by Robert Coles
Sharecroppers, like the rest of us, have an idea about the trends in their lives — something that may be obvious, but also something easily forgotten by one like me. If I have ideas about what sharecroppers do with their children, and what they go through in their minds and hearts as their children grow up, then so does a woman like this — who repeatedly objected to remarks I made, remarks full of my notions about her feelings, and who may well be responsible for this overly long and apologetic preamble: “No sir. No. I’m not going to go along with you on that, no sir. I don’t think you’ve got it right. Maybe I’m just being cross with you because it’s a bad day. I have them, you know. I just wake up with the day staring at me and no matter how good I know I should try to feel, all I can say to myself is that it’s going to be a bad day. But when you ask me if it bothers me when the little ones get bigger and start running around, then I have to tell you no, it doesn’t. A mother, she knows; she’ll be giving birth to her little child, and before her eyes she’ll be picturing her or him; and if it’s a girl the mother will see her when she’s little and when she gets bigger, and still bigger, and finally she’s all grown up and that’s the end of the child. Each time I’ll be lying on that bed about to have my child it’ll happen like that — with my mind giving me those pictures. When I told my mother, the first time, she said of course I would do that, because when a mother is bringing a baby into the world, she’s naturally going to stop and look ahead.
“Now to me it’s been good when my girls and my little boy started leaving me. I mean, you can’t be together all the time, and after a while you can feel them wanting to get away — in their legs and arms you can. They’ll be crawling on you and you know they want to go all over and find out where the floor begins and where it ends and what it’s like over there where the crops are, and the pine trees — and you know, like that. I’m happy when they’re off looking around for themselves. Yes, I truly am. It’s more trouble for me, I’ll admit. But I can be free of them longer, and that’s good. They’ll do a lot of crying, of course, and they’ll want to come back to you; but I try to tell them that they should sit over there, in front of the house, and enjoy themselves, because a little later on, it won’t be so much fun for them, no sir, it won’t. A lot of the time, when they’re crawling and when they’re learning to stand on their feet and move along, I’ll pretend to be busy fixing up something — frying up some grits, or straightening up the room — and I’ll follow them with my ears. They’ll be fighting and screaming and they’ll be teaching the smallest one, and she’ll be catching on, and I’ll tell myself it’s not so bad for the kids, it’s not so bad. But I know they’re not getting the best there is — for food and like that — and there’s not much future here, that’s what the bossman says, and he’s the one who should know. Then I’ll slip, and I’ll wonder if maybe we shouldn’t have left here, so that my kids could be growing up somewhere that has a future to give them. But from what you hear, it’s not so good up there, even if they do have a future to offer you, because the kids don’t have room to play or hardly to breathe; and I heard from the lady down the road after her daughter came home for a visit that there are no sheriffs around to push on you up there, but you can’t let your kids go anyplace, because they’ll get killed on the streets.The streets are real mean up there, she told me.
“That’s why we can be happy here, because for my little girl there’s land outside, and she can’t hurt herself too much there, I know that. There’ll be times I feel myself getting mad at her and the other kids, I’ll admit it, and my mother will see me letting my temper go and she’ll tell me that’s how she’d be sometimes. First there’ll be an irritation, and then all of a sudden, I’m shouting and screaming and I don’t know what’s come over me. Later on I’ll recall bits and pieces of what I said and what happened. My mother says we all have to fall to pieces sometimes, or else we couldn’t go on.
“When you ask what I say to the kids during a temper, it’s hard to tell, except that I’ll say things I never should, and sometimes it’s like I’m doing the exact same thing I tell my kids not to do, and I should be punished like them — as the minister says, with soap on my tongue, except we don’t have soap, no sir, because it costs a lot, and you need a lot of water for it, like she has, the bossman’s wife. My husband went in her house once — they’d asked him to carry some furniture down. He said the bossman and his wife and kids leave the water running, and there was soap thrown out in a trash can, and it was a piece you could have used and used.
“I guess the main thing is I tell the kids to stop with their fighting and pushing all over one another. I tell them — I’ll be real mad and shouting, yes sir — that they’d better watch out, because it won’t be long before they’ll be big and grown, and if they start getting fresh then, they’ll end up in jail as fast as can be, and that will be the end of them, oh will it. Then I’ll speak to them like the sheriff would, I guess, and I’ll be telling them what the minister will say — and you know, they’ve got to learn to pay me attention and obey, and if they don’t, they’ll suffer for it even more than I tell them they will. And the way I see it, I’ve got to suffer for them right now. I mean, if they see me getting upset and bothered then they’ll stop in their ways and get to behaving themselves, you know. It’s too bad, that’s what I believe, that I can’t have a lot to give them. Maybe if we’d gone North I could be shopping and buying things for them; but we’re here, and they’ll have to like it. They’ll ask me those questions, the children do, and it shows you they peek in on what my mother will be saying, or me. They’ll bother you with all the whys, until you’re ready to go kill them to stop them from talking, yes sir — and I’m not ashamed to admit it. My mother says they’re just learning things and having their fun by teasing me, and that’s the way a child will be. They’ll be upset by you, and they’ll want to get even, so they’ll go and upset you right back. My boy used to tell me he was going to go shoot the sheriff, and the bossman too, and take over his plantation and live up there in his house, and he wouldn’t let me come in because I was bad, and so was the minister. Then he’d say it over and over again, how bad, bad, bad I was, until I had to shout him down, and I’d be telling him he was bad and he’d be telling me the same thing right back and it’d be a fight we’d have — until I just came and grabbed him and made him stop. I’d put my hand over his mouth, yes that was how.
“Maybe if my children were up North, they’d be out fighting the police, the way they tell me they will when they are little. I don’t know. Here, you have to watch your step. Here you have to hit a colored man if you’re going to hit someone, and that’s the truth. I don’t let my children go hitting one another too much. They might get ideas in their heads about a white man, and that would be the end for all of us. I teach them to be quiet, and they get to be quiet, and that’s good. Sometimes I think they’d like to be doing more talking and playing, but I don’t have the time to be with them and also help in the field sometimes and also go work for the bossman, cleaning up his office; and besides, I have my stomach pains, and there must be something wrong in there, and my legs are bad, the veins. There’ll be one day I’m feeling pretty good, then the next I feel as bad as can be, so bad I can’t describe it. I take to crying and I don’t know why. My head will be aching, and all of a sudden there’ll be the tears, and I have to wipe them away, and then there’ll be more after those I cleared off. It’s my older children, I sometimes think. They don’t have much hope, and when they lose it, I lose it with them. I’ll tell them that it may get better here, you know, but they don’t listen much, and I’ll wonder if they’re asking themselves why it was we stayed here — being colored for one thing, and not getting much that you can call your own, except the cabin they give us.
“We get enough from work and the ‘loans against the crops,’ the bossman calls them, to keep from dying. But you feel disappointed sometimes, even if you can scrape up some food; and that’s how the kids, my children, they get to be �
�� sort of disappointed. And so am I, except that I can’t spend my days feeling I’ve lost all my hope, and it’s never going to get better. So, I’ll tell the kids to go outside there and sit under a tree and play and don’t just stare and stare, unless they want to be resting. I know they’re tired a lot, because it’s hot, and the bugs, they eat on them and itch them and it wears them down. If they’re staring here, near me, and then they start talking and making me feel I was real bad not to have a better life waiting on them when they got born, then I’ll be all upset, and one minute I’ll want to sit with them and say yes, you’re right, you are; but the next I’ll want them to stop with their complaining and leave me alone and stop making themselves upset, and like that. If their daddy comes by, then I’ll tell him, and he’s very good with them, because he’ll just go out after them, and he’ll tell them we can’t sit back and feel bad, because the only way the colored man has ever amounted to something, it’s because he keeps himself going, and you just have to, and that’s all there is to say, and nothing more.”
So she insisted then and so she has many times insisted. Yet, over the years I have learned to doubt her silences and her claims that this or that word (or long speech) represents her final position on a given subject. For a long time she almost literally had nothing to say. She sat out my visits or stood watching me as I anxiously and indeed somewhat desperately tried to talk with and play with her children, who began to take me for a strange white fool — first to be feared, then to be suspected, and finally to be indulged and flattered and really helped along in whatever fuzzy and persistent schemes he had in mind. It took their mother much longer to take my presence for granted, then to assume my presence as in essence a friendly one, and at last to forget my presence for a minute here and for considerably longer than a minute there — or even use my presence, apologetically in the beginning and forthrightly later on, three years later on, when a thought or a question or a reminiscence would simply be spoken. Those were the moments I remember best, and they were almost always moments when she was remembering something. I think I am being true to the occasions when I say they were almost invariably (I began to feel inevitably) nostalgic.
In her own way she, too, felt the persistent force of past events. Both of us knew that she had found in me a listener, and that I was not by any means the first one. There had been her mother, and there was “the reverend.” She shouted and “hollered” at them, too — and sometimes, like the rest of us, she stopped in the middle, seized by a moment of self-consciousness, worried by a glimpse of her own petulance, which we all have and which only some people manage to acknowledge. A few times I also raised my voice — I thought because I wanted to get through, be heard by her. She was so absorbed in putting her thoughts to word that I feared she would not hear my remarks, my objections or observations or pleas that one thing or another be considered.
Afterwards, of course, I would have second thoughts about everything said. I would think about our talks, or play them back and try to hear again exactly who said what and when. I would try to figure out why she got so excited and why I did. I would, in fact, be “home,” because I was doing what my life had somehow brought me to do: analyzing things and finding reasons and explanations for them or trends and patterns in them. It was a comfortable feeling I had in those small, uncrowded motels — “rural” as the terrain they serve and different indeed from the large noisy motels one finds elsewhere. It was comfortable because I was surrounded by comfort: air conditioning and running water and a bathroom and a good bed and nearby a restaurant that served a reasonable variety of reasonably good food. I was also comfortable because I was now doing something that had continuity.
After all, years of my life had been given over to listening and coming up with interpretations, and in those motel rooms I could sit back and listen to a machine and write things down on sheets of white paper — and do it all under reasonably decent physical circumstances. But I had my doubts in those motel rooms. Should I actually be there at all? Should I be spending all those hours with that woman and her family? Shouldn’t I rather be some other place doing some other kind of work? And she had her doubts, too. Although excitement can mask beliefs, it can also make possible their expression — like this: “I’ve been saying not one good word today, that’s what I just realized. I’d better stop. I guess this isn’t one of my happy days — but they can’t come all the time. I feel happiest after I’ve gone and spoken my troubles in church. I’m sorry I was having you hear me, but it’s no easy time we all have here, and there’ll be a minute once or twice a day that I can’t be sure I’ll last — because there’s too much we don’t have that we need, and there’s not enough of what we do have.
“I get to the point I’m ready to die; I’m ready to say I can’t do it any longer, oh Lord, I can’t, so You’ll have to come and take me, and if it means I’m going to go to Hell, because I can’t wait until it’s my time to be called, then I guess it’ll have to be Hell for me. And you know, sometimes I’ll be carrying on a talk with Him, with God, and all of a sudden I’ll feel better, like the reverend said I should. The only trouble is I never do let Him know how really bad it can get for us — and the reverend said I don’t have to, because He knows anyway. But when I was hollering just now, that’s the same thing my kids will hear sometimes, and they know not to speak back, just listen. Their daddy can holler, too; he’ll get all upset, and he’ll talk and talk and talk, and you can’t follow his every word, and sometimes he’ll go outside and start kicking things around, but other times he just stops, and I think maybe he’ll begin to cry, but he never does. He just sits there, and after a while he’ll shrug his shoulders and go back to doing what he was doing before. Then there will be a time when we both start complaining, but soon we decide, most of the time we do, that if there’s trouble we have — well, there’s also a lot we can recall that wasn’t so bad, no sir. And most of all, you have to remember, like we say to ourselves: here we are. That’s what my husband will say, and so will I: here we are.
“I guess we mean if we’re here, then how could it be so had — because if it had been even worse, then we wouldn’t still be here. Then we’ll get to thinking, and we’ll recall a good time we had once, and then another time — how the girls were born, and the boys, and how my mother has been good to us, and how the bossman came over and said there was nothing to be afraid of, because if the civil rights people or the Klan started getting after us, they wouldn’t get on his property. He said he’d go and shoot them himself, if he had to, if they didn’t leave. He said he knew we didn’t have anything to do with the civil rights people, and that’s why we shouldn’t be scared. So we weren’t, and nothing happened.
“You know, there are more happy times than you might think — once you start looking for them. You have to be in the right mind to go look. That’s what I’ll say or my husband will say — when we’re feeling good. There was a Christmastime a few years back, when my brother sent us more money than we’d ever seen, and I went down to the store and the man, he thought I was losing my mind, because I asked for one thing, and then another, and pretty soon I had a big pile of things, and in the beginning he went along and got them, but after a little, he stared at me and he asked me what I’d been having to drink, and he said if I didn’t get out fast, he’d have the sheriff out there, and that would be some Christmas I’d have — in jail. Then I naturally decided to show him the bills, and I did, and he looked at them real long and he asked me — yes, he was getting a little more respectful, he was — if he could just take ahold of one of the ten-dollar bills and see if it was OK. After he saw it was real money I had, then he told me I was the luckiest woman in Tunica County, and maybe the luckiest one in the whole state of Mississippi, and if there was anything he could do to be of help, then he’d go over and deliver and he’d even drive me along, because it sure would be heavy, toting along the packages and more packages, and he could understand I’d be fearful of buying things if I didn’t know ho
w I’d get them back to the place.
“Yes, I said, he could drive me and my packages and that would be a relief. So, I bought and I bought. I’d see this and that, and I’d ask for the candy and the cookies and the cheese and the meats, you know, and I knew I was going to have me a time, telling my kids that they should eat the new food and it would be good for them and make them grow bigger. They like Kool-Aid, and it isn’t often they can have milk for themselves and there we were, having a chicken on Christmas. I had to tell my kids that you may get used to Kool-Aid and like it, but if you have good luck, like we did that Christmas — well, then you can drink milk and eat the better things and they’ll taste just as good and even better, once you get used to them. Of course, one of my girls went and spoiled things; she said we weren’t going to be having that food again, so why should we try eating it, just for Christmas. Then, I didn’t know what to say. It was my husband who answered; he said we should just forget all we ever ate before and all we’ll ever eat later on, and just have ourselves a good Christmas — and you know, we did. It was the best day ever in the world, yes it was.”
As a matter of fact there have been other good days, too. The memory of one would trigger the memory of another, and on a few such occasions she allowed herself to get dangerously full of them all, to the point that she would appear euphoric (which I suppose was as “inappropriate” in her as in anyone else) or almost bizarrely contented with her life, her lot, her future as she saw it. I am not necessarily referring to a sort of “religious fugue,” as I found myself calling some of the vehement joy, the biblically suffused, highly oratorical transport she could manage. On the contrary, it was nostalgia, pure if not so simple, that would come over her and make her feel quiet and pleased with things, but sad, very sad in a reflective way, sad without hysteria and without desperation.