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Authors: Debra J. Dickerson

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BOOK: An American Story
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But Daddy was still on Old Testament time. A son stole fifty cents, so the patriarch beat him all over the house. From where we cowered in the attic, we girls could hear my mother calling, “That's enough Eddie. That's enough Eddie. That's . . .” Bobby just kept screaming and running. Afterward, the furniture in nearly every room of the first floor was overturned, upended, scored by Daddy's belt. My cousin Nicky was staying with us that week. She secretly phoned our uncle to come get her and waited on the porch until he arrived.

After that, we were almost completely isolated from the family. We'd been cut off from our friends for a long time. The embarrassing half-paneled, half-painted walls and hand-me-down everything were one part of the problem; the other was Daddy's tendency for mayhem. Once, when we'd thought him away, he'd snuck up on a group of us playing gin rummy, that game of de debil. He passed through, seeming unconcerned. But that was just a diversion. He slipped upstairs, ran back down with his belt, and beat us all. The cousins and neighbors ran, but not us Dickersons. We knew that running was defiance, crying was contradiction. We'd gritted our teeth and took our blows like men, like marines, like Dickersons. No one came to our house after that; we wouldn't have let them if they'd tried.

The whipping Bobby got for the desk caper was a turning point for Mama. Though I'd begged, though her sisters had begged, she would not discuss leaving. What God had joined together . . . But Mama overheard Wina and me laying plans to run away and accepted that it had to end. That she had to leave this foolish, doomed man who could not tell the difference between fear and respect.

In the spring of 1973, while he was away driving his truck, we moved across town to a safe house. Safe, because he wasn't there.

CHAPTER TWO

———

WHISTLING WOMEN

It was raining the day we left.

It was spring but still early yet, and the last of winter's chill seeped in through the big crack in my bedroom window. Through the connecting door, I could hear Mama moving around. Eyes still closed, my ears strained, but no use. He didn't want to be located. No telling where he was.

Wordlessly, we finished our morning tasks and took the breakfast seats we'd occupied forever, then waited for him to sit so we could eat. Ignoring us, he finished making his lunch, fumbled around at his desk in the hall, spent a few minutes in his basement. His point proved, we sat and waited. Finally, he sauntered back in, sat, and blessed the table.

Sitting to his left, my sister Dorothy said a Bible verse and everyone followed suit clockwise around the table. Then it was my turn. There was a long silence.

My heart was so full of bitterness I thought I might choke. I contemplated speaking from my heart on this last day under his thumb, as I had fantasized about so often. A million things—curses, pleas, memories, confessions, questions, all the things I might have said, all the things I would never say—coursed through my mind. I watched the ever-present storm clouds of his hellish temper gather on his face as I wasted his precious time.

We're leaving, you crazy bastard! I thought, and I knew my eyes were dangerous.

Mama cleared her throat. She was right. I couldn't risk pushing him too far, not today.

Jesus wept,” I said with all the authority I could muster.

Then, all of a sudden, breakfast was over and he was gone. I have been fatherless ever since.

My mother managed pretty well that day for a woman who was dooming herself to eternal damnation. We flew all over the house, my mother, Dorothy, Wina, and I, carting off the few possessions we'd be taking with us. We'd been stockpiling castoffs in preparation for this day. This time, I hadn't minded scavenging through the piles at the VV; now, we had a reason to settle for others' discards. Given the sin she was already committing in leaving her husband, my mother would not compound it by absconding with one whit more than necessary. We left him the furniture, the dishes, the pots and pans, the bedding. The house.

For all my righteous anger, once our labors began I found myself feeling sorry for my father. Then I found myself feeling angry for pitying him. Then I didn't know what I was feeling, just that I felt bad.

I had begged my mother to tell him we were leaving. The thought of my father coming home to a house empty of his wife and children broke my bitter little heart. How could he help knowing the truth, that those he saw himself as protecting had fled him like a pestilence. I knew just how desperate I was to be away from him, and the knowledge that he would know it, too, made me want to howl with sympathy for him.

I couldn't stop imagining what it would be like to walk through the front door that day and find my world turned upside down. So I had pestered my mother, with increasing hysteria, to tell him. I guess I thought that a polite notification would have made our leaving him a mere inconvenience he could have planned his week around. I even lectured her that it was un-Christian, lying almost, to run off while his back was turned. She forbade me to broach the subject again. “You'll understand by and by,” she said. As always, she was right.

As the day progressed, I continued to lurch between emotions. Like good little Dickersons, we didn't discuss our feelings or try to comfort each other. We just scurried around avoiding eye contact, each lost in her own private misery, each stoic as hell.

Her arms full of clothes from our clothesline, Mama regarded me strangely as I stood in the middle of the hallway, trying to decide how I felt seeing these walls, these rooms, for the last time.

You run out of stuff to do?” she asked.

“Look at these walls. He never finish nothin, do he?” I sneered. I had no idea I was going to say that.

Mama followed my gaze around the room. “Huh?”

“Look, there.” I pointed at the base of the staircase. “Look at all the mouse holes. Why cu'nt he jes plug em?”

“Debbie, stop,” she warned, still confused but figuring it out. Children had no business criticizing anyone, let alone their father.

“Look up, Ma,” I said, straining my head toward the watermarked, cracked ceiling. “I guess he jes waitin for the roof to fall right in on us. Triflin.”

“Stop, Debbie.”

“Triflin. 'Sall he is.”

She slapped me. I insulted him again. She slapped me again. I opened my mouth and she turned on her heel, but I followed her, spewing insults. On the trot, she turned and slapped me again, then slammed the kitchen door in my face so she wouldn't have to slap me anymore.

I ran out of steam and lurched back to sadness. That's how Mama found me a few moments later. Sad. I was emptying the hamper, separating his clothes from ours. She found me there at the top of the stairs weeping into one of his work shirts. It was the VV smell his clothes never seemed to lose that got me.

——

The strain of our escape plan had been nearly unbearable. We were racked with worry and guilt, especially our mother. It all went over Bobby's head; we picked him and Necie up from school and brought them to a new home. He hadn't had to do any work, he hadn't had to bear any guilt, he bore no responsibility. He had no choice. He was eight and I was twelve. Incongruously, he was excited over the new house. He didn't get it; he didn't realize his life had changed forever. All he knew was that he had a cool new bedroom while his sisters had to share the basement. He couldn't fathom our gloom.

Daddy showed up after work and I watched through our new front window as he searched out addresses. He squinted back and forth from the letter in his hand to the house before him, as if a wrong address would bring his family back to him. Eddie Mack looked cowed, something I had never seen before. The look on his face made me drop the curtain and back away. He marched himself in and we stood around mute and agonized; a lifetime spent together and we still had no idea how to reach each other.

Bobby ran around waving a chair in the air in his excitement and broke the dining room chandelier. My father moved automatically to give him a smack, then stopped himself. It was as if we'd been granted asylum in some foreign country where he had no authority. I hovered close to my mother while he was there; even had they been capable of talking, they wouldn't with me present. They couldn't even look at each other; they fidgeted and bobbed from foot to foot and continued failing each other. Twenty-five years of marriage just slipped away from them that day and came to nothing but their six kids, only two of whom—JoAnn, who was across town with her own family, and the inexplicable Bobby—could abide their father.

ON OUR OWN

My mother and I became ever closer in those lean years on her single income. Those years were grim, grim but good. We were too poor to pay attention, but at least there was no fear; we never considered going back, though the privation of those years nearly broke us. It's hard to say which made me stronger: living with Eddie Mack Dickerson or living without him.

My sharpest memory of those years is of watching my mother calculate the bills each payday. Still uniformed, she'd sit at the kitchen table every Friday afternoon clucking fretfully to herself, biting her lips while she rifled through the shopping bag which held our household accounts. She'd organize, then reorganize, the little envelopes with their cellophane windows. Invariably, some bills went back into the shopping bag to be attempted again next time around.

Afterward, Wina and I would head to our little branch bank in the Riverview Circle with a list of money orders. Like many poor people, my mother had no bank accounts except for a frequently raided Christmas club. I'd hand over that list written in my mother's crabbed hand on the back of a receipt or a tear of paper bag and watch the teller roll her eyes heavenward at the tedious prospect of preparing yet another raft of piddling money orders: $10.00, $13.47, $10.00, $18.18, $22.14, $10.00, $10.00, $10.00. Ten dollars, the minimum payment for most of her debts, was the money order amount most frequently represented on Mama's list.

That sad list of forlorn numbers fascinated me. I still have a pile of them, those scraps of paper bearing the symbols of her toil, of her love for her children. I knew they identified her as a slave. A slave to her job, a slave to debt, a slave to the nearest grocery store. For better or worse, a love slave to her kids.

The early seventies were a time of inflation, recession, and job instability; not a good time for a major lifestyle change. Mama switched from waitressing to a factory job and things improved. Daddy gave us what he gave us and we never asked for more. Then it all fell apart. There was a blur of bad times: her union went on strike, or she was laid off, or she'd had that surgery. Take your pick, each of those occurrences sent us into a tailspin. She waitressed when she could, cleaned offices and homes, but it wasn't enough. With so many out of work, wages were a joke and full-time work unavailable. We started dumping the bills, unopened, into the shopping bag. Wina and I invented the tea and crumpet game then. The only things we could count on eating were tea and toast, fried potatoes, canned pork and beans, or meatless spaghetti. The game was to fill up on Lipton's and toast while reenacting what we assumed was high tea as culled from my reading. We did our best English accents, said “dah-ling” and “rahthuh.” This bit of toast became a cucumber sandwich, that one a hot buttered scone. There were free lunches at school and something, if only “tea and crumpets,” for breakfast and dinner. Mama would remind us that “you go to sleep, you won't know you hungry.” She was right.

In the evenings, we'd huddle together in the kitchen, the only warm room, and talk, crochet, read, do our homework, each other's hair. Since we had nothing but each other, that's what we made use of, especially after the TV broke and we could afford to neither replace nor repair it.

Regardless of all the things we did without, no one complained; we knew there were worse things than hunger or a lack of sitcoms. Charity, for instance. Hard as I argued against it, the day came when Mama and I drove, grim and miserable, to the welfare office. Sick with the shame of it, I told her: “I'd rather starve. The rest would, too.” Distracted and sad, she mumbled, “Guess I rather y'all wun't.” Forbade to speak further on the subject, I just stewed—but wouldn't let her go to that shameful place alone.

I behaved badly at the welfare office. I sniffed at the other women and their surely illegitimate children. I refused to sit on the germ-ridden chairs. I corrected the English of every social worker who spoke to us. We didn't belong there. Mama was too dispirited to give me the throttling I deserved. And then we were told we were not in financial need.

Stunned, we left without another word. Back in the car, we sat there staring at each other openmouthed, the keys still in Mama's hand. Focused on dealing with the shame of charity—Mama in quiet contemplation, me in feigned contempt—we had not imagined such an outcome.

Simultaneously, we broke into sniggers. They escalated into outright guffaws. We had no idea how we were going to manage until the factory reopened/the strike ended/she recovered from her surgery, but laughing at the absurdity of it all was what we most needed. Since we didn't starve to death, didn't lose the house, didn't die of hypothermia, I guess our beloved civil servants were right. No matter how dire our circumstances after that, never again would we consider public assistance. I was even more contemptuous of welfare recipients after this than I had been before. They couldn't be any worse off than we were and we'd made do “without accepting” handouts, so, I concluded relentlessly, anyone could.

My relief at not going on welfare and my contempt for its recipients coexisted with a subconscious fury at the impersonal government which taxed us but failed to take an affirmative interest in our well-being. Like most poor minorities, my mother had an unexamined fear of the government not unlike her fear of our neighborhood strongmen. She dreaded drawing its attention.

As late as the 1980s, I had to come home on leave to drag my mother to the Social Security office to collect her widow's benefits. She wouldn't be eligible in her own right until sixty-five, and with her peasant's inbred low profile, she just knew the government would find a way to punish her for stepping into its gaze; help for a working-class widow who'd raised five kids alone just seemed too good to be true to her. I couldn't even get her to articulate the fear that cost her nearly a year of benefits. Mama held her breath for months and hoarded the money, waiting for the other governmental shoe to drop. No, we Dickersons didn't fight the power, we sought the shadows. We were oriented toward evading blows, not striking them. It never occurred to us to protest the denial of our benefits. It didn't even occur to us to be angry. We didn't think our good citizenship meant anything; we didn't see ourselves as served by the government, but rather as subservient to it. Taxes, for us, were a form of protection money; all we asked in return was not to be crushed under the bootheel of government. We expected, demanded, nothing, and that's exactly what we got.

——

Our new home life, compared to what had preceded it, was a haven. Outside it, however, I was still a stranger in a strange land. Every adolescent is, of course, but I had no way of knowing that.

Puberty crushed me. My stinky hair, my electrical-taped glasses, my pizza face, the home I wouldn't allow anyone to see—I was a social outcast at Wade. I hung with the uncool, unbeautiful people. Darlene was fat. Beverly was tormented for coming to school dirty and hungry: they called her “Snow Monkey.” Wanda: dark skin, bad hair, bad neighborhood. Karen was a grade ahead but had committed some social faux pas that made her classmates torture her. On the bright side, Valencia was beautiful, stacked, and athletic, but considered “country” because she came from Wanda's same bad neighborhood but refused to be ashamed of it. They'd sneer about the slaughterhouse a block away from her home and the foul fumes it spewed into the air. She'd kick their ass. The voluptuous Valencia brooked no disrespect.

BOOK: An American Story
9.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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