Warriors Don't Cry (41 page)

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 stepped 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.

Today, when I see how far we have progressed in terms of school integration, in some instances I am pleased. In other areas I am very angry. Why have we not devised a workable plan for solving a problem that has so long plagued this nation? We put a man on the moon because we committed the resources to do so. Today, thirty-six years after the Central High crisis, school integration is still not a reality, and we use children as tender warriors on the battlefield to achieve racial equality.
IT would take years of sorting out my Central High experience before the pieces of my life puzzle would come together and I could make sense of what happened to me.

In 1962, when I had attended the mostly white San Francisco State University for two years, I found myself living among an enclave of students where I was the only person of color. I was doing it again, integrating a previously all-white residence house, even though I had other options. I had been taken there as a guest, and someone said the only blacks allowed there were the cooks. So, of course, I made application and donned my warrior garb because it reminded me of the forbidden fences of segregation in Little Rock.

One night, a brown-haired soldier wearing olive-drab fatigues stepped across the threshold of my suite. His name was John, and he was a blind date for Mary, my roommate. Of course, for just an instant, he reminded me of my 101st guard—same stature, same uniform. When he tried to talk to me that evening, I ignored him. But the next morning, Saturday, he rang our doorbell. When I told him that Mary had already left, John said never mind, he’d really come back to see me.

He brought me strawberries in dead of winter and flowers every weekend. Six months later I had married this bright, kind, green-eyed martial arts expert, who said he would protect me forever. Later I would come to understand that he represented Danny, my 101st guard; Link, my protector; the power of those who held sway over me at Central High; and the safety that my black uncles and father could not provide in the South.

“If you can’t beat them, you’re going to join them,” my mother said when I nervously announced my wedding from a phone booth in Reno. “I hope you’ve thought this over, young lady. It’s not the racial difference, it’s the philosophical difference that is most important.”

Seven years later John and I split up because he had been a farm boy who wanted a wife to putter about the house and have babies. I wanted to be a news reporter. But he had by then shared with me the most wonderful event in my life, the birth of our daughter, Kellie. As I held the cinnamon-colored bundle with auburn hair and doelike eyes in my arms, I swore she would never have to endure the racial prejudices I endured. I was wrong. But then that’s a story for another book.

Until my marriage, I had been hearing from my old friend Link, living in faraway places as he piled up awards and degrees from this country’s most prestigious educational institutions. He was livid about my marriage, saying I’d all along told him we couldn’t date because he was white, and now look what I’d gone and done. I never heard from him again. Still, I think of him as a hero, yet another one of those special gifts from God sent to ferry me over a rough spot in my life’s path.
INDEED, I followed my dream, inspired by those journalists I met during the integration. I attended Columbia University’s School of Journalism and became a news reporter. I always remembered it was the truth told by those reporters who came to Little Rock that kept me alive. Later as an NBC television reporter, covering stories of riot and protest, I would take special care to look into those unexposed corners where otherwise invisible people are forced to hide as their truth is ignored.

I look back on my Little Rock integration experience as ultimately a positive force that shaped the course of my life. As Grandma India promised, it taught me to have courage and patience.

Some observers have said that its negative impact may have been that it forced me to live my life as a marginal woman, in two worlds—white and black—by virtue of my early experience with the McCabes and my marriage. But I see that as a distinct advantage, for it has allowed me to know for certain that we are all one.

If my Central High School experience taught me one lesson, it is that we are not separate. The effort to separate ourselves whether by race, creed, color, religion, or status is as costly to the separator as to those who would be separated.

When the milk in Oregon is tainted by the radiation eruption of a Soviet nuclear reactor, we are forced to see our interdependence. When forgotten people feel compelled to riot in Los Angeles, we share their pain through our TV screens, and their ravages impact our emotional and economic health.

The task that remains is to cope with our interdependence—to see ourselves reflected in every other human being and to respect and honor our differences.