by Robert Coles
My dilemma was not too different from the one that many civil-rights workers — particularly the white middle-class kind — have come to recognize. In 1964, when by the hundreds we went south to Mississippi, the emphasis was on setting free a cruelly oppressed people. Again and again the black man’s plight was analyzed, his suffering emphasized. We had come to put an end to it all, to fight with the weak against the strong. At that time a writer like Ralph Ellison — who for years has insisted upon the rich culture that Negroes have created for themselves — was summarily dismissed by “liberators” who could not imagine they had a lot to learn from the victimized rural blacks of the South.
However, one by one we had to face the ironies in our apparently clear-cut situation. “It’s not so easy, the longer you stay down here,” said one northern student who had been living with a black family for a few months. “They’re poor and beaten down. They can’t talk right, and they can’t write at all. There aren’t any pictures on their walls, and the cabins they live in — you wouldn’t even use them for a summer hideaway. They’re scared out of their minds when a cop comes near them, like in a police state. But something starts happening to the way you think, because you like the people, the poor, downtrodden Negro, and the more time you spend with him the more you begin to admire him, and even wish your own family were more like his.”
“If I talk like that up in Cambridge,” he went on, “they’ll tell me how romantic I am, how naïve. They’ll say it’s fine for me to talk — with my white skin and my father’s bank account and my ability to leave any minute I want. I know, because a few months ago if I heard someone like me talking about ‘the dignity’ and ‘real character’ and ‘integrity’ of the people down here, I would tell them to get their kicks some other way, not by going native with the people who live the way they do because they have no other choice. And most of all, I would tell them to go ask the sharecropper in the Delta if he wants to stay the way he is, with his ‘dignity’ and ‘integrity,’ or get what the rest of us have, the cars and clothes and washing machines and everything else.
“It’s a fact that a lot of the people we’ve met down here are stronger than we ever assumed. And a lot of them really do treat their children in a different way than we do — and sometimes it’s for the better. The kids are close. They sleep together and help one another. They don’t go off by themselves, the way we do. They’re respectful to their parents, and to grown-ups, and very good to one another. They have a real warmth and humor and a natural kind of directness or honesty — I don’t know what to call it, but I see every one of us noticing it, and I hear them all trying to describe it, even the hard-nosed social science types. They’re ashamed at what they see; they don’t want to be troubled by finding anything ‘good’ in people they came to save from everything ‘bad.’”
The longer we talked in our all-night “soul sessions,” the more we found ourselves in agreement. We had shared similar experiences and found them surprising and worth considering. I think more than anything else we felt chastened by the sight of our own arrogance. Late one night, a black man who lived nearby spoke up, confirming our feelings. “The people who help us, we’re grateful to them,” he said, “but I wish they wouldn’t keep on telling us how sorry they are for us, how bad we have it. And I wish their eyes wouldn’t pop out every time they stay with us and see we’re not crying all day long and running wild or something. The other day a white fellow, he said how wonderful my home is, and how good we eat and get along together, and how impressed he was by it all. And I was sure glad, but I wanted to take him aside and say, ‘Ain’t you nice, but don’t be giving us that kind of compliment, because it shows on you what you don’t know about us.’”
Of course people under stress can develop special strengths, while security tends to make one soft, though no one in his right mind can recommend hardship or suffering as a way of life, nor justify slavery, segregation, or poverty because they sometimes produce strong, stubborn people. The issue is one of justice — and not only to the black man. The black man deserves to be seen for who he is and what he has become. If giving him his due — as a citizen and longtime victim of all sorts of exploitation — requires first calling him destroyed, “sick,” a psychological cripple, or a moral menace, then perhaps we should recognize our own political bankruptcy. If psychological or sociological labels are to be pinned on the black man, then those who do so might at least be careful to mention the enormous, perplexing issues that plague the white suburban middle class: a high divorce rate, juvenile crime, political indifference or inertia to match any rural black man’s, psychiatric clinics and child-guidance centers filled to the brim and with waiting lists so long that some are called only after two or three years, greed and competitiveness that worried teachers see in the youngest boys and girls and accept wearily as a manifestation of the “system.”
There are, to be fair, some observers who have consistently remarked on the considerable energy and “life” they see in slum children. They have seen openness, humor, real and winning vitality. Many ghetto children I know have a flesh and blood loyalty to one another, a disarming code of honor, a sharp, critical eye for the fake and pretentious, a delightful capacity to laugh, yell, shout, sing, congratulate themselves, and tickle others. Their language is often strong and expressive, their drawings full of action, feeling, and even searing social criticism.
One thing is certain, though: ghetto childhood tends to be short and swift. Those fast-moving, animated children quickly grow old rather than grow up, and begin to show signs of the resignation accurately described by writer after writer. At twelve or thirteen these children feel that schools lead nowhere, that there will be jobs for only a few, that ahead lies only the prospect of an increasingly futile and bitter struggle to hang on to such health, possessions, and shelters as they have.
“They are alive, and you bet they are, and then they go off and quit,” said one mother, summing it up for me. “I can tell it by their walk and how they look. They slow down and get so tired in their face, real tired. And they get all full of hate, and they look cross at you, as if I cheated them when I brought them into the world. I have seven, and two of them have gone that way, and to be honest, I expect my every child to have it happen — like it did to me. I just gave up when I was about fourteen or so. And what brings us back to life is having the kids and keeping them with us for a while, away from the outside and everything bad. But there comes a day when they ask you why it’s like it is for us, and all you can do is shrug your shoulders, or sometimes you scream. But they know already, and they’re just asking for the record. And it doesn’t take but a few months to see that they’re no longer kids, and they’ve lost all the hope and the life you tried to give them.”
The vitality of each new child restores at least the possibility of hope in a parent, and so life in the ghetto persists in seeking after purpose and coherence. Mothers tell their children to do this or not to do that — even as they hold their breath in fear and doubt. Meanwhile, many of us comfortably on the outside hide our shame by listing the reasons we can’t change things in our society, or by making the people who need those changes utterly dull and deteriorated.
Though we may console ourselves with some of the programs we offer the poor, others are not only condescending and self-defeating, but they overlook the very real assets and interests of ghetto children. It has never occurred to some of the welfare workers, educators, or Head Start teachers I have met that “their” programs and policies bore, amuse, or enrage children from the slums.
Consider, for example, one ghetto family I visit twice a week. They are on welfare. Two children were in a Head Start program for a summer. An older son took part in an “enrichment” program. A teen-aged cousin has been in the Job Corps. At school the children are told by their teachers what they already know, that their school is “inadequate.” The building is old, the corridors are packed with many more students than they were intended for, and the teachers are
disciplinarians at most. The head of this family is a woman not much over thirty who regularly calls herself “old.” Once she added that she was also “sick,” and I immediately took notice, expecting to hear about an ache or pain I could diagnose. But she went on to say that she was “tired of everything they try to do to help us. They send us those welfare checks, and with them comes that lady who peeks around every corner here and gives me those long lectures on how I should do everything — like her, of course. I want to tell her to go charge around and become a spy, or one of those preachers who can find sin in a clean handkerchief.
“Then they take my kids to the Head Start thing, and the first thing I hear is the boys’ fingernails are dirty, and they don’t eat the proper food, and they don’t use the right words, and the words they do use, no one can make them out. It’s just like that with the other kids. They try to take them to those museums and places, and tell them how sorry life is here at home and in the neighborhood, and how they are no good, and something has to be done to make them better — make them like the rich ones, I guess.
“But the worst is that they just make you feel no good at all. They tell you they want to help you, but if you ask me they want to make you into them and leave you without a cent of yourself left to hang on to. I keep on asking them, why don’t they fix the country up so that people can work, instead of patching up with this and that and giving us a few dollars — to keep us from starving right to death? Why don’t they get out of here and let us be, and have our lives?”
I can think of many things that could be done to take advantage of what that mother already has. The city might help her take part in a school she felt was hers, was sensitive to her feelings, her experiences, her desires — as indeed schools are in many other communities. There is work in her neighborhood, in her building, that she and her family might want to do, might be paid to do. Her children might be encouraged to use the strong and familiar idiom they know. Why should they learn the stilted talk of people who continue to scorn them? They might be appreciated for their own dress, their own customs, their own interests and energies — their style. They might read books that picture them, their lives and their adventures. Perhaps, then, some perennial “observers” would be surprised. With work, with money, with self-respect that is not slyly thwarted or denied outright by every “public” agency, the poor might eventually turn out to be very much like — us.
Violence in Ghetto Children
When I worked as a child psychiatrist in a children’s hospital, I spent most of my time with middle-class children whose parents very often seemed earnest and sensitive; certainly they were worried about their children, at times excessively so. The boys and girls, for their part, were usually quiet and controlled. They were suffering from “school phobias” or the various fears and anxieties that have been described by a generation of psychiatrists. If they were disobedient and loud, usually it was a specific form of disobedience I saw, a very particular noisiness I heard, all responding to something they dreaded or dared not to look at. In a sense, then, the unruliness I noticed only confirmed my impression of a general restraint (emotional tidiness, I suppose it could be called) that middle-class children by the time they are two or three years old are likely to have acquired, never to lose.
Yes, there are the usual signs of aggressive tendencies in the “latency years” (the years preceding puberty when sexual urges are quiescent) — the bold and even nasty games, the play seems involuntarily brutish. But a long look often reveals how curiously formal, even restrained, the unruliness of these children actually is. Despite all the “drives” one hears psychologists and psychiatrists talk about — the surges of desire, spite, and hate that continuously press upon the child’s mind and in dreams or daytime fantasies gain control of it — the fact remains that by the time middle-class American children first reach school, at age five or six, they are remarkably in control of themselves. As a result, when the violence in such children erupts in a psychiatrist’s office during a session of drawing or in the midst of a game played by the psychiatrist and the child, it is almost a caricature of violence — violence so safe, so exaggerated, so camouflaged, and so quarantined that the very word seems inappropriate.
We in psychiatry are often accused of seeing only the drab and morbid side of human nature. If it would be any comfort to people, I suppose we could easily make partial amends for that morbid bias by letting it be known how overwhelmingly law-abiding a certain kind of middle-class man is: if he is vindictive, he is likely to be so toward himself. Psychiatrists spend most of their time helping people take a look at violence removed far enough from their own recognition to be, in effect, somebody else’s property. If in time the patient, whether child or adult, owns up to what he secretly or temporarily senses, he will be in greater, not less, control of himself. Thus, I remember treating a ten-year-old boy who drew wild and vicious scenes, filled with fire and death or at least an injury or two. When I wanted to know about what was going on, he let me know the score rather quickly by pointing to the people in his pictures and saying, “I don’t know; you’d have to ask them.”
Not everyone in America is brought up to disown violence so consistently that its very presence in his own drawings can be adroitly (that is, innocently) denied. As I have worked with children in both southern rural slums and northern “ghettos,” I have come to appreciate how useless it is to think of, or judge, the growth and development of the children of the depressed poor in the same way I ordinarily view the development of middle-class children. It is, as one boy in a Boston ghetto recently reminded me, “a different ball game when you’re out in left field, instead of in there pitching.”
If we consider what a child of the slums goes through, from birth on, and if we keep a special eye on what in his experience may make him “violent,” even at the age of seven or eight, we may well gain, rather than lose, respect for the upbringing he receives. To begin, I have seen how much childbearing means to poor women: it is the only thing they can do, and do creatively. It is the one chance they have to show themselves and others that there is hope in this world, as well as the next. By pointing this out, I am not arguing against keeping families to a sensible size, nor overlooking the impulsive, dreary background that is also commonly associated with pregnancies among the poor, whether in or out of wedlock. I am simply saying to others what a mother once felt she had to let me know: “They all tell us to cut down on the kids, cut down on the kids, because you can’t keep up with them as it is, and even a few is too much if you’re on welfare for life, the way we have to be, like it or not. I try to cut down, and I want to, but it’s not so easy. You have to watch your step all the time, and we can’t afford the pills they have for the others.
“Anyway, it’s the one time in my life I really feel like I’m somebody, like I’m doing something. People come around and expect me to feel ashamed of myself, like I’ve done something wrong, and I’m adding to crime on the streets — that’s all you hear these days, our crime, not anyone else’s — but, instead, I feel proud of myself, like I can at least make a baby, and maybe he’ll have it better than us — who knows? — though I doubt it.”
Another time she spoke the following words, and for some reason I felt the need to arrange the words this way.
Both Ways
They say no, no, no
No more kids
The welfare worker
She tells you you’re
overpopulating the world
and something has to he done
But right now one of the few
times I feel good
is when I’m pregnant
And I can feel I’m getting somewhere
At least then I am
Because I’m making something grow
And not seeing everything die around me
like all the time it does in the street
I’ll tell you
They want to give me the pill and stop the kids
And I’m w
illing for the most part
But I wish I could take care
of all the kids I could have
And then I’d want plenty of them Or maybe I wouldn’t
I wouldn’t have to be pregnant
to feel some hope about things
I don’t know
You can look at it both ways, I guess.
If we want to help that woman keep her family small, I hope we also want to give her what she needs to feel like the somebody she still desires to be. I know her children, and already I have seen them readying themselves for what their mother herself calls “the goddam street.” Each one of those children has been held and breast-fed in ways I think some middle-class mothers might have cause to envy. Though the flat is cold and rat-infested, there is real and continuing warmth between that mother and her babies. “Symbiotic,” some of my colleagues — who have a name for everything — might call the relationship of that mother and her children; it is also a bond that unites the fearful and hungry against the inevitable day when the home has to yield to the outside.
Slum children do not always go unprepared when that time comes. As I indicated earlier in this chapter, the chances are these children receive specific and brutal instruction about the “realities” of life at the age of two, three, or four — so that when they emerge from the home the police, the hoods, the addicts, the drunks are already familiar. The disappointments in the schools or on playgrounds are already expected. The mother I have already quoted has also testified to the morality and lawfulness she tries to inspire in her children: “I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to keep my kids from getting stained and ruined by everything outside. I keep them close to me, and sometimes I feel like everything will be OK, because they know how much I want for it to be, and they’ll go make it be, the way I thought I could. But after a while they want to go out. You know how a kid is when he’s three or four, and he wants to move, no matter where, so long as he keeps going. And where can he move in here? So I let them go, and I stop and say a prayer every morning and ask for them to be saved, but I have to say it, I’m not expecting my prayers to be answered, not around here. And when the kids come back upstairs, I give them a look, if I have the time, to see what’s on their face, and what they’ve learned that’ll make a mess of everything I try to teach. And I can tell — I can tell from day to day what’s getting into them. You know what it is? It’s the devil, and he tells them to give up, because there’s no other choice, not around here there isn’t.”