My People Are Rising. Aaron Dixon
Southern social rules of the time dictated that a child who appeared to be white should not be seen in the company of an adult who was obviously Black. Soon, the decision was made that Josephine would go live with one of her mother’s sisters, Aunt Marie, in Chicago, where racial rules were slightly less restrictive. Aunt Marie’s husband, Uncle Milton, had graduated from Lane College, a boarding school in Tennessee. He was employed with the post office. They lived with their three kids in a big Victorian house on a large plot of land on Chicago’s far Southside, where they grew much of their own food and ran a family ice cream parlor. My grandmother often talked about working long hours in the ice cream parlor and performing many other chores while the other kids played.
There was one thing that my grandmother wished more than anything else, and that was to be able to take piano lessons just as Aunt Marie’s kids did. But she was denied that opportunity, something my grandmother would never forget. Her unhappy stay with Aunt Marie added to the anger and confusion she already felt. Although Aunt Marie herself was mixed, she could never really accept her sister’s half-white daughter. When Josephine turned twelve, her grandmother Emma made the long train trip up from Mississippi to Chicago and took Josephine back to Durant, and eventually sent her away to boarding school.
Black boarding schools were a saving grace for those Black families who could afford to send their older kids away to be educated and prepared to enter the segregated US society. Boarding school was a place to meet others and build camaraderie during the remaining years of youth. That is where Josephine met my grandfather, Roy Sledge, a dapper, handsome young man. It is said that Roy’s family history in America begins with the story of an African princess, enslaved and brought to the shores of the New World, who eventually married a Cherokee chief. Roy’s father, Cyrus Sledge, was the only Black blacksmith for miles around in Como, Mississippi, and was often seen riding his white horse through the countryside.
Although Roy had only one suit, he carried himself as if he owned a whole closet full. It wasn’t long before Josephine, strong-willed, and Roy, mellow and calm, married, and Josephine gave birth to my mother, Frances Emma Sledge, in 1925. They soon joined more than a million other Black Americans in the Great Migration to the North of the 1900s, looking for more opportunity and freedom than what they had experienced in the Jim Crow South.
Roy found work in Chicago as a railway porter, and Josephine, who passed as white, took a variety of jobs before finding permanent work as a waitress in a restaurant, where she eventually retired after thirty-four years. It is interesting to note that the entire time Josephine worked there, neither her customers nor her employers had any inkling that she was of mixed race. This was a common practice among Blacks light enough to pass.
Roy and Josephine struggled at times, even separating on numerous occasions. Roy’s personal battle with alcohol caused him to lose his job with the railroad. Josephine had to move to St. Paul and back to Chicago before Roy, at thirty-two, was able to get a handle on his drinking and reunite with his family. With assistance from Josephine’s uncle Milton, Roy landed a much-coveted job at the post office, where he worked until retirement. His tools for maintaining his sobriety were the Bible and the Christian Science Monitor, which he read diligently in silence every day after work.
Josephine was determined that her daughter would have the best of whatever she could provide, sending her to the best schools, starting her on the piano at age five, and finding the best piano instructors. At age seven, Frances was acknowledged as a child prodigy and began giving recitals and concerts in Milwaukee and Chicago. Josephine was relentless in her desire for her daughter to become an accomplished pianist, since the opportunity had been denied her. She would often set straight those white teachers who tried to rebuff her about teaching her brown child.
My mother graduated from high school at fifteen. After graduation, she refused to go any further on the piano. Ten years of having her knuckles swatted with rulers by stern teachers and the many hours of practice had pushed her to the point of no return. She was no longer interested in being a serious pianist. She tried modeling for a while and enrolled at Hamlin University in St. Paul before eventually settling into studies at Chicago Teachers College in 1944.
In 1943, my father was across town, preparing to graduate from Inglewood High School. Elmer Dixon Jr. was born in 1924 in Henderson, Kentucky, to Elmer and Mildred Dixon. Their family also joined the Great Migration to the North, landing in Chicago in the mid-1920s. Despite Chicago’s own form of segregation and racist practices, Chicago and other northern cities would provide a launching pad for the coming Black middle class.
My paternal grandmother, Mildred West, was one of the many grandchildren of Amanda Brooks, an enslaved woman whose father was the slave master on the Arnett plantation in Henderson, Kentucky. Mildred’s family traveled a different road out of slavery than did my mother’s family. When the Civil War broke out, Mildred’s grandfather, Richard Brooks, and her great-uncle escaped the plantation to join the Union Army, becoming some of the first slaves to join the Union forces. After the war ended, the slave master and his family abandoned the plantation and headed to Colorado. Mildred’s grandfather and great-uncle each received a government allotment for having fought in the war. Combining that with the slave master’s land, which Amanda Brooks inherited, the family founded their own town and gave it the family name, Brookstown.
As a young boy in Chicago, I always marveled at my grandmother’s oak dressers with marble tops, the two leather rocking chairs, and the other fine antiques in her house. Many years later she would tell me that those items had once belonged to the family’s slave master. My grandmother DeDe, as she was known, always talked so proudly of her family and their history. She once told me that her grandmother had her thumb chopped off for refusing the advances of a slave master. But DeDe was always happy and carefree; she did not appear to have suffered any of the effects of the slave legacy that I saw in my mother’s family. The only time I saw a hint of sadness in her eyes was when she talked about her brother Clifton, whom she described as very handsome and debonair, a star athlete, and college-bound until he was killed in a tragic car accident.
DeDe’s husband, Elmer the First, was a large, strong man with big olive eyes and a heart of gold. Little is known about his family. When he was just an infant, Elmer’s father left Kentucky and headed for St. Louis, where he became one of the nation’s few Black millionaires. But he never acknowledged his son, creating a tremendous void in my grandfather’s life as well as depriving our family of any connection to the Dixon name and history. DeDe located her husband’s father and wrote to him on numerous occasions with the hope that he would come forth to acknowledge his son, but he never responded.
So my grandfather took the deep pain of rejection and pushed it deep down inside, putting all his energy into his own family. He found work in Chicago with a wealthy Jewish family and did well enough that his wife never needed to work outside the home. She devoted her time to raising her son, Elmer Jr., and his older sister, Doris. DeDe also became a leader in her community and cofounded the Woodlawn Organization, which would have a long, rich history of community building in Chicago. When she wasn’t spoiling my father and his sister, she hosted bridge and tea parties with friends and often spent time writing poetry.
My father grew up in this protective family and the community cocoon of Chicago’s Southside, playing football with his good friend, Buddy Young, one of the first great Black college football players to come out of Chicago. My father’s artistic talents led him to start taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and he eventually received a scholarship to the institute, the most prestigious art school in the country. But college would have to wait.
One afternoon, my father, captain of the Inglewood High School ROTC, was sitting with his buddies in the Regal Theater. He and his three best friends, fellow ROTC classmates, were known as the “Four Feathers,” after the title of the 1939 movie. As they sat watching the newsreels before the movie, on the screen came footage of atrocities committed by the Japanese against US soldiers. At the newsreel’s conclusion, he and his friends jumped up and ran down to the navy recruitment center, as the navy was my father’s first choice. With enthusiasm, he told the naval officer on duty that he wanted to enlist then and there. The white officer shot back, “We don’t take boys like you.” My father was shocked, angered, and greatly disappointed. It was a rejection he would not forget.
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