by Robert Coles
Best to let that black woman have the last word. Like that child, the maid meditates, wonders, takes notice, keeps her eyes and ears open, knows to think about “the end of things,” and never stops praying. She prays that she be able to keep her mind and heart and soul, as she always says it, “open to God.” She wants to know whether she is a wise person or a fool. She wants to know whether she will always be able to believe that “wisdom excels folly,” and “light excels darkness.” She knows the ambiguities of life — even of words like “light” and “darkness.” She can talk of “light folks” and “dark folks.” She can talk of the rich who are light — and yet succumb to vanity; and the poor who are dark — and yet also succumb to vanity.
I said I would give the black woman the last word, but I had best take a certain “responsibility” upon myself. The answer is a prelude to many further questions. I placed it at the end of the first volume of this series — a sentence James Agee wrote as he sweated and struggled for the words of a language. Hope against hope. And despair all the time a threat, a temptation. Those Alabama tenant farmers, amid their wretchedness and worse, gave him, finally, this victory: “All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: and not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent; but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.” To have been presented that statement is to be privileged. We are “privileged ones” by virtue of that possession, allowed us by a certain grace. It is a start — Agee’s message, and our struggle to prove him right. The rest is life: particular human beings — and those questions from Ecclesiastes that one American black woman, under the Louisiana sun, the American sun, will not ever, it seems, stop asking.
The groundbreaking, Pulitzer Prize–winning five-volume work that established Robert Coles as America’s preeminent child psychiatrist—distilled into a single volume
Nearly half a century ago Robert Coles began studying, living among, and, above all, listening to American children. The results of his early efforts—revealed in the five widely acclaimed and award-winning Children of Crisis volumes published between 1967 and 1977—constitute one of the most searching and vigorous social studies ever undertaken by one person in the United States. Here, often in their own voices, are America’s “children of crisis”:
African American children caught in the throes of the South’s racial integration
the young children of impoverished sharecroppers, migrant workers, and mountaineers in Appalachia
children whose families were transformed by the migration from South to North, from rural to urban communities
Latino, Native American, and Eskimo children in the poorest communities of the American West
the children of America’s wealthiest families, wrestling with the burden of their own privilege
Children of Crisis reprises the most compelling and resonant passages of a masterwork of psychological and sociological inquiry. It is a book that, in its focus on how children learn and develop in the face of rapid change and social upheaval, speaks directly and pointedly to our own times.
“Coles has performed one of the most difficult and important feats of all: to criticize America and yet to love it, to lament the nation’s weaknesses … while continuing to cherish its strengths.”
—Time
“The poor have been studied many times by people who can neither see nor hear, and Coles can do both. He has a basic attitude toward those not like him that is usually missing from such enterprises: respect.”
—Marge Piercy, New York Times Book Review
“Coles’s scope for his enterprise is admirably broad, yet his perceptions are fine; his material is affecting, his writing lucid, and when discussing cases, his skill with a narrative approaches Freud’s.”
—Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek
ROBERT COLES is a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School, a research psychiatrist for the Harvard University Health Services, and the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard College. His books include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Children of Crisis series as well as the bestselling The Spiritual Life of Children and The Moral Intelligence of Children.