Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “I think I first thought of joining up when I heard another Negro talk — this one from Mississippi. Unlike the first Negro, he stumbled and paused; at times it was even hard to understand him. He was the real article, though, as genuine a person as I had ever seen. He really got to me — standing there and asking us so politely to come down for the summer, as though we were future guests of his. He offered to put all of us up, even if he and his neighbors slept in the woods. Someone finally had the nerve to ask him what we would do. I wondered about that, too, but I was afraid to ask. I thought it might offend him.

  “He didn’t hesitate for a second. He knew exactly what we could do. ‘You can live with us and give us some of your strength, and maybe then the white people of Mississippi will stop and take a look and remember that colored people aren’t alone any more.’

  “I remember feeling that I had to go shake his hand. All I could do was look at it — a huge, big black hand it was — and they were lined up shaking it. I left after my turn — I wanted to get some distance on my emotions. If I had stayed I would have joined, because of that man.

  “It wasn’t easy to forget him. A few days later I still found myself thinking of him. I could hear his deep, strong voice. I pictured him standing there, all that way from home, and in an Ivy League college. He was the first person I ever met who made Faulkner seem real to me; I used to think he was just a romantic writer. Now I had met the kind of real person who inspired him.

  “Two of my friends decided to go down there, and I began to feel that if I didn’t go I would feel lousy all summer. I pictured myself going through a museum in London or Paris and feeling like a worthless coward. I talked to my parents about it, and they said I should go to Europe; there would always be summers to spend on civil rights. (What do you think of that for a long-range view of things?)

  “They were trying to be helpful, I know. They sensed that I did want to go to Europe, but that I didn’t want to admit it to them. I also sensed that they were really afraid of what would happen to me if I went South. I asked them whether that wasn’t true. No, not at all; they wanted anything I wanted, so long as I turned out to have a ‘happy’ summer. I work hard at college, they reminded me. I deserved a rest. Each person makes his own contribution toward a better world. You can’t compare lives. I could do a lot for civil rights just by doing well at school, then going to law school and doing well there. Eventually I would be able to help as a lawyer with civil rights cases. That’s where the real victories would be won, anyway. And so it went, one argument after another. I kept on wondering what that poor Negro farmer would make of us: my father trying to have it both ways by giving money but taking no risks and preventing me from taking any either; my mother always ready with an excuse in the form of a reminder that there are many roads to Rome. For my own part, I was excited less about civil rights than a particular Negro who makes Faulkner’s writing come alive.

  “I didn’t decide to go South. I simply couldn’t get myself to buy that ticket to Europe. When I finally called my parents to tell them that I was going South, they said no. Since I was under twenty-one, I had to get their written approval. They refused it, and we had the fight of our lives at home.

  “I’ve never seen more truth come out in a shorter time. My father tried several strategies. First he told me that he was sympathetic to the project’s aim, but opposed to my involvement. To that I didn’t even have to reply. With a look I confronted him with his hypocrisy. Then my mother tried another tack. She wanted me to wait a year, ‘just a year.’ My father agreed. They insisted that I would ‘have more to offer.’ I told them they were trying to buy time, on the assumption that in a year I would lose interest; and I admitted that I might. Yet, the more I heard them talk, the more I wanted to go, then and there. My father’s temper eventually got the better of him, a good thing in a way, because he is always more honest when that happens. He shouted, ‘You can’t go, period.’ He paced the room, and in a few minutes it all came out: we were fools; the Negroes in Mississippi should leave and come North; a few hundred college students can’t fight a whole state, with the police and the courts against them; they would jeopardize the Negroes and risk their own lives, all to no avail; it is selfish and romantic to try being a hero when a complicated political problem requires — as he put it — ‘other approaches.’

  “I knew there was no point continuing the argument that day. I also knew that if I were going to get any place, it would be through my mother. She didn’t say much after my father exploded. She just mentioned that she was afraid for my safety — and I respected her for saying so. It was the one honest moment we had.

  “I let a few days go by, and then I asked my mother very casually one day whether she would give her permission. I had the form with me, and a pen. I said, ‘Mother, just sign. I won’t get hurt. If you don’t let me go, we’ll fight all summer, and we’ll all be hurt worse than anybody in Mississippi will be.’ She looked at me for a second, and said she thought I was right; then she signed.

  “For weeks my father refused to talk to me when I came home. He flushed, or gave me a look that meant he was arguing with me inside himself. He’s a lawyer. It’s his job to argue. He does it all day, and half the night. He doesn’t know when to stop.

  “I made my plans as if he had given his approval. I went to the preliminary meetings, and my mother’s signature was accepted as sufficient by the leaders of the project. Meanwhile, Mother slowly worked on my father, without telling me what she was doing. She bought a few books on the South, and read them. She left them around for my father to see: Lillian Smith’s book, Killers of the Dream; Segregation by Robert Penn Warren; and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. He read them — I later found out — in that order. It was a good way to get into the problem — reading what two white Southerners had to say, then a Negro who lived in the South.

  “Lillian Smith really moved him. He broke his silence on the subject by asking me questions about her and her book. Was it all true, or was she a writer, someone who exaggerates or is always dramatic? Why did Negroes stand for the treatment they received? (While you may think some of his questions naïve, they show how hard it is — even for someone who is trying — to understand what is happening down there.) In a few weeks he was no longer curious. He talked as if he had lived in the South for years. He insisted that there had to be change down there, fast change. He signed my application without a word of protest — and here I am. I’m not sure now that my father isn’t more confident than I am about what this project will accomplish. It’s going to be a harder summer than I thought.”

  During those days of orientation I saw the fear in Larry. I also realized how unwilling he was to talk about his fears. “Sometimes it’s best not to think,” I heard Larry — and many others — say as the orientation period ended.

  During the summer I met Larry several times. We spent a week together when I had occasion to stop traveling about Mississippi and stay in the “Freedom House” he and eight others occupied. All along, from June to September, I tried to learn how he was adjusting to the rather special kind of life he was living. By the end of the summer it was quite clear that he had survived a difficult time rather well. As I proceeded to take stock of my observations — and his, as we recorded them on tape — I realized how various his moods and feelings had been during that relatively short, if eventful, span of time.

  Two days after he arrived in the rural cabin that was to be his summer home I found him more confident and unafraid than he would ever again be in the South. He was staying with a large farming family. He was determined to be open and friendly, and immediately so. He saw in his hosts his own attitudes: they were warm, indeed more hospitable than any people he had ever known.

  On the day of his arrival he started teaching, concentrating particularly on elementary schoolchildren and their reading problems. He wanted the twenty or so children in his class to have a summer rich with words and stories. Three of his students came from the home w
here he stayed. Their mother packed lunches for them and for him. She herself ate at her “white lady’s place,” where she had spent time and worked since she herself was a child, at her mother’s side: “Then we didn’t much go to school. We learned about life tagging after our mother, and if the white folks were good, they would teach us something now and then. My mother can’t believe it, the children going to school so regularly, and now a white man from the North staying with us.”

  The second time I saw Larry he had been ten days with her and her children, but felt much worse about matters. He had tried very hard to be friendly, so hard that he could not very well recognize the nervousness and fear he inspired in the Negro family — and felt himself. He could, however, acknowledge that he didn’t like the food served him, and often found talking with Mississippi Negroes awkward: “I try and try to get them to call me by my first name, but either they won’t, or they get around it by not using my name at all. I’ll work up a sweat making conversation, but it’s hard to keep it going. I’m used to talking about ideas and events, or about people, writers or politicians, men in the news or in history. They talk about what’s happened during the day, or what they’re going to do in the next few minutes. I know they want me with them and like me, just as I want to be here and like them; but it’s difficult being together — I know that, too. It’s not only the race barrier that gets in our way; it’s the social differences, from the world of upper-middle-class New England to the poor South.”

  What kept him going, indeed kept his spirits high, was is work. He was so obviously doing so very much, and so very much that was worthwhile. The children adored him, he could see that: “They may find it hard having us around them at home, but they love coming by our school, and they at least relax here.” In the beginning he was appalled by the children’s faulty grammar. Sometimes he had trouble understanding them at all. After a few weeks he decided that the problem was his as much as theirs. Many of the children spoke the strong, forceful, active language of the Negro farmer. Perhaps he should let that be, rather than fight it; perhaps — instead of dwelling on the grim history of slavery — he should try to teach the children pride in their race’s history, in its survival against odds no other people in America have faced, in its ability, despite everything, to produce a distinctive culture: “I think it’s important for these kids to know what is really outstanding about Negro life, its writers, singers, and artists; its men of science and learning. I didn’t know about those people myself until I got involved in this project. All I knew was that the Negro has been nearly destroyed by slavery and persecution. It never occurred to me that he had really built a very significant culture of his own here, even in the South. I owe the fact that I did learn such things to the people who got this project going. They made sure right away that we didn’t try to turn these children into pre–Ivy League types. Despite their warnings, it took me a few weeks to appreciate the more positive forces working in the lives of these boys and girls.”

  A week later — his fourth in Mississippi — I found him relaxed with the Negro community but increasingly concerned with the white people of the county, of the entire South. Until then he had hardly noticed them; suddenly they were on his mind every day. He went to several church services and coffees, only to find himself ostracized. Instead of welcoming him, people glared at him. The only words he could elicit from people were harsh and critical ones. Twice he was asked to leave the church. He refused. He never before had found it necessary to defy others in front of a church, to claim (against their wishes) his right to worship. When he went to the drugstore or the post office he met up with the same opposition, so much so that he found ordinary tasks like mailing a letter or buying razor blades and toothpaste extremely difficult: “I’m afraid in the evening; they might dynamite us or snipe at us; but it’s shopping I hate — meeting the whites and seeing the murder in their eyes.”

  As he talked one could feel how lonely he was, and conflicted. He was sensible enough to see that the white townspeople he dreaded — but was drawn to — were not mad, not especially evil: “They make me wonder what I would do if I were in their shoes. I’ve never been in a situation where I would be ruined socially and economically for trying to live up to my moral code. Their code is supposed to be like mine, Christian; but I guess we just don’t read those words in the Bible the same way.”

  At times he simply wanted to see white people, to be with them rather than argue with them or speculate about their predicament. “A day will pass — or two and three — and I won’t see a white face. I even forget for a while that I’m white. I’ll see another white person and register shock. Then I’ll go downtown and feel like an explorer who has been away a long time and finally has returned.”

  The split between the Negro and white world that he was noticing every day became a decisive emotional experience for him, marking off in his thinking the past from the present and future. He felt that he never again would be able to take certain things for granted. In a sense he felt a break with his earlier life; something had started in Mississippi that was destined to affect him long after he left the state: “I feel I’m taking advantage of these people in a way. I’m living with them and being fed by them; and even if I’m teaching their kids, they’re teaching me much more. I’ll never again be able to take even the ordinary things of life for granted. It took coming down here to realize how privileged my life has been. I knew it in the abstract, from reading books and taking sociology courses, but now I’ve learned lessons about people and their problems that a million books and courses couldn’t get across to me. In fact, I’m afraid to go back to those books and courses.”

  That last sentence, spoken in the middle of the summer, would be repeated by him again and again. He found himself thinking of his return to school with mixed pleasure and dread. He missed the movies, the dormitory and its comforts, the social life of college. He wanted to swim, play tennis, or simply take a drink without worrying about sheriffs and dynamite. “I have to admit, every once in a while I just want to fly away from here. I picture myself stretched out on a sandy beach, sipping a gin and tonic. A few seconds of that and I feel ashamed. It’s the truth, though, not an idle daydream: we can always leave here when we wish. We know it, and I’m starting to realize that the people in the town do, too — both Negro and white.”

  He spoke like that to me during the week I spent doing medical examinations on the children in his class. While the summer was far enough advanced to justify a return North, he now found the possibility of that return both haunting and ironic: “So long as I can go. I’ve never really settled in here.”

  We spent long hours that week talking about degrees of “involvement” and “commitment.” How fair is it to come down, spend two months, then depart? How hard should one like Larry try to communicate with white people? Is there really the trust between him and his Negro schoolchildren that he hopes for, or imagines to be? How well, deep down, was he getting along with his “family,” the Johnsons? What would happen when he came home, when he saw his parents, his friends, their style of life, their concerns that were once — still are? — his concerns? Could he take memorizing and studying for multiple-choice exams in order to get good enough marks for law school? (More and more he thought of being a lawyer rather than a doctor.) Apart from an occasional moment of nostalgic, boastful recall would he forget the whole summer within a year, perhaps even less?

  He was gloomy as well as fearful of the future, or at the very least speculative about it. He felt like a frivolous, privileged intruder upon the lives of the Negro children he taught, and certainly upon those in the civil rights movement who were giving the struggle more than a summer of their time. While he was angry at the state’s white people, he also was newly sensitive to the charges they had leveled at him and his kind. What he imagined the Negroes thought about him confirmed what he had heard angry whites say, and what he now — in his cheerless, doubtful spells — believed to be true: he was an outsider;
it was indeed only a summer’s effort for him; in a few weeks there would be the same old and terrible confrontation of impoverished dependent Negroes and whites with at least power if not widespread affluence; and, above all, he knew that he wanted to leave, even as he wanted to stay. He knew that even were he to stay a year or two more he would still have his departure in mind upon occasion. That fact, that option if no other one, made him a privileged person among the needy.

  One night we talked through to dawn, and I heard him express a good deal of his guilt and confusion. If he felt a bit easier for having done so, I was more than a little troubled when we had finished. True, some of what he said was familiar to me before I ever set out for Mississippi that summer: as a psychiatrist I knew the strains felt by many youths as they obsessively wrestled with questions of freedom, authority and social customs. Yet, the conflicts Larry now had were grounded in the harsh truths of a political and historical struggle. They were not primarily private conflicts. Nor were they simply personal tensions masked by participation in a social cause, or finding symbolic expression in that cause. Before Larry ever became involved in the civil rights struggle he felt both loyalty and defiance toward a number of people, from his parents and teachers to his friends. He was unsure of his major, unsure of what profession he would choose, unsure of his standing with girls he successively dated, even unsure which friends were in fact his close and lasting friends. His uncertainty was not, however, asserted by “symptoms,” by the various disorders of thought, mood, or body that bring some youths to psychiatrists. It took a summer in Mississippi for him to become enough upset and alarmed about his torn feelings — his doubts and misgivings — to want to talk with me about them.