by Robert Coles
Allan liked his ruler. He would never draw without it and when he started he did so by putting the ruler on the empty paper, as if it would decide, he merely follow orders. Allan liked order and structure. He used the ruler to make sure that the walls of his buildings were straight, the pathways of his roads were direct, and the mountains un-deviating from ground to summit. Even with human forms or trees he would use the ruler, rounding off his lines when necessary. Allan talked more than most children of seven, and one day spoke as follows about Johnnie’s presence in school: “I guess he’s okay. But if we had a lot more everything would get bad. The teachers wouldn’t know what to do, and neither would we. Johnnie, he’s not making any trouble, but he’s different from the rest of us, and that’s important. So he shouldn’t be with us, any more than we should be with him; because differences mean something.” I asked him what differences meant. “They mean that one thing is one way and another was made different; and if they didn’t have differences, then everybody would be confused, and they wouldn’t know what’s right and what’s wrong to do.”
Later he drew a picture intended to show me what he meant about Johnnie being different from himself. I asked for just that. I said, “Allan, could you show me what you mean? Could you draw a picture that shows how Johnnie is different — or is it because his skin color is different and that’s it?” “No,” he shook his head, “it’s more than skin color, because if I get a sunburn, I get tan, but I’m still not like Johnnie.”
In the drawing he decided to do a street scene. He drew a road, then buildings along each side. A few cars appeared. Then he turned his attention to the sky. After that he decided to control the movements of his cars by placing a traffic light prominently on one side of the road. Finally he drew Johnnie, leaning on the post that held up the light, turned red. On the other side of the street he populated the store windows with several white faces, and put one white man on the street opposite Johnnie.
Now some of the details in this drawing were similar to others I have seen white children draw when they have in mind to show their social awareness, their realization that Negro children live a less hopeful or protected life. Thus, the sun was noticeably on the “white” side of the street, a side whose buildings were far bigger and sturdier than those on the “other” side. Red walls, orange windows, green grass and trees contrasted with the makeshift brown and purple lines of the buildings on Johnnie’s side of the street. They had no grass or trees nearby. Moreover, clearly Johnnie was the less intact person, his features in less proportion, his body less carefully and sensibly constructed (Figure 10). It was all very familiar.
On the other hand, I thought the use of the traffic light rather unusual. It signaled a definite, commanding red. Allan told me that it was a major road he had drawn, and a dangerous one to cross. The red light was on, a warning to motorists that speed had its dangers. I asked him whether there was a green light sometimes. “No,” he said. “This is one of those red lights that goes on and off. It’s to warn the cars not to go too fast, but it’s a big highway, and you’re not supposed to cross over.” Did that go for Johnnie as well as the others? Yes, he had no doubt about that. Nor did he think Johnnie in danger of confusion either: “He knows about the light; and he’s so close to it that he can’t very well forget it, can he?”
Allan is a very orderly boy. He is sensitive to what he may do, to when and where he may do anything, to the “stops” and “goes” of daily life — to be learned (and resisted) by all children. The longer I knew him the more I realized how neatly he had assigned the forbidden to Johnnie and others like Johnnie. They were the wrongheaded ones; they were unruly, even messy, disobedient, wild, unpredictable. Allan summarized it all very pointedly one day by telling me what was for him an unforgettable incident: “Johnnie dropped his ruler in class and he didn’t even seem to care whether he got it back or not.”
Allan and Johnnie, Ruby and Jimmie, the boys and girls I have known these past years have all had in common their childhood, their developing sense of themselves and the world around them. Each of these children has learned to identify himself, somewhat, by his or her skin color — learned so during the first two or three years of life. What they have learned about their skin has been but the beginning of what they will learn. Yet, when they finally know what color they possess and what color they lack, they know something more than a few facts; they know something about their future. As one little Negro girl in Mississippi said after she had drawn a picture of herself; “That’s me, and the Lord made me. When I grow up my momma says I may not like how He made me, but I must always remember that He did it, and it’s His idea. So when I draw the Lord He’ll be a real big man. He has to be to explain about the way things are.”
The Students
The Matter of Chocolate
There is more to tell about Ruby, whose drawings we have already discussed. She was born in December 1954. She entered this world in a sharecropper’s cabin at the hands of a cousin who in the words of the child’s mother “knew about children getting born.” She was a warmly welcomed first child. Her father, in his early twenties, had just returned from the Korean War, where for wounds received in combat while risking his life to save a white soldier he received a Purple Heart. Her mother was nineteen when she married, and the same age when she became a mother. The parents had known one another as children, and grown up together, in a hot, sleepy Mississippi town whose existence was confirmed only by several stores, a post office, and a gas station. For miles in all directions from the town the rich soil of the Delta stretched, and both their families had worked its soil, picked its cotton, for generations.
“Farm work is all I knew before I got into the army,” was this military hero’s summary of his education and occupation. He barely knew how to read and write, had attended school only cursorily until twelve, then simply worked at farming. It was fortunate for him that in the army he learned how to repair automobile engines because on his return home he married and started a family but was quickly confronted with the joblessness of a shrinking rural economy. Some of his brothers took to the nomadic if familiar life of migrant farm-workers. His mechanical skills prompted him to choose New Orleans. (“I figured I knew how to make cars work, so I could take on the city.”)
The young couple brought their baby daughter (six months old) to the city, and soon were settled in its eastern industrial slums, an area whose worn shacks on unpaved streets seemed impressive to two people whose rural homes were hardly more than primitive cabins. “I got a good job in a station through a cousin, and we just lived along real quiet like” was the way the father summarized their lives before the crisis of school desegregation. By then, the year 1960, they had two more girls and one son, and Ruby’s mother was expecting a fifth child.
The question has often been asked of me, and particularly by my psychiatric colleagues: Why did these parents consent to let their children face the ugliness and danger that occurred in desegregating the New Orleans schools? Ruby’s mother at first replied tersely, “We just did.” After months of our visits she talked much more openly. Her several answers basically showed that little calculation or sleight-of-hand was involved in the decision. She had no burning ideological zeal, no secret desire for prominence or profit. They had never expected the trouble they met. If they had, they would never have begun. Ruby’s father once said, “we agreed to sign for Ruby to go to the white school because we thought it was for all the colored to do, and we never thought Ruby would be alone…. We thought she’d be going with hundreds of them.”
If they had applied out of naïve faith and quiet hope, their first surprise, that their daughter would be alone, was quickly followed by their second, that she would by her mere presence at the school occasion an uproar which would plague them for months. Indeed, the grim historical facts of the kinds of pressures brought to bear upon this child of six when she started school are a matter of public record. Riots greeted her arrival there, and a boycott soon foll
owed. Daily crowds, abusive and taunting, hailed her for many months. For a long while she had a classroom and teacher to herself. At one point there were only four fellow students, so nearly complete was the white boycott on her account.
I first saw Ruby when she was facing her worst time in the first grade, and I have continued to see her on occasion ever since then. During those years she emerged from anonymity to international notoriety, then slowly saw her fame disappear, so that in one of our recent visits she could talk about my departure this way: “I told my daddy I miss the people from before that came…. Are you coming here for my promotion next year, too?”
What she missed was the excitement and attention she had received, which could now perhaps be seen as pleasant. She had never been “sick,” no matter how lamentable some of her experiences, but she had become frightened and anxious, and she had suffered private worries unknown to the world which watched her on television and saw her in newspapers. Despite the noise and disorder outside, her work in school was good and her attendance regular. For a while it was her parents who were most severely tested. Her father lost his job, and he and his wife feared for their lives. Their families in Mississippi were afraid of lynching. Yet they were strong and stubborn people — to be alive is an achievement when one grows up in the unspeakable poverty and toil that were theirs — and they managed. The father obtained a new job, not from a white man this time. Neighbors rallied round them and guarded their home. Significantly, they drew close to their children, but not anxiously so.
Ruby slept well, studied well at school, played regularly after school, and developed only one symptom — a puzzling one for her parents, who ate hungrily and heartily if not healthily. One day at the height of the tension her mother described it for me this way: “She doesn’t eat the way she used to. Ruby was always a good eater. Now she stays clear of a lot of foods and she won’t eat unless we all eat with her.” They assumed she had lost a bit of her appetite because of the strain she faced, and in a general sense they were correct. Ruby for a while had to eat alone at school, and she had been leaving her lunches untouched, hiding them in various spots of the near-empty building. When she joined her few white schoolmates at lunch she ate with them hesitantly, enough so that they noticed it. Slowly she relaxed at lunch, but only because she was very careful about what she took to school to eat. At home she ate listlessly, and never alone. Once she had sought snacks constantly and with scant discrimination; now she was fussy.
On several visits I asked Ruby about her appetite, and she replied that it was “good” or “pretty good.” She seemed unwilling to pursue the matter, but glad to share a Coke with me. One day I again asked about her appetite. Her mother had been particularly worried — “I went and got her some vitamin pills today to keep her healthy.” After being questioned, she was silent for a few seconds, then looked at our doll house nearby. I asked her whether she wanted to play with it. She nodded with obvious relief and enthusiasm. Ruby and I had spent considerable time with this set, or with crayons and paints. The set included Negro and white dolls and a house for them. We were arranging the house’s furniture when I asked how her schoolwork was coming along. She replied “okay,” then volunteered that “they’re still there.” They were, I knew, and still pretty nasty. “They tells me I’m going to die, and that it’ll be soon. And that one lady tells me every morning I’m getting poisoned soon, when she can fix it.” She paused a moment, then added, “Is it only my skin?” I wasn’t sure what she meant. I asked her, “Is what only your skin, Ruby?” She did not answer. She picked up her teacups and asked me whether I wanted some tea. I said yes, and we made some. While brewing it we talked about the kinds of cookies we’d have with it and then she volunteered that her sisters consumed large numbers of cookies each day, but not she. Had this always been the case? No, she told me, and I knew that her parents had said the same. I had known her long enough to recall her sweet tooth on earlier visits, and its indulgence in the very chocolate cookies (Oreos) she now steadfastly refused.
Ruby and I had been talking quite regularly about her school experiences. She told me she had especially disliked eating there alone, although she didn’t mind being alone with her teacher. In fact, she regretted in certain ways the slow return of white children to “her” school. On each of my visits she would give me the tally: “Two more came back.” Talkative about such matters, Ruby became quite silent about any discussion of her appetite. Her parents were the ones who were concerned, and they described their concern to me one day as follows: “She don’t eat the way she used to, and she only eats what’s hers alone, and she won’t share from our food.” Further questioning revealed that the girl was largely rejecting freshly prepared food and favoring packaged and processed food, especially potato chips and Cokes. She had always been drawn to fried and mashed potatoes, pork chops, cookies and ice cream, and now would have none of them. She was reluctant about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, once her favorite. She shunned greens even though formerly she had not.
Before discussing Ruby’s food habits and home life further, we may indicate what happened to her when she left home each morning and approached the school. Anyone who cared to “hear” could learn what this girl was told every day as she approached school. “You little nigger, we’ll get you and kill you” was a commonplace. Some of the language is unprintable. But one comment is both printable and important. Spoken in a high-pitched but determined voice, its words were always the same: “We’re going to poison you until you choke to death.” Its speaker was always the same. In the midst of so much abuse, this threat sounded relatively mild. Watching Ruby coming to school I felt that all the rebukes, all the fierce tongue-lashings, were to no avail. She came with federal marshals at first and later with her mother, and would invariably march rather firmly and stolidly right into the building. She rarely looked at her accusers, though even the slightest of hurried, backward glances from her shoulder sent each of them into excited pitches of slander. One seemed to compete with another for the child’s attention.
Those backward glances I was to learn in later months were specifically directed and significant. Ruby had been told to ignore the crowd, and she told me for some time that she did: “I pays no attention to them. I just goes in.” But she was paying attention to the one who threatened her death by poisoning and choking. She had asked her mother whether that lady owned a variety store near her home, the same variety store, white-owned, that had refused to sell Ruby’s mother food when the trouble about school desegregation first started. Of course, the woman was not the one who owned the store, but the associations in Ruby’s mind might be put together as follows: A woman tells me I’m going to be poisoned. It is dangerous anyway, going to school. I can’t get candy and cookies and my family can’t buy other food from our old store — we go to a supermarket now. Of course, I’m familiar with threats about food; that is, being told that if I’m bad I’ll be punished by missing meals or getting indigestion. My mother has told me I’ll choke on some of my bad words, and she has also kept me from certain pleasant foods when I’ve been fresh or cruel with my sisters and brother. So I’d best be circumspect. And since I’m not sure about how good and how bad I am, and since I seem to be having a rather bad time of it and therefore may well be “bad,” I’m worried enough to have lost a good deal of my appetite, and to fear punishment — from that lady outside the school building, and from my parents, too, who say they are not worried but must be, what with all those threats.
At first Ruby’s food habits changed without her family’s knowledge. She simply pretended to eat her lunch, but left most of it untouched, either discarding the food or leaving several days’ total in her desk, to be later done away with in secret. By the time this behavior was apparent to her teachers and the few white children in the school, her parents had begun to notice a definite fall in her appetite at home. They also found themselves questioned about what poison is and how it works.
“She keeps on asking me
, ‘Is it only my skin?’ and I tells her that if she was white there’d be no crowds there. Then she’ll ask if we’ll all die if they gets poison to our food, and I tells her that’s foolishness … I tells her nobody’s going to get our food like that, but I can see she don’t believe me all the way.” These recorded words helped to discover what was happening. They describe Ruby’s fears and her mother’s awareness of them. Is it only my skin?” was a question Ruby asked many times of her parents and of me. The origins of the question are in both public and private matters, a twin derivation that must be emphasized.
What Ruby meant when she asked this question of her family, and of me in our talks and play, was that she comprehended her exposure to harassment and wondered about its causes. She is a Negro; she knows that and could hardly help knowing it during those months. There are restrictions and penalties associated with her racial condition; she knows that and has been taught them. No, she cannot go here or sit there. No, her race’s people do not ordinarily appear on television programs or in movies. Yes, she would probably never finish school, because money is short, expenses high, her family large, and opportunities very few. Yes, most of her race are poor, and menially employed. You will remember that Ruby drew white children strong and able-bodied; Negroes undersized, even stunted. Her doll-house play also showed that she knew the facts of her future life: who was always mistress and who had to be servant. Nor was it all sketched and played this way merely for my benefit. Her mother daily confirmed and enforced what her children knew, what they had to know as they grew older and left their backyards to face the world of school, buses, and shopping centers.