An American Story (32 page)

——

That kid was bursting to do a victory dance, bursting to scream I BEAT ALL YOU WHITE MOFOS. ALL YOU THIRD-GENERATION GENERALS' KIDS. ALL YOU LEGACIES WHO DIDN'T NEED THE FREE EDUCATION LIKE I DID. ALL YOU MIDDLE-CLASS PUKES WHO NEVER DOUBTED YOU BELONG HERE. I BEAT YOU!!!!!! I could feel it in my overachieving, gratification-deferring bones. But the good manners his mama and the Air Force had taught him forced him to keep his peace. Four years. How hard that kid must have worked just to graduate, let alone excel.

As we were introduced, he held his hand out politely to shake mine, but I left him hanging. I let a long, awkward moment spin out between us and held his perplexed eyes.

“It's good to win, isn't it?” I said wolfishly.

I was thinking of my father surveying the enemy dead on Okinawa. Hell, the
friendly
dead of which he was not one. He must have felt like Genghis Khan because that's how I felt every time I snatched something from someone else who had as much right to it as I did. Where but in the Air Force could I ever acquire such opportunities to best a valorous competitor?

He struggled but was unable to keep the triumphant grin off his face. He made a fist with the hand I refused to reduce to a bourgeois shake and pumped it in the air for just a second. YES! Then, that housebroken smile returned and we parted, knowing exactly what had passed between us. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was a general's kid. Either way, he had a victory dance coming.

The Air Force was a wonderful place for black people.

At the end of that month, I attended that special meeting for female officers.

The Air Force wasn't such a wonderful place for women.

I was buried alive in my own life, anesthetized by a fat paycheck and bourgeois trappings. I had to stop muffling what my heart was trying to tell me. It was time to move on.

But that was so much easier said than done. If I left the Air Force, I knew it had to be for something free-form. I imagined myself tied to a desk at some bank like the one I had worked at before Mizzou and shuddered. Yet I still had no idea what I should do. Nearly thirty and there I was trying to figure out what I should be when I grew up: Doctor? No. Nurse? No. Teacher? No. I took personality tests. I researched careers from astrophysics to zoology. Finally, I believed I had the persistence and talent to be whatever I wanted and nothing struck a chord.

I signed on with a few head-hunting firms that specialized in former officers and was inundated with calls and letters, but it all sounded so pointless, so dry. Secure, but meaningless: management consultant. Secure, but repugnant: CIA. More mid-level management positions in industry than I would ever have imagined, but who wants to peddle soap with the Palmolive people or push papers around as a GS-12 government bureaucrat? The Air Force beat any of the things I was offered hands down—at least that was about more than just a paycheck.

I decided to approach the conundrum from the other way around. Since I didn't know what I wanted to do, I could focus on what I didn't want. I could focus on how, generally speaking, I wanted to live since I didn't like the way I had been living. But what was it exactly that I didn't like? If I could build my life from a kit, what would be in it? What did I want?

I carried index cards with me and scribbled down every thought or occurrence that annoyed or pleased me, every observation or insight into my own nature. To my surprise, the answers came quite easily: I didn't want anyone telling me what to do again, ever. As long as my military superiors had been benevolent, I hadn't resented their intrusion into my life. But when I didn't get what I wanted (we called this the “Burger King, have-it-your-way mentality”), I could no longer shrug it off. “Air Force needs come first” wasn't working as my mantra anymore.

I looked in my closets. Full of the exotic South Asian clothing I collected but never wore. I wanted a life where I got to wear them.

I looked in my jewelry box. Funky trinkets that never left my bedroom. I wanted to wear them too. Ankle bracelets whose tinkles announce my presence and toe rings that serve no purpose at all.

What I didn't want was to wear a uniform ever, ever again.

Or panty hose.

Or anything with a constricting neckline.

No more polyester.

No more alarm clocks.

No more meetings of more than three people.

No more meetings that didn't result in a firm plan of action, the failure to accomplish which would result in punitive measures against the malfeasor.

The power to reject joint projects and/or the power to mete out punishment (i.e., expulsion from the endeavor, group disapproval).

No more meetings of longer than twenty minutes.

No more commutes of longer than twenty minutes.

No more commuting by automobile.

No more shared office space.

No more hair-straightening.

No more living in the suburbs or any car-dependent city.

No more taking arbitrary orders from random superiors.

I want to be the idiot in charge.

I want to produce something tangible for a living, something with my hands.

I need a mission.

I hate clock watching.

I hate clock watchers.

I am stiff-necked, judgmental, and unforgiving—need work that allows for that.

I care about the character, talent, and drive of the people in my life.

Something that involves other diamond-in-the-rough black people like me.

I want to set my own hours.

A job that doesn't feel like a job. A job that feels like my life.

A job that I am.

Sentences like these made perfect sense to me.

I read self-help manuals like
Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow,
Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive,
and
How to Retire at Forty-one.
I subscribed to business magazines and looked into mall pretzel franchises. I wanted to be in charge, whatever it was I ended up doing, again for negative reasons—I was tired of taking orders from people whose judgment didn't impress me. I could do as well (but at what?) and not be annoyed in the process. I thought and thought and thought and finally noticed what was missing from my many scribblings: Money. Position. Fame. Power.

My subconscious had given me the foundation on which to structure my life while I searched for my one true calling (the existence of which I never doubted).

Autonomy.

That's what I was really looking for in my life.

Autonomy.

I would trade money, title, fame, everything—as long as I could be in the driver's seat.

Taking responsibility for myself—apart from the military, a corporation, a husband, a well-off family which could rescue me—was at once terrifying and a complete relief.

I wasn't going to starve. I wasn't going to become homeless. I would do whatever I needed to and I didn't care that people would think little of me once they knew I waited tables or sold T-shirts from the trunk of my car for a living. I knew their eyes would slide right over me once they heard me answer the “What do you do?” question with “I make dresses with my mama and sell them in church basements,” and the thought no longer shamed me. It was like the OTS board. I knew I'd do what needed doing no matter what others thought or however they treated me.

I was ready to flip burgers, make lattes, or sell T-shirts on the highway off-ramp rather than tie myself to a desk, operating room, or space capsule doing something I hated. Or even doing something that merely bored me. I wanted work that felt inseparable from my life, something I'd do even if I won the lottery. Something, the more I thought about it, that I could do from home because I had come to abhor office life, especially commuting and meetings. But until I figured out what that something was, I was ready to wash cars, herd sheep—anything I could do largely on my own, anything I didn't dread waking up to face. I'd come to hate Sundays by then, because I had to go back to work the next day. I refused to live the rest of my life that way. Most everyone I could think of—from senior officers to my cousins at the post office—hated his job. I was resigning from that club.

Recounting it here makes it all seem very simple and straightforward, but I truly believe this is the point at which I developed hypertension. I had black circles under my eyes and talked to myself. Aside from myself to worry about, I still had family responsibilities—I wasn't some Kennedy who could just disappear and find herself with the aid of an expensive shrink. My relatives thought I was crazy for thinking of leaving the Air Force after a decade, especially when I'd made officer, but I was after that examined life.

After about two years of sleeplessness and neurosis, I had to take the plunge and get out. I had no idea what I was going to do with myself but I knew I would do whatever necessary to survive and live up to all my responsibilities, however I had to do that. I knew I was doing something ridiculous, but even so, I felt wonderful. Calm. Hopeful and excited.

After much list-making of potential home-based careers and potential ways to fund said careers, I had decided to do what professional students always do when in doubt: go back to school. This time for a doctorate or a J.D. What I wasn't saying out loud was that I was sheepishly entertaining the notion of running for local office back home or teaching at a community college, notions I deduced working backwards from the idea that I was supposed to be doing something about the working class. Why else couldn't I get it off my mind? The ghetto needs living, breathing role models they can see and talk to. Bill Cosby on TV was as foreign and otherworldly to them as any white elite, his accomplishments correspondingly exotic and unimaginable. What they needed was successful, well-educated people in the neighborhoods to demystify the process. As well, both were occupations you controlled yourself, for the most part, and which allowed for great flexibility. Best of all, they were inherently meaningful and outward-directed. Even though I'd come a long way emotionally, both seemed grandiose statements I might not be able to live up to, so I kept them to myself as I typed up my separation paperwork. I wasn't ready to submit it yet, but I had to make my commitment to leave real. That night, I fell immediately to sleep for the first time in years. My insomnia disappeared.

——

Watching my mother work longer hours than any factory had ever required of her at her own projects made me appreciate the extent to which working people are deprived of any creative outlets or of even the most basic control over their own actions. Black grandmothers have to cringe before twenty-something restaurant managers to get permission to see a doctor or go to a PTA meeting. (That's why they so often take their frustrations out on the customer. I often let my turn go by in a low-level government office or retail environment rather than face an angry, dis-expecting black woman behind a cash register or computer screen. Black comedians do entire routines about the bad attitudes of low-level black service workers.)

As well, most have neither the time, the money, nor the breadth of vision to avail themselves of cooking classes, singing lessons, community theater, and the like, so their self-expression is stifled in its infancy. At the same time, the inner city is awash in working folk selling their hand-sewn pillows and kente-cloth-wrapped everything, weekend fish fries, kitchen-table beauty salons, backyard mechanics. Willette, the black hairdresser I patronized in a white shop, never smiled, never laughed, and was so softspoken I routinely had to ask her to repeat herself. Once she opened up her own (illegal) salon in her house, she blared gospel music from eight speakers as I bent over her kitchen sink. Her kids did their homework across the table from where she set my hair in rollers. She was so full-throated, I couldn't believe it was the same woman. I asked her if she thought she could make as much from home as from the high-traffic district of the old shop. “I DON'T CARE!” she yelled. “Long as I can feed myself and the kids.”

The business ventures I looked into, coupled with my community-mindedness and the entrepreneurship struggling for sunlight in the ghetto, reminded me that what poor people need most of all is money. The second thing they need, though most don't even dare to dream of it, is some measure of autonomy.

My mother filled every flat surface in our house with her handiwork and tools. She could not at first bring herself to part with any of the trophies of her new freedom, but eventually I was able to persuade her to peddle the overflow at flea markets and craft fairs. There were often more vendors at these events than customers and bargaining was fierce. Most had day jobs. My mother invested so much time and money in her craft, she always lost money. But the people who profited no matter the turnout or sale price were the people running the event and leasing the spaces.

What if I created a space for black women to earn extra money, exercise some blessed decision-making, and express themselves all at the same time? I remembered how my mother scuffled to create memorable Christmases and back-to-school collections for us. Usually, she either went into debt or took a second night job. What if she'd been able to spend her nights dressmaking or throwing pots at home with her family, then bring them to someone like me to sell for her? Usually, poor people just take another dead-end, low-wage McJob that keeps them from their families. What if I created stall space, some rented long-term, some just as needed during an expensive family crisis or to buy new furniture? Women like Willette could move her basement hair salon here and rent-to-own space from me. I could encourage, or even require, them to take an apprentice, some woman trying to get off welfare or newly released from jail. Entrepreneurially minded strivers could run a snack bar, offer accounting services, do deliveries. The local jobless could provide security. I could network with downtown big business to support vendors in spinning off their own ventures. Most ghetto businesses are off-the-books, but I'd insist on all the legal formalities (like taxes); that means I'd need to help them with basic bookkeeping. Might as well do GED classes on the side. Voter registration. Military personnel from the many local bases to do mentoring, tutoring. There must be lots of embezzlers and inside traders who could do their community service with me, teaching about the stock market or the legal system. Bugger self-esteem training—self-esteem comes from accomplishment: offer math and citizenship classes, encourage them to take the ghetto back from the knuckleheads. Citizen crime patrols. Identifying promising local kids and grooming them for leadership. Not just telling people they should aim high, but steadying the ladder for them while they did so.