From the eyes of a child, things can seem sweeter than they actually are. Love can soften reality without permission, allowing a child to see their parent through a rose-colored lens before they are old enough to understand who that parent truly is. Sometimes, the truth is simply too heavy for small hands to carry.
That tenderness sits at the center of Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me?, which opened in U.S. theaters on September 18. The film follows 12-year-old Lil Ant (Bodhi Del) as he tries to reconnect with his father, Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson), after his release from prison. Lil Ant sees his father as something grand, imagining him as Poseidon and Odysseus. Big Ant sees the weight of his own mistakes and worries about what his son might inherit from them.
Thompson-Hernández said the story reflects his own childhood, longing for a father he barely knew. “I created this like larger-than-life figure,” he said, explaining that he discovered other children in his neighborhood had done the same. His conclusion is both beautiful and painful: a child can desperately want to be loved by a father who does not have the tools to provide it.
That is where Black fatherhood deserves more than a conversation about presence or absence.
Black fathers can teach children that strength does not require hardness. They can lead while remaining soft, focus while being patient, and protect while giving their children somewhere safe to lean when life becomes frightening. They can be a reminder that the world does not have to be figured out alone.
Absence can leave a child yearning. Yearning can become sadness, sadness can become anger, and anger can become a personality built around protecting a wound that was never properly named. Sometimes that grief follows a child into adulthood, quietly becoming another cycle waiting to repeat.
Children can hold onto the father they remember, the father they imagine, and the father they hope will return. That image can offer shelter while the reality is too harsh to understand.
If I Go Will They Miss Me? places that complicated love between a father and son and asks what happens when a child’s larger-than-life hero has to become human. For Black children who have watched fathers disappear, reappear, and sometimes disappear again, that question reaches beyond the screen. The longing remains, whether distance came from choice, circumstance, or force.
The hope is that somewhere between the father and the child, an image versus the actual man standing before them, there is enough love, honesty, and grace to build something neither of them has to withstand alone.
Na’ilah Burston
