I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone Read Free

Outside of farming and service jobs within Quakertown,
the North Texas Normal College and the Girls Industrial College
both became significant employers of blacks after opening in Denton (to white students only) around the turn of the century. Other
Quakertown folk worked as daytime domestic servants of wealthy
whites along Oak Street several blocks to the west. Pride of place
in a growing Quakertown community ultimately fell victim to
resentful white racists, who appropriated the area to establish a
downtown park and fairground, forcing the black residents out of
the downtown and into an area of failed former pastureland to the
southeast. Many blacks opted to leave Texas, but those who
remained strived to restore Quakertown's hard-won level of selfsufficiency.

    In the meantime, blacks returned to being dependent on white
services downtown. "We knew where we were supposed to go and
we went where we were supposed to go, and we didn't go where
we weren't supposed to go," recalls Betty Kimble of her life as a
black teenager attending school with Sly's older cousins (including future college halfback and pro football Hall of Famer Abner
Haynes) in 1940s Denton. "We'd sit in the back of buses, and go to
colored water fountains, and at the restaurants we went through
the back door."
    As southeast Denton laid in retail outlets and services along
Prairie Street, one of its two blacktop thoroughfares, the churches
did their best to sustain hope and community spirit. The newcomer St. Andrew Church of God in Christ and its pastor, F. L.
Haynes, must have seemed like novelties alongside the established
Methodist and Baptist sects, which dated back to Quakertown.
Haynes's congregation was "more free with their rejoicing and all,"
says Ruby Cole, who went to church and school with several of the pastor's offspring, Sly's cousins. Others remember that before St.
Andrew was constructed, worship occurred outdoors under a tent,
and intimidated passersby would throw things at the "hollering"
parishioners. Eventually St. Andrew earned more respect for its
music. The pastor's younger sisters, Alpha (Sly's mother) and
Omega, led hymns with pretty, powerful voices. Alpha's husband,
K. C. Stewart, who'd relocated to Denton from Fort Worth, fashioned a percussion instrument from a washboard, tin cans, and
baking pans. This unique form of accompaniment joined in with
the church's piano and numerous tambourines.

    Into this joyful noise were born K. C. and Alpha's daughter
Loretta in 1934, and son Sylvester on March 15, 1943, the first two
of five children, all of whom would be raised in music. (Freddie
Stewart would also inherit from his uncle F. L. Haynes a pastoral
calling within the Church of God in Christ.) The growing Stewart
family occupied a large white house on bustling Prairie Street. K.
C. reportedly frequented the cotton and tomato fields, turning his
percussion array to the purpose of entertaining and soliciting
donations from the field workers. His wife, Alpha, worked as a
maid in white neighborhoods, at least up until the birth of Loretta.
    Not long after Sylvester's arrival, the family followed the path
of several of Alpha's relatives out west to the San Francisco Bay
Area, to seek a better life in an economy that had been stimulated
by wartime industry.
    Well-liked and dependable, K. C. Stewart found a home in
Vallejo, a smaller city on the northeast outskirts of the Bay. The
size of the black population in Vallejo increased dramatically during the '40s, jumping from 438 in 1940 to 1,513 in 1950, an
increase of 345 percent. With modest income from maintenance
work for a local department store and from other jobs, K. C. was
able, with Alpha, to expand their family to Rose (1945), Frederick (1947), and Vaetta (1950). In the San Francisco Bay Area, the children were able to envision possibilities far beyond those their parents had been limited to in Texas. Black Stars magazine, in 1972,