Warriors Don't Cry (12 page)

I stood for a long moment, holding the receiver to my ear, listening to the dial tone, blinking back tears. Mother came over to comfort me, but I felt as though it were the end of the world—at least the end of my own social world. I was no longer somebody people wanted to be with. I couldn’t help saying aloud how I felt. Here I was willing to face mean men with hanging ropes, give up my junior year among friends, and all the parties and fun, to integrate—to make things better for everybody. But Marsha and the gang didn’t see it that way. What I was doing wasn’t important at all to them. Instead I was someone to avoid.

“Some people are short-sighted, sweetheart. They can’t see the future, they can only live for today. In the long run, you have to do this thing because you are convinced it is right for you, not for what others will think.”

“But I don’t want to lose all my friends.”

“Well, let’s not dwell on it. Marsha’s not your only friend. Call a few others.”

“I can’t. They’re mostly all at Marsha’s house.”

“Then we’ll have a family date, right here at home. We’ll pop corn and watch TV and play games.”

Swell, I thought as I dialed Minnijean, who was feeling the same as me—like she didn’t know where she really belonged any more, either. As that boring evening wore on, the one thought that put a smile in my heart was the wrestling matches—Grandma and me—we’d be sitting right in the middle of all that fun in less than twenty-four hours.

Governor Faubus had written a long telegram to President Eisenhower, asking for understanding and support. He was also complaining that he had not had his day in court to show that he had been forced to call out the National Guard to prevent integration because the threat of violence was so great.

I spent Saturday morning worrying that Eisenhower would take Faubus’s side and school integration would be swept beneath some carpet for my grandchildren to retrieve. Between my dish-washing, reading the homework assignments Mother gave me, and answering hate phone calls, I managed to restyle my hair, and try on everything in my closet, searching for a proper disguise. I was consumed with only one thought: Grandma, the wrestling matches, and my sneak date with Vince. I worried about leaving Mother Lois and Conrad home alone at night; maybe the shooter would come again. But that worry was erased when Mother’s sister, Auntie Mae, and her husband, Uncle Morris, said they’d come for dinner and stay late.

As the morning turned into afternoon, I was busy keeping to myself so I could apply my grown-up makeup. It was an art I had not yet acquired since I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup. Even by the third try I resembled a circus clown. But as I looked in the mirror for a final check, I was proud of the job I had done. I was a new person.

Promptly at five, Grandma breezed into the front hall. She was dressed in churchgoing clothes, her Ladies Day outfit, a blue suit with a matching hat that swooped down from its mischievous perch on the side of her head.

“Well, don’t just stand there, child, help me find my parasol.” I couldn’t help smiling. The frantic search for the umbrella was a familiar scene. It made me feel that at least some part of my life was left intact.

“We’d better go without it,” I said. We were running late, and if we didn’t hurry, the bus would leave us behind. I had been patiently waiting, hoping that at any moment my grandmother would signal her approval of my grown-up outfit, upswept hairdo, and high-heeled black patent shoes. Layers of forbidden makeup and dark glasses completed what I thought was the perfect disguise. The white people would never, ever recognize me from any picture they might have seen. Of course, my one big worry was that Grandma might say it was too grown-up, but she only peered at me with a strange and lingering expression.

“Let’s go, Grandma, we’re gonna be late,” I said, trying to coax her toward the front door. I was praying Vince wouldn’t grow impatient waiting for me and leave, or, worse yet, allow himself to be talked into spending the evening with one of the other girls.

“Why don’t you take a seat. I’ll be back in a moment,” Grandma said, sounding quite strange, beckoning me to remain there in the hallway by the door. I heard her and Mama whispering in the other room. As I settled into a chair, I thought about all the earlier times when we had gone together to the wrestling matches.

Those matches were big events in my life because we traveled downtown to the Robinson Auditorium, a place usually reserved for white people only. Those were the times when I got to go outside my neighborhood, outside the world where I spent most of my life. We sat in the same room with white folks, able to observe them close up. I wanted to get to know them better, to see what it was they had that put them in charge.

Besides, the wrestling matches had always been just plain fun. Sure, we suspected it was 30 percent wrestling and 70 percent make-believe. We couldn’t have enjoyed it if we’d thought the wrestlers were really in pain, bleeding real blood and breaking real arms.

Grandma India would adjust her hat, and then we would both strut down the aisle to the seats that Mr. Claxton had saved for us. He would always be there waiting for us with the best balcony seats our people were allowed to have.

After we got settled, I would complain about my thirst, and Grandma would grant permission for a trip to the soft-drink stand. There I would meet Vince, as we’d planned, and take him to join Grandma and Mr. Claxton, explaining that our meeting had been accidental. I had enjoyed eight evenings of double-dating with Grandma and Vince, and she didn’t even realize it. I knew full well my family would never have allowed me to date. They had said all along that when I was eighteen and going to college, I could go out with boys, and then only in the company of a chaperon.

As the evening wore on and the matches got really heated, Grandma India and I would behave as we behaved nowhere else. She would pound the floor with her parasol and shout and wave her fist until her hat was twisted on her head and her churchgoing outfit was rumpled. Once she had even dropped her glasses and broken them in a fit of rage when her tag-team favorites, Mud Mountain and Blue Moon Hog, were counted out by the referee.

When it was all over, she would revert to her quietest and most cultured tone, speaking barely above a whisper. “Magnificent, child. That’s the way a body gets rid of aggression without misbehaving. Now, Melba, straighten yourself up, honey, time to present ourselves as the ladies we are.”
“SORRY, child, you can’t go with me to the matches, not tonight,” said Grandma, grabbing me from my happy recollections. “Maybe next time, when the integration settles down.”

“But why?” I felt tears coming, but I had promised Grandma I wouldn’t cry.

“It’s just too dangerous for you to go there amongst all those white people.”

“They’ll never recognize me—see, see!” I twirled about to show her that I was really a new person.

Grandma India moved closer to me and cupped my face in her hands. “You’re staying home, baby. It’s for your own good.”

“Everything’s being taken from me!” I cried.

“Your grandmother’s right, honey.” Mother Lois put her arm around my waist, trying to convince me it was not the end of the world. “Suppose one of those people who saw us at Central recognizes you and tries to pick a fight? What about the risk to your grandmother?”

“I’ll never go back to Central!” I ran from the room and locked my bedroom door, burying my face in the pillow so no one could hear me cry. Later, I wrote in my diary:

Freedom is not integration.
Freedom is being able to go with Grandma to the wrestling matches.

The next day, in the Sunday paper, I saw a pitiful closeup photograph of Elizabeth, walking alone in front of Central on that first day of integration. It pained my insides to see, once again, the twisted, scowling white faces with open mouths jeering, clustered about my friend’s head like bouquets of grotesque flowers. It was an ad paid for by a white man from a small town in Arkansas. “If you live in Arkansas,” the ad read, “study this picture and know shame. When hate is unleashed and bigotry finds a voice, God help us all.”

I felt a kind of joy and hope in the thought that one white man was willing to use his own money to call attention to the injustice we were facing. Maybe the picture would help others realize that what they were doing was hurting everybody.

Seeing that ad was the beginning of a wonderful Sunday. Just before church started, Vince walked right up and said to me flat-out, “I want you to be my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?” I repeated the word, desperately groping to find just the right response. I’d never been asked before.

As the organ music began, we found our usual seats in the pews to the right of center. From the pulpit, the minister looked down on us, two hundred or so parishioners seated in that magnificently spacious room with a ceiling that rose two stories above us. The choir began with “The Old Rugged Cross,” followed by “Were You There”—familiar hymns that were supposed to settle us into a state of grateful worship.

As the sermon began, I felt guilty that I didn’t have my mind on prayer. Instead, I was wondering whether Vince would give me a friendship ring or the letter from his sweater. It pushed all thoughts of Central High, Governor Faubus, and integration into the back of my mind.

The minister was urging us to pray for Governor Faubus and do whatever was necessary to heal any sour feelings we had against white people. He had been organizing other ministers in Little Rock to speak out and condemn the governor for dispatching the troops. He said we should pray for the judges and city officials and the President to make the right decisions—to let us into Central High.

Suddenly, my attention was drawn to what the prayer ladies were saying. They were calling my name, asking God to protect me when I walked into the lion’s den at Central. I remembered what Grandma had said: “Church is the life’s blood of our folks’ community.”

I knew very well that without the church and the help of the people sitting around me, I had little chance of making it through that school year. Certainly I couldn’t count on the police. If I got into trouble and really needed protection, it would probably be the network of phone calls initiated by Reverend Young that would set off a rescue and construct a web of safety.

Church was also the place where we exchanged the real news of what was going on within our community. It was the way we fit together the bits and pieces of information we got from our limited relations with whites. First one and then another would recount what they overheard in white ladies’ kitchens, on their other jobs, or maybe on a bus. Already, we knew that the stories of our people buying up guns and knives were untrue. We didn’t have that kind of money. Instead, one man said, some of our folks were digging in attics and closets, dusting off rusty hardware.

“Reasonable folks smell trouble. There’s too many strangers in town, too many people with Mississippi attitudes,” he continued. “Ain’t no way we’re out there buying hardware like the governor is saying. He’s a stone-faced liar.”

The big discussion on the lawn after church was all the questions white folks were asking our people about who was and was not planning to send their children to Central and who was in favor of our going there. I heard rumors that two people were fired as maids at a local hotel because their answers weren’t acceptable.

“You’re doing the right thing, girl; we’re proud of you!”

“It might hurt a little while, but when it stops we’re all gonna feel real good.”

“You’re making a mistake, but you’re making it for all of us.” Those were some of the whispered good-byes after church. Lingering among the crowd as I always did, I discovered things weren’t exactly normal, not even at church. Several people stood back and stared at me in silence. When I returned their gazes, some of them smiled, but others frowned.

“Smile, no matter what,” Mother said. “Remember, not everyone approved of what Jesus did, but that didn’t stop him.”

A week after our first attempt to get into Central, I was still rushing to get each morning’s newspaper to read about the people who gathered daily in front of the school to see that we didn’t get in. The President had agreed to give the governor a ten-day respite to sort out his response to the court order. There would be a meeting at Eisenhower’s vacation spot in Rhode Island after that.

The next day we learned that Representative Brooks Hays would go with Governor Faubus to a five-man conference that included the President, Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., and Sherman Adams, Chief White House Assistant. I couldn’t stop worrying that they were going to make a decision that could affect the rest of my life, and I wasn’t getting to tell my side. What was worse was there was nobody invited who could say what was best for us.

“Did you really think they’d invite any of our people?” Grandma India said, as she stood tending her backyard garden.

“At least they could have had somebody like NAACP President Roy Wilkins, or Mr. Marshall, or some person of color.”

She laid down the shears, pulled off her work gloves, and peered above her glasses as she said, “Dream on, child. But don’t lose faith. You’ve got the most important representative of all attending that meeting—your heavenly Father.”

I read and listened to every word of news about that meeting. I saw that Grandma did, too. We all felt the suspense, waiting to see whether or not Governor Faubus would convince the President to allow him to stop integration. Newspaper pages were filled with stories of their talk. Faubus wanted Eisenhower to delay integration for at least a year. Back and forth they went with hopes for an agreement running high one day, rock-bottom the next.

Meanwhile, we nine students were forced by circumstance to look to each other for social activities; our lives were being totally dictated by preparations for what lay ahead at Central High. We were no longer a part of all those activities we had formerly excelled in, like after-school sports, student council, or choir and band rehearsals. Few of my old school friends telephoned, and when they did, they asked lots of questions about the integration, questions I couldn’t answer.
ON September 15, the
Arkansas Gazette
headlines read: