An American Story by Debra J. Dickerson

none of the extension cord marks showed.
    As we recited the Pledge of Allegiance, I thought back to breakfast. Daddy might even be proud of the way I’d outflanked him. Confused, angry, sad, and sore, I wanted nothing more than to have things back the way they used to be when I could sit on his lap and watch him laugh. Then I tried to sit down.
    My feet were pinned in place. Sometime during the Pledge, the pliered chains had come loose and my dress had fallen off. It was garlanded around my stained white plastic go-go boots with back zippers (only one of which was operational when Daddy’d found them). I stood in the middle of my classroom wearing nothing but a too-small-to-button-below-the-sternum secondhand white blouse, white panties, white kneesocks, and raggedy white boots.
    My extension cord scars would be visible to everyone behind me. Since, as the most trusted room monitor with the most gold stars, I sat right up front at the teacher’s right hand, everyone could see my crisscrossed legs as I stood there in my hand-me-down underwear, worse than naked. As the tittering washed over me, I could only stand with my face in my hands.
    After about a decade, Mrs. Washington, our substitute teacher, came over and draped her white angora sweater around me. Then she took me to the teachers’ lounge. I waited there for Mama to come get me.
    THE MAN OF THE FAMILY GROWS UP
    As we females battled in our own ways against our father, Bobby, four years my junior, began to show scars. At four or five, he would flinch if you reached toward him. At the dinner table, a simple move toward a platter would make him cower, cover his head. He developed bizarre facial tics and a nervous blink that so distorted his face he looked like a tiny stroke victim. He baffled and worried us women, but he infuriated our father. He interpreted all these symptoms as signs of weakness. It never occurred to him that he might be the source.
    By six or seven, Bobby was stuttering, cutting holes in the curtains and towels, setting small fires. Even when directly observed, even when he saw you watching him, he’d lie. Soon, he was lying about everything, no matter how minor, terrified that he was in trouble. Speaking directly to him started him shivering and stammering. He was afraid of his own shadow. Daddy just kept trying to toughen him up.
    His mortal fear of everything notwithstanding, Bobby exhibited some behavior I now see as desperately defiant. Our father had many ways of cutting us off from the rest of the world; one was to never allow us any money. So, one day when he was about eight, Bobby broke into my father’s desk and stole fifty cents. Then he gorged himself on candy. He’d had to gouge the drawer open with a screwdriver; it was completely ruined. When confronted, he stuttered that he’d found the money in the backyard. A “big white man” had broken in and ransacked the desk.
    We women never challenged my father in such direct ways. Our skirmishes against him were clandestine. For instance, we’d manipulate him into doing something he wouldn’t have done, even though it was necessary, just so he could show us who was in charge. In particular, my response to my father’s tyranny was to develop a strongly passive-aggressive streak. I made sure that my defiance wouldn’t get me razor-strapped.
    In fact, I ensured that my defiance could never be acknowledged for what it actually was. I delighted in finding ways of setting Daddy up to say ignorant things, knowing he’d be too proud to back down. I’d speak as “white” as I possibly could around him, using archaic words mined from the hours I spent lost in the dictionary. I’d answer a sibling in French within his earshot and then grandly translate. It was all I was brave enough for. And in the end, in our very unhealthy Dickersonian way, I “won.” He figured out how to keep me mute: he stopped taking away my books.