by Robert Coles
“I’m always asking my daddy something and he’s always giving me the right answer — about the land. He’ll do a lot of explaining to us while we take the wagon and go for the water. He’ll be telling us about how when he was a boy they didn’t have the motors and the engines, and the cotton was a lot harder to take in. Now we have other crops, and it’s hard with them, Daddy says, but not as bad as it used to be with the cotton; and we have good water for the land — the irrigation, you know. Daddy says he can remember when they came around from Washington or someplace up North and told us how to plant trees and keep the wind from blowing all the good land away, and the bossman’s daddy came over and explained everything to my grand-daddy and all the others, and my daddy was there. According to what you hear the white people say — the foreman and his helper and like that — we’ll be all right here and there’s still profits to make. I heard the foreman say in the store last winter that they still needed the niggers in Mississippi to work in the fields and help out with other work, and since a lot of colored people have gone, that’s better. But there still are a lot of the colored people here, and we’re going to stay for a long time, the foreman said, and we’ll help out with the planting and the caring for the crops and getting them in on time, you know. And if you don’t get them in real fast, everything is lost.
“My daddy says he’ll never leave here, but I don’t know if I’ll be here all my life. My mother says maybe I will and maybe I won’t, when I ask her. She says some go and some stay, and if a lot of us are up there and away, in the North, a lot of us are still here, where we’ve always been, and it’s bad all around, yes sir. If I could have anything I wanted — like you say — I wouldn’t know what I’d do. I’d sit down under that tree — it’s my favorite place to sit — and I’d try to decide, and then I’d ask everyone I could, and then I’d make a choice. Sometimes I’ll go to school, and the teacher will tell us to keep on wishing we’ll be big and rich someday, and the minister, he says some people, they’re just chosen by God to have a lot of money, and live real good. Maybe that’s what I wish: some money to have, so I could go and buy everything in the store — cans of food and a lot of candy and the curtains my mother has been hoping for, if we ever get the money. My daddy says the biggest time in the world would be if we could get some money and we could fix up where we live to be better, like they did with the church. The lady — she’s the bossman’s wife and Daddy says her folks own a real big place, a plantation, not far away — every time come Christmas, around then, just before Christmas it is, she’ll show up and give us a ham. She’ll do it for a lot of people. She used to have a chicken to bring us, my daddy says, and then she thought the hams in the tin can, they’re better, so we get them. I wouldn’t mind having them all the time, and maybe that’s what I should wish for, if I could get my wish come true. Last time, I can remember, she drove up and she told us here we are, a nice ham, and my mother said thank you, and my daddy and all of us, we had to say thank you, and she said we were real good, and she was glad to come by and wish us a merry Christmas, and she hoped we’d be going to church and praying, and my mother said yes, we would, that’s for sure, and she said that was real good, and as long as you pray, you’ll stay clear of trouble, and that’s the truth. Just before she went back into her car she asked my mother if everything was going fine, and my mother said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ it was, and she got in and drove off, but before that she said, ‘Good.’ I heard her. Afterwards, my mother said it was too bad she didn’t offer us some things, and we could have said yes. My mother said she hears they’re always throwing food away up there at the House, and throwing away clothes, and maybe there would be a few curtains they could give us. But Daddy said if they gave to us, there’s all the other tenants, and pretty soon they’d be in trouble with the other white folks for ‘pampering the niggers,’ that’s how they say it. I heard it said once myself in the store that time, like I told you.”
Lawrence shows no signs of being pampered. Like everyone else in his family he gets up at sunrise and goes to bed at sunset. There are no clocks to bother him and in general his sense of time has little to do with minutes and hours. He mostly works. He walks for several miles to a pond and fills up with water two buckets he has brought along, all before breakfast. While he is walking he relieves himself. He has never brushed his teeth in his life. There are no toothbrushes in his family’s cabin, nor toothpaste. There is one mirror there, a small one, used by Lawrence’s mother on Sunday when she “fixes up” herself and “really gets dressed.” Lawrence does not regularly wash himself. Sometimes he takes a bar of soap to the pond and washes his hands there. It is a small pond, a shallow pond, and he does not swim in it. I do not believe he should drink the pond’s water, but he does drink it; and so does everyone else in his family. For breakfast Lawrence has coffee or Coke and grits, prepared by his mother who is also up at dawn. He has never in his life had bacon and eggs for breakfast; when there are eggs, usually on holidays, they are for dinner, which is the midday meal, and the main one. Usually dinner consists of a glass of Kool-Aid (first) followed by bread spread with margarine, grits again, some greens, and by no means always, a pork chop — or more likely fatback or “streak-meat,” which are both more fat than anything else. (The “streak-meat,” like the “streak-o-lean” I have noticed particularly among migrants is exactly what the name implies: a hunk of fat streaked occasionally by meat.)
Then comes work for Lawrence, or on relatively rare days, school. There is planting to be done, or chores up where the cattle are. There is fishing, which means food for dinner. There are crops to take in. On school days there are shoes to put on, and the good clothes, which are also worn on Sundays by Lawrence or his brothers, who may be of different ages and sizes, but manage to share clothes without embarrassment or difficulty. I have never seen them talk or act as if something doesn’t fit, and their mother hasn’t either. Actually, Lawrence’s mother keeps her eyes on her children and would certainly know what they do or say, though not very much conversation goes on in the cabin each morning. It is mostly quiet: “A lot of the time it’s hot, you know, or it’s cold here in the winter; and when the weather doesn’t favor you, there’s no reason why you should make it worse by talking a lot — that’s what I tell my family. My husband, he’s not one for talking, anyhow. He just gets up and tries to forget his aches and pains by going to work. Most of the time he’ll miss his breakfast, yes sir, and that gives more for the children; and I do the same. With Lawrence, we don’t have much to worry about. He’s not as sickly as Ronald, and he’ll do almost anything we ask. I don’t have to say a word to him, you know. I’ll catch myself thinking of something and he’ll pick up what’s in my mind and go do it, and there’s never a word spoken between us. Yes, maybe it is in my eyes, that he’ll see something. I don’t know. Lawrence is a good boy. I only hope he stays good. It gets harder to be good the older you get, that’s what I believe. Right now Lawrence is below ten, and he helps us out. Soon he’ll be over ten, and getting to be grown up, and he’ll be asking all those questions, and I’ll be quiet like always, but it won’t be because there’s no reason to say anything. It’ll be because I won’t know what to say — because, you know, they’ll ask you things, like why should they stay here, and that kind of question, and the best thing is to keep your peace and hope they hear from others that if you go and leave for the North there’ll be trouble for you up there.”
The silence in the cabin occasionally gets interrupted early in the morning. Birds start their talk and seem to be ignored by Lawrence and everyone else in his family. A few miles away a big truck or two can be heard passing, though the road is no major one and few automobiles use it. Families like Lawrence’s make up most of the people nearby, and they don’t own cars. Eventually the foreman and one of his assistants arrive; the point, of course, is to see how everything is going. Lawrence, like his father, says little to them, but knows why they have come and what he must do: “Daddy told me when I was littl
e to go call him when they came — when it’s the bossman himself or the people who work for him, like the foreman. Now I don’t go running for him, because Daddy can hear their car, he says. They used to ride up on a horse. They’ll just ask if we’re taking care of everything, and I’ll say, ‘Yes, sir, we are, as best we can.’ Then they’ll look around and drive off. Daddy says he’s not sure how they’ve got the plantation divided up — and how many of us are working the land for them, but it’s big, this plantation. The teacher, she said it’s ‘real big,’ and she said she doesn’t like to tell stories, so it’s true what she says. I heard her tell my mother that the sun could rise and fall on all the land on the plantation, and you would still have land left over.”
Lawrence is quite aware of the sun; indeed, it enables him to keep time. He watches the sun every hour or so, and he makes predictions about the weather by judging the sun’s heat, its intensity, its degree of control over the sky. Somehow he seems to know whether an early morning haze or the clouds of breakfast time will be burned away or remain; and his description can be a military one: “The sun wins a lot, but sometimes it just can’t. The clouds, they’re just too strong, I guess. The sun will go after them, but no use. Other days, you can tell that nothing is going to get in the way of that Mr. Sun for too long, no sir. Even the night before you can tell those days, because the sun, he’ll go down real slow-like, and he’s as red as can be; then he’ll settle over there on to the other side of the plantation, and it’ll be light so long that you know there can’t be a cloud the next day, not one cloud in the whole sky.”
Lawrence liked to draw the sun for me, and the moon, too. Both of them have a magic for him, the sun because it makes everything grow and the moon because it stands out so prominently in the otherwise rather dark sky. Millions of men, women, and children have felt the same way about both of those celestial bodies, but I doubt whether many American children who live in the suburbs or the cities spend much time thinking about the sun or the moon. A child like Lawrence lives by the sun in the day and the moon at night; that is, he is helped to tell time, figure out what he should be doing and where, and yes, he is helped psychologically, too.
***
Another child I have come to know, the nine-year-old daughter of a tenant farmer in Jones County, North Carolina, talks even more than Lawrence about the sky, the moon, the stars, the sun. Like him, she is moved constantly to draw all of them, so removed in space yet so close to her life. Jeannette is the girl’s name; and a smart, winning child she is, full of imagination and wonder and humor — but also confusion and gloom. I had to spend more time than usual with her before I found out a little of what her almost frozen appearance managed to conceal. Eventually I had to face the fact that a girl I initially considered distinctly retarded turned out to be perhaps the brightest of all the so-called stranded children I am now trying to describe — children whose fathers, like Jeannette’s, still work as sharecroppers or tenant farmers or field hands.
For months Jeannette seemed not only quieter than others in her family, but I have to confess, a little odd. She had a habit of moving near me as I entered the cabin — it can tactfully be called an extremely fragile and vulnerable building, lacking in the appointments Americans usually take for granted. Like a fly or mosquito, I once thought, she would draw close, breathe just hard enough to make a little noise, then withdraw to a distant corner of that one room which eight human beings call “home.” Her eyes never stop staring at the visitor. While other eyes, her mother’s, say, or those that belong to her sisters or brother or father usually looked down or up or in any direction that amounted to away, Jeannette’s eyes held fast. Perhaps it was my own nervousness that made me pin words like “retarded” or “inappropriate” or “eccentric” on a girl’s open and direct curiosity. In any event, I gradually began to appreciate Jeannette’s perceptiveness and the intensity as well as generosity of her mind. She missed little and gave “life” and “nature” the very definite benefit of the doubt. “I know it’s not so good for us,” she once declared, “but there’s never a day I don’t see something I like.”
Perhaps she is naïve — a child and so childlike. Perhaps “underneath” she is more in despair than she knows or can admit. Perhaps she will soon change her mind, lose what older people like me call her innocence, her exceptionally trusting or confident nature. Yet, I doubt it. After a while one sees how, in the face of great difficulties and recurrent fits of discouragement, a “trait” like Jeannette’s optimism has its roots in a long tradition. For example, Jeannette’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, is the one who inspires the child’s spirit of enthusiasm, her sense of expectation about the world. Jeannette’s mother, however, is tired and often despondent; like me, I suppose, she finds Jeannette a little unnerving. She once tried to bring alive the child’s special qualities: “She’s a strange child, my Jeannette is; and I don’t know why. I had trouble bearing her, but that’s been the case with all my children. She was strong most of the time when she was little, and she was always wanting to eat more and more and more. You have to stop them. You have to tell them you just don’t have anything more for them to eat, even if they’re as hungry as can be. With Jeannette, I’ll say this about her, she was always wondering why — why this and why that. All your kids will do that, but she was worse than the rest of them, yes she was. She’d point to everything and ask me how it all came and from where, and I’d tell her to stop and she didn’t. Instead she’d go over to my mother and start talking with her, and my mother was over there on the bed, lying there sick, and she’d try to answer the child, but no one could, I don’t believe, with all the learning in the world.
“If you ask me, my mother fell to listening to Jeannette and going along with her. Jeannette would tell her that God was up there in the sun, looking down on us and making the grass grow, and in the night He is in the moon, so we won’t be without Him, and my mother would say, ‘Yes, child,’ and ‘You’re right, child,’ and there wasn’t a thing I could say to change their minds, either of them. By now we just know that Jeannette is Jeannette, and she doesn’t go to school all the time, but when she does she’s good, the teachers say, real good, and why doesn’t she come there more, they ask, but they know the answer, I know they do. I haven’t clothes for all of them at the same time. And Jeannette isn’t that interested in school, because she says she looks around and she sees things, and she learns that way. I guess I see what she means, though I doubt there is much you can see that’ll teach you any more than you know already. But you can go ask Jeannette, and she’ll one day talk your ear off. She’s got a whole lot to say, that girl; I only tell her that me and her daddy and other people, they can’t sit and listen all day, not with the chores you have from the first thing you get up to the last second before you fall into bed, and you’re as tired as can be, and you’re asleep before you know it.”
Jeannette has done what her mother predicted, talked and talked with me and asked questions and gladly done drawings and paintings. Her landscapes are her pride, full of trees and flowers. She loves to start with the sky, then come down toward the earth, through trees that are drawn from their top branches first, followed by a sturdy trunk and at last the roots. Most children I know, regardless of race, class, family background or region, begin such drawings the other way around, from the ground on up, with the blue sky and the sun commonly a near afterthought. Eventually, after two pictures were done during the same visit, one with crayons and one with paints, one a daytime scene and one set in the evening (Figure 16), I felt able to ask Jeannette why she liked to start things up in the sky and work downward. That question marked the beginning of a certain frankness she and I shared with one another, one of the most important, instructive and above all touching experiences I’ve ever had with any child, any human being anywhere. As I get ready to set forth some of the highlights of Jeannette’s remarks, made to me over a period of many months, I wonder how any words can quite convey the liveliness in her, not
(I must say) easily visible in her face, but in her voice itself. Perhaps the best word is vibrant; Jeannette has a vibrant personality, which her voice especially gets across to people.
Jeannette’s suns and moons are also particularly alive — full, as a matter of fact, of her own animated self. Certainly she means those suns and moons to be something awesome: “The sun, it’s hot, but it’s real good. I’ll be going outside in the morning and I’ll wave to the sun and I’ll be glad when he comes to visit us, because if he didn’t we’d be in trouble. There wouldn’t be the crops, and we’d have no place to live; they’d tell us to leave, and Daddy says we’d probably go to Washington, up there, but he doesn’t want for us to go there or anyplace else. I don’t like the days when there will only be the clouds all day long. I like it when the sun will break through and start shining down on us, but I like it best of all when there’s not a cloud in the sky, and just the sun, and you feel real warm because you’re right under it, and you sure know.
“I don’t know why I start with the sun up there. I like the colors blue and yellow; maybe that’s why. I like to look up at the sky. Grandma says it’s where we’re all going — sooner or later, she says. If you look at the clouds, you can see they look like people a lot of the time. Sometimes there’ll be no clouds; maybe that’s when the Lord God has called everyone together and they’re out of sight, far away from us, maybe right in the sun. I know it must be really hot there, in the sun, but it doesn’t matter when you’re dead. Then all that matters is whether the Lord is smiling on you or frowning on you. With the moon it’s different. You don’t want it so dark that there’s no light to see by, and the moon carries you through the night, most nights, if you get scared; that’s what Grandma told me and she’s right. She said if I wake up and I get to shaking and I’m real scared, then go quietly to the door and find the moon and she’ll smile on you and everything will be fine. But if the moon isn’t there, don’t worry either; because it’ll be back real soon, and it’s never away for more than a few days. Then try to find a good star, and if you can’t because of the clouds, then go wake Grandma — but I’ve never done that.