Why I Regret Having Written This Book

My only regret in writing this book was that America took no interest that I could discern in my brother's story. We grew up in the same household, the same inner city, had the same problematic father, yet the middle- and upper class world which determines which books are important and which are not, only took an interest in Ivy League me, not my working class brother. I got almost no interest from the black book world either (so the next time somebody wants to call me out for speaking at Barnes and Noble instead of the Umoja bookstore, ask me if Umoja invited me). Everyone knows the story of the ghetto girl who makes good but what's the deal with the brother driving your airport shuttle bus, hustling your UPS packages, or shuffling between unemployment offices and court appearances? I tried hard to sell the publishing world my brother's story - he's much more accomplished than I am because he made worse mistakes, then worked like a horse to overcome them. To my continuing sadness, the best I could do was a protracted insert about him in my story, an excerpt of which follows.

[Late 1970's]
At home, overnight, puberty had hit and Bobby inherited his father's body -- barrel chest, skinny legs -- as well as his need to intimidate. He'd gone from fey to ferocious, from charming to churlish. His previously odd but fairly harmless behavior disappeared. His destructive tendencies normalized to the ones all around us in the neighborhood -- fighting, drunken carousing, misogyny. They obliterated his guilelessness and desire to amuse; it was hard to believe he'd ever made us laugh and even harder to believe we'd ever pitied and desired to protect him.

For years after, he called me little but "bitch." If I mopped a floor, he saw no reason why he should take the long way around it. If Mama left dinner on the stove for me or Wina for after work, he ate it. Left the empty plate and aluminum foil for us to clear away. He wouldn't use the napkins we'd set at his plate because he preferred using the dishtowels or the curtains, whatever was most convenient for His Highness. He'd come home at 2 am, make no attempt to walk lightly over our heads even though he knew how the uncarpeted floorboards amplified sounds, then turn on the basement lights and do laundry. Radio blasting.

Had he been intentionally trying to bedevil us, it wouldn't have been so bad. But we weren't that important; the sun doesn't try to give us mere humans skin cancer, it's just doing what it does, it's just being what it is, the center of the universe. We weren't even presumed to have any wants and needs. "Jes cook yourself some more, girl," he'd snarl impatiently after eating our meals, as if I'd demanded he urinate for me.

He rifled our purses for money, carelessly tore the linings, left them lying on the floor. He drank my infant nephew Johnny's milk. His thuggish friends leered at us. He gave our possessions to women he was trying to woo and was annoyed by our protests. It was like living with Henry VIII. All housework was "bitch work," all his sisters old maids who needed to "kiss my ass." He never washed a dish, never dusted a stretch of wood, never made his own bed. Just like his father, he knew everything and proved his points by bellowing and insulting those who demurred. Disagreeing with him only proved our stupidity. But I wasn't afraid of him; I hated him with a passion that lived and breathed. Also, I was deep in the throes of full-blown hatred of my father by my teens; I was determined never to live in fear of another man. No more cowering in terror. So I set Bobby up again and again to say and do stupid things, then laughed in his face.

Bobby could have handled his status as that holy of holies -- a black male -- completely differently. Had he been nice to us, or even merely indifferent, we would have gladly waited on him hand and foot. As it was, only our mother could bear to be around him. A true black man, he was an unrepentant mama's boy. Only with her was he gentle and kind.

Drunk, high, bloody, bruised, unheard from for days - he'd drag ass home at 3 or 4 am, go sit on her bed and wake her up to talk. Since he'd woken me as well banging along overhead, I had no choice but to lie in the dark listening to her giggle at his muffled stories. He and I barely spoke except to trade insults yet, with her, he was a human being.

I was her right hand, I brought home straight A's, I stayed home, I ran our house like an adjutant. I was taken for granted. Bobby contributed nothing, Bobby would have been left back repeatedly except that no teacher wanted to have him twice, Bobby fled our home as if it were on fire and used it as if it were a highway rest stop, Bobby couldn't be required to even flush after himself. He was her pride and joy.

One day, I came home carrying a black dress from the cleaners. I'd cleaned the house and cooked the family dinner before. There was a trail of mud and grime from the front door to the kitchen, greasy car parts lie atop the kitchen counters. Bobby stood eating with his filthy fingers from the pots I'd prepared. If I'd had a gun I would have shot him.

"Fuck you, bitch," he snarled predictably at the expression on my face. He dunked a greasy cuff in the pot and made big, innocent eyes at me. My silence made him think he'd won and he leered in triumph. But that wasn't why I was quiet.

Standing there watching him revel in his self-absorbed animality, I buried my brother. He wasn't going to make it, that much was clear to me. He was going to be another chalk outline in a gutter somewhere and I mourned him and his wasted life. For about a second. Then I let him go. I wasn't about to be one of those ghetto women caught in the undertow of a two-bit man who didn't know how good he had it. You want to die, you want to be something less than human? All right. I give up on you. I sent that forth to the cosmos like a graveside prayer in a prison cemetery. Watching his coffin lid close wasn't going to take the wind out of me the way Daddy's had. This time, I'd be ready.

I watched him curse me and act like a gorilla and felt very calm. Bored almost. He thought he was punishing me with his bestial antics -- he was too stupid to see he was punishing himself for reasons he was too stupid to articulate. Would it be a long prison stretch? Homeless winehead? Or just a simple white casket? No matter. I'd be there to take care of Mama when the inevitable came. I'd seen this movie a thousand times. Now it was simply our turn. He was just like too many other black men I knew, determined to kill himself but not until he'd wrung the last drop of love, energy, and money out of every decent person around him. I watched his performance and swore two vows: he was not going to drag my mother down with him and I was not going to enable his masochism and help him self-destruct.

I thrust the black dress in his face. "I think I'll wear this one to your funeral."

The blood drained out of his face. He flung himself away from that dress like it was a severed head dripping gore on the linoleum. I laughed at him - I couldn't help it, he was such a weakling - and he ran out the front door. When he came home three days later, he was beaten and bloody, but victorious. He'd sent three other boys to the hospital.

With minor exceptions, I refused to speak to him again for five years. To me, he was dead and there's little need to speak of spirits.

[Early 1980's. After years of estrangement, I invited him to live with me, in the full expectation that he would mess up and I'd get to pleasure of evicting him.]

He told me screamingly funny stories of taunting the cops, his misadventures with women, street corner hoops. I was mesmerized. A good girl, I had never ever hung out on the streets, and this was a window onto a whole new world for me. Though I'd known there was trouble in the streets we'd grown up on, because I'd known, I'd made it my business not to know the specifics. Now, I howled with disbelief as Bobby told me which neighbor had been the pimp, which the $5 prostitute, which the cat burglar.

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 liquor'd and high by 9 am, 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 bourgie 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 his father, he was also bussed 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, pre-defeated, 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, twelve 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.

Click here to contact Bobby