take — I signed up for Spanish my freshman year, based on the revelation about my father’s background. We spent afternoons in class captivated by unwieldy irregular verbs like tener (“to have”) or how the language considered every object in the universe either masculine or feminine. A friend introduced me to the poems of Pablo Neruda.
One day, a rumor started to spread on campus that the Menlo chorus had received permission to fly to Cuba to sing a series of concerts that spring. Not long afterward, the choral director, Mrs. Jordan, called me into her office. I’d taken her music-theory class and had been learning to write chamber music with her and a small group of students. At recitals that year, she helped record some of the pieces I composed. I thought her summons had to do with that.
“Are you a tenor?” she asked. I told her I couldn’t sing. Everyone could sing, she said. There was a pause. I thought only my closest friends knew anything about my father; everyone’s family at this school seemed close to perfect, so I rarely mentioned mine. Mrs. Jordan looked up. She noted that I had Cuban ancestry and spoke Spanish; I deserved to go on the trip. With the United States embargo against Cuba still in effect, who knew when I might get another chance? “And you don’t need to worry about the cost of the trip,” she said. “You can be our translator.”
We traveled from Havana to the Bay of Pigs and then to Trinidad, an old colonial town at the foot of a mountain range, with cobblestones and a bell tower. I sat in the front of a bus, humming along to a CD of Beethoven string quartets that I had brought and watching the landscape fly by, while the chorus rehearsed in the back.
My Spanish was halting in those days, just words and phrases stitched together out of a textbook, and the Cuban accent could just as well have been French to me then. But the crowds that the chorus sang for roared when they found out that one of the Americans would be introducing the group in Spanish. The concert hall in the city of Cienfuegos was packed with Cubans and humid air. I stepped out and greeted everyone. “He is one of us!” yelled someone in Spanish. “Just look at this boy!”
In the days after I returned home, it began to hit me just how much I had lost with the disappearance of my father. On the streets of Havana, there were men as Black as my father, teenagers with the same light-brown skin as me. They could be distant relatives for all I knew, yet with no trace of my father besides a last name, I would never be able to tell them apart from any other stranger in the Caribbean. My mother said my father had once looked for a birthmark on me that “all his children had.” So where were these siblings? How old were they now?
“How old is my father even?” I asked.
My mother said she wasn’t sure. He was older than she was.
How had she been searching for this man in prison records without a birth date? I pushed for more details. But the childhood wonder of the days when I would hear about his adventures had drained off long ago: I was 16, and the man had now been gone for half my life.
My mother tried her best to tell me the things she remembered his mentioning about himself during his visits. It all seemed to pour out at once, hurried and unreliable, and it was no help that the details that she recalled first were the ones that were the hardest to believe. He grew up somewhere in Arizona, she said, but was raised on Navajo land. He got mixed up with a gang. I had heard many of these stories before, and I accepted them mostly on faith. But now I thought I could distinguish fact from fiction. And the facts were that he had gone missing, and my mother had no answers. Was I the only one who didn’t take this casually? My mother started to say something else, and I stopped her.
“Do you even know his name?” I asked.
“Nicholas Wimberley-Ortega.” She was almost crying.
“Wimberley?” I said, pronouncing the name slow and angry. “I wonder if it even is. I’ve never known someone who had a name that ridiculous other than me.”
I know it wasn’t fair to take out my anger on the woman who raised me and not the man who disappeared. But soon a kind of chance came to confront my father too. His life at sea rarely crossed my thoughts anymore, but by the time I was in college, sailing had entered into my own life in a different way. My third year at Stanford, I attended a lecture by an anthropologist on Polynesian wayfinding. Nearly every island in the Pacific, the professor explained, had been discovered without the use of compasses by men in canoes who navigated by the stars. The professor put up an image of the Hokule‘a, a modern canoe modeled off the ancient ones. He said there were still Polynesians who knew the ancient ways.
Within months of the lecture, I read everything I could find about them. The search led me to major in anthropology and then to the Pacific — to Guam and to a group of islands called Yap — where I had a research grant; I was working on an honors thesis about living navigators. The men used wooden canoes with outriggers for their journeys and traded large stone coins as money. But their jokes and drinking reminded me instantly of my father.
One night after I was back from the research trip, I fell asleep in my college dorm room, which I shared with two other roommates. I almost never saw my father in dreams, but I’d vowed that the next time I did, I would tell him off right there in the dream. And there he was suddenly that night. I don’t remember what I said to him, but I woke up shaken. I remember he had no face. I wasn’t able to recall it after all these years. I was yelling at a faceless man.