How did you come to write An American Story,
and what did you hope to accomplish?

I’d spent the first thirty years of my life very much inside my own head. My working-class culture and the mainstream culture were all telling me that my thoughts, my wants, my ways were all wrong, that I was irrelevant. It was like carrying heavy suitcases everywhere I went and never being allowed to set them down. When I finally found the courage to speak in the last decade, a lifetime of thoughts and observations came tumbling out of those suitcases. The only way to sort it all out was to write it down.

What did I hope to accomplish? I had been extremely angry with my father, at my brother, my own people, at white people, racism, sexism—all the things that had made my life so difficult and I wanted to get over it. I knew that I needed to put my anger in context by examining my own behavior and the exogenous forces at work on us all. I wanted to look at what I contributed to the situation so I could move beyond the blame game. I knew all my unresolved issues had paralyzed me, politically and socially, and helped keep me unhappy. I didn’t want to be paralyzed anymore, didn’t want to be unhappy anymore. Had I been upper class, I suppose I’d have gone into therapy.

Secondly, I wanted to make it clear that a big part of the problem of black uplift is the inherent tension between the black bourgeoisie and the black working class. Our interests are not mutually exclusive but they don’t overlap much either. Class conflict within the black community is the crazy old aunt in the attic. Nobody in the family wants you to talk about it; especially the ones who are spending Auntie’s pension check every month. Its long past time blacks opened up a dialogue between us. It’s always been clear to me that black people put a lot more limits on me than whites ever did.

Your memoir includes vivid descriptions of some very difficult family stories. How did you get the courage to lay your story out so honestly?

My mother always said, "If you tell one lie, you have to tell two." There was no way to avoid the tough stories and tell the truth. Thanks to my mother--whose example is the most powerful one I know of a dignified life righteously, courageously, unflinchingly lived under horrendous circumstances—my conscience would have stolen my peace from me had I wimped out. What made the process eventually bearable was knowing that when I got to the end, everyone who needed to earn redemption, including me, did. Everyone who needed to have their whole story told got what they needed. That kept me going.

How has your family reacted to your book?

Some weeks I’m a hero. Some weeks no one will speak to me. I’ve gotten screamed at and hung up on a few times already. I’ve gotten tear-choked voicemails of thanks. I think it will be a few years before we all, including me, know what we really think about my having done this. I’m aware that I’m courting disaster; I’ve spent five years thinking of all the different scenarios in which I live to regret having done this. Short term--things will worsen between us. Long term--we’re peasants. We’ll keep moving.

You write, "No one could have foretold the havoc that the inherent contradictions between the way of life my parents brought with them from the South and the way of life open to us in the North would wreak on our family." How did you come to terms with this tension, keeping balance in your life?

Time. I was an unbalanced mess until my thirties, full of resentment and grudges. I did as I was told but in spiteful silence while keeping mental score.

My parents’ way of life was the peon’s way of life. Their religion of complete self-denial and extreme self-control made their lives stable and dignified but it was definitely a way of life for the downtrodden who planned to stay that way. Questioning the status quo (inside or outside our house) was completely out of the question. Our reward was to come in heaven. Yeah but, where were all our tax dollars going today? Why didn’t my brother have to stay in the house, why didn’t he have to clean up, too? The White folks, the men -- they weren’t waiting for the Rapture. I had excellent manners and high blood pressure.

But on the other hand, both the value of my parents’ value system has been obvious to me since I was a teenager. Lying: wrong. Stealing: Wrong. Failing to help others: Wrong. Showing off: Wrong. Sloth: Wrong. Not doing your best no matter the circumstances: Wrong.

In the beginning, I lived up to those standards for fear of whippings, then for fear of disapproval. But by my early twenties, I could see that those precepts, combined with northern opportunity, were a recipe for a success. Hard work in a cotton field wasn’t going to do much for me, but hard work at a Northern gifted school prepared me to do well in college. Those values paid off and kept my life simple. I shoplifted a lemon once when I was ten and almost died from the guilt. It was agony, waiting for the phone to ring and imagining my mother’s disgust. Not getting caught was so hard on me; I knew I’d never survive a bust. Easier not to steal. Simple rules, simple lives. I talk to my mother nearly everyday by phone. I almost always have a story of some incredibly bad behavior I’ve witnessed and usually end by serio-comically thanking her for raising me to be a good girl.

Reading was your salvation during a tough childhood and adolescence – what were your favorite books, which writers made the most significant impact on you?

I just read everything, anything I could get my hands on. The only time I wasn’t reading was when I was asleep but even then I slept with books the way other girls slept with dolls. I loved the flowery, somewhat surreal language of the canon. I just let it wash over me like a big, exotic wave. Simultaneously, though, I craved Dickens, Steinbeck and, when I discovered short stories, Tillie Olsen, I think because on some level I sensed their working class perspective. I knew nothing about literary schools or the politics of literature, just that they talked about people who, despite their race or dress or time in history, I knew were an awful lot like me-low class tool-users who yet achieved a certain kind of nobility.

In high school, I discovered Kurt Vonnegut and became his mental groupie. His books I read and reread because they were so otherworldly and beautiful (I used to think of reading him as reading underwater). Steinbeck and Vonnegut are the only writers who’ve ever affected me physically: Of Mice and Men slammed a fist into my stomach and Slaughterhouse Five made me gasp aloud. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy made me laugh so hard I cried, but that made me realize how infrequently I laughed which made me so sad I cried some more. Books freed me to tap into emotions I muzzled normally.

When you were in fifth grade (and had just finished reading To Kill A Mockingbird) you told your father you wanted to be a lawyer. Your father informed you that this was impossible because you were black - did some of your drive and ambition come from trying to prove yourself to him, to prove him wrong?

I think I had to prove to myself that he was wrong. Otherwise, why was I alive? Why call me ‘gifted’? Why had he left Tennessee? Could I really aspire to nothing? At 10, it was all over for me? When he closed the door in my face, he goaded me in to tackling America and the promises it made me head-on. Somebody was going to have to tell me ‘no’, I wasn’t going to just assume it. I like to think I’m too self-aware to be motivated in such an unsophisticated way, but once I’d racked up three degrees, including that j.d. the hunger to prove myself, to acquire relics attesting to my worth, was simply gone. Having wrung all the meaning I needed out of them, I rarely think about them anymore.

You describe yourself as "a dropped stitch in the fabric of black St. Louis life" - can you explain this?

I was the one getting on the "Special" bus an hour before everyone else was walking two blocks to school with their friends who lived nearby. I was the one getting off the "Special" bus to see that the rope-jumping squads had solidified; the kickball teams were already into the third inning. I was left out. Going to accelerated classes, mingling with whites--I knew things my neighbors didn’t and they knew things I didn’t. There was no overlap. Most insidious, I had something to compare them (us) to and, being self-hating, we were coming up short. At the white school, I learned to be ashamed of our way of life and, at home, learned to be resentful of being left out of that way of life. I existed physically in both worlds but wasn’t actively included in either. The white world intimidated me. The black world shamed me. So I just hid in books.

How was your relationship with your father different from your sibling's relationship with him?

My oldest sister, who was an only child for seven years, was very close to him and remained so throughout his life. She sees him entirely positively. My brother feared and adored him. The fear lessened as he got bigger but his adoration never waned. My other three sisters are ambivalent about him, like me. They see the good, they see the bad. We all wish he wasn’t dead.

"The military let me reinvent myself every time I changed stations," you write in An American Story. Reinvention is an important thread in your memoir, can you tell us about its role in your life?

"The real odyssey was the pilgrimage from Debbie to Debra, from self-hating to sane, from mental ghetto to mental freedom," you write in your memoir - how did you stay focused on this journey, what kept you striving to transform yourself?

Being observant and hyper analytical, I’ve treated my life like a lab experiment. Dropping out of college produced result A). Finishing my degree produced result B). Bodybuilding produced results C) and D). Becoming an officer: result E). Letting people talk down to me: results F-Z).

Having watched my parents’, my neighbors’, my relatives’ lives, I was struck by how bleak and other-controlled they were. I simply did not want to be a peon. That was really all I was concerned about—not my legacy, not my address, not my title or income but my day-to-day life. I simply wanted to be happy and fulfilled. I didn’t see how I could be either of those things if I didn’t fundamentally alter my relationship to the world through education or entrepreneurship or something equally drastic. Goaded by urges I still can’t trace the source of, I was constantly striving towards success. Success, in the beginning, I defined as a really good professional job. Eventually, though, I came to define success as ‘autonomy’. But where exactly does one sign up for that state? There’s no course of study, no form to fill out, no Autonomy prize to compete for. So, I realized that I’d just have to keep monkeying with the ingredients of my life til I found the right mixture. Some people thought I was merely indecisive and a "professional student" but what I really was doing was adjusting my methods until I found the right mixture that would put me in control of a life spent doing only what made me happy.

Describe your intellectual and emotional struggle with racism and sexism in the Air Force.

Gender issues so predominate, I really have little to say about racism. It’s hard to be racist when you communicate with your counterparts around the globe electronically or by phone and can’t be sure of his ethnicity (all GIs tend to talk like cowboys). It’s hard to be racist when you have four troops working for you when you need six and, by the way, they’re all black. Remember, all the services tell their people they’re the best; there’s no way to tell that to only the white troops. While not impossible, it’s hard to discriminate in the service without shooting yourself in the foot. Now, when the brass decide to open up high status jobs to women that were previously only open to men—now you’ve got gender issues. A black male GI certainly had more in common with a white male GI than with me and would certainly align himself that way.

Being female in a macho culture was incredibly limiting. The male privilege was unbelievable, as you might imagine, and it was clear that there was only just so far a female could go. The guys I worked with could get drunk and get laid but if we did it (even with them) we were whores whose professional authority suffered mightily. They could openly go to the local whores, some of whom were little more than sex slaves, but if we innocently dated a non-European local (I guess racism and xenophobia crept in here), it made us circus freak whores. Successful military women were routinely undermined as having slept their way to the top, or as ditzes. Our abilities were constantly questioned and disparately analyzed. The real issue, however, is the underlying belief that women just don’t belong in certain situations, situations that always involve cream of the crop military jobs. I knew there was no unlimited future for me in the service and that’s mainly why I left. If you don’t fly, you just can’t amount to much in the Air Force. I hope my children, male and female, will want to do a hitch though.

You were raped while stationed in Osan, and the military handled your case very poorly. Do you think this is typical, or do you believe it had to do with your race and sex?

First, let me say that I feel confident that the Air Force handles rape much, much better these days just as it does alcohol. In 1981, I doubt that the civilian judicial system would have been much more supportive or respectful.

The military generally handled acquaintance rape badly then (they shouldn’t; there’s so much of it). I think my rape would have only been handled differently had I been an officer (especially an Academy grad), a general’s daughter, married with children, or had a masked man dragged me into a dark alley and beat me bloody. Being white would probably have only helped in combination with one of those other protected categories; most enlisted white women are working-class, too. We tended not to be considered ladies, at least, not in the field. In short, it was about class and gender, not race.

It is true though that my commander went out of his way to brutalize me. Maybe it’s because of my race, but I truly don’t know. In any event, that was him individually and not the Air Force. He alone is responsible.

Can you describe how your relationship to other blacks - in north St. Louis and elsewhere - changed over the years?

I used to avoid working- and lower class blacks because I projected my disapproval and self-hatred onto them and re-interpreted it as them rejecting me. I had a classically false consciousness, blaming the black poor for being the black poor, for not trying hard enough, for expecting something for nothing. I was embarrassed by their speech, their dress, their manner, their "failure". I felt that I had been ‘run out’ of the black community because I set an example they were unwilling to live up to but really, I had orphaned and exiled myself. Then I grew up and realized I was tired of being the Lone Ranger. I accepted my own role in my ostracization, accepted that hardly anyone was likely to be spending much time thinking about me at all, accepted that I just made excuses not to be among ‘them’. I am no longer anxious around working or lower middle class blacks. I speak, act and dress as I choose and no one pays me the least mind. I maintain close ties to the poor and lower-middle class black community. Actually, I’ve become quite the reverse snob, inherently suspicious of fancy Negroes with multiple degrees. Very often, race is all they have in common with the black masses.

You were about to graduate from community college with a 3.9 GPA, and you dropped out six weeks before graduation - why did you do this, were you afraid of something?

I have a hard time accepting that I dropped out because I was afraid of success but what else could it have been? It seemed to me that graduating had to have a point, that it had to mean something about my future. But what? That I should go on to finish a B.A. I supposed but how could I? In 1979, I still had no idea what I could do with my life. Diplomas mean something, I knew, but what would that one mean? People with degrees are people to be looked up to; who could look up to me, ball of confusion that I was? I suppose I don’t think I deserved official recognition, not even when I knew I’d earned it. I didn’t want to join any club that would me as a member.

You had a run in with Chrysler (basically, they sold you a lemon and refused to remedy the situation), and your only option was to fight back with a letter-writing campaign. It's an amazing story - tell us how your fight with Chrysler re-shaped your life.

Chrysler was the final bully that forced me to fight. How could I make four years of payments on a car I couldn’t drive? How could the government do everything to help them and nothing to help me? The act of getting the affront down on paper was immensely enjoyable and immediately cathartic.

The icing on the cake was the recipients showering me with praise and letting me know how affected they’d been. I felt powerful and undeniably talented for perhaps the first time in my life. I’d dared to raise my voice and I’d been heard by the powerful. It made me feel like a citizen.

Bringing Chrysler to heel was both humbling and empowering. Humbling, because it made me realize how abandoned and hopeless people without my education and resources were; could anyone really have blamed me for arranging to have that car "stolen", or for simply defaulting on the loan? It’s impossible situations exactly like that one that get poor people into trouble. I was only special in that I hadn’t been pulverized.

Simply waging, that battle freed me to distrust and question the primacy of our bloodsucking, take-no-prisoners capitalism. It made me lose the last remnants of my fear of the government. It set me on the road to a basic disdain for the do-nothing, get-photographed-a-lot black political class. And it made me want to fight for those most often brutalized by rapacious corporations and their government protectors. Most of all, it taught me that I was a powerful writer.

Being on the fringe allowed you a unique perspective - did it also save your life, or make you who you are today?

You explain in An American Story that shifting between two cultures has given you a unique perspective - can you elaborate on this?

Being on the fringe allowed me to see in all directions—behind and beside me at the lot of the uneducated and hopeless, and in front of and above me at the American dream. Being on the fringe enormously complicated my life but it was, and remains, worth it. My children will be solidly upper middle-class and it worries me. Where will the fire in the belly come from? What will keep them from becoming smug and heartless? What will supply that little voice which whispers in my ear as I read the newspaper article or history book which blames the downtrodden for the boot prints on their backs? There was no way I could turn my back on my birth class, certainly not as long as most of my family remains on the margins. My unique perspective keeps me from straying too far into self-congratulation and never lets me forget that though my belly is full, that even though society treats me with respect, my bus driver and my doorman face daily dehumanization.

True humility and a 360 degree perspective teaches me one thing above all others: I’ve been lucky as hell. Yes, I’ve worked tremendously hard, but so does every working class person every day; for most people, hard work means not a damn thing. My life on the fringe keeps me honest and makes me one of the chosen few who can act as a bridge between the working class and the mainstream.

Your brother Bobby was a lot like your father - verbally abusive, misogynistic, selfish - yet your mother treated him like a prince; you got straight A's and kept the house spotless, yet you felt invisible at times.

Why was this, and how did it affect you?

Bobby was so difficult to live with and so nasty that you remember deciding he wouldn't make it - you wrote him off. Your relationship with your brother changed dramatically later on. Can you describe how this change occurred?

My brother was verbally abusive, misogynistic and selfish because he was treated like a prince. We say, "Black women raise their daughters but merely love their sons." Notice that even our maxims absolve men of responsibility. Black males are privileged throughout the black community, especially the working class community. My apologies to the many black men who do the right thing, but the fact remains that it is the black grandmothers, mothers and aunties that hold the community together, with little or no acknowledgement. It infuriated me; why must black women be everyone’s scullery maids?

My brother fell into most of the traps that the ghetto laid for him. I had known nothing of his life and so never realized how fundamentally different it was from mine. I thought we were all having the same childhood. I lived in an almost entirely female world at home. So did he. I had my mother, innumerable aunts and sisters. He had no father, no brothers, no uncles in town. I never factored in his need to seek the company of men. Without male protectors, and without our knowing about it, Bobby was brutalized from the third or fourth grade on. Eventually, he learned to dish it out.

We made it clear to him that his behavior was unacceptable and that he was about to be disowned. After he’d spiraled so far out of control that he ended up homeless for three days, he realized that he had to make some fundamental changes. To his enormous credit, he did. He came to live with me and we basically started over. Once I got to know him and understood how different growing up in our house had been for him, it made me realize how wounded we all were; he suffered in his way and I suffered in mine.

You excelled in the Air Force, and won the highest post open at Officer Training School: OT Wing Commander. Suddenly you were in charge of 900 Officer Trainees - after a lifetime of self-doubt, did your leadership ability start to sink in at this point?

Not so much my leadership ability as my belief that if I simply set my mind to something and worked very hard at it, I could make it happen. Duh, right? But it was a revelation to me. No magic, no string pulling, no fraud syndrome. On a truly level playing field like OTS, I learned the secret to life: keep your nose clean, set realistic but challenging goals, do the work. A cliché, I know, but that was when I realized the full-circle wisdom of my parents’ simple beliefs. They’d been right for all the wrong reasons. My sights had been set so low-simple graduation-that it breaks my heart to think of it now. I’d just been working like the dickens at OTS because I’d never been taught how to pace myself. We Dickersons work like field hands til the dinner bell rang because the Lord helps those who help themselves and I simply knew no other way. Once I had the courage and the opportunity to aim myself at an inherently worthy task, my talent took me as far as I could go. There have only been one or two occasions in the fifteen years since then that commitment and hard work wouldn’t fix.

What's next for Debra Dickerson?

More kids.

More books and articles. My next book is called The End of Blackness. There, I will reveal my grand plan for what black people need to do next.

Two foundations: first a think tank for black public intellectuals and those who study the black community. Second, a community-based remedial education foundation for deserving young adults to help them maneuver their way into the mainstream secondary education system and rewarding careers. Education is the key to everything.