Growing Up King by Dexter Scott King, Ralph Wiley Read Free Book Online Page A

looking for them. He hit the ceiling when they were
     not where he had left them. This was the only time I ever saw him angry.
    “Where are my cigarettes!”
    Silence. Three young faces looking at each other, confirming each other’s impending doom.
    “Yolanda! Martin! DEXTER!” No nicknames or “bopys” put at the end of our given names meant serious business was at hand. Our
     answering “Sir?” was weak, as I recall. I think that was the first time, probably, all of us saw him truly upset, where he
     was obviously angry. Oh, he knew.
    Imagine now—you’re going to get your vice, not finding it where you left it, somebody has messed around with it. I’m not sure
     if he was addicted to nicotine; to a degree he was, wasn’t a pack-a-day smoker, but he was accustomed to smoking feeling like
     a diversion to him, a diversion that in his mind may have been relaxing. I know how I am when somebody moves basic stuff in
     my domain and I can’t find it. Imagine if he’s in a fix, needs nicotine, can’t find it, going through a hard time. I’m sure
     I would be angry too. At this moment I wasn’t curious to see how much angrier my father could get. I can still see his contorted
     expression as he stormed out his bedroom and came down the hall looking for us. “Where are my cigarettes!? Who took my carton
     of cigarettes?”
    It was obvious what had happened. We started running—down the hall, out of the back of the house; we were so guilty. My mother
     always said that Daddy didn’t believe in spanking, but she also said if he had spent more time around us, he might have changed
     his mind.
    This was an example of him spending more time around us. We were thinking we could do whatever we wanted and he’d understand.
     That’s the only time I saw real anger when I was there with him. I’ve seen footage after the fact, and I’ve heard things from
     scholars, where something made him upset, or angry. But that’s the only time I actually saw it. I never wanted to see it again,
     either. It was some time before Martin and I got back into his good graces, but by bedtime, Yoki was sitting with him, sniffling
     apologetically, holding his fingers in her hands.
    My maternal grandparents were Obadiah Scott (everyone called him Obie) and Bernice McMurry Scott. My maternal grandfather’s
     parents were Jeff and Cora Scott. Jeff Scott ended up owning 450 acres of black dirt, rich, black-belt Alabama farmland outside
     Marion, Alabama, seat of Perry County, some eighty miles south by southwest of Birmingham, eighty miles due west of Montgomery,
     cheek by jowl with Dallas County, where the county seat was Selma. Jeff Scott was a preacher’s steward in the African Methodist
     Episcopal Church. He had thirteen children with great-grandmother Cora, and after she died, at age forty, great-grandfather
     Jeff married Fannie Burroughs and had twelve more children before he died at sixty-eight in a car wreck. My maternal great-grandfather,
     Martin McMurry, was a mixture of black, white, and Native American. He was two years of age when slavery ended.
    My grandfather Obie and my grandmother Bernice awaited us when we made our summer car trips down to the family farm near Marion,
     four hours from Atlanta. Going to Marion was like an outing. We’d always drive. It took several hours, so we got a chance
     to all be together in the car, a Plymouth station wagon later, but before that, during my father’s lifetime, a Chevy, a blue
     Chevy, which we still have. A ’65 Impala. The green Pontiac Bonneville was the car he got before—before Memphis. But we still
     have that blue Impala. I remember riding to the farm in it.
    My granddaddy Scott was a nice man. He’d let us do anything we wanted, mostly, including driving his old three-gear pickup
     truck. We liked him for this. I hate to say it because it sounds so trivial, but he ran a store, like the old combination
     gasoline “filling” station–small grocery store. Candy and