01.18.10
Babysitting Martin Luther King, Jr.
So…. my grandmother babysat Dr. Martin Luther King. Of course, we’re talking many decades ago. In honor of this Martin Luther King Day, I thought it would be fitting to find out more about the man - well, when he was a boy.
When I called my grandmother to ask her about it, I was apparently interrupting her as she celebrated MLK day by watching a movie about him. She wasn’t really eager to talk about her recollections, mainly because she says they are few and far between.
“That was so long ago, baby, I don’t remember,” she said, shrugging it off.
She is 97, so I guess I can’t expect her to remember everything. Still, the journalist in me wouldn’t let it go.
“But what was he like, Grandmother?”
“He was nice,” she finally said. “He ate up all the biscuits.”
Funny considering that my dad, as a student at Morehouse College, had his own encounter with Dr. King over a breakfast table at a mutual friend’s home in Memphis. My dad mainly remembers watching Dr. King eat a plate of bacon and eggs (the man’s wife wasn’t home, and it was all he knew how to cook). What is it with Dr. King, my family, and food?
While my grandmother acknowledges Dr. King’s legacy, she doesn’t understand my interest. She thinks I’m making a big fuss over nothing. This despite the fact she played host to little Martin Luther King when his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., a minister, dropped him off at my great-grandparents’ house in LaGrange, Georgia, when he traveled there to speak at the city’s black First Baptist Church. I can only imagine little Martin Luther King, Jr., picking blueberries out of my great-grandmother’s garden. My great-grandmother used them to make her delicious blueberry pies (my grandmother does remember those).
Still, my grandmother’s memories of Dr. King remain fuzzy, and she’s fine with that.
“I know he’s a famous man,” she says. “I think he (was) nice…(but famous or not) everyone ought to think well of themselves. If you don’t, you don’t need to be living.”
