My People Are Rising. Aaron Dixon
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 lived 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