My People Are Rising by Aaron Dixon Read Free Book Online Page B

They had both been to the juvenile detention center; Jerry had been specifically sent up for stealing. A good athlete, Jerry could play some football and baseball, but what set him apart from everybody else was that he was a thief and a very good one. I should have known that hanging with him would get me into some deep trouble.
    One morning, on a school holiday, Jerry and Danny accompanied me on my paper route. I didn’t want them to come with me because I had a bad feeling that with these two anything could happen. While I was delivering my papers, they were breaking into houses, not really looking for anything in particular, just doing it because they could. They kept trying to get me to join them, but I refused. On the way home, after I’d finished my route, they convinced me to break into one last house with them.
    Jerry had a glasscutter. He cut a hole in a glass pane on the front door, stuck his hand through, and opened the door. To our dismay, when we stepped into the house we noticed someone sleeping on the sofa in the front room. That did not deter Jerry and Danny one bit. They tiptoed around the house as if it were their own, picking up whatever they wanted. They took several items, including a .22 rifle and a transistor radio, and we left. Later in the day, Danny rode his bike down to the same house and threw the rifle into the yard. The owner saw him and called the police.
    Meanwhile, I was just sitting down with the family for dinner, as we did every evening at six o’clock. About midway through the pork chops and mashed potatoes, the doorbell rang. It was the police. Mommy and Poppy had never shown any fondness for the police. I remember the day I blurted out in the kitchen that I wanted to be a policeman—they had both looked at me with scorn.
    â€œIs Aaron Dixon here?” asked one of the cops at the door. They had come to arrest me for breaking into that house. Poppy was not about to surrender me so easily to these white cops. As the two cops stood there, Poppy pulled me behind him.
    â€œWhat if I say you can’t take him?” Poppy said, getting into a defensive stance. Finally the cops agreed to let Poppy bring me down to the station for questioning. They decided not to charge me, but because Danny and Jerry had records, they were charged and sent up to juvenile. I did not see Danny or Jerry too much after that.
    I seemed to be constantly getting in trouble, yet always just barely escaping serious consequences.

4

    Rumblings in the South
    Oh there been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long
    But now I think I’m able to carry on
    It’s been a long, a long time coming
    But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
    â€”Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” 1964

    During this same time period , but seemingly removed from the occasional personal drama playing itself out in my own life, there were tremendous changes occurring in other parts of the world and in the US South. The United States and the Soviet Union had become world superpowers pitted against each another—Communist Russia versus the United States, leader of the free world. Both nations possessed intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. I remember the lurking fear of the prospect of a nuclear attack, and how those who could afford to do so built bomb shelters. The Jewish family on the corner of our block built one, further alienating themselves from the increasing numbers of Black families moving into Madrona.
    In African colonies, Black revolutionaries, supported by Moscow, were organizing and fighting to overthrow the European colonizers, dispensing with three hundred years of imperial oppression. This revolutionary activity led to the first democratically elected African prime minister, Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who after only seven months in office was assassinated with the backing of the CIA. Revolution was also brewing in South and