She gave me a strange smile. “Leave it be. Them folks could be trying to tell us something special.”
So we listened to the radio together while she cooked the potatoes in a trance. She mixed all the wonderful ingredients together in her big fairy-tale pot, never measuring, never counting, never without that otherworldly smile and unfocused eyes.
“Ma, the potatoes,” I called. “How you know when to stop peelin?”
I might never have spoken, so small a dent did I make in her reverie.
“Mama? Mama? Mama?”
I thought that was her given name; I liked whispering it there in our gingerbread kitchen like an incantation. When I was nine or ten years old, I would be introduced to the concept of the “maiden name” and that she’d not always been my mother, that we’d not always been “the Dickersons.” I became hysterical. But I was happy that day, calling for my mama again and again and again so softly I knew she wouldn’t register it consciously but might well weave it into whatever fantasy she was entertaining. Eventually, though, I had to have her back.
“ MA. How much fillin is that?”
She looked surprised, as if she’d missed her bus stop and didn’t recognize the neighborhood. Then, a shrug toward the pie shells lined up on the counter.
“ That much.”
The tone of her voice let me know I’d asked enough questions. The ritual was complete when I got to watch the last drop of sweet potato pie filling exactly fill the last waiting pie shell.
——
Across Kingshighway, three quarters of a block from our house, was Benton Elementary, where every kid in the neighborhood went. Unless, of course, they were high-seditty and went to one of the handful of black parochial schools. We were not high-seditty. All Benton’s students and teachers were black, as was the principal. Its yard was divided in two by a white line on the pavement—girls’ side, boys’ side. Any girl who crossed the line was “fast” and got whipped; any boy who did was “bold” and got scolded.
Those were old-fashioned days; it would be 1972, my seventh grade, before females could wear pants to school. That included teachers and administrators. We square-danced in gym until the mid-seventies. Chewing gum got you sent to the principal’s office and a phone call to your parents. Passing notes or talking in class? A minimum of three lashes with a pointer or yardstick while bent over a desk in front of the whole class. What worse offenses might cost a transgressor I never knew; incorrigibility was held to a minimum in a world where parents came to administer classroom whippings. Any corporal punishment administered at school was given in the full knowledge that it would be repeated at home once the teacher called to alert your parents. Of course, the call just made it official; the news usually made it home before the sore behind did. Teachers, like the Bible, were always right; disputing their version of events would only lengthen and intensify the parental whipping. “Why would a grown woman tell a story on you?” Mama would demand, belt in hand. “Don’t you think she got better things to do?” Not that a schmendrick like me ever got in trouble in school. There were no gold stars in that.
It was a very small, very safe, very closed world. It was made even more so for us Dickersons by the fact that we were forbidden to stray beyond a two-block radius in any direction. We were not permitted to listen to adult conversation, nor were we were allowed to watch the news; I was so oblivious to the civil unrest of the 1960s that when a car passed festooned with Freedom Ride banners, I thought Good Samaritans were providing free transportation for the poor. At the Dickersons’, the sixties were about tradition and family.
JIM CROW REVISITED
We drove back to Covington as often as we could to visit Daddy’s remaining family (Mississippi was deemed too far. Also, Mama was always ambivalent about us going there; I have yet to visit the state). Road trips were high adventure for us kids.
As we got further from St. Louis, the territory became increasingly rural. Daddy avoided interstates (tolls were for suckers, yet another ploy by the masters to deny the masses that freedom which was rightfully theirs), so we bucked and heaved along two-lane roads in varying states of comfort. We exaggerated the bumpiness, flinging ourselves against each other and squealing for joy. We passed farmers and cows, we inhaled skunk stench and watched horses defecate on the run. When Mama confirmed for us that those were indeed cotton fields flying by, we laughed—they seemed unreal, a hayseed panorama staged for our amusement. Daddy listened to talk radio and baseball games and tuned us out, or so we thought.
“Lawsie, Missy Anne,” I drawled in my best eight-year-old Sambo to Wina. “Is we gwine fer to milk dis heah cow and skin us’n up soma dis heah possum?” I was smart but not smart enough to realize my own speech pattern was not much different from that which I mocked.
“I don rightly be a-knowin,” she responded, eyes round and Rochester’d. “Jes don be fer ta whuppin us’n darkies, Missy. I declares.” We giggled and snorted at our own wit.
All at once, Daddy was standing over us, ordering us out of the car.
“You think slavin and cotton pickin is so durn funny, eh? I’m a show y’all jes what our people went through so you could live so high on the hog.”
I elbowed Wina and snickered. “High on the hog!”
“Hog!” she snorted back piggily.
He didn’t laugh. “Into tha fields. All a y’all. Right now. Pick you some cotton and then tell me how funny it is.”
Mama tried to soothe him, but he bum-rushed us from the car to the cotton field in what seemed like a flash. Daddy demonstrated the proper harvesting procedure and then set off down the road, jogging up and down to keep himself awake at the wheel. Defeated, Mama settled herself under a tree with Bobby, the baby. We girls threw ourselves into our labors. We thought it was a game.
Picking cotton is hard.
Quickly, the prickly pods encasing the bolls drew blood. Wina and I conferred and hit upon the bright idea of removing our good-little-girl Sunday school white cotton gloves from the luggage to protect our fingers. Several pairs each were necessary to prevent injury.
Soon, we were chasing each other with clods of sod. We whacked away at each other with thick greenery and clumps of soil. Then we created a suitable plot and dialogue: I was the evil overseer, the others my downtrodden slaves.
“Mammy! I done tol you fer the last time. Now I’se gwine whup’n de tar outta yo wu’thless black hide.” I cracked my imaginary whip evilly.
“Please lawd! Don fer tuh whup me. Don whup ol’ mammy,” Wina wailed bug-eyed. Necie sang “Nobody Knows de Trouble I’se Seed” in the best Paul Robeson she could manage.
And then Daddy was once again standing over us, so furious he was . . . silent. He seethed so intently, he seemed to be going in and out of focus. Then he turned like a robot, got into the car, and drove away.
We ceased our game immediately and trooped back over to Mama, sat down in the shade with her, and waited. Within a few minutes, he was back. We got in, he tuned in another ball game, began whistling to himself, and we drove off. No one spoke for what seemed like hours.
I suppose we learned from television and the movies to see slavery as melodrama. Given that we learned nothing in school about slavery, Reconstruction (except that rapacious carpetbaggers oppressed the virtuous Southerners), or Jim Crow, all our information came from the tube. Sans discussion, we watched Shirley Temple, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Charlie Chan, Bette Davis’s Jezebel, and every other shlocky, apologist rendering of the benign institution of slavery.
The gift my parents’ generation gave mine was a double-edged blade: the balm of distance and the curse of ignorance. We couldn’t fully appreciate how bad, how systemically bad, things had been, which both freed us and made us insensitive.
We knew virtually no black professionals, politicians, or entrepreneurs. We rarely saw ourselves reflected in the currents of the mainstream; when we did, it was as Rochester, Stepin Fetchit, movie maids and mammies. Our cultural invisibility except as laughingstocks, crimin
als, entertainers, or athletes produced a sort of schizophrenia in us. We watched—and revered— Amos and Andy and any other show featuring blacks, yet we knew sans discussion that many whites viewed these depictions as encyclopedia entries: a lazy white guy named Bob was just a lazy white guy named Bob, but Stepin Fetchit was every black man who ever lived.
——
“Daddy! Daddy! Whataburger, please, please, Whataburger!” Dorothy, bird dog that she was, pointed with one arm and pounded his headrest with the other. We saw it too and the rest of us set up a chorus. Stopping for their greasy, waxed-paper-wrapped burgers was the high spot of any road trip down South. Given our finances, we rarely ate away from home while at home.
“All right, all right, quit your caterwaulin. Whataburger? Thataburger.”
We laughed sycophantically at the joke he told every time Whataburger was mentioned. He laughed hardest; all was forgiven. He pulled across their paved lot out front to the dirt road that ran alongside and behind the restaurant.
Mama gathered all the girls and took us off into the trees to pee and sent Daddy off with Bobby. Daddy was never saddled with a child; looking back, I can see that she must have sent Bobby with him to keep him calm. It wasn’t working. His face gray and tight, Daddy disappeared around the back side of the restaurant. Mama stopped us from following him, so soon we were playing tag among the near trees. He reappeared loaded down with bags.
Too concerned with the nearness of Whataburgers to notice his thin lips and shallow breath, we swarmed him for the bags. Soon, Mama had our feast spread out on a blanket across the tailgate. Overstimulated by our strange surroundings, we hopped from foot to foot with our burgers in one hand, shakes in the other. It felt odd to eat standing up. Then Wina threw a fry at me and the war was on. I took off after her, even madder when one of my pickles fell off my Whataburger as I ran.
“Y’all out yo minds?” Mama warned. “Don make me find my belt right out here in the open air. Don think Jesus caint see you.”
To our surprise, Daddy cut her off. “Why not?” he said bitterly. “We got to eat outside like heathens, why not act like heathens?”
“Eddie,” she soothed, “le’s jes make the bes—”
“Oh no!” Necie had fat tears rolling down her cheeks. “We dint say our verse. Now we gon all get stomachaches,” she wailed.
My Whataburger turned to lead in my stomach.
We all looked to Mama. She looked to Daddy.
“Damnation!” he fumed, and pounded his fist on the dashboard. Our wailing got louder.
“Damnation!” he croaked again. This time his fist landed on the horn.
We all jumped at the sound. Mama covered her mouth, wide-eyed. Daddy got quiet; his eyes narrowed speculatively. He blew the horn again. White faces appeared at the windows. Moving with alacrity, Mama swept the remnants of our meal back into the bags and shooed us into the car. We were bent over double, sure we could already feel our intestines cramping. Daddy was leaning on the horn now, blaring it like an air-raid warning. Whites, mostly waitresses and cooks in dirty white uniforms, began appearing from the restaurant’s back side.
“Drive, Eddie,” Mama hissed at him. He stared at the growing crowd and kept blowing the horn. “Close the door, Eddie, and drive.”
Wina groaned loudly next to me. “I’m gon be sick,” she whimpered.
I alternated between holding my belly and stopping my ears with my fingers. Mama got out, went around to his side, and closed his door. She got back in and turned the key from her side.
A redheaded man with a sweet face inched tentatively toward us. “Y’all need some help? You stuck in the mud? Low on gas?”
Mama slammed her own car door behind her. “Eddie, you drive this car now,” she said.
Still blowing the horn, Daddy pulled away, a feral gleam in his eye. Mama turned to us in the back two rows. “All right now, everybody. Le’s all just calm down cause—”
“But we gon be sick,” Necie wailed. “ Real sick, cause we was almost through.”
“Listen to me. God knows you forget sometimes and thass all right long as you right quick say your verse. You only get sick when you don bless your food and you know durn well you shoulda. So let’s quick everybody say they verse.”
She turned to Daddy. “Eddie, whyn’t you—” He sped up a little and the car fishtailed.
“I know,” Mama recovered. “Dorothy, you start.”
“Jesus wep’.”
“OK, now you, Debbie.”
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me—”
“Good! Now you, Wina. Sit up straight, that’s right.”
Wina struggled herself upright and puked in both directions like a lawn sprinkler, drenching me and Necie. I looked down at myself, over at my sisters. Necie’s eyes met mine, and we puked in unison. Mama faced forward again and slumped in her seat.
“Eddie,” she said, her voice drained. “Pull off so we can find a Laundromat.”
I read aloud every sign we passed. Miserable I certainly was, but I still needed to be the first to find the Laundromat.
“ ‘Bakery.’ ‘Joe’s Auto Body.’ ‘Benjamin Franklin.’ Hey. There it is, ‘Wash-a-teria.’ Daddy. Daddy?”
He and Mama exchanged looks. The car never slowed.
“Whites only. What that mean?” No one answered. “Aint we gon stop?” Still nothing.
Then, I got it. Our clothes were colored, not white. Had we used that place, our clothes would have faded.
Daddy finally spotted a lake and pulled over. Mama stripped us, squatted on the bank, and rinsed our clothes out by hand. Daddy smoked in squint-eyed silence.
He surveyed the bucolic meadow we occupied as if planning its invasion. When he seemed to have finished committing the area’s topographic features to memory, he settled back to blow smoke rings.
“After the fighting was over on Okinawa,” he began, apropos of nothing, “we start agitatin for better rations. Lord God was we sick of them canned goods. So, the CO—a white boy but one a them with fire in the belly—he sent us on down the road to the Air Corps boys. You know what them white boys said to us? ‘No. This here meat for white folk’ and for us not to get no fancy ideas just cause a the war. So, we jes goes back to camp. Empty-handed.” He paused for a moment, cleared his throat.
“So, anyway, the major see us without the meat and don’chou know he spit on our boots! ‘Marines. Don’t. Lose.’ As loud as he could yell it. When he said ‘lose’? He sucker-punched each and every one of us. Then he tol us to get outta his sight, like he was sicka tha stomach.
“We went back and took that place apart. Tore up every quonset in they camp and took all they food!”
By this time, he was pacing back and forth along the bank, our eyes riveted to him. His pace slowed and he stood staring back down the road we’d come along, that same feral gleam in his eyes. I had no doubt he was visualizing a horizon in flames.
“Marines. Don’t. Lose.” He barked it confidently, like a password or a secret code. As if magic portals might open and mounted warriors lunge forward to do his bidding. Then, turning on a dime, he began again.
“Another time, we was on pass back stateside when—”
The sun went down while Mama scrubbed our clothes on a rock by a lake and Daddy brayed defiant warrior stories at a town that didn’t even know he existed.
THE MAN OF THE FAMILY
Since the home we grew up in was strict and fundamentalist Protestant, it was also strictly patriarchal; our father ruled with an iron fist. So, given both those circumstances, my brother was treated by us women—by my mother especially—like a young prince.
In addition to being the baby, Bobby was a beautiful child. He had a baby’s lisp, thick curly hair, and long eyelashes. He was so attractive he was often mistaken for a girl. From the moment of his birth, Bobby was special. Because he was the baby, because he was to be the last of us, because he was so beautiful—but mostly because he was a boy.
&nbs
p; In our world of fundamentalist sharecroppers, nobody bothered to deny the double standard of male privilege. That would have been like denying the double standard of white privilege. Sex roles were presumed to have been ordained by God. Men had to work if they wanted to be thought of as men, but once the workday was through, so was their toil. For women, once the workday was through, their night jobs began at home; few could afford to be housewives. When my father made it home after a grueling day in his truck, he disappeared to tinker with his junk in the basement or in the backyard, Bobby with him.
My mother’s day started anew when she came home. Fortunately for her, she had five daughters. By the time I could reach the stovetop, I was making meals for eight. Each Sunday, I dismembered and fried a minimum of two chickens, as many as five if relatives were expected; I had burn marks up and down my arms from splattering grease that didn’t fade until my teens. Even so, I volunteered for extra duty, racing to beat my sisters to tasks, redoing work that had not been done to my satisfaction. The more work I did, the more approval I got, so I did all I could.
Given the Marine Corps standards by which the house had to be kept, there was more than enough work for us girls. Daddy’s job was mainly to exist as a disciplinary threat. He was responsible for mechanical maintenance but such work proceeded at whatever pace he deemed appropriate; there was no questioning his decision that the grass wasn’t long enough yet, or to leave the car up on blocks for weeks, or to let the roof leak until he happened upon some building materials at a job site. In any particular room of our house, the walls were part wallpaper, part paneling, part paint, and in all the differ-ent colors of the rainbow based on whatever my father found as he scoured the streets of St. Louis. Our embarrassment meant nothing to him, except, of course, as proof of our unfitness for such a cruel world. But if dinner was late, or a floor dirty, our female souls were in mortal peril.
These were community-wide standards, but my father took this further than most. He saw waste and disorder, no matter how minor, as directly related to sin and damnation. A poor, uneducated black man in 1960s America, he patrolled his home, his one area of power and authority, with constant vigilance. Whatever Mama might have thought, she backed him up; throughout my childhood, she promised to haunt me if I ever kept a dirty house, just as her mother had her. Murder? All right, just be sure to clean up thoroughly afterward.
An American Story Page 4
