Church Boy Read online

  BREAKING OUT

  So I started hanging with Marcus and Stacy. Now, remember, I had been raised by an old woman who wanted to keep me in short pants and make me her little baby—the baby she never had—but I was about ready to bust out. So Marcus and Stacy taught me about being a player, and that’s when things started to change.

  They kept talking about this place they liked to go called Jolly Time. Jolly Time was a popular skating rink, but it was not your average skating rink. It was a place where you could skate until about nine or ten, and after that everybody would take off their skates and go out to the middle of the floor and dance.

  So it was like a skating rink/nightclub. And it was on the rough side of Fort Worth, a place called Stop Six, so called because that’s where the number six city bus would stop. And there were all kinds of tough guys and gangsters hanging out over there.

  I’ll never forget how excited I was when Gertrude finally let me go with Marcus and Stacy to Jolly Time. Before all this, mind you, I was Church Boy. But after months of begging and pestering, she finally agreed to let me go, and that would bring about some big changes in my life.

  Seeing girls! Older girls dancing! I mean, this was stuff the Sunday school teachers had been telling me about, and I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this stuff. But it was off the hook!

  By this time I was playing piano for the church, not to mention occasional music jobs and performances at other places. I was a fairly regular musician on the weekends, and people in the black churches around Fort Worth were getting to know who I was.

  Gertrude was the one who kept track of all that. She wasn’t a promoter at all, and she was not a stage mother like you hear about. She just made the decisions about when and where I could play, and if anybody wanted us to do a special concert or an Easter program or something like that, they had to go through her.

  Thanks to my job at Mount Rose Baptist Church, I was making a hundred dollars a month, so I always had some pocket change. A hundred dollars a month may not seem like much now, and for a grownup it wasn’t much even then. But for a sixth-grader, that was some serious cheddar! And to me it felt like a fortune.

  Normally, Gertrude was very careful about where I went and who I went with. She believed that my musical talents were a gift from God, and she tried to guide me so I would always be available for the Lord’s service.

  She never saw my musical ability as a way to make money. She had already turned down a recording contract with a gospel music label when I was seven years old because she didn’t think it was right for me at that time. She didn’t think I was ready emotionally or spiritually for a recording contract. She was very spiritual, and I trusted her judgment. I was upset, but now I know for a fact that she was right.

  But the allure and the appeal of hanging out with a flashy, worldly, popular crowd was more than I could resist. I had been so unpopular up to that time that I was starved for attention.

  I’ll never forget that first night at Jolly Time. I was dressed preppier than everybody else. I was all button-down, and I was looking good! I had on my cool slacks while everybody else had on blue jeans and baseball caps. Besides, I came in with Stacy and Marcus, and everybody knew they were cool. They were into sports. I wasn’t in sports at that time, but I was hanging with these two dudes who were popular and well known, and I was totally caught up in the glow.

  But that night, after all the skating and dancing and being cool and popular, I came home about one or two o’clock in the morning, and Gertrude was furious! She let me know what I was doing, and what God thought about late-night carousing and every kind of vice that comes from going to the clubs, and she really made it sting.

  So, do you think I stopped right there and realized the error of my ways?

  No, of course not. I wish I had seen the truth of her words at that time, but I didn’t. I was too young, too immature, and I was totally caught up in the glamour of what was going on out there. I had had one taste of a fast, exciting, wild, different kind of life, and I wanted more.

  From that moment on, my relationship with Gertrude started to change. From that moment on, our relationship started going downhill.

  Gertrude was a spiritual woman. She was very, very serious about her faith. When she could see that I was following these wild young kids and that I had that twinkle of the world in my eyes, she must have thought, I’ve lost my baby.

  I know she cried over me, and she would have plenty of reason to cry over the next few years. But at the same time, I don’t think she was prepared for the idea of seeing her baby grow up. I think the distance that came between us, changing our relationship, was a combination of those two things.

  A little while later, when girls started calling the house to talk to me, she was very upset with me. She didn’t like me talking on the phone with girls all the time. She didn’t think it was proper. Even if they called late in the evening when I wouldn’t be tying up the phone, she would be very upset with me. I thought I was just being a typical, seventies-style boy.

  Little by little, I started retaliating against her, upset at what seemed to be her lack of sensitivity to my youth and my need to grow up. I started talking back and doing things that were designed to drive Gertrude into a rage.

  I said earlier that today I’m a rebel with a cause, but in those days I was a rebel without a cause. I just wanted to grow up, and I was going to get a taste of what the world had to offer. I mean, here was my chance to be cool, and I was sick and tired of being looked at like this little punk Church Boy.

  I wasn’t involved in sports. Most of the kids I knew had been raised in sports, but I wasn’t even exposed to them. Some of my friends were in Pee Wee Football or playing at the Boy’s Clubs or the YMCA. But when did I have time to do any of that? For me it was either Vacation Bible School or youth choir or practicing for holiday musicals. I didn’t have either the time or the opportunity to get into sports, and I missed all that. Marcus and Stacy were athletes, however, and they had taken me under their wing.

  INSULT ON TOP OF INJURY

  So that’s how my life had been going. But when I was in the seventh grade, something changed. My biological mother married a guy named Charles, and suddenly I thought I saw a faint ray of hope.

  Things were getting harder all the time with Gertrude. She was being “old school” and I wasn’t; our relationship was going south. When I found out Deborah was about to get married, I thought maybe I would have a real daddy after all. Maybe this would be my chance to have a real family who would help me and be more understanding of my need to stretch.

  I had never lived with Deborah, but I knew she was my birth mother. So this new marriage looked like the answer I had been hoping for. Maybe it would be my big chance.

  I’ve always been a pleaser, so at first I wanted to dress like Charles. If he would come over in overalls, then I’d want to put on overalls. If he had on a sweater or a jacket, then I’d go put on my sweater or my jacket so I could look like Charles. Obviously, I needed a male role model in my life, and I needed a daddy to look up to. I never had that, and I was soon to find out that Charles wasn’t going to be my dream come true either.

  In the seventh grade, all the things that had started the year before sort of blew up. I started dressing, trying to be cool, smoking weed, drinking beer, getting into fights, and looking for whatever else I could get into.

  I mean, I had been understudy to these two cool guys for at least a year already, and I decided I could be cool on my own. I still wasn’t popular, and I wasn’t liked by the girls all that much, so I decided to go out for the football team.

  Other things were happening too. By this time I was driving everybody crazy, so Gertrude and Deborah both asked Charles to do something about it, to get involved in my life. Unfortunately, he wasn’t involved consistently. So this wasn’t the best thing that could have happened for me at the time. Before long, it became pretty clear that Charles wasn’t going to be the role model I was hoping for.


  This became painfully clear one day when I was getting ready for a football game. Charles came up there and found me out on the field after school. Without saying a word, he grabbed me by the shoulder, dragged me to the car, and shoved me inside.

  Then, while I was still shaking my head, trying to figure out what was up, he reached over and popped me in the chest with his fist and said, “You been wasting your time in school, young Mr. Franklin, getting yourself in trouble, making bad grades, and driving your mother crazy. You been giving us all kinds of trouble, and it’s about time somebody settled you down.”

  Then he drove me home to his house. I didn’t know what to expect, but I wasn’t saying much.

  Remember how you used to get those three-week and six-week progress reports in school? Well, I got a bad progress report that term, and apparently that’s why Charles was hot. Deborah had told him I’d been goofing around, acting like a clown and causing trouble in school, and he said she had told him to discipline me and get me back on track. This was his idea of talking sense to me.

  “You want to be a man?” he said, shoving me backward and humiliating me. “Well, we’ll just treat you like a man.” Then he yanked off his belt and started beating me with it.

  I really tried to do better the following term because I didn’t want a repeat of that scene. But when the next progress reports came out, my grades were even worse. So Charles came back, grabbed me again, and took me back to his house. This time he beat the living daylights out of me.

  He made me strip down to my underwear and then took off his leather belt and laid into me with everything he had, until eventually I was totally unable to resist. I’ll never forget the terror, the pain, and the anger I felt. He was swinging the belt so hard that, at one point, he hit the light fixture overhead and shattered it. Glass went flying everywhere.

  I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get away from him, so I started acting like some glass got in my eye. Charles stopped swinging long enough to drag me to the bathroom. He got me under the light and looked in my eyes to see if there was any glass. He didn’t see anything, so he splashed some water in my face then dragged me out to the living room and finished the job he had started in the garage.

  But that wasn’t even the worst part. Back in the early eighties, the cool thing for black kids at our school was wearing jheri curls. There’s always some kind of cool hairstyle. Back in the fifties, I understand, a lot of black guys would get their hair pressed. Sammy Davis Jr. did that, and that was the bomb for a while.

  Today some guys get buzz cuts or shave their heads. But in those days the cool thing was jheri curls, and I had my hair done that way. So, to make my humiliation complete, Charles took me down to the barber shop and got all my hair cut off.

  That was the worst part. The beating was bad enough, but cutting my hair was an even deeper kind of pain, and he knew that. That’s why he did it.

  By the beginning of the seventh grade, the girls were just starting to like me a little better. I was dressing cool, I had jheri curls, and I was getting into sports. But Charles changed all that. He made me look stupid, and yanked me off the team. When I went back to school with this short, nappy-looking haircut, everybody looked at me like, “Oh yeah, he’s ugly again!”

  Even at church, the kids laughed at me. They made fun of my clothes, joked about Gertrude’s old Chevy Impala, and called me names. Gertrude wasn’t a very fashionable dresser, so some of the kids would even tease me about the way she looked. Those were trying times.

  When I went to choir rehearsal, I’d have to ride the bus, so sometimes I showed up late, sweaty, and really embarrassed. Even though I’d worshiped in that community all my life, there were times when I felt like an outsider.

  The other kids had big brothers and sisters or sometimes parents to take them around and look after them. But I was on my own most of the time, and I was taking a beating, not just in school but also from the kids at church!

  So all these things were piling up on me, and I was getting in more and more trouble, until one day Gertrude said, “Kirk, I’ve had enough. I can’t deal with you anymore. I want you to go live with Deborah.”

  SEEDS OF DISAPPOINTMENT

  Deborah had been through lots of boyfriends and live-ins in her life, but she had never been married before. Now that Charles was there, there was somebody around who was more than willing to give me a little discipline, even if it killed me. Gertrude thought that was a good way to solve our problems. At least, she never tried to stop it.

  She called Charles and told him what she was thinking, and Charles said that would be okay. He drove over and picked me up. But this time I had mixed feelings about the whole idea of living with him and Deborah.

  I knew what Gertrude was thinking, and I knew Charles and Deborah weren’t going to be the best parents in the world. I think part of me was still hoping that maybe this would be the chance to have the parents I’d never had. For a minute or two, it seemed like a good idea. After all, Charles had a nice house.

  Most of the kids I knew had nice places to live, and most of the kids at our church had nice houses. But Gertrude and I lived in this little shack. So the idea of moving in with Charles and Deborah had some appeal.

  But Charles had no sooner come and got me when Deborah came home from work and threw a huge fit. She said she did not want me in that house. She didn’t want anything to do with me, and she said something to Gertrude that night I’ll never forget. She said, “I didn’t want him in the first place, and you know that! If it weren’t for you I would have aborted him, but you wouldn’t let me!”

  What devastating words those were for me to hear. The sound of them has been etched in my mind ever since.

  By the time of Gertrude’s death in 1990, we were getting along okay. But our relationship was strained, and it never was as good after that as it had been when I was a little boy. I don’t feel any bitterness about that time. As I get older, I can see why she was worried about me. But I also know that that old woman saved my life, and she loved me the best way she knew how. She worried about me all the time, and sometimes she made things a lot harder than they needed to be. But I know what she did, and I’ll never forget that. She saved my life.

  At one point I got into trouble and had to go to a school for bad kids for a while. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was walking on the sheer edge of disaster. I almost flunked the seventh grade and just barely squeaked by. I tried to settle down a little in the eighth grade. I got to play football again. By that time Charles was out of the picture, so I didn’t have to worry about him.

  I grew my jheri curls back, and I was starting to be a little bit cool. The girls started liking me again. It really sounds funny to me now to say that a fourteen-year-old guy would have to have just the right hairstyle, but that’s the way it was. None of the cool girls would date a nappy-headed guy in those days!

  But the biggest change was that in the eighth grade I started hanging with a guy named Byron. He was older than I was, and he was cool. He was already out of school, but he let me hang with him. He brought me up under his wing. He was into smoking weed, and he was a real lady’s man; so at that point Byron became my role model.

  Best of all, Byron had a white Ford Thunderbird. It was real nice, and everybody thought his car was the joint. Nobody I knew had wheels like that. So that’s the kind of company I was keeping—Marcus, Stacy, and then Byron—and through their eyes I was learning how to be cool. I’m sorry to say that it was only in hindsight that I could see I was doing all the wrong things. I was so desperate for friends, I was willing to learn from guys who were showing all the wrong stuff.

  Michael Jackson was the mega-star of the day; his album Thriller was out, and I was getting into dancing. So now when we would go down to Jolly Time for the dances on Saturday nights, I was the guy all the girls wanted to dance with. I was dressing sharper, hanging with a faster crowd, and becoming known as a good dancer.

  Marcus and Stacy had been co
ol, but they operated on a smaller scale. Now that I was hanging with Byron, I started moving into an older, cooler crowd. It was a dangerous time, and I never saw what was coming next.

  Transitions

  (Part 2)

  It really doesn’t matter what you’re going through,

  I know that Jesus can work it out for you.

  His yoke is easy, and His burden’s light;

  Just give it to Jesus. He’ll make it all right.

  He can handle it;

  He can handle it.

  There’s no doubt about my Savior; I know He will deliver.

  He can handle it.

  There’s no doubt about my Savior,

  I know He will deliver.

  Whatever it is, I know He can . . .

  He can handle it.

  He can handle it.

  He can handle it.

  Words and music by Kirk Franklin.

  Copyright ©1993, Kerrion Publishing / Lilly Mack Publishing (BMI).

  Used by permission.

  4

  He Can Handle It

  All through junior high school, I was getting deeper and deeper into stuff that, if I had had any sense at all, I would have stayed away from. But you know how it is with teenagers. Along with all the mind games I was into because of my youth and immaturity, there was also a lot of promiscuity going on. I’m not proud of that, but I can’t deny that I fell into it. The physical thorn in the flesh was always there.

  I wish I had understood what I was doing at the time, but I didn’t. I was a promiscuous young man; it would be dishonest to pretend it didn’t happen. I did what I assumed everybody else was doing at the time. That was a very challenging time for me; my last year in junior high continued about the same as the year before—fast, hard, and crazy— except that everything started moving a lot faster as I got older.