#102: Kwame Alexander: What My Father Taught Me About Love (2023)

NICK FIRCHAU: You know, almost every time I sit down to speak with a guest for Paternal, I have an idea of what we’re going to talk about and where I think I want the conversation to go, generally speaking. And if you’ve listened to this show in the past you know that whenever possible we like to generally shape our episodes around a single subject, like overcoming fear as a father or a parent, dealing with anger as a man, things like that, my wife sometimes says we spend a little too much time on the darker aspects of life, and I’m not sure why that is, but I guess I agree.

But every once in a while I’ll go into an interview thinking the conversation will go one way and it ultimately goes another, which I like. And in the best-case scenario the man I’m speaking with will turn me onto an aspect of fatherhood and masculinity that I never even considered, but when we’re done talking, suddenly I’m transfixed, I can’t stop thinking about it. And in this episode, that’s exactly what happened.

This episode of Paternal is not about the darker aspects of life, but instead about love. Love is a big, cheesy word so let me narrow it down - this episode is about how we learn to love, specifically how we watch our parents or the adults in our lives, and how we learn to build and maintain a relationship. Maybe those relationships remain intact for decades, maybe they fall apart in months or years, but just as we learn how to deal with fear or anger, how we learn to love is an essential part of our identity and our happiness.

And the guest on this episode of Paternal knows a thing or two about love, but he’s also the first to admit that, like all of us, he’s got more to learn. Kwame Alexander is 54 years old, he lives in Virginia and he’s the father of two daughters, one from his first marriage and one from his second. If you recognize his name I’m going to guess you have kids who have read The Crossover, the bestselling children's book that won Alexander the Coretta Scott King Award Honor and the 2015 Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in American literature for children.

The Crossover is a coming of age story about two young basketball-loving brothers, it’s told entirely through verse, and earlier this year it was adapted into a series on Disney-plus, Alexander is a writer and executive producer on the show, he even walked the red carpet for the premiere in Hollywood.

And that’s a long way from where Alexander got his start, because at his core, Alexander is a man who writes love poems. Loves love poems. When he was in college at Virginia Tech he wrote love poems to impress girls, and it worked. He loved those poems so much he had the courage to eventually take his work out on the road, he read his love poems in book stores, on college campuses and at least in one case, a church in Los Angeles filled with older African American women. Not exactly the target audience, but love can be surprising. Here he is talking about those early days from a Ted Talk he gave in 2017.

KWAME ALEAXANDER: And I go up into the pulpit and I stare out into a sea of beautiful black women in church hats.

And I say at the top of my lungs, ‘I have never been a slave, yet I know I am whipped. I have never been to Canada, yet I want to cross your border.’

And then a woman in the back of the church says, ‘Amen, hallelujah!’ I sold a hundred and sixty books.

NICK FIRCHAU: And now, more than 30 years later Alexander has a new collection of love poems, this one, though, focused to some degree on what he’s failed to learn about love. The book, Why Fathers Cry at Night, is really a sort of memoir from Alexander, something far more intimate than the other 30-something books that made him a New York Times bestselling author, and far more personally revealing than the tv show he’s been working on with LeBron James.

And maybe it makes sense that Alexander has written this book now, he admits he’s entered midlife crisis territory. His mother passed away in 2017, his older daughter is an adult and his younger daughter is in her teens, and he’s currently separated from his second wife. He’s a man trying to figure out how he got here, and that idea comes up all the time on this show, but here’s where Alexander turned me onto an idea I hadn’t thought about much before.

And that’s the idea of what we’ve learned from our parents about love. My parents were married for 48 years before my mother passed away last year and not once did I ask either of them about their attraction to each other or how they stayed together for so long. And I’m not sure why I guess I always assumed that was their business, their story, and it was too personal for me to even consider asking about.

Now I learned more about their relationship during the last few days of my mother’s life and I have my own ideas about what kept them together, but should I have asked more questions? Yes. What did I learn from them when it comes to love? I don’t know, exactly, and that’s where I want to start this episode.

With a man trying to find some answers about love.

Here’s Kwame Alexander, on Paternal.

KWAME ALEXANDER: So I got interviewed last week and the interviewer said, ‘ So apparently you're going through a midlife crisis and that's why you wrote the book.’ And dude, I had never thought about that being the motivation, being the reason, being a thing that I would ever go through.

I set out to write a book of love poems. That was it. I just wanted to write about love. I've been through one divorce and separated now. And as much as I thought I knew, it turns out I don't know a whole lot about the sustainability of a loving relationship. How do we learn how to love? I think it starts when we're children watching our parents.

You know, they tell you, if you want to be a better writer, you go read. You go read. T. S. Eliot said, ‘Immature writers imitate, mature writers steal.’ I want to steal from my father and my mother's Relationship and all the things. ThatI think can inform and inspire me as I try to figure out my relationship.

I want to know, like, like when they laughed, I would wake up on Saturday mornings to their laughter in their room. They'd just be in bed laughing. So I want to talk to him. I want to find out more about how they love, how they Stay married. When she moved out, but they didn't get divorced, how they loved then.

And I just, I just wanna know some of these things. I feel like, you know, we can sort of hide behind this idea, this notion that these, some of these things have to remain secrets. Or we can empower our young people, our children, by giving them a little bit more information, a little bit more inspiration.

Certainly they're going to be things. When I asked my dad, he's going to say, I'm not telling you that. And that's his right. You know, that's his right. And this midlife. Point in my life. I am not scared at all.

I feel like it's gonna help me You know in about three years we can come back on this podcast and I can say no, I didn't help me But I think it will.

NICK FIRCHAU: Over the years on this show we’ve heard stories about some very formidable fathers. Military men, football players, professors, mountain climbers, and I think I can safely say that E. Curtis Alexander, the father to Kwame Alexander, might be in a group all his own.

Kwame Alexander’s father was a successful author, book publisher and Baptist minister , among other things, and I don’t think it does his parenting style justice to simply say he believed in tough love.

When Kwame Alexander was 12 years old he and his family were driving to the African Heritage Book Fair in Harlem, where his father was aiming to sell a trunk full of books. But his father fell asleep behind the wheel of their Mercury Thunderbird, and the car flipped over a dozen times and landed upside down in the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike.

His father began to take a quick roll call of the family to make sure everyone was alive, and finally he got to his son. As any young kid in shock might do in that moment, Kwame looked at the books scattered on the highway and the wreckage of the family car, and simply said “dayum.”

His father quickly reprimanded him for his language and told him simply, crawl out, and get all the books.

In an essay from his latest book entitled “A Letter to My Father,” Alexander writes “we’d just been in a major accident and your concern was that I not curse, and that I somehow get out of the overturned car and gather the books. But here’s the thing, nothing about that exchange, or your instructions, seemed strange. This is how we were. Who we were.” They made it to the bookfair, they sold some books, and they never spoke about the accident.

Years later, Alexander wrote The Crossover, his most successful work to date, as a song for his father, and, he writes in his latest book, “an inadvertent plea for you to be proud of me.”

Now for Kwame Alexander to learn more about himself and how he loves, he’s had to examine the way his father did, and he does that in one of the first poems in his new book, entitled the heavyweight of fatherhood.

KWAME ALEXANDER:

The Heavyweight of Fatherhood.

My father sometimes loved us like a boxer, would tag us with biting jibes when he was too busy to answer a question, throw numbing jabs that stabbed our ears and growing hearts when he was upset.

Round after round my mother would referee, but he would back her even into the ropes. The man would not stop until he knocked us all down.

And then when he was satisfied that we were down for the count, my sisters emptied of joy, me defeated, repressed. He would retreat to the corner and massage our wounds with a softening tongue and honest humor, a familial allegiance that lifted us all up, that left us each smiling and revived and almost forgetting the sting of his love.

My father was a beast with his words, man. He could cut you. He could make you feel really like you were on his list, like you had done something that was. inexcusable. And at the same time, he could, like, make you feel like you were the world. The reason that I am a writer is because of my father. Because he forced me to read books, and made me do book reports, and made me read the dictionary, and fusted me when, when I didn't understand a book or, or a text.

So the words were, the words were punishment and reward, man. You know, the words were, were powerful and the words were, you know, frustrating. The words were boring and the words were cool in my house. And so I would describe my dad as, as all those things, man. And, and the real reason why I sort of found my way to literature.

NICK FIRCHAU: You’ve told this story before about your dad and basketball, a huge part of your life and of your success with the Crossover, this story of a time when he asked you to shoot free throws with him and you were three years old. And he wouldn’t lower the basket for you?

KWAME ALEXANDER: No, the playground, you're right, the playground supervisor wanted to lower the basket because I was three years old, and I was shooting the ball, and I wasn't getting anywhere near the hoop.

And, and my dad was like, ‘no, don't lower the goal.’ And when I asked him, why did you say that? He says, ‘because you didn't know you couldn't make the basket.’ And so, you know, that became a big theme early on in the crossover. When the father tells his sons, never let anyone lower your goals, this cat was trying to prepare me for the world, not just to be an average, regular guy.

My favorite quote is ‘I am the greatest, not because I am better than anyone, but because no one is better than me.’ And my father instilled that in me. He wanted to create, I feel like I was the Manchurian Candidate of poetry, of literature, of books. That was his goal, man. He was trying to really prepare me for this world in a really profound and significant way, in a very meaningful and majestic way.

And he didn't know exactly how to do it, but, he he, you know, sort of figured it out on the fly and it turned out to be pretty miraculous. And, you know, when I won this, I won this award called the Newbery Medal back in 2015. And I called my mom first, but she didn't pick up. And then I called my dad and said, ‘Dad, I won the Newbery Medal.’

And he said, ‘yeah, we did it.’ So there you go.

NICK FIRCHAU: You write in an essay near the end of the book, uh, that your dad rarely, if ever, told you that he loved you. And you write in an essay near the beginning of the book entitled, ‘A Letter to My Father.’ Quote,’ I remember craving your touch, some small ritual of precious contact, like a drop of water in noonday heat.’

I get the impression that he, like a lot of dads of that era, and then a number of men who have appeared on this show, described their dads in a similar way. That he loved you, but he had no idea how to express it. Does that sound right?

KWAME ALEXANDER: Yeah, absolutely. He wasn't, he wasn't the emotive dude. Like my mom said she loved us all the time. My dad, I don't recall him saying, I love you. ever as a kid, because I knew he did.

You know, he was there. He was working hard. We played basketball when I was three, you know, we did these things. And so he loved me in his way. But the sort of concrete practical thing that he used to do was every Sunday after preaching his sermon, he would come down out of the pulpit.

And with his right hand, he would shake everyone's hand as they came by, And with his left hand, I would be standing, I'd come up and I'd be standing right next to him and he would massage my scalp every Sunday. And it just, that was our moment and it felt so good. You know, you know, you don't have to say it.

I'm his son. That's my dad. That was it. There was no other thing that I could think about in my school age years that he did that showed that level of intimacy because my dad was, he was working, he was a book publisher, he was a Baptist minister, he was a college professor, he wrote 16 books. Dude was always working.

It was about work in that house. And he always used to say, I'm, ‘I'm taking care of this family. That's what I'm, that's what I'm doing.’ And when I look at my own life, man, It's tough, bro, but every time I travel and my kid looks at me like, Oh, really, you're going again. I see a lot of my dad in me.

NICK FIRCHAU: So the next question I think is pretty obvious, where do you think he got those attributes, what informed his decision to raise you with tough love but very little affection?

KWAME ALEXANDER: Wow. That's actually a good question. I'm going to see him soon and I think I want to ask him specifically that question.

My father was the youngest son out of seven kids. My father was really smart and an athlete. And he was looked upon with pride because of those things. And he was the youngest son. And my, my grandparents, his parents were like lawyers of the community. So nobody touched my dad. My dad was like the, the next coming. He was the guy. And so he grew up with that sort of pride and that sort of arrogance.

You know, that I think infused a lot of the way he interacted with not just his children and his family, but just people out and about. I mean, I've seen my dad really whip into Avis and Hertz car rental agents because the gas was on three quarter tank and not full, like he will go hard on you. And then again, being a black man growing up in America in the 50s, In the 40s and 50s and 60s, you kind of need a little bit of confidence, a lot of confidence in order to not only survive, but thrive.

The only thing that I think saved me from having that really hard sort of egocentric personality and I'm not judging him, I'm just saying what it is, because he'll listen to this and he'll call me. Um, the only thing that saved me was my mother because she had the opposite. Like she was assured and ready and steady, but it was a kindness and a compassion that I think balanced it.

NICK FIRCHAU: You recounted a story in the book when you were a young man, you’re in college and you’re back home from Va Tech at some point and you’re up in the attic of the home where you grew up, and you’re looking for something trivial but instead you find your father’s jazz records, and that opens up this entirely different understanding of your father. The poem in the book is entitled the Gospel Truth, and I wonder if you could read that one and then tell me what that moment did to help you appreciate your dad?

KWAME ALEXANDER:

The Gospel Truth

Kneeling in the musty attic, looking for our old record player inside cobwebbed milk crates filled with moldy textbooks, dissertations, and his old fiery sermons on cassette next to a green milk crate of expired passports and credit cards, I discovered jazz.

For the first time, Duke Ellington's ‘Heaven,’ nestled right between Nancy Wilson and Miles Davis. The three of them side by side trumpeting a kind of sentimental wonder. It is up here in the sacred space where I find the melody to build a dream on where I rejoice, where I realize. He may not be all blues where I fall in love with my father.

So yeah, I, I found a crate of jazz records and I had, I had never listened to jazz and I took the crate back to Virginia Tech where I was a freshman in college or sophomore in college, and I bought a huge record player and I began playing. Uh, Nancy Wilson, ‘Save Your Love for Me. I began playing Frank Sinatra's ‘I've Got You Under My Skin.’

So deep in my heart, you really a part of me.

I began playing Miles Davis ‘Sketches in Spain.’ I began falling in love with jazz. If all I could think was, man, these albums, which had my dad's name stenciled on the top of each one belong to him. And if I'm falling in love with jazz, then my dad must've fallen in love with jazz at some point. And if we both love jazz, there's no way he's not a cool dude. And by transitive property, he's, he's full of love. And I fell in love with him. Because of these records.

NICK FIRCHAU: Right, that maybe you guys had something in common when it comes to love, and I want to be clear here, people might know you best for the Crossover but you’ve been writing love poems since you were in college. You’ve said you wrote love poems in college to get young women to notice you. Love poems make up a large part of this book. You’re a romantic, that is obvious. Why do you think you’re such a romantic, maybe you got some of that from your dad, maybe he was more of a romantic than you thought?

KWAME ALEXANDER: Dude, maybe he was. I mean, when I think about my mother who would sing around the house, like when I think about the songs she sang, they were all love songs. And she carried herself with a certain kind of sensuality that I couldn't articulate as a kid. As I look back on it, I see that. So she had to be attracted to something in him that spoke to that.

And then I guess just, It's just me, man. Like some of it's just me. It's me. And I, and I, and I've always been sort of in love. With this, you know, with love. The thing that I've missed though, and this is what I think the book helped me see, is that the only way to get better at it is you got to love yourself.

Like in a way that is like, you understand yourself better. You have a certain knowledge of self. Like the love can't be a distraction from who you are. The love can't take you away from loving yourself. And I feel like I've always needed attention. And I remember my mom used to say to me, ‘Can't you just go somewhere and sit down and be quiet for a second?’

And I feel like I've spent a lot of time trying not to be by myself. So I'm in love with love, but that can't be a reason why I don't want to be by myself or spend time with myself or experience those things that come as a result of spending quality time with yourself. So it's that balance.

NICK FIRCHAU: Kwame Alexander’s latest book Why Fathers Cry at Night is dedicated to his daughters Samayah and Nandi, with the simple phrase, “this is who I am.” The book is a collection of love poems and essays ruminating on love and relationships and there are even some of Alexander’s family recipes in there, but it was written to land in the hands of Alexander’s daughters in the hope that they might learn a little bit more about their father than he ever did about his.

The challenge, however, is that Alexander writes some love poems and essays that are brutally honest, and reveal not just when he thought love worked out - for example when he met his first wife as a college student in Virginia - but also when relationships frayed at the edges, then fell apart. The assumption is that not only will his father read this book, in fact he already has, but that his daughters will too, and they’ll learn more than maybe they were ever curious to ask about.

We talk a lot on this show about how tough it can be for some men to exhibit vulnerability, but that is not a problem for Alexander. Not anymore. He’s currently separated from his second wife and wondering what role his parents played in his own romantic relationships, if it mattered that he never saw them hold hands, if it mattered that his father watched the news while his mother quietly sang love songs in the kitchen.

There’s a poem in his new book entitled What Lies Ahead, in which Alexander compares his parents’ relationship with his first marriage, which fell apart after the birth of his first daughter, to whom the poem is directed.

“How is it possible for two people to just stop being together,” Alexander writes. “I know that you’re grading me too, and that this is a test I’ve probably failed just like I thought they had.”

KWAME ALEXANDER: A week after I got copies of the advanced reading, I woke up in the middle of the night with panic attacks. And I called my editor, I said, Judy, you gotta pull this book. You cannot publish this book. I was like, there's no way I can put this out into the world.

Well, she talked me off the ledge. But the second thing is, through these separations, through these divorces, I wanted these two loves of my life, my two daughters, to understand the love that they came out of. I wanted them to understand the context. I wanted them to understand how I love that. I cared that I tried.

I wanted them to have, you know, again, it's like I say in the introduction, is sort of like this is my trial and ultimately they're going to be the jury, but I want them to understand what was going on in my head. How I was feeling? How I was thinking, so they don't ever have to wonder if they do like I've wondered about my mom and things I can't ask her now.

So, my, my hope is that they will, this book will give them a glimpse into how their father loved and ultimately how their father loved.

NICK FIRCHAU: And that is one of the big themes here in this book. But I just wanted to give you credit. I want to say that it took a lot of courage to write some of this.

KWAME ALEXANDER: Hey, thanks for reminding me.

NICK FIRCHAU: What I mean is that when I hear you talk about waking up in the middle of the night, thinking maybe you had made a mistake, it feels like to me as the reader, like you wrote this, you wrote these poems. In this moment of crisis. And then you realize that whatever just poured out of you, that's way more than what we're used to seeing from men. And that's scary.

KWAME ALEXANDER: Yo, you're right. The vulnerability, you know, I don't think about it so much because when I do, I do feel definitely anxious and nervous, but I acknowledge that it is extremely vulnerable to be able to put some of these things down on paper. Like the last night I spent with my first wife, it's extremely vulnerable.

And my only hope is that when men, when people read this book, that they will be able to gather, glean something from it that they can relate to that resonates with them, that connects with them so that, that perhaps maybe if I'm lucky helps them in some significant way on their journey. That's my only hope.

NICK FIRCHAU: Now that the book is out, it's coming out, how do you think the book and the topics in here might change the way you talk to your dad or how he shows you love?

KWAME ALEXANDER: The cool thing is that with the publication of this book, everything's open now. My father and I didn't really talk that much as, as I was an adult, a growing man, we would talk maybe once every two months. And once every couple of weeks, and most of the conversations were, this is what you ain't doing right. This is what you should be doing. And me saying, yeah, okay, whatever. And I miss you and have a good day. When I won the Newbery Medal, my father and I began talking at least an hour a day. That was February 2nd, 2015.

Because I, again, I think the books, the words, that was the moment where he really connected. And we found our common ground. And so most of our conversations were, man, I'm so proud of you. I can't believe you're doing this. This is amazing. You're still, you're writing these good books. I read that book. This is great.

It's all this like pride coming through and, and it's, and it's all father proud of son. Two months ago, we had our first man to man conversation. Way different. And we're talking about how when my mom passed away, these women have been coming to his door bringing cakes and biscuits. And we're talking about men and women and as it relates to me dating, man, it was the best. So a lot of these conversations we're going to have as a result of this book.

NICK FIRCHAU: We talked a lot about love and what you’ve learned about how people love, how they express love. What is the message you’ve given your daughters about how to love, how to express love?

KWAME ALEXANDER: Maybe it's you, you gotta believe in it. Love is a thing. Even when there's loss, even when there's longing, even when there's separation, even when there's divorce, even when there's estrangement, I continue to believe in it. And here's all the things I've been through.

Like, I believe in it wholly and solely, and I want them to continue to believe in it. And maybe they can learn a little bit about themselves from what I've tried to share with them.

NICK FIRCHAU: That’s poet, author and father, Kwame Alexander. His latest book Why Fathers Cry at Night is available May 23 wherever you buy books. Season 1 of the The TV adaptation of his Newbery Medal winning book The Crossover is streaming now on Disney Plus.

If you want to learn more about Kwame Alexander and all of his work, we’ll put a link in the notes for this episode.