My People Are Rising Page 3
He also told me a story about patrolling through the jungle and coming face-to-face with a Japanese soldier. For a split second they looked at each other, before my father was able to get off the first shot. He then rushed to the side of the young Japanese soldier, pulled out his first aid kit, and patched up the bullet wound as much as he could. He located the young soldier’s wallet and opened it. Inside was a picture of the soldier with his wife and child, which my father let the soldier look at. My father comforted him and gave him water from his canteen before leaving his side.
In Okinawa, my father witnessed something that would change him forever, and almost cost him his life. After a fierce battle, during the mop-up, he saw a US Marine cut off a breast of a dead Japanese woman and hold it up on his bayonet. This barbaric act incited such rage in my father that he raised his machine gun and prepared to fire on the white marine, but his comrades stopped him. He had witnessed a lot of bloodshed by soldiers on both sides, but in no way did he expect to witness such inhumane cruelty toward civilians. Because of this incident, he went AWOL in Seoul, Korea, where Japanese families had also fled. He spent time with a Japanese family after meeting a young Japanese woman named Myoka, eventually returning to his post in order to avoid court-martial.
Finally, the war was over and my father returned home, bringing with him the spoils of war: two samurai swords, a 7.62 sniper rifle, a much-prized Japanese machine pistol, a Filipino bolo knife, several Japanese kimonos, and a picture of him and Myoka. Those first few weeks at home he said very little or nothing about his experiences until one evening at dinner, his mother asked him, “Well, son, what happened over there?” With that, all the emotions he had been holding back from Mississippi to Okinawa came flooding out, and he began to tell his many stories.
At last he was able to put the nightmare behind him, and he reunited with his Chicago friends, going out to parties, dancing and drinking at the city’s great ballrooms, built in the 1920s. He joined Paul Robeson’s Progressive Party and began attending their meetings. He also started school at the Art Institute of Chicago.
One evening at a party he was introduced to a young girl named Frances, my mother, and it was not long before they agreed to begin a family journey together.
2
Our Family Journey Begins
The house I live in, The friends that I have found, The folks beyond the railroad and the people all around, The worker and the farmer, the sailor on the sea, The men who built this country, that’s America to me.
—Paul Robeson, “The House I Live In,” 1947
I entered into this world in the dead of winter, not far from the cold, windy shores of Lake Michigan, on January 2, 1949, almost four years after the bloodiest of wars and shortly before the beginning of the Korean conflict. By the time my parents finished their personal baby boom, there were four little Dixons and one who did not make it. Diane, a victim of premature birth, paved the way for my entrance. For many years I felt I was living life for both of us. I always imagined what she would have looked like if she had safely made the trip. Joanne came first, taking the crown as the oldest, then came Diane’s short stay, then I arrived, and then sixteen months later, Elmer III emerged into the world. Finally, after two years had passed, Michael, the youngest, made his debut.
We lived with my father’s parents for a couple of years on Chicago’s Southside, at Langley Avenue and 51st Street, while my father completed his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. When I was about three years old we moved from Chicago to Champaign, Illinois. My father was offered a job as a technical illustrator at Chanute Air Force Base, which put his artistic pursuits on hold. We settled into Birch Village, formerly a military housing facility for air force pilots stationed at the base and their families. It would be our home for the next five years.
Birch Village was made up of dozens of cement brick blocks in clusters, each two stories high, with cold gray cement floors. Though the place looked drab from the outside, this in no way reflected the true character of the village. Many of the families were just like ours, fathered by upstart young Black men who had returned from World War II. These were men who had fought their way out of boot camp in the South just for the right to die in Europe or the Pacific. Their wives were hardworking, strong-willed women. Birch Village was like one big family. You could go anywhere in the village, any time of day, and feel secure.
Here, our family struggled through the same adjustments as most young families. Our parents strove to feed and raise four hungry, needy kids, each with a distinctive personality and specific demands, while my mother and father shifted their focus to parenthood after having spent their earlier lives worrying only about themselves. At twenty-one, my mother had been one year shy of graduating from teachers college before my sister and brothers and I came on the scene. Her time would now be devoted to washing, feeding, loving, disciplining, hugging, and teaching four inquisitive young people.
Joanne coined the names for all the elders in our family. My parents were known as Mommy and Poppy, my father’s parents were called DeDe and Grandada, and my mother’s parents were called Ma and Bop Bop.
Everything seemed perfect and safe during those early years of my life in Birch Village. Everyone looked out for one another. As kids, we roamed around the entire perimeter of the village without a worry or care, getting into mischief and playing hide-and-seek and “Crash the Circle.” In the winter we built snow forts and snowmen, and sometimes huddled against the front door of the house, trying to stay warm, wishing Mommy would let us in. But with four kids, our staying in the two-bedroom house all day was not an option. When naptime came, all four of us had to go to our room whether we wanted to nap or not. My good friends Lyn and Ricky lived in the end unit; their family had just arrived from Mississippi. We spent the night at each other’s houses and walked to school together. It seemed like we would be friends forever.
One of the elders of the village was Mrs. Nailer, toothless and hair in disarray. We kids would sneak into her house, which was full of jars with weird things held in their confines. Everyone looked out for Mrs. Nailer. The only white people we ever saw were the milkman and the bread man, who would sometimes give us hungry kids free jelly rolls.
On a day I remember vividly, my brothers Elmer and Michael followed me down past the fence around the village’s perimeter and over a set of railroad tracks to a large rock quarry. We excitedly climbed the rock mountains as our feet sank in the gravel. We got stuck in a tar pit, barely able to haul ourselves out once we heard Mommy calling us: “Aaron! Elmer! Michael!” We clambered back over the fence with tar-covered shoes and pant legs. I think that was the very first time the three of us ventured out together to do something we knew we weren’t supposed to be doing.
Mommy got a part-time job playing the piano at the local church, and at night, Poppy worked a second job making pizzas. I still remember those nights when, after work, he would bring home delicious Italian pizzas to us waiting kids. And on weekends, Mommy and Poppy would go out to parties with friends from the village, drinking scotch and bourbon, dancing the Bebop and the Swing.
During the summers, Poppy worked in Champaign while Mommy and us kids went up to Chicago to spend those months with Grandada and DeDe, and Ma and Bop Bop. They happened to live around the corner from each other: Grandada and DeDe lived on 71st and Calumet and Ma and Bop Bop lived on 69th and Prairie. At night, out in the yard, we would chase lightning bugs with our cousins Mark and Keith, known as KeKe. On quiet days I sometimes went upstairs at Ma and Bop Bop’s to talk to Gramma, my mother’s great-grandmother Emma, and listened to her stories of old while I brushed her long, silky, gray hair, looking into her big, ancient, brown eyes and touching her leathery, wrinkled skin. I loved spending those quiet times with her. They were the only connection I had to our family’s long, sometimes difficult and painful history.
When I was five years old, Gramma became very ill and requested that my mother send me from Champaign to her bedside in Chic
ago. Of course, Mommy thought it was rather ridiculous to summon a five-year-old from almost two hundred miles away, and so I did not go. Gramma passed away not long after at the age of ninety-four, taking with her almost a century of history encompassing the African American experience. I would miss those summer visits when I sneaked upstairs to sit in silence, holding her caramel hands. Perhaps I reminded her of someone or something from her past. She reminded me of something I could not quite comprehend, yet I understood our special connection. Her face, her scratchy voice, her sometimes cranky disposition would always be there with me, following me, whispering to me, protecting me, and guiding me.
When it came time for me to start kindergarten, I was not ready to leave my mother’s side. I must have cried the whole day. First grade was easier, since I started the school year with my new friends, taking shortcuts home through the Negro League baseball field, getting chased by the old Black caretaker, barely making it over the fence, and laughing from the fear of almost getting caught. By the third grade I dreamed of someday soon running with the Birch Village Cats, the neighborhood gang. I often saw them chasing their rivals, the Alley Cats, kids who lived outside the village. That was the first time I remember yearning to belong to a group. Up north in Chicago I had seen the hastily written chalk words of the Blackstone Rangers, Chicago’s largest gang, scrawled on walls and buildings throughout the Southside. I often wondered if I would join the Rangers when I got older.
One night in 1956, there was a knock on the door, and standing in the doorway were two white men dressed in dark suits. Poppy didn’t let the men in. He exchanged words with them and then hastily closed the door. He later told me that these men in the dark suits were from the FBI and they had come to question him about his involvement in the Communist Party.
Poppy had been part of Paul Robeson’s youth security contingent when Robeson had appeared at Soldier Field in Chicago in the ’40s. Paul Robeson was an almost mythic figure in Black American history. A two-time All-American football player, he graduated from Columbia Law School, played professional football, and then went on to become a world-renowned and highly paid stage actor and singer. He toured the world as a performer and as an ambassador of social justice, and his speeches packed Soldier Field in Chicago during the ’40s. Committed to justice for all working people, Robeson joined the Communist Party, which led to his being blacklisted and banned from international travel, and many recordings of his performances and speeches were destroyed. After returning from the war, Poppy, inspired by Robeson, had attended some Communist Party meetings in an effort to try to understand what had happened to him and others in the Deep South.
There was another incident of savage racism that affected Poppy deeply. In August 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black teenager from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi. He made the fatal mistake of speaking to a white woman. That night, a truckload of white men abducted him from his uncle’s home and took him down by the river, where they tortured and brutally beat him to death. His mother had the courage to leave his casket open during the funeral in Chicago. The pictures of little Emmett Till’s tortured body were seen by millions of Black Americans, thanks to the work of Jet magazine and other Black publications. Finally, the terror of the Jim Crow South was exposed to the world. The murder of Emmett Till had a profound effect on Poppy. It brought back a flood of memories of his personal experiences in Mississippi and laid bare the hypocrisy of the United States.
In response to this tragic murder, Poppy wrote this poem:
Deep in the heart of Dixie
Where the cotton blooms in June
An old black man tills the field
Humming a sad tune.
His heart was heavy, his eyes were full
His body aching and sore
I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead
My heart can’t take no more.
They took a little Negro boy
And chopped and smashed his eye
They tormented, teased, and cut him up
Just to make him die.
They tore off an ear, when he shed a tear
And they beat him in the face
Each mark and scar was symbolic of suffering
By the Negro race.
They threw him in the river
His hands and legs all bound.
Hoping that his body
Never would be found.
The river current surged and splashed
To free its mangled prey
But it didn’t matter anymore
For it was Emmett’s Judgment Day.
The two White men who did these things
Are free to lynch and kill
Now my God I pray to you
Avenge poor Emmett Till.
The hate and evil in this world
Is something sad to see
Why Oh Lord do they hate us so
Why can’t we all be free?
The children played on the courtroom floor
The grownups drank cold beer
They laughed and joked, and enjoyed themselves,
Like they had no God to fear.
I’ll never forget you, Emmett Till
And how you horribly died
I’ll never forget the smiling jurors
And how the lawyers lied.
Well Emmett’s gone, ain’t nothing to do
But push this White man’s plow
I guess little Emmett’s made his peace
’Cause he’s with his father now.
—Elmer J. Dixon Jr., Champaign, Illinois, October 1955
Poppy never spoke of this horrific crime again, but his poem was always there for us kids as a reminder of what horrible injustices Black people faced in America. By the time I was ten years old, I had memorized this poem and often took it to school to share with others.
In 1957, my father received job offers in Spain, Alabama, and a place called Seattle. I was hoping he would choose Spain, but, to my dismay, he chose Seattle, somewhere far away in the northwestern part of the country. At first I felt excitement at the thought of traveling to a distant place and the possibilities of experiencing new things and meeting new people. When it sank in that I would be leaving the only place I had known as home, this safe haven of family and friendly Black faces, I was devastated. I would have to leave all my friends, peculiar old Mrs. Nailer, and the security of Birch Village.
Most of all I would miss the trips to Chicago to visit with Ma and Bop Bop and DeDe and Grandada, as well as my cousins and other relatives scattered throughout the Chicago Southside. I would miss the family barbeques, when Grandada would cook his Kentucky-style barbeque ribs with a strong accent on vinegar. He would wrestle with us kids, letting us ride on his large back and broad shoulders before tickling us to death. On hot nights we sat on his lap while he smoked his pipe or played his harmonica, rubbing his rough, tickly whiskers against our soft brown faces. I would miss watching Bop Bop come home from work at the post office, dressed neatly in a suit and tie, bringing us his bus transfers to use as play money. He would quietly go upstairs to change, come down with his Bible and Christian Science Monitor, sit quietly on the corner of the black leather sofa, put his spectacles on over a serious face, and silently read. This was his way of keeping at bay the demons of alcoholism, which he had soundly defeated many years earlier.
I would miss my grandmother DeDe, who always reminisced about the old days, sharing stories of her family, demonstrating the Charleston; my father’s sister, Aunt Doris, and my cousins, Mark and Keith; and Ma, dressing us like prissy rich kids, greasing our faces with Vaseline, feeding us non-fried food and wheat bread, and constantly reciting from the Bible.
My grandparents represented everything that we were and hoped to be. Now, we sadly had to leave them behind. I remember Grandada standing there with his bug eyes and thick eyelashes, his stomach bulging over his brown trousers. DeDe stood next to him in the brown flowered dress that she often wore on hot, muggy days.
DeDe always affectionately referred to her son as “Brother.” We drove off slowly, with us kids looking out the back window at the two figures standing on the green lawn, looking back at us. I would never forget that image.
It took me many years to forgive my parents for taking us out of this haven of comfort. I carried a lot of anger for a long time, not really understanding or caring why. I never quite felt that security, that contentment, that familiarity again.
3
The Search for Home
When the night has come And the land is dark And the moon is the only light we’ll see No I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid Just as long as you stand, stand by me
—Ben E. King, “Stand By Me,” 1961
Moving two thousand miles away was a traumatic experience for everyone, especially my mother. I remember her bursting into tears at the sight of the Lake Washington floating bridge, the portal to the Pacific Northwest. Despite her relief at being free from Ma’s tight hold on her, Mommy missed her mother and father and Chicago, with its segregated neighborhoods and Midwestern culture, a distinct Black culture that enabled Black people to develop their own system of self-sufficiency. Poppy, in contrast, was an explorer, an adventurer, and an artist. He was sincerely inquisitive about the unknown, the taboo, and was excited about the possibilities that lay ahead. We kids just sat in the back of the ’52 Plymouth, looking at the new topography of mountains, evergreen trees, and water, homesick for Grandada and DeDe, Ma and Bop Bop, and our first home, Birch Village.
Those first couple years we must have changed residences and schools three or four times, trying to settle down to something as secure and familiar as what we had left behind. Early in our search for a permanent home, I saw Mommy and Poppy perform an act of compassion that had a lasting effect on me. We were living in a very rundown part of Seattle, on Hiawatha Street. Our two-bedroom flat was dingy and dilapidated, but it provided our family a place to rest after the long trip. One cold, rainy Sunday evening there came a knock on the door. It was an older Black gentleman, dressed in worn, tattered clothing. He had a sad, hopeless look on his face.