An American Story (17 page)

My new life and my new career were going splendidly. I breezed through my operational training at Osan Air Base, South Korea, and was designated the evaluator for my specialty. I was good and I knew it. I worked hard and I got results. That meant anyone could; assertions to the contrary were merely excuses. By the time I'd completed my nearly two years of training, I was utterly confident, totally propagandized, and fiercely “incog-Negro.”

HOW I MADE MY SELF A RACIST

While the military breeds for confidence and conservative politics, being antiblack was my own innovation. Indeed, the military is the most race-neutral place I've ever been because in uniform, nothing matters but success. Unless the base burns down, there's no excuse for not getting your mission accomplished, be that mission mail-sorting or bomb-detecting. If you've got only black troops to detect bombs with, you damn well better get over any problems with blacks you may have.

One of the reasons the military succeeds where society fails racially is that hiring, training, assignments, and the final work site are all fire-walled from each other and operating in a very competitive environment. Recruiters have quotas of qualified hirees to meet—they are in no position to sabotage applicants. Trainers who shortchange trainees will suffer the consequences on their own evaluations; units in the field will promptly let it be known that they've received poorly trained personnel. All a unit can do is request bodies to fill certain positions, and until those bodies show up—in my case two years after being hired—you have no idea whether they'll be Jews, chicks, Georgia good ol' boys, or whoever else it is that sets your jaw. You have no choice but to get over it. In the military, the only way to “win” is through your people; the better they do, the better you do, because it's entirely legitimate to take credit for your people's work. In such an environment, you sniff out talent and nurture it, just as Harris did me, and together we made our flight Honor Flight; without a doubt, that was in his next Airman Performance Report. In the civilian world, it's not self-destructive to discriminate; in the military it is.

But the military is its own little world; blacks are a big, visible part of that world, and I could no longer avoid close proximity to “them” as I'd always been able to do before. The military transcends race by creating a highly defined, societally valued persona for all to cleave to. If you jettison any aspects of your personality or culture that conflict with the military persona, you're in. If you can't, you'll be shunned and forced out. When society talks about “transcending race,” it really means “transcending nonwhiteness.” In the military, you really do have to transcend race, including the white one. Boston Southie, Valley girl, or ghetto boy—you can rise to the top in the military or just have a fulfilling four years and move on. You don't have to give up your culture; you just have to stow it for the duration of the duty day if it's going to cause a conflict. If not, no one cares about your collard greens and cornbread for lunch because it has nothing to do with anything relevant to the job and the job is all that matters.

In such a demilitarized atmosphere, people take chances. On flight in Korea once, we were passing time talking about the upcoming unit Halloween party and what costumes we'd wear. Apropos of nothing, our Hispanic flight commander suggested I tie a rag around my head and come as Aunt Jemima. A stunned silence reigned. Little by little, the silence was rent by my white flight mates' escaping giggles. But I lived and worked with these people; I knew they weren't racists.

So I said to Lieutenant Salas, “OK. I'll wear a head rag and come as Aunt Jemima if you'll dry your back off and come as an American.” The white folks nearly died laughing. Lieutenant Salas and I shook on it and moved on. Later, he taught me to two-step, a civilized dance I much preferred to the near rape perpetrated by many black men on the dance floor.

For all my interracial enlightenment, intraracially, I was a mess. I could never forgive the “hood rats” for embarrassing me. No one would blink when some black airman mangled his verbs and said “I be” while demonstrating his job for the general. No one but me. The fact that he'd been chosen by his superiors as the best (otherwise he wouldn't be doing the demo) was lost on me. All I heard was the sharecropper speech patterns. All I saw was the gold teeth.

There were few specific instances that led to my distaste for and disapproval of blacks; there was just the self-hatred I did not yet recognize which made me want them to disappear. Unless, of course, they acted just like me. Blacks were hypervisible, or at least they were to me, and I was constantly vigilant for signs of our group failure. Like a member of the white citizens' councils opposing the civil rights movement, I kept close tabs on our dangerous activities.

It was clear to me that black people chose not to work very hard in the military. Why else would so few number among the linguists, the commandos, the pilots, the officers, the academy grads? You couldn't enter a military administrative office without finding enough Negroes working there to make a Tarzan movie and it always embarrassed me. I expressed my embarrassment as annoyance. That's their choice, I thought; they might just as easily have chosen a more challenging field, but they'd rather simply take up space.

I was embarrassed to be one of so few linguists and I was embarrassed by the sharecropper intonations and low-class lack of home training I so frequently encountered among these “typing Negroes.” I hated entering admin offices when I was junior enlisted because the blacks there tended to be my peers, by rank and age group, and there was an assumption of familiarity that made me uncomfortable. I was sure they'd want to “talk black,” make fun of whites, scoff at the Air Force. Then there were the liberties black males felt free to take with me. Sotto voce, they called me “baby” and wanted to know when they were going to get “some of that sugar.” When I refused to respond to their vulgarities, I was menacingly called “sister,” a word often used to extract behavioral concessions from someone you hope will be too afraid of group disapproval not to back down. It means: “Don't forget you're black; act right or I'll call you a Tom.” I got called “Tom” a lot.

As few as we were, the “Head Negroes” (self-designated arbiters of all things sufficiently or insufficiently black) tried every form of negative reinforcement to make us behave. There's a Head Negro anywhere there are African-Americans. At the Defense Language Institute in 1981, she and I began as close friends. How could we not have been? We were both working-class black girls from north St. Louis. She was much harder-edged than me and came from a much less stable home, but still, we knew the same schools, same neighborhoods, same churches, same rib joints. We'd even graduated basic on the same day. Later Martha, who was white and one of eight children of very religious Catholics, came along and we three were inseparable. But as Martha and I grew closer (through our shared love of books and traditional upbringings) and the two of us began to spend more time together, the Head Negro expressed her hurt as racial pride. Black people weren't good enough for me. Ironically, that was true except that she was smart enough, as a Romanian linguist, to make my grade. She just wanted to act so black: she wasn't shooting for DG, she mocked me for shooting for it and she was blasé about the Air Force. She went out of her way to cultivate every black she could find at DLI. She thought she'd hit the Negro mother lode when she networked her way into Fort Ord, the Army base not so far away (not far enough away for me). The Army is a third black, and on top of that, Fort Ord is an infantry base, i.e., full of ghetto blacks. Head Negro homed in on every one she could find who was just marking time, lugging a rifle and a fifty-pound rucksack. Unless the Mafia starts hiring, I used to sneer, what were they going to do next? She was trying to re-create north St. Louis and I was trying to exorcise it. She was determined to remain the ghetto girl I was desperate to bury.

She spent all her free time with those Army grunts and expected me to as well. These were the philistines who came back from three years in Germany with only a monstrous stereo, VD, and abandoned children to show for it. No travel, no savings, no college classes, no studying for promotion, no bucking for a commission. “Barracks rats” who go overseas and never stray more than two hundred yards from the main gate, whining the whole time about how “Coke just don't taste right over here.” There wasn't a winner in the bunch. I could have stayed in north St. Louis if I wanted to hang out with trash-talking dishwashers and manual laborers, I thought as I made excuses to wriggle out of her ghetto clique.

Then there was my white boyfriend: I only wanted him because he's white, she said. You really need to leave him alone, Debra, she'd say. Why won't you go out with Derrick? Just because he's the linen supply NCO, you think you're too good. Pretending such an accusation to be beneath me, I refused to defend myself on racial grounds and I refused to modify my behavior to suit her, that ghost of the ghetto. I just didn't like the crowd she ran with—exclusively black and not interested enough in advancement.

Just like with my relatives, I was always tripping someone up. Someone would be griping about their racist commander and an undeserved reprimand. I'd ask a question like, “Well, how many times
were
you late?” Silence. They'd mention how long they'd been in and I'd ask if they were on the promotions list that had just come out. Glares. What else were we supposed to talk about? Their all-black gatherings made me nervous—it was sixth grade all over again and I knew my mannerisms would get me rejected.

She'd spring blind dates on me, knowing I'd never agree beforehand, then watch me squirm while some hood rat flashed his “grill” (multiple gold teeth) at me. She was evil to my boyfriend whenever he was around, so, just as she'd planned, I had to choose. I chose him. Even my white roommate was held against me, though I'd had no say in the matter. We'd gotten off to a rocky start when she'd found me moving into her room; she'd run back out again in a fury. I'd thought it was because I was black. But when she returned, she apologized and started moving her belongings out of my half of the room. “It was nice having so much space to myself,” she said wistfully. It was actually I who was the racist; I was relieved not to have a black roommate.

Nevertheless, I thought race was a nonissue for me. I disapproved of blacks because they deserved it, not because they were black. Or rather, it would have been a nonissue except that blacks like the Head Negro, who headed the language school contingent of the black politburo—the blackest of the black in any organization—were constantly giving me the evil eye. My unwillingness to show obeisance to them and their dictates of what could and could not be done robbed them of a courtier, which reduced their power. I was only just beginning to understand that most of the racial whip-cracking that goes on is actually just the expression of personal power disguised as something defensible. All I knew was that I felt manipulated and I didn't like it.

I remained on racial probation, also, because of my interest in all forms of music and my failure to show up at black-only parties. My roommate, a Polish truck-stop waitress from podunk Pennsylvania, introduced me to rock. Through that banged-up little radio I'd grown up listening to, I'd enjoyed some sporadically. Soon, though, AC/DC was blaring on our shared stereo. Another mutual friend from the South introduced us both to all those three-named performers like Jerry Jeff Walker and David Allan Coe—I discovered how clever, soulful, and romantic country music can be.

At military clubs, the different musical genres alternate—soul for an hour, country for an hour, rock the next—so I was glorying in all the new sensory input. I could have avoided on-base clubs like the “real” blacks did and secreted myself away in blacks-only settings to keep myself musically pure, but I was loving my education. I enjoyed all of it, if only for the newness of it—it was all part of those limitless horizons I'd fled St. Louis to find. My album collection was huge, eclectic, and damning.

One day, I was in my room with a few white girls. I had on some black music, and as a joke, I pimp-walked across the room. Before I knew it, three white girls were pimping across my room. The joke was over quickly for me and I wanted them to stop. I was moving to take the record off when they stopped dead in their tracks. I turned to find one of the Head Negro's deputies standing in the doorway, a “gotcha!” look on her face. For weeks, blacks slumped into pimp walks as I passed. By graduation from our one-year language school, I was Negro non grata. All my friends were white.

All-black chow hall tables, all-black rooming groups, all-black off-base parties, nonmainstream music—all this was somehow sinister, somehow wrong. I couldn't understand why they'd join something as all-consuming as the military and then work so hard to remain separate from it. I didn't think of all-white groups as separatist. Those were neutral, baseline. Blacks to me, as to most racists, were less invisible than hypervisible. Everything they did took on special meaning.

They talked and laughed too loud at their Jim Crow table in the chow hall, too.

ROCK BOTTOM

Once at Osan Air Base, about fifty miles southeast of Seoul, I was fully, happily ensconced in a white world. Our job at the 6903rd Electronic Security Group was to monitor the military situation on the peninsula.

For two years, from November 1981 to November 1983, I did shift work on Charlie Flight. That meant three “days” from 6
A.M.
to 2
P.M.
, three “swings” from 2
P.M.
to 10
P.M.
, three “mids” from 10
P.M.
to 6
A.M.
, not quite two days off. Weekends had no meaning, there were no holidays. Day, night. Light, dark. Morning, evening. Whatever. The 6903rd issued us blackout curtains and ordered us to buy battery-powered alarm clocks. Power outages and temporal dislocation were frequent and no excuse for tardiness. Lateness was not only an Article 15 offense (a career-buster just one step from court-martial), it was also considered an immoral breach of duty. You'd be shunned.