The following is the winner of City Paper and Blue Sky’s memoir contest, Out of Place, part of the First Person Festival.

Mornings with Daddy are always painful, primarily because he takes such perverse pleasure in abruptly waking his children early, when the sky is still blue-gray and the rest of the world silent.

"You two big-nosed girls get outta bed. What I'm a have to do? Buy y'all a husband?" This is precisely what two black women over 30 and still single want to hear at the crack of dawn. Essence magazine has already published newly released statistics that 46 percent of single black women will never marry. My sister Michele and I just stare at each other and without expressing any words quietly ponder the notion of exactly how this man managed to get next to either one of our mothers.

But Daddy can’t stand to be alone, and like some abandoned child in desperate need of a playmate he comes sneaking to my door. "You better get up, gal. We’s going to the country." Daddy and I leave the house at 8:30 in the morning. Yet, the heat is already unbearable and sun uninspiring. We pull into a gas station, get coffee, fill the tank, light our cigarettes. Daddy hits the play button on the CD player and we commence to howling, off-key, to James Brown’s "It’s a Man’s World."

By now, I am completely awake and this is something we are particularly good at, the sing-along with our cultural icons. We groove the rhythm, release the pain, shake our heads and grin at the irony of our very own existence. James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Johnny Taylor lift us to a state of absolute harmony. When we pause for local traffic Daddy points out the Jim Crow road map as to where he could and where he couldn't walk as a black man in Jackson, Miss., 40 years ago.

Once on the main highway, we pass an endless barrage of strip malls, used-car sheds and vegetable stands as we drive 60 miles south of the capital to what Daddy casually refers to as the "country." The purpose of our visit is to call on my youngest brother, whom I have met only once before. I remember him as being a tall, handsome young man who would otherwise resemble Malcolm X, were it not for the sequence of gold caps that harness the top four front teeth of his dazzling mouth. Now if truth be told, my baby brother won't be leading any revolution, but he does have Malcolm's red freckles and broad nose.

Last summer was my second time seeing my father, whom I met for the first time that previous May, on a Friday morning at Chicago’s Midway Airport. Of course, I knew he existed. In fact, I carried his name at the end of my own for 39 years. Still, everything about him had been reduced to a casual mystery that began to unravel the day Big Mama, my mother’s mother, shook her head and bowed. "Now, you actin’ like yo daddy’s people," she said, just as casual as the evening sun.

The words came out of her mouth like seeds of a watermelon that someone spat upon the dry earth. It lacked malice and was simply a way of acknowledging the fruit. This was the stuff of plantation novels, how one's paternal lineage could seep from the cast-iron pot like the yellow liquor of seasoned collard greens. With that one sentence, I was forced to reconcile the truth of my father's existence with that of my own, and with him came his five children whom I now recognize as my siblings, and who call me sister. My annual return to my ancestral home state of Mississippi has been transformed not by landscape but by the blood of my father and the soul of our people.

I am the astronaut who got lost on the mission and returns shocked at the spectacle of the earth. For the first time in my life, I can look in the face of someone other than my mother and recognize the credibility of my birth. The Bouldins, by which I mean me and them, stare at each other like cats. Though perhaps it is the newness of me when suddenly my mouth makes perfect sense, not only because of its shape but rather the involuntary speech that pierces my tongue when I make even the slightest attempt to withhold a thought.

My daddy is a hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-loving man of the deep Mississippi Delta blues. He is my preferred black male escort to truck stops, honky-tonks and through long stretches of unpredictable highways that shift across the Bible Belt. He is instinctively sharp and recklessly cool. My daddy is a relentless flirt and a shameless loud-talker who embarrasses me at civilized restaurants, museums and the occasional Wal-Mart when he chastises, "Now gal, don't you go slinging pussy all over town."

Our relationship is full of love and misunderstandings. It must be difficult for a man to see a 4-year-old in the body of grown-ass woman who looks so much like himself. I, on the other hand, am a complete mess of East Coast self-absorption desperately attempting to come to terms with the flesh-and-blood reality of how distant though alike we truly are.

Daddy makes a quick left turn on a nameless dirt road, where a tint of sunlight polishes the crimson clouds of dust that swirl against the windows as the jeep bounces against yawning terrain. On a wood fence sits a trio of black buzzards. The road is thick with dark green trees and a humble scattering of trailer homes and shotgun shacks that sit atop mounds of aged cinderblocks.

I have no idea exactly where we are, though it appears to be an isolated community welded to the past, when the coloreds were left to fend for themselves once the gin mill closed and folks like Daddy got the nerve to migrate north to the factories of Chicago or start trouble down at Ole Miss. This is where my youngest brother lives and I have never seen anything like it before. Except for maybe in The Gambia or Jamaica and that's what strikes me the most, how parts of Mississippi resemble the developing world. My uptown urban sensibilities are almost at a loss for words. At which point I realize I really am in the country and it ain't the Sundance ranch.

It is a large trailer home with a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and two baths. On the side of the trailer is a fenced cage that houses two pit bulls. The larger dog stands on her hind legs, throws the might of her sagging breast against the sweltering metal fence barking, as the puppy screeches for deliverance from the ghastly weight of the air. The seductive smell of weed lingers in the air like a lover's last kiss and out comes my baby brother with hugs and a six-pack of Miller Lite. He is just like Daddy only his youth makes him more adorable even in his thug sensation of country grammar. The trailer is dark and nearly hopeless, besieged by a cluster of empty beer bottles, decaying pizza crusts and a fleet of ashtrays overflowing with crumbled cigarette butts and deep thick ash. The large-screen TV is the most prominent fixture in the room where ESPN, CNN Sports and Classic NBA broadcasts play incessantly.

Lil' Bro is happy to see me and makes a light-hearted effort to converse about Philadelphia sports teams. But my knowledge of sports keeps the conversion brief and superficial. I wish he would ask me something about Cornel West instead of Donovan McNabb, since I hardly know what a quarterback does. The novelty of my arrival has already come to quick end.

It takes about an hour before I realize that Lil' Bro has an alternative source of employment. For a moment I contemplate what it would be like if some Bull Connor redneck sheriff walked in and saw my highfalutin black pseudo-intellectual ass sipping beer in place of coffee, as Lil' Bro slips small packages of reefer to the hip-hop country slackers that stand on the other side of the back door. Just as my fear subsides, we take a ride down to the general store where the men buy more ponies and I get a six-pack of Heineken because I can't face a conventional afternoon of cheap beer and sports.

Then we go to pick up Lil' Bro's baby's mama and his little girl. His baby's mama has one of those strange names, which sounds like a derivative of another name that you might have heard before, but one that makes no sense in its current reinvention. Her name is Tutmika, though folks call her "Tut," and she works at the sausage factory. Tut and my niece return with us back to Lil' Bro's trailer to partake in the festival of cable television, beer and fried fish. Tut is wounded by an agonizing toothache that swells the left side of her face and forces her to retire to Lil' Bro's bedroom. Tomorrow she will return to the dentist, who will pull her bad tooth. My recommendation to save the tooth is politely dismissed when Tut announces that she can only afford $50 to pull the tooth and not the $200 it would cost for a porcelain cap, which to some degree explains the disproportionate number of folks that I've already seen who are missing more than just a few teeth. Trent Lott won't tell it but Mississippi is damn near a toothless state.

Later, I play peek-a-boo with my niece as Daddy and Lil' Bro congregate like Baptist deacons over the deep fryer on the front porch. Lil' Bro lifts each of the frozen fillets from the thin cardboard box and passes them to Daddy, who consecrates the long-forgotten fish over the moaning hum of hot grease as they deliberate over baseball's best power hitter. That's when Juan arrives. Juan is the second eldest of Daddy's boys, he is older than Lil' Bro but younger than me. He too is like another version of Daddy but only on crack or, at best, amphetamines.

Juan is a truck driver with an unmistakable Mississippi drawl and I only recognize every third word that he says. The others get smacked against the inside of his mouth like an enormous wad of Wrigley's spearmint gum that's just too good to spit out. By all accounts, Juan is the family hothead or, as our cousin Dwight, a large brown man whose sense of reality revolves around Hollywood depictions of Italian mobsters, has said, "Joy, have you ever seen that movie The Godfather? You know that character Sonny, right? Well, Juan is your Sonny. Every family's got one and Juan is yours."

The afternoon is virtually slow, hot and uneventful. Wasps race against the leaves, mosquitoes hover in the grass, dogs bark and brothers continuously tap at the back door. But keep in mind that human dynamics are unpredictable, and one never knows exactly when or how your family might shame you. As the evening shade draws near Daddy and Lil' Bro drive back out for beer. I grab the remote, switch to VH1, kick off my Kenneth Coles and settle down to "Genesis: Behind the Music." I hear the voices of laughing men on the front porch, which I mistakenly assume to be those of Daddy and Lil' Bro. But such is not the case and when they return, Lil' Bro is pissed to find Juan on the porch entertaining his weed customers.

Evidently, there is an established form of etiquette even amongst low-level drug dealers and their dime-bag customers. Lil' Bro's clientele has been aptly informed to make the appropriate exit should he not be at home. In other words, under no circumstances are they allowed to linger around the property lest the sheriff and his boys take notice of Lil' Bro's illegal activities. At first, I just hear a lot of loud talking and the men are barking at each other. "Man, you know you ain't supposed to have people hanging out here," Lil' Bro says. "What you talkin' 'bout motherfucker? These yo friends," Juan replies.

Lil' Bro starts testifying 'bout how it's his house and Juan ought to abide by his rules. The issue of respect has now come into play and I immediately recognize the danger. Any time you have a group of black men on a porch in America arguing about respect, it's a dangerous thing. It has nothing to with testosterone and everything to do with words we dare not utter. Slavery, genital mutilation, community-sanctioned lynchings, forced segregation, cross-burnings, the prison industry system and hate. Do you feel me?

My brothers are tussling on the porch when Daddy jumps in and then something that I never saw before, this shiny black object, is dangling from Daddy's pocket, and the boys see too at the same moment I do, and they are on the floor scrambling for Daddy's gun. Daddy, who is an overweight pot-bellied 62-year-old black male smoker with diabetes and a bad arm, transforms himself into that mythological figure of the crazy niggah. He wrenches Lil' Bro to the floor, stomps his foot against his chest and, with his bad arm, hurls Juan off the porch like a torn rag doll.

Tut rushes out from the bedroom, grabs her baby and warns, "Bullets ain't got no name on them." She runs barefoot across the dust and grass into the country bush with my niece pinned to her hip and I am screaming hysterically for everyone to stop. Lil' Bro runs into the trailer for his gun. Daddy has a gun. Juan runs to the car to get his gun. But that fool only has bullets and no gun. They are all growling curses and posturing like Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa. Daddy runs to the car trying to talk sense to Juan and I am squeezing the adrenaline from the yellow flesh of Lil' Bro's arms, screaming, "Please, please. Lil' Bro please don't do this shit in front of me." "Joy, I hate to hell for you to have to see this. But Juan gonna make me go to jail. 'Cause I swear to God, I'm a kill this niggah."

It's a war zone. Lil' Bro is peering out of the windows with a gun in his hand and the trailer has been transformed into a Palestinian bunker. I tell Daddy that I am more than ready to go back to Jackson. But he says no, we have to wait. We wait 20 minutes and Juan returns with his gun.

Rain pours from the purple sky and Juan rises from the darkness as if he were a Kurosawa villain draped in death. And now, he's really talking shit 'bout how he's going to kill Lil' Bro and how Lil' Bro thinks he's all that and he ain't really shit but a drug dealer. I shout for Juan to go home and he snaps, "Joy, shut the fuck up. You don't know me." And he's right. Our bloodlines are suddenly diminished and I am left standing in a circle of men with guns.

Joy Bouldin is a former project manager currently working on her first novel. She has written two series of personal essays, titled "The Mississippi Diaries" and "On Dating Black Men," and is a Bread Upon the Waters Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

The runners-up essays -- "Just Visiting" by Denise Tanyol and "Brasil’s" by Rebecca Saunders -- are online at www.citypaper.net/outofplace.