Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “When I get big I’d like to go on one of those big airplanes you see passing over. Grandma said they don’t reach the top of the sky, just part of the way. She doesn’t know where they’re going, just to some cities, she thinks, but which ones you can’t tell. The first time I thought they might be some bird, but I don’t know what the name would be. Then when I went to school the teacher said maybe I was thinking of an eagle when I saw the airplane. She said she was going to write a letter to some people, the ones that own the plane and fly it, and ask them for a picture postcard — I guess it will show what you’d find it like if you went and got in and went right along with the plane through the sky. Once I was up a tree and I thought I’d try to be a plane, and I did, but I fell down. No, I didn’t hurt myself. I just kept on wishing I didn’t fall. I wished I was still up there, flying and flying, flying way high and away.

  “Grandma told me that the only way for us folks is to go up. If you go sideways, you just end up in another county, and it’s no different. If you go down, you’re on your way to Hell, like Mr. Sam Pierce, the reverend says. He says you have to lower everybody into the ground after they die, but you should really pray that they never go lower than the hole that’s been dug, because then they’re really headed for trouble. Way down in the middle of the ground, there’s no sun you can see, nor the moon; that’s what I hear. It’s no good. Grandma will say sometimes that it’s just as bad up here in Jones County as down underground, but I can’t go along with her on that. Like you hear in church: you mustn’t go along and give up and look on only the wrong side of things. If the sun comes up in the morning, it means you have the day coming around the turn, and you can be glad.”

  Yes, she can get a little maudlin, a little rhetorical; and at nine she is clearly not inventing a great and original vision of things. Yet, Jeannette’s world — at least the one outside her mind — is a terribly harsh and bare one, which she is earnestly trying to find at least passably comprehensible. In her own family, in other families a few miles this or that way, one can meet children who are not making the kind of effort Jeannette demonstrates. Her sister, the one nearest in age to her, wonders why Jeannette “troubles” about so much: “I’m older by a year, I believe, and I never have worried like Jeannette. She troubles herself, and she goes to Grandma, and they’ll get talking, and we don’t know what keeps them together so long. Once my momma said she thinks there’s a ghost or something that got stuck in Jeannette, and it makes her do a lot of the talking she does; and she’s always asking about something, too. She’ll wake up and want you to go looking out there, and when she’ll hear a noise she’ll know what it is, which of the animals. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I guess I’d rather be back to sleep. I’ll wake and hear her talking in her sleep; but Grandma says we all talk in the middle of the night, only we don’t know it. But I’ll bet Jeannette talks more than I do.”

  Jeannette does indeed talk more than her older sister or her younger ones. She also thinks more about the next few years of life than they do. She has thoughts and wishes and daydreams about those years, even as she spends a lot of time playing in the fields or the woods and helping her mother get the younger children into the house in order to eat or go to bed. She imagines herself living somewhere else, living a life thoroughly different from the one she knows she will actually have. Here is how her mind wonders and wanders and hopes and then gives up hoping and in a flash of bitter irony, a child’s kind of “black humor,” yields to what psychiatrists call “reality”: “I’ll be walking sometimes and I say something to myself. I say that maybe one day later on I’ll be far away from here, and I’ll be a singer or I’ll have a job on the radio or the television, and I’ll live nice, as nice as you’d like to. I could bring everyone in my whole family to live near me, and they wouldn’t always be thinking there’s no next meal, and they wouldn’t be scared all the time of the bossman and his people; and all of us, we’d be happy, like my grandma says God meant for us to be.

  “If I had a good job, and I liked it, I’d have clothes and shoes, so I’d never hurt my feet walking, and they wouldn’t get hot and burned, you know, in the summer. I’d have a room and it would be like you see in the stores when you go into New Bern: there would be the rugs and the television and a big mirror and you could see yourself, and anytime you wanted to find out how you are looking, you could just go over and there you’d be, right before yourself, and you could fix yourself up and be real nice. You know what I’d like a lot, too? I’d like a plant and some flowers, like the teacher, Miss Johnson, has on her desk; and I’d like to have a car, and then I’d learn how to drive it, and I could get inside and start the motor and wherever I’d want to go, I could get there, pretty soon. The other thing I could do would be find me someone who could fix my leg, so it doesn’t hurt, and fix my teeth, because they’re bad, and I’ll wake up in the night, and the tooth will really be giving me a lot of pain. I’d drive from town to town until I met a nice man, a doctor, and he’d give me medicines for all the troubles.

  “If I was feeling real good, and if I still could keep on wishing things, then I’d ask how you get to go onto those planes, and I’d go. You can fly all around to everywhere, the teacher said, and I sure would. Before long I’d be seeing the whole world, all the places and the cities, and somewhere there’d be a lot of water and somewhere deserts and no rain. Then I’d come home and I’d tell my sisters and everyone what I saw and how you can do things — if you’re not here and instead you’re away, and if you’ve got some money, you know, and if there’s no bossman pushing on you, and there aren’t a lot of people around, telling you to do what they say”

  Who are “they,” the oppressors? Are they white only, or only certain whites? Is there any hope right there in North Carolina or in other such states, or must girls like Jeannette go far away if they are to live even half comfortably, and even a little without aches and pain? One thinks about such matters as a Jeannette talks, and sooner or later she provides an answer: “Maybe we could stay here and I could have my house and I would be in a real nice place, but I don’t think the white people will let us — let us live so it’s real good for us. My daddy says it’s the colored people, too; they’ll sit on top of one another, and some will take a lot of money from the white man, so they can boss us around worse than the white man does himself. I think if you’re going to find something better — I mean, a good house and some money — then like you hear, you’ve got to leave here. The trouble is, most of the time they’ll tell you that after you go away you don’t find much that’s good, so you might just as well stay, until you know where to go. My grandma says I’ll probably be here all my life, like her, and maybe she’s right.

  “You know what? You know what I’d like to be, if I’m going to be in Jones County all my life? I’d like to be a scarecrow. Yes sir, if I got to be a scarecrow, I’d have the easiest life. I’d just be standing there, and they wouldn’t be pushing on me, like they do, and calling me bad names, whispering them, in the store, when I go there. The lady, she said I was an ‘uppity little nigger,’ I heard her, because of how I look, how I carry my head, or something. I was outside, and she didn’t know and she couldn’t see me, and I listened to her talking, and I listened until I heard what she said, the whole of it, and then I went away as fast as I could, and she didn’t know I was there. If I was a scarecrow, then maybe I could scare all those white people away; if they said something bad, I could be there and they’d want to run. The only thing is, I’d like to be alive and to fly, not just be standing there you know, like scarecrows do. I could be there in the field for some of the time and keep the birds away, but I could be a bird myself and fly around, all over. But I’d always come back here, because my grandma says they don’t like blackbirds in the city.”

  She drew a picture of a scarecrow for me one afternoon and then added those birds a scarecrow is supposed to keep away — blackbirds among others (Figure 17). All her birds were blackbirds, and so I asked her
whether other birds threaten the crops, too. Yes, they do; but mostly it’s the blackbirds. Then she added the reason: “They’re hungry, and they don’t get much to eat, and they have to try. You can’t blame them. A long time ago, I recall, my daddy was fixing the scarecrow, so it would stand straight and keep up and not fall down, and he said he feels bad for the birds, for the blackbirds, because all they’re trying to do is get the same thing as we are — food; and it’s too bad, but if the birds get all they want, then we’ll be on the losing side, and so they have to be scared away, or else we’ll starve to death ourselves.”

  Jeannette’s drawing of the scarecrow meant a lot to her. Months later she would mention the drawing, ask me if I still had it, ask me whether anyone else had ever drawn a scarecrow for me. I said no, she was the only one, though other parts of the drawing — the sky and sun and earth and blackbirds — had been done at one time or another by a good number of children I have known. She could understand that. She was glad, though, that she alone had thought to draw a scarecrow. When she was a very little girl she had seen a scarecrow and asked her father whether it talked, and if so, to whom. Well, of course, her father had told her that scarecrows don’t talk, though she doubted him at the time and in a way she still does. Oh, she knows in her mind that they don’t, the scarecrows of Jones County and all the others, all over America; but she would like for them to have a say about various matters and through her (perhaps it can be put like that) they do have a say — those lonely, ragged, and forlorn things who themselves look scared, who appear more frightened than the birds that fly by and only occasionally ignore the surrounding crops.

  “It’s talking, the scarecrow,” jeannette told me when I asked the same old question I had asked her so many times: is there anything happening there, in the place you’ve just drawn? Some children don’t like to be bothered with that kind of prodding. They know the inquiry for what it is, an effort to get them to talk about what they have put into a picture, and by doing so reveal a bit of what is on the very young artist’s mind. In contrast, Jeannette has never needed much encouragement to set her imagination afire; indeed she welcomes questions — the more the better, it seems. She likes to tell stories. I believe that she was almost waiting for me to be intrigued with her scarecrow. Within seconds of my question she was off running with a story, a reporter’s account it almost was: “The scarecrow likes to talk. He talks to the corn and the trees and he talks real loud when the wind comes and blows right through him and shakes him; and then all the birds fly away as fast as they can. A lot of the time the scarecrow wishes there’d be other scarecrows around, and then they could all talk together and have themselves a good time. But there aren’t the other scarecrows, so this one talks to himself, and he sings a lot, and that way he doesn’t feel too bad. A lot of the time he’s hungry, but he doesn’t eat the corn, because he’s not supposed to. I don’t know how he eats. Maybe he doesn’t have to. Everyone has to eat, though. Don’t they?”

  Jeannette doesn’t eat too well. Nor do many, many other children like her. I still find myself surprised and dismayed by a child’s drawing in which there is a table but no food, or a plate but no food, a bowl but no food. Unlike other boys and girls, sharecropper children do not draw strong kitchen tables or dining room tables, bedecked with flowers and dishes and fruit and vegetables. Sharecropper children don’t supply colorful tablecloths and vases and tall glasses with straws inside, and they don’t paint or sketch a refrigerator nearby, full of good things to eat, or a stove where all of that is being prepared. When a sharecropper boy draws a home, it is small and inconsequential in appearance, a mere spot on the thick, powerful earth, and all too faithfully his home. When a sharecropper girl draws a kitchen at mealtime or any other moment of the day it is her kitchen and none other (Figure 18).

  A boy of eight who lives in McCormick County, South Carolina, drew the home, and a girl of seven who lives in Holmes County, Mississippi, drew the kitchen — which means in this case the entire house, all of its one room. The boy knew what he was doing, and so did the girl. The boy had this to say: “It’s what we have. It’s not the best place in the world to live, my mother says so, and if we looked far enough, we might find a better place, but it’s ours, and so long as we’re here, there’s no reason to leave, because before we’d be long on the road, looking for something better, we’d probably get put in jail or get real bad sick, and there’d be no one to help us. Our place — you know, my daddy says he thinks it was built by slaves. All the houses around here, they were all built by the slaves. The Mister, his family has owned most of the county, a lot of it, since before we were freed, the colored; and afterwards, we stayed here, and if it hadn’t been for them, the Mister and his family, we’d all have had no place to be, and Lord knows, my mother says, if any of us would be alive today. My brother — he’s a couple of years older than me — thinks he could build us a better place than this one, but it’s not our land, and we’re lucky to have what we have. The Mister says we’re doing good work with the crops, and we can stay here, and if he can help us during the winter, he will. He lets us charge up the groceries, and then when the crops are in he deducts. Last winter it was so cold my daddy said we might as well be up North. The Mister came over and went from place to place, and he said if we needed paper to fill in the cracks we could come over and get the paper, and he would get some more if it ran out; and he told us to sleep right close to the stove, but we knew how to, anyway.”

  The girl had this to say: “I did my best to make it look good, the table we have. I can’t draw good, but I can draw some things better than others. My favorite is to draw a dress, the one that was sent down for us, my sister and me, from Toledo — no sir, I don’t know where Toledo is, except that it’s far, far off and my aunt is there, and my cousins, too. They all used to live here, you know, and they left. We got the table from them. They took it and brought it here; the day before they left, they did. No, we didn’t have our own before then. We had the bed, and we’d eat there. It was better sitting on the bed, but now that we have the table and the two chairs there, we use them sometimes. We put things on the table, the pot with the soup or the grits, and we get our servings from the table, and Daddy will sit there on the chair and rest himself. He says he doesn’t want to go to bed just as soon as the sun goes down, and he gets a good rest on the chair. That’s why we’re glad to have the table and the chairs. Now I have a good dress I can use for church, thanks to our aunt. Daddy says he doesn’t think he’ll go up to Toledo, though. You have to get a car, and a car can break down, and then you’re lost as can be. My aunt saved the fare for a long time and took the bus, but it was because her husband died that they let her go, the bossman did. He said they couldn’t be of use to him anymore, so they should leave when they could, but he wouldn’t push on them for when. Then my aunt collected on the insurance. It was supposed to be five hundred dollars, the man told her a long time ago, but he came and gave her two hundred. He said the value of insurance policies was going down, and there wasn’t anything he could do. My aunt said he must be the richest nigger in America, from all the insurance he collects every time someone dies. He has a big car and it’s got the air-cool in it. He keeps the windows closed all the time. My daddy says he comes by all the houses, and like he did with my uncle before he passed, he collects a quarter from you a couple of times in the month. Then, if you die he brings your wife the cash, but not what he told you. He brings something, though, so at least my aunt and my cousins had their bus fare.”

  In Washington County, Alabama, some white children could tell that black girl how mean and devious white insurance agents and bossmen can be — to the families of white tenant farmers, who by no means are a numerical match for their black counterparts, but who still exist (and suffer terribly) in parts of the South. Tim is six years old. He is thin and tall for his age. He has hazel eyes and light brown hair. He is far from an open, affable boy, but over the years he gets more and more talkative. His schoolteac
her thinks he “may be a little smarter than some like him.” What does she mean by that? She, too, doesn’t talk very much at first, but eventually she lets me know that she simply assumed that I was aware, as she is, that Alabama has its “poor white people” and “they’re low on intelligence, a lot of them.” Not that she is prejudiced against her own people; and not that she would ever want to use seriously that term “poor white trash”; and not that she doesn’t fully understand why things are as they are: “I know why a boy like Tim doesn’t take to school and never will. They’re dirt poor, and they have no education, his parents, and they live off of Mr. Williams’s land. They work it, and they give him a share of what they make and they keep the rest for themselves. It’s pitiful, if you ask me — how they live.”

  I do not believe the word “pitiful” quite describes Tim and his family. They are poor, as “dirt poor” as can be, which they say themselves. They lack good food and decent shelter. They see little that is promising “up ahead,” in the years to come. White though they are, there is little reason for them to be grateful for Alabama’s agricultural economy, all of which Tim’s parents know. So, while we talked about Tim, his father could interrupt this way: “Tim hasn’t got a great future, any more than I did. In every county of this state you’ll find your rich men, and the few that do well by serving them. I mean, they’ll hire their foremen and they’ll have their lawyers and the men who do the insuring and the county agents, the agricultural agents, and the sheriff — they all work for Mr. Williams, you know, one way or the other they do, just like me. The only difference is that I really work for him, from the first of the sunlight to the last; the rest, they’ll be in the town, in the Donut Shoppe there, sitting and figuring how they can get some more money out of old man Williams and his boy, Sonny Williams. Tim asked me the other day why I didn’t have a job like that, with a necktie and a big new car, and I told him there’s the rich and the poor in this county, and only a few in-between, and most of us, we’re just poor.