CHAPTER 20

The Reckoning

It had never been confronted in open court. Not for us, by us, the family of the victim.

We were in collective shock in 1968 when James Earl Ray was shot through the legal system as if greased, with first Arthur Hanes then Percy Foreman as his lawyer. For us, it was hard enough just to accept Daddy’s being dead, to accept what people said and did in the aftermath, to accept the different reactions from others, to accept what the authorities said about who killed him. “Try to move on,” I remember people saying. As if. As time went on, deep down inside, all the adults in my family—Mother, Uncle A.D., Granddaddy, Big Mama, cousin Alveda—felt there was more to it. I, me, Dexter, the last one, ended up as point man for all those years of muffled questions and suppressed doubts. My family looked to me now. Right or wrong, they looked to me. For my family. For my father. You tell me—what was I supposed to do?

Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was quick on the heels of Daddy’s, not to mention heightened tensions in the country, riots, burning in nearly every city, major and minor, after Daddy was killed; a dissolving hope, a swelling of the ranks of groups like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, or the Nation of Islam, the Blackstone Rangers, or Black P-Stone Nation in Chicago, Crips and Bloods in L.A. George Clinton and Parliament singing “(I Wanna) Testify” could not lift the mood for long. The feeling was, no matter who is involved, what can you do? What recourse do you have? You felt helpless to do anything else but think about it, roll it over in your mind, try and figure it out. Suffer in silence.

Even if Ray did it, did he do it alone? The force of will behind this murder—did he possess that? Was he that brave, that resourceful, to escape under the noses of law enforcement without any help? Was he competent enough to make that shot? Anyone behind him, or with him, we’d never be able to find out. Even if we did… how do you fight a feeling? How can you change what’s in people’s hearts? That took a man like Daddy. And he was dead. That’s what the world and we lost. I felt hollowed out inside about it, but I didn’t know it at first. If asked, I said and I believed I was fine. But it also became for my own soul’s sake that I tried to find out all I could about why and how Daddy was killed. My sisters and our mother had looked into my eyes and asked me to try. So I did.

Somehow, my logic must have escaped scholars. They can interpret Shaw, Nietzsche, or Churchill, somehow, but they can’t understand me. I find it all hard to believe, that looking into one’s own father’s murder seems somehow illogical.

Leading up to the civil trial, in the late fall of the year 1999, people asked me, “Why look into it?” The most innocent and well-intentioned people said this, as well as editorial columnists and scholar-authors with books and their own interests to protect and, maybe, I don’t know, axes to grind, although I don’t know why anyone would grind an ax on my family’s backs. Many people said I was wrong for looking into the death of my father. Was that going to stop me? Are those the people I saw when I looked in the mirror? Or did I see Mother, Daddy, Yoki, Marty, Bunny?

That’s who I answered to in the end. It was as simple as our mental health.

Before he died in 1984, my grandfather Martin Luther King, Sr., patriarch of our clan, said, “In my heart, I never believed Ray was alone in his plan.” And then he wept. And then he died. So that’s part of my legacy too. I’d disappointed him. I’d never heard the Call. This seemed like the least I could do. For years, for many reasons, I had averted my eyes. I could stand to do that no longer.

Shortly before the Jowers trial began, the verdict from our appeal in the CBS case came in; we had won a reversal in federal appeals court. The attorneys called Mon Ami. She came over and knocked on the door. She said, “We won. You will not be the sibling or heir that lost your father’s copyrights. You did what he would have wanted.” I hoped that this legal victory would bode well for the new legal journey we were about to embark on.

With William F. Pepper serving as trial counsel, we, the family of Martin Luther King, Jr., as heirs of the victim, filed a wrongful death suit, a civil suit against Loyd Jowers, the Memphis owner/operator of a place called Jim’s Grill on South Main Street, one block due west and upland from the Lorraine Motel, adjacent to Canipe’s Amusements. Jim’s Grill and Canipe’s were first-floor establishments. Over them was the flophouse and back window from which Ray is said to have taken a single shot on April 4, 1968, that changed the landscape of America and five lives in particular, those of Coretta, Yolanda, Martin III, and Bernice. Me too.

Our main purpose in filing this suit was to get to the truth by hearing testimony under oath and having evidence submitted into court records to create an official permanent record of what had occurred around this tragedy. We were concerned that with the passage of over thirty years since my father’s death, many relevant individuals would die without having their knowledge officially recorded. In other words, we believed it was now or never. We only sought a ceremonial $100 damage amount in the trial because we were more interested in getting the truth than in getting money.

By this time, Loyd Jowers was an aging, frail, seventy-three-year-old. He bore a resemblance to Byron De La Beckwith, who, thirty-five years after the fact, was convicted of killing Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963. Jowers was not accused of shooting anyone. But in his dotage he claimed to ABC TV reporter Sam Donaldson that he’d helped carry out the King assassination, and admitted it to William F. Pepper and to Andy Young, both times in my presence. Jowers contended that his place, Jim’s Grill, was used as a staging area of sorts. The .30-06 rifle, supposedly the weapon Ray used, was found in the foyer of Canipe’s Amusements on South Main, close to Jowers’s grill and a few hundred yards from the muddy chop of the Mississippi River.

In the 1993 interview with Sam Donaldson, Jowers claimed to have been in on it, and said the murderer who handed him the still-smoking murder weapon was not James Earl Ray. Pepper himself had received information from army informants that two teams of army snipers were in the area, perhaps as backups to a contract killer. All this confusion could have been avoided, maybe, if the congressional committee hadn’t, in 1979, sealed all its documents regarding the case for fifty years. Fifty years. That would be 2029. By then, Bernice, the youngest, will be over sixty.

We approached President Clinton about creating a truth and reconciliation commission, similar to the one created in South Africa to investigate crimes by the government against its people. The commission would have subpoena power and the ability to grant immunity from prosecution in exchange for the truth. Since our government had been implicated, we felt it was very important to have an independent, nongovernmental body established. But President Clinton turned it over to the Department of Justice. We wanted the truth, not retributive justice. We had lost in the criminal proceeding in Memphis, where we tried to get the rifle tested when Ray was seeking a trial. We could no longer pursue a criminal trial since Ray had died in 1998. Therefore a civil suit was the only other legal remedy we could employ to get at the truth. So starting Monday, November 15, 1999, there was a proceeding in Shelby County (Memphis), Tennessee, and some seventy witnesses would testify, including Andy Young and Rev. James Lawson, one of Daddy’s friends and the leader of the Memphis protest back in 1968. All this testimony went into the record so that historians who want to research it will have an official record of these versions of what happened.

We were not seeking monetary damages. We were not in it to try and bankrupt anybody or gain publicity. We were only seeking truth. To have Jowers offer to put into the record his information pertinent to this case. Jowers never had been officially interviewed by the authorities. He was written off as not credible. He said that if he got immunity from prosecution, he’d tell all he knew. He was never offered immunity. The Department of Justice would have to investigate, follow up, which we believed it didn’t want to do. People were getting old, like Jowers. In a way he was a more important witness even than Ray. Ray didn’t have to know anything. Jowers was in his seventies, not in good health. His memory was good, but physically he had deteriorated, as had others who were close to the—what to call it?—the… event? This was the time to get every scrap of firsthand knowledge down.

At the beginning, Mother, Martin, and myself rotated in and out of the courtroom. We all wanted to be at the opening, but Bernice and Yolanda couldn’t be there. So we took turns. My mother stayed through Tuesday, Martin came in Wednesday; I was there until Thanksgiving—they had a short week. The following week, Yolanda was there. I can still see her, dressed in dark clothing, huddled against the wet chill in a spitting rain outside the Memphis courthouse, being interviewed by Ricki Kleiman on Court TV, looking so very vulnerable to me. Seeing her there steeled me against all the doubters who questioned this course. If only to make my sister feel whole…

Judge James E. Swearingen handled the proceeding. It was a circuit court trial. He felt it should be over by Christmas. The jury was sworn in; it couldn’t have been more racially balanced—six blacks and six whites. Ordinary people. Lewis Garrison represented Jowers. Swearingen was an African American and well-respected among black Memphians, although I wondered if he would be affected by what had happened to Judge Joe Brown when he had the rifle ballistics hearing in his court. Judge Brown took it on the chin for even trying to hear evidence then. Much would be made of what Judge Swearingen allowed testimony-wise in this trial, and there was the somehow built-in skepticism by some in the media, about our credibility as plaintiffs largely because we had retained Pepper. But I thought Judge Swearingen wanted to let the witnesses speak.

I would be among the last to testify. Mother was among the first on the stand. You could see the respect and empathy in the eyes of the jurors. She has maintained her dignity a long time. I felt protective toward her.

Within three days, the courtroom was nearly empty. Court TV pulled its gavel-to-gavel coverage. This was no O. J. Simpson trial. The media did not seem to want the public to hear the evidence, so there was no live TV coverage when Andy Young took the stand. Uncle Andy was questioned by Pepper, then cross-examined by Garrison, who, by the way, said he agreed with “80 percent of [the Kings’] case.” Andy Young, without wavering, testified that he met with Jowers for four hours a year earlier. “This was a man who was very sick, and who wanted to go to confession to get his soul right,” Uncle Andy said to the jury. He said Jowers told him some Memphis police officers and federal agents met at Jim’s Grill several days before the assassination, and the group included Marrell McCollough, who had been hired by the CIA later, in 1974. Uncle Andy also said that Jowers told him “a Mafia figure” gave him money to hand over to a man who delivered a rifle to Jim’s Grill before the assassination. Jowers told Uncle Andy that he was in the back of the grill when my father was shot by a man hidden in the bushes (the area cleared and cut down the night after the assassination) and this man, a Memphis police lieutenant, handed the smoking rifle to Jowers through a back door. Jowers told me the same story. He said his place was used as a staging area.

Jowers was not present for Andy Young’s testimony. He had been in the court for the first couple of days, but his health was declining and the long days took a toll. I watched him sitting in his threadbare suit and droopy white socks and tried to imagine him young and hateful. Now he was preparing to meet his Maker. Trying to get right. After Uncle Andy stepped down, Pepper promised the jury he’d play a two-hour tape documenting Uncle Andy’s meeting with Jowers that next Monday.

I listened to Judge Joe Brown testify that next Monday, November 23, 1999. As noted, Judge Brown was a criminal court judge in Memphis; Pepper called him as an expert witness in firearms. Brown told the jury he believed “The rifle [that prosecutors used to implicate Ray in the assassination] was not the rifle used to kill Dr. King. In my opinion, that is not the murder weapon.” He looked levelly at the jury. Whether people liked it or not, it was happening. We were now taking Daddy back. As Judge Brown spoke, he held the Remington GameMaster .30-06 hunting rifle. “This weapon, literally, could not have hit the broad side of a barn,” he said. An FBI report showed that the rifle had never been sighted in (never calibrated and aligned).

Judge Brown is a recreational hunter. Guns are a hobby of his, and as a criminal court judge, of course, he has had a lot of experience with forensics experts and weapons, and knows the law. But when asked on cross-examination by Garrison if he had any formal ballistics training, he cited none. After his testimony, the press sought the opinion of the prosecutor in the criminal trial, John Campbell. He said Judge Brown’s testimony raised more questions about Judge Brown than it did about the so-called murder weapon, or Ray’s guilt. That’s how it’s often done: if you have a “black” expert witness, then his credibility is subtly undermined, not for a particular reason, but because of—well, touch the skin on your arm.

Garrison could’ve objected to Joe Brown being called, but didn’t, and the county prosecutor took Garrison to task publicly. “The problem is, if no one is objecting, it makes no difference,” Campbell said. “He could’ve gotten up there and said he was an expert in nuclear physics.” Garrison’s position consistently was that his client was a small cog in a massive conspiracy. Pepper’s evidence was amply demonstrating that that was the case.

Joe Brown is a righteous man who tried. He tried when he had the rifle in his court to get a new trial for Ray. But he met staunch resistance every step of the way. He could only do so much, and then he was summarily removed from presiding over the criminal trial by the Court of Appeals without a hearing.

For the first time, I started to identify with my own feelings. Then I saw the brutality of the autopsy photos… my God… how horrible… I had never seen the photos. I’d had no desire to see any of them. I was caught off guard. An autopsy photograph was submitted into evidence and shown in court. I was upset with Pepper. We didn’t talk about it beforehand. I felt very awkward sitting there, even though it wasn’t one of the most gruesome ones. It showed a shot of my father’s back where the bullet lodged; you couldn’t see a face, who it was. When photographs were first sent to me by Pepper, I’d put them away. No desire to see them. Now they stared at me even in my sleep.

Pepper had sent all his archives to the King Center in Atlanta, and said, “I’m giving these to you separately; they are sensitive and I’m pretty sure you don’t want them mixed in with all the other stuff.”

We got a copy of the autopsy report and the x-rays as well. Understand that all of this for me was still working out my private hurt, the pain… the death itself. The morbid side of it. The tragedy. Everybody dealt with it intellectually, but very few people had to deal with it emotionally.

At least I was able to admit in my heart of hearts that I hadn’t dealt with it emotionally.

It felt like I was in a foreign city—another planet—anytime I went to Memphis. As a child I had no real awareness of the things surrounding the assassination. But from the very first time I visited there as a child, the city felt alien. The Monday after Daddy’s death, on the eighth of April 1968, was my first time there, for the march to City Hall that Dad never got to complete. I remember the wrecked faces and wracking sobs and images of smoke, black clothing, shrieking. I went to the sleep clinic at Baptist Hospital when I was twelve with these images in my head. Then I returned as an adult, finally, to the Lorraine Motel.

I wanted to hear Betty Spates testify, but it turned out she did not testify in Memphis due to her own long-held fears for her safety, though we did have the pivotal official deposition from her put into the record during the trial. Who was she? As a seventeen-year-old girl, she’d worked at Jim’s Grill; she was there on the fateful day, April 4, 1968. Pepper first interviewed her in Memphis in 1989. She told him, “There’s no doubt [Ray] did not kill Dr. King. I know that for a fact.”

After five years of investigating and developing a measure of trust, Pepper met with Mrs. Spates again. She revealed much, not only about that April 4, 1968, day at Jim’s Grill on South Main, but also about relationships you don’t hear about in the wells of Congress, when senators are fulminating in denial about issues pertaining to their African-American citizenry. Betty was numbered among this citizenry. The pretty seventeen-year-old had not only been a waitress at Jim’s Grill, she’d also been the young black concubine of the married Jowers. Jowers had a cot set up in back of the ground floor of Jim’s Grill for their assignations. She went to the grill around noon that day, went back toward the kitchen, calling Jowers. He came through the back door carrying a rifle. He did not appear to be under stress. She asked, “Loyd, what you doin’ with that gun?” He replied, “Gonna use it on you, if I catch you with a nigger.” She was black herself. That’s how sick it was, and is. To placate him, she told Jowers she would never do that. He told her he was kidding anyway. She told Pepper that Jowers broke the rifle down and took it into the grill. She did not follow him to see where.

Jowers had always discouraged her from coming around on Thursday, a day when his wife often stopped by. But she was there that day. Mrs. Jowers called her “whore” and told her to “Get out!” He came between them and told Mrs. Jowers to “Get out yourself,” then told Betty Spates to get behind the counter and go to work. Mrs. Jowers stalked out. This was around 4 P.M. Shortly thereafter Betty Spates went across the street to see some friends at another establishment. She came back around six. The three grill regulars weren’t around.

She noticed that the door between the eating area and the kitchen was tightly closed. Thinking this unusual, she opened the door and noticed that the door leading from the kitchen outside to the back was ajar. Just then, she heard what sounded like a loud firecracker. Seconds later, she saw Jowers rushing from the brush area through the door, carrying another rifle. She was convinced it was a different gun from the first one. She told Pepper that Jowers was “out of breath” and “as white as a ghost.” His hair was in disarray, the knees of his pants were muddy. When he caught his breath, he noticed her. He didn’t look angry, but frightened. He asked her, “You wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt me, would you, Betty?” He went to a counter inside, put the rifle on a shelf beneath the counter. Betty remembered the rifle—dark brown stock, a scope, a short barrel.

Betty Spates had gone on to say that a few months after the assassination, she was visited by three men in suits who offered her and her sisters new identities, relocation, money, for their own protection. She refused. Two of the men returned five years later, repeating the offer, which was again refused. Pepper had filed Betty Spates’s primary affidavit with the court; the Nashville Tennessean had published its contents. And now her statement was on the record.

After all seventy witnesses testified—providing evidence, among other things, of details of the Mafia contract, the army backup presence, army photographers on the roof of the fire station, the suppression of evidence, the failure of the Memphis Police Department to form the usual four-man security team (all consisting of black police officers) for my father, and the identity of Ray’s contact, Raul, which was confirmed by documents produced by former FBI agent Don Wilson—Judge Swearingen gave the case to the jury.

“Guilty,” I said in the phone call to Mother. “They came back guilty. Loyd Jowers was found guilty of conspiracy involving federal, state, and local government agencies.”

It was Wednesday, December 8, 1999. I also called Ami. “You must be relieved,” she said.

“I am. I really am…”

At the courthouse after the verdict, I was emotional; it was cathartic. There were things I wanted to say and I got them off my chest. At the press conference after the verdict, I said, “I’m appalled anybody would think we’re doing this for money. We’ve lost money doing this. We’ve had to spend money. This is being said… to distract people, get them off the issue. Anyone who sat through four weeks of testimony from seventy credible witnesses would know the truth’s here. The question is: What will be done with it? What will be learned?” I spoke what I felt—not good politics. Nobody to blame. Just tired of hearing we’d been “duped.”

I thought the verdict in the Jowers civil trial was historic, but the establishment pundits said I was wrong. By their decree it wasn’t history. Many experts kept repeating this: “It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything at all.”

If I kept repeating it, one day I might believe it, and one day after that, it might become fact. That’s the way it works, isn’t it? I started out saying, “I think that this is history being created,” as I left the courthouse. “This is the highest form of democracy, independent jurors rendering a verdict. So we’re very happy.” I believed it was history, a few scholars did not. The Emory professor told Memphis Commercial Appeal, “It certainly has made the Tennessee state judiciary look like a laughingstock.” He said the verdict would have “zero” impact on history. My eyes burned as I read this. Lewis Garrison, Jowers’s attorney, bemoaned how Ray’s current and former prosecutors convinced appellate judges to stop subpoenas that would’ve forced them to testify. “Why didn’t they come help me in this case?” he asked. Congressman John Lewis said, “Who participated in the conspiracy and why? Did law enforcement agencies? Did individuals at the state level in Tennessee? Did members of U.S. intelligence?”

“I think history is being created,” I said. “The history books aren’t going to be rewritten,” said Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, based at Columbia University. One of several “single gunman” theory authors wrote an editorial in the Washington Post: “To those unfamiliar with the case, the verdict seemed a culmination of a long effort by the King family to determine who was behind the assassination. To others who have followed the case, the Memphis trial was not about seeking the truth but a ploy to obtain judicial sanction for a convoluted conspiracy theory embraced by the King family.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if the professor at Emory and the “single gunman” theorist were protecting their life’s work, their credibility as historians and scholars, their own sanity, in a way. That is only natural. I understand that. I was protecting my family, also only natural. I hoped people might understand. After all, these “experts” had already written one version of history, with Ray as lone assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., and they’d been feted and awarded for it. Maybe I’m slow to catch on, but it seems they had a vested interest in history remaining the way they said it was. “It’s not history. It doesn’t mean anything.” I’d have to keep repeating that. Maybe one day it would become true.

Nobody in our family agreed with these scholars’ assessments. How is that we, my family and me, were disqualified from having a valid thought about a matter that impacted us and our lives and futures to a far greater degree than it impacted anyone else? We were said to be dupes of Pepper. I guess we are dupes all right, but of whom—well, that depends.

It was not history, they kept telling us. It meant nothing. It meant zero. Except neither Martin, nor Bernice, nor Yolanda, nor Mother, nor Isaac, nor my cousins agreed with those statements. Rather, they thanked me.

At any rate, the trial accomplished what we needed, closure. It would be nice if there was official acknowledgment, but we never thought this would happen. We did what we could do. We did something. If it isn’t history, if it means nothing, keep on repeating it; maybe it will come true. The truth, crushed to earth, will rise again. For now, a flawed man like myself, a son who lost his father, can sleep at night, look in the mirror, maybe move on. That’s all. That’s enough.

The Justice Department’s report on the new evidence we brought to them from Jowers and Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent who had found documents in Ray’s car that had phone numbers for Ray’s handler, Raul, and for the Atlanta office of the FBI, came in after the trial. My hope was they wouldn’t whitewash and attempt to discredit the whole trial, but I thought that was probably what would happen, and it did. In William Pepper’s new book, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr., he addresses the Justice Department’s report and gives a full account of the Jowers trial. (The full and complete trial transcript is available on the King Center’s Web site at www.thekingcenter.org.)

So we can say, “It’s not history, it’s not important, it means zero,” all we want, if it makes it easier for us to get by in the dayto-day. However, that negation won’t stop legitimate, credible future researchers. As authoritative as some of the King experts think they are, they are not the last word, or even the last King experts. More of them will come along. As the writer and poet Sterling Brown once said, “Strong men keep on coming.” History has a way of being relived by future generations who will address it in a new way; you get new perspectives, new people looking into things, frankly, people with less of a personal agenda. That’s the great thing about our Constitution, the First Amendment: you can’t stop people from looking at public records; you can seal them for fifty years, as Congress did, but sooner or later the time will pass, somebody will get curious. Can’t sweep it under the rug forever. While the public may not get the benefit of official sanction, the records will bear it out. Do the majority of Americans believe the official story? Well, it’s not like people are walking around asking, “Oh gosh, could this actually happen?” I believe whoever killed Daddy was aided and abetted. It was not a one-man deal. If that’s unimportant to the minutes of history, if that means nothing, then so be it. Then neither do we. We never have meant anything at all, except as the footstools for those who would make good names and a good living off of our misery. We didn’t pursue it for any other reason than to get the truth on the permanent record, so we could feel like we’d done everything we could’ve done. We owed Daddy that.

Some months after the trial was over, in March of 2000, we as a family got a good public thrashing in the pages of TIME magazine. A columnist who did not attend the trial wrote an opinion piece called “They Have a Scheme: Can Martin Luther King’s Heirs Handle the Truth?” In this article, he stated that the Justice Department was completing its review of new evidence coming out of the Jowers trial, and was about to conclude that my family’s “allegations” were not “credible” and provided no basis for criminal charges. “In other words, they are hogwash,” he said. He described it as “a wild-goose chase to satisfy a tragically deluded family.” He called the civil trial in Memphis “a fiasco,” said Jowers changed his story so many times “it ought to come with a version number, like computer software.” He then for some reason also impugned the character of Judge Joe Brown: “Ballistics testimony was provided by Judge Joe Brown, the TV judge, who has no expertise in the field.” As for the jury verdict ordering Jowers to pay $100 in damages to the King family, he continued, “King’s younger son Dexter exulted that the verdict was ‘the period at the end of the sentence’ as far as the King family is concerned, it’s their story and they’re sticking to it no matter what DOJ says… The real mystery is why King’s heirs, who more than anyone should want the truth, prefer to believe a lie.”

Did this columnist believe that Ray was the gunman? Why was his tone bitter toward us? Were we making it harder for him, somehow? Why did those who’d only written about the Civil Rights Movement believe one thing, while Rev. Lawson, Uncle Andy, and so many others who actually lived the Civil Rights Movement believe otherwise? And, last but not least, if it had been the columnist’s father who had been murdered, would he be so utterly dismissive, so protective of the status quo?

After the trial I was on a high. Mon Ami felt like she might get the man back she originally fell in love with, not the baggage of the past three and a half years. Don’t know how it ended up going toward questions of commitment again, but I guess, after all, that’s where it always goes. After the trial we went on retreat to the Four Seasons Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. I went through a lot of emotional changes, but the thing that made me open up to her was also the thing that made me withdraw. I’d created a wall around me and my emotions. I suppose that it’s been a real sob saga for me.

Finally she said, “This is it.” I looked at her and said, “Fine.”

After the trial I started to smile, to be more carefree. That’s when she started talking about whether it was a good idea to be committed. I knew Ami wanted more. She said, “I’m not going back to the same thing. Been there, done that, read the book, saw the movie, heard the CD.” It would be four years we’d been seeing each other in April 2000—four years, off and on.

I told her I wanted and needed to move out to L.A., to be alone to clear my head and heal, live out there for a while, to see if I wanted to live there permanently. Six months. Then I could make a move. I’d been drawn to the West Coast when I’d stayed with Michelle Jenkins in Pacific Palisades, back in 1992.

Mon Ami looked at me and said, “Oh? Is that right?”

I was moving to L.A. to start the new millennium. She said she’d help me find a place. “If that’s what you want to do, go on with your bad self,” she said. There was something about the way she said it. This is where she got off my merry-go-round. “We’ve come this far, but if you don’t feel we can commit yet, that’s cool,” she said. “I support you, when you’ve got an issue I’ll listen, if you ever feel you’re ready, you call me and if I’m available, I’m available. But I would doubt it…”

There had been periods of time when we broke up before— when the Ray meeting was coming up, where I didn’t want her along for that. I said I’d call her afterward. Four months later she still hadn’t heard from me. One time we were going off on vacation to an island. I was telling her to play it by ear two days before the plane took off, because I was all tied up with Pepper and all these other things. I asked her to call one day at five, and she did. I was going through something and barked at her, “I can’t deal with this and you right now,” and hung up. Yet we always hooked back up. Those days were gone. Frankly, after the trial, and the resort at the Four Seasons in Arizona, things threatened to get more serious between us. I talked to Mother and my siblings about it—about what would they think if I ended up asking her to marry me. She tried on engagement rings. The whole bit. But I kept saying to her, “I need the time away—in L.A.”

“After what I’ve been through with you, I guess I do too.”

Every couple of days early in January 2000, Mon Ami would prod me, even though she knew I was thinking of going away. “So are we still committed?”

“Um. Yes. We’re committed to each other’s well-being, for sure.”

“How does that feel?”

No answer.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah, I’m doing okay with it… feels… good.”

“Okay, then.”

In a few weeks, as my deadline for moving out to L.A. approached, at the end of January 2000, I said, “Ami, I’ve been thinking hard about this. I still have issues within myself I need to resolve. I don’t want to put you through any more hurt or pain; but I think I just need to make my move and follow this other thing and—”

“Where are you going right now?” she asked.

“Right now? Home.”

“Home? What home?” she asked.

That stung. I came over to her place the next day. Had a basket of flowers, this big bottle of wine, good intentions, standing at her front door. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“People are staring. Please let me in,” I said.

She let me in and said, “You can sit over there.” She sat across the room.

“Dexter, do you think that what we have is not normal?”

“… I don’t know.”

“The very thing you think you can’t have—you have it now, you’re living it, and when you’re not thinking about it, you’re doing good at it. Dexter… I love you.”

“… I don’t see why you would.”

“Because for some reason God has given me the ability to see not what other people want me to see, not what other people have told me, not what you want me to think about you. I see who you are and I’m hoping somehow I can help you let that out. I don’t know if anybody knows what they deserve. People know what they want. If L.A.’s what you want, so be it. Uncover the ghosts within yourself. You need to be okay with yourself in order to be okay with being with anybody else, or you will never see what you have in me, because you don’t truly see all of who you are.

“I don’t know what the future holds,” she said. “But I think what this has done is help you find a key to unlock a door that was closed a long time ago that can never be closed again. You can never go back. At the King Center, there is a centralized system now, things move quicker, easier. More corporations are involved. If the properties are sold, that’s only land. What the Center does can never be sold, because what you do is preserve the legacy. You have put together a structure to bring the state holiday commissions under your leadership. There are King Centers around the world that should be tied here. The future is good if you communicate the message. You have to be the one telling the story, if you want it told right. So, that’s it.”

“Ami, I’m going out to L.A. to live. Give me six months…”

Mon Ami looked at me levelly. “I ain’t gonna give you six seconds. Oh, I’ll go out there with you, help you find a place, help you set it up, always be your friend, but as far as waiting here for you— the hell with that. You ain’t getting six seconds after that, let alone six months. Let me tell you something else. You have gotten all that you are going to get, because I have given all I have to give to this particular type of relationship. I love you, I’ll always be there for you, as a friend, but I ain’t giving you six seconds if you move to L.A. You want me to wait another six months while you… what? Are you out your mind? No. No. No. It will not happen. No.”

“Well, then… Ami… I… no… It’s a shame you can’t be more understanding.”

“Now you’re really trying to get my goat, Dexter King,” she said. “You can’t sell I’m not understanding to anybody that knows our situation. You can’t give that away. If you move to L.A., Dexter, then you ain’t getting six more seconds from me, let alone six months. But know what? It’s okay. Because you will have lost the best thing that happened to you. Proverbs are full of stories about that, you fool. You would have lost the best thing that has happened to you, but that’s okay, because you know what? We’ll still be friends the rest of our lives.”