Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Life is, as the man said, lean and bare for migrant farm workers, and their children find that out rather quickly. Hunger pangs don’t always become appeased, however loud and long the child cries. Pain persists, injuries go unattended. The heat does not get cooled down by air conditioners or even fans, and cold air is not warmed by radiators. Always there is the next town, the next county, the next state, and at every stop those cabins — almost windowless, unadorned and undecorated, full of cracks, nearly empty, there as the merest of shelters, there to be left all too soon, something that both parents and children know.

  How does such knowledge come alive — that is, get turned into the ways parents treat children, the ways children act, behave, think, get along, grow up? How consciously does a migrant mother transmit her fears to her children, or her weariness, or her sense of exhaustion and defeat, or her raging disappointment that life somehow cannot be better — for her and for the children who confront her every day with requests, questions, demands, or perhaps only their forlorn and all too hushed and restrained presence? I have watched these mothers “interact” with their children, “rear” them, demonstrate this or that “attitude” toward them or “pattern of behavior.” Always I have wondered what is really going on, what unspoken assumptions work their way continually into acts, deeds, and even occasionally into words — some of them surprisingly and embarrassingly eloquent, to the point that what is revealed has to do not only with their assumptions, but mine, too. For instance, I had known one migrant farm worker, a mother of seven children, a black lady from Arkansas, two years before I finally asked her what she hopes for her children as she brings them up. She smiled, appeared not at all brought up short or puzzled or annoyed. She did hesitate for a few seconds, then began to talk as she glanced at the hot plate in the cabin: “Well, I hope each one of them, my three girls and four boys, each one of them has a hot plate like that one over there, and some food to put on it, and I mean every day. I’d like them to know that wherever they go, there’ll be food and the hot plate to cook it. When I was their age, there wasn’t those hot plates, and most of the places, they didn’t have electricity in them, no sir. We’d travel from one place to the next, picking, taking in the crops, and there’d be a cabin — a lot of the times they’d make the chicken coops bigger to hold us — and the bossman, he’d give you your food, and charge you so much for it that you’d be lucky if you didn’t owe him money after a day’s work. There’d be hash and hash, and the potatoes, and bread, and I guess that’s all, except for the soda pop. There’d be nothing to start the day with, but around the middle they’d come to give you something and at the end, too. A lot of the time we’d get sick from what they’d bring, but you had to keep on picking away or they’d stop feeding you altogether, and then you’d starve to death, and my daddy, he’d say that it’s better to eat bad food than no food at all, yes sir. Now no one can deny that, I do believe.

  “But now it’s changed for the better, the last ten years, I guess, it has. They’ve put the electricity into some of the cabins — no, not all, but a lot — and they’ve stopped giving you the food, in return for the deductions. You can get a meal ticket, and keep on eating that way, and they’ll give you a sandwich and pop for lunch for a dollar or more, sometimes two, but there’s no obligation, and if you save up the money you can get a hot plate and cook your own, and carry the plate up North and back down here and all over the state of Florida, yes sir. And it’s better for the children, I think, my cooking. It’s much, much better.

  “Now, I’d like them to amount to something, my children. I don’t know what, but something that would help them to settle down and stop the moving, stop it for good. It’s hard, though. They gets used to it, and when I tell them they should one day plan to stop, and find work someplace, in a city or someplace like that — well, then, they’ll say that they like the trips we take to here and there and everywhere, and why can’t they keep going, like we do. So, I try to tell them that I don’t mean they should leave me, and I should leave them, but that maybe one day, when they’re real big, and I’m too old to get down on my knees and pick those beans, maybe one day they’ll be able to stop, stop and never start again — oh, would that be good for all of us, a home we’d never, never leave.

  “You know, when they’re real small, it’s hard, because as soon as they start talking, they’ll want to know why we have to go, and why can’t we stay, and why, why, why. Then they’d be happy if I didn’t get them in the car to move on. But later, I’d say by the time they’re maybe five or six, like that, they’ve got the bug in them; they’ve got used to moving on, and you can’t tell them no, that someday if God is good to us, we’ll be able to stop and stay stopped for good. You see, I do believe that a child can get in the traveling habit, and he’ll never stop himself and try to get out of it. That’s what worries me, I’ll admit. I’ll hear my oldest one, he’s eleven, talk, and he says he thinks he can pick a lot faster than me or anyone else, and he’ll one day go farther North than we do, and he’ll make more money out of it, and I think to myself that there’s nothing I can do but let him do it, and hope one of us, one of the girls maybe, if she meets a good man, will find a home, a real home, and live in it and never leave it.

  “We tried three times, you know. My husband and me, we tried to stay there in Arkansas and work on his place, the bossman’s, and we couldn’t, because he said we were to stay if we liked, but he couldn’t pay us nothing from now on, because of the machinery he’d bought himself. Then we tried Little Rock, and there wasn’t a job you could find, and people said go North, but my sister went to Chicago and died there, a year after she came. They said she had bad blood and her lungs were all no good, and maybe it was the city that killed her, my Uncle James said. So, we decided we’d just stay away from there, the city, and then the man came through, from one of the big farms down here, and he said we could make money, big money, if we just went along with him and went down to Florida and worked on the crops, just the way we always did, and that seemed like a good idea, so we did. And with the kids, one after the other, and with needing to have someplace to stay and some food and money, we’ve been moving along ever since, and it’s been a lot of moving, I’ll say that, and I wish one day we’d find there was nothing for us to do but stop, except that if we did, there might not be much food for that hot plate, that’s what worries me, and I’ll tell you, it’s what my boy will say and my girl — they tell me that if we didn’t keep on picking the crops, well then we’d have nothing to eat, and that wouldn’t be worth it, sitting around and going hungry all the time. And I agree with them on that.

  “So, we keep going, yes sir, we do. I try to keep everyone in good shape, the best I can. I tell them that it’ll be nice, where we’re going to, and there will be a lot to see on the road, and there’s no telling what kind of harvest there will be, but we might make a lot of money if there’s a real good one. I don’t believe I should hold out those promises, though — because they believe you, the kids, I know that now, and it just makes them good, happy children, moving along with you, and helping you with the crops. They do a lot, and I’d rather they could be working at something else, later, like I said before, but I doubt they will.”

  Her children, like others I have seen and like those already described, are in a sense little wanderers from the very start. They are allowed to roam cabins, roam fields, roam along the side of the road, into thickets and bushes and trees. They follow one another around, even as their parents follow the crops, follow the sun, follow the roads. Nor does all that go unnoticed, except by the likes of me: “I lets them have the run of the place, because we’ll soon be gone, and they might as well have all the fun they can. They want to go with us and help us with the picking, and they do sometimes, and they learn how to pick themselves, and that’s what they say they’ll be doing when they get big and grown up, and one will say I’ll cut the most celery, and one will say I’ll pick more beans than you, and one will say tomatoes are for me,
and soon they’ve got all the crops divided up for themselves, and my husband and me, we say that if the life was better then we wouldn’t mind, but you know it’s a real hard life, going on the road, and we don’t know what to do, whether to tell them, the kids, that it’s a bad time they have in store for themselves — and you don’t have the heart to do that, say that — or tell them to go ahead and plan on the picking, the harvesting, and tell them it’ll be good, just like you kids think. Except that my husband and I, we know it’s just not true that it’s good. So there it is, we’re not telling them the truth, that’s a fact.”

  She does tell them the truth, of course. She tells them that life is hard, unpredictable, uncertain, never to be taken for granted, and in fact rather dangerous. She tells them whom to fear: policemen, firemen, sheriffs, people who wear business shirts, people who are called owners or bossmen or foremen or managers. She tells them that no, the rest rooms in the gas stations are not to be used; better the fields or the woods. She tells them to watch out, watch out for just about anyone who is not a picker, a harvester, a farmhand, a migrant worker. She tells them why they can’t stop here, or go there, or enter this place or try that one’s food. She tells them why sometimes, when they are driving North with others in other cars, the state police meet them at the state line and warn them to move, move fast, move without stopping, move on side roads, move preferably by night. She tells them that no, there aren’t any second helpings; no, we don’t dress the way those people do, walking on that sidewalk; no, we can’t live in a house like that; no, we can’t live in any one house, period; no, we can’t stay, however nice it is here, however much you want to stay, however much it would help everyone if we did; and no, there isn’t much we can do, to stop the pain, or make things more comfortable or give life a little softness, a little excitement, a little humor and richness.

  Still, the children find that excitement or humor, if not softness and richness; to the surprise of their parents they make do, they improvise, they make the best of a bad lot and do things — with sticks and stones, with cattails, with leaves, with a few of the vegetables their parents pick, with mud and sand and wild flowers. They build the only world they can, not with blocks and wagons and cars and balloons and railroad tracks, but with the earth, the earth whose products their parents harvest, the earth whose products become, for those particular children, toys, weapons, things of a moment’s joy. “They have their good times, I know that,” says a mother, “and sometimes I say to myself that if only it could last forever; but it can’t, I know. Soon they’ll be on their knees like me, and it won’t be fun no more, no it won’t.”

  The “soon” that she mentioned is not figured out in years, months, or weeks. In fact, migrant children learn to live by the sun and the moon, by day and by night, by a rhythm that has little to do with days and hours and minutes and seconds. There are no clocks around, nor calendars. Today is not this day, of this month, nor do the years get mentioned. The child does not hear that it is so-and-so time — time to do one or another thing. Even Sundays seem to come naturally, as if from Heaven; and during the height of the harvest season they, too, go unobserved. As a matter of fact, the arrival of Sunday, its recognition and its observance, can be a striking thing to see and hear: “I never know what day it is — what difference does it make? — but it gets in my bones that it’s Sunday. Well, to be honest, we let each other know, and there’s the minister, he’s the one who keeps his eye on the days, and waits until the day before Sunday, and then he’ll go and let one of us know, that tomorrow we should try to stop, even if it’s just for a few hours, and pray and ask God to smile down on us and make it better for us, later on up there, if not down here. Then, you know, we talk to one another, and the word passes along, yes it does. I’ll be pulling my haul of beans toward the end of the row, to store them, and someone will come to me and say, tomorrow is Sunday, and the reverend, he said we should all be there first thing in the morning, and if we do, then we can be through in time to go to the fields. Now, a lot of the time there’s nothing to do in the fields, and then it’s a different thing, yes it is; because then we can look forward to Sunday, and know it’s going to be a full day, whether in the church, or if the minister comes here, to this camp, and we meets outside and he talks to us and we sing — and afterwards you feel better.”

  Does she actually forget the days, or not know them, by name or number or whatever? No, she “kind of keeps track” and “yes, I know if it’s around Monday or Tuesday, or if it’s getting to be Saturday.” She went to school, on and off, for three or four years, and she is proud that she knows how to sign her name, though she hasn’t done it often, and she is ashamed to do it when anyone is watching. Yet, for her children she wants a different kind of education, even as she doubts that her desires will be fulfilled: “I’d like them all, my five kids, to learn everything there is to be learned in the world. I’d like for them to read books and to write as much as they can, and to count way up to the big numbers. I’d like for them to finish with their schooling. I tell them that the only way they’ll ever do better than us, their daddy and me, is to get all the learning they can. But it’s hard, you know, it’s very hard, because we have to keep going along — there’s always a farm up the road that needs some picking, and right away; and if we stay still, we’ll soon have none of us, because there won’t be a thing to eat, and we’ll just go down and down until we’re all bones and no flesh — that’s what my daddy used to tell me might happen to us one day, and that’s what I have to tell my kids, too. Then, they’ll ask you why is it that the other kids, they just stay and stay and never move, and why is it that we have to move, and I don’t hardly know what to say, then, so I tells them that they mustn’t ask those questions, because there’s no answer to them, and then the kids, they’ll soon be laughing, and they’ll come over and tell me that they’re real glad that we were going up the road, and to the next place, because they got to see everything in the world, and those other kids — well, they’re just stuck there in the same old place.”

  Space, time, and movement, to become conceptual, mean very special things to a migrant child, and so does food, which can never be taken for granted. Many of the children I have studied these past years — in various parts of Florida and all along the eastern seaboard — view life as a constant series of trips, undertaken rather desperately in a seemingly endless expanse of time. Those same children are both active and fearful, full of initiative and desperately forlorn, driven to a wide range of ingenious and resourceful deeds and terribly paralyzed by all sorts of things: the weakness and lethargy that go with hunger and malnutrition, and the sadness and hopelessness that I suppose can be called part of their “preschool education.” Indeed the ironies mount the more time one spends with the children, the more one sees them take care of one another, pick crops fast, go fetch water and food at the age of two or three and know what size coins or how many dollar bills must be brought back home, talk about the police, listen to a car engine and comment on its strengths or weaknesses, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of harvesting various crops, speak about the way property owners profit from the high rents they charge for their cabins. At the same time, of course, those same children can be observed in different moods, heard making other statements — about how tired they are, about how foolish it is to spend a week in school here and another few days there, and then a couple of weeks “up yonder,” about how difficult it is to make sense of people and places and customs and attitudes, about life itself, and yes, about how human beings on this planet treat one another. One of the mothers I came to know best over a period of three years let me know exactly what her children thought and said about such matters. “They’ll ask you something sometimes, and you don’t know how to answer them. I scratch my head and try to figure out what to say, but I can’t. Then I’ll ask someone, and there’s no good answer that anyone has for you. I mean, if my child looks right up at me and says he thinks we live a bad life, and he thinks
just about every other child in the country is doing better than he is — I mean, has a better life — then I don’t know what to say, except that we’re hardworking, and we do what we can, and it’s true we’re not doing too well, that I admit. Then my girl, she’s very smart, and she’ll tell me that sometimes she’ll be riding along with us, there in the back seat, and she’ll see those houses we pass, and the kids playing, and she’ll feel like crying, because we don’t have a house to stay in, and we’re always going from one place to another, and we don’t live so good, compared to others. But I try to tell her that God isn’t going to let everything be like it is, and someday the real poor people, they’ll be a lot better off, and anyway, there’s no point to feeling sorry for yourself, because you can’t change things, no you can’t, and all you can do is say to yourself that it’s true, that we’ve got a long, hard row to hoe, and the Lord sometimes seems to have other, more important things to do, than look after us, but you have to keep going, or else you want to go and die by the side of the road, and someday that will happen, too, but there’s no point in making it happen sooner rather than later — that’s what I think, and that’s what I tell my girls and my boys, yes sir I do.