Warriors Don't Cry

“With the passage of time, I became increasingly aware of how all the adults around me were living with constant fear and apprehension. It felt as though we always had a white foot pressed against the back of our necks. I was feeling more and more vulnerable as I watched them continually struggle to solve the mystery of what white folks expected of them. They behaved as though it were an awful sin to overlook even one of those unspoken rules and step out of their place to cross some invisible line.”

Melba writes that, from the age of four, she began to question her elders about the racial inequities she experienced. Though not yet 10 years old, she recognized that the adults around her lived in a constant state of vigilance and anxiety. There were unwritten rules to which Black citizens knew they must adhere. Melba recognized this capricious injustice long before she faced it head-on at Central High.

“I didn’t agree with the radio announcers who described Little Rock as a nice, clean Southern town, a place where my people and whites got along peacefully. City officials boasted there hadn’t been a Klan hanging of one of our people in at least ten years.”

Melba’s paraphrasing of a radio announcer’s description of Little Rock captures the irony of the contrasting Black and white visions of the community. Melba knew Black citizens felt the need to remain perpetually vigilant and cautious. The 10-year absence of lynchings, perceived by the oblivious radio spokesman as a sign of racial harmony, in Melba’s mind was a recognition that no Black person had caused a problem for the communities segregationists. Note also that Melba never uses the term “lynch” but rather employs the euphemistic “hanging.”

“We integrating students shared many things in common. All of our parents were strict, no-nonsense types. Several of them were teachers and preachers, or held well-established positions in other professions. All of our folks were hardworking people who had struggled to own their own homes, to provide a stable life for their families. We shared many of the same family values traditional to all small-town Americans. Our parents demanded that we behave appropriately at home and in public. I couldn’t imagine that any one of us would ever talk back to our folks or other adults. […] Most of all, we were individualists with strong opinions. Each of us planned to go to college.”

As Melba describes it from a student’s perspective, choosing Black students to attend Central High was quite informal. Any Black high school-aged student living in the Central High district was eligible to attend. Though the eventual nine students who integrated the school self-selected, they had much in common, including a middle-class, high-achiever mentality and strong family background. When questioned about the selection process during the year of struggle, school administrators falsely portrayed the students as being carefully chosen as most likely to succeed.

“On the night of the governor’s speech, the phone didn’t stop ringing. One caller said he knew our address and would be right over to bomb the house. Grandma went directly to her room, where she took the shotgun she called Mr. Higgenbottom from its leather case in the back of her closet. That night, she set up her guard post near the window to the side yard where she thought we were most vulnerable.”

Continual threats and the very real need to protect Melba and her family from violence were constant throughout the 1957-58 school year, beginning with the announcement of the names of Central High’s Black students. National and international media attention caused the Little Rock Nine to become celebrities while also revealing their addresses, family members, and personal information, which segregationists used to assail them.

“You’ll make this your last cry. You’re a warrior on the battlefield for your Lord. God’s warriors don’t cry, ’cause they trust that he’s always on their side. The women of this family don’t break down in the face of trouble. We act with courage, and with God’s help, we will ship any trouble right on out.”

Grandma India approaches a weeping Melba. Fearing that attackers might be waiting for Melba to leave the house, her elders prevented her from going to the community center with her friends. India does not console but rather confronts Melba, intending to express the significance of Melba’s effort to integrate the high school and positioning her attempt in line with the struggles other women in the family endured before Melba’s time. From these remarks, Melba drew the book's title along with the recognition that this was the beginning of The Creation of a Warrior.

“I knew very well that without the church and the help of the people sitting around me, I had little chance of making it through that school year. Certainly I couldn’t count on the police. If I got into trouble and really needed protection, it would probably be the network of phone calls initiated by Reverend Young that would set off a rescue and construct a web safety.”

The struggles of the Little Rock Nine were an amalgam of individual fortitude and resourcefulness coupled with the support of some but not all in the Black community. To demonstrate the distinction of the forces weighed against one another in this conflict, Melba describes the school administration, state government, National Guard, and police as being opposed to her efforts. Working with her, though intentionally hamstrung by the opposition, were her family, community churches, the NAACP, and, by default, the regional and national news media.

“Today is the first time in my life I felt equal to white people. I want more of that feeling. I’ll do whatever I have to do to keep feeling equal all the time. I apologize, God, for thinking you had taken away all my normal life. Maybe you’re just exchanging it for a new life.”

This quote is the entry in Melba’s diary following her appearance at a press conference in which local and national media asked her about Governor Faubus’s attempts to block the integration of Central High School. Her concern prior to the press conference had been not to reveal the extent of danger and harassment she and the other Black students experienced. She found it a revelation when the media treated her with deference and respect she had previously seen reserved only for white citizens.

“‘How were these nine students chosen?’

‘The Negroes were selected on the basis of scholarship, personal conduct, and health. We picked those who had the mental ability to do the job and had used it,’ Blossom answered.

For just a moment I fretted that they would discover Thelma’s secret heart problem. But the fact was, they had never had us examined by a doctor and there was no talk of doing so.”

During a court hearing to determine whether the need existed to keep National Guard troops stationed around Central High, Superintendent Virgil Blossom makes it sound as if the nine students chosen to integrate the school were part of a careful, two-year winnowing process. Melba, who earlier indicated the students were self-selected, points out that there were no health or other examinations. Melba’s parents only learned about her intention to attend Central two weeks before school started.

“I was assigned to the third floor. We quickly compared notes. Each of us was assigned to a different homeroom.

‘Why can’t any of us be in the same homeroom or take classes together?’ I asked.

From behind the long desk, a man spoke in an unkind booming voice. ‘You wanted integration...you got integration.’

I turned to see the hallway swallow up my friends. None of us had an opportunity to say a real goodbye or make plans to meet. I was alone.”

On their first day of classes, the Little Rock Nine gather in an administration office and quickly learn they will have no classes together. Following her adult guide, Melba immediately experiences the kind of physical, verbal, and emotional abuse that will characterize the next nine months: Students and random adults inside the school curse her, spit on her, and strike her. Even when the nine believe they can begin their education, they find themselves hampered by The Persecution of the Innocent. When it becomes clear the Little Rock police cannot, or will not, contain the angry segregationist crowd outside the school, officials sneak them out of the building and home before lunch.

“We were surrounded by white men in suits speaking in frightened tones. Their expressions told me we were in the kind of trouble I hadn’t even imagined before. The enormous roaring sound coming from the crowd just beyond the door made me wonder whether or not they had waited too long to get us into these cars. Just for one instant I tried to imagine what would happen if the mob got hold of us.”

Here Melba describes the quick exit from Central High the Little Rock Nine made midway through their first day at school. She listened to police officers debating whether to hand one Black student over to the crowd in order to distract the mob while they escaped with the others. The unwillingness of the police to prevent a mob of segregationists from entering a public school to attack students reveals the authorities’ Impotence in the Face of Prejudice. That evening, Melba dictates a story to a reporter in which she does not mention the multiple physical assaults the Black students endured or the panicked escape they made. At no point during the year did the Black students fully express what they were enduring, demonstrating a differing kind of impotence in the face of prejudice.

“I felt proud and sad at the same time. Proud that I lived in a country that would go this far to bring justice to a Little Rock girl like me, but sad that they had to go to such great lengths. Yes, this is the United States, I thought to myself. There is a reason that I salute the flag. If these guys just go with us this first time, everything’s going to be okay.”

These are Melba’s thoughts upon seeing the 101st Airborne soldiers stationed in Little Rock to enforce the federal ruling allowing the integration of Central High. The troops were necessary because an enraged mob nearly stormed the school on the first day of integrated classes, turning away only when scouts confirmed there were no Black students in the school. The passage is ironic as well in that Melba eventually realized that the need for these battle-ready soldiers was necessary throughout the whole year.

“If reporters hadn’t been covering our story, we might have been hanged. News of our demise would be a three-line notation buried on the back page of a white newspaper were it not for the Northern reporters’ nosy persistence in getting the facts and dogging the trail of segregationists.”

In Chapter 8, Melba describes two essential sources of support: the 101st Airborne and national and international journalists. Her comment that the Black students might have been hanged may sound like teenage overstatement but is likely true. Even with the individual protection of a soldier, Melba endured having a lit stick of dynamite thrown at her, having burning paper dropped onto her hair and clothing while trapped in a restroom stall, and having acid thrown in her eyes. This passage is another example of euphemisms, as Melba continually refers to those opposed to integration as “segregationists” rather than “racists” and speaks of “hangings” rather than “lynchings.”

“Sammy Dean Parker was quoted as saying, ‘The Negro students don’t want to go to school with us anymore than we want to go with them. If you really talk with them, you see their side of it. I think the NAACP is paying them to go.’

When I read her statement, I realized Sammy hadn’t understood at all our reasons for attending Central High. I wondered where on earth she thought there was enough money to pay for such brutal days as I was enduring.”

When a Scandinavian journalist arranges a meeting between three Black students and several staunch segregationist students, Melba hopes that, at last, there may be some understanding between the groups resulting in less persecution. She realizes afterward that the Central High segregationists have an impenetrably hostile view of the Black students and are incapable of openness or growth. Over the year, the most hopeful Black students recognize that there will be no rapprochement between groups or easing of hostility.

“By mid-October, there were fewer and fewer 101st guards and fewer Arkansas National Guardsmen. We quickly learned that the presence of the 101st had lulled us into a false sense of security. The segregationist students were just biding their time until they could make their move. As the guards were reduced in number, our attackers revved up a full campaign against us. The less visible the 101st, the more we suffered physical and verbal abuse.”

Melba captures one of the salient features of the Civil Rights Movement as discussed in the analysis above: As time proceeds, federal interest and intervention wane. She notes that the hatred and hostile intentions of the segregationists have not diminished. Frustrated by their failure to chase the Black students from Central High, the segregationists grew all the more eager to inflict suffering upon the Little Rock Nine. As the soldiers and guardsmen received orders to deploy elsewhere, the segregationist students felt re-empowered.

“Newspapers across the country started carrying a series of articles and profiles on the nine of us. Central High segregationists used the details to taunt us. The articles gave specific information on what our homes were like, our backgrounds, our hobbies, our aspirations—all there was to know about us. […]

When the nine of us compared notes, we discovered we were all facing an increasing barrage of injurious activities. What was noticeably different was the frequency and the organized pattern of harassment. Teams of students appeared to be assigned specific kinds of torture.”

Melba and the other students did not know at this time—just before Christmas—that the segregationist students received coaching from adults. She implies that the KKK and mental-health professionals held weekly meetings, during which they specifically targeted different members of the Little Rock Nine. The publicity the Black students received turned out to be a double-edged sword, as it kept the plight and progress of the nine in public view but provided avenues of personal attack for their adversaries.

“‘Melba, the truth is we’re all afraid to come to your house.’

‘Why didn’t you say so earlier, when I called?’

‘I didn’t wanna hurt your feelings. You gotta get used to the fact that you’all are just not one of us anymore. You stuck your necks out, but we’re not willing to die with you.’”

This conversation between Melba and her former best friend, Marsha, takes place when only one of the guests Melba invited to her 16th birthday party attends. As the situation at Central High grows more volatile, Melba’s former friends at Horace Mann High School pull away from her geographically and emotionally. With enemies on one side and false friends on the other, Melba feels completely isolated. That all the Little Rock Nine experienced this may be reflected in eight of the nine’s decisions as adults to abandon Little Rock.

“When I had a long period of time alone on a Saturday, I leafed through the pages of my diary. I had not been fully aware of how deeply the turmoil at school was affecting me. I was stunned to see what I had written.

‘I wish I were dead.’ That was the entry for several days running, in late January. God, please let me be dead until the end of the year. I was willing to bargain and plead with God. I revised my request; I just wanted to become invisible for a month or two period. I clutched the diary to my chest and wept for a long time. ‘No,’ I whispered aloud, ‘I do wish I were dead.’ Then all the pain and hurt would be over.”

Melba’s diary is her constant confidant, the one place where she can be completely honest. Looking back over diary entries, as in this passage, she sometimes feels astonished at what she expressed and the power of her feelings. Reviewing her diary here makes her fully realize how miserable her experiences at Central High make her. As an adult in the years that followed, Melba continues to consult her diary, helping to breathe life and poignancy into her memoir.

“‘They win when you respond the way they expect you to. Change the rules of the game, girl, and they might not like it so much.’

‘They’d think I was crazy.’

‘They’d think you were no longer their victim.’

For the rest of the morning as I walked the halls, amid my hecklers, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would feel like to what it would be like to feel as though I were in charge of myself. I always believed Grandma India had the right answer, so I decided to take her advice.”

By the second semester of her year at Central High, Melba has determined that her natural optimism and perseverance alone will not enable her to cope with the extreme persecution she experiences. She takes to reading Gandhi. Here, she adopts her grandmother’s strategy of reacting to the violence of segregationists with gratitude, leaving them totally confused and disarmed.

“I pretended to become intensely involved in my book. I was reading about Mr. Gandhi’s prison experience and how he quieted his fears and directed his thoughts so that his enemies were never really in charge of him. […] I felt myself smiling inside. As Grandma India said, turning the other cheek would be difficult, but for me it was also beginning to be a lot of fun. Somehow I had won a round in a bizarre mental contest. […] I had a powerful feeling of being in charge. I was no longer allowing hecklers’ behavior to frighten me into acting a certain way. For that moment I was the one making decisions about how I would behave.”

Hemmed in the cafeteria by a group of segregationist boys, Melba has a revelatory moment in which Gandhi’s philosophy and her grandmother’s wisdom come alive, allowing her to outsmart and wait out her adversaries. From this point in the narrative, readers may perceive growing insight and confidence in Melba. She grasps the depth of the animosity she and the other Black students face while also claiming the determination necessary to last at Central High until the end of the school year.

“I didn’t want to defy Mother and Grandma, but Link was inside Central. He understood what I was going through. They could not help me inside that school. I had no choice but to take any help that would enable me to survive. I had to take the risk of trusting Link a little bit, at least for now.”

As the narrative progresses toward the school year's end, more evidence of the new, empowered, confident Melba emerges. Here, she begins to make decisions for herself that are contrary to the advice she receives from her elders. Soon, she makes statements about her fashion choices that run contrary to the rules set down for her by her grandmother. She has experienced persecution beyond what she could be expected to endure and embodies the warrior her grandmother told her she must become.

“‘She hasn’t got any people. She worked for my family all her life. As a young girl, she worked for my grandparents. When Daddy got married, Grandmother sent her to him as a kind of gift. She’s been with me all my life.’

‘Why isn’t she with your family anymore?’

’Cause she got sick—real sick. My folks let her go, just like that, after all the time she’d been so good to us. She’s got no money for a doctor. She won’t take my money. I think she’s got tuberculosis.’”

This passage comes at another juncture in Melba’s growth: She lies to her mother and grandmother about where she is going because she knows they would never allow her to be alone with a white boy. Link, who has saved Melba from violence several times, wants Melba to meet his Black nanny, abandoned by his parents, in hopes she can acquire medical help for this woman who cared for him. In return for the help he has given her, Melba finds a doctor to care for the terminally ill nanny. Link’s description of how his parents obtained this servant shows the attitude white Little Rock citizens had toward Black residents.

“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.”

Despite all the mistreatment she has received during the school year, Melba is still surprised at the final attempt of the segregationists to compel her to withdraw from Central High. This reveals a key distinction between the Little Rock Nine and their families and those who struggled to prevent the integration of Little Rock schools. The Black students and parents have an underlying perception that human beings share a moral basis for their actions and thus that there are limitations on the wicked things people will do to achieve their aims. The segregationists, on the other hand, demonstrate no moral baseline. They are completely ruthless.

“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 the 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 year, but she said a ceremony was important in order to have the official opportunity to give that year to God. Grandma India stood by my side as I fed the flame and spoke their names and forgave them.”

Melba’s religious faith, drawn from her grandmother’s Christianity, served as the spiritual basis for Melba’s ability to endure extreme abuse from every corner of Central High. As with other milestones in Melba’s life, Grandma India knows how to create a ceremony of passage, enabling Melba to move beyond the grueling, thankless year and let go of the people and events who had afflicted her.