Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “My boy is a fool, and he always has been.” He became angry at first, but later appeared to regret his own remark. His son, it seems, cared little about Negroes and their threatening postures. He and his son had fought about ways of dressing, table manners, and hobbies; had fought all along as the boy tried his own ways and John resisted, tried to pinion the lad, fashion him in his father’s image. Murderous thoughts by a father at the shameful possibility of his son’s “church marriage class” becoming desegregated were but a final expression of long-standing turmoil.

  It was against a background of such family problems that John ardently pursued a world as white and shadowless as possible. His work for most of the fifteen-odd years since the war had been uncertain or dull. He tired of temporary jobs selling in stores, then became bored with the security but confinement and meager pay of his state position. About a year before I met him he had run for a significant political office, claiming he would ferret out Communists in his district, export Negroes North or across the Atlantic, deprive Jews of any local if hidden sovereignty, and keep a careful, alert eye upon Washington and New York. He lost, but polled a good vote. In the course of the campaign he met a man who shared his ideals. The man owned gas stations, more of them than he could operate by himself. (“He liked to watch the help, just like me. You can’t trust a nigger out of the reach of your eye.”) John, priding himself on his sharp vision, purchased one of the stations, mortgaging his house further. His wife was enraged; her arthritis worsened, a coincidence he noticed and wanted me to know about. Selling fuel was a tough but slimly profitable venture; a fortunate arrangement in some ways, however, because he was able to inform a fellow gasoline vendor, fast and angrily, about a Negro employee working for him whose child was one of the handful to initiate school desegregation. John helped organize the mobs around the city’s desegregated schools. He was noisily attentive to those buildings, those nearly deserted and embattled buildings where a few Negro and white children stubbornly persisted in getting educated together. To enable the Negro attendant to lose his job was actually as heartening an experience as John had enjoyed in a long time, and he referred back to this accomplishment frequently. He liked disorder in the streets, but he was not one to pass up private spite or intrigue either.

  In time, we began to understand the design of his life, how old threads appear in apparently new patterns. Remember John while very young: a dark and sulky boy whose black-haired, ill-humored father preferred his fair wife, daughter, and younger son. John understood all too well arbitrary discrimination, the kind that appearances (height, build, complexion) stimulate. He was born in a state split among many lines — northern, Anglo-Saxon, light-skinned, Protestant country farmers on the one hand; southern, Catholic, Mediterranean types on the other, many of the thousands who lived in a wicked, international port city. His parents brought these different traditions together in an uneasy marriage, and the boy grew up a victim of this delicate arrangement. How accidental is it to find him years later moodily resenting dark people?

  A psychiatric evaluation finds him oriented and alert, in no trouble about who or where he is — his name, the date and place of our talks. His mind works in understandable fashion. He does not hallucinate, and though we may consider his beliefs delusional, they are held in common with thousands of others, and do not seem insistently private or as incomprehensible as those in schizophrenic delusional systems. His thinking is not psychotic; it flows in orderly and logical steps, given certain assumptions that are shared by many others and thus have social rather than idiosyncratic sources.

  He is intelligent, beyond question so. He grasps issues, relates them to others, takes stock of problems and tries to solve them. He has read widely and deeply, if with self-imposed restrictions. Much of what he reads gives him real encouragement. Full of references to God and country, encouraging virulent racism, recommending violence as possibly necessary in some future Armageddon of white versus black, Gentile versus Jew, biblical patriotism versus atheistic internationalism, this “literature” seeks an America which we hope will never exist, but it also collects its readers into a fellowship. One can call all these people crazy, but it is a shared insanity not an individual one. John works; he has a family and friends. He is fitful, alternately cheerless and buoyant. He is not shy or withdrawn; and he is in definite contact with many people, and responds to their feelings. Can we call him “sick”?

  In one of those compact appraisals of an individual person we might say that John is not insane, not psychotic in any operational sense of the word; neither retarded nor delinquent. He has no police record, has committed no crimes as his society defines them, is even careful to obey laws on picketing or demonstrations where they exist or are enforced. (His kind of demonstration has often been encouraged by some officials of his state.) Absurdly xenophobic, an anti-Semitic, anti-Negro “paranoiac”? Yes, along with many, many thousands in his region. A frustrated, defeated man, a sometime political candidate, a feckless sidewalk crank, occasionally irritable and only rarely dangerous? Yes, but far from alone.

  Born in a region long poor and defeated, into a family itself humble and moneyless, often at the mercy of capricious economic, social or political forces, the boy at home faced those first insecurities, those early rivalries, hates, and struggles which often set the pattern for later ones. White man against black embodied all those childhood hatreds, all those desperate, anxious attempts children make to locate themselves and their identities amid the strivings of siblings, amid the conscious and unconscious smiles and grudges, animosities and predilections of their parents. He was an active child, a fighter who managed to survive perilous disease and hard times. When grown he had some initial modest success at home and at work, only to return from war into a sliding, middle-aged depression, a personal one, but one that plagued his family, and some of his friends, too. (The papers talked of a “dislocated, postwar economy.”) Individual psychopathology, social conflict and economic instability, each has its separate causes. On the other hand the mind can connect them together, and for many people they are keenly felt as three aspects of one unhappy, unpredictable life.

  I looked first to “psychopathology” for the answer to the riddle of John, and those like him; for an explanation of their frightful actions. Rather than seek after political, social, or economic ills, I chose medical or psychiatric ones, the kind that seemed “real” to me. John’s life shows that it can be understood best by looking at it in several ways, and one of them is certainly psychiatric. Yet I have to keep on reminding myself that I have seen mobs such as he joined collect in one city while in another they were nowhere to be found. While the incidence of individual psychopathology probably is relatively constant in all Southern cities, the quality of police forces and politicians has varied, and so have their ideas about what constituted law and order. I have seen avowed segregationists — some of them unstable individuals in addition — submit quietly to the most radical kinds of integrated society because they worked on a federal air base. American laws and jobs seemed curiously more influential than “deep-rooted” attitudes.

  The FBI agent who spoke to me in McComb was standing in front of a dynamited house in the very heart of the most oppressive area in the South. James Silver’s “closed society,” the state of Mississippi, has a long history to fall back upon, one enforced by social, economic, and political power; no corner of the state had been more loyal to its past. Certainly I and others with me were frightened, though perhaps the FBI agent was not, by the hateful, suspicious attitude we were meeting at the hands of many of the townspeople. The Negroes were scared, and many of the whites had a kind of murder in their eyes. In the face of all that, the agent posed a question only in terms of illness, of individual eccentricity.

  In McComb, in Mississippi, at that time, a dynamited house and even three murdered youths were not unique. There were klans, councils, and societies there whose daily words or deeds encouraged the burning of churches, the dynamiting
of houses, the beating, ambushing, and killing of men. A few weeks after the “incident” in McComb I examined a minister brutally beaten in a doctor’s office in Leake County, Mississippi. The doctor — no redneck, not “ignorant” — had literally pushed the minister and a young student with him into the hands of a gang in his own office. Every bit of evidence suggests a plot arranged by that doctor — he knew in advance the two men were coming because they had telephoned to ask for medical help. Shall we suggest psychiatric examinations for him and for all the others in the state — businessmen, newspaper editors, lawyers — who ignore, condone, encourage, or fail to conceal their pleasure at such episodes?

  I wonder about the eager emphasis given private, aberrant motives by some in our society. Many ignore crying, horrible, concrete social and political realities whose effects — as a matter of fact — might lead us to understand how John and others like him continue to plague us. It is easier, I suppose, to look for the madman’s impulse and make explaining it the doctor’s task.

  The bestiality I have seen in the South cannot be attributed only to its psychotic and ignorant people. Once and for all, in the face of what we have seen this century, we must all know that the animal in us can be elaborately rationalized in a society until an act of murder is seen as self-defense and dynamited houses become evidence of moral courage. Nor is the confused, damaged South the only region of this country in need of that particular knowledge.

  II

  Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers

  The Land

  I am writing about the land. I am writing about people, of course, about fellow citizens, and particularly about children, who live uprooted lives, who have been stranded, who are hidden from the rest of us. Nevertheless, I am writing about the land, miles and miles of it, the rich American earth. I am also writing about a land, the United States of America, some country that is hilly and rocky and often windswept or fog-covered, some that is a plateau, high and leveled-off and dry, some that is low and flat and at the water’s edge. More precisely, I suppose, I am trying to approach the lives of certain individuals who may in various ways differ, as members or representatives of this or that “group” of people, but who for all of that share something hard to define exactly or label with a few long and authoritative words, something that has to do with the way people, however unlike in appearance or background, manage to live on the land and come to terms with it, every day of their lives.

  The men and women whose lives, I repeat, I can only approach, do not live in cities (though their children and grandchildren may or perhaps will someday) and certainly do not live in the prosperous suburbs that hug those cities so rigidly. People who are called migrant farmers or sharecroppers or tenant farmers or mountaineers or hillbillies are not to be found in the small towns and villages that often are taken to be the repositories of America’s rural heritage — by those who live in large, metropolitan centers and are willing to go just so far afield, so far toward the “country” in search of anything, including their nation’s history. It can be said that migrants and sharecroppers and mountaineers live both nowhere and everywhere. Their homes, their houses, their cabins (which I fear all too commonly can be appropriately called shacks or huts) are scattered all over. They defy the dots and circles that, with names beside them, appear on maps. I can pick up one of those maps and point my finger at the smallest towns in, say, a county of the Mississippi Delta, or one of Florida’s south central counties or Kentucky’s eastern counties, and still know that however large the atlas and however tiny, even microscopic, the places shown, I will not find large numbers of tenant farmers, migrants, or mountaineers, respectively, in any of them, be they county seats or the remotest of hamlets.

  It is outside the town limits, in between one town and another, straddling county lines, even state lines, that they can be found — settlements of families, as I have come to think of them in my mind. Their cabins, with a protective coloration like that of animals, have almost invariably become part of the land: the wood and metal walls turn rusty brown and dull gray and blend into everything else and successfully camouflage entire settlements. They are often nameless settlements, or if they do have a name it is to set people apart from others, and just as important, attach them to the land’s contours, to this particular field or creek or that hollow or bend in a river or valley.

  Some of the settlements, of course, move across the land — a caravan of trucks, a few buses, a single car or maybe two, all filled to the brim with migrants. Yet, when the vehicles are brought to a stop it is done beside bushes and under trees. The point is to be inconspicuous, to hide, to disappear from sight; and so a number of families disperse, become little knots of people here and there, anxious for the ground as a resting-place and anxious to blend into things, merge with them, and thereby hide away from the rest of us, from the world that gazetteers and atlases and census bureaus take note of, from the world of the police and the government, but also from the merely curious and even the openly concerned.

  The next day, when light comes, the trek is to be resumed and the risks of travel have to be taken. So, they emerge, the migrant settlers. They assemble and move on, and again they are wanderers whose chief purpose is an accommodation of their energies to the earth’s needs. If the earth is ready, about to bear its fruits, the migrants try to be there, do their work, then slip away. As some of them have said to me, and will say in these pages, a whole life can be lived away from almost everyone but oneself and one’s immediate relatives and companions. One knows hundreds of acres of land well — byroads and side roads and dirt roads and asphalt roads. One recognizes familiar terrain in a dozen states, in places all over. Yet, one is no one: frequently unregistered at birth, ineligible to vote, unprotected by laws that apply to others, often unrecorded as having died, and all during life an actual resident of no municipality or township or state — even stateless in the larger sense of being decidedly unwanted and spurned by a whole nation.

  Surely it must be different with sharecroppers and mountaineers, though. If migrants cover the land, cover a virtual continent in search of work, sharecroppers or tenant farmers are by definition rooted to a specific piece of land, as are mountaineers, who after all live up along the sides of particular Appalachian hills. A dazed, rootless itinerant field hand does not to all appearances live like a sharecropper, who may never have left a particular plantation, or like a mountaineer, who stubbornly stays up his hollow, come what may. Yet, for all three the land means everything, the land and what grows on it, what can be found under it, what the seasons do to it, and what man does to it, and indeed what long ago was done to it by a mysterious Nature, or an equally baffling, chronicle of events called History, or finally what it was made by God, like the other two inscrutable, but unlike them, at least for the people we are to meet and try to know here, very much present and listening and in fact a person, the person: He Who listens and remembers — and Whose land it all really is, something plantation owners and growers and county officials may forget for a while, but will ultimately discover at a given point in eternity’s scheme of things, so thousands of harvesters believe.

  I am not saying that all these people, so scattered and so different and so removed from one another (but so very much alike) do not share man’s general need to confine his fellow man, give him a name, call a certain stretch of territory his, pinpoint him in time and space. The title of this part of the book right away declares that my concern is with people who migrate from one place to another, and people who work the land that ostensibly belongs to others, in exchange for a share of the profits, and people who cling hard indeed to a mighty and prominent range of mountains. And the first pages in this section declare the migrants to be Americans, the sharecroppers to be Americans, and the mountaineers to be perhaps the most typically American of Americans — in the old-fashioned, conventional sense of what has constituted an American for the longest period of time. (Indians and blacks, also here when the Republic was fou
nded, would not become Americans until much later.)

  Indeed, it is possible to get quite precise; a variety of names and phrases, like nets, can pull in just about all these people. They live in the “Black Belt” of the South, from Georgia to Louisiana, or near Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades in Florida; or they live on the edge of the Cumberlands, the Alleghenys, the Blue Ridge mountains; or they spend time in the lowlands of the Carolinas, in Virginia’s tidewater area, all along a stretch of Long Island, in upstate New York, down-state New Jersey, or in New England, where tobacco grows (in Connecticut) and apples fall from trees (in Massachusetts, for instance) and potatoes cover the ground (Maine’s far north Aroostook county). Still, when all that is said, we have only begun. These twentieth-century people, living in the world’s richest, strongest twentieth-century nation, are to some extent obeying rituals and commands, are responding to urges and demonstrating rhythms that defy (as well as yield to) the influence of contemporary American life — again, as we the majority know and experience that life. The “migrants, sharecroppers, and mountaineers” who are gathered collectively together in this book live not only on the land, but in a land, one in certain respects all their own. The land all these people know so well has physical boundaries that can be traced out, if we have a mind to do so; but it is just as important for us to know about those psychological boundaries, within which a certain kind of encounter takes place between human hands and the earth; the boundaries between all those fields and meadows and clearings and forests and all those people bent on eating and sleeping and amusing themselves and staking out things for themselves and finding things for themselves.