Church Boy

by Kirk Franklin

  Yes, there’s racism in both the black church and the white church. We are all guilty of resentment and divisions. But it won’t change until Jesus comes—unless you and I begin to get real, right now, right where we are. Nobody can do that for us. We have to do it ourselves, and we need the grace of God to give us the strength and the will power to do what we know we have to do. Otherwise, others with a charismatic message will come and steal our glory.

  THE MESSAGE IN THE MUSIC

  I don’t want this to be just a book about gold records or Stellar Awards or Grammys or any of the media recognition the Family and I have experienced the last few years. It’s not about doing things the world’s way. Instead, I hope the story of my life and music will demonstrate how God can take a kid from the inner city, give him a message, and used him to be a light—because it’s the message in the music that really counts.

  This is not a book about how great I am; it’s a celebration of how great God is. It’s about how God can take the imperfect gifts of imperfect people and turn them into silver and gold.

  It’s Friday and my bills are due;

  My three-month-old baby needs some shoes.

  Can you feel what I’m going through?

  Clock on the wall keeps tickin’ tockin’,

  No stoppin’ and somebody’s knockin’,

  On the door, tellin’ me to go.

  My brother, I can’t take no more,

  So with my knees I hit the floor,

  And say, “Help me, Jesus; help me, Jesus!”

  Let’s go down by the riverside.

  Leave your problems all behind.

  You can rest your troubled mind

  Down by the riverside.

  If I concentrate on all the bad

  And all the things I wish I had,

  How can the dark clouds ever pass?

  Weeping may endure for a night,

  But joy comes in the morning light;

  God’ll keep your spirit right.

  So no matter what the people say,

  Ain’t nobody takin’ this joy away.

  In spite of everything I’ve been through,

  I can say, “Thank You, Jesus; thank You, Jesus!”

  Words and music by Kirk Franklin.

  Copyright ©1998, Kerrion Publishing / Lilly Mack Publishing (BMI).

  Used by permission.

  2

  They Need to Know

  Some people say I was a blessed child, a musical prodigy, born to play the piano; therefore, all the things that have happened in my life and musical career were just the result of growing up the way I did. That’s what they say, anyway. Others have said that I got a lot of lucky breaks along the way, as if everything that’s happened for Kirk Franklin and the Family the past five years is just some sort of crazy accident or some quirk of fate.

  Maybe that makes a good story, but unfortunately, neither version is entirely true or entirely fair. And if that’s all you’ve heard about my life and music, then I think you’re missing the real miracle of what’s been going on the last few years.

  The truth is, I’ve lived a hard life, right from the beginning, and right on the edge of poverty most of the time. If I hadn’t fallen off that dark stage in 1996, there’s a chance that most people still wouldn’t know my name. But I’m convinced that God had a plan, not just in the fall, but in the music. As long as I can remember, He has been the number one thing in my life, and I know that nothing in my life has ever happened by accident.

  I was a child of the seventies, and believe me, I looked like it! Check out the picture of me at four years old in my white suit! Wide collars, big smile. If you’ve ever seen those old pictures of Sammy Davis Jr. tap-dancing for the cameras when he was about that age, or if you can remember the photos of Donny Osmond in his little white suits and wide, seventies-style collars, then you get the picture. That was me: big teeth, big smiles, playing the piano and singing like I knew what I was doing!

  That part of my story has been told before, and everybody seems to like the “prodigy” part of it.

  When my grandmother died, my birth mother was only about fifteen years old, and she was growing up to be pretty wild. Gertrude Franklin was my grandmother’s sister and she felt an obligation to give her niece, Deborah, a place to stay; so she brought her over to live with her for a while. It was while she was living there, at Gertrude’s house, that Deborah got pregnant with me.

  Gertrude helped take care of me during the day and baby-sat me and looked after me at night whenever Deborah was out, which was most of the time. So Gertrude recognized the situation I was in from the start. She could see that Deborah didn’t know what she was doing and that she wasn’t going to be a very good mother.

  One day she confronted her and said, “Deborah, if you’re not going to take care of that baby, then give him to me. I’ll adopt him and raise him right.”

  That’s what happened. The adoption went through without a hitch, and a little while later Deborah moved out. Gertrude Franklin took on the job of raising a little boy, and she kept her word. She raised me right, and she loved me from the start. She made sure I always had whatever I really needed, and I bless her for that!

  For a sixty-four-year-old woman who thought most of the hard stuff was behind her, that must have been a brave thing to do. But she did it without complaining. Her only child had been stillborn many years earlier; so I became Gertrude Franklin’s baby, her only child, and she gave me all the love, attention, and discipline she knew how to give. She also gave me a sense of direction for most of my growing-up years. We went through some tough times, believe me, and we didn’t always see eye-to-eye. She threw me out of the house more times than I can remember!

  But Gertrude was dependable. She was as steady as a rock, and as I sang on our second album, “I loved her so—more than you’ll ever know!”

  Gertrude took me to church on Sundays, Wednesdays, and lots of other days, so I’d always know the bottom line. When she couldn’t afford to buy me school clothes, she’d make them by hand. She sent me off to school on the bus each day so I would get an education. But Gertrude and her first husband, Jack Franklin, also exposed me to something else that changed my life.

  Nobody could have guessed it would have the effect that it did, but Jack Franklin was a piano player. He played jazz and hymns and all kinds of popular music, and he even made a living at it sometimes. He was a deacon in the church, and I’m told he had an awesome voice. People who knew him say he was “good people.”

  Gertrude told me that when Jack played that old upright piano at our house, I was hypnotized. I’d sit at Jack’s feet—or sit on his knee whenever he’d let me—and I’d just listen as long as he would keep playing. I was Jack’s biggest fan! I’d clap my hands or dance or sing along with the music. When Jack would get tired and stop for the night, Gertrude said, I’d start screaming and kicking and pitching a fit!

  But one day I crawled up on the bench and started picking around until I found out how to make sounds like the ones I’d heard Jack playing. At least, that’s how I think it happened—I don’t remember much about it! But by the age of four I was doing something that people called “playing the piano.”

  That was when Gertrude realized I was probably going to be a musician someday. At least, she said that’s when she decided she needed to make arrangements for me to take piano lessons from a lady in our neighborhood. Most of the time she could barely afford to pay the light bill, so to raise the extra money for piano lessons she had to go out and gather up aluminum cans along the roadside. On weekends and evenings, we’d walk up and down the street, looking in wastebaskets for used cans. Then we’d take them down to the recycling center and sell them for cash.

  TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL

  How do you thank somebody for that kind of care and concern? I’m not sure you can. Due in large part to Gertrude’s love and courage, the first steps of my music career came a lot sooner than anybody expected. I was playing the piano by the age of
four, and I’ve been performing in churches and with music groups of one kind or another ever since. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t involved in music in some way.

  Any maturity I have today can be credited to that sixty-four-year-old woman who adopted me when I was just three years old. That woman—what can I say? When I look back on it now, I begin to see the impact she had on my life, and there are times when I don’t even believe she was from this earth.

  Talk about “Touched by an Angel”! I have been! I believe Gertrude Franklin was put here on this earth for a few years to try to pour some stuff into my soul, to keep me out of prison, out of gangs, out of drugs. And I thank God for that.

  She wasn’t a super-mom. She wasn’t perfect. Gertrude didn’t have all the answers, and she didn’t always come racing to the rescue when I got into a scrape. Sometimes her rescues were pretty blunt. She’d say, “You got yourself into this mess, young man. Now get yourself out!”

  She could be tough, but what she did do was just what I needed at the time. And what she didn’t do, I honestly believe, God never planned for her to do in the first place.

  Gertrude focused me. She pointed me toward the good things, toward the church, and toward music. She did the best she could to steer me away from things that could have destroyed any future hopes I might have had. At one point I resisted that, and I got myself into a lot of trouble as a result. But Gertrude did her best, and she gets the credit for anything good I’ve ever done.

  Despite all the love that Gertrude Franklin poured into her little boy, I wasn’t a very secure child. As I was growing up, I became self-conscious and embarrassed about the way we lived. Not only were we poor and not only was my mother an old lady with a beat-up old car and a ramshackle old house, but I was shorter than most of the children my age. The big kids liked to beat me up all the time, just for fun.

  I remember Gertrude being in church all the time. I remember her singing to me in the kitchen all the time. I also remember being the kid the other kids never liked. I was liked by some of the adults, all right, mainly because I was musical. But that wasn’t always enough.

  Some of the grownups thought I was cute—I must have seemed gifted to be playing the piano at such an early age. But to the other kids and to the parents of those kids, I wasn’t gifted at all, and they didn’t like me.

  Even at church there were bullies who would drag me downstairs to the basement and beat me to a pulp while their parents were upstairs praising the Lord! That didn’t do a lot for my self-esteem!

  When I was ten years old, we had to move our membership to another church because the bigger kids started beating up on me so bad and so often. Now, you need to understand that changing churches was a real sacrifice for Gertrude, because she had been a member there since long before I was ever born. But she did it for my sake because she could see that what was happening wasn’t good for me—or my soul.

  She owned a hat shop on Evans Avenue in Fort Worth, where she made her living. In addition to making hats, she would take in sewing. She was a good seamstress, and she used to make my clothes. She made my little suits, and she also made the little knickers I had to wear.

  Man, I hated those knickers! The boys would tease me, calling me a sissy and telling me I had legs like a girl because I had chubby little legs. But Gertrude made me wear those dumb knickers because she thought they made me look so cute!

  Yes, I even had the white booties and the white socks that came up to my knees. That might have been fine for a baby, but Gertrude kept dressing me like that long after everybody else my age was wearing blue jeans and Jellies. Those little suits may have looked cute to her, but they got old for me real fast! And Gertrude’s insistence on keeping me all dolled up had me in hot water with the other kids most of the time.

  Gertrude used to go to the senior-citizen center when I was a boy, and she was involved in all kinds of activities there. She liked to crochet, and she loved to go bowling. For extra money, she would do housework for a wealthy white family who owned a car dealership in Fort Worth. It’s not easy being a housekeeper for other folks, but they treated her well. They really liked Gertrude, and they treated me well too.

  I always used to make her laugh with jokes and impersonations of famous people. She thought it was hilarious when I would do my Richard Nixon imitation. I’d put my hands up in the “V for victory” sign and shake my head like Nixon, and she would just throw back her head and laugh. I guess I was always basically a clown!

  Even though I was formally adopted by Gertrude, I still had a distant relationship with my birth mother, Deborah, and I would see her from time to time. She would come by the house every month or two, but in reality she seemed more like a distant aunt than a mother to me.

  People reminded me that Deborah was my birth mother, but the woman who took care of me, who loved me, and who sacrificed for me was Gertrude Franklin. That’s what I was trying to say in “Mama’s Song.” I wanted to express the sense of relationship we had when I was growing up.

  It wasn’t meant to be a deep song, and it wasn’t written for performance. I wrote it for Gertrude’s funeral, and I think it touches on the special bond between us. I never planned to use that song in concert, but Vicki Lataillade talked me into using it on the Whatcha Lookin’ 4 album.

  A SENSE OF CALLING

  I always knew I was going to do something in ministry someday, and when I was four years old I told Gertrude I was going to be a preacher when I grew up. I don’t remember very much about it or how it happened, but suddenly one day I felt I had a calling from God, and I knew He was going to use me someday to spread the gospel.

  Gertrude reminded me later that I was sick that day, lying on the couch in the living room, watching a TV special about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That would have been around 1974, six years after Dr. King’s assassination. After I watched the whole thing, I sat up and told Gertrude I was going to be a preacher. She didn’t think much about it at the time, she said, but she didn’t forget it either.

  One thing that influenced me, I believe, happened when I was very small. I remember having stomach cramps a lot when I was a little boy, and sometimes I would get the twitches. I would start shaking from head to toe, and there was nothing we could do to make it stop. Basically they were just leg spasms, I guess, but whenever Gertrude would take me in to ask the doctor what was going on, he’d just say there was nothing he could do about it.

  Having the twitches was very uncomfortable and frightening for me, and Gertrude and I were both worried that the spasms might be an indication of something more serious. But after another unproductive trip to the doctor’s office, I said, “Mama, I know what we can do.”

  She said, “What’s that, child?”

  I said, “We can pray, Mama.”

  Well, Gertrude was a woman of faith, so she didn’t hesitate. She went to the kitchen and got down her bottle of olive oil. She anointed me with oil and prayed over me. Sure enough, the twitches stopped, and they never came back after that. I knew then, and I think she knew too, that I had been healed of the condition, whatever it was.

  Even then, in that situation as a very small child, I had faith that God was real and that He was a God of miracles. Since that time, I’ve always known that one day, one way or the other, I would be serving Him with my talents.

  After I told Gertrude that I wanted to preach, I decided I needed to go down and talk to the pastor at our church about my decision. So one Sunday, during a special evening service, I went down to the platform and said, “Hey, I want to preach.”

  We were in a revival at the time, and I didn’t think the preacher would do anything right away. But at the end of the sermon he told the congregation that there was somebody in the church that night who had come forward and said he was called to preach. I’m sure he must have played the whole scene for dramatic effect. Nobody knew who it was going to be, and I’m positive nobody suspected it was going to be a little boy!

  Anyway, he pulled a
chair up to the pulpit, pulled the microphone down a little bit, and then he came over and lifted me up and stood me on the chair. I gave the benediction that night. Gertrude said she nearly fainted when she saw me up there at the pulpit. She thought I was off playing with the other kids somewhere. She didn’t even know I was in the building, let alone that I was going to give the closing prayer!

  That was an unforgettable moment and, at least for Gertrude, a mixed blessing.

  Things continued just fine for Gertrude and me until I was ten or eleven years old. That was when I started doing all the little-boy stuff that drives grownups crazy. It wasn’t so much that I was an adolescent on my way to becoming a teenager or that I was some kind of horrible kid. I wasn’t. I was just changing, and Gertrude didn’t like it.

  I was becoming a man. I stopped wearing the cute little suits. I think she was afraid that if I grew up I wouldn’t be her little baby anymore. Now that I’m older and Gertrude is gone, I’m convinced that part of the reason for the tension between us during those years was that Gertrude couldn’t deal with the fact that her baby was going to be a man someday.

  I wish it could have been different. I wish I could have reassured her somehow. I wish she could have been a little more understanding or that I could have developed in some way that seemed less challenging and less upsetting to her. But the changes had to come. And whether she liked it or not, I couldn’t be Gertrude’s baby forever.

  I understand why she worried. We lived in a rough neighborhood, and some of the stuff I was getting into was pretty risky. We both knew that. For example, there was a time when all the boys in my neighborhood would go down to the skating rink on Friday and Saturday nights. That’s where all the action was.

  Reluctantly, Gertrude let me go. Thanks to the money I was making as music director at Mount Rose Baptist Church, I had more than enough to get in and buy myself something to drink. But if I came home at 12:01 instead of 12:00 on the dot, that was a major problem. No matter how often it happened and no matter how loudly I protested, the results were always the same, and Gertrude always won!