Chenault reached to get ammunition to reload. By then, Derek and some deacons were on top of him, Derek’s fists hurtling into Chenault. Derek did a good job of subduing him, screaming at him at the same time. All the frustration and anger poured out of Derek then. His Uncle M.L., gone, his father, A.D., gone, now Big Mama, gone, shot right there in church. The remaining deacons who weren’t holding my grandfather back on one side of the church and me and Isaac on the other, got to Derek, in the process of beating Chenault into submission. If the deacons hadn’t pulled Derek off Chenault, there might have been another murder in the sanctuary.
Isaac and Vernon and I tried to get to Big Mama but were held back by a sea of gnarled hands—it seemed they weren’t attached to bodies even though I knew they were. Seemed I was trying to move in outer space—everything was slow, muffled.
By then, my head had swiveled toward my grandfather, far off on the other side of the pulpit. He was bound by the restraining arms of the remaining deacons, but still so strong that he was moving the whole pile of them. “No! Don’t make me leave Bunch! I can’t leave here without Bunch!”
The deacons said, “No, no, no, Reverend King, you’ll get hurt.” He was the type of man not to care. “I got to go get Bunch!” I can still hear him. They were restraining him, but barely—Granddaddy was a big barrel-chested man, country strong, particularly with the adrenaline pumping crazily like it was then. The look on his face seemed to say, “If something happens to her then my life is not worth living.”
I know that’s what he felt. He said so later.
We raced to Grady Hospital. Aunt Naomi rode with Big Mama in the ambulance. We walked into the ER, then the OR, as if compelled, as they wheeled Big Mama in. They began working on her on a long white table. We all stood there while they operated; a nurse shooed us out saying, “Please, let the doctors work.” My grandfather, Isaac, and I went over to see Chenault, who also had been brought to Grady for treatment. Even though he was in custody, we were allowed access; this may not have been the wisest thing. We waited for Granddaddy to make a move. Once, when Granddaddy was a boy in Stockbridge, Georgia, a cruel landowner beat him up for refusing to fetch water while he was carrying a bucket of milk and butter for his mother, Deliah. He’d gone home bloodied. When his mother saw this, she asked him who did it, went down to the white man’s farm, jumped on him by the barn, fought him, drew blood. He told her to get off his land. She said, “You can kill me, but if you harm one of my children, this is my answer.” A mother this physically brave was an inspiration to Grand-daddy.
But now I heard him asking the murderer of his wife, this Marcus Wayne Chenault, a question. Looked him right in his face and said, “Why did you shoot my wife, son?” Called him “son.”
That stunned me. I looked at Granddaddy, usually so stern. A lot had gone out of him.
Chenault said, “I came to get you, and when I get out of here, I’m going to get you.”
My grandfather said, “Son, I’m going to pray for you. You need help.” He forgave him. I witnessed this. And this began then to work on me, set a subconscious tone for things later in my life. I believe this moment was the culmination of the non-violent influence of our father on Granddaddy’s life, his conduct, his sensibility.
My feelings then were in direct conflict with the way I was brought up by my parents. When my father was killed, my mother said, “You know, Dexter, you shouldn’t hate people. The man who did this was sick. And this is a sick society. But you must learn to forgive. Not to forget, but to forgive. You must. Or you will become bitter.”
My father forgave Izola Ware Curry, who stabbed him with a letter opener in the chest and almost took his life in a Harlem department store while he sat autographing books. The stabbing weapon was a quarter inch away from his aorta; had it pierced the aorta, he would have drowned in his own blood. My grandfather didn’t know his wife was dead, not at that moment with Marcus Wayne Chenault. Only that it didn’t look good. Chenault turned his head to the wall.
We all walked back to the OR. They told us they couldn’t do any more.
The pain made him grimace, wince, moan, and wheeze. He aged a decade in one afternoon. I saw him do it. I was thirteen. This traumatic experience helped shape my future—to see my grandfather this way, to have heard him say what he said to Chenault. At the moment he said it I didn’t understand it at all. I didn’t understand what was so bad about bitterness. Sometimes bitterness might leave a good taste. I wasn’t alone in my confusion. Isaac lost it emotionally. He began questioning the doctors.
“Y’all didn’t do all you could do! Y’all know y’all didn’t…”
I tried to calm Isaac. No good. He looked at me. “What’s wrong with you, Dexter? He killed Big Mama!” He tore away from me. We went to where her body was on the table and said our good-byes. It was sad. But I didn’t cry. People said something was wrong with me because I never cried in those moments. Only Bunny never questioned it. Isaac was crying, Vernon was crying, Derek was crying, Martin was crying. I understood what was going on in terms of what death meant. I had been in close proximity to this latest murder, yet I was just kind of… detached.
Was I feeling guilt, anger, sadness, fear? Guilt. And later, even more guilt. I kept thinking, “If only I had been there. So stupid! If only we hadn’t gone to Carter’s between Sunday school and Morning Worship, if only I’d been more like my father, or even more like Derek… If I’d been there, maybe I could have done something.” I lapsed into the dream state again, where I was there, and I saw Marcus Wayne Chenault pulling out the .38 pistol, and I leaped through the air and caught the bullet meant for Big Mama. I caught it in the chest… but there was no pain…
A short time later we gathered in my grandmother’s house, the family gathering place there in Collier Heights. We were all there—those that were left. M.L. Sr.’s and Big Mama’s progeny, the families of their sons, M.L. Jr. and A.D., and their daughter. Christine. There were Alveda, Alfred Daniel, Jr., Derek Barber, Esther Darlene, and Vernon Christopher—my Uncle A.D.’s and Aunt Naomi’s children; Isaac Newton Farris, Jr., and Angela Christine Farris—the children of Aunt Christine and Uncle Isaac; then us— Yolanda, Martin III, me, and Bernice Albertine, children of Martin Jr. and Coretta. Uncle Andy Young was looking at Granddaddy in shock. How could he not be broken? We gathered at the river, the home of my father’s parents. I stared at photos—Granddaddy, Big Mama, Aunt Christine, Uncle A.D., and “Uncle M.L.,” as my cousins called my daddy. Three of five were gone violently. What kind of man wouldn’t ask God, “Why?”
Later I said this to Mother, but instead of the shock and revulsion I expected from her about this blasphemy, she merely nodded and said, “Your father went through it.”
Went through what? I asked. Questioning God? Yes, she answered.
She told me that when my father’s grandmother died of a heart attack at the family home where he’d been born, 501 Auburn, he had experienced the same guilt, because he’d sneaked away to watch a parade, and he felt maybe if he had not done that, if he’d stayed at home, he might have been able to help her.
“She was the epitome of a Baptist preacher’s wife,” Grand-daddy said of Big Mama. The question I asked was, “Why would a loving God allow this? Why would God, if God was good, take a woman everybody loved? She threatened nobody’s way of life, harmed no one.” We knew Daddy had enemies. Even if my grandfather had been shot—I would have been more prepared.
What really set it off was when my little sister Bernice said what I was thinking: “If you’re not safe in the church, where else are you safe? If you can’t go to church and not worry about getting killed, where can you go?” The experience was horrific for my family, particularly, as I recall, for Bunny, who was already in a shell. Damage had been done to me; my grandmother had been the glue of my life.
We went into the master bedroom, the family and Uncle Andy, for three or four hours. There we fleshed it out, our emotions, fears, frustrations. It wasn’t heated—
no confrontation between anybody in the room. It was purely emotional. Just wave upon wave of it. And so many tears. A river of tears, for it wasn’t just Big Mama being mourned. Uncle A.D. and my father too. I can still hear the wailing, still feel the heat rising up in my throat choking me, taking my breath.
But no tears came from me. Not from Dexter. I couldn’t figure out how this could happen to such a sweet person, how she could die such a violent death. Her faith was strong, and her belief in us was as strong, and her fellowship was strongest. The abrupt loss made us all question ourselves most of all. Near the end of the four-hour session, my grandfather said, “I think— I think that I have to—we have to—forgive this, and forgive this man. Even this. Do you all follow me?”
I thought, “No sir, I don’t.” But I said nothing.
There was uncomfortable silence around me, then a soft “Yes” and “Yes sir, Daddy” and “Amen, Granddaddy.” As he prayed, you could feel trembling, hear wracking sobs—but also feel the bond. When he’d finished, Granddaddy looked up, beyond us, and said, “Now I want you all to leave. Leave me now. But remember, don’t let anybody make you hate.”
In time, my grandfather’s way and words that evening helped us overcome useless feelings of vengeance. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, hearing him say, “I cannot hate this man,” moved me. I had to honor that. Uncle Andy was there for support, advice, and consent; the sentiment from them both was, “You can’t let him bring you down to the point of hatred. I can’t hate this man. You can’t either.” This was more like my father than my grandfather. My father had a profound impact even upon his own father. Even long dead, Daddy was still our Rock of Ages.
I felt for my granddaddy because he had lost two sons. First-born son and namesake: gone. Second-born son: gone. Wife: gone. All gone, within a six-year period.
He said, “I’m here for y’all.” Then he switched, was talking like he wanted to go “to his reward,” as he termed it. “Maybe my work is done and I need to go on home.” Then, a reversal again: “But now I’ve thought on it. I still have you. I have my daughter, my grandchildren to live for.” And so he did live on for us, for ten more years. One of his sisters, Woodie Clara, came and lived with him the next year and cared for him. As we were leaving that night, he said, “Keep the faith, and keep looking up. Also be thankful for what you have left.” If he could say that—I can’t measure his suffering, and if he, an elderly person, not as physically strong as he once was, could endure this, have it taken out of him like that and still have faith and move on, then the least I could do was move on too. But as what? To what?
CHAPTER 6
Soul Survivor
For the next several months, Bernice would stare at pictures in our family photo albums, then tilt her head toward me birdlike and ask, “I wonder who’s next?” She also developed these notions in her mind that she was supposed to be this perfect person now. Which you cannot ever be. It was like a setup, really. My father was the standard for all of us to live by and live up to. He became the standard because he was so exceptional in so many ways. But how can you live up to the standard that by definition is so rare, so exceptional, that it is only met by a once-in-a-lifetime human being?
My mother says that when Bernice was born, my father said Bernice would be the most well-adjusted. Bernice articulated for me these unspeakable feelings of dread. I couldn’t get mad at her or impatient with her, for I’d had the same feelings. First Daddy. Then Uncle A.D., who had taught Bernice to swim. Then Big Mama. Bunny said she started to think that death was after my family. She’d sit there on the living room couch, look at pictures, and try to figure out who was next.
I myself was preoccupied with death for a long time. And Bunny’s preoccupation helped drive mine; I thought about her when I took a job at the Hanley’s Bell Street Funeral Home.
I ended up working there, in 1977—at the funeral home that had buried my father. I was afraid of death, so maybe I needed to get closer to it, put myself in an environment where I could better understand it. Instead of running from it, run to it. And that was my way of addressing my fear of death, getting a job working in the funeral home. My Uncle A.D. had conducted services with the same funeral home once upon a time; I didn’t know that until I got the job.
At that time, Hanley’s buried many members of Ebenezer. The proprietors were members of Ebenezer, and my grandfather encouraged patronizing them when the time came. They’d buried members of our family back to Granddaddy’s father-in-law. It was a big deal for me to drive the hearse. I was a mortician’s apprentice. I was afraid at first but kept reminding myself I was doing it to overcome my fear of death, and to explore my interest in mortuary science, so I handled the corpses and watched as my bosses filled them with fluids and dressed them so that their families would say they “looked good.” Seeing them in the pre-embalmed state, I knew better. Death was ugly. And noisy. Gases would build up in the corpses, and escape through every orifice. Sometimes through the mouth. You haven’t lived until you’ve been alone in a mortuary with a corpse sounding like it wants to breathe again. Once there was a ripping thunderstorm, dark as night in the middle of the day, and the other employees were out on call. I was alone, having a sandwich for lunch, with the squeaky ceiling fan my only company. I heard a boom from behind the door leading back to the embalming room. A tree limb banging against the shutters, or shutters slamming against the building, I thought. I took another bite of my sandwich. Boom-bam… creeeeak. For all I know, that sandwich is still on the counter. Unless whatever made that sound came out and ate it. I’m kidding, but it was serious then. I was standing outside under the awning in the rain when the hearses returned. My bosses at Hanley’s had a good laugh. The experience of working in the mortuary did help me overcome my fear of death.
Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, was part of our survival. I think we were part of his too—in a political sense. Traditionally, members of the King family went to every Democratic National Convention. Democratic honchos hadn’t forgotten the presidential election in 1960, after my father’s arrest and imprisonment, and the hand my grandfather played in the election of Senator John F. Kennedy as president. So we were invited, on the off chance that something funny might wind up happening again one day. We were invited in ’72 in Miami and ’76 in New York. So we went. He never took any credit for it, but Granddaddy was also helpful to Jimmy Carter’s being elected president in 1976.
Governor Carter, in the run-up to the campaign, had made a public statement that almost destroyed his candidacy before it began. In Atlanta’s Central City Park, he made an innocuous statement about ethnic purity that some interpreted as racist. It’s not what he meant, but it came across that way. My grandfather bailed him out. Granddaddy stood up at a rally, supported him, and said, “This is a good man, so don’t hold that misunderstanding against him. Don’t try to repeat what he said, he had a different context.” He repeated his confidence in Mr. Carter from the pulpit at Ebenezer, and the rest is history. Some inside the African-American and Jewish communities were getting ready to blister Mr. Carter behind the “ethnic purity” statement taken out of context. If those two communities hadn’t voted for Carter in numbers, he wouldn’t have won the 1976 presidential election.
The outcome was that my grandfather had direct access politically to President Carter. He could call him at the White House and actually get him on the phone. President Carter saw him as kind of an unofficial “adviser.” If Carter had an issue of relevance to the African-American community, he would not hesitate to have Daddy King tell him what he thought about so-and-so, straight up, in that down-home southern way. Carter seemed to genuinely respect him. And my grandfather became bodacious in the heady atmosphere of this kind of political legitimacy at such a rarefied altitude. He may have forgiven Marcus Wayne Chenault, but for his remaining years he was not going hat in hand to politicians or elected officials. Not anymore. The Secret Service didn’t daunt him. This all coming after Big Ma
ma died, there was no one around to rein him in, no one he felt shy or humbled around. We were in New York City during the 1976 Democratic convention; at the Sheraton Center, going up to the Presidential Suite to see Governor Carter. He wasn’t president yet, but he was a candidate and had Secret Service protection—a must for all presidential candidates since the Robert F. Kennedy assassination in Los Angeles in 1968.
Granddaddy said, “I’m here to see the governor.”
The Secret Service agents sneered, as if thinking, Who is this thick old black geezer? “Sorry, no one can come through here.”
Granddaddy did his thing, rolling out his name in an avalanche of syllables.
Next thing you know—“Oh, come in, Daddy King!” That Jimmy Carter has a smile on him, doesn’t he? Point being, Grand-daddy didn’t balk at obstacles. If you know his history, what he had been confronted with in his life, all along—being in his presence and watching him operate gave me a lot of pride. One thing he taught me was, always go to the top, if you can. If you got a problem, deal with the top man, top woman, top person, top dog, the one in charge.
He had a methodology, a way of working things out so you just felt empowered, you felt confident, you felt safe. Granddaddy was a compassionate human being, would bail out people all the time. Members of the church, whoever. You know, “Give this man a second chance!” He would go down to the court, talk to the judge. He had relationships with everybody—sheriffs, judges. These were white, old-line southerners, yet they respected him. They’d come out of the Jim Crow South, but realized this was a man to be reckoned with, a man who had a large congregation. He didn’t do his ministering as a threatening man; he befriended people. Watching him taught me about how to operate in a climate of tension. This lesson was invaluable to me. I didn’t know how close Granddaddy was to the end of his bright path.
Growing Up King Page 9
