An American Story (24 page)

He also pointed out which of his “hoodlum friends” I'd so hated were beaten every payday by an alcoholic father with a baseball bat, which went to bed hungry every night in a house with no heat or electricity. Which friend's house was so filthy Bobby slipped out back to drink from the water hose when thirsty. Which friend's brother was such a thief Bobby put his wallet in his sock when he visited; the brother had two of everything in his bedroom and his parents never asked why.

He told me how he and Packy, the terrors of Pruitt High School, would come and go by way of the ground floor's huge windows. They'd weave in and out of classrooms that way, making the girls screech, the teachers clutch their hearts. Malt-liquored and high by 9
A.M.
, they held the sweating music teacher hostage, forcing him to play album after album for them long after the period ended, and the next class milled in the hallway, too afraid to enter, while they nodded out. How Packy brought a shotgun to school to saw off in shop when the teacher told them to bring a project that interested them. How the shotgun-toting thieves who robbed the crap game he and Packy were in took one look at their eyes and robbed everyone but them. He spent most of one evening trying to explain a scam they'd often pulled at the malls involving receipts and stolen designer jeans, but my bougie brain was never able to absorb it. He laughed so hard at my incomprehension, I thought I'd have to call 911. “Jesus, you straight!” he gasped, tears rolling down his face. Just like Daddy.

Bobby made me laugh until I thought I'd hyperventilate, but what I most remember are the heartbreaking stories he told completely devoid of self-pity or rationalization. He always made himself the patsy, no excuses. Listening, I laughed and cried at the same time. He is a natural storyteller. How can you grow up in the same house with someone and not know that?

Book-smart but woefully immature, it had never occurred to me that he had a different version of life in the Dickerson family. I'd assumed that everything was the same for him as for me. Until we lived together as adults, I had never factored in what it meant to be the only boy and the youngest in a house full of women. Fatherlessness, while devastating for us both, played itself out differently for him than it did for me.

At nine, just as he lost daily access to his father, he was also bused from our stable working-class area to a school in a much poorer, much tougher neighborhood. That much we knew. But we hadn't known that on his first day, as he got off the bus, local toughs punched him in his face, took his watch, took his lunch. These were his classmates. So the curly-haired pretty little boy with five older sisters and no father began a nightmarish initiation into street life.

Involuntarily, he ended up at one of the worst public schools in St. Louis, while I voluntarily attended one of the best. My school was white, his was black. Mine was safe, his dangerous. Mine provided a superior education, his merely careened along from day to day. From the very beginning, he was singled out for torture.

He told me innumerable stories of the violence and degradation he both witnessed and endured at Stowe Elementary School in the north St. Louis inner city. You would be shocked. But the one that encapsulates it for me is this one:

Once, Stowe played softball against another elementary school. In a rare moment of triumph, he hit a home run. The little girls cheered him; they loved the soft curly hair and pretty features he had inherited from our mother. He flew around the bases feeling like Babe Ruth, he said. But this was not allowed.

Randy, a boy who had developed a seething hatred for him, his neat clothes, and his neatly packed lunches, waited for him at home plate. Bobby slowed down, he said, praying to be thrown out and avoid having to face the boy who hated him and who wasn't even in the game. But no one dared throw my brother out and draw this hateful boy's fire. Instead, he ended up walking slowly, predefeated, to claim the home run he no longer wanted.

One pace short of home plate, this boy who hated him so much smacked him in the face with a baseball mitt with all his might. Bobby's eyes were blacked and his nose poured blood while the principals, teachers, and students of both schools watched the tableau from the bleachers. Randy then made him go all the way back to first base and off the field. Not directly from home plate. No. Bobby was made to completely retrace his steps and undo, base by base, the one good thing that he had accomplished at that horrible school.

My brother gave the story his best comedic spin, but that time, I couldn't laugh. Sitting at my kitchen table in Maryland years later, I learned to hate that school where baseballs came whizzing through open classroom doors to thwack him in the head and knock him semiconscious to the floor, where hysterical little girls were dragged into the boys' bathroom, where little boys ran screaming down the hall with lawn darts hanging from their backs.

Bizarrely, my nine-year-old brother chose that moment to emerge as the class clown. Every time he was beaten, he fought back with words. My verbal acuity gave me the gift of invisibility, which, while lonely, freed me from abuse. His jibes made him a star and highly visible. Unfortunately, he was still a pretty, roly-poly mama's boy who stuttered and had facial tics—every smart remark earned him another beating, but he wouldn't hold his tongue. His five sisters couldn't come to his aid because we were all spread out in different schools, different cities. In any event, he knew without having to think about it very hard that having girls run to fight for him would not only get him killed, it would make him want to die. If he told Daddy, he'd be forced to “fight like a man.” In the end, none of us even knew what was happening. Just as he'd drawn our father's attention with inexplicable stabs at defiance and endured many self-inflicted whippings, he chose to employ the same fatalistic strategy at school. As a result, not only did all the tough boys he made laughingstocks of come to hate him, but so did the school administration; to them, any black boy not sitting quietly at his desk was a troublemaker. Bobby could just walk past a classroom and it would erupt in anticipatory laughter and head turns. He was sent to the principal's office more often than the boys who didn't even bother to beat him up out of sight.

He told no one about what his life was really like. He can't say why now.

The nightmare he lived through that year at Stowe ruined his life. It made him hate himself from every possible angle. The girls made much over his “good hair”; the boys beat him up every time they did so. On the day someone suggested a “good hair” contest, Bobby was sure he would be killed. His was the only head through which a comb passed without encountering a tangle, and his was the only head pounded against a desk at the contest's end. Three times in one day he was struck in the head with a softball every time he passed a particular part of the schoolyard. The third time he dragged himself to her office, the school nurse said gently, “Why don't you just spend the rest of the day here.” She didn't call our parents, she didn't call the principal. She just gave him sanctuary. Randy and the boys renamed him “Wide-Ass,” a sobriquet that even some teachers used.

Waiting for the school bus, Bobby watched as his classmates broke into neighboring houses. One neighborhood boy, Cookie, was a famed second-story man. Bobby watched one morning as he ascended a ladder propped against a neighbor's house. As he neared the top of the ladder, the homeowner leaned out with a sawed-off shotgun.

“Mornin, Cookie,” the man said pleasantly.

“Mornin, Mr. Cole. How you?”

“Fine. And you, son?”

“Fine.” They regarded each other for a moment.

Guess I'll see you next time,” Cookie said, and retreated down the ladder just in time to catch the school bus.

Bobby was far from their only victim. Another boy, Michael, was a special target of theirs because he wouldn't take his beatings like the punk they'd determined him to be. No matter how they beat him, no matter how outnumbered he was, no matter how exhausted, he fought back. They'd humiliate him and he'd tear into the nearest bully. Eventually, for sport, they'd make him run a gauntlet of thugs, fighting boy after boy until he'd sometimes have to be taken out on a stretcher. Finally, Michael's parents transferred him out. Bobby knew he should have been like Michael.

Instead, he was a punk among punks. He had a classmate who avoided most beatings by faking asthma attacks. Others coped by becoming one with the enemy. The punks turned on each other, each hoping to make himself seem less worthy of a beating than the next coward. Having lain down with dogs, Bobby began to develop fleas. Or tried to; not even that worked. When he called cross-eyed Rochelle by her cruel nickname (“Cross-eye”), she beat him up. Alvin, another punk who was often beaten up, beat Bobby every chance he got.

Soon, Bobby was going inside to join his school chums while they trashed the homes of decent people off at work. Once, Randy fell through a hole in the floor and cut his arm badly. Bobby helped him out and ripped off his own T-shirt to wrap his bleeding arm. He helped Randy back to school, giddy with relief now that he and Randy were buddies. When Randy got back from the nurse's office, he kicked Bobby as hard as he could in the groin with his shiny new brogans. Curled up in a fetal position, Bobby lay on the floor until the teacher who had witnessed the assault ordered him to his seat.

Their teacher went on maternity leave and Bobby's class went through fifteen substitutes seriatim—none lasted more than two days. The new teacher would turn her back to write her name on the board and the projectiles would fly at her head. Eventually, the principal had to move his office into Bobby's classroom.

Even though we didn't know exactly what was happening to him, Mama took Bobby out of Stowe after a year because he'd become a different person. We were always in the principal's office dealing with Bobby's disruptive high jinks, though he had almost completely lost his sense of humor at home. Where before he'd been mischievous and high-spirited, albeit odd, he'd become mean-spirited, snarling and eating everything in sight as if perpetually starved. Of course, he was, because his lunch and pocket money were always stolen, but we never knew this. We just knew that our lunches, our pocket money, our dinners began disappearing. He was withdrawn, moody, furious if he had to stay inside. He began throwing his manly weight around.

Mama transferred him to Catholic school. Things seemed to go well, but all too soon, Mama was in the principal's office. While Bobby was somewhat comically disruptive, they'd really called her in to tell her that they thought he should be in the gifted program. We relaxed even though my antipathy toward him was nourished by this latest act of favoritism. The good student was moldering at Southwest while the worst had a private school lavished upon him. Given our dire financial straits, it was a luxury we could ill afford, especially since, as I'd predicted, he was soon expelled.

Sure that he'd be safe among the ruler-wielding nuns, he was his old self for the first few weeks. Then one day, he was sliding down the sliding board on his belly like Superman. Ben, an older, troubled boy, stepped in his path at the last minute so that Bobby crashed into his legs, fell off, and landed on his head. In Bobby's mind, it was Stowe all over again.

Bobby said nothing, just checked himself over comically for broken bones while Ben and his boys laughed at the “fat f-f-f-faggot.” Not knowing what else to do, Bobby went on to class, hoping someone would ask him what was wrong. No one did.

Two days later, in the cafeteria, Bobby became aware of himself tracking the people around him. As if he had radar, he knew where all the boys were, where all the girls were, where all the nuns were. His shoulders twitched when someone passed behind him. His breathing halted when footsteps fell silent an arm's reach away. He was a machine, mentally calculating his place in the “jive-ass” hierarchy and the likelihood of his being attacked. He couldn't help figuring the precise number of steps between himself and the door, the door he would never allow himself to run to.

All at once, he felt, rather than heard, wood snap. It felt, he thought, the way it did when we broke off switches from the trees out back so Daddy could whip us. He turned to the surprised, innocent boy next to him and beat him with his lunch tray. He had a fight nearly every day over the next few weeks. The final one culminated in his furious, incoherent attempt to box the nun trying to end the fight. So ended his Catholic school career.

Short of mind reading, there was no way the nuns could have understood that, to him, the sliding board incident (of which they were unaware) was like the sound of a car backfiring to a veteran with post-traumatic stress syndrome. Since his family didn't know what he'd endured at Stowe, the nuns didn't either. We had no idea how to help him because we had no idea what he'd been through. From that point on till he was expelled, Bobby saw no difference between Stowe and St. Engelbert. He didn't last even a full month at Corpus Christi, the second Catholic elementary school Mama sent him to.

Several years later, while in high school, my drunken teenage brother ran out of gas just as Ben happened to be passing. Happily recognizing Bobby, Ben stopped to help. Bobby screamed, “You made me hate myself!” and beat him bloody.

After Catholic school, Bobby ended up back at Benton, our old neighborhood school, where he became king of the bullies. He beat up every punk he could lay his hands on.

By eleven, he was running the streets at all hours, which, of course, we'd known. What we didn't know was that he was terrified every time his feet left our porch steps, just as I was. But he had to leave home if he ever wanted to be around other men. He doesn't explain his compulsion to run the streets this way. He just shrugs and says he wanted to see his friends, but I think it was more than that. Years too late to help my brother, I wondered what it would have been like to lose living with my mother, my hero, as he lost living with his father. What would it have been like having five brothers and no women to turn to?