Warriors Don't Cry

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 1994

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Update-Chapters 6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Literary Devices

Euphemistic Word Choices

Readers may note that Melba is euphemistic in her word choices. While she does not hesitate to report the use of the word n***** as a racial epithet against her constantly, she never resorts to the sort of vulgar swear words that surely accompanied the use of the n-word. Additionally, whenever two different words or phrases might serve to describe a questionable act or circumstance, Melba invariably uses the less offensive expression. For example, when she refers to the practice of summary execution of Black citizens, which is virtually always called “lynching,” Melba uses the term “hanging.” She only briefly uses the term “rape” when describing the incident in which she was sexually assaulted and narrowly avoided rape. Melba consistently refers to those who attack the nine as “segregationists” rather than “racists” or “white supremacists.” When meeting with Link secretly for the first time, she expresses her misgiving about why he might want to meet with her with the euphemistic statement, “The only thing a white man ever wants with one of our women is personal favors” (197).

Readers may ask why Melba delicately couches her language choices when dealing with such potentially graphic topics. As a journalist, Melba’s goal is to portray the reality of what she experienced precisely as it happened. She likely finds this all the more important since, when she was going through these experiences, she found it necessary to hold back on expressing the exact nature of what occurred. Despite her desire to be exactly and completely truthful in her narrative, Melba knows that downplaying the graphic nature of the language is part of accommodating her intended audience of young adults and also, as noted in the section on Symbols and Motifs, euphemistic word choices are a form of maintaining her dignity as a survivor and an author.

Irony

As a writer, Melba blends irony into the narrative in several ways. In recording the conversations of others, particularly white leaders and spokesmen, she subtly uses their expressions to point out the irony of what they say. When the school superintendent summons the nine and their parents to talk about safety at Central, he discusses everything except how to keep the nine safe from harm. Governor Faubus decries the federal violation of rights in Arkansas, a state that denied Black citizens their basic human rights for 90 years. The guardsman, supposedly protecting Melba from attack by the knife-wielding segregationist Andy, warns him that the two of them—rather than Melba—will have a problem if he cuts her.

Melba’s use of irony also becomes quite personal. As she describes it, her life becomes a jumble of ironic realities after she embarks on the road of integrating Central. On her long-awaited 16th birthday, only one of the guests she invites attends her party. She discovers that all of her old friends are afraid to associate with her, plus they have planned a Christmas party to which she is not invited. Thus, the birthday she most anticipated celebrating she ironically spends alone, crying in her bedroom. As she reflects on how her life became curtailed by simply attending Central, Melba finds it ironic that her home has become her prison when she is not attending class, and the massive school building that intrigued her has become a hellish maze of danger and degradation. Perhaps the greatest irony she experiences is that many Black citizens, whom she refers to as “our people,” criticize Melba and the other members of the nine as being troublemaking meddlers. It is a final stroke of irony that, of those nine students eventually revered as Little Rock’s bravest pioneers, eight move far away from Arkansas.

First-Person Narrator

When Melba tells her story and that of the Little Rock Nine in the first person, it allows readers to live through the tumult, uncertainty, and precarious nature of the 1957-58 school year as it happens. Readers travel through the struggle with a young woman whose life abruptly fills with danger, hatred, and ridicule. Melba records all the events that occur and result in the powerful emotions that beset her. Readers experience the mountaintop moments of meeting the national leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and recognizing the true significance of what they are attempting. They also feel the depths of despair that drive Melba to confess that she wishes she were dead.

Along with Melba, readers learn how to endure physical assault, threats, and extreme verbal harassment without panicking or striking back at one’s assailants. Readers sense the growth in Melba as she emerges as an articulate spokesperson for the group, one called upon to meet with hardcore segregationists to discuss integration and whom journalists ask to record her experiences for national audiences. While the nation had the opportunity to see one face of this representative of the nine, in this first-person narrative, Melba reveals those horrific elements of the integration struggle she had to conceal from the world.