An American Story (42 page)

Just a few months after that, while participating in a BLSA street law clinic in ghetto Boston, the black principal introduced us as students at “the best law school on the planet” and said we'd be making sixty-five thousand dollars a year after graduation. I turned to the person on my left and said, “How gauche.” I turned to the one on my right and sniffed, “
Eighty
thousand.”

I told a San Francisco doctor treating me that I was sure the diagnosis of a previous condition was correct because it had been made at Harvard.

I used something personal an undergraduate advisee had told me in a
Record
column without a warning bell ever going off in my mind, so focused was I on winning a debate.

I competed for and won the Skadden Arps fellowship, the most prestigious public interest law fellowship, simply because it was the most prestigious. I didn't really want it—by graduation, I knew I wanted to write, that my foundation was on the back burner—I was just an achievement junkie jonesing for another notch in my résumé, just like the classmates I belittled. It should have gone to someone who was serious about the work, not someone who would quit only six months into the two-year term to write.

En route to Erik's posh Palo Alto home while he studied for a Stanford M.B.A. and I worked at S&S's San Francisco office, we passed through the Mission District. The people on the street looked odd to me, their clothes, their pallor. Confused by their appearance and demeanor, I asked Erik, that Princeton-educated son of privilege, “These people . . . they look . . . what's wrong with them?”

He looked at me. Looked at them. Back at me.

“They're poor, Debra.”

Oh. Only two years into the upper crust, I had forgotten what reality could look like.

I didn't want to forget. I didn't want to excuse, but I didn't want to forget and, most of all, I didn't want to become
them.
But I was still ambitious, my dreams bigger than ever, my confidence utter. How to avail myself of what I've earned, as well as what I've lucked into, without becoming the enemy?

Having a farewell lunch the day before graduation with my study group, I made a disparaging reference to “the elite.” One asked, “How's that work, now that
you're
an elite?”

Me? Elite?

I was furious.

How dare he strip me of the thing I've fought hardest for in my life—a sense of belonging in the black working class. Granted, I'd actually been struggling to rid myself of that connection, but the exact opposite had happened once my emotional maturity caught up to my intellect; I'd learned to accept who and what I am the way I accept being five foot seven and right-handed. It doesn't make me special and it doesn't make me less than. It's just my context and it need have no more control over my life than I choose for it to.

There I was, a humble penitent who'd confessed her sins and begged for absolution. It galled, it burned, to be lumped in with those who can't remain who and what they are without keeping everybody else down. How could my friend wave some magic wand and make me one of those smug toads who'd filled me with the very self-loathing I'd struggled with for thirty years? I'd sacrificed everything to forge an identity for myself in the community of my birth. The more I saw of the black upper class, the less I intended to be part of it: they talked revolution while shopping at Saks.

Me? Elite?

Certainly, I was privileged now, but at least I'd had to earn my perks. Most of the blacks at Harvard were born knowing it's cup and saucer, not cup and table. Sofa, not couch. Red leaf, not iceberg. Dunhill, Marlboro, anything but Kool or Newport. I had to learn all that the hard way with angry blacks and clueless whites looking on. Worse, I'd had so much to unlearn.

Newsweek,
not the
Enquirer. The New Republic,
not
Newsweek. Harper's,
not
Ebony. Jet?
Under no circumstances. Diaphraghm, not the Pill. The Pill, not withdrawal. Art houses, not cineplexes. Subtitles, not blaxploitation. No air-conditioned summers at home: internships abroad under artificially trying conditions. Foreign, not domestic, white guys.

I hadn't understood then that you can never stop being who you were born being; you can add things but you can never subtract from the baseline. Lord, the pulling, the tearing at my soul as the confused youngster I was tried to split herself in half, be two people in one body. The strain of remembering not to make any slips that might identify me as working class to whites. The feigned ennui of talking skiing and off-Broadway with fancy blacks so no one had to admit to their roots. The painful pleasure of attending a few carefully chosen black events. The stab of self-hatred at my own evil jokes about how wealthy the white guy supplying the kente cloth concessions must be as the wannabe “African” outfits paraded by. Pondering the significance of myself as the only black person my many white friends know. But who was I kidding: I was usually the only black at my own parties then. Most choices caused me no anguish, merely rendering unto Caesar . . . but
Cosmo
over
Essence?
I couldn't do it.

I couldn't wait to tell my friend off. How could that privileged white boy know anything about schizophrenia? About a family, a soul, ripped asunder by the forces of history? About struggle? He would never have the least notion of who I really was and what I'd been through and how hard it was to decide which part of my personality to draw on in a particular situation. I opened my mouth to set him straight with all the ghetto-girl neck-wagging, finger-pointing, infinitive-splitting gusto that I was no longer embarrassed of.

Me? Elite?

Then it hit me.

Yes.

Me. Elite.

No world traveler with a B.A., M.A., and Ivy League J.D. can pretend to be one of the proletariat, no matter her origins. I can understand it. I can commiserate with it. I can suffer, through loved ones, the very real tragedies visited upon those who think they've escaped. I can remain involved, I can fight for its rights, I can tell its stories. What I can't do is claim more than honorary membership. All I can do is stand ready to be of assistance and to take advantage of my unique vantage point.

Me. Elite.

I wandered the Harvard campus, totally at ease, totally at home.

I went to Mattapan, totally at ease, totally at home.

How had that happened? When had that happened?

I didn't want to give up either—I'd worked damned hard for admission to both—but how can they possibly be melded?

As on the beach at Okinawa, I found myself again mourning my dead, the little girl who could now be at peace.

I cried for that little girl who couldn't smile without covering her face so no one would see her nose spread. I cried for the girl who had saved her pennies for bleaching cream and circled the hair-relaxer section till no one was left to see her purchase. I cried for the girl hiding in a closet with a salvaged tape recorder trying to ditch her Southern accent. I laughed through tears to imagine her shock at discovering that it would still be detectable to her more sensitive law school classmates.

In crimson or in a McDonald's uniform, in English or in Korean, I was what I had always been: a daughter of the Great Migration. Though being born in 1959 officially made me a Baby Boomer, I had always shrugged off the moniker; it just feels wrong, as when people call me “Debbie.” That just wasn't me. I saw myself as part of my family, not as an individual. My war of personal reference was World War II, not Viet Nam. I valued production, not leisure; I was thirty-four before I was able to put aside my distaste at the lazy decadence of it and nap when given the chance. I endured the nausea and pain of chronic hypertension for years before it occurred to me to see a doctor—I wasn't bleeding, was I?

But at HLS, it became clear to me that I had grafted my Southern Baptist work ethic and hardscrabble determination onto the opportunities for which my progenitors deprived themselves. On their backs, I had transformed myself into that which they could only dream of—a Harvard-trained, world-traveled, neurotic attorney turned writer with a Gold Card who dated interracially but had the home training to be ambivalent about it, who would rather have eaten cornbread and collards than sushi, rather have listened to gospel than hip-hop, and who believed that disrespectful rap artists would burn in hell and was comforted by the thought. But whose favorite food, next to fried chicken and mustard greens, is Vietnamese. Who loves classical music and opera as well as the blues.

I had become a fully realized America. I will not be denied. But then, I no longer expected to be.

JUNE 8, 1995. GRADUATION DAY

There was only one bridge left to burn.

As graduation loomed, BLSA circulated order forms for kente cloth stoles to wear over our graduation robes. My heart sank. What, I wondered, is this piece of cloth, probably produced in Belgium, going to tell the world about me that this face already doesn't? Why distance ourselves from the people we've been through so much with over the last three years? Don't we really have enough in common now to make this gesture merely defensive and self-conscious? Isn't it self-indulgent, cutting off our noses to spite our faces, to dig this one-sided trench? If, as they argued, the cloths didn't mean anything, why wear them? Why wear them on this day and not others? Shouldn't we always be proud of our heritage? What, exactly, was the point?

I graduated without one.

I spent my graduation day alone except for my mother because the rest of my family couldn't afford the trip. My friends' families could, though, so I just wandered in an anticlimactic funk while Mama rested after the ceremony.

I watched my classmates—black, white, other—move about in jovial, mixed-generation groups and speak the common language of upper-middle-class possibility.

Since I had no other choice, I just made my way alone, walking and thinking. On my own.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I've been pregnant since 1995. That's when I began this book. I have been carrying the weight and responsibility of it around with me ever since, wishing I could undo it, fighting for it, planning every decision around it, wondering what it would be like, wondering whether it would survive, how any new endeavor might affect it, would it emerge healthy or fail to thrive, was I working too hard or not hard enough, which lies to tell it and which truths, should I abandon it or just love it more? Whether I was making love or making a left turn, I was thinking about this book. It has been the only constant in my turbulent last few years.

Hard as I worked, however, I realized early on that I while I might succeed as a storyteller, I would fail as a witness undergoing cross-examination. Even with truth serum, how could I possibly (or readably) convey the complexity of the first thirty-five years of my life, four generations of family lore, two parents, five siblings, and the lot of African-Americans in post–civil rights America? When I began quizzing relatives, notebook in hand, a few years ago, I naively thought that that would lead me to “the truth” of what happened in our family, when and why. Shoot, in a family full of ornery cusses like mine, I was wrong to think that would even lead to replies.

Funnily enough, I was the only one who thought our story so emblematic of the Great Migration and post–Jim Crow America that it “just had” to be written down for all the world to see. But I had to see it through, so I did what I had to do. I went commando. I stopped asking direct questions—I'd just keep my ears open. Then, I'd sneak off to the bathroom to scribble on dinner napkins. I'd debrief disgruntled, divorced in-laws and corner unsuspecting old great-aunts from out of town who hadn't been warned. I'd keep wineglasses full and lurk in hallways while unsuspecting loved ones reminisced. Well trained in the ways of disinformation as an Air Force intelligence officer, I'd even toss off history I knew to be so inflammatorily erroneous that no one could let it stand uncorrected. In the end, I learned that no two people ever see the same thing and no one ever changes his or her mind about anything, least of all me. I understand now why the Russians say, “He lies like an eyewitness.” All of that to say that no one named either Dickerson or Gooch (my mother's family) wanted me to write this book if only because no two of us can agree on what happened. I focused on succeeding as a principled storyteller.

All I can say is that this is my story and I'm sticking to it. I tried very hard to tell the truth but four years later, I know it's just my truth. I've been over it all so many times, trying to mixmaster my own self-centered memories with the reluctant offerings of not disinterested relatives; I'm well aware that I may just remember remembering some things. Certainly, I re-created dialogue, made calculated assumptions, amalgamated events, and moved things around in time or location for ease of storytelling, but not so as to fundamentally alter their nature. For instance, an incident where my secondhand dress falls off took place at Benton Elementary in the third or fourth grade, not Wade Elementary in the fifth. I say it makes no difference—the point is that it made me resent our poverty—and makes the story flow more smoothly. Names which appear in quotation marks the first time have been changed because I'm uninterested in causing anyone either happiness or sadness with this book. Regardless of what I claim they did, they had no idea how they would figure in my life. I'm long past getting even with them now; I'm simply trying to give my testimony. People who have treated me far worse but don't further my agenda here are not mentioned at all; I'll get to them in fiction. Those given appellations like “Spineless Worm” simply don't deserve to have decent people say their names.

Several years into this process, I realized that the real distortion will derive from my omissions—the things I was told but don't believe, the things I believe but chose not to tell, and most insidious of all, the things I don't remember. A sister recently told me that I'd worn my father's oversized house slippers to tatters in the years after my mother left him and took us with her. I remember those years as the height of my hatred of him; I cannot believe that I did such a heartbreakingly transparent thing, but my mother corroborates this revelation. Conversely, I remember things that no one else does. I have to acknowledge that I most likely blocked things out, made them up, or substantially altered them in my mind (but I don't really believe it: I know I'm right!). Four years of trying to get a straight story out of myself and a thousand other headstrong Negroes just like me has taught me something crucial to understanding humans: each of us is the star of our own personal soap opera with its own plot, its own logic, its own villains, and its own heroes. Regardless of the proof offered, those story lines are unshakeable. I had many opportunities to listen to outrageous lies about an event the liar knew I witnessed, or which defied the laws of time and space (one would have had to be in Indiana and Mississippi at the same time given the previous story). But then, I still can't accept that I cherished my “hated” father's raggedy shoes. It contradicts all the other things I “know” as an eyewitness.

I tried hardest of all to tell the truth on myself. You know by now, of course, that I believe that there is no such thing. For decency's sake, I must state that my oldest sister sees our father entirely positive and will be devastated by my depiction of him. We might as well have known completely different men, so differently do we remember him. In the early years of his marriage, he quite probably was a different person. By the time I came along, though, our home was a different place. We will never agree on whose fault that was or how it came to be. I simply did not know the man she describes (how could I? I didn't exist). We know pieces of the same story from different vantage points to which each of our worldviews is inextricably wedded. The real difference between us? I envy her.

My father, my mother, and my brother are the only family members I discuss in detail in this book. Their stories are simply too fascinating and too bound up with my own to resist. I'm prouder of my mother and brother than of any other people I know, so I hounded them and gave them no option but to cooperate. All I will say in my own defense is that I feel compelled to tell the world about them and all the other working-class, ghetto-trapped tool-users just like them whose leaders aren't fit to shine their shoes. I'll just wait till they forgive me. My brother, in particular, laid himself bare to me in a most heroic and humble way once I had him cornered. His story is much braver than mine, his fortitude much greater. My mother is a saint who should immediately be made galactic president. She is wise and strong and the most difficult thing a human can be: kind. As for my father, I still don't understand him fully because he's too difficult for us to talk about, but the picture I paint of him is one I can understand and is true, I think, as far as it goes. Without a doubt, however, it is incomplete.

Difficult as this process has been, I feel neither good nor bad, happy nor sad about it now. Merely finished. Done. Task completed. It was simply something I needed to do—like acquire a graduate degree or have a painful medical procedure—so I did it. Now I can let it go. Some people work out their issues in therapy. Some over glasses of wine with friends. Some take hostages and climb up bell towers with high-powered rifles. I wrestle with things on paper until they make sense to me. That makes me ruthless with the lives of both myself and others; be interesting around me at your own peril.

My heart is in my family and in the black working class. I write about them to honor them, something people like us have long deserved and seldom receive. Even so, I am going to try very, very hard never to write about my family again. In nonfiction.

——

Caterwauling completed, let me now acknowledge that I have been befriended by so many people in so many places at so many different times in my life, I'll never know what I did to deserve it. I just pray I leave no one out.

There would be no book and no acknowledgments had not Erroll McDonald and the amazing Pantheon team rescued me and my erstwhile manuscript when they did. Had they not, I might just have climbed that bell tower with that high-powered rifle. Erroll's calm maturity, sure eye, and finely tuned bullshit detector—what a relief. Ron Goldfarb, my agent, was an oasis of sanity as well in the neurotic-rich environment that is big-time publishing. By allowing me to write about him and his incredible courage, my nephew Johnny Townson made my writing career. It was because of him that editors became interested in me in the first place; I'd still be writing $200 book reviews if he hadn't allowed me to invade his privacy. As your grandfather used to say, one day I'll dance at your wedding, Johnny. And without my accountants, Nelson Costa and Stephanie Meilman, I would have gone under long ago. I never cease to be amazed at how seriously they take their work and how much concern they showed me, far beyond the call of duty. Granted, they never gave me anything but bad news (never, ever be self-employed; the IRS hates us) but they always took it as hard as I did. My everlasting gratitude to all of you. Finally, without Ted Halstead and the New America Foundation, I would have had to make lattes at Starbucks to finish this book. Instead, NAF gave me a warm, lively, and challenging intellectual home and all the support any writer could ever fantasize about. You screwed up, Ted—I may never leave. My lasting gratitude.

Some of the folks that follow may be very surprised to see themselves listed here. But their love, support, and failure to panic every time I did gave me the confidence to strike out on my own in the first place and, later, to believe I could write. I've made a lot of bold, fairly desperate lurches upward in my life and it has only been recently that I have done so with any confidence. Many people along the way have dismissed me as merely indecisive and unrealistic, which only fed my self-doubt. These people, though, embraced me as special and helped me dream. More often than not, all I needed was to be taken seriously and listened to, which these kind souls always did. All of these people are overcommitted and stretched every which way at once, but still found the time to give me whatever I was needing at the moment—in some cases, all the way back to elementary school. Some are here because they threw me the work that kept me alive all this time. Some because they cared enough about me and the craft of writing itself to read my many, many drafts. Some are here because I shafted them in my ruthless determination to finish this book and they forgave me. I can't blame the ones who didn't forgive me but I'm eternally grateful to the ones who did. This book would not have seen the light of day without: Jabari Asim, Pete Ballenger, Alex Beam, Jonah Blank, Matthew Considine, Jim Fallows, Jonathan Foreman, Steve Fraser, Henry Louis Gates, Paul Glastris, Bill and Barbara Graham, Jon and Linda Greenblatt, Penda Hair, Duncan Kennedy, Randy Kennedy, Sue and John Leonard, Glen Loury, Erik Markeset, Charles Ogletree, Susan Butler Plum, Ameek Ponda, Samantha Power, Katherine Russell Rich, Diane Salvatore, Ilena Silverman, Darrell Slack, Dave Stilwell, David Talbot, Margaret Talbot, Lenora Todaro, Chris Turpin, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Mike Vazquez, Steve Waldman, Joan Walsh, David Weir. Thank you all.

Finally and always, of course, Scott, the missing puzzle piece. It all makes sense now.

Washington, D.C.
March 2000