Remembering the Dark Places

As soon we we turned the corner I saw the sign for the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis and my heart jumped. Where an American Saint was gunned down is brilliantly called out with the sign ... a flashing blue arrow pointing to the place sits above a yellow oval with black letters spelling which sits above five circles each with a red letter forming the word "Motel" and that sits above a Marquee. It is from the 1960s and immediately carries me back there. There were simular hotels on Highway 80 in Garden City, Georgia when I was growing up and I thought them to be exoctic then. One had a woman in a swim cap and a bathing suit diving into a hotel that flashed neon. It was across the street from a Trailer Park. I was a baby of Racial Integration, actually embracing it pretty quickly. In Junior High we had a dance and the black kids were having a blast. The white kids were wall flowers, stuck in their religion and other constraints. I loved to dance and thought this sucked so I strolled across the Gym floor and asked a black girl to dance. She grinned an embarrassed grin as she took my hand. Her friends all smiled and joined us the dance floor. The next day I was beaten up by a bunch of people I went to Church with. I never turned back and throughout my carrer and life have tried to be accepting of all of God's people but especially those who were oppressed or shunned. Half a century later, I'm standing in the Motel room shared by Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. One of the beds is turned down where Dr. King had been laying. There are cups of coffee on the dresser and an ash trey full of cigarettes. The room is run down and threadbare. I stare out of the window at the site where he was shot. My friend Will D. Campbell was there that night. Will wrote the preface to my first book and we spent many hours together at his place in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee or at the Jefferson Street Baptist Chapel. There is a picture of him from Life Magazine standing on the spot where Martin was shot, hours after it happened, staring off into the distance, wondering or praying. I stood across the street in the bathroom looking at the spot from the bathroom window where James Earl Ray killed Dr. King. I felt similar to when I walked Auschwitz, the Nazi Concentration Camp in Poland. Sarah and I walked out into the bright sunshine, holding hands but there were no words ... just emotions as we were started by the contrast of such a wonderful day after such dark moments. That's the way it is thought isn't it. "You can't have light without a dark to stick it in," says Arlo Guthrie. There is darkness in this world ... and darkness in our lives but I believe the light always wins. Sometimes though, you have to remember the dark places to appreciate the light.