Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Perhaps she is angry at me, I think. She is angry at me, I later decide. In the beginning I tried to listen and occasionally respond — but only to restate her own remarks. After a while I realized that she also wanted to discuss things with me. She asked me frankly for my thoughts, and I offered them, in as respectful and quiet a manner as I could. I have never looked on it as my role to educate that “group” of mothers or get “therapeutic” with them or “change” them; they agreed to meet and keep me informed about things going on in the neighborhood and I agreed to speak up (when they asked me to do so) and tell them what I had seen elsewhere and what I believed I was learning in the course of my work. We always talked rather informally, and I certainly did get a continuing sense of what was happening in the school as well as in their lives. Yet, I am a doctor and from a university. From time to time I have made it clear that I felt close to those political leaders who wanted to make changes, plenty of them, rather than congratulate all of us on how big and rich and mighty we are. So, when the mother talked about “doctors” I wondered out loud whether I had become a stand-in for all the other “bureaucrats and social planners” who were “messing things up,” in the words of that same mother who mentioned doctors and college professors.

  No, the mothers said, I was wrong. They implied that I was really going mad a little, or at the very least I was just too self-conscious, too worried, too taken up with noticing everything and giving everything so much importance, so much significance. They did not offer me any “interpretations” of my implied “interpretation” — that I was becoming a living representative, as it were, of white, upper-middle-class liberals — but they did say some moving and instructive things. To call upon our same mother again: “No, no. I’ll tell you what is bothering us. We have been told that we are prejudiced and that we should be taught how to be unprejudiced. Someone in the school department wants us to go and hear a psychologist. He’s supposed to clear our minds of bigotry. I went to my minister, because it was his idea, I heard. I told him to mind his own damn business. I think the church should leave us alone when it comes to some of these problems. I get sick, watching the ministers marching in the street, demonstrating, and taking sides against their own government and their own people. There are times when I think our minister cares more about the colored people than he does about us, members of his own parish. I didn’t say it to him, but my husband did. He said we don’t want any movies and any college people telling us our minds are sick, and we don’t want to be told we’re bigots and all that, because the fact is that we’re not; we’re not prejudiced at all.

  “I wish I could say it the way he did. When he gets excited, he really knows how to talk. He’s not afraid. I am; I’ll have to admit it. I hear those sermons about prejudice and bigotry, and I feel as if I’ve been a bad girl, and I should be punished. Then I go to visit the school, and the teachers, a lot of them, are on our side; but the school department and the governor and the mayor or someone send those psychologists to give us a talking-to — there’s so-and-so, and he’s connected with around ten universities, they say when they introduce him to us, and he’s supposed to make us think differently, I guess. And my God, you can’t pick up the paper and you can’t turn on the television without reading something about the poor colored people and all their troubles and seeing a documentary on how they’re all nice, and they’ve been punished by us — me! — all these years, and we owe it to them, we owe everything to them. I’ve never been bad to any colored person. I don’t know them. But America is racist, they tell you. I’ll tell you what I believe: I believe there is an effort on the part of some to make people like us, the ordinary white people of the country, feel as if we’re criminals and get an inferiority complex, you might say.”

  I told her that I certainly hoped I wouldn’t say anything that would add to the already large stock of accusations she had just mentioned. I told her that I believe one accusation after another does little to help people see things more clearly; on the contrary, one gets defiant or moody or disgusted not only with oneself but the brazen nerve of others, who display very little good sense (not to mention generosity or breadth of understanding) when they push people further and further into a corner — to the point that they can only yield and hate themselves for doing so, or strike out in what is felt to be self-defense.

  She interrupted me to say that each person has a right to be heard, and not any “one group.” I told her I certainly agreed, but I said I believed there are indeed people ready to respond to people like her, including some of our very highest and most influential leaders. Well, yes, she did not feel entirely without support and understanding. Nevertheless, she felt increasingly put-upon these days, and she wanted me and the others in that room to hear the sources of her discontent: “Everywhere you turn, there’s a poster or a commercial on television that says the colored people are like other people, and we should have them next door, and we should apologize because we had them as slaves, and it goes on and on. On my mother’s side my grandparents moved down here from Canada; on my father’s side they were farm people in Maine. They never had any slaves. They were working people, and so were my parents, and so am I. What is all this business about racism, racism? Am I supposed to spend my whole life thinking about the colored, the colored, the colored? I never gave them a thought at all, one way or the other, until the last few years, and now I’m told I’m a racist, and I’m trying to kill off all of them, and a lot of other nonsense.

  “I believe that every single person is fine, no matter what his color or the church he goes to, so long as he doesn’t bother other people and cause a lot of trouble. I’m not against colored people. I’ve never had anything to do with them, one way or the other. The same goes for my husband. He works for the milk company. He delivers milk. He gets up at five o’clock in the morning. He comes home dead tired. He never sees colored people, and he doesn’t have a thing in the world against them. All we want is peace and quiet. We bought the house, and we’ll be paying for it the rest of our lives. We’d be crazy if we said we’d like colored people to move in here, and then we’d have a house that was worthless, but we’d still have to keep up the mortgage payments. Do the people who write those editorials, do they think we ought to let this whole neighborhood be a colored neighborhood? Should I stay here if the colored move in and surround me? Is it wrong for me to want to live near people like myself, and near my husband’s cousins, two of them?

  “It seems to me that the people who do the most talking on this subject have a lot of money, and they can live wherever they want. Even our minister, his house goes with the church. He can change churches, if worst comes to worst. And the church, that’s been a great disappointment to us, the way the church has behaved lately. All my life I’ve gone to church. My uncle is a minister, himself; he’s a Methodist. He was the bookish one in my father’s family. I’ve been in many churches and heard many sermons since I was a child. It’s only in the last few years that these churches have gone crazy over the colored, and they’re also against the government more than they’re for it. We still have the American flag in our church, but I really wonder whether one day I’ll come and it’ll be there no more. My uncle says you can’t just suddenly switch on people and expect them to go along so easy, and he’s right. I was brought up to expect a minister to give you support and lift up your spirits, not to tear into you and make you feel so low and bad that — well, that you don’t want to go back next Sunday and hear it again, how you have these prejudices, and the colored people are suffering, and white people don’t give them a chance.

  “Who gave my husband a chance? He made a chance for himself. He works so hard that I worry for him. He even does carpentry on the side. We’ve got to meet those bills. I was trained as a nurse, and I have been putting in some hours at the hospital or on private cases since the kids are in school. Now, all of a sudden, our kids have these strangers in school with them. I don’t know what the colored kids are actually learning h
ere that’s so much better than what they could be learning where they live, in their own schools. The teacher told us it’s not the same. Before, everybody was relaxed. Now if kids fight, like they always do, and one is colored and the other is white, there’s no telling what will happen. You might have one of those colored parents phoning the principal; or worse than that, some snotty white minister or college student will come and say he’s over here ‘on behalf of’ the colored people. My boy says that a lot of the time he forgets about the colored kids even being there, and my girl says they’re a nuisance, but they don’t bother her, and they mostly just keep to themselves. Well, they could keep to themselves much better if they’d stay where they live.

  “I’m sure they are going to try to move in here. They’ll hop, skip, and jump their way toward us, inch by inch they will. I have a cousin in Connecticut, and it happened to them — the first thing it was children brought in to the school, and the next thing it was houses they wanted, the colored. It’s got to the point that you have to look ahead and try to figure out if you’re safe for one year or five years or what. I tell my husband: we should sell the house while we can get a good price, and then rent someplace. That way, you can get away fast. It’s terrible when you’re in America and you have to think that way. I suppose if we had more money and could afford to live way out there in one of those plush suburbs, we’d be all right. No colored person can afford to live with the rich, and that’s why the rich can afford to give us all those sermons on how they favor integration and they believe in treating everyone equal. I believe in treating everyone equal, too. It’s just that no one’s fighting for my rights, only me. The colored have the papers and the television behind them, and the professors and the college students and a lot of the politicians and a lot of rich people who like to help the poor out but make sure they’re far enough away from them — and from people like us, too.”

  Am I to point out to her the various inconsistencies she has expressed, and pursue her and pursue her until she agrees that through her opinions runs a streak of obstinate unreason? Am I to listen as best I can, and see how worried and fearful she is, how hard she fights for what she has, how nervous she is about what the future holds, how confused she is by events which move along rather fast — events for which she was never prepared by the schools she attended or indeed the churches she went to or even the particular newspapers she read? As she points out, the churches and newspapers have only recently begun to speak out so loud and clear on certain issues. And anyway, she doesn’t read a lot of magazines and books, or “analyze” events and take “positions” with respect to them. But she and her hardworking and not enormously well-paid husband and their young children live with and are involved in and worry about those events — to the point that what we call “events” or “issues” she calls “the biggest danger we have ever faced.”

  I have been pressed to make my observations and comments, and maybe they will have their place and their value. But that woman and others next door and across the street and “over on the avenue” and “down near the square” all continue to feel apprehensive and ignored, even, in cloudy moments, betrayed by ministers and newspaper editors and others who “change their tune and expect everyone else to come running along.” As I hear in those meetings we have, “people have their limits” and “you can ask only so much of people.” I hear that last statement rather often, and sometimes when I am driving home I say to myself that I have seen people change a lot, an incredible amount, but I have to add that when people don’t want to change so much as hold their own, they will let anyone who has other wishes for them know exactly what they think.

  Laura

  Laura was seven when her school became the subject of considerable controversy. “Seven is a good age,” Laura told me when she was seven years, eleven months and five days old. She wasn’t sure what it would be like after her birthday, after she turned eight, but she did make a point of letting me know that she hoped the third grade might prove to be “easier” than the second. I asked her to write out her own prescription, tell me exactly what she would want in the way of improvement, exactly how things might get “easier,” if she could have an important say. Word for word, I said: “If you could have your way, how would you make sure the third grade would really turn out to be easier?” She replied with a long silence. Eventually she raised her head a little, darted with her eyes toward my face, then quickly turned her head away and spoke. She spoke as if to an audience, as if she was making a public statement, as if her mother’s words had finally achieved a certain power over her that could no longer be stayed. Indeed, she spoke like her mother, and the words she used were her mother’s: “If the school went back to normal, and they left, the colored kids, we would have it good again — no trouble.”

  Laura is the only daughter and youngest child of a man who works as a foreman in a factory and a woman who on occasion, now that Laura is in school, works for a secretarial pool. The mother describes her work and her family this way: “I have two sons, and they’re growing up fast. John is twelve, and he’s becoming a real man. Ted is ten. He has a lot of friends, and I don’t see him much, what with school and his baseball or football after school. Laura is our favorite I guess, being a girl. Her dad adores her, and I must admit, after two boys, I was glad to have a girl. They’re easier to bring up, I believe. Even now Laura helps me take care of the house. I try to make some extra money by doing typing. There’s a company that takes in work, and they call me up and I go there and type a few hours, I’d say three times a week. Laura is very good at taking care of herself. She dusts and she loves to use that vacuum cleaner. I’ll come home and she’ll tell me she’s ‘done’ the living room, and when she says she has, she means it. Our next-door neighbor keeps an eye on her if I’m not around when she comes home from school.”

  All of that sounds pleasant and not very remarkable. But when she used the word “school” she came to the end of one train of thought and began another. The word “school” started this off: “This past year has been awful, and there were days when I really wondered if I should ever be away when Laura comes home. We had a nice school, with no trouble at all there, and then the next thing we all knew, the school wasn’t normal any more. It was a different place, because the colored said they wanted to come over, and our school officials tried to stop them but failed. Now, all we have is trouble.”

  Later on she would qualify that observation. Less pressed by her own anger and rhetoric, she could almost casually acknowledge that things had not been “all bad,” that from day to day Laura had not witnessed “racial trouble,” that maybe over the long run “a few colored” in the school would be all right — but no more than a few, she hastens to add. Nevertheless, Laura has gone through a difficult time in school, that she knows — and that she finds unforgivable: “I’ll never forget what a year that child had; it’s a shame when a child can’t even have a quiet time in the second grade. I shudder to think of what it’ll be like in this country when she gets up to high-school age.”

  Laura herself had all along been quite able to talk about what she saw and heard during that eventful year: “They brought them over in a bus, and some of the mothers were there, right in front of the building, and they were trying to get the colored people to go back home. But they didn’t. There were the police there, a lot of them. One of the police was the head, and he kept on telling the other police what to do. They had to take the colored kids into the school, the police did. My mother didn’t go there. She wasn’t one of the mothers standing there. She said she agreed with the mothers, but she couldn’t bring herself to stand in the street with a sign, but maybe she should have, she says.

  “Now the colored kids come every day, and there’s no policeman around. We have some trouble sometimes. The teacher has to tell them that she can’t understand what they’re saying. They must go home and tell their parents what the teacher says, because a man came to the school, he’s a lawyer, and he complained to
the principal that there’s prejudice. That’s happened maybe three times, I think. I hear the colored kids talk, so I know all about what’s going on.

  “I like some of the colored kids, and some I don’t like. They are like us; they look different, but after a while I forget that they’re colored. There’s one of them, he’s a big kid, and a lot of the boys are scared of him. He pushed two kids, two white kids, and they fell down and had to go see a doctor. Then the teacher said there wasn’t going to be any more of that, and we’re not animals, and this isn’t a zoo. So, then the kid stuck out his tongue at the teacher, the colored kid did, and then the teacher told the kid to get out of the room and stay in the hall until she called him back in. Well, a little while later she did, but he was all gone, and do you know: he’s never returned to us. The teacher told my friend’s mother that she was very glad, because he was really tough, that boy, and he was always looking for trouble.”

  Laura, like her mother, wants to observe rather than take part in things. She has managed to keep her distance from the six black children in her room; that is, she has not fought with them, as some children have, nor has she played with them, as other children have. She has two friends, Mark and Sally, and together they keep themselves busy during those recess times and lunchtimes, when there is indeed a chance to talk a lot and have fun with other children. “I was told by my mother,” Laura once reminded me, “that it’s best to stay out of people’s way if you don’t know them, and the colored kids come from another part of the city, and there’s none of them living where we live.”