Sleeping Beauties, Part 2

Growing Up King: An Intimate Memoir
by Dexter Scott King, Ralph Wiley

(Page 2 of 5)

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.

Copyright © 2003 by Dextor Scott King

About the Author

DEXTER SCOTT KING currently serves as chairman, president, and CEO of The King Center, based in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information on The King Center, please visit its Web site at http://www.thekingcenter.org

RALPH WILEY is one of America's most distinguished African-American writers. A former senior writer at Sports Illustrated and a collaborator on numerous projects, he is the author of Why Black People Tend to Shout and Dark Witness.