My People Are Rising (6 page)

On the first day of seventh grade, at flag football tryouts, I got into a fight with Howard Redman. Howard was a cousin of James, Joyce, and Randy Redman, the most fearsome family of fighters in the Central District. Everyone knew and feared the Redmans. Just the name would send shivers up your spine. It wasn't until I had Howard on the ground and was beating him that I heard whispers in the background saying I was in for it, because Howard Redman was a cousin to James and the rest of the Redman gang. I immediately got off of Howard and refused to fight any further. When I came home from school that day, word had already spread to the park about what had happened. As a result, I got into two more fights while playing football.

But I was not really a fighter. I didn't like to fight, unlike some of the kids I hung out with. I did it to keep from being beaten up, which I was determined never to let happen to me. I soon began running with a Madrona gang called the Inkwells. After a few months I got into an argument with the younger brother of one of the leaders. But I refused to fight him. Ma had sent all of us siblings our own Bibles. In her letters, she was always quoting scripture. Some of the verses she quoted had connected strongly with me, and I gradually resolved to avoid fighting. At this point I was also pretty tired of it. After refusing to fight, I ran home in tears.

Poppy was very angry with me for not sticking up for myself. “You're a coward!” he yelled at me in disgust. The word “coward” rang in my head for a long time. I often wondered if that were true.

Music was one of my first loves. I enjoyed sitting and watching Mommy while she delicately played the piano, swaying from side to side, playing Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Our house was always filled with music, and each day there was a different kind of music in the air. On Saturdays the sounds of Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington, and Errol Garner could be heard late into the night on the hi-fi. Sunday morning would be gospel, giving way to opera—
The Tales of Hoffman,
Carmen,
and
Madama Butterfly.
During the week it was musicals like
Oklahoma,
South Pacific,
and
My Fair Lady,
and, as we got older, artists like the Temptations, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin began to be heard more frequently.

When I was in the fifth grade, Joanne, Elmer, and I began to study music in school. Joanne took piano lessons from my mother, and Elmer started the guitar and later the trumpet. I was uncertain of what I wanted to play, so Ma, who was paying for the instruments, decided I would take up the violin. I loved the sound of the violin, but it was not what I wanted to learn to play. I struggled through my violin lessons, barely learning to read the notes. Mommy and Poppy would fuss and yell, trying to get me to practice. One day on the way home from school, my friends and I stopped off in the alley and traded instruments. I took Ronny Hammond's drumsticks and he took my violin, and I also played somebody's sax. We had a lot of fun. However, my violin strings broke, along with the bridge, the small piece of wood that holds up the strings. That evening, Mommy and Poppy angrily told me I couldn't play an instrument anymore. Michael eventually got my violin, and sadly the opportunity to play music was taken from me. I was the only sibling who did not learn to play an instrument.

I began hanging more with Elmer, trying to avoid the gang of tough cats who always seemed preoccupied with fighting. Elmer had transferred schools after the move to Madrona and was attending Madrona Elementary, a well-integrated school with whites, Asians, and Blacks. He had met a couple of white boys—Mark Sprague and David Booth. Mark did some professional acting work and was from a well-to-do family. In contrast, David and his older brother and sister were raised by their working mother. Yet Mark and David lived across from one another down on 35th
Avenue, a predominantly white part of Madrona. The four of us spent a lot of time playing war and archery, and we even put on our own abridged production of
West Side Story.
David was more mischievous than Mark, and, as time went by and Mark became more occupied with his acting, David, Elmer, and I began to get into pranks that weren't really Mark's style. We rang doorbells at night, wrapped houses in toilet paper, stole stuff from the drugstore, and plastered passing cars at the corner of 34th with eggs we'd swiped from the grocery store.

David was full of ideas for troublemaking. Once he told us he knew how to make a bomb—all we needed was some saltpeter and powdered sugar. Off we went to the drugstore to steal some saltpeter. We got some powdered sugar, compressed the mixture in cans and bottles, and made a fuse. To our surprise, when lit, it exploded. We did this several times, blowing up cans and other things until David came up with another idea.

Poppy had kept only one gun out of all the weapons he had brought back from the war, a 7.62 Japanese sniper rifle. He had taken out the firing pin, rendering the gun useless, or so he had thought. We had often played with the rifle, mimicking the soldiers in the countless war movies we watched. However, David had experience with hunting and knew a thing or two about guns. His idea was to take a nail and stick it into the bolt in place of a firing pin. Then we took some of the empty shell casings Poppy had, filled them with the saltpeter–powdered sugar mixture, and packed it in. Finally we melted some wax over it, making a hard, wax bullet.

We took the rifle out onto the front balcony of the house, which faced the park, and pulled the trigger. We didn't really think it would work, but to our shock it did, letting off a loud bang. Laughing, we went back into the house. Minutes later the police rang the doorbell. Mommy and Poppy had been downstairs in the kitchen, sipping highballs and listening to some jazz, oblivious to what had just transpired. Poppy answered the door.

“We just had a report that a weapon was fired from this vicinity,” said the officer.

My father answered, “We don't have any weapons in this house, so it didn't come from here.”

We later learned that the wax bullet had just missed the head of Peanut, one of the neighborhood bullies. We laughed for days about this incident but never revealed our secret to anyone.

In junior high, I was in need of some extra money, so I got a morning paper route, which meant getting up at six in the morning to deliver the papers before school. Sometimes I teamed with Michael Lee, one of the older, tough guys in the neighborhood, who had a route parallel to mine. On Sundays we would get our papers and head to the Laundromat on Cherry Street, climb inside the dryers, and try to warm up before going out in the cold to deliver our papers.

I hung out with an assortment of friends. One was Johnny Goodman, a red-headed white boy a year older than me. Johnny had done time at Green Hill School in Chehalis, a state juvenile rehabilitation institution, and had the muscles to prove it. He was a good baseball player who could often hit home runs.

One day, Johnny and I went down to his house near the lake. “Hey, man, my father made some blackberry wine,” he said, grabbing two small beer bottles filled with his father's home brew.

We started drinking. The taste was sweet and slightly tart. In minutes we had emptied our bottles. I started to feel lightheaded and somewhat dizzy. The only wine I'd had prior to this were the sips that my siblings and I would occasionally sneak from our parents' supply. After a while, I looked at my watch and it was nearly six o'clock. I almost freaked out. I had five minutes before I was supposed to be sitting at my spot at the kitchen table. And I would have to walk six blocks up steep hills, including a climb up a three-block-long staircase. I had no idea how I would make it in my condition. Pulling myself up the steel stair banisters and stumbling the last two blocks home, I barely made it to the kitchen table in time. My drunkenness went unnoticed.

I also took to hanging with some Filipino boys who lived down the street, Danny and Jerry. They had both been to the juvenile detention center; Jerry had been specifically sent up for stealing. A good athlete, Jerry could play some football and baseball, but what set him apart from everybody else was that he was a thief and a very good one. I should have known that hanging with him would get me into some deep trouble.

One morning, on a school holiday, Jerry and Danny accompanied me on my paper route. I didn't want them to come with me because I had a bad feeling that with these two anything could happen. While I was delivering my papers, they were breaking into houses, not really looking for anything in particular, just doing it because they could. They kept trying to get me to join them, but I refused. On the way home, after I'd finished my route, they convinced me to break into one last house with them.

Jerry had a glasscutter. He cut a hole in a glass pane on the front door, stuck his hand through, and opened the door. To our dismay, when we stepped into the house we noticed someone sleeping on the sofa in the front room. That did not deter Jerry and Danny one bit. They tiptoed around the house as if it were their own, picking up whatever they wanted. They took several items, including a .22 rifle and a transistor radio, and we left. Later in the day, Danny rode his bike down to the same house and threw the rifle into the yard. The owner saw him and called the police.

Meanwhile, I was just sitting down with the family for dinner, as we did every evening at six o'clock. About midway through the pork chops and mashed potatoes, the doorbell rang. It was the police. Mommy and Poppy had never shown any fondness for the police. I remember the day I blurted out in the kitchen that I wanted to be a policeman—they had both looked at me with scorn.

“Is Aaron Dixon here?” asked one of the cops at the door. They had come to arrest me for breaking into that house. Poppy was not about to surrender me so easily to these white cops. As the two cops stood there, Poppy pulled me behind him.

“What if I say you can't take him?” Poppy said, getting into a defensive stance. Finally the cops agreed to let Poppy bring me down to the station for questioning. They decided not to charge me, but because Danny and Jerry had records, they were charged and sent up to juvenile. I did not see Danny or Jerry too much after that.

I seemed to be constantly getting in trouble, yet always just barely escaping serious consequences.

4

Rumblings in the South

Oh there been times that I thought I couldn't last for long

But now I think I'm able to carry on

It's been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

—Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” 1964

During this same time period
, but seemingly removed from the occasional personal drama playing itself out in my own life, there were tremendous changes occurring in other parts of the world and in the US South. The United States and the Soviet Union had become world superpowers pitted against each another—Communist Russia versus the United States, leader of the free world. Both nations possessed intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. I remember the lurking fear of the prospect of a nuclear attack, and how those who could afford to do so built bomb shelters. The Jewish family on the corner of our block built one, further alienating themselves from the increasing numbers of Black families moving into Madrona.

In African colonies, Black revolutionaries, supported by Moscow, were organizing and fighting to overthrow the European colonizers, dispensing with three hundred years of imperial oppression. This revolutionary activity led to the first democratically elected African prime minister, Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who after only seven months in office was assassinated with the backing of the CIA. Revolution was also brewing in South and Central America, as poor and oppressed Latin countries were tiring of the domination of American corporations and the exploitation of their people and land. Closer to home, in Cuba, Fidel Castro marched into Havana and overthrew Fulgencio Batista, the US-supported tyrant who had allowed American businessmen to use Cuba as their personal whorehouse and casino. The dynamic intensified when Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union. The increasing probability of Russian missiles being positioned close to US soil led to a failed CIA plot to overthrow Castro, the Bay of Pigs debacle. And across the Pacific, following World War II, the Allied powers had foolishly and selfishly split Vietnam into two nations, giving North Vietnam to the French, and setting the stage for what would become America's own Waterloo.

In the Deep South of the United States, Black folks began to lay the foundation for the permanent transformation of America. I remember well sitting at home, watching the black-and-white images on TV. The sit-ins, the demonstrations, and the faces of hatred—white men beating or hosing down the protestors, Black and sometimes white, who were mobilizing against segregation, a byproduct of three hundred years of slavery, oppression, and terrorism. Change was in the air, and soon my generation would step up to play a leading role in confronting the archaic and puritanical past.

I had seen Martin Luther King Jr. on TV, fearlessly leading his demonstrators into the jaws of the enemy. He was poised for greatness, almost saintly. In November 1961, King came to Seattle to support a march against redlining. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, I found myself marching down 23rd Avenue South, walking arm to arm with thousands of other people of all colors, singing “We Shall Overcome” and other protest songs. It was a unifying moment of solidarity, a feeling of serene peace and the possibility that our world could come together to create something new, something different. You could feel the determination, the sense of purpose, the spirit of oneness engulfing us all, culminating in a large rally and a speech by Martin Luther King.