Prologue

Memory is not always to be trusted, yet memory is all we have, where we all live. I’ve learned memory is all that can be trusted, in the end.

For any five witnesses to an event, there are five versions of what happened. Which is closest to truth? In this book I trust my memories, and those of my siblings, my mother, friends, and family members. I looked at documents, notes, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, books, film documentaries, and other references, the better to refresh and confirm this collective memory. I searched myself as well. But I also know no book that has been written has captured how much I loved my father in Atlanta when I was six, or how I felt at seven, when he was killed in Memphis.

There is no polite way to bust out of prison. Jailbreak! is how it felt after the verdict came in at the civil trial of Loyd Jowers in Memphis in December of 1999. I didn’t care about Jowers’s role in my father’s murder on April 4, 1968. I didn’t care about conspiracies, or anybody going to prison. I cared about getting out of prison. I’d faced up to what had happened to us. Pope John Paul once said that the quest for freedom is one of the great dynamics of human history. Such a quest can take many forms. I went back to Atlanta. I thought back as I drove past the National Historic Site, past 501 Auburn Avenue, the house where my father was born, past Freedom Hall complex where his remains lie in a crypt in the plaza of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change.

The plaza stands next to old Ebenezer Baptist Church, at the corner of Jackson Street and Auburn Avenue, Northeast. “Kodak products available here,” reads a sign. I had pictures in my memory. My grandfather’s leathery hands lifted in supplication. My grandmother at the organ. Daddy’s ascending voice. Gunshots in the pulpit. The old church is a relic, for tourists who can’t see or hear what I see and hear in my memory. The new Ebenezer Baptist Church is on the opposite side of Auburn Avenue. A sculpture of a black man holding a baby up toward the heavens stands in an amphitheater on the grounds of the National Park Service’s King Visitor Center. The sculpture was inspired by the scene from Roots: “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself,” Omoro Kinte said to baby Kunta; Kunta, as an adult, repeated it to his daughter, Kizzy, in Alex Haley’s epic tale. It reminded me of Daddy and me. His marble crypt stands in the middle of a reflecting pool on the grounds of the King Center. The inscription is simple:

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
1929–1968.

“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”

Amen, Daddy, I thought. Inside the King Center hangs a framed newspaper article:

King Children Reflect on the Values Their Father Taught

Hours later I was at the Four Seasons at Troon North in Scottsdale, Arizona, preparing to bring in the new millennium, Y2K. A photo was taken. For years I’d looked in the mirror and seen my father’s face trapped in mine. Now my face relaxed. Free at last. Was I? Were we? I go back now, in memory, to try and find the answers.