"You're right, Sophia, okay?" I said, knowing she was. "But we're here now, so let's just find King-Roy and then we'll leave."
A tall man with a broom in his hands was coming out of one of the apartments. He looked over at us, and his head jerked back with surprise. "Hey, what's this we got, now? What you three doin' here?"
"We're looking for Ax," I said, speaking louder than usual because there was a couple on the floor below us yelling at each other.
The man slid his eyes sideways at the apartment door across the hall from him. "Ax ain't here."
"Do you know where he is?" I asked, hoping he was telling us the truth.
"You don't want to go there." The man shook his head.
"Yes, I do. I'm looking for our friend, King-Roy Johnson. He's living with us this summer."
"Oh, yeah?" The man said, a smile coming to his lips. "Well, I met King-Roy and I seen him go off with Ax and I know where they gone, but you ain't invited."
I heard a loud noise coming from below us and it sounded like a gunshot. I glanced over at Sophia and Stewart and their big, wide eyes had grown even bigger, and I could tell they were ready to run out of that building, flee Harlem, and get back home, now, whether I came with them or not. I knew, too, that I was going to be in big trouble when we did get home, but we were there and I couldn't leave Harlem until I had found King-Roy. I gripped their hands in mine, ignored the noises below, and turned back to the man.
"Could you tell us where they are, please? It's getting late and I need to find King-Roy."
The man cocked his head to one side. "What if he don't want to be found?" he asked me.
I looked down at the floor and realized I was standing on a dark stain that looked like old blood. I stepped off of it, and feeling a surge of irritation and impatience hitting me at the same time, I said, "If he doesn't want to be found, then I'll let him tell me so himself." I glared at the man.
The man held up his broom and hid his face behind it. "One Twenty-fifth and Seventh," he said from behind the bristles.
"Seventh Avenue? Is that where he is?" I asked.
"That's what I said. One Twenty-fifth and Seventh."
"Thank you," I said.
The man poked his head up over the top of the broom and said, "I'm gon' kill me some rats."
I turned to leave, pulling Sophia and Stewart with me and hoping that this man wasn't about to hit us with the broom, thinking we were rats. "Thanks again. Bye, now," I said, fleeing back down the steps.
"Watch out for them rats on the third floor," the man called after us.
Back out on the sidewalk I had to do some quick thinking. I knew it would be easier and faster to take the subway, but I also knew that Sophia and Stewart would insist that we go home and forget about finding King-Roy. I knew they would stay on the subway, and refuse to get off with me, so I decided we had to walk. Twenty city blocks equals a mile, so I figured we had just a little over a mile to go and it was already after six. I looked at my brother and sister and said, "Come on, we'll have to hurry; it's getting late. Sophia, do you need me to carry you?"
She shook her head and said nothing.
I knew Sophia was scared out of her wits, because she clutched my hand and didn't make a sound all the way to 125th Street, even when a gang of boys about Stewart's age followed us for two blocks, taunting us and throwing litter at us from off the sidewalk, and even when we passed an alleyway filled with garbage and too many rats to count, and even when we passed a group of men nodding at us and looking half out of their minds, and even when we passed a white policeman, who kicked a tired-looking man just sitting on the curb and minding his own business. None of us said anything. It felt like more things happened in that long walk to 125th Street than we had experienced in our whole lifetimes combined. It was more than any of us could deal with, so we just kept our heads down and ignored the comments, the calls, the litter, the rats, the dogs, the police, the dirt, the beggars, the stoned, and everything else until we started to notice a crowd gathered up ahead. I could hear someone speaking, someone saying, "... stolen our heritage and the so-called Negro isn't going to take it anymore."
Shouts came up from the crowd.
We kept walking, listening to the short heavyset man we saw standing in front of the crowd, wearing a gray suit with a white shirt and a bow tie. He had a book in his hand, and he held it above his head when he spoke and brought it down whenever he paused for breath.
"You don't need bleach creams," he shouted, and the crowd agreed. "You don't need to get your hair straightened," he said, and again the crowd agreed. "And you don't need anything else the white devil is selling in his stores and on the streets and in his churches. He's selling Christianity, but we don't want it!"
"No sir!" The crowd yelled.
"He's selling us the idea of a white Jesus and a heaven above, but we aren't buying it."
"We aren't buying it!" the people shouted.
"And he's selling us Cadillacs and trying to get us to spend more than we got so we're always in debt to the white devil, isn't it so?"
The crowd agreed, with "That so!" and "Yeah, man!"
"Mr. Charlie's selling us drugs and alcohol and cigarettes so we get addicted and go out of our heads and we can't think straight, isn't it so?"
"That's right!"
"Right on!"
"Why are you buying things from Mr. Charlie? Why are you buying things from the white devil? White isn't even real. They aren't even real people. The white man was created in a test tube. He's made of chemicals, bad chemicals, and now we got all these white devils, these bad mistakes, walking the earth."
The man shook his book above his head. "The honorable Elijah Muhammad has been sent from Allah to free us, to open our eyes and show us that we've been blind. We're better than the white man."
"Much better!" The crowd agreed.
"We're smarter."
"Much smarter!"
"We're superior to the white man in every way."
"In every way!"
"It's time we acted. It's time we showed them we mean business. It's time we showed them we're not going to let them push us around."
The crowd shouted. "That's right!" "Yeah, man!" "Ain't it the truth?"
"The white devil has stolen us from our country, stolen our African names, and given us their names, like Jackson and Brown and Smith. We ain't no Jackson and Brown and Smith!" he shouted.
The crowd cheered.
"They've raped our women and beaten our men and pushed and shoved us in and out of this place and that. Look around you. Is this how you want to live? Do you want to lose all your children to the white devil's drugs and alcohol?"
The crowd shouted, "No sir!"
"We're not going to take it anymore. We got too much self-respect. We got too much pride. We say enough's enough!"
Everybody shouted, "Enough's enough!"
"If they shove, we gon' shove back. If they strike, we strike back. If they shoot, we shoot back."
This got the crowd really stirred up, and the man at the front smiled and shook his book again. A group of men, standing close by, suddenly took notice of Sophia, Stewart, and me, and looked as if they were checking to see if we were about to strike or shoot, because they were ready, they were ready to fight back.
While this man was speaking, I was looking over the crowd standing there, a mix of well-dressed men and women, in suits and dresses, and men and women dressed like the poor people we had seen back on Eighth Street. I looked for King-Roy, but I kept finding myself listening to this man up front. What he said stirred me. I felt frightened and angry and confused all at the same time. What did he mean by saying white people were created in test tubes? Who told him that? Were white people trying to hurt Negroes by selling them things they couldn't afford and trying to get them addicted to drugs? I had heard stories about the South, about bombing Negro families' homes, and about hanging them and beating them. I had heard King-Roy's horrible story about the hoses and the dogs, bu
t as much as it had upset me, I had felt that it had happened in some far away, unreal place. I had been to Alabama to visit relatives, and I never saw any of those kinds of things happening. It was like hearing in school about slavery, something that happened too long ago and too far away to be real, but as I stood there listening to this man up on the stand, shouting and waving his book, and heard him talking about freedom and how the "so-called Negro" was still a slave, still living with their heads caught in Mr. Charlie's noose, and how they would never be free until they lived in a separate nation from the white devil, I felt the immediacy of what he was saying. Everything—all those terrible stories about the South, and King-Roy's stories, and the stories the man up front was telling us—suddenly felt real and true and close, too close. I was standing in the middle of it. I had seen it with my own eyes right there in Harlem, and as I stood listening to the shouts of the people around me and saw the tired gray looks in some of their faces, all the tragedy and sorrow in the stories I had heard hit me all at once and I felt angry. I felt so angry, I found myself shouting with the crowd. "Enough's enough!" I shouted. "Enough's enough!" I raised my fist in the air and shouted again, "Enough's enough!"
TWENTY
I had gotten so involved in the shouting and in shaking my fist in the air that I had forgotten all about Sophia and Stewart, and even looking for King-Roy, but then I heard a woman close by say, "Ain't nobody gon' hurt you, baby. You all right."
I looked around and saw an attractive chocolate-skinned woman, wearing a pretty aqua dress, speaking to Sophia. I looked at Sophia and saw tears running down her face. Before I could lean forward and say anything to comfort her, the woman in the aqua dress reached down and picked Sophia up in her arms like she was picking a flower from a garden. "You a pretty little thing," the woman said, smiling big.
I was afraid Sophia might demand that the woman put her down and then start showing off how smart she was the way she usually did when people mistook her for a typical six-year-old, but Sophia just wiped her eyes and said, "My feet hurt and I'm tired and I want to go home."
She sounded so pitiful and so little, just like a real six-year-old, and I knew her feet must have been killing her, because we were all three dressed in our good shoes. Her shoes were at least a size too small because she didn't want to get big feet like mine, so she always wore the smallest shoes she could stand. I patted her foot. "Sorry, Sophia. I'm really sorry," I said. "I shouldn't have dragged you here. You either, Stewart."
Stewart stood with his arms crossed and tried to look angry with me, but I saw the bruised-looking circles under his eyes and knew he was more exhausted than angry. I was just about to suggest we go home and forget about King-Roy, when I saw him. I saw King-Roy standing up near the front of the crowd, with a girl in a flowered dress standing next to him and leaning on his shoulder.
"It's him," I said to the lady. I reached for Sophia. "I'll take her now. I've found who we were looking for. Thanks for being so nice."
The woman handed Sophia over into my arms and said, "You take care, now."
With Sophia in my arms and Stewart following close behind, I pushed through the crowd until I reached King-Roy and the girl. "King-Roy?" I said.
King-Roy looked over at me, and the girl turned around, still hanging on King-Roy. She was a tall, light-skinned Negro girl, wearing pink lipstick, with thick frizzed-out hair and long eyelashes that curled way up toward her eyebrows. She looked surprised to see us and so did King-Roy.
"Esther, what are you doing here?" He walked backward, drawing us away from the crowd and across the street.
"We came to find you," I said, following him. I shifted Sophia higher up on my hip. "You were supposed to meet us at four, remember? It's almost seven and Mother's going to kill me. Why didn't you show up? What happened? What are you doing here?"
I stood staring up at King-Roy, who looked at me with his mellow expression as though he didn't care that we had dragged ourselves all over Harlem looking for him, and I felt tears stinging my eyes. "King-Roy?" I said.
"I'm sorry, Esther," he said, trying to look sorry but not succeeding. "I called your house and I told your Auntie Pie I wasn't coming home. I thought you'd call home, too, and they would tell you that. I'm sorry y'all came out here looking for me. I never would have expected that."
"These the kids you were tellin' me about, then?" the girl asked King-Roy, hanging herself back onto his shoulder again.
"Yeah," King-Roy said. He gestured toward me with his one free hand. "This is Esther and that's Sophia and that's Stewart." He smiled at the girl. "This is Yvonne."
The girl probably wasn't much older than I was, and there she was calling me a kid. Had King-Roy called me that? What about our hug in the theater? Didn't that mean anything to him? I felt furious. I set Sophia down on her own two feet and said, "You told me you would meet us at four. You said you were going to teach me how to tap, remember? Remember, you ... you hugged me and asked me if I believed you were coming back and I said yes because you had agreed to teach me tap. Remember? And you hugged me," I said, glancing back and forth between King-Roy and Yvonne. "Remember?"
King-Roy's expression didn't change. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, "Well, things happened and now I'm staying here, here where I belong." He eyed Yvonne when he said the words "where I belong," and I felt my heart sink into my stomach.
The crowd was breaking up and King-Roy waved to the man who had been doing all the talking, to let him know where he had moved to, I guess.
"Is that Ax?" I asked.
King-Roy smiled. "That's Ax, all right. He's gon' let me stay with him awhile."
"And you?" I asked Yvonne. "Do you live with Ax, too?"
The girl nodded. "I'm his sister." Then she giggled and gave King-Roy a peck on the cheek for no reason at all except that she just felt like it, I guess.
I didn't know how girls got away with flirting like that. I didn't know the first thing about how to flirt, as Kathy and Laura had reminded me often enough, saying, "You're born knowing, Esther. You've either got the knack or you don't, and you don't." I told them I didn't want it. Watching girls flirt, it always looked so stupid I didn't understand why any boy would fall for it, but I could see that King-Roy loved it. He fell for it completely.
"So I guess you'd better get on home now," he said. "You want me to walk you to the subway?"
I knew that walking us to the subway station was the last thing King-Roy wanted to do, and I felt too angry and hurt to want him with us, so I said, "No, thank you. We kids are fully capable of getting home on our own. Remember, I showed you how to get to Harlem this morning."
I grabbed Sophia and Stewart's hands and marched away, and I didn't mind when Sophia said, "I never did like that boy," loud enough for King-Roy to hear it.
TWENTY-ONE
I was miserable on the train ride home. Not only had I lost King-Roy and my dream of an exotic, summer romance, which, I realized, had been a flop right from the start, but I knew what would be waiting for me when we got home. Before we climbed onto the train I had called Mother to let her know we were on our way, and she had asked, "Where have you been? Don't you know we've been worried sick here? Esther, you're old enough to know better. I'm ashamed of you!"
I let her rant on for another minute before I interrupted her and told her that we were going to miss our train if we didn't get going. Mother said, "Don't think this is over, young lady. Not by a long shot. I'm so ashamed of you, I don't know what to do."
I heard more from Sophia on the train ride home until Stewart, seeing how miserable I was, told her to shut her mouth. "You're giving me a headache," he said.
"How come you're on Esther's side all of a sudden?" she asked.
Stewart looked over at me and then back at her and shrugged. "I guess because she's right sometimes, Sophia."
"Well, she wasn't right dragging us to that horrible Harlem. I will never be able to wash all the dirt and poverty of that place out of my hair." She tossed h
er head back and lifted her eyes to the roof of the train, and I could just see her mind imagining herself onstage, making her dramatic pronouncement and flouncing off into the wings. Since she didn't have a stage to flounce off of, she turned to me instead and said, "Esther, massage my feet; they're killing me."
I had had enough of her for one day and I let her have it, even if she had said all that about Harlem for dramatic effect and was only six years old. "Why don't you think of someone besides yourself for a change?" I grabbed her right foot and began massaging the ball of it. "None of the people living in those apartments gets a chance to just wash the poverty away. They've got to live in it every stinking day of their lives, and it's our fault, too."
Sophia giggled and propped her left foot up in my lap and nudged me to massage that foot, too. Both her big toes and her pinky toes were rubbed raw and blistered from her shoes and the long walk. "You didn't believe that fat old jelly up on the soapbox, did you, Esther? We're not really made from test tubes, you know."
The man, Ax, had made the whole thing with the test tubes sound possible to me somehow, but Sophia made it sound ridiculous. I didn't say anything, though, and the three of us were quiet the rest of the way home.
My father picked us up at the train station, and when I climbed onto the front seat of the car, next to him, he didn't even look in my direction. He pulled out of the parking space and sped off, and the only thing he said to any of us was "It's after nine o'clock," which he said more to the windshield, really.
When we got home and out of the car, we found Mother waiting for us out on the porch along with Auntie Pie and Monsieur Vichy, who stood staring down at me with a gloating kind of smile as if to say, "I said all along you'd be the family scandal."
"Esther took us to Harlem, Mother," Sophia said as soon as she climbed out of the car. "It was horrible. Negroes were grabbing at me all over the place, and there was blood and vomit, and we heard gunshots, and we saw rats..."