An American Story (8 page)

I had a lot to think about as I emptied trash cans with Mama at her second job. I thought and thought and thought as I perfected the arts of frying chicken, mopping floors, and anticipating others' needs. I was an honor student adept at crooning “yes sir” with just the perfect amount of placidity while inwardly I boiled.

Little did I know what good training those skills would be for the next twenty or so years of my life.

THE BAD YEARS: THINGS FALL APART

What made the situation at home a powder keg for me was my introduction of “the white man” through my education and far-flung reading. What made this situation a powder keg for the entire family was the simple act of our growing up.

As his teenage wife and adoring moppets grew into autonomous individuals, my father must have felt himself minimized and second-guessed at every turn—especially by me and by the timid wife who turned out to be every bit as capable as he was.

Before he frightened me into silence, we used to have after-dinner debates the way others had after-dinner mints. I once argued with him that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments guaranteed equality of treatment for all, and therefore, there was no discrimination. He almost had an aneurysm but he couldn't convince me it wasn't so. It was written in black and white and if I couldn't trust books, I couldn't trust anything. Even my mother, who rarely railed against the system, lost patience when I refused to acknowledge the existence of either discrimination or disadvantage. All I knew was, blacks were free and equal because it said so on paper. I wasn't smart enough then to follow that thought through to its logical conclusion—so why were we so much worse off as a group?

What I didn't factor in until I was a grown woman was what must have been going on behind closed doors between my parents. What happened between them is their story to tell, so I can't say which came first—his ever-tightening grip on his family or the deterioration of their marriage—but the result was the same for us all. The shy, nineteen-year-old bride's development of the Gooch rapid-fire wit did not help matters. Soon, the simplest things would set him off and his unpredictability made our home a prison camp.

“Why you need erthing to be so hard, Eddie?” I heard my sad mother ask him once after he'd put us all through some unnecessary hardship, like keeping us home from a party or refusing to make a repair which would add to our comfort but not our character.

Apparently, he was unfamiliar with the concept of the rhetorical question, because he answered her, albeit with a non sequitur. He told her, with prim righteousness, that she was going to hell. The Bible said women were supposed to act a certain way and he had firsthand knowledge that she, in fact, did not. His real fear, as a concerned father, was that she was putting his daughters' mortal souls in peril with her heathenish example.

Mama gasped.

“Eddie,” she finally said, “I know bout how the husband and the wife spozed to be as one and all—but why is it we always got to be you?”

Daddy stormed off to his basement and stayed there for nearly thirty minutes while we waited at the table. As he well knew, no meal could start without him.

The next morning, Saturday, he woke us at 6
A.M.
with a drill sergeant's cold purpose, as had become his practice over the last few months. From the early morning, we girls were required to clean without ceasing until the late afternoon. This, in a house which was never allowed to be dirty. He wouldn't even allow us to listen to the radio while we worked because “this aint no party.” Jeeps rumbled overhead.

He passed by on an inspection sweep whistling “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” It was one of my favorite hymns, so I joined in. Briskly, he stuck his head in and informed me that I, too, was going to hell.

I stopped mid-whistle.

Hell was as real a place to us as our house at 4933 Terry. Daddy was always pointing out people who were going there and I had never doubted either their going or the justice of that disposition. But me? Screaming in agony for all time as I burned but was never consumed in hideous flame?

He recited priggishly:

A whistling woman

and a crowing hen

both come

to a bad end.

His shrug said, Sorry, not my rule.

“I thought hens had to crow,” I said stupidly. He seemed so calm about my eternal damnation; I was more disturbed by his easy abandonment of me than anything else.

He was quickly exasperated. “Y'all don't never learn nothin in the country. Roosters. 'S roosters that crow. Males. Women got they jobs and men got they's. Decent women don't whistle. Just like they don't cut they hair ner wear pants ner answer back. 'S mannish. The Bible say.”

Bored with cleaning, this caught my fancy. I loved indices, tables of contents, appendices, footnotes, encyclopedias, almanacs, dictionaries, atlases—I adored fact-checking. When the ministers gave chapter and verse in church, I raced the old ladies around us to find it first. Daddy had always been proud of that. I wanted to track this down, too. I accepted everything I read at face value and knew women were second-class citizens. It didn't occur to me to object to this stricture; I did, however, want to see it in print. Old Testament or New? I wondered. Knowing my Daddy, it had to be Old.

So I asked him, “Where?”

His lips thinned.

I was “quizzin” him, calling him a fool. He turned on his heel and left. Nastily, I thought to myself: At least I won't be lonely in hell; Mama'll be with me.

It was well into the afternoon and we'd been cleaning nonstop. Since he was so stealthy, it was hard to know exactly where he was in the house. He was always sneaking up on us, poking his head through doorways and appearing from corners to keep us off-balance. He'd appear on top of us from a shadow and exult in our gasps and frightened exclamations. Then, he'd say something like “Had I a been a sniper, you be dead.” After all, there was no one else to use for target practice.

Bored with my dustrag, my mind wandered to the new book I was reading. I tiptoed over to flip through it; I never meant to actually read it right then. But somehow, I found myself stretched across my hospital-cornered bed, lost in
Little Women.

The next thing I knew, Daddy's razor strap had me pinned, whimpering and disoriented, to the covers. The whole time, he kept up the question-and-answer session with which every African-American of my generation is so familiar.

“Didn't . . . I tell you . . . [WHAP] . . . to . . . [WHAP WHAP] redo those mirrors?” WHAP!

“Yes sir . . . [WHIMPER] . . . you told . . . [WHIMPER] . . . me you . . . [BLUBBER] . . . told me.”

WHAP. “Next time . . . [WHAP] . . . you gon . . . do . . . [WHAP] what I say . . . ?” WHAPWHAPWHAP.

CRINGE. “Yes . . . [WHIMPER] . . . sir.”

“I [WHAP] know [WHAP] you aint [WHAP] crying. [WHAP] Shut up that [WHAP] . . . noise . . . [WHAP] fore I give you [WHAP] . . . something to cry . . . [WHAP] . . . about!”

Silly me. I thought you just did.

I flooded my mind with a million similarly caustic one-liners to stop myself from crying. It was imperative to stop because he'd beat me as long as I cried. Why? Because he'd told me to stop.

We cleaned pretty much straight through until dinner with a lunch break only long enough for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I was starved. My stomach rumbled and gurgled through Daddy's blessing. There was grape Kool-Aid, fried chicken, black-eyed peas with cornbread, and fresh tomatoes from our garden, my favorite meal. Mama was trying to cheer us up after a day in the salt mines. More hungry than neurotic for once, I opted for simplicity. So, when Daddy finished, I lowered my standards and mumbled a fairly commonplace “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”: overused and less than a tenth of my usual performance but still probably twice as long as anything anyone else was going to say. It was “Jesus wep”'s all around. I won.

Daddy began lecturing on the evils of white people—how they couldn't sleep at night unless they'd harassed somebody that day, how deep down in their hearts they knew other folks were just as good, if not better. That was what kept them so mean and hateful all the time. I understood that by “white people” he meant the rich and powerful, the college-educated, the movie stars, and, by all means, the Jews—the haves, in other words—not just the merely Caucasian. “Other folks” really meant the poor, the sickly, the workers of the world: the have-nots.

Something in the paper had set him off. He screeched his chair back from the table and thumped the paper down in his lap. He began tearing through it and shouting about how, if a white man manages to blow his nose, they quick run out and put him on TV. He held up a random picture filled with whites as if written above their heads by the finger of God was the word GUILTY! We shammed studying it intently, non sequitur that it was. Humoring him was our only hope of returning to a quiet dinner. But he'd already whipped himself up into a class-based, race-enhanced frenzy.

Waving a portion of the paper over his head, he shouted, “I dare you to show me colored folk in any of these fancy pictures!”

He flung the paper down so it landed just off to my side on the floor. The advertisement section opened to an ad featuring four women; three white, one black. The sister was right up front.

I looked down at it for a nanosecond too long. I knew when I raised my head that Daddy would be staring me down. I said nothing, kept my face blank. Looking away might well be considered back-talking. I held my breath and held his gaze, trying to look as stupid as possible. Forks clinked faster and faster against our VV plates. No one spoke. Finally Mama cleared her throat and sent me upstairs to make sure there was toilet paper in the bathroom.

I stretched out on the floor for as long as I dared. Bleak as my immediate future was, I enjoyed knowing that, for once, no one would bang on the door and invade my privacy. I did what I always did when I managed to be in a room alone back then; I recited passages from the books I loved. Dickens was my current favorite. I recited the beheading scene from
A Tale of Two Cities,
just to make sure that the good twin's bravery would still bring tears to my eyes even as I faced my own angry mob. It did. I went back to dig my way out of that half-assed foxhole I'd dug.

When I returned, Daddy looked calm. I sat silently for a minute in case he had something to say, then resumed eating. Or tried to. My fork was gone. For a comically long time, I looked around for it on the floor, even though I knew where it had to be.

For the rest of the meal, he never looked at me. He made chirpy small talk to which everyone responded with extreme caution. They needn't have worried; he was charming. Even so, when he reached past me for the cornbread, Bobby flinched. I watched my fork there on the far side of his plate with my hands in my lap.

After he'd finished eating, he did what he always did: with the last of Mama's homemade biscuit, he scraped the last morsel of food away so the plate looked scoured clean even before washing, then began chain-smoking neat piles of Belair cigarette ashes into it. He held forth on the stupidity of every person he'd come into contact with that day. Across from him, Mama gazed somewhere through and beyond the window behind him. Though she seemed far away, as each of my siblings made it furtively known that they wanted to leave, she nodded permission. Finally, just the three of us were left. Without one clever thought in my head, I did what I had to. I let the tears roll down my face.

Sometimes you had to stop crying. Sometimes you had to start. His call.

“Clean up this kitchen and git to bed,” he said, and left.

My stomach roared with hunger. My tears disgusted me. I wanted to slam a door or throw something at the wall. I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured myself answering Daddy back with big words he wouldn't understand, but my fantasy's very dreamlike quality made it just that much more frustrating. Dangerously, I tossed a plate from hand to hand and made faces at the hallway, knowing I'd never have the nerve to drop it. Daddy would see that for what it was: defiance. At the best of times, a broken dish would earn you a thunderous sermon on your ingratitude and sloth. This was hardly the best of times.

I knew which book I was going to start as soon as I finished with Louisa May Alcott
—The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—
and I couldn't wait. Reliving dinner again and again, I hated myself for not simply asking for my fork or for not having just gotten another from the drawer. But I'd been too scared. Too scared of what Daddy might do. My anger gave way to confusion. What happened to the zoo-zoos and lollipops? What was I doing wrong that he didn't like me anymore?

Crying and hiccuping, I lifted the dishpan to empty it down the drain just as my knees gave out in a blinding swirl of pain. Dirty, greasy water from the upended dishpan drenched me as the doubled-over extension cord cut into the back of my legs again. Daddy's strong arms pinned my face to the faucet by the scruff of my neck and kept me from falling down. I hadn't heard him coming.

“I'm a give you somethin to cry about,” he snarled. “I'm a teach you about back talk if it kills me.” His voice was a hiss in my ear.

Ah, tears were such a complicated phenomenon. Tears of submission were acceptable, the proto-lawyer in me had the time to conclude, while tears of sadness and blame were not. I'd better get this right pretty soon or there wasn't going to be much left of me.

Of all the things to be whipped with—bare hands, tree switches, belts, hairbrushes, razor straps—extension cords were the worst. They made a sickening whistling sound as they whipped toward your bare flesh which, no matter how you steeled yourself, squeezed agonized, anticipatory moans from you. When it landed, it cut a strip of skin away and seared the very air from your lungs. The sting of an extension cord robbed you of all coherent thought except this lone sentence: I cannot survive this. It left painful welts that took as much as a week to heal; they were visible for far longer. Females could not wear pants to school in those days, but even if you could, you could not bear the pain of cloth touching the welts. Tights were a special form of torture. When the entire schoolyard is snickering because you have to sit on the edge of your seat, humiliation is a word that just isn't deep enough. In the hood, extension cord whippings were like VV clothes: everyone got them but we all pretended to be unacquainted with them.