An American Story (28 page)

When I had to tackle the confidence course for the second time at OTS, I went all out knowing that the black female prior-service OT wing commander's progress would be of great interest. I attacked the obstacles like a maniac. As I bore down on the water obstacle, I could see the rope we were supposed to swing across on hanging still in the middle of the brackish pond. I couldn't possibly reach it.

I can't swim. I am terrified of water.

So terrified that, in basic, I had seen that rope swinging toward me for exactly what it was—the blessed lifesaver that would keep me from drowning. I'd timed it perfectly and swung to safety in one hysterically balletic movement. But now, I was the designated role model—and that cursed rope wasn't swinging toward me. It was miles from my grasping fingers.

The flight commander manning the obstacle wasn't looking my way and there was no time to await instructions. The rest of OTS was running behind me—everybody had to swing on that rope and I couldn't hold things up. There was no help for it. I gritted my teeth, pumped my legs as hard as I could, and dove for the rope that was so very, very far away.

Thank God I didn't end up going headfirst into that disgusting water—I went feet first. The photo I was presented shows me going for my dip with outstretched arms and an odd smile on my face. My head is held high and my tippy-toes are just touching the water.

When I surfaced, the throng lining the pond was hooting with laughter.

“OT,” the flight commander gasped between guffaws, “I'da swung the rope to you. Everybody else waited—but not you!” He waved the grappling hook he used to retrieve the rope; he'd dropped it as I approached and was looking for it when I made my great leap forward.

I laughed, too. My worst physical fear—water—and I'd faced it. My worst emotional fear—public humiliation—and the phrase had lost its force. My mother had kept having babies even though the doctors said it would kill her. My father had jumped off that troop ship. Sodden and shaking but still moving forward, I felt their proud presence as I made my giddy way to the next obstacle amid the back slaps and shoulder squeezes of my fellow OTs. I lived every day at OTS buoyed, challenged, and comforted by the knowledge that I was doing my family proud, that I was making their sacrifices count for something.

But I had more fears to face. Project X is an open-air facility of eight or ten different exercises, each blocked off from the other's view by high walls. We were placed in teams of three to ten, depending on the exercise, and had to figure a way out of some scripted scenario against a stopwatch. We were handed a card which explained that we were the crew of a bomber downed behind enemy lines, for instance, and had to make our way back to friendly territory. Or the mission might be an escape from a POW camp across a raging “river” marked on the ground. One of us might be designated wounded and have to be gently carried, even if it was an all-girl team but for the “injured” six-foot-two, 220-pound former linebacker on a stretcher. There were walls, ledges, minefields, ropes to swing on, “burning building” façades to jump from—MacGyver-like ingenuity was required to figure out what the pair of gloves or the iron bar or those six short lengths of rope we were given were for. But it wasn't our ingenuity that was being tested, it was our ability to work as a team under pressure. As with the sports, everyone was required to play every role, from squad leader to comatose deadweight. There was a “school solution” to every scenario and it was our job to find that solution. The flight got a merit for each scenario we mastered.

I ended up atop a goalpost-like structure, all my team members on the other side waiting for me to swing across the divide on a rope before the “enemy patrol” was due by.

I am afraid of heights. I get dizzy on a ladder. I'm more afraid of water, but not much more.

But if I didn't swing on that rope, thrown across an even higher third goalpost and anchored only by two flight mates' body weight, we wouldn't get the merits or a leg up in the Honor Flight competition. We'd fail. Because of me. I would have eaten the demerits in a minute, but my flight . . .

I made every person on that other goalpost, the one that was at least one hundred feet away and twenty feet in the air, say: “Debra, I will catch you.” Not “Miss Dickerson” or “OT.” Debra. As the stopwatch ticked off the last of the few seconds we'd been alloted, I closed my eyes and let go.

My feet never touched that goalpost. Every member of my team had some part of my body and I couldn't have cared less whose hands were where.

Daddy wouldn't have asked for their assurance—he'd rather have gone splat on the pavement—but I had no such qualms. I'm not a sharecropper, just the daughter of sharecroppers. I know how to meld the old and the new. Still, I know he'd have been proud, because I got the job done, however I had to do it.

——

Once I became OT wing commander, I had been afraid that my flight mates might freeze me out, but to my amazement, quite the contrary happened.

Twice during OTS, the second time at about the nine-week point, we had to write letters evaluating every other member of the flight on their strengths and weaknesses. OTS called them “peer evaluations”; “peer smears,” of course, to us. They were supposed to be constructive and anonymous. But I don't believe in anonymous statements so I signed all of mine, which made the exercise excruciatingly difficult and time-consuming. Criticism, after which you will have to live and work with the person you've criticized, is hard work.

I was very worried about my peer smears. I'd gone out of my way not to overshadow my mostly young, mostly non-prior-service flight mates. The last thing I wanted to do was be some know-it-all GI Joe jerk bossing everybody around and boring one and all with my war stories. I gave advice and help when unavoidable but kept even that to a minimum. Yet they were so young and untrained, there'd been many occasions when flight progress was at stake and I saw no choice but to be somewhat dictatorial. In fact, Captain Lowery had counseled me about it early on, telling me it was the “retreads”' duty to lead. But how were the “initials” to learn, as I had in basic?

Once I became OT wing commander, I was even more hesitant to throw my weight around. I stepped in when it seemed needed but otherwise stayed mum. I bit my tongue often. But with peer smears winging their way toward me, I girded myself to be told off for my bossiness. I was sure that, from the safety of anonymity, I'd finally get the comeuppance I certainly deserved from their point of view, even though I'd tried to walk a restrained line.

I was right. They told me off. I got twenty letters chiding me for having withheld so much of my knowledge, leadership, and experience. It was frustrating, they wrote, to have me stay so much on the sidelines when I could have cleared up so much and told them more about what to expect in the Air Force. I'd thought I'd been overbearing; they thought I'd been maddeningly unassertive.

I didn't ask my other prior-service flight mates if they got the same critique, but given that we were a low-key bunch that didn't throw our weight around, they probably did. We despised the other prior-service types who swaggered around inflating their records and trying to both impress and micromanage the initials. We gauged our own behavior in opposition to those “beggar, lifer, puke” losers, warriors at OTS but chairborne clock watchers, no doubt, back in their units.

My peer smears weren't in the least mean but they
were
disappointed. In them, I was praised and congratulated and great things were prophesied for my future, but they made it clear that I had failed—no,
cheated—
my flight mates by refusing to be more of a leader.

I crammed as many war stories as I could into our final three weeks and taught them every trick I knew about Air Force survival. Especially the one I learned at OTS: Always go first.

——

On graduation day, July 3, 1985, Captain Lowery escorted my family to watch from the stands as I led the wing in the graduation parade. I had informed them of my position, but the words held little meaning and I didn't try to explain. When they saw me lead the parade, though, with all eyes on me and nine hundred people awaiting my commands, they got it.

“Long way from Miss'ippi,” Mama murmured, that thousand-miles-away look on her face.

I suppose she was fantasizing about what it would be like to have my opportunities. To travel the world, and preside at meetings where she could overrule men and white people. To speak with loud confidence and make demands of important people. But I couldn't give her any of those things. All I could do was make a comfortable home for her. I browbeat her into quitting the vending machine factory and moved her to the burbs with me as soon as I got settled.

That day, though, she tried to melt into the crowd, but I held on to her and kept her by my side while I shook hands and greeted dignitaries. The general called her ma'am and complimented her on my accomplishments. My blend-in-with-the-wallpaper mama didn't blush or stammer. She looked him in the eye and said, “What else would she do but what needed doing?”

CHAPTER SIX

———

FULL CIRCLE

I wasn't worth a damn until I was thirty.

It wasn't until then that I got some perspective on how all the contradictory parts of my makeup could combine in a way that would allow me to capitalize on the opportunities for which my forebears sacrificed. Making peace with my family, my community, and myself gave me both a sense of personal freedom and a heightened sense of community responsibility. I didn't lose my baggage. I couldn't. All I could do was make room for it.

No one's as zealous as a convert, and as I became increasingly consumed with the plight of the working class and my narrow escape from it, my magazine and newspaper subscription list expanded. I was in a constant state of political agitation. Even though I was moving farther and farther away from the poor with every accomplishment, my heart wouldn't stay where my head was. At last, I was suburban and professional, but everyone I loved was a slave to the business cycle and to events on the front page of the morning newspaper. My late-blooming political awakening had forged a surreal connection between the politico-historical frameworks in my head and the news of the day. Philosophy and political theories were not buried in my junior-high unconscious background since I hadn't been exposed to them then; they were foreground. I couldn't experience anything in a vacuum. Nothing “just happened” for me.

My head spun as I unraveled current events to trace them back to their origins in federal housing policy, migration patterns, or Jim Crow restriction, once de jure, now de facto. I'd talk with a family member as I packed for a six-week intelligence-gathering trip around the Pacific (at a generous per diem) or gathered materials for the congressional budgeting exhibit I was preparing in the name of the United States Air Force and feel lost in a political limbo. I had the feeling we were all characters acting out roles in history books that hadn't been written yet—the peon laborer, the first-generation professional, the pink-collar typist—hostage to whatever deals got struck in Washington. Health benefits, no health benefits. Workmen's comp, no workmen's comp. Union? No, Right to Work. The very programs through which the taxpayers subsidized my undergraduate and graduate degrees were facing extinction as Congress looked for ways to cut the budget. Simply talking with my relatives became profoundly political and fraught with revelation.

Bobby, humiliated and drained on the phone after a waitering day spent in a cheap polyester uniform taking abuse from both managers and customers. Certainly, he should have worked harder in high school, stayed out of trouble, equipped himself for a better job. Now he has the rest of his life to pay for decisions he made at fourteen while living in a black boy's hell. He wasn't a child of the middle or upper class; he had no margin of error.

My youngest sister crying on the pay phone outside her cashier job at a you-buy-it-you-bag-it, generic-brand-only discount supermarket where you shopped directly from open packing crates. Her
former
cashier job. She'd been forced to watch while the manager she'd stood up to publicly searched her locker and purse. He even unwrapped her tampons. That he found no stolen goods made no difference. She was fired on the spot and threatened with arrest. All this for minimum wage.

The bittersweetness of watching my mother blossom when, for the first time since she was fifteen in 1942, she could stop working. Months to talk her into moving in with me. More months to pressure her into believing that she could trust me—trust the fates, trust that she had value other than as a workhorse—and quit the factory job she immediately found in San Antonio. I didn't remind her of my frequent promises, twenty years before, that we'd be bougie someday. She remembers. At 4
A.M.
, the sound of her whirring sewing machine and her tuneless, happy hum would lull me back to sleep. Free from an overseer and endless debt for the first time in forty years, she couldn't produce enough with her own hands and on her own timeline. She became a master seamstress and ceramist of exquisite skill. There isn't a home in our far-flung family without examples of her work. All that talent buried for all those years and she's so far from alone. Black clerks snarling and sullen from the safety of their pointless but secure DMV jobs. Surly black security guards fuming as they sign you in and out of buildings. Grown men making a teenager's wages washing dishes. How stifled the working masses are. How, pardon my Marx, alienated from the product of their own labor.

Home on leave, I went with a friend to sign the papers on her new apartment. The white owner made us stand on his porch in the rain while he conducted our meeting from the doorway of his hip, high-rent-district home. He lectured her on paying her rent on time like she was a kindergartner threatening not to nap. I asked about the faulty door locks. “Safety is a state of mind,” he said airily. I indicated the sturdy locks on his door and asked what state
he
lived in. He looked bored. I asked about the cockroaches so numerous they fell from the ceiling, the peeling plaster, the water damage. He looked annoyed. I asked to use the bathroom. No. I asked for a drink of water. He held the lease an inch from my friend's face. Asked her if she had a problem, if she wanted the apartment or not, made no difference to him. She squeezed my arm. I shut up.

My homies couldn't afford to get mad. They couldn't even afford to dream. I could. I did.

It wasn't enough that
I'd
escaped. In 1983, I hated to come home because their “choices” so infuriated me. By 1986 I hated to come because I was so infuriated
for
them. Was a life of simple dignity, whatever your aspirations or status, too much to ask?

The complacent heartlessness of my new peers, both in the workplace and in public opinion polls, chilled me. The honest ones took a myopic, “not my problem, it's every man for himself” attitude. The rest seemed to think they were well off because of their innate superiority and their clear-eyed acceptance of personal responsibility. Yet the reality is that the ghetto would explode if the majority of its denizens didn't exercise ramrod control every day of their lives. I felt more humble, more fortunate with each passing day; too many of my fellow members of the middle and professional class seemed to feel more entitled. Politically overstimulated though I surely was (all read up and nowhere to go), I didn't want to give up any of my perks, I wanted
more
people to have access to them. A willingness to work hard, as my mother's life proved, was no guarantee of a decent living, and it maddened me that this was how discussions about economic justice were framed, not in terms of fundamental fairness but around the reality-defying notion that poor people are poor by choice and not mostly by circumstance, that historic oppression and political gamesmanship don't largely determine who gets what.

Without having consciously chosen to, I felt ever more connected to those I'd left behind. I'd made it over the Berlin Wall, I'd ridden an inner tube to Miami; I felt more like an exile than a native, grateful and guilty for having escaped, cosmically deputized to be a living reminder of those still captive. Listening to the poor being insulted and dismissed was listening to my mama, my siblings, my childhood friends, being insulted and dismissed—how could I just go to the mall, just wash my new car? But then exactly what was I doing for them besides haranguing hapless office mates and making things worse by meddling in their affairs?

I was devouring journals and nonfiction to understand the pass America had come to and toying with a vague, titillating notion of entering law and politics. The corporations had their congressional mouthpieces, the black bourgeoisie had theirs. Why didn't poor blacks?

I added the whole raft of political talk shows (
Meet the Press, Face the Nation, The McLaughlin Group,
etc.) to my source list. So as to avoid commercials and superfluous TV, I taped all the shows and smoked watching them in the wee insomniac hours. God how they galled me with their glib dismissals and crocodile tears over the little people's travails. No wonder I couldn't sleep.

As always, negative examples opened up whole new vistas of possibility for me. Through the papers, I'd follow the black political class openly selling out the black masses for greater access to power, or, worse, to assuage their own self-hatred. I'd gnash my teeth while white suburban representatives acted as marionettes for defense contractors and separatist, exclusionary white residents. Dairy farmers and international conglomerates on the public dole. Ethanol subsidies, money
not
to farm. Yet a poor kid can work hard, think she's excelling, and graduate valedictorian of a ghetto high school without ever having performed a science experiment or written a footnoted paper. At the college she dreamed of while others sold crack, she finds out she's laughably unprepared. It physically hurt to watch our elected representatives subvert the common good for the benefit of a few, already privileged reactionaries.

How hard could it be, how much brains could it really take to do that? I'd fume and think. How hard could it be, how much brains could it really take to beat them, at the polls and in the halls of Congress? Just as with college and becoming an officer, or going for a graduate degree, the better I did in life, the closer my contact with elites, the more doable their accomplishments seemed.

Who was fighting for the black poor? The black political class claimed to, then, once elected or appointed to high office, embraced affirmative action at Ivy League graduate schools as the best way to help blacks stuck in the neighborhoods. Fighting for busing instead of fixing neighborhood schools, or even starting schools of our own instead of constantly begging whites to associate with us. Fighting the eviction of troublemakers and criminals from public housing, defending murderers, stifling internal critiques. Policies that make a lot of sense when you're drafting them in your office at Yale or the Longworth Building, but not when you're listening to footsteps behind you as you scurry from your tenement apartment to the bus stop. Not when you hear from another elderly relative newly burglarized by a knucklehead much more likely to be represented for free by a black lawyer than she was. They couldn't even keep patio furniture, landscaping, or a kiddie pool in their yards without some thug boldly making off with it, but black leaders couldn't figure out how to fight
that
everyday battle simultaneously with the more nebulous one against white racism.

Just as I'd needed the Air Force to fill my selfish need for a noble, meaningful mission in life and not just a job, I began thinking that working for the betterment of the working class would make me happy. The conspiracy against it was obvious, both because of my state of hyperpoliticization and because I was such a recent escapee. I hate bullies and the middle and upper classes steal the working class's lunch money every goddamn day. It made me frantic. I scratched my TV screen flinging shoes at Reagan during his State of the Union address. Reading George Will and Joe Klein in
Newsweek
made me fume and, ultimately, cancel my subscription. The history books I devoured made me cry.

Though I knew I was obsessed with race and economics, I had only the vaguest idea that it might, or should, lead me somewhere. How does one even “enter law and politics” anyway? Thinking I could do something about the plight of the black poor was like thinking I could cure cancer—noble but pretty egotistical. The notion embarrassed me in its grandiosity and messianism.

Also, community-minded though I was becoming, I was still quite concerned with the direction of my own life. My future was bright, but far from solidified. The “Who am I? Why am I here?” questions still plagued me, though now in a positive, measuring way. I actually had hope, born of confidence and achievement, for my future. I'd always had desperation. Now I had calm cunning. All I needed was direction.

I still believed then that the Air Force was the best place for me—constant challenges, upward mobility, travel, good benefits, lots of responsibility, little institutional racism. Nothing in civilian society could rival it. I felt strong and capable, and, most important, humble. But I was still frustrated by my distance from the everyday world of black folk. Socializing has never come naturally to me, and without my race consultant, I was at a loss as to how to proceed. San Antonio was a terrible place to decide to exercise my Négritude.

A tiny percentage of the population, and a very quiescent one at that, blacks were actually difficult to find there. I refused to give up my hard-won spot in the middle class; that meant refusing to frequent ghetto bars. I already had a ghetto home back in St. Louis, I didn't need another. I wasn't going to seek out the hood just to prove something. I wanted what I'd earned—full access to all of American life and the cushy environs I could afford on my military salary and generous benefits.

Also, it was a very interesting dynamic to be black in a city where Hispanics were a numerical majority, whites the power majority, and blacks so insignificant as to escape notice. The Hispanics were the niggers in San Antonio; white racism was directed at them. They'd be blamed for crime or depravity anywhere in the city. Occasionally, some white Air Force person expected me to help him insult them.

An office mate's wife complained about the theft of two wrought-iron porch chairs saying, “There were a couple of green-carders working down the block.”

A white master sergeant gave me an inquisitive sideways glance before adding, “The problem is jail don't mean nothing to those people. They have family reunions in there.” They waited for my reaction.

This was a victory of sorts. My uniform, comportment, and officer's rank had promoted me to a “daylight white”: almost, but not quite, one of them and therefore eligible to participate in the oppression of the lesser orders.

“I've heard tell that white folks, on rare occasion, have been known to break the law. Some of those ‘green-carders' might well have been in America for hundreds of years. When did your ancestors get here?”