Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  I found her at times suspicious and preoccupied with religion. As her remark indicated, she and her husband have not always had a good time of it together. He is a very heavy drinker, enough so to be considered an alcoholic: he can’t quite live with or without liquor. After two years of visiting the family and interviewing young John, I learned from him what he himself had only recently learned from his oldest sister, that when he was three, following the birth of his youngest brother, their mother had left for several months, hospitalized for “mental troubles.” Mrs. Washington later talked very briefly about the episode: “I don’t remember much. I know I got low, and they gave me electricity, and I got pulled back.”

  From what I could observe and gather from her response to my questions, she still has her moody times. How much they influenced John during his childhood is hard to know. He was breast-fed until “over a year” old, even while his mother was upset. His grandmother also cared for him then, in South Carolina, and for a month in Georgia. At about three months his mother was alone with him; she was still shaky psychologically. Later, when his mother’s illness required hospitalization, his grandmother again cared for him.

  John was rather strictly toilet trained, in contrast to the way his three older sisters were reared. A very interesting change fell upon him and all the other children who followed him; they were rigorously and even punitively made to respect what was essentially a new — and I would imagine fearful — routine for their parents as well as them. In our first discussion of the subject Mrs. Washington noted that, “In the country we didn’t much worry, except for the difference between the house and the trees, and that they has to get to know the difference. But in the city we knew we had to watch out in the apartment. The white owns it, and we just made sure the kids took care of theirselves right off.”

  It became clear to me — though very slowly — that not only plumbing (sink, running water, and radiators) was new to John’s parents when they moved with him as a baby to the city. We often forget what a perplexing and intimidating event it may be for people to leave the secluded poverty of sharecropper cabins for city living: its crowded streets, with their cars and rules of traffic, its noisy anonymity. John’s strict upbringing reflected in some degree the guarded adjustment his parents were making to Atlanta. His mother put the matter this way to me once: “If we had stayed on the farm, I wouldn’t have been so hard on John when he was little; but his daddy and me had to be more careful of what we did and what the children did, living in a new place where the rules are different — and for a long time you don’t know what they are.”

  So far as John’s parents, older sisters and past teachers can recall, he was not a particularly outstanding boy, either at home or in school. His appetite as an infant and child was normal. He grew normally, suffered the usual childhood ailments. At school he started out hesitantly and without distinction, but gradually gained ground, so that in the sixth grade he was one of the three or four leading students in his class. He always excelled in sports, whether in his neighborhood or at school. His parents proudly attributed his agile manner, his athletic excellence to the rural, farm boy “soul” in him. “John was born on a farm,” his mother once reminded me, “and that’s where his soul got fixed. He can run and jump because that’s what you do when you live where we did. People say he’s so strong, and his muscles are so good, but we’re not surprised. He carries my daddy’s body, and he’ll hand it down, too — if the city don’t take it out of him, somehow.”

  Whatever value both parents put on a limber body, they matched it with emphasis upon the worth of education. Amid the talk we hear these days about “culturally disadvantaged” Negro children, I think we tend to overlook the fact that Negroes — not only those from the skimpy Negro middle class — have had a widespread interest in education, though to be sure it has necessarily been education of a special kind. Negro colleges are scattered all over the South. Negro seminaries seem to be everywhere. Negro boys have aimed for teaching or the ministry as commonly as white boys have hoped to become lawyers, doctors, or businessmen. By Northern white standards many of the schools and seminaries are weak indeed. We may, today, scoff at state-supported A. and M. (agricultural and mechanical) colleges as part of the “Uncle Tom” tradition that started with Booker T. Washington and is only now ending. We may be dubious about the endless educational courses and credits taken and achieved by the thousands of Negro teachers in the South’s segregated schools — all leading so often and ironically nowhere but to further spiritless, flawed learning. Yet, such efforts have at least enabled the hopes and ambitions of Negro people to find some outlet, however small, during a period in history when nothing else seemed at all possible.

  For example, Mrs. Washington wanted a future for her children, and even though she doubted its realization, she constantly invoked it as a possibility. Not only did she want her first son to be a teacher; she told me that her grandfather had wanted her father to be a teacher. When today we observe the aimlessness and apparent inertia of many Negroes, we may be seeing people who once had ambition, but have forsaken it.

  John entered school at six, and for several years was a rather ordinary pupil. His favorite subjects were geography and history, to which he apparently brought considerable imaginative effort. His fifth-grade teacher gave him a book of travel adventures by Richard Halliburton as a reward for excellence in written reports on such subjects as “wheat” and “cotton.” Mrs. Washington saved them and I have read them. They are neatly written, with pictures of cotton fields and sharecroppers working in them. As a matter of fact, John as a young boy was once told by his mother that such pictures showed the kind of life he might be living, had his parents not moved to Atlanta: “I told him that he has cousins working at cotton, and would you believe it, he said no, it wasn’t so. He was six or so, and he believed we had always been in Atlanta; and every time we took him to see his grandfolks he wanted to know why they had left the city to work so hard in the fields.”

  John had some trouble with arithmetic when first introduced to multiplication and long division, but slowly mastered both. He also tended to talk or whisper in class enough to earn B’s and C’s in conduct. He was never known to have any psychological troubles. He has always had a lusty appetite (“he’d eat us poor if I didn’t tell him there isn’t any more left”). He never had trouble sleeping; and generally — from what his parents and former teachers say — he was obedient at home and school without turning obedience into the compulsion of uncritical compliance.

  John entered junior high school (and adolescence) at twelve. He took up with a girl in his class, a rather attractive and quiet girl who then dreamed of being a nurse, and afterward became one. John continued to see her over the years, though they became “old friends” rather than courting friends. I noticed that they drew closer together — at his behest — when he faced the ordeal of desegregation.

  He became involved in that ordeal quite casually. He was a tenth grader in one of the Negro high schools in Atlanta. He had been thinking of quitting school, as many of his friends had been doing with increasing frequency. He fought with his parents over this, and the considerations at issue tell about his home life. His father, as I mentioned, had been drinking for many years, but until John was about ten had managed to confine his intake to weekend bouts. John remembers as a child that his father would simply disappear, sometimes coming home for brief periods, sometimes lying down to sleep in hallways or alleys and then being picked up by the police and jailed, dried out and returned home, or brought to his family directly. However, he generally kept sober during the week, and kept his job out of jeopardy. About the time John entered high school his father’s controls weakened; he insidiously began weekday drinking. Mrs. Washington apparently saw what was coming, and obtained work at a nearby factory where she helped assemble children’s toys. She called upon her religious faith more than ever at that time, and attributes her job to divine intervention: “I saw him going for the bot
tle worse than ever, and I prayed to God for guidance. He told me to go and find a job, and let it be between Him and my husband, what will come from the drinking. So I looked, and I found one, and it’s a good job, too.”

  The older sisters took care of the younger children. John became a kind of father to them, something he himself once readily described: “My sister Mary and I have sort of been mother and father to my younger brothers and sisters, especially the sisters, because they’re young enough to need us.” With this in mind, John wanted to leave school, find work, and establish his position as the chief breadwinner of the family — its most reliable man. His mother, however, objected. She feared her son would take after his father if he didn’t consolidate his own life, educationally and professionally. His father, too, objected to John’s leaving school; so much so that he stopped drinking for the few weeks the decision was in balance.

  Largely for those reasons — the various fears of his parents — John stayed in high school, and obligingly set to work studying harder than ever before. Listening to him talk about it several years later, I felt he must have been relieved to see his own struggles and decisions act to stabilize his family. In a way, he achieved his purpose without quitting school.

  When the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia yielded to a federal court order requiring a start toward school desegregation, they chose to begin with the last two years of high school. John was a sophomore at this time and like all his classmates was confronted with the choice of applying or not for transfer the next year to a white high school. The school board would then act upon the applications, selecting the children it judged suitable to make the move.

  My experience in city after city of the South has taught me to expect no set pattern for the kinds of children who have taken on the leadership in school desegregation, nor any pattern for the criteria imposed by school boards in selecting them. Many Negro parents would not allow their children to face the dangers involved: some because they were poor and afraid that they would lose their jobs; some because they were comfortable and unwilling to risk the loss of that comfort; some because they were (and are) so fearful of whites, or hate them so, that they would not want their children exposed to them even if they were assured it wasn’t dangerous.

  School boards in Southern states have not always shown a consistent interest in trying to select the students whose abilities would augur well for making desegregation work. In many instances the age of the child and his place of residence were the only considerations observed. Indeed, often the school boards regarded themselves as under legal attack and accommodated themselves minimally, and only under court order. Frequently they would agree to desegregate, and announce that fact publicly; later on they set a time for those who wished to apply for transfer. In Atlanta a large number applied when they learned that the eleventh and twelfth grades of several white schools would be open to them.

  John decided on impulse to request a transfer. Like his friends and classmates, he had been paying particular attention to what he once called “race news.” He was eleven when the Little Rock crisis occurred, and remembered it vividly. He later told me that he would “never forget that if I live to be one hundred. I was walking every inch with those kids.” In 1960, just a year before Atlanta faced its crisis, New Orleans had been the scene of more riots, in a sense worse than any before them in duration and intensity, let alone the vulnerability of the children involved. John had particularly worried for the young children — he had a sister of seven. “I kept on picturing her going through it, and I figured if she did, I’d walk beside her; and just let anyone try anything.”

  Walking home one day with his friends, he heard some say yes, they would, some say no, they wouldn’t think of going through mobs or sitting through insults at a white school. John recalls the atmosphere and conversation as follows: “We were just kidding around, like any other time; only that day it was about integration and what we would do now that it was coming to Atlanta. We kept on daring one another and teasing each other. My friend Kenny said he was going to do it regardless; and the girls let out a big cheer and hugged and kissed him. Then Larry called him a fool. He said we would be giving up the best two years of our lives for nothing but trouble. He meant the end of high school, and the dances and football games — everything you hope for when you’re beginning high school. Well, we most of us said we would do it — I think more to be the hero before the girls. Then they fell to arguing just like we did. My best girl then was Betty, and she told me she would sign up if I would, but we had to promise we both meant it to one another. I can still remember the bargain. She said, ‘No joking’ and I said, ‘No joking,’ and that was it. A week later we went down singing to get the forms and apply. I didn’t even tell my folks until it came time to get their signatures, and that was where the trouble started. They said no, sir. I tried to tell them we were all going to do it, but it didn’t cut any ice with them. Momma started praying out loud, and quoting the Bible to me about getting into heaven by being poor, and if I tried to go to school with whites and rise up, I’ll probably lose my soul. And Daddy told me I’d get myself killed, and they’d get him to lose his job, one way or another. For a while I thought I was out of the running before I even started; and a lot of my friends had the same trouble.”

  In a sense the week of struggle for his parents’ signatures became a real time of intimacy and discussion between the three of them. It was also a confrontation of the generations, the past incredulous at what the present seemed to expect as its due. John heard from his parents stories of experiences which they themselves had long since “forgotten”: accounts of terror, humiliation, and repudiation which had formerly been handed down from parent to child as an inheritance, to be told and later relived. John was particularly moved by his mother’s insistence that his generation was the first to be spared the worst of it — the constant possibility of lynching, the near-total lack of hope, the daily scorn that permitted no reply, no leeway. To be free of that, to be safe from night riders, to have steady work, to be left mostly alone, all that seemed enough. “They wanted me to be glad I could walk on the sidewalk,” John summarized their conversations, “because they used to have to move into the gutter in their town when a white man approached them. But I told them that once you walk on the sidewalk, you look in the windows of the stores and restaurants, and you want to go there, too. They said, maybe my children, and I said me, so that my children will be the first really free Negroes. They always told me that they would try to spare me what they went through; so I told them I wanted to spare my children going through any mobs. If there were mobs for us to face, we should do it right now. And besides, I told them they were contradicting themselves. My mother always brags about how wonderful the farm life was, and my daddy says he thought the city would save him, and it drove him to drink, so it’s too bad he ever left South Carolina. Suddenly, though, all the truth was coming out.” When I asked him how he explained their opposing sentiments he replied briefly — and for me his words are unforgettable — “I guess people can believe different things at different times.”

  As he persisted they relented. Eventually they gave their reluctant, apprehensive endorsements. They apparently were proud as well as filled with foreboding as they signed their names, itself not an easy task for either of them. John must have sensed their pride. He described an unexpected rise of sentiment in himself as he watched his parents sign their permission: I think I got more emotional over that than anything else that happened; even more than walking in the building the first day.”

  Before walking into any school building for white children he would have to meet the standards of school officials worried about how to implement an uncongenial court order in the face of an uncertain and fearful population. John expected to be one of hundreds of new Negro students. He may have been dimly aware that no Southern city had yet taken more than a handful of Negro children to start desegregation, but neither he nor his friends ever gave much thoug
ht to the likelihood that only a few of them might be chosen. To some extent they believed — and correctly — that their city was determined to secure their safety. That belief, that faith, helped these children forget or “overlook” some of the possible dangers in the future. John put it to me quite concisely one day several weeks before those dangers actually started coming to his attention: “I try not to think about what’s going to happen when school starts. I just go from day to day. We never thought it would be a picnic, but we figured we’d just take what comes, and then we could have stories to tell afterward.”

  John was interviewed, along with many of his friends, by school officials who were trying to make their choices more rationally and thoughtfully than some of their counterparts had done in other Southern cities. John realized during the interviews that a quiet and sincere presence was wanted, that an inflammatory or argumentative one was feared. He was asked by the school system’s deputy superintendent how he would manage insults and even attacks upon himself. He replied that he would ignore them. If anyone threatened to injure him or interfere with his activities, he would call for help from others, namely his teachers. He was pointedly asked whether he would strike back if hit. He said he would not. He was asked why. He said he would only be inviting worse injury by doing so; he would, after all, be outnumbered, literally a thousand to one. I asked him, on hearing him tell of this exchange, how he expected to maintain that degree of almost fearless restraint. My question was: “John, in your own mind — apart from what you told them in the interview — do you think you would act that way if one or two boys pushed or shoved you, and called you names?” He replied: “That’s where my daddy is right. He told me a long time ago, ‘The only way a colored man can win is to fool the white man into thinking he’s won.’ I don’t think that’s always right, but it has to be like that until we get strong enough to make it even Steven.”