by Robert Coles
And so people of both races have; they have left for reasons he knows about, and settled on the streets he virtually hunts along, so agile and forceful a driver is he. In a city people want to get someplace, he reminds his passenger. In a city there’s no point lingering and waiting. The streets are there to live on, play on, and ride on. He lives on the streets at night, and his kids play on the streets in the late afternoon, but in those morning hours he’s got to ride, ride, ride those streets. The streets will give him money, will take him and his family someplace. He doesn’t know exactly where. But who really does? He knows enough to know that, though — and so unbothered, unexhausted by large questions, he guns the engine, spots the customer, asks where, and shows what he knows, what he can do: go right to the desired address the fastest way allowed by the city’s streets.
Blacks in the City
I Am Black and Nothing Else
He is tall and very thin, so thin that at times I would remember the anatomy I studied in medical school and try to figure out how his lanky, almost threadlike body could possibly hold all those bones and muscles and vital organs I knew must be somewhere under his skin, all inside him. He is fast-moving, too. Long-limbed and lithe, he declares himself able to disappear from anyone’s sight “faster than it takes to pronounce my name or where I was born.” He laughs when he says that, because he knows he has three names as well as a last name: Thomas James Edward Robinson. His father had three brothers by those names, and they all died before they ever grew up; so, when he was born after four girls, his father decided not to take any chances at all: “He gave me all his brothers’ names, and used to tell me that I’d better stay alive, and he meant it.” As for Tom’s birthplace, it was in Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, that he was born in 1955. Let people try to say his full name or pronounce “that place” in Louisiana; Tom is sure he can “clear away” before they finish.
Is he a runner? Is he on some track team — perhaps at high school? Is he trying to keep himself in good condition? Three no’s and a yes: he doesn’t go to school; he would never call himself a runner; and he has never been on any “team,” but he very much wants to be in shape. He doesn’t exercise formally or methodically. He simply races down the street, “flies down,” as the younger children on the block say. He is a hero to them, the seven- and eight- and nine-year-old boys who live in the tenement house he lives in. They are all bunched together, those tenement buildings. They don’t stand near one another or lean on one another; they are in fact one thick continuous stretch of brick, and only the end of the block puts an end to them. But as soon as the next block starts one is back with the same problem: which entrance is what number of what street. Minds like mine for a while cannot stop doing things like that, trying forever to figure out what Tom’s address is, what number it is — or was, before some “vandal” ripped off all the numbers on the entrances. Finally I did learn to relax. Tom told me to relax. He told me to feel my way down the block. He told me to stop looking lost when I saw each time that there were no numbers to be found. He told me to stop counting the entrances from the corner until I came to his, near the middle. How did he know I was doing that, counting and counting? I wasn’t talking out loud, I knew that, and I wasn’t moving my lips. Of course I wasn’t; he knew that, too. The giveaway was my face; he could tell by the frown on my face: “Your face was just working too hard, man, concentrating too much. That’s all.” I suppose it is a curse of mine that I couldn’t relax then and there and smile and tell him: right, right. Nervous and cerebral, and in a way silently rude, I had to take note of his “intuitive” nature, his dislike of details like street numbers, his ability to do things without seeming to try.
I did learn eventually to walk down that block somewhat casually and knowingly. I was taught to do so by the boys and girls I came to visit. Another thing I learned from the younger children on that block had to do with Thomas James Edward Robinson, formerly of Opelousas, St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, and now of Roxbury, Suffolk, Massachusetts. The children call him T.R., sometimes Tom, but never Tommy. He bristles when he hears himself called Tommy, though the teachers used to do it all the time and he never used to mind until he was thirteen or so; until he began to awaken, began to realize what the world is like and what his people are struggling for and what “that name Tom means.” He is not, however, without humor when he talks about such matters. He doesn’t dislike the name Tom or Tommy in and of itself. He simply feels sensitive about the meaning the name has come to have, especially these days. Actually, he feels sensitive about a lot of things. He doesn’t at fifteen know exactly what to do with his feelings.
“I know some of the little kids look up to me,” he says, but then he makes a dramatic turn, a reversal in his line of reasoning: “It’s not me they turn to, though. It’s not. They’re no longer Negroes, who find a boss and obey and obey. You see that? When you live up here and you’re my age, you’ve been doing some learning, and not in school, and you’ve been doing some figuring out, and not with the help of any white teacher, or Negro teacher. You’ve discovered something. You’ve discovered that either you stand up and think for yourself and be free, or you’re a slave, just like we were before, down there in the South. You’re either black or you’re nothing at all. I am black and nothing else; if I’m not black I’m nothing. You can’t be a Negro and be anything but a tool of the white man’s. That’s what we’re learning. That’s what we’ve got to learn, or else it’ll be no good, no good. They’ll just keep on walking all over us. They always have. They still do. Why should they stop, unless we make them stop, make them stop?”
He does that often; he says something emphatic, then repeats himself, word for word, even more emphatically, and I am then half ready for a third repetition, but it never comes. He wants me to know that he has his convictions. He wants to know himself that there are convictions he has and will keep and not lose, no matter what the temptation, no matter how sad or lost or grim he might someday feel. And he has seen that in others, in older men — “the defeat in them.” He talks about that defeat a lot: “You’ve got to know that you may never win, not with us outnumbered. If you fight, though, you’re winning right there. The only way you can lose is to be an Uncle Tom. That’s the way they get you; the way they always have. I used to sit there in school and the teacher would ignore us and be ready to insult us no matter what we said, and I’d take it, man, I’d take it. They had me believing I was no good, no good. They had me ready to go scrubbing their floors, and opening their doors, and washing their cars. That’s what they want us for. They’ve always needed us to do their dishes and carry their trash away.
“The black man is waking up. I hear my brothers talking all the time. We’re brothers and sisters, all black men and all black women. The kids on this block, they’ve got to be black, black. I laugh with them. I kid them. I say, ‘Oh, I think I see a big patch of white on you.’ Then they’ll laugh back. They’ll say they see a little speck of white on me, too — a speck over here, and a spot over there. So, I’ve got to watch out, too. They’re right. You can’t just shake off your people’s past and start fresh. I heard a man, he knew Malcolm X, say that the other day. He said, ‘Brothers, it takes time to get yourself free.’ He said, ‘You can’t free yourself of the white man until you free yourself of the Negro you carry around inside yourself.’ Now there’s something to remember. I told some kids that; they were playing on the street, and I called them and they came running over. I told them what I’d heard. I told them Malcolm X, he lived right here in Roxbury, and he knew; he knew like no one else has. They all said I was right, but they wanted to get back playing. I can’t blame them. I like pool better than anything. I like motorcycles. If I had the money, I’d get on one and I’d never stop. I’d drive until there was no more land left for me to drive on. I’d drive up every road in the world. Do you think anyone has tried it? I’d grab me a sandwich and eat on the bike. I’d sleep by it and keep moving. But you have to have a fortune
to own a motorcycle. You have to get rich. And like that man said, the friend of Malcolm X, when you try to get rich you either find you can’t, or you start climbing all over your own people and kicking them and shoving them and knocking them down and pushing, pushing.”
He uses those last two words, that word “pushing,” both literally and figuratively. He is speaking of the elbowing that a man on the make, on the rise, can demonstrate. But, of course, he is also talking about drugs, about the pushers he knows and every day watches, sees at work. They do well, make a great deal of money, and tempt him. Nor does he need anyone to point out that last fact, that psychological fact. He knows the facts of envy, rivalry, greed. He knows that people have to deny what at the same time they are drawn to do. He knows the mind’s struggles, and in a straightforward and unpretentious manner he can talk about them, even explain the particular ways he has come to deal with such difficulties: “Who can say no to them? The dealers here, the pushers, they’ve told me I’m a smart boy. That’s what they call me, a boy. They say I’m a natural born leader, and there’s a place for me in that setup. They say I can be the closest thing to a millionaire I’ll ever see. They say I can carry around as much cash as my pockets will hold. They say I should just say yes, and they’ll start me out. I can get pants with pockets that stretch down to my shoes, and they can guarantee they’ll be filled up with dollar bills, those pockets, before I’m a year older. They’re fooling. I know they are. But they make plenty. I would have cash, a lot of cash. We could move to a better building. I could get the bike I want. I could drive up and down this street on the biggest motorcycle you’ll ever see.
“I told my dad, and he said he’d kill me first, rather than let me do that. I told him he was a real square guy He got mad. Then I told him to cool it, cool it. I told him I was fooling him, trying to trick him. I just wanted to get his reaction, that’s all. I wanted to see what he’d have to say. He didn’t believe me at first, though. He thought I was just backing down because he was so mad, and I was scared. He thought I was really trying to con him. But I wasn’t, and finally I made him believe me, I made him. I shouted. That’s the way he knew I was serious. I told him what I believe. He didn’t like what I told him, but he said so long as I don’t become a pusher, he won’t care what I believe — about being black, you know. I told him he should care, he had to care. I told him the reason I wasn’t becoming a pusher. I said if I didn’t think it was better to be black, to be a black man, than to be a pusher — well, then I’d go and be a pusher. He couldn’t follow me. He kept telling me he couldn’t follow me. I didn’t know what I could say to him. I thought to myself: it’s Louisiana, it’s the state of Louisiana that’s in his head, and he can’t get it out. He’ll see a white man and he begins to move out of his way, the Man’s way, but he doesn’t. He’s learned. He’s stopped doing what he did down there. But it’s in him; I can tell. My grandmother, she says I’m wrong. She says you can’t do it, fight the bossman. She still calls them that. I said we have to, or else we’ll be slaves. She said she was never a slave. Then I decided I’d better shut up. But she wouldn’t stop. She said all I was trying to do was see the bad side, the bad side. I said no, that wasn’t true. She said I had no faith. I said how could I, looking around and seeing what I did. Then she recited her Bible.
“But my father is glad I’m no pusher, and so is my mother and my grandmother. They don’t care whether they’re called black or Negro or anything. My father told me I could call him white if I wanted to. He said I could even call him an Uncle Tom. He was setting us up for a fight. He was kidding. He works in a car wash. He hates the white man. Usually he says he doesn’t, but once in a while he’ll come home dead tired; and then he admits it — that they bleed us, they bleed us white. He’s bled white, for sure he is, by the time he’s ready to go home. All day he’s heard his boss tell him to hurry up, move fast, keep on it, stop delaying — and work, work, work. He’s the hardest-working man that ever lived. You should see his muscles. When I was a little kid he used to tell me that the colored child, that’s what he’d say, the colored child is born with big, big muscles, because there’s the cotton to pick and everything else the white man needs doing. You think he was fooling? No sir, he sure wasn’t fooling. He’d be serious. He’d be trying to clue me in. He’d be telling me so I wouldn’t be surprised later on. I recall asking him about why it is that the white people on television seem to be the big shots, and we have nothing. I asked him if there are a lot of black people with big money, and if there are, why don’t we see them on the television. I don’t know how old I was then; I know I asked him, I know. And I can tell you what he said. He said white is white and colored is colored, and the whites own the world, most of it, and the colored don’t and that’s the way it is, and no one can go and do anything about it, and maybe the second time around, in the next world, it’ll be the opposite, and won’t that be good — a relief, a big relief. My poor dad, and all the poor Negroes, waiting for the second time around, the second time around!”
He has gone to work with his father upon occasion, but finds it an impossible job. The whites come in, one after the other in one big new sporty car after the other, and his father washes, washes, washes. He wonders at his father. Where’s the man’s anger? How can he take it, all day long take it? How can he let himself be ordered around so, treated so abruptly and imperiously? How can he not think of becoming a pusher himself? The man must have his secret thoughts, his dreams of triumph and glory. He must — yet he apparently doesn’t; or so T.R. believes. And he has indeed tried to find out: “I’ve asked him, I’ve said tell me, tell me why you and I and every other black man doesn’t go after them, jump them, get them out of our lives for good. He told me to shut my mouth up and not open it again until I got some sense in my head. So, I didn’t say anything the rest of the day. Then after we finished supper you know what he said? He asked me if I didn’t like what my mother had gone and cooked for us. I said yes I did, I always did. Then he said that was why he keeps his cool: if he got wise and started fighting with the white man, he’d soon be out of a job, and we’d have no money, and no food, and we’d starve to death. ‘Someday you’ll have a family, son. You’ll know then; you’ll know the difference between a lot of big talk and what you’ve got to do if you want your wife and kids to eat.’ That’s what he said, and I didn’t even try to answer him. My grandmother was nodding her head off, and I near got sick to my stomach. I wanted to throw up that meal. I really did!”
For money he works in a grocery store, stocks the counters and sweeps the floor. At least his immediate superiors are not white, though the store is owned by whites, he knows that. He is tempted to steal from the store. He is tempted to tell his boss — the manager, “the front man,” the Negro — to stop it, to stop fooling himself and everyone else. But he is a young man, and jobs for people like him are quite scarce, he knows that. And he is afraid. If he were idle all day and penniless; if he had nothing to do but sit around and stand around and have his dreams of driving around in a motorcycle or a car; if he had to go wash cars and be bossed by a white man and told he was lucky even to have that job; or if he had to go back to school, in the unlikely event a truant officer tracked him down and hauled him into court for being under sixteen and so illegally out of school — if any of those things were to happen he might take to stealing regularly and maybe even pushing, yes maybe even that.
Figure 1 Ruby by Ruby at age 6
Figure 2 A white girl by Ruby at age 6
Figure 3 Ruby’s grandfather
Figure 4 Ruby’s landscape
Figure 5 Jimmie by Ruby at age 6
Figure 6 A Negro boy Jimmie’s age by Ruby at age 6
Figure 7 Ruby by Jimmie at age 6
Figure 8 Ruby in school by Jimmie at age 7
Figure 9 Negro friend and white classmate, by Johnnie
Figure 10 Allan draws the difference between Negro and white.
Figure 11 Fields at harvest time by Tom
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br /> Figure 12 A road by Tom
Figure 13 Larry’s birth certificate
Figure 14 Drawing by 8-year-old migrant girl
Figure 15 A landscape by Lawrence
Figure 16 Jeannette’s landscape in crayon
Figure 17 Jeannette’s scarecrow with blackbirds
Figure 18 A sharecropper girl’s kitchen
Figure 19 Mr. Williams by Tim
Figure 20 Tim’s dad
Figure 21 Billy’s drawing of Rocky Creek
Figure 22 A ravine near Rocky Creek by Billy
Figure 23 The moon “leaning” on a hill by Billy
Figure 24 Billy’s drawing of the Potter family and their cabin
Figure 25 “I can’t draw, but I’ll try to show you how good a teacher she is — she’s with you all the way; you can see it on her face.”
Figure 26 “Now a bad teacher — I can’t even draw them because they’re all alike and they’re no good — so, there, the best thing to do is cross them right out, the way they do to us.”