An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

No more hair-straightening.

  No more living in the suburbs or any car-dependent city.

  No more taking arbitrary orders from random superiors.

  I want to be the idiot in charge.

  I want to produce something tangible for a living, something with my hands.

  I need a mission.

  I hate clock watching.

  I hate clock watchers.

  I am stiff-necked, judgmental, and unforgiving—need work that allows for that.

  I care about the character, talent, and drive of the people in my life.

  Something that involves other diamond-in-the-rough black people like me.

  I want to set my own hours.

  A job that doesn’t feel like a job. A job that feels like my life.

  A job that I am.

  Sentences like these made perfect sense to me.

  I read self-help manuals like Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow, Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, and How to Retire at Forty-one. I subscribed to business magazines and looked into mall pretzel franchises. I wanted to be in charge, whatever it was I ended up doing, again for negative reasons—I was tired of taking orders from people whose judgment didn’t impress me. I could do as well (but at what?) and not be annoyed in the process. I thought and thought and thought and finally noticed what was missing from my many scribblings: Money. Position. Fame. Power.

  My subconscious had given me the foundation on which to structure my life while I searched for my one true calling (the existence of which I never doubted).

  Autonomy.

  That’s what I was really looking for in my life.

  Autonomy.

  I would trade money, title, fame, everything—as long as I could be in the driver’s seat.

  Taking responsibility for myself—apart from the military, a corporation, a husband, a well-off family which could rescue me—was at once terrifying and a complete relief.

  I wasn’t going to starve. I wasn’t going to become homeless. I would do whatever I needed to and I didn’t care that people would think little of me once they knew I waited tables or sold T-shirts from the trunk of my car for a living. I knew their eyes would slide right over me once they heard me answer the “What do you do?” question with “I make dresses with my mama and sell them in church basements,” and the thought no longer shamed me. It was like the OTS board. I knew I’d do what needed doing no matter what others thought or however they treated me.

  I was ready to flip burgers, make lattes, or sell T-shirts on the highway off-ramp rather than tie myself to a desk, operating room, or space capsule doing something I hated. Or even doing something that merely bored me. I wanted work that felt inseparable from my life, something I’d do even if I won the lottery. Something, the more I thought about it, that I could do from home because I had come to abhor office life, especially commuting and meetings. But until I figured out what that something was, I was ready to wash cars, herd sheep—anything I could do largely on my own, anything I didn’t dread waking up to face. I’d come to hate Sundays by then, because I had to go back to work the next day. I refused to live the rest of my life that way. Most everyone I could think of—from senior officers to my cousins at the post office—hated his job. I was resigning from that club.

  Recounting it here makes it all seem very simple and straightforward, but I truly believe this is the point at which I developed hypertension. I had black circles under my eyes and talked to myself. Aside from myself to worry about, I still had family responsibilities—I wasn’t some Kennedy who could just disappear and find herself with the aid of an expensive shrink. My relatives thought I was crazy for thinking of leaving the Air Force after a decade, especially when I’d made officer, but I was after that examined life.

  After about two years of sleeplessness and neurosis, I had to take the plunge and get out. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself but I knew I would do whatever necessary to survive and live up to all my responsibilities, however I had to do that. I knew I was doing something ridiculous, but even so, I felt wonderful. Calm. Hopeful and excited.

  After much list-making of potential home-based careers and potential ways to fund said careers, I had decided to do what professional students always do when in doubt: go back to school. This time for a doctorate or a J.D. What I wasn’t saying out loud was that I was sheepishly entertaining the notion of running for local office back home or teaching at a community college, notions I deduced working backwards from the idea that I was supposed to be doing something about the working class. Why else couldn’t I get it off my mind? The ghetto needs living, breathing role models they can see and talk to. Bill Cosby on TV was as foreign and otherworldly to them as any white elite, his accomplishments correspondingly exotic and unimaginable. What they needed was successful, well-educated people in the neighborhoods to demystify the process. As well, both were occupations you controlled yourself, for the most part, and which allowed for great flexibility. Best of all, they were inherently meaningful and outward-directed. Even though I’d come a long way emotionally, both seemed grandiose statements I might not be able to live up to, so I kept them to myself as I typed up my separation paperwork. I wasn’t ready to submit it yet, but I had to make my commitment to leave real. That night, I fell immediately to sleep for the first time in years. My insomnia disappeared.

  ——

  Watching my mother work longer hours than any factory had ever required of her at her own projects made me appreciate the extent to which working people are deprived of any creative outlets or of even the most basic control over their own actions. Black grandmothers have to cringe before twenty-something restaurant managers to get permission to see a doctor or go to a PTA meeting. (That’s why they so often take their frustrations out on the customer. I often let my turn go by in a low-level government office or retail environment rather than face an angry, dis-expecting black woman behind a cash register or computer screen. Black comedians do entire routines about the bad attitudes of low-level black service workers.)

  As well, most have neither the time, the money, nor the breadth of vision to avail themselves of cooking classes, singing lessons, community theater, and the like, so their self-expression is stifled in its infancy. At the same time, the inner city is awash in working folk selling their hand-sewn pillows and kente-cloth-wrapped everything, weekend fish fries, kitchen-table beauty salons, backyard mechanics. Willette, the black hairdresser I patronized in a white shop, never smiled, never laughed, and was so softspoken I routinely had to ask her to repeat herself. Once she opened up her own (illegal) salon in her house, she blared gospel music from eight speakers as I bent over her kitchen sink. Her kids did their homework across the table from where she set my hair in rollers. She was so full-throated, I couldn’t believe it was the same woman. I asked her if she thought she could make as much from home as from the high-traffic district of the old shop. “I DON’T CARE!” she yelled. “Long as I can feed myself and the kids.”

  The business ventures I looked into, coupled with my community-mindedness and the entrepreneurship struggling for sunlight in the ghetto, reminded me that what poor people need most of all is money. The second thing they need, though most don’t even dare to dream of it, is some measure of autonomy.

  My mother filled every flat surface in our house with her handiwork and tools. She could not at first bring herself to part with any of the trophies of her new freedom, but eventually I was able to persuade her to peddle the overflow at flea markets and craft fairs. There were often more vendors at these events than customers and bargaining was fierce. Most had day jobs. My mother invested so much time and money in her craft, she always lost money. But the people who profited no matter the turnout or sale price were the people running the event and leasing the spaces.

  What if I created a space for black women to earn extra money, exercise some blessed decision-making, and express themselves all at the same time? I remembered how my mother scuffled to create
memorable Christmases and back-to-school collections for us. Usually, she either went into debt or took a second night job. What if she’d been able to spend her nights dressmaking or throwing pots at home with her family, then bring them to someone like me to sell for her? Usually, poor people just take another dead-end, low-wage McJob that keeps them from their families. What if I created stall space, some rented long-term, some just as needed during an expensive family crisis or to buy new furniture? Women like Willette could move her basement hair salon here and rent-to-own space from me. I could encourage, or even require, them to take an apprentice, some woman trying to get off welfare or newly released from jail. Entrepreneurially minded strivers could run a snack bar, offer accounting services, do deliveries. The local jobless could provide security. I could network with downtown big business to support vendors in spinning off their own ventures. Most ghetto businesses are off-the-books, but I’d insist on all the legal formalities (like taxes); that means I’d need to help them with basic bookkeeping. Might as well do GED classes on the side. Voter registration. Military personnel from the many local bases to do mentoring, tutoring. There must be lots of embezzlers and inside traders who could do their community service with me, teaching about the stock market or the legal system. Bugger self-esteem training—self-esteem comes from accomplishment: offer math and citizenship classes, encourage them to take the ghetto back from the knuckleheads. Citizen crime patrols. Identifying promising local kids and grooming them for leadership. Not just telling people they should aim high, but steadying the ladder for them while they did so.

  How hard could it be?

  I was asking for a separation date six months off, mid to late 1989. By then I’d be safely ensconced in a Ph.D. program somewhere studying political economy, or in law school, or running for local government, or substitute teaching at a ghetto high school while selling homemade pies door to door at night to fund my school board campaign. I was open to anything, as long as doing it made me happy, left me largely in charge of myself, and kept me engaged with other forward-thinking people. My big plan was substitute teaching. I could decide day by day, school by school, whether or not to work, and earn just as much as I needed to get by.

  My separation paperwork burning a hole in my briefcase, I set the following Monday as the day of submission. Tingling with nervous excitement, still, I felt at peace for the first time in years. It was such a relief to not be going round and round in open-ended circles. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. I just knew I would do something—my commitment to my mother alone would ensure that.

  I wandered down to the cafeteria and who should I encounter but the captain who’d kept me a prisoner at Kelly by refusing to work an assignment for me. I was so serene and resigned to stepping off the cliff of my own future, I spoke warmly to her and inquired about her family. It was hard for me to even remember the hostility I’d harbored for her. She was so surprised her eyes widened like saucers. We chatted amiably. When I got back to my desk, my phone was ringing.

  “You’ll never beat out all the fighter jocks for the intel chief job in Iceland. Still want to go to Turkey?” she asked.

  I took the discharge paperwork out of my drawer and tore it up. I knew I was still going to get out, but just not until I’d had my last overseas hurrah. I was ready to take my destiny in my own hands. But first, an adventure!

  JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT

  My fifteen months from June 1989 to October 1990 assigned as chief of intelligence, Ankara Air Station, Turkey, were the best of my career. I’d done no research about the country apart from its military significance, yet I was still hearing voices. My instinct told me it was the right move.

  With a small band of other young officers, I traveled all over the region and saw sights thousands of years old. I drank from St. Paul’s local well in Tarsus and visited the protoconvent where Mary lived after Jesus’ crucifixion. I saw places like Spain, Egypt, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Syria, and the medieval walled city of Dubrovnik. With my friends, I saw the whirling dervishes (they’re slow and mesmerizing, not high-speed and manic). I watched the sun come up over Nem Ru mountain with its ancient stone heads lying about like a giant child’s discarded toys and wondered about the peasants who must have died by the thousands dragging them up the mountainside. On a train platform in Budapest, a young Gypsy man threw me a devilish kiss and led his troupe in serenading me (much to my boyfriend’s disapproval)—they looked right out of National Geographic and yet they thought me exotic! Wherever my (white) boyfriend Erik and I went, there was so much gawking, he used to joke that he was going to get a T-shirt that read “Yes! She’s That Color All Over.” There are supposed to be lots of Africans in eastern Europe, but we encountered very few (and virtually no women). When we did, it was clear how mongrelized African-Americans have become after three hundred and fifty years in America. The Africans stared at me, too.

  We drank Turkish beer and bought lots of gold and handwoven carpets (even though I knew that women and children slaved making them, often involuntarily). We lived like kings on our military pay and thanks to Turkey’s ever-worsening inflation—for twelve dollars a month, I had a cleaning lady. For a few bucks more, she’d have cooked too, but I was rarely home.

  But all this was a sidelight to my military job, by far the most satisfying of my twelve years in uniform. Our air station was there to support and defend our commitment to the southern region of NATO. I was assigned to DO, the Directorate of Operations, as chief of intelligence. I wrote the intel annex to the war plan for our region and developed plans for supporting and directing troops that would have to deploy to the region in a contingency. We expected our enemy to come from the Soviet Union, but it was deteriorating at such a rapid pace, we began to wonder if there’d be much for us to do at all.

  The highlight of my job was the weekly intelligence briefings I delivered to General Grove and his almost entirely male and middle-aged staff. It took me a couple of weeks to get my legs under me, but in very short order my briefings were standing room only. I enjoyed them tremendously. It was exactly the type of challenge I relished. There was a piss-and-vinegar full-bird colonel who loved to play “stump the dummy” with me, asking questions he thought I wouldn’t, but should, be able to answer. He cut me no slack, and trying to anticipate his demands—it was a point of honor with me to have no questions asked at the end of my presentation—kept my briefings razor sharp.

  Rather than stage fright, my problem was a lack of nervousness. Once I’d done my homework on the region’s military situation (which I continually monitored anyway with help from my headquarters at Ramstein AB, Germany), what was there to be nervous about? Had I had to lecture on physics, I’d have died a thousand deaths, but knowing I knew more than my audience did in my area of responsibility—where’s the edge going to come from? I found myself leaning on the podium, not standing up straight, my mind wandering from a presentation I’d memorized and practiced to the point where I couldn’t listen to it anymore. I wasn’t strack because it just came too easily. I ran across an article about Al Pacino. In it, he said that he didn’t eat before a performance, that hunger gave him an edge.

  To sharpen my own performance, rather than work efficiently on my presentations all week, I’d just file away items I thought I might brief in a special file. As always, I made sure to keep abreast of all developments, keep my map file stocked, my weapons slides up to date and complete. Then, the afternoon and night before a briefing, I whirled into action, knowing I had exactly enough time, but no more, to pull it together. I was a tornado, running around, gathering final up-to-date info, making my presentation slides, orchestrating with the airman who handled the briefing room infrastructure. I’d work till late in the evening, go straight to bed, back up again at five. Lots of black coffee but no breakfast.

  Hungry, overcaffeinated, and heading for a line after which I would be dead (0800 sharp), only then would I run through the briefing a few times, keying from the slides I’d
made the day before. I allowed myself no margin for error. Since I didn’t have time to choose my words carefully and memorize, I’d have to rely on my wits and thorough background knowledge to pull each briefing off. It was a high-wire act and I loved the high. I made the odd mistake here and there (I recall being unable to find Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, on my slide even though I’d placed a huge gold star on the spot). What fun.

  Keeping up with the dissolving USSR, Lebanon, the standoff between the Turks and the Kurds, the Turks and the Greeks, the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots—not to mention the likes of Muammar El-Gaddafi, the western Sahara, and the Israeli-Arab conflict—I had more than enough to monitor. It was the perfect job. I got to indulge my love of history, research, international politics, and public speaking every Wednesday morning at 0800 hours. I relied on The Economist as much as I did the intel infrastructure at Ramstein.

  But reality was never far off and the reminders to remain in control of my own life were everywhere. Since my mother hadn’t wanted to move to Turkey, I was maintaining two households. I arranged to share an apartment with a male Air Force nurse in Ankara only to have his boss, the hospital commander, order him not to move in with me because it might look bad to the Turks. There were no single female officers to share with, so I was stuck footing the bills alone. How I longed to be in control of the intimate details of my own life, how I longed to be the idiot in charge. The biggest reminder was yet to come, though.

  To keep me operationally ready, my boss sent me to join a stateside unit deployed for a long exercise in the countryside of a NATO ally. That brief experience made me reflect on the murky status of women in the military and on my own personal and feminist evolution. It also steadied my resolve to separate.

  During my first few military years, I had consciously eschewed female frippery. I’d completely identified with the down-and-dirty ethic of my new world and felt that acting like a man was the route to the top. I wore fatigues and combat boots, cursed, smoked, drank my beer from the bottle, didn’t carry a purse. I was one of the boys.