by Robert Coles
She is a churchgoing woman, as are many of her neighbors. I have found that she knows her Bible better than me or my neighbors, and in fact she doubtless puts more store in prophetic, messianic Christianity than most Americans do. When her children start walking and talking, she starts teaching them rules and fears — enough of both to satisfy anyone who is worried about the decline of “morality” in America. At least in that home, and others like it I have visited, children are not allowed free rein. Instead, they are told to obey, and they are swiftly slapped or punched if they falter.
Over the years I have learned how loyal slum families can be to America’s ethic of “rugged individualism.” Children are taught through the ubiquitous television to seek after all the products of our proud technology: the cars that can speed faster than any law allows, the records and clothes whose worth can only be seasonal, the bright and shiny places to frequent, the showy, gadget-filled places that not only shelter people but also make statements about their power, influence, and bank accounts. At five and six years old, ghetto children in today’s America share through television a world quite similar to the one known by their wealthy age-mates. I find it almost unnerving when I see drawings from a child not yet old enough to attend school that show the appetites and yearnings our advertisers are able to arouse. Precisely what do such children do with such wishes and fantasies, besides spell them out on paper for someone like me?
When a child of six or seven from the ghetto encounters the politics of the street or the school yard, he brings along both the sensual and the fearfully moral experience he has had at home. Slum children live at close quarters to their parents and their brothers or sisters. They are often allowed to be very much on their own, very free and active, yet they are also punished with a vengeance when distracted or forlorn parents suddenly find an issue forced, a confrontation inevitable. They face an ironic mixture of indulgence and fierce curtailment.
Such children come to school prepared to be active, vigorous, perhaps much more outgoing on an average than middle-class children. But they are quick to lose patience, sulk, feel wrong and wronged and cheated by a world they have already learned to be impossible, uncertain, and contradictory. Here are the words of an elementary-school teacher who has worked in a northern ghetto for three years and still feels able to talk about the experience with hope as well as bitterness: “They’re hard to take, these kids, because they’re not what you think when you first come, but they’re not what you’d like for them to be, either. I don’t mean what I used to like for them to be, but what I want for them now. They’re fast and clever and full of life. That was the hardest thing for me to realize — that a boy or girl in the ghetto isn’t a hopeless case, or someone who is already a delinquent when he comes into the first grade. The misconceptions we have in the suburbs are fantastic, really, as I think back — and remember what I used to think myself.
“I expected to find children who had given up, and were on the way to fail, or to take dope, or something like that. Instead it was in a lot of ways a breath of fresh air, talking with them and teaching them. They were friendlier than suburban children, and they got along better with one another. I didn’t have to spend half the year trying to encourage the children to be less competitive with one another. We don’t call middle-class children ‘culturally deprived,’ but sometimes I wonder. They’re so nervous and worried about everything they say — what it will mean, or what it will cost them, or how it will be interpreted. That’s what they’ve learned at home, and that’s why a lot of them are tense kids and, even worse, stale kids, with frowns on their faces at ages six or seven.
“Not a lot of the kids I teach now. They’re lively and active, so active I don’t know how to keep up with them. They’re not active learners, at least learners of the knowledge I’m trying to sell them, but they’re active and they learn a lot about the world, about one another. In fact, one of the big adjustments I’ve had to make is realizing that these kids learn a lot from one another. They are smart about things my kids will never understand. They just don’t think school is worth a damn. To them it’s part of a big outside world that has a grip on them and won’t let them get anyplace, no matter how hard they try. So what’s the use, they ask themselves. The answer is that there isn’t any use — so they go right on marking time in class until they can get out.
“We teachers then figure they’re stupid, or they’re hopelessly tough and ‘delinquent,’ or their homes are so bad they’ll always be ‘antisocial’ or ‘incorrigible.’ I’ve found that when they’re playing and don’t know I’m looking they are different kids — spontaneous, shrewd, very smart, and perceptive. Then we go back into the classroom, and it’s as though a dense fog has settled in on all of us. They give me a dazed look, or a stubborn, uncooperative one, and they just don’t do anything, unless forced to — by being pushed and shoved and made to fear the authority they know I have.”
We have compared notes many times, this teacher and I. One child we both know is a boy of eight who does very poor work in school. He is a belligerent child, a troublemaker. I see him in his home because his brother is going to a predominantly white suburban school, one of the very few children in the neighborhood who does. Their mother, living on public assistance with six children and no husband, has her hands full. She finds her “difficult child” smarter than her “model” one, the boy I watch riding a bus that takes him away from the ghetto.
The teacher and I agree, the “difficult boy” is a smart boy, but an impatient, agile, and provocative boy. He is headed for trouble, but as I talk with him I find myself in trouble. I have asked him to draw pictures — of himself, of his school, of his home, of anything he wishes. I get from him devastating portrayals: schools that look like jails, teachers whose faces show scorn or drowsiness, streets and homes that are as awful to see on paper as they are in real life, “outsiders” whose power and mercenary hostility are all too obvious and, everywhere, the police, looking for trouble, creating trouble, checking up, hauling people to court, calling them names, getting ready to hurt them, assault them, jail them, and beat them up — even though they are children.
Once I asked the boy whether he really thought the police would hurt someone his age. He said: “To the cops, everyone around here is a little bad boy, no matter how old he is or how many grandchildren he has around.” At moments like that my psychiatric, categorical mind finds itself stunned and for a change ready to grant that boy and others like him freedom from the various diagnostic, explanatory, or predictive schemes people like me learn so well and find to be (in our world) so useful.
Welfare workers, in the pictures ghetto children draw, stand near the police like dogs, with huge piercing eyes, ears that seem as twisted as they are oversize, and mouths either noticeably absent or present as thin lines enclosing prominent and decidedly pointed and ragged teeth. To ghetto children, as to their parents, the welfare worker is the policeman’s handmaiden, and together they come, as one child put it, “to keep us in line or send us away.”
I have listened to public welfare workers and their “clients” talk, and I recognize the impossible situation they both face, the worker often as insulted by the rules and regulations as the family he visits. I often compare the relationship between the workers and their clients with one that develops in psychotherapy, as for a while powerful forces pull both doctor and patient backward in time toward those early years when parents check up on children, trying to keep them on the right side of a “line” that constantly puzzles the child and perhaps also the parent more than she or he realizes.
One welfare worker recently summarized the situation for me: “They behave like evasive kids, always trying to avoid getting caught for this or that. And me, I’m like a child myself, only an older one — always trying to take care of my poor brothers and sisters, but also trying to get them in trouble or find them in trouble, so I can squeal on them.”
I find in some of the children that worker sees a vitali
ty, an exuberance, that reminds me often of the fatally ill I once treated on hospital wards: for a long time they appear flushed with life, even beautiful, only to die. I remember hearing from a distinguished physician who supervised a few of us who were interns: “they’re fighting the battle of tuberculosis, and they’re going to lose, but not without a brilliant flash of energy. It’s a shame we can’t intervene, right at the critical moment, and help them win.”
IV
Eskimos, Chicanos, Indians
Once and Still the Frontier
The American West still seems endless, untouched, even unknown. The West’s land is not the land of the South; it is not a clearly defined mixture of plantations, farms, and copper-red earth covered, mostly, by piney woods. The West’s land is not the land of the Appalachian highlands; it is not hollows, for the most part easily walked in a few hours, or valleys that are all to narrowly crowded by hills that may be tough and austere, but are rarely uninviting or unyielding. The West’s land is certainly not the open land left in the East, conservation land, small national parks or so-called rural land — meaning, rather commonly, the space between cities that planners expect, eventually, to become more and more settled, to become, successively, “countryside,” “developed land,” then part of a town, a suburb, even a city. The West’s land is not even the land of much of the Midwest: large, formidable cities like Chicago, St. Louis, or Omaha, hardly distinguishable from those in the East; highly developed agriculture — one farm after another, a productive network of family farms, or, in recent years, enormous agribusinesses whose wheat, corn, and cattle spread predictably over the vast flatlands, interrupted by rail lines, rivers, strategically placed towns.
Not that the West doesn’t possess with its enormousness, its diversity of weather, land, and people, elements that dominate or characterize other regions of the United States. In the Southwest one can find cotton growing, if not antebellum homes; coal being mined, if not a “hollow-culture” that goes back a century or two; and cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Albuquerque, or Denver, which manage to offer and suffer from all that other cities elsewhere in the nation boast and complain of. To be more specific, the West, like the South, is migrant workers, living a life of virtual peonage, if not slavery. The West is widespread, racially connected poverty. The West is, like Appalachia, coal companies and utility companies, intent on taking what is there, no matter the devastation visited on the land, not to mention on the lives of many thousands of people. The West, like the Northeast, is cities with smog, the bewilderment of families newly arrived from farms, the guarded sovereignty of suburbs, each nervously looking at others nearby, and all in mortal fear of something called, these days, “the inner city.”
But the West is also itself, much more than the sum of resemblances to other regions. To a degree every region is, among other things, a state of mind. Self-conscious plantation owners of Mississippi’s delta or Boston brahmins are not the only Americans who proudly identify themselves by region. Even migrant farm workers, as rootless a people as one can find in the United States (except, perhaps, for some corporation executives) find it important to place themselves, locate themselves not only geographically but by race, religion, occupation, or, in the case of Chicanos, national ancestry. In Florida, among Spanish-speaking migrants, one hears talk of “Mexican-Americans from Texas,” talk of how “different” they are — from those who once were themselves Mexican-Americans. Now they have become, at the very least, residents of Florida, if not Southerners. One Florida migrant with such a history makes plain what he has gone through and why he makes a distinction between his past and present situation: “Here it’s no Valley; there’s no Mexico across the river. When I was in Texas I could always cross over the border and become a Mexican, even if it was for a few hours. We worked for the Anglos, but they were only a few, and they would respect one of us, if he became a businessman and made money. Here we’re like the colored; we have to watch our step. Here it’s the South. I keep telling my children to be careful — there’s no place to go, except to jail. They tried to send us to jail in Texas too; but we could usually slip away before they came. There’s a lot more room in Texas than around here.”
He goes on to spell out the particular social, economic, and racial problems he has encountered in the ten years he has spent as part of the so-called eastern migrant stream — one of thousands from Texas who have made Florida their base (November through May) if not their home. But as he does so he talks about space, room, a boundary, a river, a nation (Mexico) beyond; that is, he talks very much like those who once employed him, ordered him around, threatened him with the very expulsion from America he both wanted and dreaded. Eventually he expelled himself — from Texas but not America. He heard that he could make more money in Florida. He went east rather than south, where his heart would have taken him, or west, where others like him, not to mention many millions of Anglos (as he calls them), have sought a better life. And, at times, when he is not utterly exhausted or preoccupied with harvesting crops or moving himself and his family to them, he even has what might be called nostalgic reveries in which the Rio Grande Valley figures prominently, for all the economic exploitation and political repression that he experienced there. The memories have to do with people, past events, or experiences; but there is, as the social scientists put it, a context that is broader — as far-reaching, spacious, and immense, maybe, as the Texas land he crossed so many times in his young life: “I’ll be working my way up from Florida, through Georgia and South Carolina and North Carolina, and I’ll look around, and I’ll say to my wife that we’re not in the Valley, or anywhere else in Texas. The other day I thought of Amarillo; I don’t know why. We’d go through there every year, on our way to Colorado, for the beets.”
He stops, changes the subject. He has no interest in imagining Texas, with its dry and lonely panhandle, to be the New Jerusalem. He knows why he left the Valley, why he never sees Amarillo anymore, why he is quite willing to go in and out of Carolina towns without too much annoyance. But he does feel the relative congestion of the East and his own situation as an outsider. The black man is, after all, a Southerner, a natural part of a region’s human landscape; hurt and betrayed and badly put upon still, but always there — thoroughly integrated, it can be said, into a once-segregated society. The Chicano receives looks or glances, hears remarks that expose the feeling of white and black alike: that man, his family, his people — they belong elsewhere. And he can only agree: “If I ever got some money saved, I’d leave. I’d go back to Texas. I wish one of my boys could get a job in the Valley and stay there — a job in a grocery store. I have a cousin who runs one, but he can’t hire everyone who is related to him. He’d be even poorer than he is. He’d be broke. The market is a small one. Even our Chicano people now go to supermarkets. When I was a boy the Anglos didn’t even want us to buy in their stores. All that has changed. The Anglos here aren’t the same as the Anglos in Texas. I used to hate the Anglos in Texas, but here they’re worse. One foreman told us that his boss doesn’t like ‘the Spaniards’ picking his crops! But he has no choice. The foreman said he hoped I didn’t mind being called a Spaniard. I said no; I said I loved being called a Spaniard. I’m a Spaniard from Texas!”
For him and for hundreds of thousands of his people, both in the state and separated from it, Texas is a rather special expanse of land: the rich, dark alluvial soil of the Rio Grande Valley, the hill country to the north of San Antonio, and, not least, the great high plains, known as the Staked Plains or, in Spanish, Llano Estocado, of which the panhandle and the west Texas area that abuts New Mexico are a part. The Valley is, of course, for many Chicanos “home,” a row of counties that stand like dominoes against the long, winding, somewhat depleted Rio Grande as it works its way toward the Gulf of Mexico. San Benito, Texas, is where the Florida migrant already quoted originally came from — at least so far as the American part of his heritage is concerned. It is a town near the gulf and near the river, a
town surrounded by large farms, on which all sorts of fruits and vegetables grow. The climate is semitropical — warm and humid almost all year around. Not only crops flourish; in winter large numbers of ducks, geese, and a variety of birds come and stay until spring: egrets, cranes, spoonbills, herons, and ibises. Not too far inland are doves, quail, pigeons, and the wondrous mockingbird, the officially adopted state bird of Texas. The gulf is, of course, full of shrimp, red snapper, flounder, and mackerel. Chicanos go to San Antonio to visit relatives and friends in the city; they also, like the Anglos, go to the gulf to fish, though they do not have much equipment or boats.
Working westward up the Rio Grande, the communities yield to one another, and within them the towns — a strange assortment of Anglo and Spanish names: Cameron County, with towns like Rio Hondo and Harlingen, as well as San Benito, and to the south, Brownsville; Hidalgo County, where much of the interviewing for this book was done, with towns like Edinburg, Pharr, and McAllen — balanced by La Joya, San Juan, and Donna; and on up to Starr County, Zapata, Webb, Maverick, Val Verde, Terrell, Brewster, Presidio, and Jeff Davis (a wedge of it barely touching the river), and finally, Culberson (another wedge directed toward the Rio Grande), Hudspeth, El Paso. The point is that these are evidences of cultural intimacy, for all the tensions between those who speak Spanish and those who speak the Texan kind of English. The Chicanos who live in, say, Hidalgo County know people in the other counties along the river, and they know what is going on where: a good Anglo sheriff in one place, a bad one elsewhere; a relatively decent grower or foreman, as opposed to a mean and spiteful one.