Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “I do believe we could have it better; because if we could get a job in one of the towns, then we could get a house and keep it and not leave and then if I broke my arm, like I did, they would take care of it in the hospital and not send you from one to the other until you pass out because you’re dizzy and the blood is all over, and it hurts and like that, yes sir. Also, we could go and buy things in the stores — if we had the money and if they knew you lived there and weren’t just passing through. All the time they’ll tell you that, they’ll say that you’re just passing through and not to bother people, and they don’t want you to come in and mess things up. But I could have a baby carriage and take my babies to the shopping stores, like you see people do, and we could go into all of them and it would be fun. I’d like that. I’d love it. I’d love to go and shop and bring a lot of things home and they’d be mine and I could keep them and I could fix up the house and if I didn’t like the way it looks I could change things and it would look different, and it would be better.

  “My mother, she always says it don’t make any difference how we live in a place, it don’t, because we’ll soon be leaving. If it’s a real bad place, she’ll say, ‘Don’t worry, because we’ll soon be leaving,’ and if it’s a better one, then she’ll say, ‘Don’t fuss around and try to get everything all fixed up, because we’ll soon be leaving.’ Once when I was real little, I remember, I asked her why we couldn’t stop our leaving and stay where we are, and she slapped me and told me to stop bothering her; and my daddy said if I could find a better way to make some money, then he’d like to know it. But I don’t know how he could do any better, and he’s the hardest-working picker there is, the crew man told him, and we all heard. My daddy said if he would ever stop picking, he’d never, never miss doing it, but he can’t, and maybe I’ll never be able to, either. Maybe I’ll just dream about a house and living in it. My mother says she dreams a lot about it, having a house, but she says it’s only natural we would wish for things, even if you can’t have them. But, if you’re asking what it’ll really be like when I’m much older, then I can tell you it’ll be just like now. Maybe it’ll be much better for us, but I don’t think so. I think maybe it won’t be too different, because my daddy says if you’re doing the kind of work we do, they need you, and they’re not going to let you go, and besides there isn’t much else for us to do but what we’re already doing. My brother, he thinks maybe he could learn to drive a tractor and he’d just go up and down the same fields and a few others, and he’d never have to go on the road like we do now and he says when I think of going with a boy, I should ask him if he’s going to go on the road, or if he’s going to stay someplace, where he is, and get himself some kind of work that will let him settle down. But every time you try, they have no work but picking, they say, and the foremen, they’re around and soon the sheriff and likely as not they’ll arrest you for owing them something. If you get away, though, then you have to go someplace, and if you go to a city, then it’s no good there, either, from what you hear, and you can’t even work there, either; and it’s real bad, the living, even if you don’t have to be moving on up the road all the time.

  “To me it would be the happiest day in the world if one day I woke up and I had a bed, and there was just me and a real nice man, my husband, there; and I could hear my children, and they would all be next door to us, in another room, all their own; and they would have a bed, each one of them would, and we would just be there, and people would come by and they’d say that’s where they live, and that’s where they’ll always be, and they’ll never be moving, no, and they won’t have to, because they’ll own the house, like the foremen do and the crew men and everyone else does, except us. Then we won’t be with the migrant people anymore, and we’ll be with everyone else, and it’ll be real different.”

  So, it would be, vastly different. She and children like her would see a different world. Unlike migrant children, other children like to draw pastoral landscapes, like to drench them in sun, fill them with flowers, render them anything but bleak. Unlike migrant children, other children don’t draw roads that are fenced in and blocked off or lead nowhere and everywhere and never end. Unlike migrant children, most children don’t worry about birth certificates, or doors and more doors and always doors — that belong, even in a few years of experience, to half a hundred or more houses. So again, it would be different if the little girl just quoted could have a solid, permanent home. Her drawings would not be like the ones I have selected, or like dozens of others very similar. The themes would be different, because her life would be different. Her days and months and years would have a certain kind of continuity, a kind we all don’t think about, because some things are so very important, so intimate to life’s meaning and nature that we really cannot bear to think about them; and indeed if we were thinking about them we would for some reason have come upon serious trouble.

  Even many animals define themselves by where they live, by the territory they possess or covet or choose to forsake in order to find new land, a new sense of control and self-sufficiency, a new dominion. It is utterly part of our nature to want roots, to need roots, to struggle for roots, for a sense of belonging, for some place that is recognized as mine, as yours, as ours. Nations, regions, states, counties, cities, towns — all of them have to do with politics and geography and history; but they are more than that, they somehow reflect man’s humanity, his need to stay someplace and live there and get to know something — a lot, actually: other people, and what I suppose can be called a particular environment, or space or neighborhood or world, or set of circumstances. It is bad enough that thousands of us, thousands of American children, still go hungry and sick and are ignored and spurned — every day and constantly and just about from birth to death. It is quite another thing, a lower order of human degradation, that we also have thousands of boys and girls who live utterly uprooted lives, who wander the American earth, who even as children enable us to eat by harvesting our crops but who never, never can think of anyplace as home, of themselves as anything but homeless. There are moments, and I believe this is one of them, when, whoever we are, observers or no, we have to throw up our hands in heaviness of heart and dismay and disgust and say, in desperation: God save them, those children; and for allowing such a state of affairs to continue, God save us, too.

  Stranded Children

  The cabins; they stand off the highways, way off them, up the dirt roads — and almost always the children linger around those cabins. They sit and play or they run all over and play or they linger about and seem not to be doing much of anything — those boys and girls of, say, Tunica County, Mississippi, or Clarke County, Alabama, or McCormick County, South Carolina. In books read by second- or third-grade students, such children are called “country boys” or “farm girls.” In textbooks, such boys and girls are called sharecropper children or the children of tenant farmers or field hands. I suppose, as we now seem to insist, it is a state of mind, a quality of upbringing that characterizes those children: they are seriously “deprived” and “disadvantaged” — “backward,” it once was put — and they need so very much that perhaps the easiest way to start is to say they need just about everything.

  Many of the cabins have been abandoned, but thousands and thousands of them remain inhabited, and the people who live inside know that. They know they have been left behind; know they often have chosen to be left behind, chosen to remain and feel — perhaps the word is stranded: “I don’t know why we’re still here, but we are; and I guess we always will be, yes sir. There comes a time when you say to yourself that the only thing you can do is whatever there is to do, and if there’s nothing more, then there isn’t. But a lot of them, a lot of our people, they’ve left, you know. They’ll still be doing it, too — a family here and one over there, and mostly by night. That’s the time. It’ll be around midnight or into the morning, and you can almost hear them. I do sometimes. I’ll be turning over in my sleep, and suddenly I’ll hear a car coming
, or there’ll be one over the other side of the plantation, a car being started, and I’ll scratch myself and ask if it’s a dream I’m having, or if it’s another family going up there — to Chicago, likely. That’s where I think most of us from here go, if they get there; and you wonder sometimes if they don’t get lost or give up and stop someplace by the road and settle into raising some food. But like down here, the people up North whose land it is, they probably don’t want us growing a lot of food ourselves there, either. They just want us to sweat for them, grow for them.”

  So, she is resigned to staying put; she is resigned even though her older sister and her two younger sisters and her brother have left the state of Mississippi and even though they all have at one time or another come back and told her to leave, to leave for good and take their mother along so that none of them would ever again live in or return to the plantation every one of them calls “the place.” She is resigned to the kind of life her mother had — though she wonders whether even that kind of life will be permitted: “They said we could stay, especially my mother, but if she goes, then they might make me and my family leave here, and they’ll burn down the house, like they’ve been doing, and like they’d really have done already if it wasn’t that my mother waited on them for years and years, and the bossman, his wife said no, they should let us alone. You know she came over here, the missus; she drove up one day. She got out of her car and she started looking around, and we got scared, because from the look on her face we thought she was real sore at us, and she was going to take after us and tell us we were in the wrong for something.

  “We just waited, and after a while she came over and she said she was real sorry that we didn’t have a better place to live, but it was going to be machines now that harvest the crops, and there wasn’t much we could do anymore. She went over and looked my mother straight into her eyes and told her she sure was grateful for all she’d done; and it was too bad about her arthritis and the pain she was having and how sad it was to see her bent over like that, but not to worry, because she can stay here for as long as she wants, my mother can, and not to worry about the house (the big house she meant, yes she did) because there was this nice young girl, and she was working out fine, and they had some other help, too — for the heavy work, a boy I believe she said. Then she turned around fast, all of a sudden, and she just marched out and drove off, and she didn’t say good-bye — not until she was in the car. Then she waved, but I don’t believe there was a smile on her face, no sir; and my mother, it was she that was smiling, and afterwards saying how nice it was for her, the missus, to come up here.”

  I described the daughter as resigned, yet her words also convey a certain sense of annoyance, however restrained; or perhaps what I notice is a wry or sardonic quality mixed with an earnest and forthright manner that tempers the underlying resignation. The resignation emerges when least expected: “To be telling you the truth, I’m not sure it’s going to be any better for my children, not than it was for me or for my mother, and maybe even for my grandmother, and I can remember a little of her. Sometimes I’ll be wondering if maybe I should have said to my mother that we’ve got to go up there to Chicago, and then she would have gone; but I never tried it, and I’m just as glad, actually. The way I see it, my little ones wouldn’t have been any better off in the city, and worse, maybe — it might be much worse up there. A nephew of mine, he’s my sister’s boy, I hear he’s in jail, someplace near Chicago. Now, the sheriff, he doesn’t put us in jail, so long as we don’t bother anyone — yes, I mean the white folks. And you’d be crazy, you’d have to be, to go bothering them, don’t you know.

  “I tell my boys and I tell my girls that they should stay clear of the white man, unless he beckons you, and then try to be nice and polite and do what he’s asking if it’s possible to do, and if it’s not, then always apologize and say you’ll do the best you can, and you’ll be sorry if it’s not enough. They say up North the colored man doesn’t have to be afraid of the white no more, and the colored children, they speak up and say as they please before the white man. But there’s my nephew — they put him right into jail. And I’ll bet there’s a lot more of us in jail up there than down here, though I do know we’ve got plenty of us put away down here. The reason is, a lot of the colored people have gone into the Mississippi towns, don’t you know, since they can’t stay here on the farms and work for the white people, and so they go to a place like Greenville, and some even to Jackson, and that’s where they get into trouble with the law, they sure do. So, I’m afraid to leave and I’m afraid to stay, and whichever I do, I think it might be real bad for my boys and girls — real bad.”

  She has five children, or five that have so far stayed alive. She has had “three or four” miscarriages and two of her children died, one at seven months, “suddenly and for no reason” and one at age four “of a real bad cold, it seemed like.” Over the years I have come to know her as well as someone like me will ever really understand someone like her — which is to say that I do indeed believe that I have learned a lot about her and her family. Yet I worry about those often discussed (maybe too much discussed) barriers that separate observers like me from sharecropper families like hers — and for all their present difficulties, she and her husband and their children are precisely that, sharecroppers, or so they think themselves to be: “We’ve been on shares to the mister and his daddy and before him the old, old gentleman, and I do believe it goes back to when we were all slaves, yes sir. Today there isn’t much for my husband to do, except for errands here and there. But until a couple of years ago, we’d work our land, the part the bossman gave to us, and at the end of the year he’d come over and he’d settle up with us. No, there wasn’t too much money we’d get; but you now he’d be giving us the house, this one, all along, and they’d supply us our food and like that, and if anything special comes up, something real bad, they’re good people, and we could go over there and ask them, and they’d be glad to help. Of course, we don’t ask anything big of them, and we never did. It worked out OK, being on shares with him, because he’s a fair person, and he’d tell me and my husband to stop standing and sit down, and he’d open his book and point to the page and tell us it was the one with our name on it, and all the figures were there, and that’s how it all added up — and he never would be like some of the others. They’ll give you nothing, or close to it, and they’ll say you’re lucky to be getting the food all along, and lucky to have a roof over your head.”

  They do not feel too lucky these days. They worry about their children, yet don’t know how to make those worries less necessary. They care about their children, yet have no conviction that such love and concern will matter. Most of the time they simply go about the business of living, or trying to live, or just barely staying alive: “I’m afraid we’re sick a lot of the time, me and my children are. If it’s not one thing, it’s something else, and according to the minister, we’re all of us just as likely to die sooner than later, because God might be waiting on us — you never know. I tell my children, each one of them, that it’s better they be good and obey me and do as I say, because they can go fast, just like the older people, and it’s a long time to spend in Hell, if they’re no good and God turns His back on them.

  “They’re good, though, my boys — the two of them — and my three girls. They like to go along and help me, and most of the time they don’t give me trouble. I try to do the best I can for them, and I tell them they’ve got to look after one another, because their daddy and me might die one day, and then they’d be alone, except for my mother, and she’s sick. Then they’ll ask about their cousins, and I’ll tell them it’s a long way from here to Chicago, and I hope it stays that way, because as bad as it is here, it’ll be only worse someplace else; and I say it twice, and sometimes more, so they’ll hear and they won’t forget. Then, of course, they’ll ask why it is that the people are leaving, and I say some are, but some aren’t, and we aren’t, and that’s the answer, and there’ll
be no other answer, and stop asking. But they do, a little later on, and I’ll be repeating the same thing. And you know, a while back my boy Henry, he’s seven, wanted to know if there wasn’t some chance we’d leave here, and I told him no, and why was he keeping on asking me, and he said that if someday we didn’t go, then maybe he would, but I told him how bad it would be if he was up North, and he listened. I could tell he got scared by what I was saying, and he said maybe I was right and it was bad here, and maybe we could die all of a sudden — like I keep on telling him — but from now on he was going to be happy we’re here, and from now on he promised he’d stop talking about the North. Like I said, as bad as it is, there’s always worse trouble you can get into.”

  Such children, sharecropper children, learn that particular kind of self-satisfaction rather early. A child born of a sharecropper or a tenant farmer gradually gets a sense of things, a sense of who he is and where he is and what his life is likely to be like. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how early it is that such a “sense of things,” complicated and subtle, yet ultimately all too brutal and clear, begins to develop. For example, the mother I have just quoted has what I suppose can be called an “attitude” toward her children, an attitude that begins to take shape well before the boy or girl is born, and an attitude that upon analysis reveals all sorts of things not only about a particular kind of “child-rearing,” but also about a whole region, a whole way of life. At different times the mother and I have talked about her children and her hopes for them and her fears about them and her view of what they will have to learn. Any one conversation has its limits, but over the years particular things occur and occur, are stated and stated; and finally one can somewhat reliably feel certain words and sentiments “coming,” or “near expression” in the course of a given talk — in which case the observer feels that he, like the children in question, has a little of that “sense of things” just mentioned. Perhaps I am merely saying that the wife of a sharecropper, like the wife of a lawyer or a businessman or a psychiatrist, needs time and various kinds of occasions if she is ever going to get across either to herself or some observer what can so glibly be called her “philosophy,” or again, her “attitudes.” A sharecropper’s wife does not use those words, but she knows what they are meant to mean, and she has her own words that are not exactly vague or pretentious or incomprehensible: “To me, if you ask me what I believe, it’s that God wants us to have children, and not only because without them we’d soon disappear, but because as long as boys and girls keep coming, you know the world might one day get better. I get to feeling better when I’m carrying, yes I do. You know something else — each time I’m carrying, the missus up there will be a little nicer to me, all during the time she will. She’ll ask me how I’m getting on; and she’ll ask me if it’s a boy or a girl I want; and she’ll ask me if my legs are swelling up, like the last time, or not; and toward the end, if I don’t lose the child, like I have, you know, she’ll come over sometime, when I’m working up there for her — in the house, yes sir — and she’ll tell me not to be in a hurry and to share my work with Alice and with Lucy, because they’re helping her a lot, too.