Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  They think I’m a millionaire, the little kids do. They ask me how I make the money to buy so many flowers, and I tell them I know a man who sells them, and he gives them to me, gives them away. They believe me. They say they wished they knew someone, too. I tell them they will, they will, later on. They’re so good, the little kids. It’s when they get to be eight or nine that they turn sour. Oh, they get awful right before your eyes, and I’m not their mother. I’m glad I’ll never be a mother. I don’t want to be. I don’t want the heartache. I’d die as soon as I started seeing my children going bad. What’s the use of bringing them into the world and trying to do everything you can for them? What’s the use if all your work goes down the drain? There’s no kid on my block who’s not going to be bad. I just know it. Even the people who look to be good, they’re bad underneath. I see them. Every night I see them. I should know. If anyone knows, it’s me. They wear their nice suits. They have a tie on, a lot of them. They’re dressed as if they’re going to church. A lot of the black men, I’ll bet they get all dressed up like that for only two things: the church and me. It’s like I always say: it’s a funny world, mister. Sometimes the man, especially if he’s white, starts trying to tell me a story. He wants me to know all about his life, and I keep on telling him to forget it, just forget it. To get them out, I say to them: it’s a funny world, mister, it sure is, and they usually leave right away. If they don’t, I go to the door and hold it open. I can’t stand the sight of them for longer than I have to.

  When I’m not looking at my roses, I close my eyes. I don’t like the light on. I like to keep my eyes closed. Then I can picture things. I can go anyplace I want, in my mind. You don’t have to travel to get away. You can shut your eyes and use your head! My mother used to tell me when I was real little that the best thing to do when you have a few minutes is to dream, and then the time goes faster. Just close your eyes, she’d tell me, and think of someplace real good and nice. When I’ve got a lot saved up, five thousand dollars, I’ll stop working and go around the world. I’ll visit California and Mexico and Africa and Trinidad, those are my favorite places to go visit. I’ve heard about them.

  The only time I talk with a man is if he mentions a foreign country. Then I’ll sit down on the bed and ask him all about it. I’ll stay a long time with them if they’ll tell me something interesting about a place like Mexico. It’s when they want to talk about themselves that I can’t stand them. Why should I listen? They give you a big headache. They don’t know there are other people in the world besides them. If you remind them, they look as if you just gave them a spanking, and you were wrong, because they’re the nicest one who ever lived. Well, I don’t let them get me feeling sorry for them. Their pockets are full of money, aren’t they? I should be feeling sorry for the people they got the money from. In this world, if you can make a lot of money, that means someone has lost a lot of money so you can have it. That’s my philosophy. Nothing comes easy in this world, nothing.

  Let the ministers and teachers preach and tell you to be good; meanwhile, the landlord is squeezing you hard, and so is the grocery man, and so is everyone. I always watch the store people at work in the stores near where I live. They try to get everything they can from their customers. The same goes with the fancy stores downtown. They’re just smoother. They put on airs. They try to be so polite with you. White people seem to think that if they can just talk pretty words to each other, and have a big smile, then they can stick the knife in and no one will notice. I hate our black men and their loud mouths; but I hate worse the whispers and the sweet smiles of those white men. And that goes for the women, too — the white women. Black women are mostly too much in pain to be bad; that’s what I believe. They’re aching and aching all through their lives, they are. I’ll be going to my room or coming back home, it doesn’t matter which, and I’ll see a black woman, a mother, walking down the street, and I’ll feel like crying. I admit it. I have to fight back the tears, and sometimes I don’t win. I think of my mother. I think of her mother. I think of an old aunt of mine who’s still alive, and she’s so tired and she thinks she’s going to Heaven, so she’s so happy. I go visit her once a week. I bring her roses. I bring her money. I give her enough to keep her happy. She thanks me, and she tells me that God is smiling on her through me. I asked her once how she ever got that idea. She said she was in church and doing her praying — she prays hard, real hard — and she was answered by the Lord, and He told her yes, I was coming as a favor to Him. Then you know what? She went to that minister and told him what she’d heard. She told him I was coming for Him, so as to do His bidding. And he’s the one I’ve seen — he’s the minister I mentioned. They almost sent him up to my room by mistake. It’s a good thing I told them no in time. But he saw me anyway. And to think: that’s what my aunt told him. I asked her what he said back to her. She said he didn’t say anything. She said he just nodded his head, and she knew how busy he is, because everybody likes to come and have a word with him, so she just moved away. I told her I was sorry I wasn’t there with her. I told her that one of these days I’d like to go there and talk to him myself, that wonderful minister she keeps on mentioning to me.

  Yes, I’m sure it would be good for that “man of God” to see my old aunt and me together. He’s so convinced he can separate everyone into the saved and the damned, and the good and the bad, that I’d like for him to separate my aunt from me — and himself from me. That’s what I’d like. And he could separate some of his deacons from me, too; while he’s at it. They own buildings, but they go and visit the building my room is in. The other day a man told me how he liked to travel a lot. I thought to myself that he sure does. People just don’t stay at home, like they should. Then they go and call the people they visit bad names. But names don’t hurt me. Not while I have a big leather pocketbook and cash inside it and my bankbook. I figure that way I’m as honest as anyone around, as honest as any businessman, as honest as those politicians. You start being a crook and a bum when you don’t have money and your clothes are no good. That’s what I’ve learned in my life, and I’m glad I’ve learned it, let me tell you.

  Black Fathers

  We have heard so much, and properly so, about the difficulty that black men have obtaining work, hence becoming good providers for their families. Needless to say, a man who cannot bring home money gets discouraged and bitter. Nor can we forget that, until recently, in many cities and counties families became eligible for welfare only when the father was dead or disabled or no longer at home. In thousands of instances, men have left their families for just that purpose. They sneak away when the welfare worker is expected, and return in-between her visits. Or go away and stay away. In Roxbury and Harlem and the Hough section of Cleveland and Chicago’s West Side I have over and over again encountered families headed by mothers; and often the various children have different fathers. I have met up also, however, with sturdy, tough, outspoken black fathers, men of astonishing independence and vitality and resourcefulness, for all the burdens they bear, the doubts they have, the fears they fight every day. Somehow, those fathers are less apparent to the outsider than fatherless families, however careful and curious the observer may be. For one thing, they are working, or trying to find work, or off in some corner talking with a friend or two about how hard it is to get a good job and keep it. For another, they frequently are quiet, unassuming, quick to retreat when the children burst forth with remarks or the wife speaks out. But that is not to say a modest and reticent black man (worker, husband, father) needs to be labeled “weak” or “submissive” or “passive” or “dominated” by some “matriarch,” some black virago who need only raise her eyebrow to have her way.

  During the years that have gone into the work I am trying to report upon here, no individuals have confounded me so persistently as the “black fathers” I have met and spoken with and listened to and for long stretches of time, I believe, sorely misunderstood. Not that I understand black women all that clearly, but I hav
e often found that black mothers can somehow find words for a passionate voice, a cry of mixed despair and hope. I once asked a black mother in Roxbury where, just where, she learned how to give forth so, assert herself, make her wishes and fears so vividly, compellingly known. She had a little trouble putting into words that particular answer, but soon one was forthcoming: “I’m not talking for myself. I’m speaking for Joseph and Sally and Harry and Stevie and Benjie and Mary. I’m speaking for them, and they push on me until I get the words out, that’s what I believe. Because if ever I have trouble saying something, I look at my boys and girls and the words come to my mouth.”

  One has to ask how black fathers can talk the way so many of them do, with their own kind of cleverness, guile, humor, sarcasm, exuberance, and often, in spite of everything, a certain guarded confidence. One such man is Ray Phillips, a cabdriver, a black cabdriver. He says that, calls himself “a black cabdriver.” He still remembers when many white people wouldn’t take a cab driven by a black man, and when blacks took cabs far less frequently than they do today, and when white cabdrivers bumped him with their cabs and swore at him, and when the police were constantly asking him to identify himself and show cause why he should not be called a liar, a crook, a pretender, a public nuisance or menace. Now, at forty-eight, he is a father, a grandfather, a fairly good wage earner and, most important, he emphasizes, a husband: “I love my children, but most of all I love my wife. We’ve been married for thirty years. Yes, that’s right: I was eighteen and so was she when we got married. The minister told us no, because our parents told us no, but then I got my dad to say yes, and pretty soon we were in the church there, swearing we’d stand by each other until the end of our lives. Thank God we did get married; a year or so later I was in the Army, the Second World War. My son was born when I was out in California and then I was sent to the Pacific and I didn’t see him until he was five, I think it was. I’m getting hazy about all that. He’s got two of his own children now. After the war we had a girl, then another girl, and then I said the time has come to stop. I’m no millionaire, and three kids is enough. Sometimes I think: I grew up and there were six of us, and maybe it would have been better with more children. But I’m glad we stayed at three. My wife would look a lot older than she does if she’d have had three or four more kids pulling on her and taking it out of her. A man doesn’t know what his wife goes through all day. All he knows is his own troubles. He forgets what it means to bring up kids — and I mean bring them up, not drag them up.

  “I’ll be driving a customer someplace in the city, and if he’s a nice, friendly guy he’ll start telling me about all his troubles. He’ll tell me his business is good, but it could be better, then he’ll tell me some other worry he has. Then I’ll try to change the subject. I ask if he’s married. Yes, he says. Children? Yes, he says. How’s the wife find her work, I say. Oh, fine, fine — that’s what they’ll say, unless they come at you with: what work? A lot of husbands just don’t know what their wives do all day. I’m the kind of husband who does. I’ve tried to pitch in and help my wife every way I can. I’ve tried to be around my kids, too. I was a real father to them, not a man they called father. And I’m a good grandfather, I believe, a very good one. That means I spoil them the way someone should!”

  The more he talks the more one forgets that he is anything but an American taxi driver who doesn’t make a huge amount of money, who hustles (he puts it) for what he does make, who happens to know just about every street, or so it seems, in Cleveland, Ohio, and who happens also to be close to his wife, devoted to his children, and anxious to be a grandfather about nine or ten times, he says. He never finished high school. He was born in eastern North Carolina, but was brought to Cleveland at age three. His parents were not members of the “black bourgeoisie.” His father left North Carolina because he told a white man to go to Hell and was promptly arrested. He escaped from jail, though Ray Phillips was told that the escape was permitted by a deputy sheriff who disliked the man who was insulted and who caused the black man’s arrest. How, then, did Ray Phillips manage to do so well, become a successful cabdriver, be so good a husband and father?

  Perhaps he has a right to ask me why I have to ask such a question, though God knows even more insulting and patronizing questions are asked these days. However, because Mr. Phillips has a radio in his car and hears a lot of “talk shows” and “call-in” programs, and because he also reads the papers regularly, and because he watches television documentaries, he is prepared for the likes of such questions: “Everyone is looking at the black man today and saying: who is he, and what’s on his mind? I know. I flip from one station to another, or I’ll meet a real honest fare and he’ll say to me: come on, level with me and tell me what you think of all our race problems. Well, I do tell them, even if he’s a big, fat white businessman. I say: mister, I’m a citizen of this country, just like you. I was over in the Pacific, fighting to beat Japan and win. I was under MacArthur. I’ve seen other parts of the world, and I’m glad to be living right here. If the white people would only get off our backs and leave us alone, we’d be the best citizens this country has, and everyone could relax and stop being so damn nervous. That’s what I tell people. Sometimes they listen, and sometimes they don’t. I can tell. If they want to hear more, I’ve got through to them. If they shut up and don’t say another word, I know I haven’t; and I know I’ll be getting a real small tip — if I get any tip.”

  The more he talks the more he decides to call himself a teacher. He is only being half humorous. He sees a lot of people in the course of a day, a week, year; and he tries to get the word across, spell out a certain message that he believes, that he considers just and sensible, and that he wants others to hear. He doesn’t have the same words for each person. He realizes that many hear nothing, that many are hopeless causes, are unapproachable. He is an observant and intuitive man, a person who can sense what other people are like, can quietly and without a lot of trial-and-error exchanges decide who might and who might not want to hear some of his ideas. And as he gives expression to those ideas, he rather often hears in the casual atmosphere of his cab much the same kind of question I more formally have had in mind over the years, and indeed have just set down above: how is it that this man has become — well, “just like anyone else”? That is the way he finds a lot of white men putting it — tactfully, they believe. He does not get excited or angry with them. He smiles and brings out into the open what they “really” want to say, and thus helps them along, shows them how categorical and indiscriminate they have been: “I say, look: you’ve met me. Think of the thousands and thousands of guys you haven’t met who would talk to you like me, if they had the chance. I happen to like to talk. I’ve been a cabdriver all these years, and it’s an education, and you get to feel comfortable with people, so I can speak up. But I’m just one of about twenty million Negroes. Call me black, call me colored, call me a Negro. I don’t care, so long as you see that I’m Ray Phillips — you hear? — and I have my wife and my kids and my grandchildren and I watch the same television shows everyone else does, and when the President said we’ve got to protect the country from Hitler and the emperor of Japan, he got me to go fight along with everyone else.

  “They begin to think by then — the customers who have some sense in them to start with, I guess. You’re right, you’re right they’ll say. Then I look at them through my mirror and I can tell by the look on their face that they still think I’m someone special. He’s different, their face says. He’s a real smart one, they seem to be saying. That’s why I can’t let it drop there. I have to work. I even have to knock myself a few pegs down. I have to convince them that for every me, there’s another me — a million other me’s. I have to tell them that my dad was a guy on the run, a ‘fugitive from justice,’ they called him. I have to let them know that I was born poor and if I’m not poor now, I’m sure a lot poorer than they are. Otherwise I keep hearing: you’re exceptional, you’re an unusual guy. When you hear t
hat you know what that means: he thinks everyone else black is no goddam good. I’m supposed to feel big when someone says to me I’m the greatest person he’s met, but I could take the guy to the building we live in and the one next door, and all up and down the street, and there would be men just like me: they’re not rich; they work hard and they get by, they just get by, and sometimes they don’t, I’ll tell you, with prices going up, up; but most of all, they’re like other people in this country. I mean, they try to do the best they can by their wives and their kids, and if they can only come home and be with them, they’re willing to work hard, plenty hard, and be glad to have the work. If they don’t find work, then that’s another story. But so long as a man can get a job, and if he’s honest and he’s not crazy because of drugs or liquor, then he’ll be fine, and if his wife is a good woman, he’ll stand by her, I believe, and he’ll stand by his children.”

  Of course, there are exceptions, he reminds himself and me. White fathers betray their children, and so do black fathers. Individual men can be fickle, unreliable, devious, awful examples to their children and harsh and callous men to their wives. Moreover, he repeatedly takes pains to remind me that it is “another story” when a man has no job, or has one but then is laid off and cannot find another one, or finds one but gets little pay and works under demeaning circumstances — all of which causes in husbands and fathers a kind of fear-fulness and resentment which wives and children do indeed come to experience. I suppose, in sum, Ray Phillips has this to say: There are plenty of aimless, wandering dazed and ruined black men, even as in America white men by the thousands are alcoholics or philanderers or crooks or loafers or clock-watchers or slowpokes or sleepyheads. Yet, there are among black America’s people many millions of men who are faithful husbands, devoted fathers, and hard workers. By and large those men are not as well off as their white counterparts, do not have access to jobs many whites can either take for granted or obtain with relative ease if they so desire. Yet, despite such “facts of life,” black men in street after street of our northern cities struggle to find what work they can, and struggle also to maintain intact homes in which children grow up with a sense of continuity and stability in their lives.