An American Story (25 page)

In my junior year of high school, I had my only high school boyfriend, Robert, a classmate of Wina's from Beaumont in our old neighborhood. That year, she and I swirled at the center of a large group of guys who were his friends. There were so many of us, our girlfriends and his guy friends in tow, we made our own party everywhere we went. There might be eight guys over to bike-ride, play Ping-Pong, or eat the cakes Mama baked for them.

The guys abused him sadistically and Bobby dogged their footsteps like a pickpocket. They used him as a human dartboard, they locked him in their trunks and screeched around corners, they pounded on him with their fists. He loved it. When Wina and I tried to stop them, Bobby turned on us like a wild animal. During the year I had a boyfriend, Bobby had protectors. He locked himself in the bathroom and cried for joy when they hunted down and pummeled the teenager who'd mugged him. But Robert and I broke up and Bobby, again, lost the only positive male figures in his life. He hated me for “messing things up” with Robert.

Eventually, at about sixteen, he got so bad Mama found the money to send him to a psychiatrist. I hated him for the constant rewards he got for being a screwup. I brought home straight A's and Mama could barely be bothered to notice; Bobby managed to get one C among a rogues' gallery of D's and F's and Mama killed the fatted calf. I should have been the one sent to a shrink.

One day, Mama gave Bobby fifteen dollars and sent him out to Ladue, a ritzy, exclusive suburb of St. Louis. With her hard-earned money, he bought a tank of gas and a nickel bag and set off for the good part of town. Only Mama could have made such a request of him and lived to tell the tale. Only for Mama would he actually have shown up. Only for Mama could I so resent my own flesh and blood.

Bobby sat outside the splendid home of the white man who actually thought he could make sense of the madness inside his head, and smoked three joints. Through the haze of reefer smoke, he watched the gardener come and go, the black housekeeper converse with the black postman, the stay-at-home moms in their expensive peignoirs toddle out for the newspaper. Red-eyed and ravenous, Bobby rang the doorbell and watched the little white man's eyes grow round at the sight of the large, confused black man on his doorstep.

The nervous white man led him up the three flights to the converted office in his mansion and tried to do his job. He reassured Bobby that anything he told him was strictly confidential. Bobby could tell from looking at him that Mama had told him as much as she knew. OK, man, he said. Silence stretched out between them. The white man caved first.

“Do you drink?” the psychiatrist asked.

“Nah, man.”

Smoke dope?”

“Nah, man.”

“Do you . . . fight?”

“Uh-uh.”

The white man was at a loss. The two sat in silence while my mother's money ran out and my brother thought about how he didn't care whether he lived or died. He thought about all the times he and Packy had braced their chests against the shotgun barrels that were supposed to make them back down and screamed maniacally, “SHOOT ME, MOTHAFUCKA!” He thought about how obvious his death wish was, so obvious, in fact, that the worst hoods backed off. He thought about how worthless he felt and how he knew he wasn't good enough for his family. What he wasn't thinking about—and this was most important—was his father and how he was dead and how he loved, missed, and resented him. All those beatings, yes, but oh, all those times together working with tools and getting dirty. But does he drink, toke, or fight? Nah, man.

The timer dinged. My brother drove back to his life.

He was a maniac; who else has ever gotten thrown off his high school football team for beating up his own teammates in the middle of a game? He didn't think they were working hard enough. As he got older, he'd disappear so often and for so long, I'd been sure he was committing the worst crimes imaginable. A decade later, I found out the truth. Until our father died in 1977 when Bobby was thirteen, he was spending most of his time at 4933 Terry Avenue.

My mother had to force me to spend time with Daddy after their separation. I said perhaps fifty pained words to him before he died, all either “yes sir” or “no sir.” He'd inquire politely about my schoolwork or general health, I'd offer up a dish of demure “sir”'s and count the moments until I was safely away from him again. We were like polite litigants trapped together in the courthouse elevator. I'd assumed Bobby's relationship with him was the same. I was very wrong.

Bobby spent five years waiting hours in the snow or humidity for the two buses it took to get back to our old home. A great deal of the time I thought he spent marauding St. Louis, he spent riding around with my father in his broken-down old truck.

I had hated him when he left our warm home swarming with Gooches on Christmas Day, 1976. We had ham, turkey, dressing, greens and cornbread, sweet potato pie—the works. We'd been cooking for days and the house was filled with love and laughter, but still, he had to go.

Like an animal, he rooted with his bare hands among the pile of fried chicken, and I pictured him lying dead on the floor. “Merry Christmas, thug,” I'd sneered. He gave me the finger.

Why was it that he could appreciate nothing that came from his own family? I'd pictured him toking up a Yuletide joint and trashing our gifts to him for his friends' amusement, even though he'd not bothered to buy any. I figured he'd be behind one of the tragic Christmas armed robberies we'd see reported on TV that night. Rather, he'd waited in the freezing cold for the bus and gone to have frozen turkey TV dinners with his father in an empty house.

Bobby spent Christmas night in my old room and listened through the open connecting door as Daddy coughed uncontrollably all night with the metastasized lung cancer that would kill him three days before my senior prom in 1977. Mama forced us to buy Daddy birthday, Christmas, and Father's Day presents; that year's was an industrial-size bottle of Old Spice. After he died, we found it still cellophane-wrapped and untouched in a box with every other unused gift we'd given him over the five-year separation. He died never knowing how to enjoy life.

That left my brother to finish his man-training on the streets. My father and those north St. Louis hoodlums laid the foundation. Puberty did the rest. He got bigger and madder and stopped cowering. He stopped blinking. He started fighting back. He started fighting for no reason at all. Sitting at our Maryland kitchen table, he remembered clearly the first time he fought back and the feeling of satisfaction it triggered, even though he was soundly beaten. “I beat that boy,” he said, “till it wasn't nothing left of my Batman lunch box but the handle.”

What made him decide to fight? Inspecting his beer, he said, “You know, Debbie, you just get tired. All I knew, I was tired of gettin pushed around.”

So why did he stop fighting, stop marauding, give up street life? He shrugs the question off, as if reclaiming one's life is a mere hat trick. My guess is he stopped fighting because he was again tired. Tired of being a teenage failure. Tired of being an able-bodied burden. Tired of self-elimination from his family. I think he wanted to come home to the mother who never lost faith in him, and to the sisters who did.

Once while we lived together, I planned to take my brother to an upscale D.C. bar, but it turned out that he didn't own a tie. I went door to door in my building and borrowed one. Then he annoyed me by dawdling with it around his neck. Finally he told me, brusquely ashamed, that he didn't know how to tie it.

My father taught him that hitting is the way to express disapproval, and that real men don't clean up their own messes. But he didn't teach him to tie a tie. Everything I learned about being a woman I learned from my mother and I consciously pattern my life after hers. My brother's legacy from his father is much more complicated.

MY BROTHER, THE RACE CONSULTANT

My brother's gifts to me, however, are unproblematic. I'd been so smugly sure of all the good I could do for him, it never occurred to me that he had anything to offer in return. I was his bridge back to the family and out to the mainstream, but he was mine across to my black peer group. Without him, making my way back to a sense of my black self would have been mostly mental. I lacked the courage to approach young black people I was unrelated to, especially in culturally specific settings. Older people have always approved of me since I am the quintessential dutiful daughter, but young people—I knew I'd be judged and found wanting, both racially and socially out of step. Also, I dreaded exposure to that special brand of negativity and defeatism which abounds in the black community.

With Bobby by my side, I could go to black gatherings on his coattails and be assumed cool. Often, his friends cocked an eyebrow at my speech patterns, but behind me, I would hear my brother bat cleanup for me with a simple “She cool, man.” In any event, I was smart enough to know to keep my end of a conversation to a minimum. So I just paid attention, listened, and watched. Bobby was my race consultant. I'd shoot a quizzical look at him while one of his friends used ten “know what ahm sayin”'s in a row and he'd translate. One of his friends said I was “razor.” I almost cried; I thought he meant I was cutting, a hard-ass, the very thing I was trying not to be. But no, my brother informed me. “Razor sharp” he meant. Well dressed. Oh.

I was dancing with one of his friends once to Teena Marie's song “Square Biz,” except I didn't know who Teena Marie was, nor had I ever heard the song before. The guy said to me nonchalantly, “Square biz, baby.” I said, “What?” “Square biz. You know . . .” and hunched one shoulder in the general direction of the DJ booth. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was sure a liberty was being taken. Who was he calling baby? I was getting angry and the guy was looking at me like I was loud-talking him when Bobby walked over.

“'S jes the name of the song, Debbie,” he said. To the guy he said, “She don't get out much. Know what ahm sayin?”

“Solid,” the brother said, and they exchanged a complicated handshake.

I just shut up, smiled apologetically, and danced.

While Bobby dictated, I made slang flash cards—“sweet sixteen,” as it turned out, was not a statutory rape victim but a measurement of some drug, cocaine I think. Or maybe it was a particular type of car. I could never remember. My vaunted memory struggled to handle these new inputs, but I persevered. Within days, Bobby made more black friends in my neighborhood than I had in the year before his arrival. Our doorbell started ringing. Within five minutes of hitting town, he'd found and programmed in the happening black radio stations; I alternated between them and the jazz station on my Walkman while working out. He never developed a taste for Billie Holliday and Count Basie, though. I found him shaking his head ruefully over my album collection. He asked me, “How come erbody you listen to is dead?” To my happy surprise, my brother's friends accepted me without comment. Most deferred to and overly respected me. I never mentioned my accomplishments, yet it was clear Bobby had been talking me up. I was like Dorothy at the end of the movie; I'd always had the power to go home. All that had stopped me was my own pigheadedness. I'd always wanted a brother and finally I had one. I'd always wanted to belong somewhere and now I did—the place I'd turned my back on.

I spent as much time as possible reconnecting with my brother—he had insights into the ground level of the community I had no other way of tapping into.

But Bobby wasn't just my path back to my community; he also gave me back my father. Always much too deferential toward me after our reconciliation, Bobby never argued or disapproved when I raved about how much I hated Daddy. He didn't try to excuse our father's iron control over us, or all the whippings over minor infractions, or all the needless deprivations. He'd just say, “Yeah, that's true,” and begin another story about all the time I'd never known about that they spent together working, fishing, hunting, or just puttering in the basement.

He showed me a relaxed, everyday side of Daddy I never knew existed. Just the fact that he'd voluntarily spent time with our father floored and angered me. It also made me see just how wedded to my own opinion I was—how like my father. He also showed me that it was possible to hold Daddy accountable for his brutality while also acknowledging all the other things he was. If only I'd known about all those other things. Bobby told the stories of Daddy's beatings as readily as those of the good times. One story would be about being forced to eat rotted fruit because of the sin of wastefulness, the next about Daddy fighting off the rabid dog bearing down on Bobby. He took the good with the bad in a way that I still can't.

Accepting my brother back into my life was the easiest thing I've ever done. In no time at all, we grew close and have stayed that way, normal sibling wear and tear notwithstanding, in the decade since. My father, conversely, broke my heart all over again. I was so comfortable with the facile hatred for him I'd cultivated over the years that it hadn't occurred to me there was another version of the story. I carried around with me a depthless, one-dimensional TV movie of an inexplicably abusive father who reveled in the unhappiness he'd caused his blameless, abused family. Imagine my horror at finding myself laughing at funny things he'd done with Bobby or taking retroactive pride in some brave thing I'd never known about. I didn't know what to think; nothing he was telling me fit into the comfortable, inch-deep little tableau I'd concocted. For a smart girl, I was awfully confused.

I'd lie in bed remembering Bobby's stories of mundane hauling trips with Daddy and weep for no reason that I could explain. Nor did it help that Bobby had grown into the spitting image of our beefy father. More than once, I'd turn and find my heart in my throat at the sight of my father standing at the kitchen sink—chicken legs, barrel chest, square head, and all. I was furious that I was having a hard time holding on to my anger. I couldn't get him off my mind. I became fascinated by him and yearned to understand what made him behave the way he did.