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It might have been a hundred years ago for all people spoke of it. Dr. King's sad knowing eyes looked out from every fan in church when I was a child but his name was rarely mentioned: not in church, not in school, not at home. All I ever heard about was Elvis.  

--Taming It Down

I've been thinking about those lines from my first book a lot the past few days, as I struggled to write something worthwhile about growing up in the city of Dr. King's death.

There's a lot to write about Memphis that has nothing to do with Dr. King. The myth of Memphis depends on who you are and what you've heard: Beale Street or Graceland, the Mississippi and the Handy blues. But when I was growing up there these things were all very far removed from daily life.

Far more pressing was the food – getting enough, getting it right, getting it good. I don't eat like that anymore. I guess I know better now. I know that Wonder Bread is neither a wonder nor bread and Kool-Aid is disgusting. I know that ham is a slab full of heart attack, that catfish are bottom feeders, and greens don't have to be boiled to within an inch of their life to be edible.

Because of all this wisdom, my children have never tasted a hush puppy or a canned mackerel patty, let alone a chitlin or the jowl of a hog. On the other hand, they've never tasted Tops pit barbeque either, and their young lives are the poorer for it.

There's the heat to write about, and the Pink Palace museum, and school trips to fake Indian places, and the great river, which we saw often, but never really touched. There is the great mystery of the dog track, a place in West Memphis which seemed to swallow grown-ups whole on Saturdays. And there are long, glazed Sundays in church to dissect; Sundays which made me a writer, because the only way to get through six or seven hours of being told you are going to hell is to go inside your head.

In fact, as I sit down to write about growing up in Memphis in the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr., I find it difficult, because that shadow seemed simply not to exist.  

There was no national day of remembrance on his birthday back then, and Stevie Wonder had yet to raise our consciousness with his wonderful song. The radio songs we sang along to came via the Jackson Five and Roberta Flack and Helen Reddy belting I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar. 

Beale Street was a place best avoided, garbage men were just garbage men, and the Lorraine Motel was some rundown little place where poor people lived, people poorer than us.   

Maybe I knew that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot there, maybe I didn't – I don't remember. No one made a big deal about it in my circle. We never went there to look at the place, not intentionally. Maybe we drove past on the way to somewhere else now and then.

I don't know if it was my family or Memphis or black people or America who wanted to forget the brilliant struggle and its painful aftermath during those years, but forget we seemed to.  

And yet, Dr. King, his life and his death have everything to do with who I was and who I have become.   

In some ways, I was born to integrate. I arrived a southern child in the late spring of 1964, the very eve of Freedom Summer. One month before Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner took their fateful journey in Mississippi. Two months before President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Ten full years after Brown.

My mother was not in the city that April morning; she was in Baltimore, watching her marriage crumble, preparing to give birth to twins. We got back to her hometown of Memphis four months after the assassination and settled in as best we could.

That fall, my mother walked us down the street to the nearest elementary school, Vollentine. Ten years earlier, in 1958, the parents of little Gerald Young, aged eight, had tried and failed to enroll him at the school, then all-white. But a 1960 federal lawsuit led to a peaceful integration of the Memphis public schools. Memphis leaders like to pride themselves on being the "Mid-south" – not the deep.  By the time we arrived on the steps of Vollentine Elementary, my mother was able to walk her children right through those heavy wooden doors without a word. Nobody brought out lemonade, but nor did anyone stand glaring in the doorway, hearts and arms crossed. Nobody called us names or unleashed the dogs. Nobody threw rocks at the car.  

From kindergarten on, I sat in the classroom with children both white and black and thought little of it – the sitting together, I mean, not the racial differences. We weren't that advanced. Some people were black and some people were white (in Memphis, that pretty much summed it up), and it was glaringly apparent to everyone that the distinction meant something important.  

But whatever it meant, it wasn't enough to keep us apart. My two best friends in elementary school were black girls, which seemed normal and reasonable, but I was friends with many white children in my class, too. Betsy and I walked home together, though she stopped at a nicer house. Denise and I practiced our songs for the school talent show on the sidewalk outside her house, though she never invited me inside. Our worlds were neither separate nor of a piece, but for the most part, we all just got along.           

It was a golden age of integration, sweet but brief. It was a moment when America said, "Okay, let's try," and then quickly, "Maybe not."