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Ancestors

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

—Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit,” 1939

On a hot, muggy night during the tumultuous and wild summer of 1968, I crouched in waiting, along with three comrades, clutching my carbine tightly with sweaty hands. We were silently waiting for our prey. No, this was not Vietnam; it was Seattle. The riots had raged for three nights, much like the other rebellions that scorched across America that summer, from Newark to Chicago to Los Angeles. These rebellions would leave hundreds of people dead, wounded, and imprisoned, as well as endless blocks of burned-out, ravaged buildings, standing as a lasting memory of the anger of Black America. I did not know, nor did I care, whether I would survive that night or, for that matter, the many other nights we took to the streets to seek our revenge.

It was only a few months earlier that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, and just a few years since the assassinations of Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. These deaths were still fresh in our minds and hearts, as were the countless deaths of the lesser-known victims of American racism. For more than three hundred years, Black people in America had been denied basic civil rights, first when they were ripped from their African homelands and sold into slavery in the New World, then, after Emancipation, under the racist system of Jim Crow laws and segregation. The uprisings of the ’60s, erupting with volcanic force throughout Black America, sent a loud and clear signal that the time of silence and complacency was at an end. Taking up arms against the racist power structure was a powerful move toward liberating our streets, our cities, our communities, not only for Black Americans in our time but also for those who had come before, and those who would follow.

Thus, my story, and the stories of so many others, begins not in 1968 but hundreds of years earlier, when the first Black slaves set foot on this sacred land of the red man. Yes, the ashes of our ancestors are long gone, and memories of them have long since dissipated. Yet their struggles, their strength, their courage, and their wisdom, along with their failings and flaws, will always be with us, pushing us, encouraging us, and watching over us as we navigate our way through the life ahead. For most of us whose ancestors were dragged ashore, shackled, bewildered, and despairing, it is difficult to tell where our stories begin or end.

I know very little of my slave ancestry, and even less about Mariah, a small, bowlegged Black slave woman in Durant, Mississippi, where she lived, toiled, and died thousands of miles away from her ancestral homeland. In 1858, under the old slave laws that did not legally recognize marriage between enslaved people, she married Frank Kimes, a half-Irish and half-Black mulatto man, as he was described by the census. They officially remarried after Emancipation. Mississippi, like most Southern states, was an inhospitable place for most newly freed slaves. Many remained in bondage or worked as indentured servants under the Black Codes, laws enacted after Emancipation by the Southern states to restrict the rights of Black people, keeping them in servitude. Worse developments were to come with the reign of terror under Jim Crow laws, starting the 1870s, which included mandatory segregation, the elimination of the rights to vote and to bear arms, forced imprisonment, and hideous acts of lynching.

My maternal great-great-grandmother, Emma, one of Mariah’s four daughters, was born August 2, 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War. Emma grew up in a small house in Durant under the watchful eye of Mariah, now a free woman, free to raise her five children according to her own will. When I was a little boy, Emma would tell us stories of her childhood, such as how her mother would sit on the porch and keep an eagle eye on her children as she instructed them in the art of doing laundry. Emma also told us how, when she was a young child, the local Cherokees attempted to kidnap her, thinking she was one of their own because of her long black hair. Emma left home at eighteen to marry Mr. Joseph Ely, who worked as a brakeman for the railroad. Emma worked as a laundress, one of the few occupations available to a Black woman during the late 1800s in Mississippi. In the early 1900s, her husband died a tragic death on the job in a railroad accident. Emma went on to live a very long life, surviving uterine cancer, and she gave birth to eight children, only four of whom lived beyond childhood.

One of Emma’s surviving girls was Mabel, my great-grandmother, who according to many was very beautiful. Mabel did the unthinkable—she had an affair and became pregnant by a German-Jewish man, Mr. John William Brown. This affair and pregnancy led to her being ostracized from her family and community, and resulted in the birth of a daughter, Willy Joe—my grandmother. Named after her father, later she was raised as “Josephine.” Mabel departed this world far too early, at the age of twenty-three, dying of “consumption,” the earlier name for tuberculosis.

Josephine was only three years old when her grandmother Emma took her in. The fact that Josephine looked more white than anything else presented problems for her grandmother. 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.

Just months later, on the day he graduated high school, he received his draft notice. My grandfather escorted his only son down to the induction center. A large man, my grandfather dwarfed his son as he prepared to hand him over to the unknown. Neither of them had any idea what the trials ahead would present.

My grandmother could not bear for her son to leave. She was a doting mother, and her son and daughter meant the world to her. She told me that when her son left to go to war, she let loose a sound of anguish so deep and so pained that it could be heard by many of her neighbors. The thought of her little boy, now a man, going off to war and facing possible death was almost too much for her to bear. But he was determined to go. Finally resigned to the fact that her son had gone, she penned the following poem, published in a local paper in 1943:

To My Son

Oh, how I miss you my son,

And the tricks you played in fun.

I miss your loud laughter and tumbled room

And your constant juggling of the kitchen broom.

How I miss your begging for pie,

And saying in fun, that for sweets you would die.

I miss the gang who would come to the door

Just as you started to scrub the floor.

There are many things I miss, since you went away,

As I wander through the quiet house each day;

Praying to Him, who is above

To send back to me the son I love.

At boot camp in Kentucky, my father and his friends were assigned to the famed Seventh Cavalry, a fact that made him very proud. In preparation for war, they learned about weapons and proper use in discharging them, as well as techniques of hand-to-hand combat. They were also whipped into top physical shape, running and marching in the Kentucky countryside, where my father was bitten by a rattlesnake while marching in the field. He also experienced constant haranguing from some brothers about his light-brown complexion. After boot camp, the green recruits were ready to confront the enemy. But they would soon find out that the enemy was not the one they expected. The young, exuberant Black soldiers were loaded onto a train with the windows covered and issued helmets with the letter “M” painted on them. The recruits thought the “M” meant they were being shipped out to Michigan, or maybe Minnesota. They had no idea that their destination was Mississippi. My father had never been south of Kentucky, let alone as far as Mississippi.

The legacy of slavery in the South was still intact in 1943. My father and his friends had heard the stories of lynching and brutality against Blacks, and of the segregation that was far worse than in Chicago. But for a wide-eyed young man, none of those things mattered, or maybe they sounded too extreme to be true. He and the others had no idea what shocks and dangers awaited them in the Deep South.

The segregated South and the segregated US Army presented serious problems for Black soldiers. On the army base, they were treated with disdain. Off the base, their lives were often in danger. The mere sight of a Black man in uniform could often be enough to incite violence from whites. There were three main incidents in Mississippi that reshaped my father’s understanding of his country and what it meant to be Black in America.

The first trial took place on a dusty road as Black soldiers marched in formation, carrying their packs and unloaded weapons. Led by their white officers, they had been marching for hours in the hot, humid Southern sun, fighting off the aggravating mosquitoes, sweat running down their brown faces, marching across cotton fields where Black slaves had once toiled in the heat of the day for the white master. Finally they came to a large field with a faded red barn. Standing there to greet them was a white man in dingy overalls, holding a double-barreled shotgun.

“You niggers stop right there!” he barked out.

The commanding officer put up his right hand slightly for his tired troops to halt. He replied, “Sir, my men and I need to march across your field so we can avoid the swamp.”

The white man’s face remained emotionless. As far as he was concerned these niggers should still be in chains, heads bowed, shuffling along. Pointing his shotgun at the men as he spoke, he said, “Ain’t no niggers gonna march across my field.” The words came out of his mouth finite and resolute.

In other circumstances, most of the Chicago men would have rushed the gun-toting white man. They had been in their share of racial brawls in Chicago, but this was not the time or the place to fight back. And even though the white man was outnumbered, there was no doubt among the men or the officers that he would use his weapon. At the officer’s command, the exhausted men turned around and marched into the swamp. Later that evening the men set up camp, ate their rations, and bedded down. Once the white officers were asleep, my father led a group of his friends back to the farmer’s land and torched his field and the red barn. It is difficult for me to imagine what was going through my father’s mind or the minds of his fellow conspirators. For young Black men from Chicago to commit such an act in the heartland of Jim Crow America in 1943 represented either sheer insanity or tremendous defiance.

The second incident occurred while my father was on furlough in the local town not far from the base. He had met a pretty, young Black woman who was very light-skinned and probably passed for white on occasion. They had spent the day at the edge of town enjoying the sunny weather and each other’s company, as any young couple on a first date might do. As evening approached, the young lady announced that it was getting late and she had better get home before dark.

My father responded, “I’ll walk you home.”

His friend began to get anxious and nervously replied, “Oh, I think you better not do that.”

But my father, being a true Chicago boy, brought up to respect tradition and the old-fashioned cultural values of honor and chivalry, persisted. Back home in Chicago, the proper thing to do was to escort your date home. Even though the young woman protested that he should not walk her home, my father insisted on continuing with his escort, oblivious to the line he was crossing. They set out on the walk across town, which took them out in public. My father was dressed smartly in his uniform, hat tilted to the side, smiling a happy-go-lucky grin as he often did. His young female companion was nervous and doubtful. First it was the threatening stares and the whispering from passersby. And then, there on the sidewalk stood the town sheriff, his red neck almost bursting through the stained collar of a brown shirt and his stomach bulging over the belt that held his service revolver. The sheriff wasn’t quite sure what he saw. He had seen these nigger soldiers all spruced up in their brown uniforms, and had put many of them in their place, and maybe he’d done more than that. But now, this nigger appeared to be walking with a white girl.

He looked my father in the face and said, “Nigger, when I come back here, you better be gone.”

My father continued walking with his date. They just happened to be passing a post office, so he and his date went inside. He wrote a postcard to his mother, describing the danger he was in and what had been happening to him and his fellow Black soldiers in the Deep South. He asked for a stamp and mailed the postcard. Then he continued across town with his date, walking toward her home. He made it back to the base unharmed but was shaken by what had occurred. When his mother received the postcard, she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the president, telling Mrs. Roosevelt about her son’s dire situation and that of the other Black soldiers on the army base.

Some time later came the third incident. On a Sunday morning, my father and the other Black soldiers were preparing to go on furlough when orders came that their furlough had been canceled. Instead, they were ordered to clean the latrines in the white soldiers’ barracks. This was the last straw. All the incidents since they had been in the Deep South came to a head and exploded on that Sunday. Anger and rage and defiance all collided and ignited as the Black soldiers broke out in rebellion. They smashed up the furniture, beds, and anything else from the barracks they could propel out into the yard. They lit fires and refused all orders to disperse. Their rebellion continued for almost three days. Finally, a train pulled into the camp, and all the Black soldiers from that Mississippi base were taken out of the South. My grandmother always believed that Eleanor Roosevelt had played a role in relocating the Black soldiers and delivering her son to safety.

After stops for further training at Fort Lewis in Washington State and at Pearl Harbor, my father and his friends stepped aboard an amphibian craft in the Pacific, clutching their weapons, preparing to storm the beach. They fought ferocious battles in Luzon, Philippines, and Okinawa, Japan, facing young, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old Japanese soldiers who were encountering the onslaught of the US Army, newly rebuilt and expanded following the attack on Pearl Harbor. For the young Japanese soldiers, it was their last stand, a fight of desperation, which made for an extremely tough adversary. The battles were brutal; many men perished on both sides. My father remembers that, after one battle, he found himself standing, blood splattered all over him, bodies of the enemy scattered about, and only a handful of his comrades still alive, including the two brothers who had harassed him in boot camp, trembling in fear in the trench.

He also told me a story about patrolling through the jungle and coming face-to-face with a Japanese soldier. For a split second they looked at each other, before my father was able to get off the first shot. He then rushed to the side of the young Japanese soldier, pulled out his first aid kit, and patched up the bullet wound as much as he could. He located the young soldier’s wallet and opened it. Inside was a picture of the soldier with his wife and child, which my father let the soldier look at. My father comforted him and gave him water from his canteen before leaving his side.

In Okinawa, my father witnessed something that would change him forever, and almost cost him his life. After a fierce battle, during the mop-up, he saw a US Marine cut off a breast of a dead Japanese woman and hold it up on his bayonet. This barbaric act incited such rage in my father that he raised his machine gun and prepared to fire on the white marine, but his comrades stopped him. He had witnessed a lot of bloodshed by soldiers on both sides, but in no way did he expect to witness such inhumane cruelty toward civilians. Because of this incident, he went AWOL in Seoul, Korea, where Japanese families had also fled. He spent time with a Japanese family after meeting a young Japanese woman named Myoka, eventually returning to his post in order to avoid court-martial.

Finally, the war was over and my father returned home, bringing with him the spoils of war: two samurai swords, a 7.62 sniper rifle, a much-prized Japanese machine pistol, a Filipino bolo knife, several Japanese kimonos, and a picture of him and Myoka. Those first few weeks at home he said very little or nothing about his experiences until one evening at dinner, his mother asked him, “Well, son, what happened over there?” With that, all the emotions he had been holding back from Mississippi to Okinawa came flooding out, and he began to tell his many stories.

At last he was able to put the nightmare behind him, and he reunited with his Chicago friends, going out to parties, dancing and drinking at the city’s great ballrooms, built in the 1920s. He joined Paul Robeson’s Progressive Party and began attending their meetings. He also started school at the Art Institute of Chicago.

One evening at a party he was introduced to a young girl named Frances, my mother, and it was not long before they agreed to begin a family journey together.