MY grandmother India always said God had pointed a finger at our family, asking for just a bit more discipline, more praying, and more hard work because He had blessed us with good health and good brains. My mother was one of the first few blacks to integrate the University of Arkansas, graduating in 1954. Three years later, when Grandma discovered I would be one of the first blacks to attend Central High School, she said the nightmare that had surrounded my birth was proof positive that destiny had assigned me a special task.
First off, I was born on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941. Mother says while she was giving birth to me, there was a big uproar, with the announcement that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She remembers how astonished she was, and yet her focus was necessarily on the task at hand. There was trouble with my delivery because Mom was tiny and I was nine pounds. The doctor used forceps to deliver me and injured my scalp. A few days later, I fell ill with a massive infection. Mother took me to the white hospital, which reluctantly treated the families of black men who worked on the railroad. A doctor operated to save my life by inserting a drainage system beneath my scalp.
Twenty-four hours later I wasn’t getting better. Whenever Mother sought help, neither nurses nor doctors would take her seriously enough to examine me. Instead, they said, “Just give it time.”
Two days after my operation, my temperature soared to 106 and I started convulsing. Mother sent for the minister to give me the last rites, and relatives were gathering to say farewell.
That evening, while Grandmother sat in my hospital room, rocking me back and forth as she hummed her favorite hymn, “On the Battlefield for My Lord,” Mother paced the floor weeping aloud in her despair. A black janitor who was sweeping the hallway asked why she was crying. She explained that I was dying because the infection in my head had grown worse.
The man extended his sympathy. As he turned to walk away, dragging his broom behind him, he mumbled that he guessed the Epsom salts hadn’t worked after all. Mother ran after him asking what he meant. He explained that a couple of days before, he had been cleaning the operating room as they finished up with my surgery. He had heard the doctor tell the white nurse to irrigate my head with Epsom salts and warm water every two or three hours or I wouldn’t make it.
Mother shouted the words “Epsom salts and water” as she raced down the hall, desperately searching for a nurse. The woman was indignant, saying, yes, come to think of it, the doctor had said something about Epsom salts. “But we don’t coddle niggers,” she growled.
Mother didn’t talk back to the nurse. She knew Daddy’s job was at stake. Instead, she sent for Epsom salts and began the treatment right away. Within two days, I was remarkably better. The minister went home, and the sisters from the church abandoned their death watch, declaring they had witnessed a miracle.
So fifteen years later, when I was selected to integrate Central High, Grandmother said, “Now you see, that’s the reason God spared your life. You’re supposed to carry this banner for our people.”
2
BLACK folks aren’t born expecting segregation, prepared from day one to follow its confining rules. Nobody presents you with a handbook when you’re teething and says, “Here’s how you must behave as a second-class citizen.” Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions of segregation creep over you, slowly stealing a teaspoonful of your self-esteem each day.
BY the time I was three years old, I was already so afraid of white people that when my red-haired, white-skinned cousin, Brenda, came to babysit, I hid beneath Mother’s bed. Like many nonwhite Southern families, ours included people with a variety of skin tones and physical features. Although Daddy’s skin was brown like mine, some of his relatives looked white.
My mother was fair-skinned as well, but Brenda’s skin color was made more stark by her flaming red hair. As a toddler, growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1945, I felt safe only in my sepia-toned world, a cocoon of familiar people and places. I knew there were white people living somewhere far away and we didn’t do things together. My folks never explained that I should be frightened of those white people. My fear developed as I observed adults and listened to their conversations. With alarmed expressions, they often whispered, “The white folks won’t like us to do that,” or “We don’t wanna anger the white folks.”
Whenever we walked uptown, among white people, Mother held my hand too tight. I could see the fear in her eyes, feel the stiffening of her body as white people walked past. If we happened to be in their path, she quickly shoved me aside, according them the privilege of first passage.
If white adults were accompanied by children, those kids scowled or stuck their tongues out at us. Even worse, they’d sometimes say, “Mama, look at that there nigger.”
Those trips to town became my primer on relating to white people. While shopping in the five-and-dime one hot summer day, I urged my mother to ask the waitress behind the lunch counter to give me a glass of water. She clutched my arm and whispered that we had to use our own drinking fountain. I started to cry aloud. I looked over to see the shiny chrome fountain the white people used. I didn’t want to go to our fountain marked “Colored.” It was the old dusty one located in an isolated part of the store, where I was afraid to go even with Mother.
Mother says when she tried to usher me to our drinking fountain, I caused such a fuss that the store manager chided her and asked if we were some of those uppity niggers from the North come to stir up trouble.
BY the time I was four years old, I was asking questions neither my mother nor grandmother cared to answer. “Why do the white people write ‘Colored’ on all the ugly drinking fountains, the dingy restrooms, and the back of the buses? When will we get our turn to be in charge?” Grandma India would only say, “In God’s time. Be patient, child, and tell God all about it.”
I remember sitting on the dining room floor, writing letters to God in my Indian Head tablet. I painstakingly formed the alphabet just as Grandma had taught me to do in order to distract me from my asthma cough. I could do the multiplication table through ten and read and write simple sentences by the age of four as a result of all those long nights working with her.
I also wrote to God about getting a park where I could swim and ride the merry-go-round. Whenever we went to Fair Park, the grownups warned me not to walk near the pool. We had to stay in a separate area. If I asked about riding the merry-go-round, Mother Lois and Grandmother India got very nervous. They would tell me there was no space for me as they dragged me away.
When the mailman failed to bring a reply from God, and things at the park didn’t change, even after a year, my patience wore thin. With each passing day, I realized just how different things really were for me.
When I was five, I had my first true bout with testing the harsh realities of segregation. My family—Grandmother, Mother, Daddy, and Conrad, plus most of my aunts and uncles—had gathered at Fair Park for a Fourth of July picnic. As usual we were separated from the white people, set apart in a wooded section away from the pool and the merry-go-round. While the grownups busied themselves setting up the meal, I made my escape, sneaking away to ride the merry-go-round. I had had my eye on one horse in particular, Prancer, the one I had dreamed about during all those months as I saved up the five pennies I needed to ride him.
I reached up to give the concessionaire my money. “There’s no space for you here,” the man said. But I pointed to Prancer’s empty saddle. That’s when he shouted at me and banged hard on the counter, spilling my coins on the ground. “You don’t belong here, picaninny.” I didn’t know what that word meant. But his growling voice hurt my ears and made my knees shake. Angry faces glared at me as though I’d done something terribly wrong. Scurrying past the people waiting in line, I was so terrified that I didn’t even take the time to pick up my precious pennies. At five I learned that there was to be no space for me on that merry-go-round no matter how many saddles stood empty.
AS a young child, my life was c
entered around the big, old, white wood-frame house at 1121 Cross Street that was my home. I lived there with my mother, Lois, her mother—my grandmother India—my father, Howell, and my brother, Conrad. Seven red cement stairs led up to the front door. A giant rubber plant stood just inside the front hallway next to tall mahogany bookcases that held the cherished volumes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Emily Dickinson, and of James Welden Johnson and Langston Hughes that Grandma and Mother loved so much. Some of the shelves held the textbooks Mother used for teaching seventh-grade English and for the night classes she took to get her master’s degree.
Next came the living room with its tattered, overstuffed green velvet chair and matching couch. The half-moon-shaped radio with brass knobs sat on a round mahogany table. Wine-colored leather chairs stood on either side. Great-grandma Ripley’s clock and a copper horse that had belonged to Great-grandpa rested on the mantel over the fireplace.
The kitchen had a huge old-fashioned stove, a red chrome-trimmed breakfast table and chairs, bright yellow walls, and a linoleum floor with visible marks of wear and tear. Grandma could usually be found scrubbing it sparkling clean or baking cornbread, simmering collard greens, or preparing her special gourmet salmon soufflé. She had learned to cook some of her fancy dishes when she worked as a maid in white ladies’ kitchens on Park Hill. Much of that time, she earned only a dollar a day, which she used to support her three children after Grandpa died. Since they had very little money, my uncle and aunt worked to help
Grandma put my mother through college.
MY favorite place in our house was Grandma India’s bedroom, filled with her “dibbies,” the name she gave the personal things that “a body treasures and holds close to the heart.” Her room always smelled of fresh flowers. Antique velvet scarves with satin fringe draped the back of her rocking chair and the back of the overstuffed maroon velvet chair in the corner by the window. There were photographs of her travels—to an Indian reservation where her husband, Grandpa Charles Peyton, had grown up with his people in Canada. There were also old tin-plate photos of her travels as a young woman to Italy with her father, Great-grandpa Ripley, when he accompanied his boss to Rome on business.
I couldn’t decide which of her treasures I loved most—her eight-foot-tall antique armoire with its ornate Oriental carvings, her iridescent green music box that played “Stardust,” or the special Dutch-girl quilts she created with colorful fabric profiles in each square.
I don’t remember life without Grandmother India. Mother and Daddy had lived with her in North Little Rock even before I was born. When they purchased our Little Rock house, Grandma came with them. Unlike Mother, who was delicate and fair, Grandma was tall and copper-skinned. She had pronounced cheekbones and huge, deep-set almond-shaped eyes that peered at me from behind wire-rimmed spectacles. She had a regal posture and a fearless attitude. My happiest evenings were spent listening to her read aloud from the Bible, from Archie comic books, or from Shakespeare. I sometimes gave up my favorite radio programs like The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, Our Miss Brooks, and The Aldrich Family to hear her read to me.
For as long as I can remember, I spent late afternoons with Grandma India in her garden, tending her four o’clock plants. I would stand beside her holding on to her skirt as she pulled the weeds or held the water hose. That’s when we had our private talks. Once when I was six or so, I explained to her that I believed each human being was really only a spirit—made by God, and that our bodies were like clothes hanging in the closet. I said I thought that one day I would be able to exchange my body for a white body, and then I could be in charge.
“Some of your thinking is right, child. We are not these bodies, we are spirits, God’s ideas. But you must strive to be the best of what God made you. You don’t want to be white, what you really want is to be free, and freedom is a state of mind.”
“Yes, ma’am, but . . .”
“I hope you haven’t told anyone else about spirits and bodies.” She squeezed my hand. “Well, have you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good. It’s time you started keeping a diary so’s you can write down these thoughts and share them with me sometimes, but mostly keep them to yourself and tell God.”
The next time she went to town she brought me a pink diary that I could lock with a little key. Most evenings before sleeping, I looked forward to going to my bedroom to write to God. I was actually giving God an exam because He hadn’t kept His promise so far. I had asked Grandma could I still trust Him, and she had said, “Always, child, but remember, it’s His schedule, not yours. His good will come when you least expect it.”
My room was a place for my stuffed animals to live and a home for my huge brown Raggedy Ann doll, the one Grandma India made for me. It was a magical place where I daydreamed for hours as I listened to music or radio shows. There I could be whoever I wanted; I could be white—I could be free.
My brother, Conrad’s, bedroom was filled with strange trucks, glass jars of crawly bugs, and a wooden train Daddy made for him. Conrad spent lots of time counting marbles, putting puzzles together, and playing Monopoly. His room always seemed to be cluttered with pieces and parts of things, and Daddy would often march into Conrad’s room and demand that he put all his toys and trucks back into the red wooden box they had built together.
Daddy worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad as a hostler’s helper. He would arrive home, his huge muscular body obviously tired from the physical labor of his job. Mother constantly reminded him that if he’d finish just one more course, he could graduate from college and have a professional job that paid more. But he resisted, saying he preferred to work outside in the fresh air, where he was free. He loved hunting and fishing and getting away to the wilds where nobody could bother him. It made Mother very angry that he wouldn’t follow her advice. I worried they might do what my friend Carolyn’s parents did—get a divorce. At the time, I didn’t know the meaning of that word, but I knew that when it happened, her daddy was gone forever.
The dining room with its big oval table was the place we gathered each night for dinner and evening games. Daddy sat in the brown leather chair, reading his newspaper and working his crossword puzzles. Grandma entertained us with reading or checkers and chess so we wouldn’t bother Mother as she studied for her night-school exams. She was determined to complete her master’s degree.
When she began graduate school, our people couldn’t attend classes with whites at the University of Arkansas. After much grumbling and dickering, white folks had begun to allow small departments to integrate, class by class. She would tell us the story of the lone black man who was trying to integrate the law school. In the classroom, he was forced to sit confined by a white picket fence erected around his desk and chair. When he needed to come or go, he sometimes stumbled over that fence. White people around him sometimes stumbled over that fence, too. And still each day when he arrived, there it was, encircling him, keeping him separate but equal.
Mother began meeting with a few others from our community who were also determined to be admitted to the graduate school of education at the university. At the time, they were attending extension classes but in a separate space set aside for our people. Sometimes we got telephone calls from people warning us not to push any further to integrate the university. Nevertheless, Mother Lois continued her meetings and her classes.
I will always remember the night she casually looked up from her papers to tell us she would be one of the first of our people to attend the University of Arkansas. There was a nervous quiver in her voice. The glance she exchanged with Grandma made me realize they were both frightened of what lay ahead. “I can’t turn back now,” Mother said. “Forward is the only way our people can march.”
Later that winter, she smiled as she talked across the dinner table about the integrated classes. Some nights she would come home exhausted, her face pale and drawn, her teary eyes reflecting the discomfort of her plight. When I asked what happen
ed, she would only say white folks were stubborn about seeing our people as God’s ideas.
Nevertheless, she survived. A few years later in 1954, she tugged me forward by my hand as Conrad and Grandma walked just behind us up the sidewalk to her graduation. It was a rare occasion, for I saw a few white folks look at Mother with a pleasant expression. This time she didn’t seem as nervous around them, maybe because she was wearing the same black cap and gown they were as she held the diploma in her hand. “It’s the first graduate degree I know of in this family,” Grandma India said, stroking the document as though it were the same precious tablet given Moses in the Bible.
WITHIN our community, we were considered middle-class folk. The middle-class label was mostly because of Mother’s teaching job. It didn’t mean we had lots of money or lived without struggling to pay our mortgage or the bills. Preachers, teachers, and doctors were usually the only professionals in our community, and hence they were accorded a special kind of respect because they had educational degrees. Certainly we were not considered radical integrationists or people who made waves. We were quiet churchgoing folks. Daddy’s Uncle Benjamin Pattillo was a preacher who traveled from city to city conducting revivals. I remember spending many a night sitting and fanning myself in churches as he preached, while aunts and cousins joined in the choir.
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