A Summer of Kings

by Han Nolan

Monsieur Vichy smiled. "Turn zee page."

  I turned the page to the cast-of-characters list and I saw that the main character's name was Esther.

  I looked up. "Monsieur Vichy, thank you," I said.

  Monsieur Vichy made a bow with his head and said, "You were my muse, Esther. I believe it is my best play yet. I like zee beginning, middle, and end story."

  "Me too." I leaned over and hugged him. "Thank you. I look forward to reading this."

  Monsieur Vichy blushed and patted my leg. "Why don't you try to sleep now. We have a long day ahead of us."

  I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes, believing I could never fall asleep—I felt too excited—but I was wrong. Before I knew it, we were in Baltimore, where we all seemed to come awake at the same time, and we wondered aloud what kind of day it would turn out to be. On the news, they had said that the organizers hoped as many as ten thousand people would show up, from all over the country. I couldn't imagine so many people gathered in one place.

  We didn't talk about it, but I knew the idea of possible riots was on all of our minds, as well, and the mood in the car had become tense and alert.

  I had heard on my radio that Malcolm X had changed his mind and had decided to come to Washington after all. All the black leaders would be there, so he would be, too. That made me wonder if Ax and Yvonne would be coming, along with other Nation of Islam members, and if their presence would change the tone of the march. Would they try to incite a riot?

  I looked out my window and saw a bus go by with a banner on its side reading FREEDOM, and then another bus and another, all with the FREEDOM banner, all heading to Washington, all seven of them. I rolled down my window and cheered at them, raising my fist in the air. Several people cheered back, and I sat down in my seat and laughed. That broke the silence and the somber mood that had fallen on all of us in the car, and we started to talk again, and then we sang songs. Then as we pulled up outside of my father's friend's house in Georgetown, where we would leave our cars and catch a bus, I said a quick prayer under my breath for the success and safety of the march.

  We arrived at the assembly grounds to check in soon after nine in the morning. We thought we would be early, but already people were pouring into the area. Everybody looked happy; and groups of people, linked arm in arm, walked along singing. Women in white uniforms sold us buttons to wear, for twenty-five cents, that said, MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM, and in the center of the button was a black hand and a white hand joined together. When I saw that, I thought of King-Roy and me holding hands, and I wondered what was happening to him that day. Was he just then getting up and eating a plate of fried eggs?

  I learned later, when we got home, what had happened to King-Roy on the day of the march.

  King-Roy had joined bis family and his aunt's family in Bessemer, Alabama. He had gotten up early that morning of the twenty-eighth of August and had eaten sausage and biscuits for breakfast and had gone off whistling with his cousin to buy a new fan for the back bedroom where King-Roy and his brothers and sisters slept.

  Pip bought six of the MARCH ON WASHINGTON buttons and pinned them all over the front of his shirt. "I love a good button," he said, puffing up his chest to show me the final effect.

  "You're going to clank when you walk," I said, and he replied, "Who would hear me? It's so noisy."

  Pip was right. People were chanting and singing and talking and laughing, and more and more people kept arriving every minute. They came with picnic baskets and umbrellas and placards, wearing buttons and hats with freedom messages, and they were black and they were white and they looked poor and they looked wealthy, and the more people I saw crossing the lawns, moving toward the Washington Monument where we were to gather for the march, the more excited I became.

  My mother looked at me and said, "Esther, are you all right? You look awfully flushed. It's hot out; you be sure to drink enough water."

  "I'm just excited, Mother. Do you believe all the people? Can you believe it?"

  Mother smiled and squeezed my arm. "This is good, Esther. I'm glad we came." My father, who walked behind me, reached out and tousled my hair and said, "We're all glad." And Monsieur Vichy said, "Zis will make a good ending to your story, zis march, non?' and he winked at me.

  Then we heard an announcement about the start of some mid-morning entertainment, and a few minutes later Joan Baez, a folksinger, started singing, "Oh Freedom," then "We Shall Overcome," and we all sang together in one voice, and I could hardly get the words out, the lump in my throat was so large.

  After Joan Baez sang we heard Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Odetta and other folksingers, and we sang and cheered and swayed and cried, and there were poetry readings and spiritual songs and a song I especially liked—"Blowin' in the Wind," which Peter, Paul, and Mary sang—and I could see that all of us, my family and everyone around us, felt so full of a mix of emotions, we just could hardly contain ourselves.

  A large group of church people joined hands and started praising Jesus, and they invited us into the circle. We joined hands in the prayer group while over the loudspeaker someone kept asking for the singer Lena Home. Then people started moving away from the monument. Our group also started moving, and the only thing I could do was to move, too, to start walking or get trampled. "Are we marching?" Pip asked, and Stewart and Sophia looked at me as if I had the answer.

  "I guess so," I said, surprised that there had been no official announcement. We all just started walking, marching along the bank of the reflecting pool toward the Lincoln Memorial.

  King-Roy and his cousin Robert took the shortcut through the woods, carrying the tall, standing fan between them. His cousin was a talker and he rambled on and on about New York, telling King-Roy all about it, as if he had been there and King-Roy hadn't, and King-Roy only half listened because he kept thinking he heard something, or someone, walking behind them. King-Roy looked back several times but never saw anyone.

  The marching crowd had stopped singing and cheering and praying and chattering. We had become a more solemn group. Two elderly black women who walked beside Pip and me had tears rolling down their cheeks, and they walked leaning against one another beneath an umbrella to keep off the hot sun, dabbing at their noses with tissues.

  I looked behind me, to smile at Mother and Dad and Beatrice, and I saw a man in a wheelchair, wheeling himself and wearing the most blissful expression on his face. I thought that if you mixed the two women's and this man's expressions together, it would reflect the way I felt at that moment, listening to the thousands and thousands of footsteps beside and behind and in front of me, all marching, all moving toward the Lincoln Memorial, all with the hope for unity and equality in our hearts.

  A white teenager handed me a black marker, and I looked up at him, wondering what I was supposed to do with it. I saw an equals sign marked on his forehead and I nodded. I grabbed Pip's head and I marked his forehead with the symbol for equality, and then he marked mine, while people kept on marching past us. We caught up to my family again and I handed them the marker, and when all of us, including Auntie Pie, had our foreheads marked, we passed the marker on and kept walking. We walked slowly, hampered by the crowd and the heat. Beatrice held her umbrella over her head to ward off the sun. Mother, Sophia, and Auntie Pie wore straw hats, while my father and Monsieur Vichy wore berets. Stewart and I had on sunglasses and Pip wore a Yankees baseball cap, but all of us felt the heat. One white man up ahead of us a ways had fainted, and the crowd passed him over their heads toward one of the first-aid stations.

  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 th
e 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.

  FORTY-THREE

  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.