Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  The reader is entitled to know why, how, and where these drawings came into being, and who did them. As I have already mentioned, my work in the South studying school desegregation fell into three rather distinct categories: weekly (at a minimum) interviews with high school children of both races; weekly interviews with young children — from five to eleven — of both races; and periodic interviews with the parents and teachers of all these children. I was able to talk with the adolescent youths (say, in Atlanta) and the adults who taught them or were their mothers and fathers or grandparents. Young children, however, are often uninterested in conversation. They want to be on the move, and they are often bored at the prospect of hearing words and being expected to use them. It is not that they don’t have ideas and feelings, or a need to express them to others. Indeed, their games and play, their drawings and finger paintings are full of energetic symbolization and communication. It is simply that — as one eight-year-old boy once told me — “Talking is okay, but I don’t like to do it all the time the way grown-ups do; I guess you have to develop the habit.”

  Before I ever started my work in the South I had been interested in what the children I treated would tell me with crayons and paints — and chalk, for I always kept a blackboard in my office, and often a child would suddenly want to use it, then just as quickly apply the eraser to it. Because of my own interests I made a point of asking children whether they would like to sketch whatever came to mind, or indeed draw for me their home, school, parents, or friends. Some did so eagerly, some reluctantly; some would have no part of my schemes for a long while, though in the course of treatment those who refused invariably changed their minds, as if they recognized that now they were able to let me know something once unmentionable and as well forbidden to representation.

  I kept those files with me when I went South — a stack of drawings made by the middle-class children who make up the major population of a child guidance clinic and a child psychiatrist’s private practice. When I started visiting the four little girls in New Orleans whose entry into the first grades of two white schools occasioned the strenuous objection of mobs and a boycott by most white children, I carried with me paper and crayons. From the very beginning I made a point of asking those girls to draw pictures for me: of their school, their teacher or friends, anything they wanted to draw. I also took an interest in the artwork they did in school, always a favorite activity for children in elementary school. There is no doubt about it, they learned that I was interested in their sketches, and without exception they have furnished me an increasing abundance of them over the years.

  That same school year (1960–1961) a few white children trickled back to the boycotted schools, in spite of tenacious mobs that in varying strengths constantly besieged the two buildings. I began going to the homes of those children too, and I encouraged those children to draw as well as play games and talk with me. (They were five children from three homes.) During the second year of desegregation, from 1961 to 1962, I continued my studies in New Orleans and expanded them there (while also starting them in Atlanta) just as the city itself, by coming to some terms with its unruly elements, enabled its harassed schools to return gradually to normal. I started interviewing the eight Negro children who were added to the roster of pioneers; they went into three additional elementary schools. (I also expanded the number of white children I was seeing so that I could include their classmates.) All in all in New Orleans I was following up twelve Negro children and twelve white children that second year, as against the four Negro and five white children who in the first year were at one point the entire population of two schools.

  In addition to those children I was seeing regularly and continually, I traveled widely in the South, spending a week or two in other villages, towns or cities where younger Negro children were initiating (and white children were experiencing) school desegregation. I lived for a while in Burnsville, North Carolina — a small, rural mountain village — and nearby Asheville, its metropolis. I spent several weeks in Memphis, and later I worked in Birmingham. Finally, in 1964, I divided three months’ time between Jackson, Mississippi, and the little farming community of Harmony, near Carthage, Mississippi. In all these instances I tried to gain some impression of how children other than those I knew in New Orleans were managing the social and personal trials of desegregation. At times I felt rude and presumptuous asking children I scarcely knew to draw a picture of their school, a friend, eventually of themselves. Yet these children (and especially their parents) found it easier to draw than to talk; in fact I came to see that they expected me to ask them to do something, to test them in some way.

  Television reaches across the barriers of race and caste, class and neighborhood, bringing our self-consciousness, our preoccupation with knowing and measuring the “normal” and “timely” in the child’s growth and development, into cabins and tenements otherwise far removed from our national life. For example, I was astonished to find the mother of a six-year-old boy in an isolated Mississippi town relax visibly when I took crayons from my pocket, placed them on the paper of my clipboard, and asked her whether her son and I might draw pictures together. “Son, the doctor is going to learn about you and find out how good your thinking is, like they say it has to be done on TV,” she told the boy, and they both seemed able, finally, to comprehend my purposes. David drew eagerly, as if taking an examination at school, and his mother no longer worried so openly about just what the white doctor had in mind. “It’s testing you’re doing,” she told me, answering her own silent questions aloud, “and I’m sure grateful for that because David will do better in school if he knows what his mind is about.”

  In New Orleans, as the months passed by, a firm relationship between the children and me developed, so that our drawing and painting exercises became more enthusiastic and personal. I encouraged the children to draw whatever they wished. The troubles and joys of their lives gradually took on form and color, and so did their shifting feelings toward me. At times I tried to direct their attention toward one or another concern I had: how they regarded themselves; how they felt they were managing at school; what skin color meant to them, and to others in their neighborhood or the city; why the mobs formed, and to what purpose; how they saw themselves getting along with their white or black classmates; how they viewed their teachers, and how they felt their teachers felt toward them as children, or as representatives of a race or a group of people. (One white child brought me up short at the very beginning of my work by telling me she thought her teacher prejudiced toward her: “She wishes my daddy made more money, so I could dress better. She always talks about the nice kids she used to teach in the Garden District, and how good they behaved. I think she minds me as bad as the nigra girl.”)

  What have these children had to say in the drawings they have done these past years? Is there any reasonable way to categorize and classify their pictures so that the individual child’s feelings are preserved, and yet more general conclusions made possible? I think the answer to the second question is yes, and I will try to show why by describing the interests and concerns these children reveal when they take up crayons or a brush.

  Drawings and paintings can be compared in a number of ways: the use of color; the subject matter chosen; the child’s command of form; his desire to approximate the real or his ease with whatever fantasies come to mind; his willingness to talk about what he draws and explain it, to expand upon its relevance or significance — for his own life or the lives of others around him. Moreover, anyone who has worked with children and watched them draw over a period of time knows how sensitively the child’s activity and performance will respond to his various moods. One day’s chaos on paper may give way to another’s impressive order and even eloquence. The child’s fear and shyness, his doubts and suspicions about adults, especially doctors or visitors to his home, are translated onto the canvas: little may be drawn, mere copying is done, or only “safe” and “neutral” subjects are selected. Often the child
may say that he has absolutely nothing on his mind, or that in any event he does not know how to draw. Weeks later that same child may ask for crayons or pick them up quite naturally. What he said in the past is of little concern to him; at last he feels safe, or interested in exchanging ideas and feelings with his doctor, that older stranger who keeps returning to his home.

  Any discussion of what a given child (or one of his drawings) has to say about racial matters, school problems, or mob scenes must take pains to put the child’s social observations, his prejudices and partialities, into the context of his home life. By that I mean to insist upon the young child’s strong inclination to reflect his parents’ views; but even more, transfer to the neighborhood his personal tensions and struggles, so that other children, not to mention teachers or policemen, take on a meaning to him quite dependent upon how he manages with his parents, brothers, and sisters.

  I am saying that each child’s particular life — his age, his family, his neighborhood, his medical and psychological past history, his intelligence — influences what and how he draws. I am also saying that the way these children draw is affected by their racial background, and what that “fact” means in their particular world (society) at that particular time (period of history). My task in the analysis of these drawings has been not only to understand them, but to learn to appreciate their significance in clinical work with adults. Over the years I have heard grown-up Southerners of both races recall their childhood experiences, their “old” attitudes; but there may be a distinct difference between the memories we have and the actual feelings we once had (or didn’t have but now claim to have had) years ago. For that matter, it is often interesting to obtain the reactions of a parent or a teacher to a given drawing. A mother in New Orleans said to me once: “I looked at Mary’s picture and all I could see was that she didn’t draw it as good that time as she does others.” The girl’s teacher had this to say about the same picture: “Mary had trouble keeping the drawing accurate. She must have lost interest in it, and the result is a poor picture.” Mary herself had the following appraisal to make: “Maybe I tried too hard, but it’s a better picture than the easy ones I do.” In point of fact, for the first time she had tried (and struggled) to include herself (and her brown skin) in one of the landscapes she usually did so easily.

  The first Southern child to put my crayons and paints to use was Ruby. She and I started talking, playing, and drawing together when she was six years old, and braving daily mobs to attend an almost empty school building. Upon her first meeting I told Ruby of my interest in drawings, and she showed me some she had done at school and brought home to keep. Over the years she has drawn and painted during most of our talks, so that I now have over two hundred of her productions. Many of the topics were her choice, while other pictures were started in response to my specific suggestion or even request. I would ask her to draw a picture of her school, or of her teacher. I would ask her to paint a picture of anyone she knew, or wanted to portray. I might ask her one day to try putting herself, her brother, or her sister on paper, while on another occasion I might ask her to sketch a particular classmate or schoolmate of hers. (For many months there were only two or three of them, the children of the few whites who defied the boycott. We both knew them, and each of us knew that the other spent time with them, Ruby at school and I in visits to their homes.)

  For a long time — four months, in fact — Ruby never used brown or black except to indicate soil or the ground; even then she always made sure they were covered by a solid covering of green grass. It was not simply on my account that she abstained from these colors; her school drawings showed a similar pattern. She did, however, distinguish between white and Negro people. She drew white people larger and more lifelike. Negroes were smaller, their bodies less intact. A white girl we both knew to be her own size appeared several times taller. While Ruby’s own face (Figure 1) lacked an eye in one drawing, an ear in another, the white girl never lacked any features (Figure 2). Moreover, Ruby drew the white girl’s hands and legs carefully, always making sure that they had the proper number of fingers and toes. Not so with her own limbs, or those of any other Negro children she chose (or was asked) to picture. A thumb or forefinger might be missing, or a whole set of toes. The arms were shorter, even absent or truncated.

  There were other interesting features to her drawings. The ears of Negroes appeared larger than those of white people. A Negro might not have two ears, but the one he or she did have was large indeed. When both were present, their large size persisted. In contrast, quite often a Negro appeared with no mouth — it would be “forgotten” — or she used a thin line to represent the mouth; whereas a white child or adult was likely to have lips, teeth, and a full, wide-open mouth. With regard to the nose, Ruby often as not omitted it in both races, though interestingly enough, when it appeared it was in her white classmates a thin orange line.

  Hair color and texture presented Ruby with the same kind of challenge that skin color did. So long as she kept away from brown and black crayons or paints she had to be very careful about the hair she drew. White children received blond (yellow) hair, or their hair would be the same orange that outlined their face — always the case with Negro children. Many people of both races had no hair. No Negro child had blond hair.

  The first change in all this came when Ruby asked me whether she might draw her grandfather — her mother’s father. It was not new for her to ask my permission to draw a particular picture, though this was the first time she had chosen someone living outside of New Orleans. (He has a farm in the Mississippi Delta.) With an enthusiasm and determination that struck me as unusual and worth watching she drew an enormous black man, his frame taking up — quite unusually — almost the entire sheet of paper (Figure 3). Not only did she outline his skin as brown; every inch of him was made brown except for a thick black belt across his midriff. His eyes were large, oval lines of black surrounding the brown irises. His mouth was large, and it showed fine, yellow-colored teeth. The ears were normal in size. The arms were long, stretching to the feet, ending in oversize hands; the left one had its normal complement of fingers, but the right was blessed with six. The legs were thick, and ended in heavily sketched black boots (a noticeable shift from the frayed shoes or bare feet hitherto drawn).

  Ruby worked intently right to the end, then instantly told me what her grandfather was doing, and what he had to say. (Often I would ask her what was happening in the place she drew or what the person she painted was thinking.) “That’s my momma’s daddy and he has a farm that’s his and no one else’s; and he has just come home to have his supper. He is tired, but he feels real good and soon he is going to have a big supper and then go to bed.”

  Ruby’s father at that time was unemployed. It was not the first time, though never before had he been fired simply because his daughter was going to one school rather than another. He tended to be morose at home. He sat looking at television, or he sat on the front steps of the house carving a piece of wood, throwing it away, hurling the knife at the house’s wood, then fetching a new branch to peel, cut and again discard. He also suffered a noticeable loss of appetite — the entire family knew about it and talked about it. The children tried to coax their father to eat. His wife cooked especially tasty chicken or ribs. I was asked for an appetite stimulant — and prescribed a tonic made up of vitamins and some Dexamyl for his moodiness. I gave him a few sleeping pills because he would toss about by the hour and smoke incessantly. (In a house where eight people slept in two adjoining bedrooms with no door between them it seemed essential to do so not only for his sleep but the children’s.)

  I asked Ruby whether there was any particular reason why she decided to draw her grandfather that day. She told me she had none by shaking her head. She smiled, then picked up the crayons and started drawing again, this time doing a pastoral landscape (Figure 4). Brown and black were used appropriately and freely. When it was finished she took some of her Coke and a cookie, then spoke: �
��I like it here, but I wish we could live on a farm, too; and Momma says if it gets real bad we can always go there. She says her daddy is the strongest man you can find. She says his arms are as wide as I am, and he can lick anyone and his brother together. She says not to worry, we have a hiding place and I should remember it every day.”

  She was having no particularly bad time of it, but she was rather tired that day. By then she also knew me long enough to talk about her fears, her periods of exhaustion, her wish for refuge or escape. Only once before Ruby decided to draw her grandfather and a countryside scene had she mentioned her impatience with the mobs, her weariness at their persistence: “They don’t seem to be getting tired, the way we thought. Maybe it’ll have to be a race, and I hope we win. Some people sometimes think we won’t, and maybe I believe them, but not for too long.”

  It took Ruby several more months to be able to draw or paint a Negro without hesitation or distortion. From the beginning I wondered whether it all was my fault, whether she was in some way intimidated by the strange white doctor who visited her, with his games and crayons, his persistent curiosity about how she was getting along. Though in fact I am sure she was, there is reason to believe that the pictures she drew reflected a larger truth about her feelings than the undeniable one of my somewhat formidable presence. Her mother had saved many of the drawings she did in Sunday school (all-Negro) before either desegregation or strange visitors came into her life, and the same pattern was to be found in them: whites drawn larger and more intact than Negroes; brown and black used with great restraint, just enough to indicate the person’s race but no more. It was as if Ruby started drawing all people as white, then turned some of them into Negroes by depriving them of a limb or coloring a small section of their skin (she preferred the shoulder or the stomach) brown.