Growing Up King (34 page)

She said, “All right. I understand.”

So when I went to meet Ray, Mon Ami and I were apart. She had friends who ran one of the largest government relations lobbying
groups, a minority lobbying firm in Florida that wanted to expand into Georgia. They asked her to come on board as vice president,
set up the office in Atlanta. She did that in June ’97, and didn’t tell me. No reason for her to, really. We weren’t seeing
each other. Still, when I found out, it bothered me. It did. I can’t deny it. I didn’t want to lose her, period. It was very
difficult for her, very tough. How could she find her place in this relationship where she was committed to a person who was
not committed to her? It seemed I was moving further away, not just from her but from everyone. More bogged down. More lost
in my own thoughts. Getting ready. Add that to my whole commitment phobia. Mon Ami brought back to me the awareness that faith
doesn’t mean terrible things aren’t necessarily going to happen, but that if they do—and they probably will—you can overcome
any adversity with faith.

In business, she was very effective, good at what she did, with a sense of how to get things done; she was pragmatic, intelligent,
able to separate business from personal. I had given her a hard time on the other levels because of my personal frustrations,
phobias, inadequacies, stresses, and pressures; you tend to take things out on the people closest to you. While I know it’s
not fair, the reality is— who else are you going to share them with? Who else? If you live with a cop, where does he take
all of that stuff after work? And my situation has been similar in terms of mental rigors and, as I said, the transformation
I went through during that period. It took a major toll on us.

The James Earl Ray meeting in March 1997, what followed in Memphis during the Joe Brown hearing, my investigation of the assassination
in Memphis, and the decision to file the civil suit against Loyd Jowers, operator of Jim’s Grill on South Main Street in Memphis,
in 1999—all of this was a turning point in the relationship between Mon Ami and me. I was stressed out. I’d never dealt with
anything like it; once I saw what was going on, what we as a family had to do before we could put this to rest, it was constantly
in my head. I was thinking about it all the time, about ramifications of looking into it, about being torpedoed in the mass
media, about fearing for the personal safety of loved ones. All of this meant I never fully relaxed or let my guard down.
I was afraid. I questioned everything and everyone; you start saying, “If that can happen over there, who’s to say people
might not hurt my loved ones?” Attacks in the media, evidence of things unseen—it all helped distance me from Mon Ami.

I told myself this distancing was for her own good and for her protection. I’d received death threats and become very cautious
as a result of reopening the investigation surrounding my father’s death.

The minute I shut Mon Ami out, she could not deal with it. She felt I was unable to believe in her, I wasn’t able to engage,
compounded by that part of me that had never dealt with my dad’s death. By the spring of 2000, the process of shutting Mon
Ami out had taken a year. It was true that for the first time I was dealing with Daddy’s death in a serious way. Mon Ami had
completed her work at the Center for the most part and it was time to move on. Or stay. We agreed that one way or another
a move would have to take place once the civil trial was over.

W
hen in doubt, go home. Go see Mom or Dad. If you can. If you’re that lucky.

When I go home, I go to 234 Sunset. She’ll be there. She’s always been there. And thank God she was, or else the four of us
might be totally disconnected from living. She sacrificed for us.

For the longest time, there was always a thought in her of growing old and dying there. But during the late ’90s, I became
concerned about her safety. Vine City, never fully tranquil, had changed, as a reflection, as part of the echo of the rifle
report, so to speak—a sign of the times.

Crime is worse than when we were growing up; the crimes are more violent because of the nature of this drug epidemic of crack
cocaine, which did not exist when we were growing up. It is a drug that seems to cause not just addiction but also a sordid,
soulless madness, without conscience. I’ve watched things worsen in Vine City. For years, I lived in Midtown, in a townhouse,
behind a gate. Mother needed to be in a place where she wouldn’t have a lot of maintenance issues, and where she could live
her life in peace. She wants to entertain, have a place where she’s not so public; 234 Sunset is on the tour guides’ route,
like in Hollywood, when they take out-of-towners around to see the “homes of the stars.” Except that Vine City isn’t Hollywood.
Mother doesn’t have privacy. Not at 234 Sunset. Never did.

Growing up, we’d have to be our own sentries. When the tour buses were coming, we’d have somebody posted, up on the hill as
lookout; if we were outside we’d run into the house, or back through the alleyway, or we’d hide behind the bushes and trees.
Tourists would get off the tour buses sometimes and come right to the door, and knock, and if anyone answered they would actually
ask if they could “come in and look around.” They were dead serious. At times, tourists would pull up into the driveway in
buses, or in wood-paneled station wagons, vans, RVs with out-of-state plates, and say, “We’re from Lawrence County, Alabama!”
or “Just pulled in from Hopkinsville, Kentucky!” or “Wichita, Kansas!” or wherever it might be. “We just want to have a look
around… wonder if we could get a tour of the house?” Or “Can we look around?” This was frequent enough to be looked out for,
especially in the summer. We really had little or no privacy at home after my father’s death; even to this day my mother is
exposed in this regard.

I began thinking, for practical reasons, that it would be a good thing for her to move from the ancestral home. The question
would be, to where? It’s a hard thing to even think about, let alone do; and you can relate, I’m sure, if you have a family
ancestral home where you were raised, and where you lived, and where some of the closest people to you lived and died. Because
of so many memories, so much emotion, so much life being accomplished and lived out there, you feel like you’re abandoning
part of your life, maybe even abandoning the people who lived with you, who helped you, and who are no longer living—it’s
like as long as you’re still there, they still live.

Nobody can walk away from that cavalierly—well, some people can. Some people can’t or don’t walk away from it at all. It’s
not easy to move from an ancestral home. She’s dealt with it all these years. She wouldn’t leave on her own. She’s just that
type. In her golden years, she has a right to live the way she’d like to live. She’s done all the living for others. Now let
it be for her.

I’ve been concerned for her well-being there; it’s like she’s trying to preserve something, she’s always tried to preserve
what Daddy wanted done. He wanted to live there in the first place, to the disagreement of our grandfather, partly to appease
the people who tried to damn him by calling him bourgeois. But I believe he would’ve changed with the times. The fact that
this is not the same neighborhood it was once, even though it was the ’hood, society then was not in as bad a shape at the
bottom as it is today. You didn’t have the same kind and strength of drugs in Atlanta in the ’60s and ’70s. It’s a whole different
vibe, a wholly different reality today.

Most people we grew up with didn’t come from a lot of money; neither did we. People were of more meager, humble means, but
still had values, and they would generally be good people. They just didn’t have much, didn’t have a lot of education. But
today, no telling what’s going on. Could be a college graduate who fell victim to the crack pipe or meth or Sherm, angel dust,
or heroin, but especially crack cocaine, and is killing or robbing not to have something but because crack will make you do
anything to get more of it. It’s been as epidemic as AIDS in many ways. None of this was true or even thought of when I was
growing up in Vine City.

I’ve always been concerned about Mother. Living alone there doesn’t bother her so much, or so she lets on, but I want more
for her than she wants for herself. I feel like we as a people marched and were beaten and jailed and died and we did all
these things so we could move a person like her into a position of dignity and reasonable comfort and convenience in life.
Not that she’s chafing to go. But something as simple as being able to go outdoors on the patio or being in her backyard is
important at her age. The way the house is set up, there’s not enough space, she’s exposed, and if she wants to do some entertaining,
she doesn’t have the facilities. Even though she’s done it over the years, now it’s just not conducive. Things have changed.

* * *

When I was growing up, no one would think of breaking into our house. But in 1996 there was a burglary at 234 Sunset. A man
broke in while Mother was asleep. For some reason the alarm didn’t go off even though the thief broke a window. The alarm’s
sensor was not working; it didn’t go off. This thief, after ransacking the living room and study, came into the bedroom where
Mother was sleeping. There, he stood over her—deciding what, God only knows. “Do I kill her? Do I rob her? Rape her? Who is
she?” Did he know? She didn’t know he was there at first. The only reason she knew later is because he’d taken things out
of the bedroom before he escaped. She heard him as he left; that’s what woke her up. By God’s will, she got the chance to
wake up.

The police found this burglar eventually, he had taken a King Center two-way radio from the house; she’d had it placed in
the battery charger. The cops found him because he was talking on the two-way radio, believe it or not. King Center security
heard him, and asked for his location. The police were able to locate and apprehend him, interrogate him, do an investigation;
they found he’d stood over my mother for a long time considering whether to kill her. Then he saw a picture of my father.
He was also responsible for three rapes and the murder of an elderly woman in the neighborhood. We were left with the fact
that he didn’t touch my mother. We figured either he must have recognized some King family possession in the living room,
or he recognized Mother, or maybe he saw a picture of my dad in the bedroom. That’s what he claimed. Something scared him
off. We don’t know what, but thank God, he didn’t harm her.

After that happened, I was more concerned for her safety, even though she doesn’t worry about it. I would have moved her out
of there then. She said no. But I think she was ready by the end of the ’90s. The issue became, could she afford to do it?
We began to have conversations with the National Park Service about them buying the house and turning it into a National Historic
Site—it was one already anyway, unofficially, and had been since our father was killed. It would make more sense if the Park
Service bought the house from her. She can’t buy much house today, not for what she paid for that one. At her age, the question
becomes, does it make sense for her to buy a house? Maybe a condo? I only knew it made sense for me to help her do whatever
she wanted to do.

I had long talks with Mother about what would be the right thing to do with my father’s legacy as it relates to her care and
comfort. What would he have done in this situation?

We knew he was very self-effacing about monies, as they dribbled in to support the struggle against segregation, as they came
to the SCLC or Ebenezer Baptist Church. But he won that struggle, posthumously. Would he have put a price tag on things like
his own papers, or his ancestral home, or his own intellectual property, or his image, as far as commercial use of it went?
Would he want us to benefit from it if we could? I’m sure he would, mother said, because he licensed his intellectual property
and writings to support his family while he was alive. He put a value on himself. What struggle would he support now? Would
he want his widow imperiled? I had to guess in the end. I made an educated guess. To help his wife seemed to be a good guess,
or a guess I could live with, even if nobody else could.

I asked my mother about this—could a man risk alienating his family from the rest of society by trying to do the right thing
by his family? She said it was a dilemma, all right, but that life is full of them. She thought it made more sense to think—or
know in your heart—that he would do whatever he could, not for himself, necessarily, but certainly for his family.

People have compared my family with the Kennedys. But the Kennedys had wealth. My father’s generation of Kennedys, JFK and
RFK, and their siblings and cousins—they were born into wealth. In fact, I don’t know too many folks who have made it on their
own. Wealth begets wealth. Auctioning Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s belongings—that’s okay. The Kennedys have had the privilege
and luxury of being seen and even at times portrayed as do-gooders, humanitarians, public servants. But they also have had
the luxury of many resources already accumulated when they got here.