An American Story by Debra J. Dickerson Page A

He even brought them home to me whenever he found some, knowing it would keep me occupied and silent. But Bobby just kept making flagrant, doomed gestures that kept him cringing under my father’s belt.
    It wasn’t just my father Bobby felt impelled to defy. We, his sisters, were always running to help him fight the neighbors and strangers he was always at odds with. If one of us fought, we all had to, but the problem was that he was the only Dickerson who ever had to be saved because he was always provoking fights, often with boys much larger than he.
    We were always running pell-mell to find him at the center of a group of gawkers, barely defending himself from at least one teenage boy. He’d be taking their punches while keeping up a running stream of mama jokes and personal insults. The crowd was rolling on the pavement at his patter, which would infuriate the bigger boys he was “fighting,” and intensify their attack. Invariably, our arrival would disperse the combatants: no boy wanted to hit one of us girls and face Eddie Mack. Also, they knew we Dickerson girls fought like marines and, against boys, would use the sticks and stones that no self-respecting boy could. But Bobby was vilified for having to hide behind his sisters. After his opponents smacked him around, we often would, too, for making us fight all the time. And within days, he’d just instigate a new argument with even bigger boys and take his licks until we got there to both help and humiliate him.
    My brother was being trained in his father’s image. While Daddy insisted we girls be meticulously trained in women’s ways, Daddy set about making my brother a man. Long past the age where we were still getting whippings, my father was still teaching my brother his limits. Unlike us, my brother kept testing him.
    But Bobby decided on his own definition of manhood and stuck to it. He went out when told to stay in, he spoke when told to be quiet, he broke nearly everything he touched, his teachers couldn’t contain his high spirits—his every move seemed designed to infuriate our father. I thought he was mildly retarded.
    But for all this, it was in our sharecroppers’ blood to pull together as a family. It was impossible not to feel the pull of that blood when an outsider threatened one of us. It was no less impossible to ignore the call of that blood when the threat was inside our own house. Every whipping our father gave him drove a wedge between us women and Daddy. We knew every whipping the son got was one the daughters had only avoided by biting our tongues and knuckling under. Because we were well-trained, God-fearing Southern Baptist women fresh from the cotton fields, we didn’t fight back. That wasn’t a reasonable option. We saw no dishonor in living to fight another day whole and in one piece. But times had changed. This was the 1970s up North in St. Louis, not Webb, Mississippi, nor Covington, Tennessee. There was no cotton to pick, no back of the bus, no more Mistah Charlie. We owned our own home, I went to school with white kids. Women were burning their bras and demanding to be heard. We were too old-fashioned for that, but revolution was definitely in the air.
    But Daddy was still on Old Testament time. A son stole fifty cents, so the patriarch beat him all over the house. From where we cowered in the attic, we girls could hear my mother calling, “That’s enough Eddie. That’s enough Eddie. That’s . . .” Bobby just kept screaming and running. Afterward, the furniture in nearly every room of the first floor was overturned, upended, scored by Daddy’s belt. My cousin Nicky was staying with us that week. She secretly phoned our uncle to come get her and waited on the porch until he arrived.
    After that, we were almost completely isolated from the family. We’d been cut off from our friends for a long time. The embarrassing half-paneled, half-painted walls and