by Robert Coles
He does indeed apply himself. He goes to a first-rate bilingual (English and French) private school, where, as he puts it, “all the kids are from homes like mine.” What does he mean by that? He replies tersely at first: “They live in the Garden District.” He thinks of an exception or two; then, prompted to explain who the students are and why they have come to his school, he goes into a description of the school’s purposes. “There are some other schools that prepare you for college. But we have French as well as English. Some parents drive their children a long way to get them here. I’m lucky, I can walk. We have a colored girl in the school. She doesn’t pay tuition, I hear. If you have a few kids different from yourself, then you learn from them. The colored girl — her father is a professor at a college, I think. There’s a boy who is Chinese. I don’t know how the Chinese got here in Louisiana. My Daddy says they’re all over, and they came a long time ago. I think this boy is the son of a businessman who owns a motel. But mostly the kids are regular, and I know a lot of them well, because they live nearby or their parents know my parents.”
When he does his homework he likes to stop after a bout of concentration and look out the window. He will see someone standing or walking and quickly do a sketch of the person. He will doodle, then put a big circle around the doodles, then throw them out. He will pick up a board with nails driven into it and arrange elastics around the nails, to make up various patterns. He will look at a map of the world, and wonder where he will go in the course of his life. He expects firmly and without qualification to visit every single continent before he is twenty-one. His father has told him so, because the father also wants to get to see every continent — before he reaches the age of forty-five. Left to be seen are Australia, Africa, and Asia; but the boy knows that “it only would take two trips at the most” for the goal he and his father have set. Once in a while he doodles like a geographer; he sketches North and South America, or Africa. He puts in a river or two, makes note, through dots, of certain cities he happens to think of, then abandons the diversion for a mathematics assignment or a composition he is struggling to write. He has trouble writing; he is quite fussy about language — is constantly asking his mother or his father about the meanings of various words or looking them up in the dictionary. Though he talks well, he finds it hard to write about his personal thoughts or ideas.
Nor is the boy unaware of the possible reasons he has for holding back, for struggling hard to achieve a more impersonal essay than an English teacher may have in mind as desirable. “My father says that once you’ve put something down on paper, you’re committed to it. When you’re committed, you’re really on the line — you can’t just forget about the whole business. My father once wrote a letter to the newspaper; he said that he was against the colored people going to our schools, but the law is the law, and if the judge said they had to go, then we should all obey the judge. Well, we had to disconnect the phone, and we got letters from people saying they were going to kill us. We were scared. The police came, and they looked at the letters. They had a police car near the house for a few days. My father hired a detective to watch the house. My mother drove me the two blocks to school. When it was all over, my father said there was one lesson to learn: if you have an opinion, keep it to yourself. My mother said she didn’t agree, because if no one expressed any opinions, it would be like living in a dictatorship. But Daddy said that he wasn’t against speaking your opinion; he just thinks that there are a lot of no-good people around, and they are ignorant, and they are violent, and if they don’t like what they hear from a person, they’re as likely to try to hurt him, or even kill him, as not. So, the best thing to do is stay out of their way — the mob.”
That word “mob” has interested him for some time. In one of his doodles he drew a mob, a lot of people pressed again one another, their bodies not distinguishable, their faces small and sometimes twisted. He used shading to connect faces, or stray hands and legs and torsos — a rather powerful sketch, actually (Figure 54). And he didn’t throw it out as he often has done. He gave it a title, “The Mob,” and put it on his bulletin board. He has read about mobs in history books — the mobs that turned the French Revolution into an orgy of killing, with the innocent suffering as much as the guilty. He has heard his father talk about “mob rule,” the danger in a democracy. He has seen a mob, too; the frenzied white men and women who heckled black children of his own age when they tried to enter previously all-white schools. For days, weeks, months, that mob persisted, aided and abetted by a city’s indifference, a state’s defiance of federal laws, and, for a long time, a national government’s (in 1960, under President Eisenhower) reluctance to move quickly or effectively. James was taken by his parents to the scene of the riots and mob formation, will never forget what he saw and heard — from the mob, and from his parents, as they drove away and reflected upon what they had seen: “The women were calling the colored girls bad names. The men were threatening the girls. A lot of people had posters, telling the girls to stay away and never come near the school. The police were just standing there, and my father said he thought the police were joking with the mob, and encouraging them, instead of telling them to cut it out. When the girls were gone — inside the school building — the mob stayed and they cheered and shouted and said they’d be back in the morning. On the way home my father said that there’s a great danger in a country like ours that mobs will take over, because there are a lot of ignorant people, and they listen to ignorant politicians, and the next thing you know, there’s a lot of trouble. My mother said she never wanted to see that neighborhood again. My father said he agreed, but mobs can move into any neighborhood, even ours.”
He was younger then; the words above, spoken five years later, have to do with memories that still linger. A city’s turmoil became for a rich and prominent family the basis of an emotional series of discussions which the child did not so easily shake off. The father took the boy back, just the two of them. They never left the car, but they saw once again the hate and threatening violence. Afterwards, the father repeated to his son certain philosophical premises, which the boy in subsequent years has fashioned into a way of looking at the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, the United States of America.
When he had completed his drawing of a mob scene, and drawn a circle around it, he pinned the paper to the cork of his “message to myself center,” as he calls the bulletin board, and began to talk about his views: “If that mob broke through the circle, we’d all be in trouble. My father says there’s always that danger. When we go downtown to his club, the people you meet on the streets and coming out of the stores — a lot of them look as if they might join a mob if something got them upset. They push and shove; Dad says they’re already half a mob — the way they act when they go into the department stores. Even in the good restaurants you’ll meet people who push when they’re standing in line, and they make a lot of noise, and they could cause trouble, if they weren’t in a good mood. That’s why the city has to have policemen who know how to keep control, and that’s why the state has its own police, and the government has the troops, and there’s the National Guard.
“My father was a colonel in the army. He says a strong army is important. If we didn’t have the army, the Russians would invade us. And there’d be mobs all over, and the country wouldn’t be the same. A lot of people don’t believe in obeying the law. They want to steal and rcb; or they want to hit someone; or they want to march up and down on the streets and scare people. If the police don’t stop mobs from forming, then the city begins to fall apart. We almost had the whole city of New Orleans become a huge mob a few years ago, and it could happen again.”
He draws a picture of a policeman, makes him tan, burly, wide-eyed. He provides the man with a billy club in one hand, a gun in the other. The reason: he has just seen a thief and is going to take after him, catch him, apprehend him. The officer has another gun in a holster. He has a large badge on his chest. James shows no interest in t
urning the portrait of the man into a street scene. He does not provide, either, a sky or any ground for the officer to stand on (Figure 55). He explains the reason he doesn’t want to show an actual chase: “I’ve seen the police, and I talk a lot with one policeman who stands near our school, but I’ve never seen any thieves, so I don’t know what they look like. I’ve asked my father if he has ever seen a thief, and he said no — but then he changed his mind and said he’s probably seen thousands of them, but not when they’re actually stealing something, or being chased by the police.” And anyway, he wouldn’t want to draw a thief even if he had caught a glimpse of one. He prefers to draw pictures of friends or allies rather than enemies.
There was a time when he himself thought about becoming a policeman. He mentioned his idea to his parents, and was not actively discouraged. His father knows the chief of the New Orleans police, and so the boy was brought to headquarters and shown around; he met a number of officers, got a ride in a cruiser, and even saw a few rookies being given training. When a year or so passed, and James was still talking about the glories of a policeman’s life and his own intention of sharing in those glories later on, the mother began to have second thoughts and to speak them. She was sure there were other boys who would grow up to be quite satisfactory policemen; James had “better things to do.” The boy couldn’t imagine what they were. The mother came up with a few suggestions: law, business, or the boy’s long-standing interest in architecture. But James would not budge; he was going to be a policeman. He remembers telling his mother that “there is no work more important than a police officer’s”; and he remembers telling her who told him so: his father.
And it was the father who carefully remained loyal to his earlier pronouncements. He told the boy that he agreed — the police do indeed “hold everything together.” He bought him two children’s books that try to tell boys and girls about the working lives of the police. He allowed the boy to watch television programs that featured the activities of the police. And gradually he began to tell the boy how the police in turn need others to help them — prosecuting attorneys, judges who are not “soft” but utterly determined to “protect the public,” and, not least, “ordinary citizens,” who will back the police, if need be, against their enemies. The boy learned, with respect to “enemies,” that the police not only have to hunt down criminals but to deal with the attacks of all sorts of “dangerous people.” Who? The father has been both vague and precise. He has referred to “lawless people,” and to mobs, of course; also to the Ku Klux Klan, but no less to “civil rights agitators.”
Eventually James began to lose interest in the police — so far as a career for himself was concerned. At eleven he had even decided that the police had failed to curb various “mobs”; they therefore may be part of the nation’s problem. He has wondered out loud repeatedly why Princeton University doesn’t train police officers — who would, he is sure, be much more competent and effective than many now on the force. His father has agreed but tried to explain to the boy what is meant by the expression “division of labor.” The boy tries hard and with considerable success to explain the concept: “Some people are good at being carpenters and some people are good at being architects. The carpenter doesn’t know what to do in a house that is being built unless the architect makes his plans, a blueprint, and shows the carpenter what has to be done. That’s division of labor. Princeton University is where you learn to be an architect, or a lawyer. If you want to be a carpenter, then you don’t go to Princeton. You can learn that in a high school or from a carpenter who will teach you. The policeman is like a carpenter; he doesn’t need to go to college. If you went up to a policeman — to most New Orleans cops — and asked them if they would have liked to go to Princeton, they’d think you were some nut trying to be funny. They wouldn’t even know, a lot of them about Princeton; it’s too far away. And my father says they don’t like Tulane, and that’s right here in our city.”
The mob he saw as a child is the mob he thinks about when he stresses the importance of the police to New Orleans. When a Tulane professor criticized the city’s police for being heavy-handed in the way they dealt with blacks or poor people regardless of race, the boy rallied to the defense of the police — after hearing his father do likewise. At such moments James stakes out an interesting position. He condemns Tulane, condemns the people of both races who complain against the police, declares himself only too anxious to leave the city and atter d Princeton when the time comes. But he will come back, and then, he hopes, the police will be at his side protecting the Garden District, he says bluntly and unashamedly, from the people who “want to take away what we own here.” His father has said as much: “Dad says that when people want to cut down on the number of police we have, ard cripple them with rules and regulations, it’s because those people don’t want the city protected. Once the police are gone, the mobs will start marching, and they’ll come here and break into the homes. We’ll lose all we’ve got.”
James has heard his mother argue time and again that the family ought to sell their city home, go live upstate on their plantation year around — or, alternatively, take an apartment, in which they would be “less exposed.” The father has said no, he will not budge; he insists that once fear obtains that degree of leverage over the lives of people, they won’t know when to stop running. He wants to stand and fight. He has several guns in the home, two rifles and a handgun. He does target practice on weekends, when he and his family do indeed go to their plantation or their oceanside home in Mississippi. His son has also learned how to shoot, possesses a lightweight rifle, enjoys using it in the woods of northern Louisiana.
Upon occasion James has thought up a rather spirited if harrowing scenario of what might prompt him to aim a weapon and pull its trigger inside the New Orleans house. In a picture drawn at the age of ten he showed himself at the window of his Garden District home, with his newly acquired gun. The street outside was filled with another of his “mobs,” and the assault was obviously directed toward his family’s property. The house seems vulnerable indeed, not the sturdy, even imposing, building he sometimes draws — as if the mob had already won part of its objective simply by putting in an appearance. The boy is prepared to fight to ward off the enemy. The mother, the boy explained later, is in the kitchen preparing for the necessity of flight — cooking food, filling up a thermos or two, packing a suitcase. There is a lot of smoke coming out of the chimney, more than one expects, since the home is in New Orleans, not known for its cold weather. The sky is cloudy; no sun is shown (Figure 56). The boy explains the smoke — and much more: “I think my mother would probably be burning some family papers. My father says we shouldn’t keep anything important at home. But my mother doesn’t like to go back and forth to the bank. She keeps her papers in her desk. She’s told us that if a robber wants to find out how much stocks she inherited from her father, that’s all right. But if a mob tried to break in, I’ll bet my mother wouldn’t want them poking into her papers!”
A year later, as he talked yet another time about the police and a recent news story of a robbery in a Garden District home, James began to speak of envy — his envy. If only he were “one of those poor colored kids” he had seen five years earlier, walking past a mob into school; then he wouldn’t be worried about thieves and robbers and mobs and the destruction of his home. It is an anxious and fearful life, the one he has inherited from his parents — or so he was beginning to believe. Better to be poor; one has little or nothing to lose! Nevertheless, he had no choice but to do the best he could under the circumstances — try to gird himself for future hazards, stresses, times of outright danger, if not disaster.
“I know that I’ve got a lot of advantages,” he announced a week before turning twelve. “But it’s not all easy for us, here in the Garden District,” he went on. And he knew exactly why: “The more you have, the more people want what you have. My Dad says he wakes up, and he’s dreamed that he’s been robbed and lost his watch,
his wallet, his key chain, and even the coins in his pocket. I’ve had the same dream: a kid came — he was white, I believe, but he could be colored — and he took away my model planes and my Tonka toys. My father said it was just me saying I was too old for those toys. I told him I disagreed. I said a lot of kids want my toys, just like a lot of grown-ups want his wallet! He said I was right. Then my mother asked him again if we couldn’t please move away to the country. And he said no. And she wouldn’t talk to us anymore. She asked to be excused, and she rang and had her breakfast brought upstairs to her bedroom. And she wasn’t too nice later on, either. She was working on her plants until a minute before supper, and then she said she didn’t feel too good, so she was going to skip eating. But Dad went upstairs, and persuaded her to come down, and the cook had made a good supper — her favorite red snapper — and we forgot about the trouble. It’s always around the corner, though — the trouble that comes when one of our neighbors tells us that someone tried to break in; and then mother gets upset. She’s had three locks put on all our doors. And we have an alarm that’s supposed to be the best. Dad says he’d hire a private detective to watch the house at night, if it would make mother feel better; but he says it’s crazy to do that now, and if he ever really has to do it, then he will sell the house and we’ll leave the whole United States, not just New Orleans, because by that time there will be mobs in the small towns, too!”