Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  He is not being especially ironic and certainly not sarcastic when he talks that way about his mother. If anything, he is expressing sympathy for her, and more than a little understanding of how she feels. He is himself rather shy. He has no close friends, has never had any. He doesn’t like to talk very much with those of his own age, though he is considerably more open with older people. His maternal grandfather calls him an “extrovert,” but James disowns the description a little contemptuously. He is not all that close to the old man, who has (the boy believes) confused his polite conversation made in the presence of elders with a genuine desire to be with people. James says he is “most happy” when he is looking at his watch collection; in second place he puts playing tennis with his father — provided they go afterward to lunch at a certain private club whose food the boy especially likes. They don’t often go there; it is a treat and they prepare for the moment a week or more in advance. There is, first of all, an announcement of a kind: “My father will tell me that next week we can go have lunch.” When they go alone, it is always to the club; so the boy has been promised something quite appealing, by his standards. It is upon those occasions that he talks about “important subjects”; his father, he says, is his “best friend,” and he likes very much talking with him. He also likes going with him to buy clothes — another “time” (the boy calls it) they have together. When Brooks Brothers comes to New Orleans, James and his father, also James, go to the hotel where the clothing representatives are staying, and get fitted.

  The boy wants to go to Princeton; his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather went there. He does not want to go to Tu-lane. He says unfriendly things about the college, and thereby irritates classmates of his in the private secondary school he attends. He criticizes the college’s buildings, maintains that the courses there aren’t “so good.” His source: his father. When the boy is asked whether there aren’t good reasons for some of his family’s neighbors to send their children to Tulane, he says yes, there are. He doesn’t know them, but again, he has heard his father speak: “My Dad says it’s a city university and it has to serve a lot of people, and the classes are probably bigger than they should be. A lot of people here in New Orleans would die for Tulane. It’s a good school. It’s got a good reputation. But I’d rather go to Princeton. You keep up what your ancestors started. My great-grandfather went to Princeton, but he got in some trouble there. He never graduated. I think he fought with a Yankee. That’s what my father always tells me. My mother says it may not be the whole truth, but it sounds good — it’s a good story! Dad doesn’t like her talking that way Now women can go to Princeton. Dad was against the idea, but he says it had to happen. My grandfather graduated with high honors; he was a lawyer, and he invested in cotton, and he started a brokerage house, too — three professions, my Dad always says. And besides, my grandfather bought a lot of land in northern Louisiana and he invested in the railroads, and we can go free on them, even now. I think he was a director of the Louisville & Nashville — but who wants to ride on the railroads, the way they are now? I used to have a set, trains going in all directions, a whole room of trains, but I lost interest. Now I like to go out to the airport to meet my Dad when he comes back from a trip: all the jets to see.”

  James likes to draw planes, mostly large jets, but some smaller ones too, and, rarely, some older planes which he’s only seen pictured. When he was younger, eight or nine, he favored struggle — aerial dogfights, formations headed toward formations. But more recently he has abandoned military aircraft for the commercial kind. He sketches 707s, 747s, DC10s, puts Delta or Eastern or United labels on the fuselages. As he does so he recalls the various flights he has taken — to Atlanta, to Nashville, to New York, to Mexico, to Brazil, to Europe. And he talks about the advantages of comfortable, first-class travel: “My mother said she didn’t know how people travel tourist, especially on the long flights across the ocean or up to New York. You can’t relax when you are sitting in a narrow seat and there’s someone on each side of you. My father’s friends, two of them, have their own planes, Lear jets. We’ve gone with them to Washington, and to Birmingham. I’d like to be a pilot, but I wouldn’t want to fly commercial. I’d like to have my own plane, and then if I read the National Geographic and there was a city I wanted to see, or a country, I’d just pick up the phone and tell them at the field to get the plane checked out, because I’m coming over soon and I’d like to leave as soon as possible. I’d call up my friends, and the next thing you’d know, we’d be up in the air and headed north over Lake Pontchartrain or south over the Mississippi River. When you’re over the clouds, you feel you’re on your way. My father has promised that when I’m old enough to take driving lessons, I’ll be given flying lessons too, if I still want them. I know I will. I think I’d rather fly than drive. There are too many cars on the road, too many madmen speeding in cars that shouldn’t even be allowed to move out of a garage. I once dreamed up an idea: special roads for people who have real good cars and really know how to drive and can afford to pay — first-class roads, they could be called, like the first-class section of an airplane.”

  He remembers one evening when no amount of money in the world could separate him and his parents from hundreds of other travelers, many of whom he still quite vividly remembers: “I’ve never seen so many people inside a building. We came into the New York airport from London, and we were the last plane to land — a bad snowstorm. We were supposed to go into the city for a couple of days, but we decided to go right to New Orleans. We couldn’t. We just sat there. All these people were sitting there, too. My mother got nervous. She was afraid we’d be robbed. My father says it was one of the worst times he’s ever had.” He doesn’t easily bring up what specifically bothered his parents and himself. He talks about a “bad storm,” a “long delay.” Finally, he refers to “the crowd,” and to “some of the people in the crowd.” Then he describes his mother’s fears — not only that she’d be held up, but that for some reason violence would break out, a riot would take place, there would be (she was utterly convinced) trouble and more trouble.

  The boy volunteered to draw a picture of the waiting room at Kennedy Airport. He thought it would be rather a challenge to recall and evoke that scene through crayons. But he could not really get himself going. He stared at the paper, started to draw, stopped; in the end, he abandoned the project. He decided to draw, instead, particular individuals whom he still could remember — people who belonged to what he calls the “mob” at Kennedy that stormy evening. He contemplates drawing a man in a wheelchair first. That man seemed lost, helpless. The boy had wanted to go help, offer to push the chair — but no, his parents told him to sit with them, not go anywhere or talk with anyone. James decides not to draw the man. The next possible subject is a Texan, the boy was sure — a man headed for Houston and wearing a “cowboy hat.” He had come up to them, asked a question or two, been politely denied satisfactory answers. Again, the boy had wanted to be of assistance. Might he go ask a policeman he saw walking in a certain direction? No, he should not, said his father. The boy had seen how much luggage the Texan had, and merely tried to lend a hand, but his parents had by then become quite annoyed. The mother spoke to the father; the father took the boy aside and told him that he must sit down and stop “getting involved with a lot of strangers.”

  James begins work on the Texan. He draws him quite tall, gives the hat obvious emphasis. The man’s hands are made large, his feet also oversize. The mouth is open, toothy. The boy gets curiously agitated as he tries to complete the drawing. He seems satisfied at last, ready to turn to other matters, when suddenly he crosses the effort out with two strokes of a black crayon (Figure 53). It is not that he is artistically too critical of himself: “I can’t do a good job on any of those people I saw that night. I think I remember them, but I forget them while I’m trying to draw them. I guess I didn’t get as good a look at those people as I thought, because if I had, I know I could do good pictures
of them. Maybe I obeyed my mother. I remember she told me to close my eyes and think pleasant thoughts. I kept opening my eyes and peeking, but maybe I didn’t peek very much.”

  He has learned over the years to do as his mother suggests — and with less and less desire on his part to peek. Waiting with his father for a cab downtown, he sees someone or something, feels uncomfortable amid the jostle and hustle of the situation, and immediately his eyes close and he thinks, invariably, of his room at home or the inside of his father’s club. He is not so much afraid as amused by his ability to spare himself unpleasantness, to create for himself a feeling of well-being: “My mother was right; if you’re having trouble or you don’t like the people around you, then you can get rid of them. All you have to do is think of some other place! My father says I’m lucky. He can’t close his eyes, except when he goes to sleep. He says it can be dangerous, anyway. If you just stand there on the street, with your eyes closed, someone will think you’re blind and come up and try to steal from you. The other day I went Christmas shopping with Dad, and I was holding the packages and waiting for him to pay for them. I guess I must have closed my eyes again, because he took hold of my shoulder and said I should pay attention and not ‘be in a dream,’ or else I’d end up with nothing in my arms, and some colored kid would have a real good Christmas! Or it could be a white kid too!”

  His father had in his remarks mentioned only a “colored kid,” but the boy wanted to be less specific. He has, in fact, remembered his father’s social and racial views quite well and is insistently loyal to them. The father has worried about the impoverished condition of black people, expressed repeated concern for their lot. The father has also denounced the Klan in no uncertain terms — and other “redneck” social groups or activities. Not far from the Garden District live working-class whites (in the city’s so-called Irish Channel district); and also not far away are clusters of black people — servants, many of them, to families like his. James has been driven through those neighborhoods, has heard opinions expressed about the people there, and has heard their lives connected to his — as it is and as it will be: “My father says I’ll have to learn how to live with the colored, the Negro people, and I’ll have to live with the rednecks. We have a lot of rednecks in Louisiana. They can cause trouble. They vote for someone who gets them excited. A lot of people don’t know how to keep their tempers, and they go shouting in the streets. The rednecks hate the colored, and the colored hate the rednecks. My mother says she’d rather be with the rednecks, but my father says he trusts the colored more.

  “We used to have a governess, she was French — from Paris, not New Orleans. She taught me to speak French. She didn’t like a lot of the white people in the city. My father would agree with her, then my mother got angry. She said — she says she’ll always say — white is white and black is black. The reason my mother let the governess go was that I was old enough to be in school all day; but my mother says she would have let her go anyway, because she was more interested in the colored and their troubles than taking care of me. I think she even joined the colored — the NAACP, my father said. She used to tell me that it was not the fault of the colored that they are poor; we made them be, the whites. I told my father, and he told her to stop talking to me about the races, and concentrate on the French language. So she did. But Daddy agrees with her; he says there’s good and bad in every kind, and he says sometimes the worst kind are the rednecks.

  But both parents make references to “the colored” as pickpockets, thieves; it is the boy who corrects them, reminds them of their own past observations. Neither parent argues with the boy. They are both impressed with what they call their son’s “sensitivity.” He is not, however, “a bleeding heart,” they reassure themselves. He has heard himself openly talked about, heard his mother worry, right to his face, that he would get “too worried” about blacks and their struggles. And he has heard his father reassure the mother, remind her that children go through “stages.” James doesn’t know what a “stage” really is, but he knows what his father means — that for a while, but only for a while, it is all right that he worry a little more than his parents do about blacks or working-class whites or, indeed, the Indians.

  The last have intrigued him for a long time — ever since he saw some of them being rounded up in a movie and heard his governess say that “it wasn’t only the Negroes.” He can still hear her repeating those words to him, to herself, to the one friend she had in New Orleans, whom she’d call on the phone, the boy listening in all the while. The governess read to him books that gave a chronicle of the fate of various Indian tribes, and James’s parents did not object. But when, James, at six, talked of becoming an Indian and fighting on their side against “the white man,” the mother began to ask around: did any of her friends know of a housekeeper who would be “good” with a boy like James or, even better, a “girl” from Europe who was here, didn’t want to go back, and might enjoy a not too demanding job? The father called in the governess and told her stop talking to the boy about Indians. By that time the governess was ready to quit, her employers ready to fire her, and James quite ready to abandon all interest in this nation’s racial or ethnic minorities. Still, the parents noticed after she was long gone that their son continued to worry over blacks who begged in the street or whites who cussed out blacks. When at eleven James was still applauding the Indians in the Westerns he saw, the parents lost their capacity for detached silence, and spoke out: the Indians were as cruel or brutal in their own way as the white man, and it’s not fair to take sides.

  The boy has learned that message; says it is a “prejudice” when a person takes sides with one party in a struggle and forgets about the viewpoint or experiences of the other side. But there are times when he abandons the various messages he has heard and plays all-out war. He mobilizes his considerable army of soldiers, tanks, airplanes, and shoots at the enemy. He includes in the enemy blacks, whites, Indians. He declares himself a general defending his territory — one of his father’s plantations. His troops have been hired; he isn’t calling upon friends or neighbors. They are contemporary Hessians, those men he controls and launches against what he calls “the Americans.” Then he explains: “I could be the descendant of a French prince; he came here to Louisiana and then France left, but he held out, and no one noticed, until one day the census people came and spotted the plantation and they started asking a lot of questions. Then the government agents said they wanted us to give up, and let them own the plantation, and we could work for them! That’s when I decided to fight! I said never, and I hired the troops, and they fought and won.”

  He goes through the motions — the arrangement and rearrangement of his troops. He pretends that guns are going off, makes noises for the sake of realism, abruptly ends the encounter. He declares himself, thereafter, “a kind prince”; he will not take advantage of those he has vanquished. But he will keep some of “the enemy” on his plantation. They will work the fields, produce good crops, look after the main house, and in return get “all the food they want.” Of course they won’t be eating his kind of food. They like french fries and sausages and Kool-Aid and candy; he has learned to like grapefruit, cut oranges, fortified cereal, lots of vegetables, and steak from which the fat has been trimmed. He has pecan pie or vanilla ice cream occasionally, but not every day. He takes vitamin pills year round. He uses Vitamin C in winter, as soon as anyone in the house begins to suffer the flu or a cold. He never eats chocolate; takes only a Life Saver occasionally. He used to like popcorn, but now finds it “too salty”; however, he is willing to supply “them,” his various employees, with all the popcorn they desire.

  It comes to that — the use of a blanket “them” in his story or fable or imaginary game; and also in his “real life,” the expression he and many other children use for the day-to-day activity which a boy of his age has learned to take for granted. When he becomes more “realistic,” more “grown up,” he sees himself as a businessman, an arch
itect who designs and builds shopping centers, a lawyer, a man who buys and sells land in Central America or crops from there. He talks of choosing one of those pursuits, or maybe trying all of them. He talks of becoming an experienced scuba diver. Every year the family goes to Mexico or the Caribbean after Christmas Day — to “unwind.” His mother, he knows, has a case of the “nerves.” She tires easily, takes to her bed for no discernible reason. She becomes demanding, more critical of the boy than usual. The father intervenes, reassures the child, tells him that time will soon enough bring a change in the mother’s “spirits.” The father goes further sometimes, insists that the country is going “mad” — so no wonder his wife wants virtually to lock herself up. The boy has heard talk of “therapy,” of a possible “rest home,” of too many pills. But always, it seems, as things are getting alarming, the mother inexplicably and to everyone’s surprise “snaps out of it,” an expression the father uses when talking to his son. And when the son wants to know how she has managed to become so much better, so soon, the father gives his reply: willpower.

  The boy is told often that he, too, has obligations, must not stumble, has within himself an exacting conscience. There is a time, James knows, for fun and games, for strolls through cemeteries or mock games of a historical and military nature; but there are also times for intensely serious “business.” He spells out the demands he has learned to place upon himself: “I’d like to know about the stock market. You can’t inherit money and just forget about it. My father goes over the financial pages with me. He points out what’s been happening to our money. I have to tell him whether we’ve lost or gained — the total. He bought me a little calculator, a pocket one, made in Japan. It’s great fun, but it’s very important business. If you have money, you have to know how to keep it, or you’re in big trouble. I have my animals to take care of. I have a dog and I have three white mice. I used to have a snake, but my mother didn’t want it around. The maid can’t touch my mice, and only I feed the dog and take her for a walk. I have my homework, and that’s very important. You have to have good marks to get into Princeton. Daddy says he was lucky. When he was young he could just know he’d go there. If I do my work, I will. But I’ve got to do my work.”