A Summer of Kings (22 page)

The Beast leaped off of Beatrice's lap and barked at my feet. I ignored the barking and told Beatrice about the production Sophia, Stewart, and I were putting on, and I asked her if she would do our makeup.

Beatrice shrugged. "Yeah, sure. I can put some makeup on you," she said, not even looking up from her magazine.

"But I want you to make me look really pretty, Beatrice, okay?" I said, feeling myself blush.

That got Beatrice's attention.

"You're going to be in the show?"

"Yes," I said. "I told you, I'm going to do a tap
dance that King-Roy taught me, and I want to look pretty. Do you think—do you think you could do something for me?"

Beatrice looked so pleased and surprised. "You want me to make you up?" She got up and walked around me as though I were a piece of marble she was hoping to sculpt, and then she grabbed my hands and said, "You know, you might look real pretty. Yes," she said, studying my face. "We'll soften all those freckles with some foundation, put some mascara on those blond lashes of yours, and add some eyeliner, some lipstick, rouge, and eye shadow ... Esther, I do believe you're going to look beautiful."

I couldn't help myself, I laughed, and so did Beatrice, and for the first time ever, I felt close to her. I felt as if we were sisters.

Already, in just an hour's time since I had come up with the idea, I could feel the weight of gloom that had settled about the house lifting, and as I tapped my way down the hallway toward my room, I said to myself, "I will be the change."

My second wonderful idea was even bigger. I wanted to go to the march for freedom and jobs in Washington DC at the end of August. I wanted to see Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and hear him speak about nonviolence, and I wanted to get as many members of my family to come with me. I especially wanted King-Roy to come. If we could all participate in the march, I thought we could be a part of the change we needed to see in the world. And if groups of friends and families came from all over, black and white together, then maybe King-Roy and Ax and Yvonne and the white people who are prejudiced and think things will never change would see that it could. If enough people came, change could happen. I believed it. That was the way the bus boycott worked in Alabama, and I believed it could work again in Washington.

I knew the only way I could get my parents to let me go and to convince them to go with me was if I could convince my mother. If Mother said yes, then Dad and everyone else would go along—except for King-Roy. He was another problem. I knew he would come back from
the Malcolm X unity rally even angrier than when he left, but I had an idea that I thought would get both Mother and King-Roy to go to the march in Washington.

It came to me while I was thinking about King-Roy and how he wanted to go live in Harlem with his friends but his mother wanted him to stay with us. That made me think of my mother and his mother being best friends when they were little, and that made me think of how they hadn't seen each other since high school days. I thought if King-Roy's mother could get on one of the buses I had read in the paper were coming from Birmingham to bring people to the march, then maybe my mother would want to go to see her old friend and show her support, and King-Roy would go to see his mother, and then we'd all be there together. I thought it was my most brilliant idea ever, and I set about right away writing a letter to King-Roy's mother, asking her if she and her family would come to Washington. I enclosed in the letter a twenty-dollar bill, which was two years of birthday money saved up, and was all I had since my 1922 silver Peace Dollar had disappeared. I wrote that I hoped the money would help pay for the family to come to Washington.

That night at dinner Mother announced that her friend Madeline had died that morning. "It's better for her now," Mother said. "She's at peace. No more pain. The funeral will be this Wednesday, and I hope you will all be there. Madeline had only me—I was her only
friend. It would be nice if she had a few more people there at her funeral."

When Mother said Madeline had no friends except for her, I felt cold all over. I didn't want to end up just like Madeline someday, with no friends and only strangers at my funeral. I could barely eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I had prepared for dinner. Then Dad announced that he had accepted an invitation to direct a film in Hollywood, and everyone got so excited, everyone except me. "Will we be moving?" I asked. "Would we leave this house?"

I looked around the dining room with its pretty bird wallpaper and the cozy alcove where I used to sit on my father's lap while he read the
New York Times
and where I cut out Betsy McCall paper-doll clothes with Mother, and I just wanted to slip down in my chair and under the table in a heap if he said we had to move.

"Well, nothing's certain, yet," my father said. "We'll have to see how this movie goes. If it's a hit—if
I'm
a hit—then who knows; in a couple of years, Hollywood, here we come."

"But you're a theater man," I said. "You've always told me that you were a theater man. It's in your blood—the smell of the greasepaint and all that."

Dad shrugged. "People change, Esther."

Before I could ask why, why do people change, why do they have to? Before I could find my voice again and ask how could this happen, how could he think of leaving New York and the city and this house and the
theater, everyone had started talking about Hollywood. Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood. The only person who didn't looked thrilled besides my mourning mother was Monsieur Vichy. He looked down through his pince-nez at his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and said nothing.

While everyone talked around me, I stared through the windows that looked out over the front yard to where my polar-bear rock lay and silently asked it why things always had to change. I stood up, on shaky legs, to leave the room, but then Stewart said, "Hey, guess what? We're going to put on a show for everybody." He looked at me. "It's Esther's idea. We're going to sing and dance, and there's going to be some real surprises."

Auntie Pie, who had skipped over her peanut butter and jelly sandwich and gone right to the cheesecake dessert, mumbled over her mouthful, "I'm doing the costumes—roaring twenties."

I sat down in my seat.

Beatrice said, "I'm doing the makeup," and Sophia said, "And I'm the star."

Mother looked over at me and said, "I hope this won't be before this Wednesday, Esther."

"No, Mother. It's in two weeks. It's just to ... to cheer everybody up because people have seemed so down lately," I said, feeling ready at that moment to burst out crying. I could feel my face turning red as I waited for my mother to tell me that we couldn't have the show and that it was in poor taste considering Madeline had just died, but she didn't say that at all. She said, "That's very thoughtful, Esther. I look forward to seeing Sophia and Stewart's performance."

I smiled and felt suddenly lighthearted. Mother was pleased. She said I was thoughtful. I couldn't wait to surprise her with my tap dancing. I couldn't wait to surprise everyone. King-Roy said I was a quick study. He said I had a real talent for tap.

Then my father said, "That's just what we need, a good show." He nodded and smiled at everyone around the table and took a big bite of his sandwich. He held up the rest of it in his hand and said, "Good sandwich, too. Thank you, Esther, for all the dinners you've made for us the past couple of weeks."

I looked over at Mother and I knew she must have said something to Dad about our thank-you talk. I felt so good, I didn't know what to do. Then Beatrice and Auntie Pie and Stewart, all at the same time, said, "Thank you, Esther," and I lowered my head and smiled. I said real quietly, "You're welcome." And I thought, maybe some change is good.

The next day, while in the car with Mother, Auntie Pie, Sophia, and Stewart on the way home from church, I brought up the idea of the march in Washington to Mother. I said, "Maybe all of us could go to that march and show our support."

Mother said, "There's likely to be riots. Those things always end up in riots and with people getting hurt. No, Esther, it's nice if you want to support the Negroes' fight for their civil rights, but I think we had all better just stay home."

Sophia said, "Esther doesn't care about the Negroes' civil rights, she's just in love with King-Roy." She looked over at me, all dressed up like an angel in her white taffeta dress and hair ribbons, and I thought she was the devil's own advocate saying that to Mother.

Mother looked back at me through the rearview mirror. "Esther, I don't want you getting any notions about King-Roy. Teenage romances are hard enough without adding racial issues to it."

"What notions? I'm not getting any notions," I said, blushing. "At least not anymore. I just love him like a
brother, that's all. I'm not
in
love with him,
Sophia.
" I turned and glared at my sister when I said her name, and Sophia stuck her tongue out at me.

I turned back to Mother. "Gandhi said that we should be the change we wish to see in the world, and I wish to see everybody get along and get their fair share and for black people to be treated just like white people, and this march is going to be really big, and Martin Luther King Junior is going to be there, and there'll be singers there and other famous people, and it's a big black-and-white together thing, Mother. I think we should be there. I think we should go and show President Kennedy and all those senate people that we all want Negroes to get their rights."

"No," Mother said. "That's not how we Youngs do things, Esther. You ought to know better than that. We don't get out in the streets and protest. If we feel strongly about something like this, we write a letter to our senators or to the
Times.
"

Auntie Pie said, "Big crowds are dangerous. Haven't you read
Julius Caesar
? They turn into mobs and mobs do crazy things. Someone's always getting killed."

"Well, I just thought ...," I said, staring out the window at nothing. I let the idea drop after that and decided to bring it up again if King-Roy's mother ever wrote me back and told me she would be going to the march.

When we got back from church, I found that King-Roy had returned from Harlem, and just as I knew he
would be, he was even surlier than before. I had gone up to his room to talk to him. I wanted to try to get him to be in our show. I stood in his doorway and explained my plans and how I wanted to do that fancy Shoop Shoop tap number he taught me, and I said how I wanted him to then do something really jazzy for everybody. I said, "I thought you could do a solo and be our grand finale."

King-Roy sat on his bed, reading from a book called the Holy Qur'an, and didn't look up or say anything to me, so I said, "What's that you're reading?"

King-Roy mumbled, "The Holy Qur'an. It's like the Nation of Islam Bible."

"Are you a Muslim now?" I asked.

King-Roy lifted his head and pushed his glasses up on his nose in that slow, careful way he sometimes did, and said, "I am. You can call me King-Roy X now because that's my name until I get a new last name from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad himself."

"You want to be called King-Roy X?"

King-Roy nodded and stuck his nose back in his book.

"Like Malcolm X?"

"Um-hmm," King-Roy said.

I said, "X is the mark you make when you don't know how to write or spell or anything. Why would you choose that? Won't people think you're illiterate or something? Doesn't that put you right back where you started as slaves signing your name with an X? I don't
get why Malcolm X would use that name when he probably had—"

King-Roy's head shot up. "Esther!" he said, his eyes bulging and glaring at me. He opened his mouth, stopped, then shook his head and let out his breath and said, "Esther, just don't bother me now. I'm reading. I've got lots of reading to do. Anyway, I told you; you don't know what you're talking about. You never will. You can't understand 'cause you aren't black."

"I knew you'd come back meaner after that unity rally," I said, turning to leave.

"I'm not being mean; I'm just angry. I'm just really angry."

I turned back around. "At me?"

"At everybody." King-Roy shut his holy book, turned, and sat on the edge of his bed, resting his elbows on his thighs. "You know what they're calling me in Harlem? You know what Ax and them are calling me? The black elite! The black elite, he's calling me. Me!"

I took a step into his room and said, "Why'd he call you that? What does he mean?"

King-Roy took off his glasses and rubbed at them with a handkerchief he pulled out of his back pocket. "He means I'm living out here in rich old Westchester with the nasty, blue-eyed, smelly white man, that's what he means." King-Roy put his glasses back on his face. "That's what Malcolm X said yesterday. He said that the black elite live out in Westchester with their white friends and they never reach back to pull the rest of the
Negroes along with them. And when Malcolm said that, Ax points at my head and yells out, 'Here he is! Here's the black elite.' Now, how you like that? Everybody looked at me like I was the white devil himself."

"That was mean," I said.

King-Roy hung his head and shook it. "My momma's got my hands tied, making me live out here."

"Why is she making you if you hate us so much?" I asked, moving in closer to the bed and King-Roy.

King-Roy lifted his head. "That's just why. She doesn't want me hating white people. She's afraid I'll do something crazy."

"Like what?"

King-Roy lifted his glasses up on top of his head and rubbed his face with his hand. "Like kill somebody."

I drew in my breath. "King-Roy, do you think she thinks you killed that fireman who shot the hose at your sister?"

King-Roy stood up and his glasses fell backward off his head onto the bed. "Esther, I told you when we first met, she's the only one who believes I didn't do it!"

"Okay," I said. "I just thought that maybe—"

"Well, don't think. Don't think about it, you hear?"