For Men Who Learned To Cry

And other forms of masculinity. By Chad Jordan

I knew it was coming. No matter how recently he’d seen me, once he caught sight of my chubby, pubescent cheeks or noticed that my five-foot-nine frame was already outgrowing my uniform khaki slacks, he’d crumple his kind, artfully wrinkled face and purse the lips beneath his soup-soaking mustache.

“Boy, how much you weigh now?”

My paternal grandfather, Granddaddy, asked this with melodic disbelief.

At fourteen, I was still trying to come to terms with my changing body. I’d shrug, avoid eye contact, and silently pray that no one else had heard him. Then came the jovial slaps on the shoulder, the playful pokes to my chest, and an inquiry into how many push-ups I could do. Sometimes he’d remove his burgundy suit jacket, unbutton his starched cream dress shirt, and demonstrate the exercise himself, announcing that he was sixty-four and used to be able to do a hundred at a time. My embarrassment would ease, and I’d begin to chuckle.

It took me years to understand the pride beneath the ribbing.

Granddaddy had grown up during the Great Depression, with hunger shadowing his childhood. To him, a stout grandson was proof that things had improved. I was well-fed and growing. He wanted to know how strong I was getting.

My maternal grandfather stood five-foot-nothing and dragged a wooden cane everywhere he went. We called him Pépère, the Louisiana Creole name for grandfather used in our family. The folks in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward knew him as Kippy, or Kip if they knew him well.

“Kippy!” someone would yell as he rounded an aisle in the grocery store.

“Where ya at, nah?” he’d shoot back with a smile and a wink.

He rocked a half-done comb-over slicked across his dark, olive-hued bald head when it wasn’t covered by a rumpled fedora. He was the life of any room he limped into, a shot of earthy joy whose ability to charm seemed handed to him directly by God.

A retired postal worker, he carried either the aroma of French Market Coffee or the pungent odor of Jax Beer, both of which he drank too much of. He ate red beans on Mondays, spoke French as fluently as a Parisian pickpocket, and hiked up his pant leg to keep it from dragging beneath his heel while he danced to brass-band music. He cried after every Saints loss as though he had buried a friend at St. Roch Cemetery. The team gave him plenty of opportunities.

When I say he cried, I mean warm tears, moaning and cursing at the television before tossing his cane at the wall. Pépère cried all the time. Burned eggs. A preempted soap opera. A minor disagreement with our grandmother, whom we called Gammie. Here came the boo-hoos. Some of it was for comedic effect, but most of it was genuine.

I never thought this was strange. The most popular and beloved man I knew freely sobbed at the whisper of an opportunity. Later, I wondered whether he’d become this way with age. My mother told me he had always been like that.

Granddaddy was no less eccentric. He painted, sculpted, and drew subjects with gorgeous, ink-black skin and exaggerated features that accentuated the beauty of their African roots. On an unremarkable weekday, you might catch him in a retina-scorchingly bright suit, gleaming white loafers, and a yacht captain’s cap. At Southern University of New Orleans, where he taught art, his small, kitsch-filled office was always brimming with students doubled over in laughter.

For all that exuberance, I never saw him cry. Not even in the days after the death of his beloved wife, Grand Mommy. Whimsy, for sure. Bemusement, sometimes. Frustration, frequently. But sorrow was something he kept beyond my view.

I recognized that reserve in my father, whose intelligent, tasteful demeanor I came to associate with elegant strength. Between him and Granddaddy, I learned to admire composure. Pépère made it impossible for me to believe that tears cost a man anyone’s respect. I had watched people love him through too many of them.

Of course, I knew both grandfathers as a child. Whatever they felt when I wasn’t in the room belonged to lives I couldn’t fully know. But I carried what I’d seen into my own.

For much of my adulthood, I’ve tried to examine my feelings before allowing them to dictate my behavior. Some days I manage that better than others.

I also cry easily. If this essay were a support group, I’d stand up, clear my throat, and confess, “Hi, my name is Chad, and I’m a crier.”

A gorgeous melody by Stevie Wonder or Cleo Sol can do it. So can Kendrick Lamar’s righteous anger on “Alright,” or a heart-wrenching passage in a novel. My displays are rarely as extravagant as Pépère’s, but they may be just as frequent.

Nothing, though, has made me blubber like a baby more than having one. I cried when I learned my son’s mother was pregnant, at his first sonogram, and in the hospital bathroom on the day of his birth.

My son is thirteen now. Neither of my grandfathers lived to meet him; both died more than a decade before he was born. Still, his honey-toned skin and facial structure remind me of Pépère. Watching him paint, draw, and sketch, I sometimes think Granddaddy must have passed the graphite pencil directly into his palms.

I can spot things he’s picked up from me, too. That gives me something to think about. Raising a Black boy means preparing him for peril I know exists while leaving him room for joy. I want him to be steady when he needs to be. I also want him to feel free to cry in front of his father.

At a recent church service, the choir sang the gospel standard “Excellent.” If you’ve heard it swell through a Black church, you know what I was up against. I made it through the first half emotionally intact. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my son composing himself with a quick swipe across his eyes. I gently touched his shoulder. He turned toward me, his eyes still wet, and I draped an arm around his shoulders. We sat in silence.

I hadn’t planned that moment or rehearsed what kind of father I would be in it. I knew how to sit beside him. All those years of watching two very different men had given me that much.

My son will decide what to keep from me, too. I see my grandfathers in his face and his drawings, but I’m still getting to know the young man he’s becoming. They couldn’t have known the father I would become. I’m learning to leave my son that same room.

“Boy, how much you weigh now?” Granddaddy used to ask.

All these years later, I finally know the answer: I carry the weight of both men.

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Chad Jordan is a New Orleans native based in Houston, where he works as a legal professional, creative designer, and writer. Follow him on Instagram and Threads at @sacred_athletics and on Substack Chad Jordan

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