Uber to Eternity

It was almost 1:30 in the morning when my four-year-old daughter, Asa Pearl, and I finally climbed into the back seat of an Uber outside my mother’s house in East Point.

Most of the time, I simply called her Asa.

She was much too young to be out that late, and I knew it. But it was the weekend, neither of us had anywhere to be the next morning, and I had once again lost track of time simply because I enjoyed being her father.

Asa curled into my side as the car pulled away from the curb. The streetlights moved across her face in brief flashes, light, darkness, then light again, until she settled her head against me and stared quietly out the window.

We had been riding for less than two minutes when I noticed the driver watching us in the rearview mirror.

At first, I thought he was checking the road behind him. Then he looked again.

And again.

His eyes would rise to the mirror, settle on my face for a moment, and then return quickly to the street.

Finally, he cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, sir.”

I looked up.

He leaned slightly toward the mirror, trying to see me more clearly in the darkness.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to keep staring at you. It’s just that you look so much like somebody I used to know.”

People had told me that before. All my life, strangers had stopped me to say I looked like my father.

For a moment, I wondered if that was where this conversation was headed.

“Who did you know?” I asked.

The driver kept his eyes on the road.

“I used to work at Wolf Camera,” he said. “The one at Greenbriar Mall.”

He smiled faintly, as though he had already stepped into an old memory.

“There was this man who used to come into the store. Usually by himself. He would have on a jogging suit and some sneakers. Nothing flashy. If it wasn’t for that expensive camera he carried, you would have thought he was just some regular guy.”

I felt Asa shift beside me. She was awake, listening.

The driver continued.

“He was quiet. Real polite. Always knew exactly what kind of film he wanted. Sometimes he would ask us whether there was any new equipment that could help him take better pictures. But he never acted important. Never acted like he knew more than anybody else.”

I said nothing.

Something in his description had already begun to tighten inside my chest.

“He would bring his film in after he traveled,” the driver said. “At first, we didn’t know where he was going. We would just develop the pictures.”

He shook his head slowly.

“But once we saw them, all of us in the shop started waiting for him to come back.”

“What were the pictures of?” I asked, although I already felt the answer moving toward me.

“Africa,” he said. “Places none of us had ever seen. Temples. Villages. Statues. People. Things that looked thousands of years old.”

His voice changed as he spoke. It became softer, almost reverent.

“He would spread the photographs across the counter and explain every one of them. He would tell us who the people were, what the buildings meant, and what had happened in those places. It was like he wasn’t just showing us pictures. It was like he was taking us with him.”

The car moved through the sleeping streets of Atlanta. Asa’s head was still against my arm, but now I could feel her looking up at me.

The driver gave a short laugh.

“I’m going to be honest with you. The first few times he came in, I didn’t know what to think. This quiet man in a jogging suit was telling us he had been traveling back and forth to Africa.”

He glanced at me in the mirror.

“I thought, ‘This man ain’t been to no Africa.’”

I smiled despite myself.

“But then he started talking,” the driver said. “And he knew too much. He knew every place in those photographs. Every carving. Every name. Every date. You could ask him anything.”

He paused.

“I figured he had to be some kind of teacher.”

My heart began to beat harder.

The driver went on.

“After a while, we finally asked him where he was taking all those pictures.”

His hands shifted on the steering wheel.

“He said he went to Egypt every year.”

Egypt.

The word entered the car and changed everything.

My breath caught.

I turned slightly toward the window, trying to steady myself.

There was no longer any question.

He was talking about my father.

Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III had spent much of his life teaching African history and leading study groups through Egypt. He believed that people of African descent deserved to see themselves inside the full reach of human history. He carried cameras everywhere, documenting monuments, faces, inscriptions, and landscapes so he could bring them home and teach from them.

But the driver did not know any of that about me.

To him, I was simply a passenger in his back seat.

“I never liked history in school,” he said. “Couldn’t stand it. It was just names and dates to me. But when that man talked about those pictures, history came alive.”

His eyes met mine briefly in the mirror.

“He made us feel like we came from something.”

I looked down at Asa.

Her full name was Asa Pearl Hilliard.

Her mother and I had searched for months for the right name. Nothing felt large enough, warm enough, or rooted enough until we returned to the names already waiting for her.

Asa was the name of my great-grandfather, a name carried through five generations of Hilliards. My father had carried it. My brother had carried it. Now my daughter carried it too, the first girl in our family to do so.

Pearl was the name of my great-grandmother.

Together, those names felt like a prayer.

But they also carried grief.

My father had died before Asa was born. My brother, whom we called Ace, had died too. Both men would have loved her fiercely. Ace had often encouraged me to have a child and keep the family name alive, although he had decided not to have children himself.

There were times when I wondered whether giving her their names had been an act of hope or an act of longing.

Maybe it was both.

The driver was still talking.

“He started coming in around the same time every year. After a while, he would call ahead to ask whether his pictures were ready. I think he knew we were excited to see him.”

He laughed.

“Sometimes we would practically close the shop when he came in. We would stop working and stand around that counter for an hour listening to him.”

I could see the scene as he described it. My father in his jogging suit, photographs spread across the counter, young employees gathered around him while he transformed a camera shop in Greenbriar Mall into a classroom.

“One year,” the driver said, “he came back and brought all of us African jewelry. Had our names on it and everything.”

His voice thickened.

“Can you believe that? He remembered all our names.”

He became quiet for a moment.

Then he said, “I haven’t seen that man in a long time. But I will never forget how he made me feel about myself.”

Neither Asa nor I moved.

The driver looked at me again.

“You really do look just like him.”

I finally asked the question, although there was no mystery left in it for me.

“Do you remember his name?”

The driver laughed immediately.

“I’ll never forget that man’s name.”

He lifted his chin, smiling at the memory.

“His name was Asa Hilliard.”

Beside me, Asa sat straight up.

“That’s me, Daddy,” she whispered urgently.

I turned toward her.

Her eyes were wide.

“That’s my name,” she said, pointing to herself. “I’m Asa Hilliard.”

The driver continued, unaware of what was happening behind him.

“What’s crazy is, I found out years later that he was a really important man. I saw his picture in the newspaper after he died. Front page. Said he died in Egypt.”

He shook his head.

“All that time, he was living right there in East Point. He never told us anything about himself. Never said he was important. He just wanted to show us what he knew.”

He smiled, but there was sadness in it.

“I really miss that man.”

I nudged Asa gently.

“Tell the gentleman your name.”

She leaned forward between the front seats.

“My name is Asa Pearl Hilliard,” she said in her small, high-pitched voice.

The driver kept talking over her.

Then he stopped.

“What did you say?”

Asa looked at me, then back toward him.

“My name is Asa Pearl Hilliard.”

He leaned forward over the steering wheel, staring into the mirror as though the darkness itself had spoken.

“What did you say your name is?”

“I’m Asa,” she said. “Asa Pearl Hilliard.”

Then, with the certainty only a four-year-old can possess, she continued.

“And Asa Hilliard is my grandfather. He died, but I have his name now. My uncle’s name was Asa Hilliard too, but everybody called him Ace. He died too, and my Daddy misses him.”

The driver said nothing.

Neither did I.

The car became impossibly quiet.

For several minutes, the only sound was the tires moving beneath us and the low hum of the engine. Streetlights passed over the driver’s face one after another, revealing his expression and then hiding it again.

I watched him grip the steering wheel.

Once, he lifted a hand toward his face.

I could not tell whether he was wiping his eye.

As we turned onto my street, he finally spoke.

His voice was barely above a whisper.

“I can’t believe I’m meeting you.”

Asa looked toward me.

The driver swallowed and tried again.

“I can’t tell you how proud I am to meet you.”

The car stopped in front of our house.

Before I could find the words to answer him, Asa pushed open her door and called brightly into the night.

“Thank you for the ride!”

The driver was already getting out.

He walked around the car and stopped in front of her. For a moment, he simply stood there looking down at this little girl who carried the name of a man he had not seen in years.

Then he knelt.

“Can you ask your Daddy if it’s okay for me to give you a hug?”

Asa turned toward me.

I nodded, unable to speak.

The driver took her small hands in his and pulled her gently toward him.

He held her for a long time.

Not the quick, careful hug of a stranger.

Not the polite embrace of someone saying goodbye.

He held her as though he had been waiting for her.

As though he knew her.

As though somewhere inside him, something unfinished had finally found its ending.

When he stood, he shook my hand with both of his.

Then he remained beside the car, watching us walk toward the house.

Asa walked backward up the path, her eyes still fixed on him, as if she did not want the moment to end.

“He’s a nice man, Daddy,” she said when we stepped inside.

Later, I tucked Asa into bed and sat beside her until her breathing softened and sleep carried her away.

But I could not sleep.

I kept seeing that man kneeling in front of her.

I kept seeing the way he held her.

He had entered our lives as an Uber driver taking us home through the dark streets of Atlanta. But when he wrapped his arms around Asa Pearl, he no longer looked like a stranger. For one brief moment, he looked like a grandfather meeting his grandbaby for the first time.

And lying there beside her that night, I began to understand something my heart seemed to know before I did. Love does not always leave when the people we love are gone. Sometimes it finds another voice, another face, another pair of waiting arms. Sometimes it crosses years, grief, and even the distance between this world and the next just to remind us that it still remembers the way home. And sometimes, if we are quiet enough to recognize it, eternity slips into the back seat of an Uber and gives a little girl the hug her grandfather had been waiting a lifetime to give.