An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  Determined to avail myself of the mainstream I had battled so hard to enter, I made the rounds of San Antonio’s nightclubs and discos. What pitiful excursions those were. On my solo nighttime excursions, rarely did I encounter other blacks; when I did I was barely tolerated. I sometimes found a table of three or four black women trying to do what I was doing—find young black men to connect with. The problem was that I was equally interested in connecting with young black women. I’d ask to join them and they never refused, but they were never friendly. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t welcome me—at least we could make our own fun even if we couldn’t connect with black men. But instead, I’d come back to the table from the ladies’ room to find them huddled, arguing about how best to ditch me. If a black man asked me to dance, I could hear their indrawn breaths and tooth-sucking as I moved toward the dance floor. Ditto, but for different reasons, if it was a white man.

  I gave up on befriending women—they were simply on a manhunt when I was on a comprehensive Negro hunt. I’d have been happier to find girlfriends than a boyfriend.

  On the rare occasions when I saw black men, they seemed physically incapable of meeting my eyes. I’d shoot them a big smile and welcoming toss of the head. They’d frown. Often they’d leave.

  Buoyed with feminist brio and naive thickheadedness, I’d cross the dance floor, sure they just hadn’t seen me, or sure I could convince them that I’d settle for solidarity; there was no reason we couldn’t unite racially, if not personally. I tried to give them the long-lost-sibling treatment, but they angrily shrugged me off. Then, I figured it out. They were looking for white girls and I was cramping their style.

  The night I finally got it, one of the brothers on a two-man white-girl-reconnaisance mission turned his back pointedly. The other seared me with the evil eye and snorted: “I cudda went to the West Side for this.”

  Payback really is hell.

  ——

  Intellectual loneliness was the worst of it. I had too much ambition to stay home, too much drive and too little patience with human foibles to be well liked, opinions too divergent from my peers’ to be comfortable. I knew my “daylight whiteness” was limited, and every day there was another way for that to be made clear to me. The white boyfriend who removed all the photos with me in them from his photo album before going home on leave. The volleyball game where my coworkers said nothing when someone complained about a shot that went too high: “I aint no nigger.” Going out for beers with my male coworkers and listening to them vent their frustration at the lack of “decent” women.

  I knew for sure that something had to give the day my office mate Lindsay and I attended a special meeting for female Air Force officers.

  Rarely were meetings of this kind held during the duty day. Sans discussion, it was considered dangerous, divisive, and non–Air Force for women or minority groups to hold segregated meetings, let alone on Air Force property. Insofar as GIs congregated in these ways, they did so sotto voce, off duty, and off government property (usually we didn’t do it at all). Billed as an “informal lunch talk,” it was a daring thing for these two colonels to do and we appreciated it. In the end, though, it scared me into entrenched insomnia and pushed me irrevocably toward separating from the Air Force.

  At the lunch, we managed to seat ourselves in rank order as GIs always will. We lieutenants positioned ourselves at the foot of the table. Then captains, then majors, then light colonels. The two “full-bird” colonels sat at the head of the table, chain-smoking and gravelly-voiced. It was like my first board at OTS; I had a fish-eye view of everything and everyone, everywhere in the room.

  I couldn’t help seeing that we lieutenants, being fresh to adulthood for the most part, had few weddings rings between us. Most of the captains and majors were flashing rings, but only one of the light colonels and neither of the full colonels. None of the colonels had kids.

  Trying to relax us enough so that we would speak freely with them about women’s future in Air Force intelligence, they joshed around, engaging in male-like one-upmanship and exchanging show-offy jokes about each other’s Mercedeses, big houses, and elaborate vacations. What they failed to kid each other about, though, was vacationing alone. Driving alone. The lack of a husband or family to greet them at their luxurious houses after a hard day in the trenches. These realities were clear from the content of the jibes and their lack of rings. So utterly had they accommodated themselves to the male structure we all coveted entrée to, they seemed barely women. I kept expecting one to cough up a hock of phlegm and spit it on the floor, the other to hitch at her crotch. No doubt it was my penchant for overdramatization that made me see them as so masculinized, but still, I did a mental head count and realized that of the few female Air Force generals, only one I could think of was married. Much the same went for the few female full colonels.

  I sat at the end of that table with the lowly lieutenants and saw my future pass in front of my eyes. No husband. No kids. Especially given that I was the only black in the room and overage at that. Not to mention overopinionated and highly politicized. If I did marry, almost certainly I’d have to give up my Air Force career—many more civilian men were marrying GI women and following them around, but the odds were against it. Many of those captains and majors might soon be mustering out when the Air Force tried to send them to Germany for four years just as their civilian husbands were getting entrenched in a company. Or, if they stayed in, their careers would take a backseat to their GI husbands’; no way could they both be maximized. Worse, many marriages, whether between two GIs or a GI and a civilian, became pseudomarriages as the family endured years-long separations rather than lose the time put in toward retirement. To my mind, a family that wasn’t together wasn’t a family—that’s not a mind-set compatible with military life. It was fine for a single person, but I didn’t want to be single forever.

  I had to at least consider striking out on my own, security and public approval be damned. I wanted both a family and fulfilling work. There was something I was supposed to be doing, I knew that as clearly as I knew I was alive, and the Air Force, much as I valued it, as ungrateful as I felt for thinking of leaving, was not it. Not anymore. It was an invaluable part of my maturation process—second only to my parents—but it was just about time to move on. But to what?

  Thinking about leaving the military—my home, my redeemer, the only place that ever believed in me—was terrifying. I scrambled for ways to bind myself more firmly to it, like distracting myself with a graduate degree. Every officer is required to get one to progress (that’s why there is no shame in acquiring a master’s from a diploma mill). Because of Atticus Finch and the pioneers of the civil rights movement (and probably because of my father telling me I couldn’t do it), I wanted a J.D., but San Antonio had no night law school.

  I settled for an M.A. in international relations at St. Mary’s University. My assignment “dream sheet” said “anyplace overseas is better than anyplace stateside” and I was still trying to get overseas. I knew I would always be an autodidact; what I learned formally would only supplement the learning I’d always do on my own. A graduate degree in domestically focused political science would be somewhat redundant, while one in a rigorous IR program would both expose me to a new strand of political science and put me ahead of my peers, who tended not to take their graduate studies seriously. A grounding in international politics would best prepare me for that happy day when I would join an overseas flight crew and ensconce myself in a down-and-dirty, front-line flying unit. Then I’d be too busy to ponder the fate of the black masses beyond sending a check to the United Negro College Fund, or mentoring some diamond-in-the-rough kid like me on the weekends. After retirement (2000 at the earliest), I’d think again about a more personal involvement, perhaps teaching. Perhaps in local office. But that day, I hoped, was far off.

  I chose St. Mary’s because it was private, had small classes, and had the most stringent admission requirements (a week of audited
classes at the more expensive Trinity failed to impress). I wanted to see if private schools had more to offer than the public school I’d attended and I wanted serious classmates.

  I immersed myself in the political and economic classics at St. Mary’s. I had misread the course catalog and thought basic graduate economics (a subject which had baffled me as an undergraduate) a graduation requirement. After one class, I was mesmerized. In the end, eighteen of the thirty-six hours in my master’s program were in economics.

  Though my elementary school education laid an excellent intellectual foundation for me, I’d received almost no instruction in philosophy. Discovering it and economics in grad school was the final layer in my growth as a thinker. I read everything from Plato to Rousseau to Aquinas to Mill to Marcuse to Ricardo, Marx, and Veblen. I didn’t just read the assigned chapters, I read the entire volume and went back for the authors’ lesser-known writings. I had no social life. I never had, so I didn’t miss it. I just read, thought, wrote papers, and argued politics with anyone who came near me.

  Politics kept me so agitated, my cigarette input doubled; my brain whirred so I couldn’t keep my hands still. Smoking gave them something to do while I argued with the thin air at home, lectured my long-suffering mother on the intricacies of the omnibus spending bill pending on the Hill, or in the car while analyzing the radio news.

  I was politicized to the teeth, unable to evaluate any social phenomenon apart from its place in the sweep of history, probably the only bona fide radical in uniform. When a pimply-faced movie theater operative demanded to search my backpack for reasonably priced contraband food (it contained only Marx’s Das Kapital and Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class ), I bombarded him with such a furious lecture on constitutional law and the rights of man, he ran off and I proceeded victorious to see Weekend at Bernie’s.

  Besides working out, movies—sometimes three, sometimes four a weekend—were my only outlet. I’d buy two tickets, come out of one movie and go right into the next at the multiplex. Then I’d go home and read some more. When not studying, I sewed, knitted, and crocheted at a prodigious rate. Being stuck stateside and forced to be a bureaucrat, I was desperate for some creativity, something real, something not fraught with ambivalence, something I could feel and produce in my life.

  I had so many projects going at home and was so frustrated at work, I reported for duty at 6:30 or 7 A.M. and I ran out of the office each day at 3:30 or 4. By the end of my three years there, I was driving home at lunch to put in a sleeve or block a new sweater or speed-read a few chapters. I knew that Daddy had trained me to be a prisoner in my own home, but by the time I unlocked the door, it was too late. I’d learned to roam free in my own head and to look to family for human contact. I had never picked up a phone, dialed someone local, and said, “What are you doing? Want to go shopping?” It never occurred to me. I called a sister or cousin long-distance instead. Trained to keep busy, I have never once been bored or at loose ends. Lonely perhaps, but never bored or aimless—there’s always something that needs doing.

  Being raped didn’t help. I could hit the gym and two movies before dark on the weekend if I got an early enough start and I always did. I was militant about doing what I wanted to do but I avoided moving about at night if I didn’t have to. There might have been a club in my hands but there was also still a target on my pelvis. I didn’t go out at night alone to prove some feminist point. I was just trying to live my life unmolested (which is my definition of feminism).

  Books and the knowledge they contained continued to keep me at a fever pitch of intellectual excitement. Once I discovered The Economist, I never again had an unagitated moment. It enabled me to carry the whole world around in my pocket every week to obsess over at my leisure. There was just so much to be concerned about.

  After my Damascus Road undergrad political awakening, I considered myself a hard-core leftist and was looking desperately for fellow travelers. Outside of the middle-aged professoriat, I never found them at St. Mary’s. I started night grad school at twenty-seven, graduated at thirty (my grandfather remarked that I was “the graduating-est somebody [he’d] ever heard tell of”). Once again, I girded myself to face being the “grandma” of the group. Instead, I was continually amazed at the anti-intellectual small-mindedness of the young people in my classes. Though it was the Reagan eighties, when it was cool to be dumb and selfish; I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  In answer once to a professor’s call for unrestrained brainstorming, I made the obvious suggestions of increased, incentivized mass transport and carpooling as remedies for San Antonio’s intolerable and growing traffic congestion. A twenty-one-year-old honor student allowed to take the class gasped and breathed at me in horrified wonder: “That’s communism. ” She said “communism” as if it were “necrophilia.”

  Another young twenties type gave an impassioned speech about how much he liked being able to deviate from a planned route to hit McDonald’s or a mall if the mood struck him. That would be much more difficult on a bus or train. How he liked being able to drive alone singing at the top of his lungs if he wanted to without other carpoolers interfering with his unfettered freedom. His personal convenience was the only variable in his analysis. I pointed out that these were not arguments addressing the problem of traffic congestion, which had been our assigned task. I asked him how we could fix something we all agreed was a problem without being willing to make some sacrifices. He, with the other young conservatives, rolled their eyes. How funny. The lone military person was a liberal. All the college kids were conservatives, if you can dignify their self-concern with a political label (they did).

  Nor did they work hard. Few did the reading, even fewer participated in class discussions. A few of our professors responded by asking precious little of us. I was shocked when my economics professor laid out the requirements for the end-of-course paper (at the first class, when he’d mentioned the required paper, four of the twenty of us present got up, left, and dropped the course). He distributed handouts printed in insultingly large type, spelling out the style manual we were to use, the minimum number of footnotes (a paltry five), the minimum number of pages (five. In graduate school, for goodness’ sake) as if we were fifth graders. He barely mentioned the topic, all he cared about was the format. Months later, when papers were due, half the class was a no-show. He collected the papers of the hardy few, then, disgusted, sorted through them one by one.

  “Mr. Jones. How many footnotes did I require?”

  “Five.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Three.”

  “Miss Smith. What style manual did I require?”

  “Turabian.”

  “What did you use?”

  “APA.”

  “Miss Baker, how many pages were required?”

  “Five.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Two.”

  Another class required us to present our papers. The professor told us that we couldn’t just thumb through them, that we had to structure a separate presentation from them. Those who even turned the paper in, let alone on time, just strolled up and thumbed through their paper randomly reading paragraphs. Whenever a paper was due, from my seat up front I’d watch my peers saunter up for extensions (some professors didn’t even dock the late submissions a letter grade—had they, there would probably have been a riot).

  Since Southwest, I had never missed a class. I even structured my many business trips around my class schedule. I’ve never turned a paper in late or asked for an extension. I would watch their sorry (young!) asses and wonder: Maybe they’re right and I’m wrong—why bother? Am I really a freak? How could they take their educations so lightly? Mind and body—that’s all we’ve got to work with, so don’t take them for granted. Why not give a damn?

  I watched the parade of students offering excuses, nearly all of whom sauntered off with the same A’s I earned, and envied my brother his forthrightness in beating
up his football teammates mid-game for slacking. If I’m to teach, I thought, I won’t be aiming to teach lazy, ungrateful, overprivileged wretches like these. Better community college and a hardy student population that gives a damn.

  At work—well, I loved my military family, but open-minded they were not. Clear-minded, but definitely not open-minded. If it wasn’t traditional two-party, winner-take-all, every-man-for-himself mytho-Americanism and fundamentalist Protestantism, they weren’t having it. They never gave an inch, not on anything. They drove me crazy but I admired their tenacity. For their part, they thought I was a bleeding-heart liberal living in a dream world. One said, as if a thunderbolt of clarity had struck him, “I know what’s wrong with you, Debra. You want things now that can’t happen until after the Rapture. You want a paradise on earth and that can’t happen until Jesus comes back and separates the lions from the lambs.”

  They could accept that Jesus walked on water, they could accept that He had risen from the dead, and they could accept that He was coming back to lead them all to glory. But they couldn’t accept that we could clean up the corner of Fifth and Elm, that we could show a little initiative and provide quality education and health care to every kid in America —that was pie in the sky.

  They believed what they believed with all their hearts, though. I thought they were so brainwashed by the status quo as to be unreachable, though neither of us stopped trying. Many was the time that half the office would crowd into my cubicle to debate me on some leftist firebomb I had lobbed while waving some obscure text around. The height of my affection for them came the day I looked up to find them smirking and crowded into my cubicle doorway, each jockeying for a position from which they could observe my reaction to their own little firebomb.

  My immediate supervisor, whom I respected and loved, was the leader. Triumphantly, he slapped a book opened to a highlighted passage on my desk.

  Obligingly, I read aloud (something like): “The triumph of communism is the starvation of millions. The tragedy of capitalism is the starvation of a few. Winston Churchill.”