An American Story. - Review - book review

Black Issues Book Review, Nov, 2000 by Susan McHenry, Kelly Ellis

An American Story by Debra J. Dickerson Pantheon, September 2000, 524.00 ISBN 0-375-42069-X

I'm sure it's no coincidence that the title of Debra J. Dickerson's memoir echoes Colin L. Powell's 1996 bestseller My American Journey. Dickerson's, too, is a success story, a bootstrapper's account of an anonymous climb from humble origins in the black working class to the distinguished club of American role models via the U.S. military. The Harvard Law School graduate turned journalist, essayist and social commentator for elite journals of news and opinion spent 12 years in the U. S. Air Force. She identifies herself as a daughter of the Great Migration, having grown up the fourth of six children in predominately black north St. Louis, where her folks had resettled from the sharecropping fields of the South (Tennessee and Mississippi, to be exact).

This is no sunshine narrative of triumphant upward mobility. Dickerson offers a blunt and painfully honest account of the bumps in the road--all the wrinkles, warts and dysfunctions she found along the way--and she gives us thoughtful and thoroughly unpredictable critiques of Truth, Justice and the American Way. Dickerson self-consciously writes a story of her origins that is not the typical script of oppression and deprivation.

We get a compassionate portrait of her often brutal father who did the best he could at providing for and raising his family on a laborer's wages. Interestingly, the defining experiences of Eddie Mack Dickerson's life were his years in the Marines. He bought his family a ramshackle home he was always fixing, and he ran his house like a dosed military system. No wonder his daughter was immediately at home with the discipline and rigors of the Air Force. It served as a comfort to her, and a haven where she could excel.

The grace of Dickerson's mother, who supported her children after the break-up of her marriage, stands as a counterpoint to the grit and grimness of her father. What Dickerson gives us is an entirely human and detailed portrait of life within a black working-class family. You have a sense of their individual strengths and potential as well as the personal dysfunctions and failings that are only exacerbated by social powerlessness.

Dickerson shows herself to be a self-righteous and judgmental woman, but she's smart as hell and is as funny as she is sometimes unforgiving. An American Story reveals her own quest for increasing self-awareness. Still, while on one hand this is an account of Dickerson's reconciliation with her own black identity after a long and peculiar estrangement, no matter your cultural or class origins, or political persuasion, you will be challenged by the iconoclasm of her views about change and social justice in America. She hates the misogyny that exists in the Baptist church and the military (the Air Force shamelessly mishandles the investigation of the rape Dickerson suffered abroad at the hands of a fellow officer). She suffers no fools-black or white--and reserves an especially scathing scorn for the so-called black elite. An accomplished writer, she portrays a remarkable journey to self-acceptance in the face of constant social signifiers of contempt. I can't be mad at her.

Susan McHenry is BIBR executive editor.