Growing Up King Read online

Like I said. We were rehearsing Yoki’s play as the alley and our friends beckoned to us. In a nearby house, Lou Rawls’s “St. James Infirmary” wafted up from a “record player.” Yoki also had a “record player,” on which spun large-mouthed 45s filled by yellow prong adapters; “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” by the Temptations, Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” My father preferred Mahalia Jackson singing “Amazing Grace,” or Aretha Franklin singing “O Mary Don’t You Weep.” He often tapped his foot and bobbed his head to secular music, and he didn’t deny it to us—he couldn’t, not in Vine City. Music was everywhere. Like Yoki.

  Yoki was five years older than me and forever putting on plays and musicals. We were her troupe. It was not often that anyone else got a starring role with Yoki around. At my shoulder was Martin III, Marty then; he was restless, sighing heavily, looking away, mumbling. Yoki was telling me what I must do to make things right before we could leave.

  “You’re supposed to lean over and kiss her. On the lips.”

  My face continued to betray me, and my lack of enthusiasm.

  Bernice was lying with lips chapped, eyelids closed, then fluttering. She was pleased to be Sleeping Beauty. Usually her role was Yoki’s handmaiden, subject to taunting. Yoki was a stern taskmaster, particularly for Bunny. We often teased Bernice, saying she’d been left on our doorstep by mistake, or was adopted. Now I was in Yoki’s sights, subject to her derision—but it wasn’t enough to make me kiss a girl, particularly my little sister, for no good reason at all.

  “Why do you want me?” I whined.

  “Why?” Yoki repeated. “Why do you always ask why? Because I said so, that’s why. Because that’s the way the play goes. You’re supposed to kiss Sleeping Beauty; that will break the spell cast by an evil witch and everyone will live happily ever after. Don’t you want to live happily ever afterward, you stupid boy? Don’t you know anything?”

  “But she isn’t Sleeping Beauty. She’s Bunny.”

  “Not right now. She’s Sleeping Beauty right now,” Yoki countered.

  “Well… why can’t Martin kiss her? Why does it have to be me?”

  Yoki’s voice dripped with venom. “Because I said so.”

  “… But it don’t make no sense,” I whispered.

  “Don’t make any sense,” Martin said. He was trying to get back to playing. If we were lucky, once Dad got home he might take us over to the Ollie Street Y. If we were really lucky, Uncle Ralph and Aunt Jean’s children would go with us too. But we had to get past Yoki first.

  “Go on, get it over with,” Martin whispered, smiling at Yoki when she looked daggers at him. So I leaned over and kissed Bernice. On the cheek. I still feel her tiny cheekbone rise beneath my lips. “Don’t smile too quick, Bunny,” Yoki chided. “Let the kiss take effect.”

  Martin and I made our escape into the alley and whatever devilment we were up to. As we ran, the scent of honeysuckle mixed with the occasional open garbage can to sweeten and make pungent the late summer air; gravel secured our feet to the red clay; we raced by kudzu-choked fences in varying states of repair.

  Yoki didn’t bother calling after us. The play was given the following evening at home for our parents and a few of our aunts and uncles; so it was, and always has been. But even long after we grew up, we kept doing plays under her direction, the last time when she turned forty. She wanted to do what she loved, what was in her blood, and to make Daddy proud of her. We all wanted that.

  I was born worried. I was born anxious. I was born on January 30, 1961, in the Hughes-Spaulding Hospital, a private hospital for “Negroes” in Atlanta. My father was in Chicago at the time, but rushed home as soon as he got the word. “Negroes” was then the term for Americans of discernible African descent. What to call us, what to do with us—these questions were not for children but rather for their parents who wanted the best for them one day. “Negro” households in Atlanta not on public assistance utilized that one hospital, Hughes-Spaulding.

  Atlanta has always held a special spot. At one time it was called Terminus; railways began and ended here and ran throughout the South, so it’s always had a pivotal position. But it was basically a big old landlocked town, and still is. It’s also a cliquish, insular town, and it can be hard for outsiders coming in. It can be difficult for insiders who don’t conform.

  Atlanta remains a difficult town to crack the code on.

  In terms of the black/white so-called race relations, Atlanta has always been just smart enough to be smarter than most. I don’t know if it’s because of what happened during the Civil War, General Sherman burning it down. Since then Atlanta had the sense to recognize it needs to be peaceful, though there have been lynchings of blacks and bombings of Jewish synagogues here and there; there have also been efforts to stem the tide of hatred by being civil in that southern, intimate way, by being “down home.” The raw, murderous violence of Alabama and Mississippi didn’t seem to cloak Atlanta. But in my youth, it was rigidly, bitterly segregated.

  Before the ’60s, before the Civil Rights Movement and social reformation, “Negroes” in Atlanta—never “blacks,” not then; calling somebody “black” back then would get you a look, maybe even a punch in the nose—weren’t as affected by the segregation dooming the poor in other places; in Atlanta, “Negroes” had infrastructure. It was by comparison small and circumscribed, but it was there, not rich compared to the Augusta Country Club and the riches that spawned it. But “Negroes” did have social clubs, financial institutions, schools, churches, some land, so in that respect there was hesitation with change; there was a risk of losing what little you had. You felt like you finally had acquired something you didn’t want to lose.

  Blacks in Atlanta weren’t as downtrodden as in the Mississippi Delta, or in Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago, or in the rice paddies of the Sea Islands off the Carolina coast, or in the black belt of south-central Alabama, where my mother’s parents lived, or other places South and North. “Negroes” in Atlanta were not as anxious as they were in other places, where people were trying to gain access, rights, a crust of life, because they didn’t have anything to lose, they were trying to get a little something. In Atlanta, “Negroes” already had a little something; in some cases they had nice somethings. This made it more impressive to me, later, to realize that my father, in spite of his privileged position, would take up the civil rights struggle, battle against the system of segregation. Because he really would have had it made, relatively, in old Atlanta. Could’ve gone with the flow, succeeded Granddaddy as pastor at Ebenezer, conducted weddings, funerals, encouraged generosity from the Ebenezer flock, attended National Baptist conventions, risen to be an H.N.I.C.—Head Negro In Charge of what little we had, and we had a nice if not an idyllic life.

  I don’t know how it was in Daddy’s mind. I’ve been asked many times, as have many if not most other black people, “What do you want?” I can’t answer for him. He was, if nothing else, a man of his own conscience. The ’60s were idyllic to me. How they were for him, I don’t know. He could’ve limited his battles to Ebenezer, local politics, as my grandfather did. But he didn’t; wasn’t that kind of a man. Greatness was thrust upon him, and for some internal reason or external destiny, he did not turn away. Because he was the man that he was, I was born six weeks premature.

  My mother was traumatized during her pregnancy with me. All of us were born and raised in struggle. In January of 1956, Yoki was ten weeks old and they were living in Montgomery when a bomb was set off at their house. My father spoke of having an epiphany at the kitchen table in this same house a few days before that. The bombings—the one at my parents’ house was not the only one— were owed to the violence of vigilante whites, poor whites, after the bus boycott led by the Montgomery Improvement Association, for which my father served as president. He held some of the smaller meetings at his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church; Uncle Ralph’s—Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s—First Baptist Church held larger mass meetings. My father had talked about being “par
alyzed with fear” during this time.

  But at the kitchen table in the house in Montgomery, he had an epiphany; he said all the fear left him, and he gave himself and his Cause over to the hand and grace of God.

  It wasn’t until this bombing in Montgomery on January 30, 1956, that it dawned on him: it wasn’t just him but also his family who were involved in this Cause. Yet only he had the epiphany.

  In April of 1960, after having dinner, my parents were returning the southern writer Lillian Smith to Emory University Hospital, in DeKalb County, where she was getting cancer treatments. After dropping her at the dorm they were stopped by police. My father was a black man; a white woman had been in the car. My father was recognized by the DeKalb County police and arrested because he had not changed his driver’s license from an Alabama license to a Georgia license in the three months since they left Montgomery. Daddy answered the summons, was fined $25 for “driving without a proper permit,” given a suspended twelve-month sentence by Judge Oscar Mitchell, and released on probation. This occurred at the time of the Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch-counter student sit-ins to protest segregated public facilities, on the heels of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott sparked by the arrest of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Shortly after this event, sometime in June, my mother discovered she was pregnant with me.

  These were heady, dangerous days. But my father, pleased my mother was pregnant for the third time, was undeterred by his arrest. My mother did her usual thing and exploded in size; she was one of those women whose entire body, not just the belly, became larger when she got pregnant. By October, she was five months gone, and showing like nine.

  This was when my father agreed to be a part of a lunch-counter demonstration at Rich’s department store, protesting segregated eating facilities—the only time he joined any such local demonstration in his hometown of Atlanta. He did it against his father’s wishes, to support idealistic student leaders like Lonnie C. King, Marian Wright, now Marian Wright Edelman, and John Porter. They’d ask for service at a snack bar at the downtown Rich’s, which, like most department stores in southern cities, “welcomed” black patrons through a back entrance to come spend their money as long as they didn’t use rest rooms, drink from water fountains marked “Whites,” try on hats, or get refreshments.

  My father was first to be arrested, then the students; tactically, they didn’t accept a $500 bond from Judge James Webb. Dad was carted off to Fulton County Jail along with seventy-five “lawbreakers,” mostly student leaders from the Atlanta University Center. They would agree to be released only if the charges against them, based on unjust Jim Crow laws, were dropped. After reaching a settlement with the affected parties the students were released on their own recognizance.

  People say that’s when Senator John F. Kennedy got involved, but actually that’s when my father’s friends and admirers got moving. One of them worked for the Kennedy-for-president campaign. His name was Harris Wofford. He started calling around—Atlanta mayor Bill Hartsfield, a local lawyer named Morris Abram, anybody he could call that might be able to help. Mr. Wofford had great admiration for my father and Mohandas Gandhi. He was a learned, sensitive man who had gone to Howard University Law School after graduating from Yale.

  Mayor Hartsfield was about to broker a deal to let the students and our father go anyway. But Daddy was kept in jail. Monday morning, a DeKalb County deputy sheriff came, put him in manacles and leg irons, and took him from jail in Fulton County to DeKalb County—which in those days was going from the dragon’s back into its mouth. Murders of civil rights workers by rogue law enforcement officers and other vigilantes were routine occurrences; such deaths had been common for the hundred years since the Civil War. DeKalb County was a Klan stronghold. My distressed mother, with me floating in her belly, went to the hearing at the DeKalb County courthouse with Granddaddy and my Aunt Christine. Members of the faculty at Morehouse College and AU Center students went as well.

  Judge Oscar Mitchell found my father guilty of violating his probation over the misdemeanor involving the “invalid driver’s license,” then sentenced him to four months’ hard labor at Reidsville State Prison, which was isolated far downstate. There was pandemonium in the courtroom. Immersed in this was Mother, me in her amniotic sac, feeling each twitch and strain, feeding off her moods.

  Yoki was four, Marty was about three, but they weren’t there. Mother was shocked when Judge Mitchell announced the sentence; my father’s sister, Aunt Christine, broke into tears. So did Mother, and she wasn’t given to crying. Staid male professors fell prostrate and wept.

  Mother said she felt helpless and out of control and desperate despite the fact my father’s family was with her. They were not inside her. I was. She was emotional, weepy; Daddy had not seen her like this, and said so. “You have to be strong now, Corrie,” he said. Mayor Hartsfield, in Atlanta and Fulton County, backed off from Judge Mitchell’s sentence, saying it “didn’t happen in Atlanta.” Hartsfield was mayor when the chamber of commerce came up with the slogan that billed Atlanta as “The City Too Busy to Hate.” At the time, Georgia wasn’t too busy.

  Governor Ernest Vandiver crowed about Daddy’s dilemma.

  Phone lines buzzed. My father’s friends—like Stanley Levison, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Jackie Robinson, and a horde of less famous but equally concerned folk whose common denominator was being American and feeling for my father—they all made calls or had aides-de-camp making calls to see what could be done for Dad. Of these, Harris Wofford was best positioned to effect change, being connected to the 1960 Kennedy presidential campaign. He spoke to Sargent Shriver of JFK’s staff. Shriver balked— the first law of political campaigns is to say anything but do nothing. In the end, Wofford convinced Shriver at least to run it by Senator Kennedy, presidential candidate, that maybe he should call the wife of Martin Luther King and offer her comfort. The woman was pregnant, alone. There was all sorts of palavering first. But, cutting through all the political intrigue, JFK wound up calling Mother on impulse, against advice and all political logic, not because it might get him votes. In that climate, it might easily have cost him votes; his advisers were not shy about pointing it out. But JFK called my mother anyway, because Harris Wofford had the right phone number to give Sargent Shriver; it flashed in JFK’s mind that calling Mother was the decent thing to do. I believe that was his motivation, and also why things turned out well for him in the election. You get back what you put out. My mother was at home, preparing to go see Morris Abram, a Jewish lawyer who was a family friend. At this point, Robert F. Kennedy, head of JFK’s presidential campaign, probably wouldn’t have had JFK call Mother for all the tea in China.

  The phone rang anyway. My mother spoke with Senator Kennedy; he said he knew it must be hard, he knew she was expecting; if there was anything he could do feel free to call. Mother said she’d appreciate anything he could do to get my father out of prison. Meanwhile, Bobby, JFK’s campaign manager and soon to be attorney general, called Judge Mitchell to see why my father couldn’t get bail on a misdemeanor. What the hell was going on? Bobby wanted to know.

  Who knows what went through Judge Mitchell’s mind, but Daddy was released, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) chartered a plane to bring him home from Reidsville. My Grandaddy King said at a mass meeting after my father was released that if he had a suitcase full of votes, he’d take them and put them at Senator Kennedy’s feet in the election just a week away. We can thank a cop harassing my father and Judge Mitchell as much as the Kennedys: the long and short of it was that JFK’s political intervention on my father’s behalf during the final days of his campaign was a decisive factor in his election as president of the United States in 1960. Senator Kennedy won by the equivalent of one vote per precinct nationwide, and his campaign wisely made what hay it could in “Negro” precincts.

  After the election, the Kings were seen as an influential family, even a royal family, in the well-lit backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, e
xcept our imperial conditioning was different. Where the Kennedys or the British royals were given latitude and a very long leash, the Kings were seen as these pious moral exemplars— a difficult posture for human beings to maintain.

  I was born six weeks premature in January of 1961. Only my mother can know what she went through, mother of two at the time, pregnant with a third, dependent on Daddy, worried about his safety, whether something would happen to him because they had whisked him off in the middle of the night to Reidsville. They could as well have been taking him to Hell. He could have easily not even made it to that prison—could have wound up bloated in an earthen dam. It was known to happen. It seems incredible, but those were the harsh realities of the times. So, my mother was in a nervous state for the entire time she was pregnant with me. Everything I’ve read or heard of since implies that the emotional state of the parents, particularly the mother, is transmitted to the fetus. I felt what she went through. My mother thinks it had a bearing in shaping me, may have forced me out sooner, the urgency of the times.

  My paternal grandfather also made his mark on me. He made his mark on all of us, on the whole city of Atlanta, long after he, as Mike King, at age sixteen, had hopped a freight from Stockbridge, Georgia, Henry County, south by southeast of Atlanta, back in the day. Later he argued with his father in order to stay in Atlanta at Bryant Preparatory School, where he was learning how to read and write. Neither of his parents could read or write. When his father, James, went to Atlanta and demanded Mike come back to the farm, because they couldn’t make it without his labor, Mike declined. He’d stay on at the school and go about ministering the Baptist way in nearby East Point. Mike King had been born in 1899, to Delia Lindsay and James Albert King, whose father was a white Irishman. He courted and married Alberta Williams, the daughter of the well-known and respected Rev. A. D. Williams; was determined and felt the call to be a Baptist preacher.