A Middle School Memory of MLK
Excerpt from “The Adventures of MysticKid on Planet Earth” by SAWiltse
A guiding star on the Earth’s dark horizon flickered and went out and with it all the sunrises that might have been. A single photo captured his dying. The shepherd lay murdered at the feet of his flock, who all pointed accusingly somewhere off into the night. From every broadcast and every newspaper his voice still spoke of “mountaintops,” as if he had quoted that scripture in the throes of some terrible premonition. Somehow he knew there would be no “promised land” for him. Martin Luther King was dead. From all accounts, he would never have wanted any American city to burn as tinder for his funeral pyre. Yet burn many did.
Who had known there were so many ghettos, or that a place called “Watts” even existed?
The struggles of the civil rights movement had been a distant thing someplace else. We’d looked upon King with suspicion, as if he were just grandstanding somehow. Why was he stirring up such trouble all the time? Could there really have been something so wrong with our nation, if we’d never heard much about it? But now his death made the truth of it all too clear. No one ever again could say that they had not known of a murdered black man in America, not now, not ever again.
Leslie Brown and her mother were the only colored people I’d ever been aware of before going to Hackett. Once the novelty of it wore off they were just like anybody else, aside from the fact she had a parakeet and her mother liked to make their house stinky cooking up some weird, awful green stuff called ‘collards.’ But wasn’t I different than everybody else, too? Wasn’t everybody different in some way or other? Where were they now? Was Leslie okay?
For the first time I noticed just how many dark faces passed me in the halls and stairways at Hackett. Where once there had been a kind of defiant boredom about them, there was now pain, anger, confusion. Who could blame them for feeling resentful. But what could one say that could make it any better, that wouldn’t bring up other very awkward truths. We braced for a revolt that never came to our safe, quiet, all-white ‘academically talented’ classrooms.
Why didn’t the shabbiest kids, or even at least the hungriest ones, demand their right to the advantages we had always had, and had always taken for granted? “Finish your plate for the starving Armenians,” I’d always been told by my loving grandmother. Were these kids Armenians? But how does my getting too full feed someone else? That was a question neither Sunday school nor confirmation class ever answered.
