by Robert Coles
“Since then I’ve been looking. I’ve been looking for work, and I guess looking for happiness. I’ll never be happy until I find a job and it lasts; and the way things look, that means I’ll never be happy. The first thing I found out in Cincinnati was this: if you have only your strong arms, it’s no good. They want you to be a carpenter or a plumber or an electrician. I can build a house, but I didn’t have the references they wanted. I’ve never been an apprentice to anyone, excepting Dad. And the last few years they’ve been cutting down on construction in the cities, so even if I was a certified electrician, something like that, I might have trouble finding work. I take jobs washing dishes and floors and all that. I’ve tried to hold on to each job, but no luck. Once the owner said he didn’t like a white man doing that kind of work; it was for colored, he said. He said I was being too careful with my work, and I took too much time. Another time they got a machine and didn’t need the three of us with the mop and pail. I almost had a job a few times elevator-operating, but they seem to like the colored for that, too. They always complain, the colored, but the way I see it, white people want the colored in a lot of jobs. The people at the employment agency kept on telling us that white people like us, from the hills, don’t stand much of a chance in Cincinnati, because some jobs are reserved for the colored, and there are so many of us white people coming in. I had a job washing cars, but it was the same story there; the man said I cleaned each car like it was my own, and that’s no good. He said I should go back to Kentucky because I was too good a person for the city; so I told him I would, if he’d only tell me how I could find a job there. He shook his head and said he didn’t know.
“In the beginning we were all in one room, the children and my wife and me; and Cincinnati is a hot, sticky city in the summer. We fought for air all day, and at night we were so tired we gave up; I would fall asleep and it was bad, because the last thing I’d think was: maybe I’ll never wake up, and then I’ll be happy. I decided to go farther north. I heard it would be cooler, and besides, I kept hearing we’d have a better chance to find work in Chicago. Well, I heard right and I heard wrong. In Chicago we get it hot and sticky, too — come summer. It’s true there are plenty of temporary jobs here, but none that I can keep and hold on to. I get up at four in the morning and I go and try to find something. They’ll take me for day labor, like I say, but they tell me right to my face that I’m not an educated man, with a degree from a high school and all that — and with a lot of jobs the people will tell you they have to hire the colored, or else the government will get after them, and all that. It’s no good. The factories take people who’ve got friends and relatives, and now it’s slow for the factories anyway; they’re laying off, a lot of them, not hiring. Things have been getting worse the last couple of years, and here it is, 1970, and there’s no sign of the country having jobs for a man like me.
“The ministers try to help us out. They have missions. They have people looking out for us. They try to find work for us. They do all they know how. There are some good people in this world, I’ll say that: young students and some people that work with the churches. Thank God for their help. They’ve given us food and helped us find a place to live. We go over to a place they have and we meet other people, and they’re just like us: they can’t really go back, because you can go for a year and not see a dollar bill up there in the hollows, and they hate it here, but at least there’s day labor, so we’re not starving.
“I’ve done so many jobs. I’ve cleaned places and helped people move and done some raking or shoveling, and I’ve had some good jobs before Christmas, loading and unloading and keeping stock moving in the warehouses. I wish Christmas came once a month and not just once a year. Between all the part-time work and the busy seasons in the fall and the spring, and with the help we get from people up here, we manage to keep going, and I’m grateful, I really am. I’m sure my kids eat better up here, for all the uncertainty we have from day to day. It’s no joy living in these old buildings; there are too many people around, and the halls are as bad as can be — pitch-black, and holes in the stairs. My boy tripped and fell and his arm was broken. My wife tripped and fell and she was bruised and it hurt bad. We all crawl and scurry upstairs like we are frightened squirrels. We stop and go. When we’ve made it to the top we’re safe for one more day!
“I have my beer. Sometimes I have a shot or two of whiskey. I’ll tell you why: maybe I’ve been taken out in a truck to do some moving, and I’ve been lifting all day, and now I’m through with work and my arms are sore and my hands are red and my back hurts real bad, but I’m home at last. It’s been hot all day, and we’ve been stuffed into that dark truck as if we were pieces of furniture, too. I didn’t eat anything, because I get a stomachache when I eat fast and then go right back to lifting. I’d sooner not eat and just work right through. Then the truck finally gets us back to the agency, and they check us out and give us about two-thirds of what we make — the rest goes to them — and then I’ve got my money. I’m hungry. I’m parched. I’m tired. I’m thinking: what will I do tomorrow? I’m thinking: if I was back in Breathitt County, what would I be doing? The boys say, ‘Let’s stop and have a beer.’ I say, ‘Yes.’ I think to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have a beer; I shouldn’t have two beers.’ But a man has to relax a little. I feel tired enough; if I didn’t stop and listen to the music and nurse along my beer, I think I’d explode. I feel like dry powder near a fire, come five or six o’clock in the afternoon. And when you’ve been going since four or five in the morning, you’re ready for a rest.
“We all sit around and talk about the old country, that’s what some of us call it, back in Kentucky. We talk about going back, until you’d almost think we are back, to hear us. I’ll close my eyes sometimes in the bar, and by God I can be right up that creek — sitting there, deciding whether I should go hunting or go visit my cousin Jim. He was killed in Korea, you know. If I keep my eyes closed too long, someone has to nudge me, because I fall asleep. It’s in between being awake and falling asleep that I like the best. I’m not really in Chicago and I’m not dead to the world. I’m in the woods, or up one of the hills, or I’m in that store, with some of my ‘Chicago dollar bills,’ Mrs. Perkins who runs the store calls them. When I come there and pay her for something with cash she says that right off.
“I do, I certainly do, look forward to going back on visits. It’s a lot of driving, but we arrange to go when it’s really slow up here and I wouldn’t be missing any jobs I might otherwise get. We go on holidays, too. We drive through the night. We drive and drive. The old car holds out. I can fix almost anything, if I can get the parts. I try to keep good tires, all four of them. Here in the city as long as I know there’s that car outside, waiting on us to tell it where to go, I’m not too unhappy. I can always go back, I say to myself. But I never do, except when it’s a good time. A man has to dream, and I do. I see myself finding a real, lasting job, and then I save up money, and we go back to Breathitt County, and I buy the store from Mrs. Perkins. She’s getting on. She’s over seventy. She would sell, but there’s no one to buy. She has no children. She doesn’t trust her kin. She’d sell to a stranger first, I believe. But how could I run a store? I’d know everyone, and I’d trust them for the money, because they wouldn’t have any. Soon, I’d be owing to the people that supply me, and I’d have to close the store down. She’s tough, and she can scare people. It’s not in me to be like that. So, like I say, it’s a dream I get now and then.
“Up here I can rest on Sundays. I try to find work on Saturdays, if there is any. If there isn’t I come back and sleep a little and have a beer and sit and talk with some of the neighbors. I’ll throw a ball with one of my boys. I’ll watch the television, and that puts me to sleep again. There sure is a lot of talking that goes on in this country. No matter what hour it is, there’s someone talking away on the television. And the news, they keep telling you the news, and how bad it is for the country. I don’t understand why America is always having
trouble on its hands. If we’re the strongest, we should be winning all the time, not having everyone talk back to us. But what the country takes is what I have to take: people say bad things to you, unfriendly things. They’ll say you have no education, and you haven’t the right way of talking, and you’re too careful, and you spend too many minutes trying to be perfect — they say the same thing all the time. Then they’ll tell you they’ve driven through the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, and they thought it was pretty there, and they want to know if there wasn’t something that I couldn’t find back there. I tell them no, there just isn’t. They don’t understand, though. They think jobs are around, if you really look. They think we’re lazy, or something, and we didn’t have the brains to stay in school, and we’re running away from some crime, you know, or we’ve done a bad deed — otherwise we’d be back there.
“There’s no use explaining things to people. They believe what they want to believe. They want to think ill of us; it’s easier for them to do that than think there’s something wrong with Chicago. One man told me that; he said Chicago is his hometown, just like Breathitt County is mine, and he always thought that anyone who comes here can find a good job for himself and settle in, and he’s sorry I haven’t found what I was looking for up here, but maybe I’m a special case, he said. I told him he could think so if he wanted, but the truth is that I’m like my friends and my kin — we have some kin up here, too. I told him to go check us all out, but he said he had a lot of other things to do, and I said I wished I was as lucky as he is.”
Actually, he does feel lucky at times, because he remembers worse hardships than those Chicago presents. He knows that he is up in Chicago because there he can obtain work — even though it is intermittent and not highly paid; but still it is work, and the result is money, food, clothes, and a place to live. To a man who used to go for days and weeks without seeing a single dollar bill, such a state of affairs is not a disaster. And for such a man the world was never expected to be an ideal place, or a place without substantial pain. The years in cities like Chicago can only remind a man that if he has it rough, so do others; and if many have a relatively good life, then no one is without tribulations. Here, for instance, is what might be called a philosophical statement, an exercise in reflection and introspection: “I never thought I’d find Heaven up here. I’ve been asked whether I’m disappointed. Are you disappointed, a minister asked us one day. I said, ‘Hell, no.’ I shouldn’t have sworn, but I forget myself. Of course, I am disappointed; I won’t say I’m not. I’d like to be making a regular living. I’d like my kids to be able to say their dad has a job, and his work is something that has a name to it. In school they ask them what I do, and they don’t know how to answer. I don’t blame the kids. They get to feeling sorry about themselves. I tell them not to worry, we’ll be fine, but they’ll worry anyway. One of my boys asked me if we were on relief. I said no. He said a kid had told him that all of the hillbillies are feeding off the welfare department. I told him to go ask the kid to come home, and I’ll straighten him out. I wouldn’t hurt the kid. I wouldn’t lift my voice at him. I’d just tell him he’s mistaken, and I’m sorry he is.
“I’ll be walking, and I say to myself: there’s something wrong in America, and I wish the government would make the country better. I’ll be on the truck, coming back from work, and I see people all dressed up in their suits, you know, and driving good cars, new ones, and even so they look to be in real bad shape. I look at their faces and I say, ‘Oh, it’s not a good day, is it!’ They glare at each other. On the road they use their horns at each other, and they go cutting into each other. If my dad ever saw me use a horn, he’d stop me from driving. He said a horn is for real bad-mannered people. And I’ve never used my steering wheel the way they do up here. They mean to kill, the way they cut out of line, then cut back in. Then they all catch up with each other, because lights make them stop and go and there’s no figuring them out, no matter how clever you try to be.
“There’s a lot of good about the city of Chicago. I’m not one of these people who always say bad things. I’m not ungrateful. I saw a television program a few months back. They told me at work to be sure and see it. They said it was about the hillbillies. I felt like telling them to go to Hell, but they’re foremen, and they pay you, and it’s not worth it, fighting. You never change anyone’s mind when you fight. But I remembered what they said, and I watched the program. They had some nice people there — talking and speaking their minds — but there was too much bellyaching, if you ask me. Just because it’s not easy for us, that’s no reason to keep on complaining and asking for more of everything. I want more work; I could use more money, but I’ll be damned if I want someone else I don’t know to turn on a television set and see me there saying that it’s all bad up here in Chicago. The truth is it’s bad everywhere, if you’re not making any money.
“If I had money, I’d drive back home. But if I was born here and never knew anything else, I guess I’d be driving all over those big, superhighways, just like the people here do, and cutting in and out, and stepping on the gas with all my might just to move ahead a few feet, and cussing at the next guy because he won’t move out of the way — when it doesn’t make any difference, because ahead of me is someone else, and then someone else, and then someone else. The way I see it, a city is like a forest, only the people are trees and bushes, and they’re all over, and you learn to live with them. I’ll be walking down the street, and I see people cutting into each other, like they do in their cars, and they run and bump into the next fellow, and they push someone else to one side. They’re just trying to make a path for themselves, I guess. I’ll be thinking to myself that it’s like in the hills, when I want to be in a meadow but I’m in the woods, and I get caught by a bush, you know, or I nearly trip over a fallen branch, and I say: I’ve got to keep pushing through here, even if the path gives way and it’s hot and the bugs are all over me and I get scratched and I’m afraid I’ll lose my bearings. If you want to hunt, you have to push into the woods. No animal is going to stand out there in the meadow and say: here I am, and there’s nothing to hide me, or protect me, and go ahead, enjoy yourself walking through the grass, and I’ll be standing and waiting on you to come across me and lift your gun and fire. Like I say, if you want to hunt you have to make your way through the woods, and if you want to get someplace in Chicago you’ve got to force yourself through the crowds.
“I’m not as God-fearing as I guess I ought to be. When I was a boy my mother taught me I might have to wander for a long time before I found my God. I always thought that would be after I died, and not before I go to my grave. We’ve been doing our share of wandering since we left home, and there may be more ahead. I should pray harder when I’m in church. Maybe God is signaling us. Maybe He wants us to go someplace else. But Chicago is the best we can do, I believe. I told my wife the other day that if there’s to be more wandering, like the minister says, it’ll probably come later, when we’ve departed this earth. We’re alive here in this city, and if a man can say he’s kept his family alive, I don’t believe he ought to be too bitter, you know. I moved with my wife and children because there just wasn’t another thing to do, except throw ourselves on the mercy of the county officials, and they would have laughed and told me my family is no friend of theirs, and why don’t I leave right away, before I’m carried into jail. I have a friend who keeps on saying that these cities are like the Hell you would hear the ministers back home talking about, but I look him in the eye and I say, ‘You’re here, aren’t you?’ Then I say, ‘I’m going back home in a month or so, and you can squeeze in with us. Would you like to go? Would you like a one-way trip for free back to Kentucky?’ He’ll show a big grin then and say no, and then I say that I feel like he does all the time, but you can’t let yourself forget why you’re up here. My wife is the one who reminds me, and I keep her words in my head. A woman can make a man stop and think.”
He likes to stop and think.
He likes to talk and reminisce. But most of all he likes to keep busy. If he can’t find work, he walks and goes to a bar and talks, and he goes to a “center” and sips free coffee, and he goes to his car and looks at it and checks on the motor and makes sure it sounds right and runs right and looks to be responsive and ready to go and able to last the journey. More and more, though, he doubts there will be any more long journeys. Trips, there will always be trips back to Breathitt County; but his children will grow up in Chicago, and it may even be that he and wife will die there, rather than in Breathitt County. He has to accept such a likelihood, come to live with it and find it not unbearable. He has to see in the coming years hardship and struggle, but also a life to be lived, day after day and concretely. The alternative is endless dreaming about a distant and unlikely future in which the prodigal son returns home in triumph. “I’ll stay here; I’ll stay here and work here and die here.” He says that after he has put in a long day’s work and has a beer or two in him and has had a thought or two about the old days “back home” and now has to pick himself up from the chair and walk out into the streets, Chicago’s streets, and make his way “back home” — to his family in a nearby building.
Sally
Ten years is a decade, I was told by Sally three days after she became a decade old. In Chicago a child learns things like that, Sally also hastened to tell me. I asked her whether there was something special about Chicago that enabled her teachers to be so fine — because, after all, Sally was always telling me how “very good” these teachers are, and how “poor” (she was sure) her teachers were back home. Not that she can really remember that one year of school she had in the little school near Burning Springs, Clay County, Kentucky. As we talk I find her constantly struggling to forget the past, or else happening to forget it, or else pretending to forget it — then all of a sudden remembering it with a vengeance.