by Robert Coles
I fear I had better explain my language and my various qualifications. Sally likes to think of herself as a native of Chicago, even though she knows full well that she was not born in the city. About three years ago her teacher asked the class who was not born in Chicago. More than half the children in the class raised their hands, Sally told her mother later — but Sally didn’t. She said at the time that she didn’t know why the teacher would want to ask such a question, since it seemed “stupid.” Her mother told her she was right: “I said to Sally that there are a lot of poking, prying people up here in this city. They want to know everything. They’re worse than the sheriff and his people in Clay County, that’s what I believe.”
More recently, Sally likes to joke with her younger sister, tell her that they were both born in Chicago, and they will one day go to New York City, which is even bigger and “more of a city” than Chicago. Sally hears her teacher talk about New York or Los Angeles, and then tells her sister Anne what has been said — but, again, she confuses her sister by mixing in with all sorts of facts and descriptions the remark that Chicago is their birthplace, when Anne knows otherwise. Is there something wrong with Sally? I mean, is she at the very least becoming swept up with her own fantasies? Is something even more ominous at work? Does she, in fact, know where she was born; and, if so, does she have a very good reason for amusing herself and perhaps her sister with her story?
I have no intention of turning little Sally into a psychiatric patient. Her “problem” is that she is a very imaginative girl who likes to march up before the class and tell them stories. When she was in the second grade, and not long in Chicago, her teacher asked various children, including her, to come up front and talk for a minute or two about anything the child wished to share with other children. Sally apparently obliged. She said that she had been born in Chicago, then moved to Kentucky for a while, then returned. She said that her father loved to drive bulldozers and once owned a mine, but now had given up on that and instead had brought his wife and children to the Windy City, as Chicago is called. Then she sat down — amid applause. Later, she came home and told her mother what had happened, what she had said, and her mother laughed and laughed, and her usually taciturn father also laughed. So, Sally decided, one gathers, to keep on amusing her parents, keep on trying to make them laugh — and she has succeeded.
Her mother can give a chronology: “Sally has become better and better with her jokes and her stories. She makes us laugh more than anyone. Her dad comes home and he is tired and he doesn’t feel any too good. His heart is poor, you know. He always asks for Sally. She comes and laughs at him. She says, ‘You’re no owner of Kentucky horses.’ She says, ‘You’re no owner of coal mines.’ She tells him he’d better go wash up fast, or else she’ll begin to believe he might be a plain old workingman, just as he says he is. Sometimes she talks like one of her teachers, I guess — I’ve never met any of them. She tells her dad that she has big hopes for him, but he’d better go and put on the best clothes he has and try to speak the best possible words he can think up. So, her father laughs and laughs and goes and scrubs his face and hands and puts on another shirt, and if he’ll have another beer in him before he gets home, and he’s not too tired, he’ll take up with the girl. I mean, he’ll come away from the sink and announce that he had a good day inspecting his mines, and they really are producing. Then he’ll tell her that he decided to ride a bulldozer or two, just so he could show the men how good he was, and how good they ought to be. She comes right back at him and tells him she still wonders about all those horses he owns. I guess the teacher told the class that Kentucky is known for all its fast-running horses. Well, her daddy says he rode two or three of them in the morning and turned them over to one of his ‘men.’ Sally says she wants to ride a horse someday, she really does — and then I get a little frightened for the child, because I’m her mother, and I can look in her eyes and see the tears she’s fighting back and see what’s in the back of her head: she is wishing with all her might that she could be riding a horse, and be out in some pastureland and not here in this neighborhood. I’ll have to agree with her, but I never could say so. I think it would break the girl’s heart to hear me say that it’s too bad we’re not back home — only with some money, enough money so we could own a horse and not be hungry all the time.”
Sally can also turn her attention toward others. Yes, she is partial to her father, but she is also close to her mother, and the mother depends on the child for the same kind of affectionate reassurance the father often gets upon his return home. If the mother can describe what goes on between father and daughter, the father can describe what his wife and child say to each other at certain moments: “They’re like on a television program, that’s how I’d describe them when they get to talking and laughing. Sally tells her mother that she’s going to Washington, D.C., and when she gets there she’ll send a postcard back home. Then my wife asks the girl what kind of postcard, and Sally says it will be of the White House, and she will say on the card that she’s visited the place and talked with the President. Then her mother asks her what she’ll tell the President when she gets to see him. Well, damned if that little girl hasn’t got a long story figured out in her mind. I don’t know where she gets those ideas from, but she sounds like the old union men I knew back home, some of the time she does — and great storytellers they were! Then at other times she just seems funny, like a comedian, you know. Maybe she will get herself a job one day on television; they have a lot of nice ladies talking and letting you know all kinds of things when you turn on to listen to them.
“Sally will say she wants the President to know that we’re the best people in the world. She tells her mother to get ready, because the postcard is going to be a huge one, and there will be a big, long message on it, with the White House for a picture on the other side, like I said. Sally says she’d write like this: Dear Mother, I’m here in Washington, and I saw him, the President, and he’s a nice man, but he hasn’t come to Kentucky to visit our people there, and he hasn’t seen us in Chicago. We’re doing fine in Chicago, but we need help. He should make sure everyone in Chicago has a job, or else there will be trouble. I told him so. I told him he’s got a nice house, and there are nice buildings in Chicago, too. So, we should have a nice place to live.
“She has a new message each time, and her mother surely does laugh. She tells Sally that she started talking the day she was born, and she’s never stopped and never will. I have to say that the girl is a puzzler to me sometimes; she’s got a very strong imagination, our minister said, and her teacher back home said the same thing after the first day the child spent in school. When we left for Chicago the teacher said we should tell Sally’s teachers up here that Sally was the best storyteller in the mountains. We never have met any of Sally’s teachers, what with city living being as it is, but I think they know, they know about Sally. We got a note last year that said our daughter might turn out to be an actress one day. I told my wife: she’d make a lot of money, a lot of it, and we’d have our problems over that — spending the money. The truth is that Sally has a good sharp ear, that’s all. She can listen to me or her mother or a kid she’s playing with or a teacher, and then what she does is come home and start talking like she’s heard the person talk, imitating the person. I believe I could do the same, but I’m too shy. My brother, he’ll get a drink or two in him, and he starts picking away on that guitar of his, and soon he’ll stop and tell one story after another, and he has everyone laughing so hard they’re pleading with him to stop, but when he does, they plead for just one more story, please. The thing that gets to them is the way he’ll take off after other people; he uses their voices, and he makes you think that it’s them, and not him, who’s the one talking. Now, Sally has been with him, and I told her mother: it’s catching, like a sickness can be, except that I’d rather make people laugh than get them sick. Sally caught her uncle’s storytelling gift, the minister told me, after I said she’d sit on his kn
ee and listen to him.
“Sally’s uncle, my brother, is dying. He should be up here in Chicago. They’d fix him if we took him to a hospital. He can’t see a doctor back home. He’s got no money. They only care for money, most doctors do. They have all that talk about helping people out, but if they don’t get those dollar bills, they say, ‘Sorry, mister, I’m too busy for you.’ Sally says we should bring my brother up here, and she’d go with him to the hospital and between the two of them all the doctors would be laughing, and they’d become a friend to him and cure him. She’s always seeing the good side, that girl is. I tell her, she was born in the middle of the day. I remember. The sun was out all the way. I think the result is that she’s a very happy child, and she likes to make everyone else happy.”
Does the girl get carried away with herself? Does she know the difference between fact and fantasy, between the stories she tells and the actual, day-to-day life she lives? Is she “basically depressed” or seriously fearful and anxious — all of which she “denies,” or “projects” onto the people in her stories? Is there something “bizarre” about her behavior, something seriously “hysterical” or “prepsychotic” — and on and on? I have to emphasize that Sally has not been sent to a child-guidance clinic or any other kind of clinic by her teachers or her family’s minister. Nor does she make people nervous or apprehensive or worried for her or about her. Nor is she out of touch with what psychiatrists call “reality.” She knows exactly who she is and where she lives and what her prospects are. Perhaps she knows all that a little more acutely and vividly than the rest of us, who spend a good deal of our own time using psychological mechanisms like “denial” — to protect ourselves, for example, from thinking “too much” (or at all) about the fate of people like Sally and her family, including her uncle, whom I have met, who worked in a mine for twenty years, who was fired without a pension and now is dying of pneumoconiosis, so-called black lung disease. The coal dust is choking the man to death, but still he struggles not only for a breath, but a chance to entertain, make people laugh, keep his own spirits up. As for Sally, she also is struggling with the darker side of life — and she also tries to push aside her worries, many of them quite real, or “objectively based,” as I sometimes hear it put in conferences.
Here, drawn together from many conversations — because, of course, children of ten, even those natural-born talkers and entertainers like Sally, don’t go on at such lengths without interruption — is the sober and undramatic side of the girl, the side, I suppose, that would reassure one like me, who always has to consider how “appropriate” various forms of “behavior” are, and how “well-integrated” or “pathological” a child’s “defenses” are, and how successfully the child is moving along up some “developmental scale,” which means how “normal” the child can be considered — perhaps judged is the word: “I don’t believe everything I tell my friends, no I don’t. My daddy told me once that we don’t have to sit and stare and feel glum all the time. He said I should never lose my smiling face, so I try to smile, and if I tell him a story, then he smiles. I’ve seen my daddy cry. He hasn’t the money we need. He tries to work, but the jobs close down, and he has to look again. He has a bad arm from working in the mine. But at least he can breathe OK. My uncle, he tries so hard to breathe you just sit there and hold your breath and hope he’ll catch his.
“When I grow up I’d like to live in a nice, big home. I’d have a lot of food in the kitchen, and anyone who wanted food could just knock on the door, and I’d ask them to come in, and I’d tell them they should eat all they want, because it’s no good to be hungry. I’d give people work to do. They could work on the house to make it look nice. My daddy had a job cleaning out a place; they had torn down a building, and they were going to build a new one. Daddy helped get all the wood and pipes and bricks into trucks. It’s too bad they won’t let him do work on the new building, then he’d make a lot of money, he says. He can build anything, I think. He says he can. But he’s not in the union. All they let him do is clean up and load the trucks.
“I don’t think I’ll ever live in a mansion, no. The teacher showed us some pictures of big homes, and she asked which we liked best. I said I’d like to go and see them, and then I’d decide on my choice. The teacher said that was what she expected me to say. She said I was always wishing I’d get a peek at the rich people. I didn’t answer her, but I was almost going to say that a peek would be all I’d ever get, I know for sure. Daddy said that’s right, and so did my mother. It doesn’t seem fair that only a few people have houses like that, big ones with a garden all around. If we had a garden, we could play on the grass. I think my uncle could breathe better if he lived in one of those houses.
“I wish we’d go back to the mountains. I like my teacher and my friends, but I think we’d all be happier in the mountains. My daddy says if only we had a little money, he wouldn’t stay here one minute. I tell my friends I was born here, but I’m fooling them. I’m from Kentucky. Maybe I’ll live there when I get older. I told a boy that I was going to Washington and to New York, and he believed me — until someone told him I was fooling. I don’t think I’d like going so far away from home. My mother says that if you don’t know a politician, there’s no reason to go visit Washington. All the politicians from all over the country live in Washington, because it’s the capital. Daddy says the politicians get the money that’s collected in taxes, and they fight over who is to keep the money. He says that no one in Washington or any other place sees that people up the hollows get much of anything.
“If I had one wish, and no more, I know what I’d wish. I’d wish my uncle got better. Then, if I could have another wish, I’d wish that my father found a good job. He says it’s in Kentucky that he’d really like to be working — so, I’d wish he had a job back in Kentucky. Then, if I still could wish things, I’d ask for a new dress and some shoes and a doll and a pair of roller skates. I’d ask for a bicycle. They are expensive. They cost more than a man can make in a week, even up here in Chicago. Of course, if you live up the hollow, there’s no need for a bike. Even a car can only go halfway up the hill; that’s how it is if you live in a hollow.
“The saddest thing I see is when my mother has to go shopping, and she’s afraid she hasn’t the money she needs, and she starts crying. I try to make her stop. I come near and tell her something funny. If I can’t make her smile, I keep on trying. I make up a new story, one she’s never heard, and she pretends she’s not listening, and her head is still down, and she’s sniffling and wiping her eyes, but I know she’s heard me. Yes sir, I know by the way she turns a little to me, and I can see her face, and there’s a smile beginning on it. When I finish, she takes me round and says, ‘God bless you,’ and I can see she’s more smiling than anything else. The tears are mostly gone.”
I am not sure that the description Sally offers of what goes on between her and her mother doesn’t apply quite exactly to what goes on between Sally and some of her friends, whom she so ambitiously and warmly and generously entertains. For that matter, I am not so sure that Sally doesn’t do her share for her teachers, too. They also get weary and discouraged — and as I try to show in a long section of this book devoted to schools, a classroom can be a scene of great sadness, and therefore present a child like Sally with a particularly strong challenge. And so, when I went to see Sally’s fifth grade teacher I got from her the following response: “She’s a lovely child. Her mind fairly races along. No, I have never felt her to be particularly troubled. I suppose all my children here in this school are in a bit of trouble. They come from poor families. Their parents would much rather be back in Kentucky, up those mountains, than here in this big, sprawling city. They all get confused, the parents do, and the children naturally try to help them out. We forget sometimes how much a child like Sally can do to comfort her mother. Sally is a born nurse, that’s my opinion of her. Miss Florence Nightingale, that’s Sally. I’ve called her that. She looks embarrassed, but she loves m
e for giving her such a nice, long, impressive name. I told her that Florence Nightingale was a nurse who helped soldiers who got hurt in war. Sally said her father had been in the war, the Korean War I believe, and he’d been in the mine union and fought with the bosses — the bosses of the union, I’m quite sure, as much as the bosses of the coal mine. They’re all corrupt, you know — labor and industry both. It’s people like Sally’s parents, and us, the schoolteachers, who get caught in the middle.
“Anyway, when Sally once told me that her father had been in fights, I told her that we never stop fighting, one way or another, until we die. After I’d said that, I bit my lip. I thought to myself: she’s ten years old and too young to hear that kind of talk. But she knew exactly what I had meant. I’m afraid that she’s probably heard much worse at home. She said, ‘I know. My daddy says he has to fight all the time.’ I asked her what she meant — as if I didn’t know! — and she told me how he has a bad arm, but he goes out every day and uses it and uses his good one, too; he shovels and rakes and lifts things and pushes things and moves things, and then he comes home dead tired, but glad to have the dollar bills. I felt my eyes filling up, so I turned away from the child. That was all she had to see. She’s a bright little one. She doesn’t miss anything. I think a lot of my children are like that. They live close to much suffering, so they keep their eyes wide open. True, some of them close their eyes and keep them shut tight for the same reason — they’ve seen so much, and they don’t want to expose themselves to one more thing. But a girl like Sally is too smart; she’s going to keep on noticing all the troubles in her world, and then she’s going to do her level best to heal as much as she can. The first day in this room, she asked if she could bring her daddy over to plaster the walls and get rid of the cracks. I was taken aback, and then I thought to myself: there’s a girl who’s trying, really trying!