Crowd control

...And if you don't like that, well, I suspect Mr...

...Daddy brought Jim Crow with him...

...So do aesthetic standards and the standard of living...

...LOOK BACK IN ANGER A Personal osyssey Thomas Sowell The Free Press $25,308pv An American story Debra dickerson Pantheon books $24,285pv Don Wycliff Among all the stories in Thomas Sowell's A Personal Odyssey, two struck me as particularly revealing...

...However, the standard of ingenuity and socialization often goes up...

...Sowell would be happy to step outside with you and settle the matter on the street...

...Context is everything in a memoir or autobiography...

...When Bobby is at his lowest, Debra, flush with her success as an Air Force officer, invites him to come and live for a time with her...

...Money was always short when it came to providing multiple wardrobes and other things...

...Actually, it's not strange at all...

...I always felt meals were central, and dinner, served at six, was a mandatory family function...

...Usually the first person up in the morning was the best dressed—having "borrowed" a sister's or brother's clothes, much to the irritation of late risers who couldn't find the favorite shirt or skirt they had purchased with their babysitting or yardwork money...

...There is always one child who needs more attention than others and if the parents don't pick up the signals, the siblings will, usually with great generosity...

...Large families are now out of style or at least considered unaffordable by many people...

...In most cases, an individual's life story is of interest to a gen27 eral audience mainly because of what it tells of how the person dealt with, overcame, succumbed to, or accommodated external circumstances...

...Sowell quotes himself writing to a 26 friend about the inddent: "Fortunately, there was nothing bad about him but his intentions...

...All eight of us have survived...

...Some friends avoided me, fearful that I might ask them to shoulder part of the burden...

...But if it doesn't mean anything, why mention it...

...Sowell obviously considers himself one of these rare ones...

...Children have never been cheap to raise...

...And that would appear to be true of Thomas Sowell no less than of Eddie Dickerson...

...Still, remember that the cost per child does go down as their number increases...

...Godfrey teaches in the department of European languages at SUNY Stony Brook...

...Faced with a power structure and a political system that enforces racial inequality, as he was in Saint Louis, Sowell seems never to have been able to find a reason to challenge it—or to justify other black people in challenging it...

...As parents, they are much less rigid than I was and their families are smaller...

...She learns for the first time who her little brother really is, what he has endured, and why he has become the person he is...

...Godfrey My wife died suddenly more than twenty years ago and I was left with seven children, five of them teenagers...

...I've spent my whole life trying to avail myself of what's good about one way without closing the door on the other...

...Strange that two men who couldn't be less alike politically and in socioeconomic status should have wrestled with the same dilemma...

...My children are all married and have young children of their own now...

...Pope John Paul II has a specific message to convey, and there are at least two of us who think his message is right on...

...It is short on context and long on details about the main characters: "me," "myself," and "I...

...the white man') was a seething socket deep within him that he plugged into for energy and drive...

...Actually, she is at her best describing her father, Eddie Mack Dickerson, the ex-Marine who never really ceased being a Marine, the refugee from the South who "brought Jim Crow with him," the family man who ultimately drove his family to flee him...

...After forty years, I've just about got it figured out...

...Or, rather, Debra's unresolved anger at, love for, need to please— or at least understand—her father...

...I found these episodes interesting in light of Sowell's prominence over the last three decades as a "black conservative" commentator on—and critic of— traditional civil-rights leaders and their strategy of confronting entrenched white power...

...I simply got up and left...

...It becomes evident after a time that the central figure of this book is, arguably, not Debra Dickerson but Eddie Dickerson...

...Don Wycliff is public editor of the Chicago Tribune...

...I had supposed it was much more than that, because that is the most memorable part of the book...

...Children in large families also learn to share...

...They continue to humor or bait me in ways that some consider irreverent...

...The first occurred in 1960 when Sowell, a thirty-year-old candidate for a Ph.D...

...She went all too abruptly from relating the fascinating story of an American family of the great black migration, to relating a story of her navel-gazing efforts, to finding her place in the great American scheme of things...

...He is probably most widely known as a black conservative newspaper columnist...

...He smuggled it in, a stowaway in his heart, an overstuffed duffel bag about to burst at the seams...

...29 (Continued from page 4) goodness of sexual pleasure" more than enough...

...This despite Dickerson's awesome talent as a writer, so wonderfully graceful and colorful...

...The stories in this volume he calls simply "vignettes...

...Others believed I would soon remarry just to get someone to help with the children...

...Bobby has lived what to his big sister looks like a pampered life...

...Less well known is that he is a scholar, an economist who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the author of almost a dozen volumes on race, economics, and other weighty topics...

...But one day while walking elsewhere in the city, he went into a restaurant where segregation prevailed...

...No question that Sowell is a smart man—and that he apparently has the IQ scores to prove it...

...However, I still suffered a swollen hand, a slightly sore shoulder the next day and blood spattered on my clothes...

...A large family can also discourage selfishness...

...Once kids get past the early and scary phase of adolescence, they learn to tune in to their brothers and sisters and are inclined to help and advise, sometimes with disastrous results, but always with love and concern...

...Things went fine for him at the convention hotel, where the association had negotiated a nondiscrimination agreement...

...In going back over Debra Dickerson's An American Story in preparation for writing this review, I was surprised to realize that only about a third of it is about her family life and her growing up...

...Indeed, his willingness to resort to fisticuffs seems to have become for him a strange kind of proof of his bona fides as a black man...

...In the process, she begins to develop some of the same insights into her father...

...After the funeral, I felt dreadfully alone, knowing I had a difficult job and no models to follow...

...The pressure of earning a living every day means there is limited time at home to accomplish what needs to be done...

...The sense of unity a large family develops often entails coming together against all opposition, even when a sibling is wrong...

...All that's best and worst about me derives from the fact that I'm a daughter of the Great Migration...

...And invariably, his winning remark is too perfect...

...We didn't always talk pleasantly...

...Her context is the Great Migration, that vast mid-twentieth-century flight of some 5 million black Americans from Southern apartheid to relative freedom and prosperity in the North...

...Though both my parents, like millions of black Americans, made a conscious choice to thumb their noses at Jim Crow by migrating, in the end only Mama was able to leave her anger at the Mason-Dixon Line...

...Many teachers did not make follow-up telephone calls because they assumed "that's the way men are...

...The most fundamental of those insights may be that to be a black man in American society is to be "always on the verge of an eruption...

...The surveillance system in a large family is usually quite extensive...

...Dickerson is at her best describing growing up in her parents' household in Saint Louis...

...The manager came over to the table to say politely and quietly that I could not be served there...

...I would not dare to claim that I have been a successful parent or the crucial ingredient in my children's lives, but they have turned out well...

...For example, writing of his youth, he notes at one point that "I do not recall ever losing a fight to a white kid my own size at J.H.S...

...I have always liked that and I realized that if anything had happened to me, the family members would be able to take good care of one another...

...A.W...

...it has too much the ring of the quip we all wish later on we had been able to think of at the moment of confrontation...

...My next observation will probably irritate single female parents who have done a good job of raising families...

...Time and again, from his earliest years to his most recent, Sowell presents himself as getting the best in arguments with foolish, lessintelligent antagonists...

...Dickerson's is an "up from" book, part of a tradition of black autobiographical storytelling that extends at least as far back as Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery...

...There are, nevertheless, enough saving graces to make this entire volume well worth any reader's investment of time and effort...

...Unlike some memoirs which 'tell all' (or perhaps more than all)," he writes, "these reminiscences are as selective as memory and as prudent as required by a concern for other people's feelings...

...It is no accident that this book is named A Personal Odyssey...

...in economics at the University of Chicago, was attending the annual meetings of the American Economic Association in Saint Louis in search of a job...

...In addition, parents of a large family usually know where the children are, even if they suspect some of the teenagers may be in the attic smoking cigarettes or pot, or drinking beer...

...That" s fine...

...Men can even learn to be nurturing and to show emotion, although such learning does take time and sensitivity...

...This is how I learned how schools stereotype children from single-parent households...

...Indeed, as late as 1962 he privately—and now publicly—expressed misgivings about the effort to desegregate public accommodations in the South, suggesting remarkably that "the blind preoccupation with this one thing seems almost pathological...

...RAY TOLOSKO West Newbury, Mass...

...Many blacks during the 1960s (and later) were inordinately impressed with strident loudmouths whose chief claim to fame was that they 'stood up to the white man.' As someone who first decked a white guy at age twelve, and who last did it at age thirty-five, I was never really impressed by such credentials...

...The result has been to turn him into a spoiled, helpless creature, living on the street because he lacks the discipline to pull himself together and achieve, as Debra has managed to do...

...I still love and like the children, and am proud of them...

...Just part of the American dilemma, which is the ultimate American story...

...3O CROWD CONTROL A.W...

...He is sketchy about exactly what happened, and particularly about whether there was any racial component to it apart from the fact that a man who happened to be white stepped on his toes and refused to apologize...

...Long years' experience has led to some conclusions that are opposed to current thinking and rhetoric about families and the roles of men and women...

...When we bent Daddy's rules, we did so with all the stealth of escaping slaves following the North Star...

...Later, in a reflection on the whole course of his life, he observes that "I grew up with no fear of whites, either physically or intellectually...

...That resolution begins to take place after his death and through the unlikely agency of Debra's brother, Bobby...

...I did neither, but have had a lot of time to think about being a parent and about families in general...

...The second is that if there must be a single parent, in most cases strong male parents have certain advantages over female parents, if only because of how society as a whole perceives things...

...Because of inequities in society, women make less money, which has a subtle negative effect on their authority...

...Selectivity of memory is one of the problems with the book...

...Rare is the person whose story is so intrinsically compelling that the times, the places, the political and social circumstances of his or her life are unimportant or incidental...

...Society still sees the male as the authority figure...

...The antagonist's blood, he took pains to add afterwards...

...But let some hapless white guy mess up the shine on his shoes in the subway— in an incident that, for all anyone knows, may have been motivated by plain old New York boorishness rather than racial animus—and Sowell goes ballistic...

...On the other hand, that may also explain why the rest of An American Story— about Debra's decision to enlist in the Air Force, her "finding herself" in the military environment, her career and personal growth, her higher education— seemed, frankly, tedious...

...This was still the era of racial segregation in the South," writes Sowell, an African American, and Saint Louis was "a border state city with Southern practices...

...Contrast Sowell's reaction in that instance with his reaction in a second episode five years later in the New York City subway...

...My first conviction is that large families are more supportive and build stronger characters and relationships among children than do small families...

...For example, in our house negative reports from school were often intercepted by concerned siblings...

...Fathers, besides, have fewer qualms about coming down heavily on errant children, which makes discipline easier...

...But even smart folks don't bat 1,000...

...Often there was fighting or complaints about the food...

...We are all good friends...

...In a statement that could have been made of 28 my family or any of thousands of others, she writes: "No one could have foretold the havoc that the inherent contradictions between the way of life my parents brought with them from the South and the way of life open to us up North would wreak on our family...

...His anger at life's unfairness (a.k.a...

...Listen to some of what she says of him: • "He lived his life at a slow boil, always on the verge of an eruption...

...Permissiveness does not work in a large family because of the sheer limitation of time and the number of people involved...

...They still groan, "Oh, Dad," when I repeat a story—like this one—that they have heard more than once...

...But we had to face each other at least once a day, en masse, which fostered a sense of community that has served us well...

...This resulted in my being labeled an unconcerned parent by some teachers...

...I have found that children from other homes find the large family dynamic and attractive and want to hang around...

...However, I do think large families deserve a better press...