“Of course, there is good news here,” Grandma said, rattling the newspaper. “Seems as if some moderate white businessmen are getting together to oppose that special session of the legislature Faubus wants to call.”
“The one to enact laws that would make integration illegal?” I asked.
“Yes, I hope they can do something to slow him down.”
IKE REJECTS FAUBUS’S STATEMENT
AND AGREEMENT FALLS THROUGH
—Arkansas Gazette, Wednesday, October 2, 1957
The Wednesday morning Gazette reported that Governor Faubus and the President had come to the brink of an agreement to remove the federal troops from Little Rock the day before, but at the last minute the President called it off because he didn’t believe the governor would act in good faith.
As we walked toward Central that day, I was looking forward to having the 101st come back to make my life inside school at least tolerable. But right away my hopes for a more peaceful day were dashed. Showers of loud insults greeted us. Straight ahead, in front of the school, I could see a group of about fifty boys waiting at the top of the stairs as they had the day before. This time, however, they descended on us like locusts.
“Get the coons! Get the coons!” The boys were brash and bold, behaving as though they feared no consequences. There were no parading 101st soldiers to stop them. Frantically, we looked around for someone in authority, but none was in sight.
Minnijean, Ernie, and I decided to retreat, but just then, vice-principal Huckaby made her presence known at the bottom of the stairs. Tiny, erect, and determined, she stood there all alone between us and our attackers, demanding they leave us alone. One by one she challenged the leaders, calling them by name, telling them to get to class or there would be hell to pay. I had to respect her for what she did. Whether or not she favored integration, she had a heck of a lot of guts.
We circled around to the Sixteenth and Park Street entrance. As I climbed the stairs, there was no sign of Danny—or the other 101st guards I knew. In fact, I didn’t see any uniformed soldiers. Just inside of the front entrance, where Danny usually stood, I saw some of the same hooligans who had tried to block our entrance only moments before. They moved toward me, and I circled away from them and walked quickly down the hall. I was desperately trying to figure out why there weren’t any teachers or school officials guarding the halls the way there usually were.
I panicked; I couldn’t decide where to go or what to do next. I was being pounded on my arms, my back, and my legs by angry students. Their blows hurt so much that my desire to stop the pain and survive overpowered the fear that paralyzed me. I got hold of myself. No matter what, I knew I had to stand up to them even if I got kicked out of school for doing it.
“Dead niggers don’t go to school,” someone said, hitting me hard in the stomach. My first instinct was to double over. The pain burned my insides. But I stood still and stared at my attacker without flinching. He taunted me: “You ain’t thinking of hitting me back?”
“I’m gonna cut your guts out,” I said, standing my ground. There was a long pause while we stared each other down. It was a bluff, but it worked. Looking almost frightened and mumbling under his breath, he backed off.
Just then, I noticed the members of the Arkansas National Guard lounging against the walls like cats in sunlight. Gathered in small clusters with smug, grinning expressions on their faces, they had been watching my confrontation all along. I couldn’t get used to the fact that our safety now depended on nonchalant, tobacco-chewing adolescents who were most likely wearing white sheets and burning crosses on the lawns of our neighbors after sundown.
I had walked only a few steps before I was knocked to the floor. I called out for help. Three men from the Guard gave further substance to my suspicions by taking their time to respond, moving toward me in slow motion. I scrambled to my feet.
How I longed to see Danny, standing on guard in his starched uniform, and hear the swift steps of the 101st. As I felt hot tears stinging my eyes, I heard Grandmother India’s voice say, “You’re on the battlefield for your Lord.”
I was as frightened by the ineptness of the Arkansas soldiers as by the viciousness of the increased attacks on me. If the soldiers had been armed, I was certain they would either have shot me in the back or themselves in the foot. I watched as they stood in giggling clusters while a crowd of thugs attacked Jeff and Terry and kicked them to the floor in the hallway just outside the principal’s office. A female teacher finally rescued the two.
Once I was seated in class, I felt I could take a deep breath. For the moment at least I was off the front line of battle in the hallway. But just as I was feeling a snippet of peace, a boy pulled a switchblade knife and pressed the point of the blade against my forearm. In a heartbeat, without even thinking about it, I leaped up and picked up my books as a shield to fend him off.
He responded to a half-hearted reprimand from the teacher but whispered that he would get me later. At the very first sound of the bell ending class, I ran for my life, only to encounter a group of students who knocked me down and hit me with their books. As I felt rage overtake me I recalled what Danny had told me: “When you’re angry, you can’t think. You gotta keep alert to keep alive.”
It was still early in the day, and things were so bad that I decided I had no choice: I had to find somebody in authority who would listen to me. Outside the principal’s office I found Minnijean looking as abused and angry as I was.
“We gotta get out of here!” she said breathlessly.
“You’re right. They’re gonna kill us today,” I replied. “Let’s call our folks.”
“Let’s call Mrs. Bates. Maybe she can talk to the army or reporters or the President.” I assumed calling the head of the NAACP would at least get some response. Merely reporting this kind of trouble to school officials might not get anything except more of the same denial that there was trouble, or perhaps reprimands for being “tattletales.”
Since neither of us had change for a call, we reluctantly decided to go to Mrs. Huckaby, although we were afraid she would try and convince us to stick it out. Mrs. Huckaby greeted us in a matter-of-fact way until it dawned on her that we might be using the change we asked for to call for outside help.
“Wait a minute. What’s going on?” she asked, trailing behind us.
“We’re calling Mrs. Bates. We need help. Maybe she can talk to the reporters and get us some protection.”
Just as we suspected, Mrs. Huckaby insisted we go to the principal’s office to give him a chance to solve the problem. She assured us that he would be fair.
Principal Matthews began to speak in his slow plodding way, wearing his usual nervous smile. It was apparent he only wanted to stop us from making the call. I was in no mood to have him tell me I was imagining things, not with my leg aching and the steel flash of that switchblade knife fresh in my mind.
“Either you give us some protection so we can function without getting killed, or we go home.” I heard the words come out of my mouth, but I could hardly believe it was me speaking. My knees were shaking. It was the first time in my life I had ever stood up to any adult—certainly to any white adult. But I was on the edge, ready to take the risk, because how could anything the adults might do to me be worse than the abuse I was already enduring?
“Wait here,” the principal said, his tone of voice leaving no doubt he was annoyed with us. Shortly afterward, we saw the brass approaching: General Clinger and Colonel McDaniel of the Arkansas National Guard, and a third military man I did not recognize.
Clinger pointed to the two of us, most especially to me, and said, “You’ll sit over there where I can look you in the face.” Right away, I didn’t like him, but I was ready to deal with him.
The rest of our group was summoned to the office. Everyone was vocal about the severity of the attacks during the morning. Each one had a story about how the physical abuse had in-creased significantly. We told Clinger that his men were not pr
otecting us, that they stood by, socializing and flirting while we were being beaten within an inch of our lives. “Those guards are turning their backs to attacks on us, and we demand you do something about it,” I insisted.
Clinger didn’t deny the charges. He explained that his men had to live in the community.
“We just wanna keep living . . . period,” I said.
“Don’t talk directly to the guards. Go to the office and report incidents,” we were told.
I said, “With all due respect, sir, how can we run to the office every time we want help. Somebody could be beating one of us at the far end of the hall, and we’d have to wait until they finished and let us up so we could come here to report it.”
I felt something inside me change that day. I felt a new will to live rise up in me. I knew I wasn’t just going to roll over and die. I could take care of myself and speak up to white folks, even if my mother and father sometimes feared doing so. I discovered I had infinitely more guts than I had started the school year with. I had no choice. It was my life I was dickering for. I knew that Clinger didn’t care about our welfare—not even a tiny bit.
“Young lady,” Clinger said, eyeballing me, “you are turning our words. I didn’t say—”
But I cut him off. “My friends and I will leave school if we don’t get adequate protection. It’s as simple as that,” I told him. The others were obviously as angry as I was as they chimed in with their complaints. They voiced their agreement that something had to be done immediately.
“You’ll have bodyguards.” Clinger spoke with a definite edge to his voice. He summoned another soldier and told him to select eighteen men while we waited there. Those Arkansas guardsmen were the biggest, dumbest, most disheveled hayseeds I’d ever seen. They looked as if they had slept in their rumpled uniforms. We stood there not believing our eyes, dumbfounded by the sight of them.
“These clods will trip over their own shoelaces,” I whispered to Minnijean.
“Or worse yet, get us in some dark corner and beat the living daylights out of us,” she replied.
After about fifteen minutes we “moved out,” or in their case, shuffled out. It was a sight to behold. There we were, followed by an absurd wall of not so mighty military green trailing us like a ridiculous wagging tail.
We found ourselves laughing aloud, and the white students were laughing with us. For just one moment we all realized the ridiculous situation we were caught up in.
Four of us went to our usual table in the cafeteria; the guards took up their posts, leaning against a nearby wall. When I got up to get in line for a sandwich, they fell over each other trying to see where I was going and which of them would follow me. Two stood in line with me, arms folded, tummies out, and shoulders rounded. Each time one of us rose to get anything, two of those clowns stumbled up to follow. It was a comedy of errors.
As we moved through the halls in our oddball group, I saw, just a few feet away, the boy who had pulled the knife on me earlier. The momentary terror I felt reminded me our situation wasn’t funny after all.
I missed Danny. That was another feeling taking me over. Rumor had it that the 101st waited at Camp Robinson, just outside Little Rock. But I knew that even if he came back again and again, there would come the day when he would be gone for good.
Still, I was overjoyed when on Thursday we once again had our 101st bodyguards. Maybe they were forced to come back because the morning Gazette had reported the story of Terry and Jeff being kicked while Arkansas National Guardsmen looked on.
As we arrived at school that morning, I noticed right away that there was a different kind of tension, as though everyone was waiting for something awful to happen, only we didn’t know what. We had heard rumors of a planned student protest. I could see groups of students standing in the halls instead of in class where they would normally have been.
Just before first period, more students began walking out of classes. Rumors about a big event reverberated throughout the school. I could see and feel a new level of restlessness and a deepening sense of hostility. I was on edge, waiting for disaster any moment, like dynamite or a group attack or I didn’t know what. “They’re hangin’ a nigger, just like we’re gonna hang you,” someone muttered. That’s when I learned that some of those who walked out had assembled at the vacant lot at Sixteenth and Park across from the school, where they hanged and burned a straw figure.
That demonstration set the tone of the day. Belligerent student protests were firing up the already hostile attitude inside the school. Danny broke the rules by coming closer and talking to me—warning that we had to stay alert, no matter what.
Near the end of the day I was walking down a dimly lit hallway, with Danny following, when I spotted a boy coming directly toward me on a collision course. I tried to move aside, but he moved with me. I didn’t even have time to call for help.
The boy flashed a shiny black object in my face. The sudden pain in my eyes was so intense, so sharp, I thought I’d die. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. I couldn’t hear or see or feel anything except that throbbing, searing fire centered in my eyes. I heard myself cry out as I let go of everything to clutch at my face.
Someone grabbed me by my ponytail and pulled me along very fast, so fast I didn’t have time to resist. The pain of being dragged along by my hair was almost as intense as that in my eyes. Hands grabbed my wrists and pried my hands from my face, compelling me to bend over. Then cold, cold liquid was splashed in my eyes. The water felt so good. My God, thank you! The pain was subsiding.
“Easy, girl, easy. You’re gonna be fine.” It was Danny’s voice, his hands holding my head and dousing my eyes with water.
“I can’t see,” I whispered. “I can’t see.”
“Hold on. You will.”
Over and over again, the cold water flooded my face. Some of it went into my nose and down the front of my blouse. Bit by bit I could see the sleeve of Danny’s uniform, see the water, see the floor beneath us. The awful pain in my eyes had turned into a bearable sting. My eyes felt dry, as though there were a film drawn tight over them.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know,” Danny said, “maybe some kind of alkaline or acid. The few drops that got on your blouse faded the color immediately. Hey, let’s get you to the office so we can report this. You gotta get to a doctor.”
“No. No,” I protested.
“Why not?”
“School’s almost over, I wanna go home, right now. Please, please don’t make me. . . .” I felt tears. I knew he hated me to cry, but the thought of going to the office made me crazy. I couldn’t handle having some hostile clerk telling me I was making mountains out of molehills.
“Calm down. You can do what you want but—”
“No, home right now,” I said, cutting Danny off.
A SHORT time later, an optometrist examined my eyes and studied the spots on my blouse. He put some kind of soothing substance into my eyes and covered them with eye patches. As I sat there in the dark, I heard him say, “Whoever kept that water going in her eyes saved the quality of her sight, if not her sight itself. She’ll have to wear the patch overnight. She’ll have to be medicated for a while. She’ll need to wear glasses for all close work. I’d really like to see her wear them all the time. I’ll need to see her once a week until we’re certain she’s all right.”
Glasses, all the time, I thought. No boy wants to date a girl with glasses.
Despite the doctor’s instructions to wear an eye patch for twenty-four hours, I had to take it off. I couldn’t let the reporters see me with the patch because they would ask questions and make a big deal of it.
By the time we got home it was seven o’clock, and I wasn’t very talkative for the waiting reporters. Once inside I fell into bed, too exhausted to eat dinner. “Thank you, God,” I whispered, “thank you for saving my eyes. God bless Danny, always.”
THE HANGING, STABBING, AND BURNING
OF A NEGRO EF
FIGY NEAR CENTRAL HIGH
—Arkansas Gazette, Friday, October 4, 1957
The newspaper story contained several vivid pictures of Central High students gathered the day before, hanging the effigy, then burning it. They were smiling gleefully as though they were attending a festive party.
“You made it. It’s Friday,” Danny said, greeting me at the front of Central once more. “Your peepers okay?”
My eyes still felt very dry and tight. There were floating spots before them, but I could see. They only stung when I went too long without putting the drops in.
Later that afternoon there was a movie star—someone I’d never heard of—speaking before a pep rally: Julie Adams, a former student. She was there to boost spirits because, she said, Central High School’s reputation was being tainted.
Over the weekend of October 5th, a great thing happened that took the Little Rock school integration from the front pages of the national news. The Russians launched their 184-pound satellite, Sputnik.
Warriors Don't Cry Page 19
