What happens to a family when a father goes to prison
Poignant and soul-stirring memoir about struggle, redemption shows that it’s survivable, but not without suffering
More than 1.8 million people in the United States are behind bars. This is an unconscionable fact of life in America. Scholars have written brilliantly about the origins of America’s particularly punitive culture, the federal and local policies that built and maintain this system, and the stark racial disparities embedded within it. We have paid far less attention to the disruption of family life that mass incarceration leaves in its wake.
Ashley C. Ford’s heart-wrenching memoir, “Somebody’s Daughter,” tells the story of a family that must shoulder the weight that such an absence creates. Ford’s father was in jail for nearly 30 years, and her memoir painfully and poignantly shows us that life goes on, even when a parent is not there. Her abusive mother became more volatile, and her grandmother tried to fill the void, while siblings drew closer to each other. They survived, but not without suffering.
The memoir begins with a phone call from Ford’s mother, who passes on the news that her father soon will be released from jail. In the chapters that follow, Ford pieces together her childhood through intimate storytelling. You see the world through a child’s eyes and feel the pain that a child feels. Sometimes her story makes you laugh out loud; sometimes it makes you weep. This is a soul-stirring tale of a child contending with “big feelings” and, later, a teenager becoming a woman.
The process of becoming and self-discovery is just as harrowing and cruel as it is beautiful and full of joy and wonder. There are moments when you wince and wish you could protect young Ashley from an unkind world; reassure her that she is beautiful, special and innocent; and keep her safe from the brutal experiences of physical and sexual violence. When she finds out at an early age that Santa Claus is not real, you want to give her more time to be a child who believes there is magic in the world. You want to tell her that it does matter when she hurts and that she deserves apologies she will never receive. When she is raped by a boy from her school in the shed at her house, she describes floating away, out of her body, and being unable to let herself back inside. You want to gently take her hand and help her to find her way back to herself.
The blurred figure of Ford’s father never falls entirely out of view. She longs to be his “favorite girl” and believes that he would understand her, protect her and love her unconditionally. She sears into her memory an old family photograph taken before he went to jail. She listens for his voice when she hears his brother, Clarence, speaking. When a teacher gives her a Kenny Loggins tape to help her sleep at night, she finds comfort in the music and feels that Loggins sings to her in the same way she imagines her father would speak to her. Her father remains the missing link, the mislaid brick that would make her foundation sturdier and safer.
After reading some of Ford’s writing, her mother asks: “Why can’t you ever write about the happy times we had? We had happy times too.” Despite the turbulence and chaos of her childhood, there were good times: nights when the family rented movies from Blockbuster and lay together on a mattress in the living room, moments when her mother’s laughter resounded throughout the house, and a festive celebration her mother planned when Ford was accepted to college.
There is a universality in the themes that “Somebody’s Daughter” presents that many readers will recognize and understand, but at its core, this is a story about the complexity and vulnerability in Black women’s lives, told firsthand by a Black woman. This is “Black Girl Magic” at its very finest and its most unapologetic. Ford helps to fill a gap in the literature on African American women’s lives.
As Ford’s grandmother told her, “I never lost a fight in my life, because I never stopped fighting until I won.” Ultimately, the same is true for Ford. As a child, she becomes known as a girl who will fight boys. As a teenager and an adult, she is troubled by her body, which she feels has betrayed her by being “too big” and “inappropriate.” Her outer self is mismatched with her inner emotional life. She grapples with agonizing feelings of insecurity, self-doubt and invisibility.
Her most difficult internal struggle is with her father, who committed heinous crimes: He raped two women. His absence has caused her “big feelings,” and his crimes have made those feelings even bigger, leaving Ford emotionless and lost. When her grandmother tells her why her father has been in jail, Ford does not cry; instead, she tells herself “Control your breath, quiet your heart, die on the inside, only let them see life.” In time, she sees life, too. This is a story of redemption: Ford finds the courage to solve the mystery that is her father, to come to grips with his past and ultimately “to feel like somebody’s daughter.”
Perhaps the greatest contribution Ford makes is to offer her story — written in the most lively and lucid prose — in its most raw and unabridged form. In the end, she finds that she can “tell the truth” and “be loved anyway.” As she writes, “Some things were too precious not to be shared.” By telling her truth so honestly and authentically, Ford invites us to tell ours, too.