by Robert Coles
John was chosen, one of ten in a city of a million. He was surprised and quite disappointed rather than honored to learn that he and a girl he casually knew would be the only two of their race to enter the large “white” high school near his “old” one. Again he made light of his worries by speculating that since they were so few, none of them would be allowed to enter at all. In fact one of the girls selected for another school soon decided to forgo her chance. She took stock of the threats and dangers about to begin and decided they were too much for her.
John did not seem to falter. I talked with him all that summer, and was myself a bit unnerved at his day-to-day calm in the face of harassment by phone and mail. Unlike the children of New Orleans, Little Rock or Clinton, Tennessee, that year, John would never face a mob. Yet, John could not have known that he would be spared; and so he experienced — somewhere out of sight — a long summer of anxious waiting.
During that time I talked with him two or three times a week, and finished gathering my general medical and psychiatric impressions of him — his past health, his way of getting along with himself and others, the history of his family, his interests and activities, his hopes, any of his difficulties he cared to remember or talk about. John’s general health had always been good. His mother recalled that he suffered the usual childhood diseases, including an episode of colicky stomach when he entered school at age six. He had experienced occasional headaches in the past few years, but no other symptoms. John was not reluctant to talk about his father’s alcoholism. He did so with a mixture of sympathy and anger. His mother’s biblical preoccupations also upset him. As she gave vent to her warnings of sin and redemption, all the children kept a respectful silence until she stopped, then tactfully resumed their activities. In contrast, John himself had no trouble with drinking, no biblical preoccupations. He did not smoke. He had never had any trouble with the law. By his own description, he was “an ordinary teen-ager.”
For three summer months he awaited his role in desegregation. He worked at cutting lawns, emptying trash, helping his father by substituting at the gas station, or selling Cokes at local baseball games. I saw very little evidence of anxiety in him. He did become concerned with his “strength,” and accordingly set himself a routine of exercise. His sister asked him whether he was worried about trouble in the fall, and he impatiently denied it. He had noticed he was short-winded on occasion, and that alone was the reason for his exercise. I was on the lookout for “trouble,” but his appetite held up; he slept well; he seemed to his family quieter and more relaxed than usual.
The week before school started, the threats on his life, on his family’s life, reached their terrible and bizarre peak. The telephone calls came in round the clock, angry voices talking of dynamite, alarmed voices talking of “racial amalgamation,” plaintive voices urging John to reconsider his ill-advised decision “before it is too late.” His parents — and especially his older sisters — wanted the phone changed. A city detective watching their home advised them to change their number. John would not hear of it: “I’m going to have to get used to that, so we might as well start now.” Such a response showed how firmly and stubbornly he was girding himself. As I look back — and only in retrospect can I see it and say it — his willingness to take on the constant irritation and heckling of the telephone calls foreshadowed his future capacity to deal with similar episodes in school. At the time I failed to understand why he wouldn’t let his family follow their inclinations and the advice of the police department. Oversensitive as I was to the possibility of incipient neurotic illness under stress, I failed to recognize this youth’s desire to have his preliminary struggle with the enemy on “home territory,” and win it.
On the first day of school he was escorted and driven to school by city detectives. I watched him walk up to the door of the high school, heavily guarded by police, the students and teachers waiting inside for him, and wondered how he felt, what he was thinking, and whether in fact he had any words to describe those seconds. Everybody else seemed to have words: national and local political leaders, reporters, observers, all noted how important it was for a Southern city to initiate school desegregation without violence. There was none.
Certainly the white children and their teachers felt themselves in the presence of history; and so did John. He told his mother later that he said a prayer she long ago taught him as he left the police car; when that was finished, still walking toward the school, he looked quickly at the building and thought of words he had heard from his grandparents as a boy: “It’s going to get better for us, don’t you ever forget that.” Approaching the front door, he thought of the classroom and pictured the students sitting, waiting for him to enter, and then watching him as he did.
They were doing just that, watching closely, and would continue to do so for two years. They stared at him and looked away from him. At the end of the first class some of them heckled him. A few days later he found insulting words scribbled on his books. Some of the students tried very hard to be friendly, though most of them kept an apprehensive distance from him. He, too, watched apprehensively; but he also worked hard in school, studied earnestly at home, and took things as they came each day.
During his two years in a desegregated high school I kept trying to learn how he managed to cope with the constant strains. I kept careful track of his moods, particularly so because I became puzzled at his altogether remarkable composure in the face of various social provocations or intellectual hurdles. In the first place, he was woefully unprepared for the transfer academically. He had prepared himself for unfriendliness, but not for the long hours of homework required to catch up with, not to say keep abreast of, his fellow students. Meeting these problems daily and a host of others he had never expected, he survived and — I came to see — flourished. I had a hard time understanding why.
I did note his increasingly guarded and circumspect behavior as it spilled over from life at school to life elsewhere. Even at home he walked more carefully, spoke a bit more slowly. He seemed less relaxed, less willingly outspoken and humorous. These were times now when his appetite diminished; he picked at meat once gobbled, played with French fries once almost swept into his hungry, growing body. His mother and sister bought steak they couldn’t afford to strengthen him, fight his loss of interest in ordinary food. He wanted only to be left alone, to study.
He sought out some academic help; he went to see a professor at the Negro college he would someday attend. He told me then that he was worried about his math and his French. Yet his tutor told him that his math seemed good, that he was doing his homework correctly. His French teacher in his “old” high school made the same observations about his work in French. Still, he did not seem appropriately reassured by them, or by his good grades as they started coming in. I saw that as evidence of tension, of an increasingly brittle determination that was costing him a high price in humorless rigidity and lack of perspective.
He didn’t sleep as well as he once had. He had dreams, on occasion remembering fragments of them to tell me because he (and I) thought that studying dreams was my job. He also told me about his ordeal and that of his white classmates; for he saw that they, too, were having difficulty in reconciling their past expectations of Negroes with his particular presence.
There are two special moments worth mention here. In a way, each tells the story of what happened to John during those two years — how, to some extent, he survived as handily as he did. The first involves the one dream he did remember fully; the only one, in fact, he ever related to me in careful detail and worried seriousness: “I was walking to school, and was stopped because some railroad tracks were there and a long train was going by. I tried to get across the train, because it didn’t seem to be going too fast; that is, I tried to leap across the connections between the cars. I know you can’t, but in the dream I was staring at them as the only hope to get across, because the train seemed to stretch on and on in both directions. Well, finally the train d
id pass by so that I could get to school; but it stopped, with the last car right near me. I saw a lot of children on the car; it was like a platform, like in a campaign, where speakers speak from. They were colored children; I think they were maybe seven or eight, and I think one might have been my little sister. Then I saw some grown-ups. Then more and more of them came out from the car, and they came off it, toward me. They were colored, too. They had on suits and ties, I think. One of them was my French tutor [from his former Negro high school] and I think I saw my granddaddy, but I’m not sure. Then I got nervous, because I knew I had to get to school, and I was afraid I’d be late. So I started to move on, and suddenly I saw a huge hole in the road; it was a kind of pit, and I could see my momma and daddy in it. It was mainly their faces I saw, as big as life, just staring there. Then I woke up, and I was clutching the sheet. Boy, was I glad to be in bed. I really felt it had all happened. I went to school this morning, and I had to catch hold of myself near the railroad tracks. I thought I’d see that pit and fall into it. I’ve never had a dream stick with me like that.”
The dream had obviously been upsetting to him, though he could make no sense of it. He had the dream several months after school desegregation had begun; indeed, he was well along the year, and well past the worst tension he had experienced in those first few awkward weeks. He had learned “how to behave” — at least his teachers felt so. I realized that he had his own doubts and fears, though at first I didn’t know exactly what this dream told about them. About fifteen minutes after he had told me the dream (and I told him that I didn’t know what it “meant”) he came forth with two details to it that he had forgotten: “There was something else that just came to me. One of the boxcars on the train said Southern and Gulf Limited; and I think I saw Warren Sands near the pit. He seemed to be standing there, smiling. I think I was glad he was there or something — that was just as I woke up. I must have been afraid I would fall in there; and maybe Warren was there to rescue me.” Warren Sands is a white youth. He was a classmate of John’s, a friendly boy, active in student government, one of the first to come greet him and talk openly with him several weeks after school had begun.
Then I asked John what he thought the dream “meant.” He shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Beats me. The only thing I could make of it was that it showed I’m nervous about getting to school.” His next comment was about Warren: “I don’t know how Warren got into it. He’s just a classmate of mine.” In point of fact Warren was not just a classmate, and John himself had made that quite clear to me. I said nothing, because he wanted to talk next about his troubles with French, a foreign language which — as he was putting it then — “must have been invented to give trouble to people studying it.” Yet, his main trouble, from his teacher’s viewpoint, was not his ability to study the language, but his hesitation at speaking it in class. There were “conversational hours,” the one time John was forced into a social setting by an academic routine. He was embarrassed, and very shy about taking up with anyone in French. Several white boys had tried talking with him, to no avail. He balked on his words. The teacher had sensed the awkwardness right off, and had frankly been unable to deal with it except by talking with John herself. On those occasions his French came to him easily. It was, however, a weekly ordeal for him and the whole class.
John and I never talked about his dream that year, though I think our talks generally helped him — and me — put some of his feelings — and my own, too — into explicit language. The following summer I asked him whether he remembered the dream, and he did; it was one that somehow lingered, stayed in his consciousness. He still couldn’t make much sense of it; he called it “a sign of the strain I was under then.” I had, of course, come to the same conclusion; but a few weeks after I heard that dream, I saw John face a strain in real life (and talk about it afterward) that gave me some concrete idea what the dream may have meant to him.
John and I went to a basketball game at his high school. The opposing team was from a school not yet desegregated. John as the only Negro in the audience attracted attention from the visitors by his mere presence. Indeed, a good part of the audience eventually paid more attention to him than the game. After the game, as we started leaving, one heckler after another confronted us. They had also seen the game, and now that it was over they turned their attention to John. Their language was awful, their behavior threatening. Were it not for quick action by hastily summoned police, there might well have been a riot. I was quite alarmed, and afterward sad and very angry. John was astonishingly steadfast during the episode, and rather composed afterward. I had known him for several months by then, and so I felt free enough to say what I did: “I don’t know how you can take that sort of treatment; I really don’t.” He smiled, and looked at me as if he understood my problems and would try to help me as best he could. In a moment he did. He started with gentle criticism of me: “You don’t know how I can take it because you haven’t ever had to take it.” He paused, “You see, when I grew up I had to learn to expect that kind of treatment; and I got it, so many times I hate to remember and count them. Well, now I’m getting it again, but it’s sweet pain this time, because whatever they may say to me or however they try to hurt me, I know that just by sticking it out I’m going to help end the whole system of segregation; and that can make you go through anything. Yes, when they get to swearing and start calling me ‘nigger’ I think of the progress we’re making, I’m making, every minute; then I know I can take even worse than we had tonight. I saw much worse happen to my momma and me when I was eight or nine, and we were shopping, and a woman decided she belonged ahead of us in a line in a store downtown. She slapped my momma, and momma didn’t do a thing. I got so angry I kicked the lady and shoved her; so she called the police and soon the whole store seemed after us. The worst of it was that I got the beating of my life from my parents for doing that. You see, we just grow up to take it. But not you, you don’t have to, and that’s the difference.”
When John had graduated from high school and I was trying to make sense of his two-year experience, I kept on returning to those two events, his dream and his virtual “speech” to me (and at me) after the basketball game. The dream told of his struggle going to school and being at school, not only with hecklers but with those who became kind to him (like the white boy whom he belatedly remembered to be in the dream) only to make him feel that he was turning his back on his own people. He felt a traitor trusting and accepting the friendliness of white people. Several times he could frankly tell me how hard it was for him to respond to some of the genuine respect and affection shown him by white students at school.
I suspect he also felt accused by his own people for the increasingly conscious desires he felt to leave their company, to spend his time with white people, even to be white. After we had known one another four years he told me that some of his friends in college deny ever having thought of what it was like to be white. I no longer record our talks on tape, but he spoke words to this effect: “I would never have admitted to you two years ago that I wished I was white when I was at school with whites. I never really could admit it to myself. The thought would cross my mind, and I’d try to forget it as quickly as it came.”
John could also show signs of exhaustion and depression; he could summon a level of self-criticism far more severe than any censure I ever saw him direct toward others. He did not get depressed that night at the basketball game — I think taking me to task helped prevent it. At other times, however, he became weary, sulky, gloomy, and unable to heed easily what he had assured me was the persuasive voice of his past life, reminding him at all times that he must not retaliate, that he must endure insults in silence.
John was particularly unhappy during the last months of his final year of high school. He knew he had done a good job, but he also knew it was time to say good-bye to friends he wished he had known longer and whom he realized he would never see again. He had studied hard and been rewarded with consistently
high marks, despite inadequate preparation for the academic burden. In his senior year he decided to attend a local Negro college. Even though he was tempted mightily by the prospects of going North to an Ivy League school, he was also afraid of the prospect, and he admitted that he was perhaps tired of the strains that go with desegregated education — the self-consciousness and constant girding of oneself. Were “things different,” were he from another home, he might have welcomed a continuation in college of such mixed blessings and hurdles. Beneath the surface lay other problems, though — the troubling fragments of his home life and the attention they demanded from him. His older sisters were leaving home for marriage; his father was sick, his mother rather worn. In a sense his crisis had been theirs, and they had all prospered under it; for their lives had found a real, tangible, and significant purpose. That accomplished, John felt he could not simply walk off. Perhaps his family would eventually learn to need him less, but he felt that he and they both were not yet ready for his departure from Georgia.
As it turned out, he was wise to stay in Atlanta. His father’s drinking became worse, though it had improved while the family was under the pressures of John’s critical situation at school. His mother, too, declined into a condition of chronic, spiritless fatigue. John both studied and looked after his younger brothers and sisters as well as his parents. They had all supported him; he now worked at helping them.
As I have watched John grow from a youth to a young man, and reflected upon his capacity to endure the simple trials not only of growing but of growing in a home such as his, of growing while a student in a white school, while taking a leading part in an important social change, I have found the limits of my own particular professional training rather severely defined.
