A Summer of Kings (20 page)

"Maybe since Mother's on the board, they don't charge for the lessons," Stewart had said to me when we discussed it. "Maybe since they donate so much money
to the ballet company, they don't send a bill. Do you think that's possible?" he asked.

I guessed that it was, since my parents hadn't ever spoken to him about the extra lessons. So I figured it wouldn't hurt to let Stewart go, as long as he let me take him to the door of the studio and waited for me to pick him up again in the afternoon.

I had never seen Stewart happier than during that week and over the next few weeks, and it was good to see that at least one of us was happy. He came out of the studio each afternoon smiling, his curly blond head bobbing up and down as he pranced along the city sidewalks. He laughed easily and enjoyed teasing Sophia out of her moods, and he helped me any way that he could, and I, remembering my talk with my mother, thanked him for his help.

The high spot in my day, however, came in the evenings when I had my tap lessons with King-Roy.

King-Roy had gotten a job down the street at the college. He worked days in the cafeteria kitchen as part of the cleanup crew, and he had to wear a hairnet over his head like a woman, so that his hair wouldn't accidentally fall out of his head and drop into a soup or a salad or some other dish sitting around in the kitchen. He said none of the white men working in the back had to wear one, just the Negroes, and he said this with a bitterness in his voice that I hadn't heard before.

I took my lessons in the ballroom, where King-Roy and I stood sometimes side by side; sometimes with him
in front of me, demonstrating a step; and sometimes facing each other. King-Roy started me out with simple flap steps and brush-ball steps, which he made me do a thousand times until I could make the step small and light and quick instead of big and clumsy. I never knew there was so much to just tapping my feet. I had to work to keep my balance while I stood on one foot and flapped the other one over and over and I had to remember to watch my hands so that they didn't freeze into clawlike positions while I concentrated on my simple footwork. In a way, it was like taking ballet classes, only the steps were freer and looser and more comfortable to do.

King-Roy always acted patient with me that first week of lessons, and he seemed pleased with me, too. He seemed pleased that I was so eager to learn the steps, and pleased that I never complained when he made me do the same fl-ap, fl-ap, fl-ap, over and over. I could see his pleasure in his eyes, the way they twinkled when he watched me, and one time when I lost my balance, he caught me when he didn't have to. I wasn't going to fall on the floor, but he caught me, anyway, and he held me a few seconds, without saying anything, until it felt awkward for both of us and he moved away and didn't look me in the eyes the rest of that lesson.

Each night, when the lesson was over, King-Roy would dance for me. I had brought my record player out into the ballroom and we put on one of my father's jazz albums and King-Roy danced.

I had never in my life, not even at the movies or in
the theater, seen such fancy dancing as the tap dancing King-Roy could do. He used the whole ballroom, traveling from one end to the other, or traveling in a circle, jumping up onto the window seats and twirling off again. He tapped and turned and leaped and kicked, and the whole time he looked as if he were skating on ice, the way he glided over the floor. He could do a step on one foot that tapped a thousand taps a minute; that's what it looked like. It was as if his foot wasn't even part of his body. It was like a machine, like a jackhammer. I could sit on the window seat and watch King-Roy and his beaming face dance all night.

I said to him once after he finished all breathless in the center of the room that he looked different when he danced.

"How do I look different?" he asked me, taking a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiping off the sweat.

"I guess," I said, walking over to him, "you look more like you, somehow. Do you know? More like who you're supposed to be. Like you're this complete, happy person. It's like that saying, 'God's in his heaven and all is right with the world.' You look like that when you dance," I said.

That week was the best week we had had together all summer. Just spending the extra time together made me feel closer to King-Roy. He seemed more relaxed and happy, dancing and laughing with me, than I had ever seen him, and I tried my best to push my own anxieties
about feeling left behind and about King-Roy someday leaving us out of my mind.

Sometimes at night, after our lesson, King-Roy would get a telephone call from Ax. I always knew it was Ax because right away King-Roy would have this guilty look on his face and he'd turn his back on me to speak. I felt jealous of those calls because afterward, when King-Roy hung up the phone, he would become so quiet and subdued, he didn't want to talk with me anymore. He'd head off toward his room, saying, "I got me some reading to do," and I'd watch the back of him retreat up the steps, with his hand gripping the banister as though it were supporting his whole tensed-up body.

King-Roy wasn't the only one doing some reading. I had lots of time on my hands while I waited down at the theater during Sophia's rehearsals, so I either stared at the one-sentence play I had written for Monsieur Vichy, trying to figure out how to at least make it into a two-sentence play, or I worried about how I was going to catch up with the rest of the world, or I read.

Ever since King-Roy's story and my trip to Harlem, I was interested in the nonviolent movement going on down south. I heard about the Negro protests and marches, every night on the news on my transistor radio, and when one reporter mentioned that Dr. King was inspired by the nonviolent philosophy of Gandhi, I recalled that my parents had a book about Gandhi in their library, so I took it out and brought it with me to Sophia's rehearsals.

What I hoped to find in that book was some kind of ammunition to use against Ax and the Muslim newspapers that he sent in the mail to King-Roy, because during the second week of my tap lessons, King-Roy had begun acting sullen even before Ax's nighttime calls, and I wanted some way to talk him out of his moods.

King-Roy didn't laugh anymore, or tap for me after the lesson the way he had that first week. He just gave me my lesson on the time step, made his corrections, and looked either mellow or downright somber while he did it. Sometimes when I looked at him at the dinner table or while he washed a dish after he had a late-night snack, I'd see this terrible, sad, almost tortured look come into his face, and I felt so helpless seeing it, I didn't know what to do.

Finally one night, when King-Roy got all snappy at me for not doing my shuffle, ball-change steps just right, I snapped back. I said, "King-Roy, I don't know why you keep talking to that Ax man, when he just gets you feeling so angry and mean all the time. That's really why you're yelling at me. I've been doing some reading, and Gandhi said that you have to love even the meanest of creation like he was yourself. You have to rise above—"

"Rise above?" King-Roy barked at me. "Girl, don't talk to me about 'rise above,' because you don't know what you're talking about." He strode across the room and sat down on the window seat.

"Well, I heard on the radio that they're planning a big march down in Washington DC—a big freedom
march," I said, standing still, not moving any closer to King-Roy, who, when I said this, looked ready for a conniption fit.

"You think I'm gon' do another march? Of all days for you to be talking about a march. I don't want to hear about it. You don't know what you're talking about, anyway, so hush up. No march is going to make a difference. The only thing that's gon' make a difference is revolution. Bloodshed's the only thing the white devil understands."

"But Gandhi got all of India free from England's rule just by using nonviolence, and Dr. Martin Luther King Junior is doing the—"

King-Roy lifted his hand up like he would have slapped me if I had been close enough. "Esther! Don't say it, 'cause I don't want to hear it. You think I don't know all about what you're saying? I've listened to Dr. King speak plenty, and I've lived life his turn-the-other-cheek way all my life, you hear? But now I've heard Malcolm X speak, and I know which one's gon' get me freedom
today,
not some hundred more years from now, when I'm dead and buried and it doesn't matter to me anymore."

I opened my mouth to speak, but then King-Roy set his face in his hands and it looked like he was trying not to cry, or maybe he was crying, so I didn't say anything.

I hurried over to the window seat and sat down next to him, and I watched his back heaving and was sure he was crying. I didn't know what to do or what to say.
I had said too much. I had made him cry. I heard his breath coming out in sobs and I put my arm around his back. It was damp and warm against my arm. We sat together like that for a few minutes, and then King-Roy wiped his whole face with his hand, sat up, and said, "Today's my little sister Syllia's birthday."

"It is?" I set my hands in my lap.

"Nine years old." King-Roy nodded.

"Why don't you call her up and wish her happy birthday? Mother and Dad don't mind if you call home."

King-Roy sniffed and ran his hand over his face again. "Can't call a dead person, can I?" He blinked his eyes several times.

"King-Roy, what do you mean? What do you mean a dead person? When did she die? Why didn't you say?"

King-Roy stared down into his lap. "She died after that march. She died after that march in Birmingham."

"But you said she came home. You said—"

King-Roy raised his voice. "I know what I said, Esther." Then he got quiet again. "She got that hose water shot up in her sinuses and it made her sick. The infection moved down into her chest and she ... she just got real sick." King-Roy dropped his head. "She got sick and died." Then he said real softly, "She died 'cause we promised Dr. King we wouldn't fight. We turned the other cheek and it killed my sister." He looked up at me and said with his nostrils flared and that new bitterness back in his voice, "Now, you tell me. You think that's
right? Or do you think maybe, just maybe, we got a right to protect ourselves and fight back? 'Cause that's what I'm struggling with now. And every day I'm struggling with the shame of that march, so don't tell me about some big march they gon' do in Washington." He paused a minute, staring across the ballroom to the fireplace, then he shook his head, and with a look like fear in his eyes, he said, "I don't know—I just don't know how I'm ever gon' get over my shame."

King-Roy set his face in his hands again and took several deep breaths, and I slid in closer and put my arm back around him. I knew nothing I could say would help him feel any better, so I stayed quiet, and when he didn't lift his head up from his hands for a long time I rested my head against his warm back and listened to the sad, slow beat of his heart. Then, after another minute or so, King-Roy reached up to his shoulder, reached up to where my hand rested there, and he placed his hand on top of mine and let out a long, deep sigh.

King-Roy and I sat huddled together for some time before I noticed a movement outside one of the ballroom windows. I lifted my head up off of King-Roy and caught Pip staring in at us from the stone porch. When he saw me looking at him, Pip leaped back from the window, startled, and took off running. I jumped up and ran to the window, lifted its handle, and flung it open. I called after Pip. I called out his name, but he didn't look back and he didn't stop running.

Later that night I called Pip on the phone. His mother said he was out.

I hadn't seen Pip since the day he brought Randy over to meet me. I had gotten up early as usual the next day, to talk with him before he went for his run, but he didn't come over to the house. He didn't show up the next morning, either, and I figured since I was up and dressed, I would run on my own. While I ran, I realized that I liked running, even if Pip could run faster, and even if I could never run on a cross-country team the way he could. I liked running through the woods and the easy happy way it made me feel, so I kept doing it,
but Pip never came back to run and I had decided that he, like everyone else I knew, had gotten fed up with me and didn't want to be friends anymore.

I tried a couple of more times to reach Pip by phone, and I walked over to his house Saturday morning, but his mother said Pip had gone to spend the week with Randy in the Catskills, and I returned home, feeling shaken and upset. I missed Pip. I missed talking to him and arguing with him and running with him, and I missed him loving me and me pretending that I didn't love him. But I did love him. I realized that, walking back to my own house after I had found out he had left with Randy for the Catskills. I didn't know how I loved him, or maybe I mean I didn't know what kind of love I had for him, but I knew that I loved him, and I knew, too, that once again I had messed things up. Pip was gone and I felt lost and even more left behind than before.

On that same Saturday, King-Roy went to Harlem to visit Ax and Yvonne, to fill up on all their white-devil, Muslim revolution talk, and even though he swore he would come back and he reminded me that he had promised his mother he'd stay with us until the end of the summer, I felt anxious about his leaving. I didn't like the way the Muslim talk had started to change King-Roy. King-Roy had said, "You don't like it because you're white, and you white people feel threatened by the power and the anger of the black Muslims."

I thought maybe King-Roy had a point with that, but
his calling me one of "you white people" hurt, and to make myself feel better and maybe less threatened, I went down to our town library and found a book written by Martin Luther King Jr. called
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.
It was about how Negroes were told that they had to sit at the back of the bus and give up their seats to any white person who got on and wanted their seat, but then black people started to refuse to give up their seats, so they got arrested and thrown off the bus. Then the whole Negro community just wouldn't ride the buses anymore and finally, after more than three hundred days of the Negroes walking to work or catching rides in cars, and the buses driving around mostly empty and losing money, the Negroes won the right to sit anywhere they liked.