Though the day was cold, she sat at the edge of the reflecting pool in front of her father`s tomb.

”He was a great joker,” she said. ”He told the funniest jokes I have ever heard. Most people don`t know that.

”The photographers captured only the dramatic moments. It was the times, I guess. But I remember him as a very funny man.”

Yolanda King, eldest child of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is 29 now. She was 12 when her father was killed.

”He would come home and he would get on the floor and romp with us and roll around and Mother would come into the room and say: `Stop, stop! You`re going to break something,` ” she said. ”And then we`d stop for a few minutes until she left and then he`d roll around with us again.

”Do you know what I think of when I remember him? I think: He was such a kid. He taught me how to swim when I was 4 and how to ride a bike.

”So when I think of Martin Luther King, I think of laughter. I think of the play and the fun.

”He never spanked us, you know. He didn`t believe in spanking kids. Of course, maybe if he had been around us longer, he would have changed his mind!”

SHE LAUGHED and her corn-rowed hair shook. This is typical of her. Though she is an actress and director of cultural affairs for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, she avoids dramatic moments.

Her speech, richly modulated, is often interrupted by laughter and mimicry. She does not give many interviews, but it was Martin Luther King Week in Atlanta and I caught her between seminars.

”He did spank us once, though,” she recalled. ”My sister and I had poured water down his ear while he was sleeping. We thought that would be very funny. He didn`t think so.

”What else do I remember? I remember the things that people don`t think of when they think of him. I remember him telling me and my older brother about the birds and the bees. I remember the simple and honest way in which he did it.

”He was always there for us, you see. He traveled a great deal, but he was there for us. And Mother was there, too, of course. She was there to comfort us when the other kids called him a jailbird and made fun of us.”

IT IS EASY to forget that Rev. King was not universally loved by the black community during his life. There were those who felt that nonviolence was an inadequate answer to the massive problems facing blacks in America.

”At 16, I went to Smith College in Massachusetts and that was right after the peak of the civil-rights movement and all the rest,” Yolanda said. ”It was an era when students were making demands and many black students were closer to the teachings of Malcolm X, or what they thought were his teachings.

”And I remember when they would come up to me and say to my face that my father had been too moderate, that he had been an Uncle Tom.”

Her father had been dead only four years, and she was terrified that perhaps history would judge him that way.

”At that time, he was still just `Daddy` to me,” she said. ”I had never read his works. I was just someone who loved someone, and I knew he had done great things and now people didn`t appreciate it.”

SO SHE SAT down and read his books and studied the complex ideological twists and turns that marked the civil rights movement. After that study, she decided her father had been right all along.

”I learned, I grew, but I never doubted,” she said. ”And I made the philosophy of nonviolence an integral part of my lifestyle. I try to understand people who do violence. I try to understand what they are feeling and experiencing.”

Even James Earl Ray? I asked. Even the man who killed your father? Are you saying you don`t hate him?

”I do not hate him,” she said quietly. ”I was watching the news that day when the bulletin came on that my father had been shot. I prayed. I asked God, `Please don`t let my daddy die.` ”

But later, when she knew her father was dead, she went into her mother`s darkened bedroom. ”Should I hate him?” Yolanda asked. ”Should I hate the man who killed my father?”

”YOUR FATHER would not want you to,” Coretta Scott King said.

”And so I never did hate him,” Yolanda said. ”I never felt angry. I felt terribly hurt and sad, but never mad.

”I feel my father was sent here to do a specific job and when he was through he moved on to something higher.

”I honestly doubt he could have lived much longer. There was too much pressure. Too much stress.

”Andy Young said that in a sense, his death was a freedom for him. And I largely agree with that.”

Behind her, on the white Georgia marble of her father`s simple tomb, were carved the words: ”Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, I`m free at last.”

THE ENTIRE PLACE, the King Center, is a shrine, I said. Your father`s remains are right here and this is where you work. There is the constant reminder of his death here. Doesn`t that bother you?

”No, because I don`t think of him being in that tomb,” she said. ”He is in a better place. What is here is his spirit. His love.”

She looked toward the eternal flame before his tomb, flickering in the winter wind.

One must come to grips with grief and Yolanda King has. But that does not mean she does not feel.

”Twice a year,” she said, her voice growing thick, ”twice a year we lay a wreath there. On his birthday and on his assassination day. And those are the only times I think of that awful day when . . . he left us.

”And then. Then, I wish very much that my daddy was still here.”

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 56 on Tuesday.