Growing Up King by Dexter Scott King, Ralph Wiley

The Lord
     will make an accountin’.”
    Now, does that make sense to you? It didn’t to me back then. The Lord was up in the sky, and Granddaddy was cheated on earth.
     I didn’t understand. Yet he seemed to want for nothing.
    It was busier than you might imagine for the country, or for what I had always thought the country would be like—everybody
     lolling about being indolent with a piece of hay stuck in their teeth. Oh no. He worked at a sawmill, bought a truck, hauled
     logs and timber, cut hair on the weekends. He later bought a sawmill that was burned down two weeks later by racist whites.
     My grandmother had borne her children—my mother, Coretta, her sister, Edythe, and their brother, Obie. They tended crops when
     they grew up, hired out to pick cotton at harvest. My grandfather used to say he wouldn’t tolerate laziness in his house.
     When we visited, we worked. We didn’t go on vacation. We all had chores. When I say it was mixed work and play, what I really
     mean is on one hand, we thought we were going on vacation, because we were going away from home, but the truth is, we were
     working harder there than anywhere else. Granddaddy Scott could soften his approach; my grandmother was always strict. But
     they were both all about work. My grandfather would come in at 6 A.M. . “Y’all get up! Work to do!”… “We did it yesterday.”… “Do it every day. You need to be up. Open that shade. Let the Lord’s
     light in here!”
    Obie Scott was old school, with the ethic of: You work your life through, and if you’re not up doing something, you are wasting
     time, your life has no purpose. So we didn’t really mind. We wanted to sleep later, don’t get me wrong. And we kind of knew
     if we wanted to go back to bed, we could just turn the light off and he wasn’t coming back to check. That was Martin’s move,
     to jump up and say, “Yessir!” and then plop back down after my grandfather left the room.
    My grandmother, Nana, as we called her, wanted us to participate in the process: help her prepare the food, help her do chores,
     which we didn’t mind, typically. We learned a lot. Like milking cows. Not something on my list to learn how to do, but I did
     learn. Granddaddy would take Martin to the slaughterhouse. I don’t remember going; Martin never had much to say about it.
     Grand-daddy owned cows and hogs and chickens and everything; they somehow became cut-up slices and slabs of meat; he’d send
     us back to Atlanta with what seemed like a whole cow or pig, cut up. We’d have six months’ supply of sirloin, T-bone, ham,
     and bacon. We never wanted for meat, not as long as he kept livestock. He also ran a hauling business; Martin and I learned
     to drive a standard shift with him. “Drive, boy,” is all he would say, and I ground gears and killed the engine misapplying
     the clutch before I got the feel. That was fun. I didn’t have my driver’s license, but on those country dirt roads, I could
     play around with his pickup or tractor.
    It was a diversion from city life, going to the country to do things not available in the city. Even my mom, even though she
     was a parent and concerned, would relax the standards. I don’t remember my dad being in that setting as much. When he did
     go, he almost always disappeared.
    Sometimes my mother’s sister, Edythe Scott Bagley, her husband, Arthur, and their son, Arturo, would visit the farm with us.
     Uncle Obie, Mother’s brother, was always around to help and support us as well. In later years, his wife, Alberta, became
     an invaluable member of our family. Arturo is actually probably two years younger than Bernice, and that is the only cousin
     we had on that side of the family—the only first cousin. Now, we had all kinds of more distant cousins. That was the other
     special thing about “the country.” My great-grandfather had twenty-five children. We were literally related to most of the
     county. We would meet new people on a