by Robert Coles
Yet, Ruby is also a girl in a particular family, and now the eldest of six children. She was a growing girl of six years when she was told every day that she would die from something she ate. Her symptomatic reply of appetite loss and sharp sensitivity to categories of food and food technology reflected her awareness of her social and racial vulnerability. But her question, her play and talk, showed that she vaguely expected other punishment or knew of other causes for worry or guilt.
Once she told me she had been punished that day for striking her sister hard enough to fell her. Her mother had lost her temper and punished her with a “good” whipping. Ruby told me that her mother had said words to this effect: “We’re letting you off easy and often these days, because we know you’re under a strain at school; but there are limits.” I asked Mrs. Bridges later what had happened and she replied, “Ruby has always got on bad with Melinda [eleven months her junior]. She bosses all the children too much and they gets angry; so I have to punish her — even now when I know she’s getting it bad at school … but two bads won’t make Ruby a good girl.”
Ruby, then, was learning to be a good girl, a rather conventional task for one of her age. Her envies, her feelings of rivalry toward others in her family, are not unusual. She is a girl of sound mind and body, a lively, rather perceptive child whose drawings and frolic show imagination even as they indicate the normal anxieties and fears of a growing child. Were it not for the intersection of her childhood with a moment of our country’s history, her difficulties at school or with her family would not be under discussion.
Anna Freud’s work during the Second World War demonstrated that tensions in the family engage with public tensions; that is, the adjustment of children to the various hardships of war depended to a considerable extent on how they managed with their parents, nurses, or guardians. True terror can invade and destroy the happiest home; but an unhappy home can be crushed by the merest discomfort.
Ruby’s home life seemed basically sound, and her family stable. As a girl of six, she was fast learning the rights and wrongs of her world, shaping her conscience to reflect what her family urged. The crisis of school desegregation became involved in this development, its perils and punishments fitting in with her prior guilts. Her mother had threatened her often with no supper if she persisted in wrongdoing — hitting her sister too hard, failing to obey a command or request. Now segregationist mobs were telling her she might be hurt, poisoned, and killed. One member of that mob, impelled by reasons within her own life, kept telling Ruby of poison in her lunch or supper, forging in the child’s mind a link between home and school, between the child’s personal conflicts and this public struggle which found her a sudden participant.
Small wonder that Ruby developed temporary symptoms and asked her fearful question — one stimulated by racial conflict, but also related to her psychological development and the quality of her family life. Small wonder, also, that with slow improvement in the city’s crisis and continued growth on Ruby’s part, she is now a normal, even lusty eater. “Lord, she eats the table up now,” has been her mother’s consistent report to me in recent years. Ruby is now saying goodbye to childhood, and her school is quietly, fully attended on a desegregated basis.
Eventually attending that school with Ruby was the child of a woman who once vowed the contrary, not only for her own child but for all other white children. Mrs. Patterson withdrew her son Paul from the third grade when Ruby entered the school, and he went without schooling the rest of that year. The following year Paul attended a private school specifically, abruptly, and furiously organized for the white children “dispossessed” by the Negro child. The next year the boy’s mother bowed to the inevitable. To abide by her principles would cost more money than she could afford. The public school was a better school, a nearer school, a free school, and now hardly boycotted. Her boy wanted to go back there. She agreed, saying like others I was interviewing, “There’s only a few of them in our schools now, anyway. The real ruin will be for the next generation, when they flood us unless we get them all to go North.”
For that matter, as language went this woman’s was mild for a member of the mob that bothered Ruby. Moreover, part of her threat to Ruby was one she hurled at her own children. If they misbehave she threatens to choke them. I have heard her use the expression commonly enough to indicate that for her it has the meaning of a serious spanking. Her children do not seem overly frightened by the threat. She is a cooperative informant and I visited her and her sister and two of their children for the same length of time I saw Ruby. I saw and heard her on the streets, angry and shouting. I was introduced to her there, by a minister who knew her well.
There is no question that this woman fears and hates Negroes, and there is also no question about her generally suspicious personality. She is poor, now in her very late thirties, with little education (eighth-grade) and perhaps too many children as well as a wayward, fickle, heavily drinking husband. Most of all she is tired: “I have enough to do just to keep going and keep us alive without niggers coming around. They’re lower than our dog in behavior. At least he knows his place and I can keep him clean. You can’t ever do that with them. They’re dirty. Have you ever seen the food they eat? They eat pig food, and they eat it just like pigs, too.”
When she is weary she becomes surly, and underneath it all very sad and very frightened. She is struggling to manage herself and her large family in the face of poverty, ignorance, social isolation (like Ruby’s parents, she comes from a farm in nearby Mississippi), and virtual abandonment by her occasionally employed husband. She herself is an obese woman, plucking candy from cheap assortments during every visit I made. Her five children are as old as nineteen and young as four.
She has had no history of contact with a psychiatric clinic. One of her children is mildly retarded and mildly spastic, and has been followed by one of the free clinics in the city. Her other children are “normal”; that is, they appear to have no symptoms warranting referral to a child-guidance clinic. One boy was a bed wetter until fourteen, but seems without major emotional troubles now. He is rather tough and laconic, very much like his father. Her husband has bouts of heavy drinking, at irregular intervals, which are followed by pious sobriety. He is a guarded, aloof man, possibly very paranoid under his stylized silence or episodic drinking. Yet, he seems less entangled with racism. He will sneer at “niggers,” then shrug his shoulders and sit back saying nothing, or very little. His silence is often his wife’s cue for a bitter remark about the lowly nature inherently attached to Negro skin. One of her complaints is that her husband cares very little for the education of his children. Another is that he is not suitably aroused by the perils of the Negro advance into the white world. I have never heard her directly attack her husband’s character or habits of drink and work.
Mrs. Patterson does, however, complain about her own life, even as she can complain about Negroes. Her life is cheated and impoverished, and she feels at times lonely and hard-worked with little hope of an end to either condition. Her feelings emerge in remarks like this: “I have to do the best I can with little help from anyone, and I’ll probably die young doing nothing else.”
There is no very special reason why this woman joined a mob and said what she did while its member. When I asked her why she joined she replied with conventional hatred for Negroes, not unlike those of other people who never have joined mobs. She was undoubtedly influenced by the attitude of her city, its hesitant police and politicians; that is, by the fact that there was a mob, that one was allowed to form and daily continue its actions. She is not a psychotic woman, and when reality changes, as it has over these past three years, she makes her ideological and practical adjustment to it. She now defends her right to her school against the claims of “the niggers.” The same Negro child no longer bothers her as before.
As for her choice of threats for Ruby, they surely bear some relationship to her own problems. Feeling her own life frustrated and empty, she co
uld only want to poison another’s, but as a devout Baptist she could only allow herself to express such despair and rage at a Negro. She, who ate chocolates so passionately, who was so lonely herself, would poison a lonely chocolate-brown girl. The need for a public scapegoat could not be more clear. Yet, the history of her life shows that for her, unlike some, the possession of a public scapegoat is no compulsion. Deprived of the outlet of the mob, she goes on, her family goes on, strained, tense at times, but law-abiding.
In a sense the chocolates Ruby came to shun and the chocolates one of her hecklers craved were a symbolic link joining their fears. Ruby once told me I could choose vanilla cookies because I was white. I have often heard Negro children and adults similarly attach importance to the white or brown color of food, clothes, even furniture. Ruby at the height of her difficulties was all too Negro. She avoided reminders and “reinforcements” as the poisonous threats she believed them to be.
Her taunter of each morning ate chocolate cake and candy to soften her feelings of desolation. Listening to Mrs. Patterson then and listening to her again and more closely on tapes it becomes clear that Ruby’s isolation as a Negro expressed this woman’s sense of her own condition. She shouted at the Negro girl because she was moved to cry out and protest her own fate. What she called the Negroes she feared herself to be; what she saw in that Negro child was herself, unhappy and isolated. She wanted that part of herself to die, and in one of those “moments” which allow people like her “expression,” she said as much with her threats toward Ruby. Indeed, the transcripts of her associations during our conversations — the trends in our talks — reveal again and again her mind’s unwitting connection of frustration and loneliness with chocolates, with worthlessness, with Negroes, with Ruby.
Pioneer Youth: John Washington
“We once were slaves, but now we have to free our country as well as ourselves,” said a Negro minister to his flock in the summer of 1961. His church is in Atlanta, Georgia, and in the words of one parishioner, “it is a hard-praying one.” It is also an old and a new church: the redbrick building housed a congregation of white Methodists for many years; but the neighborhood around the church had changed recently, and with it the character of worship practiced in it. “We’re Baptist sometimes,” the minister had explained to me, “but sometimes we’re just ourselves. We takes the Bible at its word, and goes off on our own kind of original praying.” Most of his flock were new to the city, and their rural ways of worship did indeed persist in that church: passion and severity, heaven and hell, sin denounced ecstatically. It was a hot terribly humid day, but everyone was immaculately dressed in clothes never worn except in church. They listened attentively, nodding often and occasionally shouting their assent to one point or another made in the sermon. It was a sermon meant to bolster the spirit of a community set to accomplish part of its liberation; school desegregation would take effect the coming week. Sitting in the church was John Washington, a youth of fifteen who was to be one of ten students (in a city of a million, a state of several million) to lead his race out of its special schools and into those shared by the rest of the community.
After the church service had ended, I was at a loss to see how John would be able to live up to his avowedly solid faith during the time ahead. For one thing, he himself seemed bored and restless during the rather long time of singing, reading, and listening. Moreover, I had been in Negro churches better led, more neighborly and warmhearted in atmosphere.
Yet, whatever I felt, in our first interviews John emphasized to me his reliance upon religion, and predicted his ability to survive — through faith — whatever dangers and pressures he was soon to face. “If it gets rough, I can always pray and go to church, and that will calm me down real fast” was the way he once put it. He spoke quietly and slowly, as if he was needing and gaining strength from his own words.
John was born in South Carolina in the early summer of 1946, the fourth child of Joseph and Hattie (Turner) Washington. His grandparents grew up in the homes of people once slaves — all of his ancestors worked on cotton for generations. His parents took pride in telling me that theirs was the first generation free enough to raise children who would never see a slave. John’s birth was attended by his aunt, one of the younger sisters of his mother. His parents were sharecroppers, and until the Second World War had been having an exceedingly hard time of it. Their yearly income had never been more than two hundred dollars. They lived in a cabin at the edge of a large plantation; the cabin still stands, occupied by Mr. Washington’s younger brother. He now averages about a thousand dollars a year for farming cotton and tobacco. The land is rich and seemingly inexhaustible. Several times I visited the farm with John — after I had known him for two years — and we both noticed the curious presence of shabby, makeshift living quarters amid abundant wild flowers, heavily cultivated land, and well-fed animals — hogs, chickens, even a goat.
John’s father never left that farm until he was drafted to fight in the war. He had his basic training in New Jersey, then went to Europe, where he served as a cook for troops fighting in France. He says that he will never be able to forget the sight of men dying in war, but he counts his time in the army as the best and most influential period of his life: “I never had it so good. I ate food I never dreamed I could, even in battle; and I had a good bed and real fine clothes. I saw the world outside, and I figured I wouldn’t stay a ‘cropper’ after that.”
He didn’t. He came home for a year and tried resuming his earlier life. He had married a nearby girl when she was fourteen, he sixteen. When he was drafted at twenty they had three children. His wife Hattie very much wanted to remain in South Carolina. Her large family lived only a few miles away from his. They were all part of a community. If they were poor beyond description, essentially illiterate and almost totally isolated from the social, cultural, political, and economic life of the nation, at least they knew it in their bones; and so they feared the risks and burdens of leaving one another as well as a life both familiar and communal, whatever else it was not. Some, of course, had left, even before the war. Each family had its son or daughter, cousin or neighbor “abroad,” in the Southern or Northern cities.
Hattie finally agreed to leave, to emigrate, but not until John had been born in his grandmother’s cabin. Her husband Joseph had agreed to wait for the birth. Hattie had hoped that by the time their new child had arrived, Joseph would change his mind about moving. Instead, he was more determined than ever. Their fourth child was their first son; he was given his paternal grandfather’s name. Mr. Washington wanted a job in a city. He wanted schooling for his children, particularly his new son. He wanted to go northward, to Philadelphia or New York. His wife persuaded him to compromise on Atlanta. “I felt safer going to Georgia since we had to go at all,” she now recalls, “and if it was to do again, I’d still rather be here than up there North.” She didn’t like cold weather, snow, distance from her family, large cities or the way people get along in them — shunning one another, making her feel lonely. In Hattie’s town white people spoke to her on sight, asked after her. Hattie knew Negroes had a much tougher life to live, but she wasn’t sure that moving from one place in America to another would solve that problem. To this day she feels this, her own version of the Southerner’s pride. She accepts the higher standard of living she now has in the city, and the new-found rights she has there — to vote easily, to ride anywhere on the bus, to walk into any store without worrying whether she will be arrested for doing so. Yet, she also will say nostalgically: “I’d sooner have an outhouse and all the land we had than live like we do here, crowded together, even if the plumbing is good.” Another time she remarked that, “We knew white folks by their names and they knew us; and when we met we were real cordial to one another. Now it’s everyone strange to everybody else, and it don’t make any difference what your color is, people will let you die in the street before helping you. My granddaddy had his life saved by a white man, on a road right near our ho
use. Now fancy that here.”
In Atlanta young John began to grow up. Six months after he was born his mother was again pregnant. John eventually was to have seven brothers and sisters. Two brothers followed him, and two sisters followed them. This steadily increasing family settled at first in the outskirts of the city, where Mr. Washington obtained occasional employment as a dishwasher in a restaurant, then as a handyman in a service station. When John was two his parents moved into the neighborhood they now call their own. They have since lived continually in the same apartment, the five sisters in two bedrooms, the three boys in another, the parents in the living room. In addition there is a kitchen. For the entire Washington family — including the relatives in South Carolina and a few north in Chicago — this apartment represents the highest standard of living yet achieved. It is heated, has electricity, is not rat-infested, has running water, and though poorly furnished and crowded in comparison to the way most Americans live, it is by no means unattractive, because Mrs. Washington is a neat housekeeper.
John’s childhood, as a matter of fact, was a fairly strict one. His mother, I eventually learned, had a breakdown shortly before the family moved to Atlanta. John was a few weeks old. She became despondent and her mother took care of the baby. She turned to the local minister and to a rather intensive reading of the Bible for support. She recovered upon moving to Atlanta, but since then describes a definite change in her personality: “I used to be easygoing, but since we had to be on our own I’ve been careful to be good and do things right. I turned to religion so that we would survive, and I’ve tried to instill the Word of God in all my children, and sometimes I think even my husband may get it.”