Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  So far he and hundreds of thousands of others are still there, still migrant farmers, still sharecroppers or tenant farmers, still living up those mountain hollows. They all look for changes, hope for them, dream of them — and at the same time stand their ground, and more literally, walk it, walk that ground and work it, and stay with it and stay on it, and know it as a friend, a giver, a lover, a great protagonist that is ready to bargain, that is ready to resist, that is there. The American land.

  The Children

  Uprooted Children

  For nine months the infant grows and grows in the womb. The quarters are extremely limited; at the end an X-ray shows the small yet developed body quite bent over on itself and cramped; yet a whole new life has come into being. For some hundreds of thousands of American migrant children that stretch of time, those months, represent the longest rest ever to be had, the longest stay in any one place. From birth on, moves and more moves take place, quick trips and drawn-out journeys. From birth on for such children, it is travel and all that goes with travel — forced travel, by migrant farm workers who roam the American land in search of crops to harvest and enough dollars to stay alive — “to live half right.”

  How in fact do such children live, the boys and girls who are born to migrant farmers? What do they gradually and eventually learn — and what do they have to teach us, the homeowners and apartment dwellers, the residents of villages and towns and cities and states? To begin with, many migrant children are not born in hospitals, not delivered by physicians, or even carefully trained midwives like those who work with the Frontier Nursing Service in eastern Kentucky. Again and again the migrant mother will casually describe the work she does in the field all during her pregnancy, the travel she undertakes during that same period of time, and finally the delivery itself: done in the rural cabin, or yes, done “on the road” or even in the fields. However indifferent one may be to the cause of such people, it is hard to accept the fact that in the second half of the twentieth century, in the United States of America, women bear their children on the side of a road, or in a one-room house that lacks running water and electricity — in either case, attended by a friend or neighbor or relative, who is able to offer affection and sympathy, but not medical help. Here is how a rather conservative grower both confirms the existence of and objects to a state of affairs: “Sure, some of them have their babies away from hospitals. I know that. We’d never turn them away from a hospital, here or anyplace. But they have their own life, you know, and they don’t do things the way we do. It’s ignorance; and it’s superstition. A lot of them, they don’t know where the hospital is, and they don’t want to go there; and some of them, they just want to be with their mother or their aunt, or someone, and they’ll scream out there. I’ve even heard them a couple of times by the side of my fields, and the best thing you can do is leave them alone. Once one of my men went over and tried to take them to the hospital, but they screamed even louder, and he thought they believed he was going to arrest them, or something. It’s awful, how ignorant people can be.”

  Yes, people can be very ignorant. One migrant woman I have come to know is a mother of four children. She attended school for three, maybe four years, and then only “now and then.” She admits to knowing very little about any number of things, though she does claim a certain kind of awareness of herself: “Yes sir, I’ve always had my mother with me, come the time to have the child, except for once, and then my sister, she was real good with me, yes sir. I have them real easy, and it’s bad for a little while, but then something happens, and the next thing you know, the baby is crying. I bleed for a week, and I have to keep washing myself, but soon you’re not doing so bad, no sir, you’re not. The first time and the second time my momma tried to take me to the hospital, you know. She comes from Sylvester, Georgia, yes sir, and she never went to any hospital herself, to have us; but she said I deserved better, and she tried. She just told me when the pains started that I had to come with her, and we went to the hospital, and I got scared, but I went in, and I was shaking real bad, not because of the baby, but I thought they’d arrest us, and I’d end up having the child, my first one, in a jail.

  “When we asked to see a doctor and I said I was hurting, and there’d be a baby soon, the way it looked, the nurse said who was my doctor, and my momma she said there wasn’t any. Then the nurse said that was too bad, and did we have a deposit for a bed, and it was a lot, more than we ever see, and we said no, but we’d try to pay any bills we ran up, and as fast as possible. Then she shook her head, and she said it was too bad, but we should hurry on up to the other side of the county, to the county hospital, and that was where we might get in, though she wasn’t sure, but her hospital, it was an all-private one, and you couldn’t come there except if a doctor brought you in, or if there was the money, and only then could she call up a doctor and ask him if he could come over and take the case.

  “So that’s what happened, and we went back, and it was good that I had my girl real easy-like, my momma said. The next time we tried another hospital, but it was the same thing. So, after that, we knew what to expect, yes sir. You get to know about things after a while.”

  She had learned something, learned a lot actually. Ignorant, barely able to write her name, never a reader, without a diploma of any kind, even one from a secondary or elementary school, she yet had figured out how certain private hospitals are run, what “criteria” they demand before a potential patient, however much in pain and in serious medical difficulty, becomes an actual patient. She needed no teacher, no social scientist to tell her the economic and political facts of life, of her life. I was gently reprimanded when I asked her whether she might not have been helped by a policeman or a fireman, who traditionally (so I thought from my work as a doctor in northern cities) respond to the pleas of women about to deliver babies: “You couldn’t be too serious, I don’t believe, because you must know, you must, that if we ever go near the police, or the fire people, or like that, the sheriff, then it’s like asking for trouble, and a lot, too, because they’ll tell you, if you pick the crops, they’ll tell you to stay away, and if you go asking them for anything, then it won’t be but a few seconds, and they’ll have you locked up, oh will they”

  She has never been locked up, nor does she believe in keeping her children locked up — watched over, carefully controlled, trained to do all sorts of things. “I lets them be,” she says when asked how she spends her day with them. In point of fact, like all mothers, she constantly makes choices, or has no choice but to make a particular choice. For instance, I have watched her and other migrant mothers begin to breast-feed their children as a matter of course. For some months I assumed they naturally had to do so, because bottled milk is expensive, and certainly there are no physicians around to prescribe this formula and that one, and all the rest of the things American mothers of the middle class come to take for granted. Finally I began to notice how much she enjoyed suckling her child, and how long she went on doing it, and how sad, very sad she became when at a year and a half or so the time came to stop (for what reason, even then, I began to ask myself). So, I went ahead one day and made an observation: “If you had a lot of money, and could buy a lot of milk at the store, would you want to feed your small babies that way, with the bottle?”

  She knew exactly what I was getting at, knew it in a sure, self-confident way that did not have to reduce itself into a barrage of nervous, anxious, wordy statements and counter-questions and explanations: “Yes sir, I know what you means. There are times when I find myself wondering if I’ll ever get a chance to try one of those bottles out. I’d like to, but you have to keep going to the store then, for the milk, and then I’d run dry — and what if I started with the bottle and I couldn’t buy any more milk, because there was no crops, you know, and then I’d be dry, and the baby would be suffering real bad, she would. If I had all that money, like you say, I’d try it, though. But I don’t think I’d want to keep away from my baby all the time, li
ke that, and so I don’t think I’d try it for so long that I’d run dry, no sir, because I like being near to the baby. It’s the best time you ever have with your child, if you ask me. That’s right, it’s the best time.”

  She holds the child firmly and fondles her lavishly as she feeds her. She makes no effort to cover her breasts, not before me or her fellow workers. Many times she has carried her infant to a field, done picking, stopped to go to the edge of the field, fed the child, left the child to itself or the care of its grandmother or older sister, and returned to the tomatoes or beans or cucumbers. Many times, too, she has reminded me that picking crops can be boring and repetitive and laborious, and so made very much more tolerable by the presence of good, clean, cool water to drink, and a good meal at lunchtime and best of all, a child to feed lying nearby. She knows that the chances are that good water and food will not be available, but an infant — yes, the presence of an infant is much more likely: “To tell the truth, I do better in the field, when I know my baby is waiting there for me, and soon I’ll be able to go see her and do what I can for her. It gives you something to look ahead to.”

  She plans then. She plans her days around the crops and around the care of her children — she and her mother do that. Sometimes they both pick the crops, and nearby the children play, and indeed upon occasion the oldest child, nine years old, helps out not only with the younger children but the beans or tomatoes also. Sometimes the mother works on her knees, up and down the planted rows, and her mother stays with the children, on the edge of the farm or back in the cabin. Sometimes, too, there is no work to be had, and “we stays still and lets the children do their running about.”

  To my eye, migrant children begin a migrant life very, very early. By and large they are allowed rather free rein as soon as they can begin to crawl. Even before that they do not usually have cribs, and often enough they lack clothes and usually toys of any sort. Put differently, the migrant child learns right off that he has no particular possessions of his own, no place that is his to use for rest and sleep, no objects that are his to look at and touch and move about and come to recognize as familiar. He does not find out that the feet get covered with socks, the body with diapers and shirts and pants. He does not find out that there is music in the air, from mysterious boxes, nor does he wake up to find bears and bunnies at hand to touch and fondle. In sum, he does not get a sense of his space, his things, or a rhythm that is his. He sleeps with his mother at first, and in a few months, with his brothers and sisters. Sometimes he sleeps on a bed, sometimes on the floor, sometimes on the back seat of a car, or on the floor of a truck, and sometimes on the ground. If the locations vary, and the company, so do other things. Unlike middle-class children, the migrant child cannot assume that internal pains will soon bring some kind of relief, or that external nuisances (and worse) will be quickly done away with after a shout, a cry, a scream. One migrant mother described her own feelings of helplessness and eventually indifference in the face of such circumstances: “My children, they suffer. I know. They hurts and I can’t stop it. I just have to pray that they’ll stay alive, somehow. They gets the colic, and I don’t know what to do. One of them, he can’t breathe right and his chest, it’s in trouble. I can hear the noise inside when he takes his breaths. The worst thing, if you ask me, is the bites they get. It makes them unhappy, real unhappy. They itches and scratches and bleeds, and oh, it’s the worst. They must want to tear all their skin off, but you can’t do that. There’d still be moquitoes and ants and rats and like that around, and they’d be after your insides then, if the skin was all gone. That’s what would happen then. But I say to myself it’s life, the way living is, and there’s not much to do but accept what happens. Do you have a choice but to accept? That’s what I’d like to ask you, yes sir. Once, when I was little, I seem to recall asking my uncle if there wasn’t something you could do, but he said no, there wasn’t and to hush up. So I did. Now I have to tell my kids the same, that you don’t go around complaining — you just don’t.”

  She doesn’t, and a lot of mothers like her don’t; and their children don’t either. The infants don’t cry as much as ours do; or at least the infants have learned not to cry. They are lovingly breast-fed, then put aside, for work or because there is travel to do or chores or whatever. The babies lie about and move about and crawl about, likely as not nude all day and all night. A piece of cloth may be put under them, “to catch their stuff,” but not always, and in the outdoors, in the fields, usually not.

  As for “their stuff,” what we call “toilet training,” migrant children on the whole never, never get to see a full-fledged bathroom. They never take a bath or a shower. Sometimes they see their parents use an outhouse; and sometimes they see them use the fields. The children are taught to leave a cabin or car or truck for those outhouses and fields, but the learning takes place relatively slowly and casually, at least to this observer’s eye. What takes place rather more quickly has to do with the cabin itself and the car: at about the age of two the child learns he must respect both those places, though not very much else, including the immediate territory around the house — all of which can be understood by anyone who has seen the condition of some outhouses migrants are supposed to use, or the distance between the cabins migrants inhabit and those outhouses, or for that matter, a good serviceable stretch of woods.

  They can be active, darting children, many migrant children; and they don’t make the mistake of getting attached to a lot of places and possessions. They move around a lot, and they move together, even as they sleep together. They are not afraid to touch one another; in fact, they seek one another out, reach for one another, even seem lost without one another. They don’t fight over who owns what, nor do they insist that this is mine and that belongs to someone else. They don’t try to shout one another down, for the sake of their mother’s attention or for any other reason. At times I have felt them as one — three or four or five or six children, brothers and sisters who feel very much joined and seem very much ready to take almost anything that might come their way. Some might say the children clutch at one another nervously. Some might say they huddle together, rather as Daumier or Kathe Kollwitz showed the poor doing. Some might say they belong to a “community,” get along better than middle-class children, grow up without much of the “sibling rivalry” that plagues those more comfortable and fortunate children. Some might say they “adapt” to their lot, “cope” with the severe poverty and disorganization that goes with a migrant life. I find it very hard to say any one such thing. At times I see migrant children very close together, it’s true, but much too quiet, much too withdrawn from the world. At times I see children together but terribly alone — because they are tired and sick, feverish and hungry, in pain but resigned to pain. Nor does that kind of observation go unnoticed by their mothers, those weary, uneducated, unsophisticated women — who have trouble with words and grammar, who are shy for a long time, then fearfully talkative, then outspoken beyond, at times, the outsider’s capacity to do much but listen in confusion and sympathy and anger: “It’s hard with the children, because I have to work, and so does my husband, because when the crops are there, you try to make the money you can. So I gets them to be good to one another, and watch out for each other. But a lot of the time, they’re not feeling good. I know. They’ve just run down, the way you get, you know. They don’t feel very good. There’ll be a pain and something bothering them, and they all look after each other, yes they do. But it’s hard, especially when they all goes and gets sick at the same time, and that happens a lot, I’ll admit.

  “I guess I could be better for them, if I had more to give them, more food and like that, and if I could be a better mother to them, I guess it is. But I try my best, and there’s all we have to do, with the crops to work on, and we have to keep on the move, from place to place it is, you know, and there’s never much left over, I’ll say that, neither money nor food nor anything else. So you have to say to yourself that the litt
le ones will take care of themselves. It’s not just you; it’s them, and they can be there, to wait on one another. But I’ll admit, I don’t believe it’s the right thing, for them to be waiting on one another so much that — well, there will be sometimes when I tell their father that they’re already grown up, the kids, and it’s too bad they have to worry so much for each other, because that’s hard on a girl of seven or eight, worrying after the little ones, and each of them, looking after the smaller one. Sometimes I think it would be better if we didn’t have to keep moving, but its what we’ve been doing all these years, and it’s the only thing we know, and it’s better than starving to death, I tell myself. So I hope and pray my kids won’t have to do the same. I tell them that, and I hope they’re listening!”

  She tells her children a lot, as a matter of fact. She does not spoil them, let them get their way, indulge them, allow them to boss her around and get fresh with her and become loudmouthed and noisy and full of themselves. She can be very stern and very insistent with them. She doesn’t really speak to them very much, explain this and that to them, go into details, offer reasons, appeal to all sorts of ideas and ideals and convictions. She doesn’t coax them or persuade them or argue them down. She doesn’t beat them up either, or threaten to do so. It is hard to say what she does, because words are shunned by her and anyway don’t quite convey her sad, silent willfulness, a mixture of self-command and self-restraint; and it is hard to describe what she does, because whatever happens manages to happen swiftly and abruptly and without a lot of gestures and movements and steps and countersteps. There will be a word like “here” or “there” or “OK” or “now” or “it’s time,” and there will be an arm raised, a finger pointed, and most of all a look, a fierce look or a summoning look or a steady, knowing look — and the children stir and move and do. They come over and eat what there is to eat. They get ready to leave for the fields. They get ready to come home. They prepare to leave for yet another county, town, cabin, series of fields. They may be sad or afraid. They may be annoyed or angry. They may be troubled; but I have never seen any evidence that they are afraid of being left behind. They may be feeling good, very good — glad to be leaving or arriving. Whatever the mood and occasion, they have learned to take their cues from their mother, and one another, and hurry on. I suppose I am saying that they tend to be rather obedient — out of fear, out of hunger, out of love, it is hard to separate the reasons, the reasons for the obedience or the reasons we also learn to be compliant. I hear just that from the owners of farms and the foremen who manage them — that migrant children are “a pretty good bunch.” Well, if the people who employ migrants by the thousands find them “lazy” or “careless” or “shiftless” or “irresponsible” or “ignorant” or “wild” or “animallike,” then how is it that their children manage so well, even earn a bit of praise and respect here and there? “I know what you mean,” the owner of a very large farm in central Florida says in initial response to the essence of that question. Then he pauses for a minute and struggles with the irony and finally seems to have his answer to it, which is a very good half question indeed: “Well, I don’t know, you take children anywhere, and they’re not what their parents are, are they?” Then he amplifies: “Sometimes they’re better than their parents and sometimes they’re worse. You’ll find good parents and bad kids and vice versa. As for these migrants, if you ask me, it’s the parents who have never amounted to much and maybe they try to do better with their kids, though they’re certainly not very ambitious, those parents, so I don’t think they push their kids to be successful, the way we might. Maybe it’s just they’re good and strict with their kids, and if that’s the way they treat them, then the kids learn to behave. Of course, they can’t really spoil their kids, I’ll admit. They don’t have much to spoil them with; and what they have, they tend to be wasteful about, you know.”