An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  At home, overnight, puberty had hit and Bobby inherited his father’s body—barrel chest, skinny legs—as well as his need to intimidate. He’d gone from fey to ferocious, from charming to churlish. His previously odd but fairly harmless behavior disappeared. His destructive tendencies came to mirror those all around us in the neighborhood—fighting, drunken carousing, misogyny. They obliterated his guilelessness and desire to amuse; it was hard to believe he’d ever made us laugh and even harder to believe we’d ever pitied him and desired to protect him.

  For years after, he called me little other than “bitch.” If I mopped a floor, he saw no reason why he should take the long way around it. If Mama left dinner on the stove for me or Wina for after work, he ate it. Left the empty plate and aluminum foil for us to clear away. He wouldn’t use the napkins we’d set at his plate because he preferred using the dish towels or the curtains, whatever was most convenient for his highness. He’d come home at 2 A.M. , make no attempt to walk lightly over our heads even though he knew how the uncarpeted floorboards amplified sounds, then turn on the basement lights and do laundry. Radio blasting.

  Had he been trying to bedevil us intentionally, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But we weren’t that important; the sun doesn’t try to give us mere humans skin cancer, it’s just doing what it does, it’s just being what it is, the center of the universe. We weren’t even presumed to have any wants and needs. “Jes cook yourself some more, girl,” he’d snarl impatiently after eating our meals, as if I’d demanded he urinate for me.

  He drank my infant nephew Johnny’s milk. His thuggish friends leered at us. He gave our possessions to women he was trying to woo and was annoyed by our protests. It was like living with Henry VIII. All housework was “bitch work,” all his sisters old maids who needed to “kiss my ass.” He never washed a dish, never dusted a stretch of wood, never made his own bed. Just like his father, he knew everything and proved his points by bellowing and insulting those who demurred. Disagreeing with him only proved our stupidity. But I wasn’t afraid of him; I hated him with a passion that lived and breathed. Also, I was deep in the throes of a full-blown hatred for my father by my teens; I was determined never to live in fear of another man. No more cowering in terror. So I set Bobby up again and again to say and do stupid things, then laughed in his face.

  Bobby could have handled his status as that holy of holies—a black male—completely differently. Had he been nice to us, or even merely indifferent, we would gladly have waited on him hand and foot. As it was, only our mother could bear to be around him. A true black man, he was an unrepentant mama’s boy. Only with her was he gentle and kind.

  Drunk, high, bloody, bruised, unheard-from for days, he’d drag himself home at 3 or 4 A.M. , go sit on her bed, and wake her up to talk. Since he’d woken me as well banging along overhead, I had no choice but to lie in the dark listening to her giggle at his muffled stories. He and I barely spoke except to trade insults, yet with her, he was a human being.

  I was her right hand, I brought home straight A’s, I stayed home, I ran our house like an adjutant. I was taken for granted. Bobby contributed nothing, Bobby would have been left back repeatedly except that no teacher wanted to have him twice, Bobby fled our home as if it were on fire and used it as if it were a highway rest stop, Bobby couldn’t be required to even flush after himself. He was her pride and joy.

  One day, I came home carrying a black dress from the cleaners. I’d cleaned the house and cooked the family dinner beforehand. There was a trail of mud and grime from the front door to the kitchen, greasy car parts lay atop the kitchen counters. Bobby stood eating with his filthy fingers from the pots I’d prepared. If I’d had a gun I would have shot him.

  “Fuck you, bitch,” he snarled predictably. He dunked a greasy cuff in the pot and made big, innocent eyes at me. My silence made him think he’d won and he leered in triumph. But that wasn’t why I was quiet.

  Standing there watching him revel in his self-absorbed animality, I buried my brother. He wasn’t going to make it, that much was clear to me. He was going to be another chalk outline in a gutter somewhere and I mourned him and his wasted life. For about a second. Then I let him go. I wasn’t about to be one of those ghetto women caught in the undertow of a two-bit man who didn’t know how good he had it. You want to die, you want to be something less than human? All right. I give up on you. I sent that forth to the cosmos like a graveside prayer in a prison cemetery. Watching his coffin lid close wasn’t going to take the wind out of me the way Daddy’s had. This time, I’d be ready.

  I watched him curse me and act like a gorilla and felt very calm. Bored almost. He thought he was punishing me with his bestial antics—he was too stupid to see he was punishing himself for reasons he was too stupid to articulate. Would it be a long prison stretch? Homeless winehead? Or just a simple white casket? No matter. I’d be there to take care of Mama when the inevitable came. I’d seen this movie a thousand times. Now it was simply our turn. He was just like too many other black men I knew, determined to kill himself but not until he’d wrung the last drop of love, energy, and money out of every decent person around him. I watched his performance and swore two vows: he was not going to drag my mother down with him, and I was not going to help him self-destruct.

  I thrust the black dress in his face. “I think I’ll wear this one to your funeral.”

  The blood drained out of his face. He flung himself away from that dress like it was a severed head dripping gore on the linoleum. I laughed at him—I couldn’t help it, he was such a weakling—and he ran out the front door. When he came home three days later, he was beaten and bloody, but victorious. He’d sent three other boys to the hospital.

  With minor exceptions, I did not speak to him again for five years. To me, he was dead and there’s little need to speak of spirits.

  PINK-COLLAR GHETTO

  I worked a raft of pointless clerical and food service jobs to help out at home while piling A atop pointless A at school. But why? Why was I born, why were any of us, just to toil in peonage at unfulfilling, unremunerative scut work? I never contemplated suicide but I often wished I would just die.

  I used to scour the newspaper for stories of young people just like myself “tragically” killed in car wrecks or by freak, painless acts of nature. Why couldn’t that happen to me? To help things along, I started smoking. I stopped using seat belts, started dressing inappropriately for the weather. Typically working class, I was too passive, too defeated to take even that bull by the horns. Plotting elaborate ways to place myself in the path of danger gave me many hours of grim amusement.

  As the end of Flo Valley’s two-year program neared, I panicked. Yes, again. Now what was I supposed to do? What would graduating mean for someone like me? I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do once I had a diploma, so my 3.9 GPA and I dropped out six weeks before graduation.

  I took several dead-end secretarial jobs. They were such horror shows of moronic, sexist bosses and brain-dead coworkers that after a few days at each, I simply stopped going. Some of them sent me checks for the few days I’d worked, some didn’t.

  I took a job at a bank that was mind-numbingly simplistic. I checked credit. The loan officers would give me a name and Social Security number, I’d put the information into a little computer and out would come a credit history. Before lunch each day, I had no work left to do.

  I shared a big, open office with twelve or so catatonic people and I’d bother them for work to do. I learned to do a great many jobs that the bank would have been surprised (and fined by the federal government) to know about. The loan officers sat in the open in the middle of the ground floor, a creepy place to work. Bored nearly to tears on a very slow, very rainy Monday in August 1979, I stood talking with my favorite officer, Tony.

  I was miserable. It was harder and harder to drag myself into the office every day. There were two blue-haired little ladies in the office. They bragged about having been with the bank for twenty-fi
ve years. They kept worn house slippers in their bottom desk drawers that they padded around in all day. Through my in-house moonlighting, I’d learned how to read all sorts of computer files. I’d seen their paychecks—I knew exactly how much the bank cared about their devotion.

  I bitched and bitched and bitched to Tony about the stupidity of the bank executives and the vacuousness of the job. I told him I didn’t intend to be there long. That I was going to travel, I was going to finish college. Maybe write, maybe . . . maybe who knows what I might do. I blabbed on and on and he just let me. When I was finished, he said, “No you won’t.”

  I was stunned. “Excuse me?”

  “You won’t do any of those things.”

  I could only stare.

  “You’ll never get out of here,” he said. “Everybody says what you just said when they start here. Hell, I said it. But nobody gets out. First, you get an apartment you can barely afford. Then a car. Then you get married and the kids start coming. Before you know it, you can’t quit. But don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. I have.”

  I know he was just describing the suburbs and the PTA and sex once a month, but it sounded like Kafka to me. I crawled back to my office and just sat there. I imagined myself a grandmother still dragging in to move twenty-five dollars from Mr. Smith’s checking to his savings. The vision was no less a nightmare than the one I’d had of myself waiting at the bus stop with the other manual laborers.

  What got me most about Tony’s prediction was the calm way he’d consigned me to that living hell, the calm way he knew himself to be trapped. How could he recognize his own doom and not make a break for it? He made it all sound so inescapable, like he was putting a quiet little curse on me.

  Five days later, I was in Columbia at the University of Missouri begging to be admitted. Classes began in just seven days. I was smart enough to have brought my transcripts with me. Once I produced them, the black admissions officer stopped sermonizing about the triflingness of black students and their constant lateness and started slavering to have me.

  ——

  I’d been at Mizzou only about six weeks before St. Louis dragged me back. Bobby. Again. I lay in bed that morning trying to muster the energy to spend another day with the brother to whom I had not spoken since I settled on my wardrobe for his funeral. I’d only listened long enough to find out which jail this time and hung up on him. I wouldn’t have bailed him out of the home he preferred, but I couldn’t let Mama go there alone.

  Sixteen years old, Bobby had been arrested for drunken brawling yet again and had spent the night in the tank. It was impossible to calibrate whether he was more drunk than high, but in those precrack days, the cops (it had taken six of them to control him) didn’t expend much effort differentiating between Thunderbird and Mary Jane. This time, he’d led a twelve-person fight at school which involved dangling a freshman from a third-story window. Enough was enough; the school administration made good on its promise to expel him.

  I caught Greyhound home. All too soon, we were bailing him out. Silent in the car, I dropped our sighing mother off at the vending machine factory to join her assembly line. Bobby and I tended the silence we’d cultivated like a rock garden for the past few years; no mimes were more adept at avoiding verbal communication. We drove to the worst neighborhood in black St. Louis, to Pruitt, the high school set aside as the last exit en route to jail. We could only stare in stunned silence at the concertina-wired teachers’ parking lot, the squint-eyed security guards with real guns, high-voltage Tasers, and no patience left for their charges. Pruitt was much more about the guards than the teachers. This time, my brother the tough guy couldn’t feign indifference; I saw his eyes widen. As we sat in the car, a group of male students accosted a female one. They had her back embedded in the chain links, her feet off the ground, her skirt yanked up over her hips. In no particular hurry, one annoyed guard ambled over to break it up. As the boys moved off, bored again, the guard yelled at the girl. He looked disgusted. I couldn’t help myself. I had to speak to my brother.

  “You happy now?!” I yelled, and spit rained down on the dashboard. “This is what you wanted, right? What you been aiming for all your miserable life. I guess now you can die happy in this toilet bowl, since you’re bound and determined to die. Could you just do us a favor and die a little more quickly?”

  I got out and slammed the door. We made our way through the many security checkpoints to the principal’s office, where, with a weary wave of déjà vu, I formally handed authority over to Pruitt’s principal. How many times had I done this—getting him back into school, finessing a gullible principal, humbling myself before the parents of a mauled child so they wouldn’t press charges?

  We maintained an uncomfortable silence while the principal reviewed Bobby’s long history of trouble at Beaumont. Staring out over his bifocals, he read implacably over the more gruesome aspects of the fight which had brought Bobby to Pruitt. Bobby remained impassive throughout, but with that familiar stubborn jut of his chin. The physical resemblance to our father, dead now for two years, wasn’t helping me feel any more charitable.

  Embarrassed and ashamed, I tried to finesse the principal as I’d done so often in the past with landlords, utility companies, and the like. I tried to get him to agree to contact me before taking any drastic action since it was a foregone conclusion that Bobby would screw up. The principal cut me off with military briskness; he wasn’t about to be “worked.” I didn’t doubt that he’d have no trouble handing Bobby over to city cops to face criminal charges if he caused trouble at Pruitt. For my mother’s sake, I hoped Bobby believed him, too. Personally, I didn’t give a damn.

  Still silent, my brother walked me back to the car, his face smashed and purple from the fight he’d won, and I drove off. For once, he didn’t call me a bitch, didn’t tell me to shut up. He said nothing at all. In the rearview, I watched him watch me pull away. Guards yelled at him to get back behind the security barricades. His expression was unreadable.

  Bobby survived Pruitt. Indeed, he spent most of his high school career there, too feared to face much opposition. Years passed before we spoke another word.

  ——

  I took the bus back to Mizzou and my own problems. I had changed my major and classes so often that the administration required me to get an increased number of signatures authorizing any further changes. I was renting a cheap room in a slummy house with a bunch of drug-using women I hardly knew. Having shown up for admission only a week before the semester began, I’d had no shot at a dorm room. I had no friends, and my white boyfriend, the one who made the black students disown me, was cheating. With a white girl.

  Sitting in the Student Union, I’d watch groups form, coalesce, break up, re-form, and have no idea how to break in. I felt both invisible and glaringly, indelibly stained with some mark of shortcoming. “Hanging out” was simply foreign to me because Daddy had never allowed it. You got time to lean, you got time to clean. Life is a struggle, them that work is them that get: I didn’t know how to relax. Whenever I had a free moment, I lost myself in a book, the one pleasure I could always count on. Indeed, I took a bleak, Protestant pride in the featurelessness of my own life, little realizing how much that made me like the father I hated.

  The blacks especially disturbed me, since I knew I was expected to bond with them. One part of me wanted to try to make friends, another stubbornly wanted to do so more in the course of things, through shared interests and classes. Also, it was obvious that the same social rules would pertain at Mizzou: if you light, you all right. If you black, get back. I was sickened by the pigment/hair follicle hierarchy, mostly because I could only lose at it. And I was embarrassed by blacks’ pathetic aping of white Greek traditions. Whites had whole city blocks at Mizzou of gracious houses and sweeping lawns emblazoned with the Greek letters of unintegrated, hoary fraternities going back generations and lovingly supported by doting alumni. Blacks had fetid apartments crawling with dope-smoking near-dropouts that
they insisted on calling “frat houses.” The blatant wealth of so many around me choked me with shame and rage. Thank God I hadn’t attempted Dartmouth or Bryn Mawr in that state of mind.

  In the end, none of this mattered at all. I had no time to socialize because I had three part-time jobs and only slept in snatches. Chronically broke, I lived on canned soup and popcorn. There had been a spate of campus rapes; I was always alone so I was always afraid. My only comfort came from reading the newspaper searching for stories of quick deaths visited upon stupid people in bizarre situations. Again, I used them to devise grandiose but passive fatal-accident schemes which all had in common painlessness and the element of surprise.

  Worst of all, my stint at the bank had opened up a whole new source of confusion. There had been college-educated people there, filling their hours with work so unrewarding just watching them do it made me want to poke my eyes out with a sharp stick. I saw then that just as that vaunted sheepskin was no guarantee of the bearer’s fitness, neither did it guarantee a life worth living.

  Left to my own preferences, I would, of course, have majored in literature. Then what? Been a teacher, I guess. But I waited tables with literature Ph.D.’s. Most often, however, I was sure I’d never escape my working-class fate. I attempted to get some guidance from my guidance counselor but I merely annoyed him. “I sign study cards,” he said gruffly. “When you know what you want, come back.” So much for guidance. I just read and moped and attended the classes which, in the end, I’d chosen pretty much at random.

  But there were a few signs of hope. They were perverse signs of hope, but they gave me what I needed. The most satisfying was being plagiarized by a professor.

  Like Mr. Smith, he was a pompous windbag who chose teaching simply to have a captive audience. One of my many roommates took a different, though related, class from him. She asked me for help with a paper and showed me his instructions. Included in them, completely without attribution, was a large chunk from a paper I’d done for him; it was Xeroxed into his own writing so as to appear organic.