Growing Up King (14 page)

Later on, I had a conversation with the late Lee Atwater, Republican National Committee chairman. Everybody was asking him
why a country and blues guitar player was managing George Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988. I talked to Atwater at Bush’s
inauguration. I happened to sit next to him. He happened to start talking. He said musicianship transcended expediencies one
made for politics, he said politics was just his job. Music was his love. Being a musician helped him as a political strategist
in terms of understanding how things harmonize. Anybody you talk to who’s a musician can relate, from whatever point on the
political compass. He seemed quite anxious for me to understand this point about his political efforts.

I was always exposed to music. Mother made sure of that. I played trumpet. Then I learned to play the bass, electric bass
guitar, a popular instrument in many Baptist churches. In fact, most popular musical acts, ones with African-American talent
certainly, came up out of the church, one way or another, since time began in this country. One of the members of an R&B group
called Brick gave me bass lessons at Johnson’s Music Studio, which was run by Cleophus Johnson, who also served as band director
at Morris Brown College. I would get together with guys in the neighborhood, and then we were gigging here and there, but
for some reason I did not stay with it. I think part of it was again the focus, a lack of concentration, of focusing on getting
my chops in order, playing R&B and Top 40, mostly R&B, and, of course, when I was playing the trumpet, that was all kinds
of music. Mother insisted that we all take piano lessons growing up, but I didn’t do as well with that. I didn’t stick it
out, and of course now I wish I had, for the sake of composition and also reflection and private solace. Ah, most grown-ups
say they wished they’d stuck with the piano lessons their parents gave them, don’t they? My approach to music may not have
had to do with my passion but may have been related to my strange inability to concentrate, or to stay focused, to sit there
and grind it out, to practice and do the lessons. Whatever— music was my one great love.

Even at that young age, I was an old head in what was soon coming to be, the hip-hop nation. Just what is that? I would call
it a phenomenon, which first was manifested audibly by the rappers up in places like the Bronx in the late ’70s and early
’80s— Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, Afrika Bambaataa.

Then in the ’80s the explosion came, where all children had to have “rhyming skills,” the ability to mimic drums or other
musical instruments, and also to tell a story in a metered, rhythmic, even poetic way, even though the emotions they expressed
were not allways about love. How could they be? These were the children of the generation of African Americans who had had
the hope let out of them like the air out of a pricked balloon, with the assassination of Daddy and other people who seemed
to be just trying to help them. This was the end result of all that.

This was music. Hip-hop culture later came to embrace everyone and everything from Lauryn Hill, formerly of the group the
Fugees, to certain hairstyles, to clothing, to a general sensibility of life. I think that sensibility of hip-hop has to do
with honesty at all costs.

Of course, I couldn’t quite put it together like that back then, what was coming, in the form of this new hip-hop culture
and sensibility. Neither could I even begin to imagine how it would affect me, and all of us, as Americans, or even that it
was coming at all. At the time I couldn’t see that it was coming, or that it would also represent and encompass me. Not just
yet I couldn’t.

In life, as in music, sometimes, when you’re improvising, you just… let it happen.

One night, long ago, when Daddy was still alive, we went to Yolanda’s elementary school for an event called “Great American
Music Night,” where different kinds of “American” music were celebrated. Only they didn’t play any African-American music:
no blues, gospel spirituals, R&B, jazz—nothing. My father said it made him sad. It was supposed to be an American celebration.

They ended the program by playing “Dixie.”

It’s funny, but I hardly remember that night at all.

I
attended Galloway School. Isaac went over to Oglethorpe Elementary. The Galloway School was an integrated private school/academy
based on the open classroom concept. Classes were not graded. You got credit or no credit. Pass-fail. A small school, it had
been started by the headmaster, Mr. Elliott Galloway, whose son was an Olympic track star, Jeff Galloway. Galloway was highly
rated academically. What interested my mother about this school was it was open, it was more progressive and open-minded—and
it was integrated. It was always important to my mother that my father didn’t die in vain, that what he’d fought for we at
least lived out. That was critical to her.

So every one of us, her children, went to Galloway School, except for Yolanda. Yolanda went first to Spring Street Elementary,
then to Henry W. Grady High School. Martin and I also attended Spring Street Elementary School, I for kindergarten through
second grade, Martin through fifth grade. Bernice went to Galloway through seventh grade, having attended the Montessori School
before that. The Abernathy kids, Ralph and Juandalyn and Donzaleigh, were still at Spring Street when we left for Galloway.
I stayed there through ninth grade.

Galloway was located in north Atlanta, in affluent north Buck-head, in an area known as Chastain Park. The school was actually
next to Chastain Amphitheater. At the time there were about five hundred students, K through 12. Class sizes were ten students,
maximum.

Initially, Galloway was fine. It was me that wasn’t so fine. Galloway lacked a certain structure I may have needed. Maybe
the lacking was in me. Galloway was structured in three levels. Early, middle, and upper learning, almost the same as elementary,
middle, and high school. Upper learning started at eighth grade. Once in upper learning, all bets were off; it was so open
you could smoke cigarettes in class if your folks gave you permission. A lot of people called it weird.

As I mentioned, you didn’t get graded. You either got credit or no credit. The upside of this was that you literally had some
ten-year-old geniuses walking around doing calculus because they weren’t discouraged from it. That was the upside of the freedom.
The downside was that if you did not or could not self-manage, if you needed structure, your learning might suffer.

In my earlier years at Galloway, I was hanging with everybody else. I was having a little extra success in math. I liked math.
I took math books everywhere. To church. I’d sit there reading algebraic equations and word problems. I loved word problems.
But around seventh grade, I started losing even that math focus. This turns out to be when many black boys in general begin
having trouble in the school system. There may be some general trend—society no longer sees these young black males reaching
puberty as cute mascots, but as threats.

My attention span, my ability to reason and focus, was becoming more of a problem. I had anxiety attacks. Sweating. Fearing
something bad was going to happen, yet not knowing exactly what, which made it worse. I couldn’t sit still in a classroom
and listen to the teacher—I was constantly jumping ahead or around, frustrating the teachers because I would stop their roll,
ask, “Why is this, why is that?” and they would get irritated. I was treated like “the black,” a special “black” kid.

African Americans had at the time progressed, if it can be called that, from “Negro” to “black.” At Galloway, we were different
from other blacks, to the white kids. Galloway was 98 percent white; of that number many were Jewish. But there was a feeling,
gleaned from others, that I was different.

“You’re a privileged black, aren’t you?”

The inference was, You can’t relate to these other “blacks,” can you? I’d be having lunch and talking about a football game
or a new record album or something and suddenly and unwillingly I was involved in commentary on “black” issues and had to
defend my background. My school chums’ parents obviously had said some things at home that the kids would regurgitate in school.

One of the issues at school was Maynard Jackson being elected the first black mayor. A lot of things happened in 1974. Jackson
took office as the first black mayor of Atlanta. He was elected in ’73, but took office in ’74. He showed up at my grandfather’s
home to pay his respects, always with his bodyguard. My siblings and I had activities, but we never went to pistol ranges,
never went skeet shooting, never went hunting. Police were integral in my development, because when you don’t have a father
you substitute people who are more visible who represent a male presence. Maynard’s bodyguard took time to play with us. Maynard’s
bodyguard became chief of police. His name was Eldrin Bell. I remember admiring him. At that time he was a sergeant.

I also had met Maynard Jackson. My family knew his family, and he knew who I was, and I knew who he was. He wasn’t really
that close to any of us then, but there was always a cordial family respect. His family grew up here, but mainly in his younger
years; he was away for some time too, then came back. He was important to me on a symbolic level. The fact that I had history
with him made me feel special about him. He was much more important to me than he was to most of the kids at Galloway—or to
their parents. At Galloway in the seventh grade I would get into these debates with other seventh graders over them saying
he was not “qualified” to be mayor. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. You’re hearing twelve- and thirteen-year-olds
saying, “Well, it’s a shame, he’s not qualified,” as if they were authorities on political parties and pressure groups. Here
I am, thirteen, defending full-grown man Maynard Jackson.

Didn’t Maynard have a long history of being in the city government at that time? Yes he did. He was vice-mayor before he was
mayor, I said. On the city council, I said. Came up through the ranks, I said. Morehouse man, I said. I said all that, to
much eye-rolling among my classmates. Those were my comebacks. Clearly, “not qualified” was their emotional response, given
matter-offactly, tossed off like science—science of spin. Attacking Maynard was emotional, self-serving, not supportable by
fact, primal, and racially charged. All the stuff that would usually be ascribed to black folks. Pot calling the kettle black.
What disqualifies Maynard?

“What?… Well, he just isn’t,” they would insist.

I pointed to the skin of my own hand. “Is this what disqualifies him?”

I was constantly getting in debates and arguments over this kind of thing. Occasionally there might be a kid who would say
the “n” word casually, not to me, not in a charged way, but just around me, and I would have to speak on it. Maybe twice it
happened. But it did happen.

There was this one kid—Rogers Baker Wolfe, I’ll call him. He was more maladjusted than the rest of my schoolmates. He wanted
me to feel different, to feel bad, to be inferior, and to be happy about it.

“Hey, Dexter King, you hear about what the blaaaacks did yesterday?” Rogers Wolfe might say. As if I was responsible. When
the Atlanta child murders—the mysterious murders of twelve prepubescent black boys in West End and other inner-city areas—began
at the end of the decade, I wondered about Rogers Baker Wolfe, if he was taunting any innocent blacks about that.

At Galloway, there were a lot of affluent kids whose parents were heads of corporations, that kind of thing. Most were cooler
than Rogers. I got invited to bar mitzvahs. Children who invited me into their homes came to ours. Mother said, “If you go
into their homes, they come into ours.”

In many ways I had both worlds, if not the best of both worlds, growing up in Vine City, a black working-class neighborhood.
I had relatives in middle-class black suburbs; I was going to an avant-garde school with white children of industrialists
and professionals, exposed to views that amused the white middle-upper class and drove the white working class. Most of my
playmates at home were lower-income, from broken homes, but with extended-family support; by day, I was dealing with people
who were from well-to-do homes economically but who might have been in broken homes emotionally or on other levels. A lot
of kids I knew were dysfunctional for different reasons. I saw it all—thirteen-year-old alkies or addicts at Galloway. Drugs
were in Vine City, but not the worst kind, not yet, not yet the crack cocaine that finally leveled it.

On one hand, some of my classmates at Galloway were wealthy, but on the other hand maybe their parents were not there, not
hands-on. Even when families were together, they weren’t together spiritually. I was exposed to kids in the ’hood who were
from broken homes but were genuinely good people, spiritual people, who didn’t have the means to rise and had to pin their
hopes on the following generation. Till this day I feel comfortable in any environment. I could hold my own back then. I accomplished
this by trying to appear calm and saying nothing. Let others make the mistakes first. Elliott Galloway always seemed to me
to be an optimistic person. He was not imposing physically. Everything about him was medium. Medium height, medium build.
Tweedy, just a little bit. Reminded you of an “all-American” type person. An all-American type guy who was always up, just
very optimistic, very extroverted you know, kind of a cheerleader type. Loose collar. Just seemed very accessible. Could get
serious too. Interactive. When he got serious, he’d put on his glasses. Then you knew he was serious. He didn’t wear them
all the time.