by Robert Coles
In 1958, under the old doctors’ draft law, I had to put in two years of military service — and, accordingly, ended up in Biloxi, Mississippi, where I helped run a psychiatric service in the hospital of Keesler Air Force Base. When I went down South to start working there, I was not by any means celebrating this new episode in my professional or personal life; soon enough, though, I’d be getting to know an America I’d not before witnessed, never mind had any reason to try to comprehend in its variousness — the ironies and paradoxes of a region’s everyday life. Yet such an assignment, reluctantly embraced, with no small amount of melancholy, would become an enormously significant one for me; a whole new education unfolded before my once dismayed eyes (speaking of ironies) — the civil rights struggle that children, among others, steadfastly pioneered: past mobs shouting hate, threatening injury, six-year-old African-American children walked into the school buildings of New Orleans. On my way to a medical meeting I saw one of those children, Ruby Bridges, trying to approach a school’s steps, while men and women assailed her with words, waved placards bearing messages of contempt, rage. Even as I heard the voices of ill will, I saw a child forthrightly walking, policemen to her side — and so observing, I heard in my mind the voice, the words, of a Boston boy, Tim: here, too, I realized, was a young one going through a crisis, a nation’s lessons become her very own.
Within weeks, my wife, Jane, and I were visiting Ruby Bridges at her home — making our acquaintance with her, and with her mother and father. There were other children initiating school desegregation in New Orleans at that time — encountering mobs in front of a school. Jane and I got to know them as well — all in weekly visits, on occasion biweekly ones. Jane, a high school teacher, spoke at greater length with the parents and teachers of the children. I sat with one child, then another, in their homes — talking and observing the children draw, even as, sometimes, I tried to follow suit. We had a great time with those many crayons, all of us, I think it fair to say: a social and educational crisis become ours to attempt sketching, coloring, getting down to appropriate size, shape. For a while I listened, recalled afterwards; then I began lugging a tape recorder around, much to the amusement of the children, who noted readily my mechanical incompetence, my chronic frustration. Ruby and others would eventually be of more than help — anticipate my inadequacies, more than address them. Later on, Jane and I moved to Atlanta, in hopes of learning from older children, who were initiating high school desegregation; we got plenty of valuable advice there about taping and transcribing interviews from youths avidly able to press the right buttons, replace exhausted tapes — and quite interested in having their say put down on the record, courtesy of a gadget whose workings they had come to know rather well.
By the middle 1970s, a decade after I’d begun talking with Ruby and others in New Orleans, with seven of the “Atlanta ten,” as the high schoolers who started desegregation there were called, I’d been all over the United States, become the appreciative student, as it were, of “all sorts and conditions” of a great nation’s children — white Southerners as well as their African-American school counterparts in that region’s embattled schools, and children whose parents were migrant farm workers, or lived up the hollows of Appalachia, or out West, or way north of the Arctic Circle. All the while I was keeping to a set routine: weekly visits, transcriptions of conversations, editing of them — no mean job for one who was actually trying to learn to write in ordinary language, to do justice, also, to the heart and soul of what he’d heard, observed, concluded. All the while, too, I tried to keep in mind the remarks I’d been fortunate, indeed, to hear spoken by Dr. William Carlos Williams, whose writing I had studied as a college student, and whom I had come to know, emulate as best I could. So often, in medical school, I visited him, went with him on his house visits, his hospital rounds: such a privilege, so much to learn and later keep very much in mind. He was aging and ill as I began the work that would eventually be described in the Children of Crisis books, but he certainly was able, as always had been the case, to make bluntly clear his way of working, his manner of connecting with certain individuals, then telling others, as a writing doc, what he had come to know. Here he is once, speaking of the “doctor stories” he wrote, and of so much else (what an observer gets to know through encounters with fellow human beings): “The stories develop their own energy; they take over — leaving me behind. I read them, afterwards, and hope I will forget that it was me, me, me — me going to visit patients, me glad when I could be of help to them, and me driven to write about them and proud that I could. If I’ve managed to get rid of myself as an annoyance to the reader, but still give the best of myself and what I’ve experienced to that reader — then the effort has been worth it, and is a success.”
By 1977, I felt that I’d given my all to the kind of “effort” Dr. Williams had put on the table for himself and others (his readers) to consider. Perhaps the story of the children whose pictures and words show and tell a good deal in the five volumes of Children of Crisis is also the story of a doctor who listened long and hard to a young patient (Tim, in Boston, in 1956) and who found his way to the learning places that homes and schools and city streets and country places can provide. Along the way there were teachers carried within as well as heard in casual talks that became long discussions: Erik Erikson and Anna Freud, very much my instructors (and heroes) in psychoanalytic training, thinking, practice; Robert F. Kennedy, with whom I was so lucky to work, during his memorably intense visits to some of the nation’s at-risk children, whose plight (and whose dignity and importance as future American citizens) he recognized and sought earnestly, passionately to address. (He was the one who very much encouraged me to go west, live in New Mexico and elsewhere, so as to observe, learn from the boys and girls out there.)
“It takes two to make a truth,” said Nietzsche; and so it can go, our humanity thereby affirmed: the observer and the observed, the child and the parent, the teacher and the student, the attending (and one hopes, attentive) physician and the patient, the speaker and the listener — and the writer and the reader.
I
A Study of Courage
and Fear
The South
I came to the South a New Englander, not only by birth but with over a quarter of a century of living and growing up. At the end of a psychiatric residency I was called to Mississippi to serve my required two years in the military as a doctor, in this case as the chief of an Air Force neuropsychiatric hospital. The Air Force is a memory, but the South has become a real, a fresh part of my life. At first it was a region that I cared little to know, in fact it took me from several assignments I would have preferred. It has become one whose continuing pull upon my mind and heart prevents me from staying away for very long.
It is easy to categorize and give names to experiences once we are done with them. It is often sad that we do, because the effort takes away much of their original and spontaneous character. I suppose we need to try — it helps others understand, and makes us feel less anxious because more in control of our fate. As I look back at the past years in the South, I recall how easily I slipped into its very distinctive life and how pleasant I found that life to be. Only now do I stir anxiously at the thought of just how long (weeks turning to months) it took me to develop the dim awareness that became the vague uneasiness which marked a change in my thoughts and habits while living there.
One way of putting it is that I was a white, middle-class professional man, and so I easily fitted into that kind of Southern society. Only gradually did I begin to notice the injustice so close at hand, and as a consequence eventually take up my particular effort against it. (There would be those various categorical “stages” in such a development, ranging from faint glimmers to horrified, full recognition.) In the South, of course, anyone who begins to discover “injustice” in the world is in fact noticing the existence of a caste system wherein Negroes have an inherited position in a social organization which both needs them an
d yet notices their skin color before any individual attainments or accomplishments.
I think the major conclusion that I now draw from my first stay in the South is less one of deliberate accommodation to its social evils than of intense preoccupation with a brief but demanding interlude in my life — a new kind of job in a new location. The world cries out with its innumerable trials and horrors — the betrayal of human life, made cheap and stripped of its dignity, in every nation. The very nature of the human mind forces us to limit our interests and compassion, or else we drown in their diffusion and our own extreme pain.
In any event, toward the end of my second year South I was interrupted one day on a bicycle trip along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico by the sight and sound of a vicious battle. To this day I can remember my mind working its way toward some comprehension of what was happening, fighting its way through its old attitudes for a moment, then slipping back to them in relief. I saw a scuffle, and at first I wondered why people would want to behave that way. For a few seconds, I suppose, my lifetime — and I don’t think only mine — was recapitulated: its innocence, its indifference, its ignorance, its sheltered quiet, its half-and-half mixture of moral inertia and well-intentioned effort. For a while I could only see people fighting. I heard shouts and cries. Some nasty and vulgar words fell upon my ears. I recall thinking for a moment that it was a Sunday, a beautiful Sunday; and it was a shame that people could be so mean-spirited and irreverent on Sunday, on any day, on such a clear, warm morning in early spring. I pedaled faster; I almost had the scene out of sight; but I can remember today slowing down, hesitating, only able to stop by lifting my body from the seat of the bike, by using my dragging, scuffing feet. I let the bike lie on its side, and stood still.
Not only was there a fight, but among the people I could see several women. A woman screamed that a man had smashed her watch and stepped on her glasses. Before I saw that she was a slender, middle-aged Negro lady, that he was a young, athletic white man, I felt the sympathy and horror that the weak share with the weak against the powerful. With that feeling I also knew for a moment that I would not easily be able to go to the woman’s aid. In another flash, however, I realized I could justify my reluctance: it was a racial incident; the truth of what was happening was that the people were not simply people, the men and women not simply that.
I can still feel myself standing there, benighted, frightened, seized with curiosity, suddenly quite restless. I was not morally outraged. I did not want to join in the Negroes’ protest for equal access to that essentially useless, shallow bit of seashore. Eventually, I simply wanted to go away; and I did. Riding home I condemned all the antagonists for fighting, for choosing to fight for such absurd stakes, for being the kind of people who would fight. I am not now very proud of those minutes. Yet if I forgot them, I would be even more ashamed.
That night I worked in the emergency ward of the base hospital, a duty which fell on each doctor with unnerving regularity. I had come to know the local police quite well during those evenings; they were on call, too, and we shared the long stretches of dark silence in that small town. The incident I had inadvertently witnessed was very much on the minds of both policemen, and their insistent talk about it made it impossible for me to forget it. We had never before mentioned the subject of race, but not, so far as I know, out of self-conscious or fearful avoidance in any of us. I liked those two policemen. They were kind, polite, and quite intelligent — considerably more so than many I had met in similar situations in certain Northern hospitals.
Like the event itself, I recall the first words: “They’d be dead now if it weren’t for the publicity they get these days,” followed by an avowal from his companion that “They will be if they try it again. We’re never going to have mixing in this state.” They had been talking with me; suddenly I felt them talking to me — at me. Their voices tightened. They spoke as crisply as a Southern drawl will permit — the honey in it had crystallized. They seemed aloof, yet fiercely determined to make their feelings clear to me, to the others nearby — now I realize to themselves. I found myself slipping into a psychiatric posture with them, noticing their defensive anger, their accusations — diffusely directed at history, at Northerners. I decided that they were afraid, but I really didn’t know why. I said little in reply. I wondered how men so strong, so appealing, so sensible could be aroused by an event I had managed to put out of my mind. Then a patient came in, and I was strangely glad to see him. His minor infection kept me exceptionally busy. If he hadn’t been there … I remember thinking that I would not have told my friends that I had seen the “swim-in.” I saw their mood, observed their tension, felt their resentment, sensed their irritability, and feared my own involvement in any of them. Psychiatrists, of course, learn to watch for the unreasonable, avoid entanglement with the irrational. I imagine it was handy for me to be able to call upon such professional practices.
By morning we had talked of town news, the fishing and shrimping, the new shopping center going up, the meaning to the area of a projected increase in the population of the air base. That dawn we left, friends to one another as before. During the next weeks I continued with my usual tasks of work and play; but something had taken place. I can recollect, for instance, picking up the Jackson and New Orleans papers, reading in them of the coming probability of school desegregation in nearby New Orleans. It was well before the fateful day of its start, but the New Orleans papers were bitter and the Jackson papers almost incredulous. Somehow that news didn’t manage to slip by me the way some news does, out of the impossibility of keeping totally abreast. It wasn’t simply my reading, however, that was being affected. I started noticing where Negroes lived, where they didn’t; where they were in evidence, where they were not; how they behaved with white people, and white people with them.
This new consciousness took root over several months. I find it hard to do justice to whatever growth and consolidation of feeling may have occurred during those months, because to think about that time now often invites in myself a certain scornful disbelief — that I could have lived so long under such a clearly oppressive social, political, and economic system, only to have been so blithely, so very innocently unaware of its nature. Yet I was.
Today there may be other problems than blindness facing many people living in the South. Large numbers of people in the region have awakened to the racial problem, and many of them, like me, must be freshly sensitive to the limitations which all human beings discover in their involvements and sensitivities. As if that were not enough, many probably are also coming to know that strong commitments push and tug at one another with their various demands, so that new kinds of indifference — even arrogance and hate — can follow old blind spots or prejudices. For example, there is the fighter’s need to shed himself of much of the ambiguity of life, to sacrifice perspective, kindheartedness, and even, at times, good judgment to the interests of the hard battle. When I look back at my first days there I am glad that I came to know the South as I did; but I also feel torn and paralyzed when I think of those times too long. I enjoyed one kind of life then, and that kind is gone for me.
Of course the South has always had its moments of paralyzed nostalgia. Nostalgia can be for anyone a valuable way to avoid the terrible strain of the present by forsaking its reality in favor of the more pleasant world of memory. There is a painful ambiguity to Southern life: the genuine beauty of the landscape, the very real tradition of generosity and neighborliness, the long-standing sense of persecution, moral as well as economic, at the hands of powerful and hypocritical Americans from other areas. Effective protest, even against many open and declared social evils, does not always easily find a voice; and segregation in the South has hardly been considered anything but inevitable for both whites and Negroes: each in their own way have known for generations the futility or risks of trying to change so awesome and peculiar a social system.
The protest I witnessed at the seashore in Mississippi showed that whatever
balance it had taken to keep a way of life from being seen as a social evil was beginning to be upset. Not only was the protest no accident, but the restraint of the town’s police was no accident either — whatever solemn excuses they offered for it. The South was feeling the swift encouragement (and consequent fear) of a chain of events connected to world history as well as our own nation’s. My life is no “average white Southerner’s” (hopefully none of our lives submit to approximations like that), and I am not sure that sit-ins such as I saw that day affect the majority of the South’s white population as they do many of us who live elsewhere. Yet I think most people of the South — Negroes and whites alike — have experienced some of that same surprise I did, a jolting flash when one kind of world begins to collapse, another begins to appear, and it all becomes apparent.
My work of the past years has been to study what happens to people in the midst of such social changes, how they relinquish their old ways and take up new ones, how, that is, they manage the various stresses and exertions of doing so. I shall never know how those Negroes and whites felt whom I saw that day on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, but I think I have some fair notion about how others like them have felt in equally tense if not so vicious encounters — the children in desegregated schools in Louisiana, or in Georgia, where I lived for two years; the sit-in students from all over the South, and the whites who have been confronted by them; some leading segregationists, whom I came to know over a good number of months; and most recently, some sharecroppers and migrant workers, the poor of both races whose hands harvest our cotton and food for little enough reward indeed.
Doing such work has required so much travel throughout the region that I know much of it better than any part of the North where I have lived. Even before I started studying some of the problems in the South, however, I had become somewhat sensitive to it through the astonishing contrast there with all that New England taught me to expect from nature and people. The very names of the towns were surprising. Some were familiar enough, but there are special preferences, too, such as the Greek and Roman names given to town after town in state after state: Rome in Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee; or Sparta in Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The ancient city of Carthage on the Gulf of Tunis is no more, but of fourteen cities which carry on its name over the world, six are in the South. There are other names less classical but in their sum a story of the region: Laurel, Enterprise, Liberty, Eufala., Senatobia, Natchitoches, Yazoo, Magnolia, Opelouses, Amite, and the Fayettevilles and Waynesboros, telling of flowers, ideals, Indians, and the French or English who lived there or came to do so.