My People Are Rising by Aaron Dixon Page A

fortunately never really using them on one another.
    For ninth grade, I transferred to an all-white school called Denny Blaine, located in a white neighborhood of fine homes called Magnolia, which sat on a bluff overlooking Elliott Bay. I had chosen this school partly because a friend of mine, Mike Rosetti, went there. Mike spent the summers at his aunt’s house, down the street from ours in Madrona. His aunt was a madam, and at night her place transformed into a bordello. Mike was a scrawny, troubled Italian kid whose father was involved in some Mafia-type activities. Mike’s dad was hardly ever around, but he showed up on occasion in his white Cadillac, with a CB radio and a snub-nosed .38, to dish out dollar bills to his son and wife. Mike’s mom was definitely being abused; she often had bruises and black eyes and was clearly overwhelmed at having to raise Mike and his two sisters on her own.
    I enjoyed that year at Denny Blaine. I had only a few friends, but that was okay, as long as nobody tried to mess with me. Being about the only Black kid in the school, I was looked to as an athlete. I played on the flag football team at halfback. The girls even started a cheer when I wasn’t in the game: “We want Aaron! We want Aaron!” I guess they must have been disappointed at basketball tryouts, because at that point I had not played a lot of basketball and ended up not making the team. However, I did go out for track toward the middle of the season. As the school was so far from my home, I only went to a few practices, and when I did, I worked on the high jump. I loved to jump as a little kid. I would try to jump over bushes, fences, anything. At one of the practices I managed to attend, the coach approached me and informed me with a look of astonishment that I had just broken the state junior high school record in the high jump. You would think that upon such a feat, I would have felt fueled to pursue track and high jumping, but after that day I never showed up for track practice again.
    I had always loved sports, especially football. I was taller than most boys my age and quicker than most my size. As I grew older, I channeled all my anger and frustration into playing football at the park. We played in the rain, snow, sleet, hail, hot weather, or freezing weather, pretending to be Gale Sayers, Jim Brown, or Dick Butkus busting through the line, throwing the halfback for a loss. In the evenings we stopped at six o’clock so Elmer, Michael, and I could go home to eat, and sometimes my brothers and I would get to go back outside to play until the sun had disappeared behind the Olympic Mountains. I played other sports as well, like ping-pong, tennis, basketball, and baseball—but football was my love and passion. I could be reckless, playing with abandon and determination, pulling out all the stops to score that winning touchdown or make that great defensive play. My friends always asked me why I never tried out for the Gil Dobie or Bantam youth football leagues. I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don’t know.”
    After the year at Denny Blaine, my last year of junior high, I continued on my personal quest toward integrating Seattle’s schools and enrolled at Queen Anne High School, an all-white high school on top of Queen Anne Hill, in a middle-class neighborhood of Victorian homes. Now a sophomore, I finally got the courage to try out for the football team, and made it. I remember how quietly excited I was to be issued my uniform, shoulder pads, and helmet. My confidence grew with getting my ankles wrapped and plodding out to the field in my black, high-top football cleats and lying on the ground doing calisthenics with the team. The coach had a real Southern drawl, something I had heard before only on TV, and at times he seemed to be picking on me as the only Black kid on the team, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.
    Later that week, we started scrimmaging, and