Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Maybe I am talking about the kind of sadness the rest of us have heard in the blues and “work songs” and “field songs,” an almost distilled sadness that defies the outsider’s comprehension and sometimes prompts him to think of Kierkegaard’s “resignation” or Buber’s “acceptance.” There is a passion and a biblical quality to the expression of that sadness — though “the reverend” himself comes in for some fairly sharp if forgiving criticism, which would be retracted, I noticed, not immediately but several days later, when one of his sermons (which I would have heard in church) would be repeated as if in repentance by a parishioner who had listened carefully indeed when she was in church. As a matter of fact, during those nostalgic moments “the reverend” is not really condemned as a person. Once, when the story of the lavish Christmas was fondly recalled for me (the third time it was, in three years), “the reverend” more or less served as a link between that particular memory and the larger mood that was to be expressed: “I don’t mean to jump on the reverend, but he was down to see us as soon as we got home. No sooner had the grocery man left, than the reverend was there, and it was the first time I ever saw him bend over and lift his hat and treat us like we were — I guess you’d have to say he was looking at us as though we’d become white folks. Yes, the word spreads fast around here, and I’ll tell you what must have happened. The colored people in the store were watching, and when they saw the man, the white man, carry our packages and drive us home, they must have gone running home themselves, and I’ll bet everyone a hundred miles around knew what happened, and the reverend included.

  “He came, like I said, and he was nice and polite, and he didn’t have a cross word to say to us, and he was real obliging and asked if we wanted him to come back later, because he could see how busy we were, and with all those groceries and things — well, it might take a day or two to unload them. So, I told him that there wouldn’t be no difference; now or later was all right, and we’re always glad to have him around, including that time. Then he said he was always glad to come around and that time especially, because he could see we were really happy and in good luck, he said, and that was how it was meant for us to be around Christmastime, because it was a joyful day, Christ being born and like that. Then I said he was right, and we sure felt glad and pleased by our good luck, and we wanted him to know we would pray and thank the Lord. Then he said he was glad of that, and you mustn’t take anything for granted in this world, no sir, and the Lord provides, and now we had proof. So, I said yes, I was sure he was right about the Lord and His providing — but this time it wasn’t Him, it was from our family up North, and they’d sent us a lot of money, more than we ever before had seen. As if he didn’t know from what he heard!

  “Well, he didn’t have much more to say, the reverend. My mother asked him if he wanted to come and eat with us on Christmas, and he said no, that he liked to eat with his family, and they would be cooking in their home, and everyone should be in his own place on Christmas. Then he told us again how lucky it was, what happened, and we agreed, and he got up and he was getting ready to go, I thought, except that he wasn’t. Instead he walked over and he stared right at me, he did, and then he asked: ‘If you have some money left, you can believe that I’ll be glad to have it, and I would try to do God’s Will with it, and there sure are a lot of people who won’t be having the Christmas you’re going to have.’ It was like that, only he went on and on, and while he was speaking I was thinking and deciding. He’d been staring at me, and the way I figured it, if I stopped staring back, he’d walk away with everything we had, the few dollars left, and all the groceries and everything. But if I just kept on looking right into his eyes, then he wouldn’t have me bowing down before him, and he’d stop and leave us be — and it wasn’t as if we’d had Christmases like that one every year.

  “So, I kept hearing him and looking upon him, and he kept talking and looking upon me, and then he finished with his talk, and I didn’t say a word, and then I did. I said, ‘Yes sir,’ that’s what I said. Then I said: ‘I know what you mean,’ that’s what I said. Then I asked him again if he wouldn’t like to come and eat some of the food we’d got, and he said no, he had a lot waiting for him over there at home, and then I said the same thing again: ‘I know what you mean.’ In a second he was at the door leaving us and you know what, he didn’t even remember to wish us a Merry Christmas. I guess he was in a hurry, and people forget a lot when they’ve got to rush on.

  “The reverend, he’s no different than anyone else. I mean, he is, because he’s God’s minister; but he’s one of us, that’s for sure, and the way I see it, even Jesus had His trouble in the Temple, so you can’t trust ministers any more than the rest of us people. Remember what happened to Jesus? He ran into enemies all over, and it was with ministers just like with the other people who didn’t like Him. I guess you’re pretty lucky in this world if you stay alive long enough — I mean so you can grow up, and not die the first thing when you’re born. When you’re little and you don’t know much except that you’re you, and you’ve been born, all you want is to stay here as long as you can, even if the reverend does say it’s better up there in Heaven. I recall when I became a woman and I went and told my mother, she started to cry, and I didn’t know why. She said she was glad I’d lived as long as that, so that I could become a woman; and maybe I could go and live longer and have children and like that. Then she told me about all the people that died, her sisters and her brothers and a lot of them before they were ever born in the first place — and now I know what she was telling me about!

  “Most of the time you just go along and you don’t think back; but my little girl — she isn’t little any more — came to me a couple of months back, and told me she was bleeding and what did she do wrong, and I said nothing, and I told her why she was bleeding. I tried to recall what my mother said to me, and I did; and we both sat and talked, and yes sir, we were all filled up with tears, we were. But if you didn’t have times like that, then you’d never know you was even living. That’s what my mother said when I told her I was bleeding. She said you can’t just go along and never have something real important happen.

  “Here it’s quiet compared to the city, I know. I’ve never been to a real big city. My uncle, he’s been to Jackson and Birmingham and Memphis, because they had him in the Army, you know; and he was up there in New York and then he never did come back. The next thing we knew, he was dead. We got a telegram from a veterans’ department of the government, saying he’d been in the hospital and he died there. It was he who was the one that told us all about going to the cities, and that’s how my sister and brother happened to leave; in the same year they both left for the North. I thought of going myself, and so did my husband, but why should we, I asked myself. Even if there wasn’t my mother or the reverend or the bossman telling you it was no good up there — even so, I would have been smart enough to know it. I mean, is there anyplace on God’s earth where a colored man is going to have a real easy time? Is there? I’d like to know where, I would. As I see it, you’ll be here or someplace else and it’s the same; and you know, I’ll picture us all leaving here, and traveling up the road, like the others have done, and I can’t see us going too far before I’ll want to turn around and get back — because we won’t have what we’ve got and there won’t be anything better in its place.

  “I recall I went over to Greenville once, with my grandma it was, because she had a sister there. It took the whole day, with the bus late, and we sure had a long walk after the bus. All the time I was missing my home, and I wished I was back there. I’d think of our bed, and my daddy telling us before we fell asleep that we should be good and mind ourselves and not get fresh and if we did he’d hit us bad. I told Grandma I wanted to go home, and she said she did, too, but let’s go visit her sister first. Then we did, and her sister said she wished she could go back up with us, but she had to stay, because she came there, to Greenville, with her husband; and he was there because he had a broth
er who learned to fix automobiles in the Army, and now he wasn’t doing so bad, after all.

  “That’s me, I guess; I’m always looking back on things and recalling them and trying to forget something if it isn’t any good. Every time a bad thing happens, I’ll try to push myself to think of a good one. Mostly there’ll be the Christmastime I told you about, and the times I’ve been with my grandma — like on the bus, with her looking out of the window and telling me it was real beautiful to look at, the state of Mississippi, even if it didn’t treat us the best. That’s what I say, too. That’s how I believe. I’d be sad if I didn’t have those sunflowers around and the pine trees, you know; and even in Greenville, Mississippi, I’ll bet we’d have to give up on the flowers we have, and we couldn’t have a chicken or two. We bought the chickens with the money we got from Chicago. They sent us a card with the money, and they said they didn’t want us eating up everything at once, and we should go buy some chickens, and we did. Then the teacher helped me and my kids write back and thank them; and we couldn’t help but add how good the chickens were and wasn’t it too bad that they couldn’t have them up there in Chicago. And you know, it’s not as bad here all the time as it is some of the time, and you have to remember that. We have the seasons, and they change; and so does your luck.”

  She was smiling when she said that, and she went on in a more or less circular fashion — remembering that Christmas again, not because she was rambling or “senile” or provocative or at loose ends for conversation, but because she wanted to fall back on a few things in her life as long as the spirit moved her to do so. At the same time, I began to realize, she was responding to a moment not only in her life, but her daughter’s — a second daughter who had also “become a woman” a little while ago. Sharecropper children, then, like children all over the world, stir their parents, and particularly their mothers, to a variety of responses and states of mind. Sharecropper children can make their parents smile and laugh. Sharecropper children can inspire self-congratulation in their parents. Sharecropper children can cause their parents worry or melancholy. The mood that dominates among those sharecropper children is one of mixed sadness and doubtfulness. I say that not only because I have subjected miles of tapes to something I dubiously call “thematic analysis”; but because I have myself seen what cannot be recorded on a tape recorder, seen gestures and looks and moves and responses to moves and signals made and nods given and arms raised — to express frustration, rage, confusion, hopelessness.

  In South Carolina it was once put this way: “I hope maybe you could go tell a lot of people that we never stop trying. I don’t have much to offer my kids, but I tell them I’m here and they’re here, and it won’t be long before we’re gone, so the best thing to do is go ahead each day and say thank you, sun, for rising, and good-bye, sun, when it goes down, and I hope to see you tomorrow, and if I don’t, then be good to those who stay after me. I do believe the sun must be part of God, because if we didn’t have the sun we’d have no crops at all, and then we’d be dead and it’s bad enough now even with the sun. All I know is that you can’t worry more than from day to day. There’ll be times when I start, but I say to myself that I should live by the sun, and not look ahead more than each day, because if I did, I believe my tears would come and they’d come and they’d wash us all away, they would. There’ll be sometimes when I recall my mother saying that the sun is meant to dry up all your tears from the night before, that’s what — besides making the land grow the crops. So, you see, we’d have a bad time without the sun. If you ask me, we just plain have a bad time all the time. But at least the sun is there, thank God, to help us out. There’s just so much helping out that we ever get, and it’s not enough; no, it isn’t.”

  For such mothers life has an undeniable sadness to it — interrupted, though, by periods of earnest faith or gaiety or hard work that forces a suspension of all feelings. “When I’m helping out with the cotton and tobacco,” says that mother, “I don’t keep track of anything, not my kids or the time of day it is or even if I hurt or I don’t. It’s like you’ll be dead for a while — just going along, up and down, doing what you have to do; and then, when you stop, you all of a sudden say to yourself that you’re the same old you again, and you have to do this and that, and there’s an ache you have, or an errand to get over with. There’ll be some afternoons, I’ll say so, when I feel real bad, and it’s like the whole world has come crashing down on me. But I soon catch my breath and go about my business. I thank God for sparing me trouble while I have to be busy working, and I thank Him for keeping me alive. If I died, there’d be no mother for the kids — my mother died when I was little, and I know — and they’d be even worse off than they already are, and it’s pretty bad for them each day, you know.”

  When I hear sadness expressed, I often hear something else, something that the children I am describing in this chapter begin to convey almost as soon as they can talk and draw and paint. I am speaking of something that the word “stranded” conveys. It is as if the child right off knows (or comes to know or is taught or learns) that he and his family have little future, no prospects, hardly anything ahead but a mean, even cruel struggle for that very minimum of things, mere existence itself. It is as if the child realizes full well that others by the thousands, even by the millions, have left rather than face what is ahead of him or her. A child of ten managed to tell me about himself and his coming fate: “I don’t think it’ll be much different, my life and my daddy’s; I mean, what he’s doing and I will do. The trouble is, Daddy says it may be worse for us. My momma says no, it won’t, because it can’t be, because we’re already as bad off as it can get. I’d like to find me a job that I could keep, and it would be a good one, and near here; but you hear there’s no work, except helping with the crops, like my daddy does, and he says that’s all I can expect is to do that, unless there’s more machines, so that the bossman won’t need but two or three men. Daddy says the bossman told him that it’s still cheaper to have us than the machines, and that’s why we’re here, I guess.

  “Yes, I’ll ask my daddy sometimes why we don’t just up and leave, like a lot of people have been doing. He says that there’s no reason to; and if we did, we’d be going from out of one mess into another one. My brother Billy and me, and my sister Alice, we all asked him once, and when he said the same old thing to us, we said that we heard the bossman kept telling the foreman that the colored people would leave Mississippi, every one of them, and Alabama too, if they know what’s best for them, but since they don’t then they’d better obey and do what they’re told. Daddy didn’t say anything back. He nodded his head and he went back to cutting the trees, and we were about to go away, and then he said we should stay right where we are, and listen to him, and he told us if we’d all gone up to Chicago or New York, then we might be dead from some accident or poison or all the things they have up there. He said to grow up in those cities is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, even including Mississippi and Alabama. So that’s why he stayed, he said; and he’s going to stay until the day he dies, and he told us to watch out and not get a lot of ideas, because the next thing you know we’ll be all grown up, and we shouldn’t have the idea we can go someplace and it’ll be better there. That’s a wrong idea.

  “No, I haven’t been to school this year, because of my momma being sick and then my grandma died; and we don’t have the clothes. I help my daddy with the planting and I do errands for the foreman and I help with my little brothers. I’d like to go to a big city, even just to visit. I’d like to go to Birmingham, Alabama. I know a kid, his uncle lives there. He works in a big factory, I think. But he came back last year, the uncle did; and he told my friend there wasn’t much reason now to go to Birmingham, because they’re cutting back on people unless they’ve gone to school half their life, almost, and have the papers, you know, to prove it. I hope maybe I can go into the Army. I hear say if they consent to take you, they give you all the clothes you’ll ever need i
n your whole life, and they feed you all the time, with the best food in the whole world and all you want of it, and they’ll train you for working in a good job. They say it’s hard to get yourself accepted, though, because you can’t have any sickness, and they check up on you, how big and strong you are. I have some trouble with breathing, and the man in the grocery store, he said it was probably that my heart didn’t grow to the right size and I guess it’ll never go away. I asked my momma if it could be cleared away somehow, so that my heart could grow, and she said she didn’t think so, because it’s too late now. But I hear they may be opening some factories right down here. The minister said they might one day, but you can’t be sure when; and he said if we pray, then maybe it’ll be sooner and not later. Sometimes all of us try to pray at the same time; my momma makes us. I pray the factories will come down here real soon, when I’ll be old enough to go and work in them.

  “There’ll be times when I hear my daddy say that soon there’ll be nothing for us to do here, but there still won’t be any point going to another place. So we’ll be lost, he says, and left with only this roof to cover us — as long as the bossman says it’s OK to stay here. I have my friend Tom, and he says he’s going to catch a ride on a freight train one of these days, and he’ll end up there, in the North; and then he says he’ll go to a policeman and tell him he’s lost and do they know where you can get a job and something to eat. It’s better up North for the colored people, and there you can go ask for help, that’s what Tom says. Tom asked if I wanted to go with him, and I said I’ll think about it and make up my mind. I didn’t ask my daddy, because I know what he’d say, right away. I asked Mr. Robinson, the funeral man, and he said I would be a fool not to go, because you can always get a meal up there, through welfare, but you can’t down here. But then he turned around and said I should be careful, because it was real bad up there, real bad, and getting worse all the time. He said if you went up there around ten or twenty years ago, the colored man, then you were all right; but now it’s a different picture. He said you end up all the way across the country, up North, and it can be better than here and it can be worse than here, all depending on a lot of things. You can freeze up there, I know. And my daddy says you live in a room or two, and you see no land. All you can see is the rats; they hide way down under the buildings and they crawl up at night and bite you. But they’ll give you good welfare money up North, except that you have to pay most of it for the building you live in. I guess we’re just going to stay here, and there’s nothing else to do: each way, you’ve got your troubles, everyone says. My daddy always tells us we’re just stuck here, and we’d better stay, because we should have left, maybe, a long time ago; and now if we leave it’s like asking for trouble, and there’s no guarantee it won’t be worse than what we’ve already got, yes sir.”