Isaac's Song

Isaac Swinton, a Black gay man living in Chicago, learns that his father, Jacob, has died. Despite their distant and painful relationship, Isaac is devastated. He buries Jacob in the rural Arkansas community of Blackwell, where Jacob grew up, next to Jacob's brother, Uncle Esau, as a flock of red cardinals gathers in the cemetery trees. Weeks later, unable to sleep or eat, Isaac visits a therapist who challenges him to stop blaming his father and instead write his life story on a legal pad, promising the process will lead to freedom.

Isaac begins with his earliest memories. His mother, Rachel, a Midwestern woman with a musical voice, nurtured his imagination by reading to him nightly and inventing a story called Isaac's Song about a brilliant Black boy with extraordinary gifts. Isaac eventually realizes the story is about him. His father, Jacob, a man from the Arkansas backwoods with limited formal education, expresses love through relentless discipline and labor. His greatest fear is raising a lazy son. Yet Jacob shows hidden generosity: he works overtime to buy Isaac a red tricycle for Christmas and carries a live tree into Isaac's third-grade classroom when Isaac volunteers to provide one. Isaac never thanks him.

By age eight, Isaac knows he is different. He admires and emulates his mother, walks expressively, and dances freely. Jacob works to suppress these tendencies, controlling Isaac's clothing colors and confiscating a pink sweater Rachel buys. One evening, Isaac dresses in Rachel's pumps, dress, pearls, and makeup and enters the living room. Jacob slaps him and orders him to remove everything. The next morning, Rachel confronts Jacob, and they argue fiercely. Isaac notices a bruise above his mother's eye and resolves that he and his father will never be friends.

Isaac's maternal grandmother, Grandma Pearl, offers quieter wisdom. She tells Isaac stories of their enslaved ancestors in Missouri and urges him to love himself first, insisting that God does not make mistakes. She also defends Jacob, saying he means well despite being hard on Isaac.

Isaac's artistic talents clash with Jacob's expectations. Jacob enrolls him in Little League, and when Isaac deliberately throws wild pitches, Jacob whips him with a belt on the pitcher's mound. Meanwhile, Isaac discovers Rachel passed out drunk and learns she drinks to cope with a life she never wanted, having abandoned dreams of writing poetry when she became pregnant. After accepting that Isaac is no athlete, Jacob buys a piano on layaway. At a recital, Isaac freezes, but Jacob encourages him, saying Swintons do not quit. Isaac plays flawlessly on his second attempt, and Jacob stands and claps.

In eighth grade, a white classmate named Henry Adams asks Isaac if he is gay, and Isaac admits it aloud for the first time. He tells Rachel, who slaps him. She calls Jacob, who asks if Isaac wants to be a "sissy." Isaac lies and says no, then spends weeks redecorating his room with football bedspreads and magazine centerfolds, performing a masculinity he does not feel. His parents are pleased; Isaac is miserable.

The summer he turns 14, Jacob takes Isaac to Blackwell, where Isaac watches his father transform, becoming joyful in ways Isaac has never seen. Jacob shares family history: Their great-grandfather Wilson Swinton bought 500 acres after slavery. A cousin named Isadore, known as a conjurer, put a spell on a white man who cheated him, killing the man's sons. In retaliation, white men burned Isadore's house with his wife and children inside. The trip deepens Isaac's understanding of his father. Back home, Isaac dates Marie Washington, a preacher's daughter who serves as his cover girlfriend, but when Marie falls in love with a girl and ends their arrangement, Isaac begins questioning God and the Bible.

A month before turning 18, Isaac tears the centerfolds and football bedspread from his walls, telling Rachel he can no longer pretend. She apologizes and sings his childhood lullaby. Isaac befriends Ricky Stanton, the star quarterback, who reveals he too is attracted to men. Ricky's refusal to feel shame becomes a model for Isaac. On graduation day, Jacob appears in a new suit and, for the first time, calls Isaac "son," revealing that Isaac is the first Swinton to graduate from high school since the family arrived in America.

At Lincoln University, a historically Black college, Isaac experiences acceptance for the first time. He encounters works by James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison that reshape his understanding of his father and himself. He befriends Adam Stewart, a brilliant student with sickle cell disease who insists Isaac's stability comes from having an invested father. During Christmas break of his junior year, Isaac confronts Jacob about hitting Rachel, and Jacob acknowledges he should not have done it.

After graduation, Isaac joins Microsoft in Chicago. He and Adam lose touch until Adam calls, seriously ill with AIDS. Isaac brings Adam home and cares for him until Adam dies. Isaac attends a Black church, drawn by the gospel music, but walks out when the pastor condemns homosexuality. He reconciles with God after saving a baby bird fallen from its nest, recognizing the encounter as orchestrated, just as God and his father sustained his own life without his recognition. At a Microsoft Christmas party, the regional manager asks Isaac and another Black employee to lead the office in songs, assuming they can sing because they are Black. Isaac refuses. When he calls home, Rachel tells him his education does not exempt him from racism.

Isaac begins a years-long affair with Travis, a brilliant, married man from New York who eventually dies of a brain aneurysm. At the funeral, Travis's wife approaches Isaac and says, "You're the one from Chicago, aren't you?" Rachel is diagnosed with cancer and dies; Isaac's world goes silent. She appears to him in spirit, urging him to find love and repair things with Jacob. Desperate to build a conventional family and have children, Isaac proposes to Verlinda Washington, a coworker, but when Verlinda asks if he would still want her without children, he cannot answer. They break up. Friends push Isaac toward graduate school at the University of Chicago, where a professor dismisses his undergraduate education and suggests he is not suited for academic life.

A week before his 35th birthday, Isaac drives to the family home in Kansas City and discovers dozens of handwritten letters from Jacob scattered across the coffee table. In them, Jacob apologizes for his failures and his treatment of Rachel and Isaac. He reveals his motherless childhood, his regret, and his self-education through reading. The letters show that Jacob met Adam while Adam was dying and witnessed the cost of the world's hostility toward his son. Jacob asks Isaac to take his body home to Arkansas, never to sell the land, and to tell people he tried. He has placed tombstones on every Swinton grave in Arkansas, building a labyrinth of family history as his legacy.

Isaac quits Microsoft and begins writing a novel about two enslaved brothers, Matthew and Jesse Lee, separated as small children. One night, driving aimlessly, he finds himself headed to Arkansas. Arriving at the family land, he realizes that Matthew is Uncle Esau and Jesse Lee is his father: The novel is his family's story. Jacob's spirit appears beside him and tells him to finish. Rachel's voice instructs Isaac to forgive. Isaac kneels at Jacob's grave and performs a water libation, an African ritual of ancestral reverence, praising Jacob's sacrifice while naming the hurt Jacob caused. He declares that everything he is was meant to be and calls Jacob's full ancestral name with the affirmation Asé, a Yoruba word meaning "so be it." A red cardinal perches above him, echoing the flock that gathered the day of Jacob's burial. Isaac pours the last drops for all fathers who spent a lifetime trying and sons who missed it, then returns to the car and resumes writing.