An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  My makeover also included the beauty-magazine variety. I chose that moment to become a glamour queen. I stopped wearing fatigues and started wearing tailored “blues” (with skirts, not pants) every day. Heels and sheer hose. I stopped biting my nails, and when they grew long began a regimen of manicures and vampish nail polish; I wore every bit of jewelry allowed by regulation. I stopped swigging my beer from the bottle and stopped cursing like a sailor—phrases like “cluster fuck” evaporated from my vocabulary. I stopped carting things around in my fatigue breast pocket and bought a purse. I haunted the cosmetics aisle in the BX. I spent so much time and money there that the saleswoman pulled me close and said, “Don’t you think you’ve spent enough?”

  I took a tiny apartment alone in the Korean community and discovered the blues and jazz records at the base hobby shop.

  I spent whole days listening to Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, and the queen, Ella Fitzgerald.

  At the base library I joined the twentieth century. I discovered Philip Roth, Anne Tyler, Solzhenitsyn, Eudora Welty, Norman Mailer, John Irving. I read Kurt Vonnegut in his loopy entirety. Then I discovered Ayn Rand. I would have carved her name on my forehead if that wouldn’t have been a violation of the dress code. I read all her fiction, then special-ordered her nonfiction. Where had she been all my life?

  With her as my spiritual guru, I took my reevaluation of myself to the next level. While for the first time in my life I felt powerful and confident through my job, my personal life was a mess. I had an on-again, off-again boyfriend whom I allowed to make me miserable for years. I was intimidated by black people. Rand completed my conversion to far right conservatism and firebrand feminism. No more profligate drinking and smoking, no more unhappy sex, no more loser men, and, most of all, no more fear of blacks and their disapproval. I entered a take-no-prisoners phase that lasted nearly five years. At the time, I thought it was simply a focus phase. It was that, too, but most of all it was about anger.

  I wrapped myself in my anger at blacks and lashed out whenever possible. Before Rand, I’d always taken the long way past known trouble spots, like the Red Horse barracks (civil engineering; many black men perform manual labor there). Not anymore. I walked past Red Horse, through the black men’s catcalls and requests for dollar blow jobs since I wasn’t “nothin but a ’ho anyway.” I was in uniform. Officers came and went through the main doors just below the win-dows where the black men howled at me, yet they said nothing. Had I or one of those men failed to salute them, they’d have taken our heads off.

  I didn’t falter. I didn’t flinch. I wanted them to see how unfazed I was, I wanted to prove to myself that they were too pitiful to fear, and I wanted to store up on their abuse. Just like with Davis, I used them for fuel. They justified my distance from blacks. Just look at how they acted.

  The defining moment of my new, confrontational attitude toward blacks and their nonsense came as I stood at a food cart off-base with four white male flight mates to buy greasy fried squid and newspaper-wrapped “yaki man do.” Two black guys ambled over, eyed me. They eyed my friends a few paces away waiting for me to finish the transaction. My mistake was conducting my business with the cart guy in Korean.

  “Look at this Oreo bitch,” one said evilly to the other.

  “I know, man. Think she the shit.”

  I said nothing. The pre-Randian me would have shriveled up and fled. The new me would have liked nothing better than a showdown with these deficients, but not with white folk present. I didn’t want them to see how typical blacks acted.

  “Bitch think she aint black no mo. Done forgot she a nigger, too.”

  “Bitch.”

  I never acknowledged them, just kept up a running conversation with the Korean man, knowing that that’s what was really infuriating them. The black men kept their voices low, horribly intimate. No one overheard us.

  “Bitch might need her ass kicked.”

  “Might.”

  They never stopped their evil commentary and I wouldn’t let myself walk away while it continued. That would be running and that I refused to do. Just for something to do with my hands, I pulled out my Benson & Hedges and we reached a new low in intraracial comedy.

  “Look at this bitch, man. She caint even smoke black. She caint smoke Kools or Newports. She got to smoke some goddamn white shit.”

  I stopped with my lighter halfway to my lips. My cigarettes weren’t even black enough? I laughed so hard I dropped the lighter.

  “I funny, bitch?” He snarled but I couldn’t have been less afraid.

  “Oops, careful, genius—lost your verb there.”

  It was just like playing the dozens again. I enjoyed their humiliation very, very much.

  “By the way, just how low is your IQ?” I asked the first one. “Is it even double digits? Because I know it couldn’t possibly be triple.”

  Their mouths snapped shut as if hinged but their eyes spoke volumes of violence. Only the power of a court-martial kept them from hitting me.

  “Why don’t you do yourselves a favor? Instead of harassing people who have what you want, why don’t you just work on getting it for yourselves? The words ‘black’ and ‘loser’ don’t have to be synonymous.”

  I was very, very proud of myself. Those words may look like tough love in print, but I meant them to crush. I had boiled blacks’ problems down to the comments I made to those two men that night. A busy Randian with no time to waste, I used these formulations repeatedly to shrug off blacks’ underachievement and self-defeating behaviors. I must have said them a thousand times in those years to bleeding-heart liberals and other assorted black apologists. I had it all figured out. I knew what their secret fear was—I’m a loser by birth—and I rubbed their faces in it.

  Content, I walked away to join my oblivious white friends. I could feel the black men’s eyes boring into my back, but I knew they wouldn’t dare touch me now, not if there was the least chance I might get to speak again before they could choke me into silence.

  UP BY MY BOOTSTRAPS

  When I rotated home to the National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland, in late 1983, I did so with a plan. I applied for, and won, a Bootstrap fellowship which allowed me to go to school full-time in lieu of work. I desperately wanted to become an officer. That was my big plan. Get a degree, any degree, and become the first Dickerson officer in a long line of cannon fodder. Davis was an aberration that I never held against the Air Force. I saw myself in Air Force blue for the rest of my life, and as a highly decorated officer to boot.

  My up-close and personal experiences with officers, after two years in the trenches, had had the same effect on me as had that with my well-educated teachers at Flo Valley: none seemed to me to have accomplished anything that was beyond me. I watched them do their jobs and there was no magic there, just work. As always, negative reinforcement did more for me than positive; it was the sad-sack officers who most motivated me. If they can do it, I damn sure can, I thought.

  Far from the timid second-guesser I’d once been, I was calmly sure I could have been a pilot, a commander, an airborne commando—but I didn’t want those things. As a woman, I could never have maxed out in those testosteronic fields; I would always have been a bridesmaid, the one left behind to man the phones while the men won medals. I determined never to work in an organization I could never head. I could never lead an operational unit, regardless of what the posters say, but I could be Air Force chief of staff for intelligence someday. So, I wanted to be an intelligence officer working directly with flight crews in a hard-charging operational environment. I wanted to wear camouflage fatigues and combat boots all but a few weeks a year, I wanted to look down on headquarters “day whores,” I wanted to lose track of time and spend years at a stretch overseas, and I was a committed Cold Warrior: I wanted to drop bombs on people who challenged the United States of America. Lots of them. I didn’t want a degree. I
wanted a commission and a jihad against my formerly meaningless existence.

  Stateside, as my Bootstrap application was pending, I was working with a few of my competitors. The contestants were Air Force–wide; however, there were six or seven people in my unit who’d applied in the same cycle. A large percentage of linguists have at least two years of college, so it was unsurprising that so many of us bucked for a commission. All my competitors were white men, which I found unsurprising. At office parties and the like, we tended to drift together and update each other on any scuttlebutt we’d heard about the selection process. As announcement day loomed, one of them said to me with patronizing magnanimity, “You’ll win since you’re black and female, Debra, and that’s as it should be, I guess.” Oh! the look of noble suffering on his face.

  “I’ll win because I’m better than you!” I shouted. “Right now, we compare GPAs, evaluations, test scores, letters of rec, awards and decs. I’ll be back with my file in five minutes and I better find you standing right here with yours.”

  I left him standing there red-faced while I ran back to my desk, where I kept a complete copy of all pertinent records, probably in triplicate and cross-referenced. Needless to say, he wasn’t there when I got back.

  For far too many white people, the existence of affirmative action means never having to consider that you’re just not good enough. Worse, I got it from both directions: successful military women are routinely believed to have slept their way to the top.

  Concomitant with my Bootstrap application, I applied for a spot at Officers’ Training School and won it. I couldn’t sleep at night with all my planning. I went home on leave then and ran into all my cousins and neighbors who weren’t living their lives as they should. That started keeping me up at night. I was so tired of black people who wouldn’t face reality and take control of their lives. There were lots of black admin personnel at Fort Meade and I was constantly trying to motivate the bright ones to take advantage of degree and commissioning programs. Enlisted then could get 75 or 90 percent tuition assistance, yet all I ever got were excuses. They never missed a party, but they never made it to class.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ———

  BEGINNING AGAIN

  I was accepted at the University of Maryland, College Park. It never occurred to me to apply to Georgetown or American, or one of the Ivys. There, I evaluated my credits with a guidance counselor whom I would not allow to wiggle out of doing his job like his Mizzou predecessor. I was closest to a degree in government and politics. I had no interest in government and politics, but no matter. I knew by then that whatever formal education I got, I had always been and would always be an autodidact. No one at College Park was going to work me harder than I’d work myself.

  My existence was spartan. For the six months while I waited to be relieved of duty, I rose at 4:30 A.M. each morning, worked at the NSA from 6 A.M. to 2 P.M. , worked out from 2:30 P.M. to 5 P.M. , carried a full load of night classes at College Park, and was in bed by 9 or 9:30 P.M. I spent the weekends studying, doing research, writing papers, and doubling my workouts. I wouldn’t allow a TV into the apartment. To my running regime, I’d added hard-core bodybuilding.

  I immersed myself in nutrition, supplementation, and metabolic studies and evaluated every morsel that entered my body. I scoffed at those who ate for pleasure, and took carefully coordinated doses of vitamins and supplements throughout the day. I must have inherited my father’s propensity for muscles, because I got results. My biceps were so big and my waist so small I had to have my uniforms tailored. I couldn’t get strong enough, couldn’t run fast enough, couldn’t get high enough grades. I took a tumble down a gravelly hill one day and finished my untruncated run exultant, arms and legs bloody.

  Aside from my baffled roommate, I saw no one. Finally, I broke things off with my hapless boyfriend and sautéed my soul with a very conscious hatred of men; I took a vow of celibacy that lasted years. My youngest sister was deputized to ask me if I was a lesbian.

  One day at the height of a humid Maryland summer, I was walking down the street wearing as little as possible—miniskirt, halter top, sandals. From the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a guy with a great body. My anger at men notwithstanding, I couldn’t help stopping to check him out. But it was me. I was looking into a plate-glass window and I was the guy with the great body.

  MY LEFT TURN

  At that point, I’d rarely read a magazine, a newspaper, or a work of (non-Randian) nonfiction. The 1984 elections were coming up, so I assigned myself the task of following the election closely. A staunch Reagan supporter, I relished the notion of following his every move. I began reading the Washington Times and the Washington Post every day, very much looking forward to using the former to prove how duplicitous was the latter.

  Reagan was the first president I was fully aware of, and his decision to bomb Grenada, instead of merely yelling at it, impressed me greatly. In my simplistic mind, the president came as a package deal with the military, the institution I lived and breathed, the institution that saved my life. His conservatism and blame-the-victim ethos resonated squarely with my GI world. Based solely on the word of mouth of those around me, I bought his whole tough-talking, lock-em-up, cut-em-off-welfare shtick. Or, I did before I paid anything like close attention to him. A month later I was reeling with confusion. A month after that, I was howling with anger. Another month—I was laughing uncontrollably. The man was a moron. A sexist, a racist, and a howling elitist to boot, but by far his biggest crime was his imbecility. I was learning that my hero was neither honest nor bright.

  I went out of my way to see him on television, the vaunted Great Communicator, hoping that would change things for me, but that actually made it worse. Though it would take more time before I gave up the ghost of my conservatism, I scoffed at the notion of his communicative genius. He talked to the nation like we were idiots or toddlers or toddling idiots. It was so obviously contrived, so obviously the grade B ham reciting the lines his controllers wrote for him.

  The Times and the Post were not enough; I had to have more.

  After I sucked all the knowledge I could out of my textbooks, I got recommendations from my professors for extracurricular nonfiction reading. Soon, I couldn’t get enough news and analysis. I began reading newsmagazines. I was appalled by the state of the world. I’d had no idea.

  Shielded by my parents, lost in books and my own misery as I grew up, overseas for two years, and insulated from the Reagan recession by my government job, I’d had no idea how bad things were for working people. With my new wide-focus perspective and all those pesky facts, as a college student in 1984 and finally thinking for myself, I began to see my relatives’ layoffs and evictions differently. Maybe every detail of life was not completely within the control of the individual. Not that I gave in easily. There were spirited, even book-throwing arguments in my classes between us military conservatives and the civilian liberals. For the first time, none of the right-wing things I spouted went uncontested. My professors and classmates made points I had never considered before and could not easily dismiss. I had to fight for my rhetorical life in the classroom, and I argued the conservative cause far longer than I actually wanted to simply because I was still a bad loser. A prelaw course, especially, made it impossible to argue that individuals exercise anything like the unfettered freedom of will which justifies leaving every man for himself.

  I began to view my relatives’ struggles with more complexity. Every time I called home, another one of them would have been summarily let go from a job and be frantically scrabbling for a new one. They wanted to work, even though the jobs they were able to get barely afforded them a decent living. The long lines to apply for menial jobs that I saw on TV and in the papers told me that most people want to work. It maddened me that they wouldn’t break the cycle with a degree, investments, or entrepreneurship, but for the first time, it occurred to me that some people just want jobs. You need money to live, so they work sim
ply for money and look elsewhere to find the meaning that humans need to survive. They don’t aspire to be CEOs, they don’t aspire to work that fulfills or challenges—some people just want to exchange labor for money in a pleasant environment and get back home to their families.

  One of the most arresting images I’ve ever seen was of those thousands of people shivering in a Chicago snowstorm as they waited to apply for hotel lackey jobs. Soon after, when the millionaire aristocrat Reagan thumbed through the want ads to prove that people could work if they really wanted to, I almost had an aneurysm. How could an honest person say such a thing? It was patently obvious that people were being buffeted by forces much larger than themselves, but I couldn’t get my military friends to make that simple acknowledgment. We could disagree about what our societal response to that should be, I argued, but not about that basic reality.

  But no, I had to sit through pious stories about their poor immigrant grandparents who came here with nothing, or about the guy from their hometown who sold tomatoes door to door from a little red wagon rather than accept government handouts. They posited a world wherein every individual was completely autonomous and in control of his environment. Their analysis was that some people just don’t want to work or that people have to live with the consequences of their actions. It was Joe Six-pack’s fault that Reagan ballooned the deficit, that he broke the unions, that he deregulated everything? Even if some people chose poorly and, for example, dropped out of high school or had an illegitimate child—should one teenage mistake doom them for the rest of their lives? Is that really what’s best for America? I could never understand liberal opposition to workfare—there is no dignity in handouts, I’ve always believed. Also, people are rational; they’ll factor the specifics of any given welfare regime into their choices. However, workfare, as usually espoused, is more punitive and humiliating than loving but strict. If a welfare mom has the brains to be an astrophysicist, are we really better off forcing her to pick up trash on the highway in exchange for her welfare pittance each month? Some will aspire no further than manual labor and every society needs manual laborers—but others pine for more. People from the lower socioeconomic classes need direction and support to aim high; they don’t need the government to help them underachieve. Why not help as many citizens as possible maximize their potential and then require them to pay the cost of it back either monetarily (like my college loans) or through substantive community service (like working for low pay in underserved areas)? My conservative coworkers just rolled their eyes, called me a bleeding-heart liberal, and sermonized about giving people “something for nothing.”