Warriors Don't Cry (3 page)

The kitchen had a huge old-fashioned stove, a red chrome-trimmed breakfast table and chairs, bright yellow walls, and a linoleum floor with visible marks of wear and tear. Grandma could usually be found scrubbing it sparkling clean or baking cornbread, simmering collard greens, or preparing her special gourmet salmon soufflé. She had learned to cook some of her fancy dishes when she worked as a maid in white ladies’ kitchens on Park Hill. Much of that time, she earned only a dollar a day, which she used to support her three children after Grandpa died. Since they had very little money, my uncle and aunt worked to help

Grandma put my mother through college.
MY favorite place in our house was Grandma India’s bedroom, filled with her “dibbies,” the name she gave the personal things that “a body treasures and holds close to the heart.” Her room always smelled of fresh flowers. Antique velvet scarves with satin fringe draped the back of her rocking chair and the back of the overstuffed maroon velvet chair in the corner by the window. There were photographs of her travels—to an Indian reservation where her husband, Grandpa Charles Peyton, had grown up with his people in Canada. There were also old tin-plate photos of her travels as a young woman to Italy with her father, Great-grandpa Ripley, when he accompanied his boss to Rome on business.

I couldn’t decide which of her treasures I loved most—her eight-foot-tall antique armoire with its ornate Oriental carvings, her iridescent green music box that played “Stardust,” or the special Dutch-girl quilts she created with colorful fabric profiles in each square.

I don’t remember life without Grandmother India. Mother and Daddy had lived with her in North Little Rock even before I was born. When they purchased our Little Rock house, Grandma came with them. Unlike Mother, who was delicate and fair, Grandma was tall and copper-skinned. She had pronounced cheekbones and huge, deep-set almond-shaped eyes that peered at me from behind wire-rimmed spectacles. She had a regal posture and a fearless attitude. My happiest evenings were spent listening to her read aloud from the Bible, from Archie comic books, or from Shakespeare. I sometimes gave up my favorite radio programs like
The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show
,
Our Miss Brooks
, and
The Aldrich Family
to hear her read to me.

For as long as I can remember, I spent late afternoons with Grandma India in her garden, tending her four o’clock plants. I would stand beside her holding on to her skirt as she pulled the weeds or held the water hose. That’s when we had our private talks. Once when I was six or so, I explained to her that I believed each human being was really only a spirit—made by God, and that our bodies were like clothes hanging in the closet. I said I thought that one day I would be able to exchange my body for a white body, and then I could be in charge.

“Some of your thinking is right, child. We are not these bodies, we are spirits, God’s ideas. But you must strive to be the best of what God made you. You don’t want to be white, what you really want is to be free, and freedom is a state of mind.”

“Yes, ma’am, but . . .”

“I hope you haven’t told anyone else about spirits and bodies.” She squeezed my hand. “Well, have you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good. It’s time you started keeping a diary so’s you can write down these thoughts and share them with me sometimes, but mostly keep them to yourself and tell God.”

The next time she went to town she brought me a pink diary that I could lock with a little key. Most evenings before sleeping, I looked forward to going to my bedroom to write to God. I was actually giving God an exam because He hadn’t kept His promise so far. I had asked Grandma could I still trust Him, and she had said, “Always, child, but remember, it’s His schedule, not yours. His good will come when you least expect it.”

My room was a place for my stuffed animals to live and a home for my huge brown Raggedy Ann doll, the one Grandma India made for me. It was a magical place where I daydreamed for hours as I listened to music or radio shows. There I could be whoever I wanted; I could be white—I could be free.

My brother, Conrad’s, bedroom was filled with strange trucks, glass jars of crawly bugs, and a wooden train Daddy made for him. Conrad spent lots of time counting marbles, putting puzzles together, and playing Monopoly. His room always seemed to be cluttered with pieces and parts of things, and Daddy would often march into Conrad’s room and demand that he put all his toys and trucks back into the red wooden box they had built together.

Daddy worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad as a hostler’s helper. He would arrive home, his huge muscular body obviously tired from the physical labor of his job. Mother constantly reminded him that if he’d finish just one more course, he could graduate from college and have a professional job that paid more. But he resisted, saying he preferred to work outside in the fresh air, where he was free. He loved hunting and fishing and getting away to the wilds where nobody could bother him. It made Mother very angry that he wouldn’t follow her advice. I worried they might do what my friend Carolyn’s parents did—get a divorce. At the time, I didn’t know the meaning of that word, but I knew that when it happened, her daddy was gone forever.

The dining room with its big oval table was the place we gathered each night for dinner and evening games. Daddy sat in the brown leather chair, reading his newspaper and working his crossword puzzles. Grandma entertained us with reading or checkers and chess so we wouldn’t bother Mother as she studied for her night-school exams. She was determined to complete her master’s degree.

When she began graduate school, our people couldn’t attend classes with whites at the University of Arkansas. After much grumbling and dickering, white folks had begun to allow small departments to integrate, class by class. She would tell us the story of the lone black man who was trying to integrate the law school. In the classroom, he was forced to sit confined by a white picket fence erected around his desk and chair. When he needed to come or go, he sometimes stumbled over that fence. White people around him sometimes stumbled over that fence, too. And still each day when he arrived, there it was, encircling him, keeping him separate but equal.

Mother began meeting with a few others from our community who were also determined to be admitted to the graduate school of education at the university. At the time, they were attending extension classes but in a separate space set aside for our people. Sometimes we got telephone calls from people warning us not to push any further to integrate the university. Nevertheless, Mother Lois continued her meetings and her classes.

I will always remember the night she casually looked up from her papers to tell us she would be one of the first of our people to attend the University of Arkansas. There was a nervous quiver in her voice. The glance she exchanged with Grandma made me realize they were both frightened of what lay ahead. “I can’t turn back now,” Mother said. “Forward is the only way our people can march.”

Later that winter, she smiled as she talked across the dinner table about the integrated classes. Some nights she would come home exhausted, her face pale and drawn, her teary eyes reflecting the discomfort of her plight. When I asked what happened, she would only say white folks were stubborn about seeing our people as God’s ideas.

Nevertheless, she survived. A few years later in 1954, she tugged me forward by my hand as Conrad and Grandma walked just behind us up the sidewalk to her graduation. It was a rare occasion, for I saw a few white folks look at Mother with a pleasant expression. This time she didn’t seem as nervous around them, maybe because she was wearing the same black cap and gown they were as she held the diploma in her hand. “It’s the first graduate degree I know of in this family,” Grandma India said, stroking the document as though it were the same precious tablet given Moses in the Bible.
WITHIN our community, we were considered middle-class folk. The middle-class label was mostly because of Mother’s teaching job. It didn’t mean we had lots of money or lived without struggling to pay our mortgage or the bills. Preachers, teachers, and doctors were usually the only professionals in our community, and hence they were accorded a special kind of respect because they had educational degrees. Certainly we were not considered radical integrationists or people who made waves. We were quiet churchgoing folks. Daddy’s Uncle Benjamin Pattillo was a preacher who traveled from city to city conducting revivals. I remember spending many a night sitting and fanning myself in churches as he preached, while aunts and cousins joined in the choir.

We lived in the heart of my community, a short distance from the church and school I attended. As I grew older, I began going places on my own, like to ballet or piano lessons and to Girl Scout meetings. Still, my immediate neighborhood and its people continued to be the most important threads of the tapestry that was my life.

With the passage of time, I became increasingly aware of how all of the adults around me behaved the same. They were living with constant fear and apprehension. It felt as though we always had a white foot pressed against the back of our necks. I was feeling more and more vulnerable as I watched them continually struggle to solve the mystery of what white folks expected of them. They behaved as though it were an awful sin to overlook even one of those unspoken rules and step out of “their place,” to cross some invisible line. And yet lots of discussions in my household were about how to cross that line, when to cross that line, and who could cross that invisible line without getting hurt.

On those rare occasions when a white person came into our house, children and adults alike would all stand at attention, staring, waiting for them to give orders. There was the milkman, blond and smiling, who leered at Mother Lois every time he delivered our milk. Usually he would insist that she bring him a drink of water, even when she pleaded she didn’t have time. He’d set down his metal case with its glass bottles of undelivered milk and wink at her as he gulped his water.

She would clasp her shaking hands, nervously waiting for him to finish and go away. Finally, he would hand the bottle of milk to her; but when she tried to take it from him, he wouldn’t let go and kept holding it tight, forcing her to plead for it. And that’s when he would offer her free milk and ice cream if she “cooperated” with him.

Mother Lois’s face would turn red and her mouth would tighten just the same way it did when the insurance man offered her free premiums if she’d be his special colored lady. As always when either of these men behaved inappropriately, she would urge me to go inside. But somehow I knew I had to disobey—I had to stay with her.

Even though they were all adults, the milkman seemed to have some strange power over her, just as the insurance man and other white people did. I watched as she struggled to stay calm while the milkman hassled her.

Sometimes my father stood silent in the next room peeking through a crack in the door and listening to those men insult Mother. He would clench his fist and clear his throat loud, but he wouldn’t show his face or say anything. Afterward, he would either storm out, mumbling under his breath, or sit down in the chair at the dining room table and bury his face in his hands. Sometimes he talked loud as though he were really going to do something awful, but only after the white men left our house. I could tell he really loved Mother and wanted to protect her, but there was an awful big fear keeping him silent.

I would sit beside him as he took his shotgun out, oiled and cleaned it. There was a sad, pained look in his eyes as he would turn to me and say, “You understand, don’t you, that man’s got no call to talk to your mama that way.” He stood, then paced as he wrung his hands and whispered, “God, give me strength and patience to do Your will.” He would stroke my cheek and smile as he continued to answer as though he could hear all the questions in my head. “Someday things will be different, someday our men will be respected and not be called ‘boy’ and treated like children.” Then he would calm down and smile, describing his visits to states like North Dakota and Pennsylvania where our men were treated as equals—where they looked white men in the eye fearlessly, where they could protect their women. These were places where we would all move—someday.
THERE were so many times when I felt shame, and all the hope drained from my soul as I watched the adults in my family kowtow to white people. Whenever we shopped at the grocery store, they behaved as though they were worried about something.

The grocer, tall, skinny Mr. Waylan, with his Adam’s apple sticking out above his collar, his fish-belly blue-white skin and oversized fingernails, was the white man I saw most often. At least twice a week, I would accompany one or more of the adults in my family to his store. Looking through horn-rimmed glasses, with what Grandma India called “criminal eyes,” Mr. Waylan sometimes greeted us cordially. There were even times when he inspired a nervous laugh from Mother and Daddy with his placating chatter.

His store was one of my favorite places because going there was sometimes like going to a neighborhood party. Mostly our people shopped there, although a few whites from a nearby neighborhood came there, too. There was sawdust on the floor, and the air was filled with the aroma of spices, fruits, onions, nuts, and potatoes. Maybe it was the festive colors and sounds that reminded me of a party.

Early one Friday evening, when the store was crowded, our entire family went in for a shopping spree. We had Mama’s teaching check, Daddy’s railroad check, and the money Grandma India had earned from her work as a maid. It was one of those times when we all felt joy and peace and lots of hope. I looked forward to the bill paying because the grocer sometimes rewarded Conrad and me with Sugar Daddy suckers after the grown-ups handed over the money.

Grandma was the first to look over Mr Waylan’s bill. Her forehead wrinkled; she mumbled and handed it to Daddy. He looked it over and talked to her with his eyes. By the time Mother examined the bill, all their faces were grim. They quickly moved Conrad and me with them to a corner of the store.