“What are you staring at, nigger?” I was indeed staring, transfixed and elated at seeing what the boy was carrying. It was the sight I had been waiting for, praying for.
“The graduation gown Ernie’s gonna wear,” I said loud and clear. I couldn’t help responding to his snide remark as I glared back at the boy wearing a flattop haircut and black shirt. In his right hand he was carrying his gown on a hanger, and his left hand was holding his cap. He was attempting to block my way, but he had no free hands. I simply made a wide circle around him. Nothing, not even his foul mouth spewing ugly words, could make me unhappy at that moment. The sight of that gown meant summer and freedom were right around the corner.
At home the phone calls were coming fast and vicious. “We got a way of gettin’ you darkies now, for certain. We’re offering ten thousand dollars for your head on a platter.” I gulped as I replaced the receiver in its cradle. I couldn’t help thinking about how that was an awful lot of money. Poor folks might take a notion to collect. They’d get ten thousand dollars for my head. Did that mean they’d have to cut it off to collect? I told Grandma India of my fears.
“Surely you’ve got something better to do besides speculating about white folks’ silliness,” she said.
“I can’t help worrying about Ernie. One of those students could be an impostor—anybody could wear a robe.”
“Impostor?” Grandma looked up from her needlework with a question.
“You know, someone from the KKK who wants to collect that reward money could pretend to be a graduate.”
“I don’t think Ernie is in any real danger during graduation because he’ll be there among six hundred and one white graduates. Besides, God’s watching after Ernie just like he’s watching over you.”
“But. . .” I tried to continue being in my pity pot. She motioned me to shush my mouth and hold my hands out so she could circle the embroidery thread around them to straighten it out. After a long moment she said, “You’re fretting a mighty lot this evening. Hard work is always the cure for worry. So busy yourself doing those dishes and getting ready for your final exams.”
I HAD always imagined that my last day of the term at Central High School would be marked by a grand ceremony, with a massive choir singing hallelujah, or perhaps some wonderful award from my community—a parade maybe. I imagined the roar of helicopters overhead towing flying banners of congratulations—something—anything. But it was just the same as any other day. Four of us, Thelma, Elizabeth, Jeff, and I, rode home together early that afternoon. We wouldn’t be going back to Central High for at least three months. Long spaces of silence punctuated our talk about how we thought we did on our exams.
“It’s over,” Conrad said, greeting me as I climbed the steps to our front door. “You don’t have to integrate anymore.”
“Well, praise the Lord,” Grandma India said, her arms wide open to receive me. “You see, you made it.” She squeezed me and kissed my cheek.
“Well, well, young lady, welcome to summer.” Mother Lois handed me a large box that I rushed to open. “You’re very special to have come through all this. I thought you deserved a special summer outfit.”
Early on Wednesday morning, I built a fire in the metal trash barrel in the backyard, fueled by my school papers. Grandma had said it would be healing to write and destroy all the names of people I disliked at Central High: teachers, students, anyone who I thought had wronged me. It was against the law to burn anything at that time of the year, but she said a ceremony was important in order to have the official opportunity to give that year to God. Grandma India stood silent by my side as I fed the flame and spoke their names and forgave them.
After a long moment she walked over to water her flowerbed. The four o’clocks were blooming purple and red. We stood together for what must have been half an hour, with only the sound of the crackling fire and the garden hose. Finally she said, “Later, you’ll be grateful for the courage it built inside you and for the blessing it will bring.”
Grateful, I thought. Never. How could I be grateful for being at Central High? But I knew she was always right. Still I wondered just how long I would have to wait for that feeling of gratitude to come to me.
COVERAGE CURBED TO ASSURE DIGNITY
OF CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION:
Each Graduating Senior to Receive
8 Admission Tickets;
Press Admitted Only by Ticket.
—Arkansas Gazette, Tuesday, May 27, 1958
EVEN though I had made it through the school year, Ernie still had to survive that one final brave act. I counted on being with him, on applauding for him from our isolated though well-guarded section of the audience.
“None of you will be allowed to attend either the graduation commencement or the baccalaureate service,” Mother Lois announced over dinner. “The authorities believe it would not only risk your lives, but also make it more difficult for them to protect Ernie and his family should they have to do so. They’ve also forbidden any non-white reporters or photographers to attend.”
“But, Mom!”
“But nothing. This is no time to satisfy a whim and unravel everything you’ve accomplished. There’ll be enough of a circus, what with the soldiers, FBI, city police, and who knows all.”
“The paper says every policeman not on vacation will be on duty from six o’clock on,” Grandma said. “They wouldn’t go to all that trouble and expense unless they expected something to happen.”
“Besides,” Mother Lois continued, “their best efforts should be directed to protecting Ernie.”
She’s right, I thought to myself. It was selfish of me to want to go, I suppose. But what I knew to be practical advice didn’t lessen my disappointment at not being able to watch Ernie march triumphantly to the stage to receive that diploma. That night I wrote in my diary:
Dear God,
Please walk with Ernie in the graduation line at Central. Let him be safe.
Quigley Stadium was where the 101st troops set up their headquarters. It was there, on Tuesday evening, May 27, with 4,500 people looking on, that Ernie received his diploma. I held my breath as I listened to the radio broadcast news of the graduation ceremonies. At 8:48 P.M., Ernie became the first of our people to graduate from Central High School in all its forty-nine years. Chills danced up my spine as I sat in the big green living room chair with Mama and Grandma nearby. “It really happened,” I whispered. “We made it.”
The audience had been applauding those who previously marched, but when Ernie appeared they fell silent.
“What the heck,” Mother Lois said. “Lots of people in the rest of the world are applauding for Ernie and for all of you who made it through this year.”
“Who cares if they applaud, they didn’t shoot him. There was no violence. Everybody is alive and well.” Grandma stood and applauded.
Ernie was escorted from the stadium by police to a waiting taxi in which he, his family, and their guest departed. The newspapers said Ernie’s diploma cost taxpayers half a million dollars. Of course, we knew it cost all of us much, much more than that. It cost us our innocence and a precious year of our teenage lives.
THE next morning, Link called, sounding as though he would fall apart. He was grieving because Mrs. Healey had died on the day of his graduation. He insisted I come to meet him. When I said I couldn’t get away, he called me a thousand times that day insisting he had to see me or something awful would happen.
Late that afternoon, I had no choice but to meet him. He threatened to come right over to my house if I didn’t agree. I figured I had to quiet him down or he would explode. He seemed inconsolable and really crazy. So I said we could walk around the block near the Baptist college. It was a safe place for me in my own neighborhood. Besides, when I asked Mother if I could go to the Baptist college library with a friend, I wouldn’t be telling a lie—at least, not altogether.
When I arrived, he was red-faced and teary-eyed, insisting that I go with him to the Northern town near Harva
rd University where he would attend college.
“Things will be much better for you there. I’ll take care of you until you get a job.” He was so distraught that I felt sorry for him. He insisted that I leave Little Rock immediately.
“You’re just saying this because you’re sad about Nana Healey,” I told him. “You’ll feel differently tomorrow, next week.”
“I’ve thought about this a lot. I’m tired of worrying about you. What will you do when I’m gone?”
“I can’t leave. I have to stay here and go back to Central,” I argued. “Everything depends on it.”
“You keep acting this way, girl, you are gonna get yourself killed. I told you, there’s a price on your head. They have posters all over offering that money. They’ll never let you come back next year.”
On and on he went, talking loud and frightening me. To calm him down, I told him I’d think about running away to the North. But when I waved good-bye to him, I knew I would never, ever see him again, although I would remember him forever.
BY May 29, the eight of us had flown off to Chicago to receive the Robert S. Abbot Award conferred by the Chicago Defender newspaper. I was so excited because Minnijean joined us there. It was the beginning of a whirlwind tour and another in the series of awards we received for “bravery and significant contributions to democracy.”
In Little Rock we had been “niggers,” but up North, we were heroes and heroines. We were paraded across stages before adoring audiences, chauffeured about in limousines, and treated like royalty at luxurious hotels.
In New York, we had suites at the Statler Hilton, took limos to Sardis, and lunched with United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. We hobnobbed backstage with Lena Horne and Ricardo Montalban at their Broadway play Jamaica. In Washington, we had a private tour of the White House and posed on the steps of the Supreme Court with Mr. Thurgood Marshall.
In Cleveland, we received the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. We received so many other awards in so many cities that I lost count after a while. The first time I was asked for my autograph, I was astonished; afterward, I went to my room to practice a special signature.
But by late June, even as Minnijean and I were whirling about our hotel room, dressing to see a man we thought of as a deity, Johnny Mathis, Little Rock school integration was unraveling. On June 22, Federal Judge Lemley granted the school board’s request for a stay in the integration order for Central High School, delaying it for three and a half years. The NAACP began a round of appeals up through the courts, trying to get us seven students back into Central High.
BY September 1958, we had won our court battle. Armed with judgments in our favor, we prepared to reenter Central High. But Governor Faubus had the last word. He closed all of Little Rock’s high schools. So we began the school year waiting for the law of the land to blast Mr. Faubus out of his stubborn trench.
I couldn’t know then that I would spend the entire school year of 1958-59 in lonely isolation and despair—waiting in vain. We had come back home, to Little Rock, back to being called “niggers” by the segregationists and those “meddling children” by our own people. Our friends and neighbors resented not only the school closure but most especially the negative economic impact our presence in that school had on our community.
By that time, segregationists were squeezing the life out of the NAACP and the Bates’s newspaper, the State Press. Our people continued to lose their jobs, their businesses, and their homes as pressure was exerted to convince them to talk us into voluntarily withdrawing from Central High.
During those lonely days of what would have been my senior year, I waited for legislators and Faubus and the NAACP to resolve the entanglement that surrounded Central High’s integration. As September days turned to late autumn, my world fell apart with the onset of Grandmother India’s leukemia and her death on October 24. Ultimately, I was alone, at home, waiting to restart my life—waiting to live my teenage years.
By September 1959, we had waited as long as we could for Faubus to open the schools. The unrest in Little Rock and the bounty on our heads had by that time forced two of our seven families to move their homes away from that city forever. NAACP officials sent an announcement to chapters across the country, asking for families that would volunteer to give us safe harbor and support us in finishing our education.
I was fortunate enough to come to the Santa Rosa, California, home of Dr. George McCabe, a San Francisco State University professor, and his wife, Carol, and their four children. They were a family of politically conscious Quakers committed to racial equality. When I arrived I was frightened to see that they were white. But they became the loving, nurturing bridge over which I walked to adulthood.
More than their guidance, it was their unconditional love that taught me the true meaning of equality. To this day I call them Mom and Pop and visit to bask in their love and enjoy the privilege of being treated as though I am their daughter.
The love of George and Carol McCabe helped to heal my wounds and inspired me to launch a new life for myself. It was also their voices echoing the same words of my mother that made me enter and complete college. In fact, George took me to college in January, 1960, to register for my first classes.
Not until September, 1960, did the NAACP, with its tenacious legal work, force Central High to open to integration once more—but only two black students were permitted entry. Carlotta Walls and Jefferson Thomas ultimately became graduates of Central along with Ernest Green.
LOOKING back, I suppose that had Faubus not called out the troops on that first day, had he remained silent, the integration at Central High would not have been as difficult. By dispatching the Arkansas National Guard to keep us out of school, he set the tone. His bold, defiant act gave renegades, who had until then been only a very minor thread in our city’s fabric, the green light to play a major role. They took that opportunity and made the most of it, because or in spite of the fact that the world was watching.
As I watch videotapes now and think back to that first day at Central High on September 4, 1957, I wonder what possessed my parents and the adults of the NAACP to allow us to go to that school in the face of such violence. When I ask my mother about it, she says none of them honestly believed Governor Faubus had the unmitigated gall to use the troops to keep us out. Mother explains that they assumed he would order the military to quell the mob.
Since Little Rock’s citizens had in most recent years behaved fairly rationally, Mother assumed the mob would be dispersed by the police and that would be the end of that. She recalls as well that even when a rational voice nudged her to keep me home, there seemed to be that tug to go forward from some divine source.
Many historians contend it was a brilliant stroke on the governor’s part suddenly to remove the Arkansas National Guard from around Central High School in response to Judge Ronald Davies’s ruling for integration on Friday, September 20, 1957. It allowed Faubus to set up an explosive situation, while maintaining a veneer of innocence. He could ignite and fuel segregationists’ anger without being caught holding the matches.
When on that ominous day, Mob Monday, September 23, 1957, the NAACP officials and ministers dropped us off to go to Central for the second time under court order, I wonder how in their minds they justified such an act. As an adult, I believe had it been me driving, I would have kept going rather than allow my children to face that rampaging mob. And yet had we students not gone to school that day, perhaps the integration of Central, and of a whole string of other Southern schools that eventually followed, would never have taken place.
When I watch news footage of the day we entered school guarded by the 101st soldiers, I am moved by the enormity of that experience. I believe that was a moment when the whole nation took one giant step forward. Once President Eisenhower made that kind of commitment to uphold the law, there was no turning back. And even though later on he would waver and not wholeheartedly back up his powerful decision, he had stepp
ed over a line that no other President had ever dared cross. Thereafter the threat of military intervention would always exist whenever a Southern governor thought of using his office to defy federal law.
I marvel at the fact that in the midst of this historic confrontation, we nine teenagers weren’t maimed or killed. Believe me, it was only by the grace of God and the bravery of those few good men—some of them white men. I never allow myself to forget that although I was abused by many white people during that incident. Without the help of other law-abiding whites who risked their lives, I wouldn’t be around to tell this story.
Yet even as I wince at the terrible risk we all took, I remember thinking at the time that it was the right decision—because it felt as though the hand of fate was ushering us forward. Naïve and trusting, adults and children alike, we kept thinking each moment, each hour, each day, that things would get better, that these people would come to their senses and behave. This is a land governed by sane citizens who obey the law, at least that’s what we’re taught in history class.
So we headed down a path from which there was no turning back, because when we thought of alternatives, the only option was living our lives behind the fences of segregation and passing on that legacy to our children.
Warriors Don't Cry Page 33
