by Robert Coles
She was, in fact, always asking me questions and making sly, provocative, even enigmatic remarks. “I love the Yo-Yo” she told me, “because it keeps going, up and down, and that’s what I do.” What did she mean? “Well, we don’t stay in one camp too long. When the crops are in, you have to move.” As for the pictures she did, she liked to put a Yo-Yo or two in them (“for fun”) but most of all she liked to make sure the sun was blocked out by clouds that loomed large over the sketched or painted scene — which frequently would have a door or a window or both, along with, say, a lone tree or some disorganized shrubbery. In one picture (Figure 14) she allowed a door to dominate the paper. I expected her to do something with the door, to attach it or use it in some way, but she simply let it be and went on to other things, to the sun and its grim face, to the clouds, those sad, inevitable clouds of hers, and to a sandbox and a Yo-Yo, and finally, to a tall plant which I thought might be a small tree. I asked her about that — the pine tree, as I saw it: “No, no, it’s a big, tall corn. We pick a lot of corn up North.” She was, in other words, getting ready to go North. It was early May, and soon they would all be on the road. What does that mean, though, to her? I’ve asked her that question in various ways and she in her own ways has replied — through her drawings and paintings, and in the games we’ve played and finally, with these words: “I hate to go, yes sir, I do. I found some sand over there, and my brother Billy and my brother Eddie and me, we like to go and make things there. Soon we’ll be going, I know. I can tell when it’s happening. First we move our things into the car, and then we go in, and then we go away and I don’t know if we’ll come back here or not. Maybe, my mother says — all depending, you know. I try to remember everything, so I won’t leave anything behind. Every time we go, my daddy, he gets sore at me, because at the last second I’ll be runing out of the car and checking on whether I’ve left any of my things there. I’ll go inside and come out and then I know I haven’t left something.”
Twice I watched her do just that, watched her enter the cabin, look around and leave, watched her watch — look and stare and most of all touch, as if by putting her hands on walls and floors and doors and windows she could absorb them, keep them, make them more a part of her. She is a touching girl. She touches. In a minute or two, while the rest of her family frets and adjusts themselves, one to the other and all to the car which they more than fill up, this little girl of theirs scurries about — inspecting, scanning, brushing her body and especially her hands and most especially her fingers on a broken-down shack she is about to leave. When I saw her look out of the window (no screens) and open and close the door several times (it didn’t quite open or quite close) I realized at last what all those windows and doors she drew might have meant, and the sandboxes and the corn up North, the corn that was waiting for her, summoning her family, drawing them all from the cabins, making an uproar out of their lives: up and down, to and fro, in and out, here and there, they would go — hence the Yo-Yo and the windows from which one looks out to say good-bye and the doors which lead in and out, in and out, over and over again.
It is hard, very hard to do justice to the lives of such children with words; and I say that because I have tried and feel decidedly inadequate to the job — of all the jobs I have had, to this one I feel particularly inadequate. I do not wish to deny these American children the efforts they make every day — to live, to make sense of the world, to get along with one another and all sorts of grown-up people, to find a little pleasure and fun and laughs in a world that clearly has not seen fit to smile very generously upon them. Nor do I wish to deny these children their awful struggles, which in sum amount to a kind of continuing, indeed endless chaos. It is all too easy, as I must keep on saying, for a doctor like me to do either — see only ruined lives or see only the courageous and the heroic in these children. I am tempted to do the former because for one thing there is a lot of misery to see, and for another I have been trained to look for that misery, see it, assess it, make a judgment about its extent and severity; and I want to praise their courage as an act, perhaps, of reparation — because I frankly have often felt overwhelmed by the conditions I have witnessed during seven years of work with migrant farm families: social conditions, medical conditions, but above all a special and extraordinary kind of human condition, a fate really, and one that is terrible almost beyond description.
What Conrad, in “Heart of Darkness,” called “the horror, the horror” eventually has its effect on the observer as well as the observed, particularly when children are the observed and a professional observer of children does the observing. “The horror, the horror” refers to man’s inhumanity to man, the brutality that civilized people somehow manage to allow in their midst. The crucial word is “somehow”; because in one way or another all of us, certainly including myself, have to live with, contend with even, the lives of migrant children — those I have just attempted to describe and hundreds of thousands of others — who live (it turns out, when we take the trouble to inquire) just about everywhere in the United States: North and South, East and West, in between, near towns or cities and also out of almost everyone’s sight.
Somehow, then, we come to terms with them, the wretched of the American earth. We do so each in his or her own way. We ignore them. We shun them. We claim ignorance of them. We declare ourselves helpless before their problems. We say they deserve what they get, or don’t deserve better, or do deserve better — if only they would go demand it. We say things are complicated, hard to change, stubbornly unyielding. We say progress is coming, has even come, will come in the future. We say (in a pinch) that yes, it is awful — but so have others found life: awful, mean, harsh, cruel, and a lot of other words. Finally, we say yes it is awful — but so awful that those who live under such circumstances are redeemed, not later in Heaven, as many of them believe, but right here on this earth, where they become by virtue of extreme hardship and suffering a kind of elect: hard and tough and shrewd and canny and undeluded; open and honest and decent and self-sacrificing; hauntingly, accusingly hardworking. I have many times extolled these children and their people — extolled them all almost to Heaven, where I suppose I also believe they will eventually and at last get their reward, and where, by the way, they will be out of my way, out of my mind, which balks at saying what it nevertheless knows must be said about how utterly, perhaps unspeakably devastating a migrant life can be for children.
I am talking about what I imagine can loosely be called psychological issues, but I do not mean to ignore the bodily ills of these children: the hunger and the chronic malnutrition that they learn to accept as unavoidable; the diseases that one by one crop up as the first ten years of life go by, diseases that go undiagnosed and untreated, diseases of the skin and the muscles and the bones and the vital organs, vitamin- and mineral-deficiency diseases and untreated congenital diseases and infectious diseases and parasitic diseases and in the words of one migrant mother, “all the sicknesses that ever was.” She goes on: “I believe our children get them, the sicknesses, and there isn’t anything for us to do but pray, because I’ve never seen a doctor in my life, except once, when he delivered my oldest girl; the rest, they was just born, yes sir, and I was lucky to have my sister near me, and that’s the way, you know.” She has some idea about other things, too. She thinks her children are living in Hell, literally that. She is a fierce, biblical woman when she gets going — when, that is, she is talking about her children. I have heard the sermons, many of them from her, and I see no reason, after these years of work with mothers like her and children like hers, to refuse her a place in the last, sad summing up that mercifully allows an observer to go on to other matters while the observed, in this instance, pursue the most they can possibly hope for — the barest, most meager fragments of what can only ironically be called a life.
“This life,” says the mother, “it’s no good on me and my husband, but it’s much worse than no good on the children we have, much worse than it can be for
any of God’s children, that’s what I believe. I’ll ask myself a lot of the time why a child should be born, if this is the life for him; but you can’t make it that we have no children, can you? — because it’s the child that gives you the hope. I say to myself that maybe I can’t get out of this, but if just one, just one and no more of my children gets out, then I’d be happy and I’d die happy. Sometimes I dream of my girl or one of my boys, that they’ve left us and found a home, and it has a backyard, and we all were there and eating in the backyard, and no one could come along and tell us to get out, because we could tell them to get out, because it’s our land, and we own it, and no one can shout at us and tell us to keep moving, keep moving. That’s the life we live — moving and moving and moving. I asked the minister a little while ago; I asked him why do we have to always move and move, just to stay alive, and not have no money and die, and he said we’re seeking God, maybe, and that’s why we keep moving, because God, He traveled, you know, all over the Holy Land, and He kept on trying to convert people to be good to Him, you know, but they weren’t, oh no they weren’t, and He was rebuked, and He was scorned (remember those words?) and He couldn’t stay anyplace, because they were always after Him, always, and they didn’t want Him here and they didn’t want Him there, and all like that, and all during His life, until they punished Him so bad, so bad it was.
“The minister, he said if you suffer — well, you’re God’s people, and that’s what it’s about. I told him that once he preached to us and told us all morning that it was God who was supposed to suffer, and He did. Now it shouldn’t be us who’s going from place to place and, you know, nobody will let us stop and live with them, except if we go to those camps, and they’ll take all your money away, that you must know, because they deduct for the food and the transporting, they tell you. Pretty soon they’ll give you a slip of paper and it says you’ve worked and picked all the beans there are, and all the tomatoes, and the field is empty, and you’ve made your money, but you’ve been eating, and they took you up from Florida to where you are, and it cost them money to transport you, so it’s all even, and they don’t owe you and you don’t owe them, except that you’ve got to get back, and that means you’ll be working on the crops to get back South, and it never seems to stop, that’s what. Like I said, should we be doing it, the crops every last place, and without anything to have when it’s over? They’ll come and round you up and tell you it can be jail or the fields, that’s what they will tell you, if you get a bad crew leader, that’s what. Once we had a nice one, and he was always trying to help us, and he wanted us to make some money and save it, and one day we could stop picking and our children, they could just be, in one place they could be, and they wouldn’t always be crying when we leave. But he died, the good crew man, and it’s been bad since. You know, there comes a time, yes sir, there does, when the child, he’ll stop crying, and then he doesn’t care much, one way or the other. I guess he’s figured out that we’ve got to go, and it’s bad all the time, and there’s no getting around it.”
That is what the migrant child eventually learns about “life,” and once learned finds hard to forget. He learns that each day brings toil for his parents, backbreaking toil: bending and stooping and reaching and carrying. He learns that each day means a trip: to the fields and back from the fields, to a new county or on to another state, another region of the country. He learns that each day means not aimlessness and not purposeless motion, but compelled, directed (some would even say utterly forced) travel. He learns, quite literally, that the wages of work is more work. He learns that wherever he goes he is both wanted and unwanted, and that in any case, soon there will be another place and another and another. I must to some extent repeat and repeat the essence of such migrancy (the wandering, the disapproval and ostracism, the extreme and unyielding poverty) because children learn that way, learn by repetition, learn by going through something ten times and a hundred times and a thousand times, until finally it is there, up in their minds in the form of what me and my kind call an “image,” a “self image,” a notion, that is, of life’s hurts and life’s drawbacks, of life’s calamities — which in this case are inescapable, relentless, unremitting.
By the time migrant children are nine and ten and eleven they have had their education, learned their lessons. In many cases they have long since stopped even the pretense of school. They are working, or helping out with younger children, or playing and getting ready to go out on dates and love and become parents and follow their parents’ footsteps. As for their emotions, they are, to my eye, an increasingly sad group of children. They have their fun, their outbursts of games and jokes and teasing and taunting and laughing; but they are for too long stretches of time downcast and tired and bored and indifferent and to themselves very unkind. They feel worthless, blamed, frowned upon, spoken ill of. Life itself, the world around them, even their own parents, everything that is, seems to brand them, stigmatize them, view them with disfavor, and in a million ways call them to account — lace into them, pick on them, tell them off, dress them down. The only answer to such a fate is sex, when it becomes possible, and drink, when it is available, and always the old, familiar answers — travel, work, rest when that can be had, and occasionally during the year a moment in church, where forgiveness can be asked, where the promise of salvation can be heard, where some wild, screaming, frantic, angry, frightened, nervous, half-mad cry for help can be put into words and songs and really given the body’s expression: turns and twists and grimaces and arms raised and trunks bent and legs spread and pulled together and feet used to stamp and kick and move — always that, move.
“I do a lot of walking and my feet are always tired, but in church I can walk up and down, but not too far; and my feet feel better, you know. It’s because God must be near.” So she believes — that God is not far off. So her children believe, too. What is life like? One keeps on asking those children that question — for the tenth or so time (or is it the hundredth time?) in the last year or two, because they do seem to want to talk about what is ahead for them, and that, one believes, is a good sign for them and a helpful thing (it must be acknowledged) for anyone who wants to find out about such matters, about what people see their life to be, their future to be, their destiny I suppose it could be called. “Well, I’ll tell you,” the girl says gravely in answer to the question. Then she doesn’t say anything for a long time and the observer and listener gets nervous and starts rummaging for another question, another remark, to lighten the atmosphere, to keep things going, to prevent all that awkwardness, a sign no doubt of mistrust or suspicion or a poor “relationship.” Yet, once in a while there does come an answer, in fits and starts, in poor language that has to be a little corrected later, but an answer it is — and a question, too, at the very beginning a question: “Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t know how it’ll be ahead for me, but do you think my people, all of us here, will ever be able to stop and live like they do, the rest of the people?” No one knows the answer to that, one says, but hopefully such a clay will come, and soon. “No, I don’t think so. I think a lot of people, they don’t want us to be with them, and all they want is for us to do their work, and then good-bye, they say, and don’t come back until the next time, when there’s more work and then we’ll have you around to do it, and then good-bye again.”
There is another pause, another flurry of remarks, then this: “I’d like to have a home, and children, maybe three or four, two boys and two girls. They could all be nice children, and they wouldn’t get sick and die, not one. We would have a house and it would have all the things, television and good furniture, not secondhand. If we wanted to work the crops, we’d plant them for ourselves, because the house and the land we’d have would be ours and no one could come and take us away and take the house away, either. I’d make us all go to school, even me; because if you don’t learn things, then you’ll be easy to fool, and you’ll never be able to hold on to anything, my daddy says. He says he tries, and he
doesn’t get tricked all the time, but a lot of the time he does, and he can’t help it, and he’s sorry we don’t just stay in a place and he’s sorry my sisters and brothers and me don’t go to school until we’re as smart as the crew men and the foremen and the owners and the police and everyone. Then we could stop them from always pushing on us and not letting us do anything they don’t want us to do. That’s why, if I could, I’d like to be in school at the same time my kids would be there, and we’d be getting our education.