An American Story (14 page)

“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.

I was awed by my power over a man old enough to be my grandfather. He had a doctorate, he'd studied at prestigious universities, and yet he had to steal from me, a nobody. What else could he be saying but that I was a better thinker and writer than he? It gave me an enormous jolt of confidence. But it wasn't enough. All I had was options. What I needed was direction. All I knew for sure was, I had to get away from St. Louis and I had to have a job with meaning. If I'm to type, so be it, I thought. Just let me type in the name of something meaningful. I needed a reason to get up in the morning.

I got one.

PART II

THE POLITICAL

CHAPTER THREE

———

AIRMAN DICKERSON

BASIC TRAINING

March 10, 1980: my first day of basic training in San Antonio, a month shy of my twenty-first birthday. In my flight of fifty women, few had been to college, few were older than eighteen. We were almost entirely working class, almost entirely white except for four Hispanics and four blacks.

I stood at what I hoped was attention while a team of TIs performed a “health and welfare” inspection on our luggage. Ostensibly, they were looking for contraband before our bags were stowed for the duration of training. The real reason was to show us that we were at their mercy; contraband items (marijuana, candy, other people's belongings) were merely confiscated, no one got punished. All personal belongings were dramatically pawed through, lacy bras held up to the light with great seriousness to ascertain whether they were transparent. The female TIs hung at the edges, laughing at the males' jokes, letting us know whose side they were on. I felt confident, knowing my luggage contained nothing at all interesting. For once, being a bespectacled nerd was going to pay off. The sense of surreality was immense; nothing fully prepares you for the self-contained, Jabberwocky world of the military. The mob of TIs finally arrived at my bunk.

One stepped forward and came to stand nose to nose with me, hoping I'd squirm or try to see around him like the others had so he could dress me down. His highway-patrolman hat dug a trench in my forehead and cast both our faces into shadow. Combat boots crushing my feet, he stared me down. Looking away would only make him light into me—north St. Louis taught me that. Daddy had told us about boot camp on Parris Island when his drill sergeant had woken them all up at midnight in his skivvies, combat boots, and that designed-to-intimidate hat. He'd lined them up and gone down the row punching each one in the gut sans explanation. A sense of warm remembrance had permeated his tale.

All at once, I realized that the TI wasn't really crushing my feet; he was holding his mere millimeters above mine. I felt not pressure, not pain, but the simple nearness of another human. The hat brim was merely resting on my forehead; my imagination, my fear had dug that trench. All I had to be was brave. All I had to do was face this, the path I'd voluntarily chosen.

I tossed my head back and stood up to my full height. I felt powerful, knowing. I wasn't scared. The TI flashed me an almost imperceptible nod and backed off.

I could hear the ominous sound of the taps on the TIs' shoes ricocheting around the room. With my peripheral vision, I could see gangs of them roaming the room like wolves to bellow and attack people: fidgeters; that one girl who would cry for the entire six weeks; feisty “Rodriguez” from a little Texas border town, who would brag that her daughter was conceived in the front seat of a Pinto at McDonald's and who would never, in six weeks, wipe the kiss-my-ass smirk from her face.

Much to my surprise, I
was
berated for the contents of my luggage. My father's stories had not been lost on me; boot camp was something I had a feel for. Aside from a minimal number of necessaries, I'd brought only my favorite author (six Dickens novels—one for each week).

“Looky, looky, we got ourselves a college gal. You been to college, aint ya?” A second TI mugged like a simpleton. He handled my books with feigned awe. “Nick-o-las Nickel-, Nickel-, Nickle bye-bye? Is that how you edu-macated folk pronounce that?” He stopped and stared at me; he was enjoying himself. It was a test—was I supposed to acknowledge him or not?

“Say somethin telligent, college gal. Come on, teach us poor ignent folk somethin, purty pleez!”

The irony made me smile. I used to be berated by black people for putting on airs; now it was as much a class thing as a race thing. That smile was like blood on the water.

The TIs descended en masse. But I was still smiling—I was on Parris Island in the 1940s, the white man at my back, the Japs lurking in the shadows to ambush me. Impartial victory waited in the wings, preferring only the boldest, most dedicated contestant. The TIs were going to yell at me whether I responded or not, whether I smiled or not. But no one there was going to throw me off a troop ship mid-Pacific to make sure I could swim. No one there was going to punch me in the stomach. No one there could terrify me like my father could. No one there could endure what my father had endured. After each slur, I yelled “Sir! Yessir!” even though no one else had, and kept smiling. That must have come to me from my father. This was a kind of lunacy I intuitively understood, and, in a weird way, enjoyed. There was only so far these people, unlike my father, would go.

They could yell all they wanted, as long as they let me stay.

——

In many ways, basic training was a lark. When it was difficult, it was so because everything had to be done as a group, meaning that all progress occurred at the pace of the weakest link. When we went to the clinic for shots, the whole unwieldy flight had to be marched en masse across base for them. In full formation, a five-minute walk could take a half hour. When we ran, no one could be left behind; sometimes we'd end up “running” in comic slow motion while somebody puked alongside the track. No one was allowed to fail, no matter how mundane the task. I folded a thousand duffel bags for the fumble-fingered, hospital-cornered a thousand beds.

Since I had no point of reference for the day-to-dayness of the military, no understanding of why they made us do the odd things they made us do (e.g., folding socks in a particular way or progressing through the chow hall according to a precise pattern of movement), I simply threw myself into each assigned task, however tedious or inexplicable, as if my life depended on it. I'd hit rock bottom as a civilian. I had to make the Air Force work.

When we were sent out on “weeds and seeds” detail (i.e., picking up litter), my neurotic competitiveness drove me to retrieve the most cigarette butts. When we buffed floors, mine had to be translucent. My life had to mean something, I needed to be able to feel my life, even if my life was picking up trash. Anyway, I couldn't help it; my parents did it to me. Sloth was a sin to us and I was no sinner. Also, I didn't want to get yelled at. Soon, however, I was addicted to the high of the TIs' approval. In the beginning, we were pushed no harder than manual labor, but soon we were all thrust into leadership situations to see how we would fare. Not that I realized that then. It was all about not having the TIs turn on me, not getting shipped back to St. Louis in disgrace.

Whether we were sent in twos and threes for weeds and seeds or twenty at a time to do KP, one of us was placed formally in charge and held responsible. That someone was usually me. That responsibility included everything from Airman Brown's rumpled uniform to Airman Waller's failure to salute, to Airman Cady's “flip” attitude and the floor that wasn't quite shiny enough. One of my troops burped during inspection and I was hauled onto the carpet. In the military, someone is always responsible. In the course of any given day, I went from begging my flight mates to behave to cajoling them to psychoanalyzing them to threatening to kick their asses after lights-out—but I got the job done. No one was more surprised than I.

Having grown up under two strict disciplinarians, one of whom thought he was still a marine, I had no trouble adapting. People around me got yelled at for having their hands in their pockets—my mother used to cut mine off or sew them shut to keep me from doing just that. My flight mates would unbutton their shirt cuffs in the Texas humidity; my mother cut my flapping cuffs off. My posture was already ramrod—Johnnie Florence would come up behind me and jerk me up straight when I went through my preteen slouching period. I never got yelled at for not saying “ma'am” and “sir”; I've addressed every elder, every person in a position of authority, that way since I could talk. To this day, my mother, my best friend, is still “ma'am.” After her strict housekeeping and my role as Mama's adjutant, I was relieved to have only one bed to make, one area to keep tidy, one set of laundry to keep clean. Since my father subjected us to 6
A.M.
Saturday morning white-glove inspections for as long as he was around, there was nothing new to me there. No water in the sinks, no trash in the trash cans—I'd always had to live like that. I was amazed by how difficult my flight mates found this. Did they have to do no work at home?

For a bookworm, the academics were a breeze. A true daughter of the Great Migration, I instinctively coupled my strict upbringing with my education and love of indiscriminate reading and grafted them onto the military's need to regulate the minutiae of everyday life. I learned a lesson in basic training that led me straight to the top of every pile I was in during those twelve years: the regulations are your friends.

The proper way to do everything, no matter how trivial, no matter how important, is written down somewhere in the military. Whether it's the proper way to perform an about-face, the procedure for becoming an Air Force One pilot, or how to make three tons of oatmeal, there's a regulation. And NOTHING, but NOTHING, trumps a regulation. Terrified of making a misstep and comforted by reading and rereading the only printed material allowed us, I dove headfirst into the manuals we were given on wearing the uniform, military custom, and the like. I was the “answer girl,” the one who could explain how a proper “to the rear, march” was executed and just how many inches away from the heart your decorations were supposed to be. Nerdiness, love of detail, and hyperorganization are valued traits in the service. They make you cool.

A few weeks into our six weeks of training, Sergeant Harris, our head TI, called me into his office and told me he was naming me dorm chief and that I was well on my way to distinguished graduate. Harris, who was also black, reminded me that I wasn't the first dorm chief; he'd already fired a couple of white girls. “You'll be highly visible,” he said soberly, and we both knew what he meant.

A black TI designating one of the few blacks dorm chief would attract special attention and get us both fried if I botched things. Unless I shone like a star, he'd be accused of playing racial favorites and I'd be accused of getting over simply because I was black. We'd both be tainted. The Air Force is at once a huge, far-flung place and a tiny town—there are far fewer than six degrees of separation between any two members. In any event, our reputations, earned or unearned, would precede us. He was taking a chance with me, something military people do not do lightly.

It was the PSAT all over again. I begged to be passed over.

I didn't want to shine like a star. I didn't want to be “highly visible.” I just wanted to be Air Force. I wanted a satisfying job I could wrap my arms and legs around and hold on to for twenty years until I could retire with a full pension and my memories of letters typed in exotic locales.

The look of quiet pride on his face changed to a sneer. He tossed the dorm chief badge at me and ordered me out of his office. I kept begging. He started assessing five demerits for each minute I spent disobeying a direct order. At the ten-demerit point, I about-faced in a fog and marched off. I wanted to die. There was no way I could pull this off. No way. North St. Louis, here I come.

I wept in the hallway for a while, then marched myself home (basic trainees can't just walk), my future passing in front of my red eyes. Hairnets and deep fryers. Welfare caseworkers and police investigators asking about relatives. Temporary restraining orders.

Hoo ya.

The black girls were ecstatic. “All right!” one crowed. “Now we can give all the shit jobs to the white girls.”

My heart sank. On top of getting all our work done and making sure no one was left behind, I was also sitting atop a powder keg of interpersonal and intergroup chaos.

Then her choice of words hit me.

“What do you mean ‘we,' Waters?”

Sergeant Harris wouldn't yell at “us” if something went wrong. “We” wouldn't be up all night with a flashlight checking wall lockers for conformity while evading marauding TIs.

“‘We' aint dorm chief. I am.” I wasn't happy about this. Couldn't they see that?

No, they couldn't. I saw it in their faces. Someone sucked her teeth in that way that says, I got your number, sister. I was on racial probation, presumed guilty. Now that I'd lucked up on a nickel more than the next black had, I had to consciously demonstrate the racial loyalty that had been presumed before or be damned for my success. But dammit, I had a job to do.

“Oh, it's like that, is it?” “Waters,” the scariest human being I have ever been locked in a confined space with, stood to her full six feet. A Watts native, her voice was a cruel rasp and she had scars I was sure were from knife fights.

Even so, I was more afraid of Harris than of her. A beating I could recover from, but the loss of the Air Force and all its possibilities? All I wanted was a new life. The Air Force was going to give me that, so I was prepared to render unto Caesar by doing things the Air Force way. If I didn't run the flight efficiently, if things fell apart—well, that was an eventuality I wasn't prepared to face.

“Yeah. It's like that,” I said, and stared them down. There was no going back for me and I knew what would come next. Since I wouldn't identify solely with the blacks, they wouldn't identify with me if I ever needed backup. If I black-identified preemptively, they'd back me up no matter what; any opposition would instantly become “racist.” If I wouldn't, I would be on my own if I got into trouble. So be it.

The white girls, too, challenged my authority. Not so much on racial terms as on general principles. But as we moved along in the program, everyone adapted, became more confident. The TIs lightened up, too, since we were doing so well. We were all after new lives, all happy to lose ourselves in the program. Inevitably, I bumped heads with lazy girls, girls who felt they should be dorm chief, or girls who simply pulled something boneheaded, but I managed. It was then, the first time I got to make myself over, that I found out I was funny.