Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “We’re not niggers, though; I’ll tell you that. I feel sorry for them. They can’t read nor write, and as bad as it is for the white, it’s worse for the colored. Old man Williams, he has the colored working on his land, too — on the other side of the county. I hear they have it bad, real bad. My wife says they can’t be much worse off than we have it, but I reminded her — they’d be killed if they tried to step in the Donut Shoppe or our church or like that, and we’re not going to let one of them in our school, no matter what they try to do up there in Washington, D.C. Sonny Williams, he’s my age, born the same year, my mother told me, and he’s good and polite and respectful to all of us white men who work his daddy’s land; and I hear he hates the niggers and wants to drive them all up North. He says they just live for the next meal, and they’ve got no ambition in them. I don’t see how he can go and get rid of all his colored, though; not with all the land under cultivation. They’re still needed around here, yes sir — niggers are. But if they want to go up North, I’m in favor of it. I’d never leave here, but I could understand them leaving. Maybe if they went, there’d be more machines the old man Williams would have to buy, and I could learn to drive one, and he’d pay me. I guess he’d have to be real nice to the white, if more of the colored left.

  “Maybe Timmie will keep on going in school, and maybe he can get a job there in town, and he could live better. I always tell my children that they’re not me, nor their mother, and they can go and find a better life, maybe; and they’re not niggers, either — I tell them that. They should keep their eyes open, and there’s no telling what comes up, sometimes — I mean a job or a chance to make some money. I’m afraid I don’t see much of that — money.”

  He doesn’t see money at all for weeks at a time. Like black tenant farmers or sharecroppers, Tim’s father is part of a virtual barter economy. He seeds the black earth, cares for and harvests cotton and a variety of vegetables, and in exchange he gets a rather broken-down cabin (which has electricity but no running water and no heat except for what a coal stove provides) and a share of the profits, a share of what is sold to a nearby “wholesale produce company” — owned and run, it turns out, by the same family that lets Tim (for the boy at six already knows how to pick weeds and later picks the crops themselves) and his father work their “parcel” of land. Tim knows all of that, at age six knows who he is and who his father is and who the colored man is and who old man Williams is and who Sonny Williams is. Shyly, yet with obvious relish he draws a picture (Figure 19) of a great big hulk of a man, and tells me very explicitly what that man is like: “He’s the richest man I’ll ever see, my daddy says, unless I go a long way from here. He owns the county, just about, and into the next one, too — they say. Daddy says there could be worse, but sometimes he’ll change his mind and say no, there can’t be worse — not worse than old man Williams.

  Now Mr. Williams does indeed appear threatening and even grotesque when compared to Tim’s sketches of his dad (Figure 20) or those the boy did of a black “handyman” — which is what Tim and his father both choose to call a man who in fact does exactly what they do, work Alabama’s generous land for the very ungenerous old man Williams. Tim might be tempted to be as rich and powerful as Mr. Williams, but Tim at six has some ethical concern inside that literally childish and immature and undeveloped mind of his: “I don’t know. I’d like to be like old man Williams, but if I had all he does, I’d want to give some of it away. I mean, I could give some of it to my daddy, and I wouldn’t stop there, no. I’d go and give some to Mr. Howe and Mr. Gurney and Mr. Wallace and Mr. McKeon and — maybe everyone old man Williams has working for him. I’d go and give some to his niggers, too; yes, I would. He has those handymen, you know, and they help him and they are in the worst shape in the whole world, and if I had the money they have in the Williams family, I’d share it, that’s what I think.

  “Daddy says once you get money, you think different; you just want to hold on to what you have. But if you remember your own troubles, then you’ll be nicer to other people, that’s what he said in his sermon, the minister, and I would, if I became rich. My brother Richard, he says he would, too; and Daddy agreed. He said that the trouble is that Mr. Williams has never been poor a day in his life, and he’s never been without anything, so you can’t expect him to think as we do. Then my mother said maybe they should start rotating around the money, to more and more people, rather than one man and his family having it, and then there’d be more people with money, and some of them might be willing to go and give a little money to others, especially to the people who work so hard for practically nothing. Then we’d have a better state of Alabama than we do right now. My brother Richard must have told the teacher that — she’s Miss Wilson, and she’s got the fourth grade all to herself, yes she does — and she got real upset with him and said to him, ‘Richard, you’ve got some crazy ideas in your head and where did you get them?’ And my brother didn’t lay it on anyone, the blame. My mother said they’ll let us talk like that, because we’re in school, but not when we get to be a man or a woman — then there’d be the sheriff out after us, and the next thing we’d know, we’d be run out of the county and maybe the next one, too.”

  So, Tim’s view of the world turns out not to be so different from that of other children, who, though black, share much of Tim’s experience: with the land, with the bosses and their agents, with parents who feel hurt and used and put upon and cheated, yet also feel unable and afraid to do anything but submit and complain and grumble and fret and murmur and at times shout and cry and scream — all that to themselves or among others like themselves. In the end, however strong the protest, there seems no choice but, once again, to submit, to acquiesce, to go along and hope that somehow and in some way there will come an end to it — an end to the hard, mean toil, barely rewarded and performed for the gain of others. Tim’s father speaks, I believe, for this nation’s thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, men who keep on working and working, compliantly it seems, but feel worried and victimized and ill-used and, during bad moments, broken in mind and spirit: “I’m all right a lot of days. I just do the work that has to be done. There’ll be a day or two out of the month, though, that I get wondering too much about things, and I feel I’m slipping into trouble; yes, I do, I’ll admit it. I was born and brought up here, and before me there was my daddy and before him there was his daddy, and way back we go. We love Alabama, and I’d never leave, not for anything. I’m a Southerner, I guess you’d say. But there’s a lot of unfairness around here, and I don’t think it’s right. I’ll be plowing or picking and I’ll say to myself that it’s not right for some of us to have almost nothing, and there’ll be others who own everything there is to be owned. But you can’t think like that, because then you’re getting to be dangerous. That’s what the teachers will tell your kids when they go repeating you in school, and I guess the teachers are right, because they know a lot more than someone like me does, I’ll admit to that. But they’ve got their salaries, you know, and they live as good as anyone does here, except for Mr. Williams and his people that run things for him. I guess I run things for him, too — just like his foreman Mr. Graves says he does; only I get nothing and Graves gets his big fat check. It’s enough to break me up sometimes, but you can’t let that happen. You’ll become someone for the doctor then, and you don’t want that. So you go on and work the next mile of land, that’s what.”

  It is always there for them, Tim’s father and all the fathers like him, the next mile of land; and for Tim and all the children like him the land also figures prominently — in their words and thoughts and dreams and drawings and paintings. In contrast to migrant children, who also know the land and work on the land but see it as the cause of their confusing, irregular kind of life, sharecropper children view the fields and the crops as life’s one reliable element. When will it all end, migrant children ask in any number of implicit and explicit ways. At least we have the fields out there and what they br
ing us, sharecropper children feel and often enough even say. Migrant children know that the crops mean money, meager though the amount is, even as sharecropper children associate a harvest with a few if not many meals. On the other hand, the migrant child knows one farm will lead to another, and all of those farms mean, finally, the dazed and bewildered state of mind that goes with such living; whereas sharecropper children have roots — if nothing else, roots. The world may be unfair, the bossman stingy, the children themselves half starved, but at least there is that particular stretch of land out there, familiar and unchanging and yes, full of the miraculous fertility that children like poets can celebrate. The ten-year-old daughter of a Mississippi tenant farmer put what I am trying to say into words a few weeks before her family was to leave for Chicago: “Everyone says you should leave here, but I don’t want to. I know all the people around, and I know all the roads and the fields, and I told my daddy that when we get up there we won’t know anyone and it’ll be strange as can be up there, and we shouldn’t go. But he said we have to, and that’s that, and for me to stop bothering him and upsetting myself. But I think he’ll change his mind when we leave, and we’re far away, and then it’ll be too late, that’s what I think.”

  She does indeed know “the roads and the fields.” She knows the best spot to be cool and the best spot to see the sunrise and the best spot to see the sunset and the best spot to hide and watch rabbits or skunks and the best spot to hide and listen to them talking, the boss-man and the foreman and the assistant foreman — as they are walking along and laughing and kicking stones or smoking or chewing on a piece of grass and saying something like, “The nigger’s doing fine, ain’t he.” She knows where to find water and where to find a soft bed of pine needles and where to find pieces of old, abandoned machinery which are the best playthings she and her brothers have. She knows how “the irrigation” works and how the pesticides work and why the soil needs fertilizer. Put differently, she is informed about things agricultural, and she is protective about the land, her land psychologically if the bossman’s legally. Again the contrast has to be made with migrant children, who never really get to know a particular piece of property, but instead experience fields as places that offer a few days of work, but then must be left, and quickly, too.

  If migrant children and sharecropper children are alike in being poor and scorned and thoroughly ignored by the rest of us, childhood is different among, on the one hand, a white boy like Tim or the little black girl just quoted, and on the other hand, those migrant children described in the previous chapter. Sharecropper children experience hardships, but they are surrounded by things that give them a tangible refuge, however unpleasant and even stomach-turning some of those cabins can be. In Holmes County, Mississippi, a mother said what I am trying to say: “The kids know everything that goes on you know. Anytime I want to hear about something, I ask them. They sneak around and listen to people, and they’re always poking around outside. They’ll come in and tell me that the first leaf has turned, and we’ll be having cooler weather. They’ll come in and tell me that they’ve seen a little flower sticking its head up from the ground. They’ll come in and tell me that the water is beginning to run low or that way over on the other side of the place the crops need more weeding than we thought, or that we forgot to spray a corner of the land, and all like that. You can walk around here and you’ll see their marks on the trees and the rocks and you’ll see all the huts they’ve put up and torn down and the other things they’ve made with the branches and the grass and — well, they’ve walked over every inch of the farm, yes sir, and probably a million times, I’ll bet. If I had to know where the best worms are, I’d go ask them, just like their daddy does. They’ll tell you where the best fishing is, and the bossman, you know he takes along one of my kids every time he goes fishing. My boy says the bossman will say it right to him: ‘You little nigras, you sure know your fish.’ And he’ll give them a quarter, if there’s a good catch they get. If the fish aren’t so good, he’ll turn them over to my boy, and then we eat them up for supper, and they always taste good to us, I’ll say that.

  “If you drove in your car for miles around, my children could show you every bird’s nest there is here, and where they’re all living, the animals. They keep their eyes on the crops, too. The foreman will always ask them how is everything doing, just like he’ll ask me or my husband, and I do believe the children know better than we do. That’s why they hate to go over to that school. They’ll be sitting there all day, and the teacher will be pushing things on them, the letters and the numbers and like that, and she’ll call them the same things the white people do, just as bad, and they’ll come home and say they are dumb — for going over there and listening to her. They’ll tell me they’d rather go out and listen to the animals make noise and help their daddy, if they can, and keep themselves busy and not bother me, than go off there to school and be told all the time that the colored people are no good, and they’ll always be like that, because we’re working on the land and we’re so poor and we don’t know how to be clean with ourselves and behave the way we should. Sure enough, it’s not a life I’d like for my children, the kind I’ve had; but if we could make half a living — which we can’t, and that’s the trouble — then I wouldn’t be so sad about anything, and I’d never leave here. You know why? My kids wouldn’t let me. Even now they don’t want to go — except around mealtime, when I don’t give them all they want, because I haven’t got it to give, and then they’ll change their minds and start telling me we should leave here and go someplace else, where we won’t always be afraid there won’t be another thing to eat, and come the next time we’re supposed to eat, and come the next time after that — until we’re so weak we’ll never be able to leave here, and that would be the end of us, I guess.”

  It haunts them, the questions that pose the great alternative. Shall we stay or shall we leave? Shall we keep on fighting a terribly grim and losing battle, in the hope that at least the few years we live on this planet will be spent on familiar and friendly ground, however cold and unfriendly and worse the people are who own that ground, and all the other ground nearby and far away? Shall we, rather, gird ourselves and go — leave as others have left, fearfully, and with all sorts of hopes and expectations? The land restricts and denies. The land awaits and offers up things. The land is someone else’s to profit by, but ours to use. The land makes others rich and does little to keep us from extreme and unrelenting hardship. The land is everything we know. The land is, in a way, the source of all our misery. We will miss the land, miss it more than we can ever know — except that even here we do know how much our lives are tied to the rhythm of planting and growing and harvesting. We will leave and indeed forget the constant fear, the insults, the hopelessness; we will forget and start again up North, even as our ancestors did centuries ago, when, carried here in chains, they learned how to master the land and make it produce and produce — until white men became rich and proud and cultured and in the end died fighting to keep their land and keep us, their property.

  So it goes, I believe, in thousands of minds as men and women mull things over and try to decide whether to continue being sharecroppers and tenant farmers and field hands or whether to make what so often is a fearful and sad as well as a necessary and hopeful break with the past. Sometimes the decision hinges on the children, on how strongly attached they feel to what they already know, on how sick and hungry and tired they are — and in need of help they will never get “nearabouts,” as those rural counties are sometimes described. In any event, however the early lives of sharecropper and migrant children differ, one from the other, by the time the children described here and the children described in the previous chapter become eleven or twelve a common fate awaits them, a fate that distinctly overshadows all the differences I have just taken such pains to describe. I am talking about the swift decline of childhood, the abrupt beginning of a working and loving life — all in a matter of months. Then come the res
ponsibilities that go with hard toil and the presence of a woman to feed or a man to cook for and soon, very soon, the arrival of children. At twelve or thirteen, the light and tender moments begin to wane, the world begins to shrink and toughen. Then the wisdom and humor get curbed. Then a kind of battle is joined, and under such circumstances a lot has to be forgotten or taken for granted, rather than enjoyed: the pathways that lead nowhere and everywhere, the rocks hidden all over, the large holes in the ground that indicate rabbits are living nearby, the buttons on the scarecrow, all four of them loose and ready to fall at the slightest provocation, the soil with black ants and toads and caterpillars, and the soil with abundant worms swimming in it, the cool, dry, shaded, restful soil under a pine tree. “You live fast,” I often heard from young migrant couples, young migrant parents. Suddenly they were no longer children and all too much the burdened, troubled grown-ups their parents had always been. One can hear the same surprised, puzzled, disappointed remarks from young tenant farmers: “I don’t know; it seems yesterday I was just helping out, and now it’s all on me, life. My daddy said it was just in time because he fell down and he can’t move his left side much, and he came over, the bossman, and said I could take over, if I was planning to stay here, and even if my daddy hadn’t gone and fallen sick, I was working along with him, he noticed, and now that I had my woman and all, he thought he might give me a little to do, on top of what Daddy does — some more land to work — and besides that, I can help with driving the truck, if I can learn to tame it. And I can work over in his place where they sort the vegetables and pack them. They pay good there, but it’s only a few weeks from the year.