Warriors Don't Cry (31 page)

Each day of vacation, Minnijean and I spent time on the phone or on visits, talking at length about what might happen to her. The more we talked, the more we realized it was something we could do little about. The final word rested with Superintendent Blossom.

Later that evening, Papa Will came by to bring his presents. I hadn’t seen much of my father since the integration began, but this time he was in a good mood. He didn’t bother to say “I told you so,” even though his awful predictions about integration causing trouble had for the most part come true. He was pleasant and genuinely concerned. The best part was the surprise he had hidden on the front porch, a brand-new television set with a big screen. He had chosen a special small gift for each of us. The fact that he put lots of time and thought into the gift selection made me feel that despite the way he had behaved, maybe he really did love me.

He and Mama looked at each other fondly for just an instant, and it felt as though we were a family again. I sometimes prayed they would get back together. At first Conrad and I had hoped against hope. As the years passed, we watched them grow apart in odd ways that made us sad. Rumors around church were that Papa even had a girlfriend now. But just for an instant, Conrad and I eyed each other, both thinking how nice it would be if he stayed. Maybe they would go with us to the family dinner and announce they were getting back together. But then Papa looked at his watch, cleared his throat, and off he went as though he had an important thing or person to get back to.

As Mother walked him to the door, I heard her invite him to our family Christmas dinner the next day at Aunt Mae Dell’s house, but he said he didn’t feel comfortable there.

Dear Diary,
It’s Christmas Eve and Papa’s not coming home to stay. For nine Christmases now I’ve prayed he would be with us. Maybe it’s not gonna happen. Could I please have a nice, new stepfather. Thy will be done. By next Christmas either I want things to be a lot better at Central or I want to be somewhere else, please God. Merry Christmas.

 

 

Christmas dinner with the family was the biggest occasion of the year, a time when we spent the day catching up on family love and bloodline gossip, as Grandma called it. We were twenty-seven laughing, chatting people. I had waited all year to see all the relatives who weren’t at Thanksgiving.

Even though all of them had definite opinions about my adventures at Central High, I had vowed not to talk about it. No matter what it took, I wanted to pretend life was normal again. I wanted the feeling of Christmas before integration. By late evening, as we sat in front of the fire singing Christmas carols, I realized maybe I had my wish. I hadn’t felt that content since the summer before in Cincinnati.

 

 

 

THE stories ranged from number one, the launching of Sputnik, to Nikita Khrushchev emerging at the top of the Kremlin, the Teamsters Union hearings, Hurricane Audrey, President Eisenhower’s stroke, Asian flu, and the passage of the Civil Rights bill.

 

How strange, I thought, to be involved in something that the whole nation considers among its ten most important stories. If it’s that important, you’d think somebody would be able to do something to make the Central High students behave themselves. Is it that nobody cares, or nobody knows what to do?
BY New Year’s Eve, I only thought about Central High perhaps every other hour. Vince had invited me to a party, but of course Grandma and Mama said no. Besides, our famous shadows, Mutt and Jeff, were parked across the street, faithful as hound dogs in their vigilance. Although we discussed reporting them to the police, we knew full well that might bring on more trouble. So we simply lived with their being there, watching us. Mother didn’t like my coming and going at night even when the party was in my neighborhood. Only on rare occasions did any of us go out after dark. Once dusk came, we locked all the doors and windows and closed the curtains.

So on New Year’s Eve, I sat home completing my list of New Year’s resolutions:

1. To do my best to stay alive until May 29.
   
2. To pray daily for the strength not to fight back.
   
3. To keep faith and understand more of how Gandhi behaved when his life was really hard.
   
4. To behave in a way that pleases Mother and Grandma.
   
5. To maintain the best attitude I can at school.
   
6. To help Grandma India with her work.
   
7. To help Minnijean remain in school—to be a better friend to her.
   

22

 

THOSE first school days of the new year were frightening without Minnijean because it made us realize any one or all of us could be next. Posters and cards reading “One nigger down and eight to go” were everywhere. Segregationists left no doubt that they were seizing Minnijean’s suspension as an opportunity to fire up their campaign.

 

Governor Faubus was adding to our insecurity and revving up segregationists’ hopes by publicly announcing that the school board should file a petition asking the courts to delay integration. He cited a recent order to that effect in Dallas, Texas, as evidence that Little Rock could do the same. He also constantly threatened to call a special session of the legislature to enact segregation laws unless the feds would immediately take us out of school and halt integration.

Once we got back into our daily routine, it was evident that segregationists must have spent their holidays thinking up ways to make us miserable. I could feel their electrifying hope of victory all around me: they walked differently, talked differently, and didn’t hesitate to shower us with angry words and deeds, letting us know we were short-timers.

I had by then withdrawn from French class because I wasn’t able to concentrate with the combined pressure of the extremely hostile students and coping with everything else. I was also concerned that I couldn’t do my best in my English, shorthand, and typing classes, all of which would have been a breeze under any other circumstances.

Even before lunch on our first day back, we had all begun to experience a hell we could not have imagined. The rumor was that the White Citizens Council would pay reward money to the person who could incite us to misbehave and get ourselves expelled. It was apparent that many students were going for that reward.

Boys on motorcycles threw an iron pipe at the car in which Gloria and Carlotta rode to school. Inside school, the group of students whose talent was walking on my heels until they bled met me after each and every class to escort me to the next. I would speed up, they would speed up. I couldn’t escape no matter what I did. Ernie and Jeff were bombarded with wet towels, and boys overheated their showers. Gloria and Elizabeth were shoved and kicked. Carlotta was tripped in the hall, and I was knocked face forward onto the floor. Thelma was spared some of the physical abuse during that period because of her petite stature and fragility, but even she was jostled.

One of the ever-present and most annoying pastimes was spraying ink or some foul-smelling, staining yellow substance on our clothes, on our books, in our lockers, on our seats, or on whatever of ours they could get their hands on. We complained long and hard to the NAACP.

 

Thurgood Marshall, Chief Counsel for the NAACP, said Little Rock officials should get tough with the forty or fifty hard-core white students causing trouble at Central. “The toughs are still pushing our kids around, spitting on them and cursing them,” he said.

 

 

On Monday, January 6, Minnijean and her parents met with Superintendent Blossom. She was allowed to return to school Monday, January 13, with the proviso that she not respond to her attackers in any way.

I drew a deep sigh of relief as we discussed the good news by telephone that evening. “Fine,” I said to her. “You can do it.” I tried to explain to her what Grandma India had said about freedom being a state of mind. I tried to impress upon her that our being able to make it through the year was the biggest talk-back and fight-back we could give them.

A short time after Minnijean’s return, a boy doused her with what appeared to be a bucket of soup. She froze in her tracks and did not respond, even as the greasy liquid trickled down her chest and horror painted her face. Afterward, a group of perhaps fifty students gathered outside the principal’s office to shout cheers for the douser, saying he had paid her back. He was suspended, but we were frightened that he had set in motion an all-out soup war that could lead to the drenching of each one of us and guarantee a real brawl if we tried to fight back.

On January 11 a white girl was also suspended for pushing Elizabeth Eckford down a flight of stairs before a genuine adult witness—a teacher. She was punished, but the others who pushed us down stairs were not. Headlines in the newspapers told of some of the other perils we faced over the next few days:
January 15: GUARD PLATOON SENT TO SCHOOL AFTER THREATS OF BOMBING
January 17: ANOTHER RACIAL CLASH REPORTED AT CENTRAL HIGH
January 21: DYNAMITE FOUND AT CHS—BLOSSOM SEES CAMPAIGN TO TRY AND CLOSE SCHOOL
January 22: ANOTHER BOMB SCARE DISRUPTS CHS ROUTINE—BLOSSOM APPEALS FOR THE END OF THREATENING CALLS
January 23: CHS PLAGUED BY MORE BOMB SCARES
January 24: NEW BOMB SCARE AT CENTRAL HIGH PROVES FALSE
January 27: ANOTHER BOMB TOSSED AT LC BATES HOUSE

The segregationists were becoming even more vocal, urging the students to harass us at every opportunity. The Central High Mothers’ League announced a nighttime rally with the Reverend Westley Pruden, president of the Citizens’ Council, speaking on “What Race Mixers Are Planning for Us.” They issued a special invitation to Central High students. We heard that almost two hundred hard-core segregationist students protested our presence by being absent from school on the day of that rally.

In addition to all the other indignities and physical pain we endured, we were now taunted by large groups of students who picked certain days simply to stare at us. They came to be known as “stare days.” Large, boisterous groups of hecklers stared intensely and harassed the living daylights out of us. On several occasions, seventy or so students showed up at school wearing all black to protest our presence. Those were known as “black days.”

The segregationists organized a systematic process for phoning our homes at all hours of the night to harass us. They also phoned our parents at their places of work and any other relatives or friends they could annoy. One day, Terrence’s mother rushed into the principal’s office, having been called and told her son was seriously injured, only to find the call had been a hoax. Repeated bomb threats were telephoned to our homes.

Somebody was also calling in reports to the news media that Minnijean had done outrageous things like running nude in the school’s hallway. Time after time, she was devastated by reporters’ inquiries about some bizarre thing she was said to have done in school and gotten away with. Those stories, when printed, only served to agitate students who had already made it their life’s work to get her out of school permanently.

Late one afternoon, Minnijean was waiting outside school for her ride home when she was kicked so hard she couldn’t sit down for two days. That incident was embarrassingly painful to her in many ways. Her bottom was discussed in the newspaper and by people as though it were an object without attachment to her body, and that hurt her feelings. That incident made her the victim of ridicule. Whenever we spent time together, I could tell she was growing more and more weary. I feared she couldn’t take much more of the constant mental and physical pounding. And yet school officials seemed unwilling or unable to stop the war being waged against her.

I remember a moment near the end of January when I was struck by the fact that all the school officials were increasingly nervous and behaving as though things had gotten out of control. Even the soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard seemed fearful of what could happen in the hallways of Central. Their presence had always only added to our problems; now we saw mirrored in their faces a reflection of the danger that surrounded us.

I could also see the fear in Mrs. Huckaby’s eyes. Somehow in the course of time, she had become our liaison to the other school officials. Even though she was the vice-principal of girls, she was the one person we all, both male and female, reported our problems to. Not that she could do anything about them, but she would usually listen. We had also come to trust her at least to be as fair as she could under the circumstances. I thought that she, too, must be under a lot of pressure. During those late January days, we had kept the door to her office swinging. We would meet each other coming in and going out with our complaints, sometimes teary-eyed, sometimes smoldering with anger.

On January 27, I wrote in my diary:

The National Veterans Organization has awarded us the Americanism Award. They think we are heroines and heroes. Why are we only Niggers to beat up on to the students at Central High. I don’t know if I can make it now. It’s really really hard. Why should life be so hard, when will it ever be fun to live again?

 

 

We had real evidence that school officials weren’t certain of their ability to protect us, when, on the day of a pep rally, Mrs. Huckaby suggested that Thelma, Minnijean, Elizabeth, and I sit in her office rather than be exposed to the hostility and physical abuse that certainly awaited us.

We were having more frequent meetings with Mrs. Bates and other NAACP officials about our problems. Despite our conversations and all the public declarations that school officials could protect us, the truth was, things were getting worse by the moment. When it came to Minnijean’s suspension, segregationists were like sharks who tasted a drop of blood in the water. Their determination to have their kill—to see her gone—brought us to an impasse. If some resolution were not found, it seemed certain all of us would be forced to leave school within the week.