to cry because my dad is not dead. He may be dead physically, and one day I am going to see him again". On July 21, 1969, King's uncle and father's brother Alfred Daniel Williams King was found dead in the swimming pool of his home. His youngest two children, Esther and Vernon, were vacationing with King and her family in Jamaica when they heard of his death. On April 4, 1970, the second anniversary of her father's death, she and her sister Bernice attended their grandfather Martin Luther King, Sr.'s silent prayer for their father at his gravesite. The practice of going to her father's grave on the anniversary of either his birth or assassination became an annual ritual for the King family to mourn his death. In her teenage years, King preferred to go by her nickname "Yoki." As she said during an interview, "I prefer Yoki. Maybe when I'm older I won't be able to stand Yoki, but Yolanda sounds so formal!" She felt teenagers were confused and were using drugs as a method to escape their problems. At 15 she was subject to controversy when she appeared in the play The Owl and the Pussycat with a white male lead. Though her mother kept her naïve to the controversies so she could "fulfill [her] objective, which was to do the play", that did not stop her from learning of the negativity implemented from her role years later. Her grandfather Martin Luther King Sr. initially was not going to go to her performance due to opposition by locals, but changed his mind afterward. During a Sunday visit to Church, King was forced to stand before the congregation and explain her actions. In response to her role in the play and her own response to the role, a man wrote to Jet predicting that she would marry a white person before she was eighteen. Despite statements such as these, King did not become aware of the public discomfort with her role until years later, citing her mother's involvement in her knowledge of the criticism. When King was 16, she received attention in Jet in 1972, where she talked about what her father's famous name was doing for her life. In the interview with the magazine, she related how people expected her to be "stuck up" and referred to it as one of the "handicaps" of being Martin Luther