“Father’s Feet” by Donna Hemans

4/19/2022

Donna Hemans is the author River Woman, Tea by the Sea and Tree of a Thousand Feet (forthcoming in 2023). Her writing has appeared in Slice, Shenandoah, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine and Crab Orchard Review. She lives in Maryland and operates the DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers.

Minneh Kane is an MFA student in American University’s Creative Writing program. Recently retired from a long career as a World Bank lawyer, she is fulfilling her passion for creative writing and working on an auto fiction novel spanning several generations of a family and straddling Kenya and the US. Ms. Kane is a graduate of Harvard Law School, a barrister-at-law of Grays Inn, London and was called to the Kenyan Bar in 1982. She holds a first law degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury and a Diploma in French Law from the Université de Paris-Sud. She has lived in the Metropolitan Washington area for over 30 years. In retirement, Minneh has volunteered towards several Arlington issues. She was on the working group that renamed Lee Highway to Langston Boulevard and she co-chaired the panel that developed a new official logo for the County.

Introduction to “Father’s Feet”

By Minneh Kane

Donna Hemans’ short story Father’s Feet is a bittersweet story about a gifted athlete whose life takes an unexpected and challenging turn. The story explores the rewards and challenges that come with talent and the roles that genes, character and sheer hard work play in realizing that talent. It felt particularly poignant to read in the wake of Simone Biles’ recent experiences leading her to her decision to bow out of the last Olympics, and the commentary around that decision.

Hemans, who was born in Jamaica and came to the US as a teenager, infuses her work with the particular longing that comes from straddling two worlds. Her characters navigate the often painful choices made by immigrants as they pursue opportunities at the expense of proximity to home and to family. She shows the particular anguish of first-generation immigrants for whom the price of pursuing ambition can be unbearably high. Hemans writes eloquently about belonging, and about the duties that parents owe to their children, children owe to their parents. In our recent conversation, she told me that she aims to examine, with sensitivity and nuance, the decisions made by humans who fall in the vast gray area between heroes and villains.

Hemans is the author of two award winning novels both of which center on the complexities of family. Her first novel River Woman, (2003) which won the Towson University Prize for Literature, follows a young woman dealing with the aftermath of the death of her child as she tries to reconnect with her own mother who left her in Jamaica to pursue a better life in the US. Her second novel Tea by the Sea (2020) centers on a woman’s seventeen-year search for her child who was stolen from her soon after birth. It is one of the best depictions of grief that I have read in a long time.

Father’s Feet, which was published in Furious Gravity in 2020, echoes the themes in the novels and is as engrossing to read. Additionally, it examines what gifted athletes owe their families, their country and ultimately, themselves. Told in age snapshots, it follows Jacinth as she grapples with her identity and her talents. Hemans very effectively uses the close third person point of view in this story to allow the reader to experience life from the perspective of Jacinth – from when she is a little girl to adulthood. We first meet Jacinth, a four year old girl in Jamaica, as her mother tells her that she “has her father’s feet.” Jacinth wonders whether this is the reason why her father’s legs have been cut off at the knees, and goes to apologize to her father, who gently explains to her that his legs were amputated after a car accident.

Jacinth’s understanding of inheritance deepens as she grows into an athlete as talented as her father was before the accident that led to his leg amputation. At sixteen, her parents take her to live in New York City in order to better fulfill her talents. She is full of confidence, channeling her father’s ambitions, and “she knows for sure that she can compete at a national level, and win Olympic medals for her country, the small island already known for building sprinters.”

But underneath her strength is a hidden vulnerability. The story takes an unexpected and sad turn and the protagonist grapples with the complexities of genetic inheritances – some are positive but others less so.

Father’s Feet takes the concept of belonging to the DNA level. It also asks: where does character come from? Where do dreams and ambitions come from? Who are you when your body betrays you, when you can no longer meet the dreams set for you by your family, by society? What would it be like to escape the strictures of inheritance?

The story is a poignant look at the ways in which our families and our bodies can both support and betray us. It also looks at the question of agency: how does a person live the life she wants to live as opposed to the life her family and society in general expect for her?

Father’s Feet is an engrossing story and well worth the read. Some may see the ending as representing a glimmer of hope, though others may not. It left me with deep questions about the meaning of a good life, and new insight into the pressures put on young people, particularly young Black women to excel.