Now home to three controversial atomic energy reactors, Indian Point was then a popular park spread over more than two hundred acres. It included carnival rides, a swimming pool, and picnic grounds. We were going on a picnic, and I could hardly wait to get on the rides. A ferry took us to the park, but there were two stops. Our stop was first, and the next one was Bear Mountain State Park, another expansive park near West Point, the U.S. military academy. After the ferry left Indian Point, it would travel to Bear Mountain and dock there for the rest of the afternoon. Just as the ferry was about to make its first stop for us to get off, Mr. Andrade, Uncle Freddie’s father, needed to go the bathroom. Uncle Freddie warned: “Dad, just make sure you’re back within five minutes. We’re getting off here.”
The ferry docked temporarily, and after five minutes of waiting for Mr. Andrade to return, we got off. Five more minutes passed and then ten, and still no Mr. Andrade. As we stood waiting just beyond the dock, we watched the gangplank to the ferry rise slowly, and then the boat pushed away deeper into the water and glided out of sight, off to Bear Mountain. Mrs. Andrade looked terrified. She spoke rapid-fire in her native tongue. Uncle Freddie tried to calm her.
“I’m sure he’s here,” he said. “He probably got off before us. We just need to look around.”
We walked around for what felt like hours. No Mr. Andrade. But here’s the catch: We had the picnic basket of food, and Mr. Andrade had the money. Uncle Freddie didn’t have a dime, and neither did his mother or Aunt Juanita. So we ate our picnic lunch and played the free games, but all of us kids were angry because we couldn’t get on the carnival rides. That had been the main reason for going to Indian Point.
About three-thirty in the afternoon, it was time to return to New York City. We stood and watched as the ferry came around the bend and docked. The gangplank went down, and the rest was like a scene from Ellis Island. Mr. Andrade, who apparently had gotten lost on the way from the restroom, came running down the plank. His wife ran to meet him, again speaking quickly in her native language. Tears streamed down both of their faces. They were hugging and crying, so happy to see each other. You would have thought they had been separated by an ocean for years.
Among my other New York firsts was pizza. Little Rock didn’t have pizza, but my friend Peggy, who had visited New York one summer with her grandmother, had told me all about it.
“Make sure you try the pizza,” she reminded me again and again.
I couldn’t wait to tell her that it was every bit as delicious as she had described.
I also tasted Cream of Wheat for the first time and marveled over the Rockettes, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty. I visited Radio City Music Hall, where I saw a thrilling Technicolor remake of the box office hit Show Boat and its unforgettable classic, “Ol’ Man River.” I even took the train to Harlem to spend the weekend with my great-uncle Callon Holloway (Uncle Buster). I felt like a real city slicker when I sat on the stoop with him and his friends at night, sometimes as late as midnight. They would set up a card table and chairs under the streetlamp at the corner nearest his apartment and then gather around for games of dominoes, checkers, and cards, mostly pitty-pat. Uncle Buster also took me to the Polo Grounds and to Ebbets Field, where I saw our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers play the New York Giants.
But among the more memorable experiences of that magical summer in New York were the times I spent with the white boy who became my best friend. His name was Francis, and that was the first thing that struck me as funny. In my book, Francis was a girl’s name. He had pale skin and strawberry blond hair, and like me, he enjoyed playing stickball and tops. We met on the playground in the courtyard of Aunt Juanita’s apartment complex, and from that day on, we played ball together, chased each other around the playground, and giggled over the silliest things. Most astonishing of all, no one even seemed to notice. I guess I took to him because he wasn’t one of the most popular kids. And like me, he was an early bird. Some mornings, it would be just the two of us, swatting our little pink ball back and forth to each other with our narrow sticks. Francis and I weren’t close enough to share secrets, like my friends Bunny, Peggy, and I did back home. There wasn’t really anything all that extraordinary about my friendship with him, except this: Here in this brand-new world, an ordinary friendship between a little black girl and a little white boy could exist, free of the boundaries that defined such relationships back home.
Summer zoomed by, and then one day I returned to the apartment to find Aunt Juanita standing atop a large navy blue suitcase trimmed in white leather.
“Look what came in the mail today,” she announced excitedly, pointing to the matching two-piece luggage set.
My parents had sent me Samsonite’s latest suitcase—Silhouette, the model was called. I’d seen television and magazine advertisements touting the bag’s strength as a model stood on top of it, but I grimaced when I saw my aunt acting out those ads. Fortunately, the luggage was every bit as durable as the ads claimed.
A short time later, my new suitcases were packed and I was on the train, headed back to Little Rock, no longer the same girl. I’d tasted the sweetness of freedom and seen more than my eight-year-old mind could fully understand. But everything that the Jim Crow South had tried to make me believe about my people and my place in life had been flipped upside down. Suddenly, the world had opened wider. It was just a matter of time before I was ready to step out of the one I knew.
CHAPTER 2
The Playing Field
Softball was as much a summertime staple as homemade ice cream around my neighborhood. Practically every evening before sundown, a group of us—my good friends Herbert Monts, Peggy Cyrus, Marion Davis, and Reba Davis and whoever else we could round up throughout the day—gathered for a game. If we ended up with fewer than ten people, we played in the street. But most days we rallied enough players for a real game—five or six members per team—and headed across 15th Street to a huge vacant lot. It was shouting distance from my back door, and it became our Ebbets Field—in more ways than one.
Just a few years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball at that historic New York stadium, a group of us schoolkids crossed that line, too, on a vacant lot in west Little Rock. Our motives were purely practical: The black kids needed more players to fill our teams. So, as we gathered on the field one day, we just began recruiting the white kids passing on their bikes.
“Want to join us?” one of us called out.
Before long, we had a group of regulars: J.R., Connie, Billy, Jay, and Pete. The adults stayed out of our way, and there wasn’t a moment of trouble or awkwardness. I was keenly aware, though, that what was happening on our field was, to say the least, different. Aside from those three months in New York, I had never played with white kids before. I’d seen my white neighbors in passing, standing in their doorways, sitting on their porches, or riding their bikes along our dusty roads. We usually acknowledged one another with a polite nod or even a “hello.” But they were lumped together in my mind as simply “white people,” as nameless and faceless as shadows to me, as I’m sure I was to them.
Things were quite different among my black neighbors, which included a mix of professionals—a doctor, lawyer, Philander Smith College professor, and high school teacher—as well as postal, railroad, and construction workers, like my dad and Sam Mumford. Mr. Mumford, the one Grandpa Cullins claimed was the grandson of former president Zachary Taylor, often worked on construction jobs with my father. He lived about a block away, and every morning, about six a.m., he would walk to our house to meet Daddy. When I made it to the kitchen, Mr. Mumford would be sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. He always helped me with current events, especially when I got to junior high school. By then, I was taking civics and had to bring in a current news topic for discussion.
“So, what’s happening in the news today?” I’d ask.
Mr. Mumford would look up from the paper and launch a discussion abo
ut whatever had caught his attention on the news pages that day. Thanks to him, I left home each morning feeling more prepared for my civics class.
The neighborhood was full of people like Mr. Mumford. Even the families that didn’t have children my age welcomed us into their homes. The Duncans, an older couple who lived across from us on Valentine Street, had the first television on the block, and I sometimes stopped by to watch my favorite television show, American Bandstand. They had helped to raise their three granddaughters—Alexine, Norma, and Billie Jean—all of whom were at least ten years older than me. The oldest of them, Billie Jean, had babysat me.
I especially liked spending time with another neighborhood couple, A.B. and Doll Fox, who were in their fifties and lived across 15th Street, next to the field. They were the surrogate grandparents of the neighborhood, the first to stop over with home-cooked food if someone was sick and the first to offer hugs and help if misfortune struck one of the families. They were the ones who somehow managed to stay connected to everybody’s lives. I watched boxing matches with Mr. Fox, an industrial arts teacher and real Renaissance man, who also played the cello. Some of our neighbors called him “Professor,” which he didn’t like because he didn’t have a doctorate. Though he had graduated from Kansas State Teachers College and pursued postgraduate studies, he still didn’t believe he had earned the privilege to be addressed with such esteem. But the title fit him perfectly. Mr. Fox was a smart man and by nature philosophical. He was always teaching, even when we didn’t realize in the moment exactly what we were being taught. As I was about to enter junior high school, Mr. Fox warned: Always be prepared because you will be tested every day. The thought at first intimidated me because I thought he was talking about written tests. But more conversations with him revealed that he was sharing a deeper lesson about life and making good decisions. His wife, Doll, loved to bake, and she kept homemade goodies around their house. She knew my father had a huge sweet tooth, so she usually sent me home with slices of pound cake or sweet-potato pie for him. Her sugar cookies were my favorites, particularly because they were always burnt around the edges. Cookies that looked too neat and fussy never seemed to taste as good. Nobody in the neighborhood could bake like Mrs. Fox.
Our neighborhood was full of kids about the same age, and the black parents saw it as their moral duty to keep watch over us all, correct us, and, if necessary, report any misbehavior to one another. While my parents were generally mild-mannered folks who rarely raised their voices, I knew that nothing could result in serious trouble at home quicker than embarrassing them or bringing shame to the Walls name by acting up in public. The black kids rode bikes, walked to the corner store, and swam together in the segregated swimming pool at Gilliam Park, a small recreational area operated by the city for Little Rock’s black residents. We also knew and respected one another’s parents as our own. But when it came to our white playmates, we knew nothing more than their first names.
On our playing field, though, everything was level. Our teams were integrated, and every one of us, black and white, played hard. For the most part, we also played fair. We knew how one another hit, caught, and ran. We knew who played dirty and who could steal a base. And none of us was above boasting when the game ended in our favor.
“We’ll whip you again tomorrow,” I proclaimed many times after victory.
I imagined myself Jackie Robinson and always played first or second base. I was somewhat tomboyish and one of the better players. I also was usually among the first ones picked for a team. Occasionally, when we needed an extra player, I called my cousin Robert Henry Harris, who lived with his grandmother on the other side of town during the summer. It would take him about forty-five minutes to get to the field on his bike, but we just made small talk to kill the time. Robert Henry, who often saw the Cardinals play when he visited his father in St. Louis, was a pretty good center fielder. But when his team began winning too often, the losers started complaining and demanded a new rule: No one from outside the neighborhood was allowed to play in our games. In those moments on that field, there was no black or white, just winners and losers and kids being kids. The only outsider was a too good center fielder who had seen too many professional baseball games up in St. Louis.
Away from the field, though, the boundaries were clear and unspoken. When it was time for a game, a few of us black kids might walk over to a white neighbor’s yard and just stand there, close to the road, until a parent spotted us. We knew better than to even knock on the door.
“There’s a colored kid in the yard,” we’d hear one of the white parents yell.
Soon, our white playmate would come running out, ready to play. There were times, too, when a white neighborhood kid walked over to my yard and just waited.
“Some white kid is outside,” Mother called out to me.
I grabbed my mitt and dashed outside.
Most days, we played so hard under the blazing Arkansas sun that we had to stop for water breaks. The black kids would all run over to one of our yards and turn on an outdoor water faucet, usually connected to a long green hose. We’d take turns sipping from the cool stream pouring from that pipe. I suppose the white kids ran to their yards or homes, too, because they seemed to disappear like ghosts. Then we’d all meet back up on the field and play until hunger got the best of us or the grown-ups called us home.
Except for the white kids on our teams, the rest of us had known one another practically all our lives. Most of us were students at Stephens Elementary. It was the neighborhood elementary school, and it was named in honor of Charlotte Stephens, the first black teacher in Little Rock. She had taught English and Latin for sixty years—more than any other teacher in the school district’s history—mostly at Dunbar, where she also served some of the time as the librarian. Stephens Elementary was the physical and cultural center of the neighborhood, a place that drew practically everyone together for holidays and special occasions. In my early days there, the school was an old, multistory building that sat atop the hill on W. 18th Street. Big wood-burning stoves in each room provided heat in the winter, and we relied on Mother Nature and the help of big fans to keep the rooms comfortable in early summer. None of the schools and only one or two homes I’d visited were air-conditioned back then. The school’s wooden floors were cleaned religiously with linseed oil, which left a thin shine and light oily scent. But the old building was replaced a couple of years after I arrived by a one-story California-style model, similar to the building that sits in the same spot today. From as early as I can remember, I walked up that hill every day alone or with other schoolmates to class. Parents felt safe enough to let us go, and I certainly didn’t feel a need to have Mother or Daddy tag along.
I was a sixth grader at Stephens in May 1954 when news about the historic Brown v. Board of Education broke. I read about it in the Weekly Reader, a popular children’s newspaper. My teacher, Mrs. King, explained that the highest court in the land had decided it was unfair and against the law for black and white children to attend separate schools. Black children would finally have access to the same opportunities the white students had, she told us. Being a kid, I thought she meant we’d see some changes—new books, at least—right away. I was disappointed when, as far as I could tell, nothing changed that year. The next year, I moved to the all-black Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jr. and Sr. High School, which had been named for the internationally renowned black poet.
Some days, I caught a ride with a family member or rode the city bus to school to Dunbar. But most of the time, I walked the two-plus miles. I’d pass Roselawn Cemetery and cross the bridge over the Union Pacific Railroad track. Then, there it was—to my left, just one mile from my house, the all-white Little Rock Central High School. From that angle, I could see only the huge football field and stadium. That grand school building, with a campus that spread across four square blocks, loomed just beyond in the distance. The stadium was so close that on Friday and Saturday evenings during football season, I could see the
bright lights shining from Central’s football field in the neighborhood. That stadium and field house were the envy of schools everywhere.
But the school’s reputation extended far beyond its championship football teams and sports facilities. Mr. Fox had taken classes at the University of Kansas with Jess Matthews, Central’s principal, so when I visited the Foxes, I always got an earful about the school’s academic success and first-rate programs. The school had a stellar reputation for sending its graduates to the top-rated colleges in the country, often on scholarships, Mr. Fox told me. It also had a huge two-thousand-seat auditorium, professional stage, and state-of-the-art lighting for students interested in theater. Students interested in biology and science had access to a fully equipped greenhouse.
Sometimes, as I passed Central, I wondered what it would be like to be a student there and have access to all of that and more. I was a serious student who made A’s and B’s and spent a good bit of time thinking about my future. I had recently begun dreaming of becoming a doctor after reading about Madame Curie, the first woman in France to receive a doctorate and the only woman to receive the Nobel Prize twice. She wasn’t a medical doctor, but she was a brilliant scientist whose discoveries in the field of radiation changed the world. I liked that her discoveries helped prove to the world the scientific capabilities of women. I’d heard one of my uncles say that he once wanted to become a doctor, so I figured that would be a good field for me. I didn’t know of any women doctors and certainly not any black ones, but Madame Curie had inspired me to take a chance. I loved science, and I liked the idea of helping people, of changing the world. I was sure that Central would have everything I needed to reach those goals someday. Maybe there, I thought, I could even get a new biology or chemistry book—one that I could write my name in. At Dunbar, all of my books were hand-me-downs from the white schools. By the time I got them, a white kid’s name usually was already scrawled across the front cover. Some of the books were so shabby and worn that they were missing pages. My ears would always perk up when I heard the white kids on our neighborhood softball teams talking to one another about new lab equipment coming to their school or a new book a teacher had promised. New books and resources for the white kids usually meant newer hand-me-downs for the black kids, always far better than anything we had.
A Mighty Long Way Page 4
