Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  That is what it feels like to be stranded. The word has come back from the North, the word that lets those hundreds of thousands who are still Southerners know how things have changed, say, since 1940 or 1950. And yet, people continue to leave, but often with grave doubts and fears, and with few illusions about the freedom and wealth of those beckoning cities — which of course, always seemed to promise more than they actually delivered, or so many of those who have stayed behind also somehow knew and insisted, perhaps to make themselves feel better. Even those children who definitely plan one day to leave the countryside and go to a city nearby or far away, have their doubts and can talk about them, as did one girl of nine, alternately naïve and cynical, trusting and suspicious, grave and optimistic: “If you’re a girl, I believe you can get yourself a job better, whether you’re down here or up North. So, I hope to do that, and maybe if I’m married, my husband will be able to find a job, too — though it’s not so easy, I know, for the man. When you ask me what I’ll be doing later, and where I’ll be living, I don’t know the answer. From as far back as I can think, I used to tell my mother that we ought to leave here, and not be always doing what they tell you to do, the people that run this place. My mother used to say that one day we’d leave, but we owed all this money, from borrowing until the crops would come in. Then my aunt and uncle, they owed a lot of money and they came over last year, I think it was, and said we should all just up and leave one night, and the money we owed, we more than made up for with work, and the debt was just the bossman’s way of keeping us doing whatever he wants. But we stayed and my aunt and uncle left the state.

  “Everyone says I can be a maid and wash dishes, but I’d like to be a teacher, if I could. I don’t go to school all the time, but when I do I find myself liking some of the teachers, how they dress up and know what to say. One of them is real nice, and she drives a new car to school, and she’ll talk to you about going to a meeting in Memphis, and then there was another meeting in Atlanta, and she’s been around and all over and everywhere. I did real good in school, and the teacher said I was coming along fine and I should go there more, and she’d teach me more — but we have to take turns. There’s my other sisters and my brother, and we go one after the other to school and to church, and maybe one day we’ll all have the right clothes, but until then we just have to go by turns.

  “Once another teacher gave me a ride and she wanted to know what I was thinking of, for my future; and I said I don’t know, and she said I should get on it, and start thinking. I told my mother what the teacher said, and my mother asked what the teacher expected us to do, since we’re not getting all that money from the state of Alabama, like teachers do. When I next went to school, I asked that teacher if she could figure out how me and my sisters and my brother could go ahead and amount to something, like she said we should, if there wasn’t a nickel or dime in the place, never mind any dollar bills. Yes sir, that’s what I said, and it was just what my mother said. The teacher told me I was getting fresh. But I told her right back. I said it was all right for her telling us what to do, but meanwhile we were out there and we didn’t hardly see any money, and it was real bad for my mother, trying to figure if we’d be getting what we should to eat every day. Then the teacher said I was beginning to talk like I was from the civil rights people and to shut my mouth or go and leave, and the next day it wasn’t my turn to come there anyway, and I gave the shoes to my sister Mary Jean, and I told her to give the worst look she could to her, Miss Holmes. Mary Jean promised she would, and she did; and I never went back for a long time, and when I did she paid me no attention, Miss Holmes did, but I believe Mary Jean went up and asked if she could speak to the teacher, and she explained that none of us has ever seen a civil rights person hereabouts — never; and we just try to work the land and mind our own business, and they would all testify to it, the foreman and the bossman. My mother wanted the school people to know the truth, so she had Mary Jean tell the teacher.

  “I don’t trust no one, especially most of the teachers, and the big important people. Once the sheriff came to school, and the teacher told us we’d better not make a single sound, or he’d hear us, and he’d send us right to jail. Then one boy raised his hand, and she called on him, and he asked if it was right that they can put us in jail anytime they please, no matter what we say. Well, the next thing the teacher did was tell us that we should get those silly questions out of our heads, or else we would really end up there, in jail. Then the girl near me raised her hand, and she asked the teacher if it wasn’t so, that we should all go away from here because there was nothing to keep us. The teacher said again that we should stop the questions and she was sorry she mentioned the sheriff and let’s go back to learning arithmetic. There was a girl who was nodding and saying yes, we should go back to the arithmetic, and you know who she was: Caroline Jones, and her daddy is the richest colored man between here and Chicago, my daddy says. He owns funeral parlors and an insurance company, and if you have a complaint, you’re supposed to see him, and then he’ll tell you if he’s going to talk to the white people about it, or if he won’t. His girl, Caroline, comes to school with all different kinds of dresses and shoes, and she walks around as if she owns the school. The teachers, I believe they’re scared of her, because if her daddy really wanted to, he could probably get them fired, any teacher that crossed Caroline. The other day I asked Caroline if she really planned to be a teacher, because the teacher told her she’d make a good one. Caroline said no, she’d like to go to Hollywood and get a job in the movies. I said that would be what I’d like, too, but I haven’t seen many movies. She said her daddy drives her up to Memphis, I think, and they see them there. A while ago we had a television set, and we’d see movies on it; but it wasn’t a good set when we got it, and soon it broke down for good. The man at the store said there was no point trying to fix it. Oh, it was left by a family when they went North.

  “If I really could choose, I’d leave here, yes sir, and never come back. I’d try to get my whole family to go with me, though. If they wouldn’t leave, I don’t know if I could. I’m sure if I stay I’ll get some job cleaning up for the white folks, and if you get a good woman to work for, she’ll be nice to you and slip you a dress or something, before she throws it out. Maybe I could marry Caroline’s brother, except she says he’s going to Atlanta to college, and she thinks he’ll never come back. If he did, and I married him, I’d be rich! Then we’d have a television that works real good, and I wouldn’t need dresses from the white folks, no I wouldn’t. I could go and get my own, and I’d wear shoes all the time, like the teachers do — and Caroline.”

  Such children, like all other children, have their dreams; but sharecropper children also have their doubts, very concrete ones, perhaps more of them than most boys and girls do. The younger sharecropper children I have met and observed can draw or paint pictures that express those doubts, and incidentally, a whole range of other feelings, which in sum constitute, I suppose, a “world view” — though the children themselves might wonder, were they to hear that expression, why I make so much of their halting or casual or eager and enthusiastic efforts. Yet, they do manage to “say” a lot in those drawings; and since children of poor, southern rural families are likely to be even more silent (at five or six, for instance) than other children in the presence of someone like me, the use of crayons and paints becomes particularly important and instructive — I believe for them as well as their observer. In any event, Lawrence kept on telling me — briefly, but to the point — that he enjoyed the artwork he was doing, but he also hoped that I would like what I saw and keep it, so I “could show all the pictures to the other doctors, and they could see if they are correct.”

  What does the boy mean by “correct”? Well, of course if asked, he doesn’t really know how to answer, or so he says at first. Then he acknowledges he had wondered whether (as in school) someone is grading his work: “I’ve not been to school much, but my sister has, and she said if you dr
aw something the teacher tells you later if it’s good or bad.” He is seven, and actually he has been to school for a couple of years — though he does miss many days because he is sick, or because he doesn’t have warm enough clothes, or any suitable clothes at all. (Like others who live nearby, he shares a particular set of shoes and a pair of pants with his brothers. They rotate the use of the clothes, and by the same token rotate their attendance at school.) Finally, he lets me know something else: “The best thing would be if you kept the pictures, all the pictures I’m making; and even if they’re not so good, they could remind you of the place here, after you go away.”

  Lawrence always liked to draw “the place,” by which he meant the cabin in which he was born and now lives, and the land around it, some of which has pine trees, some of which is planted in cotton, some of which boasts a few flowers grown by his mother — who, incidentally, is not allowed to grow vegetables anywhere on that land. I asked Lawrence about that one day, because he put a few tomato plants and a few pieces of corn near the sunflowers he drew: “Well, it’s not our land, except to grow cotton and corn and then share with the bossman, if we make money. The bossman says he doesn’t want us using his land to grow a lot of food we could use for ourselves, so he said no to my daddy, and we’re only allowed the flowers. My mother likes the flowers, and she grows them, and when the bossman comes by every once in a while, he’ll tell us they are real pretty, the flowers she grows, and aren’t we glad she’s growing them, because they’re as good as can be to look at. My mother doesn’t answer him, and later she says he is the meanest man who ever smiled — and he’s always smiling at us and telling us we’re real good colored people, and he wishes everyone else colored was as good as we are, even half as good, he says.

  “That’s why, in the picture I tried to fool him and put the corn there and the tomato plants. It used to be that my granddaddy grew a little of each, and he’d go and bring some to the missus and she always said his was the best she ever tasted. But after she died and her husband got sick, the son took over, Junior they used to call him — that’s what my daddy told me — and he’s tough, real bad tough. He comes around on his inspection, that’s what he calls it, and wants to make sure we’re all being good and not ‘sitting in the sun,’ he says, and being ‘lazy,’ he says, and my daddy says he’s scared to tell him to leave us alone, because it’s his, the land, but if we didn’t do anything but sit under the sun, then it would be us who’d suffer the worst — that’s what my daddy said he’d like to tell him, Mr. Junior, the bossman. But my mother laughs and says he comes around here because he likes to feel big and important, and he likes to feel like his daddy, ‘inspecting’ us. Each time he comes he’ll take and pick one of my mother’s little flowers and put it on his jacket, and he won’t even thank her. Then the next thing, he’ll be sending the maid they have, Ruth, to come over and pick a whole bunch for the house. Once he sent us a dollar, but most of the time he sends us nothing, and there’s not a thing we can do, no sir, that’s what my daddy says.

  “There was a time we might have gone away from here, but my daddy said no, and I’m glad. I sure know a lot of places here, and I’d hate to leave now. I like the woods the best, and next best the road down beside the big house; it goes near the pond, and there’s a well there, and I get the water. The teacher told us if you go to a big city, likely as not you’ll have water right in your house, and all you do is turn it on and turn it off, and it’s always there, and it’s as clean as can be. But she says it’s real bad up there, and better to stay here; and my daddy says she’s right. He says that here you don’t have much except plenty of land, and the little you can get from working it, and up there you get your money, but you’re like in jail, from all you hear; and that’s no place to be.”

  He has drawn dozens of pastoral scenes, all of them evidence of his familiarity with the land he and his father and indeed everyone in their family knows so well. He has his very own way of approaching the paper, using the crayons, and in general doing his work. Like many sharecropper children I have met, he has done more drawing in school than anything else, and he could even (toward the very end of the time I spent with him and his family) tell me why: “The teacher said the other day that none of us talk right, and we should be ashamed of ourselves, and how could we ever amount to anything if that’s how we’re going to be speaking later on. That’s why she has us make pictures, she said. Then she told us we’ll be hopeless on the rest of the lessons, too — the writing and numbers — so maybe we should just wear the crayons down every day.”

  Actually, Lawrence does rather like drawing, though he does not wear his crayons down in a blind and obliging way. After all the experience he’s had with those crayons, he still seems to value the magic they possess, their constant readiness to offer up a variety of colors. For Lawrence it can apparently be remarkable that something in this world is thoroughly reliable, and almost always there, to be called upon and applied. On several occasions, as he prepared to work, Lawrence made remarks similar to this: “Don’t those crayons lose their color sometime? I mean, you use them and you use them, and they have the same color always. I thought after you used them a while they wouldn’t be so red and blue and green and yellow. My daddy says that anything you own gives out after long, and he says that goes for the land we have here to plant. Daddy says we’re lucky, because the land is good here, and it’s still got a lot of life in it — but one day the life will go away. Maybe that will happen after I’m gone, he says; but a lot of land, it gives out fast, and there isn’t anything you can do. Daddy said we’re losing our woods, too — and the bossman isn’t stopping it, because they cut down the pine trees, and then they send them away, and before you know it the logs get to be paper, I don’t know how. And the bossman makes some money. Up the road they came and put stakes on a big piece of land, and said we were to stay off it, because they’ll be planting pine trees and growing them, only to cut them down. The first I heard of it — they were talking at the store, some white men from the city — I came and told my daddy, and he said I make up things in my mind, but they came and did what I heard, and my daddy told me later I was telling the truth, he could see.”

  Lawrence often begins a drawing with a tree, maybe two of them. Then he moves to the land, the earth he knows so well, the earth he never stops seeing. In the morning, he wakes up and looks through the wide cracks on the floor of the two-room cabin he and his three brothers and two sisters and parents and one aunt and three fatherless cousins and grandmother call home. All during the day he sees the earth as he goes to get water or goes to “help with the planting” or “work on the crops”; and in the evening he finds himself lying on a mattress with two of his brothers and staring down at the darkness of the ground. So, he draws that ground, that earth, that land; and he puts a little grass on it, and some cotton and some corn, and some tomatoes, and sometimes his mother’s flowers. He makes the earth prominent, substantial, thick with layers and at times several shades — light brown and dark brown and gray and black. He brings out the consistency of things — the sandiness, the lumps and clods. He brings out the interruptions that rocks make and the intrusions that roots make. He brings out man’s artifacts, the ditches that irrigate, the tidy furrows that have to do with cultivation and planting. He brings out the land’s larger hospitality to chipmunks and ants and worms as well as to human beings.

  While he draws a picture — say, this one (Figure 15) — he is willing to talk about the land he knows so well. That land is all the picture shows, except for a thin blue sky, put in last, and a red-hot sun, which marks the end of a day. There are no people around, no buildings, no evidence of anything human. Or, in fact, is Lawrence there, somewhere — and his family, and his neighbors and his father’s bosses and just about everyone in the whole Mississippi Delta? Here is what Lawrence at various times said about that drawing and several others almost exactly like it, a “series” I suppose they could be called: “I guess I always draw the sam
e thing. Maybe you draw what you really know, what you know the best. I know this land best, because my daddy started me out from as far back as I can remember helping him do the chores; and he would tell me there’s one thing I’ll have to know all my life, as long as we stay here, and that’s what to do on the land we have to use. The bossman gives it to us, and it’s ours, and he doesn’t care what we do, so long as we raise what he wants and do it right and bring it all in; and then he takes care of everything, and tells us how we made out. Daddy says you can’t but pray, and no matter what happens, the bossman will say that we could have done better, but we can stay through and try again next year, and he’ll help us right through, like he always does, and we won’t be without food and we can stay where we are. My daddy says it could be worse for us than it is, and we owe what we have each day to the land; and my mother says we should be thanking God for the good land He gave us around — here in this county.