My People Are Rising Page 4

  He asked, “Can you spare something to eat?”

  Mommy and Poppy invited him in. Mommy went into the kitchen and made him a sandwich from the roast she had been preparing for supper, along with chips and cookies, packing all of it neatly in a brown paper bag, and gave him some money as well. It was something I would see Mommy and Poppy do many times over. These acts of kindness helped shape my concern for others.

  In 1960, three years after our departure from Birch Village, we moved into our permanent Seattle home, in a mixed neighborhood called Madrona Hill in Seattle’s Central District. Across the street from our house was a neighborhood park with a baseball field that doubled as a football field, and at its other end a tennis court. The streets of the neighborhood were lined with large maples and reddish-brown Madrona trees, native to the Pacific Northwest. On our block and the blocks west of us, most of the inhabitants were Black, Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese. We lived on 33rd Avenue. On 34th Avenue and down the hill heading east toward Lake Washington, the residents were mostly white.

  Madrona was like a lot of the neighborhoods in central Seattle back then. Formerly occupied largely by Italians and Jews, these neighborhoods were now “in transition,” as many Black men and women had returned from WWII and the Korean conflict and moved in. They had served their country and many had worked in munitions factories, helping the United States to victory. Now it was time to enjoy a piece of the pie—and home ownership was part of that pie.

  Japanese Americans released from WWII internment camps, who had in many cases lost their homes, businesses, and possessions, also moved to the area. The Central District was the only part of Seattle where Asians, Jews, and Blacks were allowed to live, due to the racist zoning practice known as “redlining” and racial restrictive covenants. In response to the influx of Black and Asian families, many whites had moved out in droves, relocating across Lake Washington and farther south into the suburbs.

  Two blocks to the north of us was a small business district with a little Chinese mom-and-pop grocery store, owned and operated by Joe and Mae, who would give credit to anyone in the neighborhood who needed it. On the corner was a Black-owned cleaner, and across the street was a Chinese drugstore. Two Black-owned gas stations stood directly across from one another on 34th and Pike. Nearby were an A&P grocery store and a Bavarian bakery that my parents were very fond of.

  Madrona was a little paradise of Asian, white, and Black families, a bit removed from the rest of the city, with Lake Washington as a natural boundary to the east and the Harrison Valley to the west. The park was the hub for all the kids in the neighborhood, the focal point where much of our growth and maturation would take place. It was a battleground of sorts, a training ground for athletic endeavors, a spot to meet friends and acquaintances, and often the scene of physical confrontations.

  On hot days we would go down to Collins’ Soda Fountain, an old-fashioned soda shop operated by Mr. Collins, a slim, white-haired, elderly white man. We would sit on the twirling stools, surrounded by old wood and leaded glass, sipping hand-mixed sodas or malts or milkshakes. When we were done, Mr. Collins would carefully bring out a wooden box of penny candies, wrapped in waxed paper. Afterward, we would run across the street to the Rental Freezers and take refuge inside the cold store, trying to cool down from the scorching sun. Along with our newfound friends, on summer days my brothers and I would make go-carts with broken roller skates and wooden crates. Or we would make stilts, swords, bows and arrows, and slingshots. We would play marbles on patches of dirt or lag pennies against the wall, winner take all. Sometimes when we needed spending money, we would cut the grass of our neighbors’ overgrown lawns.

  Our house was large and spacious. Its hardwood floors were softer than the concrete floors in Birch Village. Joanne got her own room, but even though there was an extra room designated as the “TV room,” Elmer, Michael, and I had to share a bedroom. The front and rear verandas, extending off the upstairs bedrooms, soon would serve as our escape route out into the night. Sometimes I caught Poppy standing and surveying his new home, beaming with pride and contentment. He brought home young trees and planted them around the house, one for each child. Seattle, especially Madrona, was much more racially and socially diverse and tolerant than the segregated Southside of Chicago had been; for Poppy, that is what his artistic soul needed to heal from the scars of war.

  Poppy always sought out people from other cultures. I remember the friendship he struck up with Mr. Aschak, the old Russian man who lived down the street from one of our temporary apartments. Poppy and Mr. Aschak would get together and drink vodka and eat Russian rye bread. Even though Mr. Aschak could barely speak English, he and Poppy seemed to have a genuine liking for each other.

  It was not until we got to Seattle that I had any lasting contact with a white person other than schoolteachers. Mr. Santo lived across the street from another of our temporary living quarters. A short, squat, red-faced Italian man in his eighties, he lived in his yellow house by himself. Sometimes we would trample through his well-cultivated garden on our way to raid the cherry trees next to his house, and he would give us a good scolding. I remember sitting in the yard next door with my friend Cornelius Bolton, watching Mr. Santo in the hot sun in his straw hat, working his garden of tomatoes, squash, and beans. He looked up and motioned to us with his hand to come over.

  “Have you ever had fried squash?” he asked us in his accented English.

  We shook our heads no, looking inquisitive.

  “I’ll cook you some.” He got up and went inside. About three minutes later he came out with fried squash and fried tomatoes that were very tasty. After that we were much more careful of Mr. Santo’s garden. Later I learned that he was the father of Ron Santo, the famous all-star third baseman for the Chicago Cubs.

  Poppy and Mommy began to make friends in Madrona—artists, musicians, folk dancers, beatniks, communists, a mix of Black, Jewish, and Greek individuals. Our house sometimes resembled an international festival. Once a month the rug was rolled back and the cheese and wine put out as my parents entertained their friends, who all belonged to the same folk-dancing group. It was fun to watch the adults sipping wine and eating cheese, having political discussions before engaging in Greek, Italian, and Jewish traditional dances. On the weekends, Poppy sometimes tried to paint before taking us out on long Sunday drives to explore the natural splendor of the Puget Sound area.

  Much of Mommy’s time was spent taking care of the family—cooking, cleaning, serving as president of the PTA, watching over us at home, reading us classics such as Edgar Allan Poe, or keeping tabs on us at the park. Not long after we moved into the neighborhood, a couple of the local bullies took a baseball mitt that Elmer had found. They said it was theirs, and it may have been, but the way they snatched it from Elmer did not sit well with Mommy. After Elmer ran home to tell her, within seconds she was out of the house, all 110 pounds of her, yelling and chasing the bullies, Tommy and Delbert. She gave them a good tongue-lashing. They politely gave the baseball mitt back to Elmer, and from that day forward, all the kids in the neighborhood knew Mommy respectfully as Mrs. Dixon.

  Even though Poppy had a good job as a technical illustrator at Boeing, Mommy finally had to go to work to help pay the monthly house note. She started working at Christmas and other holidays at Frederick and Nelson, the large department store downtown, battling subtle racism every step of the way. When she went to apply for the job, they said they didn’t have an opening, even though it was posted on a sign. She insisted they give her a job and they finally relented. Customers as well as her employers often spoke to her in a disrespectful manner, and she would tell us all about her battles at work. Eventually she got a job as a doctor’s assistant at Virginia Mason Hospital, where she worked for many years until retirement. She never got the opportunity to finish teachers college, which had always been her dream.

  My father was gregarious and outgoing, but the war had left him hard in many ways, and he still live
d in its shadows. He called himself the commander in chief of our family. Parading around the house in his military hat with a broom on his shoulder as a makeshift rifle, he would bark, “Attention!” and then “Parade rest,” spreading his feet and putting his rifle out front. Poppy also frequently recited Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar about the great Pompey walking the streets of Rome. He taught me how to recite Shakespeare’s verse, and the Pompey speech was forever etched in my mind.

  My own shy, inward nature was sometimes at odds with his “get up ‘n’ go” style. Once, when I was in the fifth grade, he told me I was nothing but a dreamer. I did love to daydream about faraway places and fantasy worlds. I still had not gotten over being uprooted from the Midwest, taken away from the security of Birch Village and from my grandparents and all our other relatives. This anger I held on to like a piece of fungus clinging to an old dead tree. I was sometimes sullen, preferring to be by myself. Ma, my grandmother, had told me I was a deep thinker and said that one day I would be a minister. Elders often praised me as a thoughtful and kind person. I would buy cards for birthdays and little boxes of candy for my mother, especially for Valentine’s Day.

  Despite these attributes I found myself in more fights than I care to remember, and I often hung out with the baddest kids in school or the neighborhood. Fighting was something I had to do once I started school in Seattle. Colman Elementary School, where Mommy enrolled us when we first got to town, was a predominantly Black school. I guess since I was a new kid, shy, and curly-haired, I was fair game. At times it seemed that Colman Elementary was a “gladiator school” of sorts, where you were trained to defend and take care of yourself. I began hanging with some of the tough crowd, feeling connected by our inner anger. When my family moved to Madrona, I continued to attend Colman but also had to fight all comers at the park across the street from our house. It seemed a fight could break out for any reason.

  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.