What can King do but obey Khalid’s last piece of brotherly advice? He tells Sandy that they can’t be friends anymore, to the puzzlement of both Sandy and their circle of shared friends. We can’t have them hating us because of something like that too.”īefore King could work through his feelings about what his adored big brother had said, Khalid died of a heart attack. “We’ve already got the whole world hating us because of our skin. “Black people aren’t allowed to be gay, King,” Khalid had told him. Khalid had overheard Sandy, who is white, tell King he was gay, and he didn’t want people thinking King was gay, too.
Shortly before he died, Khalid, perhaps intuiting that his little brother had questions about his own sexual orientation, warned King away from his best friend, “Sandy” Sanders. In King and the Dragonflies, award-winning author Kacen Callender chronicles King’s troubled path through his own and his parents’ grief over Khalid’s death, and King’s understanding and acceptance of himself.
When a dragonfly alights on the edge of the casket at his brother’s funeral, Kingston Reginald James is convinced Khalid isn’t really gone, just changed into one of the dragonflies that flutter around the bayou near his Louisiana home.
0 kommentar(er)
