An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  So why did he stop fighting, stop marauding, give up street life? He shrugs the question off, as if reclaiming one’s life is a mere hat trick. My guess is he stopped fighting because he was again tired. Tired of being a teenage failure. Tired of being an able-bodied burden. Tired of self-elimination from his family. I think he wanted to come home to the mother who never lost faith in him, and to the sisters who did.

  Once while we lived together, I planned to take my brother to an upscale D.C. bar, but it turned out that he didn’t own a tie. I went door to door in my building and borrowed one. Then he annoyed me by dawdling with it around his neck. Finally he told me, brusquely ashamed, that he didn’t know how to tie it.

  My father taught him that hitting is the way to express disapproval, and that real men don’t clean up their own messes. But he didn’t teach him to tie a tie. Everything I learned about being a woman I learned from my mother and I consciously pattern my life after hers. My brother’s legacy from his father is much more complicated.

  MY BROTHER, THE RACE CONSULTANT

  My brother’s gifts to me, however, are unproblematic. I’d been so smugly sure of all the good I could do for him, it never occurred to me that he had anything to offer in return. I was his bridge back to the family and out to the mainstream, but he was mine across to my black peer group. Without him, making my way back to a sense of my black self would have been mostly mental. I lacked the courage to approach young black people I was unrelated to, especially in culturally specific settings. Older people have always approved of me since I am the quintessential dutiful daughter, but young people—I knew I’d be judged and found wanting, both racially and socially out of step. Also, I dreaded exposure to that special brand of negativity and defeatism which abounds in the black community.

  With Bobby by my side, I could go to black gatherings on his coattails and be assumed cool. Often, his friends cocked an eyebrow at my speech patterns, but behind me, I would hear my brother bat cleanup for me with a simple “She cool, man.” In any event, I was smart enough to know to keep my end of a conversation to a minimum. So I just paid attention, listened, and watched. Bobby was my race consultant. I’d shoot a quizzical look at him while one of his friends used ten “know what ahm sayin”’s in a row and he’d translate. One of his friends said I was “razor.” I almost cried; I thought he meant I was cutting, a hard-ass, the very thing I was trying not to be. But no, my brother informed me. “Razor sharp” he meant. Well dressed. Oh.

  I was dancing with one of his friends once to Teena Marie’s song “Square Biz,” except I didn’t know who Teena Marie was, nor had I ever heard the song before. The guy said to me nonchalantly, “Square biz, baby.” I said, “What?” “Square biz. You know . . .” and hunched one shoulder in the general direction of the DJ booth. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was sure a liberty was being taken. Who was he calling baby? I was getting angry and the guy was looking at me like I was loud-talking him when Bobby walked over.

  “’S jes the name of the song, Debbie,” he said. To the guy he said, “She don’t get out much. Know what ahm sayin?”

  “Solid,” the brother said, and they exchanged a complicated handshake.

  I just shut up, smiled apologetically, and danced.

  While Bobby dictated, I made slang flash cards—“sweet sixteen,” as it turned out, was not a statutory rape victim but a measurement of some drug, cocaine I think. Or maybe it was a particular type of car. I could never remember. My vaunted memory struggled to handle these new inputs, but I persevered. Within days, Bobby made more black friends in my neighborhood than I had in the year before his arrival. Our doorbell started ringing. Within five minutes of hitting town, he’d found and programmed in the happening black radio stations; I alternated between them and the jazz station on my Walkman while working out. He never developed a taste for Billie Holliday and Count Basie, though. I found him shaking his head ruefully over my album collection. He asked me, “How come erbody you listen to is dead?” To my happy surprise, my brother’s friends accepted me without comment. Most deferred to and overly respected me. I never mentioned my accomplishments, yet it was clear Bobby had been talking me up. I was like Dorothy at the end of the movie; I’d always had the power to go home. All that had stopped me was my own pigheadedness. I’d always wanted a brother and finally I had one. I’d always wanted to belong somewhere and now I did—the place I’d turned my back on.

  I spent as much time as possible reconnecting with my brother—he had insights into the ground level of the community I had no other way of tapping into.

  But Bobby wasn’t just my path back to my community; he also gave me back my father. Always much too deferential toward me after our reconciliation, Bobby never argued or disapproved when I raved about how much I hated Daddy. He didn’t try to excuse our father’s iron control over us, or all the whippings over minor infractions, or all the needless deprivations. He’d just say, “Yeah, that’s true,” and begin another story about all the time I’d never known about that they spent together working, fishing, hunting, or just puttering in the basement.

  He showed me a relaxed, everyday side of Daddy I never knew existed. Just the fact that he’d voluntarily spent time with our father floored and angered me. It also made me see just how wedded to my own opinion I was—how like my father. He also showed me that it was possible to hold Daddy accountable for his brutality while also acknowledging all the other things he was. If only I’d known about all those other things. Bobby told the stories of Daddy’s beatings as readily as those of the good times. One story would be about being forced to eat rotted fruit because of the sin of wastefulness, the next about Daddy fighting off the rabid dog bearing down on Bobby. He took the good with the bad in a way that I still can’t.

  Accepting my brother back into my life was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. In no time at all, we grew close and have stayed that way, normal sibling wear and tear notwithstanding, in the decade since. My father, conversely, broke my heart all over again. I was so comfortable with the facile hatred for him I’d cultivated over the years that it hadn’t occurred to me there was another version of the story. I carried around with me a depthless, one-dimensional TV movie of an inexplicably abusive father who reveled in the unhappiness he’d caused his blameless, abused family. Imagine my horror at finding myself laughing at funny things he’d done with Bobby or taking retroactive pride in some brave thing I’d never known about. I didn’t know what to think; nothing he was telling me fit into the comfortable, inch-deep little tableau I’d concocted. For a smart girl, I was awfully confused.

  I’d lie in bed remembering Bobby’s stories of mundane hauling trips with Daddy and weep for no reason that I could explain. Nor did it help that Bobby had grown into the spitting image of our beefy father. More than once, I’d turn and find my heart in my throat at the sight of my father standing at the kitchen sink—chicken legs, barrel chest, square head, and all. I was furious that I was having a hard time holding on to my anger. I couldn’t get him off my mind. I became fascinated by him and yearned to understand what made him behave the way he did.

  Only then did I spend time thinking about the significance of his childhood, his historical context, his personality. I grilled everyone I could to find out more about him. I began to see that though I was legitimately angry at him, I was also sad. Sad for me and sad for him.

  Then, while on a military business trip to Okinawa, I found I had Eddie Mack Dickerson dogging my heels.

  From the time my taxi pulled into Kadena Air Force Base, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I found myself wondering where the battles were that he’d fought in. Where was the camp? Where were the caves they had to clean out of defenders one at a time? What did they do for fun? Were there hookers? Where was that quonset hut they destroyed when the Air Corps disrespected them? I sat drinking gin and tonics at the beachfront officers’ club and wondered, Is this where he waded ashore, his rifle over his head, enemy bullets sinking
into the chests of all the men around him?

  Embarrassed and giggly like a little girl, I found myself tearing around the island going to bookstore after bookstore. Sheepishly, some silly part of me was hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of my long-ago marine father and his Tennessee homeboys smoking cigarettes or guarding POWs in a World War II photo. Okinawa abounded with photographic history books about the famous battle waged there, yet I could find none with even one picture of a black GI. The more I searched, the more enraged I became. Not even the several base bookstores had photos with black GIs in them. He might have died, I might never have been born, yet he was not fit to capture on film or be acknowledged by the forces of history.

  He’d told us about how he and his homeboys had reacted when they were shown newsreel footage of the battle once the island was secure. All the blacks had been edited out. They rioted and flattened the quonset hut where the movie was shown. Forty years later, in his honor, I tore the head off every bookstore manager whose shop failed inspection.

  I felt closest to him on the beach, so that’s where I spent every free moment on that trip. I’d sit there and picture him wading ashore through that hellish barrage of enemy fire, the dead floating all around. How terrified he must have been, that young teenager fresh from the Tennessee cotton fields. He must have been sure he would die. And victory—total, utter victory—what must that have felt like? He must have felt like Superman.

  And his family. For the first time, I wondered what he thought of us. I’d spent most of my life analyzing my feelings for him; I’d never wondered what he was thinking. For the first time since the day we left him and I pitied him, I confronted the knowledge that we’d broken his heart.

  But simultaneously, I was barraged with so many bad memories. It was physically painful, that game of mental tennis with my father as the ball, but I couldn’t make it stop. First I’d have a happy remembrance of him, then a painful one.

  I could see him sitting at the dinner table, laughing himself silly over a histrionic, cross-eyed choir director who visited our church. “I bet when he cry,” he’d wheezed between guffaws, “the tears run down his back!” Mama tried to stop us from indulging in such un-Christian laughter at another’s frailty, but there was no resisting my father’s laugh. He’d laughed so hard, all he could do was rock back and forth helplessly in his chair. I hadn’t laughed at the joke, I’d laughed for joy at my father’s joy.

  But when a first-grade playmate took a silly little squeak toy from me, more from playfulness than spite, he’d grimly repeated that story about how the Air Corps boys wouldn’t give them meat. I knew what I had to do when he hissed that punch line at me: “Marines. Don’t. Lose.” I couldn’t have cared less about the toy, yet I’d marched myself across the alley to oblivious little Garland Lee’s house and started pummeling him the moment he opened the door. Marines and Dickersons. Don’t. Lose. I cried harder than Garland did.

  Daddy thought he was making me tough, and the irony is, he was. But my first use of my toughness was to squeeze him out of my life.

  I cried and cried on a beach halfway around the world. I cried for my father and I cried for myself. Eddie Mack Dickerson was a hard man to love, but he was even harder to hate.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ———

  IT ALL COMES TOGETHER

  Officers’ Training School, March 1985. In typical Air Force fashion, after waiting months for a slot, I had all of eight days to wrap up my Maryland life. Bobby and I’d had only a few brief months to repair our relationship; thankfully, we’d made the most of it. He returned to St. Louis and shortly thereafter moved to Las Vegas, where he’s lived ever since, trouble-free and suburban.

  I, on the other hand, got to reenter basic training. A more genteel, white-glove, twelve-week version, but basic nonetheless. Room and uniform inspections. Marauding flight commanders instead of TIs. Shoe polish and marching in the hot Texas sun. Memorizing convoluted regulations. Constant testing. Demerits for using a blue pen when the fine print said black. We were “Miss,” “Mister,” or “OT” and no one ever raised his or her voice, but then you don’t need to in such a situation.

  Just like in basic training, I threw myself into it body and soul. My feeling of anticlimax upon my selection for OTS notwithstanding, I wanted to be an officer with everything in me, sure I would be wearing Air Force blue till I was forced into retirement. After that, who knew, but till then—my Air Force, do or die.

  I turned twenty-one in basic and twenty-six in OTS. Being older, prior-service, and a Dickerson, I did well. Where five years before I had excelled at basic fueled by a hysterical determination, this time it was a cold one, focused like a spotlight on the “butter bars” of a second lieutenant; nothing and no one could come between me and them. I would endure a twelve- month OTS to become the first Officer Dickerson. I was no more ambitious than that. For all my newfound sense of possibility and confidence, I was still thinking small.

  I had no plans to end up with an exalted student rank—flight “fire safety OT” or “mail honcho” would have sufficed. I would have been happy, dutiful even, handing out care packages from home to my flight mates. All I wanted was a commission on my personal terms—doing the best job I could, causing no trouble but taking no guff.

  It quickly became apparent that to survive OTS, the most difficult task would be simply remaining calm. The key to basic training was following orders thoroughly and with alacrity; those with leadership potential naturally ended up coordinating and directing others in accomplishing those tasks. The key to OTS, however, was time management and leadership. Prevailing as a group was as important as it had been in basic; but we potential officers also had to show ourselves to be capable of functioning without constant oversight.

  The school tossed us into a high-stress, fast-paced, highly structured environment and told us how to survive it: prioritize. Again and again, we were lectured about time management. After the first two weeks, a great deal of our time was our own to organize. We had to create a path of order through the overwhelming number of tasks we were given to complete, none of which, standing alone, was very difficult. It’s just that none of them stood alone. Our flight commanders tossed us piles of regulations and study guides that first day—wearing of the uniform, flight regs, squadron regs, group regs, wing regs, physical fitness requirements, the demerit system, academics, professional development, Air Force history, the honor code . . . it went on and on. We would regularly be tested on our knowledge of these documents as well as held responsible for the least violation of a reg, no matter how obscure.

  Unlike the huge, open bays of my basic flight, at OTS we were two to a comfortable room on coed floors. The bathrooms were single-sex but otherwise there were men all around. No attempt was made to put all the women together on a floor, and they only told us once that no “fraternizing” would be allowed. OTS was the most gender-neutral place I’ve ever been. Our unisex barracks uniform was squadron shorts, white T-shirt, flip-flops. Underwear not optional. We saw each other at our worst every day during the first two degrading “chicken stripes” weeks; it was hard to see each other as sexual beings after that. When we ran the confidence course (again), I had trouble getting over a high wall we had to rope-climb. The people behind me couldn’t get over until I did, so I was heaving and straining and getting nowhere. Suddenly, a big, strong, and undoubtedly male hand landed on my butt and pushed. I scrambled over the wall, utterly unconcerned with whose hand it was or what its owner might have been thinking at the time. I didn’t even look back.

  Lights-out was at eleven. Unlike in basic, you could go to bed before that, but given the near impossibility of completing all our tasks, more than a few minutes early was a forlorn hope. Focused on the big tasks like reg memorization and mastering the push-ups which would bedevil me the entire twelve weeks, I usually managed fifteen minutes or so early on the theory that nothing could be accomplished in so little time. But I watched my roommate one night methodically
folding socks, organizing her briefcase, and making lists right until the clock struck eleven. Fifteen minutes seemed a lot longer to me after that, and I accepted that OTS was really, truly a full-time job. About halfway through, after we’d proved ourselves, things lightened up and I sometimes got as much as an extra hour’s sleep. But until then, I never wasted another moment.

  THE MOANERS BENCH

  Our flight commander, Captain Lowery, called me in to give me my evaluation. Beaming, he told me he wanted me to compete for a squadron position.

  It was basic training all over again. I begged to be passed over.

  I wanted a commission, not a command. When I told myself I could do anything in the Air Force, I didn’t mean all at once. I wanted to become an officer, then cast around for ways to the top. I had no intention of shooting for the moon at OTS, failing, and being shown the door. In basic, they’d been desperate to rebuild after the Viet Nam drawdown: you had to impregnate the base commander’s daughter or smoke a joint in his office to get shipped back home. At OTS, if you wanted to leave, you could SIE (self-initiated elimination) as quickly as they could complete the paperwork. Not only that, if you appeared not to have the right stuff, they’d ask for your SIE, then force you out themselves if you demurred. I was frantic to remain unnoticed.

  Just like Technical Sergeant Harris’s had, Captain Lowery’s proud smile turned to disgust. Maybe it was disappointment.

  “So, you want to be a ‘low-key OT,’ huh?” he sneered.

  Hell, yes! I thought.

  Among ourselves, we lavished praise on the OTs who managed to keep their heads low and graduate with the same butter bars the most “strack” OT did. I had to mount a convincing argument that I wasn’t trying to evade responsibility but rather was trying to focus as seriously as possible on the basics, unworthy as I was, to be sure I’d make a fitting officer. I tried to convince him that I was barely keeping up and had to stay focused on just that, graduating.