Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  The injury was not that major—a chunk of thumb just hanging there by a sliver of skin. He’d chomped down good. They’d covered it up with a balloon wrap, put an IV in my arm, then my arm in a sling. I looked like a casualty of war. I remember the face of the inspector when he came by to get an incident report, how shaken he was by what he saw.

  The same prisoner, when I took him to court a few weeks later, was sober, apologetic, down off his high—he was out of his mind at the time of the bite, didn’t know what he was doing.

  Initially some fellow officers felt awkward, until they got to know me. One of them said, “It’s like trying to run Hell while watched by an angel.” I said, “I’m no angel.” Most of them were very supportive.

  This was before things got really bad with the drug scene. You had a lot of people there on traffic charges. DUI was big at the time. Mothers Against Drunk Driving had by then mounted an effective legislative crackdown. You had situations where you had somebody on DUI in the same environment with somebody charged with armed robbery or murder. The lockup is no place for the faint of heart, I can tell you with some authority now. I would never want to be in jail on the side of the bars my dad used to be on. There is little about it that strikes you as noble when you’re in there. Maybe after you get out you can look back on it that way, but jail is no place for the good. The good can’t stay that way long in jail.

  One of my high school football teammates came in on a murder charge; he had murdered his girlfriend, whom I also knew. I had to handcuff him, take him in, process him. It was bizarre—the way he looked at me, the way there was nothing to say but the formal language of incarceration.

  Another time, a cop I knew came in on a rape charge. Occasionally you would see people you went to school with, women who came in on prostitution. You were like, “No, I can’t believe it, she was an honors student!” “Oh no, not her!” “Oh no, not him!” I’d talk to them. “What happened, why did you do it?” What I found was that even with people who’d committed the most heinous acts, more times than not, they didn’t know what they were doing. They snapped. There were a few occasions of premeditation. But I’d say the vast majority had just lost control.

  Then there were some there just out of ignorance. They needed guidance and help. I had experiences with people who would come back after they got out of jail and thank me. They’d say, “Hey, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.” I did my job, never crossed the line, but if they said, “Please, tell me who do I need to talk to?” I’d always answer. Part of their problem was fear of the process. Some had never been incarcerated. I’d say, “These are your rights. You can talk to the public defender. Your warrant was incorrect procedurally.” My job was to make sure their rights were kept; that their rights were protected while in custody.

  I tried to treat them all like human beings. Some appreciated it. One guy was going to hang himself. I talked him out of it just by listening; that was all it took to get him to face the next day. I often got the feeling if somebody had just listened to them beforehand, so many crimes could’ve been averted. In that case, it was a white guy who’d broken up with his girlfriend. He wanted to hang himself. Jail is depressing. I said, “Hey, it ain’t that bad. It’s not worth dying over. Don’t give the people who put you down the satisfaction of seeing you live down to their opinion of you.” Maybe he heard me, but anyway, he lived, walked out of jail later on, giving me the thumbs-up sign. Just my taking time to hear his story was half the battle of his gaining self-control. It wasn’t what I said so much. Most people, if you give them an ear, that solves half the problem. That helped me to develop a better sense of dealing with people on the edge, and bolstered my own confidence.

  It was rewarding and challenging.

  However, I was just an officer, a private, so to speak, and had to make a choice. Was I going to take the examination to be promoted or not?

  I was there because I wanted to learn; you can’t affect a thing unless you know it, how it works. You have to get in there and see it. I never want to seem like a guy talking about things from afar, so I’d worked hard and learned a lot. I’d been there and done that, I know security issues, the criminal justice system from a practical level. I got what I needed out of it. A lot of what I needed came from the head of the bureau, who was both a mentor and a father figure.

  J. D. Hudson was a stern man. Not a big man, but a presence— his voice, his way, and his manner. He came from college—the College of Hard Knocks. Hudson was an ex–police captain and homicide detective whom Maynard Jackson brought in to run the Bureau of Corrections, under the Department of Public Safety. There had been a lot of pernicious racism in the department, so Maynard broke it up and created a separate Bureau of Corrections with jurisdiction over the prisoners, because there’d been everything from suspicious prisoner deaths to contraband being sold, guard to prisoner, to officers beating false confessions out of people. Maynard put Director Hudson over the operation and said, “Clean it up.” Hudson was no-nonsense. He reminded me of my grandfather in some ways.

  So I think he too was disappointed when I told him I felt I had to muster out, yet I think he also knew there were other things for me to do. He said so. I don’t know if I believed him. But he said things to me that stuck with me until now. I talked to him about how I felt traumatized by losing my father, and how maybe that was one reason I wanted to spend some time on the force. But now it was time to move on. He listened to me. When I paused, he asked me if I was finished. I said, “Yes… yes sir… I think so.”

  J. D. Hudson sighed and said, “Listen here. You don’t need to be feeling sorry for yourself. You know how many other people lost their fathers, just on April 4, 1968? Do you want me to go through a census records check, just so you can see how many died that day, and how?”

  I squirmed in my chair. “No. No sir.” I’d never thought of it that way before.

  Hudson said, “You come from better timber than that. Some people don’t even know their father. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? You can’t use your father being killed, or not being here for you, every time you have a crisis, as some kind of an excuse.”

  He said I was fortunate to have had not only a great father, but a great mother. And I knew that. I’d had two parents, together, for a number of years, and I should be down on my knees thanking God for having such parents for any length of time. He said, “You be thankful for what you got, and what you had.” It was like a figurative ass-kicking, in a good way. I’d heard similar comments, but never as strongly and logically worded and never from a man I respected so much. Back in high school, I heard it from the principal, Dr. Lester Butts, but at that age I wasn’t mature enough to hear it right, the way I heard it from Director Hudson. J. D. Hudson came across to me as not only a father figure, a disciplined figure, an authority figure, but also as a peer figure, a work-related figure. Hudson was a man who related to and cared about me, a man who had walked in my shoes, who knew loss, lived with loss, survived and overcame it with tough love. He had many “adopted children” working in the bureau who were the sons and daughters of prominent Atlantans. He took us all under his wing. I cherished him and that experience.

  One summer between ’82 and ’84, I was cruising along the freeway between Buckhead and Midtown. I was alone, having dropped off my date after a semiformal fund-raiser for the United Negro College Fund. I was in Martin’s brand-new amber-colored Pontiac Trans Am. I always borrowed Martin’s cars. Couldn’t wait for him to get another, so I could have it.

  Here I was driving south along on I-85 near the Brookwood Connector when a transfer truck swerved right in front of me, fish-tailing, to avoid another vehicle. I slammed on the brakes, yanked the wheel opposite; the Trans Am spun out of control. The rear of the truck tailed over, almost took me out then and there, cut so close to the bumper that the only thing that kept us from having impact was the Trans Am spinning out. The Trans Am hit the retaining wall on the right side of the freeway and the
front end was flattened into a standstill from a 65 mph brake-and-turn, ejecting me thirty feet away, the rear end of the car coming to rest facing in the direction from which I had come. I went hurtling through the night air, having been ejected through the driver’s side window, which was rolled up at the time. I went through a closed window— shattered the glass and went right through.

  It was one of those life-altering experiences where people talk about seeing the white light; it was a near-death experience. Right before impact I said a prayer because I knew it was over. There was a slow-motion calm to the sequence. Oddly, a smell went with it, like… after rain. Or like the smell right before a thunderstorm. And white light. And the voice. A clear channel to the heavens. That’s what it felt like. I experienced being taken out of harm’s way. It’s like some angelic presence took me out of the car. Physically, what happened to me was virtually impossible.

  I was in a low-slung car, and I’m not a little man. I’m big-boned like my mother, and six foot one. Martin doesn’t hold it against me, but it was his car. I’d torn up a couple of his cars before this, too. The first thing I thought after the light dimmed and the rain smell went away was, “Man, Martin’s gonna kill me.” It had gotten to the point where he was wary anytime I asked him to let me drive, grumbling as he handed over the keys. I was fitted rather snugly into the cockpit of the car. As tight as I was in there, my body literally left the cockpit at an angle, right angle, left turn, through the glass, and right through the driver’s side window. I was catapulted through the air, curled in a fetal position, like I was still behind the wheel, but twirling in the air outside. I could see all of this happening, somehow.

  What blew me away was how I landed in a ditch of sand on the right side of the freeway. The highway was under repair so there was a lot of debris. How was it that I landed dead center in this ditch and didn’t go headfirst into the concrete divider, or over the divider into the path of oncoming traffic? A miracle.

  I landed sitting upright, as though I was still driving. Two feet either way, and I would have flown into concrete or the speeding steel of onrushing cars on the other side of the divider, and would not be here talking about it. When I hit the sand ditch, I hit it as if I was still behind the wheel. Literally sitting still in that posture. Upright, in a three-piece suit. Right on my butt. Bam. I looked to the right of me and my brother’s car had to be a good twenty to thirty yards away. Totaled. To show you how powerful the impact was, one of the headlights was ten feet to my right. Other debris was nearby. That’s how far I was ejected. I stood, felt for my body, and mumbled, “Thank you, Lord.”

  I couldn’t believe it; until this day I have trouble explaining how everything was intact. Even my glasses were still hanging inside my jacket pocket. Yet my shoes were not on my feet. I’d been wearing loafers. I wobbled over to the wreckage of the car and peered inside.

  My right shoe was resting on the accelerator.

  I was literally snatched out of my shoes. Later, somebody took pains to tell me that Daddy was also snatched out of his shoes when the bullet hit him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

  My other shoe, the left one, ended up a quarter of a mile down the freeway.

  I was standing on the side of the freeway, still getting my bearings together after I had walked around. There were witnesses, rubberneckers, Good Samaritans, passing by when it happened. A few stopped and asked if I needed any help.

  A white couple stopped. I said, “I think I’ll be fine; if you could just call the authorities because this is a dangerous situation.” The accident had occurred at a blind curve in the freeway just outside of a covered overpass and in not a good spot visible to following traffic. They said, “No, no, you need to go to the hospital.” If you saw the totaled Trans Am, you’d say, “This poor guy didn’t make it out of there alive. No way.” Even the cops were freaking out when they found out I was the driver. And the cops did not arrive quickly, because the accident created a chain reaction of crashes. I was witnessing the chain reaction. My car sat on that blind curve on I-85, heading south.

  I could see these other people pulling up. Dominique Wilkins, for one. He was one of the Atlanta Hawks pro basketball players at the time. He drove by in a Jaguar and he and somebody else looked over as he was easing around the car. At that point, other collisions had occurred; it had been kind of a mini–chain reaction, actually, and I had heard brakes squealing, then silence, then crumpling impact. I guess Dominique was a good driver; he had avoided the mini-pileup and driven around. As he eased by, Dominique said, pointing to what was left of the Trans Am, “Whoever was in that— they didn’t make it.”

  I was standing there trying to talk, and it was almost like they couldn’t hear me, either I looked too unmussed and couldn’t have been involved, was just a bystander, or—this occurred to me, for a split second—maybe I wasn’t there at all in the corporeal sense. It was like I was watching them but I was out of my body and they were watching my demise and I couldn’t say, “Hey, I’m okay.” It was the strangest thing. I was standing on the other side of the accident, watching, trying to let them know I was okay. I could hear them, but they couldn’t hear me.

  It was like I was in a Twilight Zone episode. Then suddenly back to the land of the living. A woman driving behind me hit her brakes to keep from hitting my car, then got hit. I knew her from college. Her mother worked at Morehouse; she was a student at Spelman. She was upset because the person who hit her didn’t have insurance. The woman was shaken, she was having a conversation with me and herself. “Dexter, that you? Dexter, they don’t have insurance. What are you doing here? Can you help me? Where’s your car?”

  I said, “Over there.”

  She looked over at the wreck and gulped. “Oh… Dexter… you okay?”

  Everybody who saw the car freaked. “You’re walking?” she asked. “You can’t be walking.” By this time, it was like a tailgate party on the freeway. People were out of their cars. It took the ambulance forty-five minutes to get there. If I had been seriously hurt, it would’ve been too bad.

  She immediately shifted from her worries. “You need medical attention. You don’t look like you need it, but based on that car…” She made me sit down until the ambulance got there. When the ambulance finally arrived, I told the EMS guys, “Go ahead, I’ll meet you down there, ’cause I need to collect all my stuff and wait for the cops to come and do the report.” The cops were having to work accidents all along the way until finally they got to me. The glass was shattered out all over the car. My briefcase and all my stuff were strewn all over the freeway. I wanted to collect it. I must have looked insane, or like some kind of ghoul, walking amid this wreckage, bending to pick up papers, pens, other items.

  “You’re the one who was driving this car?”

  “Yes.”

  The cop’s eyes widened as he looked at me. “Hold on. You mean to tell me you walked away from that?”

  “Not really. I got thrown away from it.”

  “… Have you been drinking?”

  “No. No sir. No I haven’t been drinking.”

  “Good. Then you should be able to tell me how in hell you walked away from that.”

  “I have no explanation for it.” I knew the old cops’ tale: when people walk away from major accidents, they’ve been drinking; people who walk away are often intoxicated. The officer recognized me when I told him my name. He rushed me to the hospital, blue lights blazing.

  Shock? Worse than that. The doctors thought I was mentally disturbed. They could not believe my condition. The resident looked at me and said, “What’s the problem,” and I explained I’d been in a wreck. He looked at me like, “Right. Sure.” He said to the cop, “This guy okay?” and then motioned to his head. I said, “I know they don’t teach you this in medical school, but there’s a higher power, and there are such things as miracles. I was ejected from the car. Out of the window. It was rolled up at the time.”

  Everybody thought I was crazy; either I ha
d made it up or I was on narcotics. I tried to explain: “There are such things as miracles. They don’t teach it in medical school.” It bothered me, the way it was being denied that I’d been in an accident. The ER resident was probably thinking, “Okay, full moon, Saturday night—who knows?” People who work the ER or the cophouse will tell you, full moons and Saturday nights—that’s when the wild stuff happens. They get crazy action then.

  I was x-rayed; everything checked out, except I had an ankle that was so badly sprained that it swelled to twice its normal size and felt broken. That was it. No internal injuries. I was off my feet for several weeks, ankle bandaged up. If you could say any good comes out of tragedy, my mother literally nursed me back to health. She cared for me like I was a kid again. There’s nothing like a mother’s tender loving care. Aunt Christine came by, and after wagging her finger at me for my recklessness, she said, “Dexter, God is saving you for something.”

  Although I had been at fault only once before, that was my fifth total wreck. But this was the last major car accident I ever had. It did something to me, inside. It made me take my life into my own hands. Before, I’d put it to chance. This was a life-changing experience. I realized maybe God didn’t have it in for me; maybe I had to help myself. I changed from living aloof, to saying, “Okay, now you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”