My People Are Rising. Aaron Dixon
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 Chicago. 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.