by Robert Coles
The boy is sure that there are some poor children, black and white, who will never grow up to be greedy, lawbreaking, violent people. He recalls quite vividly the dignity of “the colored kids” who started school desegregation. He recalls the “nice” children of his parents’ servants — boys and girls whom he has, however, seen only occasionally, because their mothers or fathers are not prone to bring them to work. He wishes there were more like “them” — those children of his family’s maid and laundress and gardener and handyman, who also serves as a butler at formal parties: “They are polite. They look at you with real respect in their eyes. I told my cousin that the colored kids are the equal of their parents. My cousin is going to Princeton next year. He said the colored up North aren’t as nice as they are down here. My Dad says the children of our servants would naturally be good, but some other colored kids in New Orleans aren’t so good. My mother says she’s never met a bad colored kid from the country; the city makes the colored greedy and they lose their manners and they get in trouble with the law. I asked her about the children we’ve met, the children of our servants, and she said they’re special.
“We go to their houses every Christmas; my father was brought up to do that. On Christmas Day we bring gifts to the servants before we open up our own presents. We’ve been going for years. I was once given a long lecture, because my father said I was rude when we went to the servants’ homes. I didn’t ask after them, and I didn’t try to make conversation with them. I guess I just stood there. I must have been about six. I remember it was when those colored kids were having all the trouble with the mobs. The next year I was much better. I got so friendly with one colored boy, our maid’s son, that I asked him to come over and play with my Lego. He said he’d like to, but his mother said no. My father said he’d try to get us together one day, the colored boy and me; but afterwards, in the car, I got another lecture. I realize now that I was too young to realize how to behave. It was a bad thing to do, because it really embarrassed the maid’s whole family, and the boy must have felt bad. My father was sure that the maid gave her son a whipping. She talks a lot about whipping her children when they don’t behave. I asked my father if he wouldn’t turn around, please, and let me go back in the house and apologize, and ask the maid to leave her son alone. But my Dad said no, if we tried that there’d be even more trouble, and they’d all be in a real scared state over there, and they wouldn’t know what to say or do. So, we drove on, and I realized then and there how careful you’ve got to be when you’re talking with colored people, and it’s our responsibility.”
The word “responsibility” is one he has learned to use with increasing frequency. When he was six years old, and his parents were upset by the racial struggle and near chaos facing New Orleans, there was a lot of talk in front of him about “responsibility” When the boy was taken to see the mob in action, his father told him afterward, day after day, that it was the “responsibility” of families like theirs to fight for “law and order,” to resist “mob rule,” to prevent “violence” from spreading — to the point that the city becomes “a jungle.” The boy still links together in his mind those various words or phrases. He talks about a safari his cousin went on; then goes on to remark upon how “violent” the jungle is and how hard it must have been for the white men who explored Africa to come to terms with the various tribes, as well as the animals. So with our own settlers, who came West against the opposition of Indians, some of them violent. His uncle worked for a while in Latin America as an executive of a major American corporation and has told James and his father a number of times how “primitive” the people are in countries like Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and how much “responsibility” an American company incurs as it tries to “raise the standard of living,” “stay in business,” and “make a reasonable profit.”
James has heard, and will not forget, that there are a lot of people in this country who have never been within a thousand miles of “a jungle” or “an underdeveloped nation” and have no idea what the people of such places are like — but who are against all American companies on principle, and “make a lot of noise” to that effect here and abroad. The same holds nearer at home, the boy knows, at the age of eleven. He is worried about his nation’s future: “My uncle told us that he tried to get the people near the jungle of Colombia to be clean and to take medicines, so they wouldn’t be tired and they wouldn’t feel so bad, and they could work better and live better. But they suspected him, and they were very superstitious. They need a lot of education, and that takes years. That’s why the colored in our country should go into the same schools as whites do; then the colored will begin to learn a lot more than they once did, and they will be better off. The trouble is, a lot of white people aren’t too good either. You’d think white people would know better, but they don’t. It depends on who the white person is. The same with the colored: my father says there are some very smart colored people, and they’re more civilized than the white. Dad told Mother he wouldn’t mind going to lunch at his club with a colored man, if he was the president of a colored university, or a doctor, a surgeon. There’s supposed to be a very good colored surgeon in Nashville, my mother heard someone say. She says she’s never been convinced the colored should go to school with whites; she says they should civilize themselves, like the surgeon did, and stay away from the rednecks. Dad says they’re the most uncivilized — worse than any colored are.
“My father went to a meeting; he talked with judges and he met the chief of police, and he said they all agreed that America is in trouble. By the time I grow up New Orleans might need an army to keep the peace. The colored have become more violent. They’re not as polite as they used to be, except for our servants and some people like them. The rednecks are looking for fights with the colored. My father says we’ve got to do all we can to be umpires; it’s our responsibility. My uncle says that he used to think he was crazy for going to South America and trying to live there, but now he’s sorry he’s become vice-president and lives here, because it’s safer in the jungle than in downtown New Orleans; and it’s getting worse here, and you can’t be sure that even in your own neighborhood you’re safe. People want the government to take everything away from the people who have earned it, and they want a lot of things for nothing, so it’s like the jungle, with everyone trying to beat out everyone else — only in the jungle, when you come there from this country, and you have your bulldozers and rifles, and you bring food and medicine for the natives, then you can make them work, and they live better than ever before, and it’s pretty safe down there. Up here it’s getting more and more dangerous. My uncle says he’s glad he’s lived most of his life; the way it’s going in America, everyone will soon be nervous about being robbed. But my father says I shouldn’t pay any attention to talk like that, because there’s always going to be some trouble, and if you read the diaries of my grandfather and my great-grandfather, they were in a lot of trouble too, but they didn’t retreat, and they knew how to live up to their responsibilities, and they did right well, so it’s not all so bad.”
No, indeed; he has wonderful times throughout the year. He goes north to the family’s plantation on weekends; there he fishes, learns to shoot and hunt, swims in a pool that is heated (hence usable all year), goes horse riding, learns to play tennis. In addition to family travel abroad, there are other trips, too; James occasionally goes skiing in Colorado with his parents on long winter weekends, missing a day or so of school, or goes to the family’s home on the Gulf Coast, where he has learned to sail. In fact, as he has noted often, the family’s “main home” (his expression) seems like a stopping place: a place among places — all very reassuring, actually, for people who have increasing doubts about city life, however privileged it be.
But the city at least offers the excellent private school he attends, and the teachers there are quite accommodating as well as serious-minded and demanding. “They expect us to miss school,” he observes. As a result, they keep hi
gh standards, get a lot of work done with each child when he or she is in attendance, and assign a lot of homework to someone going away with his or her parents. The headmaster has even told the children that absences are not all that detrimental, so long as the student really takes advantage of the time spent in school: “He said he knows our families are living busy lives, and have a lot to do, and places they have to go, so he doesn’t get upset when our mothers or fathers write letters saying we’re going to be out for a couple of days, or even a week. He says that we’re all from good homes, and our parents have gone to college, and they’re successful, and they want us to be successful, so they’ll keep us working and make sure we don’t lose out if we miss school. My father does keep me working, too; no matter where we go on a weekend, he makes sure I have my books with me, and either he or my mother go over the work. My spelling has never been very good, and my father is always asking me to spell words. We’ll be driving, and he’ll say: James, how do you spell “restaurant”?’ Then I do, and then my mother says to him: ‘You must be hungry!’ I think I’ve learned how to spell from my father more than from my teachers. They say you have to keep practicing, and my father makes sure I do. Even at breakfast, he’ll look up from his paper and ask me a word. When we’re skiing or way over in Europe, he remembers to ‘give me a word.’ He’ll stop what he’s been doing and say: James, let me give you another word.’ I tell him okay, I’m ready”
James looks forward to the future — when he will be the father and a child of his will be asked how to spell. He assumes he will have a son; he bears the number III after his name, and he wishes that one day the number IV will appear after the name of a newborn baby in the family. The family will persist, he is sure; it has for centuries — through wars, revolutions, natural and man-made disasters. Maybe there will be a strategic retreat: the abandonment of New Orleans, even of Louisiana. But the father has said that this will not be necessary. In the event of a disaster, however, there are always the mountains of east Tennessee or of Colorado.
The son is reassured as he contemplates the safety of the mountains, but he hopes never to leave New Orleans. He remarks upon the affection he feels for his Garden District home, predicts that his own children will love going there and visiting his old room. He might, one day, have a house nearby, well placed in the District, and so his parents and his future wife and their children would be quite intime, as his mother puts it. And maybe “the colored” and “the rednecks” by then would be the ones to have left New Orleans. After all, as his parents keep mentioning, cities are expensive places to live in. James has wondered why the poorer people don’t move out, find cheaper places to live. His father has explained that people stay in the city because they can get work more easily there than in the small towns or the country. But the father has also mentioned repeatedly that the unemployment rate is high in New Orleans, so the boy has felt puzzled.
He has asked what the poor who can’t find work do. He was told that “a lot of them don’t do anything, they just loaf around.” James suggested that they might eventually get tired of “loafing around” in the city. They might pick themselves up and go back to places like northern Louisiana or the Mississippi Delta. At least they will be able to hunt and fish — and so eat rather well. In the small towns or the countryside they’d feel better, live better, and if they got into trouble, they’d know the sheriff, and he’d give them a second chance and keep a friendly eye on them. The father heard the boy out, said nothing for a while, then decided that his son was a social prophet, a young person of hope and wisdom. When he acknowledged as much out loud, the boy smiled, asked his father if he was “just fooling” or “trying to be nice.” No, the man was quite serious. Well, if that is the case, won’t the Garden District soon be as safe at night as the homes his parents owned elsewhere? The father shook his head, told his son that it may take decades for his prediction to come true — for the poor and potentially troublesome ones to be gone from New Orleans. Meanwhile, they had to gird themselves for more trouble, rather than less. The son asked when he might own a pistol as well as a beginner’s rifle. Soon, he was told. The boy left for his room, where he looked at a gun catalogue and made a selection, which he showed to his father, who said yes, one day the two of them would go make the purchase.
When James has recalled the mob scene he saw at the age of six, he has wondered repeatedly whether the parents of the black children had guns at home, or on them as they walked with their children — “just in case.” The father used to say each time that he doubted very much “any colored person would pull a gun on a white mob.” But more recently he has changed his mind. The city has seen crowds of blacks stand up and assert themselves rather forcefully, so the father is quite sure that never again will he or his son see what they once saw — terrorized children and parents heckled mercilessly, with no apparent inclination to fight back. The boy goes a step further, speculates that blacks have been secretly “practicing,” hiding guns and using them to aim at targets, on the assumption that one day there might be an awful confrontation. He would fight to death to defend his home, his neighborhood, and has imagined himself doing so. Blacks would, too. That is the bottom line, he is sure — defense of one’s place of residence against mob assault.
Grandchild of a Mine Owner
Four daughters, and each so different; everyone comes up with words to that effect. The mother is delighted with her girls, the father has long since given up being annoyed that he has no “heir,” a word he once summoned with a certain bitterness and now uses casually — such as when he reminds his wife that the girls will marry someday and maybe provide a grandson or two. But that is all in the future. Right now the oldest girl, Marjorie, is a mere twelve. She has an eleven-year-old sister, a seven-year-old sister, and a five-year-old sister, who cheerfully announces, often, that after her “they gave up.” Their father is quite willing to tell them all his theory of why they have no brother. Their generation, he has informed them several times, is the first one in the family that lacks male offspring. There has to be a reason, and the father wonders whether it is the move to Charleston (West Virginia) that accounts for, in his phrase, the “chain of girls.’
The father first heard the theory proposed by his father, a mine owner who likes to visit Charleston, but prefers to live in Mingo County, where he owns several mines. The grandfather is not a “first-generation owner,” as he refers to some newly rich mountain men who have recently (in the 1970s) made a lot of money stripping the land mercilessly, or going after second- or third-rate coal in hazardous seams — anything to find the stuff and send it on to a newly profitable market. No, the grandfather of “those four Charleston girls,” as he playfully calls them upon occasion, was himself born “pretty well-off.” His father owned a store, a small mine, and, late in life, an automobile agency. The grandfather went to West Virginia University in Morgan-town and thought of going to law school, living in Charleston, as his son eventually did.
But there were family investments and interests to be looked after, and as the grandfather has pointed out, it was a good thing he did go back home after college: “We’re not one of America’s richest families, by any means, but we’re quite well-off, and by the standards of West Virginia, of Appalachia, we’re wealthy. I guess we’re wealthy by national standards; we have several million salted away — it’s no secret. But we’ve worked for the money. I’m no fly-by-night strip miner. I’ve never wanted to squeeze profits, just make them! I try to be a responsible man, and I try to think of my son and my grandchildren. My people have been in this state for many generations, and I hope the family never leaves. I didn’t mind my son becoming a lawyer and leaving Mingo County. If I’d done that, we wouldn’t have the money we all have now. My father was born dirt-poor, a subsistence farmer the census people would call him, from up a hollow. But he came down from that hollow and he borrowed money and he bought land and there was coal under it and he just kept on making money and investing it. I had about a
hundred thousand dollars to play with when he died, a lot of money in the nineteen-thirties. I didn’t gamble and I didn’t drink, and I knew how to take risks — good risks; so I made a lot more than a hundred thousand dollars. The times got good, especially during the Second World War and afterwards. We needed coal, and I had it to sell. Also, I spotted IBM and Xerox and Polaroid, companies like those, right at the beginning; I put my money in them. I bet on free enterprise!
“Things haven’t been so good in the nineteen-seventies. I’ll tell you, I’ve pulled a little out of the stock market, and put my money back in land, where it all started — our family’s rise from poverty, you could call it. My son says I should forget about making money. He says we’ve got enough — plenty, as a matter of fact — and the best thing to do is keep it in good securities and enjoy ourselves. But that’s him; I’m me. You don’t change an old dog; he’s younger, and he’s different. Up there in Charleston they live a fancier life, and they don’t want to be caught crawling for money, the way we do out here. But I’ve never had to compromise my principles; maybe my father did — if he did, he never told me. I’ll bet my son doesn’t even mention the word ‘money’ to his girls.”
He is correct. The son is a prominent West Virginia lawyer, a member of several corporate boards, an influential stockholder in a number of local companies — and of course not without substantial shares in national companies. But he doesn’t like to talk about such matters, nor does his wife, the daughter of a West Virginia bank president. Their daughter Marjorie wrote a composition for her sixth-grade teacher about the future, and never indicated how she’d be able to do all the things mentioned. The girl wrote about ballet lessons, a trip around the world, a spell in Holland, where she would learn about various cheeses and wear wooden shoes, a year or two on a ranch out West, with several horses to ride. Marjorie’s teacher surprised the girl with this comment: “A very nice paper, full of interesting plans. But do you have the money for all this?” The teacher was being a bit facetious, but Marjorie did not respond with a smile. She was confused, upset. She came home and showed the paper to her mother and father, then with a touch of anxiety, asked them whether in fact the teacher was suggesting that there wasn’t enough money in the family to support the aspirations of the children? The girl’s mother contributed to at least an hour or two of apprehension and uncertainty by saying she didn’t “know anything about money,” and so “Daddy will explain everything later.” That evening Marjorie’s Dad told her not to worry, there was “enough money” so that she could go ahead and “have her dreams.”