A Summer of Kings (21 page)

In the book, Dr. King wrote about how sometimes he would get as many as a dozen threats on his life a day down there in the South, but he still believed that Gandhi's ideas about nonviolence and Thoreau's ideas on civil disobedience were the ways to bring about a peaceful revolution. I loved that. I loved the idea of it, a peaceful revolution.

I carried the book with me to read during Sophia's rehearsals, and I got so excited reading about the boycott and the idea of a peaceful revolution—something I could tell King-Roy about—that I started talking back to the book, sometimes crying and sometimes cheering, and the director had to ask me to leave the auditorium.

That book was the only thing that gave me any kind
of hope those days when everything and everyone around me seemed to be shifting and changing and moving in some new direction that I couldn't keep pace with or even comprehend. I felt as if some giant switch that had kept the world turning in the right direction had been flipped. I could feel the change, feel the slowing of the earth as it got ready to stop and reverse direction. I could feel it in our house, with the way Mother came home each day from the hospital so depressed she couldn't eat or speak to any of us, and the way Father, who had returned from California, couldn't sit still, as if he had some big decision to make that kept him up all night, pacing in his study.

Sophia had daily tantrums at the theater over nothing important, and I suspected it was because Mother couldn't pay her any attention and I had been a poor and impatient substitute for her.

Auntie Pie had released the two hawks she had nursed back to health, and I found her combing the woods one morning as I ran there. She was pale and pinched in the face with worry and had gone out there dressed still in her nightgown and bathrobe. Her hair was falling about her shoulders, looking wild and untidy. She said she had a strong feeling that one of the hawks didn't make it; she had decided in the middle of the night that she had released it too soon, and she was searching the woods for its body. Thursday of that week she found it, and we had a little funeral for the hawk, and then Auntie Pie retreated into the gatehouse and
wouldn't come out. She had never made a mistake with her animals before and her mistake had cost it its life.

Beatrice had grown impatient with Dad, who had told her he wasn't sure he was going to direct the Vera play after all, so she took a part in an off-Broadway play, and the experience of working with a new group of people had turned her into a beatnik. She said everything was "cool, man," and she called people "cats" and said "I dig" a lot. She had flattened her hair and had bangs down over one eye. She wore a cotton beret on her head and black slacks with man shoes and a tight pullover top. I had never seen Beatrice in slacks before. She reminded me of a lady spy.

Monsieur Vichy came down from his rooms to meals looking disheveled, dressed in the same black pants and the same muslin short-sleeved shirt and wearing his funny French sandals. His hair looked greasy like he hadn't bathed in forever, and just like everybody else at the table, he didn't have much to say. I decided he must have been having trouble with the new play he was writing, but since I didn't want him to ask me about my play, I didn't ask him about his. All the same, one night he came to my room—something he had never done before—and he asked me how my play was coming along.

I said, "I bring it with me to Sophia's rehearsals every day," which was the truth.

Monsieur Vichy took his cigar out of his mouth and asked, "Do you want me to look it over for you? Do you need perhaps some help with it?"

I should have said something then; I should have confessed that I had nothing to show him, but I didn't. I couldn't bear to have him shame me after all the bragging I had done. I imagined him laughing at me and pointing me out at the dinner table and telling everyone how I couldn't even write a paragraph, let alone a play. How could I stand it? So I said, "No, thank you. I'll keep working on it on my own."

Monsieur Vichy left my room looking disappointed, as though I had deprived him of a good night's entertainment making fun of me and pointing out all my ineptitudes. As soon as he left, I pulled out my play and wrote, "
The lights come up and the sound of the waves, though diminished, remain constant throughout the first scene.
" I looked at my new sentence and I realized, staring down at it, that I was stalling. I was stalling because I had nothing to say. I had nothing to write about. How could I write a play when I knew nothing about how the world worked? How could I write about what I didn't understand? How could I write about people's lives when my own life was a mystery to me? The answer was I couldn't. I shoved my notebook under my bed and decided I wouldn't bring it with me to rehearsals anymore, and I thought, sitting there on my bed, how everything I had touched that summer, everything I had attempted, had failed. Even my tap lessons had turned sour.

King-Roy still gave me lessons, but it wasn't fun anymore. He taught me how to do the Shim Sham, but he barely spoke a word. Most of his teaching was through
demonstration. Any time I looked at him, his gaze was always looking away, far away, as though he didn't know he was in the room with me, as if his mind was in Harlem with Ax and Yvonne.

I told him about the book I had read by Martin Luther King Jr. and he blew up at me.

"Stop reading all that, Esther!" he shouted. "It's not your business, anyway. It's just none of your business. Peaceful revolution ain't no revolution, you hear me? That's just the old slave-boy mentality, all that peace talk and making nice with the blue-eyed devil. We're no closer to getting our rights than we ever were, or ever will be if all we got is a
peaceful
revolution."

King-Roy was flapping his arms and flaring his nostrils at me, and I couldn't stand it. He sounded so angry. He sounded as if he hated me.

I said, "But Gandhi said that we must be the change we wish to see in the world. That's what Dr. Martin Luther King Junior is doing, isn't he? He's being the change. He's being the peace and the love he wants to see in the world. I think that's a good thing to be, don't you?"

King-Roy marched about the room, his tap shoes slapping at the floor. "He can go on and be all the peace and love he wants to be, but that doesn't stop white folks from bashing our heads in and hanging us by our necks and bombing our homes." King-Roy spun around and pointed his finger at me. "And the only reason you're rootin' for nonviolence is because that way the only people who are getting hurt and killed are black people. You don't like what Ax and Malcolm X say because maybe y'all in your big white mansions and your all-white towns don't feel so safe anymore."

I jumped back when he pointed at me, and I said, "Well you're right, King-Roy. I
am
scared. I'm scared of how angry you are. I'm scared because you look at me like you hate me, but ... but you don't, do you? We're still friends, aren't we? King-Roy? Aren't we?"

King-Roy had turned away, to face the windows, and he stood there shaking his head.

"Are you thinking about it, or are you shaking your head no, we're not friends?"

King-Roy sighed. "Esther," he said, then shook his head again.

I moved so that I faced him again, and he folded his arms across his chest and looked down at his feet.

"King-Roy? We're still friends, you and me, aren't we? I mean, you hugged me and you held my hand the other day, and you're teaching me tap. And I'm trying, I'm trying to understand and learn how it is for you. I'm really trying, King-Roy because, well, because, I ... I love you and you love me, don't you? I mean, don't you? Don't you care about me? Just tell me that you care, okay?" I felt desperate for him to say he still liked me, that we were still friends. If he couldn't say that, well, then, I had lost every friend I had.

King-Roy shook his head some more and held out his hands and kind of shrugged, then said, "Esther," again, and I grabbed one of his outstretched arms and
pulled myself to him and hugged him around the waist really tight and I said, "I love you. I love you, anyway, okay? I love you." I squeezed him as hard as I could, and King-Roy tried to pry my arms loose but I wouldn't let go.

"Esther," he said, more calmly, "that's enough, now, you got to let go of me. What if someone came in on us?"

"No one will," I said.

"Someone might, and I'm the one who's gon' pay for it if they do."

"I'll let go only if you tell me you love me," I said, feeling suddenly wild inside. What was I doing?

King-Roy reached back for my hands and tried again to pry me loose but I held on, locking my arms tight around him.

"I know you love me, King-Roy. I know you do and I love you and you have to say it. You have to say it."

I heard King-Roy sigh and I felt the air leave his body. I could hear his heart pounding hard in his chest, just the way mine was doing, and I could smell his Lifebuoy soap and the sweet-smelling stuff he put in his hair. I could feel his warm body up against mine, and I said again, "I love you, King-Roy Johnson," and then King-Roy said very quietly, very softly, with a sigh, "I can't say it, Esther. I can't say what I don't feel."

"What?" I let go and backed up, feeling as if the earth had come to a standstill, as if this moment was the reason why the whole household had become so unsettled. I looked up into King-Roy's eyes and saw nothing familiar there—no light or life, just a dullness that given the slightest push could harden into something cruel. I knew that King-Roy had planned to return to Harlem the next day to attend the unity rally Malcolm X was holding, and I thought as I stared up at King-Roy's blank face that that rally might just be the push.

I felt so sad and frightened watching King-Roy, no longer my friend, leave for the train station the next morning that I didn't know what to do with myself. Everything around me had fallen apart and I didn't know how I could fix it. I didn't know how to make Pip my friend again, or how to get Kathy and Laura to accept me, or how to make my mother happy or my father not worried, or how to calm Sophia down or get Auntie Pie to come out of the gatehouse. Everybody was at loose ends, and I felt responsible for all of it.

I went for a run through the woods and got so sad thinking about how Pip and I used to run together that I couldn't finish and I ended up walking back from the pond to the house in tears.

I put on my tap shoes and practiced the Shim Sham and the difficult kick-back Shoop Shoop dance that King-Roy had made up and taught me, and that made me even sadder as I recalled the first week of tap lessons, when King-Roy and I had laughed and touched and he had danced for me.

After lunch, where we all sat around so steeped in our own miseries that no one but Stewart had anything to say, I went up to my room and stared down at the cover of the bus-boycott book I had gotten out of the library. I thought about Martin Luther King Jr. and the big march he and other Negro leaders were planning to hold down in Washington, and I wished that King-Roy would join them. I wished that he would give nonviolence another chance. Then I thought about Gandhi and how he said that we needed to be the change we wished to see in the world, and I wondered how I could be the change I wished to see in my world, and in my house. I flopped down on my bed and kicked off my shoes. I still had on my saddle oxfords, the ones I had had the shoe repairman in town attach taps to, and they dropped down onto the floor with a slap. When I heard the slap of the shoes, an idea popped into my head. I sat up and another idea popped into my head. I had two wonderful ideas. I jumped up off the bed and ran out of the room to go find Stewart and Sophia.

My first wonderful idea was to put on a show for everybody. Mother loved when Sophia and Stewart sang and performed, and now I could perform, too. I thought I could do my tap-dance routines, and Sophia could sing and do a monologue, and Stewart could dance a ballet.

Stewart had said when I told him, "You mean you want me to do the ballet that I'm learning in class? What will Mother and Dad say?"

"When they see how good you are and how happy it makes you, I know they'll let you keep dancing."

"But what if they don't? Then what? They'll know that I've been sneaking off."

"They're going to find out sooner or later, and besides," I said, "Mother and Dad love a good show. You just have to be the very best you can be. We'll put on the show two weeks from today, that's the twenty-fourth. We'll just have to really practice like crazy until then so that we're perfect."

When I told Sophia about my idea, her face lit up, especially when I said that I was going to try to get Auntie Pie to make us some costumes. Sophia loved costumes—the frillier the better—and I figured if Auntie Pie made the costumes, it would take her mind off of the dead hawk and make the show look like a real production.

I went over to the gatehouse and told Auntie Pie my plans for the show. She was sitting on the floor with her injured skunk curled up in her lap. "Costumes," she said, tilting her head and thinking it over. "In two weeks?"

I nodded. "I know it's short notice, but I thought you could use some old costumes and kind of put things together—you know, the way you know how to do."

Auntie Pie didn't say anything. She just stroked the skunk's back and looked out the window, so I added, "I thought I could wear some kind of roaring-twenties jazz costume."

Auntie Pie looked over at me. "Jazz? That might be fun."

I smiled and knelt down beside her. "Really? Then, you'll do it?"

Auntie Pie stopped stroking the skunk and sniffed. "Yes," she nodded. "Yes, I'll do it."

I was so excited, I hugged Auntie Pie hard and she squealed and woke the skunk, which blinked up at us as if it wondered what all the hubbub was about.

After my great success with Auntie Pie, I decided to go over to the servants' quarters and talk to Beatrice about being our makeup artist. I found Beatrice and the Beast in her sitting room, a room Beatrice had decorated with lots of peacock feathers and orange furniture. She was reading from a stack of old
Playbill
magazines when I knocked on her open door.