An American Story

by Debra J. Dickerson

  Warning bells were clanging.

  One of the women who was both the funniest and the most militant of the typists had brought a grievance meeting to a halt recently to brandish a Lawyers Weekly article trumpeting the firm’s unprecedented profits. She’d read aloud the part about the partners’ take and demanded to know what percentage of those millions the staff was going to get. Gleefully, the typists had told me about it. Reportedly this partner had been furious, telling her she was out of line for inquiring into things that were none of her business.

  I knew what sort of “misunderstandings” he meant and I did not want to be the one sent to “explain things” to the “staff.” I had no one to blame but myself for thinking I could straddle the line. What would happen when one of my lunch buddies thought they could slack off on some work for me? What would happen if one of them made a huge mistake? Was I willing to share more of the profit with them? Decision-making?

  I was very worried about my future in a world so starkly divided between haves and have-nots because I was pretty sure I would identify with the haves. I’d encourage the have-nots to do the work and join us in the penthouse, but until then . . .

  Fortunately for me, there were no barricades to man that summer, no cake to offer the starving instead of bread. I got away with it, that high-wire act I had naively created. I never had to put my money where my mouth was and I knew I had dodged a bullet. I’ll respect the nonprofessional staff wherever I am, always, but I will never again pretend to identify with them.

  Early one morning, I looked up to find that militant would-be labor organizer standing in my office doorway staring at me.

  “Miss Thing? Yes?” I prodded her jokingly, but she just kept staring.

  “You look good today,” she said with a strange intensity.

  Huh?”

  She snapped out of some reverie and blew her nose into a wad of tissues twisted in her hand. She’d been crying.

  “I just needed to see you, like this,” and she gestured at the pile of treatises on my desk. “Harvard. Everything.”

  I got her to come in and sit down. Then she told me her story.

  The night before, she’d picked her husband up from the country club where he caddied.

  (Her husband was a caddie? A grown man was a caddie, that still happened?)

  The sprinklers had been tossing up rainbows as she waited in the car. The sunset had been so beautiful, the landscape so lush, they’d ended up sitting in their car necking.

  Her husband had just called. Security patrols had noted them “casing” the country club and fired him. He’d only just managed to talk them out of calling the police. There were no black marks on his record there.

  “So, I just needed to see little Miss M&A today,” she laughed between sniffles.

  I didn’t know what to say, so we just sat there.

  “Hey!” I said. “My secretary’s white. Want me to call her in and order her around?”

  That made her smile. I brought her some coffee, and when she’d collected herself, she made her slow, dignified way back to the word-processing pool.

  ——

  After a summer spent watching working-class black people struggle with real problems, I returned to Harvard to find that my wish hadn’t come true and the BLSA membership issue had not resolved itself. I was torn to pieces. I was militant about our right to a place of our own (though I rarely went there), yet I thought it inexcusable to take law school funds without being open to the whole law school. The reactionary forces demanding an open-door vpolicy at BLSA would rather be expelled than find themselves in a majority-black room, yet they had us dead to rights. Worse, I felt sure BLSA would handle the issue poorly.

  I was so committed to my column then, anything that stayed on my mind got written about. So I decided not to attend BLSA meetings on the subject. I was enough of a tribalist not to want to give aid and comfort to the enemy on such a core issue. One way or the other we were going to lose, so I decided we should close ranks and go down united.

  The membership consulted Professor Charles Ogletree, our official adviser, former National BLSA president and a criminal law specialist. He gave BLSA the bad news: there was no way to keep the policy, so give in gracefully. BLSA held straw polls and emergency meetings while blowing the Record off completely, though the editor, Greg Stohr, pestered the president constantly for an interview. Stohr asked me to try to persuade him, a request which I refused. Personally, though, I had decided that BLSA should remain black-only and stop accepting university funds. Failing that, we had no choice as moral beings but to open the membership to all. If BLSA did neither, I was going to resign, via my Record column.

  If it meant that much to us, we should be willing to give up what was purportedly the best student-organization office space on campus and go off-campus. HLS’s wealthy black alums could help us offset the cost and law firms would still shower us with funds and attention. All we needed was a little determination, a little willingness to look beyond our own creature comforts, a little initiative.

  But in the end, BLSA caved. Near as I could tell from all the meetings I’d missed, no one made any bones about the fact that, in the end, it was all about the perks of the HLS letterhead.

  We stayed on campus and kept Big Daddy’s dollars. Once it was decided and announced, I went to a meeting the point of which was to design the new membership rules. Just as I’d suspected, the talk was only of the huge, law-firm-funded BLSA Job Fair, the BLSA study guides reproduced at HLS expense, the resource base of HLS, and how no one was prepared to give that up. I guess there’s something to be said for their bare-bones honesty, but a little bit of shame might not have been misplaced just then. Martin wrote his letter from the Birmingham jail, but the best we could do was write a host of onerous restrictions aimed at dissuading white folk from daring to cross BLSA’s threshold. It was grandfather clauses all over again. I heard proposals detailing the ridiculously high amount of committee work new members would have to undertake, the lengthy papers they’d have to write, the high percentage of meetings they’d have to attend. Few BLSA members evinced that level of commitment.

  How many bubbles in a bar of Ivory soap, nigger?

  What amazed me was how open the discussion about running the white folks off was. When I graduated, new members had to sign a McCarthyite loyalty oath, one which I spoke up against at the last BLSA meeting I attended and which I went on record saying I wouldn’t sign. Their matter-of-fact selfishness left me breathless; they had no shame. What they did have, however, was vengefulness. That’s what the new killer rules were about.

  Lots of blacks went about campus after that dramatically haughty, wearing our unearned suffering and racial superiority like an ermine cape. I thought we should have felt shame. Shame for our greed. Shame for our vindictiveness. Shame because when the moment of truth came, we acted just like them. We’d become what we professed to loathe.

  ——

  I felt farther removed from the black liberal bourgeoisie in 1995 than I did in 1992. I’d already had several soul-scares, though, a few moments where my own wonderfulness went to my head and I actually believed that I was better off because I was better.

  A Shearman partner had been trying to talk me into joining the firm after graduation and I’d avoided the core issue by focusing on New York’s crime. This partner packed more pro bono civil rights work into her litigation docket than some LDF staffers, yet she responded to me like the slumlord who had humiliated me and my friend on his porch.

  “Not that again! Look, safety is about brains. I live in a doorman building. I take taxis or a car service, not the subway or buses. I stock up so I don’t have to go out at night. Jeez, what do they expect?”

  “True,” I said. Then, “Wait a minute! You’re a millionaire.”

  My head reeled with cognitive dissonance. I’d scared myself so badly I had to sit down and make myself say “People aren’t poor and victimized because they’re stupid” ten times. Privi
lege, on the other hand, can make you a moron. It certainly did me a few times.

  What I failed to add to the vignette about Mark Gearan giving my job away was the little detail that, back in D.C. just before I left for Boston, I had respectfully told Mark off. He was nonplussed. That angle (my existence) had not occurred to him. Merely grateful that he’d heard me out, I thanked him for listening and turned to go. He called me back and, without apologizing, asked what he could do to make up for it. Unprepared for this turn of events (all I’d wanted was the dignity of acknowledgment), I thought to ask for a chance to do advance work, which had struck me during the campaign as flight-line-like and adrenaline-fueled. He picked up the phone and I left the next day for a week prepping for a Gore campaign swing through Stockton, California. The people on the advance team, who had presumably struggled up through the ranks, had no choice but to accept Gore’s campaign manager’s specific “request,” this woman from nowhere with no advance-team experience. The team leader watched me like a caged but unfed boa constrictor—not about to piss off someone as important as Mark but furious that I’d been forced on her. I felt like I’d climbed through their windows with a stocking mask on. While I stacked Evian and Gummi Bears in Gore’s command-center hotel room, I tried to justify my string-pulling by the work I’d done for Mark and by the fact that I hadn’t actually tried to cash in; it had just happened. It almost worked until I began wondering how my “replacement” had justified her own hookup to herself every time I had used my eyes to jab voodoo-doll pins in her.

  Just a few months after that, while participating in a BLSA street law clinic in ghetto Boston, the black principal introduced us as students at “the best law school on the planet” and said we’d be making sixty-five thousand dollars a year after graduation. I turned to the person on my left and said, “How gauche.” I turned to the one on my right and sniffed, “ Eighty thousand.”

  I told a San Francisco doctor treating me that I was sure the diagnosis of a previous condition was correct because it had been made at Harvard.

  I used something personal an undergraduate advisee had told me in a Record column without a warning bell ever going off in my mind, so focused was I on winning a debate.

  I competed for and won the Skadden Arps fellowship, the most prestigious public interest law fellowship, simply because it was the most prestigious. I didn’t really want it—by graduation, I knew I wanted to write, that my foundation was on the back burner—I was just an achievement junkie jonesing for another notch in my résumé, just like the classmates I belittled. It should have gone to someone who was serious about the work, not someone who would quit only six months into the two-year term to write.

  En route to Erik’s posh Palo Alto home while he studied for a Stanford M.B.A. and I worked at S&S’s San Francisco office, we passed through the Mission District. The people on the street looked odd to me, their clothes, their pallor. Confused by their appearance and demeanor, I asked Erik, that Princeton-educated son of privilege, “These people . . . they look . . . what’s wrong with them?”

  He looked at me. Looked at them. Back at me.

  “They’re poor, Debra.”

  Oh. Only two years into the upper crust, I had forgotten what reality could look like.

  I didn’t want to forget. I didn’t want to excuse, but I didn’t want to forget and, most of all, I didn’t want to become them. But I was still ambitious, my dreams bigger than ever, my confidence utter. How to avail myself of what I’ve earned, as well as what I’ve lucked into, without becoming the enemy?

  Having a farewell lunch the day before graduation with my study group, I made a disparaging reference to “the elite.” One asked, “How’s that work, now that you’re an elite?”

  Me? Elite?

  I was furious.

  How dare he strip me of the thing I’ve fought hardest for in my life—a sense of belonging in the black working class. Granted, I’d actually been struggling to rid myself of that connection, but the exact opposite had happened once my emotional maturity caught up to my intellect; I’d learned to accept who and what I am the way I accept being five foot seven and right-handed. It doesn’t make me special and it doesn’t make me less than. It’s just my context and it need have no more control over my life than I choose for it to.

  There I was, a humble penitent who’d confessed her sins and begged for absolution. It galled, it burned, to be lumped in with those who can’t remain who and what they are without keeping everybody else down. How could my friend wave some magic wand and make me one of those smug toads who’d filled me with the very self-loathing I’d struggled with for thirty years? I’d sacrificed everything to forge an identity for myself in the community of my birth. The more I saw of the black upper class, the less I intended to be part of it: they talked revolution while shopping at Saks.

  Me? Elite?

  Certainly, I was privileged now, but at least I’d had to earn my perks. Most of the blacks at Harvard were born knowing it’s cup and saucer, not cup and table. Sofa, not couch. Red leaf, not iceberg. Dunhill, Marlboro, anything but Kool or Newport. I had to learn all that the hard way with angry blacks and clueless whites looking on. Worse, I’d had so much to unlearn.

  Newsweek, not the Enquirer. The New Republic, not Newsweek. Harper’s, not Ebony. Jet? Under no circumstances. Diaphraghm, not the Pill. The Pill, not withdrawal. Art houses, not cineplexes. Subtitles, not blaxploitation. No air-conditioned summers at home: internships abroad under artificially trying conditions. Foreign, not domestic, white guys.

  I hadn’t understood then that you can never stop being who you were born being; you can add things but you can never subtract from the baseline. Lord, the pulling, the tearing at my soul as the confused youngster I was tried to split herself in half, be two people in one body. The strain of remembering not to make any slips that might identify me as working class to whites. The feigned ennui of talking skiing and off-Broadway with fancy blacks so no one had to admit to their roots. The painful pleasure of attending a few carefully chosen black events. The stab of self-hatred at my own evil jokes about how wealthy the white guy supplying the kente cloth concessions must be as the wannabe “African” outfits paraded by. Pondering the significance of myself as the only black person my many white friends know. But who was I kidding: I was usually the only black at my own parties then. Most choices caused me no anguish, merely rendering unto Caesar . . . but Cosmo over Essence? I couldn’t do it.

  I couldn’t wait to tell my friend off. How could that privileged white boy know anything about schizophrenia? About a family, a soul, ripped asunder by the forces of history? About struggle? He would never have the least notion of who I really was and what I’d been through and how hard it was to decide which part of my personality to draw on in a particular situation. I opened my mouth to set him straight with all the ghetto-girl neck-wagging, finger-pointing, infinitive-splitting gusto that I was no longer embarrassed of.

  Me? Elite?

  Then it hit me.

  Yes.

  Me. Elite.

  No world traveler with a B.A., M.A., and Ivy League J.D. can pretend to be one of the proletariat, no matter her origins. I can understand it. I can commiserate with it. I can suffer, through loved ones, the very real tragedies visited upon those who think they’ve escaped. I can remain involved, I can fight for its rights, I can tell its stories. What I can’t do is claim more than honorary membership. All I can do is stand ready to be of assistance and to take advantage of my unique vantage point.

  Me. Elite.

  I wandered the Harvard campus, totally at ease, totally at home.

  I went to Mattapan, totally at ease, totally at home.

  How had that happened? When had that happened?

  I didn’t want to give up either—I’d worked damned hard for admission to both—but how can they possibly be melded?

  As on the beach at Okinawa, I found myself again mourning my dead, the little girl who could now be at peace.

&n
bsp; I cried for that little girl who couldn’t smile without covering her face so no one would see her nose spread. I cried for the girl who had saved her pennies for bleaching cream and circled the hair-relaxer section till no one was left to see her purchase. I cried for the girl hiding in a closet with a salvaged tape recorder trying to ditch her Southern accent. I laughed through tears to imagine her shock at discovering that it would still be detectable to her more sensitive law school classmates.

  In crimson or in a McDonald’s uniform, in English or in Korean, I was what I had always been: a daughter of the Great Migration. Though being born in 1959 officially made me a Baby Boomer, I had always shrugged off the moniker; it just feels wrong, as when people call me “Debbie.” That just wasn’t me. I saw myself as part of my family, not as an individual. My war of personal reference was World War II, not Viet Nam. I valued production, not leisure; I was thirty-four before I was able to put aside my distaste at the lazy decadence of it and nap when given the chance. I endured the nausea and pain of chronic hypertension for years before it occurred to me to see a doctor—I wasn’t bleeding, was I?

  But at HLS, it became clear to me that I had grafted my Southern Baptist work ethic and hardscrabble determination onto the opportunities for which my progenitors deprived themselves. On their backs, I had transformed myself into that which they could only dream of—a Harvard-trained, world-traveled, neurotic attorney turned writer with a Gold Card who dated interracially but had the home training to be ambivalent about it, who would rather have eaten cornbread and collards than sushi, rather have listened to gospel than hip-hop, and who believed that disrespectful rap artists would burn in hell and was comforted by the thought. But whose favorite food, next to fried chicken and mustard greens, is Vietnamese. Who loves classical music and opera as well as the blues.