The Fire Inside
From The New York Times Review of Books:
October 8, 2000
By Janny Scott

It is a startling thing to hear an American speak as frankly and un-self-servingly about race as Debra J. Dickerson does in ''An American Story,'' her memoir of her first 35 years, in which she lurches from ghetto misfit and two-time dropout to Air Force trainee, Pentagon junior officer and Harvard Law School graduate. The book traces her journey across borders of class and race to the lonely promontory where she lands, and examines in astonishing detail the ambivalent relationship between a brainy, overachieving black woman and other blacks.

Dickerson is the daughter of sharecroppers, Southern Baptist fundamentalists who moved North in the Great Migration and raised six children in the all-black world of North St. Louis in the 1960's. ''Whites, and the wide-open spaces they occupied, were not real somehow,'' she writes. ''For me, they only existed on TV, another place we couldn't live.'' Her father, an ex-marine, ''lived his life at a slow boil... 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.''

Her father becomes the first person to tell Dickerson she cannot do something because she is black. She is in fifth grade and has talked her parents into letting her commute to a school for gifted students, an experience she views even now as the most intellectually stimulating of her life. (She also learns at the school, mostly white, that she is poor and low class and does not really speak English.) When she ventures that she might prefer to become a lawyer instead of a waitress, her father doubles over laughing. ''A lawyer, eh?'' he says. ''Girl, don't you know you's Negro?'' Dickerson, who is so unsparing with herself and her family that she vows at the end of the book to try very hard never to write about them again, says, ''Later, I came to understand that he both expected and needed blacks to fail, otherwise there was no proof of white perfidy.''

Her father, she says, ''like many other blacks, did the oppressor's job for him; he taught me to do the same.'' Like the ancestor freed on his master's deathbed only to resell himself into slavery for a fancy pair of boots, Dickerson takes the preliminary College Board exams by accident and aces them, then can barely bring herself to speak to the admissions officers who call; she turns away Duke, Bryn Mawr and the rest of them and goes back to waiting tables. Later, with a 3.9 grade point average, she drops out of community college six weeks before graduation, unable to imagine what she is supposed to do with a diploma.

The Air Force saves her. She turns 21 in basic training. For the first time in her life, someone has big plans for her and she falls headfirst into them. She becomes a Korean linguist, wins a fellowship to finish college, is accepted into Officers' Training School, gets a master's degree in international relations, becomes chief of intelligence at the Ankara air station in Turkey, then returns to work at the Pentagon.

But for all her interracial enlightenment, she writes, ''intraracially, I was a mess.'' From her first foray out of the neighborhood in fifth grade, she grows isolated from other blacks. She is chased home from the special bus for ''thinkin you's better than erbody.'' She becomes disapproving, then downright racist. She is embarrassed by the sharecropper intonations of the ''typing Negroes'' in the Air Force administrative offices. She is convinced that black people are trying to fail.

She offends one of the ''Head Negroes,'' whom she describes as ''self-designated arbiters of all things sufficiently or insufficiently black,'' in whose ''racial whip-cracking'' she sees ''the expression of personal power disguised as something defensible.'' When she ignores the come-ons of black men, she finds herself ''menacingly called 'sister,' a word often used to extract behavioral concessions from someone you hope will be too afraid of group disapproval not to back down.''

The book is full of breathtaking observations of all sorts of things, like the way the disinfectant smell on her secondhand-store clothes gave her away in school, along with the welts from the extension cord whippings that everyone in the neighborhood got but pretended to know nothing about. She describes the fear of the government that kept her mother from collecting widow's benefits: ''Taxes, for us, were a form of protection money; all we asked in return was not to be crushed by the boot heel of government. We expected, demanded, nothing, and that's exactly what we got.''

Dickerson logs in more monumental changes in her short lifetime than most people could manage in multiple incarnations: From nerd to jock, glamour queen, firebrand feminist, Ayn Rand acolyte, bodybuilder, celibate, Reaganite, liberal and finally some uncategorizable philosophical state in between. She comes eventually to question her faith in free will. She starts toying with the idea of entering law and politics, to become a voice for unempowered women and blacks. Having made peace with her family, she sets about trying to reconnect to the black working class. She joins a black officers' community service group but finds it ''more about a pecking order and the in crowd than anything else.'' She goes alone to bars but is brushed off by black women looking for men and by black men looking for white women. Payback is hell, she says.

She leaves the Air Force for Harvard, where she joins the Black Law Students Association and again finds herself suspect. ''There is something about seeing other blacks' eyes go slanted in negative judgment when I break racial ranks on a matter of principle that wakes in me a pubescent need to pretend to be something I'm not,'' she writes. She finds a study group where she can speak her mind without being frozen out. And she becomes a writer.

At a farewell lunch before graduation, she makes a disparaging reference to ''the elite.'' How's that work, someone asks, now that you're an elite? Dickerson opens her mouth to set him straight ''with all the ghetto-girl, neck-wagging, fingerpointing, infinitive-splitting gusto that I was no longer embarrassed of.'' How dare he strip her of the thing she has fought hardest for, a sense of belonging in the black working class? Then it hits her: It's true. She can fight for the proletariat's rights, commiserate, tell its stories. But she has lost her claim on anything more than honorary membership -- a fact she reflects upon wistfully yet at the same time with determination finally to make it all work.

As her mother once said, ''Long way from Miss'ippi.''