A Summer of Kings (26 page)

By this time we had arrived at my parents' room, and Mother pulled me inside and closed the door behind us.

"Esther," Mother began, after letting go of my arm, "you're a smart enough girl to understand that Sophia is a lot more delicate than you are. She's high-strung, do you understand? She's a little girl with a big girl's mind, and she feels everything more deeply, more painfully, than the rest of us do."

"So when she makes a scene, she's high-strung and we should all feel sorry for poor little Sophia, but when I make a scene, I get yelled at and told to shut up."

"Esther, I have never told you to shut up. I do not use that kind of language."

I ignored this and said, with my arms flailing wildly,
"And you—
you,
Mother—you tell her my dance is silly and that it's nothing. King-Roy's dance is nothing! You insulted both of us just so our dear little precious doesn't think someone might be better at dance or prettier or smarter than she is."

My mother stood with her arms folded and one toe tapping nervously on the floor and said to me, "I'm sure King-Roy understands completely."

"Oh, does he? Is that why he stormed off so fit to be tied, I thought he was going to strangle you?"

"Esther—"

"Am I supposed to act stupid and ugly just so Sophia doesn't have a conniption fit or a mental breakdown? Am I not allowed to have a dream? Is Stewart not allowed to have a dream? Is no one allowed to dream anything because it might upset Sophia? Is that why you always make me feel stupid and ashamed of myself? To protect the fragile Sophia?"

"Esther—"

"You can't control the whole world, Mother, you know. There are prettier and smarter and more talented people out there. You can't protect her forever."

"But I can protect her now, while she's still young, and so can you."

I stopped and glared at my mother. "Mother, I'm almost nine years older than she is. When is it my turn? Why didn't I ever get my turn?"

"Esther—"

"Did it ever occur to you that I don't want to be a
gym teacher and maybe I don't even want to be a mother or a wife, either? I mean, why can't I be a star? I could be one, you know. I could be an actress, too, you know," I said, my heart pounding hard in my chest as I prepared to tell Mother what had happened down at the theater during Sophia's auditions.

My mother smiled at me with a sad little smile, and said, "Esther, if you want to act in your high school's little plays you—"

I stamped my foot. "No, Mother, I mean I could be a real actress on Broadway. Is that so hard for you to believe? Well, it's true. At Sophia's audition, the casting director wanted me to play the part of Zelda. He wanted
me!
" I jabbed my thumb into my chest. "He said I was really good. And so did his assistant and Stewart and King-Roy."

Mother's brows drew together and she asked me, "When did you audition?"

"It happened by accident, but they said I was great. They wanted me to play Zelda."

My mother closed her eyes and waved her hand in front of her face as though brushing away a gnat. "I'm sure they knew you were Herbert Nelson Young's daughter."

I nodded. "Yeah, I told them I was, but that's not why they offered me the part. They practically insisted I take it, but I didn't. I didn't because I didn't want to hurt Sophia in case she didn't get her part. But now I think I should have taken it."

"I'm sure you were too afraid to take it," Mother said. "I'm sure it had nothing to do with Sophia's feelings." Mother looked away. She looked toward the windows, so I jumped sideways to get in her view again and I said, "No, Mother. I wasn't afraid at all. It had never even crossed my mind to take it. I guess you've got me trained so well to think so little of myself and only to think of Sophia that it never even occurred to me to take the part." This realization had just come to me as I spoke, and then as soon as I said it, I knew it to be true. Mother had trained me to play the supporting role to my brother and sister all my life, and finally the role had started to chafe. I looked into my mother's eyes and I thought I saw fear there. I didn't understand it. "Mother," I said, "why wouldn't you want me to be an actress? Why don't you ever give me credit for my dancing or when I sing?"

Mother said, "I just don't want you to get your feelings hurt."

"But you're the one who's hurting them. Why don't you ever think I'm good at anything? Why haven't you ever encouraged me the way you do Sophia or Stewart?"

Mother walked over to the windows that looked out over the front yard and the polar-bear rock and stood with her back to me. "This is nonsense. Of course I've encouraged you."

"To get better grades maybe, to take better care of my hair and clothes, to learn how to bake a cake, to look after Sophia and Stewart, make the beds, vacuum the
foyer. Maybe you think you're encouraging me with these stupid things, but who cares about those? Those aren't anything to encourage me about, except maybe the good grades. But those aren't talents. Those aren't my dreams."

Mother whirled around and I saw tears in her eyes. "Well, they are mine, Esther. You have just described my life as a wife and mother. So what you think of as no talent and unworthy of dreams is all I have. I have taught you only what I know. I have given you all that I have to give. I don't teach Sophia these things. I don't teach her anything. I only try to protect her, and Stewart is like your father, so like your father, but you, Esther, you've always been most like me."

There isn't anything in this world my mother could have said that would have stunned me more. I had never in my life thought of myself as being anything like her, and here she was telling me, asking me, even, to agree to this, to agree to be like her, to live a life like hers, and I felt so sad and guilty because I knew inside that I couldn't live her life. I couldn't be her, just as I couldn't be like Kathy and Laura. I thought about this and I wondered if there was something wrong with me. What kind of strange bird was I?

I looked at my mother, standing by the windows, her head held high and proud, her eyes blinking at me, and all I could say was "I'm sorry." I didn't even know what I was sorry about; I just knew someone needed to say it.

After I left my mother in her bedroom, I went down to King-Roy's room to try to talk with him, but he didn't want to speak to me or to anyone else in the house. I could hear the anger and hurt in his voice when he told me to go away. "Esther, I got nothing to say to y'all. I got nothing to say. You go on, now, and don't you keep talking to me."

"We don't have to talk about what happened," I said. "We can talk about this book I'm reading. I'm reading a good book by James Baldwin—
The Fire Next Time.
Have you heard of it?"

"I got nothing to say."

"The librarian in town gave it to me. She knows all about you because I told her, and she said for me to read this book. It's new." I paused for a few seconds and listened at King-Roy's door. "King-Roy?"

"I got nothing to say."

"He's a Negro like you and he says how he wants freedom and justice but he doesn't want to lose his soul in the process of getting it. He doesn't want any Negro to lose his soul going after freedom, and he thinks that
doing to the whites what they've done to you is beneath your dignity." I waited. "King-Roy?"

"I'm not listening to that."

"He wants to know what makes a white man so arrogant as to think a black man would want to be equal to him. He says to be equal to a white man isn't good enough."

"That's what Elijah Muhammad says, too."

"Yeah, this James Baldwin met Elijah Muhammad. He tells about it in this book. You want to read it?"

"I don't have time."

I leaned my head against King-Roy's door and I could smell the paint on it. I took a deep breath of the paint and then spoke, my lips almost touching the door. "Why don't you have time? What do you mean?"

"I don't have anything to say to you."

"Are you packing in there?" I asked, hearing King-Roy moving about. "Are you cleaning up? What are you doing?" I knocked on his door. "Can I come in?"

"No, now go away."

"But the march is just three days away. You're still going, aren't you?"

"I can leave for the march from Harlem."

"So you
are
leaving."

"My momma said living here for the summer would change my mind about white folks, but it hasn't changed anything. Not a thing. Not one blessed thing. I don't know how my momma and yours could ever have been friends. Your momma doesn't even see me as a person. Calling my dance no account, she might just as well have said the same thing about me—it all comes to the same thing, anyway."

I heard something bang inside King-Roy's room.

I pounded my fist on the door. "She didn't mean to hurt you, or me, she just meant to protect Sophia." I lowered my voice. "I think she's afraid for her. She's so high-strung and all. But she doesn't have to worry about us, you see. She knows we can handle it. It's a compliment, really," I said, trying to explain to King-Roy what I didn't quite understand myself.

"Yeah, I know all about those kinds of compliments. That's the only kind white folks give a black man, ones that sound like insults."

"So you're going to run away?"

"Go away, now, Esther. I don't want to talk to you."

I pounded the door again. "You're always threatening to leave. That's what you do, isn't it? You leave. You run away. You always run away. Just like at that march last May."

King-Roy yanked open the door so fast, I didn't have time to pull back and I fell against him. At the same time that I fell, he said, "What did you just say?"

He pushed me off of him and glared at me, and I never saw him look so angry. I didn't know his mild-mannered face could get that mean-looking. His eyes smoldered and he jutted out his jaw, flared his nostrils, and held his body so rigid and puffed up, I thought he might strike me.

I backed away from him and straightened out the flapper dress I still had on. Then I said, "It's just that James Baldwin says that what we're all really afraid of in life is death, the
fact
of death. That's what we're running from. But he thinks we ought to face up to death, because that's the only sure thing in life. Isn't that something? And—and he thinks we ought to go on and earn our death by living our life and facing up to our problems with passion." I shook my fist in the air when I said the word
passion.

King-Roy glared at me, his nostrils moving in and out. He was breathing hard. "So you think I'm a coward, too. All this time, you've been thinking I'm a coward?"

I backed away some more and came up against the opposite wall. I shook my head. "No, King-Roy."

"Why do you think I joined the Nation of Islam? So I could run away? So I could hide? So I wouldn't have to fight? The Nation is all about passion—passion for the Negro, passion for freedom and human dignity. What I see is that I'm not running away, Esther, I'm running
toward.
I'm going where I belong, and if you or my momma or anybody else can't understand that, if you gon' keep calling me a coward, well, you go on, 'cause it won't make a difference to me. I know just what I gotta do. I know who my people are, and they don't live here."

King-Roy took a step back and slammed the door, and I felt its reverberation run straight through my body.

I changed into a pair of shorts and a button-down shirt and spent the rest of that afternoon reading in my favorite climbing tree. I thought that if I stayed up in the tree, I could keep a lookout for Pip across the road and also keep an eye out for King-Roy in case he came out and said he was leaving for Harlem. I tried to convince myself that it would be all right if he left. I could still go visit him. I could visit him in Harlem and maybe learn how to skip double Dutch with those girls I saw skipping rope in the street. Maybe he would even come back out to our house for visits once he stopped hating everybody—if he ever did. I knew he'd be a lot happier in Harlem than here with us. Yes, it would be all right. It wouldn't be the end of the world.

When I finished my James Baldwin book, I closed it and thought about what he had said about being passionate about life and earning your death. I thought what he was saying was for us to take action and be passionate about the things that mattered to us in life and to try to make a difference in the world so when it was time for us to die, we wouldn't have any regrets
and we'd be ready, we would have earned our time to die.

In my mind, this sounded like what Gandhi had said about being the change we wish to see in the world, and I decided this would be my philosophy of life. This was how I wanted to live my life, and when I thought about that, having a philosophy to live by, I thought it didn't matter so much that I wasn't like Laura and Kathy. Maybe what Pip had said was right. Maybe I was changing, too. Maybe I wasn't being left behind. Maybe I really was just going in a different direction.

Thinking about this made me think of Pip again, and I wished like anything we could get back to being friends. We had had plenty of fights over the years but never one that lasted almost the entire summer.

I looked across the road to his yard, huge and green and bright, and thought about going over and trying again to talk to him, but then I heard the phone ring in our house through the open windows in the living room and I thought it might be Pip. Maybe he had seen me up in the tree and that reminded him that he forgot to come to the performance today.

I stashed my book in the waistband of my pants and climbed down out of the tree. I walked across our lawn and the circular driveway, toward the house, listening out for someone calling me to the phone. I didn't hear anyone, so I decided it couldn't be Pip. I slowed down and took my time walking up to the porch and then I waited at the bottom of the steps. When I heard King-Roy's voice I figured Ax had called him up and I left.

I ran out to my polar bear and sat on the rock and dug at the holes in the toes of my Keds. I sat on the rock for a long time, and I watched the sun move lower and lower in the sky until it scattered its light in the branches of the trees. I stared at the light, the way it sparkled on this leaf and that and made the pine needles look as if they were made of light, and I got so deep into wondering what it would feel like to be the sun that I didn't hear King-Roy come up behind me. I didn't know he was there until he spoke.