by Robert Coles
Does she think those children would want to live near her? Does she think they like being at school with her? And in general, what does she make of them? How are they doing, now that she has had a chance to watch every day for a number of months? Always the first answer, rather naturally, is a noncommittal “all right I guess” or “I don’t know” or “maybe” or “pretty good.” But Laura likes to talk, again like her mother, and so she can be depended upon to amplify her terse characterizations. What she needs to do is hear yet another question, because the second inquiry tells her that the listener knows she has some ideas and wants to hear them and, indeed, would be disappointed if he did not hear them. Then comes the story or two, the expression of amusement, the question of her own to ask, the statement of doubt or the admission of error or the declaration of pleasure or the inscrutable remark which is elaborated upon and unraveled and made quite clear, all by the girl herself.
“They’ve been OK, pretty good, the colored kids,” Laura told me one day after school. I decided that after six months of talking with her I could get a little pushy with my questions, so I asked, “How good?” She was properly confused. Did I want a grade for them, some exact evaluation? How is she supposed to know “how good?” She sat in her chair and puzzled over my question until I decided I had been dumb, and I had better pull myself together and demonstrate more intelligence and tact to the young lady — who must have been thinking, so I thought later, that it was not her place to make quantitative judgments about her classmates. (And what is wrong, anyway, with that man? How can he possibly believe that a question like his can be answered?) In any event, I next asked Laura whether she could think of some good moments she’s had in class and some not-so-good ones — hoping thereby to bypass for a while our previous discussion of her “colored” classmates. We certainly hadn’t always talked about racial issues, and now was a time to speak more broadly about school and home, I felt. Laura at times wanted very much to discuss how things were going with the school’s new students, and at other times — this time, I believed — wanted no part of such a discussion.
“Most of the time it’s good in school,” she said right off. She seemed pleased to have, at last, something she could dig into and expand upon: “We all play, and then the teacher tells us to hush, and then we do. The best time comes later, after we’ve done our work, and we have juice and cookies. She lets us get up and walk around and talk — but no games and no fooling around, and we have to keep our voices low. Janice is one of the colored girls, and she always goes across the room to see her friend Henrietta. They won’t leave the room without each other. The teacher asked them one day if they were related, and they said no, but they live near each other.”
She had on her own moved the discussion toward one that had to do with the “adjustment,” as some would have it, of “colored” children like Janice and Henrietta; so with only the slightest prodding from me I could hear her sharp and sharply worded observations: “They seem scared. That’s what I think. They don’t talk to you unless you talk to them. Sometimes they do, I guess. But mostly, Janice and Henrietta and the others stick together. When they forget, they’ll break up and play with us. If the teacher tries to get them to scatter, they obey her. The teacher says, ‘Now I want all of you to scatter and meet new people!’ She’s kidding us, but she means it. She gives us a talk sometimes about not sticking with only one person at recess.
“There’s a boy in our room who is very nice. He’s colored, but he dresses very good. He wears a bow tie every day. I asked him if he knew how to make the knot. I told him I said to my daddy one morning when he put on a bow tie that we have Jerry at school, and he has a bow tie on all the time. Daddy told me to ask Jerry if he had a real knot that he made himself, and he probably didn’t, Daddy thought. I asked Jerry and he said yes, he did. The teacher heard him, and she said, ‘Jerry, that’s not a knot you made yourself, is it?’ Then Jerry said it wasn’t, and he showed me he could pull the tie and it would snap back, because there was an elastic, and he just put it around his neck, like an elastic band, and it looked like my daddy’s tie, only Daddy stands before the mirror and it takes him too much time, because he has to have the tie ‘just right,’ my mother says, and it’s not easy to do.
“I try to stay out of trouble. Jerry fights with some of the boys. He’s strong. The other day he said one kid called him a nigger. He went and told the teacher. The teacher told both of them they should stop fighting and she didn’t want any noise. She wanted them to shut up and stay shut up, she said. Then Jerry talked anyway; he turned and talked with his friend Richey. Richey is colored, too. The teacher sent them both out of the room. But she must have been afraid they would go and leave like the big colored boy did after she put him out in the hall, because no sooner were they out than she called them back in — and they came. They didn’t cause any more trouble that day. She kept on walking up and down the aisles, and when she came to their desks, she stopped and looked at what they were doing. She told them they were doing OK. She had her ruler in her hand. We know she means business when she walks around with that ruler. She’ll tap you on the shoulder if she likes what you’re doing, and if she doesn’t, she tells you what’s wrong. The colored kids are scared of her, I believe. I’ve heard them say so. They call her Miss Whitey. Her name is Miss Cunningham, but they still say Miss Whitey. My mother says they’re rude if they do that. I told her that if you’re colored, you notice the skin color of the white person. I think the teacher notices their color, too — and that’s why they call her Miss Whitey. If she’s against them, they become against her.”
Shortly after that conversation, Laura drew for me a picture of her school. It was one of some twelve pictures of that school she has done for me in the course of the four years (as of the time I write this) I have known her. Sometimes when we have nothing much to talk about, or indeed sometimes when we have all too much to discuss — a particular incident at school may have aroused the girl’s imagination — I suggest that we both sit down and use the crayons or paints I carry around with me. I rarely have to suggest a subject for Laura, though she often tells me to do a particular sketch: a home, a college building, a doctor’s office, an airplane, a dog, her school building or the school building my children go to, among others. I do the best I can, and as Laura tells me often enough, so does she.
This time she worked extra long on her picture, done carefully with crayons. Meanwhile, I did my work. I was asked by her to do a picture of a tennis racket. I had a few weeks earlier told her, when she asked me, that my favorite sport was tennis. She pointedly had let me know that her brothers liked baseball and football, and that they don’t play tennis at all, and that her father doesn’t, and that she wasn’t even sure she knew how one plays the game. I had told her that when I was her brothers’ age I, too, played baseball a lot and not tennis, but now I love to play tennis. I had explained the game to her. She wanted to know where the game is played and how one learns, and I told her that there are indoor courts and outdoor courts, and that I knew a good tennis player, who was about halfway between her age and mine, a college student, and he was right at that time doing a great job at making me a better player, and perhaps someday she would be able to meet a teacher like him and learn how to play.
Now, a few weeks later, she wanted that racket drawn, and I tried my best. Meanwhile, she did her best. When I asked her about what was happening, as I often did when clearly something was happening in the picture, she said this: “It’s a school day, so we’re all in the building. The only ones outside are Janice and Henrietta. They think they’d rather stay in the yard and talk than come in. But the teacher will go get them. Maybe they should stay at home, if they like to talk so much. But I guess you can’t be at home all the time. I guess they should stay here, and then when they get home there will be plenty of time for fun.”
So it goes for Laura — and for Janice and Henrietta. The two girls have stayed — and not done so badly, after all. Laura cont
inues to take note of them; they are special in her mind, two close “colored” friends who quite obviously rely upon one another and have demonstrated to Laura and others their pluck, their determination, their ability to keep on coming to that building. As Laura has noted, they could probably have a better time elsewhere, but again, they “can’t be at home all the time.” I later asked Laura whether she in fact thought Janice and Henrietta desired to stay home rather than come to the school they are now attending. “No,” she answered immediately. “I think they really do want to come to our school. They say it’s their school, too, and I think it’s right they say that. I’m not for more and more colored kids coming here, because pretty soon we wouldn’t have any room, the white kids wouldn’t. But if they send over Janice and Henrietta each year, and some of the others, I think we’d all feel good, because it’s like our teacher says: there is every different kind of person in the world, and if you don’t get to meet them all, you’re not going to know what they’re like. The teacher told us she thought she was learning herself, now that we have new people coming from different places in the city, and we should, too — we should learn, too. My mother said the best thing is to let everyone be polite toward everyone, and we try to do it.”
From all I have seen they indeed are polite; girls like Laura and Janice, or Laura and Henrietta are not very friendly to each other and not unfriendly. They keep a certain distance, yet talk in an open and cordial and familiar way. At times as I talk with Laura or with Janice or with Henrietta, I think that for all the world the year could be 1962 or 1963 — and I am back in the South, talking with young southern white children and young southern black children, who likewise gradually learned to get along, to stay somewhat apart but also move step by step by step toward some familiarity, some capacity for mutual recognition and acceptance.
In the Places Where
the Mountains Are Gone
Work and No Work
The states of Illinois and Ohio are familiar to him. He also knows the southern part of Michigan. Breathitt County, Kentucky, is where he’s from, though, and like so many others, he gets back to Kentucky a few times a year, mostly on holidays. He is six feet three and muscular and blondish; his face is prematurely lined. He has gray eyes. His arms and legs are long. I believe a lot of people would think of President Lincoln when they saw him: the angular features, the heavy eyebrows, the untamed hair, the heavy, sad look on the face. In Chicago he talks about his mountain life ahead — after he strikes it rich. There is a pleasant glow to him when he speaks about that future, but the glow fades fast. One believes in his self-knowledge without his having to put his despair into words. Though he cannot give his “realistic perceptions” the brutal force of language, no sensitive observer would need him to construct a wordy analysis of “the muck of life” he feels himself struggling through.
He tries hard to get through that life, as hard as any “realistic” observer could ever expect him to try. Yes, he has a huge appetite for beer and whiskey, which are supposed to push people into a “dream world” or bring on “depression,” if not a “manic” attack. Here he is, though, sober as can be and utterly “oriented” and thoroughly clearheaded — two days after he has lost a job, an hour after he tried to find another job: “The trouble with me is that I’ve got my body here, and it’s willing to work, and I’ve got my head, and it tells me to go to work, and I can take care of a horse and goats and chickens and I can grow crops, but I’m not good for a single thing up here, except what they call ‘day labor.’ When they run out of day labor, that’s the end of me. In Breathitt County I couldn’t make a single penny. There was no work at all; and that’s why we’ve all come up here to Chicago: we thought we’d go get work, and then we could buy our kids shoes and our women would have shoes, too. But you get up here, and there’s work one day and no work the next, then work again, then no work. How long can a man stand it? I try to talk to myself. I try to tell myself that this is a good country, and I’ve not seen the end of my life yet, and one of these days a man like me, who’s strong and willing, will be able to go into a place and say: here I am, and all I want to do is give you every ounce of energy I’ve got, and do anything I can, and all I want back is a fair wage, enough to give my woman some money to buy food and my children the clothes they need, so they won’t go cutting their feet all the time and shivering come winter.
“I wish I could go back to Breathitt County. If only I could get work there! Up here I can at least tell my wife to say I’ve deserted her, and she’ll get money from the city. But I don’t picture myself doing that. I couldn’t swallow my pride that way; nor would my wife ever be able to say something like that. She says she tried to say it, just to herself, and she broke down and cried and cried, to the point that my little girl, Mary Elizabeth, thought she was crying because something bad happened to me, and when she told her mother what she thought, of course her mother broke down even more, and I think the child was really scared quite bad.
“I don’t know what is going to become of us. There was a time that I thought God would take care of us. I used to hear my mother pray, even when she wasn’t in church, and what she said was this: it’s hard, living on that patch of land by the creek, but if God had any other ideas for us, He’d let us know. Well, how long can a man put up with that way of thinking about the world? I tried — until I found myself cussing at the Lord so hard I figured He’d rather I stopped relying on Him at all than saying yes, I’m waiting for you, but then giving Him a piece of my mind when nothing ever happened. I really had to leave Breathitt County. What was there for me to do? Nothing, is the answer. And how many of us brothers could live off that one little farm we have? I was glad to go. I thought I’d do well in Cincinnati, but there wasn’t work there. A minister told me to try Chicago. He said this is a bigger city and there’s more work up here.
“It sure is a bigger city. I hear on the radio: Chicago, Chicago, a wonderful town; that’s a song. I never want to sing it. I’d like to know who wrote the words. He never talked to us who are here from the hills; I know that. Like my wife said when she heard the song: wonderful for those who have it good, and terrible for those who have it bad. Bad as it is here, we have to stay. We’ve tried Dayton, and we’ve tried Detroit. I’ve had jobs for a week or two, and I’ve tried to save a few dollars each time, and when I heard I might get a permanent job in Detroit, I took us all over there. But they’re not making cars the way they used to. Things are slow, so I couldn’t find a job. Thank God for the church missions. They help you eat, and they try to get work for you. But when I saw that there was less work in Detroit than Chicago I took us all back to Chicago. Thank the Almighty Lord for my car; and if I didn’t teach myself a long time ago, in Breathitt County, how to make an engine go, I do believe we would have ended up in some ditch by some road, and we never would have gotten out. We would have sat there and waited for God to say: OK, come on up here, because you people are really stranded now.”
He goes on to tell how he’s had that 1959 Dodge for years, how his older brother and he bought it together with money they both got when they came out of the Army, how his brother reenlisted and is still in the service. Now the brother has a new car, while he drives the old Dodge and cares for it and tries to keep it running, because he may have to move on to another city or he may want to go home. And anyway, the one thing he really looks at and feels proud about, feels to be his, is that car. Memories, too, go with the car: in it he and his wife and four children left Breathitt County; in it they drove up Route 75 to Cincinnati, crossed the state of Ohio, headed for Chicago, went over to Michigan, returned to Illinois; and of course in it they all go back there to Kentucky “oh so many times a year, whenever it’s a good time.”
What does he mean by those few words? Is he nostalgic, incurably and ruinously so? (There is a touch of the skeptical moralist in the listener because he wonders whether the man’s remark might just possibly “give away” something that explains his trouble finding or
keeping a job.) Does he really get tired of the work he finds, leave it, go home, then come back homesick as well as on the look again for employment? I fear a question like that last one is too readily asked by someone who knows something, but not enough, of what actually goes on when many mountaineers try to find work in cities like Chicago. All one need do is go to certain bars in that city, or in Dayton or Cleveland or Detroit, and listen to the men dreaming about the next trip home and talking bitterly and sadly about the disappointments they have met in the city — and the conclusion seems obvious: their hearts are elsewhere, so that they never really stick with whatever possibilities or opportunities may be forthcoming; indeed, after a while they either return once and for all to the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, or they live in limbo, not quite settled in the city, but not quite back home either.
All well and good, such explanations; and I suppose one can add the observation that many mountaineers are “naïve” and “gullible” and easily persuaded to accept almost anyone’s promises. And of course mountaineers are also poorly educated people, unsuited for most skilled jobs, and by their “cultural tradition” prone to “passivity” and other “traits” that a big, booming, buzzing, business world can do little with except exploit in its own relentless, unthinking, and rather automatic manner. Meanwhile, there is a man’s life, his personal experiences, his history as a particular human being, and his narrative history, too — which, as it emerges, gives the listener a thing or two to think about before he accounts for everything in a life: “When I was a boy I’d ask my dad what I’d be doing when I was his age, and he said that most likely I’d be doing what he was doing, trying to stay alive by squeezing what he could out of the land. But there was just so far we could go on a few acres of land. And there were more and more of us hungry for food, too! I hated to leave Breathitt County, but let me tell you something right now: I was also glad to leave. I recall saying to my dad: if I can find work up there, I’ll be the happiest man that ever lived. He said: son, I know how you feel.