If These Walls Had Ears (17 page)

The students were in the dark for seventeen days. A few blocks away in the governor’s office, Faubus wrangled with a federal
judge, with the Department of Justice, and even with President Eisenhower. Finally, on September 20, Faubus withdrew the Guard.
Three days later, the nine Negro students were admitted to Little Rock Central High School. An angry crowd appeared out front,
and school adrninistrators ordered the removal of the black students through a side exit. The next day, the mob was even more
unruly. President Eisenhower responded by federalizing the Arkansas Guard and ordering in one thousand troops from the U.S.
Army’s 101st Airborne. For the next month, the nine Negro children were escorted to school and from classroom to classroom—by
armed soldiers.

Martha had several classes with the Negro students. “The classroom activities were very stressed,” she recalls. “In those
classes with the blacks in them, the soldiers, four or five of them, would have duty standing around the walls in the classroom.
Then, five minutes before the bell would ring to indicate that class was over, the soldiers would circle the black students
and carry them down the hall, like they were little peas in a pod.”

Martha and her friends found the entire process terribly disruptive. “My French class had two black girls in it,” she says.
“This was second-year French. These girls had had first-year French, but they might as well have had only three weeks of French.
They didn’t have the slightest notion of what was going on. It was sad, because they were obviously going to fail. And they
were slowing down the progress of the classroom, which I and the rest of us resented.”

A lot of people felt that way—Billie and Ruth among them.

While Martha was trying to concentrate on her senior year, Pat was a ninth grader at Pulaski Heights Junior High. It was nice,
for a change, not being in the shadow of her sister. Pat had developed a full social life of her own, and in junior high she
had talked with her parents about even going to sock hops. Ruth and Billie responded in an amazing way: They volunteered as
chaperones.

This was probably Ruth’s influence, combined with the coming of age of a second child. Over time, parents learn to choose
their battles. Still, for a Baptist deacon and member of the censor board and his wife, this was a revolutionary leap. Second
Baptist, the church they attended, was very strict: no mixed bathing, no movies on Sunday, and, certainly, no dancing.

One day when Ruth was at home, the phone rang. It was the Baptist preacher, and he wasn’t pleased one bit. He’d heard that
the Murphrees allowed their daughter to go to
sock hops,
and he was calling Ruth on the carpet about it. ‘Unfortunately for him, word about Ruth’s moods hadn’t made it to the parsonage.

At the beginning, Ruth tried to be reasonable. She told him yes, she
did
let her daughter go to sock hops—that she’d rather Pat be at the school dancing, where Ruth knew what she was doing, than
in the backseat of a car parked in the dark. The preacher didn’t see it that way. “I’m going to church you,” he told Ruth,
meaning he intended to run her out of the congregation. “Do you hear me? I’m going to
church
you.”

And that’s when, as Ruth remembers it, she “told him how the cow ate the cabbage.” That’s an old Arkansas expression meaning
she verbally crucified him. One thing she said was, “Well, if you’re going to call the rules, I’ll just join the Catholic
church, where I can have someone to pray
for
me.”

The next phone call rang in Billie’s office at the VA. It was the preacher telling Billie that his wife had committed the
unpardonable sin of disagreeing with the head of their church. The call made Billie angry, though he maintained his composure.
But before he hung up, Billie gave the preacher a word of advice. “When you tangle with her,” he said, “you’re tangling with
someone who can really hand it back at you.”

The preacher didn’t take the hint. Instead, he began preaching about the abomination of allowing children to go to sock hops.
Ruth never heard a word of it, though. She quit Second Baptist immediately, and took her three daughters with her. Billie,
because of his position in the church, felt he had to stay. Ruth and Billie never had another conversation about it.

For a while, Sunday at the Murphrees’ was a day of unrest. On those mornings, as Billie hummed his hymns and clutched his
duct-taped Bible for the drive downtown, Ruth and the girls would walk the three blocks to Pulaski Heights Baptist Church.
The rift lasted a year, at which time Billie left downtown and “moved his letter,” as the Baptists say, to the Heights closer,
in so many ways, to home.

My mother used to sing me a sad song about two brothers, Tobias and Cachunky. Tobias won their sibling competition at every
turn. When the brothers grew up, they went off to war. I used to feel a terrible ache in my heart whenever she sang this verse,
to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”:

These two boys to the army went,

And both high places filled—

Tobias was a brigadier,

Cachunky, he got killed.

Martha got through high school, dashing across the finish line in her baby blue Ford convertible just before the red flag
fell. She was accepted into a good out-of-state school, Mississippi State College for Women, where girls from prominent Southern
families had gone for generations. In the fall of 1958, she packed up her stylish clothes and her new records, and her Band-Aid
box full of Kents, and she drove off to a bright future—deliriously happy, too, to be out of her mother’s house at last.

Standing in the driveway waving, little sister Pat must’ve felt that life wasn’t very fair.

When the first year of integration was over, Governor Faubus called a special session of the Arkansas legislature. The legislators
granted him the power to close public schools being integrated by force. Faubus wanted a delay in the order to integrate,
but when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow that, the governor played his stunning new trump card: He announced that
he was shutting down the city’s high schools for the 1958-1959 school year.

Suddenly, Pat had nowhere to go. Staying home was out of the question. That was the year of the fire, and there were workmen
around constantly, laboring under Ruth’s watchful eye. The kitchen and back porch had to be redone again. Also, Ruth had finally
decided to remove the wall and French doors between the living and dining rooms and to replace the casement windows with picture
windows in each of those rooms. Picture windows were the style now. They were what the
new
houses had. The carpenters put up a massive support beam where the wall and French doors had been. On the casement windows,
after they had puttied in the giant panes of glass, the real trick was patching the sills and window frames so that the transformation
wouldn’t be so obvious. If you wanted to make a house look modern, you couldn’t leave a lot of reminders around that it really
wasn’t.

There’s a photograph of Pat taken at the War Memorial Park swimming pool in July 1958, the summer before the lost year at
school. She’s fifteen. She and a friend are sitting in their one-piece bathing suits at a picnic table on the hot concrete,
eating Dream-sides. On the table in front of them are their impossibly thick billfolds, the kind teenage girls have carried
since time immemorial. In the background, showing through the cyclone fence, are the cars of teens lucky enough to have real
wheels. For the others, there are bicycles parked in a row. Pat no longer looks like a child in this photograph. She’s at
that awkward age: too young for cars, too old for bikes—an age when the tensions build up tighter than your wallet.

One of the things that doesn’t show in this photograph is that Pat now had a steady boyfriend.1Iis name was Larry Sparks,
and he was in the same school situation she was in. Maybe his was even worse—Larry was two years older, so he was losing his
senior year. All around them, their friends were trying to figure out what to do. A segregationist group had arranged for
the opening of a private school, for white students only. Some kids went there. Others were tutored in the basement of one
boy’s grandmother’s house. One girl’s parents were so eager for her to get a good education that they allowed her to be legally
adopted by relatives in Texas so she could qualify for the resident requirements and go to school there.

Billie and Ruth at the height of hostilities in their household.

For the entire month of September, Pat was at loose ends. There was a lot of anger in the house—Ruth and Billie were upset
because of the Negro problem that had started this whole series of events, and Pat was bored, frustrated, and cut off from
her friends, who had been scattered to the winds. One day, Pat and a couple of girls were in the music room listening to records.
Suddenly, Ruth burst in and snatched the record off the turntable and broke it into pieces, right in front of Pat and the
other girls. “You
know
your father doesn’t approve of that music,” Ruth said. Nearly four decades later, Pat remembers that the song said something
about “I want you, I need you, I love you” —-it was Elvis, of course, that other dark force in the modern world. Ruth doesn’t
recall the incident at all.

In October, Pat began attending a school out in rural Pulaski County. One of Pat’s aunts, Billie’s sister, taught there and
had finagled spots for Pat and one of her cousins. For a city girl such as Pat a girl from Pulaski
Heights—this
was an awful comedown. The county school was a wood-frame building, with individual stoves in each classroom. Compared with
what Pat had been used to at Pulaski Heights, this was like going to a pioneer schoolhouse.

Her boyfriend, Larry, was taking courses at another county school. Meanwhile, Pat was so bored that she couldn’t even make
herself go to el-ass. She made straight A’s anyway. The only activity was girl’s basketball, but her parents wouldn’t let
her play: In Little Rock,
nice
girls didn’t play basketball. So she spent most of her time in the study hail, trying to figure out what to do to keep from
going crazy. She asked if she could take advanced courses, and the administrators said fine. Between October and April, she
took arid passed several eleventh-grade classes while making straight A’s in the classes she was supposed to be attending.
At that school, if you made straight A’s, you could get out in April, six weeks early. It had been an awful school year, but
she had survived.

Martha, meanwhile, had stolen the spotlight again. In the middle of the year, she’d announced that she and. Jerry, now a medical
school student, were getting married in June. At 501 Holly; this news had brightened Ruth’s days. Not only was it going to
be nice to have a doctor in the family but it had given her something to plan for, to buy for, to get the house in shape for.
She was a ball of energy There was a flurry of letters and phone calls between Ruth in Little Rock and Martha at school in
Mississippi. There were details to work out about invitations. There were showers to go to, teas to attend.

On May Day, Pat turned sixteen. It was a far different experience from that on her sister’s big birthday three years before.
Pat had access to a car—an old Oldsmobile that all the girls had learned to drive on—but no car of her own. At least summer
was almost here. Even though Billie would insist on summer school, she could go out with Larry at night and spend lazy afternoons
at the swimming pool.

In June, Martha and Jerry married at Pulaski Baptist, followed by a reception in the basement of the church. Almost everyone
involved was a nervous wreck. Billie woke up the day of the wedding with a fever blister on his lip. Martha had her eyebrows
dyed, and they turned out way too dark. Ruth, wanting
her
side of the family to look as nice as the Murphrees’, had sent money to her mother to help her get a nice dress, and it had
hurt Mrs. Taylor’s feelings. Pat, the maid of honor, and the bridesmaids—looking striking in bouffant hairdos and pink knit
full-skirt dresses that they would never wear again—had to stand in spike heels until their feet cramped. It occurred to Pat
that she didn’t want to ever go through anything like this again. At one point, Billie joked to Pat that when the time came
for
her
to get married, he’d pay her five hundred dollars to elope.

That summer, Pat dutifully went to school in North Little Rock, trying her best to pay attention to the teacher, who kept
droning on about long-dead poets and dull-as-dust novels. It was the summer of “Lonely Boy” by Paul Anka, of “Lipstick on
Your Collar” by Connie Francis, of “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters. The name Drifters must’ve seemed ironic to Pat every
time she heard it on the radio, and it was on the radio a lot that summer. She felt that
she
was drifting. She started adding up all the extra courses she’d taken, and she figured out something alarming: Even if the
schools opened in the fall, she was now so far ahead of her friends that she wouldn’t even be in the same class with them.
What was the point?