by Robert Coles
“People have asked me to wait. ‘This thing will take generations. Why do you want to take the whole burden on yourself — and your children?’ (They always wait before they add the last few words; and they smile, so as to conceal their nastiness with a veneer of friendliness.) Of course I thank them for their concern — especially for my children — and tell them the simple truth: they want nothing done; I want to do something; that is that.
“‘Are you afraid?’ they ask. There would be something wrong with me if I weren’t. But I’m no more afraid than they are. At least I know why I’m afraid, and what I fear. They’re so frightened and suspicious they’ve lost their common sense. They talk of ‘conspiracies’ and the like. They get nervous at every whisper, every news story, every rumor, every hate-mongering voice they meet up with. Yes, I’m afraid that one day I’ll be shot at. I’ve settled my affairs in case it happens, and I’m ready to go. Meanwhile, I live every day as my conscience tells me to do, and as a result I feel content with myself, if scared at times. What about my friends, who wish me so well and keep on telling me to talk with a doctor or minister for ‘counsel’? They’re angry, distrustful, shrill, and hateful — and getting worse in all those respects every day. Most of all, they’re guilty, and they don’t know it. Who needs the ‘counsel,’ I ask you?
“There is one more matter I would like to bring up. I have been asked by everyone from the police to members of my family why I have ‘chosen’ (as they put it) to be so ‘different.’ The truth is that I was brought up to feel as I do. My mother taught me most of what I say. She may have feared saying it in public — and sometimes even at home when my father was present — but if she were alive today she would be proud of me for doing so. My husband might have disagreed with me, but he never would have tried to silence me. We would have talked it all out — and perhaps changed one another a bit in doing so. Now he is gone, and I must do what I feel is right, without his advice or views. I miss him when some of those threatening calls come, but I can’t dishonor his memory by buckling under to those calls because he isn’t here to protect us. I told my daughter the other day that we owe it to his memory to be strong — to prove that he truly gave us his strength, that we have it in us, to use and rely upon. So long as I can think back and see my mother and my husband, I think I’ll be able to keep my courage up. I know they would be happy for what I’m doing. They would be afraid, too; I know that. If they were alive they might be so afraid that they wouldn’t do what I’m doing. I know that, too. But they are gone, and I am here. Perhaps I’m too loyal to them — still — but I feel somehow I can make the best of them live on, in honor.”
Mrs. Trumbull never mailed that letter to the sheriff. Instead she sent him yet another curt note, reproving him for his “illegal, unconstitutional manner of law enforcement.” She had kept a diary for years, and told me she intended to make the letter a part of it.
I felt lucky to have a chance to read the letter, but at a loss to answer her question after I had finished. “Does this explain anything to you, about why I’ve taken the stand I have?” I said yes, it did; as much as such things could be explained. Her reply to that was quick in coming and a surprise to me: “I think explanations don’t settle an issue, they only make way for more questions. I’ve asked myself a lot of the questions you’ve asked me, directly or indirectly, these past years. After I answer them I still don’t feel at rest. There are other women who have had mothers like mine, and have lost husbands like mine. I could have done other things with my memories, or my loneliness. It seems that I couldn’t though. That’s the only explanation I’ve ever been able to find for myself that sets my mind to rest.”
Stay Home or Go to School?
The first children I came to know in New Orleans were Negro children, and for a while it appeared that they would be the only children in the two schools the four little girls were attending. As one of them reminded me in a talk we had after her first few days of school: “I don’t see anyone but the teacher all day. They said I would be seeing the white kids, but none have come yet, and the teacher, she says they may never come — all on account of me. But I told her they will.”
In point of fact several white children were almost always at school during her long ordeal, though it took her time to become aware of their presence. For a time she was the first grade of a fairly large school, while a fluctuating handful of white children constituted the remnants of the other grades, the second through the sixth.
Two of these white children came from minister’s homes, one Baptist and the other Methodist. Four of them, two boys and two girls, came from a third home, a Catholic one with five other children, headed by an accountant.
“We are eleven, so we’re a mob, too,” the wife of the accountant and the mother of their nine children once told me as we stood in her kitchen and looked at an angry crowd outside and not far away. She was counting those on her side because she knew those on the other side had become her enemies.
She lived near the school, near enough to see it from her backyard; near enough to see and hear the crowds from her front window. She was born in Louisiana, as were her parents, and their parents. She and her husband were “ordinary” people, or at least so it would once have seemed. That is to say, they lived with their children in a small, lower-middle-class area, their home like thousands about it, their life distinguished by little except its daily routine of care for one another and the children. They were both high school graduates.
Just before the crisis which came upon their city they had no interest in politics and were against school desegregation. “We never really thought they would do it, and then we found that not only did they mean to go ahead, but ours was slated to be one of the schools.” That was the way she summarized her surprise, her previous attitude of mild or unexcited opposition to what the newspapers less indifferently called “mixing.”
In a matter of weeks this mother and her children were being subjected to a degree of danger and intimidation which rivals for violence any I’ve seen in the South. Her house was assaulted, its windows broken, its walls stained with foul inscriptions. Her husband’s place of work was threatened and picketed. It became necessary for the police to protect her children as well as the little Negro girl whose lone entrance precipitated disorder in the streets and sporadic violence destined to last for months. In watching this Southern white lady walk through those mobs with her small children, one could not but wonder why she persisted. Why did she take on that challenge, and how did she endure it?
After years of interviews with her, I have had to guard against tampering with my recollection of this woman, against making her into someone she wasn’t at the time she made the various choices — choices which in turn helped make her into the person she is now. This is a problem psychiatrists must always keep in mind. It is possible to forget the truth of the past when the present, with its visions and formulations, is the vantage point from which the conclusive determination is being made.
Here is how — word for word — she once described her attitude when the conflict of school desegregation, hovering over the city for months, settled upon her children’s school.
“I couldn’t believe it. First I became angry at the nigras. I figured, why don’t they leave well enough alone and tend to their own problems. Lord knows they have enough of them. Then, I thought I just couldn’t keep four children out of school; not on one little nigra girl’s account. So I thought I’d just send them and see what happens. Well, the next thing I knew, mothers were rushing in and taking their children out; and every time they did it, they would get cheered. The end of the first day of it there wasn’t much of a school left.
“The next day I decided to give it one more try. I was going to stay away, keep my children away, but to tell the truth the idea of having four children home with me, squabbling and making noise and getting into trouble, was too much for me. So I thought I’d just stick it out and maybe things would quiet down, and then we’d all
forget one little nigra and our children would go on with school.
“The crowd was there the next day and they were more of one mind now. They started shouting at each white mother that came to the building, and one by one they pulled back. It was as if the building was surrounded and only the police could get through, and they weren’t doing anything. The mob let Ruby (the Negro girl) through, because they said they wanted her to be there alone. They screamed when the minister brought his girl, and I decided to withdraw. Well, I was walking back home, and I saw the back door to the building. They were so busy with the minister and shouting at the reporters, they weren’t looking at the rear. So I just took the children there and let them go in. At that moment I thought, ‘It’s better than their being at home, and better than their listening to those people scream all day from our porch.’ It was bad enough I had to hear it, and my baby too young for school.
“The next day I really decided to join the boycott. I couldn’t see fighting them, and they weren’t going away like I thought. Well, my husband stayed home a little later than usual, and we talked. I said no, no school for the kids, and he agreed. Then he said maybe we should try to move to another part of the city, so that the kids could continue their schooling. Then I said I’d try one more day. Maybe the mob would get tired and go away. After all, they had their way — there was only the children of a minister or two left out of five hundred families. I snuck the kids in, and later that day one of the teachers called, to ask me if I was sure I wanted to do it. She sounded almost as scared as me, and I think she would just as soon have had the whole school closed, so she could be spared listening to that noise and that filthy language.
“That night, I think, was the turning point. A few of the mob saw me leaving with the children, and started calling me the worst things I’d ever heard. They followed me home and continued. Thank God the police kept them away from the house, but I had the sickening feeling on the way home that I was in something, unless I got out real fast. In the morning I couldn’t send them, and I couldn’t not. One woman came here instead of to the school, to swear at me just in case I tried sending the children off. I guess she thought that just her being there would take care of me. Well, it did. I became furious; and I just dressed those children as fast as I could and marched them off. Later that day those women from the Garden District came, and they said they’d stand by me and help me and even drive the children the one block, and I guess I soon was a key person in breaking the boycott.
“But I didn’t mean to. It was mostly, I think, their language, and attacking me so quickly. I didn’t feel any freer than the nigra. I think I gained my strength each day, so that I was pretty tough in a few months. After a while they didn’t scare me one bit. I wouldn’t call it brave; it was becoming determined. That’s what happened, really. We all of us — my children, my husband, and me — became determined.”
Of course I am giving you one section from hours of taped conversations. I knew her quite well when we had that talk, and it was not the first time she had given me an account of those experiences. When I listen to her voice today I can almost feel her drifting — precisely that — drifting — and then coming to terms not only with her past but with history itself. Choice was required: at some point her children either had to stay home or go to school. Each alternative had its advantages: a home without restless children, or a home unbothered by restless and angry outsiders — calling at midnight to predict death and destruction, shouting similar forecasts in the daytime.
We are still left with the matter of why this woman chose as she did, and how she managed the strength to make her choice stick fast so long.
Surely we may call that unassuming strength her courage. Not everyone, even among the so-called mature, will take on the possibility of death day after day with evident calm. In this woman’s case her commitment, her course of courageous action developed through a series of “moments” or “accidents.” Step by step she became an important participant in a critical struggle. Indeed, in looking back at her life and the situation she faced we may forget that a historical event was once a crisis by no means settled. Had the boycott in New Orleans held fast, the forces at work there for segregation would have become stronger, perhaps decisively so for a long time. That is what I heard from people on both sides of the struggle as it was occurring.
Our “Southern lady,” like Conrad’s Lord Jim, slipped into an important moment that became a determining force in her life as well as her country’s history. Not only her views on segregation but her participation in community affairs and the goals she has for herself and her children are far different now than they “ordinarily” would have been. “I met people I never would have,” she said to me recently, “and my sights have become higher. I think more about what’s important, not just for me but for others; and my children do better at school because they’re more serious about education.”
What can one say about this woman’s choice? Certainly there was no one reason that prompted it. I have talked with enough of her neighbors to realize the dangers of saying that her past actions or beliefs might easily differentiate her from others. Many of her nearby friends are decent, likable people. Before a mob they simply withdrew themselves and their children. This woman had also planned to do so. Yet she never did, or she never did for long or for good. She drifted. She tried to resolve the mixed feelings in her mind. She weighed her fear of a mob against her annoyance at her children’s loss of schooling and their bothersome presence in the home. She was a hopeful person and she assumed — wrongly indeed — that the riots would end quickly. She is a sound, stable person, and once under fire she did not waver. She is the first one to remind me that her husband’s employers stood by him. Had they wavered, she is certain that she would have quickly withdrawn her children from the school. For that matter, were her husband different — that is, more of a segregationist, or generally more nervous and anxious — she might never have dared stand up to a mob’s anger.
In sum, there were a number of reasons which helped this woman’s courage unfold, each of them, perhaps, only a small part of the explanation, though each necessary. I suppose we could call her — in the fashion of the day — “latently” courageous. A crisis found her strong, and in possession of certain ideals. Those ideals gained power through a cumulative series of events which eventually became for one person’s life a “point of no return.” She puts it this way: “After a few days I knew I was going to fight those people and their foul tongues with every ounce of strength I had. I knew I had no choice but that one. At least that’s how I see it now.” It was an impressive experience listening to her tell her story, and watching her realize — often only in the telling — what had actually happened to her feelings and her goals.
Lookers-On and the Last Ditch
Even when an entire social system is in convulsive transition there are many who neither try hard to resist change nor lift a willing finger to bring about a new kind of life. From people on both sides of the struggle one hears summoned the “ordinary” man, the “average guy,” the “typical person” as potentially friendly, vaguely supportive, fitfully antagonistic, or somewhat — but only somewhat — alarmed. Such descriptions, inevitably tentative, ambiguous, or open-ended, reflect the uneasy truth known to ideologues and just plain idealists of all persuasions: many people, perhaps most people, are content to live in society rather than commit themselves to its alteration, let alone transformation. Among those so content are numbered the discontented as well as the reasonably well-to-do. Just as I have found all classes represented in both the sit-in movement and the various segregationist organizations, I have found among a wide range of people in both races an essential determination that their lives — in the words of one (Negro) citizen of Georgia — “not be bothered by all the trouble around.”
A Store Is a Store
The more I watched sit-ins and other demonstrations over the South the more interested I became in the specific psychological
effect they exerted. What happened to white people (or Negroes) as youths or ministers quietly, solemnly marched before them, or toward them? During a long — perhaps too long — interview with a tired, angry, still nonviolent Negro youth in Atlanta I heard him suggest an end to our talks, and a beginning for another series of conversations.
“I can see how you might want to know how someone like me keeps his head from splitting in all directions, but I think you’re losing a real opportunity. You should go speak with those white folks — the ones who look at us, and stare, just stare without giving a clue what’s going on in their minds. Or you could go talk to the store owners we picket. Some of them look as if they’re ready to go mad, not get mad. One came out yesterday and begged us to leave him alone. He said he didn’t care one way or the other what happened. He just wanted to make a living and mind his own business — I mean really mind his own business, without us bothering him. We told him he could. All we wanted was to help him make more money, by serving us. But no. He said the white people would stop coming, and he’d go broke or have to move to a Negro neighborhood.
“To tell the truth, I felt sorry for the guy. I don’t know how he feels about segregation and integration, but he didn’t strike me as very different from my own parents. They want to stay alive, and when given half a chance, they’ll keep quiet and do just that, stay alive. Now the trouble is, a lot more Negroes have trouble staying alive than whites, so a lot more of us are moved — moved to do something, get involved in the movement. But there are plenty of Negroes, even the poorest — maybe especially the poorest in some towns — who don’t want to get involved. They say leave me alone, and after you’ve tried to get them to join you, and they’ve said leave me alone again, only louder, you know they mean it.”