An American Story (13 page)

One: he was right.

I
am
a naive realist. For all the veneer of sophistication I have acquired since, I know that no matter how you camouflage reality with fancy talk, you can't escape it. Mr. Smith was living proof. He had a fancy-boy degree from a fancy-boy school, but he had little to teach me, either intellectually or in terms of character. He was his own worst enemy because, through his weakness, he taught me that I had power.

The second realization was this: he couldn't hurt me.

Over the semester, as I'd watched Mr. Smith cow my classmates and pat himself on the back, I'd become annoyed, angry, and disappointed; much to my surprise, these feelings combined to produce bravery. He had tried to silence and embarrass me, but instead his bullying gave me confidence. I was used to feeling unworthy and out of place. But somehow, by the time I was eighteen and in college, I had learned a thing or two. His disapproval meant nothing because I had no respect for him. He had substituted his unilaterally presupposed superiority for reasoned discourse. If he was so much better and smarter, why didn't he prove it by besting me in a debate instead of dismissing me?

All my life, I had been intimidated by my “betters”; I'd conveniently done all the work of cowing myself for them. Now, I understood one of the unacknowledged reasons underlying elites' insistence on keeping their social inferiors ignorant, their choices circumscribed—familiarity really does breed contempt. It was clear to me that prolonged exposure to my supposed betters could only bridge the gap between me and them. As time went on, they just seemed less and less superior. I was ready to accept that I was wrong, but if I was, Mr. Smith was going to have to do better than roll his eyes to convince me of it.

My first act of social rebellion was letting him have the last word. Watching him, I saw, so clearly that there might have been subtitles inscribed in the air over his head, that expensive schools and parchments inscribed with Latin are no guarantees of fitness. Because I no longer needed the approval of this designated superior, I saw in a flash that my time and attention were valuable commodities—he wasn't worth it. I sat silent and perfectly comfortable as Mr. Smith mocked me, and thought about how Daddy used to say: Never waste two seconds on a fool. This man is a fool, I thought, and felt no further need to engage him.

But a fool to whom I am indebted. Mr. Smith was fuel; he made me want to catch up.

——

While I was en route to class one day, a man ran a light, made a left in my path, and caused an accident that left me unconscious and another car damaged. The mark of Zorro on my forehead, I shook glass out of my hair for days. The driver left a fake name and address and was never heard from again. My '62 Valiant was totaled. State Farm, the damaged car's insurer, came after me. Even though it freely admitted I wasn't responsible for the accident, it claimed “that wasn't the point” and that it could make me pay for the damage to the third car since the person who'd caused it couldn't be found. Probably they were lying, hav-ing judged from my circumstances that I had no way of fighting. But after weeks of phone calls so threatening I'd start crying whenever the phone rang, we borrowed money to pay them off. I felt like a rag, like a shameful thing with no rights and no worth.

My image of lawyers as Atticus Finch replicas and the law as that noble body which had freed blacks was replaced by a loathing so deep I swore I'd rather die than be associated with it. After State Farm, I saw the law and lawyers as part of an abusive, exploitative system dedicated to keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. It was the intellectual shamelessness of it, the willingness to make any amoral argument in the name of winning, that I couldn't abide.

But that only made deciding what to do with myself, with my future, that much more difficult. Even through the worst periods of my low self-esteem, becoming a lawyer was always in the back of my mind. My grades were good, but they'd always been. It was just that I had no idea what I was doing or why. I didn't know how to think about a future. What was it that I was trying to be? I had no point of reference for anything other than manual labor; what could I do but clean offices or change diapers? Engineer, doctor, banker: these were mere words without content. I had no idea how to get there from here or whether I'd enjoy it once I arrived.

As well, I was alienated from everyone around me, the blacks especially. Even community college was an environment fraught with opportunities to be humiliated both socially and intellectually. In that majority-white environment, we blacks just seemed so loud and so backward. The day a black work-study coworker bragged about getting some class notes down “verbatim for verbatim,” I thought I would die of shame. One invoked her “baby daddy” while warming up greens and cornbread in the office microwave. I had to leave. But I had a double standard: when a white paraded his ignorance, he was simply a stupid individual. A black who did so I elevated to a symbol of our race. No Klansman was as racist.

At home, overnight, puberty had hit and Bobby inherited his father's body—barrel chest, skinny legs—as well as his need to intimidate. He'd gone from fey to ferocious, from charming to churlish. His previously odd but fairly harmless behavior disappeared. His destructive tendencies came to mirror those all around us in the neighborhood—fighting, drunken carousing, misogyny. They obliterated his guilelessness and desire to amuse; it was hard to believe he'd ever made us laugh and even harder to believe we'd ever pitied him and desired to protect him.

For years after, he called me little other than “bitch.” If I mopped a floor, he saw no reason why he should take the long way around it. If Mama left dinner on the stove for me or Wina for after work, he ate it. Left the empty plate and aluminum foil for us to clear away. He wouldn't use the napkins we'd set at his plate because he preferred using the dish towels or the curtains, whatever was most convenient for his highness. He'd come home at 2
A.M.
, make no attempt to walk lightly over our heads even though he knew how the uncarpeted floorboards amplified sounds, then turn on the basement lights and do laundry. Radio blasting.

Had he been trying to bedevil us intentionally, it wouldn't have been so bad. But we weren't that important; the sun doesn't try to give us mere humans skin cancer, it's just doing what it does, it's just being what it is, the center of the universe. We weren't even presumed to have any wants and needs. “Jes cook yourself some more, girl,” he'd snarl impatiently after eating our meals, as if I'd demanded he urinate for me.

He drank my infant nephew Johnny's milk. His thuggish friends leered at us. He gave our possessions to women he was trying to woo and was annoyed by our protests. It was like living with Henry VIII. All housework was “bitch work,” all his sisters old maids who needed to “kiss my ass.” He never washed a dish, never dusted a stretch of wood, never made his own bed. Just like his father, he knew everything and proved his points by bellowing and insulting those who demurred. Disagreeing with him only proved our stupidity. But I wasn't afraid of him; I hated him with a passion that lived and breathed. Also, I was deep in the throes of a full-blown hatred for my father by my teens; I was determined never to live in fear of another man. No more cowering in terror. So I set Bobby up again and again to say and do stupid things, then laughed in his face.

Bobby could have handled his status as that holy of holies—a black male—completely differently. Had he been nice to us, or even merely indifferent, we would gladly have waited on him hand and foot. As it was, only our mother could bear to be around him. A true black man, he was an unrepentant mama's boy. Only with her was he gentle and kind.

Drunk, high, bloody, bruised, unheard-from for days, he'd drag himself home at 3 or 4
A.M.
, go sit on her bed, and wake her up to talk. Since he'd woken me as well banging along overhead, I had no choice but to lie in the dark listening to her giggle at his muffled stories. He and I barely spoke except to trade insults, yet with her, he was a human being.

I was her right hand, I brought home straight A's, I stayed home, I ran our house like an adjutant. I was taken for granted. Bobby contributed nothing, Bobby would have been left back repeatedly except that no teacher wanted to have him twice, Bobby fled our home as if it were on fire and used it as if it were a highway rest stop, Bobby couldn't be required to even flush after himself. He was her pride and joy.

One day, I came home carrying a black dress from the cleaners. I'd cleaned the house and cooked the family dinner beforehand. There was a trail of mud and grime from the front door to the kitchen, greasy car parts lay atop the kitchen counters. Bobby stood eating with his filthy fingers from the pots I'd prepared. If I'd had a gun I would have shot him.

“Fuck you, bitch,” he snarled predictably. He dunked a greasy cuff in the pot and made big, innocent eyes at me. My silence made him think he'd won and he leered in triumph. But that wasn't why I was quiet.

Standing there watching him revel in his self-absorbed animality, I buried my brother. He wasn't going to make it, that much was clear to me. He was going to be another chalk outline in a gutter somewhere and I mourned him and his wasted life. For about a second. Then I let him go. I wasn't about to be one of those ghetto women caught in the undertow of a two-bit man who didn't know how good he had it.
You want to die, you want to be something less than human? All right. I give up on you.
I sent that forth to the cosmos like a graveside prayer in a prison cemetery. Watching his coffin lid close wasn't going to take the wind out of me the way Daddy's had. This time, I'd be ready.

I watched him curse me and act like a gorilla and felt very calm. Bored almost. He thought he was punishing me with his bestial antics—he was too stupid to see he was punishing himself for reasons he was too stupid to articulate. Would it be a long prison stretch? Homeless winehead? Or just a simple white casket? No matter. I'd be there to take care of Mama when the inevitable came. I'd seen this movie a thousand times. Now it was simply our turn. He was just like too many other black men I knew, determined to kill himself but not until he'd wrung the last drop of love, energy, and money out of every decent person around him. I watched his performance and swore two vows: he was not going to drag my mother down with him, and I was not going to help him self-destruct.

I thrust the black dress in his face. “I think I'll wear this one to your funeral.”

The blood drained out of his face. He flung himself away from that dress like it was a severed head dripping gore on the linoleum. I laughed at him—I couldn't help it, he was such a weakling—and he ran out the front door. When he came home three days later, he was beaten and bloody, but victorious. He'd sent three other boys to the hospital.

With minor exceptions, I did not speak to him again for five years. To me, he was dead and there's little need to speak of spirits.

PINK-COLLAR GHETTO

I worked a raft of pointless clerical and food service jobs to help out at home while piling A atop pointless A at school. But why? Why was I born, why were any of us, just to toil in peonage at unfulfilling, unremunerative scut work? I never contemplated suicide but I often wished I would just die.

I used to scour the newspaper for stories of young people just like myself “tragically” killed in car wrecks or by freak, painless acts of nature. Why couldn't that happen to me? To help things along, I started smoking. I stopped using seat belts, started dressing inappropriately for the weather. Typically working class, I was too passive, too defeated to take even that bull by the horns. Plotting elaborate ways to place myself in the path of danger gave me many hours of grim amusement.

As the end of Flo Valley's two-year program neared, I panicked. Yes, again. Now what was I supposed to do? What would graduating mean for someone like me? I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do once I had a diploma, so my 3.9 GPA and I dropped out six weeks before graduation.

I took several dead-end secretarial jobs. They were such horror shows of moronic, sexist bosses and brain-dead coworkers that after a few days at each, I simply stopped going. Some of them sent me checks for the few days I'd worked, some didn't.

I took a job at a bank that was mind-numbingly simplistic. I checked credit. The loan officers would give me a name and Social Security number, I'd put the information into a little computer and out would come a credit history. Before lunch each day, I had no work left to do.

I shared a big, open office with twelve or so catatonic people and I'd bother them for work to do. I learned to do a great many jobs that the bank would have been surprised (and fined by the federal government) to know about. The loan officers sat in the open in the middle of the ground floor, a creepy place to work. Bored nearly to tears on a very slow, very rainy Monday in August 1979, I stood talking with my favorite officer, Tony.

I was miserable. It was harder and harder to drag myself into the office every day. There were two blue-haired little ladies in the office. They bragged about having been with the bank for twenty-five years. They kept worn house slippers in their bottom desk drawers that they padded around in all day. Through my in-house moonlighting, I'd learned how to read all sorts of computer files. I'd seen their paychecks—I knew exactly how much the bank cared about their devotion.

I bitched and bitched and bitched to Tony about the stupidity of the bank executives and the vacuousness of the job. I told him I didn't intend to be there long. That I was going to travel, I was going to finish college. Maybe write, maybe . . . maybe who knows what I might do. I blabbed on and on and he just let me. When I was finished, he said, “No you won't.”

I was stunned. “Excuse me?”