Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  We had a program called children’s chapel, a kind of Sunday school, actually one of my Uncle A.D.’s ideas, a prerequisite to grown-up church that gave children a chance to worship with children, and taught you how to prepare to graduate to full service. That was nice. I enjoyed it more so because you were around your peers. We’d still do our running around, but when my father was scheduled to preach, somehow we’d end up in the front row of the balcony, forearms resting on the railing, listening intently. Daddy had a style; he’d mastered it, and it mastered the listener. Even a child was charmed not only by what he said but also by the way he said it. It wasn’t haphazard, came from work, study, talent. And he never once asked if we would preach.

  My mother would tell us—usually it would be Isaac and me, or Martin and me—“Don’t do thus-and-so because this could happen.” “Don’t play in the street,” or something very simple, and Martin would automatically respond, “All right, Mother.” Isaac would say, “We better not. Aunt Coretta said not to.” If Mother said, “Martin, Dexter, and Isaac, don’t you all go around that corner, because there’s a saber-toothed tiger on the other side,” Martin would say, “Uh-oh. Mama says a tiger’s over there.” Isaac would say, “I ain’t scared, but Aunt Coretta won’t like it if we go.” But I’d say, “Let me see it then! I want to see what that tiger looks like!”

  My mother would get frustrated because I seemed to have a great need to know why. Some parents say you’re not supposed to ask “why?” as a child.

  “Because I said so, that’s why.”

  That was my mother’s unfailing reaction—and Yoki’s too, as the younger version of her. I was the type that came across like I was questioning authority, but I had a need to explore and see how things worked. That was just me; some people may have taken it wrong. I think Mother even took it as me being defiant. But I didn’t feel defiant. She didn’t have much tolerance for foolishness either way. She’d spank us—“whip” us, as they call it in the country. My father wouldn’t. He didn’t spank us. She would. Daddy might sit down and explain things. “This is why you shouldn’t do that, son.” He would deal more on a mental level, try to get us to understand why things were.

  One day my brother, Martin, Isaac, and I came across a treasure trove. Plastic toy guns! Immediately we were having a ball, playing army, playing war, playing gangsters, cops and robbers, the Untouchables, cowboys and Indians. There are a lot of different ways boys can play with toy guns. We were going “bang! bang!” feigning death throes, the things boys do when they play with guns, me, Martin, and Isaac. Daddy must have been watching from a window, must have stood watching us for the longest time; I wish I knew what all was going on in his mind. He came out, sat down heavily, gathered us at his knee.

  The indoctrination of children who are being exposed to violent instruments of war—he didn’t want to see it happen to his sons, his nephews, or anybody, but it was hard if not impossible to stop it, even within the borders of his own home in the society in which we came up. He knew this; it weighed on him. That’s why when he came outside he sat so heavily and sighed so deep.

  It was me who most enjoyed playing with toy guns. Any kind. Water guns, cap pistols shaped like six-shooters, shaped like .45 automatics, you name it, I was fascinated. Whenever we were around policemen I stared at their holstered sidearms. I don’t think Marty was that keen on it at all, not as keen as me. I’d stick a toy gun in my pants pocket in a minute and practice my quick-draw, like cowboys on TV, James Arness as Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, or Chuck Connors as the Rifleman. I’d make a mock badge out of tinfoil off chewing-gum wrappers and pretend to be a sheriff. I’m sure Marty got sick of me bang-banging away, insisting he was dead. I didn’t often get chances to play with toy guns because we weren’t given any to play with; you had to come upon them in our forays into the neighborhood, but this one time, someone had given us these plastic toy guns all our very own and we were getting good wear out of them.

  My father extended his palm and asked us for the guns. Martin gave up his right away. I hung on to mine, frowning as my father’s hand closed around the barrel and he gently tugged. “Dexter, let it go, son,” he said. I wanted to ask why I had to give up the gun when I was having such fun playing with it. My father looked at me levelly. When my father looked at you like that, you had better be right in your position. Slowly my fingers relaxed and I released the gun.

  Daddy laid them down in front of us, then said, “Boys, sit here with me for a little while.”

  He was always kindly in speaking to us, unlike Granddaddy, who often roared.

  “Why do you suppose we, as young men, are fascinated by firearms?”

  “Fascinated, Daddy?”

  “Why do we enjoy them? Holding them, pointing them at each other, pulling them out, waving them around, twirling them around our fingers, making the noises that a gun makes?”

  “Bang! Bang! Like that, Daddy?”

  “Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, that’s the way the machine gun sounds, Daddy!”

  “Yes, Dexter-wexter. Why do you think we enjoy it, Marty-bopy?”

  “To kill bad people?”

  “And how do you tell who the bad people are?”

  “They’re the people who get shot!”

  “Not always. Not always.”

  “By how they look?”

  “… No.”

  “Then… then… I don’t know.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Then we’re together,” my father said. “I don’t know either. But I do know this: You should only use your imagination. Never use real guns. Never even use toy guns.”

  My disappointment must have been obvious.

  “I don’t want you playing with these. All right?”

  Silence.

  “Is that all right?”

  “If you say so, Daddy,” said Marty. My father nodded at him. Then… “Dexter?”

  “I won’t play wif ’em, then,” I said, sounding unconvinced, I’m sure. “But everybody else will anyway, Daddy. They all will.”

  Then Daddy sighed again and sat there, silent for a while, before saying, “The guns these toys represent have one use. They’re not like Granddaddy Scott’s .22 hunting rifle. These represent handguns; they’re only used to kill or maim people. If you saw what they did to people, you’d be sad. Suppose somebody shot somebody you loved?”

  I looked at him as if to say, No, that could never be, thinking as a child, that “bang-bang” meant you were “dead,” but you could get up and argue about whether you were “dead” or not.

  “You don’t want another human being’s death on your conscience,” my father said. “You want to have life. I’d rather see you boys play sports like football than play with guns. I’d rather you play a musical instrument, debate, or even fight… but not with these…”

  He talked with us for a while longer. The way he spoke was so effective that at the end of it he actually had us destroy those plastic guns. We put them in a metal trash can and burned them, melted them down. I didn’t fully understand it then. I liked the toy guns, and the real guns police and security officers wore. But I was moved by what my father had said. He had such a cool way of explaining things that it was almost like we were happy to do what he had asked us to do, even though I still didn’t quite know why.

  This and other lessons stuck with me. He was very much a talker, he would talk about subjects with us, was intimate in his feelings, in terms of our being able to understand the subject and his feelings. You felt like his equal, almost, like he was bringing you up in the world to his level, not like he was coming down to you. He was soothing to listen to, authoritative you knew, because he was Daddy, but also deliberate, precise; when he spoke, you listened.

  I don’t remember exactly where, it was probably a passerby in later years who didn’t want to believe that my father had mortal qualities, vices, fallibilities, and shortcomings; these would come out when he was under duress. “Your father never smoked a cigarette in his life,”
I heard from people who claimed to be authorities, “believers” of my father’s life and work. They were talking about what they’d read. I’m talking about what I’d lived, seen, and felt.

  I thought to myself, “Not only are there photos of him holding a cigarette, my sister and brother and I once took his cigarettes and hid them.” Maybe it was something he wanted to keep private. He struggled with it. He knew it was not good for him, but it happened.

  There was an unbelievable amount of stress on him at the time. He didn’t start smoking until the last few years of his life.

  Early in 1968, he seemed more quiet than usual; he was being pulled into causes around the country. Yet he was just a man. He’d just returned from a trip. Now there were calls from Rev. James Lawson, for him to go to Memphis.

  We just wanted him to take us to Pascal’s Restaurant, or to an amusement park, or to the next SCLC outing that spring, or up to the Ollie Street Y, but he didn’t have any more time.

  He planned to take me and Marty on a quick trip around Georgia in March. We just knew it was a trip with Daddy. He was drumming up support for his Poor People’s campaign. It was then that Yoki, Marty, and I hid his cigarettes. Maybe this was to get his attention, I don’t know what our motivation was, really, but we hatched an elaborate scheme first to find where he kept his cigarettes, then take them out and squirrel them away, and surprise him when he couldn’t find them, and tease him. A whole carton too. We hid his carton of cigarettes in the closet of the guest room. He didn’t smoke regularly that we saw; he only smoked when he was going through tense times. By the time I turned seven years old, in January of 1968, all his times were tense. We were children and didn’t know specifics. He’d been to California right after New Year’s, he’d spoken there at a college. Now he was getting requests to go to Memphis. Memphis I knew nothing about; my mother said some garbage men—“sanitation workers”—wanted my father to help them. I plotted with Yoki to steal Daddy’s cigarettes. Don’t know why. Yoki’s motives were nobler. Maybe she didn’t want to see him smoke. I know she ended up smoking when she was older (and has since stopped). She may have started as a way of communing with him. We hid them, and he came looking for them. He hit the ceiling when they were not where he had left them. This was the only time I ever saw him angry.

  “Where are my cigarettes!”

  Silence. Three young faces looking at each other, confirming each other’s impending doom.

  “Yolanda! Martin! DEXTER!” No nicknames or “bopys” put at the end of our given names meant serious business was at hand. Our answering “Sir?” was weak, as I recall. I think that was the first time, probably, all of us saw him truly upset, where he was obviously angry. Oh, he knew.

  Imagine now—you’re going to get your vice, not finding it where you left it, somebody has messed around with it. I’m not sure if he was addicted to nicotine; to a degree he was, wasn’t a pack-a-day smoker, but he was accustomed to smoking feeling like a diversion to him, a diversion that in his mind may have been relaxing. I know how I am when somebody moves basic stuff in my domain and I can’t find it. Imagine if he’s in a fix, needs nicotine, can’t find it, going through a hard time. I’m sure I would be angry too. At this moment I wasn’t curious to see how much angrier my father could get. I can still see his contorted expression as he stormed out his bedroom and came down the hall looking for us. “Where are my cigarettes!? Who took my carton of cigarettes?”

  It was obvious what had happened. We started running—down the hall, out of the back of the house; we were so guilty. My mother always said that Daddy didn’t believe in spanking, but she also said if he had spent more time around us, he might have changed his mind.

  This was an example of him spending more time around us. We were thinking we could do whatever we wanted and he’d understand. That’s the only time I saw real anger when I was there with him. I’ve seen footage after the fact, and I’ve heard things from scholars, where something made him upset, or angry. But that’s the only time I actually saw it. I never wanted to see it again, either. It was some time before Martin and I got back into his good graces, but by bedtime, Yoki was sitting with him, sniffling apologetically, holding his fingers in her hands.

  My maternal grandparents were Obadiah Scott (everyone called him Obie) and Bernice McMurry Scott. My maternal grandfather’s parents were Jeff and Cora Scott. Jeff Scott ended up owning 450 acres of black dirt, rich, black-belt Alabama farmland outside Marion, Alabama, seat of Perry County, some eighty miles south by southwest of Birmingham, eighty miles due west of Montgomery, cheek by jowl with Dallas County, where the county seat was Selma. Jeff Scott was a preacher’s steward in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He had thirteen children with great-grandmother Cora, and after she died, at age forty, great-grandfather Jeff married Fannie Burroughs and had twelve more children before he died at sixty-eight in a car wreck. My maternal great-grandfather, Martin McMurry, was a mixture of black, white, and Native American. He was two years of age when slavery ended.

  My grandfather Obie and my grandmother Bernice awaited us when we made our summer car trips down to the family farm near Marion, four hours from Atlanta. Going to Marion was like an outing. We’d always drive. It took several hours, so we got a chance to all be together in the car, a Plymouth station wagon later, but before that, during my father’s lifetime, a Chevy, a blue Chevy, which we still have. A ’65 Impala. The green Pontiac Bonneville was the car he got before—before Memphis. But we still have that blue Impala. I remember riding to the farm in it.

  My granddaddy Scott was a nice man. He’d let us do anything we wanted, mostly, including driving his old three-gear pickup truck. We liked him for this. I hate to say it because it sounds so trivial, but he ran a store, like the old combination gasoline “filling” station–small grocery store. Candy and everything was in the store, and he told us to “help yourself,” against my grandmother’s wishes. Her thing was, “Child, you need to eat healthy. You’re going to work here.”

  Her cooking was great, southern country cooking, the fresh taste. I mean even till this day, once you’ve sampled it, you can never forget it. Fresh turnips, collards, okra, squash, onions simmering over roasts, and hams stuffed with cloves and a raisin glaze; cornbread, eggs, bacon, tomatoes, fresh everything, made deliciously. Now you and I know time gilds—often dietary habits you had as a child are remembered so fondly until other people from other families in other parts of the country find it all too appalling. You ate grits!? Indeed we did, ate them and loved them as they were prepared in the country, slathered in fresh butter or in a puddle of brown gravy off the rendering fat of chicken or ham with a touch of celery or bell pepper. Those grits back then were not just plain grits you get from a box or some Denny’s. In my memory, they were right—creamy, smooth, delicious, all so good and remembered well.

  Granddaddy Scott was a hardworking, frugal man, who learned from watching his father. It must have been hard to maintain a simple abundance in a system where a black man’s life was virtually worthless and he could be “disappeared” for working hard, accumulating something, a little more than some few of his white neighbors down the road. An authentic line from Mississippi Burning, delivered by Gene Hackman, talking about how his poor white southern character’s father felt about a “Negro”: “If you ain’t better than a nigger, who are you better than?” We could talk about the psychology behind that line, or dryly recite events of the day. But no need. Great-granddaddy Scott and Granddaddy Scott lived when it was an unforgivable crime for a “Negro” to get ahead.

  Granddaddy Scott’s home was a wood-frame house on a large tract of land. Animals in the backyard; cow pasture, barn behind the house, adjacent to the hog shed and chicken shack; vegetable garden and produce trees on the side of the house; then cropland, several hundred acres elsewhere; the farm itself, and main house, on about fourteen acres. My grandfather was well regarded in the community—you got that sense. Marty and I would come in the store and work. He’d
let us tag along, teach us how to work a cash register, let us help wait on people who came to get gas.

  You could tell that everybody looked up to Mr. Obie. Mr. Obie was for all intents and purposes the local bank and the local barber. He did some of everything. Cut hair on his porch. When people couldn’t afford to buy groceries, he’d extend them credit. There were so many people who owed him money that if they paid him off, seemed like he would’ve been a millionaire. He gave away so much at the end of his life and didn’t have a lot to show for it. Some people see that as mismanagement, other people see it as I do—he worked at what he loved, he helped people out, wasn’t in it for the money. He saw it as justice. He’d been fleeced himself. He was always courteous and giving to people. Some people took advantage, cheated him right to his face, let’s say on his gas pump. “Three dollars on regular,” a bad one might say, when he’d actually put in five. Granddaddy didn’t spend his life chasing the bad ones, or trying to keep them more honest. He was honest himself, never let other people’s transgressions affect him or the way he lived. And I saw this, and at the time it confused me, but in later years I began to understand it better. It took a while, though.

  “Granddaddy, did you see what that man did?”… “Yeah, boy, I sure did. Think I’m blind? Make sure you don’t go around doing things like that.”… “You gonna let him get away with it, Grand-daddy?”… “Ain’t for me to let him get away or not. The Lord will make an accountin’.”

  Now, does that make sense to you? It didn’t to me back then. The Lord was up in the sky, and Granddaddy was cheated on earth. I didn’t understand. Yet he seemed to want for nothing.

  It was busier than you might imagine for the country, or for what I had always thought the country would be like—everybody lolling about being indolent with a piece of hay stuck in their teeth. Oh no. He worked at a sawmill, bought a truck, hauled logs and timber, cut hair on the weekends. He later bought a sawmill that was burned down two weeks later by racist whites. My grandmother had borne her children—my mother, Coretta, her sister, Edythe, and their brother, Obie. They tended crops when they grew up, hired out to pick cotton at harvest. My grandfather used to say he wouldn’t tolerate laziness in his house. When we visited, we worked. We didn’t go on vacation. We all had chores. When I say it was mixed work and play, what I really mean is on one hand, we thought we were going on vacation, because we were going away from home, but the truth is, we were working harder there than anywhere else. Granddaddy Scott could soften his approach; my grandmother was always strict. But they were both all about work. My grandfather would come in at 6 A.M.. “Y’all get up! Work to do!”… “We did it yesterday.”… “Do it every day. You need to be up. Open that shade. Let the Lord’s light in here!”