Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Billy’s father has been out of Logan County, has even lived in Beckley, West Virginia, which the teacher has told Billy is in Raleigh County. His mother, like him, has never left Logan County; and she can remember each time in her life she’s left the creek and gone more than the few miles it takes to go to church or shop. Billy knows how far his ancestors traveled to get to Logan County — and not because his teacher emphasized subjects like history. The ballads and songs he has heard since he was a baby remind every listener how hard it once was to penetrate those mountains, survive those winters, stick fast and work upon those small plots of land. If Billy went to Ohio like his cousin Steve, or to Pennsylvania, he might forget those songs, and that would be a shame, or as he put it, “no good.” On the other hand, he does want to look at the outside world. Right now Rocky Creek is the whole world for him, but he knows there are other worlds. His teacher keeps talking about those worlds and sometimes his father does, too. Billy once asked his teacher where she had been, and she listed the cities for the class: Charleston and Morgantown and Pittsburgh and Beckley and over to Washington, D.C. Billy remembers those, and remembers that there were others, though he forgets the names. Billy also remembers what the teacher said after she enumerated the cities. She told the class it wouldn’t be a bad idea if they as a class went over to a city like Washington, D.C., and looked around and saw buildings and monuments and statues and all sorts of things like that. Billy feels she was pushing Washington, D.C., too hard on him and his class. West Virginia is a better place than Washington, D.C., he is sure of that.

  For the very reason that Presidents have lived and continue to live in Washington, Billy would be less rather than more impressed with the city, if he ever got there and had a chance to look around. Why? Well, because Presidents must be like those people he hears the men of the creek talking about, the county officials and people like that; they’re all quite rich and they’re all quite crooked. There are a few good people over there in Logan, the capital of Logan County, Billy knows that, and in fact there have been a few good Presidents, “especially John Kennedy.” Yet, on the whole it is the same old story: the rich take away from the poor; the mine owners plunder the land and cheat the people; the sheriffs and people like that push around ordinary people and take their orders from a few, a very few, who really run things. Billy has heard all that many times but he wanted me to know that he wasn’t simply mouthing things because he had heard them declared by others. How did Billy let me know that he also had been thinking about some of those things? He did so delicately and discreetly and a little indirectly but also by shifting — rather as many of us do in such moments — to a “larger” or more “general” kind of discussion or analysis: “Ben and I — he’s my best friend — decided that one day when we’re big we’ll go to every city our fathers or our mothers or anyone we know have been to; and then we can see what they’re like, and if they’re better or worse than what you hear people say. We decided we’d include all the states Mrs. Scott says she’s traveled through, and especially Washington, D.C., which she keeps on telling us about in school. I’d like to go in the Army when I get big, and maybe that would be the time. Ben says he’d like to join the Navy, because we’ve neither of us seen the ocean, except on television, and in the pictures of Mrs. Scott’s books. If we became sailors on a ship, we’d go all around the world and then when we got back here to Rocky Creek we’d be able to tell everyone what we saw and if they’d ask us whether there’s any better part of the world, we’d say no, nowhere.

  “If we joined the Army or the Navy we’d see a lot of people, and they’d be different from us, I know that. Mrs. Scott says we came here first, the people in West Virginia, the people in the mountains here, and then came people from the other countries — from France and like that, or Italy, she said. We don’t see them here, but they’re in Washington, D.C. I guess, and a lot of the colored people, you’ll find them there, Mrs. Scott says. I’ve never seen people like that in my life, but if I did, I wouldn’t act surprised. I’d just try to say hello and ask them what they wanted. Sometimes people pass through here, and they come to the beginning of the creek, just off the road there, and they’ll want to sell you something, or they’ll be checking up on you for the county, to see if you’re hiding something they want, that’s what my father will say is the reason they come. Last year the sheriff came and he said we were hiding corn liquor, that’s what he kept saying, and everyone laughed and told him to go and search the place up and down and every way he wanted and see if he could find it. He didn’t find a thing, because it was buried yonder near that tree, and how could he find it, even if he took himself a whole year to go and try.

  “I like to see people that I’ve never seen before. They’re people who are not like us; and you can tell they don’t live near here, because they’ll have on suits and hats, and they’ll talk different; yes, even if they come from over in Logan they talk different. The best thing to do is keep quiet and ask them what their business is here and why do they want to come up the creek. If they’re looking for trouble they’ll soon find out they’re wasting their time, but you should be polite and ask them their intention, and it’s only if they don’t give you a straight answer that you should go and get the gun and let them see they’d better be careful. I told Ben I wouldn’t mind working for the county, Logan County, just for a year or two; then I could get those boots that the sheriff has, and his hat and badge and the pistols — he must have three or four — and the belt and bullets. He’s got a car with a red light on it that goes around and around, and he can make more noise with that car than you can imagine. He’s on the side of the strip miners. My daddy says so; and all you have to do is listen to him and you can tell. Mrs. Scott had him come in one time and tell us we should mind the law and not get fresh, because it doesn’t pay, except if you want to end up in his jail over there in Logan. She asked if any of us had questions to ask him, and one of the bigger kids, Larry, raised his hand and asked if he was working for everyone in the county, equal, or if he got his salary from the people who had all the money. Then Mrs. Scott told Larry to stop with that talk, and he was just like his father, and he was always spouting off, Larry’s father.

  “The sheriff laughed and said he didn’t mind answering; and he was working for everyone in Logan County, that’s how he saw it, and the best people in the county, he believes, are the people who run the school, because you need the schools if you’re going to learn what you should, and if there’s grown people ready to spend their lives making sure Logan County has the right kind of schools and teachers, then they’re the best people in the world. He was getting red, his face was, the more he talked, and I could see he maybe wasn’t sure of what he said — whether he believed it himself, I mean. You can tell when someone is having trouble persuading you and persuading himself, and maybe that’s why he’s talking in the first place, to make sure he believes what he says. My daddy says it’s not so hard to spot bad people, if you remember to keep your eyes open and your ears. I told Ben I didn’t think the sheriff was bad, no; he just does what he’s told.

  “Afterwards, when he left, Mrs. Scott got real mad at Larry — and she said that people blame the wrong men, the sheriff and the school people, when they’re only doing the best they know how, and the trouble lies elsewhere, that’s what she kept repeating to us. Then I raised my hand and asked her where that was, ‘elsewhere.’ She got red like the sheriff, and said we’re not in school to go blaming everyone on the whole earth, and that was up to God, and we’d better make sure we study our lessons, so there’d be no one blaming us. I had on my tongue to ask her if maybe it was Washington, D.C., where all the trouble came from and the crooks and thieves, but she was looking real wild at us, and more me than Ben or the others, and I thought I’d better not say anything for the rest of the day, and I didn’t. Afterwards, Larry came up to me and he said I should be promoted ahead of him in the school for saying what I did; and he laughed and said I should even be ahe
ad of that — I should be the teacher, and teach her, Mrs. Scott. Larry said the crooks and thieves came from Logan and from Charleston, where the capital of West Virginia is, and out beyond, too — like in Washington, D.C. When I came home and told what happened while we were eating supper, my mother and father laughed themselves so much they said I ruined their supper, but they told me it was worth it.

  “I’d like to go see for myself when I get bigger, like I said; I mean, I could go and see what people are like in the cities, over there in Logan. I could get a car, if I went into the Army or the Navy and saved up my money like Steve did. I could drive through, and like Mrs. Scott says, you learn that way, just like from reading the books she has for us. If I could choose, like you say, I think I’d do the traveling and then I’d come back here, and I’d try to work in a store, maybe; that way I’d get some more money, and you see a lot of people in the store, and there’s food they have, and they’ll give you a good meal, I hear say, if you work for them real faithful, like they need you to do. Then after I’d saved a lot, I’d come back here; yes, I sure would, and by then I’d never want to leave the creek again, and neither would Ben or anyone, once they’ve gone out and looked around. Steve says you have to look around to know what you’ve got that’s so good, and it’s right before your eyes. My daddy says that’s only half true; he says we’ve got a lot good here, but there’s a lot we don’t have, and it damn well should be that we have some money around here for the men who hurt themselves in the mines. That’s what he always says if you tell him there’s no place better than Rocky Creek.”

  Billy’s Rocky Creek is a scene he can draw and draw and sometimes paint, too — though he is not usually one for paints because they are messy and he also finds the brush hard to control. Not one picture he did of the creek shows a person in it — and in all he did twelve of them with me. He loves to draw trees on the hills or snow up on the hills, or maybe a cabin or two near some hills, or the sky toward which those hills point. He loves to draw water: the rugged, almost impenetrable land making way for water; or water spilling over the land; or water just sitting there in the form of a lake. In Figure 21 he told me he was going to do the best job possible, “so that Rocky Creek will be there for you, wherever you go, and you can just look at my picture and see it.” In Figure 22 he sketched a ravine near the creek and the water that pours out of it — water that often enough has him virtually mesmerized. Billy told me one afternoon that he remembered being very little and asking his dad where that water comes from and how it managed, even over thousands of years, to cut out the ravine — a fact the father had told the son several times, only to be met with a mixture of surprise and disbelief and awe that every parent knows under such circumstances. Apparently, once the question was too much for Mr. Potter, because he told his son God had done it, made the gorge, made the ravine, put the water there, and given it the force it has; whereupon Billy reminded him what he had said, that thousands of years had been required for the slow, erosive process to take place; whereupon the son recalls the father saying, “God sometimes takes it slow in what He does.”

  The day Billy drew the ravine I asked him, as I have on other occasions, whether he would want to put himself or his father or indeed anyone — say, his dog Speedy — near the ravine, as onlookers perhaps. No he didn’t. He just didn’t like to draw people or animals he told me, as he had before. He likes to draw the creek and he likes to draw other places he has seen, a nearby hollow, or again, that ravine, or the highest hill he’s ever climbed. He likes to draw the moon “almost leaning on a far-off hill.” He has seen the moon “leaning” like that from his position on top of a tree halfway up a hill, and it is a scene he likes to see in his mind and reproduce. He wouldn’t mind trying to do so with paints, he told me — and in fact a day came when he did (Figure 23).

  A little too eager at times, a little unrelaxed when I’m with a child like Billy in a setting like Rocky Creek, I finally did get a picture of the Potter family, or at least some of them, standing near their cabin (Figure 24). I had asked Billy one time too many whether he wouldn’t want to show me what his house looks like (as if I didn’t know!) or sketch out himself or some of his kin. He had tired of me and my requests — but also tired of saying no. Not that he was seriously annoyed with me; I hadn’t been all that forceful or insistent about the matter. I believe now I had simply been unknowing. I hadn’t been able to realize what really mattered to Billy, what experiences and images meant everything to him and were used by him to express himself, if not draw himself. When I worked with middle-class suburban children, they always wanted to draw pictures of themselves or their friends or their parents or their teachers. And often I had tried to get them off that track, tried without success to get them to draw a scene of some kind, a building perhaps, or a yard or street they knew. In contrast, Billy never seemed to forget that he was a small part of a much larger scene. At all times he wanted to take on that scene, do justice to it, and like a Chinese or a Japanese painter, smile benevolently and philosophically at man’s relative insignificance in the face of the natural world — hence the way he did choose, finally, to portray his house and kin.

  Nor ought an observer conclude that the boy was hiding from himself or fleeing into the woods or up a hill. He was not dodging the issue of his future — by telling me, for example, he couldn’t draw a picture of himself grown up. Many children I have worked with elsewhere, well-to-do or poor, respond at once tentatively but with surprising eagerness to the opportunity that a drawing about their future gives them. They can be this or that, live here or there, realize one or another dream or fantasy. But Billy knows exactly where he is and where he will most likely be (if he has anything to say about it) and he also knows why his future seems so assured, so concretely before him, so definite. He knows that Potters have been in the creek for generations — and that it was no small job in the first place to get there, to dig in and last and last and last over the decades, which have now become centuries. He knows that ravines take an immeasurable, and incomprehensible length of time to come about, and he sees himself and his family and his kin and his friends as also part of something well nigh everlasting, something that continues, goes on, stays, is there, however hard and difficult and miserably unfair “life” can get to be.

  Am I perhaps speaking wrongly for the boy? I do not think so. Here is what he said to me about Rocky Creek on the last day of a long stay I’d had with him and his family: “When you come back we’ll be here, and you’ll know the creek, so I won’t have to take you around and show you all over, like before. It’ll be the same, because it’s only the seasons that change the creek. If you come in the spring or the summer, you’ll find it’s just like it was this spring, or like it is now, in the summer. If I had to choose a time of the year I like best, then I’d choose the winter. It’s hard in the winter, and you’re cold and you shiver, even near the fire; but the creek looks the best, and we all have the most laughing and fun then. My daddy says he’s in a better mood in winter than any other time, because there’s no place to go, and we just get buried in Rocky Creek, and we have the big sled we built and we go hunting, and it’s a real job you have fooling those animals and catching them, what with the snow and a lot of them hiding and some of them only out for a short time. A lot of time there’s no school, because you can’t get in here and you can’t get out. We play checkers and cards and we take turns picking the guitar and we have the radio with all the music we want, except if there’s a bad storm out there. Daddy teaches us how to cut wood and make more things than you can believe. Each winter he has a new plan on what I’m to make out of wood with my knife. He says he’s my teacher when there’s no school. But it’s a little strange about Daddy, our mother says: he begins to feel bad when the sun melts the snow and it’s easier on us to leave the creek. He’ll go to church and he’ll say he’s glad the weather is warming up, and we can leave the creek, but then he’ll come home from church or the store over there, where we get the
provisions, and he’ll get real sad and down, and say he wishes we were back in January, and the whole state of West Virginia was covered with snow, and most of all our creek.

  “For me, this is the best place to be in the whole world. I’ve not been to other places, I know; but if you have the best place right around you, before your eyes, you don’t have to go looking. Mrs. Scott says they come from all over the country to look at the mountains we have, and Daddy says he wouldn’t let one of them, with the cameras and all, into the creek, because they just want to stare and stare, and they don’t know what to look for. He says they’ll look at a hill, and they won’t even stop to think what’s on it — the different trees and the animals and birds. The first thing he taught us was what to call the different trees and bushes and vines. He takes us walking and he’ll see more than anyone else. He knows where the animals live and where they’re going and why they want to go over here and there. He’s taking my brother Donald around now and asking him questions; not like Mrs. Scott does. Then he comes home and tells us that Donald is learning — or else he’s not learning all he should. If I left here and went to live in a city, I’d be losing everything — that’s what I hear said by my father and my uncle and cousins. We’ve been here so long, it’s as long ago as when the country was started. My people came here and they followed the creek up to here and they named it Rocky Creek; they were the ones, that’s right. In the Bible we have written down the names of our kin that came before us and when they were born and when they died, and my name is there and I’m not going to leave here, because there’d be no mention of me when I get married and no mention of my children, if I left the creek. The minister says that all over the county people are moving and moving, and they don’t know what to call their home, because they’ll no sooner get to a place when they’ll be planning to leave because of some reason. But us — well, here we are and here we’ll be. And that’s the big difference, the minister said; and he’s right, he sure is.