Art Winfield, a thirty-five-year-old laboratory assistant with a high school education, had only the barest acquaintance with the women’s movement and, unlike Adrienne Sherman, his wife had never pressed him to do more at home. But Art has a natural interest in children and a passion for being with his five-year-old adopted son, Adam. Art was not the self-consciously celebrated New Man; he is a gentle, easygoing black man, the New Man disguised as an ordinary fellow.
He was taking night classes twice a week in lab technology mainly at his wife’s urging; she had hoped these classes might motivate him to search out more interesting work. But as he drove to and from his lab, Arts mind would wander from his job to the bright smile that would light his sons face when he greeted him at the day-care center door. “My son gets only three-and-a-half hours of my time a day,” Art explained, “so the time Гт with him is very important to me.” Sometimes when he came to fetch Adam at day care, Art lingered for half an hour or so to see a secret hideout, climb a favorite tree, or organize a relay race. During several months when he was on leave from the lab, he stayed longer.
The Winfields needed two salaries to live, no question about it, so Adam had to be in day care. But Art’s feelings about it are mixed: “Adams best buddy, his number-one main man is there [at the day-care center]. But sometimes he still gets tired of being there. Its real hard for a five-year-old kid to spend eight hours away from home. Sometimes Г11 take the day off and take him out of day care and spend a day at home with him.”
Wherever people found Adam on a weekend—bicycling, visiting a favorite uncle, collecting rocks—they found Art with him. Friends and relatives called them “the twins.” Basking in the subject of his tie to his son, Art reflected: “We re affectionate toward each other. Sometimes I wonder if I overdo it. But I think a father — son relationship happens pretty easily.”
Some fathers reach out more easily to a son than to a daughter, but this didn’t seem true for Art. He and his wife, Julia, who is white, are trying to have a child of their own, and when I asked him how he felt about a daughter, he replied:
I’d love to have a little girl. Yeah. I think little girls are precious. I’d like to have a father-daughter relationship, and I guess I’m sort of nontraditional when it comes to that. Regarding sports, or her basic outlook on life. I’d raise my daughter just as positively as a boy. My wife is a strong woman and I’d like to have a daughter like that too. Girls are very smart! They certainly learn a lot quicker than boys do. Thats quite obvious. Plus it would be special for Adam to have a sister.
Art also enjoys children who are not his own, and they flock to him. Tough teenage boys drop by the Winfields’ home in a poor, rough neighborhood of East Oakland to show off their pit bull dogs, and talk. When there’s trouble in the neighborhood, they protect the Winfields’ home. One disturbed boy showed up regularly on Art’s porch. As Art recalled:
It was a challenge to me to get to know him, because I knew what he needed. His mother was raising five kids by herself, and he needed some attention. We worked together. He came around and got to be one heck of a kid. His grades improved. Now he’s an “A” student. He knew I was really serious about my relationship toward him, that I wasn’t trying to prove I could conquer and make him be an exceptional individual. He just turned out to be a real good kid, which he was anyway,;
He’s eighteen now and the bond is still pretty tight.
Art’s wife, Julia, feels she lacks Art’s gift with children:
I love my own son, but I’m not good with everyone’s kids, like Art is. I’m one of these people who doesn’t know how old a child is. I’ll ask, “How old are you?” And they’ll say, “Why do you want to know, lady?” But Art knows what level to approach a child on. After a long day’s work, it’s hard for me to compliment all the little kids at day care on their finger painting the way he does.
Art focuses on children. About tending house he simply feels that “sharing is fair.” As he puts it: [11]
conditioning, too, because we re led to believe were lords and masters of the household [laughs]—that there are certain things were not supposed to do. Also, I’m kind of stubborn and its wrong to be like that. Anyway, Julia works as hard as I do, probably a lot harder. She deserves to have me participate. So, for about ten months, since Julias had to work overtime at her office, IVe been doing half.
Art does the laundry, vacuuming, yard work, and half the cooking. Julia, a plump, good-natured woman of thirty, appreciates the help. But she also wishes that Art loved his work more. It seems to make her a bit anxious to be more engrossed in her own job (as a legal secretary) than Art is in his. She doesn’t care about money; between them she feels they have plenty. It was more a matter of her wanting him to be more drawn to his job—because it is good for people to like their work, maybe especially if they are men.
For his part, Art feels that $25,000 is pretty good pay, and that the center of a mans life ought to be his family. He wonders at Julias ambitions for him. Does it mean there is something wrong with him? Does he seem inadequate? He explained to me in confidence, that he thought her anxiety might be due to her desire to please her older brother, a conventional man who had never approved of her interracial marriage, or their house in East Oakland. Art talked the matter over privately with his mother by phone, and finally agreed, without enthusiasm, to let Julia type out a resume for him and apply for an evening course in laboratory technology.
I asked Art why he thought his bond with his son was so warm, relaxed, and strong. He began his answer with his early childhood. His mother had raised his brother and himself by working as a cook in a childcare center. As he put it, “I could give you the whole black saga—living in a dingy apartment, sleeping in bed with my brother and my mother, rats jumping over it at night.” From time to time, his father would appear at their apartment, argue bitterly with his mother, then disappear. “I think my father helped me know what kind of man I didn’t want to be,” Art said. He continued: “He was my biological father. And from the time I was born until I was nine, he was all I had as a father. We didn’t really have the fatherly thing when I was coming up. Because my mother was a very strong force, I didn’t realize I was missing a father.”
When Art was nine, his mother married a longshoreman, a strong, gentle, kindly man with no children of his own. He worked the evening shift and was home days, waiting for Art when he came barreling in the door after school. Coming to trust and love this man was the most important event in Art’s life:
When he married my mother, he understood that it would take some time to interject himself into our family. I can recall that he took his time doing that. He got to understand us first.
I was a sensitive kid, and the youngest, and it had to be explained to me that my mother was still going to be there, that he was joining the family to make it a little better. He was a gentle man, a good man.
Art spoke of his stepfather with great softness:
I don’t call him my stepfather. He’s my father. He’s everything a father ever could be. I love him as if I was the biological son. Because he’s a good man. He’s a gentle man. He’s a very honest man. We were always together. I had a father that was always there to help me whenever I needed something. He wouldn’t give me anything, but he made me realize I had to work for what I wanted. He really did teach us how to love. . . .
Through him I learned what I want to do with my own kid.
I’m trying to form the same kind of relationship. I want Adam to know that I really care about him.
Vacations at his grandmother’s farm in Arkansas were vacations “with my father.” As he spoke about this his eyes dampened, as if it was still hard for him to believe his stepfather loved him. “I hate to keep saying this,” he said, “but it’s true, he’s a very warm man.”
Perhaps Art’s double legacy—a father he did not want to be like and a stepfather he did want to be like—prompted his gift with children. In his bond with his own adopted son he may be consolidating his boyhood victory.