An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  Even if your marginal existence is your own fault, I couldn’t help wondering, is it really in our societal best interest to let people starve, to poorly educate them? Hopeless people commit crimes, so let’s feed and educate them so they don’t climb through our windows at night. Incarceration is so much more expensive and just about guarantees that the incarcerated will remain predators unable to support themselves legally: educated people commit white-collar crimes, the illiterate draw blood. What could be more conservative than crime prevention? But in response to my arguments about the relationship between lack of education and crime, all I’d get were sanctimonious non sequiturs like “Nobody ever gave me anything” and “Build more prisons.” I couldn’t even get them to concede the bare-bones notion that crime reduction and prevention were preferable to high prison occupancy. Some people belong in prison, they’d sniff. I actually had a four-against-one debate once wherein my coworkers argued that inmates should be offered only the Bible during their incarceration. No exercise, no classes, no TV, no work—just sitting on their beds reading the Bible from five to ten. The fact that prison guards would resist such a regime more than any goo-goo liberal fell on deaf ears. My continued reading of the right-wing press only hastened my looming defection. I was used to the intellectual dishonesty of the left and black apologists—they pushed me right. But then, the intellectual shamelessness and moral clay feet of conservatives pushed me left. The left annoys me but the right insults my intelligence.

  I was in a constant state of intellectual and emotional turmoil. It was my college angst all over again: who am I? What’s my relationship to other blacks, to America? How am I supposed to figure out what to do with my life? Why can’t I stop thinking about politics? I felt strong and confident but . . . toward what end? All I had were questions; I needed answers. When my commander called to tell me I’d been accepted into Officers’ Training School, all I could think was, Now what? My coworkers were cheering and clapping and tossing papers at me like oversized confetti. I was faking a smile and thinking, Now what do I shoot for? Why isn’t this enough? I was happy, just not satisfied.

  I lay in my bed one night all alone, my mind whirring with plans and counterstrategies, when a sudden thought imprinted itself on my brain. Apropos of nothing, I said aloud, “I feel like I’ve been mugged.” I realized what my Osan malaise had truly been about. I was exhausted. Worn out by my own life. The effort of dragging myself from the working class to the middle class, though successful, had nearly killed me. Even my fixation on physical fitness had been just another way of simultaneously gaining control over my life and expressing a deep-seated anger. I never had to consciously decide between conventional attractiveness and the female bodybuilder’s stylized look because once I started dealing with the root of my behaviors, I never again worked out with the same intensity. I couldn’t.

  Where I’d once had a “let them eat cake because it’s their own fault they don’t have bread” attitude about those I’d left behind, by the time I graduated in December 1984 I was feeling not so much vindicated as humble. No wonder so many people give up or never try at all; it shouldn’t have to be this hard, I realized. But even if it has to be this hard, society should acknowledge the structural disadvantages so many face and ameliorate them as much as possible. What could be more conservative than abetting each citizen in maximizing her potential so she can contribute as much as possible? I tried and tried, but I just couldn’t be satisfied with my own individual success. I knew I’d just been lucky.

  DRIVEN TO ACTION

  If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who realizes that she can’t have what’s being conserved. The final experience that changed my worldview was buying my first new car.

  Military bases are full of concessions. As I planned to rotate back from Korea at the tail end of 1983, I bought, sight unseen, a Chrysler/Renault Alliance, the 1983 Car of the Year. That and the implicit military seal of approval were enough for me.

  As I drove home from the dealership, the car died in the middle of the highway. It continued to die, for no discernible reason, for the rest of the time I owned it. The dealership tried repeatedly to locate the problem, but couldn’t. Finally, they told me to have my car towed off their premises. The Chrysler representative laughed at me when I asked for a refund.

  I was frantic. The car payment and insurance consumed most of one biweekly paycheck; I couldn’t afford to buy another car, nor was Laurel, Maryland, an area well served by public transportation. How was I going to get to school?

  I appealed to the military for assistance but was told it was none of their affair. I was, however, ordered to continue making the payments and reminded that I’d lose my security clearance for “financial irresponsibility.”

  Those were the days just before lemon laws; I was booted out of one lawyer’s office after the other. Not only that, they did so in a manner which suggested personal disapproval of me. Just as had Lieutenant Colonel Davis when punishing me for having been raped, several of these lawyers failed to offer me a seat and snapped at me.

  What was most remarkable to me about this experience was the vehemence with which everyone who refused to help me insisted that I keep up the car payments—not for my own good but because it was my duty. I was struck by everyone’s deference to big business’s interests, as if they were a proxy for morality; they could just as easily have been in my shoes. How brainwashed we all are, I thought.

  It was January 1984. I’d been making payments since September. I’d only had the car a month. The last lawyer had just finished telling me I’d be better off buying another car. I couldn’t take any more. What was I supposed to do, have someone “steal” the car or make four years of payments on a car that didn’t run? I couldn’t believe that these were my only options, I, who so believed in America. I felt like a rat in a maze with no outlet, like a speck of dust on a tabletop, like a thing unworthy of the least consideration. There was no way out of this situation, no matter how willing I was to work hard and play by the rules. This, I thought, is where outlaws come from.

  I made for the door, blinded by tears and racked with sobs. Frantic for something to say, the lawyer sputtered about how his mother-in-law had gotten a couple hundred dollars’ refund with a letter-writing campaign and maybe I should try that. I didn’t even bother to respond, just dragged myself out to my friend’s car and back to my one-sided responsibilities.

  I was trapped. My only option was the letter-writing campaign. As I worried my situation around and around in my head, I stopped crying and started to get mad. Really mad. I hadn’t done anything wrong, I always played by the rules, yet I was being abused.

  I didn’t just want out of my contract. I didn’t just want my money back. I wanted acknowledgment of the wrong being done to me and I wanted revenge. So I took three days off from work and waged war on Chrysler.

  At the base library, I explained my situation to the librarian. Unlike the lawyers, this lowly government worker was energized and outraged. We explored the government committee structure, which regulatory bodies did what, the structure of the automobile industry. I learned how to research corporate hierarchies and trace ownership.

  In the end, I sent out a mass mailing of two hundred letters to everyone from Reagan and Bush (neither of whom responded with even so much as a form letter), Tip O’Neill, every female and/or black in Congress or the Senate, all the way down to my local Better Business Bureau. I swamped the federal government, the Missouri and Maryland governments, business, military, and women’s groups.

  I also mass-produced letters addressed to the chairman of Chrysler’s board reading: “I am aware of the situation between you and Debra Dickerson regarding the car she bought from you which does not run and cannot be fixed but for which she must still pay. As a consumer, I will be following this situation closely and telling as many people as possible.” They were to sign and include their city and state, then mail them to Chrysler’s chairma
n in the pre-addressed envelopes I provided. I sent them to relatives all over the country and friends all over the world to disperse. Each letter I wrote made me feel less like crying and more like challenging the chairman of Chrysler to a duel. It’s a dangerous thing to leave a person no way out.

  Two weeks later, my office at the NSA had dedicated a phone line for me to answer all the calls I was getting. It was a populist uprising. People were furious on my behalf, which they saw, correctly, as theirs.

  I had taken a scattershot approach, writing groups even only loosely related to my issue; many of the calls and letters I received began, “I can’t help you with your problem, but I was just blown away by your letter. Have you tried this group or that senator?” Some of the callers were still shaking with indignation, my letter still in their hands. Many pleaded with me to keep them informed.

  A lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission called to explain the warrant of merchantability and how any of the lawyers I’d seen could have gotten Chrysler to cave if they’d given it half a try, especially with lemon laws pending all across the country. But they just didn’t give a damn about a mousy little black girl with no money, even though I went to all those meetings in uniform. Not one of them mentioned this concept of merchantability (that a thing sold will be fit for the purpose for which it was intended). Not one of them.

  Shortly thereafter, I got a call from the Chrysler chairman’s lackey. He apologized for the “mixup,” made it my fault because “I hadn’t sufficiently explained the situation before,” and asked with feigned nonchalance how many miles were on the car. I said, “Twenty-seven. Mostly from towing.” “Jeee-sus!” the man muttered. Again, with feigned nonchalance, he asked, “By the way, just how many people did you write?” That was when I knew I’d won.

  Two weeks after that, in March, a very embarrassed Chrysler rep called and begged to know who else he should expect to hear from. You can actually hear an oppressor sweat when you turn the tables on him. We worked out the details of the buyback. Though my mother would have been able to, I couldn’t help myself. My last words to him were, “Is it still funny?”

  People from all over the NSA and the country asked for copies of the notebook I’d compiled or for me to act on their behalf. Unsurprisingly, a great many people had been victimized by car companies and had nowhere to turn. Had I been less well educated or had a less flexible job, I’d probably have been jailed for insurance fraud.

  The magnitude of what I’d accomplished without lemon laws (or word processors) didn’t really hit home until I was deferring to my insurance agent on the details of winding up the insurance, saying, “Just do what you normally do when a car company buys a car back.”

  “Debra,” he said, “in twenty-five years, I’ve never seen a car company do this. We’re in virgin territory.” The Chrysler rep, as well, was at a loss as to how to proceed.

  Including licensing fees, insurance costs, and payments on a car I couldn’t drive, I lost nearly two thousand dollars and nine months’ worth of peace on that deal, and with it, the last vestiges of my political innocence. Instead, I gained an appreciation of my own power as well as of the helplessness of the unsophisticated and uneducated.

  ——

  That experience made it crystal clear to me whose side society was on and how much contempt the ruling class has for the masses. If a blameless person in uniform in the Reagan eighties couldn’t get respect, who could?

  I was appalled by the legal profession all over again when Chrysler refused to reimburse me for the money I’d lost on the deal (known legally as consequential damages). I saw the same lawyers again only to be subjected to their inexplicable fury. They accused me of trying to “steal from Chrysler,” of “trying to get money I didn’t deserve,” of “trying to take advantage.” None advised me calmly that it would cost me more to sue than I could hope to win. Instead, they lit into me. “You should be grateful instead of begging for more,” one lectured. Where did we all learn to cringe before capitalism?

  The last lawyer I spoke with was so vicious I hung up on her. Weren’t they supposed to be technicians really, simply saying yea or nay to the facts laid out before them? Why the emotion? Why the identification with Chrysler and not the person they might wrest some money from? I think it made them uncomfortable that I was self-assured, well educated, and successful. I’d made them look foolish. I was uppity.

  Perhaps because of the similarity, that distasteful memory of my long-forgotten run-in with State Farm resurfaced and I had another of those moments which reshaped my life.

  Chrysler made me realize that I’d been wrong in my earlier dismissal of lawyers, after my Flo Valley accident. The vision I had for myself was this: to tackle the power structure head-on rather than to hold my nose and suffer nobly while it ravaged me and everyone else. I had to go to law school and perhaps to government office, though I still believed the law to be the tool of the ruling class, because ignorance comes with too high a price tag.

  I stopped seeing these brutalizing experiences as particular to me. I could see now that all the little people got treated this way and would continue to be as long as we remained passive. It was clear to me that though with each passing year I became less vulnerable to exploitation, that was not true for most Americans. Few had the resources or personalities to engage in this type of work. The conviction grew in my mind that people like me have to fight for the masses who are unable to fight for themselves. It’s just not enough that I, personally, got out of a car contract. It’s not enough that I got a decent education, that I was able to haul myself up from the working class.

  As my formal and informal education continued simultaneously in the most intellectually and politically pivotal year of my life, 1984, I began to see myself, my family, my neighborhood, my people in historico-social context. Some things were our fault, some things were not. Oppressed people have a duty to fight back, work hard, and retain their dignity, but society also has a duty to acknowledge disadvantage and work to end it. It was the second prong of that analysis that forced me to disavow conservatism. Liberals, with their condescension and lack of common sense, are wrong a lot, but at least they err while giving a damn about people.

  Liberal concepts like “internalized oppression,” “self-hatred,” and “false consciousness” had always made me roll my eyes, but by 1984, I had to revisit them. I knew I suffered from all three, as do a great many blacks—from the overachievers to the troublemakers and the apologists for both groups. Self-hatred is the number one problem among black people; all our counterproductive behaviors stem from it.

  I had a dream right about then. Really, it was a memory, but it came to me while I was sleeping. When I’d come back from Korea in November 1983, I’d been taken, as usual, to the same tacky, beer-sodden club in east St. Louis we’d always gone to. In my dream, I stood again in the back of the room on a riser, just looking at that room full of black people. Perhaps it was two years in Asia that made the sight of all that blackness swirling around me so arresting. I couldn’t take my eyes off us. I watched us dance and flirt and drink and talk and cuss each other out, and for once, I hadn’t felt afraid or annoyed. What I felt was wistfulness because I wasn’t part of it. Even so, it was a soothing dream, one that filled me with hope and humility. I envied my oblivious brethren their places at the table and I wished I could move so unselfconsciously among them. For the first time, I also knew that anyone in that room who was wasting his time judging me and critiquing my every move wasn’t worth worrying about. I even considered the possibility that nobody was paying me the least attention. How self-absorbed to carry on as if no one but me had mastered mainstream English or ever cracked the covers of serious literature. The weight of the community off my shoulders, I woke up smiling. It hit me like a thunderbolt. I was alone. Truly alone.

  I didn’t like it.

  I wanted to be black.

  I admitted to myself how ashamed I’d been of us and I simply let it go. I just walked away fr
om it.

  It was much easier than I would have imagined it would be. Once I stopped kidding myself about my true feelings, I just stepped out of that shell of self-hatred and felt a hundred pounds lighter. Once I did, my overwhelming emotion was—foolishness. I felt silly. How could I hate black people? That’s like hating my elbows. If black people were no good, then I was no good. My mother, my sisters, strangers on the street. That couldn’t be. I had a lot more thinking to do, but the more I lived, the more all my old assumptions were crumbling.

  DIGGING DITCHES

  It occurred to me that Bobby epitomized the false choice—sociopathology and active wrongdoing versus an upstanding but incredibly difficult life lived while society ignores you—that so many blacks face.

  He was the only one left at home. While he’d calmed down from his wildest years, at twenty, he was still headed nowhere fast. Minimally literate, often either drunk or high, with a shoddy work history of gas station jobs held until he’d punched out the owner, he faced a future that did not look bright. The only ghetto folly he’d avoided was fathering bastards—I suspected a low sperm count rather than the use of birth control. I may have been reassessing my relationship to blacks at large, but I was feeling no more charitable toward my brother. Nobody was oppressing him; he was choosing to fail for no reason I could see.