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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.

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.