My travels began to heal parts of me that had hurt. Life always continues.
And then, just when I was beginning to feel some wholeness again, on a summer morning, the last Sunday in June of 1974, my Bunch was killed. . . .
I was awake early that day, lying in bed at dawn trying to go over in my mind the speech I was scheduled to deliver up in New Jersey late that afternoon. But it wasn’t any thoughts of that speaking engagement that had wakened me. Bunch had experienced some difficulty sleeping at night, and I knew that she was greatly concerned about my traveling so much. But retirement was something I’d never been able to understand, much less practice. Keeping active was my way of keeping fit. Knowing that I still had much to share with other people in my country and throughout the world was a way of sustaining the spirit through difficult moments and memories.
Bunch worried, though. She’d say, for instance, that the weather was so unpredictable up North that I needed to take a warmer top coat, maybe some overshoes. This was her way of telling me how much she agonized when I went away, how much she dreaded each journey I was taking, so afraid was she that I might not return. Of course, she didn’t want me to know how these feeling affected her, so she just fussed about my being dressed properly, or remembering all the schedules, calling when I got there or when I was ready to leave; staying in touch.
She carried that burden that only mothers can know, the burden that comes with losing children of whatever age. That her sons were grown when they passed and had lived extraordinary lives didn’t minimize the feeling that they were still her babies when they were taken away.
On that Sunday morning, I dressed very quietly as Bunch slept, stopping now and then just to look at her, hoping that she’d had some rest and some ease from her worries. Across the years the aches that move through life had burdened her and she hadn’t wavered. Oh, it was difficult. We had held each other through moments when life seemed to be tearing both of us to pieces. There had been victories we’d gloried in, seeing Atlanta and the South and the United States become better than they had been, more than they were, and strong enough, we thought, to move ahead into being what many of us for so long had dreamed they could be.
We tried not to measure the costs in personal terms, but of course they were always there with us: the bombs, the guns, the clubs, the dogs and the jail cells. All these things remained, no matter how diligently we worked to put them aside. But at least we could, Bunch and I, consider that tears were now being shed throughout the South over the same things. Griefs could no longer be separated by color. Americans were now facing one another in the effort to discover just who they were and what this country was and would be. These tears, then, hadn’t been shed for nothing.
I took my suitcase and forgot the topcoat I promised Bunch I’d take along with me, and I drove alone over to church. Along the way I saw families and individuals moving quickly to their own places of worship, black and white folks, children on their way, grown-ups hurrying them through the streets of Atlanta, streets that seemed to be changing over and over, becoming newer and newer since those days when I first saw the city, while riding in my father’s wagon with all my brothers and sisters, bringing vegetables into what I thought was the biggest market in the whole world. All things were so much smaller now. Buildings I recalled as huge were tiny today. And, as usual, so much of what I saw reminded me of times M.L. and I had been here, or A.D. and I had passed by there . . . I missed both of them so much.
At Ebenezer that morning, I parked the car and stood for several minutes talking with men and women who’d been members of the church for years, long enough in a few instances to have grandchildren who were growing up at Ebenezer. These folks had struggled with us, experienced joy and unhappiness with us, as we made our church into the solid, special place all of them knew. I shook hands, trying to remember faces and match them with names, looking at six- and seven-year-old boys and girls who could only be, from those features, descended from folks who’d been there at the church for as long as I had been.
“Daddy King!” they’d shout to me, the little ones, “Daddy King!” And I knew again from the sound of all this how Ebenezer constantly saved me, pushed me forward into all my days.
I sat in my study glancing through some mail that had accumulated for nearly a week, but a restlessness came over me, and for several minutes I paced the floor, trying to organize all the thoughts and expressions in my talk for later in the day. I prayed silently for a while, giving thanks to God that my strength was holding up. The traveling I did at my age was too much for many men years younger. Yet I was able to do it, and I was grateful to Him for allowing so much energy to remain in these later hours, when so many folks were just content to sit and wait. . . .
Going downstairs, I moved through the hallways and past the rooms of the church basement, where Sunday school classes were now humming along, and I felt myself wondering again just how many of those bright faces, among all those young ones, held a mind active enough to lead America. Oh, there were some, I could sense it in the questions I heard them asking, in the very serious contemplation they gave to the stories in the Bible that would form the base of their religious conviction and their commitment to justice, to freedom.
Suddenly, though, I felt another presence, one I couldn’t really identify clearly. Several minutes passed as I looked through the classes, one by one, and saw the faces of people I didn’t know very well. But, I thought, Ebenezer is a church that attracts folks from everywhere, from other churches and from lives without the worship of God to sustain them. I’d always felt good inside when someone told me how much coming to Ebenezer had meant, how much of a search had been ended when he or she found our doors.
I was about to return to my study when the classes began emptying out. Soon after, the basement was filled with dozens of young people, some of them calling to me and being cautioned by the Sunday school teachers to behave. I tried to look at them sternly, but there was too much love for that, and they saw one tiny smile after another form on my face. So many of the little children of Ebenezer returned them to me with a little wave here and there to let me know they were with me. Then, something seemed to brush past me, a quick, cool wisp of air. A number of young men and women took the Sunday school classes. Many others that I didn’t always get to meet personally before they started with us taught these classes. And now, from within that moving crowd that surrounded me, I felt someone watching me closely, someone I could not yet pick out, but someone I could feel was following every move I made.
My eyes came to rest on several strangers, unusually tense young men who weren’t really to be called visitors. They smiled, too, but in ways that seemed to express no happiness, no hope, and no joy whatsoever. And as I moved toward a staircase to start back up to my study, there was a pair of eyes . . . turning away, being swallowed up in the crowd, but somehow, through all of that, watching me steadily. . . .
In my study again, I tried to put the feeling of tension out of mind and spirit. But it remained. I could hear the organ now, and I knew that Bunch had arrived and started to play. More than an hour had passed since I arrived, much more, and the time had been swallowed up by all these concerns, which I suddenly felt were foolish and unnecessary.
The organ sound blossomed and was filling Ebenezer as I entered the main sanctuary. The church pews were filled, a few latecomers were at the back peering through the rows for one final seat that had not been taken. I moved alongside the pulpit area, where my grandson Derek, who was now a theological student, was seated with our guest minister for that morning, the Reverend Calvin Morris. Christine was seated in the first pew to the left facing the pulpit, and as I started there to join her, something held me for a moment. I leaned against the piano near that side of the church and stared across the sanctuary toward the raised platform that holds the Ebenezer Hammond organ. (We were buying a new pipe organ, and it was still being built.) Bunch was playing, very quietly, and I stared at her, seeing my times
and hers blended together in that moment and so many others. We were at the point in the service where the Lord’s Prayer is chanted, and we had completed only a few measures of the chant. And then, that awful moment began. It started with a voice none of us had heard before that raised up and shrieked through the sound of the music.
“I’m taking over here this morning!”
Then, a popping sound, and Bunch cried out. I saw her hand fly up to her face. Blood came through her fingers. I saw the eyes again, those wide, angry eyes. They belonged to a young man I’d seen earlier, one of the strangers who had come to our church that morning, and who now was standing in a pew near Bunch, waving a pistol in the air.
Later I would realize that if he’d only stopped after that first shot, if he’d run away, things might have turned out differently.
Now I was standing. I started walking to that side of the church when more shots rang out, one of them whistling past the side of my head. But I was moving toward the stranger. I could see Bunch falling forward, now holding her side. Motion blurred in front of me, arms waved, bodies scrambled about as everyone sought cover. Now I couldn’t see Bunch, there were so many people moving around me, hands grabbing my arms and pulling me.
“I can’t leave here without Bunch!” I heard myself shout as several of the church deacons pulled me backward, away from the pulpit. Derek jumped down and was tackling this young man as I was yanked nearly off my feet, still crying out that I wouldn’t leave my wife there, struggling to get over to where she’d fallen now, across the organ.
The police and ambulances were called. Mayor Jackson came to the church and comforted the congregation, which was in a state of shock at what they had witnessed.
Just a few minutes later I was in a police patrol car, speeding behind an ambulance carrying Bunch to Grady Memorial Hospital. We rushed through streets I’d seen all my life. Now they were blurred into a forest of stone and metal and glass I felt I’d never seen before. I could see nothing, not even sense anything, except Bunch and the years and all the love and hopes. I knew she was hurt badly and of course I prayed hard as we moved quickly through Atlanta toward the hospital. The red light of the ambulance seemed to be jabbing through the car window at me. Suddenly the ambulance slowed down, almost to a stop, and I realized the car I was in was parked at Grady. I ran to the ambulance as they were getting her out on a stretcher. There was a lot of blood; I knew without asking that her wounds were very bad ones. She tried to speak when she saw me, tried to tell me where it was hurting. But the words wouldn’t come out, just a gasping sound from deep within her.
I sat alone in a small office on the ground floor of the hospital and waited. It seemed like months passed, but it was just minutes later when a young doctor came into the room and said, “I’m sorry, Reverend King, we just couldn’t save her. All of us tried, but it was just too late.”
Deacon Edward Boykin was also fatally wounded that morning, and three other members were wounded.
I faced some difficult days following Bunch’s passing. My family saved me during this period. Both Christine and Coretta remained in constant touch with me, as did Naomi. They saw that I was so busy doing things with all the grandchildren that I never had time to feel down or upset. The presence of the young is a huge comfort during such times. I was fortunate—and I was grateful.
The solace, hope, and love that we received from people around the world at the time of Bunch’s tragic death was a reservoir of strength and consolation to each of us in the family. Each family member had his or her set of friends who said, “Whatever you need, don’t fail to let me know.” Then there were the persons who were friends to all of us, collectively, and of course there were the Ebenezer members. In six brief years, the Ebenezer family had experienced more pain and sorrow with us than many congregations experience in a generation. I remembered, if our pains have been numerous, our joys have come in multitudes.
I thought about the beginning of my family. I was determined to be the father to my children and the husband to my wife that my own father had not been able to be. I remembered the discussions at meal times, the pride and thankfulness that Bunch had taken in the growth of the children. My mind went back to the trips we had made as a family—any parent knows that traveling with three children in a car is an unforgettable and patience-trying experience. I saw us worshipping together and supporting each other in our individual endeavors—the five of us had been so close. Now there was only Christine and me. Oh, yes, there were my son-in-law, my daughters-in-law, my grandchildren, and the other family members, but my family, the bond which I had forged, was again broken, and this time it was Bunch who had been taken away.
Christine had always been such a tower of strength. Before M.L. and Coretta married, Christine and Coretta developed a bond of friendship which would be deepened and strengthened over the years. She loved her brothers and was always present when they needed her—at their homes which were bombed in Alabama, at their installations in Montgomery, in Newnan, in Birmingham, in Louisville, and at Ebenezer, where she was as diligent and dependable a member as any pastor would want in his membership. Christine was her brothers’ sister, but she was also their friend.
It was she who went to New York with Coretta when M.L. was stabbed, she marched with him, she was with him in Oslo, and she traveled with Coretta and the others bringing M.L. home from Memphis. She went with me when I was called to A.D.’s home after he drowned, and she witnessed her mother being shot. I was watching her receive the callers at our home—people from all ranks of life came. Mrs. Rosalynn Carter was among the first to reach us that Sunday afternoon. Friends from the childhood and college days of my wife, business friends, public officials, my ministerial colleagues, college presidents—there was no end to the continuing flow of those who felt our grief. Christine was the gracious hostess whose strength emanated to each person whose hand she shook. The mantle had fallen on her, and she who is committed to duty and responsibility and who always says, “You do what you have to do,” was doing just that. She took the lead in arranging the programs for two services that were held for Bunch. The finalizing of each detail was hers, and she knew the persons to contact.
The pain was deep and piercing, but the exquisite beauty of the flowers, the eloquence of the spoken words, and the ethereal quality of the music—the music that was Bunch’s life—brought indescribable solace to us on Tuesday evening at the memorial service in Sisters Chapel on Spelman’s campus, and the next day, July 3, at Ebenezer.
Our confidant and spiritual leader, Dr. Mays, delivered the eulogy that evening, and we could not have asked for more comfort than he brought in his unmistakably wise and consoling statements on the meaning of life—Bunch’s life.
On Wednesday, it was Sandy Ray, my best friend, my friend from college days, my friend who could not attend our wedding because he didn’t have a suit he thought was good enough to wear, who gave the eulogy. As I sat and listened to Sandy, I thanked God that he let me so live that during what seemed like unbearable grief there was a Sandy Ray and countless others whose strong arms of love had been thrown around us to keep us from falling.
It was a beautiful service. The program was printed on pink paper because Bunch was music and pink is the color for music. The music and the musicians that Bunch had taught were never better. And, yes, there was even laughter at the funeral!
Bunch had a boundless sense of humor, and Dr. Melvin Watson, who had known both of us before we met, recalled that very recently Bunch had said to him, “Melvin, I don’t understand what is happening to King. When he met me, he said he was five years older than I was. Apparently he has forgotten that, because for the past four or five years he has changed his age so much that he is now five years younger than I am! Do you think you can talk to him and help him get the years straight?”
I was proud of Christine; her faith shone as it had never shone before. She gave me more attention than I thought I deserved. She had always talked to her mother and me
each day—in fact, she often came to the house each day—but now she did not let a day pass without spending time with me. She saw to it that I stayed on my diet, kept my appointments with the doctor (sometimes she made the appointment for me when I rebelled against making it), gave instructions to the housekeeper which sometimes included calling her, Christine, if I decided to go out when I had been told to stay in. Christine has borne great sorrows with grace, and I thank God for a daughter who has loved and cared for me while making a life for herself and her husband and children.
It was time for me to retire from Ebenezer. My energies were not what they had been, and I did not want the church to decline under my leadership. Bunch and I had discussed retirement many times, and in 1972 she had formally relinquished her role with the Music Department.
At our annual church conference in November 1974, I recommended the Reverend Joseph Lawrence Roberts, Jr., to the membership. Joe was born and reared in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where his father was a minister. Joe’s mother was a public school teacher; he has one sister.
Joe was a graduate of Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee, where under the influence of the Presbyterians, he was invited to join their denomination. He accepted their invitation and continued his education, earning degrees from Union Theological Seminary in New York City and Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, awarded him an honorary degree.
My recommendation, if the church accepted it, would mean that Joe would have to join the Baptist church. The members accepted my recommendation, and after many hours of prayer and consultation, Joe agreed to the call, joined Ebenezer, and was baptized by me on Sunday, January 5, 1975.
This unprecedented act created considerable media interest on the local and national scenes. A new pastor at a church seldom receives more than a release in the local and church papers. But in the case of a new pastor at Ebenezer, the story appeared in Time magazine, several issues of the daily Atlanta papers, and the denominational organs.
Daddy King Page 21
