Finally, when it was dry, we got to sit in a kitchen chair next to the stove while Mama slathered on more Vaseline and dragged a heavy metal comb, red-hot from lying in the gas burner, through it, essentially frying our hair. Like most of my generation, I spent my girlhood with burns on my forehead, ears, and the nape of my neck. The least moisture makes African-type hair shrink and shrivel, so often after only one sweaty day’s play in the humid air, it would “go back” to its natural state. Rain was my fiercest enemy. Fat, tangled, nappy roots swelled and bulged and made me hate myself. This battle black women fight with our hair is a large part of the reason why so few black women over the age of thirty can swim—chemical relaxers had yet to be invented and we simply would not subject ourselves to the public humiliation of nappy hair.
Washing and pressing my hair was a childhood trauma I still shiver over. I learned to hate it when the white kids at school would sniff the air and try to trace the source of the smoky smell while their own hair wafted on the breeze. I didn’t hate them. I hated that part of us that was so deficient as to require the application of fire. I finally came to fake washing my hair. I’d just dip my two or three braids in water, maybe lather them up a little with soapsuds, then let Mama press my filthy, soap-scummy hair. But my hair, our hair, was only one of the many things to be ashamed of. My big, fat nigger nose. Ugly, gnarled nigger toes. Blackened elbows and knees. The ashiness that threatened to envelop my entire body unless I coated myself with Vaseline every moment, it seemed. I envied the women of Saudi Arabia those handy veils they wore. Being deprived, I had to settle for long sleeves, closed shoes, and knee-length skirts regardless of the weather. A hand to cover my smile and the spreading nigger nose it produced. Habits I couldn’t break until my thirties.
I learned many things at Wade. The first was that I was poor. The second, that I was low class. I learned that some mothers stayed home and that some fathers wore suits to work. It turned out that not everyone wore used clothes from Veteran’s Village. Some folks didn’t even roll in the aisles at church and scream at Jesus.
I learned to marvel at how multifaceted a thing it is to be poor; it’s much, much more than the mere absence of money. I heard snatches of conversations about summer science camps, I heard parents lay out their children’s progress ten, fifteen years into the future. Mine never discussed the future except to hope that things would be generally better then: poor folks can only afford the present tense. I’d known that the middle- and upper-class lifestyle was book true, TV true . . . but in real life people ate in fancy restaurants, took European vacations?
I also learned that I didn’t really speak English.
During a boisterous classroom discussion that first year, someone said something with which I heartily agreed, so I blurted out, “Sho nuff!”
The black kids froze, mid-laugh, and sealed their faces off. The whites giggled and scooted around in their chairs to pinpoint the source of the funny words.
The teacher laughed appreciatively. “Who’s the li’l ol’ Southern honey chile?” she mock-drawled.
I collapsed into myself and sunk down into my seat. I never admitted to having sho-nuffed, though all the other blacks knew. “That was real black, heifer,” one said to me at recess.
Saying “sink” in the neighborhood made me an Oreo. “Zink” at school made the white teachers patient with missionary zeal. “ ‘Tin’ is a metal, dear,” our English teacher said in front of the whole class while I stood wishing to die. “If you’re referring to the number that comes after nine, it’s pronounced ‘ten.’” One day, we black kids would chastise each other for using black English, the next day for not using it. A quick dictionary check, to me, settled the matter.
I began to cringe when elders spoke of the “horse-pital” or preferred “the new-monia” to the infinitely worse “old-monia,” which would make you as crazy as the “bessie bugs” I could find nowhere in the encyclopedia. I tried not to grimace when my mother opened the “winder” or threw the rotten “poke chop” in the “ga’bage.” Once, when an earache earned me her rare full attention, my moment in the sun was ruined when she asked “which un?” I began to correct my elders; having Mama slap my face on the spot of the transgression broke me of that habit. Street fights cured me with my peers. So I kept my knowledge to myself and wondered why people wouldn’t rather know. I thought I was helping.
But at some point, I discovered that I could wield my knowledge like a sword when needed. One day, I had again been chased home from the special bus for “talkin all proper and thinkin you’s better than erbody.” This had happened nearly every day for the first few weeks of Wade; that day, my mother locked the screen door against me and forced me to face them. During the preliminary “dozens” session, I claimed the power of my special knowledge.
Usually, the neighborhood understanding that anyone who wanted to fight a Dickerson had to fight all of us seriatim was enough to stop a disagreement at the name-calling stage, but Rochelle, Queen of Group III . . . she was a special kind of tough. Once, the year before, I’d kicked at her dismissively from a foot away when she called me “fatso.” She’d caught my foot and hopped me around the schoolyard one-legged for a week. Knowing that I would have to fight her, no matter how well I acquitted myself in the “dozens” preliminaries, tinged my words with hysteria.
I began with a promise to “reduce her head to lowest terms.” I opined that her mama’s head was biiiiiig, really, really big. As a matter of fact, her hat size was 10 to the twelfth power. It was so big, it was “bullish on America.” I pointed out to Rochelle that since she had so little idea of who her father was, when he died, he’d have to be buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Daddies.
Afire, I let loose with an brier patch of French nouns, names from Greco-Roman mythology, and elements from the periodic table adjectivized and anthropomorphized into a venom that surprised even me as it spewed forth willy-nilly from my frightened fury. Gobbledygook for the most part, but it served its humiliative purpose. The crowd was mine. I still had to fight, but Rochelle’s blank face had admitted defeat in the preliminaries and the crowd had to support me and my lethal tongue. It also took the gusto out of her assault on me; she just smacked me around a little, then wandered off to the crowd’s catcalls. This experience was so successful, I repeated it over and over until I could verbally ice any potential opponent. No one wanted to face me in a verbal joust, but everyone wanted to watch me eviscerate someone, so potential opponents took the long way around. Soon, I had what I wanted: invisibility. I was safe. Safe, but completely separate.
It’s hard to say which had more to do with my isolation—my special schooling or my self-imposed physical distance. My mother used to have to order me outside to play. She’d send me outdoors, only to knock me flat onto the back porch when she opened the door to hang out the wash; I’d be leaning back against the door reading a book, technically outside but as close as possible to the safety of the house.
When I tried to be a part of neighborhood goings-on, I floundered. St. Louis was firmly racially segregated in those days. Perversely, Jim Crow functioned as a kind of social shorthand for blacks then; it filled in the gaps of nearly any social situation. Our civic and social options were so few, knowing where someone lived told you just about everything you needed to know about that person. So, my living at the corner of Terry and Kingshighway but not going to Benton with everyone else made me strange. More than that, it made me suspect. I was a dropped stitch in the fabric of black St. Louis life; I kept tripping everyone up.
Meanwhile, at school I was just as much on the fringes as in my own community. We blacks in the gifted program were like Cinderella at the ball; the party was over when our special bus arrived to whisk us back to the ghetto. Our inclusion in the mainstream only lasted the duration of the school day and within the confines of the school building. We “bused kids” were not allowed off the school grounds before or after school nor during lunch. Because of the logistical difficulties of h
aving students from all over the city, there were few after-school activities; even when there were, my father forbade me to associate with whites beyond my schooling. So I spent those years alone with my books, increasingly mad at the world—and increasingly fearful of my father.
——
One morning, sometime after I started at Wade, I was scrubbing the kitchen table. Since it was already clean, as everything else in our house was required to be at all times, my strokes were overbroad, leaving wide, unwiped swaths visible among the wet streaks.
Daddy chuckled. “Girl, you won’t never make no good waitress.”
“ ’S OK by me, I don wanna be no waitress,” I rejoined.
“Watch that tone, good sister. See that stain right there? Why you leave that there, ’s triflin.”
“But, sir, ’s under the surface. It been there forever; it aint gon come out.” I’d wiped this table often enough to know.
He sucked his teeth and took a disgusted breath. “When I was on Parris Island . . .”
Not boot camp again.
“. . . they had us digging foxholes just before we was to ship out for Okinawa. It was about two hundred degrees and 700 percent humidity, so, way we dug em, them foxholes was only yea deep. We was goin off to fight the Japs in two days, we figure, what else can happen to us now? Drill sergeant tryin to make us understand how deep them holes need to be, so they can protect us. We figger we just wait till Okinawa to get em deep enough. So, OK, drill sergeant says. Fine. Them holes jes fine. Now get in em, he say, so we do. Bless God if drill sergeant don start drivin his jeep right over our holes. Right over our heads! Since I’m right here talkin to you, I guess you believe I got my foxhole nice and deep fore drill sergeant got to me.”
“But, Daddy, cu’nt folks a got hurt?”
He slapped the slick tabletop. “And aint that just the very point.” He barked, “If we’da done it right the first time, nobody wudda got hurt, would they a? Them that did had it comin. You think the Japs cared about how tired we was? How scared we mighta been? Erthin aint no picnic, good sister.”
“Yes sir; you right, erthin aint no picnic,” I soothed before he could get worked up to full sermon steam. “ ’S just that I rather not be a waitress if you don mind.”
“OK, Miss High-Seditty, jes what is it you think you gon be?”
“A lawyer,” I bluffed. My aspirations changed with every book I read and I’d just finished To Kill a Mockingbird.
Halfway through an inhalation of Belair smoke, the absurdity of this caught Daddy by surprise. He doubled over laughing.
“A lawyer, eh? Girl, don’t you know you’s Negro? You think the white folks calling you ‘gifted’ or all that book-readin change that?” Still chuckling, Daddy left me alone with my chores.
I got mad—and then I got worried.
Daddy was the first person to tell me I couldn’t do something because of my race, but I took it personally. I thought he meant I couldn’t do it because I was me, Debra Dickerson. Who should know better than he what I was and was not capable of? And I, the fragile little fifth grader just beginning to test her own limits, believed him; it occurred to me for the first time that some things, important things, might just be beyond me.
Later, I came to understand that he both expected and needed blacks to fail, otherwise there was no proof of white perfidy and soullessness. He never understood that his fatalism was a self-fulfilling, self-defeating prophecy. He never considered that he had to believe, at some level, that whites were superior since he believed blacks had no chance whatsoever in life—but probably, he would have attributed that to the transcendent power of whites’ innate evil. Among ourselves, we say “the white man’s ice is colder” to describe the many of us who won’t believe or value anything unless it comes from white people. The worse off some blacks are, the more magical whites seem, albeit an evil magic.
So my father, like many other blacks, did the oppressor’s job for him; he taught me to do the same. This was the moment that I began to close doors on myself. Perhaps whites would have been happy to take that task on themselves, but they rarely had to. Whites didn’t have to place barriers in my path, I did it myself by “accepting” my preordained place at the end of every line. Racism and systematic inequality are very real forces in all our lives, but so is fatalism and a perverse kind of exaltation of oppression.
I attended Wade Elementary School seething with the knowledge that doing so would have no bearing on my future. Illogically, but implicitly, I saw my presence there as merely one of an invited observer soon to rejoin her proletarian peers. My homeroom and math teacher did everything she could to fortify this belief in me.
Miserable and an inveterate daydreamer, I’d tune out repeatedly during class, lost in my own imaginings. As soon as I did, she’d pounce on me. I could catch up on my own in English, French, and history. But math . . . She’d send me to the board and heckle me as I struggled to concentrate. Whether I knew the answer or not, I’d just stand there facing the board till she sent me back to my seat. Eventually, she told me there was no point in my attempting the work and that I, along with her other designated math dummies, could just read a book while the others did problems. But look on the bright side, she’d say, you’ll make a fine secretary. When our Iowa Basic Skills Test scores came back, she called us to her one by one to show us ours. She preened like a whorehouse madam over Tracey Nash, the latest in a long family line of high-yellow doctors, and Nevels Scott, the son of black engineers. While I stood beside her, in front of the class, she expected me to laugh with her at my low spatial-relationships score. Don’t pout, she said, secretaries don’t need to understand these things.
I had a lot to think about as I emptied trash cans with Mama at her second job. I thought and thought and thought as I perfected the arts of frying chicken, mopping floors, and anticipating others’ needs. I was an honor student adept at crooning “yes sir” with just the perfect amount of placidity while inwardly I boiled.
Little did I know what good training those skills would be for the next twenty or so years of my life.
THE BAD YEARS: THINGS FALL APART
What made the situation at home a powder keg for me was my introduction of “the white man” through my education and far-flung reading. What made this situation a powder keg for the entire family was the simple act of our growing up.
As his teenage wife and adoring moppets grew into autonomous individuals, my father must have felt himself minimized and second-guessed at every turn—especially by me and by the timid wife who turned out to be every bit as capable as he was.
Before he frightened me into silence, we used to have after-dinner debates the way others had after-dinner mints. I once argued with him that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments guaranteed equality of treatment for all, and therefore, there was no discrimination. He almost had an aneurysm but he couldn’t convince me it wasn’t so. It was written in black and white and if I couldn’t trust books, I couldn’t trust anything. Even my mother, who rarely railed against the system, lost patience when I refused to acknowledge the existence of either discrimination or disadvantage. All I knew was, blacks were free and equal because it said so on paper. I wasn’t smart enough then to follow that thought through to its logical conclusion—so why were we so much worse off as a group?
What I didn’t factor in until I was a grown woman was what must have been going on behind closed doors between my parents. What happened between them is their story to tell, so I can’t say which came first—his ever-tightening grip on his family or the deterioration of their marriage—but the result was the same for us all. The shy, nineteen-year-old bride’s development of the Gooch rapid-fire wit did not help matters. Soon, the simplest things would set him off and his unpredictability made our home a prison camp.
“Why you need erthing to be so hard, Eddie?” I heard my sad mother ask him once after he’d put us all through some unnecessary hardship, like keeping us home from a party or refusing to ma
ke a repair which would add to our comfort but not our character.
Apparently, he was unfamiliar with the concept of the rhetorical question, because he answered her, albeit with a non sequitur. He told her, with prim righteousness, that she was going to hell. The Bible said women were supposed to act a certain way and he had firsthand knowledge that she, in fact, did not. His real fear, as a concerned father, was that she was putting his daughters’ mortal souls in peril with her heathenish example.
Mama gasped.
“Eddie,” she finally said, “I know bout how the husband and the wife spozed to be as one and all—but why is it we always got to be you?”
Daddy stormed off to his basement and stayed there for nearly thirty minutes while we waited at the table. As he well knew, no meal could start without him.
The next morning, Saturday, he woke us at 6 A.M. with a drill sergeant’s cold purpose, as had become his practice over the last few months. From the early morning, we girls were required to clean without ceasing until the late afternoon. This, in a house which was never allowed to be dirty. He wouldn’t even allow us to listen to the radio while we worked because “this aint no party.” Jeeps rumbled overhead.
He passed by on an inspection sweep whistling “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” It was one of my favorite hymns, so I joined in. Briskly, he stuck his head in and informed me that I, too, was going to hell.
I stopped mid-whistle.
Hell was as real a place to us as our house at 4933 Terry. Daddy was always pointing out people who were going there and I had never doubted either their going or the justice of that disposition. But me? Screaming in agony for all time as I burned but was never consumed in hideous flame?
An American Story Page 6
