by Han Nolan
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.
TWENTY-NINE
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 o
ur 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.
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 ca
re, 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.
