by Dana Canedy
I told him that it was the opposite of Radcliff in nearly every conceivable way. McDonald’s delivered Big Macs. There were day care centers for dogs. I probably walked three miles a day in New York, but in Radcliff I drove around the supermarket parking lot for ten minutes, looking for the spot nearest to the entrance. There was nothing like the dim sum in Chinatown or Rockefeller Center at Christmastime.
“If you love Monet,” I said, “maybe I can show you the real thing.”
Charles had mentioned that he was moving to Fort Riley, Kansas, in a few months, to start a new assignment. He was a newly single man whose heart was still bruised. I sipped the last of my cold coffee and wondered whether I would ever see him again.
Three
Dear Jordan,
If my family was boisterous and chaotic, your father’s was hushed and polite. We settled our disputes with family summits, arguments, and the occasional shoving match. In the King household, whatever might cause a disturbance—resentments, money troubles, strong emotion of any kind—was suppressed. Your father’s parents were determined to live peacefully and properly in a world that was increasingly turbulent.
Your grandfather Charlie—a towering disciplinarian who before you had even reached your first birthday said I should do my best to teach you to be quiet—took pride in having dutiful children. Your grandmother Gladys—a prim, mild-mannered woman who even as you were learning to use a sippy cup sent me a china demitasse with instructions to demonstrate how you should hold it—cared deeply about decorum.
“We never really liked a lot of conflict and so we just tried to make peace,” she explained recently. “Maybe we went to the extreme, I don’t know.”
They lived in a modest one-story white house with sea foam green shutters in the working-class neighborhood of Lee-Harvard in Cleveland and both worked at the Veterans Administration hospital in Brecksville, Ohio, for close to thirty years. They spent their lives trying to turn the pain of how they had each grown up into something that would help others—although I do not know how much they were conscious of that. Mr. King had gone hungry for much of his childhood; now he worked as a dietitian, planning meals for vets who were injured or ill. Healthy eating became his lifelong obsession. Because your grandmother, a nurse, worked the 4 to 12 a.m. shift to be home during the day, it fell to your grandfather to feed your father and his sister. If he got home late, he would wake them for supper—something they were none too happy about
“My dad was adamant about us eating three meals a day,” your aunt Gail recalled.
It is typical of your father that he wrote less about his frustration with his parents’ strict ways or with middle-of-the-night meals, and more about his father’s resolve.
Charles Monroe King made his way into the world on June io, 1958, a screaming 6 lb., 7 oz. baby with wisps of fine black hair. His vociferous arrival in a Cleveland hospital after ten hours of labor offered no sign of the child he would be.
Charles—or “Chuck,” as they called him—was shy and sensitive, traits he got from his mother. “A gentle soul” is how she once described her boy.
Chuck was devoted to his mother. The former Gladys Freeman was the beautiful daughter of a farmer and a domestic from rural Newell, Alabama. She was light-skinned with hazel eyes and wavy auburn hair that she wore in a tight ponytail. She collected antique china and books about history and art On weekends, she would take Chuck and his younger sister, Gail, to museums and department stores downtown.
By the time he entered kindergarten, Chuck could read. Mrs. King was aware of her son’s precociousness, and she provided him with books and comics to spur his interest Your father’s love of reading stuck with him all his life.
Charles’s mother encouraged his passion for art as well. He was in the first grade when he drew his first prize-winning picture, a portrait of a boy on a street corner holding a handful of balloons attached to invisible strings. “You have to use your imagination,” he explained to his mother about the missing strings. The judges admired his ingenuity.
As much as he adored his mother, Chuck revered his father.
Mr. King was a tall, lean, handsome man with dark eyes and ebony skin. He cut an imposing figure, and his pressed slacks and tailored suits offered no hint of his harsh beginnings in Sweet Water, Alabama. Charles admired his father’s work ethic and resilience, and he loved to hear him laugh. He treasured the memory of skeet shooting with his father on a cousin’s land in rural Ohio.
The Kings talked at the dinner table about the struggle for equality, although the emphasis was almost always on the positive. There was no discussion of the violence in Cleveland, which, like so many other American cities in that era, was rocked by racial ugliness and unrest. In July 1966, the tensions erupted. It happened in Hough, a disenfranchised neighborhood near downtown, a place of few jobs, rising crime, and shoddy housing that many residents and businesses had already abandoned. A black man went into a white bar and asked for water. The bartender refused, then posted a sign on the door: “No Water for Niggers.” What began with words and shoves exploded into gunfire, arson, and looting, which became so relentless officials called in the National Guard to restore order. Firefighters battled hundreds of blazes, and hundreds of people were arrested. Millions of dollars in homes and businesses were destroyed. It took six terrifying nights for calm to return, and by then four people (including a young mother looking out the window of an apartment) were dead.
Charles knew little of the fury and pandemonium nearby. His parents had told him nothing of it His school was on the eastern edge of the city and remained open, and although the couple drove through Hough to see the devastation, they decided to shield their children from it. Mrs. King told me she never wanted Charles and Gail to have “bitterness about white people.” When, years later, the family traveled to the South and stopped at a Holiday Inn or a Howard Johnson’s, the Kings reminded their children that they hadn’t always been allowed to patronize such places. But they never dwelled on it.
‘Our parents never taught us that white people were racist or that there were obstacles,” Gail recalled. “They just showed us to believe in ourselves. It was more about who we were. There was just no distinction between us and the white kids.”
Yet they were not unrealistic, and the Kings did tell their son and daughter that the civil rights movement was fundamental to racial progress. They spoke with great pride of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (no relation to your father’s family) and of Carl Stokes, who became the first black mayor of a major city when he was elected in Cleveland in 1967. They wanted their son and daughter to understand that there were good and bad people of all races. Their message was one of love, respect, and unity.
His parents’ worldview shaped Charles’s perspective in situations that might have left him bitter and defeated.
Your grandmother still speaks vividly about the time that she shook hands with King during one of the leader’s last trips to Cleveland. She can remember every moment: the frigid wind whipping off Lake Erie, the speech in which the civil rights leader rallied the crowd over the hiring practices at Sealtest, demanding the dairy company hire black milkmen and front office personnel. She remembers standing in line on that cold day, and finally grasping his hand.
“I thanked him for all the things he was doing to make our lives better,” she told me. “He was so gracious; you’d think I was the person who was the big shot. I told Chuckie, The lesson here is that one person can make a difference.’ That’s what we tried to instill in him.”
She also remembers your father’s reaction when an assassin’s bullet killed King a few months later: ‘Oh, he cried. We all cried. I told him that I felt like God called Martin Luther King home because he had done what he was supposed to do.”
That day your grandparents knelt in prayer, something your father had seen them do often during his childhood. Your grandfather King, a deacon in their church, told his son many times how the power of prayer sustained him as a child
growing up poor in the segregated South, with parents who had had no education.
Your father was proud of his dad’s service in World War II, and proud that he’d completed a college degree at Tuskegee Institute. He remembered times when they had bonded without words, often just by watching TV together.
Your father does not spell out why he might have wished for relief, but I know there were some hard times. Early in our relationship, he confided that, when he was six or seven, he was abused by a relative who babysat for him. She yelled at him, pounded him in the head, and force-fed him frozen food. She often had sex with her boyfriend in front of him. Charles said he sought help from his parents but was unable to get them to listen. His parents say he never spoke about it, but Charles always insisted to me that he had tried to tell them. Throughout his life Charles hated red nail polish because he remembered seeing it on his babysitter’s fingers as she undressed. I never wore it in his presence.
After your grandfather took in his ailing, diabetic mother, Daisy King, and began working longer hours to pay for her care, Charles came to see his father as austere and aloof. The pressure of meeting her needs seemed to leave Mr. King little time or energy for his son.
The elder Mrs. King, a dark-skinned woman who had lived a hard life of servitude, was bitter and tired in her waning years. She did not hide her disdain for her daughter-in-law because of the younger woman’s fair complexion. Such friction was common at the time, especially among blacks from the segregated South. Darker-toned blacks often resented the greater social access and more abundant job opportunities afforded to lighter-skinned blacks. They also resented the fact that some fair-skinned folks considered themselves a class above other blacks—especially those who could not pass the “paper bag test” People whose skin tones were darker than the color of the bag were often regarded as inferior—”field Negroes.”
The tension permeated the household. There were times when Gladys drove the elder Mrs. King to medical appointments and the old lady refused to sit in the front seat beside her. Yet, to hear Charles tell it, Gladys endured most of her mother-in-law’s slights patiently. And she accepted the financial sacrifices they were forced to make. The Kings had at one time planned to move to a bigger house in a better neighborhood, but the medical bills meant that any money they had went toward the elder Mrs. King’s care and toward their children’s schooling.
The incident with his babysitter was not the only time your father felt alone with his pain. For a time his maternal grandmother also came to stay with the family—and one of the most traumatic events of your father’s childhood was her death in the King home.
Charles kept his pain to himself, which his mother attributed to selflessness. “He never gave us any trouble,” she told me. “He kept things from me because he knew I worried so.”
There was a price for that silence, however. Charles told me that he often felt as though he had no voice, and when he couldn’t be heard, he just stopped talking. It became a lifelong defense mechanism.
So your father looked elsewhere for aplace to be heard, and for someone to fill in as his dad became increasingly unavailable.
At the age of eleven or twelve, your father and Eddie were paperboys and shared a route. They shared little else, Charles being the obedient child who kept God first in his life and Eddie the neighborhood troublemaker, with no respect for authority. No one expected the friendship to last, but it did.
Even Eddie’s own mother did not understand their bond.
“They were so different,” Mattie Mason said. “I don’t know what brought them together but my son really cared for him and he cared for my son. He was forever trying to keep Eddie out of trouble. He always tried to protect him and lead him down the right path. I remember him sitting on the steps and talking for hours with Eddie, trying to give him good advice. Eddie stayed out of trouble for most of his high school years thanks to Charles.”
At the Masons, Charles also found another male role model, almost a surrogate father.
Mr. Mason was the one with answers to questions about matters that were simply not discussed in the King household.
After Charles left Cleveland for college, Eddie Mason, who had by then taken up with a group of thugs and was no longer living with his parents, was adrift without his only true friend. Eddie was killed in a drug-related shooting at the age of twenty-two. Charles’s grief was palpable. He was angry, too. The first time he visited his friend’s gravesite, he told him off, saying that he had wasted his life and hurt the people he had loved.
“He acted like he lost a brother,” Mrs. Mason said. Anytime he came home to Cleveland, Charles would come by to check on the Masons, and on Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Christmas, he would send cards he had made himself. For years he would say apologetically, “I tried, I tried.”
Other than the Masons, one of the places where your father felt most relaxed and protected as a child was the Lee Heights Community Church, a sanctuary of about three hundred members. It was a single-story brick building, modest except for its towering stained-glass windows behind the pulpit The Kings had searched for nearly two years for the right church before settling on Lee Heights. They chose it because they believed in the Reverend Vern Miller, a diminutive white man with giant convictions, and because it was one of the very few churches where black and white worshipped together. Miller preached racial unity and involvement in the community, two of the Kings’ most deeply held ideals.
Mrs. King noticed the allure of crime and drugs for some of the neighborhood kids with too much idle time, and got Charles involved in the church as a way to keep him from falling prey to the same influences. She sent him to summer camp with other children from the congregation, urged him to attend Bible study, and encouraged him to join the youth choir. She also hoped that attending Sunday school and being part of the choir would help with her son’s reticence.
“Even as a teen, he didn’t mind waking up early Sunday morning to go to church. He had it in him. He had the spirit/’ Gail recalled.
I envied Charles his Christian upbringing and believed his faith had everything to do with his buoyancy and his composure. I cherished the image of him in a crisp white shirt and tie on his way to church, and of him hiding behind his hymnal every time he had to sing before the congregation. We read the Bible when I was a child and prayed over meals and at bedtime, but my father did not trust organized religion and said he was doing us a favor by not bringing us up in a church. I never believed him, and I wondered how different I might have been with a solid spiritual foundation, or with a mentor like Charles’s Pastor Miller.
Recently, Miller spoke of the kinship he felt with Charles. “He reminded me of my own childhood,” he said. “I was a shy kid. He spoke only when you spoke to him, but when he did reply he was very courteous and respectful.”
Charles and Miller shared a reverence for the Bible, and your father developed a deep understanding of the scriptures that would sustain him all his life. “Every Sunday he read the Bible,” Miller said. “He was very diligent Both his parents took God seriously and he tended to be very eager to follow that example. That was his character.”
During the time Charles and I were together, he often would cite Bible verses when we were confronted with difficult decisions. He was the only man I ever prayed with.
Your father said often that he believed his artistic talent as well as his outstanding athletic abilities were divine gifts. He received a gold medal in track and lettered in football and wrestling—which evidently came as a surprise to your grandfather.
Your father’s athleticism did not escape the notice of the girls at school.
“He was one good-looking boy,” recalled Kimberly Mack, a high school girlfriend who is now a middle school teacher in Cleveland. “A lot of girls liked him.”
Charles’s friendship with Kimberly turned romantic during their sophomore year. “I used to wonder if he would ever kiss me,” she said. “It took him a good while. He was
probably the most respectful guy I have ever dated—ever. He never pushed me more than I was willing to go. He always made sure I got home at the time my parents wanted me home.”
The courtship lasted just a few months, but the friendship endured—even after Charles began dating one of her friends.
“It kind of happened and then it just melted away,” Kimberly said. “He was not a player. We were probably the only two girlfriends he had in school.” Kimberly still has a picture of her and Charles with their classmates. He is standing in the back, on the outskirts. “He always kept to himself,” she said. “While all the other guys were out ripping and running, he was a lot quieter.”
On occasion, though, she saw flashes of temper. “I remember one time someone was teasing one of the kids. He got all in his face. Here was this nice guy and all of a sudden he was roaring. He never, ever raised his voice, so to see that was a shock.”
As a young man who respected authority and craved structure, your father had always been enthralled with the military. In fact, if he had had his way, he would have embarked on a military career much sooner than he did.
In their work at the VA hospital, the Kings had seen too many maimed and scarred veterans to be comfortable with the prospect of their son ending up among them—or worse. After Charles graduated from high school in 1977, Mrs. King persuaded him not to join the military. Ever the obedient son, he pursued a career as a commercial artist, earning an associate’s degree in art from a junior college in Boston and studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. He attended the school from 1979 to 1983, when he ran out of money just a few classes short of graduating.
