Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  I would like to begin, in other words, by describing the land and what it is like, what is there for men and women to work on, to handle every day. And it should be emphasized that the men and women and children whom we are trying to know here do indeed “handle” the land, do so quite stubbornly and successfully and patiently and cleverly and at times fearfully, but at other times fearlessly and casually and yes almost brazenly, in view of all the threats and the misfortunes, the never-ending dangers and obstacles.

  What is the land like? To migrants the land is not “like” anything; rather, it never stops appearing, waiting, calling, needing, summoning, urging, and then disappearing. To sharecroppers the land is more familiar, but not all that familiar, because it belongs to someone else, and always what is to be done must be settled with that stranger, that boss. To mountaineers the land is almost anything and everything: a neighbor, a friend, a part of the family, handed down and talked about and loved, loved dearly — loved and treasured and obeyed, it can be said, as we agree to do when we get married.

  Yet, once more, for all those differences, the three kinds of people are one people; and it is what they do that makes them one. Together they grapple and fight the land, dig into it, try to tame it, exploit it, even plunder it; together they placate the land, bring water to it, spread nourishing substances over it, and in many ways curry its favor. They appeal to it, both openly and more slyly, with rakes that brush and stroke and caress and with hands that pick and pluck, and with words and songs, too — prayers and pleas and cries and requests and petitions. High up the hills of West Virginia men petition for sun; they live nearer the sun than most people, but they can be denied the sun by clouds that hang to the hilltops. In the “Black Belt” men petition for rain; the land is rich and the sun plentiful, but water is needed, and not everywhere has man had the money and ingenuity to bring that water in and keep it at hand, ready and waiting — “the irrigation” as a sharecropper calls it, the pipes and way yonder the dams and artificial lakes he may have heard a plantation owner or his foreman talk about. In southern Florida men petition for peace and quiet of sorts: for an autumn without hurricanes; for a winter that brings no icy blasts, no ruinous frosts; for a spring and summer that offer rain, but not too much rain — though if a choice has to be made, for more rather than less rain, because the droughts are the greatest danger, are a calamity all too familiar in and near the Everglades.

  Much of that petitioning takes place right out in the fields themselves, and is done by tenants or itinerant field hands or proud landowners of small plots up in the hills. As with many things that happen in the world, the cliché holds: one has to see something to believe it. In this case one has to hear as well as see: hear the nervous statements and observations, the speculations and predictions, has to hear the doubts and the exasperated, anguished cries which express a sense of futility, foreboding, or distress, a desperate suspicion that all is lost, perhaps only for this year, perhaps even for good. Alternatively, there are the good moments, the occasions when the petitions have been answered, when grateful men and women and children can say thank you or thank You, Almighty God, for befriending us through yet another stretch of time — from planting to plowing to harvesting, from spring through summer and into the autumn, or way down in Florida, from autumn through the winter and into the spring.

  The seasons at their worst can bring all but certain defeat, or at their kindest the seasons can offer the distinct likelihood of victory; but most of the time the seasons only begin to influence the land — do so decisively, but not conclusively. Men, men and their wives, parents helped by their children, can through work, hard and tough and backbreaking work, manage to get a reward for their efforts: “crops” or “produce” or “a harvest,” the reward is called. Their work is called menial; such efforts are considered automatic and stereotyped — but by whom? Nature is a formidable adversary, most of us will acknowledge in an offhand way, but we who spend most of our lives in the cities have no reason to understand just how formidable Nature can be — and therefore cannot know how shrewd and inventive a field hand, yes a common, ordinary, badly paid, poorly educated field hand has to be, faced as he is with land that must be coaxed, persuaded and prompted, aroused and inspired, however much richness and fertility it possesses.

  I have seen those field hands walking the flat land, climbing patches of hilly land under cultivation, talking to themselves as they sow seeds, calculating the moment to take it all in, what they have planted and managed to grow. Later on I will hope to give some indication of what is thought and said by sowers and reapers, planters and harvesters, but as a start the majesty of the challenge to be faced by men who would tame the land had better be acknowledged. Modestly the men themselves admit that “it is no mean job,” and if they will not advertise the cleverness and ingenuity required, they will most certainly let you know how fickle spring can be, how disappointing summer sometimes is, how overly prompt and forbidding a particular autumn’s appearance was, and how utterly devastating it turned out, that last winter.

  Joys are to be had, though; and keenly appreciated, too — a magnificent rural landscape, much of it semitropical, which still exists, miraculously enough, in this giant of an industrial country. In winter Alabama’s mean temperature is 48 degrees Fahrenheit and in summer 79 degrees Fahrenheit. On the average, less than thirty-five days witness temperatures below the freezing point. Snow falls once or twice a year, and then only in the northern part of the state. The prevailing winds come from the south. Rain is generally plentiful, amounting to over fifty inches a year. In West Virginia, for all the timber-cutting and the depredations of insects, substantial remnants remain of a vast, primeval forest, a blanket of hardwoods and pines that once completely covered the state. Hemlocks, chestnuts, and oaks are to be found in abundance. Some tulip poplars stand two hundred feet tall. Some sugar maples stand one hundred feet tall. And there are others: ash trees, whose wood is used in baseball bats, tennis rackets, and hockey sticks; or the buckeye; or sourwood trees that supply the sour-wood honey that is much loved up the hollows; or those holly trees, the Christmas holly and the mountain holly; or the black cherry tree, whose bark is used in making cough syrup; or the black walnut; or the silver bell; or the spruces so thick, clothing one ridge after another; or the lindens, which stand more alone, and can go dozens and dozens of feet into the air.

  What air it is, too! The air up those hills and mountains can be so clear and dry and bracing that the lungs shudder, the head feels much more invigorated than it wants to be. The air can also be raw and wet, or heavy and clammy. Rain is plentiful, at times more than plentiful. Some regions receive seventy or eighty inches a year. Needless to say, trees flourish under such conditions, but incredibly, so do people — the kind who find the brisk winds, the chilly weather, the continual dampness appetizing, and even intoxicating. For such people clouds are no dreaded stranger, thunder and lightning are music, and fog an amusing, welcome visitor. There is enough sun to grow a few vegetables, and the forests — why, without the water, without the mist and the dew and the long “downfalls” and the sudden cloudbursts, there would be no forest worth the name up the side of those hills, only fires and the burned remains that fires leave. Instead, those trees continue to stand; and also around are plants and flowers, hundreds of different kinds, all very much known to mountaineers as well as botanists. The forests are filled with shrubs, lovely ones like azaleas and rhododendrons and wisteria and laurel. A man looking for berries finds huckleberries and strawberries and raspberries. A man wanting to take a look at flowers finds lilies and bloodroot and phlox and the colorfully named lady slipper or bleeding heart or Indian paintbrush or Devil’s walking stick or bee balm. On the other hand, a man who has more serious things (or simply fauna instead of flora) on his mind can find foxes, skunks, opossums, raccoons, rabbits, beavers — or frogs and toads and turtles and snakes, plenty of all of them, and up in the sky, plenty of birds, some that stay year round, and many that
come and stop and leave during and in between the seasons.

  Men who till the soil, who live intimately with a given kind of terrain, whatever its features, are men who share more than their particular “culture” or “life-style” may at first glance seem to indicate. Perhaps most of all there is the vastness of the land, its size, its expanse, its ability to seem limitless and all-powerful. The sun rises out of the land tentatively, then with increasing assurance and influence; the sun goes down into the same land flaming, even if weak enough, at last, to be stared at. The days and seasons come and go, but the land stands firm. Snow may cover the land, water drench it, wind dust it off or try to carry it off, lightning seem to jab at it, tornadoes bear down on it mightily and fearfully, the sun warm it up, draw it out, excite it; whatever happens, the land remains, survives, is. Yes, in the thirties America had its “dust bowl,” and its earth still shows the ravages of man; but by and large the people in this book, plundered and needy though they may also be, live on rich, fertile land, yielding and bountiful, so blessed as to be for decades and decades almost defiantly productive, even in the face of predatory man’s greed and carelessness, which have been compensated for only recently and in certain places by chemicals and water pumped in from afar.

  Most of Appalachia and the rural South and for that matter the rural North is graced with a wonderful, life-giving, utterly reassuring abundance of water, so that the irrigating canals and pipes that migrants know in central Florida are not part of a desperate, do-or-die stand, such as a farmer might have to take in Alabama or parts of California. Water beats down upon the Appalachian mountains, and all over them one sees the result: gorges and ravines and passageways pouring forth that water; rivers never very low and in spring almost invariably flooded; rivers that compete with one another, join and separate, fight for streams and draw competitively upon tributaries. Water comes to Mississippi and Louisiana from the greatest of American rivers, but water comes openly and secretly even to Florida, whose land stretches further south than any other state, whose land also can experience seasons of bad, worrisome drought. As is the case with the Carolinas, sand reefs and generally narrow, elongated islands hug both of Florida’s shores, thus making for a whole series of lakes, lagoons, bays, and splendid, restful harbors. The state is laced with rivers and lakes, including the very large Lake Okeechobee, near which thousands of migrant farmers spend their winters at work with the crops. The lakes are frequently connected by subterranean channels, and for that matter isolated subterranean springs and streams can be found all over the state. The springs and streams eventually become rivers, and through a system of man-made canals farmers try hard to exert a degree of control over the natural largesse.

  More often than not, mountaineers and tenant farmers and migrants can be found living near that water, near creeks and not far from lakes and quite close to the waters of any number of rivers. The mountain settlements are squeezed into a valley a river has carved out, or pressed close to a creek whose banks actually provide a clearing, a way down, a road out of the wilderness; or settlements are crammed near a lake, where a hungry migrant or tenant farmer can search for fish, which is one thing that costs nothing. “We never lose sight of water, and we never lose sight of the sky, and we never lose sight of the land, that’s how we live,” I was told by a tenant farmer who lives in what history books variously call the Black Belt, the Black Prairie, the Cotton Belt. He actually lives in Alabama, whose land is several colors; black yes, but also red and sand-brown and mixed with green moss and the whiteness of chalk. Along the Gulf of Mexico and some miles north — a so-called timber belt — the land is sandy but quite responsive to fertilizers. Then comes the famous black soil: laced with limestone and marl formations; essentially devoid of sand; especially suited to the production of cotton and grains. A little farther north one finds land rich in minerals, rich for instance in the iron that makes Birmingham a steel city. And, finally, Alabama’s land becomes part of the Tennessee valley, and there contains red clays and dark loams which, again, can nourish grains and vegetables.

  It is, of course, easy for a visitor like me to work himself up into a lather about such things, to become almost euphoric at the variety of trees or birds or types of soil; about striking waterfalls and rapid streams and sluggish rivers and wide estuaries and bayous dripping with Spanish moss; about lonely herons that rise out of mist only to fall quickly and just as quickly disappear. All of that is the heady and maybe corrupt stuff of southern nostalgia or Appalachian romanticism. All of that would seem to border on the bizarre or the Gothic and even the outrageous when it is made to accompany a discussion of how, for example, an extremely poor migrant, most of the time hungry, and without money and maybe even a roof of any kind over his head, manages barely to stay alive. Tourists may hear about those plateaus and mountaintops, those headwaters and ebb tides, those rich clays and silts and peats and gravelly or sandy spots, and all the lovely flowers and shrubs they bear. Tourists, too, may hear about soft white sands and a coast’s shallow indentations, which become inviting bays; and tourists love to hear about mild, equable weather or low, marshy tracts that offer surprisingly good fishing. All the while terribly forsaken and just about indigent families live nearby, nearer-by in fact than most tourists will ever realize; and those families have little time to care about such matters, such attractions, or so we might reasonably believe.

  Certainly it is true that migrant farm workers don’t look upon their experiences the way casual travelers might. Nor do sharecroppers wax lyrical about the South, that haunting, mysterious, strangely uncommon region which has both defied and invited descriptions all through American history. Mountaineers have their ballads to sing, their guitars to “pick” away at, but they don’t stand on ridges or the edges of plateaus or way up on peaks in order to get breathtaking views, which are then photographed and thereby carried home, to be shown one evening after another. No, in Logan County, West Virginia, mountaineers don’t find themselves quaint; and in Adams County, Mississippi, tenant farmers don’t burble about those antebellum homes, or gush in pride and awe at the river, the great god of a river; and in Collier County, Florida, or Palm Beach County, Florida, migrant workers don’t join hands with conservationists and worry about wildlife in the beautiful, ever spectacular Everglades.

  And yet, I have, I think, learned a few things from these people. I have learned something more than how they live and scarcely stay alive. I have learned what little margin, what little leeway I was prepared to give them. I came ready to comprehend their suffering, their misery, the injustice of their position in our society, and I came prepared to write down my indignation and rage and horror. But I am not sure I was prepared to ask myself a single thing that would upset the central beliefs I brought with me to the “Black Belt” and those migrant camps and the Cumberland Mountains. I believed that these groups are the poorest of our poor, the most overcome, the most broken, the most bowed down; that they are sunk, lost, tired, discouraged; that they are faced every day with dreary work, if indeed any work, and with miserable living conditions and with varying degrees and kinds of hunger, malnutrition, and illness; that they are at the mercy of things, compelled to face life passively, fearfully, even automatically; and that finally, if they deserve sympathy and concern and the conscientious efforts of the rest of the nation in their behalf, they also have to be looked at directly and without illusions, for their own sake. There is no use trying to fool ourselves about the seriousness of their problems or the damage done to them over the generations by the circumstances that not only surround but utterly envelop their lives, and there is no use, either, indulging ourselves, by turning such people into storybook characters, full of nobility and interesting, intriguing passions and charming or innocent (hence particularly enviable) virtues.

  And yet — I have to say that again — a good portion of this book will, I hope, spell out what goes, what has to go, after “and yet,” even as still other parts of the book will confirm quit
e grimly what has just preceded those two words — confirm human misery, confirm the waste, the outrageous and unconscionable waste of lives, and particularly of the energy and talent and spirit that these lives have to offer. Still, right here in the beginning of this part of the book I want to quote the words of a man who understands a lot about the land and a lot about his life — a lot that I found (and maybe still find) hard to fathom and comprehend, but even harder to accept and fit into my scheme of things, my political ideas, my psychological theories, and my social values. He works on the land in between what I suppose could be called the rural South and Appalachia, in a broad valley at the foot of the hill country of Tennessee. Although no one man can speak for the three groups I am concerned with here, this man comes as close as any in combining elements that belong to all of these groups. He is a tenant farmer; he practices a kind of sharecropping, by no means the worst, most exploitative kind, and finally, not uncommonly, he has two close relatives who have joined the eastern migrant “stream.” The man I call a yeoman, a sturdy and almost fierce small farmer, talks about matters other than his “problems,” and those other matters, I would argue, ought to get recorded at the very start of things — much earlier, alas, than I came to grasp them in the course of my work.