by Robert Coles
“Yes, I met one today. She wasn’t worse than the last one, but she wasn’t better, either. We could tell. She started in with what we had on, and how we could at least clean our shoes, even if they weren’t good, and all that; and I said in my mind that I wish I was outside, fishing maybe, or doing anything but listening to her. Then I recalled my daddy saying it would only be two or three weeks, so I didn’t get bothered, no. She asked me my name, and I told her, and she asked me where I was from, and I told her, and she asked me what I was going to school for, and I told her — that it was because I had to — and she smiled. (I think it was because I said what she was thinking, and she was glad, so she smiled.) I told myself later that if I’d gone and told her that I was there at school because I wanted to be a teacher, like her, or even the principal, then she’d have come after me with the ruler or the pointer she has in her hand all the time. Well, I figure we’ll get a good rest there, and the chairs are good, and they give you the milk and cookies, and my momma says that’s worth the whole day, regardless of what they say, but I think she’s wrong, real wrong.
“To me a good school is one where the teacher is friendly, and she wants to be on your side, and she’ll ask you to tell the other kids some of the things you can do, and all you’ve done — you know, about the crops, and like that. There was one teacher like that, and I think it was up North, in New York it was. She said that so long as we were there in the class she was going to ask everyone to join us, that’s what she said, and we could teach the other kids what we know and they could do the same with us. She showed the class where we traveled, on the map, and I told my daddy that I never before knew how far we went each year, and he said he couldn’t understand why I didn’t know, because I did the traveling all right, with him, and so I should know. But when you look on the map, and hear the other kids say they’ve never been that far, and they wish someday they could, then you think you’ve done something good, too — and they’ll tell you in the recess that they’ve only seen where they live and we’ve been all over. I told my daddy what they said, and he said it sure was true, that we’ve been all over, and he hopes the day will come when we’ll be in one place, but he sure doubts it, and if I wanted I could tell the teacher he said so — but I didn’t. I don’t think she’d know how to answer Daddy, except to say she’s sorry, and she’s already told us that, yes she did, right before the whole class. She said we had a hard life, that’s what, the people who do the picking of the crops, and she wanted us to know that she was on our side, and she wanted to help us learn all we could, because it would be better for us later, the more we knew, and maybe most of us would find a job and keep it, and there’d be no more people following the crops all over, from place to place, and it would be better for America, she said. Then she asked if I agreed, and I didn’t say one way or the other, and she asked me to just say what I thought, and I did. I said I’d been doing enough of traveling, and I’d seen a lot of places, and I wouldn’t mind stopping for a change, no ma’am, and if we just stayed there, in that town, and I could go to school there — well, that would be all right by me, and it would be better than some of the other places we stop, I could say that right off, a real lot better.
“There’ll be times when I wish I’d have been born one of the other kids, yes sir; that’s how I sometimes think, yes. Mostly, it’s when the teacher is good to you — then you think you’d like to stay. If the teacher is bad, and the kids don’t speak to you, then you want to go away and never come back, and you’re glad that you won’t stay there too long. Now school is good, because it’s a good school and they pays attention to you; most of the time though, in other schools, you just sit there, and you want to sleep. Suddenly the teacher will ask you what you’re thinking, and you tell her the truth, that you don’t know. Then she’ll ask you what you want to be, and I don’t know what to answer, so I say I’d like to work like my daddy at the crops, and maybe one day get a job in the city, and stay there. Then they’ll tell you to study hard, the teachers, but they don’t give you much to do, and they’ll keep on asking you how the crops are coming, and how long you’ll be there, and when are you going to be going, and like that. Sometimes I won’t go to school. I tell my momma that I’m not going and can I help take care of my brothers and can I help in the field, or anything, and she’ll say yes, mostly, unless she thinks the police will be getting after me, for not being in school — but most of the time they don’t care, and they’ll tell you you’re doing good to be caring for your brother and working. Yes sir, they’ll drive by and wave and they don’t seem to mind if you’re not in school. Once a policeman asked me if I liked school and I said sometimes I did and then he said I was wasting my time there, because you don’t need a lot of reading and writing to pick the crops, and if you get too much of schooling, he said, you start getting too big for your shoes, and cause a lot of trouble, and then you’ll end up in jail pretty fast and never get out if you don’t watch your step — never get out.”
Peter seeks consolation from such a future; and he often finds it by looking back to earlier years and occasions. In his own brief life as a young child, a young migrant, a young boy of, say, eight or nine or ten, he has begun to find that the one possession he has and cannot lose is yesterday, the old days, the experiences that have gone but remain — and remain not only in the mind’s memories and dreams, but in the lives of others, those brothers or sisters who are younger and who present a child like Peter with themselves, which means all the things they do that remind Peter of what he once did and indeed can continue to do as the older brother becomes a companion of younger children. I found myself concluding and in my notes emphasizing all of that, Peter’s tendency to go back, to flee the present for the sake of the past. After all, I had to repeat to myself again and again, Peter finds school useless or worse. He finds his parents tired and distracted or worse. He finds himself at loose ends: I am a child, yet today I can work, tomorrow I may be told I’m to attend school, the next day I’ll be on the road again and unsure where I shall soon be, when I shall again be still for a while — sitting on the ground, that is, or in a cabin, rather than upon the seat of a car or a bus. In the face of such uncertainties, earlier moments and ways and feelings become things (if such is the word) to be tenaciously grasped and held. And so, Peter will help pick beans, and do a very good job at moving up and down the rows, but soon thereafter be playing on his hands and knees with his younger brothers, and sucking lollipops with them and lying under a tree and crawling about and laughing with them. His mother in her own way takes note of what happens, and needs no prodding from any observer to describe the sequence of events: “I think stooping for those beans can go to your head. You get dizzy after a day of it, and you want to go down on your back and stretch yourself all you can and try to feel like yourself again, and not all curled up on yourself. If Peter goes along with his daddy and me and does the stooping and picking, then he’ll be real tired at the end of the day, and it seems he wants to be like my little ones — and I say to myself if it’ll help him feel any better, after all that work, then Lord he can do what he likes, and if I had it in me to keep them all little babies, then I’d do it, because that’s when they’re truly happiest, yes sir.’
Yet, it turns out that her children and thousands of other migrant children are not very happy for very long; actually, many of those children have a hard time understanding the many contradictions that plague their lives. For one thing, as already indicated, migrant children of two or three are allowed, in some respects, a good deal of active, assertive freedom. They are encouraged to care for one another, but also encouraged to fend for themselves — go exploring in the woods or the fields, play games almost anywhere and anytime, feel easy and relaxed about time, about schedules, about places where things are done and routines that give order to the doing of those things. Again and again I have seen migrant children leave their cabins for the day and return anytime, when and if they pleased — to get themselves a bottle of pop
and make for themselves a meal of “luncheon meat” and bread and potato chips, or often enough, potato chips and potato salad and Coke, period. At the same time, however, those very children are also taught obedience and a real and powerful kind of fatalism: one can only go here, do that, and most of all, submit to the rigors and demands and confusion and sadness of travel — always the travel, inevitably the travel, endlessly the travel, all of which can amount to a rather inert and compliant and passive life. Put differently, the child is told the grim facts of his particular life, but also given dozens of stories and excuses and explanations and promises whose collective function, quite naturally and humanly, is to blunt the awful, painful edges of that very life. It can even be said that migrant children obtain and learn to live with an almost uncanny mixture of realism and mysticism. It is as if they must discover how difficult their years will be, but also acquire certain places of psychological and spiritual refuge. Naturally, each family has its own particular mixture of sentiment and hard facts to offer and emphasize, even as each child makes for himself his very own nature; he becomes a blend of the assertive and the quiet, the forceful and the subdued, the utterly realistic and the strangely fanciful. What I am saying, of course, goes for all children, but at the same time I must insist that migrant children have a very special psychological fate — and one that is unusually hard for them to endure.
For example, I mentioned earlier that migrant children tend to be close to one another, tend to care very much for one another, tend almost to absorb themselves in one another, and certainly — the first observation one like me makes when he comes to know them — tend to touch one another, constantly and reassuringly and unselfconsciously and most of the time rather tenderly. At the same time those same children, so literally touching to each other, can appear more and more untouched — indifferent, tired, bored, listless, apathetic, and finally, most ironically, isolated physically as well as psychologically. Many of them, unlike the boy Peter, just discussed, abandon themselves to a private world that is very hard for any outsiders to comprehend, even a mother or father. School means nothing, is often forsaken completely, even the pretense of going. Friends are an affair of the moment, to be forsaken and lost amid all the disorder and turmoil and instability that goes with one move after another. Sports, organized and progressively challenging sports, are unknown. Needless to say, the migrant child does not go to restaurants, theaters, movies, museums, zoos, and concerts; nor do those television sets he watches work very well; they are old and half broken to start with, purchased secondhand (with a bit of luck) on a never-ending installment basis, and in addition, as Peter’s mother puts it, “way out in the country you can’t pick up the pictures,” particularly when there is no antenna, and the set has been bouncing around for miles and miles, as indeed have its owners.
It is hard to convey such experiences, such a world, to those who don’t see it and feel it and smell it and hear it. It is even harder to describe that world as it is met and apprehended and suffered by hundreds of thousands of parents and children. I say this not as a preliminary exercise in self-congratulation — what is hard is being done and therefore deserves admiration — but to warn myself and the reader alike, particularly at this point, against the temptation of psychological categorization, the temptation to say that migrant children are this or that, are “active” or “passive,” resort to excessive “denial” and too many “rationalizations” and “projections” or resort to an almost brutal kind of realism, a kind of self-confrontation so devoid of humor and guile and hope and patience as to be a caricature of the analysis the rest of us value, be it psychological or political or philosophical. I am saying that migrant children are many things, and do many things with their brief and relatively sad lives. They can be ingenious and foolish. They can have all sorts of illusions, and they can speak about themselves with almost unbearable candor and severity and gloom. They can feel disgusted with their lot, or they can pay no attention to it, simply endure what has to be; or they can romp and laugh and shout, even though their observer knows how close to the surface are the tears (and fears) and how overworked even the fun seems at times — the kind of thing, of course, that can happen to all of us.
In a sense, as I write about these young children I am lost. How literally extraordinary, and in fact how extraordinarily cruel their lives are: the constant mobility, the leave-takings and the fearful arrivals, the demanding work they often manage to do, the extreme hardship that goes with a meager (at best) income, the need always to gird oneself for the next slur, the next sharp rebuke, the next reminder that one is different and distinctly unwanted, except, naturally, for the work that has to be done in the fields. I also want to emphasize that extremely hard-pressed people can find their own painful, heavy-hearted way, can learn to make that way as bearable as possible and can laugh not only because they want to cry and not only in bitter, ironic resignation (the kind melancholy philosophers allow themselves to express with a wan smile) but because it has been possible, after all the misery and chaos, to carve a little joy out of the world. That is to say, they make do, however sullenly and desperately and wildly and innocently and shrewdly, and they teach their children unsystematically but persistently that they, too, must survive — somehow, some way, against whatever odds.
Peter’s mother, over the years, has essentially told me about that, about the facts of survival, not because I asked her what she has in mind when she punishes or praises her children, or tells them one or another thing, but because she constantly does things — for, with, to — her children. In a moment of quiet conversation her deeds, thousands of them done over many, many years, sort themselves out and find their own pattern, their own sense, their own words — oh, not perfect or eminently logical or completely consistent words, but words that offer vision and suggest blindness and offer confidence and suggest anxiety, the responses of a hardworking and God-fearing mother who won’t quite surrender but also fears she won’t quite avoid a terrible and early death: “I worry every day — it’ll be a second sometime in the morning or in the afternoon or most likely before I drop off to sleep. I worry that my children will wake up one time and find I’m gone. It might be the bus will go crashing, or the car or the truck on the way to the farm, or it might be I’ve just been called away from this bad world by God, because He’s decided I ought to have a long, long rest, yes sir. Then I’ll stop and remind myself that I can’t die, not just yet, because there’s the children, and it’s hard enough for them, yes it is — too hard, if you ask me. Sometimes I’ll ask myself why it has to be so hard, and why can’t we just live like other people you see from the road, near their houses, you know. But who can question the Lord, that’s what I think. The way I see it, I’ve got to do the best I can for my children, all of them. So, I keep on telling them they’ve got to be good, and take care of each other, and mind me and do what I says. And I tell them I don’t want them getting smart ideas, and trying to be wild and getting into any trouble, because you know — well, the way I sees the world, if you’re born on the road, you’ll most likely have to stay with it, and they’re not going to let go of you, the crew man and the sheriff and like that, and if they did, we’d be at a loss, because you go into the city, I hear, and it’s worse than anything that ever was, that’s what we hear all the time.
“I’m trying to make my children into good children, that’s what. I’m trying to make them believe in God, and listen to Him and obey His Commandments. I’m trying to have them pay me attention, and my husband, their daddy, pay him attention, and I’d like for all of them to know what they can, and grow into good people, yes, and be a credit to their daddy and me. I knows it’s going to be hard for them, real bad at times, it gets. I tell them that, and I tell them not to be too set on things, not to expect that life is going to be easy. But I tell them that every man, he’s entitled to rest and quiet some of the time, and we all can pray and hope it’ll get better. And I tell them it used to be we never saw any money a
t all, and they’d send you up in those small trucks, but now they’ll pay you some, and we most often have a car — we lose it, yes sir, when there’s no work for a few weeks and then we’re really in trouble — and we have more clothes now than we ever before had, much more, because most of my children, they have their shoes now, and clothes good enough for church, most of the time. So you can’t just feel sorry about things, because if you do, then you’ll just be sitting there and not doing anything — and crying, I guess. Sometimes I do; I’ll wake up and I’ll find my eyes are filled up with tears, and I can’t figure out why, no sir. I’ll be getting up, and I’ll have to wipe away my eyes, and try to stop it, so the children don’t think something is wrong, and then, you know, they’ll start in, too. Yes, that has happened a few times, until I tell us all to go about and do something, and stop, stop the crying right away.
“You can’t spend your one and only life wishing you had another life instead of the one you’ve got. I tell myself that, and then the tears stop; and if the children are complaining about this or that — well, I tell them that, too. I tell them it’s no use complaining, and we’ve got to go on, and hope the day will come when it’s better for us, and maybe we’ll have a place to rest, and never again have to ‘go on the season’ and move and keep on moving and get ourselves so tired that we start the day in with the crying. Yes sir, I believe I cry when I’m just so tired there isn’t anything else to do but cry. Or else it’s because I’ll be waking up and I know what’s facing us, oh I do, and it just will be too much for me to think about, so I guess I go and get upset, before I even know it, and then I have to pinch myself, the way my own momma used to do, and talk to myself the way she would, and say just like her: ‘There’s no use but to go on, and someday we’ll have our long, good rest.’ Yes sir, that’s what she used to say, and that’s what I’ll be saying on those bad mornings; and you know, I’ll sometimes hear my girl telling herself the same thing, and I’ll say to myself that it’s good she can do it now, because later on she’ll find herself feeling low, and then she’ll have to have a message to tell herself, or else she’ll be in real bad trouble, real bad trouble.”