Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “I’m on the scene early, before eight. Walter and I drive around for a few minutes. He’s more excitable than I am. He really bleeds for some of the people — and he really would like to throw a lot of the agitators in jail. I keep on telling him: there’s just so much we can do. We look at the stores to see if any have been broken into. We check out the hydrants and the street lights. We go see a few of our friends. If I were to tell you that a good policeman knows everything, everything that is going on in his district, you would laugh. How can a guy like me keep track of the Negroes in their ghetto? I heard someone on one of those talk shows say that the blacks hate the cops; they hate us and they don’t trust us worth a damn, that’s what he kept on saying. I had to laugh. I wouldn’t be worth anything; I’d be totally useless, if it weren’t for some black people. And I don’t mean the store owners. I’m talking about young kids and their parents, too — just plain people, like anyone else; people who want to have as much law and order as it’s possible for them to have. They know they can’t live the way they’d like to. They know they’ve got to put up with gangs and violence and stealing and drugs and all that, to some extent at least. They want our help, though. They know that if we don’t come around and round up a few people and demonstrate that we’re ready to take on any really crazy types, then they’ve all had it, the thousands and thousands of people who live in all those tenement houses.

  “Hell, the people in the ghetto are at the mercy of every two-bit thug and gangster around. And when you have poor people like they are, the colored people, and a lot of them just up here from some little town in the South where they lived — I believe it — like animals, then you’ve got to protect them. And that’s exactly what the police of this city do. I could get a thousand signatures of gratitude for all I’ve done and Walter has done. He’s gruff and he doesn’t smile much, but he’s rescued people from fires and caught kids and made them return what they’d taken — from old ladies and mothers whose husbands have left them, and from some poor kid who suddenly finds a big, tough hoodlum has grabbed a pair of skates his father worked for and saved for and finally bought for him. Why don’t the bleeding-heart types worry about that kid? Why don’t they worry about the mother who tells us, ‘Thank God you’re here.’ Why don’t they worry about the hospitals that serve the poor? Every day some thief tries to break in and steal something and scare the nurses and doctors. If we weren’t patrolling the streets nearby, I can tell you what: there wouldn’t be a hospital. They’d strip the place bare. They’d strip every store and every building. And it’s not the hungry who do it; it’s the addicts, who need hundreds of dollars to buy their heroin.

  “You know, I’m not the one to tell you what goes on over there in the ghetto. I’m not a crusader, so I’m not so damn sure of myself. I try to do my work, and I’m grateful if I have done just a little bit each day. Walter, my buddy, won’t even talk at all. He’s so fed up that he’s thinking of leaving the force. He’ll stay, but it’s hard on a man who tries to protect people and be there when they cry for help — it’s hard when all he gets from a lot of snotty people is insults and wisecracks and filthy names. Let some of those nice people out in the rich suburbs and the universities come with me for a few days, and see what I see and hear what I hear and do what I have to do. And let them come and talk to the people from my district — the people, not the propaganda types, the fast talkers. I give them one day, those nice, kind, sympathetic people who live in quiet streets where everyone has a hundred thousand dollars or so, and they all say hello to each other, and they’ve got about a hundred or two big, fat books in their houses and plenty of furniture and a car for each kid and summer houses and boats and all the rest. They all don’t know what we’re protecting them from, never mind the poor old colored lady or the young mother I had to rescue yesterday — from her own husband, who came and stole their own son’s bike, and when she caught him, threw lye at her. That’s right! He could have blinded her. He could have killed her. He’s no good. He’s a pimp and an addict. He’s been up before the judge again and again. I’ll tell you this: there isn’t enough room for them in our jails, and if we doubled, tripled the jail space in this country there still wouldn’t be enough room to hold all of them. I don’t haul a lot of them in. The judge tries to keep a lot of them out on parole, or with their case pending. What else can we do? There aren’t enough police, enough judges, enough probation officers — you name it, we don’t have it.

  “Yesterday I broke up four fights between women and their men. Don’t ask me if they were married. I’ve given up even asking, or God help me, even caring. I told the priest a long time ago: I can’t do everything! He smiled, and he told me we’d both have to pray for all of them. I thought for a moment he was kidding, but no, he had a serious look on his face. I couldn’t hold my tongue. I said. ‘Father Lynch, they don’t want our prayers, they really don’t. They don’t even think they’re doing anything bad, living as they do.’ He said yes, he knew, but that was all the more reason we had to pray for them. Well, I have! I’ve been there in church and I’ve asked our Lord, please, to do something. I sometimes think He’s the only one Who ever will, Who could. Walt and I agree on that. He’s come out of some rough meetings, especially with the addicts when they’re desperate for money and they’re stealing left and right and they know we’re onto them and we’re going to take them in, which means they may easily lose the habit once they’re in jail. They do smuggle drugs into prisons, I know that. He’ll turn to me and say, ‘Ed: all we can do is pray to God that a few of the kids will turn out OK.’ And I say yes, that’s right.

  “Neither of us believe one single kid would have a chance, a chance to become a halfway decent person, if the police didn’t keep the blocks under some control — at least compared to what the streets would be if we left there for good. And are we tempted! I leave my house in the morning and I ask myself: why should I get the salary I do — barely enough to pay our bills, and plenty of times not enough — in order to risk my life protecting a lot of people from their own kind, their very own ‘brothers,’ they call each other? And then the college kids call us ‘pigs’ and ‘murderers’ and ‘oppressors.’ Oh, my God, I’d like to lug a few of those kids out to my beat. I’d like them to see what I see and hear what I hear. I’d like them to talk with the people there and hear what they would say about the work I do. Those students, they sit in their campuses and talk, talk, talk. They’re full of hate, and if you ask me, they’re full of ignorance. They have their ideas, but they don’t come out in the world and learn the facts. They insult a man like me, and meanwhile I’m carrying an old Negro lady down five flights of stairs and taking her to a hospital; and I’m protecting a Negro lady from her ‘man,’ who’s drunk and on heroin, both; and I’m being rushed to a hospital myself, because I rescued two little Negro babies from a smoke-filled apartment, and they were unconscious and I was also near unconscious.

  “Look, I’m not asking to be called a hero. To Hell with that! I’m a cop. I’m nothing more. I’m like thousands of cops all over the country. I try to do my job the best I can. I make my mistakes. And I admit it, I have my prejudices. Everyone does. But I’ll tell you this: I’m out there on the firing line; I’m taking it every day. Because those people got a raw deal a long time ago, they’re in a sad way now, a lot of them, and it’s left to a guy like me to keep them from killing one another and beating one another. I can’t count the number of addicts I’ve found unconscious; I’ve had to rush them to a hospital to keep them from dying. Now I don’t have the answer to all this. That’s not my department. I try to do the best I can. But I don’t like being called a pig, and I don’t think it’s fair to the Negroes themselves if those college kids listen only to the Negroes who attack the police. You know, it’s the criminals who always attack us and call us names. Like I keep saying to you: what about the poor people in those buildings, hundreds and hundreds of people in my district alone, who call us up all the time for help and thank us fo
r coming and giving them the help they needed and offer us food and all the rest? Who is telling the American people about that? What do our college students, the radicals among them, know about that? It sickens me, the way the truth gets buried. If I didn’t know them better, I’d feel sorry not only for myself but for all the other cops in this country. But Hell, I haven’t got time for that!”

  A day spent with him would certainly convince his most skeptical listener, even perhaps his most outspoken opponent, that he is at least right on that last count. He is indeed a busy man. He has little free time for much of anything. He is overworked and underpaid. He constantly risks his life, and therefore he is quite naturally afraid. He feels as “rebuked and scorned” as the black people he spends his time with have always known themselves to be. Nor is it only those “college radicals” who trouble him and accuse him so sternly and vehemently. He himself has his misgivings — not so much about anything he personally does as about what he calls “the whole damn business,” by which he means, in effect, the train of events that began centuries ago and now has reached a crisis, forcing him to take risks all the time, while the wrongs and injustices (again, centuries of them) persist. For the fact is that he strikes out at “college radicals” for two reasons: yes, he believes them to be mean and gratuitously insulting and arrogant and self-centered; but he also considers them privileged, protected, secure, on top of all sorts of ladders — which means, bluntly, that their fathers and grandfathers are so often the ones who own or owned plantations, or real estate, or banks and stores, or whatever. He puts it this way: “Who has to keep the whole country from becoming a big battleground? Who’s protecting the wealthy suburbs? Who’s keeping the Negroes from killing themselves and killing the white people? The white people who own all those tenement buildings, and the white people who are the lawyers to the landlords, and all the rest? No. It’s a guy like me; and I’m not sitting here with stocks and bonds, and my kids off in fancy colleges deciding whether they want to be in the Peace Corps in Africa or maybe spend a year in Europe someplace.”

  From him I hear angry, brutish, callous remarks, some I don’t care to set down here, about black people and college students; but from him I also hear a frustrated kind of indignation that I fear many of us simply do not know about, or do not care to recognize as additional evidence that this nation has a lot of political and economic business left to transact. Presumably, many who consider themselves to have “social consciences” refuse to appreciate one group of people at the expense of another, but prefer to see what is shared among an Edward Herlihy and the people he claims to help and the people he constantly offends. What do all of those people share? I believe Mr. Herlihy has himself come very close to an answer. They all, though in different ways, feel themselves now suffering from rather than profiting from all that has gone before them, suffering from the painful and grave part of America’s history.

  The Welfare Lady

  Janet Howe, who is twenty-four and well-educated and articulate and anxious to help “her” families, could surely find other, less strenuous ways to earn the approximately ninety dollars a week she now makes as a welfare worker. Yet, Janet Howe would have it no other way; she likes the families she visits, and for good stretches of time they enjoy her visits. They offer her coffee — not to placate her, appease her, ingratiate themselves with her, but because they like to sit and talk with her; they know she comes to them wanting to do whatever she possibly can. Still, even for her, an obviously able and kind and generous and well-intentioned worker, some sharp and abrasive moments come up, moments in which she is subjected to abuse and bitter invective, moments which she tries hard to “understand” and not so much ignore as “survive.” Those are the verbs she often uses as she talks about her work: understand and survive. She must understand the angers and frustrations of her “clients.” She must understand the way they take out on her feelings “really” directed toward many other people. She must understand, too, the fears and resentments, the continuing prickliness of the “political majority” (as she refers to them): the hardworking, also harassed or edgy or worried people who put in long and not always satisfying hours on the job and bring home just enough, just barely enough to pay those mounting bills and make ends meet. They feel threatened or enraged that others should get “for nothing” what they must obtain by working long and hard.

  “It is a matter of envy,” Miss Howe says. Nor is she being snobbish and coolly analytical when she makes a remark like that. She really does understand how so-called lower-middle-class families feel. She herself came from one of them; her father to this day is a carpenter who is up at six and out of the house at seven and not back home until six or seven in the evening. He works for himself. He is an entrepreneur of sorts who never made a fortune, but also never took a cent of money from anyone, even during the thirties. He detests “freeloaders.” He believes that if a man really wants to work, really is an honest and reliable person, then he will find a job, and “for the life of him,” keep it. And he believes in “education,” in the importance of saving one’s meager dollars so that a girl like Janet Howe can go to college, go to a school of social work, and finally come to be self-supporting. “I hear my father’s voice sometimes,” Janet Howe says, and then she talks about her own mixed response: “Of course I have a mind of my own, and when his words and philosophy come to me — often it’s when I’m driving — I have my answers. I remind myself how fortunate he was. He is white. His family has been around here for a long, long time. He was not a dazed and confused and frightened man from the rural South, or a Puerto Rican never before in an American city and unable to speak English. He was not from a hollow in West Virginia. He went to school; he even graduated from high school. That may not mean a lot now, but it meant a lot forty or fifty years ago. And he has a skill, a ‘trade,’ as he calls it. He was trained by his uncle; he apprenticed with him. though they never were so formal that they called the work they did together an ‘apprenticeship.’

  “But I know I could never get away with it; I mean if I said all that to my dad and tried to explain to him what the families I see have gone through, in contrast to the experiences his family has had this past one hundred years — well, he would get angry and hit his fist on the table and say to me: look, where there’s a will there’s a way. And that’s the point, for him that has always been true. Like everyone else in this world, his source of knowledge is his own experience. It would be easy for me, I suppose, to dismiss him, but I don’t think it would be fair — even though I realize that a lot of the welfare rules and procedures, awful as they are, have come about in response to the feelings that millions and millions of people like my father have. Does anyone doubt that the majority of the country’s people talk the way he does?”

  She can go on only so long in that direction. Soon she feels the tug of her clients, her families, her friends. Soon their voices are in her mind, clamoring for recognition, craving a word, many words: “I don’t know how to talk with my dad, but I do believe from the very bottom of my heart that he is blind to some terribly important facts. I wish some of the people I go to see could sit in his living room and tell him about their lives. I wish they could say: Mr. Howe, you don’t know what it has been like for a lot of people in America. You just don’t. We don’t have anything against you personally. We can’t expect you to go and visit all over and take an interest in everyone else’s problems. It’s just that we do have our problems, and believe us, they are not yours and they aren’t necessarily solved the way you’ve solved yours.

  “I know that my father is never going to hear someone in the ghetto talk like that to him. It takes time to explain what others have to face, more time than anyone has got, I sometimes believe! I myself sometimes have to be convinced! On a rough day, in each home, I hear complaints and more complaints, and requests and more requests, and threats — more than you would ever imagine. I’ll be tired and all I can do is say to myself: wait until you get home; a glass of
sherry or a gin and tonic, and you’ll be feeling better. Instead, I’m in the last or next-to-last apartment, and someone raises her voice at me and tells me I’m not doing enough, I’m not providing enough money, and it’s my fault, mine, because I have to ask a supervisor for permission, or I have to fill out a request and hope — that is all I can do — the right decision will be made back at the office. Suddenly I hear myself saying: enough! I’ve had enough of it. Suddenly I picture myself quitting and going to work in a school, in a hospital, in an office — anyplace where I’m not under this kind of cross fire. And I’ll admit it, if I get really annoyed, and I’m completely exhausted, my voice gets sharp with the people. Then I obey the letter of the law and get out fast — because I’m tempted to tell them to shut up and stop swearing and stop cursing and leave me alone and go out and work.

  “I’ve never said something like that to a person, but I know at times they can read my mood if not my exact thoughts. And I’m one of the young, so-called activist welfare workers. I’m one of the protesters. I’ve even picketed our own headquarters! I’ve signed dozens of protests. I’ve called our regulations inhuman, unfair, condescending, arbitrary — you name it! I’ve refused to ask some of those insulting, demeaning questions. I’ve written letters to my congressman and senator. I’ve written to the governor. I’ve joined new organizations. And I honestly believe that, day in and day out, I do pretty well with the people I visit. It’s just that the whole system is an impossible one, and the people who need welfare are in an impossible series of binds. So, when I come to see them, and they have me right there and available and ready to listen and not push them around and not scream at them and not threaten them, they just let it all out on me, the anger they feel toward the landlord, or the city’s garbage department, or the whole social and economic system in America, actually — and if they don’t use the words we do, they come close enough. They pull themselves together and say it’s not me, they know, but ‘everything.’ If I ask them what they mean by ‘everything,’ they let me know — that everything is ‘the way things are run’ or ‘the way people are allowed to treat other people.’ And I prefer their way of speaking to the hazy, indirect talk I used to hear from my professors of social work. Some of them are as afraid as the people in the ghettos. I guess we’ve all got our bosses to worry about, me included.”