Warriors Don't Cry Read Free Page B

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 centered 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