Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Does Tom wonder where it will all end, the travel and the new places to occupy for ever so short a time? Does he dream of some road that will lead to some other way of life? Does the continual motion make him grow weary and resentful, in spite of his own words to the contrary? Does he think about other children, who live not far from the roads he knows so well, children he occasionally, sporadically meets in this school, where he attended classes for a month, and that one, which he liked, but had to leave after two weeks? I have asked him questions like those, but often he condenses his answers in a particular drawing — such as this one (Figure 12): “I don’t know where that road is going; I mean, no, I didn’t have a road I was thinking of when I drew. I just made the road, and it probably keeps going until it hits the icebergs, I guess. I put some little roads in, but you shouldn’t leave the road you’re going on. I remember I asked my daddy once if he knew where the highway ends, the one we take North, and he said it probably ended where you get as far North as you can get — and there aren’t any crops there, he said, so we’ll never see the place, but it’s very cold there, and maybe a lot of it has no people, because it’s better to live where it’s warmer. I said I’d like for us one time to keep going and see an iceberg and see what it’s like there. My daddy said maybe we would, but he didn’t mean it, I could tell. A lot of the time I’ll ask him if we could go down a road further, and see some places, and he says yes, we can, but he doesn’t want to — my momma says we’ve got to be careful and we can’t keep asking to go here and there, because we’re not supposed to and we’ll get in trouble. She says we should close our eyes and imagine that there’s a big fence on each side of the road, and that we can’t get off, even if we wanted to and tried to, because of the fence. That’s why I put the fence in, a little, to keep the car there from getting in trouble with the police.

  “No, I didn’t mean for there to be a crash, no. It would be bad if one happened. My daddy’s brothers, three of them got killed in a crash. They were coming back to Florida from up North, from New Jersey it was, and the bus, it just hit a truck and a lot of people got killed. They say the bus was old, and once down here the brakes stopped working, but the crew leader had it fixed, and it was supposed to be safe. They were younger than my daddy, yes sir, and he said he didn’t see how it could be anything but God’s desire, that they should all, all of them, be saved forevermore from going up and down through the states and never being paid enough, except for some food and a place to sleep, and after that, they don’t give you much money for anything else. I figured that if I was picturing the road and me in the car, I’d put a truck there, too; because, you know, we see a lot of trucks and the buses, too, when we go through Florida and then up North. But I hope the car and the bus in the picture don’t crash like they do a lot of the time.

  “Sometimes — yes, sometimes I think to myself when we’re passing a town, that I’d like to look through the place and maybe stay there — I mean live there, and not go right on to the next place. I used to ask why, I’d ask my momma and my daddy and my uncles, but they all said I should stop with the questions, and stop trying to get a lot of reasons for things, and like that. In school once, in Florida it was, there was a real nice teacher (it was last year) and she said to the class that they should all be nice to me and the rest of us, because if people like us didn’t go around doing the picking, then there’d be no food for everyone to eat — the fruit and vegetables. A girl laughed and said that was a big joke, because her daddy had a big farm, and he didn’t use any people, just machines. I nearly asked her what her daddy was growing, but I didn’t. I guess I was scared. The teacher didn’t do anything. She just said we should go on and do our work, and the less trouble in the class the better it would be all the way around. I thought afterwards that I’d like to follow her home, the girl, and see if she was telling the truth; because I didn’t believe her.

  “I asked my daddy, and he said there are some farms like that, but not many in Florida, because the farmers need us to pick beans and tomatoes, and the machines cost a lot, and you can’t get a second crop from the plants after the machine. No, I didn’t speak to her, and I didn’t follow her either. I mean, I did for a little while, but I got scared, and my friend, he said we’d better turn around or we’d be in jail, and we wouldn’t get out of there for a long, long time. Then we did, we turned around, and when I told my sister — she’s ten — she said we were lucky we’re not there now, in jail, because the police, they keep their eyes on us all the time, if we leave the camps or the fields, to go shopping or to school or like that. I said one of these days I’d slip by. I’d get me a suit or something, and a real shiny pair of shoes, and I’d just walk down the street until I came to where they live, the kids that go to that school, and if someone came up to me and tried to stop me and if he asked me what I was doing, then I’d say I was just looking, and I thought I’d go get some ice cream, and I’d have the money and I’d show it to the policeman, and they couldn’t say I was trying to steal something, or I was hiding from them, the policemen and like that. But my sister said they’d just laugh and pick me up, like I was a bean or a tomato, and the next thing I’d know I’d be there, in jail, and they might never let me out, except if one of the growers comes, and he would say it was OK if they let me out, and he’d pay the fine, but then I’d have to work for him.

  “That’s how you end up, I hear. They never do anything a lot of people, but work for the same man, because they always are owing him money, the grower, and he is always getting them out of jail, and then they owe him more money. My daddy says, and my sister, she says that the grower keeps on giving them the wine, and they drink it, and they’ll be drunk, and the police will be called, and arrest them, and then the grower will come, one of his men mostly, and pay to get people out, and then they’ll have to work some more — until they get killed. I hope it’ll never happen like that to me. I’d like someday, I’ll be honest. I’d like to go to the city, and I could get a job there. Once there was a nice boy who sat beside me — not long ago, I think it was this same year — and I was going to ask him if I could get a job from his father. No, I didn’t want to ask him what his father’s job was, but he seemed like he was real rich, the boy, and I thought maybe I could get a job, and I could maybe live there, in the house there, you know, where the boy does, and then I wouldn’t have to be going North later this year.”

  Would he miss his mother and father? “No — I mean, yes. But I think they could come and see me sometimes. If the people let me live in their house, maybe they would let my daddy come and see me, and my mother could come, and they wouldn’t stay too long, I know.”

  Migrant children see everything as temporary. Places come and go; and people and schools and fields. The children don’t know what it is, in Tom’s words, to “stay too long”; rather, they live in a world that lacks holidays and trips to department stores and libraries. Children like Tom, for example, don’t see any mail, because their parents lack an address, a place from which letters are sent and to which letters come. Children like Tom don’t know about bookshelves and walls with pictures on them and comfortable chairs in cozy living rooms and telephones (which are put by telephone companies into residences) and cabinets full of glassware or serving dishes or stacks of canned goods. A suitcase hardly seems like a very important thing to any of us, yet migrant children have dreamed of having one, dreamed and dreamed and can say why after they draw a picture, as a girl of nine named Doris did: “I was smaller when I saw a store, and it had big suitcases and little ones; they all were made of leather, I think. I asked my mother if she could please, one day, get one for me; not a big one, because I know they must cost more money than we could ever have, but a small one. She said why did I want one, and I said it was because I could keep all my things together, and they’d never get lost, wherever we go. I have a few things that are mine — the comb, the rabbit’s tail my daddy gave me before he died, the lipstick and the fan, and like that — and I don’t want t
o go and lose them, and I’ve already lost a lot of things. I had a luck bracelet and I left it someplace, and I had a scarf, a real pretty one, and it got lost, and a mirror, too. That’s why if I could have a place to put my things, my special things, then I’d have them and if we went all the way across the country and back, I’d still have them, and I’d keep them.”

  She still doesn’t have her suitcase. In fact, Doris doesn’t have very much of anything, so that when I asked her to draw whatever she wished, she answered as follows: “I don’t know if there’s anything I can draw.” I suggested something from the countryside — she seemed sad, after all, and in no mood for my kind of clever silences, meant to prod children like her into this or that psychological initiative (and revelation). She said no, the countryside was the countryside, and she sees quite enough of it, so there is no need to give those trees and fields and roads any additional permanence. Rather, she said this: “I see a lot of the trees and farms. I’d like to draw a picture I could like, and I could look at it, and it would be nice to look at, and I could take it with me. But I don’t know what to draw.” Her judgment on the countryside was fairly clear and emphatic, but so was her sense of confusion. She knew what she didn’t want to do, but she was at loose ends, too. She seemed to be asking herself some questions. What do I want to see, and carry with me through all those dismal trips and rides and detours and long, long, oh so long journeys? Where can I find a little beauty in the world, a touch of joy, a bit of refreshment and encouragement — and self-supplied at that, through crayons I have myself wielded on paper? Is there anything worth remembering, worth keeping, worth holding onto tenaciously, without any letup whatsoever? Perhaps I am forcing melodrama on Doris’s mind, which certainly needs no more worries or fears. Perhaps, for her life is a matter of getting up and working in the fields and eating what there is to eat and sleeping and moving on, moving here and there and always, always moving. I don’t think so, though. For all the fancy words I use, and all the ambiguities and ironies I hunger after, the little girl Doris has insisted that I also listen to her. She has even made me realize I must do more than listen and observe and collect my “data” and, like her, move on: “If I draw a picture, a good one, I want to keep it. The last time you said you wanted it, and I told my mother I liked it and I wanted to keep it. I asked my mother if I could get some glue and put it on the window of the car, but she said no. She said we’d get stopped and arrested.”

  So, Doris did two pictures at each sitting, one for herself and another one, as similar as possible, for me — all of which leads me to state another thing I have noticed especially among migrant children: unlike other children I have come to know, girls like Doris and boys like Tom don’t want to give up drawings they make, not to me and not even to others in their family or to neighbors. It is not a matter of property; nor does the child cling to the picture because he feels “realized” at last through something artistically done. Nor is he drawn irresistibly to the form and symmetry he has wrought, to all those colors at last made accessible to himself. Doris one day told me why she wouldn’t let go, and I will let her explanation — unadorned by my translations and interpretations — stand as quite good enough: “I just want it — because it’s good to look at, and it may not be as good as it could be, but it was the best I could do, and I can take it and look at it, and it will be along with me up North, and I can think of being back here where I drew it, and then I’ll know we’ll be coming back here where I drew it, and I can look ahead to that, you see.” Doris did a second drawing, essentially the same, which she gave to me, then put the first version away — with her rabbit tail and other belongings. She had done many other drawings for me, but somehow this one, a picture of the few things she owned, meant more to her than any of the others. It was as if she had finally found some kind of permanence for her meager possessions, and also a talisman of sorts. So long as her things had a new and separate life of their own, in the picture, they would all be collected together, her little world of possessions, as they could not be in the suitcase that has never come. Now she could look ahead and look back and have some sense of direction, some idea of a destination, some feeling that life has its rhythms and sequences and purposes. But I said I would not do what I have just done, speak for her, be her interpreter.

  We are all compelled whether we know it or not, and the well-educated and well-analyzed are not the only ones who comprehend the mind’s constraints. I have to make my little and not so little remarks, and Doris has to carry a few personal effects all over America. Another child known to me, whom I will call Larry, can paint the necessities that govern his particular life (Figure 13). What would he like to draw above all else, he was asked, and he said in reply that he didn’t want to draw at all this time. He wanted to paint. Well, why did he want to paint this time? (We had together been using crayons for over a year.) “Oh, I don’t know — except that tomorrow is my birthday.” He was to be nine. Half because I wasn’t actually sure what day “tomorrow” was, and half because, I suppose, I knew the reason why time had become blurred for me during the weeks I had moved about with Larry and his family, I asked him what day his birthday was: “It’s in the middle of the summer, on the hottest day.” He was dead serious, and I was both puzzled and embarrassed, a condition of my mind which he noticed.

  He was moved to explain things, to help me — to do what I am trained to do, formulate and soothe and heal or whatever. “I don’t know the day. The teacher in one of the schools kept saying I had to bring in a certificate that said where I was born and gave the day and like that. I asked my mother and she said there wasn’t any. I told the teacher, and she said that was bad, and to check again. I checked, and my mother said no, and so did my daddy, and so did the crew leader. He said I should tell the teacher to shut up, and if she didn’t I could just walk out of school and they wouldn’t go after me or give me any trouble at all. No, I didn’t leave, no sir; I stayed there for as long as we did in the camp. It was the best school I’d ever seen. They had cold air all the time, no matter how hot it got. I wanted to stay there all night. They gave you good cookies all the time, and milk; and the teacher, she said she wanted to buy us some clothes and pay for it herself. She said I should tell my mother to come to school and they would have a talk; and she said I should get my birth certificate and hold on to it. Then one day she brought in hers and showed it to us; and she said we all should stand up and say to the class where we were born and on what day of the year; but I didn’t know. She said we should ask where our mothers were born and our fathers. So I did and I told her. I was born here in Florida, and my mother in Georgia and my father there, too; and my mother said it was a hot, hot day, and she thought it was right in the middle of the summer, July it must be, she said, around about there, but she wasn’t sure. Then I asked her if she’d go register me, like the teacher said, and she said I’d better stay home and help out with the picking, if I was going to go listening to everything and then getting the funny ideas and trying to get us all in trouble, because the crew man, he said if we started going over to the courthouse and asking one thing of them, and then another — well, they’d soon have us all in jail, my mother said.”

  He painted a picture of his certificate, and thus showed both me and himself that he could persist with an idea, an intention. Paint to him meant a more worthy and lasting commitment. To paint is to emphasize, to declare out loud and for all to hear — or so he feels: “If you paint a certificate it won’t rub away, like with the crayons. I don’t know how they make the real ones, but they have big black letters and one of them, it has a red circle — and the teacher, she said it was a seal, and it belonged to a city and it was put on a lot of important papers.” If he had his certificate what would he do with it, once he had shown it to his teacher? He would keep it, treasure it, fasten it to himself in some foolproof way that he himself could only vaguely suggest rather than spell out: “I’d never lose it, like I did my belt. My daddy gave me a belt, and I was afr
aid if I put it on all the time, it wouldn’t look so good after a while; so I kept it with me, and put it with my shoes and when we went to church I’d have on my shoes and my belt. But once in a camp there was a fire, and I lost my belt and my shoes; and I should have worn the belt, my mother said, or carried it with me wherever I went, even to the field. But I didn’t, and too bad.”

  Shoes cannot be taken for granted by children like him, nor belts, nor socks; nor (so it seems) birth certificates, which presumably everyone in America has. Since I know that children like Larry are born in cabins or even in the fields, with no doctors around to help, and since I know that they move all over and have no official address, no place of residence, I should not have been surprised that those same children lack birth certificates — yet, I was indeed surprised. Who am I? Where do I come from? When did it really happen, my entrance into this world? Those are questions which, after all, the rest of us never stop asking, in one form or another; and they are questions Larry asks himself in a specially grim and stark fashion, because he really doesn’t have the usual, concrete answers, let alone all the fancy symbolic or metaphysical ones. Since he is, I believe, a bright and shrewd child, he won’t quite let the matter drop, as many migrant children seem to do. I’m not at all convinced they actually do let “the matter” drop. Given a little acquaintance and the right conversational opening, I have heard other migrant children tell me what Larry has told me: it is hard to settle for near answers and half answers when the issue is yourself, your origins as a person and as a citizen.

  Put a little differently, it is hard to be an exile, to be sent packing all the time, to be banished, to be turned out and shown the door. In the drawings of migrant children I constantly see, at no one’s behest but their own, roads and fields (quite naturally) but also (and a little more significantly) those souvenirs and reminders of other places and times — when a comb was given as a present, when something that at least looked precious was found; and finally other drawings show even more mysterious objects, such as windows that are attached to no buildings, and doors that likewise seem suspended in space. Why, exactly why, should a number of migrant children flex their artistic muscles over windows and doors, over sandboxes, or more literally, over a series of quadrangles? I cannot speak for all the migrant children I know, even as many of them can only stumble upon their words, only stand mute, only look and grimace and smile and frown, only ask questions in reply to questions. Yet, a few of those children eventually and often unexpectedly have managed to have their say, managed to let me know what they’re getting at, and by implication, what is preventing me from recognizing the obvious concerns of their lives. I have in mind a girl of eight who spends most of her time in Collier County, Florida, and Palm Beach County, Florida, but manages a yearly trek north to upstate New York and New Jersey and into New England, to the farms of Connecticut. As I became a regular visitor of her family, she above all the other children expressed an interest in the paints and crayons I brought along, as well as the various games. She loved a top I had, and a Yo-Yo. She loved the toy cars and trucks and tractors: “I know about all of those. I know my trucks. I know my tractors. I know the cars, and I’ve been in a lot of them.” She once asked me how fast I’ve driven. She once asked me what it was like to be on an airplane. She once asked me if an airplane could just take off — and land on the moon or the stars or the sun. She once asked me why there are always clouds up North — and why down South the sun is so mean and hot, so pitiless to people who don’t own air conditioners or screens or even mosquito repellents or lotions to soothe burned and blistered skin.