Daddy King Read online

  “Well, let me carry you out for a ride sometime,” I said to her. She looked surprised, then she chuckled a little. Her father would never allow that!

  “Well, the truth is,” I told her, “that I’m preachin’ pretty good along in here, and I was wonderin’ if you ever thought about courting. I’d like to if you’d consider it.”

  “Court?” she said. “But I don’t know you, Reverend King.”

  “No better’n I know you,” I answered. “Difference is that I’m interested in findin’ out more about you, ’cause you seem to me such a fine person, very gracious and all.”

  This shocked her, I think; nobody had ever asked her to court. And Alberta had set her heart and mind on teaching school. This was her consuming interest—the future of the children in our community.

  For a long time she just stared at me. “I . . . I’m not sure what my folks would say,” she told me.

  I said, “Well, maybe we’d better find out first what you think. Could I come and take you for a drive one time when you’re home?”

  “That’s so very nice,” she said. “It’s the nicest thing. But I’d have to ask my folks. . . .”

  “Well, ask them,” I said to her. “I mean, if it’s all right with you.”

  “Why, yes,” she said, “I think I’d like that very much!”

  And so we started a courtship that lasted six years. This wasn’t uncommon in those days. Marriage was regarded with great seriousness, and almost never entered into lightly. Alberta and I went for our drives, and after some real work at convincing Reverend Williams, we went to see a movie being shown in town, back then when they were called picture shows. This was a very happy period in my life. “I think about you a lot, Alberta,” I’d often tell her, “about what a fine life two people like us ought to try and have in this world.”

  One night, her father came out on the porch while Alberta and I were talking. He sent her inside and sat down for some talk, man-to-man, with me. Alberta’s education wasn’t going to be interrupted, he made it very clear. “We don’t have any spare rooms in this house for broken hearts, son.”

  Well, I knew what he meant and quickly I tried to make him understand that I had nothing but honorable intentions where Alberta was concerned. “In fact,” I told him, “I’m hopeful I can convince her to consider marrying me, Reverend Williams.”

  Alberta was returning with a tray of lemonade just as I started talking about my plans for our future. She put the lemonade down next to her father, looked at me, and rushed back into the house, where she and her mother soon started taking turns trying to calm each other down. Reverend Williams said he couldn’t hear himself think for the sound of their voices, and he went inside to try and quiet them down. Then I heard Woodie’s voice, and one of the elderly sisters who was boarding with the Williams family at the time, and soon it sounded like a choir rehearsing in there.

  Woodie suddenly reappeared on the front porch. We held hands and stood there looking at each other, starting to say things and not finishing the sentences, as the voices from inside grew louder and happier.

  A few minutes later it was still going on. A few neighbors had come by, and Mrs. Williams was serving lemonade. The Reverend and I took a walk down Auburn, along the way where Negro businesses were springing up and flourishing as a new Atlanta started to grow. Reverend Williams spoke of the new city and of the days ahead for it. The black population was not only large but many in it now owned property and were sending record numbers of children to college.

  “It’s goin’ to be different here in a few years, King,” the Reverend said. “Change is comin’ whether the white man can handle it or not. There may be a lot of difficult times, and I hope you’re a man ready to deal with it. But let me be clear about something. This isn’t the time for you and Alberta to be thinking about gettin’ married. She’s got school to finish, and you’ve got your ministry to establish.”

  I told him I could respect that view, but that Alberta and I had been very attracted to each other from the first day we ever met. “It’s not gonna change, sir,” I told Reverend Williams as we walked back toward his home.

  And so our courtship blossomed, and I was soon known in the congregation of Ebenezer as Alberta’s preacher beau. My life blossomed, too. I had my little Model T Ford, and I’d take a drive with Alberta nearly every weekend. Or we’d convince Reverend Williams, over and over, that these moving-picture shows folks were running didn’t have so much sin in them that good Baptist people couldn’t enjoy attending. Church folks then didn’t drink or smoke or dance with each other. I had grown up that way in the country, just as Alberta had in the city. Social life was built completely into the framework of the church. But it wasn’t as rigid as many people say. There were picnics and boatings and drives, plenty of good food among very warm, affectionate people.

  Everything was strictly chaperoned, of course, even the teas they held at Ebenezer, where nobody would dare get out of hand anyway, even if none of the older members were around. Usually, the older saints of church did the chaperoning, women who’d raised children and spent all their years praising the Lord in the hardest of times. Negro people had a closeness and sense of family that made for very strong bonds of emotional security. I was very happy.

  But the next fall Alberta left Atlanta to study at Hampton Institute, in Virginia. I was just torn up inside when she told me. But her parents felt we needed some time apart to let our senses cool off some. We’d both told them we were in love that summer. Marriage was the next step. But there was one hitch. The board of education in Atlanta had a rule against hiring women to teach if they were married. Reverend and Mrs. Williams had grown very fond of me in a very short time. But they weren’t about to sacrifice their daughter’s education and training before she had any chance at all to use it. They frankly wanted us to test this love we talked about so much and so happily. So Alberta went away to Hampton and studied there for nearly a year and a half. Our only communication during this time was by letter. But our affection for one another simply found another way of expressing itself.

  When Alberta came home for good, after finishing her courses up at Hampton, I drove down to the railroad station and stood in the door of the colored waiting room on this very rainy afternoon and then ran along the platform when I saw her and just swept her up into my arms.

  “Aw, there you are,” I shouted. “My little bunch of goodness is back with me again! I love you, just love you more than anything in this world.”

  She was laughing. “What’s this bunch-of-goodness business?”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s what you are to me. But I’ll shorten it up some if you want and just call you Bunch!”

  Bunch and I had our engagement announced by her father during Sunday morning services at Ebenezer, and as we stood outside afterward, greeting people, accepting congratulations, I began to notice that many of the church folks seemed to take it for granted that I was now going to be Reverend Williams’s associate pastor.

  It was the greatest period of happiness I’d ever known. But it was interrupted in 1924. One afternoon in the spring, I drove over to the bus depot to meet my brothers Henry and James, Jr., who were coming up from Stockbridge for a weekend in the city. From the moment they got off the bus, I knew something was wrong. Mama, they finally told me, was doing very poorly in her health, but didn’t want me to worry.

  “But it’s real bad, Mike,” they told me, and I could see both of them had been crying. So we just turned around and drove down to Stockbridge, with my thoughts and feelings turning over even faster than the wheels of the car. My blood just rushed at the thought of anything being wrong with my mother, and when we arrived and I saw her, I knew my very worst fears were accurate.

  A huge tumor had developed on her neck, just below her chin. She had so much pain she couldn’t turn her head, and this tumor had been growing there for months. The boys told me some old country doctor had sold Mama some medicine that made her even worse, it s
eemed to them. Now I was angry and felt like going out and grabbing that old quack and shaking the life out of him. But Mama was so happy to see me. And I realized I’d been planning to do so much for her that I no longer visited regularly. I was ashamed of that, and told her I’d do much better from now on.

  Mama just smiled and shook her head. “It’s all right, son.”

  Later that evening, when she fell asleep, I jumped back into my car and drove on up to Atlanta. One of my boardinghouse mates had a cousin who was a doctor there in town, and this young man agreed to come back down to Stockbridge with me and take a look at Mama. I prayed to myself all the way there, running much too fast over those country roads, but, of course, not concerned about driving safely.

  Back in Stockbridge, the doctor examined the swelling on Mama’s neck, then walked with me along the road outside the cabin.

  “It’s very bad, Mike. There’s really nothing that can be done for her now,” he told me. “Just keep her as comfortable as you can.”

  “How long?” I asked him.

  “A few months . . .”

  I dropped out of school and went down to Stockbridge to spend my mother’s last days with her. She was in agony most of the time now; no matter what medicine she took, nothing helped very much. She took comfort in my reciting Scriptures to her, and I concentrated on the Psalms, which she loved hearing, until, one morning, she passed into a deep sleep and began to breathe heavily and to moan. That noon, she died.

  We buried her several miles away, near the school I’d attended, which was near the church of Reverend Low, the husband of our teacher. Papa was just ruined by Mama’s death. She’d suffered so much, and he’d been able to do nothing, offer no comfort. It cut into him. He took it hard and thought that whiskey would help. His grief just broke him down at the graveside, and none of us could do anything to help. And in the sound of his pain I heard Papa’s love for Mama, and I heard the years they’d spent trying to build a life in a place where the Negro wasn’t regarded as a human being.

  During those final nights, when she was slipping away from us, I cursed the whites who took so much away and inflicted so much hatred and violence on people whose color they didn’t happen to share. I told Mama, as I had years ago, that I’d hate every white face I ever saw, but she made me promise I’d never let that happen. “Hatred,” she told me, “makes nothing but more hatred, Michael. Don’t you do it.”

  But as I looked at my father that day we buried Mama, and saw so many of the scars that had been left on my parents, I really didn’t know how I could keep that promise.

  I grieved deeply for many weeks afterward. And several months after Mama’s death, the family suffered another tragedy when my sister Ruby suffered from a ruptured appendix and died suddenly. All this grief brought home very clearly that running away from the country had solved very little for me. The pressure of discrimination and bigotry followed very closely, country or city, wherever people’s skin was dark. White supremacy took different forms in Atlanta, but it was always around, just as it had been back there in the country. Whites had invented the “nigger,” who lived everywhere and suffered wherever he lived. And when the nigger was finished hauling water and wood, he could always serve as somebody to be blamed for what was wrong anywhere. Southern politicians built up whole careers with a single issue: Niggers. Not people. Niggers. Not life. Niggers. Whites became twisted out of shape when it came to race. Some hated very quietly, just going along instead of actually doing any of the hating themselves. Southerners developed looking-the-other-way into an art. Seeing no evil, they could feel certain they were responsible for none. But it was there—in the lynch mobs that ran free in the rural areas, in signs all over Atlanta that separated human beings by color and channeled their lives through doors that read WHITES ONLY or COLORED ENTRANCE.

  People were like zombies within the system of southern segregation. Whites often apologized for it, but none of them ever moved on their own to do anything about ending the lie of separate but equal lives for the races.

  Alberta, whom I now called Bunch all the time, urged me to involve myself even more in my studies. Finishing Bryant was fine, she felt, but it should not be the end of my formal education. Reverend Williams had attended Morehouse College for a year, and he advised me to look into taking some courses over there. And so, in the fall of 1926, I walked into the Morehouse registrar’s office and told the young man there, a fellow named Lloyd O. Lewis, that I was ready to start college. He was skeptical, and he had reason to be. Mr. Lewis gave me some tests. He was a very able and demanding fellow, and after he’d marked my exams he said, bluntly, “You’re just not college material, Reverend King.”

  I was furious. It seemed that folks kept telling me I couldn’t do things that I then went out and did.

  “I can handle anything you’ve got here,” I told Mr. Lewis. “If hard work’ll git it, I ain’t got a problem.”

  But in Lewis’s opinion, college required more than hard work. A student had to have a background, something to build on, a foundation. According to Lewis, I didn’t have that. “Nothing personal,” he assured me.

  I left his office thinking I should have been satisfied with my diploma from Bryant, but realizing that this would never be enough when there was so much more to learn. Bunch put it all in perspective. “You’re not an educated man, King, not yet. You’ve got work to do, and you’ve got to get started.”

  But to return to school at my age seemed more than just difficult. So I had almost convinced myself, after that initial effort to enroll at Morehouse, that scholarly pursuits just weren’t going to be part of my life anymore; but Bunch wasn’t impressed by my viewpoint on this matter. She convinced me that I had to continue my studies.

  Unfortunately, Lloyd Lewis, too, was unmoved. When I visited his office again, he stuck to his original judgment that I’d be wasting my time and the college’s if I tried to pursue a course of study at Morehouse. I asked if he’d give me a trial, a term, say, to prove I could do the work. He listened patiently, but still concluded that I couldn’t do the required work, and my test scores were all the evidence he needed to decide.

  I left his office feeling as if I’d been kicked. My spirit was torn, and I just walked around the school for nearly an hour. Then I made a decision, a very reckless one. I walked back into the Morehouse Administration Building, straight past the secretary and into the office of the president of the college. Once inside, I stopped cold.

  President John Hope was clearly not a man you just walked in on. He glared at me from the other side of his large, ornate desk, with eyes that seemed to burn right through mine. But I looked him straight back in the eye and said, “Sir, my name is Mike King, Reverend Mike King, and I know, sir, that my tests are not too good. But I want to go on in school, I want more education, and if there’s any way I can come here to Morehouse . . .”

  He stood up, and I thought about sinking right through the floor. When I told him that I failed all the tests Mr. Lewis had given me, his eyes hardened even more. “But, sir,” I said, “when I came to Atlanta I couldn’t even read, I had to go to grammar school to learn anything. And I put in five years, I know a lot more than I did! I can go further, if I work at it, and I will.”

  When I’d poured all this out, President Hope seemed so unimpressed that I turned to leave. I’d reached the steps of the Administration Building when the secretary caught up with me and said that the president wanted me back in his office. I ran there, tried to calm myself down, and went in again. He stared at me, said nothing, then handed me an envelope with the registrar’s name on it and waved me out of his office. Quickly, I returned to Mr. Lewis’s office and gave him the letter. As he read it, the expression on his face changed from amusement to anger.

  “Apparently,” he snapped, “you can begin classes at Morehouse. Don’t ask why, but you can. . . .”

  My old mates at the boardinghouse gradually scattered to the winds, moving to different parts of Atlanta or to ot
her places in the United States. At Morehouse I had little time for the ordinary framework of social life. I was older than most students, engaged to be married, and already practicing my profession as a preacher. And so I made only one good friend while I was there, a young student minister from Texas. Sandy Ray was his name, and we were to be friends for many years after our student days. We shared an awe of city life, of cars, of the mysteries of college scholarship, and, most of all, of our callings to the ministry. Like good pals should, we tried to help each other with studies. It didn’t take either of us long to realize that that wasn’t going to work too well; both of us needed better assistance than that. I was fortunate to have a fiancée recently out of college herself, who could explain, as patiently as possible, what was the obvious to her. What I learned I passed along quickly to my friend Sandy, before it became mysterious all over again.

  Where Sandy and I were really able to reinforce each other, though, was in the common view of religious life both of us had as kids and had carried into our adulthood. Sandy viewed the opportunity to provide moral leadership and Biblical commitment to a congregation as the most challenging task he’d ever known. He knew, as I did, that some of those old country preachers back home in Texas and in Georgia used the church for gain, for one kind of profit or another. This gave the Negro Baptist minister a reputation, among some folks, as a confidence man who took advantage of the poor and the ignorant. Yet even from their bad example, Sandy would say, we can learn how the road should run, and make our way along a better path.

  But Sandy wanted another kind of environment than the South for his work, while I was committed to stay in that part of the country. He was convinced I could put together a great pastorate in one of the northern cities with a sizable population of transplanted Georgians.