Morning at the Lorraine Motel

Growing up White when MLK was murdered

My son and I had come to Memphis for the music. He and I had been linked that way even when he was a boy and now as a young teenager. We talked about musicians and songwriters and guitar licks and drum fills through an eclectic rush of songs from Dave Brubeck to Hendrix to the Beatles to Slipknot. We played a curated playlist all the way down I-55 from Chicago to Tennessee on our way to Sun Records and Graceland. We had vague plans to stop at the Lorraine Motel, certainly, but that wasn’t our main purpose for the road trip. It was music.

We made our way to Sun Records, walked on the studio floor where Cash, Dylan, U2 and so many others had been. A small, humble space dripping in music history. At Graceland, we walked the grounds and the house, saw the tear in the pool table fabric. Elvis was said to have ripped it in an argument with friends. There are many stories that explain that damage, but that was the story most told. The evening after our first day, we walked Beale Street, heard the music coming out of the bars into the night air. My son was too young at the time to venture inside, but we took it all in. Later we ended up in a used record store where the owner told us about the time Jimmy Page walked in and bought a couple of vinyls. He signed a Led Zeppelin II album that was now hanging on the wall. The owner said it was worth over a $1000, but it wasn’t for sale.

The next day, before traveling back north, we walked from our motel to the Lorraine, the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The old motel is now a museum, but it is as if history had stopped that day. The museum, you may be familiar, has preserved that terrible day in a time capsule. The motel looks the same. In the parking lot there are cars circa 1968. It feels like a movie set, without the artificial essence one might experience on a Hollywood lot. This was the real Lorraine Motel. This is where King bled to death. Right there, I remember pointing, on that balcony. Right there.

I grew up in the 1960s. I was too young to be an all-out hippie, but old enough to be, I thought, somewhat aware, to understand, at some level. I remember the morning after Robert Kennedy was shot, how I stood with my classmates in front of the elementary school, one of my friends telling our cluster of schoolmates that he had died. JFK’s death was still fresh. I was a 2nd grader at the time. Our teacher cried in our classroom. We were sent home early.

Of course, King died only two months before RFK, but I don’t recall it as starkly as Kennedy’s death. I wondered about that for years. Why isn’t it as seared in my memory as JFK’s or his brother’s? And I thought about this again in Memphis with my son, as I stood at the door of the Lorraine Motel.

We walked the grounds, we took the tour, not only of the motel but the former rooming house on Main Street across the road where James Earl Ray fired his rifle. From that former bathroom window, I could see the target sight lines to the balcony. A chill swept over me.

Through much of the morning, my son and I remained silent, a kind of reverence had overcome us. An ugly, terrible history had been summoned to our present-day consciousness. Still, I couldn’t recall my own experience. I was 12 years old on the day King died. I knew then he was someone important, but did I know why? Did I understand? Even at a younger age I knew the death of an American president was scary, especially so for a little boy watching my mother and grandmother cry in front of the television set as the president’s son, a boy just a few years younger than myself saluted his father’s casket. And Robert Kennedy’s death is also a closely held memory, that morning at the school and how my heart sunk as if someone I knew, like a cousin or an uncle had been taken from me in a most violent act.

But King’s death was different.

On the ride out of Memphis that night, the Lorraine Motel fresh on our minds, my son asked about King and what I remembered? How old were you? What was it like? How did you hear about it? Was I sad?

I tried to answer as best I could, and possibly, even most certainly why I only could assume what that day and my emotions might have been. I was embarrassed to say that I couldn’t recall. I should have recalled. I should have been intimately connected to those emotions, the same as I was with a dead president and his brother. But as I tried to make sense of what I had not recollected, what emotions might never have been evoked, I began to cry, the silent tears of a young boy growing up in a very White neighborhood of Irish and Germans, a young boy who eventually attended a large suburban high school of some 900 students, of which only six were African Americans. My world was Wonder Bread white. My parents, as progressive as I remember them to have been, had no experience with Brown people, the world of African Americans or anyone else of color. There were only Whites in every direction for miles and miles. And in 1968, for a young couple trying to raise a young family on an insurance agent’s salary, trying to put food on the table, and keep their children happy, the death of a man from outside their world was foreign to them. And so, foreign to their young son. At the time the Civil Rights Movement was only coming into consciousness for many working-class, suburban, marginally informed Whites. It was not their world. This doesn’t dismiss their ignorance, or even that of a young boy, but it does explain it. Still, I was ashamed when I realize this on the ride out of Memphis, heartbroken that I was somehow shielded from King’s death only because I was hopelessly unaware, naive, ignorant, and White.

On the way home, our road trip eventually returned to music, soon finding ourselves on Highway 61, the Blues Highway. We turned up the volume of the Dylan song that had been written all about it. But halfway home, after my son had fallen asleep in the passenger seat, the wheels on pavement the only sound in the night, I could see the images of the Lorraine Motel, the ones I had experienced the day before. I saw the balcony, and felt the grief, the sorrow that had not been there when I was a boy, a boy who wasn’t yet ready to understand.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His memoir Daylight Saving Time will be out this summer from Collective Ink/O-Books. It is available now for pre-oder.