by Robert Coles
He doesn’t talk about that dog Beauty very much, but over the years he has drawn pictures of her several times — and then gone on to tell me that he can remember Beauty running across a field in North Carolina, and remember Beauty in the car, resting beside him, on the way up North; and he can remember his mother’s scream when she heard that Beauty was dead. Beauty was only six when she got killed, two years older than Orin was. A year after Beauty had died, and several months after I first met Orin, he drew Beauty for me and explained to me that the dog was happy, because she was back in North Carolina. About a year after that, Orin was again going to draw Beauty — but suddenly, halfway through, he stopped. He crossed out the picture and nearby started another one: “I want you to see the new swings they put in the playground,” he told me, and then he set to work showing me them. I decided to ask him whether he ever saw any dogs in the playground. “Yes, sometimes. But it’s not a place for a dog — unless it’s a real smart one who knows how to stay clear of the cars.” That was all he had to say for a while. He went back to his picture. He had a few finishing touches to do. There was the fence that was being built. There was a street lamp. Finally he handed me the picture and said, “Now, that’s it.”
I was looking at what he had done, and he was looking at a drawing I did — it was a bargain we had made: if he drew, so did I. Suddenly I heard Orin’s words: “I’m just as glad.” I didn’t know what he meant, and I told him so. He let me know exactly what he meant: “My grandmother told me that Beauty went back to North Carolina. That’s silly. She died. But it’s just as well she did die. She wouldn’t even like our new playground if she was here now. Daddy says a dog born in the city doesn’t know any better. But Beauty knew better.” And he, does he know better? Would he like to go back there, back to Old Dock — that is, if his parents decided to move back? And if they were undecided, what would he advise them? What is his preference? One wonders about such matters, and stumbles forth with a question like, “Orrie, if you had to choose where you and your whole family would live, where would it be?”
Not for a second does he hesitate: “I like to go visit my grandparents in North Carolina, but like my daddy says, we can’t live there anymore. The white people there don’t like us, and they want us to get out fast. Here you never see much of the white people. Daddy says they’re no better up here than in Old Dock, but they’ll leave you alone more, so long as you leave them alone. They don’t want any part of us. I’m glad we’re up here. Daddy said if we’d have stayed there we might all be dead. No work means no money and no money means no food — and then you die. Daddy says the rich white people have been feeding a lot of the black people, even if they don’t work because of the machines that do the harvesting. I asked him what would happen when the rich white people died. Would all the black people die right after them? My daddy said the rich white people will never die, but he thinks that soon there won’t be any black people left in the county down there.”
At eight what does Orin see ahead of him? His father was in the Army, and Orin thinks he might also like a few years in the military, “only maybe the Marines.” His father learned “about electronics” in the Army, and Orin thinks that kind of work intriguing. In fact, the more one talks to Orin and his parents, the more one sees that the first departure for Orin’s father was ordered by the government, and only upon the soldier’s return did the second and final departure from North Carolina take place. Orin has heard his father and mother talk about the sequence, and so understands rather a lot about various social and economic and educational issues: “If my daddy hadn’t gone into the Army, he thinks he might still be back home, and we’d all be in bad trouble. He doesn’t have the kind of job he wants, but he’s on the way to getting one. He works in a factory; they make electrical equipment in it. They’ve promised that they’ll keep on teaching him, and that he can be moved up and be over some of the other men one of these days. We’re not rich, but we’re not poor. My mother says that she’d like to get us out of here, into a better street. I like it here, but she says there are nicer places to live. The white people don’t like us moving out to where they live, though; so we may be here for a long time. My dad says that even if he’d gone to school a long time and had the best job he could ever want, we might not be able to live where we’d like. My mother says she can buy us the food we need, and the clothes; and that’s more than she ever dreamed she’d be able to do when she was little. She says she likes to look at some of those dollar bills she has and smile and smile. She says when she was my age she’d never seen a dollar bill, never mind anything bigger. Dad gives her five ten-dollar bills every week to spend, and they have more; they’re saving some money and they put away some for the rent. Dad says if he could only get some land he could build a house himself. But you can’t just go and get land. Back in North Carolina there was plenty of land. The white people would have let us stay on theirs. They even offered to help fix up the place where my dad was born. But they didn’t have money to give us, and that’s why we’re here. My dad says that when you weigh everything, we come out best right where we are — even if the building we live in is falling apart and you pay a fortune to stay in it.”
Orin’s dad has fixed up his apartment and has even thought of doing repairs in the halls. The trouble is, how far does one go? He laughs when he asks a question like that. He’d like to fix up the entire block, the whole neighborhood, all of the streets his people walk and play on and call theirs. He’d like to help turn what others call a “ghetto” into what he calls “a nice-looking place, where nice-looking houses are.” He knows those nice places, those nice houses, exist all over; and he feels that with his job and future he ought to be able to live in such a place, such a house. A day doesn’t go by when he fails to mention that hope. The television set brings up close the neighborhood he has in mind, and within seconds he has made his remark. The boy Orin describes what happens: “I can tell when my dad is going to speak. He’ll see a program and there’s a nice house, and I look over and I see him just staring with all his might. Then he says something. He says he wishes we could live there, in a place like that. He says we could, if we weren’t black. My mother always interrupts and says we should be thankful that he’s got a good job, and it’ll be an even better one soon. She says we’ve come a long way to be where we are, and you can’t have everything. She says when I grow up I’ll have it better, and I might even go all the way through school, and I could be high up in a company like the one my dad works for. Dad laughs at that. He says you can’t be so sure. True, you have to be thankful for what you have. But who knows if we’ll keep on being so lucky? And then he’ll say he still wishes we lived in some nice house somewhere.”
Once again Orin told me where that somewhere might be: “It would be way out where there are trees and plenty of grass and there would only be black people there — no white people. We would have our own police, and if anyone tried to come and bother us, they’d protect us.” He had no more to say on that particular subject. I asked him a question or two, hoping he might go on; but no, at the present time he is content to let the matter drop right there. But not far from his home I have stood with him and other children like him and listened to men talking, men saying more emphatically what Orin said — that the black man has to build his own place, his own home, and by God defend it with drawn guns. Orin’s father thinks such talk about guns is “foolish.” At eight Orin is not so sure.
The Wanderers
They had almost invariably lived in one place all their lives when they came to the city. They were born where they once lived, and their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents had most likely died there and no place else: a cabin, a shack, a place, or a “spot” on the bossman’s property. Suddenly they are no more there. Suddenly they live in a building in a city, far away from “home.” And suddenly they are adrift. They do not settle into one building and stay there and stay there, as their sharecropper ancestors did. They move from one address
to another. First there is this building, where a brother or sister or cousin or uncle or aunt is staying. Then there is the next building, and the next one, and the next one. Sometimes the buildings are relatively nearby; but a family can just as well hop, skip, and jump all over a city, within the confines of the so-called ghetto, of course. A family can even move from city to city: from Boston to Hartford, or from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant to Newark.
Such families elude creditors, city officials, and, significantly, statisticians who like to know who lives where. Such families can be called all sorts of things: unstable, shiftless, rootless, disorganized. Such families are, to other families in the ghetto, a source of apprehension and surprise and speculation and sadness. For a long time I hesitated to talk about “such families.” How did I know that these were in fact a recognizable “group” of people whose “adjustment” to northern cities has been one of continual movement — to the point that within a year or so, four or five apartments are obtained, lived in, then hastily abandoned for the next one. What distinguishes “such families” from other people, who find one building too expensive, a second impossibly infested with rats or cockroaches, a third with no heat, a fourth so full of addicts that “the children stumble all over them, and I’m afraid one day a little child of mine will come here with a needle mark in his arm”?
Over the years I have simply learned to expect that from time to time a family will be pointed out to me as “movers,” as people whom others quickly come to know as “moving, moving, always moving.” Nor is there any one “explanation” for such behavior. Some people may be fleeing the police, others have no money to pay bills and find a midnight departure the best way to wipe clean the slate, still others have less obvious reasons, reasons of the mind and heart, I suppose it can be said. For example, they can’t “take” the city but can’t go back South, either — and so they hope that a new building, a different street, will perhaps “quiet their nerves down,” give them a feeling, at long last, of the “peace” they openly say they are seeking. Words like crime, poverty, indebtedness begin to explain something; but again, for certain people there are ghosts that are to be fled, shadows that make inexplicable visits, noises that unaccountably are taken to mean danger, mean the presence of the devil himself.
Here is a woman talking about her own sister: “I can’t figure out what has happened to her and her husband. They’re always in trouble. He’s had a few jobs, but in one they closed up the store, and then he was let off the second time because business is slow and they didn’t even want a man around to clean up. My sister said she had no money, so I told her to stay with us while she goes on welfare, and then her husband could come and be with her except for when the welfare lady shows up. But he wouldn’t listen to me, nor she; I couldn’t talk with her, my own sister. They kept on telling us that they were going home, and they’d rather be in Georgia than up here. Now, can you imagine that! I reminded them that they shot and killed our brother because he stared back at a white man and wouldn’t apologize to him for saying something bad under his breath. I reminded them of everything. But they said we had to be real fools to stay in this city. Then, the next thing I knew they left the building where they’d been a year, and I thought they’d gone back to Georgia. I was beside myself. One afternoon I’d seen my sister and the next afternoon I went over there and there was no answer and I thought something was funny, but I went back to my place and my sewing, and I went over again around supper-time and still there was no answer. Well, I was scared. I scratched my head and tried to figure out what could have happened. Then I guess I must have leaned on the door, because it opened — and it was empty. They never did have much furniture in there. But what there was, it was all gone. I ran back so fast to my place that I fell. What’s the matter, a kid asked me? I wish I knew, I told her. I got upstairs and I told my husband and he said we should go to the police. But he thought better, and he decided no, that was the wrong thing to do. We figured that they must have gone someplace, and we’d hear from them after they’d settled into their new place. I went over and asked their neighbors, and they said it must have been in the middle of the night that my sister moved, because they don’t recall hearing any special noise in the hallway during the day.
“Well, about a week went by and all of a sudden my sister showed up one morning. I pinched myself, and I went over and kissed her, and I wanted to pinch her, too. I asked what happened, and she said nothing, and then I started crying, and then she did. She told me everything. She said they didn’t have any money and he didn’t know where he could get a job, her husband, and they owed on the rent, three months of it, and the landlord was threatening to kick them out, and they owed other people, and they didn’t know what to do. Her husband has a friend who has a car and he said he could come and get them out in an hour, and they could go someplace else, and that way they wouldn’t owe anyone a penny anymore, because when you’re gone, you’re gone, and who’s going to go find you out? So, the friend came, and they went to a building way away from here, about two or three miles, my sister figured. Her husband’s friend knew a building where they could stay for nothing, because it was closed up by the city, and no one was supposed to be there, but some people were there anyway”
She has a lot more to tell. That move was a mere beginning. The husband got another job, and they moved nearer to their original apartment. He lost the job and they moved to another abandoned building. They have a cousin in a city about one hundred miles away. He thought there was a better chance for both families in his city, so the already wandering family went there. The woman quoted above refused to budge, even though her husband was barely holding on to a low-paying job, and their bills were also mounting. Within six months the sister was back and installed in an apartment not far from the very first one she had upon arrival from Georgia. And there have been three other abrupt moves since that last one just mentioned.
If anyone asks why, why all those moves, there are always thoroughly “objective” reasons. Yet the woman who has not moved once can say this about all those expeditions of her sister’s family, which includes three children below the age of five: “I think it’s gone to their head, living up here. I’ve decided that they should go back to Georgia, but I know they can’t go. They won’t go. They’d die down there. They’d starve to death. They might be killed by the sheriff for coming back. He told both of us to ‘get the hell out.’ But up here, my poor little sister, I don’t see how she’ll survive this going here and going there. As soon as they run into any trouble they up and go. They don’t seem able to sit back and try to get used to a place, and they can’t find help for themselves from their neighbors. My sister was always shy, but now she can’t talk to anyone but her husband and her children and me. She says that she’ll go to a store and she starts trembling and she can’t speak. She’s afraid the police will come in and arrest her. She’s afraid she’ll just start crying and then fall down in a faint. And her husband, when any trouble comes he just stares, and then he starts whispering to her: let’s go, let’s go, let’s move. She says she’s glad when they do go. She says she feels each time that they may hit upon luck and start a new life and have none of the old trouble. But of course it doesn’t take her long to see that it’s the same old life, and nothing more.”
I realize that the sister and the brother-in-law sound “disturbed,” perhaps a little too suspicious, a little too fearful. No doubt they feel sad and bitter also. No doubt they are subject to confusion and spells of disoriented apathy. And I could escalate the language here; I could call them all sorts of psychiatric names. However, I have only met them intermittently; never have they sat down with me and talked about their innermost worries and fears. Their talk has had to do with their struggle for work and a place to stay and a means of obtaining the money they need for themselves and their young children. And it is significant that a sister looks upon them as “different,” as badly “upset,” as “in trouble” — by which she means psychologi
cal trouble. Yet, I have come to know dozens of families whose mode of survival in the city is not unlike the kind just described by this black woman, and I am assured by the people I work with that thousands of families live similarly nomadic and clandestine and hunted and wayward lives. I hesitate to draw upon my clinical vocabulary to describe such people. Their actions obtain from others a degree of social acceptance. There is almost a tradition among some people in our ghettos that under certain circumstances one “picks up and leaves.”
Put differently, when a black family comes North and runs into trouble, the husband and wife soon learn that there are indeed dozens of “outs.” There is a building here, another one there; they are buildings condemned, abandoned, half torn down, but, most important, rent free. And in those buildings live others — families also on the run, also up against it, also not able to deal with the world as “the rest of people” do. Such troubled, hunted, apprehensive people leave quickly, under cover of night, with a minimum of belongings (not that there is usually an alternative), leave for a friend’s house or for a different city, where a relative lives, and perhaps then scatter — a boy here, a girl there, the father in one section of the city and the mother, perhaps with an infant child, way across town. I am trying to emphasize that such practices are not as surprising and shocking as they may seem to outsiders. I am not saying that the woman I have already quoted was undismayed at the turn of events in her sister’s life. Nor am I denying the obvious torment such nomadic individuals carry around inside themselves, and manage to express by constant change. However, those of us who want to comprehend this way of living must face something that can almost be described as a social custom, an established, widespread manner of attempting to diminish personal fears and anxieties on the one hand and severe social stresses on the other — and surely what is “personal” and what is “social” ought to be categorically distinguished.