There is a moment in All God’s Kids when a doctor explains, kindly and at some length, that a man’s sperm cannot make the journey it needs to make. The man’s first response is to list his rugby career. His second is to say that he could never bring up a child that was not his, or really love it.
He believes it completely when he says it. That is the point. He is not a villain and he is not lying; he simply has not yet met the child.
Three men, three answers
The novel puts the same question to three households and gets three different answers out of it.
- One man demands certainty, gets it late, and spends the intervening months discovering what he is capable of saying to the woman he loves.
- One man decides in advance that he does not want to know, and holds to it, and carries two children out of a church looking happier than anyone else in the photograph.
- One man never thinks to ask the question at all, and is, by any measure that matters, entirely right not to.
A laboratory can tell you whose DNA a child carries. It cannot tell you who is going to get up at three in the morning.
Why the title is the answer
The book is called All God’s Kids because of a sentence a priest speaks over a font, and because of what one of the guests says afterwards on the way out, the ordinary, slightly flippant English translation of a piece of theology.
I am not asking readers to accept the theology. I am asking them to notice that by the end of the book, three men who began the year with strong opinions about biological fatherhood are all holding a child, and not one of them is thinking about a blood group.
