Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

I approach his land (his it is, because he so feels it to be) on a dusty path rather than a road. I get annoyed, because the path is winding, a bit wind-raked, pitted, and creviced. I look for shade; it is warm and very muggy. I have been there before, but now that all the crops are “down” — which means all the seeds are in the earth, the weeds have yet to appear, and time seems a little more available — there is every hope of the “big talk” the yeoman himself had once promised we would one day have. This was the day, and he was ready. He is especially talkative compared to others who do his kind of work, and for that I am grateful, though a little suspicious. Maybe silence is all that can be trusted by me — one who is so at the mercy of words. I am just starting out, and I have, after all, been warned again and again that this man should be glum, burdened, restrained, anything but generous with his thoughts. Instead he seems unexpectedly plainspoken and outgoing. I have noticed that he drinks rather copiously, and in ostensible jest but out of genuine candor and friendliness, he had offered to take me to a still, a place where moonshine is made, “the first one you’ll find upon leaving Alabama and coming up the road into the hills of Tennessee, yes sir.” Perhaps the drink explains it, then, his voluble, blustery, open, giving manner.

  So, as I listened over a long day and several others to the yeoman talking, I wondered: what drives him on, this expansive man, who has so much to be sad about, but insists, protests, protests too much, his pleasure in taking on — all of nature, it would seem? And why does he not face up to the substance of his life, the social and economic vulnerability that he experiences, the overwhelming difficulties that drag on, that will not, maybe never can, let go of him? In the next chapter (and perhaps all through this part of the book) I shall discuss some of that; but now is the time to let him talk about what he gets out of life, rather than what he wants out of it or what monstrous evils it most assuredly does visit upon him.

  “I can’t say I’m pleased with everything,” he will say and repeat from time to time. “And yet,” he adds and will stubbornly add from time to time — until at last, years after this first conversation, I will have finally been stopped in my tracks and made to hear, made to realize. “And yet, even if you’re not pleased, you can still be glad for what you have to be glad for, not much that’s big and important, I know, but there’s something, there’s something good we can tell you we have.” Later on he became a little less “defensive,” a little less boastful; but now, almost a decade since we first met, I have yet to hear him go back on that kind of affirmation — only progressively expand on it, while at the same time admitting to the obstacles he has to contend with every day of his life.

  “I can’t say it’s not a struggle; it is, a bad one. If I had to choose, I’d not choose this life — maybe another one that’s easier. I only know this one here, though. How can you go picking out another kind of life if you only can have the one you have? I can’t say I’m a happy man here; we have it bad a lot. I can’t say I mind my work, though, and if I had to choose, like I say, I don’t think I’d know what to do but tell the Lord that I’ll take this one, this life, all over again, with the pain and all. Every morning I wake up and I’m thinking to myself, what should I do today? We have the few chickens and I go and check on them and see if they’ve given us a few eggs, and I feed them of course. There will be a day or two, and more sometimes, when it’s a lot easier to feed the chickens than us.

  “I have to get the water, and that comes next. I take my oldest boy with me. He talks about going to a city one day, but I have an answer for him. I say: go, go North, go to Chicago or a place like that, and you’ll see, oh will you, and you may not come back here, and you may find yourself a job with good money, but you’ll pine for it here and you’ll be sorry and you’ll ache; you’ll hurt, real bad it’ll be. I’m not trying to scare him. It sounds like I am, but I’m not. We’re born to this land here, and it’s no good when you leave. I did once; I was in the Army. I know what I could have done. I know how I could have stayed there, in the state of Indiana, up toward Chicago. But I asked myself if I wanted to be in a place I didn’t want to be in — even with a check from the welfare people, or a job if I could get one — or if I wanted to be back here, doing what I was taught by my daddy to do. You can see how I answered myself.

  “Now I have the same kind of talks with my boy, especially in the early morning. We’re out there walking over to the pump before the sun is all the way up. He’ll say to me — he’s tired and just waking up, I know — that if we lived in a city, someplace big you know, there would be water there to turn on and we’d be able to sleep later. Yes, true; I admit to him when he’s right. I tell him that he’s right. But I say, look Jimmy, there are some places where you like to get up, or at least it’s not so bad, and there are other places where you could sleep all morning and have a million dollars lying near you, and still you wouldn’t want to go out and take a walk there. Maybe with a million dollars I would go anywhere. Jimmy told me I was sure wrong saying I’d turn my back on a million dollars. But he knows what I’m telling him: for us it’s a choice we have, between going away or else staying here and not seeing much money at all, but working on the land, like we know how to do, and living here, where you can feel you’re you, and no one else, and there isn’t the next guy pushing on you and kicking you and calling you every bad name there ever was. If you go, that’s what you go to. If you go you can’t hardly breathe, there are so many people, and you never see the sun, you never do. I used to wake up, when I was in the city on leave, military leave, and I’d ask myself, where is that sun, where does it hide itself from you?

  “I’ve noticed that by the time we’re on the way back from the well, Jimmy is persuaded, yes sir. He’ll agree with me; he’ll say he likes it, going out into the air, first thing in the morning, and toting the water. By the time we’ve done that, the chickens have eaten up everything and they hear us and they cackle away for more, but they’re not going to get it. Momma is all waken up, and she’s working to do the best she can for us, for breakfast; and there’ll be days when we have eggs and toast and grits and everything, and there’ll be other days when it’s coffee, thin as can be, and nothing in it, even for the baby. Yes, it gets bad — in winter especially. We make enough to get by, but there’s no spare, and if there’s an extra expense, then we don’t have a single thing to fall back upon. I can’t ask for anything. I can’t call on anyone — except for God, and sometimes He’ll answer. He’ll send the minister over with a package for us.

  “No matter, though. I always have my work. You can feed off that, you know. In the winter it’s the chickens and keeping us supplied with wood and water and all like that. The rest of the year it’s much more; it’s doing everything, practically anything you could think of. After breakfast I go out and start with the planting, or the weeding or the harvesting; it depends on what season you’re in. I know my land, I’ll say I do. I know the weather, too. When I’ve come back with the water I can tell my wife and children what the day will be like. I can say it’s going to be a day of sun, all the way; or I can say the clouds are there, thick as can be, but don’t be fooled, because they’re going to be burned right up, sent running like a pack of squirrels by that foxy old sun; or I can say we’re in for it, a heavy day of clouds, or the good rain, lots of it I hope, or maybe just a few drops that won’t add up to anything.

  “The weather helps make the land what it is, you see. Good weather, any farming man needs that. But to begin with he’ll need soil he can work on; and you stop anybody within a hundred or two miles of this place and they’ll all agree that hereabouts we’ve been blessed by Almighty God with good farmland. I talk to my land, you know. I ask it to be good; each year at the start I do. And each year at the end I say, thank you and amen. It’s like being in church and talking with God. It’s His land, anyway, and I do believe if we could ask Him He’d be in favor of us thanking Him — thanking Him through a little whisper or two while we’re out there doing the work. If God sends
sun and rain and He’s already given you your land that’s good, then there’s just one more thing needed, and it’s not hard to guess what it is: work. Jimmy laughs when I tell him we’ve got to go and see if we’re up to God, if we can do the work He’d expect from us. Jimmy thinks his old daddy is starting to get real old, and be like his granddaddy was when he was at the end and ready to pass on. But I’ve always believed that when we leave our house and start in out there on the land, we’re meeting God and doing all we can to show Him we can hear Him and we can believe in Him; and the proof is that He’s there, helping us with the gift of His land, you see, and His sun you see, and His good, good rain, His precious rain that He sends us just when we need it and sometimes in-between and to spare. It’s up to us to go out and do our best by Him, and work on His land, and take good care that we get everything we can out of it, all the vegetables and the cotton, and the flowers — I’m not forgetting them. My wife takes them over to town and we sell them. We get a good price on them. I hear they go to some man in Birmingham, maybe it is, and he sells them again to anyone who wants to have flowers and likes flowers — and the man who buys them and takes them home probably wishes he was out here and growing them and not in Birmingham, Alabama, paying his dollar for having a look at them, a little look, before the poor flowers go and die.

  “When I come home it’s a tired man that walks in that door. I’m hungry, because I don’t eat all day. It doesn’t go down good in my stomach, food doesn’t, when I’m sweating and bending and my back is bent over and my front is all caved in. I get pains, bad ones all across my middle and up to my chest. We don’t have a doctor near here, and I’m not one to feel sorry for myself. I told my wife I’d stop having food during the day, and I’d feel better; she said I was dead wrong, but I wasn’t. It’s been two years or so, two summers, since I went back in the middle of the day for some of her soup that she makes, or the potatoes. She holds it all for me, and then I’ll eat and eat at the end of the day, and it’s like I say, I don’t get the pains then, nor at the start of the day, with breakfast.

  “I’ll stop when it’s hot, bad hot, in the summer. I’ll stop around the middle of the day, when the sun is high — maybe going down some, but only a little. I have my tree, my favorite tree. It’s my bed away from bed, my wife says; that’s what she calls it, my bed away from bed. And she’s all correct, every word. I can doze off. I can lie there and look up to the sky and have my talk with God, just like I was in church, or just like I was up there, and taken in to see Him and hear His judgment, like we all will, one day. I can lie there and ask myself: James, what have you done this morning? Then I can say: James, you’ve done what’s waiting out there for you to do, which is all anyone could have told you to do and expect it to be finished. The next thing, I can ask: what is ahead for the afternoon? And you know, I’ll have it running through my mind, as if I had a television camera in my head, and it could take pictures of what is going to happen, way before a man gets himself up and lifts his arms to start. Lying on my back over there I have the tree over me, better than any curtain you’ll ever buy, and when I want to turn off what crosses through my own head, and listen in to someone else, I just do. I say: James, I’m real tired of you and all the thoughts that’s going through you to worry you. I say: James, there are others in God’s Kingdom. The next thing you know, I hear a bird up there, talking to another bird, and they’re just going and going, maybe arguing or maybe telling each other that it’s a good day, and to be glad for it.

  “We have good soil here, and the birds know it; just like you and I, they try to find the best places to stop and rest. It’s fine, hard soil, but not too hard. There are plenty of worms, and birds like them and I like them too, because I need worms for fishing. That’s what I do when I have time; and we need those fish. My wife some of the time says that if it wasn’t for the fish I catch, we’d all be gone by now. She’s wrong, but it helps to bring her home a good catch. There’s hunting a little way north of here in some woods, but I don’t have the time. I don’t have a car, either. With a car I could go hunting up in the hills. But I put all my time and energy into this land that I’ve got to use, that’s mine to use, and I’m not ready to feel sorry for myself, no I’m not.

  “I don’t like feeling sorry for myself, and I don’t like my wife to get doing that, nor my children. Nor do I like others, anyone else, to say: isn’t it sad, how bad off they are out on that farm. We have people who will come by and try to get you feeling all bad about yourself and how you live. I don’t like it, not having much money, and being a lot down and out half the year — that’s through the winter and the first part of the spring — but I get by, and I’d like to keep trying to get by. I’d like help, of course. I admit to that. I’d like the government people to help the poor, small man, and not only the big boys, the big farmers, who own the Agricultural Department, there in Washington, yes they do. One of the people here, an agricultural agent we have, told me that it’s true, that they have a big Agricultural Department in Washington, and it gives men with plantations, the real large ones, lots and lots of money for not planting their crops. I came home and told all my family that there might be a lot of hope for us: one day someone out of Washington will discover us, here in Tennessee, and he’ll say that we can have plenty of money, the green bills, all we need to live on, if we just sit here and don’t lift a finger, just look at the land and don’t plant crops in it. But I’ll tell you something: I couldn’t do it, be here and not do my growing. I’d have to leave here, I would. I’d leave so fast no one would believe I was gone; that’s what I’d do if I was told I shouldn’t plant, I shouldn’t work on my land, and if I don’t then I’ll be paid for doing nothing.

  “I’d about die if I didn’t have my work. I wouldn’t know what to do with the time; the hours would pass by, one after the next, and I’d be here, sitting and looking at my land with my legs still and my arms just hanging down and I’d be staring — I would be like a scarecrow, that’s what. I wouldn’t have any life in me left. The money would be welcome, but I know I’d soon die. And the worst of it, the real worst of it, would be knowing that the land is just sitting there, lying out there, not being touched, not being asked to do anything, not being planted, not coming up with the shoots — just those weeds, that are always there. I wouldn’t be pushing the shoots along; I wouldn’t be telling them to grow and get bigger and try the world out, because it’s not bad, what with sun to keep you warm and a good shower you get every once in a while. There will be days when I can almost see my little shoots growing and they’re weak and tender, but they’re strong, too. It won’t be long, I know, before they’ll be hardier; they’ll be tough, and no weeds can get them, not then. No weeds ever win out around here — not with me around to look at things and do what has to be done. There are times when I wish the good Lord would say to Himself that He should treat us all like we’re in His Garden, and He should help the good people along, and take up the bad people, the weeds, and put them someplace else — maybe up on one of the stars, way away. Then the weeds could have another chance there, to start over and not turn into weeds, you might say. I don’t want people to be killed, as if they could only be weeds and nothing else!”

  He doesn’t want to harm anyone, not even people who have no great respect for him, and indeed do him and his kind no good, perhaps a lot of harm. “His kind” belongs to the South and to Appalachia both, to a whole half of a nation, really. It so happens that on several counts he is rather in between: he lives at the edge of the rural South, but at the edge of Appalachia; not far from two good-sized cities yet very much in a rural setting; he is a light-skinned black man who appears to be a nicely tanned white man — and, finally, his speech includes elements of the mountaineer’s language, of the white yeoman’s, and of the black tenant farmer’s. Those who have spent any length of time in counties like Buncombe County or Yancey County in North Carolina (to move a little east from Tennessee) will know what I mean.

  Certain
ly he is not Everyman; in this instance, though, I believe a particular person comes rather close to speaking for three large and scattered “groups,” which are different in many respects but also alike in many ways. Among migrants, sharecroppers, and mountaineers one finds black people and white people — and various shades of both. They are people who stay put in the South with a vengeance, or they wander without respite over a whole wide expanse of this nation. For all the distinctions to be made, the classifications and comparisons, the “cross-cultural” similarities or the psychological and sociological differences, what is shared among these people might be called something of the spirit: a closeness to the land, a familiarity with it, and despite the suffering and sacrifice and rage and hurt and pain, a constant regard for that land, an attachment to that land, a kind of love.

  For years I have heard that love emerge, even in the midst of bitterness and frustration. I have watched migrants try to stop being migrants, become instead city folk; and I have watched sharecroppers head joyfully and eagerly North, glad to be rid of plantation owners and foremen and sheriffs, the whole miserable, mean lot of them. I have watched mountaineers slip through mountain passes and valleys toward Dayton, say, or Chicago — all too willingly, because work and the food money can buy is far better than constant and unappeased hunger. As they get ready to leave, those many men and women and children, they deny having any regrets. And yet they do: they are losing something; they feel low and sad; more precisely, they anticipate the yearning they may later have, the homesickness, the lovesickness, the sense of bereavement. Dispossessed, they have to leave; they ought to leave. It was an awful life. And yet — one more time: “If I don’t have to go, maybe it’ll be my sons. They’ll be the ones to cry and not me. They’ll be happy, I know. They’ll be looking ahead, I know. But it’ll be a shame for us to leave, my family; it’s a shame when you leave the only thing you’ve known, your land — and remember, it’s land that’s seen you trying and that’s tried back, tried to give you all it could. There’s no land up there, just people and buildings. I know that. That’s too bad. That’s the way it has to be; I know it. I do. But I don’t have to like it. I don’t. I never will, even if I have to say good-bye and go on up the road myself, away from here, from my land.”