“Wolf was about to get you, Nana,” he said. “You’re running kinda short.” They giggled to each other as though they understood without speaking.
We spent the rest of the morning there with Mrs. Healey. She coughed continuously as we went about our chores. Link again urged me to convince her to take money for a doctor. He said I could tell her it was a loan from the church. I agreed. Watching him tend to Mrs. Healey, I would never again have reason to question his motives.
There was silence between us for a long time as we drove away. And then I couldn’t help asking, “And why didn’t your folks make some provision for her?”
“Whenever I ask my folks, my father turns me off by saying I’m weak—that I’m a you-know-what lover. He says colored folks are used to doing without, and I ought not spoil them.”
I FOUND a doctor in our community who did not know Mother Lois or Grandma India and asked him to go to Mrs. Healey’s. When I spoke with the doctor later, he said there was not a lot he could do for Nana Healey except make her comfortable. What she really needed was long-term care in a hospital. I asked if she was dying, and he told me yes. One of the hardest things I ever had to do was tell Link. There were tears in his voice as he spoke through a rush of anger.
“Damn my folks. They didn’t even pay social security for her. She’s got nothing. I share my allowance with her, and some of the folks in her church give her a few pennies. But they’ve got nothing like what it will take for a hospital. I’ve gotta go now, I’ll take care of it.”
I decided that I had to tell Grandma India about Nana Healey. It took time, but Grandma got over her anger at my disobedience, and sure enough, she promised to visit Mrs. Healey on her weekly trips to North Little Rock. So in the end Link and Grandma formed something of a friendship as they discussed all the tasks surrounding Nana Healey’s care which compelled them to get to know each other.
COURT ACTION SET FOR TODAY IN CHS CASE
—Arkansas Gazette, Monday, April 28, 1958
The lengthy and bitter Little Rock Central High School integration case will be reopened at 9:30 A.M. today in Federal District Court under an Arkansas judge. Judge Harry S. Lemley of Hope will take over from Judge Ronald N. Davies of Fargo, N.D.
At issue is a Little Rock School Board petition asking for a postponement of integration at the school. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has asked that the petition be denied.
Reopening that case meant my year of suffering was in vain. If the school board was not committed to integration, how could Central’s students be expected to accept it. Even if the NAACP was successful in getting the petition denied, it set a tone segregationists would seize as a weapon against us. Downhearted couldn’t even describe how low I felt.
To cheer myself up, I decided to wear my Easter dress to school, the one Mother and Grandmother had made for me. Lately, the ink spraying had slowed down a bit in favor of more exotic torture. Even as I entered school that morning, I could tell the prospect of the hearing had already put wind into the sails of segregationists. “Won’t be long now,” one boy hissed as I entered the door. “Don’t phone or drop us a card ’cause we ain’t gonna miss you, nigger.”
I had survived the whole day and was walking through the hall to the Fourteenth Street side of the school to go home. A boy approached me, behaving normally, so I paid him no mind. As he got closer, suddenly I felt the warm liquid spray across my chest. Ink. The front of my new dress was soaked with ink spots. Before I could get away, he danced around to my right side and showered me once more.
I ran toward the exit as I held back the tears brimming my eyes. Suddenly Link was there a bit ahead of me on the walkway.
“What happened?” He stopped dead in his tracks. I tried not to let him see how upset I was. I wiped away my tears.
“Shhhhhhhhh, don’t talk to me.” I kept walking, but he followed.
“Melba . . . stop. Are you all right?”
“Get outta here,” I shouted at him. Just at that moment a group of boys approached us. Link paused, but I kept moving toward them as though nothing could stop me. I was determined to make it to the car, which waited at the curb to take me home. Suddenly, one of the boys moved closer to me and drew back his fist.
“Hey!” Link shouted. “You like the way I redecorated the nigger’s dress. Looks better than it did before, don’t you think?” The boy turned to answer Link and then started snickering. I darted around him and into the car. As I looked back, Link stood with them, laughing and chatting. I couldn’t stop my tears.
IN the days that followed, we were repeatedly warned that nothing mattered more than avoiding any activity that would get us expelled. Now the hoodlums were mounting a last-ditch effort to get us out of school before May 29th. They wanted no possibility that we could register for the next school term.
Meanwhile Link seemed nervous, asking me each day what had happened. He kept harping on the fact that he was hearing that segregationists were going to do something to somebody’s family. “Something big that will be certain to get one or more of you guys to voluntarily leave school,” he said.
But as the days passed, I was less concerned about Link’s warning and more worried about the boy who now came into study hall each day threatening to toss me out of the window, and the girls who encircled me at least once a day, saying every negative thing they could about the parts of my body. Fat thighs, ugly hair, ugly clothing, funny eyes, all shouted in a chorus. I thought sadness would force the tears in my heart to flow, but I never said a word.
At the same time I was worried about Mother Lois, who was becoming more tense with each day. At dinner, she hardly spoke. She seldom laughed and didn’t offer any of her corny jokes. It was a Monday evening when Mother gathered us in the living room for a family conference. I had never seen such a grave expression on her face.
“They’re not going to renew my teaching contract for next year. I don’t have a job,” she told us.
“But why?” we all asked. We knew very well that there was no reason to fire her. They couldn’t possibly fire her for doing a bad job. She had fourteen years of teaching experience with lots of awards to her credit. There were no complaints in her record.
And then with tears brimming in her eyes, she explained. “They say they’ll give me back my job only if I withdraw Melba from Central High School immediately. They do not want her to finish the year.”
27
“WE have no choice. We have to take the risk of talking to newspaper people. Who is going to feed us and put a roof over our heads if I don’t get my job back?” Mother Lois’s face was tear-stained, but her expression reflected the determination I heard in her voice. We sat around the big, old mahogany table in the dining room, discussing a plan to save her job.
“Those segregationists will stop at nothing to get what they want.” Grandma appeared angry and anxious as she spoke.
During the last few days of April, Mother Lois had humbled herself to make several trips to North Little Rock’s school headquarters to plead for her job, but they had refused to reinstate her. On five different occasions, her superiors told her they were taking away her contract because she had allowed me to participate in the integration of Central.
When the man who held our second mortgage heard Mother would lose her job, he called the note. It took all the money she could scrape together to persuade him to be patient and take huge payments. The grocer became reluctant to give us credit. Money was running out. Mama didn’t feel safe taking the loan she usually borrowed from the bank at the beginning of each May to support us through the summer. We made ends meet because she worked during the school year for $2,700 and then borrowed money to carry us through to August. Each year when her salary started in September, she’d pay back the loan.
Already Mr. Henson had called about our late house payment on the first mortgage. The bank was calling about the car. Mother didn’t want to plead for any more credit at the grocery store, so the
cupboards held a sparse supply of staples. The refrigerator shelves were almost bare. Grandma India was preparing more stews and casseroles with less meat and lots of rice and potatoes. She was dividing one chicken so it stretched into three full meals by using the back and wings in her lemon-rice soup. She was baking plain white bread instead of buying it at the store.
“Sitting and wishing never made man great. The good Lord sends the fishing, but we gotta dig the bait. I say we’ve got to force the hand of those administrators. They’re ignoring you.” There was fire in Grandma’s eyes as she spoke.
The loss of Mama’s teaching position had upset all the members of our family. Thinking about it, talking about it, planning for it had taken us up like an Arkansas tornado that pounded and pounded us in the wind. Now my home life was completely taken over by the same tense fretting and worrying as my school life had been. It had happened without warning. Mother explained how the administrator had called her into his office and told her he had the connections to see that she got offered a job in Oklahoma.
“You know I can’t leave Little Rock,” Mama told him. “Melba is in Central. I’m buying a home here. All our roots are here.” She felt an awful sinking feeling as she remained standing, holding on to the back of the wooden chair across the desk from her boss. Her instincts told her she should not be seated.
“You have young children and a mother to support. You need a job.”
“But I have a job, here,” she told him. She felt panic rise in her as she wondered why on earth he’d offer her a job out of state. How was he able to do that? She concluded there must have been a conspiracy of sorts—the Southern good old boy network getting together to remove a thorn in their side.
“Your contract here with us will not be renewed. The job in Oklahoma is your only option,” he said.
“But why? I’ve done a good job here. There have never been any complaints from parents or from this administration.”
“This is just one of those things that happens, Mrs. Pattillo. It has nothing to do with the caliber of your work. It’s simply that we’ve been ordered to hire a different kind of teacher.” He paused. “Of course, there is one way you can keep your job.”
“Yes, sir?”
“If Melba were to withdraw from that school, we could talk about renewing your contract this year at quite a handsome salary increase,” he said.
Mother was certain he was being pressured by his bosses, North Little Rock’s all-white school administrators who were fighting integration in that city. Still, she had not expected such harsh retaliation. As she walked away from his office, she recalled what Link had said, “Something bad will happen, something involving the whole family.”
As we sat mulling over our fate, I realized that the segregationists had taken away the one thing we couldn’t do without—Mama’s job. If there was anything that could cause me to leave school, it would be to get Mama’s job back.
Grandma was soft-spoken, calm, but emphatic as she said, “Well, Lois, you’ve tried every polite and proper way of getting that job back. I think some sort of drastic action is called for.”
“I don’t know . . .” Mother pondered the idea in silence. I had watched her expression become a little more drawn with each passing day.
“We could call some of those reporters. The main goal would be to get a story in the local white papers,” Grandma said.
Mother Lois paused and took a deep breath before she answered. “It could backfire. It will attract even more attention to Melba inside Central. The kids will see her name in the paper, and they’ll single her out. And it could make my bosses at school even more angry. Those people at the school administration could keep me from ever teaching anywhere in Arkansas again.”
“Still, we got to live. We got to eat. Ain’t nobody gonna feed us—not the NAACP, not those white folks—nobody.”
“I guess we’ve got no choice. I’ve thought about it and prayed about it,” Mama finally said. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to write down a paragraph or two and call some of those news people.”
THE next day, Friday, May 2, I entered the Sixteenth Street side of Central High. While I walked the gauntlet to get to my classroom, I escaped into my daydreams about the junior prom. In the middle of all the upheaval over Mama’s job loss and the turmoil at school, I was feeling sorry for myself. I desperately wanted some remnants of what my life might have been had I not come to Central. Maybe next year, I consoled myself, maybe it wouldn’t be so frightening to walk to class. Perhaps I would even be able to attend Central’s senior prom.
There was lots of excitement for the next few days as the yearbooks were distributed. Some of our regular adversaries complained loud and long about how the inclusion of some of our pictures had tainted their precious yearbook. But as they became preoccupied with exchanging autographs, a few of them let up on chasing and taunting us.
The halls were electric with energy and chatter while students giggled and pointed to each other’s pictures and wrote in the books, creating those funny sayings and rhyming verses they would treasure thirty years later at class reunion time. I found myself standing perfectly still in a shadowy corner, lingering at the edge of a circle of joy I could not be a part of.
We continued to hear snippets of the fancy plans for Central students to have fun during the final weeks of the school year, plans that we could only speculate about. Certainly none of the eight of us received even one social invitation, nor could we have risked attending even if we had. To make matters worse, I did not receive any graduation celebration invitations from my old school. At first I had deeply resented being left out, especially since all of us were making huge sacrifices that would benefit everyone in the future. But after thinking about it, I realized that sometimes we were excluded not as an act of hostility but because they had forgotten about us since we weren’t visible in their lives anymore.
Over the next few days, I was anxious to get the newspaper to see if somebody would print the story about Mama’s job loss. I had watched her go through the awkward ordeal of phoning news people. Three of them listened patiently as she read her two paragraphs explaining the situation. They called back later with questions, and one man interviewed her.
On Wednesday morning, May 7, I was awakened by the slam of the front door and Mother Lois calling out to us from the living room. “It’s here. The newspaper did it—they printed the article about my losing my job!”
“What on earth’s all the noise about?” Grandma said as she entered the living room, sipping her morning tea.
“That Mr. Reed, the reporter, is a fine fellow. May the good Lord bless him,” Mother Lois said, as she held up the paper for us to see. She was so excited she could hardly contain herself. She handed the paper over to Grandma, who began reading aloud immediately.
CHS CRISIS COST HER JOB, SAYS NORTH LITTLE ROCK NEGRO TEACHER, the headlines read. The article stated our problem precisely as Mother had told the reporter: The North Little Rock School District has refused to renew her contract to teach seventh-grade English because of her participation in the integration issue.
“Praise the Lord, we got us some power now,” Grandma shouted. It was the first time in days I saw hope in everybody’s eyes, hope that we could fight all those high-powered white men who were taking Mama’s job away.
“I think this is a turning point. Lois did what she had to do. Let’s wait and see how the Lord works this out.” Grandma read the article aloud for the second time.
The phone started to ring. One after another, the calls came. We raced for the telephone, delighted with the people saying they were on our side. Only a few people said negative things, like Mother deserved to lose her job for being too uppity. But some of those who wished us well were people calling from other cities. The wire services had teletyped the story around the country. People from everywhere promised they’d call the administrator’s office and say it was an awful thing to take Mama’s job away.
It had been t
he best morning in many days. We actually laughed over the breakfast table. That good feeling lingered as I entered the front door of Central and climbed the stairs to my third-floor homeroom.
“You better pack your rags and get on outta here, nigger. Your mama’s lost her job. What you gonna do now?” The baiting went on for most of the morning. They had all read the paper, too. I wondered if it had been one of their parents who caused Mama to lose her job.
“Thank you for your concern,” was my reply. I was struggling to practice the technique of not responding in kind to their mistreatment. I had begun to master it to the point that it was almost automatic. Still, I had been startled by an alarming increase in the verbal assaults and kicking and shoving incidents in hallways during the early days of May. The shoving was harder, and often people drew back their doubled-up fists to strike at me.
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