An American Story (6 page)

From the age of ten or so, at family events, I began to notice the same sort of sexual divisions: the males lounged while the females cooked and cleaned with babies on their hips. Girls got reprimanded for the most minor breaches of decorum; the boys had significantly more leeway. At one of our backyard cookouts, a gang of male cousins destroyed our backyard swimming pool with firecrackers. One of Daddy's finds, the mangy pool was on its last legs, but still, they made it unusable. At the same time, a bunch of girl cousins were cleaning up in the kitchen. A spontaneous dish-towel volleyball game broke out. All we were doing was swatting it around and laughing; we knew better than to break anything. Mama fussed at the boys; she hit us girls. Even when we got into coed mayhem, the girls were “supposed to know better” and, at a minimum, lectured, while the boys were shooed away indulgently. I noticed all these things, but didn't have the imagination to consciously resent them any more than I consciously resented whites or our inner-city cloister; it didn't occur to me that these were things that could be changed.

I thought Bobby was special, too, simply because he was a boy; I also wanted to help him stay out of trouble. I was jealous of my mother's special affection for him, but I was just as jealous of my sisters; vying for her attention was just another of life's inconveniences. I mothered Bobby as much as Mama did. All us girls did; from the very beginning, he'd intrigued us all with his comedic skills and silly wordplay. In any event, he was just a baby. Just as we'd learned to submit to Daddy's will, we learned to indulge and protect Bobby. And there was peace.

THAT VV SMELL

It was 1967; I was starting the fifth grade. We were on our way to Veteran's Village, a secondhand store where Daddy made us buy most of our clothes. (Except Easter clothes: even for him, these had to be store-bought new or one faced expulsion from the race.) When playing the dozens at school, it was a potent insult to “jone” on an opponent by saying he dressed from Veteran's Village. In reality, lots of kids at Benton wore secondhand clothes, but it was only insulting to look as if one did, wearing ill-fitting or stained and torn clothing. Even so, I preferred having no new clothes to these ragged hand-me-downs from strangers; toys from the roadside were one thing, but this was just too much. On top of everything else, they smelled of that nasty disinfectant they sprayed everything with; this was what usually gave you away at school. Everyone knew the VV smell.

Given Daddy's thrift and bleak outlook on the pleasures of life, my attitude was unacceptable. He loved any kind of salvage operation. He never enjoyed anything much unless he had a story about how little it cost him and what adversity he'd had to overcome to acquire it for free. Were we to seem uninterested and unappreciative at the VV, we could expect at minimum a severe sermon on our ingratitude and how ill prepared we were, blah blah. At worst, a whipping. So we had to move the hangers around the racks with feigned enthusiasm while simultaneously not holding our noses against the disinfectant smell. Eventually, we had to produce about three dollars worth of “new” clothes each or face his unpredictable anger.

As excited as a kid, Daddy attacked the boxes jumbled everywhere and began clearing a path for an aisle. Like his children on Christmas morning, he couldn't stop himself from whistling and holding random boxes up to his ear, shaking them to divine the treasures they contained. He was happy. I watched him scout the room for unexplored piles and cartons to conquer, and thought about how some of the kids called him a “junk man.” Looking around me at the tumbled mounds of broken toys and scarred cupboards without handles—most of it
was
junk.

I tried thinking about Oliver Twist and how suffering had ennobled him. But as exhausted-looking women with head scarves and pink curlers dandled wailing babies on their hips and foraged among the shopworn merchandise, I could only remember Oliver's poverty. So I tried to imagine the VV as the Old Curiosity Shop filled with wondrous objects, and the snoring, obese clerk as fragile Little Nell. Wina jostled me pointedly from behind—Daddy was coming. Too late, I noticed that everyone else had finished picking out their annual complement of new school clothes—three skirts, three white blouses, and a pair each of sneakers and church shoes.

Daddy was behind me. I heard him suck his teeth in that way that communicated his annoyance.

“You gotta problem, good sista?” “Good sista” was dangerous, that (and “heathen”) was what he called us while sermonizing or whipping.

I forced myself to sound cheerful. “No sir, it jes hard to choose. They so many.”

Ever efficient, Daddy held up a brown plaid jumper. There was a crudely lettered price tag attached by a dirty piece of yarn. The jumper cost twenty-five cents. The cents sign was backward.

I hated it.

“'S broke,” I said, holding it up by the cheap, flaking chains that connected the front with the back across the shoulders. “See?” I wiggled it a little. The chains came loose and I caught the jumper just before it hit the ground.

“I can fix that,” he said, inspecting the chain. “Jes take my pliers to em. Good as new.” He grinned; he was happy knowing that the nearly free dress would require labor and tool usage.

“Yes sir,” I said, and dutifully draped the dress across my arm. It was important not to sigh, not to give any sign of unhappiness. Suspicious, he was still watching me, so, nonchalantly, I picked the rest of my clothes at random from the next three rows and added them to my load.

“Finish,” I said in his general direction, and dropped my new school clothes in our cart.

The shoes were the worst part. For some reason, I was much harder on shoes than anybody else. This pair was expected to last the school year, but by spring the area surrounding my big toes would wear through down to my socks; next, the entire soles would flap free. For weeks, months, Daddy would refuse to buy me a second pair; he said my walk was slovenly and that I just needed to concentrate on doing it correctly.

Desperate, I burrowed down to the bottom of the big refrigerator box the shoes were in and found a pair that seemed barely worn. They were a little too small but I could get them on. With perseverance and practice, I was sure I could stretch them and make it through the fourth grade without my socks showing through. I added the least worn pair of everyday, nonsneaker shoes I could find and dumped my new shoes in the baskets Daddy had commandeered. When he wasn't watching, I ran to the car to claim a window for the ride home and finish
The Old Curiosity Shop.
Hot as it was, I went around and closed all the windows to block out the VV, the smell, the neighborhood.

On the way home, Daddy was feeling good.

“I figger we done saved ourselves at least twenty-five dollars. Shoot, maybe more! Don't make no sense payin full price for the same stuff these fools payin top dollar for down to Sears. All we gots to be is patient.”

He shook his fist at the big Sears at Kingshighway and Page as we passed. A car pulled up next to us filled with huge Afros and covered with political posters.

They raised their fists back at Daddy and yelled: “Power to the People.” “Capitalism Must Go!”

They had mistaken Daddy's hatred of Sears, and the full prices it represented, for the black power salute. Daddy nearly killed us all trying to catch up with them and give them a piece of his mind.

TROUBLE

By the time I was nine or ten, I knew that our home was not a happy one. The bad times became less isolated events, the good times began to take on the hazy quality of dreams. I can remember us all lingering at the table long after it was cleared, begging Daddy for more stories, more jokes, more silliness on those rare evenings when he was his old self and preening for our approval rather than swaggering jackbooted through our fear. I couldn't have put my finger on exactly when the decay began, but I knew that things were falling apart. I knew it for sure the Thanksgiving I was nine when I walked with Paw Paw to the liquor store (my old granddad pretty much lived on Old Grand-Dad and Kool cigarettes the last twenty-five years of his life). In one of only two or three serious conversations we ever had, he quizzed me about our household, about whether my father ever hit my mother (he did not), and whether or not my mother ever talked about leaving (she did not. Not yet). He wouldn't answer any of my questions, but that settled what had been taking shape in my mind: something was wrong with our family. I didn't have a name for it, I didn't know where we were headed, I just knew trouble was in the air. On top of it all, I had my own problems.

——

By first grade, I was the designated “brainiac” and good girl. I loved school, I loved teachers, and I loved books. If I didn't exactly love rules, I did accept them as a fact of life and focused on mastering, rather than resisting, them.

If I was kept home with a cold, I'd beg to go to school; if extra credit was offered, I went for it. I was always tracked Group I, always got E's (Excellent), even in conduct and citizenship; and I was never, ever sent to the principal's office. Learning was everything.

It was books that did it to me. In every spare moment, I begged permission to light out for the neighborhood library, grimy and substandard even then but a treasure room to me. I can remember it pulling me, even across full-humidity, scorching St. Louis summer middays. Standing in the foyer looking in at all the books and maps and encyclopedias and microfiche and Dewey decimals, I felt a giddy rush of pleasure.

I was always the star of the reading program: the only name in ink, mine was always first on the bulletin-board rankings. Following it was what looked like an intergalactic explosion. Many stars (all gold, even during my week of chicken pox) followed it; the librarians had given up on neatness and snuggled them in wherever they could.

Hours later, I'd struggle home with my load of hardbacks and fan my new books out in front of me. I'd open each book and sniff the pages. Most of them hadn't been opened in years; these had an intoxicating, loamy smell I craved almost as much as the printed words themselves.

I rubbed my face in them and imagined that undiscovered tombs had this smell, the smell of papyrus scrolls inscribed with the musings of ancients, lost under shifting desert sands. The places I encountered in these books were no less otherworldly to me. Going to the library was like happening upon the keys to the enemy's storehouse. I couldn't believe they just gave them to me.

——

I would lay the books out alphabetically by title, then alphabetically by author's name, next by publication date (I adored the administrative fine print in books), finally by subject matter. The ritual complete, I solemnly eenie-meenie-miney-moed to see which went first. Back against the door, drunk with anticipation, I'd dive into
The Once and Future King
or
The House of the Seven Gables.
4933 Terry Avenue slipped farther and farther away.

THE PROMISED LAND

I wanted gifted school so badly I couldn't sleep at night. Much as I loved school, I had come to dislike Benton. The classes had long since ceased to be challenging; the teachers resented me because I corrected them and asked questions they couldn't answer; the other kids hated me. I was such a nebbish, even my own siblings had taken to disowning me in public. But my father didn't want me going to school with whites and my mother opposed busing. She also wouldn't allow me to skip any grades, primarily, I believe, because it offended her sense of order. But I begged and begged and begged.

I wanted that special knowledge to which only whites had access. I knew that if I stayed at Benton, stayed in my neighborhood, I'd only know what whites wanted me to know. If I went to their school, though, I'd know what they knew. This was not a political act. I wasn't concerned that black people in general gain access to this special knowledge. I didn't intend to work for revolution or to help my people or cure cancer. I just wanted more.

In the end, I wore my parents out with my begging. They let me go. I left black north St. Louis and began my many years of long bus commutes. At nine, starting in the fifth grade, I went from an entirely black world to being one of only a handful of blacks, for the first time a practical rather than just a statistical minority. Gifted school was wonderful. Gifted school was awful.

At Wade Elementary, the classwork was as rewarding as I could have hoped; Harvard Law School included, I have yet to have a more intellectually stimulating experience. Early in the fifth grade, Miss Albrecht brought tears of nerdy joy to my eyes. We were studying the Latinate roots of English; without any previous instruction, I was nailing those prefixes and suffixes left and right. When she got to “-ject” and I yelled out “to throw!” we shared a wordless moment of egghead bonding. In front of the entire class, she came over, took my hands, and looked me in the eye. “Young lady,” she said, “you are going to learn so many words this year.” I accepted that like a blessing. That fifth-grade experience sustains me still.

The problem was spiritual survival. White-girl hair alone nearly made me beg to go back to Benton.

The pressing comb was an implement Mama, a master of the sewing and crochet needles, the spatula, the spoken word, and mechanic's tools of any arcane type, never conquered. She'd never “had” to use one either on herself or her two eldest daughters, but Wina, Necie, and I had thick, unruly “bad” hair that left her perplexed and our ears and necks scabbed.

Worse than the pressing comb was the actual process of washing our hair. We had neither a shower nor shampoo (unless Daddy found some), so we washed our hair with bar soap in the sink. Conditioner, like lotion, was a white folks' luxury I never even heard of until my mid-teens. So my hair was a bushy, tangled mess nearly impossible to comb unless I was clamped, howling, between Mama's legs. We lost enough hair in the process to make wigs for a whole chemotherapy ward. She'd put my hair in pickaninny braids because it took a full day for my mangy mop to air-dry, during which time I couldn't leave the house because of my shameful braids. Woe betide the girl who tried to press damp hair—it sizzles and fries like bacon.