Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  I said to Uncle Andy, “The man who shot my father with a gun must not have known him, because everybody knew my father, and everybody knew he was a good man.”

  “Yes,” Uncle Andy said. “Yes, he was.”

  We went to the airport to meet the body. I had Bernice with me; even though I wasn’t that much bigger than her, I kept picking her up then putting her down because I wasn’t big enough to carry her. Then Uncle Andy picked her up and we headed toward the airplane. I questioned why. I went to my safe asking-why place with it. The question I played over in my head is, Why did this person kill my father? I wouldn’t have thought it was because the killer was a “racist” and wanted to see “segregation” stay in place. I thought of my father’s voice, how it sounded different when he preached at Ebenezer, and when he asked us not to play with toy guns. Why would anybody shoot him? I didn’t understand. Uncle Andy had addressed it more from a suffering standpoint—Daddy was never in pain; if he’d lived he would’ve been paralyzed. Uncle Andy was trying to help us understand that God had taken one of his disciples home, so we could come to grips with it.

  We got to the airport; we boarded the airplane, an American Airlines Electra that Bobby Kennedy had chartered. I remember American Airlines because of the metallic finish. We walked up the portable stairs. Bernice kept asking, “Mommy, where’s my daddy?”

  Mother sat her down right in the front of the plane. And then suddenly we were at Hanley’s Bell Street Funeral Home, which handled all of our family’s burial needs. My memory goes back and forth between the inside of the plane and the dully lit back parlor of Hanley’s. I’d looked around at the plane’s interior, anywhere but at the coffin. I didn’t want to think about my father in there, unable to get out. They had taken out some seats. I kept asking Mother unrelated questions, like, “What’s this?” pointing to parts of the plane. She knew I was avoiding the fact of our father’s corpse being on the plane. I didn’t understand the inanimate part of death, never had seen anybody dead or even been to a funeral. I was curious about him being in the casket, but I didn’t want to face it. Mother spoke about being worried about how my father would look when they opened the casket. She was concerned the funeral home in Tennessee had “fixed his face,” as she called it.

  “Bunny, your daddy is… asleep. He’s lying in a casket and won’t be able to get up and speak to you, but he’ll know what you’re feeling, he’ll know what you’re thinking. Your daddy’s gone to live with God.” Bernice stood looking at him at the funeral home.

  I felt in a dream state. Wasn’t sure what was going on, where we were. Our father’s body lay in state at Sister’s Chapel on the Spelman College campus from Saturday until Monday afternoon.

  On Monday, we were taken to Memphis by Harry Belafonte— the three oldest children and Mother. There was a march. Numbly we marched too. The people were kind, yet Memphis seemed like a forbidding place, a different evil kingdom where my father was killed. People were dressed in black mourning clothes and wearing placards bearing his name as they walked along silently, crying; they looked in great pain, and so many of them were black, and so many of them were sad, and also sad for us, but mostly just sad. My mother marched with us in Memphis. It was so quiet. Only the scuffing of shoes on the asphalt could be heard. She gave a speech at City Hall. I wasn’t used to hearing her give speeches. I’d seen Uncle Andy giving her papers at the airport and saying, “Here’s your speech, but I think you should just talk from your heart.” My mother said, “I think so too.” She spoke for fifteen minutes to a crowd downtown near City Hall. Martin, Yolanda, and I sat and looked out at the crowd, where men who looked beaten wore signs that read I AM A MAN and DR. KING: NOT IN VAIN. Once we got back to Atlanta, people were everywhere. Bill Cosby and Robert Culp even came to Atlanta and played with us, trying to distract us. On the day of the funeral, Jackie Kennedy came to our home, looking stricken. People came from all over to offer condolences. The phone was always ringing.

  The funeral was at Ebenezer that Tuesday morning. The sanctuary was packed with nearly eight hundred people—there would have been many more, but that’s all the church could hold. Tens of thousands more were outside, millions more were there in spirit and via TV. You could feel the weight of everyone’s mourning. The day before, Uncle A.D. gave a sermon Daddy had planned to give that Sunday at Ebenezer. It was called, “Why America May Go to Hell.” I heard Daddy speak at the funeral—a tape-recorded sermon he had given in February. Bernice roused when she heard his voice and looked around, but slumped back into Mother’s chest when she did not see him, only his remains in the casket at the front of the church. Then there was the lonely clip-clop of the mule-drawn wagon, and the tired, trudging feet of tens of thousands, an ocean of moving bodies that accompanied his body and his spirit across town from Auburn to Vine City, onto the campus of Morehouse, where a memorial service was held at Harkness Hall. There the Morehouse Glee Club sang “O God Our Help in Ages Past” and Miss Mahalia Jackson sang, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” I tried not to feel. I watched Bernice instead.

  Afterward… we went back to our normal routine, though we knew it was a somber and serious time. I didn’t take in the seriousness of the moment in terms of understanding what it all meant to everyone else. I was sad because my father was dead. I didn’t realize many people felt almost the same way I did even though they weren’t related to him. My own reaction was held inside me, like Mother’s, like Yolanda’s. I never cried over my father’s death. I watched Mother and took cues from her. I never saw her seem agitated or disturbed. She knew how closely the four of us watched her. If she’d gone to pieces… But she didn’t. I thought that was the way you were supposed to act. That was the first death really close I’d been exposed to. I do remember her and Yolanda in the living room, sitting there, Yolanda wringing her hands in her lap and telling my mother she was so wonderful, she was so magnificent— what else was there to say? That was my clearest vision of my father’s leaving—my mother and older sister sitting alone, consoling each other over the death of a husband, a father, working it out, being strong, as African-American women have been for generations, whenever their men’s lives were summarily cut short.

  It is the way of our people.

  I must have heard clearly and taken as subconscious command Mother’s instruction to sleep. For the longest time after Daddy’s death, my sleep patterns changed. No more deep, dreamless sleep. Now I had dreams. In these dreams, he was still alive. We did a lot of the things we’d once done together, riding bicycles, playing softball, sitting in his study, me on his lap; I’d have pleasant dreams; it was exciting to see him alive, I had no feeling of him not being alive in the dreams; they were in color. Then I would wake up and find myself in the bedroom with Martin, who was asleep, his breathing buzzing, rustling under the covers. I knew then it was a dream and our father was dead. In the dreams I was happy. Then something would awaken me, I’d realize he was not here, and feel betrayed. Why is he here one minute and gone the next? For years I had the dreams. When I was dreaming, it felt real. It was my way of holding on. Don’t know how crazy or weird it sounds, but I know if you love someone you’ll go to great lengths to keep him or her with you.

  None of it had happened. It was all some big April Fool’s joke. The top came off the casket and he pushed it aside and sat up and smiled at me, and laughed that slow, sincere laughter of his. It was like we were interacting again, almost like a replay of things he had said and how he had laughed before. I might dream about the toy gun incident, or riding our bikes, or him teaching me to swim or just having fun, and there was no seriousness about it, no lesson to be learned. It was just the act of engaging together. I was just starting to learn how to be from watching him.

  The dreams for me were not strange but rather vital; I saw him on one level as a playmate and on another as a role model, neither the deified figure people saw, nor a father in the traditional sense. He could weave in and out of that role; here he was again, we were going�
�� we were going to… My eyes would open and I was staring at our bedroom wall and didn’t need to check to know he wasn’t there and never would be again. Another day would pass, another night would come, and then I’d dream of him again. I was still having this relationship with him through my dreams, so the ceremony, the funerals, the people congregated at the house all the time, the famous visitors, all that was peripheral. Like a dream it-self. Dreaming was my preferred reality. During daylight hours, I was there, but not there. I hadn’t made a connection yet in terms of what it meant, not until later. The permanence of it. I was in my own world, I was creating a make-believe dream world because I wasn’t relating to my father being in a casket. I asked questions: How did he feel? Cool? Warm?

  Back in 1968, I was often under the assumption he was around here somewhere. Sometimes I’d look under my bed thinking he was hiding there to surprise me. Except for my own family, what was in my heart for him was on a different level from what everyone else felt, including those who wept and cried, or those across America who burned, who gave up, who became bitter or beaten down. I had a different demeanor when I was among everybody else. I saw them grieving; it didn’t impact me the same way. I had a secret. I still had him, in my dreams.

  Once I dreamed we were living in Chicago, in a poor section called Lawndale, but I didn’t care that it was in Chicago or that it was poor, because my father was with us again. Why we were there, I don’t know; my father had his Cause; I assumed it had to do with that. The calendars on the wall said 1966. We rode to Chicago, then to a street, 15th Street, and we had an apartment in a dank, dreary building, on the third floor; there was an acrid smell of old urine in the hallways downstairs. I didn’t care because both my parents were there with us and it was summer and we could play all day—only for some reason there was no grass outside this building, only packed dirt of a very black sort. We would play all day and come in and Mother would say, “Look at you—black from head to foot, clothes, everything,” and we were, but we thought nothing of it, other than that baths were soon taken. Many of the buildings were run-down, some were abandoned, there seemed to be issues in the community, something had happened, and I remember Mahalia Jackson singing a song that made you bob your head and clap on beat while we were playing and living, she sang about a place called “The Upper Room,” as rioting, sirens, shooting, and looting jumbled all together in my head. I saw rats and roaches. I heard gunshots. I heard my mother saying, “Dexter, stay out of that window!”

  In the dreams, we lived in a shoddy, cramped building in pitiful disrepair with many other poor people, although I didn’t care because wherever we were in this land of Chicago my father was with us and the rest was just inconvenient for somebody else, because I didn’t care, not as long as Mother and Daddy were there. This building was like those in the projects, like Egan Homes, only taller, much, and now I was living in them, we were living in them, and somebody somewhere was saying, Don’t go over there by us, my family, because of where we lived; I didn’t care, because here came my father through the door. There was a grocery store beneath us, and I remember seeing people break out the glass and take things; shots were fired, bottles thrown. Molotov cocktails.

  Even now when I think of the “Civil Rights Movement” I think of children in war—children who grow up under siege. In my dream, and in reality, I was like what a child of war must have been. In the dream it was always summer, hot, I loved my family, we played and we prayed. I was almost killed. I darted into the street, then it was like a giant Hand pushed me in the chest and stopped me, and I came within inches of being hit by a speeding car. Then I was all alone. Everybody else was close by, but I was all alone, like the time I was all alone at the World’s Fair in New York, in 1964, when I was three years old and got lost, and a policeman found me. When he brought me back I said he was lost—I wasn’t lost, he was lost.

  As I now know, this really happened, these were not dreams, not at first: getting separated from my father at the World’s Fair, living in the hellish conditions of Lawndale—we had actually done that, and there had been rioting and shooting, and I had nearly been killed by a car. But these were not nightmares for me. Since my father was in them, they became sweet dreams.

  At four years old, Bernice was not aware of what was going on. When I study the famous picture taken by the Ebony magazine photographer Moneta Sleet, Jr., with Bernice sitting in my mother’s lap at the funeral, the Pulitzer Prize–winning picture, I don’t think she has a clue. She has blanked it all out. I sat in the pew with her at the funeral in Ebenezer. I still have the visual of the march in Memphis, the procession through Atlanta from Ebenezer to Morehouse. I was there and saw the casket and later dreamed of it; saw the pulpit and people in it; they were like ghosts to me, coming for to carry him home; yet it did not impact me the way it did my siblings.

  Yolanda was devastated. Martin too. Bernice asked my mother, “How is he going to eat?” Mother repeated what she’d told me. “When you see him, you won’t be able to hear him speak.” One of his last sermons at Ebenezer was played; Bernice could hear him; it puzzled her; in ways, she remains puzzled. As for me, it wasn’t until I reached adulthood that people saw me express much emotion about anything. A child cannot understand the full meaning of life and death.

  I wonder if adults can either, for that matter.

  Bernice doesn’t have memories of Daddy because she was so young. So it might have taken a while for her to figure out, “Hey this is over, my father is not coming back.” One thing helped me and my siblings: many surrogate father figures were there to try to help bolster us, from Uncle A.D. to Uncle Andy to Granddaddy to Uncle Harry. There were many, at first.

  I had no sense of knowing or noticing this, but Atlanta had stayed calm in the wake of the assassination while the hearts of many other American city centers were burned out. I had no way of knowing that this was going on across the nation, or that this would be a part of my father’s legacy, this expression of pain, albeit self-destructive, the crying that never was in some, the river of tears in others. Eventually the release would come to be expressed through sound and through music. There would be this crescendoing national psychic scream, the Noise, the Sound, the Big Wave— it began back then. The Hop, as in hip-hop, came in later.

  Some cities have yet to recover. Raleigh. Tallahassee. D.C. Bed-Stuy. Harlem. Hartford. Wichita. East Palo Alto. Mobile. Compton. Cincinnati. Kansas City. Des Moines. Chicago. Greensboro. Pittsburgh. The Bronx. Baltimore. The Twin Cities. Boston. Detroit. Philly. Memphis…

  Eventually from out of those gutted places would come a sound and lifestyle known as “hip-hop.” It all came in the wake of the emotional wave begun when my father was assassinated. But there were no conflagrations and no fires in Atlanta. The mood there was sad, not incendiary, as it was in most other African-American communities. The mood in Atlanta was heavy, but still.

  Robert F. Kennedy was campaigning for the presidency. He said, “Dr. King had a life dedicated to peace, justice, compassion, and nonviolence. It is up to us to fulfill his dream.”

  As I said, Bobby Kennedy had chartered that American Airlines Electra to fly my father’s body from Memphis to Atlanta for the funeral, which he attended. He would be assassinated himself before the summer ended. Afterward, the famous pictorial reproduction of him, his brother John F. Kennedy, and my father sprang up on the walls of homes of the black and the poor, all across Atlanta, all across the South, all across the nation, and you, if you are African American, and maybe even if you are not, maybe you grew up with that picture on the walls of your parents’ or your grandparents’ home.

  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.


  CHAPTER 4

  Aftermath

  Funeral 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.