CHAPTER 6

Soul Survivor

For the next several months, Bernice would stare at pictures in our family photo albums, then tilt her head toward me birdlike and ask, “I wonder who’s next?” She also developed these notions in her mind that she was supposed to be this perfect person now. Which you cannot ever be. It was like a setup, really. My father was the standard for all of us to live by and live up to. He became the standard because he was so exceptional in so many ways. But how can you live up to the standard that by definition is so rare, so exceptional, that it is only met by a once-in-a-lifetime human being?

My mother says that when Bernice was born, my father said Bernice would be the most well-adjusted. Bernice articulated for me these unspeakable feelings of dread. I couldn’t get mad at her or impatient with her, for I’d had the same feelings. First Daddy. Then Uncle A.D., who had taught Bernice to swim. Then Big Mama. Bunny said she started to think that death was after my family. She’d sit there on the living room couch, look at pictures, and try to figure out who was next.

I myself was preoccupied with death for a long time. And Bunny’s preoccupation helped drive mine; I thought about her when I took a job at the Hanley’s Bell Street Funeral Home.

I ended up working there, in 1977—at the funeral home that had buried my father. I was afraid of death, so maybe I needed to get closer to it, put myself in an environment where I could better understand it. Instead of running from it, run to it. And that was my way of addressing my fear of death, getting a job working in the funeral home. My Uncle A.D. had conducted services with the same funeral home once upon a time; I didn’t know that until I got the job.

At that time, Hanley’s buried many members of Ebenezer. The proprietors were members of Ebenezer, and my grandfather encouraged patronizing them when the time came. They’d buried members of our family back to Granddaddy’s father-in-law. It was a big deal for me to drive the hearse. I was a mortician’s apprentice. I was afraid at first but kept reminding myself I was doing it to overcome my fear of death, and to explore my interest in mortuary science, so I handled the corpses and watched as my bosses filled them with fluids and dressed them so that their families would say they “looked good.” Seeing them in the pre-embalmed state, I knew better. Death was ugly. And noisy. Gases would build up in the corpses, and escape through every orifice. Sometimes through the mouth. You haven’t lived until you’ve been alone in a mortuary with a corpse sounding like it wants to breathe again. Once there was a ripping thunderstorm, dark as night in the middle of the day, and the other employees were out on call. I was alone, having a sandwich for lunch, with the squeaky ceiling fan my only company. I heard a boom from behind the door leading back to the embalming room. A tree limb banging against the shutters, or shutters slamming against the building, I thought. I took another bite of my sandwich. Boom-bam… creeeeak. For all I know, that sandwich is still on the counter. Unless whatever made that sound came out and ate it. I’m kidding, but it was serious then. I was standing outside under the awning in the rain when the hearses returned. My bosses at Hanley’s had a good laugh. The experience of working in the mortuary did help me overcome my fear of death.

Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, was part of our survival. I think we were part of his too—in a political sense. Traditionally, members of the King family went to every Democratic National Convention. Democratic honchos hadn’t forgotten the presidential election in 1960, after my father’s arrest and imprisonment, and the hand my grandfather played in the election of Senator John F. Kennedy as president. So we were invited, on the off chance that something funny might wind up happening again one day. We were invited in ’72 in Miami and ’76 in New York. So we went. He never took any credit for it, but Granddaddy was also helpful to Jimmy Carter’s being elected president in 1976.

Governor Carter, in the run-up to the campaign, had made a public statement that almost destroyed his candidacy before it began. In Atlanta’s Central City Park, he made an innocuous statement about ethnic purity that some interpreted as racist. It’s not what he meant, but it came across that way. My grandfather bailed him out. Granddaddy stood up at a rally, supported him, and said, “This is a good man, so don’t hold that misunderstanding against him. Don’t try to repeat what he said, he had a different context.” He repeated his confidence in Mr. Carter from the pulpit at Ebenezer, and the rest is history. Some inside the African-American and Jewish communities were getting ready to blister Mr. Carter behind the “ethnic purity” statement taken out of context. If those two communities hadn’t voted for Carter in numbers, he wouldn’t have won the 1976 presidential election.

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.

Later on, I had a conversation with the late Lee Atwater, Republican National Committee chairman. Everybody was asking him why a country and blues guitar player was managing George Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988. I talked to Atwater at Bush’s inauguration. I happened to sit next to him. He happened to start talking. He said musicianship transcended expediencies one made for politics, he said politics was just his job. Music was his love. Being a musician helped him as a political strategist in terms of understanding how things harmonize. Anybody you talk to who’s a musician can relate, from whatever point on the political compass. He seemed quite anxious for me to understand this point about his political efforts.

I was always exposed to music. Mother made sure of that. I played trumpet. Then I learned to play the bass, electric bass guitar, a popular instrument in many Baptist churches. In fact, most popular musical acts, ones with African-American talent certainly, came up out of the church, one way or another, since time began in this country. One of the members of an R&B group called Brick gave me bass lessons at Johnson’s Music Studio, which was run by Cleophus Johnson, who also served as band director at Morris Brown College. I would get together with guys in the neighborhood, and then we were gigging here and there, but for some reason I did not stay with it. I think part of it was again the focus, a lack of concentration, of focusing on getting my chops in order, playing R&B and Top 40, mostly R&B, and, of course, when I was playing the trumpet, that was all kinds of music. Mother insisted that we all take piano lessons growing up, but I didn’t do as well with that. I didn’t stick it out, and of course now I wish I had, for the sake of composition and also reflection and private solace. Ah, most grown-ups say they wished they’d stuck with the piano lessons their parents gave them, don’t they? My approach to music may not have had to do with my passion but may have been related to my strange inability to concentrate, or to stay focused, to sit there and grind it out, to practice and do the lessons. Whatever— music was my one great love.

Even at that young age, I was an old head in what was soon coming to be, the hip-hop nation. Just what is that? I would call it a phenomenon, which first was manifested audibly by the rappers up in places like the Bronx in the late ’70s and early ’80s— Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, Afrika Bambaataa.

Then in the ’80s the explosion came, where all children had to have “rhyming skills,” the ability to mimic drums or other musical instruments, and also to tell a story in a metered, rhythmic, even poetic way, even though the emotions they expressed were not allways about love. How could they be? These were the children of the generation of African Americans who had had the hope let out of them like the air out of a pricked balloon, with the assassination of Daddy and other people who seemed to be just trying to help them. This was the end result of all that.

This was music. Hip-hop culture later came to embrace everyone and everything from Lauryn Hill, formerly of the group the Fugees, to certain hairstyles, to clothing, to a general sensibility of life. I think that sensibility of hip-hop has to do with honesty at all costs.

Of course, I couldn’t quite put it together like that back then, what was coming, in the form of this new hip-hop culture and sensibility. Neither could I even begin to imagine how it would affect me, and all of us, as Americans, or even that it was coming at all. At the time I couldn’t see that it was coming, or that it would also represent and encompass me. Not just yet I couldn’t.

In life, as in music, sometimes, when you’re improvising, you just… let it happen.

One night, long ago, when Daddy was still alive, we went to Yolanda’s elementary school for an event called “Great American Music Night,” where different kinds of “American” music were celebrated. Only they didn’t play any African-American music: no blues, gospel spirituals, R&B, jazz—nothing. My father said it made him sad. It was supposed to be an American celebration.

They ended the program by playing “Dixie.”

It’s funny, but I hardly remember that night at all.