An American Story by Debra J. Dickerson Page B

sisters; vying for her attention was just another of life’s inconveniences. I mothered Bobby as much as Mama did. All us girls did; from the very beginning, he’d intrigued us all with his comedic skills and silly wordplay. In any event, he was just a baby. Just as we’d learned to submit to Daddy’s will, we learned to indulge and protect Bobby. And there was peace.
    THAT VV SMELL
    It was 1967; I was starting the fifth grade. We were on our way to Veteran’s Village, a secondhand store where Daddy made us buy most of our clothes. (Except Easter clothes: even for him, these had to be store-bought new or one faced expulsion from the race.) When playing the dozens at school, it was a potent insult to “jone” on an opponent by saying he dressed from Veteran’s Village. In reality, lots of kids at Benton wore secondhand clothes, but it was only insulting to look as if one did, wearing ill-fitting or stained and torn clothing. Even so, I preferred having no new clothes to these ragged hand-me-downs from strangers; toys from the roadside were one thing, but this was just too much. On top of everything else, they smelled of that nasty disinfectant they sprayed everything with; this was what usually gave you away at school. Everyone knew the VV smell.
    Given Daddy’s thrift and bleak outlook on the pleasures of life, my attitude was unacceptable. He loved any kind of salvage operation. He never enjoyed anything much unless he had a story about how little it cost him and what adversity he’d had to overcome to acquire it for free. Were we to seem uninterested and unappreciative at the VV, we could expect at minimum a severe sermon on our ingratitude and how ill prepared we were, blah blah. At worst, a whipping. So we had to move the hangers around the racks with feigned enthusiasm while simultaneously not holding our noses against the disinfectant smell. Eventually, we had to produce about three dollars worth of “new” clothes each or face his unpredictable anger.
    As excited as a kid, Daddy attacked the boxes jumbled everywhere and began clearing a path for an aisle. Like his children on Christmas morning, he couldn’t stop himself from whistling and holding random boxes up to his ear, shaking them to divine the treasures they contained. He was happy. I watched him scout the room for unexplored piles and cartons to conquer, and thought about how some of the kids called him a “junk man.” Looking around me at the tumbled mounds of broken toys and scarred cupboards without handles—most of it
was
junk.
    I tried thinking about Oliver Twist and how suffering had ennobled him. But as exhausted-looking women with head scarves and pink curlers dandled wailing babies on their hips and foraged among the shopworn merchandise, I could only remember Oliver’s poverty. So I tried to imagine the VV as the Old Curiosity Shop filled with wondrous objects, and the snoring, obese clerk as fragile Little Nell. Wina jostled me pointedly from behind—Daddy was coming. Too late, I noticed that everyone else had finished picking out their annual complement of new school clothes—three skirts, three white blouses, and a pair each of sneakers and church shoes.
    Daddy was behind me. I heard him suck his teeth in that way that communicated his annoyance.
    â€œYou gotta problem, good sista?” “Good sista” was dangerous, that (and “heathen”) was what he called us while sermonizing or whipping.
    I forced myself to sound cheerful. “No sir, it jes hard to choose. They so many.”
    Ever efficient, Daddy held up a brown plaid jumper. There was a crudely lettered price tag attached by a dirty piece of yarn. The jumper cost twenty-five cents. The cents sign was backward.
    I hated it.
    â€œâ€™S broke,” I said, holding it up by the cheap, flaking chains that connected the front with the back across the shoulders. “See?” I wiggled it a