I Will Not Fear

by Melba Pattillo Beals

  I walked down the hall toward the living room, thinking for an instant that maybe they all were right; if I went with them to bury Grandma, it might not be so bad. But then I felt something deep inside. I squeezed my eyes tight and put my hands over my ears. I was standing motionless in the hallway with my aunt behind me, trying to push me forward. Some man whom I didn’t even know was also telling me what to do. He kept saying my grandma was dead. Shut up, I thought to myself. Grandma India would never, never die and leave me. I felt my entire body start to tremble, a trembling that got stronger and stronger as I fought against it.

  That’s when a voice screamed so loud it hurt my throat and my ears. “Grandma is not dead!” It was an angry voice that sounded much like my own. “There is no funeral to go to! Shut up!”

  “It’s all right, Melba . . . I understand.” Mother Lois stood over me speaking in a calm voice, tears running down her face. She was treating me as if something was wrong with me.

  “Never mind, I’ll tend to her.” I heard the familiar tones of our family doctor, then felt a needle prick in my arm. The shot did its job—all of my being softened into an indefinable drift to nowhere. Sometime later, when I became conscious, I was sitting in the big, green chair from the living room, which had been moved into my bedroom. There was only silence around me. The house seemed empty. I folded my arms against the chill, feeling even more lonely and lost than before. Then I heard two church ladies’ voices in the kitchen and the sound of rattling dishes, but it still felt as if I were alone.

  I walked into Grandma India’s room where she kept all her personal belongings, special items she called her “dibbies.” I reached out to stroke her embroidered pillow that read, “God is love.” Then I drew my hand back as though she would catch me. It had been one of her untouchables. Now I could touch her dibbies all I wanted because she wasn’t there to say no.

  I would have given anything to have her slap my hand as I picked up her green music box with the ivory cameo figure on top and held it to my chest. It was her favorite possession. When I lifted the lid, it played “Stardust.” The tinny music filled the air as I opened the door to her closet. There hung all her clothes. I could smell the scent of vanilla flavoring she had made her special perfume. I touched her blue crepe dress with the buttons down the front. All her shawls hung across hangers, waiting for her to choose one.

  I nuzzled among her clothes and hugged a bunch of her dresses that held her personal aroma. It made me feel as though she were hugging me. I didn’t know where it came from, but a voice seemed to say to me that she loved me just the same, even though I could no longer see her. I stood still for a long time, feeling her all around me.

  After a week’s recuperation, during which I stayed in my locked room, Mother Lois and Conrad went back to their schools. Central High and all the African American high schools remained closed to halt integration. I had no place to go. Governor Faubus had won this round. Neither the Supreme Court justices, nor the president, nor the NAACP, nor anybody else could stop him. The white people had built a huge private school, open only to their chosen ones.

  I was left alone in that house with Grandma’s memories all around me. At first, I thought I would lose my mind. I wanted more than anything to see her as she was, alive and well, to speak with her just once more. Sure enough, just as clear as a bell, one afternoon I heard Grandma’s voice remind me that I couldn’t lose my mind because God inhabited my mind. One day melted into another the way they do when you don’t have a place you belong or a work routine. I didn’t follow any pattern in eating or bathing or dressing or any of the other tasks I had to do to live. I felt numb and cold, like a statue. It was as though I lived behind a big piece of glass that separated me from all other living people. I was waiting for someone or something to rescue me. I wanted the God I had abandoned to prove to me that He did care for me, even though I hated Him. I picked up Grandmother’s tattered Bible and began reading the psalms. I read for two hours before I realized I felt better. I stood up to take care of some personal hygiene. Peace washed over me with the bath water.

  A few nights later, Grandma India came to me in a dream that was so real I felt as though I could reach out and touch her. She was robust and smiling. “Life is a precious gift, my child—a cherished grant only to those who use it to the fullest each day,” she said as she hugged me and smiled. “Do not squander God’s gift.”

  The next morning, I sat straight upright, feeling as though she were nearby. Then I remembered she couldn’t be, and I was a bundle of sadness again. Still, I felt a rush of new energy. I knew I had to resume my morning studies and afternoon housework. I felt her watching me. So with the television playing in the background to lessen my loneliness, I began doing all the household chores. I discovered the busier I kept myself, the better I felt. Deep inside I knew for certain no one was going to rescue me. I had to renew my relationship with God—I had to trust again in order to let Him rescue me.

  As the school year rolled deeper into winter, the governor’s closing of our schools continued to be challenged by US authority. At first, President Eisenhower expressed hope that public sentiment would force the governor to reopen public schools. But with the creation of private schools for whites only, based on the school board’s and the superintendent of schools’ plan to limit integration, whites were indeed able to run their private schools without tax money.

  The NAACP told us five who remained to integrate Central High to continue to wait, that the case hinged on our not registering in another school. So wait we did, while newspapers reported that the segregationists hoped we’d either register at another school or, better yet, be killed.

  Those annoying, threatening nighttime calls continued. But they came without the emotional paralysis that came from losing Grandma India. I just answered them by repeating the 23rd Psalm and slamming the phone down. I no longer feared the callers because the pain of Grandma’s loss outweighed everything else.

  Life seemed to be happening as though I were a robot on automatic pilot. The approach of Christmas gave me an opportunity to make myself very busy. Mother Lois had little time to shop and cook and decorate. Somehow, I felt obligated to keep the house running the way Grandma wanted it. I found myself taking on her role, becoming more and more like her every day. I made a list of all the things I remembered she had done in holiday seasons past and then completed everything on that list. Listening to carols and decorating the Christmas tree, we even laughed when Conrad did his Santa routine. Still, there were no gingerbread men with jelly bean eyes or double butter cakes because none of us knew the recipes.

  Worst of all, we forgot to hang stockings. Grandma India always hung the stockings and filled them with tiny goodies from Santa, like a bracelet and toothpaste and warm socks that she had knitted. On Christmas Day I sat alone, trying to remember just what it was like to have her present. All our family members had gathered as usual. Except for Mother, they laughed louder and sang louder, pretending everything was joyous. They never even asked why I sat alone staring out the window.

  Grandma India had always said that if a body has faith, even if it is only the size of a mustard seed, the promise of spring would renew all things, and so it was with me. I felt her energy driving me to be a part of the rebirth. By March of 1959, I actually began to relish my days filled with housework, studying, and watching soap operas. I was no longer angry at God. I realized God did not take Grandma to punish me. Could it be that He took her to reward her for her good deeds? God loves me and is always there for me even when I abandon Him. Grandma wanted me to claim life at its fullest, and so that is exactly what I determined to do. Someway, somehow I was going to get myself back into school.

  God is there for us even when we are angry with Him. Faith and trust in God are the only way to survive. Faith can be renewed, if we are willing to surrender. With renewal comes hope for healing and the ability to move forward.

  Seven

  God Is Everywhere, Especially in
California

  Somehow a threat to your life makes you much more aware of a need for Jesus. That’s the time when you feel abandoned, and you want something or somebody to hold on to. The first thing you realize is that no human being can fulfill that spot.

  A year later, by the end of the 1959 school semester, three of our number had already moved to other cities to attend school. It became clear over that winter that all of us would have to escape to the North to save our lives. The Ku Klux Klan bullies had posted flyers all over town with “$10,000 if dead, $5,000 alive.” Frequently, cars would drive by our house filled with gnarly looking white men who would point our way.

  I found myself locked down and imprisoned by this Klan treatment. Because Governor Faubus had closed all Little Rock schools, I was asked by the NAACP not to enter another school so as to keep the court case open. I had spent a year at home alone and lonely, having to cope with reality including life-changing milestones, like the death of Grandma India. I began believing for a time that God had abandoned me.

  I never thought I would be grateful to the Klan for any reason; however, yea team, those flyers and stalkers speeded up my ticket out of Little Rock. The NAACP and my parents took the threats seriously and told me that I would have to leave Arkansas to save my life. I was overjoyed. I was so bored spending all my time in the house or in the company of the adults guarding me. Each of the six of us still in Arkansas during the year following the integration of Central was placed with families across the United States. The NAACP put out urgent calls to members in branches across the country in order to solicit folks who would take in and protect and give a safe home to our members of the nine. I was off to California. I was set to complete my senior year of classes in a new place with strangers. Neither Mother nor I had met our sponsors, the Santa Rosa NAACP.

  I immediately began daydreaming about my life with a wealthy African American family in California who would provide me with a telephone and subscriptions to Ebony and Seventeen magazines and a gorgeously decorated bedroom, tons of friends, and the redo of the prom I had missed. Of course, I envisioned a very comfortable African American family who lived in a moderate-sized mansion like the ones I had seen on television shows about Californians. Maybe when I turned eighteen they could afford to give me a used car. I pushed the dream as far as I could expand it.

  When I was told I would be met by members of the Santa Rosa, California, NAACP at the San Francisco airport, I was comfortable and excited. “Praise God,” I whispered as I stood in the vast, unfamiliar airport, feeling lost in a strange city that I knew nothing about. I was stunned when a group of fifteen or so white adult folks rushed up to greet me and reached out to hug me. White people didn’t hug us. What was wrong with these smiling, kind-voiced people? It was frightening. What did they want?

  I hoped the NAACP committee of African Americans was nearby to rescue me. I didn’t know what to say when those white people introduced themselves as NAACP members. My mind was on fire wondering if they were really members of the Ku Klux Klan, coming to get rid of me so they could collect the $10,000. Only the trust that God couldn’t bring me all this far and drop me consoled me momentarily. I had no choice in that huge, unfamiliar city but to trust God and go with them as they loaded me in a van to take me to the family I’d be living with. I did not know what else to do.

  No one in the NAACP of Arkansas or the national group had told me that my hosts or my family might be white. En route to Santa Rosa, I was questioning myself about what got me into this mess. Were the people I was riding with really a welcoming NAACP team? Were they taking me to meet an African American family? Finally, we turned into a long, gravelly driveway that crunched under tires as we rode onto the farm. Ahead was a two-story, white farmhouse with a range of vast, green mountains looming in the distance and an occasional cow roaming about. The peaked roof covered a number of small loft rooms. We parked and got out of the van.

  Suddenly, I was introduced to the family I would be living with. I was astonished and frightened to find that they were white. Mrs. McCabe told me to call her Kay and invited me and the committee members to come inside. There I met the two smallest members of the family and was told that there were two other children my age who were still at school. Then Kay told me, “My husband, George, will be home soon. He’s teaching a psychology class at San Francisco State today.”

  It was warm and rustic inside the house, with chunky furniture, well-worn hardwood floors, and embroidered and crocheted pillows. The aroma of beef stew hung in the air. Beyond the kitchen in the backyard were pigs, goats, and the cows to be milked. Although Kay said I was welcome, I didn’t feel welcome in a white stranger’s home. I thought NAACP meant black.

  The McCabes were as welcoming, kind, and soft-spoken as they could be. However, the only words to describe my feelings were frightened beyond comprehension. Their neighbors had thrown rocks at me in front of the house upon my arrival. When Dr. George McCabe arrived home, he picked up the rocks and threw them back, saying it was none of their business.

  With their reddish hair and hazel eyes, the McCabes resembled the people in the Little Rock mob who had chased me from Central High in 1957. The adults, Kay, a petite woman with copper-brown bangs that lay across her forehead and tortoiseshell glasses, and George, a tall and lanky six-feet-two bony man with flaming red hair and blue eyes, resembled closely the predators I feared. The sisters, especially the two older ones, one my age and one a year younger, resembled the students of Central High who had defined the word misery for me by making it my reality.

  Instead of magazine subscriptions and a glamorous room all to myself, I was to share a bedroom with two white teenage strangers on an isolated farm in Santa Rosa, California, in the most modest of circumstances. I was surrounded by an ordinary neighborhood of farmers, ordinary houses, farm animals, and a way of life I knew absolutely nothing about. I was particularly unnerved by the group of cows that gathered in a neat row at a fence just outside my bedroom window. They peered in at me as I squealed and stared back at them, wondering why they were there. No one had explained that their feeding trough was there. They had gathered for their meal. I prayed so hard and spent many sleepless hours face down in my pillow crying that first week. What was I doing there with those white people? I was both afraid and lonely—I was on pins and needles, waiting for something to go wrong. I didn’t tell Mom anything about being miserable. I didn’t want to go back to Little Rock. Besides, I didn’t want to worry her. I told myself that after two awful years of fright, I deserved peace and pleasure. I deserved to be with loving people who would take care of me. The answer came back, what if that is exactly what you have here? What if these are the loving people you asked God for? Day after day, moment after moment, they taught me the meaning of kindness, acceptance, and love. There was not one iota of evidence that they wished to harm me in any way.

  Both George and Kay escorted me to school for registration. They were gentle in making certain that I was comfortable and set for the right classes. They introduced me to the principal and his assistant and then turned me over to my new sisters, Joanie, age fifteen, and Judy, sixteen. Joanie and Judy escorted me from class to class, casually introducing me to their friends without any prologue (like explaining where I came from or what I was doing there). Because of all the inquiries of the press and calls to have me speak, George said I should use my middle name, thus abandoning my identification as a civil rights heroine, one of the Little Rock Nine.

  George decided I would not speak or give interviews. “You will have the opportunity here to become a regular high school senior, free of all that confusion. I want you to relax and enjoy yourself.” Enjoy—the word echoed in my ear. My mother had never used that word before. What would it be like to feel joy? I wondered. I could not relax. Once again, I was an African American alone among hundreds of white students. Montgomery High School was small, well equipped, and warmly decorated. However, there were only four other African Americans attending
, and I seldom saw them. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I was not back at Central High as I moved among a sea of white faces. The big differences were that some of them smiled and no one reached out to hit me.

  From the first day I arrived to my classes, not one of those white students called me a name, made rude gestures, or behaved in any way unwelcoming to me. Instead, many of them wore sweet facial expressions and smiled at me as they opened doors for me, picked up my dropped books, and directed me to my next class. To my amazement, the end of the first week came, and I found myself packed into a car owned by a student named Mary on my way to the Pickup Drive-In to get a hamburger. And yes, I did have a fleeting thought that they would take me to the woods, tie me up, and leave me there or hang me. It didn’t happen.

  After school, they dropped me off at home so that I could relax. Time after time, I exhausted myself waiting for abuse, dreaming up ugly things that could happen to me. The McCabes treated me as family—billeting me in the room with Judy and Joanie. The two younger children, Ricky and Dori, had their own rooms.

  The McCabes consistently showed me their compassion. When the local swimming pool refused to allow me to swim, George gathered his university friends and marched in front of the pool to protest, chanting as they held large placards. After one day, the manager called to say I would be allowed to swim.

  I asked the McCabes if I could become a member of their church family. I told them that I had been Methodist. As they were Quakers, they suggested I go to another church across town. After a couple of visits, I determined I was the only person of color in that church, which was a little uncomfortable for me. I asked George if he knew where all the black people were. He said there were only about seven African American adults and seven young people in the town, with only two of those attending my high school. I went back to the white church and stayed there and was befriended.