Martin Luther King and I : Controversy: Saying a new book implies a liaison, the woman who served the civil rights leader his last dinner, files suit to clear her name.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. —  Adjua Abi Naantaanbuu, a graceful woman with languid eyes and pointed wit, sipped tea and talked about that day more than 20 years ago, the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. died. It was 1968 and he had had dinner at her house the night before. Those events changed her life.

“I knew something was wrong” in America if a man as revered as King could be murdered for his color and his nonviolent beliefs, she told a visitor to her home in a quiet Memphis neighborhood, the same one in which she was host to King.

Naantaanbuu, who in 1968 was Tarlease Mathews, began “embracing the African culture and being proud of who I am.” Now, she says, the only “European clothes” she owns are jogging outfits. All the rest are African, like the long, loose purple and white dress, with matching gele that she wore on a recent day.

She produces an annual African-American cultural festival in Memphis. At 53, she has carved out her niche in this city.

But another incident connected to King has come along, again altering her life dramatically.

The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, in his recently published book, “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down,” described that last dinner at Naantaanbuu’s house, and, without naming her, called her “a ‘friend’ of” King.

She “had provided dinner partners” for King and another activist, Bernard Lee, that night, Abernathy wrote. And, he wrote that, sometime after dinner, “Martin and his friend came out of the bedroom.”

The implication was clear--that King was an adulterer on his last night alive, with his closest aide a near witness.

That account, published in October, infuriated black people generally, but in Naantaanbuu’s view, it amounted to libel. She has sued Abernathy, his publisher, Harper & Row, and the book’s editor, Daniel Bial, seeking a total of $10 million--$5 million from Abernathy, $2.5 million each from the publisher and editor. And she wants a stop-publish order on any books containing what her 10-page complaint calls “the defamatory material.”

Abernathy did not return repeated telephone calls, but in past interviews he has stood by his account.

In a statement released Friday, Harper & Row officials said that the company “has complete confidence in this book and in the integrity and veracity of its author. We believe the lawsuit is without merit, and we will defend it aggressively.”

Abernathy’s account is “a lie,” Naantaanbuu said, holding a well-worn copy of the book, asserting that Abernathy makes her out to be “a madam.”

In more than three hours of conversation, Naantaanbuu gave her own account of King’s last night alive, including his comments about the likelihood he would be murdered and his threat to leave the civil rights movement. She compared her feelings about King and Malcolm X, whose philosophy she finds more appealing.

Naantaanbuu and her attorney reject the notion that the lawsuit, filed in New York earlier this month, weakens the civil rights movement, and Naantaanbuu asserts that her own faith in “the movement” remains unshaken.

Nevertheless, Naantaanbuu said that Abernathy’s book has taken a terrible toll on her. Stress has caused her to gain 30 pounds, she said. Strangers stop and stare. And the talk tears her apart. “I have a friend who said that a lady told her: ‘She’s no different from Jessica Hahn,’ ” (the one-time church secretary with whom the Rev. Jim Bakker had a sexual encounter before his television evangelical empire crumbled).

“It’s so depressing to have to deal with something like this,” she said. “My reputation is on the line. I walk out in the street, and people look at me and you can see all eyes going (here, she rolls her eyes). They’re saying, ‘That’s the woman that Abernathy said was coming out of the bedroom.’ Well, think what they read into that--coming out of the bedroom, you know? It’s a very ugly, nasty thing.”

In many ways, Naantaanbuu’s story illustrates how any person can go from obscurity to notoriety in the stroke of a computer key.

Naantaanbuu was asleep one night last October when the first friend telephoned her to tell her that she had joined the notorious.

“I’ve got something important to tell you,” the friend said, citing news reports. “Abernathy has written a book. And . . . he talked about them being at your home and seeing you and Dr. King coming out of your bedroom.”

Naantaanbuu recalls responding, “Oh, you gotta be kidding.”

She said: “I just couldn’t imagine Abernathy having something like that printed when it wasn’t true.”

Naantaanbuu and Abernathy agree on much of what happened on the night of April 3. Their major differences center on two paragraphs on Page 434 of the book, rapidly becoming known as the “$10-million paragraphs.”

In the first paragraph, Abernathy wrote that King’s “friend” invited the three men over for dinner and that when they arrived, “we found three ladies waiting.” He went on to describe a “heavy meal along with some light conversation.” In the other paragraph, Abernathy wrote that he was exhausted, fell asleep in an easy chair in the living room and awoke as “Martin and his friend came out of the bedroom.”

As Naantaanbuu tells it, she had never met King before she was “volunteered” by local rights activists to chauffeur him, along with Abernathy, Jesse Jackson and Bernard Lee, from the Memphis airport to the Lorraine Motel. The group was coming to town to lend support to striking garbage workers.

She recalls picking up the four men in her car, “a large car, a deuce and a quarter,” as the fancy Buick 225 was called then. After the men checked into the motel--the same one on whose balcony King would be shot to death the next day--Naantaanbuu delivered them to a church meeting. After the meeting she delivered three of them--Jackson rode off in a limousine and was not at the dinner--back to the motel, where Abernathy “asked me if I would prepare some food for them.”

He also asked her to supply some liquor, she said, which she did, asserting that Abernathy drank liberally from the fifth of gin. (Abernathy’s account does not mention any alcohol being served at the dinner.)

Excited at the prospect of having King and his colleagues as dinner guests, Naantaanbuu said she phoned her sister, Cleopra Mitchell; a woman friend, Marie Jones, and several other people and told them that “Dr. King was coming over to my house,” and invited them to drop by.

The meal--steak, potatoes, salad--would be eaten after King delivered his stirring, prophetic “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech to the striking garbage workers, in which he thundered: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. . . . And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Still high after the electrifying rally, the group--Naantaanbuu, King, Abernathy, Lee, Mitchell and Jones--ate about midnight, Naantaanbuu said. Jones left about 1:30 and the rest of them stayed and talked until 2:45 a.m., she said, noting that Abernathy was nodding off in the living room while King talked.

Abernathy, not King, Naantaanbuu said, went to lie on her bed. “He had had too much to drink,” she said.

Meanwhile, she said, King talked as if he “knew he wasn’t going to be around long,” recalling a conversation with Robert Kennedy in which both men predicted their murders.

At one point, she said, King said he had thought of quitting the movement, saying that once when colleagues came to his house in Atlanta, “he said he sent his wife to the door to tell them that he wasn’t there. He said at that point he had decided to get out.”

At no time, Naantaanbuu said, did she and King become intimate.

“It would have been highly unethical,” she said, fuming, “to pull somebody off to my bedroom, you know, especially somebody I’d never met before. The whole thing is just terrible.” Mitchell and Jones plan to testify for her during the trial, Naantaanbuu said.

Naantaanbuu views her plight as ironic, having her life turned upside down because she played the “good Samaritan” to King, especially since she considers her temperament closer to Malcolm X’s--the charismatic black nationalist who was murdered in 1965--than to King’s.

She said that although she admired King’s nonviolent approach to civil rights, turning the other cheek is not her style.

“Malcolm is the kind of brother I admire very much,” Naantaanbuu said, gesturing toward a copy of his autobiography, which occupies a prominent place on her bookshelf. She is fond of telling the story of meeting Malcolm at a 1963 Mississippi protest, where he lent moral support but refused to join the demonstration because, as she reported his saying, “If those (people) spit on him or kicked him, he was going to die in Mississippi.”

“I believe in loving those who love you,” said Naantaanbuu. “Fight those who fight you. That is my philosophy. Same as Malcolm’s.”

It was not always that way. She said her grandfather was a minister, “and I was in church everytime the door opened.” She later came to believe that it was wrong to “be meek and humble and believe the Lord will open up the window of heaven and pour out your blessings.”

The coming battle against Abernathy fits Naantaanbuu’s style. Her attorney, Gail Boyd, who practices in New York City, portrayed the suit as a necessary response--regardless of the fallout.

“When the shot has been fired from the opposing camp,” she said, “you have to fire back.”

As the case winds its way through the court system--Naantaanbuu is seeking a jury trial, and pretrial proceedings are scheduled for April 20--Naantaanbuu continues her effort to spread Pan-Africanism.

She is partial to large gold earrings and a nose ring, along with a necklace bearing a gold African pendant. A wall in her home is filled with books and artifacts extolling African and black American culture.

A barber and beautician, Naantaanbuu is separated from her husband. She is the mother of three children, aged 34, 26 and 16, and has extended her family by creating a program for children who are enrolled in a local Head Start program, aimed at familiarizing the 3- to 5-year-olds with black culture and heroes, African and American.

On a recent day, 22 youngsters sat in a circle at a Head Start center, and one by one, they stood, greeting the group in Swahili, then introducing themselves, taking on names of famous black people. There was a little King, a Frederick Douglass, a Cleopatra, a Nat Turner, an Angela Davis, a Jomo Kenyatta, a Cicely Tyson. And Malcolm X was there.

After an hour, Naantaanbuu, asked: “How many of you all know the movement song, ‘We Shall Overcome?’ ” Most of the little hands shot up, and a minute later, they were all singing, led by Naantaanbuu.

Back at home, Naantaanbuu is reflective.

No, the stress has not worn her all the way down. The episode, she says, “increases my determination to educate the sisters and brothers because Ralph Abernathy is an unconscious brother.”

No, she has not talked with Abernathy, whom she once considered a friend, since the book was published.

And, yes, sometimes she has second thoughts about having filed the suit because “I was just not prepared for the kinds of changes I have had to go through as a result of this.”

But, she goes on, “I’ve been damaged. My reputation--I’ll always have that stigma that will follow me all the days of my life. If I win, they’ll say that there was the woman that Abernathy said . . . “ her voice trails off. “And if I lose in court, ‘(people will say) that’s the woman that slept with King.’ That’ll always be. I mean, regardless of what happens, that’ll always be.”