Don't Cry for Me

Jacob Swinton, a 62-year-old Black man dying of lung cancer, begins writing a letter to his estranged son, Isaac, from the family home in Kansas City. More than a decade has passed since they last communicated. His ex-wife and Isaac's mother, Rachel Marie White, has died in the interim. Sitting in the unchanged house, surrounded by Rachel's reading chair and the oval kitchen table where the family once shared meals, Jacob sets out to explain himself before time runs out. He personifies Death as a female presence who agrees to wait while he finishes writing.

Jacob's account reaches back generations. His grandfather Abraham Swinton raised him and his older brother Esau in rural Blackwell, Arkansas. Abraham's own father had been enslaved until age 18, and the legacy of slavery and racial terror shaped everything: the family's self-loathing, the pursuit of white approval, and the harsh, emotionless parenting Jacob inherited. Abraham offered no affection, only brutal discipline.

Jacob's most cherished relationship is with Esau, who rubbed his head at night and told him that stars were "God's thoughts." Their childhood in 1940s Arkansas is defined by grinding poverty: no electricity, two dollars a day picking cotton, sporadic schooling. Jacob confesses a terrible secret. A group of boys cornered Elliott Strong, a quiet, effeminate classmate, and forced him to perform oral sex. Jacob and his friend Bobby Joe did not participate directly but stood watching, kicking, and cursing Elliott. By the next morning, Elliott was dead. The boys never confessed.

In 1956, Esau collapses while working and dies of a raging fever. Jacob stops speaking, eating, and sleeping. At the burial, Abraham tells him, "You on your own now." A year later, their grandmother dies, having taught Jacob to bake her lemon pound cake and passed down family stories. At her funeral, Abraham sings "I'll Fly Away" alongside a sparrow near the grave, the only time Jacob witnesses his grandfather express open emotion. The two men live in near-silence until Abraham tells Jacob, at 21, it is time to leave.

In 1961, Jacob meets Rachel, who is visiting Blackwell from Kansas City. Captivated by her beauty and intelligence, he courts her at her great-aunt Loretha's house, walking four miles each way every evening. The following spring, he moves to Kansas City. Rachel becomes pregnant, and they marry on June 13, 1962. Three weeks later, Abraham is found dead in the pea patch.

Isaac is born, and Jacob calls the day the happiest of his life. He discovers that laying the baby on his chest, heartbeat against heartbeat, is the only way to soothe him. But Rachel begins drinking when Isaac is about eight months old. Jacob comes home to find her passed out while Isaac screams in his crib, and he hits her. He also spends nights out with other women. Rachel reads Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, begins volunteering at a women's shelter, and starts resisting Jacob's authority.

Isaac grows into a sensitive, artistic child who loves music but rejects sports. Jacob saves for a piano and is proud when Isaac excels, but he also forces football and baseball on the boy. On Christmas 1974, Jacob catches Isaac kissing an action figure and destroys the toy, shouting that boys don't kiss other boys. At 12, Isaac earns the lead in a school play and performs brilliantly, but Jacob is so humiliated he hides outside. The next morning, he asks Isaac if he wants to be a "sissy." Rachel holds a butcher knife to Jacob's throat, whispering for him to let the boy go. Jacob releases Isaac and knows he has been dethroned.

Rachel reveals she terminated multiple pregnancies because she refused to have more children with Jacob. Shattered, he moves out but visits Isaac every evening, sharing the family history: how their ancestor Wilson Swinton was brought from Africa on a slave ship and, after emancipation, used smuggled gold to purchase 500 acres in Blackwell. Father and son bond over the 1977 television miniseries Roots, crying together as the enslaved protagonist Kunta Kinte is whipped for refusing to surrender his name. Jacob takes 14-year-old Isaac to Arkansas, where the boy walks the ancestral land and, at the family cemetery, falls into a trance, speaking to the dead. Isaac reaches for his father's hand, but Jacob cannot take it.

Around 15, Isaac tells his parents he is "different." Rachel stuns Jacob with her fury, calling Isaac sick and demanding Jacob fix him. Isaac recants the next day, and Jacob desperately believes him. On prom night, however, Jacob sees Isaac and his friend Ricky Stanton kiss beneath a dogwood tree. He tells no one. A later confrontation leads Jacob to beat Isaac badly enough that Rachel calls the police. Two white officers address Jacob as "boy." Isaac graduates from Lincoln University, takes a computer job in Chicago, and leaves without asking Jacob's advice.

Rachel gives Jacob The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which he reads slowly over weeks, transforming his thinking. She then gives him Alice Walker's The Color Purple, in which he recognizes his grandfather and himself in the abusive character of Mister. He visits Rachel to apologize for himself, for their family, and for Black people. She says she is proud of him.

Rachel is diagnosed with breast cancer and dies on February 7, 1994. That night, Jacob overhears Isaac talking to Rachel's spirit, saying he loves a man but will never tell his father. In the lonely years that follow, Jacob attends a reading by Walker and sees a white woman wearing a T-shirt that reads "My daughter is a lesbian because she's supposed to be." For the first time, he feels ashamed of his judgment of Isaac.

Driven by loneliness and gospel music, Jacob returns to Arkansas and learns the truth about his mother, Sarah Ann Swinton, from Abraham's elderly friend Mr. John Davies. Sarah Ann was bold and defiant. At 15, she became pregnant and refused to degrade herself when the church demanded she apologize. Abraham argued with her in a barn loft; she fell, or was pushed, and lost the baby. She later married a man who shot her dead. Jacob buys headstones for her and for Esau's unmarked grave. He recognizes that he married a woman like his mother, then tried to break her the way Abraham broke Sarah Ann.

When Jacob's cancer is diagnosed, he refuses treatment. He drives toward Chicago to apologize but turns around in Columbia, Missouri, convinced Isaac will not welcome him. In the letter, he confesses he never called Isaac "son," always "boy," because the word would have meant declaring a pride he could not feel. He admits that his love for Esau went beyond brotherly affection, and that the difference between his feelings and Isaac's love for men is not as great as he once believed.

In his final entry, Jacob tells Isaac he can see the "Old Ship of Zion," a gospel image for the vessel carrying the faithful to heaven. He asks to be buried next to Esau in Rose of Sharon Cemetery and leaves Isaac the house and 300 acres of family land, urging him never to sell it. He signs the letter "Your Father, Jacob," claiming the title without qualification for the first and only time.