A Boy Asks A Question With No Answer: 'Who' Going To Be My Daddy Now?
Times Picayune  02-01-1998
"Life After Death" 1 of 6 Part Series


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It was not an auspicious beginning.

Carla Nelson, at 23, was pregnant with her fourth child and planning to tell her
boyfriend the big news that evening, Thanksgiving 1990.

She had stayed up all night with her sister preparing a traditional dinner of
turkey, dirty rice and oyster dressing for him and his family. And then, about an
hour before her guests were to arrive, Nelson got a phone call: Her boyfriend had
been shot in the Desire public housing complex and he was fighting for his life
at St. Claude Medical Center.

"Everything just went blank," Nelson remembers. "Totally blank. Just shut down.
Went quiet. I said no, this can't be."

It was in the hospital that Nelson finally announced her news.

"I told him, 'You HAVE to be all right,' " she says. " 'I'm about to have a baby.
You just HAVE to be. I'm going to ask the Lord to let you be here long enough for
you to see the baby.' "

In fact, Levy Johnigan III did see his baby. He survived his wounds and lived to
be shot several more times, until finally he was killed in 1995 by a bullet to
the neck.

He left behind four children by four women. One of them is Levy Johnigan IV,
Nelson's son, now 6.

"I remember the night my daddy died," Levy says. "My grandma told my mama, and my
mama was crying. Then we went home."

A few days later, dressed in the blue corduroy pants and shirt his grandmother
bought for the occasion, Levy attended his father's funeral.

"At the funeral, I was touching my daddy," he says. "He feeled hard. When he was
alive, I feeled him and he was soft. But now when he was dead, he was hard.

"Then they put him in that thing and I didn't see him no more."

*** Shattered childhood ***

Like too many of the children of New Orleans, Levy has been marked by the blaze
of gunfire that robbed him of a father.

The fallout is unknown and unknowable, an injury that he probably will grapple
with the rest of his days. Although his father was hardly a model parent, he did
have a presence in the boy's life, and his death leaves a void.

Already the issue looms large for Levy.

"I don't know who's going to be my daddy now," he says. "I'm wondering who's
going to be my daddy, but I don't know."

In the tough neighborhood of the St. Thomas public housing development, Levy
lives under the watchful eye of his mother, surrounded by brothers and sisters
and grandmothers, aunts and uncles and cousins. He's a little boy who is, by
turns, adorable, silly, pouty, confused, squirmy, sad, comic, troubled and
frisky.

*** Resilient, vulnerable ***

With his knobby knees, his elfin face and his bashful grin, Levy is a winsome
child, thin and nimble. His crinkly eyes turn into half moons when he smiles. He
has a mouthful of missing teeth. He is perpetually in motion.

The far corners of his world range from McDonald's to Burger King to Shoney's to
the Oakwood mall, where his mother sometimes takes the family on Saturdays.

His favorite place on earth is the 2000 Store - as he calls it, in honor of its
address - a neighborhood grocery with rack after rack of candy and chips and soft
drinks.

His best friend is Fernandez, who also lost his father to murder. He says the
richest person he knows is his Uncle Kevin, who lives across the street and has a
piggy bank full of money. His attention span is a nanosecond. He is afraid of
Halloween. And his sweet tooth is so powerful that he has been known to pour
sugar into a Coke.

He knows what to do if he hears gunfire - "stop and drop" - because he has been
taught in school.

"We don't hear guns at home too often anymore," says his brother, Raymond, 11.
"Maybe about every two weeks."

Raymond can be protective and gentle with Levy, who looks up to his big brother.
Levy, likewise, can be playful and affectionate with his friends and family. But
he also can be rough-and-tumble when the spirit moves him, and it doesn't take
much to move him.

"Shut up and mind your business," he hisses at his cousin Jonathan in a tussle
over a Tootsie Roll.

"Stop talking like a white girl," he barks at his sister Mikeva when she
interrupts a Sega game.

One of his favorite playmates is his half-brother Levi, 4, another of his
father's sons, who lives with his grandmother but spends many of his weekends
with Nelson and her family. The two boys rollerskate together, ride their bikes,
play ball, watch TV, hang out.

"He's just like another one of my children," Nelson says.

"I wish he could come live here," Levy says.

On his first day in first grade, Levy is tremulous and fearful. Spiffy in his
requisite gray shorts and burgundy polo shirt, he mills about nervously on the
blacktop before classes begin, then gives in to a short shower of tears.

"It might be too hard," he sniffles, barely audible.

At the end of the day, a group of mothers congregates on the street corner, along
with an old Cadillac and a Chevrolet blaring rap music. Across the street from
the school are two abandoned houses with all the windows busted out and a pile of
mattresses on the sidewalk.

When Levy bounds out of school, he is transformed.

"Miss Conway, she's the goodest," he proclaims. "I'm going to learn to read this
year!"

And he is off to a flying start. One day a few weeks into the school year, he
digs around in his backpack and produces a sheaf of papers with scores of words
he can recognize: ball, cat, tree, house, me.

He also produces a picture he has drawn that includes six people, all in a row:
"Mama, me, my sister, my brother, my other sister and my daddy," he says.

"This is my family. All this is my family. I always put my daddy in. I liked it
when he was alive."

*** Family yes, marriage no ***

Thoughtful, practical and common-sensical, Carla Nelson is a striking presence
with a straightforward manner, a handsome oval face and fingernails painted a
glittery blue.

Her apartment in St. Thomas is dark, its curtains and blinds drawn tight against
the world. The living room is a scene, homey and comfortable, with people coming
and going continuously - Nelson's children, her beau, her nieces and nephews, her
sister and mother, who live down the street. There is a cushy sofa, two easy
chairs, one dead TV and one live one, which dominates the place with its Sega
games that keep Levy spellbound by the hour. The kitchen is dressed up with a
fancy glass dining table, permanently set with stylish black dinnerware and a
black-and-gold silk flower centerpiece. The upholstered white chairs around it
are encased in plastic bags saved from a dry cleaner.

One of seven children, Nelson grew up mostly in St. Thomas, reared by a mother
who married at 15 and a father who wasn't around much. She went to work before
she graduated from Walter L. Cohen Senior High School, and now she has a job as a
day-care worker at the Leslie Center near her home. Her income is augmented by
food stamps, but she has gotten off welfare. She volunteers with pride that she
has never been in trouble with the law.

Nelson has four children by three fathers, her first when she was 18. She has
never been married.

"Marriage is not for me," she says. "I just don't really see any good reason for
it. Just to say that you have someone else's last name? It never really added up
to me.

"You see women married and dedicated and getting cheated on. I've just never been
interested.

"I don't want anything out of a man. I'd rather be doing it like I've been doing
it: myself. In reality, there's no good men out here."

Even as a child, she says, when most little girls are daydreaming about weddings,
marriage held no allure.

"That's storybook," she says. "The white dress and the cake and the church,
that's storybook. It's nice to read, but I don't ever think about it for myself.

"Men don't know how to take on responsibilities. They're not reliable. They're
not financially situated. They're just not there.

"A lot of men my age, they're out here for the fast life. I don't want to be
engaged with that and I don't want to expose my kids to it."

*** Love with open eyes ***

Nelson got her fill of the fast life when she was involved with Levy Johnigan.

Their romance began in 1989 when he was a senior at John McDonogh Senior High
School and she, two years older, was working and raising the three children she
had by then. Initially he was attracted to her cooking; she was attracted to his
talk.

"He would come by my house and eat and we would sit down and talk," she says. "He
had very good conversation. He had a head on his shoulders; talked more mature
than the normal guy.

"Levy had a lot of interests in life. He would write poems about how he felt and
what he wanted to do. In his spare time, he would play basketball with the kids
in the courtway.

"If you got to know him, he was really a nice person. He talked a lot of sense;
he was very smart.

"Seemed like he could have done something better with himself."

But instead, shortly after the two met, Johnigan was sent to jail for a short
stint. Nelson wrote to him and visited him, and when he got out, they got
together.

"I wasn't trying to get pregnant," she says. "I already had three."

By the time Levy was born, the two were living together, and for a while they had
a tight family unit. But it wasn't long before Johnigan's extracurricular
activities got on Nelson's nerves.

"He had too many girlfriends for me," she says. "A lot of girlfriends. I didn't
like it. I wasn't raised to be with a man that's going to have this one and that
one. Either you're living here with me or you're not."

To make matters worse, Johnigan also was dealing drugs and using heroin. And he
never, in all the years Nelson knew him, had a job.

"The life he was leading was a fast life," Nelson says. "He was into drugs and
guns and going to jail and being shot at. And that wasn't my lifestyle."

The dangers attendant to his lifestyle became an issue between them. He had
enemies and she was afraid of them. So she wouldn't let him take the baby outside
the house. And she was cautious about being seen with him herself.

"They might want to get at him," she says. "At a nightclub, at a concert.

"I would never walk anywhere with him. I wouldn't walk around St. Thomas or
Cooper. I couldn't take a chance on being shot.

"He didn't take it as an insult. He knew it was dangerous."

*** Calm, then calamity ***

Their love affair didn't survive for long. But after they broke up, in 1991,
their friendship endured, and even deepened.

"All our feelings had changed," she says. "But he loved me and I loved him and we
were friends."

Over the next few years, as Johnigan's life grew increasingly turbulent, Nelson
remained devoted.

"Every time he got in trouble - it didn't matter what time it was or what the
situation was - I would be at his side," she says. "Not because I thought he was
right or wrong, but just because I thought he needed somebody to talk to. There
were not too many people he would open up to, but he would open up to me.

"Other women might have thought he was macho or whatever. They wanted to be with
him, wanted to be seen with him. He had that image, like this is LEVY, you know?

"But I was the one he could trust, I was the one he could rely on, I was the one
who would be there."

A period of calm came over Johnigan's life, Nelson says, after the last time he
came out of jail. Several of his enemies had been killed, she says, and others
were locked up. He told her he had stopped dealing drugs. He told her he had
begun feeling remorseful. He started seeing more of his son.

"He would tell me he was sorry," she says, "that he didn't want to put me through
these things. He would say he wanted to be a father to his son, he wanted to come
around and do for him the right way."

So when the phone call came, and Johnigan's sister was crying on the other end of
the line, it was a shock to Nelson. She was doing the laundry and watching "Wheel
of Fortune," and she wasn't prepared for the news.

"I said, 'Missy, what's wrong, what's wrong? What is it?' " Nelson remembers.

"She said, 'It's Levy. He's been shot.' "

So one more time, Nelson set out to be by his side, this time with her son Levy
in tow, just in case. When she reached Charity Hospital, where Johnigan had been
brought by his friends and left on a ramp, she came face to face with Johnigan's
mother, Donna, who told her he was dead.

"And here was my baby, Levy," Nelson remembers, "and he was saying, 'What's
wrong, Mama? What's wrong? What's wrong with my daddy?' "

*** Valuable father figure ***

Donna Johnigan is a big woman. In every sense of the word. Her booming voice is
gravelly and earthy. Her sense of style is showy and unabashed. And there is a
touch of brilliance about her.

Given half a chance, she will start into speechifying, about drugs or crime or
the violence of life in the ghetto. And her speech packs a wallop.

"Maybe we can't stop all the drug trade from coming in," she says, with her
drawling, deadpan delivery. "But we can help curb the killing. Because it's our
children that are killing up each other. There are ways to teach children values,
that a life is worth more than a pair of tennis shoes or an argument over drugs.

"As we bury 10 of our children and take 10 off the corners, there's 10 more
coming up right behind them. This is what we have to control. This is what we
have to do as moms - teach our children."

Donna Johnigan occupies a special place in the heart of Carla Nelson, and, as his
mawmaw, a special place in the life of Carla's son. One time years ago, when
Nelson was filling out a welfare form, she had to answer some questions about
what the state calls "the absent parent." The questions got Nelson thinking about
her son's parentage.

"His mawmaw is more or less the daddy," she concluded. "I tell Levy that: 'Your
mawmaw is your daddy.' "

Since the day the two women met, they have been fast friends. And Donna Johnigan
has always been for Nelson what her son never was: a sturdy source of security
and support.

"She was somebody I could lay my head on her shoulder if I was down and she would
keep me up," Nelson says.

"From the time she found out I was pregnant, she would give me money. Every time
she would get paid, she would give me some, like $60 every two weeks.

"Levy would give me money sometimes. If he had extra, he would. But Donna would
give me money all the time. For my birthday, she would take me out. She would buy
the diapers. And she didn't buy Pampers by the pack. She bought them by
quantities where you'd have enough to last.

"She was always there, always giving. And most of the time, I never had to ask
her at all."

Johnigan has thought a lot about her son's life and death, and she has no
illusions about either. The name Levy Johnigan, well-known among police, is still
memorialized in graffiti that crops up from time to time on the corner of Philip
and Clara streets, in the heart of his turf.

"I am more angry at my son than the person who took him away," she says. "The
things he got into, the drugs habits, I didn't raise him that way.

"I can't defend him. I was not with him 24 hours a day. I knew he had a problem.
I knew he was caught up in a lot. I can't tell you he went to church every day,
that he was a perfect child.

"But when you lose a child, it's different from when you lose a husband or a
mother. This is somebody you brought here, that you put up with, that you did
everything for."

At 45, Johnigan is a grandmother 13 times over. She works for Agenda for Children
and serves as president of the Citywide Tenants Council. She has three
grandchildren who have lost their fathers to violence. She is rearing two of
them. Her preaching on the power of motherhood makes the subject of her dead son
infinitely poignant.

"The hardest thing to think about when you lose your child, and you know they
were caught up in drugs, is this," she says: "When he got killed, was he trying
to hurt somebody? Somebody who was defending himself? Was it a drug deal gone
bad? Was it an old grudge?

"I'll never know. That's just something I'll have to live with."

*** Memories of Daddy ***

When Levy Johnigan came out of jail for the last time, he had only three months
to live.

"That was the most he saw of Levy since Levy's been on earth," Nelson says.
"Before that, he was always on the go. He was never in a spot where he could just
sit and talk."

The events of those months are lodged in the boy's memory in exquisite detail as
a series of father-and-son treats and adventures. He recounts them over and over
again. There was the jacket his father bought him when he went to a birthday
party and the gargoyle costume he got at Wal-Mart. There were trips to McDonald's
and Burger King, Chinese Kitchen and Shoney's.

It made up for some of the times they had missed together, such as Levy's first
birthday, when his mawmaw threw him a party complete with deejay and spacewalk,
and his father had to imagine the scene via a phone call from prison.

"Levy cherished the time they had together then and got used to seeing his
father," Nelson says.

So when death came, it was all the harder to explain to the boy, then 4. Scenes
from the funeral are still vivid for Levy.

"I thought my daddy was asleep at the funeral, but he was dead," he says. "I
touched him but he didn't wake up. I kissed him too."

After the funeral, Nelson says, Levy was not himself for a few months. He began
stuttering, he wanted to sleep in her bed at night, and his appetite was weak. He
dreamed about his father frequently, and he wanted to wear the T-shirt with his
picture on it every day.

"He would ask a lot of questions," Nelson says. "Is his daddy coming back? Why
was he laying up there and wasn't moving? Why were we leaving him at the
graveyard?"

Then Levy began worrying about his mother. He began fussing with his brother,
Raymond, who had always been his pal and defender. And he developed an envy for
his sisters, Mikeva and Miketha, that still endures.

"I don't got a daddy and they do," he says.

But the major concern in Levy's life since his father's death has been this:
"Who's going to be my daddy now?"

"He thinks he needs another daddy to take care of him," Raymond explains. "To be
around him like his daddy used to be."

He has tried out all sorts of possibilities. For a time, he asked frequently if
he could share Raymond's father, his sisters' father, his mother's father. He
asked his mother's boyfriend to be his father, he asked his Uncle Kevin.

Recently, though, he seems to have gained some insight on the subject and reached
a sense of closure.

"My daddy's gonna be my same daddy," he says. "That's my only daddy, you only get
one daddy and I can't have any more daddies."