Free An American Story by Debra J. Dickerson

Veteran’s Village. Some folks didn’t even roll in the aisles at church and scream at Jesus.
    I learned to marvel at how multifaceted a thing it is to be poor; it’s much, much more than the mere absence of money. I heard snatches of conversations about summer science camps, I heard parents lay out their children’s progress ten, fifteen years into the future. Mine never discussed the future except to hope that things would be generally better then: poor folks can only afford the present tense. I’d known that the middle- and upper-class lifestyle was book true, TV true . . . but in real life people ate in fancy restaurants, took European vacations?
    I also learned that I didn’t really speak English.
    During a boisterous classroom discussion that first year, someone said something with which I heartily agreed, so I blurted out, “Sho nuff!”
    The black kids froze, mid-laugh, and sealed their faces off. The whites giggled and scooted around in their chairs to pinpoint the source of the funny words.
    The teacher laughed appreciatively. “Who’s the li’l ol’ Southern honey chile?” she mock-drawled.
    I collapsed into myself and sunk down into my seat. I never admitted to having sho-nuffed, though all the other blacks knew. “That was real black, heifer,” one said to me at recess.
    Saying “sink” in the neighborhood made me an Oreo. “Zink” at school made the white teachers patient with missionary zeal. “ ‘Tin’ is a metal, dear,” our English teacher said in front of the whole class while I stood wishing to die. “If you’re referring to the number that comes after nine, it’s pronounced ‘ten.’” One day, we black kids would chastise each other for using black English, the next day for not using it. A quick dictionary check, to me, settled the matter.
    I began to cringe when elders spoke of the “horse-pital” or preferred “the new-monia” to the infinitely worse “old-monia,” which would make you as crazy as the “bessie bugs” I could find nowhere in the encyclopedia. I tried not to grimace when my mother opened the “winder” or threw the rotten “poke chop” in the “ga’bage.” Once, when an earache earned me her rare full attention, my moment in the sun was ruined when she asked “which un?” I began to correct my elders; having Mama slap my face on the spot of the transgression broke me of that habit. Street fights cured me with my peers. So I kept my knowledge to myself and wondered why people wouldn’t rather know. I thought I was helping.
    But at some point, I discovered that I could wield my knowledge like a sword when needed. One day, I had again been chased home from the special bus for “talkin all proper and thinkin you’s better than erbody.” This had happened nearly every day for the first few weeks of Wade; that day, my mother locked the screen door against me and forced me to face them. During the preliminary “dozens” session, I claimed the power of my special knowledge.
    Usually, the neighborhood understanding that anyone who wanted to fight a Dickerson had to fight all of us seriatim was enough to stop a disagreement at the name-calling stage, but Rochelle, Queen of Group III . . . she was a special kind of tough. Once, the year before, I’d kicked at her dismissively from a foot away when she called me “fatso.” She’d caught my foot and hopped me around the schoolyard one-legged for a week. Knowing that I would have to fight her, no matter how well I acquitted myself in the “dozens” preliminaries, tinged my words with hysteria.
    I began with a promise to “reduce her head to lowest terms.” I opined that her mama’s head was biiiiiig, really, really big. As a matter of fact, her hat size was 10 to the twelfth power. It was so big, it was