An American Story (4 page)

We oohed and aahed, pushed and shoved, fought and made up in the unstable kaleidoscope of alliances and insurgencies, détente and stalemate that demarcate the universe of six siblings required by family law to be all the friends any of us would ever need. Daddy would stay on the fringe of our family stroll, righting a toddler splayed on an icy patch, deputizing the two oldest to get hot chocolates, lifting six-year-old me high enough to see over some other father's fedora. Simultaneously wary and relaxed, like the bodyguard of a minor monarch's third son, he managed to seem both with us and employed by us. Chain-smoking cigarettes he rolled from his ubiquitous Prince Albert can, he nodded and made a measuring eye contact with passersby. Those polite eyes said, “Jes lookin at the lights. Not going to steal anything. Please don't ruin our Christmas.” The aggressive tilt of his head, the square of his shoulders, and the promise of a rapid response from the muscles he rippled at will made the “please” revocable.

I never asked to see St. Louis on any other occasion; I knew somehow that our Christmas Eve freedom was a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card, good for one use only. I didn't mind; my world was full. Whites, and the wide-open spaces they occupied, were not real somehow; for me, they only existed on TV, another place we couldn't live. We could watch, though, and I didn't aspire to more. I accepted these things as organic, like humidity and hand-me-downs, and took comfort in our close-knit, all-black world.

Holidays were my mother's especial forte. She spent the entire week leading up to one cooking. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, she got out that big cauldron of a cooking pot she only used for such occasions and started stuffing produce, little leafy sacrifices, into it. The greens varied enough to fill a botany text: mustard, turnip, spinach. Then she'd put in barrels of black-eyed peas, butter beans, and cabbage, and mounds of fatback, salt pork, and ham hocks to season the lot. Then, best of all, while the smell of roasting turkey insidiously infiltrated the house and trenchers of cornbread bubbled, Mama started peeling sweet potatoes into the big silver cook pot for sweet potato pie. That pot was big enough to cook Hansel and Gretel in; big enough to concoct a potion for spell-casting! Days passed as she peeled and peeled, humming her tuneless, bumpy dirges.

Book in hand, I glued myself to a kitchen chair. Hours went by as I watched her hands fly at their work yet still retain the precision of one deactivating a time bomb. After an indeterminate period, without warning, she stopped peeling, slicing, humming, and lined up the pie shells she'd prepared.

“Ma,” I asked, “how many potatoes is that?”

“Hmmmm?” she murmured.

Cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, coconut, whipped cream—the smells of the all-too-infrequent holidays. The smell of Mama's magic.

“But, Ma,” I asked, shivering and tingly at the cosmic forces swirling around us in the aromatic kitchen, “how you know when you done peeled enough?”

As usual, her repetitive motions had lulled her deep into a reverie and she didn't answer. Had she not learned how to detach herself and float away from her crowded home and its never-ending demands, she would never have had any privacy. She was smiling then about something, her hands momentarily still.

“Mama, what you listening to?”

The sound of wailing and warbling in some bizarre language rang tinnily forth from our raggedy radio. Daddy had found it mangled by the roadside and reinforced it with strapping tape all around; it looked mummified. A pale, sickly green, both its casing and its dial were thoroughly cracked. Most significantly, it had no knobs. To change the channel, you could either shake it just right or use a pair of pliers. In neither case could you control where you landed.

When Daddy had brought it home and lovingly bandaged it, bitterly proud of its battered condition, we'd had to swallow our tongues. He gave us females no choice but to accept it into “our” room. Though at first that banged-up radio served only to remind us of all the things we couldn't afford, eventually it became “our” radio. It was our little window on the world, a trapdoor we could escape through when north St. Louis in general, and 4933 Terry Avenue in particular, became too claustrophobic. Because it was often too much trouble to change it, and only likely to land us someplace even weirder, we listened to speeches, the Mamas and the Papas, Lawrence Welk, the emergency warning signal, political debates, bluegrass, big band, foreign languages . . . whatever poured out at us.

In the evenings, when our work was done, we women sat there reading, crocheting, and drinking Lipton tea with lots of lemon and sugar while our valiant little radio entertained and educated us. As a strange side benefit, Wina and I were unbeatable at “Name That Tune.”

Apparently, the wobbly sound pouring out at the moment was singing because crashing cymbals and plucky-sounding instruments swelled up to join it. It was so surprising-sounding, like a sudden clash of metal and hundreds of running feet, I couldn't help laughing.

“Ma, why you listening to this? Want me change it?” I held the pliers ready. Much as I'd enjoyed the sounds, I still didn't think they were music. To me then, the radio was like a carnival ride, enjoyable only for its capacity to thrill and quickly past its usefulness. Later, as Daddy cut us off almost completely from the outside world, that radio became our conduit to fresh air, but that day, it was merely a diversion.

She gave me a strange smile. “Leave it be. Them folks could be trying to tell us something special.”

So we listened to the radio together while she cooked the potatoes in a trance. She mixed all the wonderful ingredients together in her big fairy-tale pot, never measuring, never counting, never without that otherworldly smile and unfocused eyes.

“Ma, the potatoes,” I called. “How you know when to stop peelin?”

I might never have spoken, so small a dent did I make in her reverie.

“Mama? Mama? Mama?”

I thought that was her given name; I liked whispering it there in our gingerbread kitchen like an incantation. When I was nine or ten years old, I would be introduced to the concept of the “maiden name” and that she'd not always been my mother, that we'd not always been “the Dickersons.” I became hysterical. But I was happy that day, calling for my mama again and again and again so softly I knew she wouldn't register it consciously but might well weave it into whatever fantasy she was entertaining. Eventually, though, I had to have her back.

“
MA.
How much fillin is that?”

She looked surprised, as if she'd missed her bus stop and didn't recognize the neighborhood. Then, a shrug toward the pie shells lined up on the counter.

“
That
much.”

The tone of her voice let me know I'd asked enough questions. The ritual was complete when I got to watch the last drop of sweet potato pie filling exactly fill the last waiting pie shell.

——

Across Kingshighway, three quarters of a block from our house, was Benton Elementary, where every kid in the neighborhood went. Unless, of course, they were high-seditty and went to one of the handful of black parochial schools. We were not high-seditty. All Benton's students and teachers were black, as was the principal. Its yard was divided in two by a white line on the pavement—girls' side, boys' side. Any girl who crossed the line was “fast” and got whipped; any boy who did was “bold” and got scolded.

Those were old-fashioned days; it would be 1972, my seventh grade, before females could wear pants to school. That included teachers and administrators. We square-danced in gym until the mid-seventies. Chewing gum got you sent to the principal's office and a phone call to your parents. Passing notes or talking in class? A minimum of three lashes with a pointer or yardstick while bent over a desk in front of the whole class. What worse offenses might cost a transgressor I never knew; incorrigibility was held to a minimum in a world where parents came to administer classroom whippings. Any corporal punishment administered at school was given in the full knowledge that it would be repeated at home once the teacher called to alert your parents. Of course, the call just made it official; the news usually made it home before the sore behind did. Teachers, like the Bible, were always right; disputing their version of events would only lengthen and intensify the parental whipping. “Why would a grown woman tell a story on you?” Mama would demand, belt in hand. “Don't you think she got better things to do?” Not that a schmendrick like me ever got in trouble in school. There were no gold stars in that.

It was a very small, very safe, very closed world. It was made even more so for us Dickersons by the fact that we were forbidden to stray beyond a two-block radius in any direction. We were not permitted to listen to adult conversation, nor were we were allowed to watch the news; I was so oblivious to the civil unrest of the 1960s that when a car passed festooned with Freedom Ride banners, I thought Good Samaritans were providing free transportation for the poor. At the Dickersons', the sixties were about tradition and family.

JIM CROW REVISITED

We drove back to Covington as often as we could to visit Daddy's remaining family (Mississippi was deemed too far. Also, Mama was always ambivalent about us going there; I have yet to visit the state). Road trips were high adventure for us kids.

As we got further from St. Louis, the territory became increasingly rural. Daddy avoided interstates (tolls were for suckers, yet another ploy by the masters to deny the masses that freedom which was rightfully theirs), so we bucked and heaved along two-lane roads in varying states of comfort. We exaggerated the bumpiness, flinging ourselves against each other and squealing for joy. We passed farmers and cows, we inhaled skunk stench and watched horses defecate on the run. When Mama confirmed for us that those were indeed cotton fields flying by, we laughed—they seemed unreal, a hayseed panorama staged for our amusement. Daddy listened to talk radio and baseball games and tuned us out, or so we thought.

“Lawsie, Missy Anne,” I drawled in my best eight-year-old Sambo to Wina. “Is we gwine fer to milk dis heah cow and skin us'n up soma dis heah possum?” I was smart but not smart enough to realize my own speech pattern was not much different from that which I mocked.

“I don rightly be a-knowin,” she responded, eyes round and Rochester'd. “Jes don be fer ta whuppin us'n darkies, Missy. I declares.” We giggled and snorted at our own wit.

All at once, Daddy was standing over us, ordering us out of the car.

“You think slavin and cotton pickin is so durn funny, eh? I'm a show y'all jes what our people went through so you could live so high on the hog.”

I elbowed Wina and snickered. “High on the hog!”

“Hog!” she snorted back piggily.

He didn't laugh. “Into tha fields. All a y'all. Right now. Pick you some cotton and then tell me how funny it is.”

Mama tried to soothe him, but he bum-rushed us from the car to the cotton field in what seemed like a flash. Daddy demonstrated the proper harvesting procedure and then set off down the road, jogging up and down to keep himself awake at the wheel. Defeated, Mama settled herself under a tree with Bobby, the baby. We girls threw ourselves into our labors. We thought it was a game.

Picking cotton is hard.

Quickly, the prickly pods encasing the bolls drew blood. Wina and I conferred and hit upon the bright idea of removing our good-little-girl Sunday school white cotton gloves from the luggage to protect our fingers. Several pairs each were necessary to prevent injury.

Soon, we were chasing each other with clods of sod. We whacked away at each other with thick greenery and clumps of soil. Then we created a suitable plot and dialogue: I was the evil overseer, the others my downtrodden slaves.

“Mammy! I done tol you fer the last time. Now I'se gwine whup'n de tar outta yo wu'thless black hide.” I cracked my imaginary whip evilly.

“Please lawd! Don fer tuh whup me. Don whup ol' mammy,” Wina wailed bug-eyed. Necie sang “Nobody Knows de Trouble I'se Seed” in the best Paul Robeson she could manage.

And then Daddy was once again standing over us, so furious he was . . . silent. He seethed so intently, he seemed to be going in and out of focus. Then he turned like a robot, got into the car, and drove away.

We ceased our game immediately and trooped back over to Mama, sat down in the shade with her, and waited. Within a few minutes, he was back. We got in, he tuned in another ball game, began whistling to himself, and we drove off. No one spoke for what seemed like hours.

I suppose we learned from television and the movies to see slavery as melodrama. Given that we learned nothing in school about slavery, Reconstruction (except that rapacious carpetbaggers oppressed the virtuous Southerners), or Jim Crow, all our information came from the tube. Sans discussion, we watched Shirley Temple, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Charlie Chan, Bette Davis's
Jezebel,
and every other shlocky, apologist rendering of the benign institution of slavery.

The gift my parents' generation gave mine was a double-edged blade: the balm of distance and the curse of ignorance. We couldn't fully appreciate how bad, how systemically bad, things had been, which both freed us and made us insensitive.

We knew virtually no black professionals, politicians, or entrepreneurs. We rarely saw ourselves reflected in the currents of the mainstream; when we did, it was as Rochester, Stepin Fetchit, movie maids and mammies. Our cultural invisibility except as laughingstocks, criminals, entertainers, or athletes produced a sort of schizophrenia in us. We watched—and revered—
Amos and Andy
and any other show featuring blacks, yet we knew sans discussion that many whites viewed these depictions as encyclopedia entries: a lazy white guy named Bob was just a lazy white guy named Bob, but Stepin Fetchit was every black man who ever lived.