My extension cord scars would be visible to everyone behind me. Since, as the most trusted room monitor with the most gold stars, I sat right up front at the teacher’s right hand, everyone could see my crisscrossed legs as I stood there in my hand-me-down underwear, worse than naked. As the tittering washed over me, I could only stand with my face in my hands.
After about a decade, Mrs. Washington, our substitute teacher, came over and draped her white angora sweater around me. Then she took me to the teachers’ lounge. I waited there for Mama to come get me.
THE MAN OF THE FAMILY GROWS UP
As we females battled in our own ways against our father, Bobby, four years my junior, began to show scars. At four or five, he would flinch if you reached toward him. At the dinner table, a simple move toward a platter would make him cower, cover his head. He developed bizarre facial tics and a nervous blink that so distorted his face he looked like a tiny stroke victim. He baffled and worried us women, but he infuriated our father. He interpreted all these symptoms as signs of weakness. It never occurred to him that he might be the source.
By six or seven, Bobby was stuttering, cutting holes in the curtains and towels, setting small fires. Even when directly observed, even when he saw you watching him, he’d lie. Soon, he was lying about everything, no matter how minor, terrified that he was in trouble. Speaking directly to him started him shivering and stammering. He was afraid of his own shadow. Daddy just kept trying to toughen him up.
His mortal fear of everything notwithstanding, Bobby exhibited some behavior I now see as desperately defiant. Our father had many ways of cutting us off from the rest of the world; one was to never allow us any money. So, one day when he was about eight, Bobby broke into my father’s desk and stole fifty cents. Then he gorged himself on candy. He’d had to gouge the drawer open with a screwdriver; it was completely ruined. When confronted, he stuttered that he’d found the money in the backyard. A “big white man” had broken in and ransacked the desk.
We women never challenged my father in such direct ways. Our skirmishes against him were clandestine. For instance, we’d manipulate him into doing something he wouldn’t have done, even though it was necessary, just so he could show us who was in charge. In particular, my response to my father’s tyranny was to develop a strongly passive-aggressive streak. I made sure that my defiance wouldn’t get me razor-strapped.
In fact, I ensured that my defiance could never be acknowledged for what it actually was. I delighted in finding ways of setting Daddy up to say ignorant things, knowing he’d be too proud to back down. I’d speak as “white” as I possibly could around him, using archaic words mined from the hours I spent lost in the dictionary. I’d answer a sibling in French within his earshot and then grandly translate. It was all I was brave enough for. And in the end, in our very unhealthy Dickersonian way, I “won.” He figured out how to keep me mute: he stopped taking away my books. He even brought them home to me whenever he found some, knowing it would keep me occupied and silent. But Bobby just kept making flagrant, doomed gestures that kept him cringing under my father’s belt.
It wasn’t just my father Bobby felt impelled to defy. We, his sisters, were always running to help him fight the neighbors and strangers he was always at odds with. If one of us fought, we all had to, but the problem was that he was the only Dickerson who ever had to be saved because he was always provoking fights, often with boys much larger than he.
We were always running pell-mell to find him at the center of a group of gawkers, barely defending himself from at least one teenage boy. He’d be taking their punches while keeping up a running stream of mama jokes and personal insults. The crowd was rolling on the pavement at his patter, which would infuriate the bigger boys he was “fighting,” and intensify their attack. Invariably, our arrival would disperse the combatants: no boy wanted to hit one of us girls and face Eddie Mack. Also, they knew we Dickerson girls fought like marines and, against boys, would use the sticks and stones that no self-respecting boy could. But Bobby was vilified for having to hide behind his sisters. After his opponents smacked him around, we often would, too, for making us fight all the time. And within days, he’d just instigate a new argument with even bigger boys and take his licks until we got there to both help and humiliate him.
My brother was being trained in his father’s image. While Daddy insisted we girls be meticulously trained in women’s ways, Daddy set about making my brother a man. Long past the age where we were still getting whippings, my father was still teaching my brother his limits. Unlike us, my brother kept testing him.
But Bobby decided on his own definition of manhood and stuck to it. He went out when told to stay in, he spoke when told to be quiet, he broke nearly everything he touched, his teachers couldn’t contain his high spirits—his every move seemed designed to infuriate our father. I thought he was mildly retarded.
But for all this, it was in our sharecroppers’ blood to pull together as a family. It was impossible not to feel the pull of that blood when an outsider threatened one of us. It was no less impossible to ignore the call of that blood when the threat was inside our own house. Every whipping our father gave him drove a wedge between us women and Daddy. We knew every whipping the son got was one the daughters had only avoided by biting our tongues and knuckling under. Because we were well-trained, God-fearing Southern Baptist women fresh from the cotton fields, we didn’t fight back. That wasn’t a reasonable option. We saw no dishonor in living to fight another day whole and in one piece. But times had changed. This was the 1970s up North in St. Louis, not Webb, Mississippi, nor Covington, Tennessee. There was no cotton to pick, no back of the bus, no more Mistah Charlie. We owned our own home, I went to school with white kids. Women were burning their bras and demanding to be heard. We were too old-fashioned for that, but revolution was definitely in the air.
But Daddy was still on Old Testament time. A son stole fifty cents, so the patriarch beat him all over the house. From where we cowered in the attic, we girls could hear my mother calling, “That’s enough Eddie. That’s enough Eddie. That’s . . .” Bobby just kept screaming and running. Afterward, the furniture in nearly every room of the first floor was overturned, upended, scored by Daddy’s belt. My cousin Nicky was staying with us that week. She secretly phoned our uncle to come get her and waited on the porch until he arrived.
After that, we were almost completely isolated from the family. We’d been cut off from our friends for a long time. The embarrassing half-paneled, half-painted walls and hand-me-down everything were one part of the problem; the other was Daddy’s tendency for mayhem. Once, when we’d thought him away, he’d snuck up on a group of us playing gin rummy, that game of de debil. He passed through, seeming unconcerned. But that was just a diversion. He slipped upstairs, ran back down with his belt, and beat us all. The cousins and neighbors ran, but not us Dickersons. We knew that running was defiance, crying was contradiction. We’d gritted our teeth and took our blows like men, like marines, like Dickersons. No one came to our house after that; we wouldn’t have let them if they’d tried.
The whipping Bobby got for the desk caper was a turning point for Mama. Though I’d begged, though her sisters had begged, she would not discuss leaving. What God had joined together . . . But Mama overheard Wina and me laying plans to run away and accepted that it had to end. That she had to leave this foolish, doomed man who could not tell the difference between fear and respect.
In the spring of 1973, while he was away driving his truck, we moved across town to a safe house. Safe, because he wasn’t there.
CHAPTER TWO
———
WHISTLING WOMEN
It was raining the day we left.
It was spring but still early yet, and the last of winter’s chill seeped in through the big crack in my bedroom window. Through the connecting door, I could hear Mama moving around. Eyes still closed, my ears strained, but no use. He didn’t want to be located. No telling where he was.
> Wordlessly, we finished our morning tasks and took the breakfast seats we’d occupied forever, then waited for him to sit so we could eat. Ignoring us, he finished making his lunch, fumbled around at his desk in the hall, spent a few minutes in his basement. His point proved, we sat and waited. Finally, he sauntered back in, sat, and blessed the table.
Sitting to his left, my sister Dorothy said a Bible verse and everyone followed suit clockwise around the table. Then it was my turn. There was a long silence.
My heart was so full of bitterness I thought I might choke. I contemplated speaking from my heart on this last day under his thumb, as I had fantasized about so often. A million things—curses, pleas, memories, confessions, questions, all the things I might have said, all the things I would never say—coursed through my mind. I watched the ever-present storm clouds of his hellish temper gather on his face as I wasted his precious time.
We’re leaving, you crazy bastard! I thought, and I knew my eyes were dangerous.
Mama cleared her throat. She was right. I couldn’t risk pushing him too far, not today.
Jesus wept,” I said with all the authority I could muster.
Then, all of a sudden, breakfast was over and he was gone. I have been fatherless ever since.
My mother managed pretty well that day for a woman who was dooming herself to eternal damnation. We flew all over the house, my mother, Dorothy, Wina, and I, carting off the few possessions we’d be taking with us. We’d been stockpiling castoffs in preparation for this day. This time, I hadn’t minded scavenging through the piles at the VV; now, we had a reason to settle for others’ discards. Given the sin she was already committing in leaving her husband, my mother would not compound it by absconding with one whit more than necessary. We left him the furniture, the dishes, the pots and pans, the bedding. The house.
For all my righteous anger, once our labors began I found myself feeling sorry for my father. Then I found myself feeling angry for pitying him. Then I didn’t know what I was feeling, just that I felt bad.
I had begged my mother to tell him we were leaving. The thought of my father coming home to a house empty of his wife and children broke my bitter little heart. How could he help knowing the truth, that those he saw himself as protecting had fled him like a pestilence. I knew just how desperate I was to be away from him, and the knowledge that he would know it, too, made me want to howl with sympathy for him.
I couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like to walk through the front door that day and find my world turned upside down. So I had pestered my mother, with increasing hysteria, to tell him. I guess I thought that a polite notification would have made our leaving him a mere inconvenience he could have planned his week around. I even lectured her that it was un-Christian, lying almost, to run off while his back was turned. She forbade me to broach the subject again. “You’ll understand by and by,” she said. As always, she was right.
As the day progressed, I continued to lurch between emotions. Like good little Dickersons, we didn’t discuss our feelings or try to comfort each other. We just scurried around avoiding eye contact, each lost in her own private misery, each stoic as hell.
Her arms full of clothes from our clothesline, Mama regarded me strangely as I stood in the middle of the hallway, trying to decide how I felt seeing these walls, these rooms, for the last time.
You run out of stuff to do?” she asked.
“Look at these walls. He never finish nothin, do he?” I sneered. I had no idea I was going to say that.
Mama followed my gaze around the room. “Huh?”
“Look, there.” I pointed at the base of the staircase. “Look at all the mouse holes. Why cu’nt he jes plug em?”
“Debbie, stop,” she warned, still confused but figuring it out. Children had no business criticizing anyone, let alone their father.
“Look up, Ma,” I said, straining my head toward the watermarked, cracked ceiling. “I guess he jes waitin for the roof to fall right in on us. Triflin.”
“Stop, Debbie.”
“Triflin. ’Sall he is.”
She slapped me. I insulted him again. She slapped me again. I opened my mouth and she turned on her heel, but I followed her, spewing insults. On the trot, she turned and slapped me again, then slammed the kitchen door in my face so she wouldn’t have to slap me anymore.
I ran out of steam and lurched back to sadness. That’s how Mama found me a few moments later. Sad. I was emptying the hamper, separating his clothes from ours. She found me there at the top of the stairs weeping into one of his work shirts. It was the VV smell his clothes never seemed to lose that got me.
——
The strain of our escape plan had been nearly unbearable. We were racked with worry and guilt, especially our mother. It all went over Bobby’s head; we picked him and Necie up from school and brought them to a new home. He hadn’t had to do any work, he hadn’t had to bear any guilt, he bore no responsibility. He had no choice. He was eight and I was twelve. Incongruously, he was excited over the new house. He didn’t get it; he didn’t realize his life had changed forever. All he knew was that he had a cool new bedroom while his sisters had to share the basement. He couldn’t fathom our gloom.
Daddy showed up after work and I watched through our new front window as he searched out addresses. He squinted back and forth from the letter in his hand to the house before him, as if a wrong address would bring his family back to him. Eddie Mack looked cowed, something I had never seen before. The look on his face made me drop the curtain and back away. He marched himself in and we stood around mute and agonized; a lifetime spent together and we still had no idea how to reach each other.
Bobby ran around waving a chair in the air in his excitement and broke the dining room chandelier. My father moved automatically to give him a smack, then stopped himself. It was as if we’d been granted asylum in some foreign country where he had no authority. I hovered close to my mother while he was there; even had they been capable of talking, they wouldn’t with me present. They couldn’t even look at each other; they fidgeted and bobbed from foot to foot and continued failing each other. Twenty-five years of marriage just slipped away from them that day and came to nothing but their six kids, only two of whom—JoAnn, who was across town with her own family, and the inexplicable Bobby—could abide their father.
ON OUR OWN
My mother and I became ever closer in those lean years on her single income. Those years were grim, grim but good. We were too poor to pay attention, but at least there was no fear; we never considered going back, though the privation of those years nearly broke us. It’s hard to say which made me stronger: living with Eddie Mack Dickerson or living without him.
My sharpest memory of those years is of watching my mother calculate the bills each payday. Still uniformed, she’d sit at the kitchen table every Friday afternoon clucking fretfully to herself, biting her lips while she rifled through the shopping bag which held our household accounts. She’d organize, then reorganize, the little envelopes with their cellophane windows. Invariably, some bills went back into the shopping bag to be attempted again next time around.
Afterward, Wina and I would head to our little branch bank in the Riverview Circle with a list of money orders. Like many poor people, my mother had no bank accounts except for a frequently raided Christmas club. I’d hand over that list written in my mother’s crabbed hand on the back of a receipt or a tear of paper bag and watch the teller roll her eyes heavenward at the tedious prospect of preparing yet another raft of piddling money orders: $10.00, $13.47, $10.00, $18.18, $22.14, $10.00, $10.00, $10.00. Ten dollars, the minimum payment for most of her debts, was the money order amount most frequently represented on Mama’s list.
That sad list of forlorn numbers fascinated me. I still have a pile of them, those scraps of paper bearing the symbols of her toil, of her love for her children. I knew they identified her as a slave. A slave to her job, a slave to debt, a slave to the nearest grocery store. For
better or worse, a love slave to her kids.
The early seventies were a time of inflation, recession, and job instability; not a good time for a major lifestyle change. Mama switched from waitressing to a factory job and things improved. Daddy gave us what he gave us and we never asked for more. Then it all fell apart. There was a blur of bad times: her union went on strike, or she was laid off, or she’d had that surgery. Take your pick, each of those occurrences sent us into a tailspin. She waitressed when she could, cleaned offices and homes, but it wasn’t enough. With so many out of work, wages were a joke and full-time work unavailable. We started dumping the bills, unopened, into the shopping bag. Wina and I invented the tea and crumpet game then. The only things we could count on eating were tea and toast, fried potatoes, canned pork and beans, or meatless spaghetti. The game was to fill up on Lipton’s and toast while reenacting what we assumed was high tea as culled from my reading. We did our best English accents, said “dah-ling” and “rahthuh.” This bit of toast became a cucumber sandwich, that one a hot buttered scone. There were free lunches at school and something, if only “tea and crumpets,” for breakfast and dinner. Mama would remind us that “you go to sleep, you won’t know you hungry.” She was right.
In the evenings, we’d huddle together in the kitchen, the only warm room, and talk, crochet, read, do our homework, each other’s hair. Since we had nothing but each other, that’s what we made use of, especially after the TV broke and we could afford to neither replace nor repair it.
Regardless of all the things we did without, no one complained; we knew there were worse things than hunger or a lack of sitcoms. Charity, for instance. Hard as I argued against it, the day came when Mama and I drove, grim and miserable, to the welfare office. Sick with the shame of it, I told her: “I’d rather starve. The rest would, too.” Distracted and sad, she mumbled, “Guess I rather y’all wun’t.” Forbade to speak further on the subject, I just stewed—but wouldn’t let her go to that shameful place alone.
An American Story Page 8
