Daddy King Read online

  The first few weeks in the yards I slept nights in a toolshed. Nobody asked questions, there were plenty of people and plenty of secrets in railroading. And there were shootings, killings, and brawls going on through the night. To get through, I worked and prayed, and I slept and prayed . . . never once doubted God was working with me.

  I threw coal hard and steady. Word got around the yards and the engineers there would offer me a fireman’s job whenever a regular man came up sick or missing from work. The money was really good, too, both straight time and the extree, which I often earned by going out at night after my day shift ended. I started dreaming about the time I knew was going to come, when I’d walk into that old cabin back in the country and lay about five hundred dollars out in front of Mama and Papa. The work was rough, at times my whole body just ached, but the thought of seeing my folks smile with the knowledge that something good had happened for a change—well, I think I’d have pushed through a pair of brick walls for that. One thing was always clear. I earned every dollar on those fireman runs, and not just because of the work. The hollering of those engineers often hurt more than the sore muscles I dragged into my little pallet in the toolshed when my chance came to get some sleep.

  “Nigger!” these trainmen loved to shout. “Come on, nigger, you ain’t through yet. Come on, boy, toss that damn coal!”

  And of course all I could do was smile the smallest smile I figured I could get away with and go right on pushing. Pretty soon they thought of me as a young bull who could make steam and be a good nigger, too. I thought about the money, and I let them think whatever they wanted to.

  Taking the run down to Macon, the train would pass within a hundred yards or so of a hill crest where my brothers and I had played for years. Going through there, I stopped flinging my coal, and got the engineer to let me pull on the train whistle, and I’d give a little signal we all knew. Toot toot . . . Toot ta toot toot . . . Toot toot.

  And sure enough, one evening, as the run was taking me back to Atlanta, I looked out near the hill crest, and James, Jr., and Henry were running toward the tracks for all they were worth. And I started pulling on the whistle as they waved a red cloth back and forth in front of them. They got close enough for me to see those big grins on their faces, and I just started to cry. The tears were in my eyes all the way back to the yards. I kept telling the engineer there was some coal dust that wouldn’t stop flying up into my face.

  “But I’m all right, sir,” I told him. “I’m just fine.”

  About a week later, I paid no real attention when the train stopped in Stockbridge on our way back to Atlanta, but when we reached the yards again, I found out that my mother had gotten on board out there in the country. She marched straight into the yard boss’s office and shouted: “You got no business workin’ a child like this, he’s just a boy!”

  She gave the boss my true age—fourteen. A few fellows had asked me, and I’d gotten used to saying I was twenty. Nobody had ever doubted me. Well, Bailey, the yard boss, said Mama was right, I was too young to be working there, and he’d have to fire me. This just cut right through me. I felt I’d been doing so well. True, I was tired a lot of the time, didn’t always eat right, but, hell, I was out in the world earning a living.

  Mama looked at me, furious at what I’d done, the worry I’d caused her all these weeks. Bailey told her I had a pretty fair piece of money coming on what I had already done and Mama, flaring up again, told him No! Her boy wasn’t taking any more money from this place!

  Then she marched me out of the office as Bailey followed, asking her over and over, “What should I do with his money that he’s got comin’?”

  “Do what you must with it,” Mama shouted back, “but we don’t want it!”

  And with that she pulled me out of his office. She had me walking in front of her like a little boy, and I could hear men all through the yards snickering at big ol’ Mike King, young bull of the railroad, whose Mama had come to see he got home safely. I was nothing but a kid to them now, trying to be a man.

  Nothing my mother had ever done hurt me the way this did. And of course there was nothing I could say or do about the way I felt, because it was Mama, and I’d been raised to respect anything she said to me or asked me to do. As a son I couldn’t question her on anything. So I tried to explain that there was five hundred dollars back there that I earned, money that was for our family, to give us a few things we hadn’t been able to buy before, some dresses for the girls.

  “The girls don’t need clothes that bad,” Mama said.

  “Some things for you, Mama, I wanted to get you—”

  “I don’t want anything, Michael,” she answered me, “that gonna cause me to let somebody take advantage of a child of mine. Not for any amount of money in the world will I allow that!”

  Maybe, deep down inside, I thought Mama was wrong. I could say nothing. I might have been angry, might have wanted to cry just thinking about that money they owed me in the yards, that I’d never be able to get from there now. But I kept my peace, and never talked after that about what had happened in the yards that day.

  In addition to preaching, I had to become a trader. Folks in the country couldn’t deal in cash very often. They seldom had much of it, and when they did, money was spent very quickly, often on debts to landowners and the people who ran the local stores. When a preacher came some distance to offer services to a group of folks who had no regular pastor, they’d show their appreciation by giving him what they could. One congregation might have a bushel of potatoes. If the preacher was really good, the people might find a horse to let him have, or even better, a cow, which was the most valuable animal known, next to the mule, out among country people. They’d give whatever they could. And for the young preacher who was ready to settle down and raise a family, plenty of attractive young girls would try to help him to make up his mind. Before long, this young fellow might find himself farming right along with someone who was about to become his father-in-law, and pretty soon, with all the hard work and long hours that went into farming, a preacher found he wasn’t doing much preaching anymore.

  Keeping on the move, I avoided any early entanglements. I’d always be headed off someplace, trading a hog folks had given me in one town for some gasoline in another. Or maybe I’d split up twenty pounds of berries or pecans, keep some and exchange the rest for secondhand shoes or a suit of clothes. I came in contact with hundreds of people this way, and had to remember not to try and trade a fine cow, for instance, right back to the folks who’d given it to me, very proudly, in the first place.

  In my life I would always have a good head for figures; business dealing was as much a part of those early years as interpreting the Bible. Oddly enough, I never came into contact with banks during this time. Every transaction of mine was on faith—this for that—and depended on an honest, old-time, country-folks integrity. Nobody cheated anybody and stayed long in a community of Negro church folks. They’d run someone out of a place in a minute. If you told a man you had a good wagon, that’s what he could expect to see when you showed up to take care of some business with him. And if the other fellow said he could trade a nice pocket watch for the wagon, you just knew that’s what you’d leave the deal with—a very good watch.

  But it seemed, somehow, that when money was introduced into things, people changed, and sharply, right before your eyes. So, for the longest time in my young life, I tried to keep money out of business, strange as that may sound today. But as my preaching impressed more people, so did my trading increase, and soon I found myself going often to Atlanta, just to get cash for a carload of vegetables and fruit that would otherwise spoil before I could use them.

  I met a young woman in Atlanta, a very warm and friendly person, Bertha Chaney. Her father was a Methodist minister, an educated, very stately man, the Reverend Wilson Chaney. Bertha and I started keeping company after a cousin of hers from Stockbridge introduced us at a church supper.

  Bertha had been a very lone
ly young woman, and I suppose this had a lot to do with her willingness to go against a prevailing tradition of that era. In Negro communities, there was little social life outside the borders established by church affiliation. People married, did business, went to doctors and dentists, all within the structure of their churches. Methodists often looked down on Baptists, whom they considered not as well educated (which, generally speaking, was true), and more emotional than reasoned in their services of worship (a good case could be made for this point of view, also). To Baptists, the Methodist congregations were often stiff, social-climbing pretenders, people who put on airs until they suffocated everybody around them. When Bertha started seeing me, her father reacted angrily. Her mother simply pretended I didn’t exist. Bertha herself was old enough, of course, to make her own life. She worked and contributed to her household with the salary she earned in a small Negro insurance company.

  Bertha fell in love with me. I felt extremely unhappy about this, because my feelings for her were not so intense. She was a wonderful companion, cheerful and affectionate, very serious about things like loyalty and truth . . . and, perhaps more than anything else, family. She wanted to marry and have children, which was something a woman in those days could never speak about much, except to very close women friends or relatives. Around men this sentiment was always held in check until, I guess, many women were ready to explode.

  Bertha taught me how to use the bank. I carried cash around with me, just stuffed into pockets wherever there was room. Bertha helped me open an account for savings, took me into a world of little cages and books with entries and withdrawals, a world that had been all around me in my life when I didn’t even know it. At first I didn’t have the confidence to go to the bank by myself. All that writing, counting, double-checking. So, I’d catch a late train into Atlanta on a Thursday night, meet Bertha at the station, and just give her the money I was putting in my account. There was no question of trust, we both knew that, and it made our relationship a very strong one in its own way. And both of us also knew that she wanted more. Trust was a solid ground to build on. And sometimes, on the train ride, I would wonder why I didn’t love her, in the sense that she was using the term in expressing her feeling for me. I couldn’t understand. She was attractive, well-informed, had an earthy, subtle sense of humor. I enjoyed being with her because she went against the grain of what most people said about the Methodists being very rigid, stuffy folks. But my feelings just stopped short of where Bertha wanted them to go. I knew she wanted the words I couldn’t offer, not without lying, which I wasn’t going to do.

  Bertha Chaney’s father knew that she was serious about me. Everything he’d done to discourage our relationship failed, and so he resigned himself to what Bertha, at least, hoped was the inevitable. Reverend Chaney began speaking to me with more friendliness in his voice, and I let him do all the talking. No need, I thought, for things to get any more complicated than they already are. One evening in the spring, Bertha and I went to a social at her father’s church. This was a kind of Bible class, and afterward there would be some fruit-juice punch in the church basement. To my surprise, Reverend Chaney asked if I would consider offering the sermon at a Methodist retreat that was planned for a coming Saturday. I was taken completely off my guard, and said yes before I gave any real thought to what I was getting into. It turned out to be the most disastrous Saturday I’d ever had. These Methodist folks, first of all, were city people, not transplanted country men and women. My sermon was greeted with a stony silence, and when I reached the point of describing the pain that Jesus suffered carrying his cross to Calvary, my vivid picture caused eyebrows to raise throughout the wooded clearing by a brush arbor, where we’d all gathered to worship God. “Caintcha see him totin’ it?” I cried out to the Methodists, who just turned up their noses and fanned themselves a little harder. I preached an extremely short service that day.

  Later, Bertha tried to soothe my bruised, embarrassed feelings.

  Somehow, though, I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind: Reverend Chaney smirking triumphantly as his church choir muffled its laughter. They must have considered me a clown, a comical country bumpkin. Words like “totin’” didn’t fit in an Atlanta vocabulary, not among the Methodists, anyway, among those who’d escaped from the country life I was just emerging from. They didn’t need any reminders, from preachers or anybody else, of what they’d left behind. I was that kind of reminder, with my dusty, uncreased clothes, my rough country style of speaking, my whole uneducated, green, farmboy personality. I was nothing to them, almost the way I’d been nothing to the white men back in the country, when I’d been just another one of somebody’s niggers.

  I called on Bertha during the next week, and we sat on her front porch. She cried softly when I said I wouldn’t be seeing her anymore, but I knew this was the only way for both of us. My experience with these kinds of partings was limited, and I didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Bertha was hurt, and trying to hang on to her dignity as a person. I said I wanted to be her friend, that anything I ever could do for her I’d be glad to do; all the wrong things a man can say in a situation like that. She turned to me with fury in her eyes and told me to get out and leave her alone.

  As I walked down the stairs from the Chaney’s porch, she called out to me: “Oh, Mike King, you’ve got a lot to learn!”

  The words cut into me. I walked a little faster, knowing in my heart that I wanted to run because I knew she was right.

  FIVE

  Mama began to sense that I’d be leaving home again. I was eighteen now and it had been more than three years since my adventure with the railroad. But I guess she could see the restlessness coming again, the city-look forming in my eyes. She was concerned because my father, even though I was not helping him much on the farm, was convinced now that he’d kept me down in the country anyhow. That was his victory, small as it was. And he held on to it.

  “Just tell him, Michael,” said Mama. “Just don’t you leave here without sayin’ somethin’ to your father.”

  I have never quite understood why this was so difficult. My father and I argued, we had fought, our differences far outweighed the things that made us father and son. Still, I loved him. Not in the demonstrative way some sons can show their fathers, with a lot of attention, a lot of time spent together. That is the way some people can express affection. I knew that James King was a man who wanted more than he could ever have. And what he wanted wasn’t really that much—a decent home for his family, a day’s pay for a day’s work, the freedom to be judged as a human being and not a beast, a nigger, a nightmare in the white mind. But for him, these things were never to happen. Maybe tomorrow, just maybe—Papa must have thought that so many, many times. And every time he did, it had to cut through his soul—the fact that, for no reason that could ever make sense, he would not live to see, to feel, to be a part of that new day.

  When I decided to tell him, he had known, I think, for longer than I had. For weeks he avoided me around the house, turned away when I tried to talk with him out in the yard. Then one morning I trotted out to the far end of our cotton, where he was moving the mule through the new furrows. “Papa!” I called to him. He stopped the mule, but didn’t look back at me. I walked around to face him.

  “Papa, I got to go on to Atlanta and stay there. . . .”

  He wiped his face with a big bandanna he carried in his coverall pockets, and took a long drink from the water jug sitting on a tree stump near his side. He was silent.

  “You see, Papa,” I told him, “I just wasn’t cut out to be here, and I’m sorry for that in some ways. But I got to make the right life for me.”

  He didn’t turn, and when I told him I was going and wouldn’t see him for a while, he put down the jug, which he was cradling in his arms, and ginnied up the mule down through the fresh planting ground. I stood and watched him grow smaller and smaller, heading toward the line of woods between the land he worked and the railroad I’d once ste
amed along, trying to find my way out. It seemed odd. My father was trotting off behind the mule, moving to the edge of the sky; I was not moving at all. Papa was gone, and it was at the moment that he walked away from me that it seemed there was so much to say, so many things we should have talked about. Now, it just never would happen.

  I was back in Atlanta to live again. As far as earning myself some money was concerned, I wasn’t really worried because I’d never been afraid of hard work. I even thought about trying the yards again, but changed my mind when I thought of how the men there had laughed at me when Mama took me away from my job four years earlier. I found work in a vulcanizing shop, where auto tires were made. After a month, when the boss there turned me down for a raise, even though I turned out more work than anybody in the place, I quit. The same afternoon, I had a job loading bales of cotton. But the pay on that job was even lower than what I’d earned in the tire plant. However, I didn’t feel I was being cheated, so I remained there for several months before I found a decent job driving a truck for a business that sold and repaired barber chairs. This job paid fairly well, enough for my rooming-house rent and food.

  I’d found a nice place to live and now had a couple of friends who were also planning futures in the ministry. But best of all, Mama went out one day and sold a cow the family had and used the money to buy me a used Model T Ford. It was the most beautiful car in the world as far as I was concerned, and when she had Papa drive her up to Atlanta with it so they could surprise me, I felt I’d never been happier in my life with any present anyone had given me. Nothing, I now felt, could stop me. Nothing.

  That Model T came in handy a short time later. Some good old country folks who’d moved to the East Point section of Atlanta asked me to pastor a church they were starting, while I continued my truck-driving job. I went out there and met with them and got a look at the fine wooden building they were putting up and decided, Yes, I’d accept their call to a ministry. Several of the families out in East Point were friends of my mother’s from down home, and they’d built up my reputation among the others. I didn’t hesitate to preach out there, even though that experience with the Methodists had bothered me for a long time afterward, and certainly didn’t help my confidence. But Methodist ministers were formally trained, for the most part. They were college-educated men. My own preaching was rooted in the emotional appeal that country Baptists understood better than anybody in the world; an appeal often led by men, like myself, who were mostly self-trained.