My People Are Rising (8 page)

We were free to explore up in the mountains, but back at the park, we always had to be on guard. One day while David, Elmer, and I were playing, we heard five gunshots. We ran down to the corner of the park and saw three young Black men lying in three different spots. We ran to the side of one of the men. He had been shot between the eyes. Blood was pouring from his wound and we could hear a gurgling sound as he tried to breathe. We ran to the other two men and they had also been shot in the head. It seemed to take forever for the police and ambulance to arrive. We learned later that the assailant was the oldest of the several Harris brothers. The large Harris family, originally from Louisiana, was to a person quiet and respectful, never involved in any controversy, and the brothers were considered nice boys. But like most families from the South, they had a lot of experience with guns and hunting. There had apparently been an ongoing dispute among the four young men in the park.

It was the first time any of us had seen death. At the time, we didn't think too much about the shooting. It was beyond our comprehension. We had no context to help us understand what we were witnessing, but it was a stark reminder that deadly violence did not just happen on TV but was right here with us, waiting to snuff out someone's life, even the innocent. The images of those young men lying alone on the cold ground would always linger in the back of our minds.

Even before this incident, Poppy always had concerns that if he did not make the right decisions regarding us boys, we would end up in some kind of trouble. This concern had actually led to our moving to Seattle. As the influence of the Blackstone Rangers spread in Chicago, he was taking no chances on his boys' getting caught up in the gang scene. Both my cousins in Chicago had succumbed to the lure of the Rangers and their rival gang, the Disciples. To help keep us in line, Poppy made sure we were not idle during the summers.

One summer Poppy got his friend Jerry Sussman to employ us as laborers on his boat. A friend of our whole family, Mr. Sussman was Jewish, and we celebrated Passover with his family. Joanne and I also frequently babysat his three children. Mr. Sussman's boat,
The
Puffin
, was a one-mast schooner, a twenty-five-footer with a cabin. We worked hard on that boat for several months, dry-docking it, scraping the hull, repainting the hull inside and out, and re-rigging the mast. It was very tedious work, and Mr. Sussman made everything a lesson, stopping to teach us the purpose and importance of each task. After our work on the boat was complete, we sailed up through the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Cypress Island, one of the San Juan Islands up north near Canada.

As we approached our destination, islands were scattered all around us, with green forests, white cliffs, rocky coastlines, and a few sandy beaches, eagles flying. Herons skimmed the water, trying to catch jumping fish, and an occasional orca streamed by in the distance. We finally reached Cypress Island, dropped anchor, loaded up the dinghy, and rowed ashore. We could hardly contain our excitement at being in this lush, deserted place.

Mr. and Mrs. Sussman and their daughter camped on the beach, while Elmer, the two Sussman boys, David and Matthew, and I camped inland. Our main job was to help Mr. Sussman build a cabin on a cliff overlooking a small bay. In between playing on the beaches and running in the forest, we spent hot days hammering, sawing, and hauling materials up the cliff using a pulley. Some days we worked long hours, laying the floor of the cabin and putting up the frame. Other days, realizing we were city kids, Mr. Sussman cut us loose to run free.

Being on the island reminded me of the book
Treasure Island
, and I imagined I was a pirate on the crew with Long John Silver. I loved being up on Cypress—no phones, no electricity, no stores, no cars, just the ocean holding countless creatures, some of which made their way to the surface. During low tide, we gathered oysters on the rocky edge of the beach. There seemed to be thousands. We ate them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I remember the solitude of the island, the white sand and the green forest. Everything seemed so perfect, so right, so much in harmony. Sometimes I sat on a dried-out log, watching the sun slowly set, looking up at the vast, open, clear sky, wishing I could remain there forever. Much too soon, our time was up and we had to sail away, leaving Cypress behind to go back to the city, back to everyday reality.

When Elmer was fifteen he got an evening paper route, and I, without a choice in the matter, was ordered to accompany him for a whole year. We left the house together with the papers in Elmer's bag carrier, taking turns carrying the papers to the big houses down by the lake, splitting up and dividing the route, and meeting up again before heading back up the long, steep hills of Madrona. Rain, snow, sleet, or hot weather, the two of us worked that paper route as one. There were many times I detested helping my skinny younger brother on his route. I could have been up at the park or running with my friends or—worse—getting into some trouble. Despite being forced to support Elmer's paper route, I truly enjoyed those days of the two of us working in tandem for one goal: to finish in the quickest way possible. In a few short years, we would be working in tandem for a much bigger purpose.

For my junior year, I transferred to our neighborhood high school, Garfield. I was tired of the racism at Queen Anne and the whole idea of voluntary integration. Elmer and I also began to drift apart as we got older. Mommy and Poppy eased up on their demands that we stick together. Elmer hung with his white friends, wearing sandals and a serape, riding a skateboard, listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. My Black buddies from Garfield and I sipped beer and listened to the Temptations and the Four Tops, gathering in damp basements, trying to sing notes too high for our screechy voices, occasionally puffing on Pall Malls.

At some point we realized we needed to look for work. Emerson Swain, a comically wild friend, and I got jobs at the Pancake House washing dishes, making $1.25 an hour. On weekends we would get to close the place, leaving us two kids alone in an empty restaurant full of pies and ice cream. We would take a whole pie, top it with vanilla ice cream, and gorge ourselves while we hastily cleaned.

I took on a second job at Swedish Hospital up the street, making $1.75 an hour working in the kitchen. For a while I tried to keep both jobs, running from one shift to the next. I finally quit the Pancake House and concentrated on the job at Swedish. I worked with the dieticians, checking the individual patient menus to make sure the correct food was put on each patient's tray. I enjoyed working. It helped me to free myself, at least partially, from my parents. At the hospital my friend Mike Dean and I worked from 4 to 8 p.m. after school and 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends. During the summer we worked fourteen-hour days, seven days a week.

On some paydays Mike and I would have saved enough to go downtown and buy sharkskin suits, Italian sweaters, and loafers. And at Mrs. Jackson's record shop up on 34th, we'd buy the latest from Motown— Junior Walker, Ben E. King, Mary Wells, Stevie Wonder, and Smokey Robinson. No longer did I have to sit at a sewing machine under dim lighting, tapering the unfashionable baggy pants sent by Ma, as I had done on so many occasions. It felt so good to have this financial freedom from my parents. I didn't want to have to ask them for anything other than permission to go out.

At sixteen, I guess you could say I was “smelling myself.” I felt like I knew a few things—and maybe I even knew enough to set Mommy and Poppy straight on a few occasions. A collision with reality was inevitable.

On one of the many evenings that Poppy chose to work overtime, Mommy and Joanne got into a little disagreement. Like many girls growing up in the '60s, Joanne was having a difficult time with her parents—Mommy and Poppy were no exception. It was two cultures clashing—the old ways of long skirts and polite, pigtailed girls who played the piano and did their arithmetic, versus the new girls of the '60s, who wanted to wear short skirts and long hair, do the Watusi and the Hully Gully, and hang with greasy-headed boys at the dance, slow-grinding to some Smokey Robinson or Etta James. Mommy's personal frustrations and battles with her own mother often surfaced in the verbal clashes between her and Joanne.

Poppy was usually the calming force, the voice of reason in these clashes, but on this particular evening he was gone. In the kitchen, Mommy verbally attacked Joanne, asserting something she assumed was true. Joanne did not argue back. Mommy was a small, slight woman, but with a fiery disposition. She even grabbed a belt.

I was standing in the hallway, watching and listening. Suddenly I rushed in and grabbed the belt from Mommy, looked down at her, and said, “Stop. Leave her alone.”

My actions and words shocked everyone, including Elmer and Michael, who were also standing by, looking on in disbelief. I had wanted to say “stop” for so long. The words had been held at bay long enough and they just came out.

Mommy looked at me with amazement and then burst into tears. “I'm going to tell your father.”

Afterward I could feel the sense of doom in the house. Everyone knew that Poppy would not be happy about this. Disrespecting Mommy and Poppy's authority was not tolerated—not in this house.

The next morning, as I was quietly getting ready for school, I awaited my fate. Poppy came into the room, his fist up and anger on his face. I stood there, now almost six feet tall, looking down at a still muscular Poppy.

He blurted out, “If you ever do that again, I will knock you out.”

I just stood there and listened. I had no doubt that he could knock me out with one blow, but that really didn't matter. He could knock me out a thousand times and I would still have done the same thing. I felt strongly that Mommy was wrong, and that since Joanne was eighteen it was time to treat her with respect.

The Tide of the Movement

Reading my poetry in a Links Arts contest, Seattle, 1967.

6

Slow Awakening

When you feel really low

Yeah, there's a great truth you should know

When you're young, gifted and black

Your soul's intact

—Nina Simone, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” 1970

My sophomore year
as a voluntary integrator was a disaster. Seeing my dream of being a havoc-raising linebacker extinguished was difficult enough. But running into the big brick wall of racism was a rude awakening.

It had always been there, weaving its way in and out of our family's history. I first got a glimpse of this ugly monster in the late 1950s as a seven- or eight-year-old, mostly on Friday nights after the Friday night fights on TV were over, and our fried fish dinner had long since been digested. I saw Mommy and Poppy's sad faces. They knew full well that their Black, muscular fighters, Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, and countless others, despite the thrashings they gave their white opponents, had been robbed, cheated out of victory by bigoted referees and judges. They never said anything about it to us kids. They never demeaned whites. They just continued working to provide us with a sense of freedom that they and their parents never had.

Poppy would come home from work at Boeing filled with rage from dealing with some petty racism. One day while he was driving home and stuck in traffic, someone drove by and shouted, “Nigger!” Poppy lost his cool, got out of his car, grabbed rocks, sticks, anything he could throw, and propelled it all after the bastard, who was long gone. Had he been able to get to the white man, Poppy would surely have hurt him—which is exactly why Poppy never owned a functioning gun and never wanted one around. I could understand why, when he came home, he reached for a highball. It helped to defuse the anger, to hold at bay the deep rage and the memories of war.

Mommy also had her share of stories of being told lies such as “No, we don't have any jobs open,” despite a sign stating the contrary. And down from our house, there was the Lake Washington Realty office on the corner of 34th and Union, with the little, skinny, pale, spectacled white lady behind the desk who let it be known that she did not do business with Blacks or Asians. As kids, we knew every other business owner in Madrona on a first-name basis, but we never ventured inside that real estate office.

For the most part, Seattle was different from a lot of places in the United States at the time. Racism was not out in the open, staring you in the face, thrusting you into confrontations or forcing you to question your own integrity. Nevertheless, it was there, hidden, mostly in faraway neighborhoods, in the souls and the hearts of misguided, miseducated, and misinformed white men and women. I remember listening to the older teenagers in the neighborhood as they shared their battle stories of venturing out of the Central District, our safe haven, going to neighborhoods like Ballard, Queen Anne, and Shoreline, and being attacked by bat-waving, “nigger”-yelling white boys—and how, afterward, they would load up in three or four cars and drive back out to seek revenge.
Always carry a bat with you
, they said,
and be ready to run
. Then there was the unsettling story of the Black lady raped by a gang of white policemen, with nothing ever said or done about it, which created a sense of helplessness in our young minds.