So Mother’s meeting with wealthy patrons to get support for an institution starting in the basement of her house was history repeating itself. Although I didn’t know it, there was wisdom in Mother’s fund-raising technique. She always included us in processes. I was photographed with famous visitors who dropped in to see us after the nascent King Center moved from the basement of 234 Sunset to the basement of the ITC, the Interdenominational Theological Center, a few blocks away at the AU Center. She was using space in their facility. It wasn’t the King Center yet, but even then we received visitors on a personal level. There’s a photo of me talking to Mother in her office, taken around ’71. Marvin Gaye is there visiting with her. I can still hear his lyrics from his immortal album, done in the wake of my father’s death:
Mother, mother, there’s far too many of you crying
Brother, brother, there’s far too many of you dying
Though immersed in her work, Mother made time for us. She was still our mother, a working mom, and understood as a single parent the importance of playing both roles, sensitive to what Martin had said to her about wishing he had two moms. When she was gone, she made sure we had Uncle Andy, Aunt Jean, Big Mama, Uncle A.D., Aunt Naomi, Aunt Christine, Uncle Isaac, Aunt Fran Lucas, the late Aunt Fran Thomas, and my mother’s sister, Aunt Edythe. And then there was the multifaceted Mr. Horton, who helped in many ways over time.
Martin and I got minibikes. Motorized mopeds. Mine was home-rigged and a hand-me-down from Martin. My brother got a Honda 70. He led. I followed in his footsteps. Mr. Horton helped us with the engines if they acted up. He ran errands, commiserated over skinned knees. He was quiet and retiring, yet always there for us. He had us work around the house. Chores. He managed the process. Mr. Horton managed the grounds, and managed us too, in a way, and did it very well. Mother had to be out of town often. So Mr. Horton would pick us up, drop us off, listen to us, do for us. Definitely after my father died, Mr. Horton was instrumental in dealing with the day-to-day.
However, before any kind of normal routine could be established, tragedy struck again.
CHAPTER 5
A Question of Faith
That’s one small step for man… one giant leap for mankind.”
Alfred Daniel King, Sr., Daddy’s younger brother, died a little more than a year after my father was assassinated. Uncle A.D. drowned in his backyard swimming pool on July 21, 1969, nine days before his thirty-ninth birthday, less than forty-eight hours after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a week removed from the Ted Kennedy/Mary Jo Kopechne Chappaquiddick incident.
Uncle A.D. had taken my siblings and me to Jamaica for that July weekend, and two of his own five children. We’d all looked forward to it. I remember the islanders’ melodious voices sounding like Geoffrey Holder—“Welcome to Jamaica, your new i-land home”—and Uncle A.D., saying, “Watch out for the jellyfish, now!” He went with us but he went back to the mainland early, to preach a sermon that Sunday. Monday, the next day, was his oldest son Al’s seventeenth birthday. It was Al who found Uncle A.D. that Monday morning, floating in the backyard pool.
Uncle A.D. was a Baptist minister too. He came to co-pastor at Ebenezer and help my grandfather after Daddy was killed.
My cousin Alveda, eldest of his and Aunt Naomi’s five children, didn’t agree with the accidental drowning report. Uncle A.D. had been very vocal about his questions regarding my father’s death. My sisters and brother and I didn’t give it much thought. When I heard the name “James Earl Ray” I averted my eyes; consciously or not, my sensory equipment shut down. Not Uncle A.D.’s.
“There’s more to this than meets the eye, and one day God will judge it all,” Uncle A.D. said anytime the subject of my father’s murder was broached. We had gotten to the point where we didn’t broach it out loud. But we looked forward to Jamaica. Uncle A.D. had taught Alveda and the rest of his children—Al, Derek, Darlene, and Vernon—how to swim. He’d been on the swim team as a young man at Morehouse College, in fact was the number-one-ranked swimmer on the team. My siblings and I leaned on Uncle A.D. Now he was gone too, prompting a disconnect between me and any adult males. What was the point in connecting with someone who was dying soon?
We were still in Jamaica when we found out Uncle A.D. was dead. Aunt Naomi was with us. It was traumatic for everyone, but at that point, there was less of me there to be traumatized. We all had withdrawn, some more than others. Me more than Yolanda, Yolanda more than Martin, let’s say, and Bernice far more than me. But we could relax with Uncle A.D. and Aunt Naomi, be young children again, not so somber or fearful or filled with these strange but seemingly necessary feelings of formality. We were with him on the beach, swimming in the ocean. I’d gotten stung by a jellyfish, a Portuguese man-of-war. My uncle brought me out of the water, and tended to me.
“The Reverend A. D. King, brother of Martin Luther King, was found dead in an in-ground swimming pool in the rear of his Atlanta home…” “Just over a year after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated at a Memphis motel, A. D. King was found in his underwear, floating face down…”
Outside Atlanta, Uncle A.D.’s untimely death barely caused a ripple of attention. But inside our family, it was a nightmare. Alveda always suspected foul play of some kind or another.
Uncle A.D.’s death was officially ruled accidental by the Fulton County coroner.
Alveda never bought it for a second. She had sat up with him watching television the night before he died. She said he’d been unusually quiet; you know the saying—it was more like TV was watching him. Then she finally went to bed. It was mysterious, because a man who loves to swim doesn’t drown in his own pool. When the paramedics arrived, she noticed there was no water in her father’s lungs, suggesting foul play. Much later on, she and Jeff Prugh, a locally based reporter, later an editor at the Marin Independent Journal in Novato, California, went to the Fulton County coroner’s office and found no medical examiner’s notes on Uncle A.D.’s death. They were told, “Dr. Dillon [the medical examiner] had a bad habit. He kept it in his head.”
My uncle had been investigating my father’s death. We hadn’t finished grieving for our father; it was hard to believe Uncle A.D. was gone too. Uncle A.D. had become one of our surrogate fathers. He’d take us places. We spent time with his children, who were close to our age. Vernon—named for his father’s first pastorate, Mt. Vernon First Baptist Church in Newman, Georgia— was fun to be around: he made you laugh. Daddy liked to swim too; he’d taught me how to swim, but he was nowhere near as good as Uncle A.D. Alveda was nearly grown at the time, maybe eighteen. I was eight. Vernon cried hard. They were all devastated by the loss of their father. Until this day, Alveda, as a grown woman and mother of six, and as a former Georgia state legislator, Mrs. Alveda King Tookes, I still don’t believe she’s recovered. You never recover.
Burial plans were once again made at Hanley’s Bell Street Funeral Home, and another King man was buried. We had to keep on living—that much was not open to speculation, theorizing, or wondering why. We had to keep living, keep forging on. It had to be difficult for my Aunt Christine, who’d lost both her brothers, and for Big Mama King and Granddaddy, Daddy King, M. L. King, Sr., who had lost both of their sons.
I don’t remember Aunt Naomi’s reaction when she was told of Uncle A.D.’s death. That was kept away from us. I only remember swimming in the ocean with Uncle A.D.; little lizards, like geckos, running around where we were staying, then running around inside me, it seemed. Little things crawling all over the place. Then people scurrying. Then the word Uncle A.D. was dead.
Isaac said his mom totally lost it when she found out. I hurt for her. Both her brothers dead in a year: Daddy, now my Uncle A.D. But the manner in which Aunt Christine had lost it scared Isaac. I never saw Aunt Christine or my mother lose it emotionally when they’d gone through this with my father just the year before, then… Aunt Christine found out at 234 Sunset. She and Isaac were in our basement. Mother was maintaining the space whe
re the idea of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change started.
Uncle A.D.’s death damaged us all. But what really affected my spirit in an adverse way was what happened to Big Mama less than five years later.
Time had passed after my father’s death and the death of Uncle A.D. We had watched our mother move the operations of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change from our basement to the basement of the ITC, then finally next door to my father’s birth home, 501 Auburn Avenue, where my great-grandfather A.D. and his wife, Jennie Williams, had lived, and where their only surviving child, Alberta Williams King, Big Mama, had grown up, where she and my grandfather spent their lives until Granddaddy got a house a few blocks away on Boulevard. For the first four years of my life we lived in a house on Johnson Avenue that was down the street from where Granddaddy and Big Mama used to live.
The years between 1969 and 1974 passed with music in my head and my head hung down. Any extroverted tendencies I might have entertained had been obliterated. I was paralyzed by the actions and potential actions of a world gone insane. Only music soothed my mind and soul and heart. Only music could get through to me.
Martin and I rode our minibikes around Vine City. The Jackson 5 had that string of hits to keep us attentive to Motown. Aretha Franklin sang “Ain’t No Way” and “Chain of Fools” on radio stations WAOK 1340 AM and WIGO 1380 AM; I spun the dial and heard the Staple Singers—Daddy had loved Mavis Staples’s husky contralto. I heard Sly and the Family Stone doing “(I Want to Take You) Higher,” “Everyday People,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” Earth, Wind and Fire doing “That’s the Way of the World,” Seals and Crofts, then the Isleys, doing “Summer Breeze.”
Being in Georgia, I began to watch the football served up to us every Friday night at high schools, every Saturday afternoon for colleges on TV, pros on Sunday. We had pro teams in Atlanta, but it was all about the Kansas City Chiefs, then the Pittsburgh Steelers winning a string of Super Bowls in the early ’70s by playing players from historically black colleges like the ones around the corner from our backyard. The great baseball player Roberto Clemente was killed in a plane crash while delivering relief to disaster victims in Nicaragua in 1972. In 1974, Hank Aaron, from Mobile, in our mother’s home state of Alabama, hit his 715th home run at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium to beat Babe Ruth’s record. I was thirteen, had no idea of the volume of hate mail he’d received or the kidnapping threats against his daughter, then attending Fisk University. I watched Soul Train, heard the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band doing “Express Yourself,” one-hit wonder Bloodstone performing the ethereal tune “Natural High,” Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston and then Tammi Terrell having a string of duets—“Your Precious Love,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.” I saw blacks begin to pepper the Southeastern Conference varsity football teams on Saturday afternoon football games, even at the universities of Alabama and Georgia. Watching football was where I lost Martin. He wasn’t interested. He was three years older. Three years is a lifetime at that age. Yolanda went to college— Smith. Bernice was turning eleven. Granddaddy was still in the pulpit.
Six years had gone by since my father’s murder. On Sunday June 30, 1974, we happened to be together at church, me, Isaac, and Vernon, Uncle A.D.’s youngest. We were at church, dodging the unswerving eye of Granddaddy, who was still measuring us for a collar, while we were not seeing a deep, lingering sadness in him. Across Jackson Street from Ebenezer, there is a strip mall, where there were and are small stores. We were in a store called Carter’s. We frequented it on Sundays for candy, novelties, and such. This was our habit. We’d go over there between Sunday school and church, get a few goodies, then make our way into church, Vernon, Isaac, and I, not as serious in our religious intent as my cousins Derek and Al, Uncle A.D.’s two eldest boys, or even as serious as Martin. Rev. Calvin Morris, from New Jersey, was guest minister that morning. Cousin Derek was seated in the pulpit. Aunt Christine and my grandfather were sitting in the first pew to the right, facing the pulpit, smiling, nodding, humming, as my grandmother, Alberta Williams King, “Bunch” (short for “Bunch-o’-goodness”), as my grandfather called her, played the Lord’s Prayer on the organ.
I can remember that even from the novelty store across the street I could hear my grandmother playing—but I can’t be sure.
Suddenly someone ran into Carter’s hollering, “Mr. Carter! You got a gun?!”
“…Wha?”
“They’re shootin’, they’re shootin’ over in the church!”
We raced over to the sanctuary. As we ran up the steps, what we saw was like remnants of a rummage sale: handkerchiefs, a shoe, pocketbooks, a jacket, all lying on the steps. We proceeded into the church and my eyes went directly to the pulpit. Just outside it, I saw my grandmother lying there, her head propped up in someone’s lap; she was conscious. I ran toward her, but many someones—deacons—grabbed me. I was trying to get out of their grip, but it was no use. I could feel the flinty strength of their old arms and hands. I was in a vise.
I saw the blood all over her.
My cousin Derek was at the time a theological student. Grand-daddy was not in the pulpit when the shooting started. He was sitting in the pew preparing to leave the service early, to fly out of town for a speaking engagement. He wasn’t in the pulpit but he was still in the church. And so was this wild-eyed young black man, who was named Marcus Wayne Chenault. Chenault was a young man of medium build and complexion, with a big Afro. He wore glasses. His eyes were crazed. Insane. He had arrived in Atlanta that very morning from Ohio, by interstate bus, then proceeded directly to the church from the bus station. Apparently he had composed a list of other people from outside of Atlanta whom he also planned to murder, mostly black ministers, religious leaders. His goal in Atlanta was set, and grim—he came to assassinate my grandfather first. Marcus Wayne Chenault was a disturbed man, a pure lunatic, an antireligious and anti-Christian fanatic.
By fate, Chenault’s path crossed first with my grandmother. She was a sweet woman. All I know is, I always felt so special around her. I didn’t have any special name for her other than we all called her Big Mama. Everybody in our family called her Big Mama, and she was clearly the one who was the behind-the-scenes mover and shaker of her family. She got us together as a family. She was Big Mama to everybody even beyond the King family— Big Mama of Ebenezer. I felt special around her even though she had ten other grandchildren. She’d always call me to do things. I was made to feel handy as a kid. I could fix things, became industrious with my hands. Could take things apart, put them back together. Anytime she had a mechanical problem, she’d call me to come and repair whatever was broken for her, and one of my older cousins might come pick me up and take me over to Collier Heights because Big Mama was sending for little Dexter—particularly after my father died.
I would often stay with my grandparents. Even if I or we were staying with Isaac, over at Aunt Christine’s and Uncle Isaac’s, we’d always go down to Big Mama’s. As I’ve said, my grandparents lived within walking distance of Isaac’s family in Collier Heights. Isaac and I spent the night there many times, particularly after my father died. I don’t want to alienate anybody by saying I was Big Mama’s favorite grandchild, but I felt she appreciated my handiwork. I sensed she had a lot of faith in me, too. I don’t know why she would, I don’t know what it was she saw.
More heartache—more, because I was not there, or not quite handy enough, when she was killed. I was there, but not physically in the sanctuary. I still feel heartache until this day. I told you how Isaac and I sometimes would be out on walkabout, most of the time, I would say, removed from the church service, the morning worship, doing our own thing, and this particular Sunday was typical—we were not in the main sanctuary and… I don’t know why. Maybe I’m glad I wasn’t there, too. I vacillate. But I felt and still feel guilty for not being there; it may be I could have done something, prevented it. But then there is anothe
r side of me which says that if I had been there, what degree of additional trauma would I have now if I had tried and failed to stop it, and only saw it happen in front of me, while being helpless? It was enough trauma being on the periphery. If I had been in there, like some of my cousins were…
Derek was in the pulpit. He was the third child of Uncle A.D. and Aunt Naomi. Marcus Wayne Chenault, sitting in a pew next to my grandmother, turned and shot her, then jumped up saying, “I’m taking over here this morning!”
Then he continued shooting.
He had come to Sunday school earlier that morning and blended in with the congregation. He sat through Sunday school. The only thing people noticed was he had a briefcase. Inside it were two .38 caliber handguns and ammunition. As the service started, with my grandmother playing the Lord’s Prayer, he sat down by her. My grandmother was director of the choir and was always there to conduct and lead the music. The organ was between two pews. He was on the right side of her. He started shooting, jumped up, then said those words. Initially, people didn’t know what it was, exactly. Some thought the organ might have backfired. People didn’t react quickly because they were bowed in prayer. Then they heard the gunshots, and, not anticipating hearing guns in such a setting, looked up in shock and saw what was happening. By then, three people were already shot. Deacon Edward Boykin mortally wounded. But Big Mama…
Chenault had jumped up and started shooting people, then up in the air, into the ceiling; he’d turned and shot Deacon Boykin point-blank in the chest, then shot Mrs. Jimmie Mitchel, who was sitting in the same pew. She was injured, but she lived. Derek jumped out from behind the lectern up in the pulpit and dove toward Chenault without any thought or hesitation whatsoever. Chenault saw Derek coming at him, leveled his pistol, and pulled the trigger twice. Click, click. Misfire.
Growing Up King Page 8
