Warriors Don't Cry (4 page)

They were certain the bill overcharged them by twenty-two dollars. That was more than a day’s pay, Daddy said. Still, they seemed frightened to speak up. After lots of whispered angry words, they decided to complain. Although Grandma approached the grocer in a calm, respectful way, he shouted back at her in an angry voice—loud enough for everyone within a block to hear. He said he gave us credit when we didn’t have eating money, so he expected us to pay without complaining.

Seeing Daddy’s jaw tighten and his eyes narrow, Grandma touched his hand to stay him. There was an ominous silence in the store. Everybody was staring at us. Other people in the store, some of them our friends, stood absolutely still, fear in their eyes.

At first, Mother, Grandma, and Daddy stood paralyzed. Then Mother took a deep breath, stepped forward, and said in a commanding voice, “Even when we’re being overcharged?”

“You just watch your mouth or you’all will be eating beans next month.” The grocer was shaking his fist at Mother Lois. There was fire in Daddy’s eyes, but once again, Grandma looked at him and he backed down; the three of them cowered like children before a chastising parent. There was a long moment of complete silence. All at once Grandma started to pull dollars out of her purse and Daddy did the same. Together, they paid the full amount.

Mama quickly shoved Conrad and me out the door. We’d make do with what was in our cupboards for the next few days, Daddy said. We wouldn’t be going to that store anymore.

On the way home Grandma fussed and fumed, saying she was fed up with buying day-old bread and slightly rotting meat for one and a half times the price fresh food was sold to white folks. I couldn’t stop wondering why Mama, Grandma, and Daddy couldn’t talk back to that white man.

Daddy was a tall man, over six feet four, with broad shoulders and big muscles in his arms. He could toss me in the air and catch me or hoist me over the fence with ease. Until that moment, I had thought he could take on the world, if he had to protect me. But watching him kowtow to the grocer made me know it wasn’t so. It frightened me and made me think a lot about how, if I got into trouble with white people, the folks I counted on most in my life for protection couldn’t help me at all. I was beginning to resign myself to the fact that white people were definitely in charge, and there was nothing we could do about it.

The next day, Grandma called all her friends and tried to get them to agree to form a group to shop across town. All but one person warned her not to cause trouble. After she had dialed at least ten numbers, she sank down into her chair with a sad face and placed the receiver in its cradle. She sat silent for a long while. Then she picked up her Bible and read aloud the verse that cleared away the tears in her eyes: “And Ethiopia shall stretch forth her wings.” With a smile on her face and fire in her eyes she said, “Be patient, our people’s turn will come. You’ll see. Your lifetime will be different from mine. I might not live to see the changes, but you will. . . . Oh, yes, my child, you will.”

But as time passed without significant changes in my life, I was becoming increasingly anxious waiting for Ethiopia to stretch forth her wings. In my diary I wrote:

What if Grandma is wrong?—what if God can’t fix things. What if the white people are always gonna be in charge. God, now, please give me some sign you are there and you are gonna do something to change my life. Please hurry!

—Melba Pattillo—age eight—a Sunday School student

I was as impatient for change as I was with the location of the rest rooms marked “Colored.” As a child it seemed they were always located miles away from wherever I was when I felt the urge to go. When we shopped in the downtown stores, the rest rooms were usually located at the end of a dark hallway, or at the bottom of a dingy stairwell. It never failed that either I dampened my pants trying to get there in time or, worse yet, got a horrible ache in my side trying to hold my water until I got home.

An experience I endured on a December morning would forever affect any decision I made to go “potty” in a public place. We were Christmas shopping when I felt the twinge of emergency. I convinced Mother and Grandmother that I knew the way to the rest room by myself. I was moving as fast as I could when suddenly I knew I wasn’t going to make it all the way down those stairs and across the warehouse walkway to the “Colored Ladies” toilet.

So I pushed open the door marked “White Ladies” and, taking a deep breath, I crossed the threshold. It was just as bright and pretty as I had imagined it to be. At first I could only hear voices nearby, but when I stepped through a second doorway, I saw several white ladies chatting and fussing with their makeup. Across the room, other white ladies sat on a couch reading the newspaper. Suddenly realizing I was there, two of them looked up at me in astonishment. Unless I was the maid, they said, I was in the wrong place. But it was clear I was too young to be the maid. While they shouted at me to “get out,” my throbbing bladder consumed my attention as I frantically headed for the unoccupied stall.

They kept shouting, “Good Lord, do something.” I was doing something by that time, seated comfortably on the toilet, listening to the hysteria building outside my locked stall. One woman even knelt down to peep beneath the door to make certain I didn’t put my bottom on the toilet seat. She ordered me not to pee.

At first there was so much carrying-on outside my stall that I was afraid to come out. But I wanted to see all the special things about the white ladies’ rest room, so I had no choice. A chorus of “Nigger” and other nasty words billowed around me as I washed my hands. One woman waved her finger in my face, warning me that her friend had gone after the police and they would teach me a thing or two. Hearing the word “police” terrified me. Daddy and Mother Lois were afraid of the police. The ladies were hurrying out through the door saying they were going to tell the manager that they would never shop in that store again.

Just then I heard a familiar voice: “Melba Joy Pattillo, just what are you doing in there.” It was Grandma India calling out to me. She stepped inside the room. I was so happy to see her that I rushed to give her a hug. Her embrace made me feel safe, but the fear in her voice brought back my fear. My curiosity had gotten us into a real mess, she said. The police and a whole bunch of white folks were outside waiting for me. Grandma pushed me away and wiped my tears. And even as she straightened the bow on my braid, those voices were shouting at us through the door.

“I’m demanding you’all get out here right now. I’m with the Little Rock Police. Don’t make us come in after you.”

Grandma straightened her shoulders, assuming the posture of a queen as she reached down to take my hand, and instructed me to stand tall. As we walked through the door, I tilted my chin upward to match her chin as she looked the two policemen right in the eye. She spoke to them in a calm, clear voice, explaining that I was not good at reading signs. Then she apologized for any inconvenience I had caused. Her voice didn’t sound frightened, but I could feel her hand shaking and the perspiration in her palm.

Suddenly, one of the officers moved close and blocked our way, saying we had to come upstairs for a serious talk. Grandma didn’t flinch as he moved too close to her. Instead, she smiled down at me and squeezed my hand. But as he beckoned her to move ahead, I knew we were in more trouble than we’d ever been in before. When she asked where he was taking us, he told her to shut up and do as we were told. Some of the crowd moved with us. When we passed close to Mother Lois, she and Grandma talked to each other with their eyes. I started to speak, but Grandma pinched my arm.

Once inside the upstairs room with the straight-back wooden chairs, long table, and cardboard boxes, both officers lit cigarettes. One of them said we must be part of a communist group from up North, trying to integrate Little Rock’s bathrooms. Grandma’s voice only cracked once as over and over again she insisted that I had made a mistake. She called them “sir” and “mister” as she protested that we were good Little Rock citizens grateful for the use of our own bathrooms. She said she remembered the time when we couldn’t even enter the front door of the store and she was humbly grateful for that privilege.

Finally, after an hour, the older policeman said he’d let us go, calling us harmless niggers gone astray. But he warned if we were ever again caught being curious about what belonged to white folks, we’d be behind bars wearing stripes, or even worse, wearing ropes around our necks.

As we climbed into the car, Grandmother India warned me that curiosity killed the cat and it was going to be my undoing. As punishment for my bad deed, she made me read the Twenty-Third Psalm every day for a month. I also had to look up “patience” in the dictionary and write down the definition.
IN a way, she was right—patience was slowly bringing changes. As I celebrated several birthdays, growing into double digits, the one major change I could see was Mother Lois’s attending still more classes at the white people’s university. I was so fascinated with the idea that I had to see this school; so she began driving the whole family past the university extension on Sunday afternoon rides. It was located in the kind of all-white neighborhood we only dared travel through during the day. I craned my neck to look at the pretty houses and manicured lawns.

Sometimes, on our way there, we passed Central High School, so tall, so majestic, like a European castle I’d seen in history books. “Wow, that’s a lot bigger than our high school,” I said one Sunday. “I want to go there.”

“May Brown cooks there,” Grandma said. “She tells me that’s where the richest white families send their children. Folks up North know about Central High School. They know it’s a good school.”

“I wish I could see what’s inside,” I said.

“Don’t you dare even say that, girl; curiosity gets a body in a whole lot of trouble. Be patient,” Grandma commanded once more as she smiled at me. “Be patient, and one day, God willing, you’ll see inside that school, I promise.”

I was twelve years old. That afternoon, I sat at my desk in my seventh-grade class at Dunbar Junior High, copying from the blackboard. My teacher had been called outside. When she returned, she appeared frightened and nervous. Erasing the blackboard before we could finish our copying, she spoke breathlessly about
Brown v. Board of Education.

“Does that mean we have to go to school with white people?” my friend Carl asked as a chorus of voices echoed his question.

“Yes, maybe.But you needn’t concern yourself with that. Collect your things. You’all are dismissed early today.” Although she said the Brown case was something we should be proud of, something to celebrate, her face didn’t look at all happy. I didn’t understand why she was in such a big rush to dismiss us that way, but I didn’t ask. Going home to be with my grandmother India was something I looked forward to every day. Peering over the book or newspaper she was reading, she would always greet me the same way: “And what did you learn today?” She hadn’t finished high school, but she had read lots of books, and she studied everything and everybody all the time. Over an after-school snack of warm gingerbread and milk, the two of us would talk and laugh until it was time for me to start my chores and homework.

Now as we left school I heard my teacher’s quivering voice: “Pay attention to where you’re walking. Walk in groups, don’t walk alone.” She stood at the top of the steps, telling us to hurry.

Once outside, I realized I had forgotten a math book, but when I tried to get it, she blocked my way, telling me that I should go on with the others. I couldn’t imagine why she was so insistent that I hurry home. She even said she would excuse my homework assignment the next day. She had never excused undone homework for any reason before.

I trailed behind the others as I pondered her strange behavior. I paid little attention to where I was going. It was, after all, a familiar route, one I had walked since age six. I usually took a shortcut across a vacant block, through a grassy field filled with persimmon trees. In spring, ripened fruit littered the ground to make walking a hazardous, slippery adventure.

Sometimes it wasn’t always safe to take that shortcut because of Marissa. She was an older girl who frightened us. She would suddenly become very mean, striking out for no reason. I would be walking along that path, and all at once I’d be attacked by a shower of overripe persimmons. There was no way I could protect myself or fight back because Marissa was so big and overpowering. At twelve, I was considered tall for my age; most folks thought I was fifteen. But Marissa was even bigger. Nobody knew how old she was—we thought she was about sixteen—much too old to be in our class.

Marissa was different; the teachers called her “retarded.” Even though she often misbehaved, adults never did anything about it, maybe because her father was a rich minister in our community. As I crossed the field, I knew that I risked having Marissa rush out of the bushes at any moment. But I also knew I could get past her if I gave her my lunch apple or my allowance money. Otherwise, I felt I was pretty safe in that field—safe enough to lapse into my daydreams. This was my special time of the day—when I could sing as loud as I wanted and make up new daydreams about being a movie star or moving North to New York or out West to California.

I didn’t agree with the radio announcers who described Little Rock as a nice, clean Southern town, a place where my people and whites got along peacefully. City officials boasted there hadn’t been a Klan hanging of one of our people in at least ten years. They called our citizens forward-thinking because they were completing construction of the Strategic Air Command military base nearby that brought in lots of different races of people. But I didn’t think we were so progressive because I still couldn’t eat at the lunch counter at the five-and-dime, go to a movie unless I sat in the balcony, ride the merry-go-round at Fair Park, or go into the white ladies’ bathroom.