I was awed by my power over a man old enough to be my grandfather. He had a doctorate, he’d studied at prestigious universities, and yet he had to steal from me, a nobody. What else could he be saying but that I was a better thinker and writer than he? It gave me an enormous jolt of confidence. But it wasn’t enough. All I had was options. What I needed was direction. All I knew for sure was, I had to get away from St. Louis and I had to have a job with meaning. If I’m to type, so be it, I thought. Just let me type in the name of something meaningful. I needed a reason to get up in the morning.
I got one.
PART II
THE POLITICAL
CHAPTER THREE
———
AIRMAN DICKERSON
BASIC TRAINING
March 10, 1980: my first day of basic training in San Antonio, a month shy of my twenty-first birthday. In my flight of fifty women, few had been to college, few were older than eighteen. We were almost entirely working class, almost entirely white except for four Hispanics and four blacks.
I stood at what I hoped was attention while a team of TIs performed a “health and welfare” inspection on our luggage. Ostensibly, they were looking for contraband before our bags were stowed for the duration of training. The real reason was to show us that we were at their mercy; contraband items (marijuana, candy, other people’s belongings) were merely confiscated, no one got punished. All personal belongings were dramatically pawed through, lacy bras held up to the light with great seriousness to ascertain whether they were transparent. The female TIs hung at the edges, laughing at the males’ jokes, letting us know whose side they were on. I felt confident, knowing my luggage contained nothing at all interesting. For once, being a bespectacled nerd was going to pay off. The sense of surreality was immense; nothing fully prepares you for the self-contained, Jabberwocky world of the military. The mob of TIs finally arrived at my bunk.
One stepped forward and came to stand nose to nose with me, hoping I’d squirm or try to see around him like the others had so he could dress me down. His highway-patrolman hat dug a trench in my forehead and cast both our faces into shadow. Combat boots crushing my feet, he stared me down. Looking away would only make him light into me—north St. Louis taught me that. Daddy had told us about boot camp on Parris Island when his drill sergeant had woken them all up at midnight in his skivvies, combat boots, and that designed-to-intimidate hat. He’d lined them up and gone down the row punching each one in the gut sans explanation. A sense of warm remembrance had permeated his tale.
All at once, I realized that the TI wasn’t really crushing my feet; he was holding his mere millimeters above mine. I felt not pressure, not pain, but the simple nearness of another human. The hat brim was merely resting on my forehead; my imagination, my fear had dug that trench. All I had to be was brave. All I had to do was face this, the path I’d voluntarily chosen.
I tossed my head back and stood up to my full height. I felt powerful, knowing. I wasn’t scared. The TI flashed me an almost imperceptible nod and backed off.
I could hear the ominous sound of the taps on the TIs’ shoes ricocheting around the room. With my peripheral vision, I could see gangs of them roaming the room like wolves to bellow and attack people: fidgeters; that one girl who would cry for the entire six weeks; feisty “Rodriguez” from a little Texas border town, who would brag that her daughter was conceived in the front seat of a Pinto at McDonald’s and who would never, in six weeks, wipe the kiss-my-ass smirk from her face.
Much to my surprise, I was berated for the contents of my luggage. My father’s stories had not been lost on me; boot camp was something I had a feel for. Aside from a minimal number of necessaries, I’d brought only my favorite author (six Dickens novels—one for each week).
“Looky, looky, we got ourselves a college gal. You been to college, aint ya?” A second TI mugged like a simpleton. He handled my books with feigned awe. “Nick-o-las Nickel-, Nickel-, Nickle bye-bye? Is that how you edu-macated folk pronounce that?” He stopped and stared at me; he was enjoying himself. It was a test—was I supposed to acknowledge him or not?
“Say somethin telligent, college gal. Come on, teach us poor ignent folk somethin, purty pleez!”
The irony made me smile. I used to be berated by black people for putting on airs; now it was as much a class thing as a race thing. That smile was like blood on the water.
The TIs descended en masse. But I was still smiling—I was on Parris Island in the 1940s, the white man at my back, the Japs lurking in the shadows to ambush me. Impartial victory waited in the wings, preferring only the boldest, most dedicated contestant. The TIs were going to yell at me whether I responded or not, whether I smiled or not. But no one there was going to throw me off a troop ship mid-Pacific to make sure I could swim. No one there was going to punch me in the stomach. No one there could terrify me like my father could. No one there could endure what my father had endured. After each slur, I yelled “Sir! Yessir!” even though no one else had, and kept smiling. That must have come to me from my father. This was a kind of lunacy I intuitively understood, and, in a weird way, enjoyed. There was only so far these people, unlike my father, would go.
They could yell all they wanted, as long as they let me stay.
——
In many ways, basic training was a lark. When it was difficult, it was so because everything had to be done as a group, meaning that all progress occurred at the pace of the weakest link. When we went to the clinic for shots, the whole unwieldy flight had to be marched en masse across base for them. In full formation, a five-minute walk could take a half hour. When we ran, no one could be left behind; sometimes we’d end up “running” in comic slow motion while somebody puked alongside the track. No one was allowed to fail, no matter how mundane the task. I folded a thousand duffel bags for the fumble-fingered, hospital-cornered a thousand beds.
Since I had no point of reference for the day-to-dayness of the military, no understanding of why they made us do the odd things they made us do (e.g., folding socks in a particular way or progressing through the chow hall according to a precise pattern of movement), I simply threw myself into each assigned task, however tedious or inexplicable, as if my life depended on it. I’d hit rock bottom as a civilian. I had to make the Air Force work.
When we were sent out on “weeds and seeds” detail (i.e., picking up litter), my neurotic competitiveness drove me to retrieve the most cigarette butts. When we buffed floors, mine had to be translucent. My life had to mean something, I needed to be able to feel my life, even if my life was picking up trash. Anyway, I couldn’t help it; my parents did it to me. Sloth was a sin to us and I was no sinner. Also, I didn’t want to get yelled at. Soon, however, I was addicted to the high of the TIs’ approval. In the beginning, we were pushed no harder than manual labor, but soon we were all thrust into leadership situations to see how we would fare. Not that I realized that then. It was all about not having the TIs turn on me, not getting shipped back to St. Louis in disgrace.
Whether we were sent in twos and threes for weeds and seeds or twenty at a time to do KP, one of us was placed formally in charge and held responsible. That someone was usually me. That responsibility included everything from Airman Brown’s rumpled uniform to Airman Waller’s failure to salute, to Airman Cady’s “flip” attitude and the floor that wasn’t quite shiny enough. One of my troops burped during inspection and I was hauled onto the carpet. In the military, someone is always responsible. In the course of any given day, I went from begging my flight mates to behave to cajoling them to psychoanalyzing them to threatening to kick their asses after lights-out—but I got the job done. No one was more surprised than I.
Having grown up under two strict disciplinarians, one of whom thought he was still a marine, I had no trouble adapting. People around me got yelled at for having their hands in their pockets—my mother used to cut mine off or sew them shut to keep me from doing just that. My flight mates would unbutton their shirt cuffs in the
Texas humidity; my mother cut my flapping cuffs off. My posture was already ramrod—Johnnie Florence would come up behind me and jerk me up straight when I went through my preteen slouching period. I never got yelled at for not saying “ma’am” and “sir”; I’ve addressed every elder, every person in a position of authority, that way since I could talk. To this day, my mother, my best friend, is still “ma’am.” After her strict housekeeping and my role as Mama’s adjutant, I was relieved to have only one bed to make, one area to keep tidy, one set of laundry to keep clean. Since my father subjected us to 6 A.M. Saturday morning white-glove inspections for as long as he was around, there was nothing new to me there. No water in the sinks, no trash in the trash cans—I’d always had to live like that. I was amazed by how difficult my flight mates found this. Did they have to do no work at home?
For a bookworm, the academics were a breeze. A true daughter of the Great Migration, I instinctively coupled my strict upbringing with my education and love of indiscriminate reading and grafted them onto the military’s need to regulate the minutiae of everyday life. I learned a lesson in basic training that led me straight to the top of every pile I was in during those twelve years: the regulations are your friends.
The proper way to do everything, no matter how trivial, no matter how important, is written down somewhere in the military. Whether it’s the proper way to perform an about-face, the procedure for becoming an Air Force One pilot, or how to make three tons of oatmeal, there’s a regulation. And NOTHING, but NOTHING, trumps a regulation. Terrified of making a misstep and comforted by reading and rereading the only printed material allowed us, I dove headfirst into the manuals we were given on wearing the uniform, military custom, and the like. I was the “answer girl,” the one who could explain how a proper “to the rear, march” was executed and just how many inches away from the heart your decorations were supposed to be. Nerdiness, love of detail, and hyperorganization are valued traits in the service. They make you cool.
A few weeks into our six weeks of training, Sergeant Harris, our head TI, called me into his office and told me he was naming me dorm chief and that I was well on my way to distinguished graduate. Harris, who was also black, reminded me that I wasn’t the first dorm chief; he’d already fired a couple of white girls. “You’ll be highly visible,” he said soberly, and we both knew what he meant.
A black TI designating one of the few blacks dorm chief would attract special attention and get us both fried if I botched things. Unless I shone like a star, he’d be accused of playing racial favorites and I’d be accused of getting over simply because I was black. We’d both be tainted. The Air Force is at once a huge, far-flung place and a tiny town—there are far fewer than six degrees of separation between any two members. In any event, our reputations, earned or unearned, would precede us. He was taking a chance with me, something military people do not do lightly.
It was the PSAT all over again. I begged to be passed over.
I didn’t want to shine like a star. I didn’t want to be “highly visible.” I just wanted to be Air Force. I wanted a satisfying job I could wrap my arms and legs around and hold on to for twenty years until I could retire with a full pension and my memories of letters typed in exotic locales.
The look of quiet pride on his face changed to a sneer. He tossed the dorm chief badge at me and ordered me out of his office. I kept begging. He started assessing five demerits for each minute I spent disobeying a direct order. At the ten-demerit point, I about-faced in a fog and marched off. I wanted to die. There was no way I could pull this off. No way. North St. Louis, here I come.
I wept in the hallway for a while, then marched myself home (basic trainees can’t just walk), my future passing in front of my red eyes. Hairnets and deep fryers. Welfare caseworkers and police investigators asking about relatives. Temporary restraining orders.
Hoo ya.
The black girls were ecstatic. “All right!” one crowed. “Now we can give all the shit jobs to the white girls.”
My heart sank. On top of getting all our work done and making sure no one was left behind, I was also sitting atop a powder keg of interpersonal and intergroup chaos.
Then her choice of words hit me.
“What do you mean ‘we,’ Waters?”
Sergeant Harris wouldn’t yell at “us” if something went wrong. “We” wouldn’t be up all night with a flashlight checking wall lockers for conformity while evading marauding TIs.
“‘We’ aint dorm chief. I am.” I wasn’t happy about this. Couldn’t they see that?
No, they couldn’t. I saw it in their faces. Someone sucked her teeth in that way that says, I got your number, sister. I was on racial probation, presumed guilty. Now that I’d lucked up on a nickel more than the next black had, I had to consciously demonstrate the racial loyalty that had been presumed before or be damned for my success. But dammit, I had a job to do.
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” “Waters,” the scariest human being I have ever been locked in a confined space with, stood to her full six feet. A Watts native, her voice was a cruel rasp and she had scars I was sure were from knife fights.
Even so, I was more afraid of Harris than of her. A beating I could recover from, but the loss of the Air Force and all its possibilities? All I wanted was a new life. The Air Force was going to give me that, so I was prepared to render unto Caesar by doing things the Air Force way. If I didn’t run the flight efficiently, if things fell apart—well, that was an eventuality I wasn’t prepared to face.
“Yeah. It’s like that,” I said, and stared them down. There was no going back for me and I knew what would come next. Since I wouldn’t identify solely with the blacks, they wouldn’t identify with me if I ever needed backup. If I black-identified preemptively, they’d back me up no matter what; any opposition would instantly become “racist.” If I wouldn’t, I would be on my own if I got into trouble. So be it.
The white girls, too, challenged my authority. Not so much on racial terms as on general principles. But as we moved along in the program, everyone adapted, became more confident. The TIs lightened up, too, since we were doing so well. We were all after new lives, all happy to lose ourselves in the program. Inevitably, I bumped heads with lazy girls, girls who felt they should be dorm chief, or girls who simply pulled something boneheaded, but I managed. It was then, the first time I got to make myself over, that I found out I was funny.
Desperate to graduate, I often relied on humor to keep the girls’ cooperation. Also, the fact that I was a sharp airman (could Eddie Mack and Johnnie Florence’s daughter not be?) won their deference. We were all being made over in the Air Force’s hard-charging image, and our previous conceptions of what was cool and what wasn’t mutated to the Air Force’s version. Peer pressure, yes, but good peer pressure for once. I had to play ghetto girl off and on and talk tough—laughable since that was a role I couldn’t play when actually in the ghetto—but they bought it.
The Hispanic girls, all from barrios, most definitely did not buy my badass routine, so I never pulled it on them. They found me amusing, though, and didn’t fight me. Most of their hostility was intracommunal—New York Puerto Ricans versus southwestern and West Coast Mexican-Americans (I hadn’t known there were other than the latter before basic). Though I was terrified, I was also determined and I let everyone know that beefs beyond a certain level would not be tolerated and that I’d call on Air Force resources to squash them. Not black, not midwestern, but hard-core, polyester blue Air Force backup. Had I relied on the black girls to back me up, I think things would have turned out much differently. I’d have won, since we easily terrified the white girls and knew instinctively to power-share with the Hispanics, but it would have left the white girls feeling like “niggers”: powerless, ill used, and justified in their knee-jerk resentment. Once I let it be known that I’d be doing things by the book, no exceptions, even the black girls felt relieved. We all got to put our baggage down.
It was a heady expe
rience. I could feel myself getting stronger and I liked it. There could be no fraud syndrome in a place which found a way to quantify each and every facet of everyday life. I had to accept that I was actually good at this.
——
The most difficult thing about being dorm chief was the way the TIs competed nonstop. When we marched to chow, there’d be ten formations lined up to eat. TIs would show off fancy march steps and sing out their flight’s average test scores and squadron ranking. They’d denigrate the competitor’s trainee with the rumpled uniform, slightly too long hair. No elementary school bus ever heard as many insults as were hurled by a gaggle of TIs. Just like us trainees, they were held responsible for the progress and conduct of their charges, however beyond their control. Their promotions and evaluations depended on how well their flights did; just a few marginal flights in a row could get a TI busted back to the job he’d come from. Harris wanted to win, and the only way to do that was through his trainees.
He informed me that I had to beat Sister Flight’s dorm chief to the drill pad every morning for 5 A.M. reveille so he could make Sister Flight’s TI squirm. So I slept in socks, bra, panties, and T-shirt. I pinned my hair to regulation at bedtime and slept in my shower cap, which I tore off at the first note of reveille. On the run to the bathroom, I leapt into the uniform I’d prepared the night before. While I was peeing, one hand buttoned my fatigue shirt while the other brushed my teeth with a preloaded-the-night-before toothbrush. I splashed my face at the sinks, raced back to retighten the blanket on the bed whose coverings we all slept atop. I grabbed my hat and raced downstairs. My personal area returned to regulation standards, it never took me more than a few minutes to hit the drill pad. As the race got tighter, I gave up peeing and brushing my teeth beyond one quick swipe. Better kidney disease, better trench mouth than failure. Then I hacked my hair off. Sister Flight’s dorm chief never beat me. Not once.
An American Story Page 12
