A Summer of Kings (11 page)

"You live in that big white mansion over there?" King-Roy asked.

Pip nodded. "Yeah, that's it."

King-Roy straightened back up and looked at Pip. "How many people you got living over there?"

"There's just three of us; my mother and father and I."

King-Roy wagged his head. "Shoot, three people in that great big house, and we all live ten to a room where I come from."

Pip, sounding defensive, said, "Well, my father's the president of the college and my mother's a professor, so we have people from the college and from all over the country coming in and out of our house all day and all night long. The whole house gets plenty of use, and anyway, we don't own the house. It's given to the president to use only as long as he's president."

King-Roy raised his hands and said, "All right, all right, I wasn't attacking you."

Pip stood with his legs apart and crossed his arms in front of his chest like he was Yul Brenner in
The King and I
and said, "Well, it kind of sounded like you were. I'm sorry if you're living ten to a room, but it's not my fault, and it's not Esther or her family's fault, either. You can't go shooting people, if that's what you're thinking, just because they live in big houses and you don't."

That took the mellow out of King-Roy's face. He glared at me and said, "Esther, I thought you said you could keep a secret. I thought I had told you all that in private. Now look what you've gone and done."

I stood between the two of them, looking right, then left, then right again at King-Roy. "I just needed someone to talk to about you," I said, "and Pip is the only one I could." I knew I had blown it. I felt sure King-Roy would leave for Harlem that very day.

"Hey, don't blame her," Pip said. "She's scared of you, okay? She doesn't want her head blown off, all right?"

"Pip!" I glared at Pip. "That's not what I said. I said he was wonderful. Remember I said he was wonderful?"

King-Roy pointed at Pip, who was still standing like Yul Brenner, and said, "How come he thinks I'm gon' shoot people? What gave him that idea, huh?"

"Oh, all right," I said. "I told Pip about the you-know-what, but only because I was scared. Wouldn't you be? What if I had a—a you-know-what, or my father had one and it fell out of his pants when he was walking down the hallway? Wouldn't you be scared?"

"I'd mind my own business," King-Roy said.

"Well, I was scared, and I told Pip that I thought you were maybe wonderful but maybe scary, and he wanted to know what was so scary, didn't you, Pip?" I looked over at Pip and Pip nodded, but he didn't look at me. He was watching King-Roy.

"Well, so I told him about the you-know-what, and anyway, that's why I told him."

King-Roy looked at me with this hurt look on his face and said, "I thought you and me were all right. I thought we understood each other. Looks like I was wrong."

I stepped forward and reached my hand out toward his arm, not quite touching it, and said, "I thought so, too, King-Roy. I just wondered about the—the you-know-what. I only wondered is all." I felt rotten to the core.

Then, to make matters worse, Pip opened his big yap again and said, "Hey, don't blame her. You're the one who brought the gun. Don't go making out like everything is her fault."

King-Roy whipped around, puffed himself up to every bit of his height, and looked down on Pip and said, "What did you say? You think it's not her fault? You think it's our fault? Is it our fault we don't get paid same as you for doing the exact same job, only we're doin' it two times better? Is it our fault we build the buildings, plant the crops, lay out the roads and the train tracks all over this country, but we can't get a decent place to live and our own roads aren't paved and the food we get at the grocer is half rotten and full of worms? You tell me that. Is that our fault?" King-Roy glared a second at Pip, then turned around to look out across our field, and he said, more to himself than to us, "Well, just maybe it is because we're fool enough to think they gon' be decent and give us what they owe us. Nonviolence is just a waste of time."

King-Roy's voice had turned down to a whisper, and I moved over next to him to hear him. When he stopped talking I said, "King-Roy, I don't know what you're talking about. All that stuff about crops and roads. I'm sorry for what I said and I'm sorry for what Pip said and I want to be friends. I want us to be close friends. Your mother and my mother were oldest best friends. They still write to each other every Christmas. Can't we be friends, too?"

King-Roy looked at me and said, "My friend Ax said, 'No white devil's ever gon' be best friends with no black.' And he said, 'Don't turn your back on a white 'less you want a knife stuck in it.' And he said, 'Up here in New York it's worse than the South because up here they all act like they're on your side, but they aren't. They're smiling out their faces, but they're still nailing you to the wall every which way they can.'"

"And you believe him all the time? Why don't you just see with your own eyes, King-Roy?" I said.

King-Roy's eyes turned to slits, and he looked out past my head and said, "Oh, I've seen with my own eyes, all right. I've seen plenty with my own eyes." He looked at me and added, "It's you who doesn't see." Then he pointed at Pip. "And you. Neither one of y'all can see the truth, sitting inside your ballroom mansions."

Pip opened his mouth to say something and I could tell by his expression it was going to be some angry something, so I jumped in first and said, "Then make us see. Tell us. What do we need to see? What?"

King-Roy was staring back out across the field, and Pip and I stared at him. The three of us stood silent together for a minute or two, and then I saw a tear spill out of King-Roy's eye and run down his cheek.

"King-Roy?" I said, almost in a whisper. "Tell me."

King-Roy leaned forward and set his elbows on the stone wall. He looked down and shook his head, and it looked like he was struggling with himself, trying to decide what to tell us. Then, he spoke. He spoke to the stones.

"Last May, right at the beginning of the month, May third, we did this freedom march. Me and my friends, my sisters and brothers, all of us marched. Momma was scared for us. She told me to take hold of my little sister Syllia and my brother Joe-Earl's hands and to not let go. She said, 'If they haul one of you off to jail, they take y'all, but King-Roy, you hold on.'

"I told her I would. Some of my friends had already marched and they were sitting in jail already, but I wasn't worried. None of us were. We all felt brave 'cause we knew we were doing what was right. That's what Dr. King said."

"Dr. Martin Luther King Junior?" Pip asked.

King-Roy nodded, still keeping his head low and looking at the stones.

"Yeah, I've heard about him," Pip said.

I said, "Go on," and Pip came over and joined us at the wall. We stood on either side of him and listened.

"We'd gone to the mass meetings at the church, the Baptist church, and we sang freedom songs, and Dr. King talked to us and asked us if we were willing to fight for freedom, if we were willing to fight for what was right. If we were, then we should step forward and swear that if anything should happen to us, we would agree to turn the other cheek. We had to agree that we would be nonviolent, and if we couldn't agree to that, then he didn't want us to march. Well, me and my friends and sisters and brothers all agreed."

King-Roy paused to blow his nose, taking a handkerchief out of his back pocket, then returning it before continuing with his story.

"On the day of the march, we left the church chanting 'O Freedom,' real soft and quiet, and I was holding my little sister Syllia's hand and my brother Joe-Earl's hand, and we headed downtown with the crowd, but before we could get to the center, the police caught up to us, and they shouted at us to turn back around and go on home or they were going to turn some fire hoses on us."

Pip said, "I read about that in the news," and he said it sweetly, like he was sorry for the way he had been acting. King-Roy kept talking.

"I saw the firemen standing with the big hoses in their hands, and I saw some of the police had police dogs with them, on leashes, and other police had their clubs, and all of them had their guns, but I didn't feel scared, and we none of us turned around to go home."

"Did you get sprayed?" I asked. "Did you get hit?"

King-Roy nodded. "When we didn't leave, they turned on the hoses and it sprayed a group and knocked them down, and then I saw one of the firemen turn round and look straight at me, almost like he had been looking for me all along. He was standing there, standing up against a building, and I was in the street and I heard shouts all around us and rocks were flying through the air, but I didn't look to see who was throwing them because I was looking at this man." King-Roy lifted his head and stared out toward Pip's house. "I never saw such hate in my life," he said. "That man grinned like the devil, and then he turned his hose right on my sister and she was torn out of my hand with the blast of water and I thought my arm had gone with her, it was that strong. She went rolling down the street, and then that white devil turned his hose on my brother and he was torn from my other hand. I didn't see what happened to him because by then a dog was on me, tearing at the sleeve of my shirt. The dog ripped it clear off of my arm, and I looked up and I saw three white men with grins on their faces, watching me while that dog tore at the front of my pants, and that's when everything changed for me. That's when I knew the truth about people, the meanness that lives in their hearts." King-Roy straightened up and said, "Oh, I've seen ugly before, and I've seen cruelty, too, but when I looked in those faces, I saw the truth. We aren't born with goodness in our hearts the way they're always telling us in church. No, we're born mean and ugly, and if you want different, if you want to get to heaven, then you have to change your heart yourself."

Pip looked up at King-Roy and asked, "So what happened to you? What about your sister and brother?"

King-Roy blinked several times and said, "What happened? I'll tell you what happened. I ran. I ran away." King-Roy sniffed. "I ran away and some of my friends saw me run, and they called me a coward. They said I was afraid to go to jail."

King-Roy's face was struggling against the tears that threatened to come spilling from his eyes. His mouth was all bunched up and trembling, and his eyes were blinking and blinking. "They called me a coward."

I reached out and touched his hand, but he didn't feel me touch him. His mind was still far away.

"I had made a promise to Dr. King and I kept it. I didn't fight. If I had-a stayed, if I didn't run, I would have broken my promise. Everything in me told me to fight. It's not right. It's not right what they did, and I couldn't just stand there and take it. I couldn't just stand there and let my brothers and sisters take it." King-Roy wiped his wet cheek with the back of his hand and sniffed. "I had to run away or fight back. I couldn't just stand there."

"So, what about Syllia and Joe-Earl; were they okay?" I asked.

"What?" King-Roy said, turning his head to look at me. "Syllia and Joe-Earl?" King-Roy lowered his head and drew his brows together as though he was trying to remember who Syllia and Joe-Earl were. Then he took a deep breath and let it out again. "I ... I was so angry I ... I left them behind." He shook his head and another tear fell on the stones. "All I could think about was that I gave my word to Dr. King, and the only way I could keep it was to run."

"But you gave your word to your mother, too," I said. "What about that?"

King-Roy nodded and glanced up at me, and I saw fear in his eyes. He looked away and nodded. "I know. I can't explain it. I can't explain what happened—how I felt. No one understood. Momma—Momma was so ashamed of me for leaving Syllia and Joe-Earl, and everyone else was on me about running away, and they said I was the only one who ran. Momma, my brothers and sisters, the whole school—everyone was ashamed of me."

"But at least you all came out okay, right?" I asked.

King-Roy twisted up his mouth. He looked down at the tiles, tapped the toe of his shoe on them, and said, "Yeah, everyone came home. Syllia and Joe-Earl came home." King-Roy said this with a catch in his voice, and when he glanced up at me, I saw that same frightened look in his eyes that had been there before. I didn't know what it meant, but it scared me to see it. I knew he wasn't telling us the whole story, but I couldn't bring myself to ask him anything else just then, so the three of us stood there, and we didn't say anything for a while. I watched King-Roy stare down at the tiles, tapping first one toe of his shoe, then the other. Then he said, with his voice so low I could barely hear him, "That was the worst day of my life."

I nodded. "The day that changed your life, like you said to me yesterday, right?"

King-Roy didn't answer me, but he didn't have to.

Another question came to my mind, a question I thought I already knew the answer to, but I asked it, anyway. "King-Roy, what man were you accused of killing?"

King-Roy looked at me a long second, then he said, "'What man'? You know what man. It was that devil with the hose. That white devil who tore my sister and brother right out of my hands." King-Roy turned the palms of his hands up and looked at them as though he could see Syllia and Joe-Earl's little hands resting on them.

I stood facing him there in the pavilion. I stared at his face, saw the sadness I had seen there the day before, and I saw that it was an old deep-worn kind of sadness. I couldn't tell if he had killed that man with the hose or not, but I believed, at the very least, King-Roy knew who did.

King-Roy, Pip, and I didn't get to talk anymore because it was time for breakfast and Sophia had come out to get us. Pip stayed for breakfast, but afterward he said he was leaving. "You ignored me all through breakfast," he told me when we stood together on the porch and he was saying good-bye.

"I did not," I said.

"You did. You just stared at King-Roy the whole meal. I saw you."