Free An American Story by Debra J. Dickerson Page A

“bullish on America.” I pointed out to Rochelle that since she had so little idea of who her father was, when he died, he’d have to be buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Daddies.
    Afire, I let loose with an brier patch of French nouns, names from Greco-Roman mythology, and elements from the periodic table adjectivized and anthropomorphized into a venom that surprised even me as it spewed forth willy-nilly from my frightened fury. Gobbledygook for the most part, but it served its humiliative purpose. The crowd was mine. I still had to fight, but Rochelle’s blank face had admitted defeat in the preliminaries and the crowd had to support me and my lethal tongue. It also took the gusto out of her assault on me; she just smacked me around a little, then wandered off to the crowd’s catcalls. This experience was so successful, I repeated it over and over until I could verbally ice any potential opponent. No one wanted to face me in a verbal joust, but everyone wanted to watch me eviscerate someone, so potential opponents took the long way around. Soon, I had what I wanted: invisibility. I was safe. Safe, but completely separate.
    It’s hard to say which had more to do with my isolation—my special schooling or my self-imposed physical distance. My mother used to have to order me outside to play. She’d send me outdoors, only to knock me flat onto the back porch when she opened the door to hang out the wash; I’d be leaning back against the door reading a book, technically outside but as close as possible to the safety of the house.
    When I tried to be a part of neighborhood goings-on, I floundered. St. Louis was firmly racially segregated in those days. Perversely, Jim Crow functioned as a kind of social shorthand for blacks then; it filled in the gaps of nearly any social situation. Our civic and social options were so few, knowing where someone lived told you just about everything you needed to know about that person. So, my living at the corner of Terry and Kingshighway but not going to Benton with everyone else made me strange. More than that, it made me suspect. I was a dropped stitch in the fabric of black St. Louis life; I kept tripping everyone up.
    Meanwhile, at school I was just as much on the fringes as in my own community. We blacks in the gifted program were like Cinderella at the ball; the party was over when our special bus arrived to whisk us back to the ghetto. Our inclusion in the mainstream only lasted the duration of the school day and within the confines of the school building. We “bused kids” were not allowed off the school grounds before or after school nor during lunch. Because of the logistical difficulties of having students from all over the city, there were few after-school activities; even when there were, my father forbade me to associate with whites beyond my schooling. So I spent those years alone with my books, increasingly mad at the world—and increasingly fearful of my father.
    â€”—
    One morning, sometime after I started at Wade, I was scrubbing the kitchen table. Since it was already clean, as everything else in our house was required to be at all times, my strokes were overbroad, leaving wide, unwiped swaths visible among the wet streaks.
    Daddy chuckled. “Girl, you won’t never make no good waitress.”
    â€œ ’S OK by me, I don wanna be no waitress,” I rejoined.
    â€œWatch that tone, good sister. See that stain right there? Why you leave that there, ’s triflin.”
    â€œBut, sir, ’s under the surface. It been there forever; it aint gon come out.” I’d wiped this table often enough to know.
    He sucked his teeth and took a disgusted breath. “When I was on Parris Island . . .”
    Not boot camp again.
    â€œ. . . they had us digging foxholes just before we was to ship out for Okinawa. It was about two hundred degrees and 700 percent humidity, so, way we dug em, them foxholes was