Growing Up King (19 page)

So I think he too was disappointed when I told him I felt I had to muster out, yet I think he also knew there were other things
for me to do. He said so. I don’t know if I believed him. But he said things to me that stuck with me until now. I talked
to him about how I felt traumatized by losing my father, and how maybe that was one reason I wanted to spend some time on
the force. But now it was time to move on. He listened to me. When I paused, he asked me if I was finished. I said, “Yes…
yes sir… I think so.”

J. D. Hudson sighed and said, “Listen here. You don’t need to be feeling sorry for yourself. You know how many other people
lost their fathers, just on April 4, 1968? Do you want me to go through a census records check, just so you can see how many
died that day, and how?”

I squirmed in my chair. “No. No sir.” I’d never thought of it that way before.

Hudson said, “You come from better timber than that. Some people don’t even know their father. Do you understand what I’m
saying to you? You can’t use your father being killed, or not being here for you, every time you have a crisis, as some kind
of an excuse.”

He said I was fortunate to have had not only a great father, but a great mother. And I knew that. I’d had two parents, together,
for a number of years, and I should be down on my knees thanking God for having such parents for any length of time. He said,
“You be thankful for what you got, and what you had.” It was like a figurative ass-kicking, in a good way. I’d heard similar
comments, but never as strongly and logically worded and never from a man I respected so much. Back in high school, I heard
it from the principal, Dr. Lester Butts, but at that age I wasn’t mature enough to hear it right, the way I heard it from
Director Hudson. J. D. Hudson came across to me as not only a father figure, a disciplined figure, an authority figure, but
also as a peer figure, a work-related figure. Hudson was a man who related to and cared about me, a man who had walked in
my shoes, who knew loss, lived with loss, survived and overcame it with tough love. He had many “adopted children” working
in the bureau who were the sons and daughters of prominent Atlantans. He took us all under his wing. I cherished him and that
experience.

One summer between ’82 and ’84, I was cruising along the freeway between Buckhead and Midtown. I was alone, having dropped
off my date after a semiformal fund-raiser for the United Negro College Fund. I was in Martin’s brand-new amber-colored Pontiac
Trans Am. I always borrowed Martin’s cars. Couldn’t wait for him to get another, so I could have it.

Here I was driving south along on I-85 near the Brookwood Connector when a transfer truck swerved right in front of me, fish-tailing,
to avoid another vehicle. I slammed on the brakes, yanked the wheel opposite; the Trans Am spun out of control. The rear of
the truck tailed over, almost took me out then and there, cut so close to the bumper that the only thing that kept us from
having impact was the Trans Am spinning out. The Trans Am hit the retaining wall on the right side of the freeway and the
front end was flattened into a standstill from a 65 mph brake-and-turn, ejecting me thirty feet away, the rear end of the
car coming to rest facing in the direction from which I had come. I went hurtling through the night air, having been ejected
through the driver’s side window, which was rolled up at the time. I went through a closed window— shattered the glass and
went right through.

It was one of those life-altering experiences where people talk about seeing the white light; it was a near-death experience.
Right before impact I said a prayer because I knew it was over. There was a slow-motion calm to the sequence. Oddly, a smell
went with it, like… after rain. Or like the smell right before a thunderstorm. And white light. And the voice. A clear channel
to the heavens. That’s what it felt like. I experienced being taken out of harm’s way. It’s like some angelic presence took
me out of the car. Physically, what happened to me was virtually impossible.

I was in a low-slung car, and I’m not a little man. I’m big-boned like my mother, and six foot one. Martin doesn’t hold it
against me, but it was his car. I’d torn up a couple of his cars before this, too. The first thing I thought after the light
dimmed and the rain smell went away was, “Man, Martin’s gonna kill me.” It had gotten to the point where he was wary anytime
I asked him to let me drive, grumbling as he handed over the keys. I was fitted rather snugly into the cockpit of the car.
As tight as I was in there, my body literally left the cockpit at an angle, right angle, left turn, through the glass, and
right through the driver’s side window. I was catapulted through the air, curled in a fetal position, like I was still behind
the wheel, but twirling in the air outside. I could see all of this happening, somehow.

What blew me away was how I landed in a ditch of sand on the right side of the freeway. The highway was under repair so there
was a lot of debris. How was it that I landed dead center in this ditch and didn’t go headfirst into the concrete divider,
or over the divider into the path of oncoming traffic? A miracle.

I landed sitting upright, as though I was still driving. Two feet either way, and I would have flown into concrete or the
speeding steel of onrushing cars on the other side of the divider, and would not be here talking about it. When I hit the
sand ditch, I hit it as if I was still behind the wheel. Literally sitting still in that posture. Upright, in a three-piece
suit. Right on my butt.
Bam.
I looked to the right of me and my brother’s car had to be a good twenty to thirty yards away. Totaled. To show you how powerful
the impact was, one of the headlights was ten feet to my right. Other debris was nearby. That’s how far I was ejected. I stood,
felt for my body, and mumbled, “Thank you, Lord.”

I couldn’t believe it; until this day I have trouble explaining how everything was intact. Even my glasses were still hanging
inside my jacket pocket. Yet my shoes were not on my feet. I’d been wearing loafers. I wobbled over to the wreckage of the
car and peered inside.

My right shoe was resting on the accelerator.

I was literally snatched out of my shoes. Later, somebody took pains to tell me that Daddy was also snatched out of his shoes
when the bullet hit him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

My other shoe, the left one, ended up a quarter of a mile down the freeway.

I was standing on the side of the freeway, still getting my bearings together after I had walked around. There were witnesses,
rubberneckers, Good Samaritans, passing by when it happened. A few stopped and asked if I needed any help.

A white couple stopped. I said, “I think I’ll be fine; if you could just call the authorities because this is a dangerous
situation.” The accident had occurred at a blind curve in the freeway just outside of a covered overpass and in not a good
spot visible to following traffic. They said, “No, no, you need to go to the hospital.” If you saw the totaled Trans Am, you’d
say, “This poor guy didn’t make it out of there alive. No way.” Even the cops were freaking out when they found out I was
the driver. And the cops did not arrive quickly, because the accident created a chain reaction of crashes. I was witnessing
the chain reaction. My car sat on that blind curve on I-85, heading south.

I could see these other people pulling up. Dominique Wilkins, for one. He was one of the Atlanta Hawks pro basketball players
at the time. He drove by in a Jaguar and he and somebody else looked over as he was easing around the car. At that point,
other collisions had occurred; it had been kind of a mini–chain reaction, actually, and I had heard brakes squealing, then
silence, then crumpling impact. I guess Dominique was a good driver; he had avoided the mini-pileup and driven around. As
he eased by, Dominique said, pointing to what was left of the Trans Am, “Whoever was in that— they didn’t make it.”

I was standing there trying to talk, and it was almost like they couldn’t hear me, either I looked too unmussed and couldn’t
have been involved, was just a bystander, or—this occurred to me, for a split second—maybe I wasn’t there at all in the corporeal
sense. It was like I was watching them but I was out of my body and they were watching my demise and I couldn’t say, “Hey,
I’m okay.” It was the strangest thing. I was standing on the other side of the accident, watching, trying to let them know
I was okay. I could hear them, but they couldn’t hear me.

It was like I was in a
Twilight Zone
episode. Then suddenly back to the land of the living. A woman driving behind me hit her brakes to keep from hitting my car,
then got hit. I knew her from college. Her mother worked at Morehouse; she was a student at Spelman. She was upset because
the person who hit her didn’t have insurance. The woman was shaken, she was having a conversation with me and herself. “Dexter,
that you? Dexter, they don’t have insurance. What are you doing here? Can you help me? Where’s your car?”

I said, “Over there.”

She looked over at the wreck and gulped. “Oh… Dexter… you okay?”

Everybody who saw the car freaked. “You’re walking?” she asked. “You can’t be walking.” By this time, it was like a tailgate
party on the freeway. People were out of their cars. It took the ambulance forty-five minutes to get there. If I had been
seriously hurt, it would’ve been too bad.

She immediately shifted from her worries. “You need medical attention. You don’t look like you need it, but based on that
car…” She made me sit down until the ambulance got there. When the ambulance finally arrived, I told the EMS guys, “Go ahead,
I’ll meet you down there, ’cause I need to collect all my stuff and wait for the cops to come and do the report.” The cops
were having to work accidents all along the way until finally they got to me. The glass was shattered out all over the car.
My briefcase and all my stuff were strewn all over the freeway. I wanted to collect it. I must have looked insane, or like
some kind of ghoul, walking amid this wreckage, bending to pick up papers, pens, other items.

“You’re the one who was driving this car?”

“Yes.”

The cop’s eyes widened as he looked at me. “Hold on. You mean to tell me you walked away from that?”

“Not really. I got thrown away from it.”

“… Have you been drinking?”

“No. No sir. No I haven’t been drinking.”

“Good. Then you should be able to tell me how in hell you walked away from that.”

“I have no explanation for it.” I knew the old cops’ tale: when people walk away from major accidents, they’ve been drinking;
people who walk away are often intoxicated. The officer recognized me when I told him my name. He rushed me to the hospital,
blue lights blazing.

Shock? Worse than that. The doctors thought I was mentally disturbed. They could not believe my condition. The resident looked
at me and said, “What’s the problem,” and I explained I’d been in a wreck. He looked at me like, “Right. Sure.” He said to
the cop, “This guy okay?” and then motioned to his head. I said, “I know they don’t teach you this in medical school, but
there’s a higher power, and there are such things as miracles. I was ejected from the car. Out of the window. It was rolled
up at the time.”

Everybody thought I was crazy; either I had made it up or I was on narcotics. I tried to explain: “There are such things as
miracles. They don’t teach it in medical school.” It bothered me, the way it was being denied that I’d been in an accident.
The ER resident was probably thinking, “Okay, full moon, Saturday night—who knows?” People who work the ER or the cophouse
will tell you, full moons and Saturday nights—that’s when the wild stuff happens. They get crazy action then.

I was x-rayed; everything checked out, except I had an ankle that was so badly sprained that it swelled to twice its normal
size and felt broken. That was it. No internal injuries. I was off my feet for several weeks, ankle bandaged up. If you could
say any good comes out of tragedy, my mother literally nursed me back to health. She cared for me like I was a kid again.
There’s nothing like a mother’s tender loving care. Aunt Christine came by, and after wagging her finger at me for my recklessness,
she said, “Dexter, God is saving you for something.”

Although I had been at fault only once before, that was my fifth total wreck. But this was the last major car accident I ever
had. It did something to me, inside. It made me take my life into my own hands. Before, I’d put it to chance. This was a life-changing
experience. I realized maybe God didn’t have it in for me; maybe I had to help myself. I changed from living aloof, to saying,
“Okay, now you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

My grandfather died in 1984 of heart failure. As I’d gotten older, I’d begun to appreciate him more. And then he left us.
This played into my scenario that everybody close to me ultimately gets taken away. All these events caused me to start looking
for root causes and cures for any symptoms I had. I was a walking symptom of something. I didn’t find any answers until I
looked for myself, did my own independent research. Things you finally know and directions you finally go in are often not
the things you are told to do, but things you find out for yourself, through living, and through, somehow, not dying.

So it was the combination of things—the wreck, leaving the Bureau of Corrections, and Granddaddy’s death—that made me realize
that I needed to take control of my life. I was the only one in my family who had been given a reprieve when faced with certain
death. I had been miraculously delivered out of the clutches of “Who would be next?” and I was intent on finding out why I
was saved.