WHITE IS A STATE OF MIND

Beals had one story to tell, and she told it five years ago in her award-winning Warriors Don—t Cry. Elvis was all the rage. Eisenhower was the president. Women wore crinolines, and blacks and whites snarled at one another from a safe, segregated distance. After making history more than 40 years ago as one of nine students to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School, all else may have appeared pretty pedestrian for Beals. Or so it would seem. The memoirist reports in this sequel to Warriors Don—t Cry that the reason she never completed her studies at Central High was a fluke: She had been tipped off to danger by an unlikely source. That source, a fair-skinned cousin passing for white, had risen to some prominence in the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the word among his fellow Klansmen was that death would come to the five students who remained at the school if they insisted on getting an integrated education. Beals fled to Santa Rosa, a small town near San Francisco, where she completed her segregated education, albeit in more friendly surroundings. Most striking in her account is how life changed for her after moving to the coast. She fell in love with a white man, and though adjusting to the North posed its own set of problems, she seems to have found the close equivalent of domestic bliss: “I began losing weight. I no longer craved junk food to fill the empty spot in my soul.” But she avoided political activism at all costs. The Black Panthers; the free speech movement on several college campuses at the time—none of that attracted her. Little Rock had been enough. She settled into a private life of marriage, separation, welfare, and then divorce. Later, she claimed a new life as a journalist—making this an account of the fairly routine stuff of a black woman coming of age in the North.