Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  None of what I have just written is extraordinary or surprising, but I fear it is quite necessary to bring before the reader a man like Ray Phillips, a man who heads a black family, a workingman who is very much his children’s father. No doubt about it, many children (and many white children) don’t have fathers like Ray Phillips, but many, many do — and in this last third of the twentieth century, when one slogan after another is fastened upon over twenty million American citizens, it is well to keep a taxi driver in mind as we go rushing on to the next moment of panic and despair.

  Who Speaks for Us?

  There is in what are called “ghettos” a kind of rage that I fear few of us know about, either because we really don’t want to know, or because we simply have no way of hearing the voices of those who feel the rage. I have in mind the thousands and thousands of black people who do not feel themselves to be pathetic and degraded and sick and all eaten up by what is called “social pathology.” Nor are many such enraged men and women members of the “black bourgeoisie,” unless that phrase is to be ridiculously amplified to include all working people, all men and women who labor hard and are glad to do so and are proud they have done so all their lives. The very word “ghetto,” used as it is by white and some black people offends such workers: they feel they live in the city, like everyone else, and they do not want their streets talked about as if they are some awful blight upon mankind. Nor do they want their lives characterized in special and near hysterical ways. Nor do they like shifting fads that go from Negro to black to Afro-American — as if whatever a few outspoken men decide is “right” has to be obeyed by everyone, lest he be called an Uncle Tom or racist.

  As the reader will notice, many of the people I know, of both races, shift at random from the word “black” to the words “colored” or “Negro”; and the shifts are not always fraught with ideological significance of the kind that is often called “deep-rooted” or “psychological.” Sometimes we use words unselfconsciously; they have been used by our parents, and by us over the years, and it requires time and effort to make a shift, to take up new words and feel comfortable with them. Nor does everyone have the inclination to be so concerned with words, phrases, and slogans. Again and again I am reminded in the course of my work that some of the “issues” and “conflicts” and “arguments” that trouble me simply don’t vex and hound the people who speak in this book. Why is it that so many of us, who are so concerned about the “true feelings” of others, be they black or red or brown or Appalachian-white or whatever, simply cannot accept on face value some of the things we hear? And why is it so hard for us to believe that sometimes people don’t say things or believe things simply because they don’t — and not because they have some “problem” or are “defensive” about this or “reacting” against that? I have in mind the unwillingness of some black people to demonstrate self-disgust, or to ask white self-proclaimed “sympathizers” for their outrage and pity, or to use some of the fashionable terms such as “cultural disadvantage” that one hears among certain white middle-class citizens? Must it be that those blacks are demonstrating their “pride” in order to conceal their “inner” hurt? Must it be that those blacks are going through some “period of self-assertion,” some “stage in their development” as a race or a people?

  I believe that thousands and thousands of “ordinary” people feel things in their bones and speak out of their hearts, and often say what to them almost needs no saying, so obvious and concrete and clear-cut are some matters. I cannot claim to have included here every opinion I have come across, every sentiment and allegiance I have heard. I have done my best to indicate the range of ideas and activities one like me sees in certain sections of certain cities. I cannot write about what I have not witnessed or heard. I cannot claim access to the words of those who have their own good and wise reasons to stay clear of white middle-class people, or white observers, or white social scientists, or white psychiatrists.

  God knows, when I read some of the things I do in various journals, not all of them professional, I wonder what an observer from another planet, even if he had a sense of humor and the longest historical perspective possible, would make of the pompous, muddled language, the self-serving postures, and, worst of all, the narrow-minded arrogance that passes itself off as “science” or “research.” If poor people, of whatever race, have been “exploited” by those who make caricatures out of their lives and want only to rip their words and habits out of context so as to make this point or prove that theory, then many readers have been exploited in another way: their hunger for information (one hopes nothing more sinister is at work) has caused them to take in, it seems, almost anything which bears one or another “authoritative” stamp and say to themselves: interesting, interesting. Who is around to shake us and shout: come off it, man? Where are the men ready to demand that we stop being smug, self-centered “benefactors” who secretly or even openly and unashamedly love blood and gore, who enjoy the sight and smell of trouble, who crave objects to pity, groups of people to support faddishly, causes to embrace, then abandon? I fear I have to admit that I have been so shaken and shouted at; and if I cannot accept all the rage I’ve heard sent in my direction — because what I have seen with my own eyes and come to believe I will hold to and speak about — I can most definitely share much of what I have heard.

  I suppose we all worry that our own very special point of view doesn’t get understood; but often the loudest complainers are the wordiest and fussiest people. Still, the four words that make up the question Who speaks for us? can often be voiced by someone who is simply and directly annoyed and, yes, even wryly amused. Here, for instance, is what I heard in 1969 from a tall, somewhat heavyset worker; that is what he is, and that is what he calls himself and what he wants to make quite sure I call him: “I get sick when I read the papers or the magazines. Mind you, I don’t have time to read a lot, but I do my share, and I tell my wife that my stomach turns as a result. I say to myself: who do they think they are, writing all that about us? And on television, those documentaries and talk shows, I don’t recognize me or my family or my neighbors; I don’t recognize so much that I have to scratch myself and ask whether it is my people they’re talking about, right?

  “I’m thirty-seven years old. I am called a black man. The fact is, mister, I work in a factory, and I have a wife and three children and we live in an apartment. I used to think there were a lot of people like me, thousands and thousands of them. I used to think I’m a worker, and there are a lot of workers like me at the plant, and some happen to be Negroes and some happen to be white, but we’d all been there for years and we knew each other, and when you come right down to it, we’re not that different. We spend our days the same way, and when we talk about what we do in the evening and on weekends, it comes out sounding the same then, too. But these days I’m supposed to believe I’m an oddball, a rare bird, you know. I’m supposed to believe I live in a ghetto, and all around me are these diseased people, and they are crazy, and they are addicts, and they are prostitutes, and they set fires, and they think they’re in the worst, most terrible situation anyone could be in, and they need everything, man, everything — because the racial tragedy has gone to their heads, and they are in a bad way, a real bad way.

  “Well, I’ll clue you in to something. I’m not rich, and I’m not special. I’m not a doctor or a lawyer. I didn’t even finish high school. My mother and father came up here from Virginia — Dinwiddie, Virginia. They didn’t have a cent to their name, and no degree either, or rich relative waiting for them. And times weren’t so good. It was in the late twenties and early thirties. I was born under Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I can recall my father saying it sure was rough trying to make a living. But he got by. He was a janitor. He was a watchman at night. He scraped up enough for us all to live and eat and have a roof over our heads. And when I was sixteen I’d been working three or four years myself, and then I got the job I have now. It’s hard work; I have to
keep on my toes. But I get a salary that means we all can eat and have clothes to wear and a car and a phone and television and a toaster and a waffler — Hell, what more can a guy want! I help make those appliances, so it’s only right that I should own them; but I pay, like everyone else.

  “They call this a ghetto. Can you beat that? The building is old, and whites used to live in it; but it’s a sound building, and we like it here, and we don’t want to live with white people, and we’re happy with our own people, and that doesn’t mean we’re Afro-Americans or for black power or any of that. Hell, I work with white people, and I’d like my kids to go to school with them. But I live where I do, and I’m happy living here, and there aren’t rats eating up my kids or cockroaches crawling on them. My kids eat good food, and brother, we’re not rich, either. I’m just a plain guy — and there are thousands like me right in this section of the city. Why don’t people talk about someone like me? Why don’t they call me an American citizen, not a black man or Negro or all the other words? I’m not out to tear the society apart. I get up every day and go to work and come home and I’m not on heroin, and I’m not a two-bit drunk, and my kids aren’t experimenting with drugs and on the way to being pimps and prostitutes. You know, it’s insulting the way people try to create an image of the Negro as some pathetic creature who can’t for the life of him take care of himself and has nothing he can really believe in and be proud of. It’s bad enough we get that treatment from those white ‘bleeders’ who just love to find us in bad shape — the worse shape the better they like it. They’ll walk by ten blocks of buildings where we live in order to find one that’s bad, really bad, so they can start crying and can say: oh, those poor, poor people, they are so low, so down and out. Then they’ll go home to their big suburban homes and start crying for us, and they’ll take up a collection for us and feel as sorry as they possibly can for us.

  “But what about the Negroes who talk like that? It’s not just the white ones who bother us, it’s our own people who put on a show about how bad it is for anyone who isn’t white. Their eyes fill up with tears, and they start wringing their hands and say, ‘Let’s feel sorry for ourselves, brothers; let’s feel as sorry for ourselves as we can, because we are the worst-off people you can ever catch sight of, that’s for sure.’ I have to laugh when I see some white guy and some black guy appear on a talk show, and they tell you that where those Negroes live, it’s bad, real bad. After I hear them long enough I start wondering to myself: where are all those bodies lying on the street, and where are all the ruins, and where is the garbage up to your neck, and where are the mice and rats running down your back?”

  From a black nurse I hear similar thoughts. She lived for three decades in Harlem, then moved up to Boston’s Roxbury section because her brother lives there and she had lost her husband and wanted to be near him and another brother. She has two sons, one a teacher and one an engineer. No doubt about it, they are what some call “middle class”; but there is more to their lives than those words were ever meant to suggest, and even if she is a reasonably well-off person as things go for her people, she is still able to look around and talk: “I sometimes think I’m reading science fiction when I pick up magazines or the papers. When I tell people, white people, I lived in Harlem, their pupils dilate. They give me a look that is supposed to say, I guess: oh, how awful for you; it must have been Hell, a living Hell. People have said that to me, word for word. They’ve practically wanted to give me a medal for bravery and heroism. Then they decide: she’s a nurse; she must have been special — you know, the black middle class! Life is easier for them, but it’s still no picnic! I’ve heard that line, too. I’ve heard black people speak the line and watch their white audience squirm more and more with guilt. It’s all very well to laugh and say it won’t hurt to make whites squirm; it won’t hurt to make them bleed and cough up some cash; it won’t hurt to ‘mau-mau’ them, scare them by telling them we’re mad, we’re fed up — so unless they do this and they do that we’ll explode, we’ll burn up the cities, we’ll go on a rampage, we’ll turn the country over to the Russians by starting a civil war or something. But after a while I think we make fools of ourselves, and the worst of it is we actually start losing our heads and believing all that talk.

  “We forget. We forget the ideas people get of us, white people, and the ideas so many of us have about ourselves. Why do my own people, who should know better, parrot the line that goes like this: they are so destroyed and so unable to help themselves that we’ve got to do something drastic — tear down their ghettos and rehabilitate them. I’m so sick of that word rehabilitate. When I was studying to be a nurse, rehabilitation meant getting someone who had been sick back on his feet again and to work and all the rest. Now I hear that Negroes are ruined people, and the ghetto is full of pathology, and only ‘massive rehabilitation’ will work. And do you know what they want to do? These are our friends, so-called, I’m talking about! They want to take our little children and bring them up away from those ‘ignorant’ mothers of theirs. They want to tear down Harlem and Roxbury. They want to break the ‘cycle of poverty,’ which I read is ‘transmitted from generation to generation.’ Why don’t more people talk about changing the American business system, which is also transmitted from generation to generation?

  “We are called criminals and diseased and addicted, and we are told that the thing to do is build low-cost housing and get some more medical help to the addicts and alcoholics. All the while I see my people leaving their apartments to work, work, work. They teach their children to be good. They save what they can. They go to church and pray as hard as a person can pray. They buy pictures for their walls and records to dance by and listen to and enjoy. They keep the rooms they have as clean as can be, and the hallways, too. They sweep the stairs and make sure the garbage stays in the barrels and gets hauled off on time each week. And no one comes and notices. No one comes and learns that they aren’t rich, and they aren’t businessmen or professional men, but they aren’t exactly poor, either — not the kind of poor who make people weep and want to send off a basket of food. They have jobs and they try hard and they want to try hard. They do not want to have their houses and their streets torn down by some white planner — or black planner — who says: Harlem, it’s all rats and roaches and dazed people and terrible, terrible tenements.

  “I wish, oh how I wish, more people in this world would go and look around a little before they started sounding off. I mean, I know street after street in Harlem and here in Roxbury where black people live exactly like other people do in white neighborhoods — none of which anyone is suggesting need to be razed to the ground, or called ‘disaster areas,’ or be given ‘massive rehabilitation’ because the people are so out of it, so deprived and without a culture of any value. I’d like someday to tell people about how deprived my childhood was and how poor my parents’ culture was! I’d like to tell how my father and my mother read from the Bible, and how they read from the history books, and how as children they had taught themselves to read and write, and how they taught us to go and do the same, go and get an education and get ahead. I know, I do know, how awful life can be for a black man or a black woman — in the South or up here, too. But it’s been pretty awful for all groups, if you go back far enough and see what they faced. I think in America the Negro race had probably had to live with more hardship than any other group of people. But we’ve come through it, and we’re not destroyed by the experience, I don’t believe. We are a vital, alive, swinging race.

  “Some say it’s genocide that America has tried to commit on black people, but if that’s been the wish, we’ve beaten them: we’re over twenty million and growing fast. Is that a people facing genocide? And look at those white college kids. They are so ‘deprived’ culturally that they more and more try to talk like us, dress like us, play our music, dance like us. My God, I hear from my sons that there’s no limit to the white man’s interest in our habits and our values and our way of doing things! Doe
sn’t that show that we’ve been busy doing more than feeling sorry for ourselves and complaining that we have nothing? Doesn’t that show that we’re more than sick, sick, sick? Was it ‘sick’ of us to learn how to survive and keep our thinking straight and learn how to whistle a good tune and pray plenty and smile and smile and swing, rather than sit and cry all day long? I don’t want to hear my mother turned into a huge, smothering dictator and my father into some drunken, doped-up philanderer. Who has come and talked to me, or to my brothers, or to thousands and thousands of others like me in Roxbury and Harlem and any other city? Why don’t they know about our good side, our tough side, our damn smart side, our clever-as-can-be side?

  “I am a nurse. I’ve worked in hospitals. I know all the bad side of my people. But is there any group without a bad streak in it? I get sicker by the year of all this propaganda, that’s what it is. We’re made out to be so bad and so awful and so shiftless that for every white person who cries for us and says give them everything they need, another gets disgusted and says it’s hopeless, they’re just a bunch of hungry, ignorant animals. We don’t need the weepers and we don’t need the bigots. We need friends who know that most of us may have our faults, like everyone does, but we’re trying, we’re working, we’re sending our children to school, we’re going to church — and you know, we’re getting something out of life, too, not just sitting around with our heads in our hands on a drug high. And let any bulldozer come near this street; we’d laugh at the sight of it, and the man driving it would laugh, too. There’s not a stockbroker or lawyer on this street, just working people; but we take care of our buildings and our yards like people do everywhere. It’s bad on some streets, very bad; but it’s bad on plenty of streets where white people live. What I object to is the stories that have all of us at the end of our rope. I don’t like our streets thought of as if they were covered with garbage and littered with syringes. The country needs to be more discriminating, that’s right! People have got to realize that wholesale words like ghetto, cultural deprivation, black rage, black despair — that they can give a completely false impression about twenty million American citizens who are more like their fellow citizens than those fellow citizens may want to believe. But maybe whites have been persuaded to believe what they believe by — of all people! — those who keep on claiming how tolerant they are and progressive and pro-Negro and pro-black and who say how awful it is for us in such a way that everyone begins to believe we are awful.”