Warriors Don't Cry (32 page)

 

 

AS determined as everyone else was to have me remain at Central, with each passing day I began to doubt that I was strong enough to tough it out. Even as I watched the others weaken, I could feel myself growing weary and nervous. When I had a long period of time alone on a Saturday, I leafed through the pages of my diary. I had not been fully aware of how deeply the turmoil at school was affecting me. I was stunned to see what I had written.

 

“I wish I were dead.” That was the entry for several days running, in late January. “God, please let me be dead until the end of the year.” I was willing to bargain and plead with God. I revised my request; I just wanted to become invisible for a month or two. I clutched the diary to my chest and wept for a long time. “No,” I whispered aloud, “I do wish I were dead.” Then all the pain and hurt would be over. I fell to my knees and prayed about it. That’s when I knew I should go and talk to Grandma India. I told her about my wish to be dead.

“Good idea,” she said. She didn’t even look up at me as though she were alarmed after I whimpered out my confession. Instead, she continued dusting the dining room table. My feelings were hurt. And then she looked me in the eye and said it again. “Good idea! How did you plan going about it?”

“Ma’am?” I wasn’t certain I’d heard her. “I said I wish I were dead—did you hear me?”

“And I said, good idea.” Her voice was louder as she peered at me with a mischievous expression. “The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll make the segregationists real happy. They’ll love broadcasting the headlines across the world.” She braced the palm of one hand on the table to balance herself as she paused for a long moment to think. “I’ve got it. The headlines will read, ‘Little Rock heroine gives in to segregationists—kills herself.’”

“What do you mean?” I gasped. I felt really angry that she talked as though she didn’t care. She kept on creating new headlines about my death.

“Or maybe they could write: ‘Melba Pattillo died by her own hand because she was afraid of facing God’s assignment for her.’”

“Oh, no, ma’am.” I slumped down into a chair.

She wouldn’t let up. “Then, of course, there would be the celebration all the segregationists would plan. Let’s see now, I’ll bet they would rent the Robinson Auditorium for their party. It would be kinda like the wrestling matches, you know, loud, with all the cheering, singing, and dancing.” She looked back down at the scratches on the table and continued dusting. “So do as you please, but I’d also think about that moment at which you’d have to face the Lord and explain your decision to him.” She ignored me, humming her hymn, “I’m on the Battlefield for My Lord.” I stood there for a moment watching her.

That did it. I realized dying wasn’t a good idea. I was almost certain God wouldn’t allow people to die for only a short while and come back. After that, Grandma arranged for a daily time when I had to come to her room, get down on my knees, and pray with her. Then she and I would talk about what was troubling me and what I would like. We would play Yahtzee or read pages from some fun novel I would choose. Sometimes we’d read through the newspaper together, but only the good things like the launching of an American satellite into orbit that circled the earth in 116 minutes.

During those days I felt so close to her, and I knew I had been silly for wanting to give up. Several times she looked at me and said, “Don’t you know, child, how much I love you, how much your mama loves you? Whenever you think about going away from this earth, think about how you’d break my heart and your brother’s heart. You might as well take your mother with you because she’d be beside herself.”

She made me get a project I really liked and encouraged me to keep on top of it. I chose the blast-off of the Explorer, the satellite that put our country into the space race. I had always been interested in rockets and space. Once I had run away to the Strategic Air Command Base in a nearby town to see if they would allow me to become a pilot. Grandma studied up on the topic, and we talked for hours while she taught me how to do the quilting for Mother’s birthday present.

Meanwhile, Mother Lois urged me to give Vince a standing invitation to Sunday supper. I couldn’t understand why she was being so nice. I think Grandma talked to her about our conversation, and she was trying to cheer me up. Sometimes Vince came even when I didn’t want him to. There were times when I just wanted to stay in my room and think, because I had no energy or desire to do anything else. Everything in me was devoted to being a full-time warrior. When I wasn’t actually on the battlefield, surviving, I was thinking about how to do it or worried that I wouldn’t be able to make it.

Every day, Grandma and I prayed hard for Minnijean to have strength and peace of mind and for all of us to be able to feel God’s love for us, even in the face of those who spewed so much hatred our way.

For the second time, on Thursday, February 6, Minnijean was attacked by the boy who dumped soup on her. During the ruckus that followed, there was a great deal of confusion. The identity of who attacked and who fought back was not clear. Her attackers accused her of retaliation. “White trash” were the words they reported her to have said. In addition, they accused her of throwing a purse at a girl.

When she was sent home without receiving a suspension notice, I breathed a sigh of relief. But at the end of the day, Mrs. Huckaby gave Carlotta a sealed envelope to be delivered to Minnijean.

23

 

 

 

IN the article that followed, Minnijean explained the pressure she had been under at school. She said she had only had half a white friend at Central, a two-faced girl who ran hot and cold. Of the other students she said: “They throw rocks, they spill ink on your clothes, and they call you ‘nigger’—they bother you every minute.”

 

I cried for an hour when word came that the envelope sent to Minnijean was a suspension notice. I was devastated when Superintendent Blossom said he would recommend her expulsion. But when the NAACP and her parents announced they would push to have a hearing, I kept a glimmer of hope.

Back at school, I didn’t have very much time to be sad. We were under siege, at the mercy of those who saw Minnijean’s expulsion as their victory and evidence they could immediately get rid of all of us. I was warned that since I had been Minnijean’s good friend and, like her, I was tall and not at all shy, I would become the next target for expulsion.

“One Nigger Down, Eight to Go” cards and signs flooded the school. We couldn’t turn around without somebody pushing a card in our faces or chanting awful verses at us like: “She was black but her name was brown, and now she ain’t around.” Attacks on us by hostile students increased.

I read in the paper that Thurgood Marshall said he didn’t know how much more unpleasant treatment we could take at Central High. That night I wrote in my diary:

I sometimes wish I could change myself into a psychiatrist to determine what makes me such a hated member of this school. Can they really be treating me this way simply because I am brown, that’s all.

 

 

“Ooooooo, no, no,” I heard myself shout as I was walking up the Fourteenth Street stairwell one morning. It wasn’t yet 8:40, and I was already the victim of a dousing with raw eggs from someone standing on the stairs above my head. The odor bothered me, but even more, it was the feel of that slimy substance oozing very slowly through my hair and onto my face, while at the same time raw egg slithered over the sweater Aunt Mae Dell had given me for Christmas. I stood still, wondering what to do and where to go. I felt so humiliated, I prayed that a huge dark hole would appear in the floor and swallow me up.

“The nigger’s come to have breakfast. I can tell, she’s wearing eggs,” one boy called. I never said a word back to the group hovering with their ugly catcalls. I knew they were just hoping I’d do or say something that would result in my expulsion. I backed down the stairs and out the door to go home.

“Well, this egg is wonderful for putting moisture in the hair,” Grandma said. “Some people use it for that, you know. Maybe we ought to start it on a regular basis.” She was trying to wipe out as much as she could; then I would have to bathe and wash my hair. “Hold still,” she continued. “After a nice long bath, you can hurry back to school, and this will have been just a refreshing break in your morning.”

“I’ve never been so embarrassed.”

“Oh, I’ll bet there’ve been other times and there’ll be more. Embarrassment is not a life-threatening problem. It can be washed away with a prayer and a smile, just like this egg is washed away with a little water.”

“I know, but it’s the same way I feel when they spit on me. I feel like they’ve taken away my dignity.”

“Dignity is a state of mind, just like freedom. These are both precious gifts from God that no one can take away unless you allow them to.” As Grandma spoke, she motioned me to turn my head to the other side.

“You could take charge of these mind games, you know.”

“How do you mean?”

“Take, for example, this egg in your hair. Suppose you’d have told the boys who did this, ‘Thank you,’ with a smile. Then you’ve changed the rules of the game. What they want is for you to be unhappy. That’s how they get pleasure.”

“Yeah, but that would be letting them win.”

“Not exactly. Maybe it would defeat their purpose. They win when you respond the way they expect you to. Change the rules of the game, girl, and they might not like it so much.”

“They’d think I was crazy.”

“They’d think you were no longer their victim.”

For the rest of the morning as I walked the halls, amid my hecklers, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to feel as though I were in charge of myself. I always believed Grandma India had the right answer, so I decided to take her advice.

As I tried to open a classroom door, two boys pushed it closed. At first I tried to pull it open, but then I remembered changing the rules of the game. I stood up straight, smiled politely, and said in a friendly voice, “Thank you. I’ve been needing exercise. You’ve done wonders for my arm muscles.” I chatted on and on as if they were my friends. They looked at me as though I were totally nuts, then they let go of the door. I felt great power surging up my spine like electricity. I left them standing there looking at each other.

During lunch, I learned Ernie and Terry had been the victims of yet another devilish deed. While Terry participated in gym class, someone took his school clothes and dumped them in the shower. Ernie had so much trouble with students stealing his gym clothes that he bought his own, which he carried with him in a briefcase until someone wrested it away and stuffed his clothes into the toilet in the girls’ rest room.
ON February 14, Valentine’s Day, it snowed. That afternoon, as we stood in the snow waiting for our ride, we were attacked with snowballs filled with rocks. Mr. Eckford, Elizabeth’s father, bolted from the car to rescue us, but he, too, was bombarded. Little Rock’s finest police officers and members of the federalized National Guard stood by watching with their arms folded as we were hit time after time. Even when we pleaded for their assistance, they did nothing.

When I arrived home, Grandma handed me a large oddly shaped envelope. “I suspect it’s a special greeting from that young man you ignore most of the time. After all, it is a special day.”

I took the envelope to my room to open it. It was a card from Vince. As I read the beautiful words, I was sad that I couldn’t talk to him on the phone or see more of him, but for the life of me I couldn’t fit him into my schedule. Even my daydreams about him were beginning to fade because integration was taking up all the space in my mind.

 

 

Minnijean was expelled after a forty-minute hearing. The official announcement of her expulsion coming after all that had been done to stop it was a devastating defeat for us. The fact that the school board at the same time suspended three white pupils, two for wearing “One down, eight to go” cards and one for pushing Gloria down a flight of stairs, didn’t lessen the blow. The NAACP had counted on getting Minnijean’s expulsion reversed, but Blossom and the school board were adamant in sticking to their conclusion, despite all the pressure on them.

National NAACP officials arranged for Minnijean to have a scholarship to a famous private New York high school called New Lincoln. She would live with the family of a renowned psychologist, Dr. Kenneth Clark. I had read that it was his research that had supported Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP’s legal suit that resulted in the 1954 Supreme Court decision to integrate the schools.

It was a fabulous opportunity for her, but all I could think about was how far New York would be from Little Rock. We would no longer be able to get together to have our usual talks. At the same time, I tried not to be jealous that Minnijean would be escaping the hell that was my daily life. Still, I found myself daydreaming about what it would be like to get on that airplane with her and go to a place where there was no Central High School, no segregationists, and no pain stinging my heart every time someone called me a nigger.

I imagined that she’d have normal dates with nice boys, a real junior prom, and friends who smiled at her and talked with her every single day. She wouldn’t be lonely anymore. But most of all, she wouldn’t have to be frightened all day long that somebody was going to hit her, say nasty things, or even try to kill her.

Late one afternoon, a few days before Minnijean was to leave, I sat on the side of her bed, watching her pack. The two of us were talking and giggling. Again I was overwhelmed with those mixed feelings. I desperately wanted her to stay, and at the same time I would have given anything to go with her. She was showing me her wardrobe, gifts from friends to help her adjust to her new life. They were the most beautiful clothes I had ever seen: angora sweaters in deep autumn shades of rust and green, with matching corduroy skirts, a few of those wonderful fuzzy collars everyone was wearing, a velvet blazer, and even a beautiful trench coat.