October 1996. Mon Ami called and said, “You know what? Here’s what I’ve decided. I decided that I really love you and I know you love me and for whatever reason you can’t be in a committed relationship with me, so we’ll just address it another time. I’ve already learned a lot from you about myself.” I told her, “I’ve learned a lot about myself from you too.”
If someone says, “I love you and I love everything about you,” he or she is lying to you. I’m terrible to get along with sometimes. Mon Ami was impatient. We didn’t love everything about each other. But to love the other person in spite of those things, that’s true love. We had that.
February ’97. The first meeting with Pepper is imminent. We are going to look closer at our father’s assassination, and maybe after that, my mother, my sisters, my brother, and I will be free. I’m totally distracted. Ami and I are sitting in my living room, eating dinner. By now she’s used to the business phone calls at nine at night on the cell phone, on the car phone. The phone rings; it’s Phil Jones; I’d already been having conversations about meeting with Pepper. We always pray before we eat, so she was waiting for me to get off the phone. She later said she could feel the tension building, but she didn’t know what it was about; I knew what it was about, but I didn’t know it was that obvious. I tried not to tell her a whole lot about that. It was my baggage. Subconsciously I felt that would put her in danger.
In December ’97, Phil asked her, “We can use some help with the legacy, why don’t you come on board?” And after thinking about it, she said okay. I asked her, “Do you think you can do this? I mean, I know you can do the job. But can you handle the job and the personal stuff too?” I knew she had the skills—she was a shrewd MBA.
“Yes,” she said, “but can you? Are you committed to it? If you’re not committed to changing the face of this, then don’t ask me to do this, because people hire me to make real changes that are not easy and often painful. You have your vision; do things your way, in your style; what happened to him is not going to happen to you. Use your other eyes; see what God has before you instead of fighting it.”
Many others had said what Mon Ami said to me, but maybe she was anointed in a special way for me to hear her. So she came on board in the summer of ’98, and we started shaking things up. By July ’98, we placed the day-to-day operations of IPM (Intellectual Properties Management) and the King Center under her authority.
First she was a consultant, then director of external affairs, then managing director. The King Center ran more efficiently. The fact that we were in a relationship gave fodder to office gossip, but that’s always going to be there—my father knew that. He was impugned, and his reputation imperiled, by many people within the Civil Rights Movement. But he was patient with it because he had the Cause of that movement—ending segregation. Our Cause now was the next level after that—individual economic empowerment, not nearly so noble a cause. Once, and not so long ago, a simple ride from Atlanta to Birmingham, even on interstate buses, let alone private automobiles, could be fraught with danger. Now, for me and my generation, it was just a ride—we could pop in a CD, make plans to see a beautiful lady, or have her there with us. But we had a Cause too.
Daddy left off with the peace movement and the Poor People’s campaign. Our Cause had to be the propagation of nonviolence, the propagation of economic viability and the honoring of our father’s legacy and name. One look around at the differences of the living conditions of the bulk of the population—one look at the house at 234 Sunset, and its environs in Vine City, where my mother still lived—made it clear to me. Outdoor advertising for cigarettes, alcohol, and organ donation was very prominent. That’s all there was, really. The Cause was now economic.
The office gossip was difficult for Mon Ami at times. But it didn’t matter to her what people thought. As long as I was being honest with her. At times, I was honest with her to a fault. She’d ask questions many women ask of men. She’d get straight answers. Sometimes she’d regret it.
A lot of women say, “You better tell me the truth; I can handle the truth,” but that’s not really true. There were some exgirlfriends of mine around; and she’d run into them at functions, they’d come up to her and kiss her on the cheek and shake her hand and not think she knew that two years ago, five years ago, that person and I were dating; she always knew because I was always honest. We had a bond that way. My mother, my brother, my sisters, from the time she met them, were nice to her. Mother and Mon Ami had their sticking points in business, everybody does, especially since Mon Ami ended up running, as managing director, what Mother built, and Mon Ami was not married to me. Mother respected her acumen. So did I.
Her parents accepted me. I claim no real depth there, though. Her mother is two years younger than mine. Her father came to Atlanta to visit. He and I smoked cigars. Mon Ami and her dad are as close as Mother and I. He’s her best friend. So we’re smoking cigars. He says something in Spanish.
“He said you’re not holding the cigar right. How can he not be holding a cigar right?” Mon Ami translated for me, smiling. “So I said to him, ‘Dad, his father wasn’t around to teach him. Why don’t you?’”
Damned if Mon Ami’s father didn’t show me how to approach smoking a Cuban cigar, right then and there, right down to the attitude with which you smoke a Cuban cigar. Mr. Ami had a laid-back, quiet persona, which Mon Ami always said reminded her of me.
I’d never before been romantically involved with anyone I worked with professionally; it was awkward for me. We became involved first, then it turned out she had so many qualities in terms of her training, skills, and was in the right place at the right time. She was loyal, dedicated, efficient. I saw her as my “significant other.” One of the things she helped me to see is I have big problems committing on a personal emotional level. I can commit to a cause, an idea—but a living being of the opposite gender? People I love, who touch my heart, I keep them at a distance. All four of us, the children of Dr. King, are like this. None of us is married, none of us has ever been married. None of us has children. So there are issues there.
If I’ve still got insecurities or problems about how to express myself, and about how to make it all okay, well, I wish I didn’t, okay? I’m impressionable. I take in data and send it back out like a refracting lens sometimes. Mon Ami not being African American, for instance. Once we were out and a sister as light-skinned as Mon Ami came up to me yelling, “Sellout! You sold out!” I said, “Why do you say that to me?” I was trying to be rational; she was totally emotional. The fact that she could just come up to me, a stranger, and tell me that, and more: “We look up to you! You’re supposed to be our black prince. Look at you with this snowbunny!” I said, “Not that it matters, but she’s not white, whatever that is, she’s Cuban. Like everyone, she has African ancestry too. Not that it matters, but you’ve missed my father’s message if that’s what you think.”
I can’t deny it affected me.
* * *
Mon Ami and I went out for four years and also advanced the business of the King Center. The truth is, in my heart, I felt strongly for Mon Ami, but I also was not ready to make an ultimate commitment. She was the closest woman to me apart from my mother. Then she wanted more and I didn’t know if I was able to give her more. Part of her wished I’d step to her on faith.
Once, she was ill with walking pneumonia. I went to Birmingham to nurse her back to health. She talked about how I was so loving. And I did often show her the sensitive part of me, but it was under glass; maybe she was able to see it, access it for a minute; there was a small window of time. Then that window closed; it was frustrating for her. Because she saw this relationship as having potential, and then, it wasn’t happening… all relationships come to a point where you either take it to the next logical point or level, or you accept it for what it is, or it just kind of peters out. We were coming to that turning point. She said she never considered going out with a man who wouldn’t be committed to her. She said sh
e couldn’t be proud enough to pretend she didn’t love me, or that we didn’t have a bond. There was something between us I’d never experienced.
It bothered me.
Right before I was going to meet James Earl Ray, I said to her, “It’s too chaotic right now.” I saw a relationship like ours as something you had to maintain and nurture. Not something that just happens. My whole point of view then was that I needed to break away so I could focus on James Earl Ray.
She said, “All right. I understand.”
So when I went to meet Ray, Mon Ami and I were apart. She had friends who ran one of the largest government relations lobbying groups, a minority lobbying firm in Florida that wanted to expand into Georgia. They asked her to come on board as vice president, set up the office in Atlanta. She did that in June ’97, and didn’t tell me. No reason for her to, really. We weren’t seeing each other. Still, when I found out, it bothered me. It did. I can’t deny it. I didn’t want to lose her, period. It was very difficult for her, very tough. How could she find her place in this relationship where she was committed to a person who was not committed to her? It seemed I was moving further away, not just from her but from everyone. More bogged down. More lost in my own thoughts. Getting ready. Add that to my whole commitment phobia. Mon Ami brought back to me the awareness that faith doesn’t mean terrible things aren’t necessarily going to happen, but that if they do—and they probably will—you can overcome any adversity with faith.
In business, she was very effective, good at what she did, with a sense of how to get things done; she was pragmatic, intelligent, able to separate business from personal. I had given her a hard time on the other levels because of my personal frustrations, phobias, inadequacies, stresses, and pressures; you tend to take things out on the people closest to you. While I know it’s not fair, the reality is— who else are you going to share them with? Who else? If you live with a cop, where does he take all of that stuff after work? And my situation has been similar in terms of mental rigors and, as I said, the transformation I went through during that period. It took a major toll on us.
The James Earl Ray meeting in March 1997, what followed in Memphis during the Joe Brown hearing, my investigation of the assassination in Memphis, and the decision to file the civil suit against Loyd Jowers, operator of Jim’s Grill on South Main Street in Memphis, in 1999—all of this was a turning point in the relationship between Mon Ami and me. I was stressed out. I’d never dealt with anything like it; once I saw what was going on, what we as a family had to do before we could put this to rest, it was constantly in my head. I was thinking about it all the time, about ramifications of looking into it, about being torpedoed in the mass media, about fearing for the personal safety of loved ones. All of this meant I never fully relaxed or let my guard down. I was afraid. I questioned everything and everyone; you start saying, “If that can happen over there, who’s to say people might not hurt my loved ones?” Attacks in the media, evidence of things unseen—it all helped distance me from Mon Ami.
I told myself this distancing was for her own good and for her protection. I’d received death threats and become very cautious as a result of reopening the investigation surrounding my father’s death.
The minute I shut Mon Ami out, she could not deal with it. She felt I was unable to believe in her, I wasn’t able to engage, compounded by that part of me that had never dealt with my dad’s death. By the spring of 2000, the process of shutting Mon Ami out had taken a year. It was true that for the first time I was dealing with Daddy’s death in a serious way. Mon Ami had completed her work at the Center for the most part and it was time to move on. Or stay. We agreed that one way or another a move would have to take place once the civil trial was over.
CHAPTER 18
Home Front
When in doubt, go home. Go see Mom or Dad. If you can. If you’re that lucky.
When I go home, I go to 234 Sunset. She’ll be there. She’s always been there. And thank God she was, or else the four of us might be totally disconnected from living. She sacrificed for us.
For the longest time, there was always a thought in her of growing old and dying there. But during the late ’90s, I became concerned about her safety. Vine City, never fully tranquil, had changed, as a reflection, as part of the echo of the rifle report, so to speak—a sign of the times.
Crime is worse than when we were growing up; the crimes are more violent because of the nature of this drug epidemic of crack cocaine, which did not exist when we were growing up. It is a drug that seems to cause not just addiction but also a sordid, soulless madness, without conscience. I’ve watched things worsen in Vine City. For years, I lived in Midtown, in a townhouse, behind a gate. Mother needed to be in a place where she wouldn’t have a lot of maintenance issues, and where she could live her life in peace. She wants to entertain, have a place where she’s not so public; 234 Sunset is on the tour guides’ route, like in Hollywood, when they take out-of-towners around to see the “homes of the stars.” Except that Vine City isn’t Hollywood. Mother doesn’t have privacy. Not at 234 Sunset. Never did.
Growing up, we’d have to be our own sentries. When the tour buses were coming, we’d have somebody posted, up on the hill as lookout; if we were outside we’d run into the house, or back through the alleyway, or we’d hide behind the bushes and trees. Tourists would get off the tour buses sometimes and come right to the door, and knock, and if anyone answered they would actually ask if they could “come in and look around.” They were dead serious. At times, tourists would pull up into the driveway in buses, or in wood-paneled station wagons, vans, RVs with out-of-state plates, and say, “We’re from Lawrence County, Alabama!” or “Just pulled in from Hopkinsville, Kentucky!” or “Wichita, Kansas!” or wherever it might be. “We just want to have a look around… wonder if we could get a tour of the house?” Or “Can we look around?” This was frequent enough to be looked out for, especially in the summer. We really had little or no privacy at home after my father’s death; even to this day my mother is exposed in this regard.
I began thinking, for practical reasons, that it would be a good thing for her to move from the ancestral home. The question would be, to where? It’s a hard thing to even think about, let alone do; and you can relate, I’m sure, if you have a family ancestral home where you were raised, and where you lived, and where some of the closest people to you lived and died. Because of so many memories, so much emotion, so much life being accomplished and lived out there, you feel like you’re abandoning part of your life, maybe even abandoning the people who lived with you, who helped you, and who are no longer living—it’s like as long as you’re still there, they still live.
Nobody can walk away from that cavalierly—well, some people can. Some people can’t or don’t walk away from it at all. It’s not easy to move from an ancestral home. She’s dealt with it all these years. She wouldn’t leave on her own. She’s just that type. In her golden years, she has a right to live the way she’d like to live. She’s done all the living for others. Now let it be for her.
I’ve been concerned for her well-being there; it’s like she’s trying to preserve something, she’s always tried to preserve what Daddy wanted done. He wanted to live there in the first place, to the disagreement of our grandfather, partly to appease the people who tried to damn him by calling him bourgeois. But I believe he would’ve changed with the times. The fact that this is not the same neighborhood it was once, even though it was the ’hood, society then was not in as bad a shape at the bottom as it is today. You didn’t have the same kind and strength of drugs in Atlanta in the ’60s and ’70s. It’s a whole different vibe, a wholly different reality today.
Most people we grew up with didn’t come from a lot of money; neither did we. People were of more meager, humble means, but still had values, and they would generally be good people. They just didn’t have much, didn’t have a lot of education. But today, no telling what’s going on. Could be a college graduate who fell victi
m to the crack pipe or meth or Sherm, angel dust, or heroin, but especially crack cocaine, and is killing or robbing not to have something but because crack will make you do anything to get more of it. It’s been as epidemic as AIDS in many ways. None of this was true or even thought of when I was growing up in Vine City.
I’ve always been concerned about Mother. Living alone there doesn’t bother her so much, or so she lets on, but I want more for her than she wants for herself. I feel like we as a people marched and were beaten and jailed and died and we did all these things so we could move a person like her into a position of dignity and reasonable comfort and convenience in life. Not that she’s chafing to go. But something as simple as being able to go outdoors on the patio or being in her backyard is important at her age. The way the house is set up, there’s not enough space, she’s exposed, and if she wants to do some entertaining, she doesn’t have the facilities. Even though she’s done it over the years, now it’s just not conducive. Things have changed.
* * *
When I was growing up, no one would think of breaking into our house. But in 1996 there was a burglary at 234 Sunset. A man broke in while Mother was asleep. For some reason the alarm didn’t go off even though the thief broke a window. The alarm’s sensor was not working; it didn’t go off. This thief, after ransacking the living room and study, came into the bedroom where Mother was sleeping. There, he stood over her—deciding what, God only knows. “Do I kill her? Do I rob her? Rape her? Who is she?” Did he know? She didn’t know he was there at first. The only reason she knew later is because he’d taken things out of the bedroom before he escaped. She heard him as he left; that’s what woke her up. By God’s will, she got the chance to wake up.
Growing Up King Page 25
