Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  James can indeed laugh. For all the strident, stern, unforgiving side to him, the young man also has a light and humorous touch, and it comes across his face rather than out of his mouth. That is to say, he can tell me things I will later think about with a great deal of sadness or apprehension or anger or whatever — while at the time his quick eyes and the sardonic tone of his voice and the smile, at once charming and challenging, all seem to soften somewhat remarks spoken in utter seriousness. “My aunt, she was good to me,” he declares with a broad grin of approval. One begins to relax: today will be an easier day; he will be talking about his aunt, and if we can hold to that, have a more personal and warm-hearted conversation, we will not once again end up talking about racist America, racist America — to the point that he himself is exhausted and at a loss to know what can be done, after all his self-described “speeches” have been made. “She was the one who saved my life, I know that.” Now the grin leaves his face, but he continues with affection and nostalgia: “She’s the nicest woman you could ever want to know. She’s my mother, you know. My mother died when I was a baby, and all I remember is my aunt. My father died, too; my aunt tells me I should remember him, because I was two when he passed, but I don’t. I’ve had dreams: I’ve dreamed I was walking down this street, I don’t remember what its name is, and all of a sudden a man comes up to me, he must be ten feet tall, as big as a building, and he says, ‘James, I’m your father.’ But I tell him I don’t have a father. He picks me up, but I fight him off. I get down and run away. I hide, and he’s looking for me, but he never finds me. He goes away and I’m glad. Then I wake up. Sometimes in the dream I try to get him arrested. I guess I think he’s a crook, some kind of crook. But I don’t want to turn him in to the police because they’re even worse than any crook. I guess that’s why he never gets caught or arrested. I always wake up first.”

  Then comes the beginning of a switch: “The trouble with my aunt is that she doesn’t stop and question herself. She takes everything; she accepts all the troubles she’s had, and she never wants to fight back. I’ve tried to talk to her. I love her. She’s my mother, she’s my mother. But she’ll not listen to you, she really won’t. She starts in with her mumbo-jumbo talk, about God and Jesus Christ and being saved, and the next world, and all that. She’s drugged up, drugged with religion, don’t you see. She’s on drugs, just like all the other Negroes.”

  The word gets him going. Like Thomas James Edward Robinson, whose views have just been presented, James Lewis hates the word “Negro.” But unlike T.R., who is slightly older, James Lewis has already committed himself to a life of intensely political activity. He does not know T.R.; he lives several miles away. He does know the difference between them, though: “There are a lot of cats around talking black these days. I’m not against them. It’s good that we’re all waking up. But it’s one thing to talk black, and it’s another thing to be black, and I’ll tell you something: I’m not black yet. It’ll take me all my life to get black. Do you see?”

  I tell him that the answer is no, I don’t quite see. All right; he is not in the least set back. Patiently and generously he will try to show me: “I can understand. You’re you. I’m me. You try to know the black man, but you’re lost before you ever start. You’re looking through a white man’s eyes. Here in America the black man is just being born. We’re all Negroes; we’ve been Negroes ever since they brought us here. But a lot of us are through being Negroes. No more, no more, we say! And you’ll see how we mean it. It takes a lot of time, though, if you’re going to walk with your head up. Look at most black people; they walk with their heads down. I never noticed it myself until I heard a man speak and he told us that after we left the place, we should keep our eyes open and see how our people walk. So, I came home and nearly broke into tears right in front of her, my aunt. She goes and cleans up a white woman’s house, that’s the job she has. She washes the dishes and scrubs the floor and cleans the bathroom and she even has to help her, the bitch, get food ready for supper. What does the white woman do all day, I ask my aunt. Well, she has ‘activities,’ that’s what my aunt says. She doesn’t know which ‘activities’ they are, but she saw some letter and it was about the NAACP, and the woman was giving twenty-five dollars, twenty-five bills. I told my aunt to go and tell her to keep the goddam money. I told her to sit the woman down and say to her, ‘To Hell with all of you, to Hell.’ My aunt told me to shut up.

  “But that’s my aunt. She’s been brainwashed. You can’t change her. She’s too old. Like I said, I came home and saw her, all stooped over, and I realized how right that man was: my aunt has been saying, ‘Yes, yes’ to the white man so long that her whole body now does it, says, ‘Yes sir, yes sir.’ It hurts me more to see her bending than to hear her talking about ‘the good white people.’ Which good white people!”

  He wants to fight a battle someday, take on all those ‘good white people’ and beat them, beat them decisively, beat them for good. He knows how to fight. He can use a knife, a razor blade, and yes, a gun. The black man has to be armed; he tells me that an unarmed black man is not a black man at all. The white world spends billions of dollars arming itself, but when a black man carries a pistol, everyone shudders, Negro and white alike. So it goes — but so it must no longer be: “We can’t always take it; we can’t always be on the weak side. We’ve got to be as strong as the white man — stronger. I can’t let the pigs scare me. They’re working for whites, every cop is. Sure there are Negro pigs. Who said there aren’t? You drive by the police station and you see them, the white pigs and the Negro ones, they’re buddies. Do you think that fools us? A man has to be stupid to be taken in by that trick. They hire a few Uncle Toms and march them up and down our streets; then we’re supposed to bow down and be good, be real good. All the time my aunt used to say that: be good, be real good. You know what she meant? She meant to do whatever they tell you, the white teachers and the white police and the white landlord and the white store people. Black people live here, but it’s the whites who own us. They’ll always own us until we stop them — and that means it’ll come to a fight. It has to be a fight. I’ve been fighting for a long time, but that was wasting my time. The whites like it when we have our gangs and beat up on each other: the more we hurt each other the weaker we are, and the stronger they are, and the safer they feel. It’s easy to figure that one out!”

  He constantly tries to figure things out, and when he does he doesn’t hesitate to speak out. If I try to tell him that he sees things in too conspiratorial a fashion, he replies that I can afford not to look underneath and see all the ugliness and meanness and treachery which really do exist in this world. He doesn’t quite say it that way; indeed, he speaks eloquently and sharply; “If you have an easy time; if you’re rich; if you’re on top; if the world is always waiting on you — then sure you can look around and say everything is going fine, and what’s the matter with all these people who keep on digging up trouble all the time. But if you’re down, way down on the bottom, then you either learn the score or you’re a slave. If you want to be a black man, a free man, you have to keep awake, wide awake. You can’t miss the tricks. The white man has his tricks, and you can’t fall for them.”

  I do not know how a young man of fourteen whom teachers have described to me as silent, sullen, disobedient, moody, a truant, “up to no good,” of “limited intelligence,” and yes, “possibly retarded” manages to be so alert, aware, and articulate. He is a very shrewd youth, I can say — and yet somehow those words fail to do justice to him. Perhaps the point is that he has a highly developed political sensibility. He also has a sense of history, a sense of his own personal history and of his people’s history. At fourteen many of us are thoroughly self-absorbed, hence indifferent to a host of political and economic “forces” or “pressures” that do indeed exert enormous influence upon everyone. In contrast, James Lewis is jolted out of himself every time he leaves school, leaves his aunt’s house, leaves the particular neighborhood
in which he grew up — and goes to a store, a clubhouse, a meeting place, where he listens to what most Americans would consider to be revolutionary talk. Yet, even before he became “politicized” (as some would put it, though he doesn’t) there were those moments of awareness — and he can remember them and talk about them: “I’d be a kid, a little kid, and I’d look at myself in that old mirror. My aunt, she said she brought it up here from that town of hers in Alabama. I try to forget the name. I don’t want to know all about her ‘nice times’ down there. She’ll tell me about them and then she’ll tell me that if they hadn’t come up here, they all would have ‘perished’ — that’s her talking and not me. So they came up here! A lot it did for them! She has that mirror, but she would often tell me she didn’t want to look in it, because she was afraid she’d see her mother, because it was hers, the mirror was, and she used to look into it. You know who gave it to her mother, don’t you? A white woman did. I told my aunt it was hers and not her mother’s or that white woman’s. She said yes, she knew. But she’s tired, all the time she is, and she says that she wants to remember herself like she was a long while back and not like she looks now, all old. I’d go and stare at myself and I’d say to myself that no mirror is going to scare me, and I’ll never be afraid to look into one, no matter if I live to be one hundred years old.

  “I’d look at my skin. I’d look at my nose and my lips and my hair. I’m not ashamed to talk about it; no, I’m glad I can talk about it. Over at the office we make each other talk about how we look. We tell each other how we used to talk and what we used to say to ourselves in front of the mirror and what we say now. I used to think that if I could just hold my nose in, it would look different, thinner. I’d practice, tightening my lips up. My aunt said a lot of women get their hair straightened. She’s never done it, but my other aunt, you can bet she does — for the white man! Today I can admit it! I used to think I’d look great if I had straight hair and if I could change my face. I wanted to be white. I didn’t dare admit it then, even to myself. Once, though, I did. My friends here really make me admit it every day; but before I joined up, I admitted it to myself for a few minutes. I was in her room, my aunt’s. I looked in her mirror. It’s the only one we have. She keeps it beside her bed in a drawer. She’s even got part of her ticket from Mobile, Alabama, to Boston in that drawer. Can you imagine that? She has a bus ticket from that far back! I looked in the mirror and I saw the same old face, and all of a sudden I thought it would be great if I looked like the kid my aunt talks about — he’s in the place she works, the white woman’s house. He’s the white woman’s son, and he’s my age. I’ve never seen him. I’ve never seen a picture of him. All I know is that she says he’s blond; so, when I looked in the mirror I dreamed I was him. I was a white boy with blond hair! I didn’t really believe I was, but for a few seconds I almost did convince myself. I tried walking like I thought he would — fancy-like. I swung my hands. I tried to make myself bigger. I tried to talk white. Then I heard my aunt. I put the mirror away. She asked me where I was. I told her I’d been tired and I had gone to sleep on her bed. She said that was OK. She said she was sorry that she had a softer bed than us kids, but she guessed she needed her sleep, because with her husband dead and us to feed, she had to work, and when she came home she was almost as dead as him — but she had to care for us, and cook and all, that’s why she needed the best sleep she could get. I told her yes, I was glad she had the soft bed she did, and I left because I wanted to go out and be with my friends. I was glad to see them. I was glad I was right in front of our building and not over in some lousy, rotten white neighborhood; I was glad I was not that white lady’s kid and not a damned white cowboy like you see in the movies. The white cowboys almost killed every Indian in America. Didn’t they?”

  One answers questions like that as faithfully and honestly as one can, but they are, I believe, unanswerable questions. James Lewis knows what he knows, and sees what he sees. I come to hear him, and when we talk I try to tell him what I know, what I see. And he listens as intently as I do. But he continues to say what he believes he ought to say, what he must say, what he wants with all his might to say and to have heard. And I answer back and he looks directly at me and tells me how sorry he is that I am deceived, but how he understands, he understands. And sometimes as I listen to him I remember those moments when I as a doctor, a psychiatrist, have told a troubled, confused patient that yes, I understand, I understand.

  Orin

  Orin is his name, a name out of Scotland or someplace like that, his father has told him. There were some big, important tobacco people in eastern North Carolina who carried that name, Orin. And as things go in the South, the black man learns from the white man and gets his names from him. So, Orin is eight and black and called Orrie and his father’s name is Orin, and he is thirty-three and called Daddy, even by his wife. Orin was born in Old Dock, North Carolina, which is not far from Whiteville, the seat of Columbus County. Orin’s daddy once was a field hand, and used to drive a pickup truck; he would also do odd jobs and errands and “everything, you know.” At the age of four Orin was brought north to Hartford, and then to Boston. All of which means that he is half a Southerner, half a Northerner — and no kidding: “I’m from North Carolina and I’m from Massachusetts. Four and four make eight, and we’ve been up here four years and before that I lived four years in Columbus County, North Carolina, my daddy says. No kidding, I’m half-and-half from here and from back home.”

  He has heard “back home” mentioned and recalled many times. His daddy one day says they’ll be going back there soon, and the next day says he won’t ever go back. The fact is, though, that every summer for four years in a row Orin has heard his parents debate this question: will we go there to see them or will they come up here — Orin’s grandfather and grandmother. Orin’s mother has no parents. She was reared by her uncle and aunt. She lost both her parents to pneumonia, she believes. She doesn’t know, because no doctor ever got to them. But Orin’s father has both parents alive and well. They will live to be a hundred, he hopes and believes, and they are proud and good people, one gathers from listening to their proud and good son. There is only one problem with them; they won’t leave that county in North Carolina. They won’t go to live in Wilmington or any other city in the state; and they won’t go to live in Washington, D.C. — where one of their sons now lives. Nor will they go up to stay in Hartford, Connecticut, where another son lives, or Boston, where their son Orin lives, and where two aunts of Orin’s, sisters of his mother’s, also live. They will go to those cities to visit, to look around and marvel at what a city can be, but they always want to leave after a week or two; and it seems that if they go North one year, they expect their children to come back South the next year. Young Orin, therefore, has been back to North Carolina twice since he came North to live.

  Orin wishes he could live like his grandparents do; but he also is glad to live up North and be with his parents and live the way they do. In Old Dock, Orin loves to go near the mules and the horses and the chickens and the pigs he sees there. He loves to look at fields of tobacco and at the flowers his grandmother grows. He loves to “go exploring”: “When I’m in North Carolina I tell my grandfather all about Roxbury. He’s been up here, but he says I know a lot more about Roxbury than he does. He says he never hopes to know too much about any city. I told him he was wrong, and he was making a big mistake. He said I should go right ahead and tell him he’s wrong; it won’t make any difference. He says he’s happy where he is and I should be happy where I am.”

  Orin gets bored with North Carolina after a while. Each time, he has been given a chance to stay longer and return with an older cousin. Each time, he has said no, he will go back with his parents. But it isn’t a shy and fearful child, afraid to leave his parents, who refuses to stay longer in Old Dock: “I’d miss my friends. I’d miss the playground. We have a new playground, and all the kids show up there right after breakfast in the summer. We play ball. If
I’m going to be a baseball player, I have to practice.”

  He finds certain things in Old Dock rather hard to accept: the extreme quietness, the flies and mosquitoes that go undeterred by effective window screens or screen doors, the road dust that a car can stir up, the eerie sound of crickets in the early evening, the heat that doesn’t come and go but stays and sticks to the body’s surfaces and nearly smothers those exposed to it. It can be hot and muggy up in Boston, he knows; and up there one meets plenty of flies and mosquitoes, not to mention mice and rats and cockroaches. Still, there is something nice about a thunderstorm that signals several following days of real cool weather; and most of all, there is something reassuring about all those cars and trucks and buses which ride over smooth, well-paved roads: “When I’m down there I get to wondering if there are more than ten or twenty people anywhere around. That’s scary. What if you want to play a good game of baseball? Where would you get the teams from, and would there be anyone to look at the game and be in favor of your side or the other side? I’ll go for a walk with my granddaddy and he’ll be talking sometimes, but then he stops, and I can’t think of anything to say, and there’s no one around. He has a dog, but the dog only stays with us in the beginning of the walk. The dog runs and runs, and I’m sure that he’s lost, but he shows up at supper-time, and Granddaddy says to me each time that I’m sure from the city, because anyone knows that a dog will find his way back to supper. He’s right, I know. It’s in the city that you lose your dog. We brought one up here — Beauty. I remember her. She got killed, you know — Dad says it took only two days. I remember my mother crying. She said, ‘Now we really are up here, now that Beauty’s gone.’ My daddy said he’d try to get another dog. But the city is no place for a dog, Momma said, and so we’ve never had one since.”