An American Story (2 page)

As is the case with all migrants, the future held for us mixed blessings and the “in it but not of it” that all those who have challenged their destinies experience, but we've always known there was no going back. And as we alternated between losing hard and winning big up North, we've always known what happens when you get what you pray for.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

With her family, my mother migrated north from the Mississippi Delta during World War II. After the war ended and my father mustered out of the Marines, he made his way north, too, from Covington, Tennessee. Both from sharecropping families, neither had much schooling when they met, married, and produced six children with me the fourth. Settled in black north St. Louis, they overlaid their backcountry ways on the big, godless city. Given the strict enforcement of the color line back then, everyone I knew was just like me: recently arrived from and still firmly tied to the Deep South. In short, I come from a long line of folks well used to surviving against the odds so that, come Sunday, they could sing with bitter defiance, “Wunt take nothin for my journey now, Lord.” Had we not excelled at figuring work-arounds and making do, we would never have made it.

It wasn't only the lack of material wealth that we'd had to overcome. My adolescent mother had once cowered with her seven siblings under a bed while angry white men ringed their cabin and my grandfather emptied his shotgun through the front door (knowing my grandfather, he'd had it coming). Her maternal great-grandmother was an illegitimate, full-blooded white woman given away to the slaves to raise, her paternal great-grandmother a full-blooded African slave sold away and lost forever to her family. The lost one's husband was full-blooded Cherokee. Her mother, my grandmother, made my grandfather wait an entire year to consummate the marriage; given her childbed death, eight stair-step children and several miscarriages later, maybe there was more than modesty behind her refusal. My father's struggles as a Depression-era TB orphan raised by an abusive grandfather were so painful he barely spoke of them. Facing each day of my formative years with all this in the back of my mind, I couldn't help noticing that modern-day racism and deprivation couldn't hold a candle to what we'd left behind.

My parents should have been radicalized by their circumstances, but like most of their kind, they focused on work and family. They were largely apolitical except for voting straight-line Democrat; I recall almost no political discussion in our house. They shielded us from all adult affairs; we were banished from any room where a relative wouldn't be shushed from speaking of a divorce, a pregnancy, or the like. Even so, my first awareness of politics and ideology came when I was very young, maybe seven or eight. I was watching television with my mother while she ironed. I can still vaguely recall lots of white people standing on a stage with, I believe, Hubert Humphrey. I asked her what these “Demcrats” and “Publicans” everybody kept talking about were. Her words made a lasting impression on me.

“Democrat is what you are. Democrats'll let the little man have somethin. Caint have much as the white man, naturally, but they will let us ordinary folk get somewhere.” She sprinkled water on my father's work shirt and set it sizzling under the hot iron. “Republicans don't want nobody else to have nothin.”

Thirty years, a J.D., and two political science degrees later, I still find Mama's explanation useful.

In my working-class family of migrated sharecroppers, we were all unthinking Democrats. In content, though, our politics were conservative. When I was a child in the 1960s, my father called civil rights protesters “knuckleheads” who “should take their fists out the air and get jobs.” My mother opposed busing because “chiren should stay in they own neighborhoods. What y'all look like passin one school jes to get to the next un?” Fundamentalist Christians, they opposed abortion, supported capital (and corporal) punishment, kept hunting guns, disapproved of welfare recipients, unwed mothers, and those who didn't work. Raised to strict obedience, I didn't understand that there were alternatives (or problematics) to those positions, so until I was about twenty-four, I had no conscious politics. As close as I came was to know this: that rich white men ran the world and that I was going to have to work like a dog, like my parents, for survival. I had no plans to fight them, merely to outlast them and give no offense. I didn't register to vote when I turned eighteen in 1977 and gave no thought at all to politics until about 1983 or 1984. By then, I had become consciously, vehemently conservative and wanted the whole world to know it.

In 1983, newly back from two years on active duty in Korea, I was focused like a death ray on finishing my B.A. so I could become an officer in the United States Air Force. I wanted nothing else in life. Flushed with the support and external validation I'd never had before, I had all the answers to the pressing questions of the day—welfare, abortion, unemployment, education—and the answer was always the same: every man for himself. No one owes anybody else anything, and anybody who tells you differently is a whining loser who wants a handout.

My success in the military had gone directly to my head. It would be years before I'd realize that my travels from the inner city to places like Korea, Turkey, and the Pentagon were not the real journey. The real odyssey was the pilgrimage from Debbie to Debra, from self-hating to sane, from mental ghetto to mental freedom.

PART I

THE PERSONAL

CHAPTER ONE

———

FAMILY HISTORY

MAMA

It wasn't just the social and historical contexts into which I was born that made me gnaw at the corners of my place in the scheme of things; there were also the specifics of my large and close-knit family. My mother's side, my closest side, is full of vinegary characters who, out of pure cussedness, loved to fight whatever power was closest to hand. (Usually, this fight was verbal rather than legal or physical; in my family, a cutting wit is the weapon of choice. Since the little guy couldn't actually change his situation, we believe, he might as well make fun of it.) Despite their many years sharecropping in the Mississippi Delta, they rarely expended much of their hell-raising energy railing against whites.

My maternal grandfather, John Bishop “Paw Paw” Gooch, was not exactly a Norman Rockwell figure. His stories, and he had lots of them, were always either profane, sacrilegious, or X-rated, but blacks were almost always the main players. “White folks don bother me,” he used to say, “you know in the fust fi minutes where you stands wid any particular one of em. 'S niggers that cause all my problems.” He cackled about having been too young to fight in World War I and too old for World War II. He cheated his great-grandchildren at board games and blew smoke in their faces if they complained. He once tossed a crumpled dollar bill at a preteen collecting for football uniforms on the street and sneered, “Now quit beggin.” He pinched my teenage girlfriends' behinds at holiday gatherings and convinced his cronies that I was his wife. I was eleven.

When the Gooches got together, laughter and liquor flowed and everybody yelled at once, jockeying for the floor in a wonderful cacophony. Their stories, by and large, all had punch lines rather than the indictments one might have expected. They were intended to entertain, to capture the spirit of the times and the personalities of their friends and neighbors. While there were, of course, stand-alone stories of white brutality and the like, those were rare. Jim Crow was the backdrop to all their lives, but they seemed to regard it with the same spirit of inventiveness and perspicacity as they did the weather: something to be circumvented and outfoxed, or, failing that, to be borne. Rarely was the degradation the point of a story; it was merely the framework. Their stories were of people, not politics.

Born in 1927, my mother, Johnnie Florence Gooch, was her mother's right hand, just as I am to her. Paw Paw had fourteen siblings, my grandmother Ouida six; my mother was the third of their eight children. The surrounding area teemed with Gooch relations as her family farmed for the man who owned nearly everything and everyone for miles. When her mother died trying to give birth for the ninth time, fifteen-year-old Johnnie took on the role that still defines her: mother. Though life was hard, with so many relatives able to hunt, fish, and farm, the family managed.

My grandmother's side of the family was highly prized for its looks—meaning, of course, their light skin and “good” hair. These traits come from ancestors like my great-great-grandmother. Belle was white, the illegitimate child of the master's daughter and a white stable hand. When his daughter got pregnant, the master hid her away and forced her to give birth in secret to my great-great-grandmother. Then, my entirely white ancestor was torn from her mother and given to the slaves to raise. Granma Belle, now “black,” married Henry, a Mohawk Indian, and had six children. Looking white was one of the few assets the Williams line possessed; they knew it had value. When my mother's oldest sibling was born, my white-looking grandmother wept because she was dark, like my grandfather. “Y'all married dark,” she'd wailed to two of her sisters, “but yo babies aint black.” At gatherings, my mother's aunts inspected the child for signs of lightening as she stood helplessly under their disapproving gaze. While my mother is a medium brown, her long, wavy Indian-black hair and Lena Horne looks spared her this indignity.

On my grandfather's side, another ancestor's master freed him on his deathbed; he resold himself into slavery for a fancy pair of boots. One of their children married an Indian and gave birth to my great-grandmother. Paw Paw's grandmother, an African-born slave, also married an Indian. She had nine children before being sold away and lost to the family forever. Grandpa George, her Cherokee husband, was shot and killed in an argument over who was going to call at a square dance.

With this pedigree, there was no way this family could take itself too seriously. So they sang, they danced, they drank on the holidays and didn't think about work or white folks except when dealing with either directly. And they had lots of kids: I have thirty first cousins.

To think of sharecropping, Depression-era Mississippi is to think of oppression and deprivation. But in the Mississippi I heard about at home, there were usually only little stories; not lynchings but church lunches. Not rape but revival meetings. Like the local man with two wives—one for planting-time and one for harvest-time. One was so mean, with a wife so timid, that he kept her home just by sprinkling a ring of soot around the house and forbidding her to cross it. But another mean wife-beater wasn't quite so good at his job. His wife, the one he thought he'd cowed, used heavy twine to sew him up in their thick muslin sheets as he slept and beat him half to death with a poker. I heard about the several white families near the Gooches who were so poor my grandmother would take them in during cold spells so they wouldn't freeze to death. All the kids, black and white, slept together like a brood of snuggling puppies. The next day, my grandmother would delouse her children with lye; everybody knew that poor white trash had lice.

Dire though their circumstances were, I'm hard pressed to come up with many Gooch stories about the particular evil of Mississippi whites.

Hard pressed but not incapable.

There was the time the rich white landowner took a driving tour through his feudal holdings, spied my great-great-aunt's lush garden, kicked open their door, and demanded half: “What grows on my land belongs to me!” He made clear his intention to claim half in perpetuity, so they plowed the garden under that night. And then there were all the times the overlord sent for his vassals to perform some menial labor in his baronial mansion, like furniture-moving or trash-hauling. They made a habit of showing up drunk, so that custom withered away as heirloom china shattered on the polished oak floors of de Big House.

Degradation was a daily occurrence for them, yet I have to comb through my memory for stories like that. I don't believe I could come up with many more. Except, of course, for the worst one, the one I'll never forgive that Southern system of apartheid for.

Though for years my mother moved me to tears with the sad story of her mother's childbed death, I was nearly grown before she added the details many others would have put first. A white doctor had managed to stabilize my grandmother, though her condition remained grave. He left firm instructions that she was to be left alone, that only he would attend her. White interns, eager to practice their newfound surgical arts, operated on her for practice anyway. Drastically weakened, infected from the botched job, and afraid of what else they might do to her, my grandmother hid the pills they gave her in the masses of her curly black hair and died. It's not clear that the pills would have saved her, or even exactly what they were for, but none of the family ever doubted the wisdom of her refusing further treatment. Having heard about the forced surgery, the Gooches were coming to take her home to safety. But they were too late.

To my mother, that story is only about inevitability and loss. It's about hearing those tiny little pills click-clack against the floor tiles when they came to claim the body, watching them skitter heedlessly, impotently buffeted by forces so much stronger than they. This was not—as it was for me, when I tried to radicalize her later—a story about white perfidy and the valuelessness of black existence. To accept that version, she would have had to have been a different person, a person who could hate.

She rarely told a story the point of which was anything other than simple entertainment. She kept up with the yearly (pre-VCR) showings of
Cinderella, The Wizard of Oz,
and
Peter Pan;
she clapped as hard as we did to keep Tinkerbell alive. She made the simplest tasks and events seem fabulous, which is not to suggest that she wasn't a stern taskmaster; no drill sergeant set higher standards than did she. For her, there were only two ways to do anything: “my way and the wrong way.” The wrong way got you whipped, so we stepped lively. Take hanging out the wash.

After manhandling it through our wringer washer (a big improvement over the scrub board and big iron tub that used to turn Mama's knuckles to sausage, but still hard work), our job had just begun. It had to be hung in a particular order (men's shirts, men's pants, all underwear—in their proper, gendered order—obscured in the middle for decency's sake); in a particular manner (right side out, right side up, front facing the house if out back, the basement stairs if inside); and with a specified number of pins (five per sheet, two per shirt unless it's a baby's, in which case . . . ); pinned in a prescribed fashion (shirts: one at each shoulder . . . ). An overuse of clothespins was wasteful, an underuse was trifling, slovenly. Any deviation was “jes doin things any ol' kinda way.”

Worse than her whippings was her wit. If I daydreamed while a pot of water hissed and bubbled unnoticed, Mama would quip, “What you want that pot to do 'sides boil?” If some lazybones replaced an empty box in the pantry, she'd ask innocently, “When you colleck enough, you get a prize?” But when the housework was done, she let her hair down.

Everything arouses wonder and curiosity in Johnnie Florence. She doesn't hate whites or the rich or the bosses, merely the unkind. When I asked her how it felt to live under Jim Crow, she said guilelessly, “I guess I just dint wan go nowhere the white folks dint want me going ner do nothing they dint want me doin.” This kind of talk infuriated my father because, you see, my daddy was a person who could hate.

DADDY

Born in 1924 in Covington, Tennessee, Eddie Mack Dickerson's family was very small and soon to become even smaller. Both his parents (Robert and Landora) were dead of tuberculosis by the time he was six. He didn't even remember his mother; she was dead by his second birthday, another grandmother I would never know. Mary, his only sibling, would succumb to that same killer in a few years. He was shunted from one ever more distant relative to another as TB devastated his entire region along with his family.

Orphaned and no doubt traumatized, my father and my aunt, who would soon leave him, first landed with their grandparents, Eddie and Mariah. Eddie drank and used his fists. So much so, his own daughters married at the onset of menses to escape him. His wife, lacking such an alternative, rarely roused herself to take note of her surroundings. My father, the little boy, eventually cowed his bestial grandfather into drunken submission and provided a safe haven for his fading sister and grandmother. “Safety,” in such circumstances, however, was a relative term.

Though they were no longer beaten, my great-grandfather continued to drink. No longer free to physically maul and maim, he made their miserable shotgun cabin a place haunted by a living, malevolent ghost. His drinking made him incapable of bringing in the crop: this task fell to my eleven-year-old father. So, the prepubescent Eddie Mack spent those years hat in hand, begging the white folks for more time, more credit, more daylight so he could get it all done.

All in all, my father had a loveless, most un-Gooch-like childhood and he rarely discussed it with his children.

What he did discuss was white people and their evil. Most of his stories revolved around one basic theme: the fortitude required of blacks living in a white man's world. Whites made his grandfather a drunk, whites made him farm land he could never own, whites killed his family with overwork and inhumane conditions. Whites set him adrift in the world, a peasant chained to a country they never let him forget wasn't his. He lived his life at a slow boil, always on the verge of an eruption. His anger at life's unfairness (a.k.a. “the white man”) was a seething socket deep within him that he plugged into for energy and drive.

Daddy was confused about whites, though. He must have been, because when World War II began, he voluntarily enlisted. Why fight for a country of which you consider yourself a noncitizen, a country you consider to be profoundly evil and incapable of change? But in the end, his service was the thing he was most proud of in life. In the United States Marine Corps he found the family he desperately longed to have. The Marines made him part of something larger than himself, that had a glorious history, and that ensnared him in bonds of familiarity and joint effort. No more loneliness, no more adolescence and fear. Just as the Air Force would for me forty years later, the Marines set his fighting spirit alight; that light never went out again, not for the rest of his life. It put the finishing touches on the stoicism and grit he'd honed as a child and young man and gave it direction. Eddie Mack Dickerson was a United States marine until the day he died.

Unfortunately, once the war was over, there was little call for trained killers.

Mustered out, he joined some distant cousins in St. Louis and married my mother. He'd fought on Okinawa with her cousin Smitty, whom she pen-palled through the war. Daddy bartered his precious cigarettes for her photo as they steamed toward Okinawa. He vowed to marry the beauty in the picture he carried for the rest of the war when he got home, and that's exactly what he did.

Daddy did his best to train us to follow in his gritty footsteps. He taught us the proper way to bayonet an enemy (which was much simpler with the scrawny Japanese than when he'd practiced in boot camp at Parris Island), bragged about how many hours straight he could plow in subzero temperatures, lectured us on how ill prepared we were for the rigors of life and how likely we were to starve to death. He dismissed my mother's stories as frivolous because unlikely to put food on the table. He always did things the hard way: he refused to see doctors, he acquired everything secondhand, he never conceded a point in an argument no matter how wrong he was. He even refused to cry out when the truck he was working on fell and crushed his leg. He needed to fight; he needed an enemy, something to defeat or at least to resist, so he wouldn't feel helpless. He also needed an audience to witness his victories—that's where we came in.