My People Are Rising (10 page)

Thousands of miles away, young Americans were being sent to hostile, hot jungles, armed with M-14s, trained to kill Vietnamese men and women because they dared to fight for the unification of their country. Older boys I had grown up with were now absent from the neighborhood, no longer on the basketball court or the football field but in the trenches, muddy, bloody, and slowly becoming bloodthirsty for an enemy they did not know. Many would never return.

I managed to stay disconnected from all the chaos, yet it was slowly seeping into my subconscious. In other parts of the country, new Black organizations were sprouting up. Black Nationalism, which rejected white culture and made its primary concern the improvement of the conditions of Black people, was just beginning to emerge. Its focus was on Black independence and self-determination.

One day I was out on the tennis courts perfecting my serve and my net game, aspiring to be the next Arthur Ashe, the first Black male professional tennis player. Mommy called out from the porch as she usually did that dinner was ready. I remember walking by the TV as the six o'clock news was broadcasting. Walter Cronkite was reporting that in Sacramento some Black men with guns had invaded the California capitol building. After dinner, as I walked back out to the tennis courts, I thought briefly about the image of the Black men with guns, feeling a tinge of pride and amazement. Then I forgot about it, yet the image stayed in the back of my mind.

7

Stokely Comes to Town

We're people, we're just like the birds and the bees We'd rather die on our feet Than be livin' on our knees Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud

—James Brown, “Say It Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud,” 1968

The Civil Rights Movement
, initially led by Black Southern ministers, slowly began to hear other voices—voices of young Black men and women who were starting to question the tactic of nonviolent protest. With each march, with each fallen martyr, with each crack on the head by baton-wielding, racist policemen, these voices of dissent grew louder and louder.

Two of these voices soon emerged as new leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, better known by its acronym, SNCC (“snick”). Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown were both fiery speakers, addressing the concerns of the emerging youth movement that was gradually picking up steam. SNCC, founded in 1960, was originally focused on desegregation and voter registration in the South, and exercised nonviolent protest methods such as sit-ins and marches. But under Stokely's leadership, “Black Power” began to replace “We Shall Overcome.” Meeting violence with violence was put forth as an alternative to nonviolent protest. Stokely, who took over as chairman in 1965, and H. Rap, who succeeded Stokely in 1967, were eloquent as well as confrontational, unafraid to say aloud what many young people were feeling and thinking: “Whitey” was going to have to pay the consequences for two hundred years of slavery and one hundred years of segregation. These two young rabble-rousers crisscrossed the country, speaking to college students, high school students, and Black communities, preaching this new empowerment. It wasn't long before the clenched fist of Black Power became the new symbol of resistance, and soon the Black Power Movement took the lead from the floundering Civil Rights Movement, creating hysteria among whites and a lot of fear among older Blacks.

Stokely Carmichael came to Garfield to speak in the spring of 1967. There I was, sitting in the middle of the front row with Elmer and Mike Dean. We had gone out and bought some black Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses, just like the ones Stokely was so often seen in. We were excited and feeling defiant. The tall, lean brother came onstage and began to address the crowd, punctuating his speech with shouts of “Black Power!” as he raised a clenched fist. He talked about “Whitey” having had his day, and that it was our day now. He talked about the riots breaking out in Harlem and Chicago and Philadelphia, and that we had a right to burn white, racist businesses in retaliation for the many years of exploitation. He talked about the Black revolutionary leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and Samora Machel in Mozambique, who were emerging to change the colonized land of Africa. The crowd went wild with Stokely's every rebellious word. We left the Garfield auditorium with a much different view of whites than what we had before. A slow current of anger began to brew inside me, and to my mind whites were now the cause of all the problems that Black people faced.

I walked out of the auditorium transformed. I was not the same person who had entered. From that day forward, I looked at the world and everyone around me with anger and rage. I even looked at Mommy and Poppy differently. They no longer fit my frame of reality. Their views and ideas were not compatible with my new, angry, “Get Whitey” outlook. As a matter of fact, there were not many adults with whom I felt I could hold any real conversations. The anger I had held at bay for so long had now surfaced and was coming out whenever my emotions were challenged. Family conversations in the kitchen about politics often became heated, and I questioned Mommy and Poppy's political beliefs.

My job at Swedish kept me financially independent. I had even been able to save up some money. But after listening to Stokely, my job did not seem that important anymore. There were issues beyond my personal realm that now took center stage. I began to look more closely at my interactions with whites, and since most of those interactions occurred on the job, I began to scrutinize every look, every word that I received from my white coworkers. Mrs. Gannen, the head supervisor of the kitchen at Swedish, had called on the first day of my senior year to tell me they were offering me a special position if I would work full-time rather than complete my senior year of high school. I handed the phone to Mommy. She cursed out Mrs. Gannen, telling her that school was more important than some damn job, and hung up on her. I began to reflect on Mrs. Gannen. She had shown what she thought of me—to her I was only worth a buck seventy-five an hour, as opposed to my going to college and being worth twenty-five to thirty thousand a year.

For the most part, the whites my friend Mike Dean and I worked with in the kitchen were friendly. But the dynamics were changing rapidly. And I was probably changing faster than most of the people around me. I had become super-sensitized to all the events taking place, in my own life and around the nation. All the stories I had heard from Mommy and Poppy and my grandparents, all that I had seen on the evening news, and my own personal sense of righteousness were coming to a head, threatening to erupt—just like those Black folks in Watts and Newark and Philadelphia, erupting without conscience, without concern for the results. Burning, destroying, even killing, lashing out like an angry, cornered dog.

I had started wearing my Black Power shades to work. My position was the most important on the food tray assembly line—I had to read the menus so the other workers could place the proper dietary dishes on each patient's tray. With my sunglasses on, I messed up on more than one occasion. The white night supervisor was a rather rigid person, and after I'd made a few mistakes, she turned off the conveyer belt and asked me to take my glasses off. I refused; we got into a heated argument, and suddenly I exploded. All the anger I held against whites erupted like Mount Vesuvius, spewing out in words of profanity. When she threatened to send me home, I ripped off my apron, told her to kiss my ass, and called her words I had never said to an adult in my life. I stormed out of that place, never to return.

8

The Tide of the Movement

When the dog bites

When the bee stings

When I'm feeling sad

I simply remember

My favorite things

And then I don't feel so bad

—Rodgers and Hammerstein, “My Favorite Things,” 1959

In June of 1967
I graduated from Garfield High with a 2.50 GPA. I celebrated like everyone else—partying and getting drunk. I remember, a week after graduation night, sitting on the long radiator in the living room, looking out the window at the park, where my childhood years seemed to slowly disappear. My head was foggy from another night of drinking with my friends Chester, Tony, and Mike as I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

“Aaron, you're going to have to get a job or go to college. You can't be sitting around here all day,” Mommy said while sweeping the living room. Even though I was eighteen and now a high school graduate, I still pretty much respected my parents' words. I knew I was going to have to do something. But what, I did not know.

Without school and without a job, I had no sense of direction or purpose. Leroy Fair, one of the fastest football players in the neighborhood, and I had signed up to crew on a survey ship that traveled from Seattle to Hawaii and Alaska, but Poppy would not let me go. This made me terribly distraught. It would have been a childhood dream come true, an opportunity to travel the high seas and explore exotic, exciting new places. It seemed that every time I reached for a dream, either suddenly or gradually it disappeared from my grasp, leaving me empty and unfulfilled.

Slowly, I began to go into a deep retreat. I spent many lonely days walking the beaches of Lake Washington, sometimes in the rain, feeling empty and purposeless, yet sensing there was something in the distance, on the horizon, waiting to fill up my life. But I could not find any answers or guidance. Searching within, I only ran into my inner anger, my inner rage that also seemed directionless.

Joanne got married to a cat named Curtis Harris, who used to hang out at the Madrona basketball courts—he had a hell of an outside shot. In the meantime, Joanne moved out and Mommy and Poppy let me move into her room, which I appreciated, as I was finding that I needed more time to be alone.

Some days I just lay on the bed, thinking, contemplating, sometimes gazing out the window at the cold, light-blue mountains of the Cascades. Slowly I began to write down my thoughts. The thoughts turned into poems, and the poems began to fill up pages. Mommy and Poppy bought a new hi-fi and gave me the old one, and I started listening to a song I had heard Poppy play, “My Favorite Things” as recorded by John Coltrane. The rhythmic sounds of McCoy Tyner on piano and the melodic play of Coltrane on soprano sax seemed to touch a deep, inner part of my self. I borrowed more records from Mommy and Poppy, and even bought my own jazz records, listening to more Miles Davis and more Coltrane. The sweet, haunting sound of Miles in
Sketches of Spain
seemed to hold a hidden message, a profound piece of information that I somehow had to transcribe, translate, in order to move on with my life. I spent my days writing and listening, listening and writing, coupled with lonely walks, trying to decode the confusion, trying to understand the world and the endless, confounding contradictions in our society.

At times I seemed to be sinking into an abyss, a bottomless pit of despair and sadness, sometimes crying for no evident reason. The idea of death became a close companion, and I began writing about it, wondering about it, about the other side, wondering if that was where I belonged. Maybe there, in eternity, I could make the connection, decode the signals, find myself, find out who in the hell Aaron was and what he was doing here on earth.

That summer I signed up for a part-time job with a theater group presenting skits that dealt with stereotypes. The theater group was one of the poverty programs initiated by President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. I worked with actors around my age, putting on improv skits with characters we created such as slaves, watermelon-eating coons, white racists, uppity Negroes, and Uncle Toms. Calling ourselves The Walking Stereotypes, we performed all over town at community centers and for other poverty programs. I enjoyed doing those improv skits immensely. After they ended I started hanging out with Aaron Dumas, a playwright and one of the actors from the group. He was three or four years older than me and had written several plays. A smallish, round-shouldered brother with bug eyes and a goatee, Dumas looked like a young version of the playwright LeRoi Jones.

Dumas' first play,
General's Coup
, was about a Black revolt led by a mad Black Nationalist general, who stormed the White House with his troops, and his son, who was also his lieutenant. Dumas played the role of the general and I played his son. The lieutenant son was the voice of reason trying to convince the mad general that it was not necessary to kill all the whites, particularly a young white girl befriended by the lieutenant. Toward the end of the play the general is near insanity, while the son tries to control his father's rage. On our own, we performed this play all over Seattle, on university campuses, in coffeehouses, and at community events. Sometimes Dumas got carried away performing the fight scenes. At times he jumped off the stage and pretended to attack whites in the audience, yelling, “Kill all the honkies!” as I tried to hold him back.

Dumas and I became good friends, spending our free time listening to Eric Dolphy, Gene Ammons, Alice Coltrane, and Yusef Lateef, often discussing the musicians and their personal histories. Dumas knew a lot about jazz and the musicians who played it. Jazz seemed to contain so much within its chords. Listening closely I could make out words and hear stories of lost loves, hopes and dreams.

After we finished with
General's Coup
, we presented another play by Dumas, this one about an interracial affair, a topic extremely rare in 1960s theater. This time, we recruited other actors for the production. Our group was the forerunner of Black Arts/West, Seattle's first Black theater company (formed later, in 1969). Through my work with Dumas, I also got a part in the play
Tom Jones
with a small professional theater company in town, run by a white woman who lived in a Victorian house. I found that I enjoyed performing onstage. Even more, I enjoyed writing, and decided that someday I would go off to New York and become a famous playwright like LeRoi Jones—later known as Amiri Baraka—whose plays and books I had seen and read.