Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “There was a road, that’s how the dream started, and it was all smoothed out and kept clean, and if you looked down on it you’d see yourself, like it was a mirror or something placed on the top of the road. I’d be standing there, and all of a sudden I’d see one car after the other coming, and inside the car would be one of my little ones, then there’d be the next child, and the next one, and each one had a car all to himself, and they’d be going down the road, almost as though they were going to go racing one another or something. But all of a sudden they’d explode, the cars would, one and then another, and soon they’d all be gone, and I couldn’t find the sight of my children, and I’d still be standing there, where I was all the time, and I’d be shaking, whether in the dream or when I was waking up, I don’t know. More than anything else, what hurt me was that the last thing that happened in the dream was that I’d see myself, standing on the road. I’d be looking down, and I could see my new child — yes, there’d be one I’d be carrying, and I’d be near the time to have the baby, and I’d be big and I’d be seeing myself, like in a mirror, like I said. But I’d have no other of my children left. They’d all be gone; and my husband, he’d be gone; and there’d be me, and my baby, not born yet, and that would be all. No, there’d be no cars, either. They’d all have gone and exploded, I guess.”

  How is such a dream to be analyzed or interpreted or made to explain something about her, about her wishes and fears and worries, about those things the rest of us would call her “psychological problems”? Why did the dream plague her then, seize control of her mind for those few weeks, then leave her, never to return? For all the world that separates her from me, for all her naïvete (as it is put by people like me when we talk about certain other people) and my sophistication (as it is also put by people like me when we talk about ourselves) we could pursue the meaning of her dream without too much self-consciousness, and with a minimum of theoretical contrivance, density or speculation. For several years, on and off, I had been telling her that I wanted to know how her children felt, how their spirits held up (or didn’t) and she knew — right from the start, really — what I meant. In fact, once she told me what I meant: “I know. You want to see if they’re scared, or if they’re not. You want to see if they feel good, or if they feel lousy, real lousy — the way I guess their mother does a lot of the time!” So, the dream did not puzzle her all that much, only frighten her a lot, make her tremble, because at night she couldn’t escape what by day she knew, could not help knowing — in every “level” of her mind, in her unconscious and in her subconscious and in her preconscious and in the thoroughly conscious part of her mind and yes, in her bones and her heart: “I’m always thinking, when I get ready to have another baby, that I wish I could be a better mother to them, and give them a better life to be born into than the one they’re going to get on account of being my children, and not some other mother’s. It’s the worst of being a mother, knowing you can’t offer your babies much, knowing there isn’t much to offer them — there’s really nothing, to be honest, but the little milk you have and the love you can give them, to start them off with. I know it’s going to be bad for them when they grow up, and sometimes I wonder why God sends us here, all of us, if He knows how bad it’s to be.

  “There’ll be a moment when I’ll look at my children, and I’ll wonder if they hold it against me for bringing them into this world, to live like we do, and not the others, with the money you know, and with the places where they can stay and not be always moving. The only rest we’ll get, I’m afraid, the only rest we’ll get is in the grave. Once, a long time ago, I said so, to my oldest boy, and he’ll now and then repeat it to the younger ones. I want to tell him to stop, but I know he’s right, and they don’t get too upset with what he says, even if it’s bad, like that. I think they sometimes don’t really mind dying. God knows, they talk about it enough. Maybe it’s what they hear from the minister. He’s always telling us that everyone has to die, and that if you suffer here on earth you live longer in Heaven; and one of my girls, she said if that was the way, then maybe it was all right to be sick, but when you get to die, then is the time you’re going to feel better, and not before then, no matter what you try to do.”

  Her children see no doctors for their various illnesses, and they don’t actually “try to do” (as she put it) very much at all for themselves when they fall sick. They wait. They hope. Sometimes they say their prayers. Their mother also waits and hopes and prays, and apparently worries, too — and dreams and forgets her dreams and once, for a number of days, couldn’t quite forget them, the terrible, terrible dreams that reflect in detail and in symbol the hard, hard life migrants live themselves, and see their children also as a matter of course begin to pursue. “I wouldn’t mind it for myself,” says the mother whose dream stayed with her so long, “but it’s not good for the children, being ‘on the road,’ and when we’re moving along I’ll catch myself thinking I did wrong to bring all of them into the world — yes sir, I did wrong. But you can’t think like that for too long, no sir, you can’t; and I do believe the children, if they had their choice between not being born at all and being born and living with us — well, they’d choose to be themselves, to be with us, even it it’s not easy for them and us, even so.”

  Sometimes when a mother like the one just quoted made an assertion like that to me, affirmed herself in spite of everything, said that there was after all a point to it all, a point to life, to life pure (and swift and unlucky) if not so simple, I felt in her the same questions I could not avoid asking myself. What do they think, those migrant children — about “life” and its hardships, about the reasons they must constantly travel, about the special future that more than likely faces them, in contrast to other American children? Does a migrant child of, say, seven or eight blame his parents for the pain he continues to experience, day after day, and for the hunger? Does that child see his later life as likely to be very much like his father’s, or are there other alternatives and possibilities that occur to him as he goes about the business of getting bigger and working more and more in the fields? “What do you think?” I have heard from the mother who was once dream possessed and from other mothers like her; and there does come a time when people like me ought to stop throwing questions like that back at the people who ask them (as if we have some royal privilege that grants us the right to do so) and spell out what exactly (if anything) we do think.

  Fortunately, migrant children have been quite willing to let me know what they see and think, what they believe about a number of matters. Like all children, they don’t necessarily get into extended conversations; they don’t say a lot, go into wordy descriptions of their moods and fantasies and desires and feelings. They do, however, throw out hints; they use their faces and their hands; they make gestures and grimaces; they speak out, with a phrase here and a series of sentences there. Moreover, it has been my experience that they will also use crayons and paints to great advantage, so that given enough time and trust the observer (become viewer) can see on paper, in outline and in colors and shapes, all sorts of suggestive, provocative, and instructive things. When the migrant child then is asked a question or two, about this or that he has portrayed, pictured, given form, and made light or dark — well, I believe there is a lot to be heard in those moments, moments in a sense after the deed of creation has been finished, moments when thoughts and (more assertively) opinions can emerge from something concrete, something done, even something achieved, in this case achieved by children not always used to that kind of effort.

  So, the children have drawn pictures, dozens and dozens of pictures; particular migrant children whom I came to know for two, maybe three, sometimes four years, and whom, at times, I asked to use paper and pencils and crayons and paints. I might, for instance, want to see a favorite “spot” drawn, a place the child especially liked, a house he might like or a camp he didn’t like at all. I might want to know about all those schools, about how they looked and how they se
emed from the inside and how they can be compared, one to the other, the good and the bad, the pleasant and the very unpleasant. I might be interested in the crops, in which ones are good and bad to harvest, and how they look, the beans or the tomatoes or the celery or the cucumbers, when they are there, ready and waiting. I might ask about the essence of migratory life, about the way the road appears to the child, about what there is to be seen and avoided and enjoyed on those roads, about what remains in a given child’s mind when all the memories are sorted out, and one of them is left — to be chosen, to be drawn, and then reluctantly or shyly or cautiously or openly or even insistently handed to me as “it,” the thing that was suggested as a possible subject by me, and therefore to be drawn as a favor or in fear, or resisted out of fear or anger, or refused out of fear or confusion or resentment.

  What do they see, then — see in their mind’s eye, see casually or intensely, see and through pictures enable others to see? Certain themes do come up repeatedly, no doubt because migrant children share a number of concerns. Tom, for instance, was a seven-year-old boy when he drew for me a rather formless and chaotic and dreary picture (Figure 11) of the fields he already knew as a helper to his parents, a harvester really. When he was five I had seen him race along those rows of beans — picking, picking, picking. Once in a while he would show his age by shouting out his achievements, by pointing to anyone near at hand how much he had just done, how experienced he had become. Children are often like that, a little enthusiastic and a little boastful. They will learn, we tell ourselves, they will learn to take their own abilities for granted, to deal less ostentatiously and noisily with themselves and the world. I knew Tom between the ages of five, when he started working in the fields, and seven, when he still worked at harvesting crops. I spent a lot of time with him and his family during those two years, and since then have made a point of seeing him at least several times each year. (At this writing, he is no longer a child; he is fourteen and he lives with a woman and he is a father and like his parents he is a migrant farm worker — but that will have to be told elsewhere, when I describe the lives of grown-up, yes, at fourteen, grown-up migrants.)

  Tom always liked to draw pictures, and in fact knew enough about what some people would call “the problems of representation” to appreciate his own failings: “I’m no good. I’ll bet some kids can really do a good picture for you. Each time I try, but when it’s done I can’t say it looks the way I’d like it to look. It’s not like it should be — real, I mean. I know you said it doesn’t have to be, but is it a good picture if you have to tell someone what you’ve tried to draw?” Of course I reassured him. I gave him my prepared speech, full of encouragement and friendliness and praise, all of which, I have to add, I very much meant — because he did try hard, and his mind had a lot going on “inside” or “deep down,” all of which he very much wanted to put on paper and afterwards talk about.

  The fields, the dark, jumbled, confusing, sunless fields — guarded, be it noted, by a black fence and the outlines of some dark faceless men — were nearby when Tom drew the picture. They were not in sight, those fields, because a strip of pines intervened — none of which appears on the paper — but as Tom used his crayons he could hear all sorts of sounds from the migrants, who were eating their lunches and talking and arguing. One man was singing. Tom worked on the grass, used a wooden board I carried around, talked as he drew, interrupted his work to eat his lunch. This is perhaps the moment for me to mention something about migrant children: in contrast to all other children I have observed and worked with, migrant boys and girls are quite willing to interrupt their particular tasks — for instance, drawing a picture or playing various games with me — for any number of reasons. It is not that they are agitated or anxious or unable to concentrate and finish what they start. It is not that they run about helter-skelter because they are confused or alarmed or afraid. It is not that they don’t understand what we are attempting, and have to move on rather than reveal their lack of comprehension. Yes, some of them, like many other children, do have some of the difficulties I have just listed; but I emphatically do not have such essentially psycho-pathological matters in mind. The habits of children are vastly responsive to the habits of their parents. If parents accept (because they have learned they must) the necessity of constantly moving from one field to another, from one responsibility to another, each of which can only be partially fulfilled by any given person and indeed requires a whole field of people, then it is only natural that their children will experience no great need to stick at things stubbornly or indeed consistently. The child has learned that there is always the next place, the next journey, the next occasion. The fields are there, being worked on when the child arrives with his parents. The fields are still there, and often enough still being worked on when the child with his family leaves — for another location, another cycle of arrival and initiative and involvement and exhaustion and departure, a cycle that, in the words of the Bible, words that in my opinion convey exactly what thousands of children feel, is a “world without end.”

  If Tom can distract himself, say, for candy and Coke, yet return and finish what he has started, he can also do a quick turn of drawing or sketching and pause for discussion, which itself can be a pleasant distraction to a child not made anxious at the prospect of a change of direction or action: “I’d like to stop for a second, because when we’re traveling on a road like that one, we’ll have to stop, you know. My daddy, he says that a field isn’t so bad when you’re resting on it; it’s only when you’re picking that a field is so bad. No, most of the time we don’t stop by the road. My daddy, he says you can get into a lot of trouble that way, because the police are always looking to see if we’re not keeping moving, and if they catch you sitting by the road, they’ll take you to jail and they won’t let you out so easy, either. They’ll make you promise to get away and never come back. They’ll tell you that if you’re going to be picking, you’ve got to go ahead and pick, and then you’ve got to get away, fast. That’s why you have to watch where you’re going when you’re on the way to a farm, and you’re not sure where it is. You’ve got to be careful, and the best thing is to follow someone who can lead you there, that’s what my daddy says. Then, if you have to stop, you can find a path and go down it, and you’ll be safe, and you won’t end up being caught.”

  He does not seem to regard the fields as very safe or pleasant places to be. The more he works on his drawing, the more he seems compelled to talk about the subject: “I like to be moving along. If you keep moving you’re safer than if you just stop in a field, and someone comes by, and they can ask you what you’re doing, and they can tell you to get back in the car and go away as fast as the motor will go. Once I was really scared, and so was everyone else. We went way down a road that we thought was safe, and there was a little pond there, and we went and played in it, because they said we could, Mommy and Daddy did. Then the man came, he was a foreman my daddy told me afterwards. Then he said we would all be arrested and we were no good, and we should be in jail and stay there forever. My daddy said we’d go right away, and we did, and he said — the rest of the day he said it over and over — that you’re in trouble moving from one state to the other, because the state police, they don’t like you, and the sheriffs, they don’t like you, and you know the foremen, they have badges, and they can arrest you, and they have men with guns and they’ll come along and hold one right to your ears and your head, and they’ll tell you that either you work or you move on up the road, and if you sit there and try to eat something, or like that, then you’ll get yourself in jail, and it won’t be easy to get out, no sir. That’s why it’s bad luck to stop and rest in a field, and if you see one that has crops, then it’s bad luck, too — because you’re lucky if you’ll have any money left, for all the work you do. I don’t like fields, that’s what I think.”

  What else is there to say about Tom’s drawing, about the migrant life he has already become part of? Tom looks upo
n the fields and roads, the fields and roads that never really end for families like his, as both fearful and redemptive: “One thing I’ll tell you, if it’s real bad on a farm, if they’re watching you too close and they don’t pay you what they should, then you can sneak away in the middle of the night. Even if they have their guards looking over where you’re staying, the guards will fall asleep, and before they wake up, you can be on your way, and then you’ve got a chance to find a better place to work. That’s why you have to keep your eye on the road, and when you leave it to stay in a cabin near a field, or in a tent like we were in the last time, then you should always remember the fastest way to the main road, and you should point the car so it’s ready to go and all you have to do is get in the car and start the driving. It wasn’t long ago that we did that, just packed up and left. We pretended we were asleep for a while, in case anyone was looking, and then in the middle of the night we up and went, and they probably didn’t find out until it was morning, and by then we were a long way and my daddy and the others, they checked in with this man they knew, and he gave them all work to do, picking beans, and he said he was glad to have them, and he’d give them every penny they earned, and not to worry — but my daddy says you never know if you should believe them or not, and a lot of the time they’ll just double-cross you and go back on their promise, and you’re left with almost nothing, and there isn’t much you can do, so you move on and hope it won’t keep happening like that, no sir; and sometimes it won’t either, because you’ll work, and then they’ll pay you right what you deserve, and that makes it much better.”