Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “I hope when I’m as big as my daddy I’ll know the creek like he does. I hope I’ll know his shortcuts and I’ll be able to use the rifle as good. He’s the best in the creek with his rifle, everyone says so. Mrs. Scott asked me a while back what I was going to do with myself later on, because I was doing good on her tests, and I told her I was going to be as good at hunting and fishing as my daddy, and she said what else was I going to do, and I didn’t know what to answer, but I said that was enough right there, it sure was. She said she agreed, but she said maybe I could go on with my schooling and all like that, and I said that sounded good, only if I was going to live in Rocky Creek there wasn’t much point to doing so, and it’s hard, you know, because we don’t have the money for the clothes you need and the books. They’ll charge for books and for other things, that’s what you hear. Mrs. Scott told me to go home and talk to my parents, and she’s told me that a few times, to ask my parents, just outright ask them if I can’t stay in school all the way through.

  “I went and asked them; I asked if I could go to the high school. And then my daddy answered that about once a month Mrs. Scott gets it into her head to send me to a high school or someplace like that and once a month we’ve got to let her know that there’s more to learn right here in Rocky Creek than any other place in the world including a city up North or even a high school down here. All we need is a little work to do, outside the creek, that’s what Daddy says, and we’d be all right for as long as we live, and there’d be the Potter family in Rocky Creek until God decides He’s going to call the whole human race up to His throne and judge every last man that ever lived — and then maybe He’ll tell us we did good to stay in the creek and believe in Him and do all we could to live good lives here.”

  III

  The South Goes North

  The Streets

  They come to the city streets. They come by car and by truck and by bus and by train. Rarely do they come by plane. They have said good-bye to a little town in the Delta, good-bye to Alabama’s “Black Belt” or those towns in south Georgia just north of the Okefenokee Swamp or the lowlands of South Carolina or the eastern shore of North Carolina. Perhaps they have left one of Louisiana’s parishes. Perhaps they once lived in Arkansas, near Little Rock or near Pine Bluff. Maybe they are not from the deep South. Maybe they are from Appalachia, from eastern Kentucky or western North Carolina or north central Tennessee or indeed just about all of West Virginia. Maybe they are from no single place; that is, maybe they have been migrant farm workers, who wander and wander, who may once have lived here or there, but now consider no town, no county, no state or even region their “home.”

  They come to the streets, all of them, from cabins and shacks, flat and rich farmlands or hills that somehow have been made to produce at least something. They come to the streets familiar with a way of life. They have, many of them (though by no means all of them), known the advantages of electricity, of a naked bulb to provide light, of an old refrigerator to keep food from rotting too fast. Good plumbing and heating are rather less familiar to those whom we call sharecroppers or tenant farmers from the rural South, whom we call migrant farm workers, whom we call mountaineers, Appalachia’s yeomen from up the hollows. Other things are not familiar at all to such people: well-paid jobs, a sense of political power, a feeling of acceptance from schoolteachers or businessmen or sheriffs or county officials, and in addition, the experience of having a paved road near one’s home, or sewer pipes leading to it, or good drinking water nearby.

  They have said their good-byes, made their peace with their past, walked away, been driven away, slipped away, been picked up, been sent for. Some may have seen or been in a city before: Greenwood and Greenville in Mississippi, or Selma and Montgomery in Alabama, or Lexington in Kentucky or Charleston in West Virginia or Atlanta and New Orleans, those big, big cities. For many, though, the cities up North are the first cities they have looked at and lived in.

  “Lord, I never knew there were so many buildings. Lord, I never knew what a street was, not really, not streets like we have up here, not miles and miles of them.” In Tunica County, Mississippi, he had not been totally confined to a plantation, to a sharecropper’s cabin and the land nearby that needed his care. He had gone into a town or two, walked down muddy paths along which one home after another stood. And he had even caught a glimpse of Memphis; on his way north he had seen the city he used to hear the Mister talk about, and the Missus, and those laughing, romping children not yet old enough to keep their distance — yes, he’d heard them, too, the little white boys and little white girls, talk on and on about Memphis. But now he is in a city, up North in one. Now he lives there. Now, every single day, there are those streets. And now he is “used to things.” What things, though? What up North has he day by day come to accept as the ordinary, the expected? “It started with the sidewalks and the sewers,” he will say. He is trying to convey what took him by surprise when he “hit” Chicago, when he entered the city and saw one street and then another. They were beautifully paved. There were sewers. And black people lived all around. He had never before seen so many sewers. He had never before seen so many people, so many black people, and so many sidewalks and paved streets and sewers “that belong to them, the colored man.” So it was that a “colored man” like him could at one point talk about “them.” So it has been that mountaineers from eastern Kentucky and West Virginia can also feel a sense of detached surprise and wonder when they come to a city like Chicago and see those streets: “Who would ever believe it? Who would ever believe people live like this?” Then one asks what it is that he finds so unbelievable, and one hears again about sidewalks and sewers and firmly paved roads. It takes time for a man from a mountain hollow to talk about streets.

  Yet, eventually they do; those former coal miners or subsistence farmers from Appalachia begin to say a lot about those streets. Friends or relatives come to visit or stay, and they must be shown things. There are lamps for instance, “outdoor lamps.” Who would ever have thought that man could so firmly take command of night? A little girl from a place in Kentucky she is rapidly forgetting, but still just about remembers as “Winding Hollow,” wants very much to remark upon that light, the light of streetlights: “I wonder how the moon feels? If I was the moon, I’d make a face at all the lamps on all the streets.” She used to love the moon, her mother observes. The world seemed safer for the moon’s night-light. But now the moon is almost unnecessary, one more faded miracle, one more outworn imperative. The city’s streets conquer everything.

  A black child in another city uses such military imagery, talks of conquests; he also hasn’t been “up North” so long that he can’t recall what it was like “back South,” but he wants a visitor to know “there isn’t any trouble around here you can’t conquer, lick it and beat it flat, so long as you know the right person.” He has heard that from others on the street, from others his age and older; “street talk” his mother calls the boy’s statements — and those streets do indeed define one’s sense of space, determine a good deal of how children speak and what they learn. Nor does the child’s mother fail to comment on all that and more. The street she lives on is her backyard and front yard; it is the woods and the plantation and the county seat and the long road that leads to it. The street is flat, has no hills and no stream nearby, has no bank to sit on and lie down upon and use to “collect” one’s strength. The street is lined with houses; it is “thick with them” — to the point that she and her neighbors sometimes take to wondering. Who in God’s world ever had the gall to build so many houses? Where did they come from, all the people who live in those houses now and once lived in them over the years?

  Other things inspire comment, too. As a matter of fact, these newcomers to our cities, these émigrés who have never left our own borders, these long-standing American citizens who have fled in desperation from the South to the North, from the quiet and isolated mountains to the crowded flatlands, be they white men or black men, y
oung women or old women, they talk about flights of stairs or door locks or street numbers or mailboxes or light switches. For a while one thinks the problem is that of language; “they” have their words, their dialect, their way of putting things, and it is a matter of time before an outsider will be able to get the point, to understand why those simple, everyday words get mentioned so often — as if they are the keys to some mystery: “I’ve been here since the war, the Korean War. I came here from South Carolina. My husband was stationed up here, and he sent me a bus ticket. I never went back. I had my first baby inside me. The first surprise I had was the apartment building — I mean all the steps in it, the stairs and more stairs, until you think after climbing so many you’ll be seeing the Lord himself.” She goes on to remind her listener that in South Carolina there was exactly one step from the ground to the cabin in which she and her parents and her grandparents (“and the others before them”) were born. That step was actually a stump of a tree half buried in the ground. The church she went to had “proper steps,” two of them. And then suddenly she came to Boston, and encountered steps and steps and steps until she wondered in the beginning whether she could ever survive it all — lifting herself up and taking herself down again, and with no sunlight to help either. As for the hall lights in her “building,” as she calls it, “they never have worked, not once.”

  More than the steps get to her, though. The locks do, the endless numbers of door locks. She was poor in South Carolina and she is poor now. But back South one doesn’t have to fasten down one’s poverty, defend it fearfully, worry about its vulnerability. Up North it seems nothing can go unguarded, and indeed, “the nothing we have is all locked up.” She does, however, lose her keys sometimes — yes, the three keys, to the front door of her apartment and the back door and the street door downstairs. Then she becomes irritated and half amused. She also becomes nostalgic for a minute: “I think to myself that before I came to the city I’d never seen a lock in my life. That was the first thing I told my mother when I went back to see her. I told her they’re lock crazy up North. And it isn’t as if they’re millionaires, our people up there.”

  She speaks about other matters to her mother. There are, again, those flights of stairs that go round and round and lead from one story to another. In one building she lived on the second story; in another on the fifth, the fifth — which means she was so high up she could imagine herself looking down on that small rural church she recalls being so tall. She wonders to this day whether the water tower she used to believe to be the tallest thing in the whole wide world is as tall as her apartment house, which she now certainly knows is far indeed from being the tallest building on her street, let alone other streets. And since she tries to keep in touch with her mother, even though neither of them is very good at writing, there are those numbers to keep in mind. Whoever got that idea anyway — of putting numbers on houses? Where do the numbers on her street start? Where does the street start, for that matter? In Dorchester County, South Carolina, so far as she knows, “there’s not a number there on any home.” She never had a post office box number, nor does her mother even today: “I write her name; I write the town; I write South Carolina — and it gets there faster than letters from her get to me.”

  Of course she gets her mail put into a mailbox, another one of those newfangled devices that go with city living. Since letter boxes in her building are private but commonly trespassed, she has to have a “mail key,” too. For a long while the boxes in her apartment house were hopelessly inadequate — bent and punctured and covered with grime and scrawled words. Finally the postman complained, or higher officials in the post office did, or maybe it was the welfare department, which mails out checks. Someone did, she knows that, because the landlord was compelled to put in new boxes, and a policeman stood there watching while the job was done. It was a mixed blessing, needless to say: “I love the box, but the keys, all the keys you need — just to stay alive up here in the city.” She told her mother about her new mailbox. Her mother told the news to the lady who runs the grocery store and gasoline station and post office down in Dorchester County, South Carolina. She is a white woman, and her name is Mrs. Chalmers, and she had a laugh over that. She told her informant to write back to “the poor girl” in Boston and ask how the mailman ever makes sense of them all, the hundreds of boxes he must have to fill up every morning.

  People manage to make their adjustments. There are spurts and lags, naturally. Some habits and customs are mastered more quickly than others. Some undreamed-of luxuries try the mind and soul more than others do. In Cleveland a man from “near Beckley,” West Virginia, laughs about a few of his recent tribulations and compares them to what his ancestors had to go through — for they were also Americans who moved on (from the East Coast westward) when they had to: “I can’t keep up with the light switches in this city. I think it’s harder for me to figure out these lights than it was for my kin way back to cut a path through the hills and settle there. Everywhere you go here there’s a switch. On and off, that’s what you have to think about when you go into a room. Now who’s supposed to know every minute of his life where the switch is? I’ve been up in this place over a year and I forget, and I have my wife on my back, saying, ‘The switch is here, don’t get dressed in darkness.’ Well, what’s so damned wrong about darkness when it’s early in the morning!”

  In the cities late in the afternoon the lights appear, whether he or any other particular person likes it or not, and does or does not join in the act by turning a switch to ON. In the cities people seem to insist that darkness somehow be pushed into corners. There are plenty of those corners, especially in his neighborhood, but never in Ohio has he lived with the kind of darkness he everyday took for granted in West Virginia. He is the first one to point out that almost every street corner has lights, lights of all colors. There are streetlights — and the stores with their lights, and the gas stations with theirs, and the police cars with lights on their roofs, whirling around and around. And there are those signs, signs full of bulbs, signs that wait on the sun to leave so they can take over and say: look over here, look and remember and buy, and if you do, we’ll stay around and get called a success, catchy and clever and able to do our job, which is to light up your mind with desire.

  He wants people to know he didn’t live so far up a hollow that “this whole electric-light world up here in the city” is in and of itself strange to him. He had sockets with bulbs in them “back home” in his house, and he had television, also — so he really didn’t expect to be as surprised as he was when he first came into Cleveland. He used to tighten the bulb in the evening, when he’d sit and smoke his pipe and get drowsy and half watch television. It was his children who often would pay full attention to it, “that picture box.” And as a matter of fact, they were the ones who wanted him to loosen that bulb, so they could have the picture and nothing else all to themselves. But he liked to whittle, sometimes. And even if he didn’t, the evening is the right time to have a little light around. Mind, he says a little light, not so much light that one feels in China during the night — which is where he sometimes thinks he might be as he sits in his Cleveland apartment. China, he learned from a teacher a long time ago, is where the day goes when we have night.

  In any event, now his children can’t understand why he doesn’t switch on all the lights, come dusk. Nor would they think of sitting and watching television in complete darkness. Why do his boys and girls require what they once would have abhorred, glowing lamps? He is quick to note the change and explain it: “It must be they used to want to have our cabin so pitch-black because that way they could lose themselves watching the programs and forget where they were. Now they’re gone from there and up here. Now they’re in the city, and the television programs are about the city. They don’t have to imagine they’re someplace else. They don’t need it dark, so their minds can wander. We’ve wandered.”

  For people who come to the city from rural America, there is
another irony awaiting them, in the form of cellars. How can it be that these city people — who live so curiously high up in the air, so removed from farms, so oblivious of all that goes into growing food and fetching water and hunting and fishing — how can it be that they have dug themselves so far into the ground? And anyway, what does go on in those cellars? They can be frightening places — dark as can be, low and dank and just plain underneath everything. Heat is made in them, in things called boilers. Pipes and wires go in and out of cellars, or basements, as some call them. And the rats, the rats that are so common, the rats that seem to a mother an inevitable part of her child’s life, they also are supposed to come from those cellars: “I’d sooner die than go down into that cellar. I’ve heard about it. I’ve heard stories; I’ve heard there are so many rats down there you can’t see anything but them, running all over, faster than squirrels and raccoons and rabbits, much faster. They tell me a city rat is like no other animal. They’re in the biggest hurry. They’re mean. They don’t care about each other and they run and run, on the hunt for scraps of food. They don’t know the sun. I do believe rats come into the cellars up from Hell. Hell can’t be too far from here, anyway”