Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  The man owns many buildings in a black section of a large northern city, some of which are indeed to any middle-class eye old and crowded tenements, in need of various kinds of repair, and some of which, old though they be, are well kept up and relatively uncrowded. In other words, the man has as tenants both large families and modest-sized families. One need be no social scientist to see that on one street the families are black, but generally headed by men who have steady jobs that yield at least halfway decent wages, whereas on another street welfare workers can be seen knocking on most of the doors in his buildings. He claims that as a landlord he is actually “impartial,” so far as his comparative “attitude” toward his better-off tenants and his poorer tenants goes. He claims that all along he has tried to do everything that each of his nine buildings inhabited by black people requires. He claims that he has working for him a full-time plumber and steam fitter and a full-time carpenter, and a more-or-less full-time electrician, and they spend a good deal more of their time in those nine buildings than they do in the apartment buildings and stores he owns elsewhere — that is, in white, middle-class neighborhoods. And finally, he wants to emphasize his personal approach to his work, his effort to go out and see things for himself and instruct his employees quite openly and directly on what he wants done.

  Those employees, by the way, include four black janitors, who care for the nine buildings which he sometimes collectively refers to as his “headache.” Yet, he will not deny that he makes a certain profit out of that headache, and he has as reward not only the solace of money but a sense of pride in achievement which he feels his daily behavior somehow demonstrates: “I’ve got respect for myself, and that’s one reason I don’t sell those buildings. I could have sold them numerous times, and at a profit. I don’t sell property, though. I buy property and I hold on to it. I make my living by being a landlord. I’m not a speculator. I bought those buildings a long time ago, when Negroes were there, but also some white people. The whites moved out a year or two later. They just wouldn’t live with Negroes, not that close to them. I remember being angry at them. One of them asked me why I don’t sell the building he lived in and was just leaving. I asked why. He said, ‘You know.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t know’ Then he gave me a long look and he said, ‘Look, it’s not me, it’s my wife. She says they’re not clean.’ I said, ‘Do you believe her?’ He said no, and what’s more, she didn’t really believe herself. He said they were really moving out because they just didn’t think it was ‘natural’ for white people to live ‘surrounded’ by Negroes. Well, I told him I thanked him for being honest, and I could understand his feelings. I told him I didn’t live with them, and I wouldn’t, for the same reason: I believe you’re always happier with your own people. But I had nothing against Negroes, I told him that, and I was going to stay right where I was, so far as owning those buildings was concerned.

  “Two banks had offered to buy the building from me, and I felt like this: if the buildings are fully rented and they net a good profit, not a huge one, but over ten thousand dollars clear, which is part of my income, and a good return on an investment, then why should I turn that kind of investment over to a bank? Or to a big real estate firm? That’s the way I thought. Sure, I could have made a fast pile of money, but then it would either go to the government or I’d have had to reinvest it. And those buildings are good investments.”

  He is, then, proud that he bought the apartment houses and proud that he did not sell them. He is proud that he did not become panicky and flee at the sight of more and more blacks. And he is proud that he has maintained a steady, satisfying kind of acquaintance with dozens of black people, who do indeed, in the course of various discussions, affirm their friendship for him — or at the least, their toleration of him. “He’s a fine man,” one tenant says. “He’s no worse than anyone else, black or white,” another more guarded tenant says. “What can you expect? He’s the landlord. If he was black, he’d be no better. I know worse landlords who are black,” a third and more cynical or begrudging tenant observes. When he arrives at a building he is greeted cordially and often offered a cup of coffee — although that holds mostly for his better-off tenants. Sometimes he collects the rent from them. Often his agent comes and does so. None of his black tenants mails money to his office, a contrast with the way his white, middle-income tenants choose to do things. Yet, he has no illusions; he knows that even though things seem relatively quiet, there is a lot of tension in the air, and he may well one day be in serious trouble, if not face to face with what he calls “a business catastrophe.” So he lashes out. He becomes angry. He anticipates criticism, then replies to it. One gets the feeling that he somehow gains a sense of control over an unpredictable destiny by arguing out things with himself. And anyway, in time he will become hurt in some way, he knows that — which is why he believes that the best thing to do is prepare himself: “I know I’ll have trouble. Maybe they’ll burn one of my buildings down. I hate to think about it, and yet I’ve got to. I’d be like an ostrich with its head in the sand if I didn’t.

  “Who will suffer if that should happen? It’s so stupid! I’ll collect on my fire insurance, but what about the tenants? Of course, arsonists and hoodlums and petty thieves and crazy revolutionaries never care about people. They do what their wild impulses tell them to do. They aren’t sincere, kind people who want to help their fellowman. They’re exhibitionists. That’s what they are. And they’re willing to have others suffer so that they can say: look at the fire I set; I’m a militant; I’m a leader. It’s always the poor and the innocent who pay for the theatrical types!

  “I know exactly what the militants say about me. And it’s a bundle of lies. They exaggerate. They exaggerate the money I make, and they ignore the costs I have: the money I have to spend on upkeep and maintenance, the taxes I pay, and all the rest — insurance, water bills, mortgage payments. I don’t own the buildings outright. You should see the interest the bank gets out of me every month. But the public has no interest in all that. They just say: those landlords collect all that money and stick it in their pockets. If you try to explain to them what a landlord has to do, what his bills are like and what the risks are that he takes, they say you’re crying false tears. There’s no point in even trying to argue.

  “The one thing that bothers me most is that the really crooked and dishonest landlords, and the cheapest, tightest, most inhuman owners of property are the ones who never get blamed by anyone, black or white. It’s someone like me, who comes here, who is visible — he’s the one attacked. Who can insult someone never, never seen? Who can figure out who owns some of those buildings? I’ll tell you who owns them: banks who have foreclosed mortgages on deadbeats or crooks — guys who took all they could from a building and never paid the bills, so the bank had to come and take the building away, while the guy disappears or claims he’s broke or something like that. The other kind of owners are the large real estate companies. They are huge, impersonal firms. No one knows who is in charge of the buildings. There’s an agent who collects the rent, and every once in a while someone comes to fix a leak. But it takes a team of lawyers to figure out who it is — what collection of guys or what individual — owns most of the apartment houses around mine. The Negroes don’t know. How could they? In a way, they’re right when they talk about the big banks being the landlords. The banks are the mortgagees in a lot of cases. Or there are a series of ‘trusts’ and ‘corporations’ and ‘companies,’ with all kinds of ‘officers’ that a tenant will never see, and the buildings are ‘owned’ by them: the so-and-so trust, you know, and all that. If you did track them all down, the leading investors in the banks and the officers of the real estate trusts and companies, guess what you’d find. You’d find big, prominent families. You’d find the same people who invest in stocks and bonds and everything else. You’d find the most respectable and honored names. Some of them probably have no idea they’re ‘slum landlords.’ Some of them just give their money over to a man or a
company ‘for investment.’ But some are quite aware; they know they own huge blocks of property in the ghetto, and they know that the management company in charge of the property is ‘doing as well as can be expected.’

  “It’s a laugh! It’s so hypocritical! I’ll bet some of those people give to the NAACP and the Urban League. I’ll bet some of them are on the boards of those organizations. In fact, I know that’s the case here in this city. I know a man who’s on the board of a bank that owns some of the worst property in this neighborhood, and at the same time he’s on the board of all kinds of Negro organizations. He’s considered a ‘friend’ of the Negro community. He’s a big lawyer. He’s a nice man. He’s probably never stopped and checked into the various real estate holdings of his bank. Why should he? He’s a busy man, everyone says. He’s got so much on his mind. He’s so generous with his time and money. He wants the colored people to have a better life. Meanwhile, I pick up the bank’s reports and whose name do I see on the board of trustees, and who is a stockholder or something like that in the bank — a big depositor, you can be sure? Who gets his interest from the money the bank makes out of its properties in the ghetto? Well, that man of course, and many others — when you come right down to it, thousands of people who would never consider themselves property owners as such. Their hands are clean. They don’t know where their money comes from. They feel morally superior. They probably look down on me a little. I’m grubby. That’s me: a grubby slum landlord.

  “I’d like to tell those holier-than-thou types what I have to do. I’d like to tell them what some of my worst tenants do to my property. Better, I’d like them to come and see. They’d see things done to walls and stairs and mailboxes: dirty words scrawled everywhere, locks broken, screens slashed, windows constantly pushed in, garbage just thrown out the window as if I was there, ready and waiting with my arms wide open. What is a landlord supposed to do? I spend thousands of dollars every year — you heard me, thousands of dollars — in order to fix up the damage that those ‘poor, underprivileged’ Negro kids do. It’s part of my expense. I have to figure on that when I anticipate my costs. The police laugh at me when I call them. And I laugh at them. What can they do? We’d have to have a million police in some of our cities if we were going to stop these gangs. They come with paint and smear the walls. They break bottles, one after the other, until the alleys and streets are covered with layers of glass. I try to sweep up after them. I mean, I ask my janitors to do so, and they try, they really try. They are hardworking men — like I said, Negro. You should hear what they say about their own people. I never dare speak like that, even to my own kids — especially to my kids.

  “I once asked my son to come and talk with those men, but he said no. He said they worked for me, and so they said what I wanted them to say. I said OK, OK, have it your way. But you’re wrong, so completely wrong I’d like to laugh, but I end up almost in tears. Why is it that a boy like mine, in college, prelaw, gets an idea in his head and then doesn’t try to find out whether it’s right or wrong? I see him reading books about ‘logic’ and ‘reason’ and all that, and I say to him: before you call your father an exploiter, and his janitors paid dupes, please come and look around and ask some questions. But no. He’s willing to insult those janitors, never mind me — and believe only what he thinks is right. He doesn’t even want to test out his beliefs. I guess he’s afraid that if he did, life wouldn’t be so clear-cut — I’d say black and white, but I’m not trying to be funny. This is no laughing matter, the way a person believes only what he wants to believe, and doesn’t bother with the facts.”

  The facts — more than anything else he stresses the importance of facts: the money he makes, the money he spends, the rents he collects, the cost of maintenance he has to put up with. Like the policeman he calls but knows cannot really help him, like the fireman he has also had to call (so far only for “minor” blazes, mischief done by children or accidents in particular apartments), and like the welfare workers who come to see his tenants regularly, he claims to know things about black people that others do not know. He thinks of himself as the outsider who is also the insider, the white man who really has his eyes on the black man, the heavily scorned person who is really the knowing and courageous person. Again and again he wants that last point made: others talk, but he sees; others use rhetoric, but he takes part in a neighborhood’s “action.” He uses that word, action. He considers himself a restless, active man, and he says that he is glad he has to take risks, test his willpower and perseverance against the growing danger and uncertainty his work provides.

  One thing I must know: he is not afraid. And I do know that. True, somewhere “underneath” or “way down” he is scared and ashamed and guilty and all the rest, as many of us are for one set of reasons or other. But in his everyday life I am quite convinced he knows little fear. He walks those streets, streets in a sense he partially owns, and for all the world he seems almost carelessly casual and untroubled. He likes to whistle, which can always prompt from someone like me the clever observation that at some “level” of his mind he is indeed whistling, whistling in the dark — quite literally so, because he is at large among the darkskinned people who pay him so significant a part of their income. But one of those darkskinned tenants, on welfare and capable of intense anger at white people, finds that landlord no real menace and even laughs at him — with scorn yes, but genuine appreciation of sorts: “He’s always smiling, and he’ll whistle you a tune if you ask him to. So help me, he will. Now, how can you hate a man like that? I hate him on the first of the month when that Uncle Tom of his comes around for the rent; but when he drives up here, whistling and worrying about a leak in a pipe and pointing out something to his plumber and worrying if the plumber is going to cheat him good by stretching the job out — well, I have to smile and say: the poor guy, he’s running scared, too, like the rest of us. I’ll save my gun for the bigger cats.”

  So it is that those two have their moments of agreement, that landlord and his tenant. Only moments, however. Each of them can attack the other, and do so with words and phrases which make one wonder whether there is any hope that somehow this country will keep itself reasonably intact. And yet, and yet; I can only add the “and yet,” the qualification those two human beings and others like them require from me — because again, for a moment here and there, and sometimes even longer, they think and talk almost alike, which may never mean a thing, or may one day mean quite a lot.

  White Northerners

  What Have We Done?

  When the black children first came to the school her nine-year-old boy and seven-year-old girl attend, she spoke as if she faced something far more awful than a “crisis.” I thought, listening to her, that the apocalypse might be finally at hand. She spoke about how ineffective her opposition was doomed to be: “People don’t listen to someone like me. I went to our club at the church, and we all said that: no one is going to care about us. The only people that get themselves heard on television are the colored people. They stand on the street and threaten everyone and tell their people to burn down the city, and I have to see that on my television station. And our newspaper listens to any colored man, no matter what crazy thing he says, just because he’s colored. But do the ordinary white people ever get any space in the paper? The answer is no.”

  She says she is that, an ordinary white person; she used to be “just ordinary,” but now she emphasizes that she is white. For three years her children have gone to school with some black children who are bussed several miles, so no longer does she feel that the world is coming to an end. But she does continue to have her serious misgivings — about black people in general, and the ways in which one hundred black fellow students affect her children. Nor is she a peculiar or especially disturbed or anxious person. It so happens that I have met, week in and week out, for several years with her and thirteen other mothers like her; they all belong to a community whose men work in factories, work in offices, work as civil servants
of one kind or another. The homes are two-family homes, with an occasional single-family one. The streets in the neighborhood are clean and lined with trees, with cars, with street lamps and with carefully tended lawns. To this woman and her friends that street means a lot: it is a quiet and respectable street, I am told by them, and it is near a church, near a school, near a drugstore, near a supermarket, near a busline, near a bank, near a hardware store, near “everything you want and need,” is the way it is put. And now everything seems in jeopardy; even with the first scare over, the mothers continue to be fearful.

  The mother of the boy and girl speaks her fears passionately and with bitterness: “What have we done, I ask you? Do you know that the city is not only letting these total strangers come over here, but some of them don’t go home in the bus, as they should, but just stay around? I wouldn’t want my children sent to a strange part of town when there is a neighborhood school for them to attend. All I hear is that in the colored sections the schools are very old and crowded. Well, they are old here, and they’re full here. With these colored kids, there isn’t a single seat vacant. The difference is that we teach our children to be respectful of property, even if it is old, and with the colored people, it’s a different story. My son says they are a restless bunch of kids. They are always moving around, and they give everything wear and tear. The colored boy next to him sits there and his leg is jiggling all day, up and down. And he wears sneakers to school, and in recess all he does is run and jump and try every piece of equipment they have out there in the yard. My son says he thinks the kid has ants in his pants, and he’s always breaking his pencil and dropping his eraser, and he opens and closes that desk of his a hundred times a day. Now I ask you, what is wrong? I’ve watched them getting off the bus, and they’re just not like our children, and no one, no doctors and no college professors and no politicians, can tell me anything different.”