Growing Up King (9 page)

The purple bikes? They’re still at 234 Sunset. I never rode mine again. His bike is there, just as it was. Everything is.
His clothes, shoes, our pictures—everything. All his possessions are preserved for a future season. His study is intact. Mother
uses it. It is functional. But would we ever be functional again? It was a legitimate question, one going far beyond my immediate
family.

F
uneral over, repast done, visitors gone home. For the survivors, the river of life goes on, but the comforting course it takes
has been unalterably diverted. Extended family leaves. You’re there alone. Just your mother, sisters, brother, and conscience.
Mother told Martin he was the man of the house now; Martin took it to heart, causing difficulties between him, me, and Yolanda,
with him suddenly trying to be the man, with no model. Looking back on it now, I can see he was trying to fulfill the duty
our mother placed upon him. Then people, male figures, came in to try and fill the void, like our Uncle A.D., Uncle Andy,
the grandfathers, both, really, but mostly it was Granddaddy King. What was all of this like for Mother? Her stoical demeanor
didn’t change. But now roles were shifting in the sense that she now became the central figure. Almost the first thing she
did was germinate the idea for the King Center. She transferred her grieving into work, then immersed herself in that.

Uncle Andy suggested that after a year, maybe we should sit down with a counselor, a psychologist. He told Mother that he
thought the Kennedys had done that for their children, both widows, Jackie and Ethel. He talked about taking us to see Robert
Coles, a well-known educator and psychologist. He could put us on the couch. My mother said yes, she was sure Mr. Coles was
nice, but the psychiatrist she trusted was named Lonnie McDonald, who practiced in New York. They were both graduates of Antioch
College. She invited Dr. McDonald down on a few weekends; he spent time with us individually. I regarded him warily, decided
not to tell him of my dreams, but we continued to know him, not professionally, just to know him as a family friend, over
the years. Looking back, I wish I had told him about my dreams. Maybe he could’ve brought me out of them. But to what? The
realities of 1969, the early ’70s? More to the reality of how and why my dad died? As it was, we followed Mother’s lead: lick
your wounds, keep moving, don’t question.

As she dove into work, Martin told Mother he wished he had two mothers, one who did the work my father wanted done, and one
who stayed home and was a mother. Mother looked at him with love and kindness. She was torn. We’d lost our leader, yet this
man who became our martyr had told us to keep moving. He’d told us he might not get there with us, but we as a people would
get to a Promised Land.

It was only much later that I even began to understand a little bit of what my mother must have gone through. She was a beautiful,
gifted wife, a mother of four small children, and a partner whose life course was suddenly, shockingly changed forever in
an instant. She obviously had to find a way to personally make sense of her tragedy, to find her own personal peace.

Whether she was conceptualizing the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change, or writing a book, or giving
a speech, or talking to us about why she was keeping on, what my mother decided to do was continue a tradition of what my
father was working on before his death, because she honestly believed that his principles and teachings that address the triple
evils of poverty, racism, and war could help to heal America and the world. She took time off to write a book, so we were
without her for a month, but other than that, the main difference was we were now having to deal with a bigger movement, an
Aftermath movement. Mother was front and center. I wasn’t really fully aware of, but heard about, snippets where, let’s say
she was being attacked by people who were really close in, but that was even probably a few years down the road. More immediately
it was family only around us—family and Uncle Andy. We as a family bonded together, were taken on outings, given a whirlwind
of activities that kept us distracted.

The attitude was, We don’t have time to grieve. That next summer, and every summer after that, for ten years, we spent two
weeks at Camp Blue Star, in the Blue Ridge mountains of Hendersonville, North Carolina, near Asheville. All four of us went,
and Uncle Andy’s daughters Lisa and Paula, and Uncle Ralph and Aunt Juanita Abernathy’s children, and Aunt Christine’s children,
cousins Vernon and Darlene, and white Jewish, disadvantaged black and white kids went too. Two weeks every summer from 1969
until 1977, we were Blue Star campers, hiking in the mountains, sleeping in cabins, sitting around campfires, sliding down
Eagle Rock into the mountain stream.

Bill Rothchild was my camp counselor. He later became a rabbi like his father, Rabbi Jacob Rothchild, who was a prominent
rabbi in the Civil Rights Movement and whose synagogue was bombed during the 1960s because he supported my father’s efforts
during the Movement. The Blue Star was the Star of David.

We were taken to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for snow-skiing by Dr. Robert Green, his wife, Lettie, and their sons Vince,
Kurt, and Kevin. Uncle Bob was a dean at Michigan State and had spent time working with my dad in the Movement. I remember
spraining my ankle, being lifted onto a stretcher attached to a snowmobile.

I remember traveling to Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada, at the border of Nevada and California. I remember how beautiful
it was. How clear. We water-skied, and went to tennis camp. I looked down into Lake Tahoe and saw fish far below the pristine
surface.

* * *

As I’ve said, Granddaddy King did not believe in sparing the rod. He was a man of the strictest discipline; maybe it came
from the house he grew up in, the way he was raised, the circumstances of his leaving his home and philosophically battling
his father, or so it has been said. He never spoke of such things, lest it get our curiosity up. He probably would have given
us a major whipping if one of us had thought about raising a hand to him to defend ourselves. We feared my grandfather growing
up because he was a robust man who came up the hard way and didn’t take mess. As I grew older and got to know him better,
I was more appreciative of his ethics and the way he took care of business, because he did take care of business, and you
could always count on him if you were in the lurch. He’d bring a certain kind of security and confidence whenever there was
a problem; he was much less frightening after my father died.

Granddaddy became a surrogate father too. He was conscientious, tried not to usurp Mother. He respected the fact that I had
had a father, and he had never usurped Daddy’s much more gentle authority. But he was also a disciplinarian, also a man who
originally didn’t believe in nonviolence. He gradually was converted, and my father had converted him.

After our father’s death, I noticed something I’d never noticed before. Growing up, before my father’s death, Atlanta was
rigidly segregated. Black and white. Period. Then, after he won the Nobel Prize in 1964, public integration began to come
into being. Amazing things happened for the state of Georgia. Of all places, Atlanta, in 1970, granted a boxing license for
a fight between a journeyman heavyweight named Jerry Quarry and the former heavyweight champion, Muhammad Ali, who’d been
banned from the ring for refusing induction into the army in 1967, and who, as far as I could tell, many if not most white
folk disliked at the time, though I was charmed when I saw him interviewed on TV. Mother took us to the fight.

I had my own experiences of dealing with race issues; it was still a pivotal period in the Movement. Debate sprang up anywhere
we showed. If we showed, it started a conversation about civil rights. People felt they had to express opinions, pro or con.
We couldn’t go anywhere for fun or education’s sake. Children my age engaged us in debates. And I was bullied by this white
kid who called me a nigger. Technically, he spit on me first, then called me a nigger.

We’d eaten dinner out one Sunday. We would almost always go out on Sundays, over to Morrison’s cafeteria in Southwest DeKalb
Mall. Today that mall is patronized predominantly by blacks, but then it was predominantly white. I think Aunt Christine and
Uncle Isaac went with us that day, and everybody was eating dinner and relaxing. After we would eat, they would all sit around
and talk, and that’s when my cousin Isaac and I would go off on our own and explore. I was around nine or ten years old at
the time.

Isaac and I had bonded tighter than ever after my father passed. We explored the mall. Two white kids, bigger, older, tougher
than we were, smoking cigarettes, came up to us and grabbed me by the collar; it was strange because I had never experienced
direct physical contact with anybody white before unless he meant me well, like Robert Culp, or Bill Rothchild. If Martin
or Isaac had grabbed me by the collar I’d have been fighting back. But purely by chance and taken by surprise, here I offered
no resistance, as my father hadn’t when an American Nazi Party member named Roy James interrupted an SCLC convention in Birmingham
by punching my father hard in the jaw in 1962. My father had dropped his hands and had not allowed the crowd at the church
where he was speaking to even touch his assailant, doubtlessly thoroughly confusing his tormentor. That was a conscious act
on Daddy’s part. The Nation of Islam members called Elijah Muhammad “Little Lamb,” but my father’s heart was actually made
that way. The tenets of nonviolence went beyond tactical political reasoning with him. He knew the dangers of the world he
was attempting to remake. I was a child; even as a man I could never hope to have his depth.

I had spoken to whites who weren’t mean, people like Camera Man, others who respected my father; since his death, there was
this climate and feeling of disassociation among the peoples of Atlanta, even as integration slowly, inexorably had its way
in the society. But for somebody to grab you and then spit on you and call you this derogatory name, “Nigger!” with negative
force—it was foreign, shocking. I stood stunned. I might have been charmed by Muhammad Ali, but I had no sense of defending
myself physically, with my fists. The big boy offered directions: “Don’t let me catch yewe all walking in this mall agin,
nigger!” or something. Isaac was pulling my arm, to go back to the comfort of our family, but I was rooted to the spot in
disbelief. I know bad things happen sometimes to people between races, and usually it’s just the terribleness of one particular
person, but often we read it across a whole race of people, and I was so young then, and in my mind I remember thinking, “Do
other white people hate me too?” I knew this big boy was hating me deeply, not realizing then the complexity of just what
“hate” is, how closely it is associated with need, and love. I didn’t know him. When he looked at me, his eyes took in all
aspects of my face; then he was spitting, grabbing me. I shut down my feelings. I felt no more.

The Jackson 5 came to do a benefit concert for the SCLC, and visited our home. We played in our basement, Ping-Pong, board
games, with Michael, Jermaine, Tito. Jackie Jackson was older and talked more with Yolanda, at her insistence. The person
who was responsible for them visiting was Uncle Junius Griffen, a friend of my dad’s who worked in the Movement over the years,
then went to Motown, worked with Berry Gordy. He and Uncle Junius orchestrated that visit, and it revitalized us, or at least
it did me, because I was musically inclined, to the point of being fascinated by it; the Jackson 5 were in the process of
stringing together hits of bubblegum soul, as it was called, like “The Love You Save,” “ABC,” “I Want You Back,” “I’ll Be
There.” Because I was drawn to music—everyone I saw was drawn to music, music is where you go when everywhere else is forbidden—this
seemed great to me. Martin enjoyed it. Yolanda—nothing consoled her, it seemed to me. Bernice either, though in a different
way.

We could tell people were conscious of keeping us busy—we had lots of make-busy activity, though I don’t know if anyone actually
said, “Let’s keep the kids busy.”

Vice President Hubert Humphrey invited us to the White House. The White House chef made up a cake, and served ice cream. There
were photos taken of Vice President Humphrey kneeling and talking to me. He seemed a sensitive man, caring, reaching out,
trying to soothe us, to help with the grieving without mentioning any grieving. There we were, in the White House, the nerve
center of America, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, we had kind of moved on, even if we had never really addressed
Daddy’s murder per se; it was not uncomfortable for me being at the White House, sometime in May of ’68. While in D.C. we
visited “Resurrection City” for the Poor People’s campaign and came back in June for the rally on the Mall.

We were always around high-profile situations throughout my life after that; we’ve been invited to the White House under six
presidents. Another pivotal event to me came in 1972, at the Democratic National Convention. It was my first appreciation
of the political process. At age eleven, I remember the details of going to Miami Beach, riding in little boats. I remember
the George McGovern issue with Tom Eagleton, the VP candidate McGovern pulled in, who had to step down because of the questions
about his psychiatric treatment. It made me think of Dr. McDonald, and being glad I had not told him about my dreams. McGovern
was also kind to us, although I didn’t sense the same connection as with Humphrey. Humphrey, I could tell, was truly, deeply,
mournfully sorry. There was something instructive about Humphrey’s sorrow too. Something regretful. McGovern’s was different—more
pity. Eagleton was aloof, distracted. He’d gotten electroshock therapy, someone whispered. These historical events stuck out.
I felt blessed and appreciative that we were there. A lot of times people say, “Leave your kids at home.” I’m thankful we
were exposed to these processes early and continuously. And it started to have an impact on me. These were the kinds of places
that my father had died for me to have the right to go to. And maybe not just to go there, but… what else? What else should
I do once I get there, Daddy?