Growing Up King
An Intimate Memoir
Chapter One
SLEEPING BEAUTIES
I felt inadequate to the task at hand, the scene before me, though my role
seemed simple enough. Yoki had already shown me a picture of Prince Charming in
a book of fairy tales, so I knew what he was supposed to look like. I'd seen
myself in a mirror. Didn't see the correlation, didn't think I could ever look
like that or act like that. But my older sister kept on insisting I was the
Chosen One, who must bend down and kiss my baby sister Bernice, lying on one
end of our seesaw, acting dead, like Sleeping Beauty. Yoki was saying, "Let's
do this." I was steadily refusing.
"Nope," I said. "Nope, nope, nope."
The corners of Yoki's mouth curled. "Yes-that's what you mean to say. Right?"
She was about to unleash a verbal volley accompanied by a twisting pinch of arm
flesh if I wasn't quick enough, which, by the warm, so-called Indian summer of
1967, I usually was.
I was six and a half years old when I asked Yoki, "Why me?" while fixing a
pleading eye toward my older brother, Martin III, who stood be ... read full excerpt from: Growing Up King: An Intimate Memoir ebook
