A Summer of Kings

by Han Nolan

  I mourned King-Roy's death the rest of summer vacation.

  Monsieur Vichy had said that writers wrote their stories not because they understood the world, but because they wanted to find out what they didn't understand. So I started writing my story. I wrote all day long, and the story of the summer with King-Roy just spilled out onto the pages. I sat out in the pavilion with Pip, and I wrote and wrote, desperate to find some answers through my writing, while Pip sat beside me, reading the book on Gandhi or writing letters to his pen pals.

  In mid-September, the day before school started, the church King-Roy had marched from on the day his sister and brother got blasted with a hose was bombed and four girls were killed.

  I went into the principal's office early on that first day of school and asked if the principal could please announce a moment of silence and prayer for these girls and their families.

  Mr. Allston, who already looked frazzled with his glasses down at the end of his nose and the last wispy strands of hair on his head sticking straight up in the air, looked at me a moment as though trying to focus, then said, "Miss Young, we don't even have any Negroes in this school. There aren't any in this whole town."

  I said, "There was this summer. King-Roy Johnson was here. He was here." I tried to hold back the tears I felt brimming my eyes, and I swallowed hard before continuing. "And there will be Negroes living here someday. Someday they'll go to this very school."

  Mr. Allston gave me this superior look and said, "This is a very wealthy community. No Negroes can even afford to live here. Now, why don't you get along to your homeroom? I have way too much to do right now. So if you'll excuse me." He tried to brush past me with his stack of papers, but I blocked his way.

  I said, "They will live here in this town, in your neighborhood even, Mr. Allston.

  "This past summer I went to the march on Washington. Did you see it on TV? Over two hundred and fifty thousand people were there in support of Negroes. Oh, yes, they will live here someday." I nodded.

  Mr. Allston stared down at me and I saw a look of fear pass over his face. He shook his head and said, "Esther, I fail to see why you even care about this."

  And I said, "Mr. Allston, I fail to see why you don't."

  "Homeroom, Miss Young," he said, pushing me aside with a strong arm, then hurrying from his office.

  I fell against his desk, but I recovered myself and shouted after him, "Just one moment of silence? You can't even give them that?"

  The next day in school, I wore a black armband and told anybody who asked me about it why I wore it. I told them about King-Roy and the four girls in Alabama, and most people shrugged, and some laughed, but some were sorry and wore armbands, too.

  In early October I started taking tap lessons. When I tap, I'm happy. How can I help it? The music is happy and the steps are happy. I think of King-Roy when I tap, and it's as if he's near me, just above my left shoulder, and he's smiling because he's dancing, too. I believe that when King-Roy danced, his true self, his true loving spirit bubbled up from within and, at least for a while, erased all the anger and confusion he carried inside, and his face shone with a deep joy that I never saw at any other time. That's the memory I hold closest to me, those dancing moments when King-Roy would let his guard down. I think dancing was the only time he ever felt free.

  In late October, after giving it a try for one month, Pip left Hackley, and he's now going to school with me again. He claimed that the March on Washington gave him the courage to challenge his father's decision to place him in a private school. "I stood up for my rights and I won," he declared.

  Pip and I are informally going steady. I don't know what that really means, and neither does Pip, so we discuss it while we run through the woods beside my house. One day, I'm determined to beat him again in our race around the pond.

  Now it's November and I have finished my story. It's not a play, as I had promised Monsieur Vichy; it's just my story of this past summer. I thought when I had come to the end, I would understand the world more. I thought I would be able to make sense of King-Roy's death and his sister's death and the death of the four church girls, but I can't, and most of the world is still a mystery to me. What I have learned through telling my story is that I understand myself more. Monsieur Vichy says that it's only through knowing ourselves that we come to understand the world. If that's the case, I've still got a lot of me I have to figure out.

  Today President Kennedy was shot while riding in an open car through Texas. In school we had our moment of silence. Afterward, when I went to the bathroom to get some tissue, I saw Kathy and Laura sitting up on the sinks, putting on makeup, two cigarettes balanced on the edge of the porcelain soap dish and their purses on the floor with the contents of them spilled out onto the tiles.

  When I came in, still crying from the moment of silence and with my nose running, they looked at me and then at one another, and they giggled.

  I looked at them and wondered, When did I get so old?