An American Story (5 page)

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“Daddy! Daddy! Whataburger, please, please, Whataburger!” Dorothy, bird dog that she was, pointed with one arm and pounded his headrest with the other. We saw it too and the rest of us set up a chorus. Stopping for their greasy, waxed-paper-wrapped burgers was the high spot of any road trip down South. Given our finances, we rarely ate away from home while at home.

“All right, all right, quit your caterwaulin. Whataburger? Thataburger.”

We laughed sycophantically at the joke he told every time Whataburger was mentioned. He laughed hardest; all was forgiven. He pulled across their paved lot out front to the dirt road that ran alongside and behind the restaurant.

Mama gathered all the girls and took us off into the trees to pee and sent Daddy off with Bobby. Daddy was never saddled with a child; looking back, I can see that she must have sent Bobby with him to keep him calm. It wasn't working. His face gray and tight, Daddy disappeared around the back side of the restaurant. Mama stopped us from following him, so soon we were playing tag among the near trees. He reappeared loaded down with bags.

Too concerned with the nearness of Whataburgers to notice his thin lips and shallow breath, we swarmed him for the bags. Soon, Mama had our feast spread out on a blanket across the tailgate. Overstimulated by our strange surroundings, we hopped from foot to foot with our burgers in one hand, shakes in the other. It felt odd to eat standing up. Then Wina threw a fry at me and the war was on. I took off after her, even madder when one of my pickles fell off my Whataburger as I ran.

“Y'all out yo minds?” Mama warned. “Don make me find my belt right out here in the open air. Don think Jesus caint see you.”

To our surprise, Daddy cut her off. “Why not?” he said bitterly. “We got to eat outside like heathens, why not act like heathens?”

“Eddie,” she soothed, “le's jes make the bes—”

“Oh no!” Necie had fat tears rolling down her cheeks. “We dint say our verse. Now we gon all get stomachaches,” she wailed.

My Whataburger turned to lead in my stomach.

We all looked to Mama. She looked to Daddy.

“Damnation!” he fumed, and pounded his fist on the dashboard. Our wailing got louder.

“Damnation!” he croaked again. This time his fist landed on the horn.

We all jumped at the sound. Mama covered her mouth, wide-eyed. Daddy got quiet; his eyes narrowed speculatively. He blew the horn again. White faces appeared at the windows. Moving with alacrity, Mama swept the remnants of our meal back into the bags and shooed us into the car. We were bent over double, sure we could already feel our intestines cramping. Daddy was leaning on the horn now, blaring it like an air-raid warning. Whites, mostly waitresses and cooks in dirty white uniforms, began appearing from the restaurant's back side.

“Drive, Eddie,” Mama hissed at him. He stared at the growing crowd and kept blowing the horn. “Close the door, Eddie, and drive.”

Wina groaned loudly next to me. “I'm gon be sick,” she whimpered.

I alternated between holding my belly and stopping my ears with my fingers. Mama got out, went around to his side, and closed his door. She got back in and turned the key from her side.

A redheaded man with a sweet face inched tentatively toward us. “Y'all need some help? You stuck in the mud? Low on gas?”

Mama slammed her own car door behind her. “Eddie, you drive this car now,” she said.

Still blowing the horn, Daddy pulled away, a feral gleam in his eye. Mama turned to us in the back two rows. “All right now, everybody. Le's all just calm down cause—”

“But we gon be sick,” Necie wailed. “
Real
sick, cause we was almost through.”

“Listen to me. God knows you forget sometimes and thass all right long as you right quick say your verse. You only get sick when you don bless your food and you know durn well you shoulda. So let's quick everybody say they verse.”

She turned to Daddy. “Eddie, whyn't you—” He sped up a little and the car fishtailed.

“I know,” Mama recovered. “Dorothy, you start.”

“Jesus wep'.”

“OK, now you, Debbie.”

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me—”

“Good! Now you, Wina. Sit up straight, that's right.”

Wina struggled herself upright and puked in both directions like a lawn sprinkler, drenching me and Necie. I looked down at myself, over at my sisters. Necie's eyes met mine, and we puked in unison. Mama faced forward again and slumped in her seat.

“Eddie,” she said, her voice drained. “Pull off so we can find a Laundromat.”

I read aloud every sign we passed. Miserable I certainly was, but I still needed to be the first to find the Laundromat.

“ ‘Bakery.' ‘Joe's Auto Body.' ‘Benjamin Franklin.' Hey. There it is, ‘Wash-a-teria.' Daddy. Daddy?”

He and Mama exchanged looks. The car never slowed.

“Whites only. What that mean?” No one answered. “Aint we gon stop?” Still nothing.

Then, I got it. Our clothes were colored, not white. Had we used that place, our clothes would have faded.

Daddy finally spotted a lake and pulled over. Mama stripped us, squatted on the bank, and rinsed our clothes out by hand. Daddy smoked in squint-eyed silence.

He surveyed the bucolic meadow we occupied as if planning its invasion. When he seemed to have finished committing the area's topographic features to memory, he settled back to blow smoke rings.

“After the fighting was over on Okinawa,” he began, apropos of nothing, “we start agitatin for better rations. Lord God was we sick of them canned goods. So, the CO—a white boy but one a them with fire in the belly—he sent us on down the road to the Air Corps boys. You know what them white boys said to us? ‘No. This here meat for white folk' and for us not to get no fancy ideas just cause a the war. So, we jes goes back to camp. Empty-handed.” He paused for a moment, cleared his throat.

“So, anyway, the major see us without the meat and don'chou know he spit on our boots! ‘Marines. Don't. Lose.' As loud as he could yell it. When he said ‘lose'? He sucker-punched each and every one of us. Then he tol us to get outta his sight, like he was sicka tha stomach.

“We went back and took that place apart. Tore up every quonset in they camp and took all they food!”

By this time, he was pacing back and forth along the bank, our eyes riveted to him. His pace slowed and he stood staring back down the road we'd come along, that same feral gleam in his eyes. I had no doubt he was visualizing a horizon in flames.

“Marines. Don't. Lose.” He barked it confidently, like a password or a secret code. As if magic portals might open and mounted warriors lunge forward to do his bidding. Then, turning on a dime, he began again.

“Another time, we was on pass back stateside when—”

The sun went down while Mama scrubbed our clothes on a rock by a lake and Daddy brayed defiant warrior stories at a town that didn't even know he existed.

THE MAN OF THE FAMILY

Since the home we grew up in was strict and fundamentalist Protestant, it was also strictly patriarchal; our father ruled with an iron fist. So, given both those circumstances, my brother was treated by us women—by my mother especially—like a young prince.

In addition to being the baby, Bobby was a beautiful child. He had a baby's lisp, thick curly hair, and long eyelashes. He was so attractive he was often mistaken for a girl. From the moment of his birth, Bobby was special. Because he was the baby, because he was to be the last of us, because he was so beautiful—but mostly because he was a boy.

In our world of fundamentalist sharecroppers, nobody bothered to deny the double standard of male privilege. That would have been like denying the double standard of white privilege. Sex roles were presumed to have been ordained by God. Men had to work if they wanted to be thought of as men, but once the workday was through, so was their toil. For women, once the workday was through, their night jobs began at home; few could afford to be housewives. When my father made it home after a grueling day in his truck, he disappeared to tinker with his junk in the basement or in the backyard, Bobby with him.

My mother's day started anew when she came home. Fortunately for her, she had five daughters. By the time I could reach the stovetop, I was making meals for eight. Each Sunday, I dismembered and fried a minimum of two chickens, as many as five if relatives were expected; I had burn marks up and down my arms from splattering grease that didn't fade until my teens. Even so, I volunteered for extra duty, racing to beat my sisters to tasks, redoing work that had not been done to my satisfaction. The more work I did, the more approval I got, so I did all I could.

Given the Marine Corps standards by which the house had to be kept, there was more than enough work for us girls. Daddy's job was mainly to exist as a disciplinary threat. He was responsible for mechanical maintenance but such work proceeded at whatever pace he deemed appropriate; there was no questioning his decision that the grass wasn't long enough yet, or to leave the car up on blocks for weeks, or to let the roof leak until he happened upon some building materials at a job site. In any particular room of our house, the walls were part wallpaper, part paneling, part paint, and in all the differ-ent colors of the rainbow based on whatever my father found as he scoured the streets of St. Louis. Our embarrassment meant nothing to him, except, of course, as proof of our unfitness for such a cruel world. But if dinner was late, or a floor dirty, our female souls were in mortal peril.

These were community-wide standards, but my father took this further than most. He saw waste and disorder, no matter how minor, as directly related to sin and damnation. A poor, uneducated black man in 1960s America, he patrolled his home, his one area of power and authority, with constant vigilance. Whatever Mama might have thought, she backed him up; throughout my childhood, she promised to haunt me if I ever kept a dirty house, just as her mother had her. Murder? All right, just be sure to clean up thoroughly afterward.

So, we swept clean floors and scrubbed trash cans which never knew trash for longer than an hour between emptyings. If Daddy found potato peelings that were too thick, or a “filthy” container (one which had not been rinsed clean) in the kitchen trash can, there'd be hell to pay. Gone in a flash was the man who made funny shaving faces and let us swing from his biceps; he had been replaced by the humorless white-gloved inspector who determined our worthiness by our cleanliness. And to answer back, even in jest, especially in jest, would signal a disrespect that was not tolerated among God-fearing folk.

But if we were lucky, if we could all manage to seem chastened enough, we'd get off without a whipping. Though he would not shirk from what he saw as his duty, Daddy preferred to leave his daughters' punishment to our mother, usually confining himself to thunderous sermons and a swat on the back of the legs. In any case, it did not take us girls long to understand how to avoid his whippings: abject, energetic submission. Another community-wide standard carried to an extreme by a man desperate to feel himself in control.

There was so much to be done that as soon as Bobby had enough manual dexterity, we put him to work. It seemed only fair; since he was the only one (besides Daddy) not required to do housework, he was the only one who made messes. We'd certainly known it was he who thoughtlessly put unrinsed cans and the telltale (too thick) potato peels in the trash; we knew better. When we bent Daddy's rules, we did so with all the stealth of escaping slaves following the North Star. So we determined to train him, as we'd been, and keep Daddy joking and peace in the house.

When Mama found Bobby performing some household task I'd delegated to him, she simply called him to her and sent him indulgently on his way. As soon as she turned her back, I put him back to work. I didn't yet understand the full extent of gender stereotyping. I understood that Daddy didn't do housework and was never in the kitchen for longer than it took to eat and critique our labors, but I thought that was because he was Daddy. I didn't understand that it was because he was male. At least I didn't until he came home and found five-year-old Bobby standing on a chair placidly washing dishes with a large towel covering him from chin to Keds.

I was cleaning the refrigerator, my back to the sink, when Daddy came in. I hadn't even heard him.

“What on God's green—” It was the incredulous disbelief in Daddy's voice that got my attention.

“This a dress? You wearing a dress, boy!” I turned and saw him holding Bobby by the shoulders, shaking him and staring in disbelief at the towel flapping around him.

Bobby didn't say a word, his face devoid of understanding.

“Boy, whachou think you doin acting like a li'l girl! I won have it, swear fore God I kill you fore I see you like this.”

Thank God Mama appeared from somewhere. All I could think was that I was the one who'd made him do the dishes.

She pried Bobby loose from Daddy's grip. Bobby still hadn't made a sound, though he wrapped himself around her like a garden vine.

“Johnnie, I won have that boy actin like a girl.” Daddy's eyes had that narrow glint.

I spun back around to scrub the refrigerator at top speed, terrified he'd vent his steam on me. Mad as he was now, he would fulminate for at least a half hour while I would have to stand in feigned awe and humility, praying it wouldn't end with a whipping. Thankfully, he followed Mama and Bobby out of the kitchen, still bellowing.

After that, I noticed Daddy eyeing Bobby quietly for long minutes, as if seeing him anew. He took him for frequent haircuts to downplay its curly voluptuousness; he growled and ground his teeth at Bobby's lisp; he bit the head off anyone unfortunate enough to mistake him for a girl in his hearing. Bobby couldn't play with us at all anymore; if Daddy found him even in the same room where we played with dolls or cleaned, he'd thunder at him to come away. Confused, we'd watch Bobby scamper away and disappear with Daddy to hunt or use tools. We wouldn't even let him carry his own dishes to the sink, a mere two feet from the table, for fear Daddy wouldn't like it.