Jack L. Daniel and Omari C. Daniel. We Fish: the Journey to Fatherhood.

Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2003. 206 pp. $25.00.

In Jack L. Daniel's book We Fish, we are treated to a fascinating and selective autobiography that focuses on a father-son relationship over three generations. The book explores how a son not only learns how to understand and appreciate his father but also discovers how to understand and relate to his own son through that son's poetry. At first this work suggests through its intimacy, humor, and honesty Langston Hughes's The Big Sea. Hughes ends his autobiographical account of his early years by saying, "Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling." Hughes liked to write and realized that to achieve his dream he had to fish (read, write, and live) in the sea of literature. On the other hand Jack L. Daniel, despite his professional academic roles at the University of Pittsburgh, did not intend to read, write, and live in the sea of literature. His intention was just to go fishing. Fishing was his escape; it provided him his "anti-stress medicine." It was the ritual that helped him achieve a balance in his daily life, a way to escape the hard life with his parents in their apartment in Johnston, Pennsylvania. It also provided him with the pleasures denied his hardworking days during his summers with his grandparents on their Virginia farm.

It was also fishing that brought him to a deeper understanding of his feelings toward his father and later toward his son, Omari. These feelings were clarified and given focus through his son's poetry. Omari, the son, is also the second author of this work, which offers some of that poetry for us to read. In fourteen chapters Jack D. Daniel covers why he did not see at first the value of his fishing, just as he did not see the value of his son's writing poetry. But it was Omari's Father's Day letter and the poems shared with his father that gave Jack L. Daniel his new perspective about fishing. This book, We Fish, is the result of Jack L. Daniel's reviewing his fishing experiences as a young boy and man with the urging and help of Omari. It was Omari who called his father's interest in fishing a "fever." The value of that "fever" is written about in the last thirteen chapters.

We Fish is also about the "Daniel Men"--their character, strengths, weaknesses, and male bonding. The "Daniel Men" are Russell P. Daniel, Sr., Manuel Daniel, Sr., uncles Nash and William Young, Jack L. Daniel, cousins, and Omari Daniel. If one includes Omari's son Javon, then there are four generations of Daniel Men. We Fish was finished sometime during 2002, and in it Jack L. Daniel makes no attempt to place the role or meaning of black men in the decade-long controversy as represented in Marcellus Blunt and George P. Cunningham's edition of Representing Black Men (Routledge, 1996). This work escapes being a sociological tract even though Jack L. Daniel says that he hopes this work will help young black men escape the problems of growing up black in America.

Jack L. Daniel ends by asserting in his letter dated August 6, 2002, to his son Omari that Omari may have a hard time raising his son Javon in "our society" as a "Daniel Man" and not have him be a victim "of the many societal pitfalls." Jack L. Daniel then attributes the bonding of the "Daniel Men" to love which is greater than faith and hope. But I find another answer which Dr. Daniel provides in this wonderful autobiography.

I begin this section by quoting a poem:

   Telemachus' Speech
   Sometimes men scar or kill life--
   is that how we have grown
   like starving wolves or wild boars.
   It is a male social way
   necessary to the truncated intricacy
   of a man's integrity
   like Odysseus on the boar hunt
   a ritual by which men
   bond to each
   as hunters and teach their sons.
   A boy has to pass through the
   killing and roasting
   of a boar to become a man,
   pay his duties to his
   gods--the choicest
   parts cast on the fire.
   A boy guards all night
   and has star-tales to tell his sons.
   He learns how to barbecue
   a small hog
   or go on a boar hunt with
   Odysseus and his father Laertes.
   That's how boys learn
   to be men
   and men to respect death. (Green's Magazine 22.3 [1994]: 67)

Jack L. Daniel's definition of love between father and son grows out of fishing, a "fever." This is a ritual of life that ties the past to the present and extends it to the future. It is not only, as he hopes, a way by which young black males can be saved from life's pitfalls, but it is primarily a process by which a small boy learns to be curious, to be independent, to develop determination, to trust himself, to learn about white and black adult males.

By itself this is an important ritual in life, but its parameters are defined unconsciously by Dr. Daniel with respect to the "Daniel Men," his father, his uncles, his own son, and his mother. These characteristics include the fact that the ritual takes place outdoors, like a controlled return to the world of nature, a place removed from the evils of the city. It represents a shared and possibly dangerous activity, occurring on the river, by the river, in the river, and at first with a white man, and then in a camp. It reflects a family's stability with father and mother balancing each other's parental duties. It reveals that Jack Daniel's father taught him strategy, playing cards on his father's knee, and by doing so he came to learn the value of an activity, a value which Jack L. Daniel used in his early fishing experiences. It stresses the discipline of parental guidance in doing one's homework accurately, a value transferred by Dr. Daniel to his son when he misbehaved at school. It reveals Russell's emphasis that education comes before sports, a route that Dr. Daniel felt later was "a socially preordained athletic road." In this ritual of learning the wife/mother fully supports but tempers the father's role; punishment for misbehaving can be a severe belting, though later Dr. Daniel thought that maybe Omari's conduct was "a way of rebelling and identifying with his friends of color." The book depicts different rituals by which the African American male learns to cope with violence and survive, one being fishing and the other being writing poetry; this latter ritual is how Omari as a boy coped with his father just as his father had used fishing to cope with his.

Perhaps for Omari writing poetry, like fishing, is a fever. If so both activities are rituals that requires patience, trial-and-error learning, perseverance, and intelligence. Both relate one to family as well as to strangers, and both invoke the past, present, and future.

We Fish is an excellent and delightful autobiography, a book any man, white or black, who is concerned about being a father and who likes to fish, write poetry, or hunt could learn from. Like Langston Hughes's The Big Sea, Dr. Daniel's book captures one with its humor, honesty, and depth of understanding.

Robert L. Tener

Kent State University