Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “Now, they’ll come back at me, oh do they, with first one question and then another, until I don’t know what to say, and I tell them to stop. Sometimes I have to hit them, yes sir, I’ll admit it. They’ll be asking about why, why, why, and I don’t have the answers and I’m tired out, and I figure sooner or later they’ll have to stop asking and just be glad they’re alive. Once I told my girl that, and then she said we wasn’t alive, and we was dead, and I thought she was trying to be funny, but she wasn’t, and she started crying. Then I told her she was being foolish, and of course we’re alive, and she said that all we do is move and move, and most of the time she’s not sure where we’re going to be, and if there’ll be enough to eat. That’s true, but you’re still alive, I said to her, and so am I, and I’m older than you by a long time, and why don’t you have faith in God, and maybe do good in your learning, in those schools, and then maybe you could get yourself a home someday, and stay in it, and you’d be a lot better off, I know it, and I wish we all of us could — I mean, could have a home.”

  The mother mentions schools, not a school, not two or three, but “those schools.” She knows that her children have attended school, at various times, in Florida, Virginia, Delaware, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. She may not list those states very easily or confidently, but she knows they exist, and she knows she visits them, among others, every year, and she knows that upon occasion her daughter and her sons have gone to elementary schools in those states, and stayed in those schools maybe a few weeks, maybe only a few days, then moved on — to another school, or to no school “for a while,” even though during the period of time called “for a while” other children all over the country are at school. What happens to her children in “those schools”? What do they expect to learn when they arrive? What do they actually learn, and how long do they actually stay in school? Rather obviously, migrant children spend relatively little time in classrooms, in comparison to other American children, and learn very little while there. During the two years I worked most closely and methodically with migrant families who belong to the “eastern stream,” I had occasion to check on the children’s school attendance for ten families. I found that each child put in, on the average, about a week and a half of school, that is, eight days, during the month. Often the children had colds, stomachaches, asthma, skin infections and anemia, and so had to stay home “to rest.” Often the children lacked clothes, and so had to await their “turn” to put on the shoes and socks and pants or dresses that were, in fact, shared by, say, three or four children. Often the parents had no real confidence in the value of education, at least the kind they knew their children had to get, in view of the nature of the migrant life, and in view, for that matter, of the demands put upon the migrant farmer who lives that kind of life. Nor did the children usually feel that what they had already learned — rather a lot, if outside the schools — ought to be forsaken in favor of the values and standards and habits encouraged within schools often enough attended, at best, on the sufferance of the teachers and the other children.

  Rather obviously, migrancy makes regular school attendance, even if very much desired by a particular set of parents for their children, next to impossible. The most ambitious and articulate migrant farmer I have ever met, a black man originally from northern Louisiana, describes all too precisely the dilemma he must face as a parent, a worker, an American citizen: “You don’t realize how hard it is, trying to make sure your kids get a little learning, just a little. I don’t expect my oldest boy — he’s named after me — to go on and finish school. The little schooling he’ll get, it’s no good, because he’s been in and out of so many of them, the schools, and he gets confused, and it’s no good. You’ll go from one state to the next, and sometimes the school will remember Peter, and they’ll try to pick right up with him, where he left off, and give him special teaching, so he doesn’t lose all his time just finding out what’s going on, and where the other kids are. But, in a lot of schools, they don’t seem even to want you, your kids. They’ll give you and them those sour looks when you come in, and they’ll act toward you as if you’re dirty — you know what I mean? — as if, well, as if you’re just no good, and that’s that. My boy, he sees it, just like me, even if he’s only nine, he does. I try to tell him not to pay attention, but he knows, and he tries to be as quiet and good as he can, but I can see him getting upset, only hiding it, and I don’t know what to say. So I just try to make the best of it, and tell him that no matter what, even if it’s a little bit here and a little bit there, he’s got to learn how to read and how to write and how to know what’s happening, not just to himself, but to everyone in the world, wherever they all are. But the boy is right clever, and he says, Daddy, you’re not talking the truth at all, no sir; and it don’t make any difference, he says, if you get your schooling, because the people who don’t want you in school, and don’t pay you any attention there, and only smile when you tell them you’re sorry, but you won’t be there come next week, because you’ve got to move on with your family — well, those people will be everywhere, no matter where you want to go, and what you want to do, so there’s no getting away from them and why even try, if you know you’re not going to win much.”

  Yet his son Peter does try, and his failure to get a decent education, an even halfway adequate one, tells us, if nothing else, that earnestness and persistence, even on the part of a rather bright child, can only go so far. Peter has always been the quietest of his parents’ children, the most anxious to learn things and do things and question things. His younger brothers and sisters tend to be more active, less curious, more impulsive, less contemplative. From the very start Peter wanted to attend school, and worked hard while there. His efforts caught the attention of several teachers, one in Florida and one in Virginia. He has always asked why and indeed proposed answers to his own questions — all of which can annoy his parents, and apparently his teachers, too, upon occasion. I have spent an unusually long period of time with Peter, not only because he and his family have had a lot to teach me, but because sometimes the exceptional child (perhaps like the very sick patient) can demonstrate rather dramatically what others also go through or experience or endure more tamely and less ostentatiously but no less convincingly.

  It so happens that I knew Peter before he went to school, and talked with him many times after he had spent a day “in the big room,” which is what he often called his classroom when he was six or seven years old. To a boy like Peter a school building, even an old and not very attractively furnished one, is a new world — of large windows and solid floor and doors and plastered ceilings and walls with pictures on them, and a seat that one has, that one is given, that one is supposed to own, or virtually own, for day after day, almost as a right of some sort. After his first week in the first grade Peter said this: “They told me I could sit in that chair and they said the desk, it was for me, and that every day I should come to the same place, to the chair she said was mine for as long as I’m there, in that school — that’s what they say, the teachers, anyway.”

  So, they told him he could not only sit someplace, but he could have something — for himself; and they told him that the next day he would continue to have what was formerly (the previous day) had — and indeed the same would go for the next day after that, until there were no more days to be spent at the school. I believe Peter’s remarks indicated he was not quite sure that what he heard would actually and reliably take place. I believe Peter wondered how he could possibly find himself in possession of something and keep it day after day. Peter and I talked at great length about that school, and by bringing together his various remarks made over many weeks, it is possible to sense a little of what school meant to him, a little of what that abstraction “life” meant (and continually means) to him: “I was pretty scared, going in there. I never saw such a big door. I was scared I couldn’t open it, and then I was scared I wouldn’t be able to get out, because maybe the second time it would be too hard
. The teacher, she kept on pulling the things up and down over the windows — yes, a kid told me they’re ‘blinds,’ and they have them to let the sun in and keep the sun out. A lot of the time the teacher would try to help us out. She’d want to know if anyone had anything to ask, or what we wanted to do next. But she seemed to know what she was going to do, and I’d just wait and hope she didn’t catch me not knowing the answer to one of her questions. She said to me that I had to pay attention, even if I wasn’t going to be there for very long, and I said I would, and I’ve tried to do the best I can, and I’ve tried to be as good as I can. She asked me as I was leaving the other day if I would be staying long, and I said I didn’t know, and she said I should ask my daddy, and he’d know, but when I did, he said he didn’t know, and it all depended on the crops and what the crew man said, because he’s the one who takes us to the farms. Then I told the teacher that, and she said yes, she knew what it was like, but that I should forget I’m anywhere else while I’m in school and get the most I can learned.

  “I try to remember everything she says, the teacher. She’s real smart, and dresses good, a different dress every day, I think. She told us we should watch how we wear our clothes, and try to wash ourselves every day and use brushes on our teeth and eat all these different things on the chart she has. I told my momma, and she said yes, what the teacher says is correct, yes it is, but you can’t always go along, because there’s no time, what with work and like that, if you haven’t got the shower, you can’t take it, and maybe someday it will be different. I asked her if we could get some chairs, like in school, and we could carry them where we go, and they’d be better than now, because you sit on the floor where we’re staying, and the teacher said a good chair helps your back grow up straight, if you know how to sit in it right. But there’s not the money, my daddy said, and it’s hard enough us moving, never mind a lot of furniture, he said. When I get big, I’ll find a chair that’s good — but it can fold up. The teacher said you can fold up a lot of things and just carry them with you, so there’s no excuse for us not having a lot of things, even if we’re moving a lot, that’s what she said, and one of the kids, he said his father was a salesman and traveled all over the country — and he said, the kid, that his father had a suitcase full of things you could fold up and unfold and they were all very light and you could hold the suitcase up with one finger if you wanted, that’s how light. My daddy said it wasn’t the same, the traveling we do, and going around selling a lot of things. He said you could make big money that way, but you couldn’t do it unless you were a big shot in the first place, and with us, it’s no use but to do what you know to do, and try to get by the best you can, and that’s very hard, he says.

  “I like going into the school, because it’s really, really nice in there, and you can be sure no bugs will be biting you, and the sun doesn’t make you too hot, and they have the water that’s really cold and it tastes good. They’ll give you cookies and milk, and it’s a lot of fun sitting on your chair and talking with the other kids. One boy wanted to know why I was going soon — I told him the other day, and he thought I was trying to fool him, I think — and I said I didn’t know why, but I had to go because my daddy picks the crops and we moves along, and we have to. The boy, he thought I was trying to be funny, that’s what he said first, and then the next time he came over and he said that he’d talked with his daddy and the daddy said that there was a lot of us, the migrant people, and it was true that we’re in one city and out, and on to the next, and so I had to go, it’s true, if that’s what my daddy does. Then he said, the boy said, that his daddy told him to stay clear of me, because I might be carrying a lot of sickness around, and dirt, and like that; but he said, his name is Jimmy, he said I was OK and he wasn’t going to tell his father, but we should be friends in the yard during the playtime, and besides he heard his mother say it was too bad everyone didn’t have a home and stay there from when he’s born until he’s all grown up, and then it would be better for everyone.

  “I thought I might never see Jimmy again, or the school either, when we drove away, but I thought I might get to see another school, and my momma said that Jimmy wasn’t the only boy in the world, and there’d be plenty like him up North, and they might even be better to us up there while we’re there, though she wasn’t too sure. Then I was getting ready to say we shouldn’t go at all, and my daddy told me to shut up, because it’s hard enough to keep going without us talking about this friend and the school and the teacher and how we want to stay; so he said if I said another word I’d soon be sorry, and I didn’t. Then I forgot — we were way up there, a long way from Florida, I think, and I said something Jimmy said, and they told me I’d better watch out, so I stopped and just looked out the window, and that’s when I thought it would be good, like Jimmy said his mother said, if one day we stopped and we never, never went up the road again to the next farm, and after that, the next one, until you can’t remember if you’re going to leave or you’ve just come.

  “That’s what my momma will say sometimes, that she just can’t remember, and she’ll ask us, and we’re not always a help, because we’ll just be going along, and not knowing why they want to leave and then stop, because it seems they could just stop and never leave, and maybe someone could find them a job where they’d never have to leave, and maybe then I could stay in the same school and I’d make a lot of friends and I’d keep them until when I was grown up. Then I’d have the friends and I wouldn’t always be moving, because they’d help me, and that’s what it means to be a friend, the teacher said, and Jimmy told me that if I’d be staying around, he’d ask his mother if I could come over, and he thought that if I came during the day, and his father wasn’t home, then it would be all right, because his mother says she’s in favor of helping us out, my people, Jimmy says, and she said if she had the money she’d buy houses for all of us, and she said there must be a way we could stay in one place, but Jimmy said he told her what I said: if we don’t keep moving, we don’t eat. That’s what my daddy says, and I told Jimmy. It’s all right to go to school, my daddy says, but they won’t feed you in school, and they won’t give you a place to sleep, so first you have to stay alive, and then comes school. Jimmy said my daddy was right, but he was making a mistake, too — because his daddy says that if you don’t finish school, you’ll have nothing to do and you’ll starve to death, so it’s best to go to school and learn whatever the teacher says, even if you don’t like to.”

  Peter has come to know several Jimmys in his short life, and he has left several schools reluctantly, sadly, even bitterly. On the other hand, he has also been glad to leave many schools. He feels he has been ignored or scorned. He feels different from other schoolchildren — and has felt that one or another teacher emphasizes those differences, makes them explicit, speaks them out, and in a way makes him feel thoroughly unwanted. I knew him long enough and followed his family’s travels far enough to get a fairly quick response from him after his first day in a particular school. The experience invariably would either be good or bad, or so Peter judged. He would talk about what he saw and felt, and in so doing reveal himself to be, I thought, remarkably intuitive and perceptive. Yet, he insisted to me on numerous occasions that what he noticed other migrant children also notice, and no less rapidly than he. “I’m a big talker” he told me after one of our “big talks.” His younger brother, Tom, would see the same things, though, when he went to school; he might not put what he sees into words, or even be fully aware of what he senses happening, but he would know it all, know the hurt and loneliness and isolation and sadness, know it all in the bones, in the heart, in the back of his mind — wherever such knowledge is stored by human beings. So Peter believed, or so I believe he believed, on the basis of his observations and remarks and complaints and questions, all shared with me during the two years we conversed — in Florida and North Carolina and Virginia and upstate New York, each of which claims to offer children like Peter what every American child presumably
is entitled to as a birthright, a free public education: “I always am a little scared when I try a new school, yes; but I try to remember that I won’t be there long, and if it’s no good, I’m not stuck there, like the kids who live there. We’ll come in and they’ll tell you you’re special, and they’ll do what they can to make you good, to clean you up, they’ll say, and to give you better habits, they’ll say. I don’t like those kinds of teachers and schools that they’re in.