Warriors Don't Cry (9 page)

By noon, I was saturated with all the news reports and anxious to have some word from the others. I felt restless, trapped. I had helped Grandma with all the chores she’d allow, and I offered to help her with those she insisted she’d do alone. I had played all my Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis records for romantic daydreaming. I had read through the latest issue of
Seventeen
magazine and sneaked through the pages of my secret copy of
True Romance
; I was so bored I thought I’d keel over.

“I think I want to go back to Horace Mann,” I told my grandmother. “At least I’ll have assignments and friends and all sorts of wonderful first school day things to do.”

“One little setback—and you want out,” she said. “Naw, you’re not a quitter.”

In my diary I wrote:

I was disappointed not to see what is inside Central High School. I don’t understand why the governor sent grown-up soldiers to keep us out.
I don’t know if I should go back.
But Grandma is right, if I don’t go back, they will think they have won. They will think they can use soldiers to frighten us, and we’ll always have to obey them. They’ll always be in charge if I don’t go back to Central and make the integration happen.

By late afternoon the ringing phone, the hot weather, and my confinement were driving me nuts, so when the phone rang, I grabbed for it.

“Where were you?” I could hear annoyance in Minnijean’s voice.

“I was there,” I said. “Across the street. I saw Elizabeth being chased by those ugly people. Why was she alone?”

“Remember, she doesn’t have a phone, so she didn’t get that midnight call. She didn’t know where or when to meet us.”

“Mama and I barely made it out of there!” I said, being cautious not to tell all.

“We got outta there as fast as we could. First we went to the superintendent’s office. We waited there for an hour, sitting on those hard benches. Then Mrs. Bates dragged us on to the United States Attorney’s office, to see a Mr. Cobb.”

“Why?”

“She said since Judge Davies made a federal order, we should go there, but Cobb sent us on to the FBI office. That was kind of secret and fun. Those guys look just the way they do on television, like they know something but they won’t tell.”

“Yeah, but what did they do?”

“Asked a lot of questions and wrote the answers down.”

“Questions?”

“Yeah, all about where we stood and who did what to us. Took hours and I was sweating so bad I thought I would die.”

“Well, are they gonna do anything?”

“Investigate, they said they’d investigate.”

“Sure, by that time we could be dead.”

“You ain’t kidding. That mob was outright nasty. I gotta go now, but can you meet me in fifteen minutes and we’ll go to the Community Center?”

“The Community Center,” I whispered. It seemed like forever since I’d had an ordinary afternoon there listening to records and talking to friends who didn’t use the word “integration.” I thought about the wonderful times Minnijean and I had shared—times when our greatest concern was saving enough allowance to buy a new record or praying to be asked to walk to the cafeteria with the right boy. Maybe our lives could be that way again. I tiptoed past Grandma, peacefully snoozing in her rocking chair. Suddenly she was awake. “Just where do you think you’re going, Missy?”

“Uh, to the Community Center. I didn’t want to disturb you. I thought you were sleeping.”

“Uh, huh. Have a seat. The best you can do is let up a window. But you ain’t going to no Community Center.”

I couldn’t stop the rush of tears. I ran to my room and fell onto the bed, burying my face in the pillow to hide the sobs that wrenched my insides. All my disappointment over not getting into Central High and the mob chase as well as the big sudden changes in my life over the past few weeks came crashing in on me.

Then I heard Grandma India padding across the room and felt the weight of her body shift the plane of the mattress as she sat down.

“You had a good cry, girl?” Her voice was sympathetic but also one sliver away from being angry.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ll make this your last cry. You’re a warrior on the battlefield for your Lord. God’s warriors don’t cry, ’cause they trust that he’s always by their side. The women of this family don’t break down in the face of trouble. We act with courage, and with God’s help, we ship trouble right on out.”

“But I . . .” I tried to explain.

“But nothing. Now, you get yourself together, read the Twenty-Third Psalm, and don’t ever let me see you behave this way again.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The anger in her voice hurt my feelings, but her warm hand patted my arm to reassure me of her love. From then on, I knew I could only cry when no one would hear me.
I BECAME very anxious as I watched the curtain of dusk shadow the sun. Although I relished the protective veil of night, I feared the men who had chased us earlier might use the cover of darkness to hurt us. For much of the early evening, my family hovered in the living room reading newspapers, listening to the radio, and watching the news. There were the ever-present phone calls to frighten us. Sometimes they even entertained us, as when we heard Grandma give them her call-to-worship, reading Bible verses and asking them if they had found the Lord.

“Whew, that was quite a workout,” she said, fanning herself with a folded newspaper and settling down into her favorite chair. “White ministers have their work cut out for them.”

Turning away from the television, Mother said, “Yeah, but I’m not certain those ministers will get their work done before we’re driven out of our minds by the phone calls. I think we’ll have to get another telephone number. We can’t go on this way.”

“Give it a few more days,” Grandma said. “Surely . . . surely they’ll get tired and go away.”

“You know the effort they made to integrate over in North Little Rock failed dismally,” Mother Lois said. She went on to explain to us how the attempt to integrate North Little Rock’s white high school had also been met with a violent and angry crowd.

And then she told us of a frightening talk she had had with one of the administrators at the school where she taught seventh-grade English.

“He started the conversation innocently enough, but then he asked me why I would subject my daughter to being the first to integrate. I told him if nobody takes responsibility for being the first, it will never get done. On and on he went, asking questions and describing the worst possible outcomes. Then he warned that some North Little Rock white school officials might take it personally that I allowed Melba to go to Central.”

“I think this might be a time when we have to keep our business close to our chests,” Mother cautioned. “I didn’t give him any details of our encounter this morning. He asked me point-blank if I would take you out of school, and I said we’d have to see how things worked out.”

“Sounds as though they are threatening you a little.” Grandma’s face showed anguish as she spoke.

The thought of Mother not having that teaching job upset me. Before she was hired, we had little food on the table, and Grandma had to make most of my dresses from bleached flour sacks. Mother had worked so hard for it. Besides, she was now our sole support. Daddy gave us money only now and then. I decided I had to change the thoughts running through my mind. They frightened me too much. I was ready to see something other than integration on the news, so I began flipping channels, looking for
Lucy
,
Sid Caesar
, or
The Hit Parade
.

Just then Grandma India raised the newspaper to show me headlines: RING OF TROOPS BLOCK INTEGRATION HERE. NO INCIDENTS REPORTED, OFFICIALS HUDDLE. The article said that the Arkansas National Guardsmen were indeed armed with rifles, bayonets, and nightsticks to keep us out of the school, and that troopers from the Arkansas State Police had joined them. The official total was 270 guards posted to fend us off, but folks who had driven around the school said it was more like five hundred.

I took heart from another headline: IKE ORDERS BROWNELL TO LOOK INTO FAUBUS ACT. Then I spotted another story farther down the page that said Wiley Branton, legal counsel for the local NAACP, had officially announced that our parents would not allow us to return to school. We breathed a sigh of relief. The question of what I would do the following morning had definitely been settled.

Our usual household routine was stalled, however, as we dealt with threats from callers. No matter how many times we vowed we’d have a normal evening, somehow we always ended up turning back to the news to keep up with what was going on. Radio reports said the crowd gathered outside Central earlier had broken into splinter groups and now roamed the city terrorizing our people wherever they found them.

The news reports were all the same:

Gangs of gun-toting renegades are reportedly arriving from surrounding states to join segregationists’ fight to halt integration.
Meanwhile, Governor Faubus continues to predict blood will run in the streets if the federal order to integrate schools is enforced.

“I don’t see why we should allow these silly white people to frighten us into giving up our lives. I’ll start dinner, and I expect you’all to help.” Grandma gathered up the paper and headed for the kitchen.

The shrill ring of the telephone upset me even more now that I had seen my enemies. I imagined the callers to resemble those men who had chased me. It felt as though they were entering my home each time they called. I could tell Mother felt the same way. With each ring, her expression turned grimmer.

“I’ll get it.” Conrad’s voice was less enthusiastic than usual, but still he made his chase for the phone until he was ordered to halt. Grandma had interrupted her cooking to hurry to the phone.

She called to me from the hallway. “Sounds like maybe that boy Vince. You know, the polite one from church that we usually see at the wrestling matches.” Grandma beckoned me to take the receiver.

Vince, I thought to myself as my heart leaped with joy. Sure, I knew very well who Vince was. He attended high school in a neighboring town, but he was in my Sunday School class. It was Grandma who didn’t really know that Vince was my secret, pretend dreamboat boyfriend. I wasn’t at all certain he knew it. He was at least two years older than me and drove a new Chevy and looked sort of like a caramel-colored James Darren.

“Make this conversation brief, honey,” Grandma said as she handed me the phone.

“Hello . . . ,” I said, using the sexy whisper dictated by romance magazines.

“Melba?” It wasn’t Vince’s voice saying my name.

“Yes,” I answered in a polite tone, dropping my pretense. The voice wasn’t at all familiar to me.

“Melba, nigger, I know where you live . . . Twelfth and Cross. We gonna get you tonight . . . ’long about midnight.” I heard the receiver click, and he was gone. Did he know where my bedroom was? Would he come over now? Did he have a bomb? I couldn’t tell Mama and the others that he knew so much about us, so I choked back my tears.

As I entered the living room, faces turned my way in anticipation. I pretended a smile and said it was somebody else, another friend, not Vince.

I thought it was a sign that we were feeling more confident when we turned the television set off right in the middle of all the uproar about Central and took our places at the dinner table. After the blessing, the topic turned to what was really on our minds.

“I’ll keep watch again tonight. If I need you, I’ll call you,” Grandma said.

I could tell Mother was deep in thought; she studied her plate for a long moment before she looked up at Grandma and said, “Maybe you could get some sleep tonight, and I could stand guard?”

“That would be a real good idea except you don’t know how to shoot a gun. This is no time for on-the-job training.” Grandma was an expert marksman. As a railroad man, Grandpa had spent lots of time away from home. He had insisted Grandma learn to use a gun to protect herself because they had lived in an isolated area in the early years of their marriage.

“May I have on-the-job training?” Conrad asked.

“Not with this job, you can’t. God does not forgive those who kill others,” Grandma said. “Expert marksmanship is a must because you always got to aim for fingers or toes, and them’s small targets.”

When the call came from the NAACP saying perhaps we wouldn’t be going to school for several days because we’d be in court, we all seemed to relax. But our peace was only for a moment. Later that evening, phone callers told us that the houses of several of our people connected with integration had been attacked. The news reports were revealing our names and addresses. Mother Lois said Conrad couldn’t play outside, and she demanded that from now on he walk to school in the company of several other children.

As I stood over the kitchen sink getting ready to wash the dishes, Grandma went about what for the past few nights she had been calling her security walk. She placed a flashlight by the back door near the stack of chairs that blocked it. Then she took Conrad with her as she double-checked the lock on every door and window in the house.

Peering out the window over the sink, I was astonished to see the neighborhood silent, empty, and eerie. Usually, this time of the year, all our windows and doors would stand open, like those of our neighbors. We would go back and forth bearing lemonade, engaged in happy chatter. I could always hear laughter as people gathered on their porches. Sometimes a gospel group or a blues singer practiced songs for everyone to enjoy. But tonight it was dead silent; it appeared everyone had locked their windows and doors.

“Melba.” Mother Lois walked up behind me, interrupting my thoughts.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I guess I’d better say this while we’re alone and I’m thinking about it. I’m gonna leave a change of clothing hanging outside your bedroom closet door. If somebody ever gets into our house late at night, you grab those clothes, go out the back door, and run as fast as you can down to Ninth Street.”

“But, Mama, why Ninth Street? You told me never to go to Ninth Street.” It was the roughest area of Little Rock, where all the honky-tonks and sinful people gathered.