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.
The city fathers bragged about the way our people and white folks were working “side by side.” Of the 107,300 Little Rock citizens, blacks numbered about 30,000. They said blacks earned good wages, but that wasn’t true. Most of my people who earned tolerable salaries were either teachers, preachers, or doctors. For us, there were very few jobs as clerks, policemen, bus drivers, or insurance salesmen.
My mother had long ago grown weary of trying to get Daddy to finish up his university courses. In fact, she had given up on him by the time I was seven. That’s when they divorced. Even though he had been gone from the house almost five years, I still missed him, most often at dinnertime and on those evenings when we gathered in the dining room for family games. It made Conrad and me sad not to have him there. At first, when Grandmother told me to set the dinner table, I would fix a place for him. Then I would remember he wouldn’t be coming home, he wouldn’t be eating with us, maybe not ever. Often on those walks home from school, I daydreamed that we were a family again—that Daddy finished school to make Mother happy and she canceled the divorce to let him come back home.
As I entered the persimmon field, I sank deep into my thoughts, but a few steps past the big tree at the front of the path, I heard a rustling sound. I stood perfectly still, looking all around. I didn’t see a soul. Suddenly, as I came near to the end of the field, a man’s gravel voice snatched me from the secret place in my head.
“You want a ride, girl?” He didn’t sound at all like anybody I knew. There it was again, that stranger’s voice calling out to me. “Want a ride?”
“Who is it?” I asked, barely able to squeeze the words out.
“I got candy in the car. Lots of candy.” I crept forward, and then I saw him—a big white man, even taller than my father, broad and huge, like a wrestler. He was coming toward me fast. I turned on my heels and fled in the opposite direction, back the way I had come.
“You better come on and take a ride home. You hear me, girl?”
“No, sir,” I yelled, “no thank you.” But he kept coming. My heart was racing almost as fast as my feet. I couldn’t hear anything except for the sound of my saddle shoes pounding the ground and the thud of his feet close behind me. That’s when he started talking about “niggers” wanting to go to school with his children and how he wasn’t going to stand for it. My cries for help drowned out the sound of his words, but he laughed and said it was no use because nobody would hear me.
I was running as fast as I could. The lace on my shoe came untied. My feet got tangled. As I hit the ground, I bit down hard on my tongue. I felt his strong hands clutch my back. I bolted up, struggling to get away. He pulled me down and turned me on my back. I looked up into his face, looming close above me like the monster on a movie screen. I struggled against him, but he was too strong.
He slapped me hard across the face. I covered my eyes with my hands and waited for him to strike me again. Instead, I felt him squirm against me, and then I saw him taking his pants down. In my house, private parts were always kept private. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, but I knew it had to be bad. I scratched and kicked and thrashed against him with every ounce of strength I could muster. His huge fist smashed hard against my face. I struggled to push him back and to keep the dark curtain of unconsciousness from descending over me.
“I’ll show you niggers the Supreme Court can’t run my life,” he said as his hand ripped at my underpants. A voice inside my head told me I was going to die, that there was nothing I could do about it. White men were in charge. But then I could hear Grandma India saying over and over again, “God is always with you.” I fought to keep my underpants, and to roll the man off of me.
All at once, he frowned and let out an awful moan, and grabbed for the back of his head. It was Marissa banging on his head with her leather book bag. “Melba . . . Melba, . . . run,” she shouted. When he rolled off me, I scrambled free. He reached out for Marissa, but she kicked him in the shoulder. That’s when I managed to get to my feet and move away from him. He was still on his knees struggling to untangle himself, his legs caught up in his unzipped pants.
Marissa shouted to me to run faster. She let go of her book bag and dragged me by my arm. If we didn’t hurry, we’d get raped, she said over and over. Raped? What’s raped? I asked as we scurried across the field and back into the street. We raced up the middle of the street, not stopping to talk to anybody, not even the people we knew who tried to say hello. Breathless and shaken, we finally reached my backyard.
My brother, Conrad, braked his bicycle to question me. What was the matter with my face? Why were my clothes torn? I felt ashamed as I wondered if he and his playmate Clark could guess that a strange man had touched me. Just then Grandma India opened the back door. As soon as she looked at me she frowned and sent Conrad and Clark away.
Marissa explained what had happened to us, and she repeated the word “rape.” “But he didn’t do it all the way,” she said. By then, I had figured out it was something awful and dirty. Before I could ask Grandma more about it, she put a cold cloth to my face and rushed me into the bathtub.
“Now you soak a while, child. When the water goes down the drain, it will take away all that white man’s evil with it.” She had a curious look on her face, one I’d never seen before. Then she said something that made me realize just how awful things rea
lly were. “We’ll burn the clothes you took off. I got your fresh clothing on a stool, just outside the door.”
I couldn’t believe my ears! “Waste not, want not” had always been her rule. What had happened must have been truly disgusting to make her destroy my good clothing. I sat in silence wondering if I could ever redeem myself in the eyes of the Lord.
Later, I heard Grandma talking to my father on the telephone as Mother Lois came in the back door with her usual cheerful greetings. I didn’t climb out of the tub. Instead I scrubbed myself in those hot suds to wash away my shame. When Grandma came to check on me, she must have seen the distress in my expression, because she promised the Lord would still count me as one of his good girls because I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I listened for so long while the grown-ups argued in loud whispers about calling the police that my bath water turned cold. As I climbed out of the tub and got dressed, I heard Daddy’s voice. When I walked into the kitchen, for the first time ever I saw tears in my father’s eyes. As he reached to hug me, he said, “We ain’t gonna call the law. Those white police are liable to do something worse to her than what already happened.”
Grandma told me not to talk about what had happened with anyone, especially not Conrad. She said I had to pray for that evil white man, pray every day for twenty-one days, asking God to forgive him and teach him right. That way, she promised I’d get over the feelings of shame.
I wore my knees out praying night after night—I even got up early to get in extra prayers. Grandma was right. By the time my bruises went away, I didn’t feel ashamed anymore.
In my diary I wrote:
It’s important for me to read the newspaper, every single day God sends, even if I have to spend my own nickel to buy it. I have to keep up with what the men on the Supreme Court are doing. That way I can stay home on the day the justices vote decisions that make white men want to rape me.
The daily papers were full of news about the Brown v. Board of Education case. Little Rock’s white people were saying the same things as the “raping” man had said. I couldn’t imagine they would ever change their minds and allow their children to go to school with me, no matter what laws those men on the Supreme Court made. But on May 24, 1955, the newspapers said the Little Rock school board had adopted a plan to limit integration to Central High School. They weren’t going to allow it to actually begin, however, for two years—not till September, 1957.
When my teacher asked if anyone who lived within the Central High School district wanted to attend school with white people, I raised my hand. As I signed my name on the paper they passed around, I thought about all those times I’d gone past Central High wanting to see inside. I was certain it would take a miracle to integrate Little Rock’s schools. But I reasoned that if schools were open to my people, I would also get access to other opportunities I had been denied, like going to shows at Robinson Auditorium, or sitting on the first floor of the movie theater.
BY December 1, 1955, I began to realize that Grandma was right. Our people were stretching out to knock down the fences of segregation. I read in the newspaper that one of our people, a woman named Rosa Parks, had refused to give up her seat to a white man on an Alabama bus. Her willingness to be arrested rather than give in one more time led to the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. I felt such a surge of pride when I thought about how my people had banded together to force a change. It gave me hope that maybe things in Little Rock could change.
In January 1956, my hopes were dashed when NAACP officials tried to register a few of our children in several white high schools in Little Rock and were turned back. Grandma India and Mother Lois followed the story closely; but when we discussed it over dinner, the talk about white people doing bad things to us kept me from telling them I had signed the list to go to Central High.
On February 8, 1956, the NAACP filed suit in Federal District Court to make the schools integrate immediately. Referring to a poll that said 85 percent of all Arkansas’s people opposed integration, Governor Orval Faubus announced his refusal to support the integration of our state’s schools.
IN the spring of 1956, I read that Elvis Presley was coming downtown to Little Rock’s Robinson Auditorium. As I sat in the middle of my bed among my stuffed animals looking at his picture in the ad, I was heartbroken that I couldn’t go. Our people were not even allowed to sit in the balcony during such social events. How many times had I asked my parents, “Why? Why can’t I go everywhere whites can go?”
And I was really disappointed when I read that some of the city’s prominent white citizens were threatening lawsuits to delay the Little Rock school board’s integration plan until 1970. I was certain they’d succeed. They always had things their way.
On August 27, 1956, Federal Judge John Miller dismissed the NAACP suit for immediate school integration, saying it was all right for the school board to integrate gradually. I knew that meant very, very slowly, or not at all. Later, there was an appeal supported by NAACP Attorney Thurgood Marshall, but the appeal was lost, and the school board’s stingy plan to integrate only a little bit was deemed “deliberate and speedy.” During the summer of 1957, Central High seemed to be just one more place I wasn’t going to see the inside of.
IN early August of 1957, Johnny Mathis had his first big song, “Chances Are,” on the hit parade. That month, a Mrs. Clyde Thomason, secretary of a new group called the League of Central High Mothers, filed a petition for an injunction to keep the Little Rock school board from carrying out its gradual integration plan.
About that time, I decided to quit worrying about whether I should tell my parents I had signed up to go to Central. After all, if white mothers were fighting integration, it had little chance of success. I knew very well the power of my own mother and grandmother. Besides, I needed all my mind’s space for living my daydreams, since Conrad, Mother, Grandma, and I were about to go North. We were driving to Cincinnati, Ohio, to visit my great-uncle Clancey, on mother’s side of the family. He was an Episcopalian priest, and his wife, Julie, was a music teacher.
As we pulled into the circular drive, their spacious, fancy house reminded me of the kinds of places I’d seen in the movies. It resembled our Little Rock bank in size and was surrounded by hedges with planned shapes, like an artist had sculpted them.
For me, Cincinnati was the promised land. After a few days there, I lost that Little Rock feeling of being choked and kept in “my place” by white people. They weren’t in charge of me and my family in Cincinnati. I felt free, as though I could soar above the clouds. I was both frightened and excited when the white neighbors who lived across the street invited me for dinner. It was the first time white people had ever wanted to eat with me or talk to me about ordinary things. Over the dinner table, I found out they were people just like me. They used the same blue linen dinner napkins that Grandma India favored. They treated me like I was an equal, like I belonged with them.
Afterward, we went to a drive-in movie. The neighbor’s daughter, Cindy, who was exactly my age, stood beside me as I walked right up to the concession stand to buy popcorn. No one even looked at me with evil eyes or called me a name! Still, my heart was pounding and my palms were wet as I squeezed through that big crowd of white people to get back to the car.
Right in the middle of downtown Cincinnati, we walked with our heads held high, acting as proud as could be. Neither Mother nor Grandmother ever once stepped aside to let a white person pass. Sometimes we held our ground and white people walked around us, and even smiled hello as they did so. We sauntered through all the big department stores, touching expensive things without the white clerks giving us a second look. I even used the rest room, and the white ladies smiled and said hello. Later, as I sat at the lunch counter in the five-and-dime to have a root beer, I could hardly eat for keeping watch all around me. But no white person so much as frowned at me. That evening, Uncle Clancey took us to a fancy restaurant where white waiters smiled and bowed, and asked if I wanted anyth
ing.
“Melba will be hard to get along with after all this spoiled treatment,” Mama said as we ate, laughed, and talked. I’d never had lobster or cottage fries before, or had a white man play the piano just to make my meal go down easy.
It was mid August and we’d been in paradise for more than a week. I was wondering how I could tell Mama I wasn’t ever going back to Little Rock. I planned to beg and plead with Uncle Clancey to let me live with them and finish high school in Cincinnati. I thought I had a pretty good chance of having things go my way until one evening when we sat watching the national news.
“That was your father on the phone.” Mother appeared to be annoyed as she spoke. “He said to pay close attention to the news because he got a call today saying Melba’s been assigned to go to Central High with the white people.”
All ears perked up when the announcer started talking about Little Rock. He said seventeen children from my community had been selected to enter the all-white Central High School in the 1957 fall term.
Grandma stood and walked over to the television set, signaling us to be silent. The announcer talked about Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP asking the Federal District Court to start integration immediately. A judge had agreed and issued an order preventing Mrs. Thomason and her mothers’ group from interfering.
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