Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Regardless of how appropriate I thought his nervousness to be, he had his doubts: “I wonder what’s coming over me. I used to be pretty calm about life. I knew what was going on; I always read the papers and magazines. But I never let current events rub off on my personality. I never became tense, just because the world is tense. Now it’s different. I wonder whether I’m becoming sick. Everything that goes on here bothers me inside — makes me sweat, or makes me lose my appetite, or get a headache, or lose sleep. Sometimes I think I’m going nuts, but then I see it happen to others too, and I figure that it’s not imaginary things getting to me, not in the least. So I talk to myself. I say, ‘Larry, it’s right to get worked up. If you didn’t you’d be a fool, or a louse; if you didn’t then you’d be sick.’ That helps — while I’m here. What about when I go back though? What will happen then? Will I just forget the whole thing, chalk it up to a nightmare, or even worse, a kind of summer-camp experience — exciting, even dangerous, but no longer a part of my real life? That’s the kind of possibility that scares me more than the segregationists do; because if that happens I will really have become one of them — in my own New England way, one of them.”

  We had our last talk in Mississippi two days before he left for home, then school: “I can’t believe I’m still here, when I think back to my first few hours in the town. I was so scared I couldn’t even allow myself to know I was scared at all. I kept on telling myself how wonderful everything was, the people, their attitude, their life. When you asked me how we were getting along, I said, ‘Great.’ I can remember saying it — exactly where we were when I said it. The answer stuck in my throat, but I didn’t know why. It took time for me to see how scared I was and how scared the Johnsons have been all their lives, and how scared a lot of white people are down here, including the sheriffs, who have guns.”

  Larry’s departure from Mississippi was as touching an episode as I saw in my work in the South. As at graduation time in high school or college, there was a succession of events — suppers, informal picnics, and dances — to mark the occasion. On one evening Mr. and Mrs. Johnson made a large supper for Larry and his students, for neighbors and other civil rights workers, and for a few visitors — a lawyer, a minister, myself — whom they called the “older generation of Northern help.” It was actually a community celebration, and was held in the Baptist church. Larry had been arrested twice during the summer, once for “speeding,” once for failing to halt (at least long enough to satisfy a waiting policeman) at a stop sign. Each time they had emptied his pockets, removed his watch, and held him in jail for what they called “the processing” of his violation. Each time his watch was returned damaged. The second time he refused to take it back. Before supper the Johnsons gave him a watch. Mr. Johnson said very little: “Larry, this is for you from us. We’re proud to know you, and we thank you. I don’t know what more to say, except God bless you.”

  A year afterward he would still recall the event as if both he and I had not been there, and needed a detailed description of what happened. “It was late afternoon, not evening. They eat early, because they rise early and work long hours. (It took me time to get back into the swing of things up here, supper at seven instead of five.) They came together quietly, in the church. They don’t talk too much. They can be silent without feeling nervous or inadequate. They handed me the watch and thanked me for being with them, and for doing what I could that summer. Mr. Johnson handed me the watch. Then Mrs. Johnson asked me if she could help me put it on — and that about broke me up. There wasn’t a dishonest moment the entire time. She wound up the watch and strapped it down on my wrist. They clapped, but only for a second or two. Mrs. Johnson announced that she had made some delicious fried chicken. She asked us all to eat it before she had a chance to get at it; if we didn’t do so, her hands would pick up one piece after another, her dress would stretch and then split, and that would be more than she could bear, or afford either. I never ate so much in my life, and I never felt so good. I told the Johnsons that since many people work fifty years for a watch, I was getting away with a lot. Mrs. Johnson didn’t wait a second to reply to that: ‘We’re giving you a freedom watch, not a slavery watch.’”

  Larry left very early in the morning, and he left quickly. The good-byes were kept down to a minimum. They all pretended — or believed — he would soon be back. As he drove North he never doubted that he would see the Johnsons again, but he did doubt his capacity to resume life at college. “I kept on wondering how I could face it: the silliness and emptiness; the instructors who think they’re God because they’ve read a few books and can sit and talk about ‘ideas’; the ivy that doesn’t only climb the buildings but grows up the legs and into the brains of both teachers and students. What would a football game mean to me? A spring riot over nothing? A rule about wearing a tie at breakfast? I could hear all those instructors telling me how ‘complicated’ everything is, and how ‘practical’ you have to be, and how more ‘research’ has to be done; and I knew I would do one of three things: cry to myself, scream at them, or just smile.”

  After he had returned and settled into his studies some but not all of his bitterness left him. He began to realize that it was not very sensible to compare school in the North and life in Mississippi. They were different, almost incomparably so. He kept up a continual and spirited correspondence with the Johnsons, and with several of his students. At Christmas he returned to see them. The more he realized that he could keep in touch with the South and with his friends there, the less he had to insist upon confronting his college with Mississippi at every possible turn. Just before he went South a second time he had this to say: “I’m settled back here, I guess. I’ll never be settled back the way I was before, but I’ll stay and graduate. I don’t hate college the way I did when I first came back; I think I really appreciate it more. I want my friends in the South to have what we have here. They even have a chance to have more than we have here, by avoiding some of the mistakes we’ve made.

  “Anyway, I think I’m going to law school. Whatever I decide to do I’ll never forget the civil rights issue, and its meaning — for me as much as the Johnsons. That’s what happened last summer; I learned that the struggle was mine as much as theirs. I told them so just before I left, and they laughed. They apologized for ‘giving me trouble.’ I said, ‘That kind of trouble I need.’”

  After Joe Holmes

  I was born in Reform, Alabama; that’s between Birmingham and Columbus, Mississippi. My daddy worked on shares — cotton and some tobacco. We had our own garden, too. (I can remember the first time I ate tomatoes from a store, and corn from the can. I thought they tasted real strange.) There were us seven children who lived (we lost some before they were born and some after they were born) and my mother took care of everyone, including keeping my daddy going in the fields, and keeping an eye on his mother and her own mother; though, naturally, both grandmothers helped out a lot around the house.

  It wasn’t so bad growing up as some in the movement like to picture it. They don’t know what hurts you and what doesn’t. To listen to some of them you’d think a colored boy in the South is born in hell, and when he grows up he’s entitled to get a diploma that says he’s been there. I’d as soon live on an Alabama farm as be in New York or Chicago. As a result of being in the movement I’ve got to both places, on fund-raising trips, and it’s really like hell up there: cold, so cold no one can relax his limbs; and the way people live there, it makes a coffin in a cemetery down South seem like a mansion.

  Back home we had our bad times and our good ones, but I never used to divide them like that: it was just life, moving along, and me, living. You know how it is: you’re not like the trees or the rocks, so you keep doing things and more things, and you know you’re “you” even if most all the time there’s no reason to think about things that way. When I was eight or nine I once asked my mother about that; I said, “Momma, tell me how it was decided I would be me, and someone else would be them, like
Mr. Jameson’s boy Andrew.” You know who Andrew Jameson was? He was the mayor’s son, and my age. He’s become a lawyer now, like his daddy. My mother used to go help there sometime, not regular though — if they had extra laundry, or a party to give. (“He’s the bossman of the whole county, Mr. Jameson is,” my daddy would say proudly, “and your mother has gone to work for him.”) Well, anyway, my mother didn’t have a very good answer to my question. She said, “Son, you can’t know about things like that. The Lord, He’s the only one who knows, and He don’t tell until we gets to meet Him, which is you know when.” I hadn’t given up on my mother’s Bible faith then, so not only did I hear her, I was satisfied with her explanation.

  Looking back, I was satisfied with everything in my life until in church one day a man stood up and said we were going to rewrite the history books in our lifetime. There are always a few people to speak out on Sunday, but mostly it’s Scripture they will read, or a lesson from it they have received that they feel the urge to tell. Suddenly Joe Holmes, he just stood up and said his television set was speaking the Lord’s will. Every day it showed pictures of what the colored man was doing, and how he was coming into something, at last. “It must be God’s desire,” Joe said, and then he wanted to know if we were all ready. “Are you ready for the Day?”

  I thought he meant Judgment Day, just the way it’s always meant that; but he was talking of something else. He must have known we were confused, because he explained himself before we could ask him to: “There’ll come a time not too much away when we’ll have to say to the white man that it’s over, treating us bad, and we are as much citizens of the country as everyone else has been all along.” I remember him talking as if that day was tomorrow, or next week at the latest. I never had heard anything like it.

  We just didn’t ever think like that, let alone speak aloud such thoughts. You grow up and take things for granted the way they are. If the rich take them for granted, so do poor folks. Why should they think it will ever change, the world where colored people have to be below the white man? My daddy’s reaction was to say that poor Joe Holmes was always funny in the head, and now he had gone and lost his head. My mother said his head wasn’t bad and it wasn’t lost; it was just that he didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. He kept on saying out loud things no one can say, unless he’s bound straight for the penitentiary — and plenty of us go there every year. “You just forget that kind of talk.” I recall those words from my daddy. But my mother said, “Don’t forget them, but don’t let them fasten on to your tongue, or there’ll be no end for you but the chain gang.”

  I forgot about Joe Holmes and his speech until a few weeks later I heard that Joe Holmes was beaten up near to death by the police. Some students in the Birmingham civil rights movement were going from county to county trying to get us all organized, to start school desegregation and get better streets for us, with lights, and get us some jobs maybe. Joe went to a meeting they had, and they started coming to see him at home. We heard that he said they could even use his house, come live there. I guess the sheriff heard the same thing. One night they were waiting for Joe on his way home from town. We knew they were watching him. (“It’s a matter of time, only time,” my daddy kept on saying.) They must have followed him until they could get him in secret, on the long, empty stretch of road going North. He was beat so bad they must have thought he was dead when they left him. It was a white man who saw him, lying near the road, and he drove to our cousin Mac’s house to tell him that a nigger was sick on the road and needed help fast. Mac said he knew what it was that happened even before he started his car to go find Joe. The white man said it looked from the distance like a stroke or something, there being blood; but he must have been a stranger, a salesman or something. Mac knew, and any white man from Reform would have known, too.

  Mac and two others, they drove Joe to Birmingham. They called the civil rights people to tell them ahead what was coming. They had people waiting outside the city on the main highway, and they worked a long time on Joe, the best doctors they could find. It took a week, but Joe died. His head was hurt so bad he never woke up, and probably without the doctors he would have been gone in a few hours.

  We heard the news right off, as soon as Mac heard. His wife sent word over with Jean — she’s their little girl. My mother started crying. She and Joe grew up together, and she used to kid daddy that Joe was too much like a brother for her to marry, but if not she would have. My daddy was upset, too. He started to say that Joe got what he deserved for being so bold, but he thought better. He looked at my mother and I guess he changed his thinking. He said that the time was when colored people could be killed to suit the whites, but no longer. Then he got nervous, for having said what he did; he warned us kids not to let it happen to us, not to become like Joe Holmes. I could see that he was afraid, and that he was mad, both at the same time. He kept on repeating that colored people used to be murdered all the time, but that it was different now. I wasn’t sure he believed it was different, any more than I was sure that I did, either. My mother, she didn’t say anything; she just cried, then she stopped, then she started again and stopped.

  Whenever she cried I felt like crying, too; they’re like an alarm clock in you, your mother’s tears. I didn’t cry though. I felt too old to cry, being a man. (I was fifteen then). Anyway, a few days later I found something better to do. The civil rights people came to town, and they came to our door, asking if we would help them. They said we couldn’t let Joe Holmes die for nothing, not in 1961 we couldn’t. They said they were going to hold a meeting in a church if they could get one, or outside Joe Holmes’s house if they couldn’t get one, and would we come. My father said he couldn’t; it wasn’t safe. He said there was no point making extra trouble, and causing more people like Joe Holmes to die. He said they didn’t know what it’s like in Reform, Alabama, the civil rights people didn’t. “This isn’t Atlanta, nor even Montgomery, and don’t you forget it,” he told them. They had an answer for him right away: “We know. But they talked like you in Atlanta for a long time, and in Montgomery a lot of people still do talk that way; it isn’t until they stop talking defeat and start acting victory that there is any change.”

  My mother didn’t say anything until they were about to leave. She asked them how we could find where the meeting would be. They said they would come back with slips of paper that would tell us. My daddy said not to bother. My mother said nothing. After the civil rights people were gone my mother and daddy took to fighting, as much as they ever did in their lives. Daddy said we weren’t going to get into any trouble. My mother said she agreed, only you can’t blame someone for wishing it was a fair world, and not so hard on us, and trying to bring things about so that we always aren’t so down on our luck. There wasn’t more to speak about after that. Daddy asked us all to forget the whole thing. He said Joe Holmes would ask the same thing, after what happened, because Joe didn’t believe in people getting killed for nothing, himself included.

  I kept on thinking maybe I should do something more, being younger. At school the teachers said we shouldn’t talk about it, even if it was the only thing on our minds. They said we had learning to do, and that was that. When they buried Joe, a lot of people must have said the same thing. They just didn’t show up. I know, because I went without telling anyone. My father would have punished me good if he knew.

  I couldn’t get Joe’s wife and his kids out of my mind, nor what the minister said at his funeral. He said that it wasn’t only the Lord who wouldn’t turn his back on Joe; we had to keep him in mind, too. No one said anything about the white people that killed him, but the minister did say that as bad as everything all was, a lot more people were joining our side than ever before had, and Joe Holmes was probably the most famous man in our county now.

  When we left the church the rights workers were there, handing out slips of paper, to announce the rally they were having the next day. They were holding it in a field near the church, and we were all
invited to come. Some were burying the paper in their pockets, and others were throwing the paper away, as if someone were watching them. I decided I would throw mine away, so my daddy wouldn’t even see it, and then go to the meeting anyway.

  And that was how it got to me, finally. I heard people my age, or not much older, speaking up the way I used to think and not ever dare tell my own mother and my own father that I was thinking. They said we have taken it long enough, being killed and killed and killed, after being worked like horses and beaten like dogs, and everything bad. “Amen,” we all said, and “Amen” I said to my taking it any more. I signed up with them, even though I knew it would cause trouble for me.

  I went home and told my mother what happened. She told me to keep it quiet for a while until I was able to finish my schooling and maybe get a job someplace else. She was afraid for my father, and what would happen to us. She was afraid for me, too. She told me I was right though, right as could be; only you have to be careful to stay alive.

  Things happened so quick though. The civil rights people didn’t up and leave us, the way we thought. They opened up an office and moved in with us. They started holding classes for those who wanted to learn more, and they started visiting us at home, even if some were afraid to have them come. Then everything changed, all over the county, so that we knew we had more friends than ever before. Every night you could see on television that it was all changing, even in Alabama. So after a time my daddy said I could stay and not leave town, and work in the movement. “You can even keep the rights people here if you want,” he told me, and then he said that he wished he could have had the chance when he was my age; but he hoped I wouldn’t think he could have done anything then, no matter how hard he would have tried: “They killed us all the time then.”

  That’s how I became one of the leaders here in Reform, and how I got to go to Selma, and up to Washington. It was Joe Holmes who did it, and the students who came here and stood by him at the grave and stayed with us. Sure, the sheriff gave us a lot of trouble, but he never dared beat anyone else, let alone kill anybody, and now with us getting the vote and all, they say he will retire when his time is up. But how it got to me, finally, was hearing a colored boy my age speaking better than any white man I ever heard. I told myself that’s no boy, he’s a man, and since he’s about your age, you can be just like him, which after a while I did become.