Daddy King Read online

  After living in Atlanta for a while, I realized that, to be truly effective, a preacher had to reach people through their minds as well as through their feelings. In this regard I sensed how important Woodie’s advice to me about getting an education really was. As I’ve mentioned, Atlanta didn’t have a single high school for Negroes in those days. There was not a library in town that a black person could use. Learning wasn’t easy. Sometimes it seemed impossible. When that registrar at the Bryant School told me I’d have to start in fifth grade, I wanted to forget the whole thing.

  But finally I buckled down. I studied at the Bryant School for five years. This was a difficult period in my life. I came to realize that much of the capacity for learning I should have developed as a child in the country just never came about. I became bitter, deeply angry about this, blaming Mrs. Low for not teaching us anything. But how hard it must have been for her! To have so many youngsters who knew, early in their lives, that no amount of learning in the world would ever break the ties that held them to the country, held them to the land, as it had held their folks before them. Country life had its own educational system: to know the seasons and the qualities of earth for planting, or being able to face north and feel the colder weather moving down around crops that need a little more time. These things made farmers, and most of them couldn’t be learned in the schoolhouse. I thought much later, maybe Miz Low understood that, and lived quietly with all the rundown places she had to teach in, without equipment, trying, trying. . . .

  I now realized that I had done so well in school back home because I had covered so little ground. And so I came to Atlanta with an educational background so poor that my reading level was barely beyond a rank beginner’s. I could hardly write at all, I’d never known there was so much writing to be done. So I was hardly a scholar when I enrolled at Bryant, and I soon was working twice as hard as most other people in my classes just to scrape past.

  The English language became so puzzling I thought at first it was some foreign tongue. Words, parts of speech, punctuation, all these things were magic objects to a young country boy sorting out the new puzzle of his life. And so I burned a little midnight oil. Fellows would drop by my room at the boardinghouse and say my eyes were going to fall right out of my head if I didn’t stop reading so late at night. I didn’t care about that. There was so much before me. Numbers, all sorts of systems, governments, places I never knew existed and would never have heard about without sitting in that school night after night. The grind seemed to get tougher all the time. I had no natural talent for study, and my learning came after long, long hours of going over and over the work until I was falling asleep saying my lessons to myself. All this was here, so much to learn.

  God is good, I found myself saying, God is good. I’d walk around Atlanta when the summer came and there were warm, sunny days. I’d buy myself a weenie from one of those roasting stands on the street corners and look up at this city going up around me, and I’d say: I’m part of all this, these modern times, when magnificent buildings go up in hardly any time, and cars roar by going maybe thirty miles an hour. Planes flew men in the sky. And I was here, bearing witness. My Lord. . . .

  It was at about this time that something happened that would stay in my memory all my life. I was working hard at Bryant School and my constant reading seemed to weaken my vision. One of the guys at school with me suggested I get some glasses. Well, not knowing any better, I went downtown and just walked into the first place I saw with an eye on its sign. This old fellow came running out from behind a curtain to a back room and just stood there staring at me. Suddenly he yelled for me to get out.

  “You have no business here!” he shouted, with a very thick accent.

  “All I want is some specs, mister,” I told him. “Can’t you sell me some?”

  This threw him. He said he never knew any niggers who needed glasses, none ever came into his place for any. Why did I need them? he wanted to know.

  So I told him that I was in school, hoping that an education might help me in the world. He just looked at me. So I told him not to worry about money, I had a job, too, and I’d pay some every week until he had all I owed.

  He checked my eyes and told me to come back in a couple of days. When I did, the old fellow just changed part of the world around for me, putting these round metal-rimmed spectacles on me so that I could see, clearly, all there was to see.

  “They’re yours,” he told me. “You take them and study good.”

  I reached into my pocket for some money. He said no, that was all right, I owed him nothing. He was German, he said, and had come to America right after the World War. “I don’t like,” he told me, “the way some people are treated, but it is the way things are here, so everyone has to go along. . . .”

  “Let me give you some money,” I insisted, and as the two of us were standing there at the counter, a white woman walked in with a young girl. They were there to pick up some glasses. The old man looked at them, then turned to me and shouted, “I don’t have what you want here, so get out, nigger, before you get in trouble!”

  I understood. This old eye doctor knew if the woman saw him doing a favor for a “nigger,” heard me thank him for helping me in some special way, she might tell others that he was a nigger-lover or something like that, and he’d find a stone crashing through his window, or a fire eating up his business. I turned and walked out, my ears still ringing from what he’d said, this good old fellow who just wanted to do some little thing that was right, who tried and wasn’t able to.

  I looked back at him once I was outside, and through the front window of his place I saw that his head was down, as though he was looking through the case where he kept glasses on display, down beyond the floor and the earth itself, looking for a reason why. Well, I’ve never forgotten him. He was worth remembering.

  The principal of Bryant was a man named Charles Clayton, who later became an attorney in Atlanta, not an easy thing to do in those years. He was also my first English teacher, a man of great skill with ability to encourage his students, not only in matters of grammar, but in life as well. So many of the folks at Bryant were convinced from the outset that I would just never make it. Some of them, I now think, might have even admired my tenacity, but not believed at all in my chances to succeed as a student or as anything else. I wanted to prove them wrong, of course, but couldn’t do it without help. As a teacher and as principal, Mr. Clayton—who was just a few years older than I when I enrolled at Bryant—made that help available. In between his belaboring many of us about our syntax and abuse of verbs in the English language, he encouraged us to look at a rigidly fixed world and find out where the possibility of change existed. He introduced us to the electoral process and the way in which we, as Negroes, were excluded from it in the South. This, I’d never thought much about. White folks handled all that, I told myself. Who needs to vote? What’s there to vote for except one white man or another, both of them trying to keep you back?

  Charles Clayton was of a different mind. He urged his students to register as soon as they reached their twenty-first birthdays and were of legal age to vote. Why do this? I wondered. Because, Mr. Clayton pointed out, America isn’t a country that stands still. Things change here. Even the South, he went on, will have to change in time. Be ready for tomorrow today. Register because your enemies don’t want you to do it, because they know how important it’s going to be to vote in the coming years. . . .

  Now I was hearing the term struggle used to describe what my own life was really about. Negroes were fighting to advance to full citizenship in this country. Playing a role in electoral politics, at whatever level was possible, could make a difference. Federal law required that Negroes be offered the opportunity to register and vote in the national elections. The state of Georgia, like the other regions of the South, used methods of intimidation to discourage any effort by blacks to become voters. But even die-hard crackers could be convinced that the might of the federal government was
n’t something to be taken lightly. As a citizen of the United States, my right to vote in a presidential election every four years couldn’t be taken away by anybody unless I sat by and let it happen. One night after classes, I caught up with Mr. Clayton in the hallway to make sure I’d understood just what he said on this point.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You can go right on down to the City Hall and register to vote in the next national election. The crackers may make it rough for you, Young King, but they can’t stop you.”

  So I took him at his word and went down to City Hall. I told a guard I wanted to register, and he looked at me as if I’d just smacked him in the face. But he soon directed me to an elevator marked COLORED. It wasn’t running. A nearby staircase that led to the registrar’s office for COLORED was marked WHITES ONLY. So a Negro could get to the COLORED elevator, which wasn’t running. And the staircase that would have taken a Negro who was willing to walk up to the office couldn’t be used except by whites. I waited for the elevator half an hour before I gave up in disgust and left. As I passed by the guard who had given me directions, I could hear him chuckling at me under his breath. Right then I decided to come back and keep coming back until the elevator was running, or until I could find another way to reach the registration window.

  For several days I tried. The white elevator, just a few steps away, was always running. But I couldn’t use that one, of course. And I’d stand there feeling a rage build up in me as I watched white schoolteachers herding their young white pupils onto their elevator so they could tour the Atlanta City Hall and see just how democracy worked. I don’t think any of those teachers ever took the time to explain to those children why I was standing there when they rode up and still waiting when they came back down. Perhaps they never saw me. . . .

  But this was only the beginning. Eventually, the elevator would come, and the Negro waiting for it would be taken to the Negro registration window. Once there, he’d learn that a tax was levied on black people who had the uppity nerve to want some part of a white man’s business. These were the head taxes or poll taxes, as they were called. The Negro who wished to vote would often have to pay these taxes not only for himself, but for his ancestors who had resided in the same county—whether or not these ancestors had ever actually voted or even been allowed to vote. These taxes could mount up to such a sum that nobody could pay them. Some Negroes went back and started saving, then started waiting all over again for that elevator, and the checking of records at that little window. Once the money was paid up, if it was, the Negro could then take a test to determine whether he was educated enough to vote. (Sometimes he might be eligible to vote under the provisions of the “grandfather clauses,” that is, if a direct ancestor of his had voted during the early Reconstruction days.) Sometimes that would stop him again. The Negro would have to go off and study, get help with all sorts of questions about government and history and the Constitution—which all Negroes really needed to know more about. Maybe that part of it was a strange blessing because some blacks learned a lot about government that way.

  There were Negroes who went through it all and eventually came out of City Hall with a card that made them registered voters for the national elections. They came away with something rare and special. Knowing I could vote was one of the most meaningful things in my young life. But if this was any kind of victory over anything, it was just a beginning. The next phase was still years away.

  Just before classes one evening, Mr. Clayton called me into his office. My father was there, and he’d been drinking. The work on the farm was going badly. My younger brothers weren’t able to help Papa as much as he needed now, so he wanted me back home. I looked at Mr. Clayton, but he stared right back with a look that made it clear I wasn’t going to lean on anybody in making this decision. I told my father I couldn’t go back, that school was too important, not only to me, but to Woodie Clara. My sister had lost her job when a fire at the yarn factory where she was working closed the place down. So I was picking up her costs and mine, cutting down on the number of classes I was taking so I could earn a little more with overtime. I’d never go back to the farm.

  “This is your father you talkin’ to, boy,” Papa yelled across Mr. Clayton’s office. “I say you comin’ back an’ that’s it!”

  My throat went dry. All I could remember was that night we’d fought, and how sick it had made me afterward nearly every time I thought about it. Honor thy mother and thy father, the Scriptures told me. But if Papa had grabbed me by the collar, oh, what would I have done? I don’t think I could have fought again, that just wasn’t in me, not against my father! But I knew also that if it came to that, Papa would drag me back to Stockbridge, just to show he had enough will remaining in him to do it.

  Suddenly, through all the tension and pressure, I could hear Mr. Clayton’s voice as he spoke gently, persuasively, to my father. “‘Don’t ask your son to do this, Mr. King,” he said. “Not when his future is so clearly tied to his getting an education. We can only give him some of that here, maybe not enough, but let us, and let him try.”

  “How you payin’ for this?” Papa asked me.

  “Workin,’” I told him. “Doin’ odd jobs, drivin’ an’ such.”

  “You payin’ your way an’ ya sister’s, too?”

  “Tryin’ hard, Papa, I’m doin’ the best I can.”

  He stared at me, through all that liquor, through all his days and times. “I need your help, son,” he said. “I’m doin’ all I can, too, but I can’t cut it unless you come on down there an’ give me a hand.”

  The three of us stood silently in that little office, each of us trying to find something, somewhere, to look at besides the floor. “I can’t, Papa, I just can’t. . . .”

  He bit his lip hard, and I saw him lurch toward the door of the office. He turned just as he left, turned and looked back at me, his eyes narrowing, afraid, defiant, angry. He was going back to the country, back to cotton, leaving me, his first son, in a place that made no sense to him at all. For an instant I hated what I was doing. I wanted to run back home and say, Mama, I can’t do it, it’s too hard, I’m gonna farm just like everybody else.

  But I watched my father go and I knew I’d never follow him anywhere again, not down country roads, not through corn or to town or along the railroad tracks back out to where we lived.

  I was free, it seemed, in a way I’d dreamed of being, and though I knew it was going to cost me, I was willing to bear the price now, as I watched through Mr. Clayton’s window, watched and saw Papa struggle across the street heading down to the bus station and back out to Stockbridge.

  I walked back down the hall to my class, which had already started, and I sat down and listened as the teacher went over the lessons we’d been assigned from the previous night. I listened, but I heard very little. . . .

  SIX

  During the summer of 1920, I asked Alberta Williams to consider entering a courtship with me. Of course, I had no way of knowing just what kind of impression a rough farm boy had made on her. Alberta had handled it all so graciously. She never laughed at me, her smile was gentle, and her voice reassuring.

  Well, I really didn’t know much about falling in love. Maybe nobody ever really does. I’d been sweet on a few girls back in Stockbridge, but never in a way that took hold very seriously. Out there, in those days, a pregnant girl was a married girl, a young man who became a father also became a husband if he intended to stay around those church folks. So most young men, and I’d have to say especially young preachers, had to be pretty careful in their social lives. But with Alberta Williams, I felt something new, and knew that I’d have to see her again . . . and again.

  The Williams house on Auburn Avenue was a few blocks away from the Bryant School, and I took to walking past it nearly every evening on my way to and from my classes. I was hoping to see Alberta sitting on her porch, but she was never there; she usually came only for Sunday services at her father’s church. The rest of the time she wa
s at Spelman where, except for the Sunday afternoon social gathering in the dormitory parlor, she could not receive visitors or even any messages.

  One evening, as I was walking very slowly past the house, her father came out on the porch to take a stretch in the cool evening air. I couldn’t make up my mind whether I wanted to keep moving or stop right there in mid-stride. Just when I was getting ready to greet him, the Reverend turned around, without ever seeing me, and went back into his home. But I truly believed that good things would come to those who waited. Finally, my opportunity developed, very casually, one Saturday night. Alberta had been at a wedding her father officiated at in Ebenezer, and decided to stay over for church the next morning. I’d driven down to Stockbridge with Woodie, to see Mama, and was dropping her off at the Williamses’, where she was still rooming, when I saw Alberta walking toward the house along Auburn.

  She remembered me, although it had been months since we first met. “Oh, I couldn’t forget meeting a preacher, my father wouldn’t allow it,” she said. Woodie excused herself and went into the house, and Alberta and I stayed out on the porch to chat. She seemed to know about everything and talked so freely, with such ease and such style! Finally, she complimented me on the way I kept my car up, very neat and polished, always in good repair.