Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  “She’s the one, the missus, who gets us the midwife. They say it’s better having a midwife than a doctor — the missus told me that the first time, when she brought the woman over and told me she wasn’t going to have any of us delivering without someone who’s trained and knows all about things. Then the woman kept on coming back every few weeks — it was for my first one — and when I felt the baby asking to be born, moving hard at me, I did what the missus said and told my husband to go up there to the house, and tell her, the missus, that it was the time. And you know what? Well, it didn’t take the missus long to get the midwife, and when she came she stayed with me, and she delivered my Martha, and since then she has delivered my other ones, too — except for the ones I lost, and for James, because he came too quick for anyone to get here.

  “I love having the midwife woman come, and my mother says it’s a miracle, what a colored lady can learn how to do — just about be a doctor, yes sir. I’ve never gone to a doctor’s place, no I haven’t, not for myself. But once I went with the missus, because she was in a bad state. Her head was aching, and she couldn’t keep her food down, and she kept on having dizzy spells. She called the doctor, and she called her husband, he was up in Memphis; and then she said I should go with her to the doctor, and if she had trouble in the car, then she could stop and I was to go get help. She lasted through the ride, though; and when we got to the doctor’s she had me come in with her, and I’ve never seen such a place in all my life: there was the desk he had, and a table he had her sit on, and he had the books, and he had medicines and he had things to use on you, every kind you can think of, and soon he was listening to her heart, he said, and her lungs, and he’d test her with one thing and another until she must have had every test there was, and then he wrote her out something, and she got the pills at the store, and later on she said, I heard her tell her husband, that the doctor had helped and made her better, he had. Now, the midwife, she’s not like the doctor, because she hasn’t got her an office. She’s not white, either — and I should say that, I guess — and I don’t believe she can get you better so fast, the way the doctors can. But if you’re like us, the doctors don’t see you, because they’re not for the colored. I hear say that even our leading people, the leading colored folks here, they’ll be real lucky if the doctor will see them, no matter if they have the money to pay or not. The good doctors, they say, will build themselves a special door for us to use, and they’ll be real nice to you, if you can pay them; but there will be others, and they tell you that they’re only for the white people, yes sir, and we should try to find someone else.

  “I once said to the midwife that she should learn other things besides delivering — that way she could help us all the time. But she said she had all she could do to keep up with the babies, as they come; and even so, with her around for us, a lot of colored people just go and have their babies by themselves, one after the other. It’s too bad because women can suffer, they can suffer a lot having a child, and it’s bad when there’s no one to help them — and that’s how it was with my mother, and my mother says that she believes we’re lucky to have a missus like we do, who will go and get the midwife and pay for her and like that. My mother admits that’s one of the best reasons to leave, to go North. I mean, people say that it can be bad up there, but there are the hospitals and doctors, and they’ll take care of a colored person, the doctors, and you have a better chance — I mean with delivering and if your baby gets sick and all the rest, you know. Anyway, if the missus becomes nicer to you when you become heavy, that’s a good reason to become heavy! Even if she didn’t change her attitude, I’d still be wanting my children. Wouldn’t any mother?

  “One reason I go along with my mother and agree with her — I mean about staying here and not leaving, like people do — well, it’s because even if we have it bad here, it’s still what we know, and I’m afraid from what I hear — my sister writes me — that we’d be losing if we left, even if we’d be gaining. Yes sir, that’s how I’d add it up. That’s what my mother says. She’ll say to me: ‘Ella, sure we could go up there, but I don’t want to go. If I thought it was good for you, never mind me, I’d go anyway. But there’s a good chance it won’t be better — for any of us. Maybe the hospitals are good up there, but I’ll bet colored people are pushed around in those hospitals, even if they do take us in and listen to our troubles.’ That’s what she’ll say, my mother. Now, I’ll tell you, I feel the same way. My little girl, she’ll ask me why so many people keep leaving here, the colored people, and when are we going; but I say to her there’s a lot of colored people left down here, you bet. And there’s a good reason why: they know, we do, that it’s no good for us anyplace, and before you go changing one sickness for another, then you stop and think — that’s what the midwife says about going to Chicago.

  “A lot of what she says, the midwife, I agree with. She’ll tell you when she hands you your baby that you can’t build Heaven for your child here on earth, here in Mississippi; but you can try your best, and make your child feel he belongs here, belongs to you, even if it’s not the best life he’s been born to have, and even if he would have been better off to have been born somewhere else to someone else. So, that’s what I try to do. I whisper to my little baby that it sure is hot here, and we sure don’t have all the good food we should have, and sometimes we don’t have a single thing good for them to wear — nothing at all — but it could be worse, and at least we’re alive, and we do the best we can. The way I see it, a child is lucky to get born in the first place. Like the midwife will tell you, and I know it, oh do I: a lot just die before ever seeing the sun or the sky or the trees. They die inside you, before they’re much of anything, and that’s a shame. That’s what you have to keep reminding yourself, and that’s what you have to tell your children, or else they’ll grow up and they’ll feel sorry for themselves — and you should never let yourself get in low spirits, never.”

  Does she, in fact, ever get moody and sad and fearful — for all her protests that one must not let such things happen? Do her children, too, begin to wonder just what she means when she tells them they are lucky — of all ironic things (so people like me think) lucky? Put differently, is such talk from her an effort to whistle in the dark, an effort to deny or rationalize away the obvious pain and sorrow and bitterness that must in some way plague such impoverished sharecropper women? If so, exactly how long are children, however young and ignorant and naïve, deceived by such obvious (if necessary, some of us hasten nervously to add) psychological maneuvers? I ask those questions not in order to answer them flatly and unequivocally. I think I am in fact recording something when I include the questions in the midst of a particular limited psychological chronicle, when I spell out some of the doubts and confusions and misgivings I happened to have felt and tried to resolve as I listened to people trying to settle and explain a few things for themselves rather than for me.

  To start dealing with — not answering — some questions, I had better say yes, she and other mothers like her do indeed become unhappy; they get to feeling “blue,” and can be heard saying they feel “bluer than blue.” So it goes, too, with the children — the thousands of boys and girls who still live in the rural South, despite all the migration to all the cities all over the North and way out in the West. They try, those parents and those children; they try and try not to “get low in spirits.” Sadness among the sharecroppers or tenant farmers or field hands I have met has a peculiar and intense kind of life — and emotions like sadness do have a life, one characterized by growth, change, development, and above all, it seems, persistence. When, for example, I speak of sadness, I have in mind a number of ways children or mothers or fathers give expression to what is “inside.” Moreover, with the families I am now discussing, the issue of sadness — to be more specific, of abandonment — is significant or important enough, I believe, to stand as the central theme of at least this particular descriptive and analytic effort.

  To begin wi
th, there is the rather striking and thoroughly open or explicit clinging that mothers such as the one I have already quoted demonstrate toward their infants. Of course, almost all mothers cling to their babies, and I have already described how migrant mothers attach themselves with great intensity to their newborn sons and daughters. In this regard there are differences, though; differences between migrant mothers and sharecropper mothers and differences between both of them on the one hand and many other American mothers, whose position in society goes under the name of middle class. Here, for example, is another mother speaking about her children. She was born a few miles from North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, and she expects to die there. She might have been the mother of five, had she not already known a miscarriage and struggled with a dying child: “I did lose my little girl, I did; but you have to expect things like that, you just have to. I recall when I was little, and I’d cry about something, then my mother would get ahold of me and she’d tell me off, she would. She’d say as long as you’re going to be living and not dead, you’re going to be fighting the tears away, and I’d better start learning right away about how to go ahead and do my work and wipe those tears away. She’d take my hand and make me clear my eyes, and usually, when I think back, I recall her telling me one bad story or another — about how they used to treat us colored people back in the past, and how we didn’t disappear from God’s earth, even so we didn’t, and how I should never forget that for all the bad times there are good times, and it tastes better, something good and juicy, when you’ve been hungry for a long time.

  “When you lose faith in things, you should stop yourself and remember God and remember that there’s always hope. That’s what my mother always told me. I think I must have listened to her, because most of the time I keep my spirits up, and I’m now telling my children exactly as she told me, even if she is gone — it’s now five years I think. Yes, that’s right, I start whispering the words to my little baby, the first thing after they’re born — because it’s not too early, I don’t believe. The reason is they’ve got to know that we may not have a lot of the things they need, but we have each other, that’s what I tell them. Bad as it can get, so long as we keep together with each other, then we’ll get by, yes I believe we will. Sometimes a child of mine, she’ll get to crying real bad, and I know she’s hurting and I know she needs something I can’t give her; but I’ll come over and I’ll hold her and I’ll hold her and I’ll hold her, and I’ll tell her, right into her ear, that if she hasn’t got anything — nothing to wear and the sicknesses and the food that isn’t what she should be having — then even so there’s me, and I’ll never leave my children, never. If we’re to die, we’ll all go together, and that is how it has to be.

  “I think my children do pay attention. I try to make sure they’ll listen to me and do what’s right. My mother used to hit me when I was in the wrong, but afterwards she’d draw me to her and she’d tell me she didn’t want to hurt me, but the world is full of a lot of trouble for us, that’s the truth, and if we made trouble for each other, on top of all the trouble there is — well, then, we sure couldn’t expect to last very long. Even so, no matter how much my mother tried, I guess I failed her some of the time; and now I see it in my own kids: they’ll go ahead and forget everything I say to them. I don’t know how to explain why they do, but if you ask me, I think they’re themselves and not me, and I really think they sometimes don’t want to hear what I tell them. They don’t want to hear that they can’t have what they’d like, and what others have. They’ll go around hitting at the door and kicking at a pail, and like that, and they’ll ask why can’t it be this way and the other way and not like it is. And I ask, too. And I lose my temper, too. I’ll be holding my little baby as close as can be and all of a sudden I can feel myself getting full of the devil, and I want to say that I shouldn’t be saying yes to the bossman, and my baby should be having this and my baby should be having that — and everything, everything a baby needs. But I know I can’t get a doctor and I know I can’t get the best food and I know I can’t dress my children up like the white folks do — nor like some colored, a few, that do good and I hear make as much money as a lot of the whites. That’s why for one like me, you have to talk with yourself as much as with your child. You have to keep yourself quiet and pinch yourself so you don’t go crying as bad as your little girl will; and your little boy, he will cry just as much. You see, you’re being crossed all the time: there’s something else you mustn’t do, and there’s a reason why you have to stop here and stay away from the next thing. There’ll come a time, there’ll come a day, when you’re ready to shout at God Himself and ask Him why we’re on this earth, people like us, if every time we turn there’s a sign that says ‘Watch Out’ or ‘Not For You’ or — oh, like that, I guess!”

  She is plagued by frustrations. I declare her frustrated and emphasize the assertion not because I have any idea that an interpretation of mine is needed after her perfectly clear remarks. As for sadness, she denies feeling it when she describes her various frustrations. She has told me a number of times what makes her feel sad — feel “low” or feel “bad” — and never does she consider her intense attachment to her infant child to be evidence of such a state of mind. Nor does she affirm her sadness when she indicates how baffled she feels, how undermined by the world, how cramped in style and thwarted and deterred and blocked and inconvenienced and restrained and restricted. All the time the world stands in her way and undoes in fact what she might think about or dream of. All the time she fights back, holds and hugs and kisses her children, tells them to submit, to go along with what simply must be. All the time, as I see it, she acknowledges in one way or another, with one phrase or another, her sense of frustration. Willingly or reluctantly (or really, in both ways) she accommodates. She tries to warn her children and herself; she tries to speak out the discontent she feels; more than that, she tries to live the discontent out. That is to say, she draws as close as she can to her children, and she makes them right off partners in frustration — and in that way, I believe, she makes a little less oppressive the very substantial sadness she somehow must find a way to keep under control.

  Once I asked her whether she did in fact get “unhappy” when one or another frustration came up. She answered me quickly and with a look that seemed to say that she more or less expected me eventually to get around to such matters: “No, no I don’t let these things get me down. I don’t. You can’t. My mother said you can’t, and I believed her when she said it, and now that I have my own kids I believe her more. I try to forget the misery we have, because if you don’t you’re lost, and you can feel yourself going down — way under the water it is. I try to be as good as I can, and if there’s something I can’t do, and something my little girl can’t do, then I get us to go and forget and turn our minds elsewhere. There’s always the jobs you’ve got to do, and you have to tell your kids that they have eyes so they can look ahead, so that even if there’s something stopping you, they can look over it and there must be, there just must be a way you can get around trouble and get yourself to where you’re going — though, I’ll admit, there will be some days when I just can’t figure out where we’re going and how we’ll ever get there or anyplace else.”

  Frustration, frustration mingled with resignation, can turn to other moods, as we all know. The mothers quoted here often enough become irritable, sullen, annoyed, and snappish. They strike out at their children, at their husbands, at themselves. When they do so they describe themselves rather freely as “upset” or “fed up” or “angry,” but again, not sad and not overwhelmed or in danger of giving up — and indeed they are not about to surrender, though they may well fear that possibility more than they can bear to realize. I am not at this point trying to get categorical, or make those generalizations that allow us to feel conveniently in control of a bothersome and troubling “problem.” Nor do I wish to submit the many and various lives I have met in those rural cabins to a lot of fancy, self-i
mportant theoretical language — about the last thing an already burdened and restricted people need. Rather I hope to do whatever justice I possibly can to their lives — and I hesitate to use the word “justice” in this or any other context that has to do with sharecroppers and tenant farmers. I have really wanted the people I have observed to let me know, given enough time and a little trust, how they see their lives unfold or work out or develop.