by Robert Coles
Mothers like her possess an almost uncanny mixture of willfulness and sadness. Sometimes they seem to do their work almost in spite of themselves; yet at other times they seem to take the sad and burdensome things of life quite in stride. As they themselves ask, what else can they do? The answer, of course, is that complete disintegration can always be an alternative — helped along by cheap wine, and the hot sun and the dark, damp corners of those cabins, where one can curl up and for all practical purposes die. Migrant mothers know all that, know the choices they have, the possibilities that life presents. Migrant mothers also know what has to be done — so that the children, those many, many children will at least eat something, will somehow get collected and moved and brought safely to the new place, the new quarters, the next stop or spot or farm or camp or field, to name a few destinations such mothers commonly mention when they talk to me about what keeps them in half-good spirits. I will, that is, ask how they feel, and how they and their children are getting along, and they will answer me with something like this: “I’m not too bad, no sir, I’m not. We keeps going, yes sir, we do. If you don’t keep going, you’re gone, I say. You have to keep moving and so you don’t have time to stop and get upset about things. There’s always another spot to get to, and no sooner do you get there — well, then you have to get yourself settled. There’ll be yourself to settle and there’ll be the kids and their daddy, too, and right off the work will be there for you to do, in the fields and with the kids, too. So, the way I see it, a mother can’t let herself be discouraged. She’s got to keep herself in good spirits, so her children, they’ll be doing fine; because if I’m going to get all bothered, then sure enough my kids will, and that won’t be good for them or me neither, I’ll tell you. That’s why I never lets myself get into a bad spell.”
Actually, she does indeed get into bad spells, spells of moodiness and suspicion and petulance and rage, and so do her children from time to time, particularly as they grow older and approach the end of childhood. By definition, life for migrants is a matter of travel, of movement; and their children soon enough come to know that fact, which means they get to feel tentative about people and places and things. Anything around is only precariously theirs. Anything soon to come will just as soon disappear. Anything left just had to be left. As a matter of fact, life itself moves, moves fast and without those occasions or ceremonies that give the rest of us a few footholds. The many young migrant children I have observed and described to myself as agile, curious, and inventive are, by the age of seven or eight, far too composed, restrained, stiff and sullen. They know even then exactly where they must go, exactly what they must do. They no longer like to wander in the woods, or poke about near swamps. When other children are just beginning to come into their own, just beginning to explore and search and take over a little of the earth, migrant children begin to lose interest in the world outside them. They stop noticing animals or plants or trees or flowers. They don’t seem to hear the world’s noises. To an outside observer they might seem inward, morose, drawn and tired. Certainly some of those qualities of mind and appearance have to do with the poor food migrant children have had, with the accumulation of diseases that day after day cause migrant children pain and weakness. Yet, in addition, there is a speed, a real swiftness to migrant living that cannot be overlooked, and among migrant children particularly, the whole business of growing up goes fast, surprisingly fast, awfully fast, grimly and decisively fast. At two or three, migrant children see their parents hurry, work against time, step on it, get a move on. At three or four, those same children can often be impulsive, boisterous, eager, impatient in fact, and constantly ready — miraculously so, an observer like me feels — to lose no time, to make short work of what is and turn to the next task, the next ride.
However, at six or eight or ten, something else has begun to happen; children formerly willing to make haste and take on things energetically, if not enthusiastically, now seem harried as they hurry, breathless and abrupt as they press on. I do not think I am becoming dramatic when I say that for a few (first) feverish years migrant children are hard-pressed but still (and obviously) quick, animated — tenacious of life is perhaps a way to say it. Between five and ten, though, those same children experience an ebb of life, even a loss of life. They keep moving along; they pick themselves up again and again, as indeed they were brought up to do, as their parents continue to do, as they will soon (all too soon) be doing with their own children. They get where they’re going, and to a casual eye they seem active enough, strenuous workers in the field, on their toes when asked something, called to do something. Still, their mothers know different; their mothers know that a change is taking place, has taken place, has to take place; their mothers know that life is short and brutish, that one is lucky to live and have the privilege of becoming a parent, that on the road the days merge terribly, that it is a matter of rolling on, always rolling on. So they go headlong into the days and nights, obey the commands of the seasons and pursue the crops; and meanwhile, somewhere inside themselves, they make their observations and their analyses, they take note of what happens to themselves and their children: “My little ones, they’ll be spry and smart, yes they will be; but when they’re older — I guess you’d say school age, but they’re not all the time in school, I’ll have to admit — then they’re different, that’s what I’d say. They’ll be drowsy, or they won’t be running around much. They’ll take their time and they’ll slouch, you know. They’ll loaf around and do only what they think they’ve got to do. I guess — well, actually, I suppose they’re just getting grown, that’s what it is. My boy, he’s the one just nine this season, he used to be up and doing things before I even knew what he was aiming to do; but now he’ll let no one push him, except if he’s afraid, and even then, he’ll be pulling back all he can, just doing enough to get by. The crew leader, he said the boy will be ‘another lazy picker’ and I stood up and spoke back. I said we gets them in, the beans, don’t we and what more can he want, for all he pays us? I’ll ask you? I guess he wants our blood. That’s what I think it is he wants, and if he sees my children trying to keep some of their blood to themselves, then he gets spiteful about them and calls them all his names like that; and there isn’t anything you can do but listen and try to go on and forget.”
She tries to go on and forget. So do her children, the older they get. Once wide awake, even enterprising, they slowly become dilatory, leaden, slow, laggard, and lumpish. Necessarily on the move a lot, they yet appear motionless. Put to work in the fields, they seem curiously unoccupied. The work gets done (and by them) yet they do not seem to work. I suppose I am saying that older migrant children begin to labor, to do what they must do if they are not to be without a little money, a little food; but at the same time the work is not done in a diligent, painstaking and spirited way. Again, it is done, all that hard, demanding work; the crops get taken in. What one fails to see, however, is a sense of real purpose and conviction in the older children who, like their parents, have learned that their fate is of no real concern to others. The point is survival: mere survival at best; survival against great odds; survival that never is assured and that quite apparently exacts its costs. If I had to sum up those costs in a few words I would probably say: care is lost; the child stops caring, hardens himself or herself to the coming battle, as it is gradually but definitely comprehended, and tries to hold on, persist, make it through the next trip, the next day, the next row of crops.
So, all year round, all day long, hour after hour, migrants stoop or reach for vegetables and fruit, which they pull and pick and cut and at the same time those migrants settle into one place or prepare the move to another; and at the same time those migrants try to be parents, try stubbornly to do what has to be done — feed the children and get them to listen and respond and do this rather than that, do it now rather than later. I have described the determination that goes into such a life — of travel and fear and impoverishment and uncertainty. I have describe
d the first and desperate intimacy many migrant children experience with their mothers. I have described the migrant child’s developing sense of his particular world — its occasional pleasures, its severe restrictions, its constant flux, its essential sameness. To do so I have drawn upon what can actually be considered the best, the most intact, of the people I have seen and heard. After all, when parents and children together live the kind of life most migrants do, it seems a little miraculous that they even halfway escape the misery and wretchedness — that is, manage to continue and remain and last, last over the generations, last long enough to work and be observed by me or anyone else.
There is, though, the misery; and it cannot be denied its importance, because not only bodies but minds suffer out of hunger and untreated illness; and that kind of psychological suffering also needs to be documented. Nor can an observer like me allow his shame, outrage, and compassion to turn exhausted, suffering people into courageous heroes who, though badly down on their luck, nevertheless manage to win a spiritual victory. I fear that rather another kind of applause is in order, the kind that celebrates the struggle that a doomed man tries to put up. Migrant parents and even migrant children do indeed become what some of their harshest and least forgiving critics call them: listless, apathetic, hard to understand, disorderly, subject to outbursts of self-injury and destructive violence toward others. It is no small thing, a disaster almost beyond repair, when children grow up adrift the land, when they learn as a birthright the disorder and early sorrow that goes with peonage, with an unsettled, vagabond life. We are describing millions of psychological catastrophes, the nature of which has been spelled out to me by both migrant parents and migrant children. The father of six of those children — a hard worker but a beaten man — talks and talks about his failures and his sense of defeat, about his sense of ruin at the hands of a relentless fate whose judgment upon him and those near him and like him simply cannot be stayed: “There will be a time, you know, when I’ll ask myself what I ever did — maybe in some other life — to deserve this kind of deal. You know what I mean? I mean I feel there must be someone who’s decided you should live like this, for something wrong that’s been done. I don’t know. I can’t say it any other way. All I know is that it’s no life, trying to pick beans on fifty farms all over the country, and trying to make sure your kids don’t die, one after the other. Sometimes we’ll be driving along and I say to myself that there’s one thing I can do to end all of this for good, and it would save not only me but the children a lot of hardship, a lot. But you can’t do that; I can’t, at least. So, instead I go and lose my mind. You’ve seen me, yes you have; and I know I’m going to do it. I start with the wine, when I’m working, just so the hours will go faster, and I won’t mind bending over — the pain to my back — and I won’t mind the heat. There’ll be days when I work right through, and there’ll be days when I stop in the middle of the day, because I don’t want to get sick. But there will be other days when I hear myself saying that I’ve got to let go, I’ve just got to. I’ve got to get so drunk that I’m dead, dead in my mind, and then if I live after it, that’s fine, and if I never wake up, that’s fine, too. It’s not for me to decide, you see. We can’t decide on anything, being on the road, and owing everything to the crew leaders and people like that. The only thing we can decide, my daddy used to tell me, is whether we’ll stay alive or whether we won’t. He said no matter what, we should keep going; but he got killed when the bus that was taking him and a lot of others got stalled right on a railroad track and it was crushed into little pieces by the train. I’ll think of him, you know, when I get full of wine. I’ll think of him telling me that you can’t figure out what’s the reason the world is like it is; you can only try to keep from dying, and it may take you your entire life to do that — and I guess he didn’t expect that suddenly he’d be gone, after all the work he put in, just to stay alive.”
His wife has some observations to make about him and the effort he makes to stay alive: “My husband, he’s a good man a lot of the time. He never talks about the children, not even to me, but he loves them, I know he does. Once he told me that it hurts him every time one of our children is born, because he knows what’s ahead for them. You know something? Each time, with each child, he’s gone and got worse drunk than any other time. I don’t know why, just that it’s happened. He almost killed me and all the children the last time. He had a knife and he said he might use it. Then he took us all in the car; he made us get in, and he said if I didn’t go along with him, he’d kill me, and if I did, there was a chance I’d live, and the children, too. So, I did, and he drove with his foot pressing on the gas all the way down. I could hear him trying to go faster, pushing on the pedal and trying to force it, and thank God the floor of the car wouldn’t let him have his way. Well, he cursed us all, but most of all himself. He was after himself. He was chasing himself. He kept on saying that he had to catch himself and he had to get a hold on himself, and if he didn’t, then he might as well die. In between, he’d tell us we were all going to die, and the sooner the better, because the only way for us to have peace, to have rest, was to die. There was no other way, he kept on shouting that to us.
“Then I must have lost my mind, like he had lost his. I started crying, and I can remember screaming to God please to turn my husband and me and the children away from Him, because it wasn’t time yet, no it wasn’t, for us to see Him. Then I crawled down, I reached down, I don’t remember how I did, and pulled his foot away from the gas, and he didn’t try to put it back, no he didn’t; and the car went on and on, and then it began to slow down, and then it stopped, and then before he had a change of mind, I got out and I got all of us out, all except him, and we didn’t leave him, though. Where could we go? I didn’t know where we were, and it was dark. We spread ourselves down nearby to the car, and we tried to rest. I looked up at the sky and I couldn’t forget it for the rest of my life, what I saw then and what I thought, no sir, I couldn’t. When I die I know I’ll be thinking like that and I’ll be seeing like that: there was the sky, and it was dark, but the moon was there, almost round, and it hung low, real low, and it was colored funny, orange I guess; and all the stars were there, all over, everywhere it seemed. I’d never looked long enough to see so many stars, even though we do a lot of traveling, and we’re up through the night, and you might have thought I’d have noticed them, all the stars, before. But moving across the country, you forget about the sky, I guess. I told my boy that, a few days later I did, that we shouldn’t forget the sky, because we’re going along underneath it a lot of the time, and he said that maybe we forget it because it’s like a roof to us, and that if you’re under a roof, you never look at it.
“While I was staring up there at the sky, I thought I heard something, a noise. It was the wind, I know, but to me it was God, it was God as well as the wind, and He was there, speaking right into both my ears, telling me to stay where I was, with the children, and near my husband, and He was looking over us, yes, and He’d see that the day would come when we’d have a home — a home that was ours, and that we’d never leave, and that we’d have for as long as God Himself is with us, and that’s forever, you know. Maybe it would be up in one of those stars, one of the bright ones, one of the bright stars, maybe the home would be there, I thought — and then I saw one, a real bright star, and I said that’s it, that’s maybe where we would all go, but not until it’s the right time, not a second before, and I was glad then that we stayed around, and didn’t all die, and I’m still glad.
“Oh, not all the time, I’m not all the time glad, I’ll admit that. I was glad then, when my husband woke up, and he said he was sorry and he was glad, and he’d try to be good and not lose himself on account of wine. I was glad later, too. Most of the time I’m glad, actually. It’s just sometimes I don’t feel glad. I don’t feel glad at all. Like my husband, I sometimes feel myself going to pieces; yes sir, that’s how it feels, like you’re going to pieces. Once I was real bad �
�� real, real bad — and I thought I’d die because I was in such a bad way. I recall I’d have the same dream every single night, even every time I put my head down, it seemed. It got so that I was scared to sleep, real scared. I’d try sitting up and resting, but not closing my eyes. After a while they’d close, though, and then it would come again, and the next thing I’d know I’d be waking up and shouting and crying and screaming, and sometimes I’d be standing up and even I’d be running around wherever we were staying, and my husband would be shaking me, or my children, they’d be crying and telling me no, no, no it wasn’t so and don’t be scared, Momma, and it’ll be all right, they’d say. But I never believed them when I first woke up, it would take me an hour or so, I’d guess, to shake myself free of that dream, and I’d never really forget it, even when I’d be working. I’d be pulling the beans and putting them in the hamper, and I’d feel myself shaking, and there’d be someone nearby and she’d say, “Martha, you took too much of that wine last night’; and I’d say no, I didn’t touch a single drop, not last night or any other night for a long, long time. I wouldn’t tell nobody, except my husband, but it was this dream I was having, and thank God now it’s left me, but I can still see it, if I want to.