By Fredia Lucas

Initially, when I saw #Blackmendontcheat on Instagram, I couldn’t keep from rolling my eyes. It was the kind of eye roll that had a whole persona. I could see her, hands on her hips, with a sequined purse dangling from her shoulder and pearls fastened around her neck. It was the kind of eyeroll accentuated by both a scoff and light chuckle. The kind of eye-roll that felt ancestral, as if it was a gift from the many Black women I stand on the shoulders of.

#Blackmendontcheat

I read it over and over and over again but something about it just wasn’t right. It didn’t feel like a complete statement, as if the author had been typing the hashtag out, only to get an unexpected call and be torn away from the screen before him.

#Blackmendontcheat….

I read #Blackmendontcheat but wasn’t comprehending #Blackmendontcheat. More importantly, as I read #Blackmendontcheat I felt irritation creep up in my spirit.

I decided to read it aloud to see if I could pinpoint my own misfortune. I began reading, letting the letter “b” bounce between my cupid’s bow, hardening out the “d” in don’t, chopping at the “c” in cheat. I finished reading the hashtag, but my lips kept moving. My mind wasn’t done and my tongue wasn’t either. I realized that for me, it wasn’t a statement, it was a question.

#Blackmendontcheat? …..Since when?

As I type this, I can hear an uproar of Black men groaning at any opposition to this seemingly “tired” cliche. The only thing that’s more tired than this cliche, are the actual Black women who’ve had experiences with unfaithful men. They real tired.

“Fredia, honestly, all Black men don’t cheat. We’re not a monolith.”

This is not untrue. Kudos to the non-cheating Black men that do exist. I see you, and I thank you for doing the bare minimum, which is being faithful.

I pray that the men in your lives have been honest, committed, and dedicated but I can’t say that’s been my reality.

My best friend’s dad cheated. My uncles cheated. My cousins cheated and what turned my world upside down was when I found out my father cheated on my mother.

It was crazy how my father told me he cheated on my mom. It was my Senior year of college and I was visiting home for winter break. My father was dropping me off at a friend’s house for a sleepover. I sat in the front seat, scrolling through the 2014 version of Instagram. Rather suddenly, my dad lowers the 50 Cent station on Pandora. I knew he had something important to say because Black men my father’s age love 50 Cent and this was the era before Pandora had a paid subscription, which meant you just don’t get to pick what songs you want to listen to. There was no Pandora playback.

“Coconut,” he said, as he’s said many times before.

“Coconut, remember when you were a little girl, and I told you the truth about these niggas?”

When I was nine, my father gave me three tips about men, dating and relationships. This is the only conversation we ever had about me and men in my whole life but it was iconic. 

Tip #1: “Niggas ain’t shit.”

Tip #2: “Don’t give niggas ya’ money.”

Tip #3: “No matter what a man says, don’t let him put the tip in.”

At 9-years-old, I can’t say any of this really made much sense. I had no money, I knew no niggas, and the only tips I knew were “French” because that’s what my mother used to get at the nail salon. However, as a senior in college, at that point, my familiarity with all three tips had grown.

I hesitated, unsure of why he was bringing this conversation from the past into the present. There were no niggas in our midst nor on my line, at least not at that moment. My father repeated himself. “Coconut, remember when you were a little girl and I told you the truth about these niggas?”

“Unfortunately,” I replied.

My father turned to me and said, rather simply, “Well, there’s no easy way to say this, but…...ya’ daddy is a nigga.”

He said it as if he had been diagnosed with a fatal disease, like a cancer of character. 

Confused, I turned the volume on “Wanksta” down even more.

“Daddy what you talkin’ bout? Daddy, what’s wrong? What happened?”

My father was silent.

Confused, I revisited his previous lecture points on niggas, hoping to solve this sudden mystery.

“Dad, did you take all of mama's money and now you’re leaving her high and dry?”

“No, it’s not that,” he said.

I questioned once more, uncomfortable with the next question I had to ask.

“Did you put the tip in? And now you two are having another baby, even though y’all hella old?”

“No, it’s not that,” he said again.

To remind you, my father was driving—hands-on ten and two—so I could only see his side profile, but even from that vantage point, I could see that he had tears in his eyes. 

“I cheated on your mother.”

Hearing those words broke my little heart into a million, tiny little pieces. My father had been right all of this time, niggas really ain’t shit.

I began crying. My mind moved so quickly it was difficult to find the letters to assemble into the words to match my feelings. My own father, my emblem of righteousness and dignity, was flawed.

I mustered the courage to say something that I never thought I would have to say to my own father. In broken words and tears, I posed yet another question.

“So...Daddy..are... you... trying... to... tell... me... that... you... a... hoe?”

“Yeah baby. Ya’ daddy is a hoe.”

After years of both warning and reminding me of the deceitful nature of men, my father ended up being to my mother the very type of man he wanted to protect me from.

We pulled up at my friend’s house. I told him I loved him, and that we would talk more about the issue when I was ready. 

As a reminder, my dad was dropping me off at a sleepover. Have you ever cried in footed pajamas in your friend’s garage? That night, with my heart hollowed and my head still spinning, I did. 

A couple of days passed and I found myself at a point where I had simply run out of tears to cry. My despair turned into distress. I was pissed. It dawned on me--my father hadn’t just cheated on my mother, he had cheated on me. In fact, he had cheated on our entire family! I knew the only person I could talk to about this was my mother, so angry and in a fury, I stormed into her room as she was folding laundry.

“Where we ‘bout to move to?”

Without hesitation and with a stress-free ease in her voice, she quickly reminded me, “Bitch, this is my house.”

I stopped in my tracks. If anyone was going to leave it should be my father. More calmly, but still upset, I presented a new idea. 

“Well, when is Daddy moving out?”

Turning towards me with my father’s sweater in hand, she looked me straight in my eyes. 

“We ain’t going nowhere, and neither is your father,” she said.

“What? But he cheated on us!”

My mother completed her last fold, then sat in her bedside chair.

“No, he cheated on me. He has been an excellent father to you,” she said.

I was at a loss for words. My mother was right, when it came to fathering my father was second to none. But still, she wasn’t kicking him out? She wasn’t leaving him? I had so many questions but because of her calm disposition, I too began to lower my voice. I also lowered my voice because I was not too far away or too old to get slapped in the face. I could feel the sadness begin to well back up inside me. My voice began to break again.

“So why did he do it?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“Well, what do you think about it?”

“I think he made a mistake.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

Picking the laundry back up she said something so simple yet so profound that it’s  Etch-A-Sketch’d into my mind.

“I’m going to forgive him.”

I hadn’t been aware of my mother’s zen-like nature until this moment, but it took a handful of seconds to gauge her authenticity and honesty. It wasn’t that she was going to forgive him, it was that she’d already forgiven him.

The emotional toll of the conversation was weighing on me but I knew I had to ask her one last question before I retired to my bedroom to cry some more.

“Well, how do you know he won’t do it again?”

She turned to me once more, this time with tears in her eyes. 

“I have faith,” she said. 

My mother has always been my hero, but after that day she became my superhero.

My dad? Well, he’s a nigga, but he’s MY nigga.

That’s the one man I know will love me forever. 

My parents have been married for 27 years now. I am retelling this story because I’m grateful for a handful of things. I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak to my father about his infidelity face-to-face. As I share this personal story with close friends who have been in the same predicament, I learn that many children learn of their father’s “stepping out” from other family members: their mother, their cousin, their aunt, their siblings, and so I am grateful that my father found the courage to tell me himself. I am also grateful for my mother, who was patient enough to answer my very nosy and at times insensitive questions.

My parents have since worked through this hardening point and moved on to a deeper side of love, and a much more honest version for sure. I would argue that my parent’s love is stronger now simply because they had to choose whether they wanted to fight for it.

I’ve been forever changed by my father’s infidelity. Had you asked me to describe my parents before this unraveling I would have said, “My parents love each other more than the Huxtables do.” This painful reality reminded me that I don’t live in a fictitious world and my parents aren’t characters on TV. The people you love the most are more likely to hurt you simply because of how close they are to you. The people you love will make incredible and heart-wrenching mistakes that can impact you for a lifetime. 

The skill I’m working to perfect is not hardening my spirit just because the world is hard. The skill I’m working to fall in love with is forgiveness and faith as my mother taught me and extended to my father with grace, strength and courage. It is not easy to be open, but it is harder to unharden.

I’m in a relationship now. It’s the healthiest and most respectful relationship I’ve been in in my entire life. 

Lately, I’ve found myself repeating aloud #Blackmendontcheat to calm my own anxiety. I whisper it to myself at night as I lay in my man’s arms with a burning desire to go through his phone while he is sleeping. I repeat it in my head as I’m chopping vegetables at my home wondering what he’s doing when he’s not with me. As I write this, #Blackmendontcheat plays to the beat of a 90’s R&B song complete with the “Woooooyeaaah!” that is regrettably absent from the tracks of R&B crooners these days, but I digress.

I told this story for the first time in front of a crowd of my friends, family and strangers for the taping of my debut comedy special. As I was performing, there was a gentleman in the audience who interrupted me, or as we say in the business heckled me, as he yelled out, “Black men don’t cheat!”. As life would have it that man is now my man. After the taping of the show I dribbled into his DM’s and the rest is history. I think I’m in the process of reconciling my father’s behavior with his, or in other words, grappling with the reality that while my father has cheated, that doesn’t mean my man will--though he could. 

I remind myself that I can't let the unfaithfulness of others run my reality. I have to give my man a fair chance to exceed my expectations rather than fail them. 

Initially, when I set out to share this story I did it because I knew a lot of people have gone through something similar but hadn’t ever spoken about it with anyone or heard it told aloud in this kind of way. I shared my story to help other people heal as my family and I did. Having to write about this experience now six years after it happened has helped me to realize that I want to be an even stronger example of love to my children. I want to be in a love so comforting, trusting, and passionate that it will revolutionize what my children think of love. 

Right now, my reality looks like this: My father has met the man that I’m dating. He approves with both thumbs. My father continues to love his Coconut, the cheating never stopped him from doing that. My love for my father has grown into a respect for his ability to surrender his past life and transform into a better man. My relationship with my man is changing and growing me. The way my man cares for me is grounding, uplifting, and making my booty bigger. 

What rocked me about this hashtag then and what still rocks me now is that it’s both true and false. The tension there is undeniable. Black men can cheat and so can Black women, and Black gender non-conforming folks. The duality of it challenges me to consider that in some instances, what’s true for one isn’t necessarily true for all. 

As my mother taught me, strength doesn’t always look like leaving. For her, strength looked like staying. Looked like choosing. Looked like forgiving. Looked like redefining love. These are the lessons I hold closer than the pain I once felt so deeply.

You can watch Fredia tell this story aloud via the video below. Be sure to watch her Full Comedy Special "F IS FOR" at yesfredia.com