Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “My great-grandfather is eighty-four, and he’s in the best of health. It worries me that I have bad sinus trouble a lot of times after I get flu. I’d hate to be sick when I’m older. There’s too much to do; if you get sick, you can’t do much of anything, except stay home and rest. When I get a bad cold, I feel disappointed in myself. I don’t think it’s right to be easy on yourself. If you are, then you slip back, and you don’t get a lot of the rewards in life. If you really work for the rewards, you’ll get them.”

  His teachers have often given him that kind of platitude. In the fourth grade, for instance, his teacher had written on the blackboard (and kept it there for weeks): “Those who want something badly enough get it, provided they are willing to wait and work.” The boy has been brought up to believe that it will be like that for him. He knows that others are not so lucky, but he hasn’t really met those “others,” and they don’t cross his mind. What does occur to him sometimes is the need for constant exertion, lest he fail to “measure up.” The expression is a family one, used repeatedly. No matter how difficult a task, no matter how frustrating it is for others, one “measures up” when one does it well. One “measures up” when one tries hard, succeeds. One measures up because one must. No allowance is made for any possible lack of ability or endowment. The assumption is that one has been “given a lot” (another family expression) and so a “return” is obligatory if justice is to be done. If one slackens or stumbles, one ought take oneself to task. The emphasis is on a quick and efficient moment of scrutiny followed by “a fast pickup,” yet another admonitory injunction handed down.

  Such counsel is not as callous or psychologically insensitive as it may sound — or even as it may have been intended to sound. The child who hears it gets briefly upset, but “a fast pickup” does indeed take place quite often. Again, it is a matter of feeling “entitled.” A child who has been told repeatedly that all he or she needs to do is try hard does not feel inclined to allow himself or herself much skeptical self-examination. The point is to feel entitled — then act upon that feeling. The boy whose composition was just quoted from wrote again, apparently about his younger (aged five) brother: “I was watching my brother from my bedroom window. He was climbing up the fence we built for our corral. He got to the top, and then he just stood there and waved and shouted. No one was there. He was talking to himself. He was very happy. Then he would fall. He would be upset for a few seconds, but he would climb right back up again. Then he would be even happier! He was entitled to be happy. It is his fence, and he has learned to climb it, and stay up, and balance himself.”

  The little brother was indeed happy on top of the fence. He would talk to himself with obvious pleasure — tell nameless, invisible people that they are stupid and inadequate because, unlike him, they are unable to climb the fence and stay there and enjoy themselves. Yes, he was obviously talking to himself. He was also speaking to an earlier version of himself, to the boy of four who had wanted to climb that fence, wanted to get on top, and, just as important, stay there and enjoy the experience. Once he had succeeded, he enjoyed his new-found competence. He would practically never be curbed, humiliated, denied interesting or engaging occasions because of the “reality” of the world around him. Quite the contrary; there would be one inviting adventure after another over the months and years. One day, as a matter of fact, he ran across the field after he had shown himself able to climb a particular fence with ease — in search of a taller, slightly more precarious fence on the other side of the corral. And when that climb was “nothing” and the position of balance a giant bore, he predicted quite casually that he would never see a fence that he couldn’t rather quickly master. His father did not want the boy to be completely unrealistic, however. To whistle in the dark, to assume that one can always triumph, is to be vulnerable — the weakness of the overconfident. One ought to have a great deal of drive and ambition, a conviction that the world will eventually be made to oblige — but only after a substantial effort.

  It is absurd to say that all children whose parents make a certain amount of money or work at certain occupations, or live in a certain neighborhood, possess an attitude of mind (and an attitude toward the world) that might be sensibly tucked into the generalization referred to here as “entitlement.” More than once I have insisted that each individual has his or her unique way of pulling together the various elements of mental life. I have wanted, however, to suggest a common manner of response toward life among children of a certain class and background. I realize that the particular word “entitlement” has complicated psychoanalytic implications or, for some, pejorative social or political implications, or indeed, for others, quite defensible and justifiable implications. For the children I have worked with, however, the word is simply a description of a certain actuality. There are both social and psychological dimensions to that actuality, and deep down these children know them rather well.

  I have in mind especially the son of a powerful Florida grower. When the child was five he kept using the words “I’m entitled to.” His parents were much annoyed. The father did not want his son using such a peremptory, self-important, demanding expression. He began interrupting the boy, telling him that he was not “entitled” to anything, that he must ask for what he wanted, and be grateful when he got it. The boy kept asking why, why. The father kept explaining — a litany of oughts and musts. The boy in turn fell back upon his considerable intelligence and powers of observation. He reminded his father of his own words: “If you earn something, you are entitled to keep it.” Had not the boy “earned” the right to make his various requests — by trying to be “good” or “quiet”? Had not the father told him on a number of occasions that he was “coming along nicely,” that he was “making his parents proud”?

  The boy spoke up for himself in fits and starts, but he got his message across, because his father eventually settled for an ironic statement: “A boy who stands up for himself like that boy has — well, he’s entitled to say every once in a while, that he’s entitled to something!” It must be rather obvious — it was to the grower, for all his lack of interest in the plight of the hundreds of impoverished migrants who worked his land so long and hard — that not every father can be grateful for his son’s outspokenness, his young son’s assumption that he was entitled to political freedom, social equality, economic privilege.

  What Profit

  Under the Sun?

  All the children I have been writing about in this series are trying to come to terms with what one child born to great wealth in New Orleans referred to as her “one and only chance,” by which she meant nothing less than her life. She will never be a latter-day Marx or Kierkegaard. She is today well on her way to being a member of upper-crust, conservative New Orleans society, a perfect foil for a person like me. I suppose: the preoccupation with dinner parties, flowers, dances, and clothes, not to mention a suitable suitor. She has read nothing I have written, as far as I know, since I met her almost two decades ago. She reads very little, actually, except the New Orleans Times Picayune and a news weekly or two, which she only “browses through” at that. She has read her share of textbooks in school, but they don’t “attract” her, she is frank to say. She is, it’s not unfair to say, a vain, self-centered, flighty person who cares not a whit for her fellow man or woman, unless they be part of a small circle of relatives, friends, neighbors: her kind.

  Yet, when she was eight she had a habit that puzzled, worried her parents, short time that it lasted — a few months in a girl’s long years of childhood. She would, as her mother put it, “sit and stare.” In fact, the girl liked looking out the window of her parents’ Garden District mansion. Across the street was one of those striking (and to visitors, hauntingly unique) New Orleans cemeteries — the graves, the elaborate and various tombs, all above ground. The tombs cast shadows, and in the early evening or morning the girl would notice them. She wondered about who “those people” were, the departed. She wondered what kind of
lives they had lived, what they could tell her now about those lives. Maybe what she was making, in retrospect, a feeble and ultimately futile effort to avoid coming to was herself. She was really struggling hard for a few seconds of detachment, perspective, humor about the world she was part of. She would smile when she looked out and caught sight of an especially ornate, imposing, assertive monument of stone. She would, in her own way, meditate about life’s meaning.

  But, alas, she told her parents what she liked to do in an occasional “off moment.” They were hardly reassured. They were quizzical the first time; annoyed the second; admonitory the third; worried the fourth; and ready to consult a doctor the fifth — those “off moments” indeed! They did call a doctor; he urged intelligent restraint, and his advice proved correct. Not that there was actually restraint. The girl was implicitly and sometimes directly told to get on with it — life. She was, her parents decided, “a little too introverted.” She had best be made “busy.” They knew the enemy — inwardness. They knew the point of life: the headlong rush; the ferris wheel at the age of six, the assembly dance at the age of sixteen; the full calendar; the school choir, everyone beautifully, expensively, similarly dressed; the clock that keeps moving; the dream that is promptly forgotten; the sigh before retiring that registers satisfaction and congratulation — no wasted time. No wasted time. No time heavy on one’s hands. No time to spare. No time left. In no time, no time at all — world without end.

  The girl felt the push. It took her a little time to stop being part of some bad time her parents were convinced she must be having — else why the “funny time” she was for a while reported having. So the mother put it: “She still has a funny time up in her room, looking at that cemetery. She tells us she talks with the people in the tombs! I was horrified. She smiles. I thought at first she was teasing me. I guess she’s all right. She’s just growing up. All children do a few crazy things before they get sensible.” She was right; just about all children do have their strange, wondrous, luminous, brooding, magical, redemptive moments. The girl described hers in a way Clarence John Laughlin, mystical and messianic photographer of her native city, would likely find helpful to remember as he stalks the light and shadows, the memories and bizarre actualities of a place, a time: “I don’t think there’s anyone there, across the street, inside the cemetery. I just like to look at the place. I used to walk in there with my grandmother. I was little, and she was still alive. She told me she had lived a nice long life, and she had been happy, and she was ready to leave us, whenever God decided she had been with us long enough. She would be glad to go. One day we found her asleep, and it was late in the morning for her — nine o’clock. She was dead. My mother said there was no need to call the doctor, but we had to. I never saw her. I wanted to go in the room, but they wouldn’t let me. I tried to sneak in, but they said no.

  “The maid said they should let me in. The maid almost convinced my mother. I heard them arguing. I never heard the maid speak back to my mother like that. But my mother won. The maid came out crying. She wasn’t upset because of my grandmother. The tears were for me. The maid wanted me to say good-bye to someone, but I never could. They didn’t bury my grandmother in that cemetery across the street. I’d hoped they would. She and I had always been close — ‘real tight,’ she said. If they had buried her across the street, we’d still be ‘real tight.’ But there isn’t any room left, my mother says. I don’t think that’s exactly right. The maid says it’s exactly wrong! The maid says she’s done some listening, and she knows what’s true — that my mother didn’t want someone in the family buried there so near to us.

  “Some of the time, when I look across the street, I might be wishing my grandmother was buried there. A lot of the time I just wonder who someone was — someone who’s inside one of the little buildings. And I wonder if a long time from now there will be a girl like me, and she will be sitting, maybe, right in my room, and she will be looking at the cemetery, and I’ll be there, and she’ll be wondering about me! If I want, I can be buried there. The maid told me so. I guess I have a lot of time to make up my mind! It’s funny, looking at a cemetery. It’s funny playing there. We play there, some of us. It makes people nervous when we do; but they let us. You wonder if there are ghosts. I know there aren’t, but I wonder. You hear a sound, and you think someone might be talking to you. Even with the window closed, and you’re inside the house, you’ll hear a noise, and you wonder. It’ll be the dog, in the next room, shaking himself. But you wonder.”

  She stopped all that wondering within a few months. She had gone through her worrisome time, had “recovered.” So the mother had it: “Thank God, she’s better. She’s recovered from her interest in cemeteries.” An “interest”? Or was it, perhaps, a brief spell of release, of openness, of escape from Kierkegaard’s, Walker Percy’s “everyday-ness”? And maybe a dialectal moment or two — such as Thomas de Quincey, with Clarence John Laughlin approving, once described: “When one feels/oneself sleeping alone, / utterly divided from all call / or hearing of friends, / doors open that should be / shut, or unlocked that / should be triply secured, / the very walls gave, barriers / swallowed up by unknown / abysses, nothing around one / but frail curtains, and / a world of illimitable night, / whisperings at a distance, / correspondence going on / between darkness and darkness, / like one’s deep calling to / another, and the dreamer’s / own heart the center from / which the whole network of this / unimaginable chaos radiates …”

  As for that child’s maid, she was, as the girl’s mother often said, and as the girl would grow up to say herself, “not always in control, the way she should be.” So much for psychiatry, its normative judgments, and the uses to which they are put. Nevertheless, the maid surely deserves a little space, if not equal billing; she deserves to speak on behalf of herself, and maybe a lot of other maids. This book could, of course, go on and on; maids could speak about children, and so could cooks, and grocers, and druggists, and tennis instructors, and hockey coaches, and camp owners.

  But this particular New Orleans maid, let free for a few lines, will help us as we come toward the end, here — because she has never lost sight, really, of “the end of things,” as she has repeatedly put it: “I look at these folks, and my heart goes out to them. They feel sorry for me. I know they do. I hear them talking. But I feel sorry for them. Mind you, I feel sorry for myself, too. I’m not fooling myself! It’s no good being Mr. Charlie’s maid. It’s no good working in the white man’s kitchen and cleaning up after him, and getting his few dollars, his pat on the back — and because of the pat you’re supposed to act like you’ve seen God’s face, at last you have, and He’s smiling down on you. But who is Mr. Charlie? My Momma told me who he is; he’s a sad one, that’s who he is. They’re all right, these people here. I’ve worked for them for fifteen years. I’ll stay with them, most likely, until they carry me out, and that’ll be the end of things. My Momma told me: remember that you’re put here only for a few seconds of God’s time, and He’s testing you. He doesn’t want answers, though. He wants you to know how to ask the right questions. If you learn how to do that, then you’ll do all right when you meet Him, and He’s there looking you over. You have to tell Him that you’ve learned how to question yourself, and when you show Him what you know, He’ll smile on you. God’s smile, that’s the sunshine. God’s worries, that’s the night. We have to face the night. We have to face the end of things.

  “These people here, they’ve got all that money, and all this big house, and another one out in the country, and still they won’t let that little girl just be herself. She’s eight or nine, and she’s got an independent spirit in her, but they’re determined to get rid of it, and they will, let me tell you, and soon. The girl asks me a lot of questions. That’s good. She looks out on that cemetery and she starts to wondering about things. That’s good. She wonders about life, and what it’s about, and what the end of things will be. That’s good. But she’s stopping now. That’s what they want:
no looking, no staring, no peeking at life. No questions; they don’t want questions. They go to a church a couple of times a year, Christmas and Easter, and no one asks them any questions there. No one asks them questions anyplace they go. The people who are gone, who live across the street there in the cemetery, inside those tombs — they know what’s important, they’ve discovered what’s important, they’ve reached their destination. I’m poor, but at least I know that I should ask myself every day: where’s your destination, and are you going there, or are you getting sidetracked? A lot of days I wish I was them; I wish I was rich like them. Then I ask myself: would you be any different? I don’t know the answer. I mean, it’s like the minister keeps saying to us in church: ‘Who knows whether he’s going to be a wise man or a fool?’ And then he’ll remind us that ‘all is vanity’ And he’ll remind us that ‘there’s no profit under the sun.’ I wonder if there is any. I wonder a lot if there’s any profit under the sun. I read the Bible and I wonder. I’ll ask myself one day, and I’ll ask the next day, and I’ll just decide not to be too sure; just keep on asking.”