Growing Up King Read Free Page A

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