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Waking-Part 2: "What did he expect?" [1]

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Date: 2023-05-16

I am not man-made.

Which is to say, I was raised by my mother. My father was gone by the time I was three. After that, his life was unencumbered by silly burdens like visitation or child support. I have no childhood memories of him. To paraphrase the Temptations, when he left, all he left us was alone. So, from as early as I can remember, the love, guidance and survival I would get would come only from my mother.

I’m not sure what my actual earliest memory is, but I know the first memory I can pin down to an actual date. It was April 4th, 1968. I had been playing outside by myself (unsupervised) in the neighborhood of our small city after I got home from Head Start. (It was the 1960’s.) Probably around six p.m., my tummy clock started going off. It was getting close to dinner time, so I went inside. My mother would probably be getting ready to head out to her (second) job as a waitress.

When I went in, my mother was seated at our crappy ceramic-topped kitchen table. (Now it would be called “mid-century modern.” Then we just called it ugly.) My mother was listening to the radio. And she was crying. I don’t recall ever seeing my mother cry before that. (Although I am sure my father made her cry many times.)

I don’t recall if I sat down with her or tried to blend into the wallpaper. But I do remember what was on the radio. In Memphis today, an assassin gunned down Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Reverend King was 39 years old. He had four small children—the youngest of whom was my age.

I could read at age four, but I didn’t spend a lot of time with the New York Times. I did not then know anything about Martin Luther King, Jr. other than what I was hearing. I didn’t know that he had been putting his life on the line for civil rights since 1955. I didn’t even know what civil rights were or that there was any reason why anyone would need to put their life on the line for them. I didn’t know that Dr. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize (or even what that was). I was totally unaware that he had written several incredibly significant books and several of the greatest speeches ever composed in the English language. I didn’t know that he had led hundreds of thousands of people in a march on Washington for freedom.

I didn’t even know that he was black.

All I did know was that he was a “doctor,” he was a reverend, he had kids my age, and that he was murdered. And I knew that my mother was crying. Hard.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote that “When I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put away my childish things.” In my child’s mind, I couldn’t understand why someone—anyone—would kill a doctor. I was worried what would happen to his kids. What would they do? And, truth be told, I was worried what would happen to me? The world was a scary place. Fathers leave. Reverends get murdered. And my mother is crying so hard. Will she ever stop? Will we be okay? Ever?

I don’t recall ever discussing it with my mother. (That would have required talking about feelings.) But I watched as much TV about it as I could and read what I could find to try to understand and process it better. What I came away with was that he was just a young man who had fought to make the world more fair. And that he was black. And that he was murdered because of those two things.

Very soon after that, I was getting a haircut in the little barber shop next to my Pepere’s “package store.” (That’s southern Massachusetts lingo for my grandfather’s liquor store.) I loved going to the barber shop. My Pepere was revered in the community, and I got to hang out with the men who congregated there. I looked up to these men. It made me feel that for a small time, I was in the man club. And after my haircut, I would get a handful of pistachios for a nickel from a gumball machine.

My Pepere deposited me in the barber shop and told the barber what I needed. Then he went back to his store. I remember that, at some point, the conversation turned to Dr. King. Initially, I thought I was going to get to share some of the things I had learned about him. That I would wow them with my knowledge like 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple courts. But the conversation didn’t go that way. I only remember a few isolated details, but I quickly understood that—unlike for my mother—this wasn’t a tragedy to them. Someone was saying that he was a “communist” (a concept I didn’t have at the time) as if that explained the whole thing.

But the thing that stuck with me the most was when another man said, “Well, I’m not saying he deserved it or anything like that, but, really, what did he expect? I mean what did he expect?” The murmured approvals let me know that he had pretty well summed up what they were all feeling.

That day, I didn’t hear anyone talk about his widow or four children. There was not a word said about social justice. I didn’t share any of the things I had learned about Dr. King. Instead, at age four, I learned something new. Something about the world I lived in and the people all around me that I thought were “good people.” Even though I couldn’t articulate what my new knowledge was at the time, I knew I was living in a world—in a country—where a man could be murdered for trying to help others and the best people of my community would only ask “What did he expect?”

At age four, I certainly wasn’t woke, but the murder of Dr. King had already disturbed my slumber.

Next: Waking, Part 3 – My very own Mr. Tibbs.

Previous Parts:

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/16/2169006/-Waking-Part-2-What-did-he-expect

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