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.
He said, "I've come to say good-bye."
I startled, then turned around on the rock, feeling the rough granite pulling at my shorts. "So you're leaving now?" I asked, standing up and brushing off my bottom.
King-Roy nodded. "I'm going to Harlem tonight. I need to say good-bye to Ax and Yvonne and the others."
For a moment I felt a flutter of hope in my chest. Was he coming back? Did he like us after all? Was he saying good-bye and then coming back here to live with us? Had he and Mother made up?
I said, "So, does that mean—"
King-Roy interrupted me. "No, Esther. There's been some developments at home. I ... I gotta go home."
I looked into King-Roy's eyes and it seemed as if he had already left. He seemed so sad or worried—I guessed he was both.
I moved down off the rock and stepped in closer to King-Roy. "Do you mean home to Alabama? What happened? What kind of developments?"
King-Roy drew in his breath and held it for a few seconds, then he let go of his breath and said, "A couple of nights ago my brother got beat up by a group of white men back behind a Mobil filling station. They told him if they couldn't get to me, they'd get to my family."
"What does that mean?" I asked. "Were they friends of that fireman that got killed?"
King-Roy jutted out his chin to keep it from quivering and nodded. "Must be."
"But King-Roy, if you go home, won't they do to you what they did to your brother? Won't they hurt you?"
King-Roy shook his head. "I'm not goin' home to Birmingham. I'm goin' to my aunt's home." He scratched his nose and looked away. "Momma didn't want to tell me about it, but last night somebody set fire to her house."
"A fire! Was anybody hurt?"
King-Roy turned back to look at me and said, "No. Momma and them were all down at the church, praying for my brother Cyril. That's the one they beat up. Nobody got hurt in the fire, but half the house is gone."
"Why would somebody set fire to your momma's house, King-Roy? How could they do that? They can't get away with something like that!"
King-Roy shrugged and gazed toward my climbing tree. "Looks like they can, 'cause they did."
I took King-Roy's hand and I said, "Well, that's going to change."
King-Roy looked at me with a flash of anger in his eyes. "I'm gon' make things change."
I nodded. "Me, too, King-Roy."
King-Roy slipped his hand out of mine and set both his hands on my shoulders and looked straight into my eyes. "Esther, listen to me. Don't you let yourself get hurt, you hear?"
"I won't," I said, looking straight back at him.
King-Roy shook my shoulders. "No, you listen here to me, now. You've got lots of great ideas in your head, and I had them, too, once, but nobody's playing nice. It doesn't matter what color you are; if you start marching for our side, they're gon' knock you down, you understand?"
I nodded.
He squeezed my arms and blinked his eyes really fast and said, "Esther, I don't want what happened to my sister to happen to you, and don't think just because you're white that's gon' get you any kind of protection. If y'all go on to Washington, you be careful, you hear?"
"Is that why you've been so mad at me? Were you worried about me?"
King-Roy let go of me and looked away, and I saw his jaw muscles clench up.
"You do care about me, King-Roy, don't you? You do."
King-Roy turned back to me and nodded. "Course I do." The corners of his mouth turned up as he tried to force a smile. "Esther, you're my ray of hope." His smile faded. "Even if I don't think change is gon' happen until a lot more people have died and paid for it, paid for our freedom with their lives, I'm glad someone still believes a peaceful revolution is possible." He shook his head. "But I can't believe in nonviolence and mass movements as a way of changing anything anymore. Not after losing my sister and ... and everything else."
I looked down at the holes in my sneakers and said, "I'm sorry about your sister, King-Roy, and about what's happened to your brother, and to your mother's house."
King-Roy didn't say anything, and I looked up and saw him staring at the ground. He looked so miserable. I wanted so much to do something, anything to take his pain away, but I knew that his kind of pain ran too deep for my words to make a difference. Still, I tried.
I stood on tiptoe and gave King-Roy a kiss on the cheek and said, "Thank you."
He looked at me and lifted his hand as if he wanted to touch his cheek where I had kissed him, but he stopped, holding his hand in midair, and he asked, "What are you thanking me for?"
I tilted my head and tried to think of how to say what I felt. "I guess ... I guess it's for waking me up. I think until you came to our house it was like I'd been asleep. It's like all my life I've been walking in my sleep, not really seeing anything, and then you came to stay and it's like just by knowing you I've come awake to the world. I see the whole world now when I look at you."
"And I think when I look at you," King-Roy said, reaching out and touching my hair, "I see the sun."
I smiled. "Really? I was just wondering before you came over here what it would be like to be the sun. I really was. I like that, thanks." I hugged King-Roy, grabbing him around his neck, and I said, "I'm going to add that to my philosophy of life—to live bright like the sun. Let's both of us do that."
I felt King-Roy's shoulders sag, so I stepped back to look at his face and I saw that it had clouded over with sadness again.
"What? What is it, King-Roy?"
King-Roy shook his head. "I was just remembering something."
"What?"
"My sister's favorite song. She sang it the day we marched. When she was getting dressed, I heard her singing it. 'This little light
of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.'"
"Sing it for me, King-Roy."
King-Roy shook his head and looked all grouchy at me. "I'm not gon' sing it. You're always trying to get me to sing or dance or do something. When you gon' learn I'm not here just for your entertainment?"
"King-Roy, you're the grouchiest nice person I know."
Just then my mother came out of the house and stood on the porch and called out to us. "King-Roy, time for me to take you to the station."
I grabbed King-Roy's hand. "I'll go with you."
"No, Esther. I've already said my good-byes to everybody else, and your parents let me come out here to say good-bye to you alone. That's how I want it. We'll say our good-byes here. Anyway, I need to talk to your momma alone, too."
"Just don't expect an apology from her. Mother doesn't apologize. Maybe I should come with you so—"
King-Roy shook his head. "No, Esther, I'm not looking for an apology, and anyway, I want to remember you right here at this house, waving to me from your polar-bear rock."
"But we'll see each other again, won't we? I'll come visit you in Alabama and you'll come back here. Maybe someday you'll move to Harlem, after everything's settled."
"Maybe," King-Roy said, but he didn't look as if he meant it. His whole face went pale. I didn't know a black man's face could turn pale, but I saw it with my own eyes. Even the color in his lips had faded.
"King-Roy?" I said, taking his other hand in mine so that I held both of them.
King-Roy glanced out to where my mother stood waiting by the car, and then he turned back to me and said, "I gotta go now, Esther."
Then he grabbed my shoulders and hugged me and I hugged him and we held each other a long minute and I whispered to him, "I'll never forget you, King-Roy."
And King-Roy whispered back, squeezing me hard, "Yeah, I'll never forget you, either, Esther."
I watched King-Roy walk away from me, and my heart felt so heavy I had to sit down. My legs didn't want to support me anymore and they shook as I sat on my rock. I tried not to cry. I didn't want King-Roy's memory of me to be of me crying. I wanted to be his ray of hope. I wiped at my eyes and watched him grab his suitcase and a paper bag off the porch steps, say something to Mother, and then the two of them got into the car.
Mother drove around the grassy circle and out toward the gate, and I saw King-Roy looking at me. He waved and I jumped up and waved back and my tears spilled down my face as I shouted out, "Bye, King-Roy. I'll see you. I'll see you again soon. Be careful!"
The car had reached the gate, and I couldn't stand to see him leave. I ran toward the car, calling his name, and when I couldn't see him anymore, when they had turned out of the gate, I shouted, "Come back! Make sure you come back, King-Roy."
FORTY
Later, when I went inside the house for dinner, Stewart handed me his "Surfin' USA" record and smiled. "I'm taking ballet, thanks to you, Esther. Thanks for the best summer I've ever had. I know I owe you more than this."
I tried to return his smile, even though my happiness for him made me feel even more sorry for myself. I felt as though things were slipping away again, out of my grasp, and I was falling behind once more.
Then, at the dinner table, in the middle of my staring down at the plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes I didn't want to eat, Sophia said, "Well, at least now you all don't have to go to Washington."
I looked up at the guilty faces around me, then over at my mother and then my father, and I saw that they were giving each other the look. It's the look that says, Which one of us is going to explain it to her?
I dropped my fork. "No! We're still going, aren't we?"
"Esther," Mother said. "King-Roy won't be there. His mother can't come. There's no need—"
"No need? No need? Mother, I can't believe you're saying this. How can you just back out? Dad"—I turned to my father—"how can you do this?"
"Esther, we're all tired. This has been a long summer. Maybe if I were younger, if we didn't have other responsibilities, if—"
"No!" I stood up. "I don't want to hear excuses. I've told you how I feel about this, Dad. You know how important this is to me. You just don't think my thoughts or the things that matter to me are important." I looked at my mother. "If I'm dancing, it's not important. If I want to do something or go somewhere to try to change the world, it doesn't matter. Well, it's important to me, and I matter to me. At least I matter to me."
Nobody said anything. They all just sat there gawking at me, so I left the table.
My father called me back but I paid no attention. As I was running up the stairs, I heard him say in his booming voice, "I'd just like to get through one meal in this house without a lot of high dramatics. Is that too much to ask around here? What? What?"
When I got to my room, I kicked off my shoes and flopped down on my bed and punched my pillow. I thought about how miserable the whole day had turned out and how I had thought it was going to be one of the best days of my life, and how King-Roy was gone and Pip didn't even show up for the show, and how that's what I get for trying to be the change, because what good did it do, anyway?
Over the next few days, I grew more and more depressed as the time drew closer to the march. I hadn't heard anything from King-Roy, either. I didn't know if he had made it home, even. He and his family were staying with his aunt, and we didn't have her name or her number, so we couldn't call.
I spent most of my time walking in the woods, feeling sorry for myself. I ate my meals by myself, making lots of cheese and tomato sandwiches and taking them out to the woods with me to eat.
Then, on the afternoon before the march, while I was sitting out on a boulder in the woods near the big pond, thinking about all that I had seen in Harlem the day I had gone looking for King-Roy, and all the conversations I had had with King-Roy about blacks and whites and violence versus nonviolence, and all that I had read about civil rights and peaceful revolutions and Gandhi's words to be the change you wish to see in the world, I decided that I just had to go to Washington. If no one in my family wanted to go then I would go by myself. I would take the train; or if that cost more than the twenty dollars I had, I would take the bus, but I would be there. I couldn't force the rest of my family or anyone else to care just by arguing about it. I had to really be the change. I had to act on my convictions. Yes, I would go by myself.
Once I had made this decision, I climbed down off the boulder and ran back to the house to get ready. I needed to pack up some food, stuff a bag with a rain poncho and my new sunglasses and a thermos of water, and, most importantly, write a letter to Mother and Dad telling them that I had gone to Washington. I figured I could leave it on my pillow.
I planned to sneak out early in the morning and ride my bike to the train station. Then I would take the local train into the city and catch a train bound for Washington from there. The whole time I was making my preparations, my hands shook. I crept about the house, collecting my things like a criminal.
I felt so nervous and jittery that I didn't even see Monsieur Vichy coming into the kitchen, and I crashed right into him. I had my sack lunch and thermos in my hands and I was trying to make a quick getaway up the servants' stairs when we crashed and I dropped my bag. Monsieur Vichy and I both said something like "Ugh," and then he bent down and picked up his pince-nez and my sack and the hard-boiled egg that had rolled out from it.
"I hope there was nothing breakable in zis?" he said, handing me the bag and the egg.
I blushed and rolled the top of the bag down tighter, waiting until later to drop the egg back in it. I said, "Thanks," and then, "Oh, sorry for the crash."
Then I turned around and tried to open the door to the servants' stairs, but with my hands full, and my nerves in such a state, I couldn't manage it.
Monsieur Vichy, who stood there watching my attempts, finally said, "Allow me," and opened the door.
"Thanks," I said, trying to avoid his gaze. I felt that he could see right through me and that
he knew exactly what was in the bag and in the thermos and he knew exactly where I would be taking them, too.
I felt his eyes on my back while I climbed the stairs. It was a narrow staircase with poor lighting so I suppose Monsieur Vichy could just have been holding the door and watching me to make sure I arrived at the top without any more mishaps, but I didn't think so.
I hurried up the steps, tripping near the top and almost dropping the thermos, and then finally I burst through the top door and shouted down, "Thanks, again," and rushed through the servants' quarters and down the hallway to my room.
I stashed the egg back in the sack, and the sack and thermos with my other things in the beach bag, tossed it onto my bed, and then fell onto the bed next to it, panting and waiting for my heart to stop pounding in my ears. My whole body trembled. I felt frightened from defying my parents, and frightened about what I had planned to do, and frightened that Monsieur Vichy had guessed about the trip and was right that minute telling my parents all about it.
I heard footsteps in the hallway, but my heart beat so loudly I couldn't tell whose footsteps they were.
Then I heard a knock on my door.
I sat up. "I—I'm busy. Go away. I'm—I'm getting dressed," I said, grabbing a shirt off the floor and throwing it on over the shirt I already had on so that I would be telling the truth.
"It is I, Esther. It is Monsieur Vichy."
Monsieur Vichy! He knows! He had probably already told my parents. Or maybe he was coming to gloat about it first, to torment me with it.
I felt panicked. I saw the beach bag lying on the bed and I grabbed it and said, "Just a minute."
I tried to toss it under the bed, but it got stuck and I had to get down on my hands and knees and push it under. "Just a minute," I said again.
Then I remembered that I had shoved my French notebook under the bed and I thought about my play. Maybe he had just come for the play! It was the end of August, almost. Well I would just show him the play. I would distract him with the play.