Warriors Don't Cry (2 page)

Three weeks later, having won a federal court order, we black children maneuvered our way past an angry mob to enter the side door of Central High. But by eleven that morning, hundreds of people outside were running wild, crashing through police barriers to get us out of school. Some of the police sent to control the mob threw down their badges and joined the rampage. But a few other brave members of the Little Rock police force saved our lives by spiriting us past the mob to safety.

To uphold the law and protect lives, President Eisenhower sent soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division, the elite “Screaming Eagles”—Korean War heroes.

On my third trip to Central High, I rode with the 101st in an army station wagon guarded by jeeps with turret guns mounted on their hoods and helicopters roaring overhead. With the protection of our 101st bodyguards, we black students walked through the front door of the school and completed a full day of classes.

But I quickly learned from those who opposed integration that the soldiers’ presence meant a declaration of war. Segregationists mounted a brutal campaign against us, both inside and out of school.

My eight friends and I paid for the integration of Central High with our innocence. During those years when we desperately needed approval from our peers, we were victims of the most harsh rejection imaginable. The physical and psychological punishment we endured profoundly affected all our lives. It transformed us into warriors who dared not cry even when we suffered intolerable pain.

I became an instant adult, forced to take stock of what I believed and what I was willing to sacrifice to back up my beliefs. The experience endowed me with an indestructible faith in God.

I am proud to report that the Little Rock experience also gave us courage, strength, and hope. We nine grew up to become productive citizens, with special insights about how important it is to respect the value of every human life.

I am often asked, in view of the state of race relations today, if our effort was in vain. Would I integrate Central if I had it to do over again? My answer is yes, unequivocally yes. I take pride in the fact that, although the fight for equality must continue, our 1957 effort catapulted the civil rights movement forward a giant step and shifted the fight to a more dignified battlefield. For the first time in history, a President took a very bold step to defend civil rights—our civil rights.

Back then, I naively believed that if we could end segregation in the schools, all barriers of inequality would fall. If you had asked me in 1957 what I expected, I would have told you that by this time our struggle for human rights would have been won. Not so. But I am consoled by the words my grandmother spoke: “Even when the battle is long and the path is steep, a true warrior does not give up. If each one of us does not step forward to claim our rights, we are doomed to an eternal wait in hopes those who would usurp them will become benevolent. The Bible says, WATCH, FIGHT, and PRAY.”
ALTHOUGH I am perplexed by the state of race relations in this country today, I am at the same time very hopeful because I have ample evidence that what Grandmother promised me is true. With time and love, God solves all our problems. When we returned to Central High School for our first reunion in 1987, many Little Rock residents, white and black, greeted the nine of us as heroines and heroes. Hometown white folk in the mall smiled and said hello and offered directions even when they did not recognize us from our newspaper photos.

During all the fancy ceremonies, some of Arkansas’s highest officials and businessmen came from far and wide to welcome us. And perhaps the most astounding evidence that things have indeed changed for the better was the attitude of Governor Bill Clinton.

“Call me Bill,” he said, extending his hand, looking me in the eye. “You’all come on up to the house and sit a while.” He flashed that charming grin of his. A few minutes of conversation assured me that his warm invitation was genuine. He is, after all, a man my brother refers to as “good people,” based on their working relationship over the years.

So my eight friends and I found ourselves hanging out at the governor’s mansion, the one Faubus built. Governor Clinton sauntered about serving soft drinks and peanuts. He and his wife, Hillary, were the kind of host and hostess who could make me feel at home even in the place where Faubus had hatched his devilish strategies to get the nine of us out of Central High School by any means possible.

“You’all ought to think about coming on back home now. Things are different,” Governor Clinton said. He had been eleven years old when Faubus waged his segregationist battle against us. He displayed genuine respect for our contribution to the civil rights struggle. That visit was to become an evening I shall always treasure. As Chelsea played the piano and Bill and Hillary talked to me as though we’d known each other always, I found myself thinking, “Oh, Mr. Faubus, if only you and your friends could see us now.”
MY grandmother India always said God had pointed a finger at our family, asking for just a bit more discipline, more praying, and more hard work because He had blessed us with good health and good brains. My mother was one of the first few blacks to integrate the University of Arkansas, graduating in 1954. Three years later, when Grandma discovered I would be one of the first blacks to attend Central High School, she said the nightmare that had surrounded my birth was proof positive that destiny had assigned me a special task.

First off, I was born on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941. Mother says while she was giving birth to me, there was a big uproar, with the announcement that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She remembers how astonished she was, and yet her focus was necessarily on the task at hand. There was trouble with my delivery because Mom was tiny and I was nine pounds. The doctor used forceps to deliver me and injured my scalp. A few days later, I fell ill with a massive infection. Mother took me to the white hospital, which reluctantly treated the families of black men who worked on the railroad. A doctor operated to save my life by inserting a drainage system beneath my scalp.

Twenty-four hours later I wasn’t getting better. Whenever Mother sought help, neither nurses nor doctors would take her seriously enough to examine me. Instead, they said, “Just give it time.”

Two days after my operation, my temperature soared to 106 and I started convulsing. Mother sent for the minister to give me the last rites, and relatives were gathering to say farewell.

That evening, while Grandmother sat in my hospital room, rocking me back and forth as she hummed her favorite hymn, “On the Battlefield for My Lord,” Mother paced the floor weeping aloud in her despair. A black janitor who was sweeping the hallway asked why she was crying. She explained that I was dying because the infection in my head had grown worse.

The man extended his sympathy. As he turned to walk away, dragging his broom behind him, he mumbled that he guessed the Epsom salts hadn’t worked after all. Mother ran after him asking what he meant. He explained that a couple of days before, he had been cleaning the operating room as they finished up with my surgery. He had heard the doctor tell the white nurse to irrigate my head with Epsom salts and warm water every two or three hours or I wouldn’t make it.

Mother shouted the words “Epsom salts and water” as she raced down the hall, desperately searching for a nurse. The woman was indignant, saying, yes, come to think of it, the doctor had said something about Epsom salts. “But we don’t coddle niggers,” she growled.

Mother didn’t talk back to the nurse. She knew Daddy’s job was at stake. Instead, she sent for Epsom salts and began the treatment right away. Within two days, I was remarkably better. The minister went home, and the sisters from the church abandoned their death watch, declaring they had witnessed a miracle.

So fifteen years later, when I was selected to integrate Central High, Grandmother said, “Now you see, that’s the reason God spared your life. You’re supposed to carry this banner for our people.”

2

 

BLACK folks aren’t born expecting segregation, prepared from day one to follow its confining rules. Nobody presents you with a handbook when you’re teething and says, “Here’s how you must behave as a second-class citizen.” Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions of segregation creep over you, slowly stealing a teaspoonful of your self-esteem each day.

 

 

BY the time I was three years old, I was already so afraid of white people that when my red-haired, white-skinned cousin, Brenda, came to babysit, I hid beneath Mother’s bed. Like many nonwhite Southern families, ours included people with a variety of skin tones and physical features. Although Daddy’s skin was brown like mine, some of his relatives looked white.

 

My mother was fair-skinned as well, but Brenda’s skin color was made more stark by her flaming red hair. As a toddler, growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1945, I felt safe only in my sepia-toned world, a cocoon of familiar people and places. I knew there were white people living somewhere far away and we didn’t do things together. My folks never explained that I should be frightened of those white people. My fear developed as I observed adults and listened to their conversations. With alarmed expressions, they often whispered, “The white folks won’t like us to do that,” or “We don’t wanna anger the white folks.”

Whenever we walked uptown, among white people, Mother held my hand too tight. I could see the fear in her eyes, feel the stiffening of her body as white people walked past. If we happened to be in their path, she quickly shoved me aside, according them the privilege of first passage.

If white adults were accompanied by children, those kids scowled or stuck their tongues out at us. Even worse, they’d sometimes say, “Mama, look at that there nigger.”

Those trips to town became my primer on relating to white people. While shopping in the five-and-dime one hot summer day, I urged my mother to ask the waitress behind the lunch counter to give me a glass of water. She clutched my arm and whispered that we had to use our own drinking fountain. I started to cry aloud. I looked over to see the shiny chrome fountain the white people used. I didn’t want to go to our fountain marked “Colored.” It was the old dusty one located in an isolated part of the store, where I was afraid to go even with Mother.

Mother says when she tried to usher me to our drinking fountain, I caused such a fuss that the store manager chided her and asked if we were some of those uppity niggers from the North come to stir up trouble.
BY the time I was four years old, I was asking questions neither my mother nor grandmother cared to answer. “Why do the white people write ‘Colored’ on all the ugly drinking fountains, the dingy restrooms, and the back of the buses? When will we get our turn to be in charge?” Grandma India would only say, “In God’s time. Be patient, child, and tell God all about it.”

I remember sitting on the dining room floor, writing letters to God in my Indian Head tablet. I painstakingly formed the alphabet just as Grandma had taught me to do in order to distract me from my asthma cough. I could do the multiplication table through ten and read and write simple sentences by the age of four as a result of all those long nights working with her.

I also wrote to God about getting a park where I could swim and ride the merry-go-round. Whenever we went to Fair Park, the grownups warned me not to walk near the pool. We had to stay in a separate area. If I asked about riding the merry-go-round, Mother Lois and Grandmother India got very nervous. They would tell me there was no space for me as they dragged me away.

When the mailman failed to bring a reply from God, and things at the park didn’t change, even after a year, my patience wore thin. With each passing day, I realized just how different things really were for me.

When I was five, I had my first true bout with testing the harsh realities of segregation. My family—Grandmother, Mother, Daddy, and Conrad, plus most of my aunts and uncles—had gathered at Fair Park for a Fourth of July picnic. As usual we were separated from the white people, set apart in a wooded section away from the pool and the merry-go-round. While the grownups busied themselves setting up the meal, I made my escape, sneaking away to ride the merry-go-round. I had had my eye on one horse in particular, Prancer, the one I had dreamed about during all those months as I saved up the five pennies I needed to ride him.

I reached up to give the concessionaire my money. “There’s no space for you here,” the man said. But I pointed to Prancer’s empty saddle. That’s when he shouted at me and banged hard on the counter, spilling my coins on the ground. “You don’t belong here, picaninny.” I didn’t know what that word meant. But his growling voice hurt my ears and made my knees shake. Angry faces glared at me as though I’d done something terribly wrong. Scurrying past the people waiting in line, I was so terrified that I didn’t even take the time to pick up my precious pennies. At five I learned that there was to be no space for me on that merry-go-round no matter how many saddles stood empty.
AS a young child, my life was centered around the big, old, white wood-frame house at 1121 Cross Street that was my home. I lived there with my mother, Lois, her mother—my grandmother India—my father, Howell, and my brother, Conrad. Seven red cement stairs led up to the front door. A giant rubber plant stood just inside the front hallway next to tall mahogany bookcases that held the cherished volumes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Emily Dickinson, and of James Welden Johnson and Langston Hughes that Grandma and Mother loved so much. Some of the shelves held the textbooks Mother used for teaching seventh-grade English and for the night classes she took to get her master’s degree.

Next came the living room with its tattered, overstuffed green velvet chair and matching couch. The half-moon-shaped radio with brass knobs sat on a round mahogany table. Wine-colored leather chairs stood on either side. Great-grandma Ripley’s clock and a copper horse that had belonged to Great-grandpa rested on the mantel over the fireplace.