King-Roy said, "Shoot," and looked back at me.
I ran forward. "I'll get it," I said, thinking he wanted me to pick up what he had dropped.
King-Roy panicked. "No!" he said, starting to bolt, then, I guess, remembering the object on the floor, he stopped and stooped down, still with the cans of paint in his hands. Before he could release the handles, before he could reach down and pick up what he had dropped, I was there, on the floor, and I grabbed it up for him. I had only wanted to help. I had only wanted to be his friend, but when I saw what I held in my hand, when I felt the weight of it, the coolness of it against my skin, I knew I had made a mistake.
"It's—it's your gun. The one Mother threw away in the trash. Auntie Pie said so." I looked at him. Our heads were almost touching, we were so close, stooped there in the hallway. I could smell his sweat. I could see fear in his eyes.
"I sure wish you hadn't seen that," King-Roy said. He pulled the gun out of my hand, moving slowly, being really careful, as though it was loaded. Then he stood up and tucked it back into the waistband of his pants.
"Can we just pretend you didn't see that?" he asked me, whispering.
"I—I don't know," I said, standing up with him. "I don't understand. How come you took the gun back?" I kept my voice low, and when I said gun, even I couldn't hear it, but I knew King-Roy understood.
"Because it doesn't belong to me. I'm gon' have to give it back someday."
"Whose is it, then?"
He studied my face and asked, "Can I trust you?"
I nodded, wondering what he was about to tell me. I felt scared. Standing with King-Roy in that narrow, dimly lit hall felt dangerous all of a sudden. The hallway didn't look familiar to me anymore; it didn't feel safe. In my heart everything felt dangerous.
King-Roy lowered his head so that it was closer to mine and said, "I met someone on the bus on the way up here. A man. We rode together for two days. For two days this man—Ax is his name; short for Accident—he told me things. He told me things I'd never heard before. Things I could hardly believe, but it made a lot of sense."
King-Roy stopped talking and picked the paint cans back up as though that was it, that was all he had to say, so I asked him, "What did he tell you? Was it about the gun? Why did he give it to you?" Again, I only mouthed the word gun.
"For protection. That's all, just for protection."
"But from what?" I asked, wondering what kind of protection someone needed in our little town.
King-Roy lowered his head again and said, "From the white devil."
I pulled my head back. "What's that?"
King-Roy looked to his left and right and leaned in toward me. "I shouldn't be telling you this."
"Sure you should," I whispered, too curious to let him stop now.
I could see a look of doubt in King-Roy's face, so I took hold of his wrist and tugged on him to follow me. I led him back to my bedroom and we went inside and I closed the door behind us.
NINE
King-Roy turned around at the sound of the door clicking shut. His eyes were wide and his head was shaking as though he was saying no.
"This isn't good. I can't be in your room at night with the door closed," he said.
"Why not? It's okay. Nobody cares," I said, moving around him, then turning to face him.
King-Roy backed up toward the door. "People care aplenty." He spoke with his voice just above a whisper, so I did, too.
"Not here, they don't. Not in New York. Not at my house," I said, moving closer to King-Roy until I saw him backing away from me again, then I stopped and we just stood facing each other. King-Roy still had the paint cans in his hands, and I thought the handles had to be digging into his palms.
"At least you can put the paint cans down," I said.
King-Roy shook his head. "No, I'll hold on to them. I can't be accused of doing anything with my hands full of paint, can I?"
I moved over to my bedside table and turned off my radio. "So what's the white devil?" I asked, hoping to get him away from his fear of getting caught in my room and back to what we were talking about.
King-Roy looked miserable. His eyes were all over the place, glancing at the door, at the windows, at my closet door, at me. Then he said, "You're not the right person I should be talking to about that."
"Why not?" I asked, sitting down at my study table and wishing King-Roy would join me. I didn't understand anything. King-Roy's face wore two lines between his brows and they deepened when he said, "Because you're white. Don't you see? You're a white girl, a white devil."
"Me? A white devil?" I asked. "But you don't need protection against me. At least not gun protection, do you?"
King-Roy said, "I don't rightly know who I need protection from. It's different up here in New York. The rules for black and white are different up here, but Ax says just because I can sit down with y'all at the same dinner table and sleep under the same roof with y'all, that I'm not to let that fool me, and I know he's right. Shoot, maybe he's right about a lot of things." King-Roy paused a moment, pushed out his jaw, and squinted across the room at the windows. Then he said, "I was raised in a Christian home, a good Christian home, but now, that's not right for me anymore. Things have changed." He glanced at me for a second, then back to the windows. "My whole life has changed."
I tilted my head. "What do you mean, King-Roy?"
King-Roy spoke as if he hadn't heard. "It started changing before I left Birmingham, and it's still changing. It seems every day I'm waking up into a brand-new life. It's getting so I'm afraid to go to sleep at night for fear of what I might wake up to."
"Is that why you need the gun, because you're afraid to go to sleep?"
He nodded, still squinting at the windows as though he could see his friend Ax standing there, and he said, "Yeah, I think old Ax has got something there."
"Got what? Where? What do you mean?" I asked, staring up at his face.
King-Roy didn't shift his gaze. He stared steadily at the windows and said, "Ax said the white devil wants to keep us ignorant and make us feel bad about ourselves, like we're dirty and no good, so he makes up all these stories to keep us ashamed of ourselves. He said the white devil doesn't want us to know that Negroes were the first people on Earth. He doesn't want us to know that we were the original masters of this planet."
"Who says so?" I wanted to know. "Ax? How does he know?"
King-Roy looked at me as though he had just realized I was sitting in front of him, and he nodded. "Ax told me all about this Nation of Islam group and a man named Elijah Muhammad. And he gave me some things to read about it on the bus. They're articles by Elijah Muhammad, who said that all our struggles for equal rights are a waste of time. The white devil will never give us what we're due. He'll never give us our basic human rights."
"He won't?"
"Nuh-uh." King-Roy shifted one of the paint cans up under his arm. "We got to go on and take what we want and stop begging for it. We got to have us a revolution and set this world right again, with the black man back on top. That's what Ax told me."
"A revolution? Then is that why you need a gun? For a revolution? Are you planning to shoot us all dead?"
King-Roy shook his head. "I don't know what all it means. I'm just learning about it. But I want to know more because I know the way we're living's not right. And I know I don't want any part of the white devil's world anymore." King-Roy brought the paint can into his hand again and stared down at his feet. He said, "This Elijah Muhammad writes all about the Nation of Islam and being a Muslim. It's the one true religion, he says. It's the black man's religion. And he says our God is Allah, the one true God."
"What else does he say?" I asked when King-Roy just stopped talking and stood looking at his feet some more. "How does he know all this?"
King-Roy glanced at me, then went back to looking at his feet. "Elijah is Allah's messenger. He was sent by Allah to tell us how to live and what we should do to get our power back from the white man. For instan
ce, he says don't smoke and don't drink liquor." King-Roy shook his head at his feet and said, "The white devil loves to see us throw away our money on his cigarettes and liquor. He loves to see us get stoned so we don't know what Mr. Charley's putting over on us."
"This Elijah guy makes us sound so mean," I said. "We're not like that, really."
King-Roy's head shot up, and his mellow face suddenly looked pained like I had just slapped him. "Is that what you think?"
"Yeah." I shrugged and added, "Well, maybe," and King-Roy, looking like he might cry, said, "Y'all have a whole history of mean and nasty, Esther. Starting with taking us in chains from our homeland in Africa and stealing our names and giving us all your white-devil names instead. Elijah says if we're ever going to be free of y'all's oppression, then we've got to take back our names."
I shook my head. "But how do you know what your name was. If it's not King-Roy Johnson, then what is it?"
"Ax told me that it's better we take the last name X, if we don't know our names, than to keep on using a name given to us by the blue-eyed devil."
"Like that man Malcolm X? But—"
"And Ax told me," King-Roy interrupted, his voice getting a little louder, "that black and white can never live together peacefully. He says we shouldn't even have friendships with Christians or Jews and we should form our own nation. It's the only way we'll ever really be free." King-Roy licked his lips and then bit down on the side of his mouth, looking like he was mulling over what he had just said.
I stood up, and moving closer to him, I said, "Then you mean we can't be friends? My mother and your mother can't be friends? Is this Nation of Islam your new religion now? Do you hate us white people?"
King-Roy took a long time answering me. He rocked back and forth on his shoes awhile, then finally he said, "That's what I've been thinking about. I've been thinking about what I should do. I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't stay here, no matter what my momma says." He shook his head and made a tapping sound with his shoes as he dropped forward on them. "I'm thinking about moving on after I do this paint job for your momma. Yeah, I'm gon' move in with Ax. I'm gon' move on to Harlem." He nodded to himself. "That's just what I'm gon' do."
TEN
King-Roy didn't want to talk anymore after he had made up his mind that he was going to be moving on to Harlem, so he left and I stayed awake in my room a long time. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't read, either, and I didn't even want to listen for Surfin' USA anymore. The music sounded too happy, and I wasn't in a happy mood. I needed to think. I lay in the dark, in my bed, with so many questions running through my mind, like, where did this Nation of Islam religion come from? Why hadn't I ever heard of it before? And what did King-Roy mean by "a revolution"? Were black people going to come storming through our streets with guns and bombs and things, killing off all the white devils?
King-Roy had sounded so angry before he left, so different. There I had been planning out how we could maybe be boyfriend and girlfriend someday, while he had been planning out how he hated us and how he wanted to move on to Harlem to live with a man named Ax. He almost looked like he hated me when he left my room. He couldn't even look at me.
I thought about the gun. He wouldn't shoot us, would he? I wondered what the real story was behind King-Roy being accused of murder. Mother hadn't said. All she had said was that a group of men had accused him of killing one of their friends and that his momma, Luray Johnson, had shoved King-Roy onto a Greyhound before these men could do anything about it.
I decided I needed to ask him straight out what the whole story was. Who were those men? Why did they think King-Roy had killed their friend? I just needed to ask him straight out. Or maybe talk to Pip about it. Pip was good at straightening my thoughts out for me. I nodded to myself and rolled over on my back. Yes, I could ask Pip what he thought about King-Roy and his gun and stealing it out of the trash. I could ask Pip what he thought about this Nation of Islam—that is, if he would still talk to me.
My head was reeling with all the thoughts and questions I had, but then I realized that I was still so hungry and I was really feeling light-headed, so I got out of bed and crept downstairs to get myself something to eat.
Once I reached the bottom step, I saw that the kitchen light was on and I knew that Dad and Monsieur Vichy were still in there. I came into the kitchen, squinting in the bright light. "Hi, Dad," I said, shielding my eyes. "I'm glad you're home. I missed you tonight."
My father and Mr. Vichy were standing over the enormous black cast-iron stove that filled up one wall of the kitchen. Dad was eating a sandwich and drinking milk while Monsieur Vichy was drinking a gin and tonic and smoking his cigar. We never used the stove for anything except to set things down on: schoolbooks, scripts, mail, and food. We had a modern stove on the other side of the kitchen for cooking.
My father set down his sandwich and spread his arms for me to hug him when he saw me come in. "Hey, muffin, how's my girl?" he asked.
I hadn't looked like a muffin kind of girl since I was about two, but I liked that my father still called me that. When he called me muffin, I knew that he was in a good mood. My father was moody, more so than my mother. He was either all lovey-dovey and wanting you to take his hand or give him a hug or rub his back, or he was yelling at you for breathing too loudly. He was always the director, whether he was at home or in a theater, or, as Auntie Pie likes to say, "All the world's a stage, and Herbert Nelson Young is its director."
I needed a hug badly, so I rushed into his arms and wrapped my own arms around his neck.
Monsieur Vichy snickered behind me. "Like zee little child, still, Esther, running to your papa like zat. When will you grow up?"
I broke free of my father and whirled around. "When you learn to speak English correctly, I suppose. You've lived in this country since you were twenty, for Pete's sake, and I'm tired"—I took a breath, trying to stifle a sob—"I'm sick and tired of everybody asking me when I'm going to grow up. I am who I am."
Out of all of our guests, Monsieur Vichy was the most hateful. He was a fat, pasty-faced man with very small feet. He reminded me of a bowling pin when he was standing still and a penguin when he walked. He smoked cigars all day long and carried around an old candy-mint tin for his spittle. His hair, what little was left of it, was the same color as that spittle. Monsieur Vichy wrote and puffed in his room all day, stinking up the whole house with his cigars, and came out at dinnertime to join us and glare down his pince-nez at me whenever I opened my mouth to say something. He thought my little sister, Sophia, was delightful and such une fille intelligente. He told my father that she and my brother, Stewart, would both be famous someday but I, alas, was to be nothing extraordinary. In his eyes, I was plain to look at, frivolous in my speech, and a poor student in school. I was likely to become the family scandal, he declared to my father one night out on the pavilion, when he thought I couldn't hear. But I did hear, and right then and there I determined that I would someday, somehow, become the family hero and show him a thing or two; but so far he had been right in his estimation of me, and that irked me to no end.
My father patted my head, trying to calm me down. "All right," he said. "It's late, no fighting, you two."
I turned to my father. "He's the third person today who's asked me when I'm going to grow up. Well, when's he going to write a real play? I could write what he writes—all those actors walking around in cardboard boxes, saying nothing that makes any sense."
"Oh, you sink so, do you?" Monsieur Vichy said, snickering and talking out of one side of his mouth so he could hold on to his precious cigar with the other side.
"Yes, I do," I said.
I thought his plays were too pretentious for words, and I didn't understand why my father would bother with them.
Monsieur Vichy smirked when I told him that I could write a better play than he, and he said to me, "Why don't you prove it? You talk so big all the time. Why don't we see what you can write, eh?"
"I don't have to prove
anything to you," I said, and my father said, "That's enough, you two."
"Non, non, non. Let us see zis child write even a play, good or bad. I do not believe she can do it. She is lazy and stupide."
"Henri, you've gone too far! That's enough!" my father said, his voice booming, not caring, I guess, that it was the middle of the night.
I ignored his indignation, even if it was on my behalf. I was used to fighting my own battles, especially with Monsieur Vichy. I said, "Oh yeah? I'll show you a play. I'll give you a play, and my play will have a plot, a real plot, with a beginning and middle and end. You ought to try it sometime."
Monsieur Vichy nodded his head. "Oui, oui, oui, we shall see. By the end of zis summer you will show me your rough draft, non?"
"I don't need a rough draft. I'll show you a polished-to-perfection play."
"Esther, let's not promise what we can't produce," my father said, his voice more angry than concerned. I knew he didn't like that he wasn't directing this scene between Monsieur Vichy and me.
"I can produce it, Dad. Don't you think I can't, because I can," I said. "I'm going upstairs right now to start writing it. I'll show you who's lazy."
I stormed out of the kitchen without food and with Monsieur Vichy laughing behind me.
"At least get some sleep first," my father called after me.
Up in my room I sat at my desk with my light on, wondering how I had managed to get myself into such a fix. I couldn't write a play if my life, or at least my dignity, depended on it. And who wanted a writing assignment during summer vacation? I could have kicked myself for opening my big fat mouth like that. I sat at my desk, with my notebook from last year's French class opened to the blank pages in the back and a pen in my hands, and just stared at the blank page. I sat like that for a long time, trying to come up with even an idea. Then I thought, Wait a minute! Monsieur Vichy opened his mouth, too, but he doesn't have to prove himself. I should tell him that he has to write a real play, too. I should tell him that he has to write one with a plot. Why should he get out of doing anything all summer?