My junior year ended, my senior year began, and I was that much closer to the end of my own history. Other students spoke of college prep classes and the SAT. I wasn’t sure what those things were, and so faked it when they came up. Lord knows my mother didn’t know and the school counselors—well, I have no idea what they did with their time. I never got in trouble and so never got sent to them. They never sent for me.
One day, I was waiting in the administrative offices to get the signature which would allow me to continue working half the school day. There was a long queue of students signing up for something. I just kept reading and moving up in line. When it was my turn, the office lady handed me forms to fill out. I was perplexed.
“Aren’t you here for the PSAT?” she asked.
Was I supposed to be? Was the PSAT a good thing . . . or had I missed some requirement through my infrequent appearances? I stood mute, so she pressed the forms on me.
I appeared obediently at the time and place I was ordered to by the card that came in the mail. I did no preparation. When my scores were returned, calls and letters from colleges came flooding in. I was miserable.
The score was just a number to me; I can’t remember what it was. No one at Southwest called me in to interpret it for me or talk about my options. I had to learn from one of the recruiting letters that I’d scored in the ninety-fourth percentile for black students nationwide. So? I went to church with manual laborers who sang better than Aretha Franklin and danced better than Fred Astaire. We had an illiterate deacon who could calculate immense sums in the blink of an eye without pad or paper. Mama could take apart anything in our house and figure out how to repair it by tinkering with it. Ninety-fourth percentile was like being five foot seven and brown-eyed. Big deal.
I was tormented by the colleges’ offers; I couldn’t possibly accept. I wouldn’t last a week at a university before I’d be found out as the unworthy upstart I was and thrown out. I saw no connection between my intellectual yearnings, my grades, and a college education. So what if I got good grades? I was blue collar. No one had to tell me I couldn’t go to college because I was poor and black. I told myself.
That didn’t stop me, however, from reading and rereading those wonderful, awful letters. My mother collected them, her eyes shining as she filled a small drawer with them. She thought them lovely non sequiturs, too. She’d talk about them to the white folks working late at the architecture firm I helped her clean when I wasn’t at my own job. I was always rude to these people, all of whom went out of their way to be nice to the cleaning lady’s kid. They tried to give me candy and things but I just rolled my eyes and continued vacuuming, refusing even to return their greetings.
When I failed to respond to their letters, the admissions officers began calling. I stuttered and stammered. Most calls, all I ever said was “yes ma’am” and “yes sir.” I’ll get the application in right away. By Monday, yes ma’am. You’ll waive the application fee? Thank you. Yes, I’m real excited, too, I’d say as my stomach roiled and heaved. Sometimes, though, I was cocky and arrogant: Why should I come to your school? Lots of schools want me, you know. But usually I just made up fantastic excuses about why I couldn’t talk right then. Or, I’d lay the phone on the table and stare at it until I heard them hang up. But they’d just call back.
Finally I had Wina talk to them. I couldn’t even stand next to her. I’d fidget in the kitchen doorway with my hand over the extension mouthpiece and whisper questions for her to ask. What are the dorms like? Is there a choir? What’s the weather like in New Hampshire, New York, D.C.?
By March, though, I’d run the gamut of emotions and landed smack-dab at bitterness. Enough foolishness. There was work to be done. But they called and called and called. They had students call, they had alums call. Annoyingly, their entreaties always included one from the president of the black students’ organization; that always pissed me off. I wanted to be wanted only for my aptitude. But in the end, I didn’t want to be wanted at all.
I resumed answering the phone and told each I’d accepted another. Only then did they stop trying. They wished me well and congratulated me on my bright future at Duke, at Washington University, at Bryn Mawr.
I’d sit at the kitchen table and stare at the phone, hoping that one canny recruiter would see through me. I prayed for the phone to ring now that I could be sure it wouldn’t, and I didn’t know what to think. No one before had ever asked me what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, where I saw myself in ten years. The mistake they made, all those faceless white people who reached out to me, was assuming that I saw in myself the same things they did. So I made it all disappear. I hung up the phone on my future. I never filled out even one college application.
Instead, I continued working as a waitress and short-order cook instead of going to school. In between hamburgers one night on a double shift, the pay phone rang and I learned that Daddy was in the hospital. Dying. Lung cancer. The conscious part of my brain shut down and I simply sat, like a lump, with the gaggle of relatives at the hospital. The doctors performed lots of tests and exploratory surgery and gave us grim news.
It had never occurred to us not to fly to Daddy’s side when the news came. Sharecroppers share. However present we may have been, though, we couldn’t have been much comfort. As always, we had no idea how to reach out to one another. There was little conversation, most of that strained and painful. Yes sir. No sir. Do you want some more water, Da— . . . sir? We could only sit slumped in our private miseries, Dickersons to the end, without a word of comfort for each other. He may have talked to his wife about things that mattered, but to his children, he remained a blank wall. We all pretended we assumed he would be going home soon, saying blustery things like “Guess somebody’ll have to mow the lawn for you for a while, won’t they? Heh, heh.” I thought I’d scream with the strain.
The doctors removed one lung, part of the other, and part of the lining around his heart. Soon, he was on a respirator, conscious but unable to talk. Then, he was in a coma. Then he was dead. Handy, that, I quipped: his dying just then saved me coming up with an excuse for not going to my prom. As if anyone had asked me.
So I watched my father’s coffin lid close and made myself childish promises. His memory was not going to drag me down. He was not going to send me to therapy. He was the parent, I was the child; the onus had been on him to try to rectify the situation. That he never did, I sniffed, is his cross to bear. I was just going to get on with it. For years, I made people gasp at my jagged one-liners, like my prom crack, about what a jerk he was. That meant I was tough. That meant I wasn’t repressed like the rest of my family.
I fought back my horror as I watched my father’s coffin lid close—they were suffocating him!—and repeated my mantra. His mantra: What I don’t have, I don’t need.
——
Thank God for the printing press. I withdrew further and further from my own life. When I was neither working nor reading, I was sleeping. At first it was eight hours, then ten, then nearly every moment when I wasn’t required to be doing something which required consciousness. I slept and slept and slept in the basement I shared with my sisters. Since childhood, I’d been an insomniac and fitful sleeper tormented by the least light, the lightest footfall. Now, I knew a blissful vacuum as my brother spitefully did his laundry ten feet from my head, boom box blaring. My sisters filled our basement with their chattering girlfriends or gossiped on the phone but I never knew they were there. Awake, I never thought farther ahead than the next order of fries, the next mess to be cleaned up after Bobby, the next book I could read.
By July, my mother pointed out to me that the only clothing of mine in the laundry pile was underwear, my work uniform, and my nightgown. I could only shrug. What else did I need? I even sent others to the library for me, that holy of holies, that place I used to wish to be locked in “accidentally” overnight the way other kids wished they could be locked in a candy store. I lived on chocolate cupcakes and Pepsi snarfed down
in bed and gained back all the weight I’d lost from my fatty four-eyes girlhood.
Then, August began and I couldn’t sleep a wink.
I prowled the house all night, book in hand, while everyone else slept. As in my childhood, I was again moving from window to window, staring into the predawn darkness without ever knowing what I was looking for, wishing I was dead. I used to think then about people in ancient times struggling with things they didn’t understand but which we now have names and fixes for. Imagine being a slave with asthma, a manic-depressive medieval woodsman, an epileptic Russian serf. I knew there was something wrong with me and I knew it had a name. But because I was a coward and a conformist, I didn’t think there was a cure.
With all the extra exhausted hours in my days, I spun out one Walter Mitty fantasy after another and prayed they’d be enough. I assumed I’d learn to tune out the way my mother did as she floated above the drudgery of her life with a thousand-miles-away smile on her face that had nothing to do with us. And then, one mid-August morning, one week before what should have been my freshman year was to begin, I was looking out the window and saw my future gaining on me.
Outside, the neighborhood women were trudging off to their lives. They thronged the bus stops, pinched-faced and sullen, in their run-over shoes and cheap fabrics. A name tag pinned to every overflowing bosom. The old crones were difficult to distinguish from the young women. I could tell they’d all already been up for hours, prepar-ing breakfasts and lunches, wrangling with their irresponsible kids’ kids, arguing with their husbands and sons, perhaps late because the electricity had been turned off again during the night. After nine years riding city buses to school and work, that morning I noticed for the first time that no one speaks at a bus stop, not in the early morning. My own head was always buried in a book, unless it was winter and too dark to read. Most everyone else stood slumped in his or her own pre-Walkman misery, trying to catch a few fleeting moments’ rest while standing, trying to enjoy these last few moments of freedom. I opened the window and pressed my face to the iron bars, unable to look away.
All at once my future spread out before me, an endless stream of letters to be typed and coffee to be fetched. I couldn’t breathe. Literally, I could not breathe. Gasping for air, I ran downstairs to the basement, threw street clothes on for the first time in weeks, drove my mother to work, then used the car to speed back up West Florissant Avenue to Florissant Valley Community College. It wouldn’t open for two hours, so I paced outside the Administration Building nearly hysterical with panic and fear that I was having a heart attack. Then, I begged the first person who arrived for work to admit me.
OUTED
“Miss Dickerson, what is this?” Mr. “Smith,” my Philosophy 101 instructor. He had an oft-invoked M.A. from nationally prominent Washington University. I always got the impression that he was mentally holding his nose with us.
“A table.” Used to his grandstanding, I wouldn’t give him the gift of my resistance.
“What is a table, Miss Dickerson?”
I just looked at him.
“How do you know it’s a table? Rather, what makes you think it’s a table, whatever that is.”
By the second month of the semester, he and I had developed an amiable lack of respect for each other that the rest of the class relaxed into and abetted; he routinely said things I thought ridiculous and I challenged him frequently. Usually reticent and cowed by authority figures, I found that the little popinjay’s faux elitism and frequent racial and sexual insensitivity had relieved me of my hesitancy.
“I know it’s a table because of its shape, its construction, and its obvious function.”
“ ‘Shape,’ Miss Dickerson? What’s that?” Preening, he posed these questions as if they were of Talmudic obscurity and brilliance. “How do we know that what we perceive is actual reality? What if we’re incapable of perceiving things as they actually are?”
Presumably, in the hands of a real thinker, this conversation might have been conducted on an intelligent level, but in Mr. Smith’s hands, it was just another exercise in public masturbation.
“What’s the significance of all this, Mr. Smith? Even if everything you pose were true, what difference would it make? So what if ‘green’ is really ‘blue’? There is no sustained way to challenge or disprove our reality, so isn’t this just a lot of fancy talk? Our world seems to function perfectly well for all this mass psychosis of haywire spatial perception and color blindness. We can’t deal with what we call ‘table’ in any other way; so what if it’s really a rhomboid, as long as my watermelon and fried chicken don’t fall off?” I threw that in to goad him. “Couldn’t it be that things really are as they appear to be?”
“There’s a name for that kind of thinking, Miss Dickerson,” Mr. Smith said ominously, and paused for dramatic effect. “Naive realism.” He made it sound like “necrophiliac pedophile.”
My classmates chuckled or gasped, depending on whose side they were on. But I had a moment of complete calm.
I knew, down at the bottom of my soul and forever, two things.
One: he was right.
I am a naive realist. For all the veneer of sophistication I have acquired since, I know that no matter how you camouflage reality with fancy talk, you can’t escape it. Mr. Smith was living proof. He had a fancy-boy degree from a fancy-boy school, but he had little to teach me, either intellectually or in terms of character. He was his own worst enemy because, through his weakness, he taught me that I had power.
The second realization was this: he couldn’t hurt me.
Over the semester, as I’d watched Mr. Smith cow my classmates and pat himself on the back, I’d become annoyed, angry, and disappointed; much to my surprise, these feelings combined to produce bravery. He had tried to silence and embarrass me, but instead his bullying gave me confidence. I was used to feeling unworthy and out of place. But somehow, by the time I was eighteen and in college, I had learned a thing or two. His disapproval meant nothing because I had no respect for him. He had substituted his unilaterally presupposed superiority for reasoned discourse. If he was so much better and smarter, why didn’t he prove it by besting me in a debate instead of dismissing me?
All my life, I had been intimidated by my “betters”; I’d conveniently done all the work of cowing myself for them. Now, I understood one of the unacknowledged reasons underlying elites’ insistence on keeping their social inferiors ignorant, their choices circumscribed—familiarity really does breed contempt. It was clear to me that prolonged exposure to my supposed betters could only bridge the gap between me and them. As time went on, they just seemed less and less superior. I was ready to accept that I was wrong, but if I was, Mr. Smith was going to have to do better than roll his eyes to convince me of it.
My first act of social rebellion was letting him have the last word. Watching him, I saw, so clearly that there might have been subtitles inscribed in the air over his head, that expensive schools and parchments inscribed with Latin are no guarantees of fitness. Because I no longer needed the approval of this designated superior, I saw in a flash that my time and attention were valuable commodities—he wasn’t worth it. I sat silent and perfectly comfortable as Mr. Smith mocked me, and thought about how Daddy used to say: Never waste two seconds on a fool. This man is a fool, I thought, and felt no further need to engage him.
But a fool to whom I am indebted. Mr. Smith was fuel; he made me want to catch up.
——
While I was en route to class one day, a man ran a light, made a left in my path, and caused an accident that left me unconscious and another car damaged. The mark of Zorro on my forehead, I shook glass out of my hair for days. The driver left a fake name and address and was never heard from again. My ’62 Valiant was totaled. State Farm, the damaged car’s insurer, came after me. Even though it freely admitted I wasn’t responsible for the accident, it claimed “that wasn’t the point” and that it could make me pay for the damage to the third car since
the person who’d caused it couldn’t be found. Probably they were lying, hav-ing judged from my circumstances that I had no way of fighting. But after weeks of phone calls so threatening I’d start crying whenever the phone rang, we borrowed money to pay them off. I felt like a rag, like a shameful thing with no rights and no worth.
My image of lawyers as Atticus Finch replicas and the law as that noble body which had freed blacks was replaced by a loathing so deep I swore I’d rather die than be associated with it. After State Farm, I saw the law and lawyers as part of an abusive, exploitative system dedicated to keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. It was the intellectual shamelessness of it, the willingness to make any amoral argument in the name of winning, that I couldn’t abide.
But that only made deciding what to do with myself, with my future, that much more difficult. Even through the worst periods of my low self-esteem, becoming a lawyer was always in the back of my mind. My grades were good, but they’d always been. It was just that I had no idea what I was doing or why. I didn’t know how to think about a future. What was it that I was trying to be? I had no point of reference for anything other than manual labor; what could I do but clean offices or change diapers? Engineer, doctor, banker: these were mere words without content. I had no idea how to get there from here or whether I’d enjoy it once I arrived.
As well, I was alienated from everyone around me, the blacks especially. Even community college was an environment fraught with opportunities to be humiliated both socially and intellectually. In that majority-white environment, we blacks just seemed so loud and so backward. The day a black work-study coworker bragged about getting some class notes down “verbatim for verbatim,” I thought I would die of shame. One invoked her “baby daddy” while warming up greens and cornbread in the office microwave. I had to leave. But I had a double standard: when a white paraded his ignorance, he was simply a stupid individual. A black who did so I elevated to a symbol of our race. No Klansman was as racist.
An American Story Page 10
