Humbly, I walked into the kitchen. Mommy was preparing dinner, looking moody. Poppy was sipping a highball, trying to relieve the stress of working in a hostile, racist environment. I finally summoned up my courage and said, “I need twenty-five dollars for insurance so I can continue to play football and play in the game Saturday.”
“We don’t have twenty-five dollars for football insurance,” Mommy responded. Poppy continued sipping, not acknowledging my request, tacitly agreeing with Mommy.
That must have been the most disappointing day of my youth. I felt, I guess I didn’t deserve it. I even felt guilty for asking. However much I tried to hide it, I went into a permanent sulk. I took the hurt and anger and put it inside, pushing it down harder with the passage of time, burying it. I never went out for football again, leaving that day on the field as a memory of what could have been. I resolved never again to rely on my parents for anything but the bare necessities of life. Maybe if I had been different, maybe if I had been more outgoing, more gregarious, more confident, I could have overcome my parents’ own dark shadows. But I wasn’t. I was too sensitive, too quiet, and at times too rebellious. My self-esteem was too low to overcome those obstacles. This would prove to be my struggle in life, to overcome my shyness and my lack of confidence.
I continued to play sandlot football, often playing pickup games with future college and NFL players. I also played basketball in the CYO league, where all the high school ballplayers who did not make their high school teams played. And every summer, I played center field for the Parks Department softball league, frequently traveling to hostile white neighborhoods for away games. Even as much as I loved sports, there seemed to be something else calling me. I just didn’t know what.
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