Growing Up King
Copyright © 2003 by Dexter Scott King
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.,
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
First eBook Edition: January 2003
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2733-1
Contents
CHAPTER 5: A Question of Faith
CHAPTER 8: This Little Light of Mine
CHAPTER 10: Answers from Within
CHAPTER 13: Brightly Beams Our Father ’s Mercy
CHAPTER 17: Sampling a Relationship
CHAPTER 19: A Way Out of No Way
M
emory is not always to be trusted, yet memory is all we have, where we all live. I’ve learned memory is all that can be trusted,
in the end.
For any five witnesses to an event, there are five versions of what happened. Which is closest to truth? In this book I trust
my memories, and those of my siblings, my mother, friends, and family members. I looked at documents, notes, newspaper clippings,
magazine articles, books, film documentaries, and other references, the better to refresh and confirm this collective memory.
I searched myself as well. But I also know no book that has been written has captured how much I loved my father in Atlanta
when I was six, or how I felt at seven, when he was killed in Memphis.
There is no polite way to bust out of prison. Jailbreak! is how it felt after the verdict came in at the civil trial of Loyd
Jowers in Memphis in December of 1999. I didn’t care about Jowers’s role in my father’s murder on April 4, 1968. I didn’t
care about conspiracies, or anybody going to prison. I cared about getting out of prison. I’d faced up to what had happened
to us. Pope John Paul once said that the quest for freedom is one of the great dynamics of human history. Such a quest can
take many forms. I went back to Atlanta. I thought back as I drove past the National Historic Site, past 501 Auburn Avenue,
the house where my father was born, past Freedom Hall complex where his remains lie in a crypt in the plaza of the Martin
Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change.
The plaza stands next to old Ebenezer Baptist Church, at the corner of Jackson Street and Auburn Avenue, Northeast. “Kodak
products available here,” reads a sign. I had pictures in my memory. My grandfather’s leathery hands lifted in supplication.
My grandmother at the organ. Daddy’s ascending voice. Gunshots in the pulpit. The old church is a relic, for tourists who
can’t see or hear what I see and hear in my memory. The new Ebenezer Baptist Church is on the opposite side of Auburn Avenue.
A sculpture of a black man holding a baby up toward the heavens stands in an amphitheater on the grounds of the National Park
Service’s King Visitor Center. The sculpture was inspired by the scene from
Roots:
“Behold, the only thing greater than yourself,” Omoro Kinte said to baby Kunta; Kunta, as an adult, repeated it to his daughter,
Kizzy, in Alex Haley’s epic tale. It reminded me of Daddy and me. His marble crypt stands in the middle of a reflecting pool
on the grounds of the King Center. The inscription is simple:
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
1929–1968.
“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”
Amen, Daddy, I thought. Inside the King Center hangs a framed newspaper article:
King Children Reflect on the Values Their Father Taught
Hours later I was at the Four Seasons at Troon North in Scottsdale, Arizona, preparing to bring in the new millennium, Y2K.
A photo was taken. For years I’d looked in the mirror and seen my father’s face trapped in mine. Now my face relaxed. Free
at last. Was I? Were we? I go back now, in memory, to try and find the answers.
HAPTER
1
I
felt inadequate to the task at hand, the scene before me, though my role seemed simple enough. Yoki had already shown me
a picture of Prince Charming in a book of fairy tales, so I knew what he was supposed to look like. I’d seen myself in a mirror.
Didn’t see the correlation, didn’t think I could ever look like that or act like that. But my older sister kept on insisting
I was the Chosen One, who must bend down and kiss my baby sister Bernice, lying on one end of our seesaw, acting dead, like
Sleeping Beauty. Yoki was saying, “Let’s do this.” I was steadily refusing.
“Nope,” I said. “Nope, nope, nope.”
The corners of Yoki’s mouth curled. “Yes—that’s what you mean to say. Right?”
She was about to unleash a verbal volley accompanied by a twisting pinch of arm flesh if I wasn’t quick enough, which, by
the warm, so-called Indian summer of 1967, I usually was.
I was six and a half years old when I asked Yoki, “Why me?” while fixing a pleading eye toward my older brother, Martin III,
who stood behind me in the backyard of 234 Sunset, Vine City, Atlanta, Georgia, behind the house where we grew up.
Marty wasn’t about to buck Yoki’s authority; he grew deaf, looked the other way, whistled.
I’m in my forty-first year now, but thinking of what it was like back in 1967, when I was a boy but six years old, makes me
smile. A wry and cautious smile. Yoki was eleven. An eleven-year-old girl isn’t to be trifled with by her younger brothers.
“You ask too many questions,” she said, her calm that comes before a storm; we knew this, and she knew that we knew. Yoki
was my terrible older sister Yolanda. Now I know she isn’t so terrible. Now I feel I must call her Yolanda. It has more formality—something
expected of Yolanda, Martin, me, and Bernice. Ever since I was seven, I’ve felt I must be formal. But I didn’t feel it in
’67. Then she was my crazy terrible sister; Yoki-poky, as Daddy called her when we were children and didn’t have the responsibilities
or memories we have now. Formality, seriousness, certitude—all these are difficult poses to maintain, even if you’re a person
with perfect equilibrium, with all the drama life throws at you.
Speaking of what life throws at you, just then a green walnut came whizzing over the fence, crashing into our swing, cracking
open its unripe cover, its powerful astringent scent filling the air. Could just as well have been a peach, apple, fig, or
pecan—each of those species bloomed in the backyards of the small houses in Vine City. Walnuts made more of an announcement
when arriving via this kind of air mail. Marty and I looked at each other. We were being paged.
“C’mon!”
One of the neighborhood boys was summoning us without risking an audience with Yoki. Smart move. We’d relocated to Vine City
from the Old Fourth Ward in 1965. I spent my first four years in the Old Fourth Ward, up from Auburn Avenue, on Johnson Avenue,
in a house the color of the yellow brick road in
The Wizard of Oz
. A liquor store now stands where the backyard of the house used to be. What’s now Freedom Parkway was once our front yard.
Granddaddy’s house in Old Fourth Ward, where the package store now stands, was on a hill, three blocks away from Ebenezer
Baptist Church, where he was pastor, two blocks down from 501 Auburn Avenue. Granddaddy’s name was Martin Luther King, Sr.
He had two sons. The younger was Alfred Daniel King, Sr., Uncle A.D., named for my great-grandfather A. D. Williams, who’d
also been pastor at Ebenezer, and who was the father of Alberta Williams King, my paternal grandmother, whom we called Big
Mama. My father was the elder son, Martin Luther King, Sr.’s co-pastor at Ebenezer, among other things.
His name was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
When my mother became pregnant with me, the family was moving to Atlanta from Montgomery, Alabama, where my father had been
pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He’d become famous or infamous there, depending on one’s slant, as one of the architects
of the Montgomery bus boycott. That action was spawned by Mrs. Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a city transit
bus, a watershed event of the Civil Rights Movement. We moved to Atlanta after that.
The move helped my grandfather. His eight-hundred-seat church and his clout in Baptist circles were enhanced having my father
rejoin him as co-pastor. But as far as joining him in the more affluent western suburb of Collier Heights, my father wasn’t
hearing it, in spite of my grandfather’s insistence. We’d live in Vine City, with the plain folk.
A freeway was coming, as was Bunny. We moved because we needed more space and the freeway construction would displace us.
The freeway became known as Freedom Parkway, which now takes you by the Carter Presidential Center. Back when the freeway
was being planned, it was to be called Stone Mountain Freeway, taking you to Stone Mountain, where images of Confederate generals
were blasted into the granite. But both the name and the route were changed. We needed a place, so we moved to the modest,
roomy brick house on an undulating street, Sunset, at the foot of the Atlanta University Center, the consortium of five historically
black colleges and universities.
It was a split-level house with a full basement; you entered the main floor by walking up exterior stairs aided by wrought-iron
banisters painted white. The house is larger than it appears from in front. From that position you can’t get the depth of
it. Your idea of a thing is often based on the angle from which you view it. The house isn’t narrow, yet it’s much deeper
than it is wide.
As you enter, on your right side facing in is the dining room; on your left is the living room, filled with memorabilia, family
pictures, a sofa. The kitchen is beyond the dining room. There my mother or the ladies who helped her, Mrs. Dorothy Lockhart
or Mrs. Newman or sometimes Mrs. Rachel Ward, caused a racket of pots and pans. Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Patricia Cook Latimore
sometimes looked after us when Mom and Dad had to do important business. The family room is beyond the kitchen. The four of
us made a hubbub of children and toys in there. The hallway splits the house in half, running perpendicular from the front
door straight from front to back, connecting four bedrooms and a study, my parents’ bedroom at the end of the hallway to the
left, the study to the right. The first room to the left was the boys’ room, the second to the left was the girls’ room, and
in later years, vice versa; to the right was the guest room. Connecting our rooms was a play room; a door was between us.
It was the doorway to fun, conflict, happiness. We bolted and flitted around these dimensions at incredible speeds, as children
do. From here we plotted childhood.