Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  From the store Jimmie moved to the houses. Instead of brown he used red, and instead of hasty lines he slowly moved his crayon along, sometimes backtracking to broaden and strengthen what he had done. When the construction proper was over, the decoration began: a door, two carefully drawn windows, one with curtains, a chair, and outside some grass, a tree, three flowers, and finally a blue sky with the sun in it, shining directly over the new building.

  When Jimmie had finished he turned to ask me how I was doing. I was still working on the bridge, and he offered to help me. After we had finished that we compared our work. Jimmie said he was tired: “That’s a lot we’ve done. I want a Coke.” (We always had one at a nearby stand.) I had noticed his drawing, indeed had watched him draw it. He knew that, yet he wanted to make sure I took note of what he did: “Did you see my picture?” “Yes, Jimmie, I did, and I liked it a lot. You did a real good job with the house.” “Well, I tried to make it strong, like you did with the bridge. If a bridge isn’t strong it could cave in, and then someone could get hurt. They could drown in the lake. And if a roof fell down in a house it would be the same.” At that point we were ready to leave his living room for the street. I let him turn off the tape recorder — always a great pleasure for him — and carry it to my car. When we were outside we felt light rain beginning to fall. Jimmie was annoyed: “Why does it rain every time I go outside? I just drew the sun, but it didn’t help any with the weather.” Then he wanted to know whether New Orleans had any rivals in America for cloudy, rainy weather. I told him that I didn’t know; but I liked the weather there, the semitropical quality of it. He did, too: “It may get cloudy and rain, but the sun comes out a lot, too; and when it does, you like it better, because you’ve missed it.”

  What both Ruby and Jimmie chose to draw or paint reflected the particular lives each of them lived. I once asked Jimmie whether he thought his friends saw things the way he did — whether, for instance, any of them might draw his school, his teacher, his classmate Ruby as he did. Once and for all he cautioned me against whatever inclinations I might have to generalize: “I don’t know. Which one of them do you mean?”

  I followed Jimmie’s advice to the best of my ability as a clinician, so that in all I spent four years getting to know two-score children like him and Ruby in New Orleans and other Southern cities. Though each child had his own life — including his own quality of artistic interest and ability — there were certain patterns to be discerned in what these children chose to draw. Thus, Jimmie’s drawings and Ruby’s drawings resemble one another in the way all children’s drawings do — the style, the sense of proportion, the preoccupations that change from year to year. If they also differ because Jimmie and Ruby are different artists, different human beings, the racial crisis they both witnessed and experienced served to draw them together by giving them a common experience, a shared number of difficult times together. Eventually that crisis influenced not only what they thought but what they drew. Other children in their school, their city, all over the South, have been similarly aroused and affected.

  For the many I have known there can be no question that in the beginning they fear their white-skinned or dark-skinned classmates. Nor can there be any question of the very hard struggle they must contend with inside their minds as they try to sort out the hate and envy they have come prepared to feel toward one another, the curiosity, the interest, the confusion over the whole matter of black and white, bad and good, wrong and right.

  The issue of what skin color means is already confronting the child by three, let alone school age. In my interviews with grown-up Negroes and whites their memories hark back to one event or another that marks a first awareness of skin color and its implications. Yet, as I have said, the memories of adults are no substitute for direct observation of what children themselves see and do. Some of the children I have come to know were three when I first started talking with them — they were the nursery school brothers, sisters, and cousins of the older children I was visiting. All in all these children have lived in cities, towns, and the countryside. They have ranged in age from three to ten. They have lived in rather comfortable homes or in very poor ones. They have been both white and Negro children, both boys and girls. What they all have in common is their American citizenship, their Southern residence, and their Southern ancestry. Most were caught up, willingly or otherwise, in school desegregation; but I have worked closely with others, too — Negro and white children not going to desegregated schools, though obviously living at a moment in history when the subject has an unprecedented immediacy.

  Every Negro child I know has had to take notice in some way of what skin color signifies in our society. If they do not easily — or at all — talk about it, their drawings surely indicate that the subject is on their minds. Like Ruby, many have trouble using black and brown crayons and paints. One three-year-old girl obviously avoided using those two colors in the pictures she made; instead, she used her fingers as if they were crayons. After watching her use green and orange, then rub her hand alongside them, I asked her what she was doing. She said, “Nothing, just trying to make a picture.” Her mother, however, was nearby, and later she unabashedly explained it all to me: “She has been telling me on and off for weeks that she knows she can rub some of her brown skin off and use it for coloring. My two boys talked like that for a while when they were two or three and then they got over it. So I guess she will, too.”

  Negro children of elementary school age have not had enough time to set themselves straight about “why” they are colored and what that fact will mean for them in the future. Often they will try to deny the fact, or they will accept it so extravagantly that it is clear they are yet confused and troubled. Ruby abstained from browns and blacks; another girl of six I knew in New Orleans could scarcely use any other color. Her white classmates — like Ruby she was in a desegregated school — were drawn Negro, a touch of yellow here or there sometimes giving me the clue to their racial identity. For a long while I assumed that my whiteness — and my middle-class, professional whiteness at that — in some way made these children reluctant to color themselves brown or made them exceptionally anxious to color everyone brown. When I compared drawings done by the children for me with those they did with others, at Sunday school, even at the request of their older brothers and sisters or parents, I learned that what I found significant and revealing in their drawings had a consistency and persistence quite its own, quite independent of my presence.

  Is it true, then, that the words “Negro” and “white” help distinguish the dreams and fantasies of children? That is, do children of each race draw themselves and those of the other race quite differently? At two and three have they very different ideas about who they are, who they will be, all based on a budding sense of racial identity? I would answer yes to those questions. Before he is born the Negro child’s color is likely to matter a great deal to his parents. By the third year of life the child is asking the kinds of questions that ultimately will include one about his skin color. A mother of five children in Jackson, Mississippi, described it to me rather explicitly: “When they asks all the questions, they ask about their color, too. They more than not will see a white boy or girl and it makes them stop and think. They gets to wondering, and then first thing you know, they want to know this and that about it, and I never have known what to say, except that the Lord likes everyone because He makes everyone, and nothing is so good it can satisfy Him completely, so He made many kinds of people, and they’re all equal before Him. Well, that doesn’t always satisfy them; not completely it doesn’t. So I have to go on. I tell them that no matter what it’s like around us, it may make us feel bad, but it’s not the whole picture, because we don’t make ourselves. It’s up to God, and He can have an idea that will fool us all. He can be trying to test us. It’s the favorite child sometimes who you make sure you don’t spoil.”

  I asked her when she found such conversation necessary. “I’d say about two or two and a h
alf,” she answered rather quickly. A bit deferentially she turned to me and asked: “Do you think that’s too early for children to know?” I said no, I didn’t. I said that what she told me confirmed some of my own observations. She smiled, a little proud but still a little nervous. She wanted to pursue the matter further: “I know I’m right on the age; I’ve gone through it with too many to forget when it happens. But to tell the truth I never have been certain what to say. That’s why I try to talk about God. No one knows what color He is. I tell the children that it’s a confusing world, and they have to get used to it. You have to try to overcome it, but you can’t hide it from the kids. When they ask me why colored people aren’t as good as whites, I tell them it’s not that they’re not as good; it’s that they’re not as rich. Then I tell them that they should separate being poor and being bad, and not get them mixed up. I read to them from the Bible, and remind them that the Lord is a mighty big man, and what He thinks is not the same as what white folks do, or even black folks. He’s bigger than all of us, I tell them, and I hope that makes them feel satisfied, so they don’t dislike themselves. That’s bad, not liking your own self.”

  Again and again I have heard mothers talk of similar struggles, and seen their children represent on paper those same struggles (and the “answers” to them they have been given or devised on their own). It is not that Negro and white children in the South have thoughts unlike those of other children. A thematic analysis of the hundreds of drawings and stories they have produced shows their kinship with all children. They draw their mothers and fathers, food and clothes, animals and trees. They show how sensitive they are to people: to what their parents say, or their teachers, or their brothers and sisters. They reveal the affections they have, and they also reveal the tensions, the conflicts and resentments that are inexorable and shifting, part of growing up, part of life ongoing. With only one or two exceptions these children were in no sense “sick.” They had no symptoms, gave no clinical evidence of serious trouble with eating and sleeping, with nursery school or regular school, with family and friends. They did not come to see me in a clinic; it was I who sought them out because of their role in a social struggle. I had to remind myself of that fact constantly. (For that matter, even when — years ago — I treated severely disturbed children in a Boston hospital I tried to keep in mind the “healthy” side of their mental life, the strengths and abilities they somehow had mustered and consolidated in spite of the afflictions pulling at them and giving them — or those around them — so much worry.)

  Sometimes I erred by becoming too much the investigator. When I did so, when I emphasized racial matters too much, when I seemed to be forcing a point here and there, the child or his mother often managed to bring me up short. One five-year-old colored boy had been unusually explicit in both his talk and pictures: he wished he were white, and that was that. He said so, and he drew himself so. When I asked him whether he thought he was so, he said no, he was colored, but there was little harm in wishing otherwise. I asked him whether he thought all colored children shared his views: “I don’t know, I only know the ones I play with. We all say let’s turn white, then we pretend it’s done. But we know it isn’t all the while. And a white boy, he told me in school one time that he plays ‘nigger’ sometimes with his friends, and they say they’re black and pretend, and then turn back to being white.”

  Being black and being white is, however, a long-term affair, regardless of the minds ability to make believe. Thus, while all children draw animals — indeed are quite interested in them — it is the Negro child who is often apt to call himself one of them with exceptional consistency. Negro children usually draw themselves and their friends as smaller than white children. In the stories they tell that involve the two races (based on the pictures they draw) the white child is almost invariably asking the Negro to do something, or having it done. Moreover, again and again I have been assured by Negro children that the Negro in the picture is smiling, or working hard at whatever task he has set upon. That there is anger and spite toward white people burning underneath is also discernible, though by no means are such emotions easily conveyed to other Negroes (even to the child’s parent), let alone a white observer like me.

  One Negro mother put rather well the feelings I have heard many others express: “I guess we all don’t like white people too much deep inside. You could hardly expect us to, after what’s happened all these years. It’s in our bones to be afraid of them, and bones have a way of staying around even when everything else is gone. But if something is inside of you, it doesn’t mean it’s there alone. We have to live with one another, black with white I mean. I keep on telling that to the children, and if they don’t seem to learn it, like everything else I have to punish them to make sure they do. So I’m not surprised they don’t tell me more than you, because they have to obey me; and if I have to obey you and they have to obey me, it’s all the same. Just the other day my Laura started getting sassy about white children on the television. My husband told her to hold her tongue and do it fast. It’s like with cars and knives, you have to teach your children to know what’s dangerous and how to stay away from it or else they sure won’t live long. White people are a real danger to us until we learn how to live with them. So if you want your kids to live long, they have to grow up scared of whites; and the way they get scared is through us; and that’s why I don’t let my kids get fresh about the white man even in their own house. If I do there’s liable to be trouble to pay. They’ll forget, and they’ll say something outside, and that’ll be it for them, and us too. So I make them store it in the bones, way inside, and then no one sees it. Maybe in a joke we’ll have once in a while, or something like that, you can see what we feel inside, but mostly it’s buried. But to answer your question, I don’t think it’s only from you it gets buried. The colored man I think he has to hide what he really feels even from himself. Otherwise there would be too much pain — too much.”

  The task, then, is one of making sure the child is afraid: of whites, and of the punishment his parents fearfully inflict upon him whenever he fails to follow their suit. The child’s bravado or outrage must be curbed. In my experience even two- and three-year-old Negro children have already learned the indirection, the guile needed for survival. They have also learned their relative weakness, their need to be ready to run fast, to be alert and watchful. They have learned that white children, as well as adults, are big, strong, and powerful; and that such power is specifically related to the colored man’s defenselessness.

  In drawings such attitudes come up again and again. If the Negro child is alone in a white school his loneliness there is carried over to the other situations he draws. For example, I asked one Negro boy in Asheville, North Carolina, to select a neighborhood chum and any classmate he decided (in his school the child would have to be white), then place them both in a landscape the child was particularly fond of drawing for me. I said to him at the time: “Johnnie, I’d like to see how you fit the boys and girls you know into that countryside you like so much to draw.” He obliged, showing a rather robust white boy near the summit of a mountain, and a rather fragile Negro one well below (Figure 9).

  What Johnnie told me was happening in the picture he drew shows how a seven-year-old child can summon the sharpest most outspoken fantasy without the slightest embarrassment. “Freddie wishes he were up top, like Billy, but he isn’t, because there’s not room for both of them up there, at least not now there isn’t. They’re not talking, they’re just there. Freddie would be afraid to be on top. He wouldn’t know what to do. He’s used to where he is, just like Billy is. Billy is a big eater, and he has to have food with him everywhere he goes. So Freddie is getting some food for him from the farms and maybe he’ll carry it up. But he’ll come right down. He might get dizzy, and Billy would not like for him to stay there too long, because he might slip and get killed if the two of them were there when there’s only room for one.”

  I wanted to know why Freddie w
as so small, why his arms were so much less than Billy’s arms, and how they managed when they were together, up or down the mountain. “Freddie doesn’t get to be so big, because he stoops over. He picks the crops and plows, so his back is bent, that’s why; and his arms are bent for the same reason. But Billy, he can stretch when he wants to, and the air up there on top is real healthy for him. When they talk it’s real hard, because they are far from one another, so they have to shout.”

  Did Johnnie think they both did well in school? “Well, I think so,” he replied. Then he added: “But I’m not sure. Maybe Billy does better. He can talk better, so he comes out better in school, too.”

  How do boys like Billy look at boys like Freddie? White children in the South have a virtual field day attributing many of their own problems and struggles to Negro children. The segregated social system comes to bear upon children as well as adults, so that long before a white child goes to school he has learned that good and bad can find very real and convenient expression in black and white skin. Negro children are described as bad, ill-mannered, naughty, disobedient, dirty, careless, in sum everything that the white child struggles so hard not to be. Moreover, the white child’s sense of his own weakness, loneliness — or angry defiance — are also likely to be acknowledged indirectly by being charged up to the Negro. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the drawings of young white children. While Johnnie was letting me know how he saw the world, a white classmate of his was doing likewise — and with the virtuosity, I felt, of a real draftsman.