An American Story by Debra J. Dickerson

home; few could afford to be housewives. When my father made it home after a grueling day in his truck, he disappeared to tinker with his junk in the basement or in the backyard, Bobby with him.
    My mother’s day started anew when she came home. Fortunately for her, she had five daughters. By the time I could reach the stovetop, I was making meals for eight. Each Sunday, I dismembered and fried a minimum of two chickens, as many as five if relatives were expected; I had burn marks up and down my arms from splattering grease that didn’t fade until my teens. Even so, I volunteered for extra duty, racing to beat my sisters to tasks, redoing work that had not been done to my satisfaction. The more work I did, the more approval I got, so I did all I could.
    Given the Marine Corps standards by which the house had to be kept, there was more than enough work for us girls. Daddy’s job was mainly to exist as a disciplinary threat. He was responsible for mechanical maintenance but such work proceeded at whatever pace he deemed appropriate; there was no questioning his decision that the grass wasn’t long enough yet, or to leave the car up on blocks for weeks, or to let the roof leak until he happened upon some building materials at a job site. In any particular room of our house, the walls were part wallpaper, part paneling, part paint, and in all the differ-ent colors of the rainbow based on whatever my father found as he scoured the streets of St. Louis. Our embarrassment meant nothing to him, except, of course, as proof of our unfitness for such a cruel world. But if dinner was late, or a floor dirty, our female souls were in mortal peril.
    These were community-wide standards, but my father took this further than most. He saw waste and disorder, no matter how minor, as directly related to sin and damnation. A poor, uneducated black man in 1960s America, he patrolled his home, his one area of power and authority, with constant vigilance. Whatever Mama might have thought, she backed him up; throughout my childhood, she promised to haunt me if I ever kept a dirty house, just as her mother had her. Murder? All right, just be sure to clean up thoroughly afterward.
    So, we swept clean floors and scrubbed trash cans which never knew trash for longer than an hour between emptyings. If Daddy found potato peelings that were too thick, or a “filthy” container (one which had not been rinsed clean) in the kitchen trash can, there’d be hell to pay. Gone in a flash was the man who made funny shaving faces and let us swing from his biceps; he had been replaced by the humorless white-gloved inspector who determined our worthiness by our cleanliness. And to answer back, even in jest, especially in jest, would signal a disrespect that was not tolerated among God-fearing folk.
    But if we were lucky, if we could all manage to seem chastened enough, we’d get off without a whipping. Though he would not shirk from what he saw as his duty, Daddy preferred to leave his daughters’ punishment to our mother, usually confining himself to thunderous sermons and a swat on the back of the legs. In any case, it did not take us girls long to understand how to avoid his whippings: abject, energetic submission. Another community-wide standard carried to an extreme by a man desperate to feel himself in control.
    There was so much to be done that as soon as Bobby had enough manual dexterity, we put him to work. It seemed only fair; since he was the only one (besides Daddy) not required to do housework, he was the only one who made messes. We’d certainly known it was he who thoughtlessly put unrinsed cans and the telltale (too thick) potato peels in the trash; we knew better. When we bent Daddy’s rules, we did so with all the stealth of escaping slaves following the North Star. So we determined to train him, as we’d been, and keep Daddy joking and peace in the house.
    When Mama found Bobby performing some household