She is able to stomp out the flame, though her blouse is singed. While using the restroom, a group of white girls send a flaming wad of toilet paper down over the stall and bar the door, preventing Melba from escape.
Some of them are verbal, such as routinely being called a “nigger,” while others are direct threats to her life or health. While at Central High School, Melba suffers a range of abuses. Grandma India attributes the janitor’s chance remark to divine intervention and later comes to believe that God spared Melba’s life so that she could help to lead the fight against injustice at Central High. The irony of this story is that Melba’s life is saved by a black janitor who paid attention to the doctor’s directions about Melba’s health, while the white people who had been appointed her caretakers ignore the vital directive. If not for a black janitor’s passing mention of the doctor’s instructions to Mother Lois, Melba may not have lived. Though living under the weight of such a denigrating system crushes the spirits of some people, it tends to reinforce the determination of the Beals family to confront the injustices of segregation.Īs an infant, Melba nearly dies in a white hospital due to its nurses’ refusal to follow the doctor’s orders to irrigate her head with warm water and Epsom salts “every two or three hours.” When Mother Lois confronts a nurse about this, she tells Lois that they “don’t coddle niggers.” The unwillingness to treat a nearly newborn child with a fever of 106 who is suffering from convulsions illustrates the thorough contempt that white supremacists have for the existence of black people. From birth to her teen years at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, she is too often the victim of the white supremacist notion that black people’s lives simply do not matter. Melba’s experiences with segregation are sometimes life-threatening.
Through recording her experiences, Melba illustrates how Jim Crow not only reduced Black Americans in the South to second-class citizens, but also dehumanized them, allowing for white people to commit a staggeringly wide range of abuses against black people with impunity. By the time Melba, the author of Warriors Don’t Cry, is four years old, she becomes aware of this system of segregation and begins to ask her mother, Lois, and grandmother, India, why white people write “Colored” on “the ugly drinking fountains, the dingy restrooms, and the back of buses.” She also notices that black people seem to live in a state of “constant fear and apprehension,” and highlights the “shame” she feels when she watches members of her family “kowtow to white people.” Melba learns early on that white people are in charge and, even after she agrees to help integrate Central High School, fears that the system might never change. Jim Crow laws recognized people as either White or Colored and required separate services and accommodations for each group.
In the decades after the American Civil War, Arkansas, like all Southern states, adhered to a legal system of segregation, known informally as “Jim Crow”-named after a popular caricature of a black slave in nineteenth-century minstrel shows.
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