An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  My biggest disappointment was that I never had a conversation with anyone there about America, helping people, or ways to fund more Head Start slots, just about ways to advance our own careers. I was as ambitious as anyone on the planet; it just seemed to me that by focusing on the work, both the accolades and the personal satisfaction would come. They saw it the other way around—first get the gig, then think of the work. Everyone talked politics— what the Republicans were up to, how Clinton should run his campaign—but few talked about ideas, philosophy, real people’s lives. I’d expected idealism but found mostly bureaucracy. Of course, I wasn’t trying to make a career there. I could afford idealism.

  Still, it was a very cynical place. There wasn’t even an 800 number; constituents had to pay to have their voice heard. I let them talk and lied to them that Ron Brown, DNC chair at the time, would personally hear of their concerns. He wouldn’t. I sent out canned letters in response to the many we got from constituents, canned letters that were an insult in their nonresponsive bureaucratese.

  I helped administer the summer intern program, unpaid jobs at the DNC for college students. It turned out that some are less unpaid than others. One daughter of a famous Southern politician kept calling asking me about her slot and her paycheck. I tried to tell her that those jobs didn’t pay and that since I hadn’t seen her application, I was pretty sure she wasn’t going to be an intern. Frustrated but ever polite, she fretted, “I don’t do applications. You don’t understand!” She was right. I didn’t. I was given a few names and instructed to pass them directly on to a senior staffer. That woman and several other children of the rich, famous, and well-connected not only “won” those coveted, hotly contested slots, they were paid. All their fathers were millionaires.

  It should have soothed Mark’s DGA staff to see that he treated me like office furniture. No one abuses a desk lamp or fax machine, and Mark, a true gentleman and genuinely nice man, never abused me. He just treated me like a desk lamp or fax machine—useful for performing low-level administrative functions and possessing no feelings. I had no qualms about totaling his receipts or fetching him lunch. He was a busy, hardworking man with a lot on his mind; often, I brought him lunch or sodas without his having to ask. He was so busy, in fact, he barely used me. I was bored out of my mind, but all I could do was wait for work. Assistants are always promised that they’ll get to do substantive work, and it’s almost always a lie; either you do nothing or nothing but scut work. So be it. Frustrated or not, I was in it for the adventure, I still had a place in the HLS class of 1995. Assisting him at the party convention in New York, I told myself, would be reward enough. Surely there would be real work to do there, and what exciting circumstances! In the meantime, I just read the paper, answered his phones, and hung with staffers who were also nice people.

  There’s a cafeteria in the basement of the DNC operated by an Asian family. I used to go down there just to watch the young black girl they had out front work so hard sweat poured down her face. Toiling away at her dead-end job, she just tried so diligently and cared so much. Mangling her verbs and dangling her participles, she sang out all the regulars’ orders before we could speak. She scrubbed tables and counters like they were her own, she unpacked potato chips as if they were for starving refugees. The owners rarely gave her direction, they didn’t need to.

  All that talent, all that drive, all that willingness to work. No, all that need to work. If she were to commit a crime, or smoke crack, or have babies she couldn’t support, we’d design programs around her. Instead, she was a ghetto kid who did everything we asked of her—high school diploma, no black marks on her record, backbone of her family and her neighborhood. Her reward? Invisibility. Complete disregard. All her talents left undeveloped. Consigned to the steam table for the rest of her life. How long will it be before the light goes out in her heart? How long before she’s snarling at customers from across a DMV counter and scheming to get away with as little work as possible? How long before she “upgrades” to a mailroom or a security guard’s uniform and the midnight shift reading trashy black novels? She’d do better to rob this place, I’d think. Then she’d get some attention.

  I used to look at her and think: Come away with me.

  But where?

  Watching the mid-level DNC operatives around me, I realized that I was out of my league and gratefully so. Most had senators, their Choate roommate’s CEO dad, or their trophy wife’s aristocratic sorority sisters pulling strings for them. As we got closer to the convention and looming victory, the jockeying for postvictory positions was nauseating. Mark traveled constantly and took few of the hundreds of calls that came for him when in. He returned virtually none. People gave up and had no choice but to give me the message to pass on. I took many a long-winded, whiny, or nakedly bloodthirsty call, some from people soon to be occupying slots in the Clinton White House. I hope to never again witness people behaving so badly. People called who’d gone to third grade or Boy Scouts with Mark and who now wanted a job in politics. Mostly, though, it was party insiders wanting me to pass messages to Mark about “something very, very bad you should know” about a competitor. They’d bray that so-and-so muckety-muck had promised some perch to them and they damn well better get it. Muckety-mucks called to have me tell Mark that so-and-so is his son’s best friend and, well . . . you know. Many kissed up to me shamelessly, trying to buy my help with fake camaraderie or promises of their future patronage. O beautiful for spacious skies.

  As summer and the Democratic National Convention in New York neared, Mark was promoted to being Al Gore’s campaign manager and the air around him thickened with excitement—the press of bootlickers was unbearable and his phone rang nonstop. One young woman joined the queue of Mark’s never-returned calls. Soon, she was calling twenty times a day and desperate enough to try to enlist my aid, something about a job that her mother, the best friend of a DNC pooh-bah, had arranged. Mark never told me anything so I couldn’t help her. Eventually she started showing up. I gradually came to understand that she was assisting Mark too. Except she, who was neither yet twenty-one nor a college graduate, wasn’t answering phones. She was doing research, going to meetings with Mark. Once we got to the convention, which I expected to be my payoff for having been a faithful lackey, this young woman was accompanying Mark to high-level strategy meetings, riding in motorcades with him, showing up in the background on the evening news. I, on the other hand, got to sit doing nothing in the staff room while everyone kept asking me who that was that had my job.

  I was completely demoralized. Pure and simple—my feelings were hurt. What hurt most was knowing that Mark wasn’t a bastard. It never registered with him that his giving a bigwig’s daughter a cool job that (let’s face it) any bright person could do meant more than that now said bigwig owed him a favor. I didn’t even exist on his list of people or things to consider.

  I was through the looking glass in a world where basic civil behavior and decent manners had no meaning whatsoever. And why was that? Because I lacked importance. I had no protectors, no name. I was nobody. But this wasn’t personal. It wasn’t about hurting me. It barely concerned me. I was an ant. No one sets out to step on ants. That just naturally happens when they roam among giants.

  I had to face the fact that I lacked the stomach for politics.

  The man who’d parceled out jobs like mine at the DNC had taken a liking to me and listened helplessly while I cried on his shoulder about having been so unceremoniously, so publicly dissed.

  “Debra, this is how this world works,” he said. “Mark likes you. He told me so. Imagine what might happen if someone was actually gunning for you. Get out now because this is nothing to the things I’ve seen. Go on to law school and don’t look back.”

  Mark never called for me, so I stopped even going to the staff office. I went shopping. I saw Broadway shows. I watched the convention on TV. My only joy was terrifying my replacement whenever she happened to cross my path. All I had to do was give
her the look of death and she ran. Too bad mom couldn’t steal someone else’s backbone for her.

  Outside Madison Square Garden one day, I struck up a conversation with a black female attorney on Hazel Dukes’s staff. Dukes, since disgraced, was a NAACP grande dame and a well-known New York State politician of long standing.

  She asked me about the paucity of blacks in leadership positions at the DNC, Ron Brown and Alexis Herman notwithstanding, and on Clinton’s senior election staff in general. I had to admit that there weren’t many. I was elaborating that the real problem was less the lack of blacks per se than the lack of committed activists who thought beyond their own thirst for power and proximity to the powerful. As it happened, Dukes walked by and proved the point for me.

  The woman called her over and asked me to tell her what I’d just told her. Just a few sentences in, Dukes interrupted.

  “You’re wrong,” she scolded. “I’m very close to Mr. Clinton. Just yesterday, I was on the private plane. I talk to him all the time, he considers me a confidante. I’ve been to the governor’s mansion.”

  I, I, I, me, me, me.

  There was a self-satisfied simper on her face. She preened and looked around as she spoke to see who was looking at her, clearly hoping to be recognized, preferably by a news camera crew.

  “Ms. Dukes,” I said, “don’t you think you might be being bought off with a few perks? So you rode on the private plane, how does that fix inner-city schools? What did you all talk about, real issues or how good the meal was? I know who’s in those strategy meetings with Clinton and it aint you, it’s hardly any of us.”

  She sighed dramatically, then rolled off a list of the usual-suspect black politicians who’d been with her on the candidate’s private plane, how Clinton called to wish her a happy birthday, etc. She never offered an analysis of the role of blacks in national Democratic politics that wasn’t about her own individual importance or one of her equally hooked-up professionally Negro politician friends. We both thought the other a complete fool and parted with mutual disdain. With leaders who can be bought off with a plane ride, no wonder the Dems take the black vote completely for granted.

  The night of Jesse Jackson’s speech to the convention, I was the only black in the DGA’s jam-packed skybox at Madison Square Garden. There were three Hispanics, all uniformed waiters. The air was giddy with incipient victory; everyone knew we were going to beat the Republicans. I was among the few listening to Jackson orate about the poor and the downtrodden; most were partying way up in the air, above it all. A young woman who was shepherding one of the elderly party grandes dames (a famous old-guard politician’s sister) tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Another mineral water, please,” she asked sweetly, and indicated the wheelchair-bound old lady.

  I was in evening clothes. The waiters were in uniforms. I had a drink in my hand. The waiters had trays in theirs. I was doing nothing. They were working hard. I pointed to them as the polite young woman waited politely.

  “ That’s a waiter,” I said. I pointed to myself. “ This is a Harvard Law School student.”

  I never heard the end of Jackson’s speech. I went off to law school and never looked back.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ———

  BREAKING RANKS

  This was the frame of mind in which I arrived at Harvard Law School: militant and distrusting. Of my putative allies. The official enemy I understood quite well.

  Washing up on the shore of the Ivy League was a surreal experience. Wonderful. But surreal. Something amazing happened every day of my first semester there, like finding out that one needn’t work very hard at Harvard Law School.

  Many students never work another day over the next three years once admitted to HLS. As the saying there goes, “Times passes and so will you,” or “The hardest thing about HLS is getting in.” Gentlemen’s B’s and C’s were de rigueur.

  To my surprise, it was a fairly unintellectual environment. People cut class for weeks on end but they didn’t do anything interesting instead; they watched Melrose Place, slept a lot, and bitched about how much they hated HLS. They read schlock books, when they read, and the men were the least manly I’d yet encountered. The typical uniform for my average male classmate was rumpled Harvard sweats straining over a beer belly. The women put a hell of a lot more effort into their appearance and constantly bemoaned the lack of male interest. The male classmate who fit this description was also very likely to be catching the “fuck bus” from Harvard to Wellesley so he could date teenage undergrads who listened in rapt silence when he spoke. Watching a group of barely shaving, barely tall-enough-to-ride-the-teacups-at-Disneyland Lords of the Universe swagger around the Hark (our student union), one friend of mine remarked, “Screw perfect LSATs. What this place needs is a height requirement.”

  Having worked hard throughout prep school, high school, and college, many of my classmates considered graduate school their chance to relax and reap the benefits of their neurotic-compulsive, overachieving youth. Most of my classmates were just there to get drone jobs in mega–law firms, which is what gave HLS a “vo-tech” air not unlike that at O’Fallon Tech, where I’d prepared for a secretarial career. It was confounding to me to hear twenty-year-olds planning to be unhappy, scheduling it in on their day runners like a doctor’s appointment. They’d say the most amazing things, like “You’re going to be miserable anyway, so you gotta make sure you get the most money.” Even more didn’t know why they were there at all, just that it was the only item remaining unchecked on their external-validation to-do list. To be sure, HLS had its hard-charging social reformers, rabid conservative activists, and serious scholars, but it was the sad sacks I was unprepared for. The twelve years since kindergarten spent unimaginatively grades-focused robbed too many of them of the ability to feel their educations anymore. But how could anyone take Harvard for granted?

  My classmates threw the school newspaper and the weekly admin newsletter we got on the Hark floor, never mind that the cleaning staff—most our parents’ age—always placed huge bins strategically. The floor was white with discarded paper on Thursdays and Fridays. They openly read newspapers in class, carried on pointless conversations at full volume, and drowned out the last five minutes of every class snapping their binders open and shut putting their things away. Professor Meltzer, our criminal law professor, kept us late one day to finish a point. One of my young classmates stormed dramatically out, furious. He was waiting right outside the door to fume with his friends. A professor would be teaching his heart out, trying desperately to get people to participate—they’d just let him twist in the wind. I’d be thinking, Hey, the guy’s working up there, and raise my hand. I only got called on Socratically twice in three years because I readily participated. One of the most dedicated teachers at HLS, Professor Rakof, was walking backwards while making a point once and tripped. The class tittered. These, my betters?

  Most professors called on students randomly in their assigned seats, so the cowards “backbenched,” i.e., sat in the unassigned back row of our huge classrooms. This though most professors were perfectly pleasant and helped you arrive at a passable answer. God forbid they should have just looked the professor in the eye and said, “I don’t know.” Some profs picked a row at the beginning of class and cut a swath down it. Twice, I saw women in the chosen row scurry red-faced out of class rather than be called on. How many of them had perfect LSATs? Twelve years of real-world contingencies and briefing senior officers who’d rather bite your head off than let you take a breath took the starch out of Arthur Miller and Alan Dershowitz for me. I respected them but I had no fear of them (Miller is the tyrant; Dershowitz is beloved by students).

  I was very serious about my studies at HLS (as were many of my classmates), especially the first semester of the first year, which pretty much decides your entrée into fast-track law. Many at HLS affect to hate the place; that’s immaturity and upper-class “cool pose,” I think. They would have kidnapped the dea
n’s mother to get in, yet they acted as if they’d been shanghaied by a press gang once they got there. I had the time of my life. I knew exactly how fortunate I was. As well, I was blown away by the luxury of time and resources that faced me. Never before had I had only one thing to do—I had more free time in law school than I’ve ever had before in my life. I’d been helping out at home, working, and going to night school for so long that, faced now with a few hours of classes and studying each day, I was dancing in the streets. Also, being older, I knew how to organize my time and I knew how to stay cool under the pressure of HLS’s dreaded Socratic method. Every day, I was whispering grateful prayers of thanks to my parents and to the United States Air Force—I’ll never face tougher standards.

  ——

  The first thing I did was join BLSA (the Black Law Students’ Association). It did not go well. I hate working in groups (they’re never serious enough) and I hate meetings (ditto); the Air Force is the only organization I had ever joined voluntarily. Second, I was eleven years, on average, older than everyone else. Most of them were at least middle class, and, of course, there was an in crowd that put all other in crowds to shame because so many had (or claimed to have) important connections. From one moment to the next, BLSA was a fashion show, a politburo meeting, a hotbed of revolution, a social club, and a refuge from the white world we’d chosen. In short, it was a typical association of pampered twenty-somethings who couldn’t decide whether or how to take themselves seriously.

  From my crochety point of view, it was all very undergraduate. I’m critical of them, but I actually felt maternal toward them. I could see them trying on different personae (which, after all, is what college is for) and trying to gauge others’ perceptions of them. One minute they were upper class and blasé about Gstaad, the next they were ghetto-fied and “down with the peeps, know what ahm sayin?” I understood that. I certainly wasn’t the same person at thirty-three as I’d been at twenty-two and I’d certainly tried on and discarded several mutually exclusive personae; it didn’t seem fair for me to assert myself (something told me they didn’t crave my leadership the way my OTS flight mates had). Also, I was pretty sure I’d be blown off if I tried since I rarely saw things the way they did.