An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  I behaved badly at the welfare office. I sniffed at the other women and their surely illegitimate children. I refused to sit on the germ-ridden chairs. I corrected the English of every social worker who spoke to us. We didn’t belong there. Mama was too dispirited to give me the throttling I deserved. And then we were told we were not in financial need.

  Stunned, we left without another word. Back in the car, we sat there staring at each other openmouthed, the keys still in Mama’s hand. Focused on dealing with the shame of charity—Mama in quiet contemplation, me in feigned contempt—we had not imagined such an outcome.

  Simultaneously, we broke into sniggers. They escalated into outright guffaws. We had no idea how we were going to manage until the factory reopened/the strike ended/she recovered from her surgery, but laughing at the absurdity of it all was what we most needed. Since we didn’t starve to death, didn’t lose the house, didn’t die of hypothermia, I guess our beloved civil servants were right. No matter how dire our circumstances after that, never again would we consider public assistance. I was even more contemptuous of welfare recipients after this than I had been before. They couldn’t be any worse off than we were and we’d made do “without accepting” handouts, so, I concluded relentlessly, anyone could.

  My relief at not going on welfare and my contempt for its recipients coexisted with a subconscious fury at the impersonal government which taxed us but failed to take an affirmative interest in our well-being. Like most poor minorities, my mother had an unexamined fear of the government not unlike her fear of our neighborhood strongmen. She dreaded drawing its attention.

  As late as the 1980s, I had to come home on leave to drag my mother to the Social Security office to collect her widow’s benefits. She wouldn’t be eligible in her own right until sixty-five, and with her peasant’s inbred low profile, she just knew the government would find a way to punish her for stepping into its gaze; help for a working-class widow who’d raised five kids alone just seemed too good to be true to her. I couldn’t even get her to articulate the fear that cost her nearly a year of benefits. Mama held her breath for months and hoarded the money, waiting for the other governmental shoe to drop. No, we Dickersons didn’t fight the power, we sought the shadows. We were oriented toward evading blows, not striking them. It never occurred to us to protest the denial of our benefits. It didn’t even occur to us to be angry. We didn’t think our good citizenship meant anything; we didn’t see ourselves as served by the government, but rather as subservient to it. Taxes, for us, were a form of protection money; all we asked in return was not to be crushed under the bootheel of government. We expected, demanded, nothing, and that’s exactly what we got.

  ——

  Our new home life, compared to what had preceded it, was a haven. Outside it, however, I was still a stranger in a strange land. Every adolescent is, of course, but I had no way of knowing that.

  Puberty crushed me. My stinky hair, my electrical-taped glasses, my pizza face, the home I wouldn’t allow anyone to see—I was a social outcast at Wade. I hung with the uncool, unbeautiful people. Darlene was fat. Beverly was tormented for coming to school dirty and hungry: they called her “Snow Monkey.” Wanda: dark skin, bad hair, bad neighborhood. Karen was a grade ahead but had committed some social faux pas that made her classmates torture her. On the bright side, Valencia was beautiful, stacked, and athletic, but considered “country” because she came from Wanda’s same bad neighborhood but refused to be ashamed of it. They’d sneer about the slaughterhouse a block away from her home and the foul fumes it spewed into the air. She’d kick their ass. The voluptuous Valencia brooked no disrespect.

  On a field trip once in fifth or sixth grade, Wanda, Beverly, and I were in an alcove looking at an exhibit. Timmy, one of the cool kids, walked in, stopped on his toes in horror, and backed out saying, “Yeech. Wanda, Beverly, and Debra. All in one room.” We were geeks and we huddled together for protection. Every school picture showed me with my bangs standing at attention, my nasty braids sticking straight out at ninety-degree angles. When I tried a more sophisticated look—two braids pinned across the top of my head, one in back—invariably, one would spring loose, and point straight heavenward for days before the snickering alerted me. I talked to myself, I walked into walls daydreaming, I developed a slouch-walk that kept my feet from leaving the ground so the soles of my ragged shoes wouldn’t flap. I was a mess. The summer between my seventh and eighth grades, Dorothy couldn’t take it anymore. An inveterate glamour-puss even while a rowdy tomboy, she made me over. She put me in an Afro and a hooded two-piece layered-look 4-H pantsuit she’d made à la Thelma on Good Times . We dried up most of my zits with undiluted alcohol (praise God, Daddy’d found a case of it). She let me borrow her shoes. I learned to walk like a normal person except that now I walked into walls not only from daydreaming but also because I refused to wear my glasses.

  I showed up for the first day of school and the boys’ eyes went wide. Girls invited me to their slumber parties. I was cool. I was in. I was disgusted.

  I was the same person I’d always been, but now, because of new clothes and a new hairstyle, I was a different person, a person worthy of inclusion. I let Timmy be my boyfriend (how else to torture him for the museum comment?), but just for a little while. Regardless of the cool crowd’s disgust, I kept my old friends, my real friends. I knew my forays into uncoolness were dangerous and might slam the door behind me, but I didn’t care; it was the only area of my life in which I was brave.

  Fraught with anxiety as they were, gender issues were the same for me as they were for everyone else. Racial issues still made me the most miserable—specifically, my relationships with other blacks.

  Most activities in those days were neighborhood-based, but local goings-on didn’t include me because I spent so much time out of the neighborhood. I missed the boat on the new slang, the new dances. That was just as well because I rarely got to use them. As soon as a boy at a neighborhood party forced me to admit where I went to school, he’d draw back and sneer, “So, you be likin them white boys, huh?”

  “Were that the case,” I sniffed with the chilly contempt I practiced in the mirror, “would I be here?”

  I have always had a misplaced faith in logic. I can see now the flaw in this strategy, but what was a sixth grader to do?

  By the end of sixth grade, I wouldn’t touch a neighborhood party with a ten-foot pole for fear of being ostracized. I remember my final few neighborhood events as gauntlets of ravenous prepubescents waiting in line to challenge my Négritude, anxious to reject me before I could reject them.

  I had learned at Wade to be ashamed of who and what I was, what we all were. No one ever directly assaulted the black way of life; to the contrary, I recall no racial incidents at all. (Class issues undergird many a tense moment, but Americans have always been loath to call those by their proper name. I graduated as intimidated by the few black doctors’ and judges’ kids as by the white ones. Without a doubt, our teachers differentiated among us by class.) The shame came from the drip-drip-drip of their way, the white way, or no way at all. No other ways existed. Everything we low-class black kids did, said, or thought was wrong. On the rare occasions when one of us suggested an alternative to the mainstream, our teachers would appear merely puzzled and mark the attempt “wrong.” Minus five points. If you wanted to pass, you did things the white way. You thought the white way. I remember a neighbor kid venting his frustration over his score on the Iowa Basic Skills Test we took every year and which had so much to say about the direction our lives would take.

  “ ‘Cup and table’ be right!” he spat, furious. “Who the hail be usin a cup and saucer round bout here?”

  Wade wore me down and I bought into it. I accepted that the black way was the wrong way. I learned from my reading, exemplified in the high teas I reenacted with Wina, to automatically substitute whites’ experience for my own. Without having to be told, I knew that my world was just that—mine and something to be ov
ercome.

  I was the queen of internalized oppression. Every split infinitive, every sentence ended with a preposition, every act of seemingly willful ignorance maddened me. It seemed to me that blacks were trying to fail, especially as I entered my teens and saw true decline all around me. People dropped out of school, used drugs, committed crimes, and, of course, there was the never-ending tide of illegitimate babies. These self-destructive behaviors baffled me. The people who spent the most time railing against “the man”’s refusal to let us get ahead were the same ones living in their mother’s basements watching eight hours of television a day on huge televisions rented at astronomical rates. Logic told me that racism was not their only problem. It wasn’t even their biggest problem.

  I began to believe that poor people bring most of their problems on themselves. I understood that oppression was a real force in our lives, but surely the answer was not willy-nilly procreation, drug use, sloppy work habits. The answer was to work hard, be smart. Like me.

  Black people had begun to make me nervous, so I stayed away from them, family included.

  ——

  I was almost out of elementary school before I discovered the huge central library downtown and saw my first book by a black person: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. I read it five times. It had never occurred to me that blacks could write books.

  With this discovery, my desire for serious modern literature burst into flame. I lost myself in the Harlem Renaissance. Dabbled in sixties protest and non-Western literature . . . lost interest. I always came back to the canon, those Dead White Men who got me through my childhood: Dickens, Maugham, Melville, Steinbeck, Balzac.

  Eventually, I came to see that the knowledge I garnered from my reading gave me power with, if not over, whites. The offhand reference to Scott and Zelda, I soon learned, rescued me from personal invisibility even as I became increasingly aware of my literary invisibility. No high tea on the moors for folks named Eula Mae, no Afros blowing in South Sea breezes. I loved these books but they made me so mournful. I knew they were meant to specifically exclude me.

  But I couldn’t help myself. I read everywhere. I spent hours with the dictionary and atlases. On the toilet, tripping up and down the stairs. I read at the table until my mother put a stop to that, but I just read the cereal boxes and catsup jars instead.

  Poorly educated herself, my mother made no attempt to guide or censor my reading. She assumed that, since it was written down and properly bound, it must be fit to read. Since I had no guide on this journey, I read many books which I now know were inappropriate (i.e., soft-core porn or overly adult subject matter. Of Human Bondage and the complete Erskine Caldwell, which I read in the sixth grade, come to mind). My hunger for the printed word was so intense in those years that I finished every book I began no matter how indigestible, no matter how much went over my head. Eventually, since I read with such speed, sufficient length became my primary criterion. Books were my safe haven. Books made me happy. Looking at them. Touching them.

  I read especially torturous passages from the strange archaic English of Dickens or Shakespeare aloud again and again just for the glory of it. Intuitively, I not only understood the outdated language, I reveled in it. I loved the rich feel of it, the sense of continuity, the seamlessness of human experience.

  Older and more utilitarian, I’d recite the difficult passages aloud until I could do so flawlessly, without the sharecropper intonations. It was years before I mastered turning my sharecropper patois off and on like a faucet, but as with all my self-initiated extra credit projects, I persevered. I could never understand others’ lack of interest in what I was reading. Their resistance to Treasure Island or The Three Musketeers was a mystery. But I persisted. I always figured I just wasn’t making the benefits well enough understood. I was trying to help.

  I’d thought I was helping when Wina had written me a letter from a weekend church trip. I had it waiting for her on her return, corrected and neatly rewritten. She came to me excited about a book I’d recommended, but I kept interrupting to correct her misinterpretations and mispronunciations, so she quit in tears.

  Once when I was fourteen or so and all-knowing, I was bragging to a group of cousins that I wouldn’t have been a slave, that I’d have fought back even unto death rather than be inventory.

  Even at Wade, we had learned nothing about slavery, Reconstruction, or Jim Crow. We had simply learned that that there was a civil war which ended in 1865 and inspired the Gettysburg Address. Even so, I’d absorbed enough from my reading to know to be ashamed of my people for allowing ourselves to be enslaved. I didn’t blame whites, I blamed us. We shouldn’t have allowed ourselves to become chattel. I wouldn’t have.

  Out of nowhere, Paw Paw, the man who laughed at everything, was standing over me squeezing my arm to near uselessness.

  “You wun’t a done nothin,” he sneered. “You’d a prayed and cried and begged Massa for nother morsel a food to keep body and soul together jes like erbody else.”

  At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about his African slave grandmother—sold away, never to be heard of again—but I bet he was.

  “Even had you a, all you’da done was git erbody whupped! sold! kilt!” He dropped my arm like it was diseased and snarled, “You wudn’t a done nothin. The other slaves wudda kilt you theyselves.”

  All in all, there was just no talking to blacks.

  In high school, which was majority white but predominantly working and lower middle class, I didn’t join the black student organization. I always had a job, a great many responsibilities at home, and my school was so far away that I spent any free time I had reading. I used to wonder what SOBI (Students of Black Identity) was for—to sit around being black? If they had an agenda beyond shoring up their own social predominance and creating opportunities to pose for Polaroids with the principal, I never knew what it was. It wasn’t lost on me that the leaders of SOBI were just the Negro subset of the same cruel snobs that ran everything else at school. In my experience, black student groups exist primarily to provide spotlights for the children of the black bourgeoisie.

  Also, and more importantly, in the 1970s I had come to truly believe that we had “overcome” in the sixties and that the post–civil rights era required all good citizens to move beyond group identifications and forge a new collective identity as plain old Americans, not fill-in-the-blank ethnic Americans. Black student groups were counterproductive self-segregation.

  I went my own neurotic way, but as I swam against both tides of underachievement and pseudomilitant posturing, the first layer of resentment and a budding conservatism was formed. Having no intercourse with whites other than my schoolmates—who never hassled me for failing the “paper bag” test or for not having “good hair”—I grew wary of blacks and stubbornly nurtured my disapproval of nearly everything and everyone around me.

  GOING BACKWARDS

  Gifted elementary students trapped in the St. Louis public schools were merely shunted to Southwest High School, labeled “Track 1A,” and allowed to take whatever classes we chose. At Wade, in the eighth grade, I had the same books my high school sophomore sister did, so by the end of my sophomore year, there was nothing left to take. Not only that, the learning environment was one of warehousing and diminished expectation for the lower classes. As college neared, I careened between fraud syndrome and lofty contempt. Soon, I stopped trying to learn anything and took classes like “Rock and Rhyme,” where we studied pop song lyrics for English credit. By junior year, I was begging my mother to let me drop out and take a GED. God knows we needed the extra income I could generate from switching to full-time work, and anyway, why forestall destiny?

  We compromised: as long as I graduated, I only had to attend school when I chose. Given the low standards applied, I had no trouble with that and only made an appearance for exams. Most teachers lowered my grades because of my constant truancy. So what?

  I educated myself through my reading reading rea
ding. I was a junkie. I carried a heavy backpack everywhere for fear I’d finish one book (Wade taught us speed-reading) and not have another at the ready. Kurt Vonnegut kept me sane with his special brand of surreality as I grew more withdrawn from my own life. I spent more days than I can recall anesthetized under the spell he cast; the characters he created were every bit as flummoxed by life as I was. I could watch young men pass paper-bagged malt liquor between them at our early morning bus stop and blank out on it by mumbling passages from Breakfast of Champions and giggling to myself. I read Slaughterhouse Five and thought, for the first time, of writing. When the protagonist experienced a war movie from end to beginning (“mustard gas and roses”), I actually gasped aloud at the hopeless, loopy beauty of it. But Steinbeck and Dickens, those writers with calloused hands, were my most faithful companions. The denouement of Of Mice and Men literally bent me over double and punched me in the stomach.

  Only when I was reading could I actually let myself feel things. My own life had to be muffled in heavy cloth, but on the printed page my emotions ranged freely. But I was twenty years from even attempting to fill a page; if people like me couldn’t be lawyers, they certainly could not write.

  I was more diligent about the other half of my schooling at vocational O’Fallon Tech. Part of most days I spent learning to type, file, take shorthand, and operate office machines there. I was quite good at it: I could type 100 words per minute and take dictation at over 200. I competed in secretarial Olympics against other teenage drones from different schools. I was the star of O’Fallon Tech, and calmly confident of my oft-foretold vo-tech abilities. No teacher or counselor ever asked me why a gifted student was planning to become a secretary. Indeed, until my thirties, I never asked myself that question either.