Growing Up King (13 page)

The outcome was that my grandfather had direct access politically to President Carter. He could call him at the White House
and actually get him on the phone. President Carter saw him as kind of an unofficial “adviser.” If Carter had an issue of
relevance to the African-American community, he would not hesitate to have Daddy King tell him what he thought about so-and-so,
straight up, in that down-home southern way. Carter seemed to genuinely respect him. And my grandfather became bodacious in
the heady atmosphere of this kind of political legitimacy at such a rarefied altitude. He may have forgiven Marcus Wayne Chenault,
but for his remaining years he was not going hat in hand to politicians or elected officials. Not anymore. The Secret Service
didn’t daunt him. This all coming after Big Mama died, there was no one around to rein him in, no one he felt shy or humbled
around. We were in New York City during the 1976 Democratic convention; at the Sheraton Center, going up to the Presidential
Suite to see Governor Carter. He wasn’t president yet, but he was a candidate and had Secret Service protection—a must for
all presidential candidates since the Robert F. Kennedy assassination in Los Angeles in 1968.

Granddaddy said, “I’m here to see the governor.”

The Secret Service agents sneered, as if thinking, Who is this thick old black geezer? “Sorry, no one can come through here.”

Granddaddy did his thing, rolling out his name in an avalanche of syllables.

Next thing you know—“Oh, come in, Daddy King!” That Jimmy Carter has a smile on him, doesn’t he? Point being, Grand-daddy
didn’t balk at obstacles. If you know his history, what he had been confronted with in his life, all along—being in his presence
and watching him operate gave me a lot of pride. One thing he taught me was, always go to the top, if you can. If you got
a problem, deal with the top man, top woman, top person, top dog, the one in charge.

He had a methodology, a way of working things out so you just felt empowered, you felt confident, you felt safe. Granddaddy
was a compassionate human being, would bail out people all the time. Members of the church, whoever. You know, “Give this
man a second chance!” He would go down to the court, talk to the judge. He had relationships with everybody—sheriffs, judges.
These were white, old-line southerners, yet they respected him. They’d come out of the Jim Crow South, but realized this was
a man to be reckoned with, a man who had a large congregation. He didn’t do his ministering as a threatening man; he befriended
people. Watching him taught me about how to operate in a climate of tension. This lesson was invaluable to me. I didn’t know
how close Granddaddy was to the end of his bright path.

When he officially retired as pastor at Ebenezer in 1975, my grandfather brought in Rev. Joseph L. Roberts as pastor. William
H. Gray III, Bill Gray, pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church in Philadelphia, later a congressman and now head of the United
Negro College Fund, had recommended Joe Roberts. In November of 1974, five months after Big Mama was killed, shortly after
Marcus Wayne Chenault was declared insane and institutionalized, Granddaddy recommended Rev. Roberts as his successor. Rev.
Roberts was raised in the African Methodist Episcopalian Church, then went to a Presbyterian undergraduate school, Knoxville
College, then to Union Theological Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary. My grandfather turned it all over to him,
effectively breaking the string going back to 1894, when his father-in-law, A. D. Williams, had become pastor of Ebenezer.

No one else in our family was ready to enter the ministry, much less to assume the pulpit at Ebenezer. Derek was a student,
Martin would soon wind up at Morehouse College, still trying to keep up with my mother’s charge to be the man of the house.
I was fourteen, with no such inclinations. My grandfather had high hopes for my cousin Al. Maybe also for Isaac. Maybe also
for me. But in his wisdom he could see it would not be happening soon, if at all, certainly not before he was ready for his
final angle of repose.

He couldn’t leave Ebenezer at the whimsy of factions of deacons. His thoughts about a possible successor from the family stopped
with the consideration of his grandsons.

My grandfather liked Rev. Roberts’s preaching style. He was also impressed by academic credentials, even though he was a fire-and-brimstone
Baptist preacher himself, full of cadences and emotions, and he liked the rolling thunder call-and-response of a congregation
to get where he wanted to be in the pulpit. Ebenezer became a different place. It became different once Big Mama was killed.
Granddaddy retired and a man I’d never seen was in line to be pastor. My father’s voice, with its lifting, rolling cadences
that used to warm spirits, was gone.

But other music was still there.

Music had taken root in me early on. My interest was always there, from my earliest memories. Mother’s roots are in music.
She was classically trained at the New England Conservatory of Music. Mother always had us in musical processes, learning
to play instruments, singing. Growing up we all had piano lessons; later we all were in our school bands. And my father, well…
his whole preaching style, coming out of the Baptist tradition, was musical, metered, mathematic, but then it was also refined
by his own persona, his own ability to put things together that made sense and were lyric and epic. He was a composer.

There was a pure powerful seduction by rhythm and musicality in his speech. Later I picked up on deejaying. On one level,
it was a way to commune with my peers. On another level it was a way to commune with my father. For outside my sisters, brother,
and cousins, I had few peers. I was apart, distant; if this was some kind of royalty, it was accursed royalty, with violent
death.

In 1974, after an acrimonious but professionally run campaign, Maynard Jackson took office as elected mayor of Atlanta. A
Negro, a colored man, a black, an African American, was the mayor of Atlanta. “You’re gonna make it after all…” I didn’t consciously
watch
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
but its theme song was still in my head. Not really good music, but music still. For a long while after Big Mama was killed,
it didn’t look like I’d make it after all, or at all. Who cared if I didn’t? I saw what the end looked like for me, in a line
of caskets at Hanley’s Bell Street Funeral Home.

I got kicked out of the house. By that I mean my mother did not let us rest on tragedy; we couldn’t stop and lick our wounds
for a long time, into oblivion, or grieve listlessly. We had to lick our wounds and keep going. She told me, “You’re going
to do something constructive with your time, Dexter, and you’re not just going to sit around the house. Go learn something,
get a job, do something.” She had grown up in the deep country, where it’s about earning your keep; you’ve got to do something
constructive, to help develop values in your own head.

Also that summer there was a CETA program, where you learned a trade; kids and just about anybody were paid nominally to learn
a trade, an example of a good government program. I was making $5 an hour at age thirteen to learn a trade. We all had a choice
of photography, silkscreening, and brickmasonry, and a couple of other options that were so enticing that I forget them now.
I took up photography, and found I could really sink my teeth into it. An organization called Southern Rural Action administered
the CETA program at a school that was converted for this purpose, where you could come and learn these trades. Teaching the
photography course was a high-fashion photographer from San Francisco named Clint, a black man, respected in his craft.

I met many people who went on to become today’s network photographers and videographers. We learned composition, framing techniques,
point of reference, background, darkroom techniques, everything. With the money I earned, I got secondhand equipment. My involvement
snowballed. We’d go out on assignments. I was in this program when Big Mama got shot. Some of the young people in the program
were taking photographs at Big Mama’s funeral, on assignment; it was kind of weird, I went from behind the camera to in front
of the camera. I didn’t want to pose. I was vulnerable, as you are only when someone close to you dies. I went through trauma
while also engrossed in learning a trade, meeting new people, most of them older than I was. They seemed to be sorrowful as
their shutters clicked and motors whirred at the stunned faces of me and my family.

Photography was an interest, whereas music was a love. However, photography became more than just interesting when I saw I
could make a bit of a living at it. It was also an escape. Go behind the viewfinder and hide. I never stopped to think of
where my fascination with it came from before; never even recalled my fascination with Camera Man, Mr. Flip Schulke, who would
come to our house when my father was alive and document our home life, or who was in church that day—was it when my grandfather
called me and Isaac out, and somehow we got out of it? All I know is, once I got my hands on a camera, it felt kind of like
Bloodstone singing “Natural High.”

Soon, if you saw me without my camera, you thought something was wrong with me. It was my constant companion. And since my
other constant companion was my cousin Isaac, I brought him in, taught him how to shoot, develop images. I built a darkroom
in our basement, set it up from money I earned from the CETA program. Soon I was spending twelve hours a day in the darkroom.
I even put a bed down there. That’s how into it I was. I would sleep in the darkroom, adding to my reputation as “Count.”
I found satisfaction in being able to create something, a product, an image. I became obsessed, fixated. Take the shot. Develop
the print. See the fruit of your labor. I used a 35mm single-lens reflex camera—my first camera. It was secondhand, of course.
We did not have much money, nor can I ever remember us having much money, not when my father was alive nor in the years afterward.
But I made some money with photography and had my own cash before plowing it back into more darkroom equipment. It started
out as a hobby, but because people wanted copies and prints of my images that I took of them, I had to start charging. As
I started charging, it became a business. I brought in Isaac. I needed help.

Soon we were overwhelmed by business. Our grandfather was supportive of industry from his congregation, let alone offspring,
particularly his grandchildren.

“So-and-so owns a funeral home and I know y’all don’t want to support him, particularly, since everybody wants to go to Heaven,
and nobody wants to die, but we all got to go at some point, so go see Brother So-and-so in your family’s hour of bereavement
need.”

Or, “Brother So-and-so’s got a used-auto dealership, you need to support him.” This was part of his technique of growing Ebenezer
back in the day, after my great-grandfather died in March of 1931. Hanley’s Bell Street Funeral Home had handled that burial.
If new members with businesses were successful, it meant bigger offerings and tithes placed in coffers at Ebenezer. It’s no
different now. “My grandboys Dexter and Isaac have a photo business, so when y’all have weddin’s or other occasions you need
photographed, call on them. Let the church say, Amen.”

Soon we were shooting nearly all the weddings at Ebenezer and spilling over into other churches. Soon we couldn’t handle the
demand. We grew ourselves out of business. Fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old, and doing heavy-volume business. K&F
Photographers—King and Farris—became successful. Even longtime pros around town knew us and embraced us.

Along with the photography business, I had also started deejaying at parties. It kept a little change in our pockets without
us having to ask our parents. It was thrilling. Challenging too.

Music, when it came along, hit me different. More. Find a way to do what you love for a living, and you’ll never work another
day in your life. I don’t remember Daddy saying it to me, yet when that saying comes to my mind, it comes in his voice. I
recruited Isaac again, taught him to work the mixer and turntables, later how to blend. Don’t ask me how, but I think I would
get attracted to something and I would sink all my attention into it. I didn’t understand why I had difficulty doing this
with text, in class, reading history books, literature, learning all that. Anything creative, or working with my hands—that
seemed natural for me. I enjoyed it.

The deejaying was an outgrowth from growing up in a musical family. I loved the swing and flow of music; I think I enjoyed
seeing entertainers and entertaining people, making people respond, making them be happy. Making them feel energy. Like Daddy.
Part of me needed to gravitate to feel-good things. Aretha Franklin singing “Dr. Feelgood” was a feel-good thing. Things around
me were so serious. Everybody saw my dad as serious, especially after he died a martyr. And he was a serious man, but he also
loved to play, to sing, to clap his hands and enjoy himself, but there were only a few places he could, because of his public
persona.

Eventually the photo business dissolved and Isaac and I concentrated on K&F Sound. It wasn’t a change in interest: a greater
interest in music was always there. Isaac and I also had a major loss. I left equipment—larger-format cameras for portraits—in
our basement. They were stolen. I don’t know until this day what happened. I was going on a job, grabbed for my equipment,
and—gone. I had to borrow equipment to shoot my last job. Does everybody have an experience where you think you have your
belongings in a safe environment, only to find your stuff gone?

I liquidated my darkroom equipment.

I never could liquidate my ears, which even now love the sounds of music. We started out deejaying parties, but ultimately
turned more to audio engineering. I loved music. I have always wanted to be closer to it. I’ve always wanted to recapture
the feeling of when I listened to music. Listening to good music of any form—whether it be jazz, blues, big band, reggae,
country, rhythm and blues, hip-hop of the best sort, or classical, which Mother insisted upon, or the finest, most moving
music I ever heard, the sound of my father’s voice delivering a sermon—it can tilt my head to one side and close my eyes in
rapture until this day. I wanted to be a part of the process of making something like that, originating it; that was my response
to what was happening around me.