My People Are Rising (7 page)

Quietly and solemnly I made my way to the bandstand at Garfield Park, watching him and listening to his words—words that I had heard on TV, on the radio, and on record albums. I took a spot on the edge of the bandstand, scanning the crowd, looking for a threat to our savior and spiritual leader—as if a thirteen-year-old could do anything to stop an assassin's bullet. But I realize now that my taking that spot, that position of defense, was symbolic. It represented an impending shift, a changing of the guard. All across the country, thousands of Black, white, Asian, Native American, and Latino kids, just like me, were slowly making an unconscious move, positioning for the big push to change America.

The integrationists were organizing and fighting for desegregation of the schools, probably the biggest strategic blunder of the Civil Rights Movement in that it forced Black kids to travel across town to hostile, racially charged environments. While white kids were able to stay comfortably in their own schools and communities, Black kids had to give up their secure surroundings and the dedicated attention and understanding of their Black, or sometimes white, teachers. But at the time school integration sounded good, and it felt right for me, personally, to work toward Martin Luther King's dream. So in 1964 I signed up for Seattle's first voluntary busing program. The timing was perfect because I felt I needed to get out of the gladiator schools in the Black community. In junior high the combat had slowly moved beyond fisticuffs to include weapons such as push-button knives and switchblades, like the ones we had seen in
West Side Story
and
Blackboard Jungle.
I owned several push-button knives and stilettos. We would play with our knives and show them off during recess, fortunately never really using them on one another.

For ninth grade, I transferred to an all-white school called Denny Blaine, located in a white neighborhood of fine homes called Magnolia, which sat on a bluff overlooking Elliott Bay. I had chosen this school partly because a friend of mine, Mike Rosetti, went there. Mike spent the summers at his aunt's house, down the street from ours in Madrona. His aunt was a madam, and at night her place transformed into a bordello. Mike was a scrawny, troubled Italian kid whose father was involved in some Mafia-type activities. Mike's dad was hardly ever around, but he showed up on occasion in his white Cadillac, with a CB radio and a snub-nosed .38, to dish out dollar bills to his son and wife. Mike's mom was definitely being abused; she often had bruises and black eyes and was clearly overwhelmed at having to raise Mike and his two sisters on her own.

I enjoyed that year at Denny Blaine. I had only a few friends, but that was okay, as long as nobody tried to mess with me. Being about the only Black kid in the school, I was looked to as an athlete. I played on the flag football team at halfback. The girls even started a cheer when I wasn't in the game: “We want Aaron! We want Aaron!” I guess they must have been disappointed at basketball tryouts, because at that point I had not played a lot of basketball and ended up not making the team. However, I did go out for track toward the middle of the season. As the school was so far from my home, I only went to a few practices, and when I did, I worked on the high jump. I loved to jump as a little kid. I would try to jump over bushes, fences, anything. At one of the practices I managed to attend, the coach approached me and informed me with a look of astonishment that I had just broken the state junior high school record in the high jump. You would think that upon such a feat, I would have felt fueled to pursue track and high jumping, but after that day I never showed up for track practice again.

I had always loved sports, especially football. I was taller than most boys my age and quicker than most my size. As I grew older, I channeled all my anger and frustration into playing football at the park. We played in the rain, snow, sleet, hail, hot weather, or freezing weather, pretending to be Gale Sayers, Jim Brown, or Dick Butkus
busting through the line, throwing the halfback for a loss. In the evenings we stopped at six o'clock so Elmer, Michael, and I could go home to eat, and sometimes my brothers and I would get to go back outside to play until the sun had disappeared behind the Olympic Mountains. I played other sports as well, like ping-pong, tennis, basketball, and baseball—but football was my love and passion. I could be reckless, playing with abandon and determination, pulling out all the stops to score that winning touchdown or make that great defensive play. My friends always asked me why I never tried out for the Gil Dobie or Bantam youth football leagues. I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don't know.”

After the year at Denny Blaine, my last year of junior high, I continued on my personal quest toward integrating Seattle's schools and enrolled at Queen Anne High School, an all-white high school on top of Queen Anne Hill, in a middle-class neighborhood of Victorian homes. Now a sophomore, I finally got the courage to try out for the football team, and made it. I remember how quietly excited I was to be issued my uniform, shoulder pads, and helmet. My confidence grew with getting my ankles wrapped and plodding out to the field in my black, high-top football cleats and lying on the ground doing calisthenics with the team. The coach had a real Southern drawl, something I had heard before only on TV, and at times he seemed to be picking on me as the only Black kid on the team, but I wasn't going to let that stop me.

Later that week, we started scrimmaging, and since I had joined late, I started on the fifth-string defense. Within a few days I had worked my way up to second string, playing middle linebacker. The next day the second string had a full scrimmage against the first-string offense. That day I played as if I had been injected with an invincibility potion, proving to myself and to everyone on the field that I had the potential to become a very good player. Every play the offense ran, I was there to stop. On one series I ran to the right, running down a halfback's sweep, and grabbed the ball carrier and threw him to the ground. They went left and I ran the ball carrier down again. He came up the middle. I met the fullback, knocking him backward. Then they tried a short pass over the middle and I intercepted it and immediately got the hell knocked out of me.

The coach recognized that I had the speed to play offense, so he gave me a try at halfback. Even though my dream was to play defense, I was glad for this chance to show him what else I could do. But every time my number was called and I ran into the line, there was no hole. I could not break through. Maybe the white boys on the line were intentionally not blocking the opposing defense; I don't know for certain. For whatever reason, the second-string center and guards were not able to break a hole through the first-string defense while I was at halfback that day. Being unable to break through represented my entire life at that moment and into the future. I would spend a lifetime trying to break through the hole, to find the opening to daylight, to freedom, to respectability.

Despite the frustration, I remember traveling home that night on the hour-long bus ride, sitting quietly by myself, feeling a kind of confidence I had never felt before. At last I had found it—that one thing I could use to ride to the top, one thing I loved that could power me up out of my sense of despair, the dungeon of nothingness.

Humbly, I walked into the kitchen. Mommy was preparing dinner, looking moody. Poppy was sipping a highball, trying to relieve the stress of working in a hostile, racist environment. I finally summoned up my courage and said, “I need twenty-five dollars for insurance so I can continue to play football and play in the game Saturday.”

“We don't have twenty-five dollars for football insurance,” Mommy responded. Poppy continued sipping, not acknowledging my request, tacitly agreeing with Mommy.

That must have been the most disappointing day of my youth. I felt,
I guess I didn't deserve it
. I even felt guilty for asking. However much I tried to hide it, I went into a permanent sulk. I took the hurt and anger and put it inside, pushing it down harder with the passage of time, burying it. I never went out for football again, leaving that day on the field as a memory of what could have been. I resolved never again to rely on my parents for anything but the bare necessities of life. Maybe if I had been different, maybe if I had been more outgoing, more gregarious, more confident, I could have overcome my parents' own dark shadows. But I wasn't. I was too sensitive, too quiet, and at times too rebellious. My self-esteem was too low to overcome those obstacles. This would prove to be my struggle in life, to overcome my shyness and my lack of confidence.

I continued to play sandlot football, often playing pickup games with future college and NFL players. I also played basketball in the CYO league, where all the high school ballplayers who did not make their high school teams played. And every summer, I played center field for the Parks Department softball league, frequently traveling to hostile white neighborhoods for away games. Even as much as I loved sports, there seemed to be something else calling me. I just didn't know what.

5

Sticking Together

Mom loves the both of them You see it's in the blood Both kids are good to Mom “Blood's thicker than mud” It's a family affair, it's a family affair

—Sly and the Family Stone, “Family Affair,” 1971

Our family was a unit
that found happiness in being together. I remember my parents' constant reminder: “You boys, stick together.” At times togetherness was enforced, as when we had to do chores as a team. On summer days, before we were old enough to go out and play without asking permission, we had to stay in the house and clean up before being allowed to go out to the park. Joanne cooked our breakfast, making coffeecakes, teaching Elmer and me how to cook. Sometimes we would surprise Mommy and Poppy with a cake we had made from scratch. There were times we had to spring into action as a group, straightening up the house after we'd taken it apart, with one of us as the lookout while the rest hastily tried to put things back in order.

One Christmas vacation we broke a glass window in Mommy and Poppy's room while they were out being Santa Claus. We knew we would be in big trouble when they came home after spending their hard-earned money on our Christmas toys. So Elmer and I swung into action. We had helped Poppy enough around the house to know how to fix a broken window. We took out the broken glass, measured the window, and then ran down to the hardware store and bought a windowpane and putty knife with our Christmas money. We hurried back home, set in the glass, and puttied the edges just before Mommy and Poppy returned. Unfortunately, we left a putty knife sitting out, and had to confess.

On cold winter days during the long Christmas vacation, Elmer, Michael, and I would play sock football on our knees on the hardwood floors in the hallway of the house. It was me against them, using a sock as a football and scooting down the hall on our knees. They could never stop me from scoring a touchdown.

Elmer and I were accustomed to doing everything together, and were at times inseparable. When we were little kids in Champaign, Mommy sometimes dressed us up like twins in little blue sailor suits, and every Easter we had matching suits. During our early teen years we sneaked out of the house together by dangling from the veranda outside our bedroom and dropping the last five feet to the ground. Then we would roam the neighborhood, enjoying our secret freedom.

Through our friendship with Elmer's classmates Mark and David, we were introduced to the wilderness of the Northwest. We went camping and small bird hunting on many occasions, unsupervised by adults. Exploring along the Sauk River, among evergreens and ferns, we were free—free from our parents, free from our enemies in the city. Though we were only thirteen and fourteen, Mommy and Poppy did not seem to mind our going off into the mountains by ourselves. They were not as supportive, however, when we asked to go to a party or dance—then, the answer usually was no.

One December, David, Elmer, Michael, and I went camping at the base of Mount Si, a steep mountain with its base about forty minutes from Seattle. Mommy and Poppy dropped us off in two feet of snow. We four boys hiked up as far as we could go, carrying our equipment. We set up camp with our old army tent and prepared our meal. After eating, we got in our tent and sleeping bags and pulled out bags of candy. We told stories and laughed until we fell asleep.

We awoke at about three in the morning to find that two of our sleeping bags were soaking wet and our socks and pants were wet as well. It had been snowing all night and the packed snow on our old tent had leaked through at any points of contact. We decided to share the dry sleeping bags, trying not to move around and bump against the tent. We barely slept that night in such miserable conditions. In the morning, we tried to find some dry socks but everything was wet, and the snow outside was almost three feet deep. Without dry clothes or socks we could not go outside the tent to cook. After our candy was gone, we tried eating raw potatoes. That didn't taste too good or digest well. Finally, we decided to brave the cold, open up the tent, and cook on the Coleman stove. Our hot meal of eggs, potatoes, and bacon was delicious.

Although we had planned to camp for two nights, we decided we could not stay another night under those conditions and would have to hike out to get to a phone. Since Michael and I had the driest footwear, we struck out in our still-damp socks, walking down the mountain trail at a fast pace. Michael lagged behind but I made sure not to lose sight of him. It was a silent and beautiful walk among the snow-covered trees. The only sounds were an occasional bird chirp and the crunching of the snow beneath our every step. It seemed we walked for hours before coming across a little chalet. Inside, a couple was preparing breakfast. They let us use their phone to call our parents and then invited us to join them for breakfast. That evening we were back at home, sitting in front of the fireplace, trying to thaw out our frozen feet.