Daddy King

for Amy Biehl High School



Somewhere around your 12th year,

you doubted the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ

out loud in Sunday School in my church.



How embarrassing,

that what I took for the rebellious snark

of a P.K. flexing his untouchability…

was merely the beginning of your precociousness.



This would not be your last premonition.



My daddy was a slave,

so I sent you to the fields

to see what it feels like.



I am unsure how that changed you,

but you became a newspaper delivery station assistant manager at 13.



Morehouse College at 15.

Ordained minister at 19.

You were in a hurry, as though you knew

you were on dead

line.



I married you to your beloved mezzo-soprano at 24.

Later you would marry yourself to our movement at 26.

Both in Birmingham…



It was no honeymoon. I remember…

the day you wed Corretta

you spent your first night together in a funeral home, just like the last time she'd see you.


Alabama hotels didn’t welcome Black couples,

as though Black love shouldn’t exist,

as though there is only one way to bed Black bodies…



Two years later,

They bombed your home with my one year old grand baby Yolanda inside… and this wouldn’t be the last time.



You had just become who you were going to become.



One boycott under your belt,

wondering how the hell people get so worked up about transportation.



Bunch and I began to worry,

The first time your mother and I told you to quit the movement,

was after that woman stabbed you with a letter opener at your book signing.



We didn’t know then

That this wouldn’t be the last attempt on your life,

that we only had ten years of you left.



That they’d jail you over 30 times,

and we’d give God the praise every time

those racist police officers did not disappear you.



It was hard not to believe that we were a family of miracles,

until it became painfully apparent

that in the final accounting, Lady Luck

is inevitably reimbursed, by bullets being burst;



That broken hearts always break even,

even when broken laws don’t.



The last time you stood in our living room,

You told us there could be a serious attempt on your life in Memphis…

We already knew this from car radios

and overhead whisperings in cafeterias…

You simply confirmed that was gospel

and not just gossip.



You told us not to “worry over any of this,”

that the work must continue “no matter what happens now”

that your “involvement is too complete to stop”

that sometimes…



“…I do want to get away for a while, go someplace with Coretta and the kids and be Reverend King and family, having a few quiet days like any other Americans. But I know it’s too late for any of that now. And if mine isn’t to be a long life, Mother, Dad, well then I respect that, as you’ve always taught us to respect it as God’s will.”



I was 69, the first time I doubted God’s will.



Before your departure,

We joked



about the persistent charge that you, on the inside,

were more Communist than Baptist.



And that was some church folk,

and I always considered it the dumbest thing

anybody ever said about any person in America.



And then you were gone.



Shortly before you were crucified on a balcony in Memphis,

you and A.D. called your mother and I joking

about how life on the road weighed heavy on your wastlines’…



You asked Mom to have your favorite BBQ ready when you and your brother got back to Atlanta.



I’m told,

the last thing you said…was a request.

Ben Branch, the saxophonist traveling with you and your brother…was just below you as you stepped on that balcony,



out into the sunshine for the last time…



And you asked him to play your favorite hymn

at that evening’s event.



Precious Lord, take my hand

Lead me on, let me sta-and

I am tired, I'm weak, I am worn

Through the storm, through the night

Lead me on to the li-ight

Take my ha-and, precious Lor-ord

Lead me home



You were not the only person to die at the Lorraine Motel that day.



The switchboard operator at the Motel

who made the emergency call,

suffered a heart attack during the panic…



She was the owner's wife.



Your brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King

dead a year after you, same age, “accidental drowning.”



Maybe?



He had heart problems,

we all had heart problems after you.



Five years after A.D.

A 23 year-old man broke our Sundays in half

for good.



Shot your mother,

my beloved Bunch

while seated at the organ

playing a hymn…

after shouting

“You are serving a false god”



And I almost believed him.



They wanted to give him the (electric) chair…

so did I,



but I was tried by the things you taught me son.



Your legacy,

albeit more revision than resurrection

is one of love

and loss.



Besides, our family

has endured enough death,

So I had the court re-sentence him



to life.



© Hakim Bellamy Monday, January 20th, 2020