An American Story by Debra J. Dickerson

Author:Debra J. Dickerson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375421181
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

DIGGING DITCHES

It occurred to me that Bobby epitomized the false choice—sociopathology and active wrongdoing versus an upstanding but incredibly difficult life lived while society ignores you—that so many blacks face.

He was the only one left at home. While he’d calmed down from his wildest years, at twenty, he was still headed nowhere fast. Minimally literate, often either drunk or high, with a shoddy work history of gas station jobs held until he’d punched out the owner, he faced a future that did not look bright. The only ghetto folly he’d avoided was fathering bastards—I suspected a low sperm count rather than the use of birth control. I may have been reassessing my relationship to blacks at large, but I was feeling no more charitable toward my brother. Nobody was oppressing him; he was choosing to fail for no reason I could see.

Dorothy had just thrown him out of her place in Atlanta. I’ll never know why I extended to my hated brother the invitation to come live with me at precisely that moment, January 1985. A tiny part of me wanted to help him, but it was a foregone conclusion that Mama’s favorite would again fail ignominiously. In fact, I didn’t even think he would accept, which was what I actually hoped would happen. Then, I could be the virtuous one without being inconvenienced. But he blindsided me: he jumped at my offer. No attitude, no questions asked.

I girded myself for six to eight weeks of his shenanigans. I figured that was all the time it would take for him to burn this bridge too. I planned to be merciless. It was one thing to mistreat me while we lived in our parents’ home; I planned in advance to never forgive him for abusing me in my own. I just wondered exactly what it would be: pawning appliances, using my credit cards, peddling drugs from my living room, hoochie mamas coming and going at all hours? He hadn’t been at Dorothy’s long enough to reach his full negative potential, so I hid my valuables, braced for the worst, and looked forward to moving up a notch with our mother.

When I think of it now, I can’t help thinking back to Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church in north St. Louis where the old folks would cackle when we sang:

Dig one ditch

you better dig two

cause the trap you set

just might be for you.

So my brother came to Maryland and I greeted him with a long list of rules and “things I will not tolerate.” It was basically the same spiel I used when my seven-year-old nephew visited. I was a benevolent prison warden; lots of rules, lot of low expectations. He just nodded and looked away.

He’d driven in at about 4:30 A.M. By 8 A.M. he was out job hunting, and by the end of the day, had not one but two.

It wouldn’t last.

So I waited for him to fail. I waited for him to steal from my purse or tell me to kiss his ass so I could pass him on to the next sister in line.

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