A Summer of Kings (30 page)

Although we hadn't come close to the Lincoln Memorial yet, we stopped marching and chose a spot under an elm tree for a place to set out our blanket and our picnic lunch.

Mother said, "We can listen to all the speeches right from here, even if we can't see anybody. At least we can keep cool."

We all agreed and we spread out our blanket under
one side of the elm, while another family—a black family from Philadelphia—spread their blanket out on the other side. Before long our two families had joined together, and we shared our salads and fruits and desserts, and our stories.

Sophia and Stewart managed to squeeze between the crowds of people seated along the reflecting pool so that they, too, could sit on the edge of the pool and dangle their legs in the water.

After our lunch, our new friend—James—and Pip and I climbed up in the elm tree and sat on the branches beneath the shade of the leaves and looked out over the great sea of people. I had never seen such a sight in my life. There had to be even more than ten thousand people there. James told us that he had heard at least thirty thousand people had come from Philadelphia alone. I looked out toward the Lincoln Memorial, where I knew the organizers were getting ready to speak, and I thought that they had to be dumbfounded by the crowds of people who had come to show their support for civil rights. I thought, too, of King-Roy. I wished that he could be with us to see that, yes, mass demonstrations could work. We could gather together full of goodwill and make a difference. How could this march not make a difference? I knew the civil rights bill would have to get passed after this.

King-Roy sat at the kitchen table, eating cold fried chicken and a Jell-O salad, enjoying the new standing
fan blowing on his face. When the phone rang, he reached out and answered it, since he sat closest to it.

A voice on the other end asked, "Is King-Roy Johnson at home?
"

King-Roy felt a sudden chill run down his spine. "Who needs to know?" he asked the voice.

"
Just tell me, is he at home?
"

King-Roy stood up from his chair and looked out the window into the empty front yard. "And I says, who needs to know?
"

The man on the other end said, "Let's just say it's a friend of Mike Mallard's.
"

"
Don't know no Mallards," King-Roy said. "And King-Roy ain't home. His home done got burned up." King-Roy slammed down the receiver and turned to face his family. His hands shook so badly he had to stuff them into the pockets of his pants to hold them still.

Pip, James, and I watched the people streaming past us, and then out of the blue there was a wave of applause and a voice sang out over the loudspeaker "The Star-Spangled Banner," and everyone stood up. Pip, James, and I stood up on our branches, and we sang, too. Then after we sat back down, the Archbishop of Washington offered an invocation, so we stood up again while he prayed for our nation and for the people to set aside their bitterness and hatred and fill their hearts with love. Below me every head was bowed, and I saw everywhere
hands raised in the air, reaching toward God in heaven and asking Him to hear our prayers.

We sat back down again and a man named A. Philip Randolph began to speak. I had heard about him on the news. He was the man who had the original idea for the march. He had planned the march over twenty years earlier, but until this day he had not been able to make it work.

A. Philip Randolph called our march on Washington a moral revolution, and I cheered when he added that this march was not just for Negroes and their civil rights alone, but it included their white allies, as well, because how could anyone be free as long as someone was not?

Mr. Randolph told us that when we left later that day, we would be carrying the revolution home with us, and spreading it throughout the country, and that we would do so until every last person was free.

Everybody cheered, and oh, how I wished that King-Roy could have been there to hear him speak and to feel the power and the energy of all the people spread out for miles around the memorial, cheering and applauding and waving their arms in the air.

King-Roy ran back to the room he shared with his brothers and sisters and went to the closet where he had stashed his suitcase. He opened it and withdrew a paper bag from inside. He opened the bag and pulled out the gun Ax had given him. He set it down on the floor and reached into the bag and pulled out six bullets.

King-Roy's brother Cyril watched him from the top bunk bed in the opposite corner of the room. He knew that King-Roy didn't know he was there. Cyril sat up in bed, careful not to make a noise. He watched King-Roy get down on the floor and load the gun, his hands shaking and the bullets spilling to the floor twice before he could get the gun loaded. Then King-Roy stared down at the gun a long time, and Cyril could hear him mumbling to himself. "It sounded," Cyril later said, "like he was arguing with himself.
"

There was a knock at the door and Cyril and King-Roy both listened to a white man's voice asking to speak to King-Roy.

We heard more speeches, and then more singing, and I had grown uncomfortable up in the tree, so we all three climbed down and joined everyone on the blankets. We sat back in the shade of the tree and listened to the songs and the speeches, and my voice grew hoarse from cheering for the demand for Congress to pass the civil rights bill now, and cheering for the demand to unify the churches, and cheering for "freedom now!," and cheering for the declaration that women, too, would sit in and kneel in and line in and walk for freedom and the right for blacks to sit at any lunch counter and be served, and the right for all people—black or white—to vote, and the right for black children to go to the same good schools as any white child.

I cheered and I sang and I clapped my hands raw. I
jumped up and down and shouted and linked arms with perfect strangers. I carried on until I just wore myself out. Then I sat back down on the blanket, and the afternoon and the heat and the speeches wore on, and on, and more and more people kept moving toward the memorial. People just kept streaming past us. The movement never stopped.

King-Roy listened to his aunt tell the white man at the door that he wasn't there.

The white man said, "Well, now, I know for a fact that he is. We just want to talk with him, that's all.
"

Then King-Roy's mother said, "My boy did not kill your friend. He is not a murderer. He's a good boy.
"

The man said, "All right, then. Why don't you let your son tell us that? That's all we want to hear.
"

"
Y'all go on and leave us be, now," King-Roy's aunt said. "He ain't done nothin'.
"

King-Roy gripped the gun in his hands and tucked it into the waistband of his pants.

"
Now, you listen here," the man at the door said, his voice not even hinting at friendly anymore. "Y'all better go get your boy or you're goin' to find yourself in a whole lot more trouble than you are now, you hear?
"

King-Roy moved toward the door, shouting, "I'm coming. You just leave my momma and my family alone.
"

King-Roy's momma shouted, "My son is not a murderer!
"

And the white man said at the same time, his voice sounding closer, "Come on out, boy. We only want to talk to you.
"

King-Roy had stopped in the doorway of the bedroom. He lowered his head and paused a moment, then he pulled his gun out of his waistband, set it on the floor, and kicked it under the nearby cot.

As hoarse as we all were, and as sore as our hands were from clapping, and as tired and hot as we were from sitting in the sun all day, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood up to speak, we cheered and clapped for several minutes. I stood up for his speech, as if by standing I could see him better or hear him better, but I couldn't see him at all and I could hear him no better standing than sitting. Still, I stood on tiptoe and listened with the crowd, and when I heard him speak, it was like listening to a poem and a sermon and a rousing call to action all at once. I felt my heart rise up in my throat several times as he spoke of fighting with dignity and with discipline and without violence, but fighting without rest, too, until every Negro is granted his rights as a citizen.

His words were like a song, like a Negro spiritual, and they filled me with such hope, not just for the Negroes, but for every American. Every word he spoke, every dream he described, filled me with great hope for our country, and when he spoke at the end, proclaiming that someday all God's children would be able to join hands and sing, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank
God Almighty, we are free at last!" I felt not only the hope for that freedom, but the recognition that we had, all of us, black and white, been bound too long, and here was the man and the day that would set us all free. I jumped up and down and cheered and cried with the crowd, and the sound was deafening, and the sound was beautiful.

King-Roy went into the kitchen and saw a white man standing on the stoop of his aunt's house. Behind him, out in the dry dusty yard, stood three more white men.

"
We just want to talk to you, boy," said the man on the stoop. "Why don't you step out here with us so we can talk in private.
"

Mrs. Johnson grabbed King-Roy's arm. "Baby, don't go with those men.
"

King-Roy looked back at his mother and said, "Momma, I'm not gon' run this time. I'll stand my ground. I haven't done anything wrong.
"

He said these last words loud enough for all the men to hear him. Then he pushed through the screen door and started walking toward the waiting men.

Before he reached them, one of the men shouted, "Look out! He's got a gun!
"

For a moment King-Roy stood frozen, not knowing what was going on, then he heard a sound behind him and he turned and saw Cyril standing there with the gun in his hand. He had taken aim at one of the white men and when King-Roy saw this, he shouted, "No!" and jumped in front of the gun.

Four guns fired at the same time. All four bullets went into King-Roy's body. And the sound was deafening, and the sound was horrible.

After King-Roy died and after my mother and I got back from his funeral and after crying for three days, I reread the book on Gandhi. I thought about all the people who died, including Gandhi, in order that his India might be free. I wondered how my being the change I wished to see in the world could really make a difference. What did it matter that more than two hundred and fifty thousand people marched on Washington in peace and unity if King-Roy was dead? I felt so defeated.

I mourned King-Roy's death the rest of summer vacation.

Monsieur Vichy had said that writers wrote their stories not because they understood the world, but because they wanted to find out what they didn't understand. So I started writing my story. I wrote all day long, and the story of the summer with King-Roy just spilled out onto the pages. I sat out in the pavilion with Pip, and I wrote and wrote, desperate to find some answers through my writing, while Pip sat beside me, reading the book on Gandhi or writing letters to his pen pals.

In mid-September, the day before school started, the church King-Roy had marched from on the day his sister and brother got blasted with a hose was bombed and four girls were killed.

I went into the principal's office early on that first day of school and asked if the principal could please announce a moment of silence and prayer for these girls and their families.

Mr. Allston, who already looked frazzled with his glasses down at the end of his nose and the last wispy strands of hair on his head sticking straight up in the air, looked at me a moment as though trying to focus, then said, "Miss Young, we don't even have any Negroes in this school. There aren't any in this whole town."

I said, "There was this summer. King-Roy Johnson was here. He was here." I tried to hold back the tears I felt brimming my eyes, and I swallowed hard before continuing. "And there will be Negroes living here someday. Someday they'll go to this very school."

Mr. Allston gave me this superior look and said, "This is a very wealthy community. No Negroes can even afford to live here. Now, why don't you get along to your homeroom? I have way too much to do right now. So if you'll excuse me." He tried to brush past me with his stack of papers, but I blocked his way.

I said, "They will live here in this town, in your neighborhood even, Mr. Allston.

"This past summer I went to the march on Washington. Did you see it on TV? Over two hundred and fifty
thousand people were there in support of Negroes. Oh, yes, they will live here someday." I nodded.

Mr. Allston stared down at me and I saw a look of fear pass over his face. He shook his head and said, "Esther, I fail to see why you even care about this."

And I said, "Mr. Allston, I fail to see why you don't."

"Homeroom, Miss Young," he said, pushing me aside with a strong arm, then hurrying from his office.

I fell against his desk, but I recovered myself and shouted after him, "Just one moment of silence? You can't even give them that?"

The next day in school, I wore a black armband and told anybody who asked me about it why I wore it. I told them about King-Roy and the four girls in Alabama, and most people shrugged, and some laughed, but some were sorry and wore armbands, too.

In early October I started taking tap lessons. When I tap, I'm happy. How can I help it? The music is happy and the steps are happy. I think of King-Roy when I tap, and it's as if he's near me, just above my left shoulder, and he's smiling because he's dancing, too. I believe that when King-Roy danced, his true self, his true loving spirit bubbled up from within and, at least for a while, erased all the anger and confusion he carried inside, and his face shone with a deep joy that I never saw at any other time. That's the memory I hold closest to me, those dancing moments when King-Roy would let his guard down. I think dancing was the only time he ever felt free.