An American Story Read Online Free Page A

colleck enough, you get a prize?” But when the housework was done, she let her hair down.
    Everything arouses wonder and curiosity in Johnnie Florence. She doesn’t hate whites or the rich or the bosses, merely the unkind. When I asked her how it felt to live under Jim Crow, she said guilelessly, “I guess I just dint wan go nowhere the white folks dint want me going ner do nothing they dint want me doin.” This kind of talk infuriated my father because, you see, my daddy was a person who could hate.
    DADDY
    Born in 1924 in Covington, Tennessee, Eddie Mack Dickerson’s family was very small and soon to become even smaller. Both his parents (Robert and Landora) were dead of tuberculosis by the time he was six. He didn’t even remember his mother; she was dead by his second birthday, another grandmother I would never know. Mary, his only sibling, would succumb to that same killer in a few years. He was shunted from one ever more distant relative to another as TB devastated his entire region along with his family.
    Orphaned and no doubt traumatized, my father and my aunt, who would soon leave him, first landed with their grandparents, Eddie and Mariah. Eddie drank and used his fists. So much so, his own daughters married at the onset of menses to escape him. His wife, lacking such an alternative, rarely roused herself to take note of her surroundings. My father, the little boy, eventually cowed his bestial grandfather into drunken submission and provided a safe haven for his fading sister and grandmother. “Safety,” in such circumstances, however, was a relative term.
    Though they were no longer beaten, my great-grandfather continued to drink. No longer free to physically maul and maim, he made their miserable shotgun cabin a place haunted by a living, malevolent ghost. His drinking made him incapable of bringing in the crop: this task fell to my eleven-year-old father. So, the prepubescent Eddie Mack spent those years hat in hand, begging the white folks for more time, more credit, more daylight so he could get it all done.
    All in all, my father had a loveless, most un-Gooch-like childhood and he rarely discussed it with his children.
    What he did discuss was white people and their evil. Most of his stories revolved around one basic theme: the fortitude required of blacks living in a white man’s world. Whites made his grandfather a drunk, whites made him farm land he could never own, whites killed his family with overwork and inhumane conditions. Whites set him adrift in the world, a peasant chained to a country they never let him forget wasn’t his. He lived his life at a slow boil, always on the verge of an eruption. His anger at life’s unfairness (a.k.a. “the white man”) was a seething socket deep within him that he plugged into for energy and drive.
    Daddy was confused about whites, though. He must have been, because when World War II began, he voluntarily enlisted. Why fight for a country of which you consider yourself a noncitizen, a country you consider to be profoundly evil and incapable of change? But in the end, his service was the thing he was most proud of in life. In the United States Marine Corps he found the family he desperately longed to have. The Marines made him part of something larger than himself, that had a glorious history, and that ensnared him in bonds of familiarity and joint effort. No more loneliness, no more adolescence and fear. Just as the Air Force would for me forty years later, the Marines set his fighting spirit alight; that light never went out again, not for the rest of his life. It put the finishing touches on the stoicism and grit he’d honed as a child and young man and gave it direction. Eddie Mack Dickerson was a United States marine until the day he died.
    Unfortunately, once the war was over, there was little call for trained killers.
    Mustered out, he joined some distant cousins in St. Louis and married my mother.