Daddy King Read online

  My mother, Delia Lindsay, met my father a short while after his accident. They married there in Stockbridge, and because she was from farming people and never afraid of work a day in her life, the two of them decided to set up housekeeping and work some acres of cotton for a local landowner named Graves. But this man would never do right by my daddy; he and Papa clashed more than once.

  There was no way to make any money sharecropping. Owning your mule, maybe a few cows, this was about as much as a farmer working shares could hope to achieve. And even doing this wasn’t easy. Whites ruled. A Negro had no rights any white person was bound to respect. If a dispute came up, a man’s color was the deciding factor, and a Negro who argued too much or too often was leaning toward his own death. Now, Papa could be hot-tempered, and my mother knew this. She could calm him most of the time when he’d get upset. One of the things that really riled him was a man trying to cheat him in a transaction of one kind or another. Papa gave a hard, good day’s work, never shirked, never cut any corners. But to the whites who owned land around Stockbridge, the cotton traders and the tradesmen, there was one set of ethics for themselves and other whites, and another bunch of rules that applied when they were dealing with any black person.

  “Cheatin’ a nigger,” they’d say, “ain’t really doin’ nothin’ wrong. It’s like playin’ a game, ’cause most times they’s too dumb to know the difference anyhow.”

  To these whites, a Negro wasn’t a human being, but just a thing. Our lives were never real as far as they were concerned, and so nothing that might be done to us, no matter how cruel or savage, was real either. My father’s bitterness grew out of this kind of atmosphere, which made him into an object instead of a man, and always dared him, under the penalty of being killed, to do anything about it. So he had to walk a tightrope. Once in a while there’d be stories around Stockbridge about “a nigger who’s so damn crazy it’s better just to leave him alone. No tellin’ what the fool might do ’fore we could get to him.” As time went along and my daddy took to drinking a lot of whiskey, as he came to have a look of very quiet but very serious fire in his eyes, more and more people just left him alone, too. A man reaches a point in circumstances like that where he just doesn’t care anymore, not about living, not about pain, not about his anger or anything else. Most folks in the country come to learn that it’s best to leave a man like this to himself, not to push him too far.

  My mother was a different sort of person. She had a temper, too, maybe even worse than Papa’s in some ways, because it was so deep in her that anything bringing it out was bringing out some real trouble. But Mama was at peace with herself because of her abiding faith. God’s wisdom was the guide in Mama’s life, and even in her times of great suffering, which came so many times in her life, she never lost sight of the Lord. No tears could blind her to His presence, and she could not close her eyes so tight in sorrow or in rage that she did not see God’s hand reaching out to her. In the worst years, she never surrendered to self-pity or doubt. And over all these years that have passed since I last saw her, my mind and my heart continue to tell me what a remarkable person she was.

  Ten children were born to my parents. Nine survived. I was second, right after my sister Woodie; then there was a baby boy, Lucius, who died when he was just a few days old. My father held him so close, Mama told us later, walked that baby around our cabin as the child was burning up with fever. But nothing could be done to save little Lucius, and we lost him. My sisters Lenora and Cleo were born next, about a year apart. Then came three more boys: James, Henry and Joel, who were followed by my two youngest sisters, Lucille, then Ruby, the last of my parents’ children.

  Through these years, the first of the twentieth century, my mother had babies, worked the fields, and often went during the winter to wash and iron in the homes of whites around town. I look back and wonder where she found the strength to do so much. God, she always told me, provided. Mama said that He gave her all the will to do what was needed. And so I came to admire both of them, the Lord and Mama, for being so able, so strong. But for my mother the rewards of all that she did were not to come in this life. And as I realized this was true, I grew angry inside, never expressing these feelings openly, but carrying them like a huge stone within. Something was wrong, I knew, when someone who tried so hard, who kept her faith, and who provided so much of a sense of the righteous path for all her children, came away, finally, with so little for herself.

  As a boy I was called Mike King. Mama always insisted that she’d named me Michael, after the archangel, and Papa was just as adamant about saying that I was Martin Luther, after two of his brothers. Mike was kind of a compromise. Mama didn’t like it all that much, and she always called me Michael, but Papa said he didn’t mind Mike, and since all my young friends referred to me by that name, he never objected.

  It’s fair and truthful to say that I was always a little closer to my mother than my father. Papa and I had a somewhat difficult relationship on many counts. Mama would take me to every church service she attended, and I think he always resented this a little. I was the first son, he expected me to follow in all of his footsteps, be just like him on almost every point. But Papa was a farmer. More specifically, he was a sharecropper, which meant he was locked into a kind of work he hated, a kind that could take him nowhere but in the endless circle that was governed by the seasons: spring planting, fall harvesting, turning over new ground through the winter, waiting for the following spring. It was a life he never was able to escape. I would escape it, eventually, and sometimes it seemed to me that he wanted all of his children, certainly all of his sons, to stay out there with him, growing old on somebody else’s land, just waiting to die.

  Church was a way to ease the harsh tone of farm life, a way to keep from descending into bitterness. Even before I knew what the Christian faith was all about, or even understood the rituals and the ceremonies, church music had made a very deep impression on me. As a small child, I started singing, and soon was being taken by my mother to the revivals and other services, where people spoke of little Mike King, who could sing so well, and who loved church with all his heart. It was true. I always felt extremely happy and completely at ease within the church setting; I never tired of going to the revivals, the baptisms, weddings, all the gatherings where people would be found bearing a particular witness.

  Papa was not religious, and although I don’t think he was very enthusiastic about my attending so many church affairs, he never interfered with Mama’s taking me.

  I developed a strong voice and could sing nearly any song after hearing it just a few times. Few of the country folks played or even had any church instruments except guitars, and some churches didn’t allow them to be played because they were used to celebrate the devil’s music—or so some folks were convinced. The human voice was the rural church’s organ and piano. And when the traveling preachers came through the small Georgia towns, they were sure to make an impression if they could sing well. The traveling preacher, sometimes called the Country Circuit minister, or C.C. Rider because in some areas he traveled by horseback, built a word-of-mouth reputation on an ability to cite the Scriptures—usually from memory, because not many of the country folks had ever learned to read. He also helped his own cause among the people if he could bring some music to the service.

  I grew up in this tradition of rural Baptist worship, respecting and loving it. The more folks asked me to participate in services, the more I responded. My singing often brought congregations to a peak of emotional fervor, but I never felt I was losing control of any of these crowds of people. And at these services that I attended, so many of the old-time preachers, who could recite Scriptures for hours on end, provided me with a great sense of the gestures, the cadences, the deeply emotive quality of their styles of ministry. And when I was alone, I would try to duplicate the things I heard them do, and having a good memory for songs and the parts of the Bible that were especially popular among country folks, the Psalms, for
example, I soon was experiencing a growing personal vision of spending a life in the ministry myself.

  At Floyd Chapel, my mother’s church, the board of deacons had always frowned on the licensing of very young preachers. I could see that even in the years to come there would be resistance to my responding to the call I was now experiencing. That call didn’t come all at once, in any single place or at any one time. It built as an ever-deepening experience that I could not deny, even though I was so young, so unprepared to understand all of this.

  When I was ten, there was a certainty growing in me. By that time I was the match of any church singer around. My voice did not ever grow tired; I could literally sing all afternoon and late into the night.

  But I hated the country life almost from the time I was able to stand and walk around by myself. The farm work itself wasn’t so bad, I could handle that better than most folks who claimed they loved it. It was the world all around that work, this is what tore me up inside.

  Of course, none of this came about naturally. I was taught, day by day, night after night, just why the place I lived in was a place I’d grow up wanting to get away from the first chance I got. As a small kid, I had a friend, Jay was his name, and we’d walk around together, just looking over the countryside, chucking rocks across creeks to see which one of us could make one skip the farthest, racing along those dusty old Georgia roads to see who ran the best, or who could climb highest in a tree or catch a ball made out of tied-up old rags better than anybody in Stockbridge or maybe in the whole state of Georgia. We had a lot of fun, never fought, never argued too much. One day we were laughing about something along the railroad tracks that ran through town, and we came upon Jay’s father and some other men sitting near the depot. One of these farmers nudged Jay’s dad and asked him, “Who’s that with Jay?” And Jay’s father answered, “Oh, that’s just one of my niggers. . . .” The words just reached inside and twisted at me. Jay had a name, he always did. I didn’t. Sometimes I was Mike, but around these men I was somebody’s nigger. I was six, maybe seven years old at the time. I’ve never forgotten. It was a beginning of many understandings. There would be more.

  A man was killed one afternoon on a road just outside the center of Stockbridge. Some men from over at the mill had gotten their pay and started drinking some corn liquor from down in a still near there. As often was the case when some of the tongues of these folks got loosened up a little, there was a lot of talk about niggers. The politicians had been stumping through the area for several weeks before this, and it was a basic tactic of these officeholders—or those who were running for office—to stir up the passions of all potential voters by appealing to their sense of insecurity. Things were rough for everybody in Georgia at this time, no matter their color. Cotton was down to where you practically had to pay somebody to take it off your hands. Other crops had been eaten up by a very harsh winter. The politicians would come through and find people screaming at them for letting the voters down. And the politicians would come back: “Hell, neighbors, it’s not our fault. If it wasn’t for all these damn niggers, the whole world would be a lot better off!”

  Now the mills around town always had a few Negroes working at one kind of job or another. If you were black, though, the only thing that made it all right for you to have a job was that you were paid less than the whites. In some places that was law. It was the custom everywhere. Well, on this day, a Negro from the same mill as the men who were sitting around drinking passed along the road, counting the little bit of money he’d made that week.

  One of the whites yelled out that this was the reason there were so many decent white men out of work, too many niggers around taking away their jobs. Well, the black man said nothing. He tried to smile his way past these men, because it was too late for him to turn and go the other way. So he just tried to grin his way by. I had been out playing in the woods and was running on home for supper.

  “What the hell are you laughin’ at, nigger?” I heard one of the mill men shout. I stopped. Then I saw the black man down the road a piece, starting to walk real fast. They went after him. “Nigger,” one of them screamed, “I asked you somethin.’”

  “Naw, suh,” the man said. “I ain’ laughin.’ Jus’ on ma way home is all . . .”

  “Commere, nigger!”

  “I ain’ laughin,’ suh, honest I ain’t.”

  “Nigger come struttin’ down the road like he thinks he’s up North someplace. Pocket full of money. Laughin’ at white folks!”

  They tried to take his pay from him and a little tussle started. The Negro was a pretty good-sized fellow, and he put up a struggle. “This’s money fo’ my chil’ren now. I cain’ let you have that.” One of the mill men ran and got a tree branch, just ripped it down, and while some of the others held this fellow, the man from the mill started to beat him about his head with the big branch. Blood started pouring out of the man’s mouth and he started to fall. It seemed like all their feet started kicking him, then, with those heavy boots the men at the mill wore. The man started crying out in pain, and I suddenly realized I was so terrified that I was unable to move. The mill men began dragging him toward me, and for a moment I thought I was going to pass out. They pulled him right on past me—it was as if I hadn’t even been there watching. As they went by I could see through all their arms and legs, I could see the man’s head covered with blood, slack against his shoulder. Suddenly these men from the mill were whooping like crazy as one of them took off his belt and wrapped it around the Negro’s neck. They all lifted him up and tied the end of the belt to this tree and let him go. . . .

  I was still there when they’d all gone staggering off down the road, laughing to themselves, waving the jugs of corn whiskey they carried. The black man was dead, his head all twisted over, his feet about five or six inches off the ground. Suddenly I could hear my breathing coming through me harder and harder, and then there was a scream pouring through my lips that nobody heard but me. The man was dead, just a few feet in front of me, and all I could think about was that he had probably died before they even put him up on that tree. Why, I thought, why did they do that?

  But, of course, I had no answers. It was too complicated, then. All I could do was to run on home, keep silent, never mentioning what I’d seen to anyone, until many, many years later, when I understood it better.

  And when that did happen, when I did tell what I’d seen, it would be in the last days before I left home for good, to go and live in Atlanta. And what I had come to understand, as I told my mother, was that I’d carry a hatred in me for white people until the day I died. I would hate every one of them and fight them day and night, trying my best to destroy any of them I had a chance to. These feelings began to settle into my heart and I didn’t know any reason they should be rooted out. Whites, I felt, would never develop the capacity to be another kind of people. For so long had they lived with their doctrine of white supremacy that the feelings of superiority that resulted were not ever going to be rooted out. I realized very early that self-protection was a strong force in all human beings. My way to protect myself, I thought, was to build around myself an armor made of my hatred for whites. It was needed. It was valuable. And it helped me to deal with the memories, the terrible dreams and recollections. To hate those responsible made it bearable, and so I indulged myself, and began to despise every white face I saw.

  By now, I hated farming. Papa knew it, and my mother sensed it, too, though she tried to keep me from expressing my feelings about the matter quite so openly. I think she questioned my having such passionate feelings at so early a point in my life.

  Mama often cautioned me about being premature in my determination to make my life over into something new, something I had not approached carefully with thoroughness and some caution. Life didn’t run on a single track like those old country railways; it had detours, changes, alternating routes, complete stops at times.

  But as I was nearing my teens, everything began to take on a very solid
shape. At least I thought so. I seemed to be seeing everything clearly. Perhaps I had a tendency to oversimplify.

  There’s more to preaching than breath and britches, country folks would say. But I felt very secure in my calling and my faith. The warm embrace of the church surrounded me wherever I went. There was simply no other place for me. But there were events in my life that would shape my decision to seek the pulpit. And the years beginning with my twelfth birthday turned out to be extremely important in that decision.

  I faced some painful moments during that time. Uncertainty was often with me. Doubts crept in on me, and although I was able to shake them off, the impressions left were not so easily dismissed. Even today, when more than seventy years have gone by, I think of my parents, out there in Stockbridge, and all they confronted in life that made my leaving there both so difficult and so very necessary.

  A neighbor of ours had an ailing cow one spring. The poor animal couldn’t give milk and was just mooing and lowing all the time, bleary-eyed, ready to pass on any day. Mama was always a believer in the redeeming value of sharing however little we might have with those even less fortunate, so one morning she filled a bucket with milk, set a large chunk of butter floating in it, and sent me to carry it over to this neighbor. It was a beautiful sunny day in the early summer, and heading there I had to pass the local sawmill. I stopped to watch the work going on there, the oxen grunting loud as they hauled huge logs up from the forest, the men driving the animals forward toward the mill, which was on a slight incline a few hundred yards from a stream that flowed through the woods. As I watched, a man approached me, and I recognized him as the millowner. He was well on in years and had a reputation for being hard and mean when he wanted to be, which was most of the time.