Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  She has learned from her neighbor that down in the cellar of her building is a huge boiler, a furnace, “a hot, hot oven.” Again she thinks of Hell — and expresses the mixed awe and astonishment and dread she feels, perhaps about a wider range of subjects than the one she mentions: “I never would have believed it until I saw for myself — the heat you can get in this building. You need no fireplaces and no stoves. All you do is turn them on and those radiators start click-clacking, knocking and knocking, dancing, my little girl says. Not always, of course; sometimes we don’t get any heat — and then the city has to come and scare the landlord. But I still can’t get too mad, because back home we’d sit around the stove, and if we went too far away, we’d just have to be cold. It was hard on the children; they didn’t have the winter clothes they needed. In the city we get more heat than we ever dreamed we’d have, but my neighbor says they can explode, the boilers. I told her Hell will open up one day, and we’ll all sink in — and maybe the boilers are owned by the devil. She thought I was fooling. I was — but maybe it’s true. Maybe up here that can happen.”

  She believes that anything can happen “up here,” in the noisy, crowded world of her building, her block, her street. In many northern cities a street contains thousands of people — as many, for instance, as everyone in a whole county of the rural South or Appalachia. And, of course, a street can be a center of commerce, a place where people buy and sell and eat and entertain and are entertained. I have walked a mile on her street with her two sons and seen the stores: the regular grocery stores; the Dignity Grocery, whose owners emphasize their Afro-American spirit; the large drugstore that sells just about anything; the hairdressers, some of whom sell wigs, straighten hair, have white women’s faces and hairstyles in the store window, and some of whom say no, no, no — Afros, and nothing else. And there are the funeral parlors and insurance agencies, not unlike those one sees in southern towns. The two boys told me that when their mother came North she went to an undertaker to register with him. I asked them why she would do that, and one of them replied: “My grandma told her to do it, otherwise we could die, one of us, and there’d be no one to bury us, and no place to rest in.” They worry about rest, such families do, worry a great deal about what will happen to them, finally, and where they will go next and, most of all, whether always and always they will be tired and unsatisfied and fearful — destined, that is, for “no place to rest in.”

  On that street there are, in fact, people and places which offer a haven of sorts, if ever so temporary. There are women, mostly, who advertise themselves and their abilities with signs like “Reader-Adviser.” There are bars and lounges and coffee shops. There are places that say “Keys Made,” but specialize also in taking bets, which means one can sit down, make a telephone call, and have a friendly and informative talk with a broker of sorts, a man familiar with the odds, aware of hot tips, and not always on “the company’s side.” And there are those pawnbrokers, who are still around, still mostly white, still ready to cash checks and offer money (no questions asked) in return for “goods.” But the two boys like most of all a Soul on Wax store. “How Much Can U Stand?” the sign asks, and the boys say there is no limit. Soul pours out of the store. Soul is turned up high inside and demands to be heard outside. “Soul Unlimited,” another sign on the window says, and one’s ears are inclined to offer no argument to the claim. The boys’ mother finds the store an outrage. What right have they to make all that sound, assault one with all that “crazy music”? She loves hymns, passionate hymns. Her sons, though, are really turned on, have a lot of soul in them, and can stop and listen and snap their fingers and move their feet and knees and hips and torso and arms and neck and head in ways I can only marvel at, envy, and (in self-defense) dismiss as “foreign” or “alien” or a touch “wild” and “hysterical.”

  Among Appalachian whites newly settled in midwestern cities, mothers and children can take me on similar walks. Absent are the many hairdressers and funeral directors. Soul is not there, but God is; and so are country music, hillbilly music, and a gospel music not unlike the kind many blacks find congenial, important, and necessary. Missions are often present, their doors open, their signs prominently displayed and full of urgency. The mountaineer must know that he is not forsaken, that Christ follows His children into the cities, that prayer helps, works, makes a difference, saves. And the mountaineer will need to be saved, too, because those streets of his have stores that are labor agencies of sorts, stores where an earnest, tough, willing, hardworking mountaineer can be guaranteed work all right — hours and hours of it, with very little reward: “They say they’ll pay you a couple of dollars an hour, but they take half and more out as their fee. I’m left with so little, and it costs so much here, the rent and the food, that I can’t keep up with it.” So, he goes to the loan company. There are plenty of those, in all the cities, ready with money for the black man, money for the white man, money for anyone prepared to assume undreamed-of debts in the course of paying off other debts.

  Once up North, once on those streets and in those buildings, more forms of escape can be sought. Mountaineers like beer and whiskey; so do black men. So, they drink. Do they! One has to add quickly that only some mountaineers get excessively taken up with liquor. One has to add quickly and with particular emphasis (because so many of us are ready to believe otherwise) that only some black men get similarly dependent on liquor — or hooked on God knows what drug. Nevertheless, the streets have their fair share of them, the alcoholics and addicts, as a doctor calls them; the “lost people” one child I know calls them — and then he makes his emphasis: “the real lost people.”

  Does he distinguish “them” in that way from himself and his parents — who presumably are also lost, but by no means real lost? “In life some people lose more than others,” his mother often says, so perhaps that is just what the boy of nine had in mind. He and his parents are losers, but not driven mad by cravings for shots, shots of whiskey and shots of heroin, which others call “smack” but the child calls “the silent smack.” He will tell a listener why he uses that expression, and by the time he has finished he has revealed a lot about a particular child’s sensibility and a lot, also, about the streets of a great American city: “I’ve only been here a year. I’m used to the streets now. You get used to them. I used to wonder if I ever would. I once thought I never would. It hurt my feet to walk on so much sidewalk. Before I came here I never wore shoes. Now I have to wear them all the time, and they hurt. You can’t walk on the sidewalk barefoot; glass is everywhere and your feet get cut and bleed. I used to think I might dig up some sidewalk so I could have some earth to rest my feet on, soft earth. My mother says the earth up here must be hard. I asked her how she knew — since we never see any earth here. She said I should stop being smart with her. She says up here if you get too smart, you can get into trouble. I don’t want any trouble, not the kind I see hereabouts. Look at those lost people out there; I mean they are real lost. I mean, they are gone. They’ll never come back. They’re on smack. Smack is the end of the road — the last trip, they say. You’ve arrived when you take it, they say; you can’t go any further, they say. They take it and you can see them — going up, up, up. They don’t make a sound when they take smack. That’s why I say smack is silent — it’s the silent smack. You know what? My granddaddy used to say to me: watch out there, you boy, or I’ll give you a smack. My mother thought we were trying to be funny when we told her what a smack was up here. Granddaddy would hit us and his smack you could hear all over, into the middle of the field. Here I see them taking smack right out in the street, almost; maybe in the hall or in an alley. They don’t make any noise, not a sound. When my mother gets mad and shouts about how wild it is here, crazy, she says, and noisy as can be, I’ll sometimes argue with her. Some people here never talk, and they’re not wild. They’re as silent and still as if they’re already dead. I do believe if my granddaddy gave them a smack they wouldn’t make a sound or a move.
I’d wriggle and cry when he hit me, and he’d say, ‘Good, it shows you’re alive and kicking.’ Like I say: on smack, you’re dead and gone.”

  Children like him, black children, or white mountain children newly settled in a northern city, notice all sorts of voices, all sorts of clatter and cries; they are sensitive to noises and curious about where they come from. The streets never seem to quiet down. Even in the middle of the night there are cars moving, people walking, things going on. Why is that? Why is the whole rhythm of life so different in New York or Philadelphia or Boston or Chicago? Why don’t people live the same way they did “back South” or “back home” in the mountains? That is to say, why don’t they move the way they used to move, and divide up their time in the old ways? What is it about those streets that “gets into you so,” to call upon the words I heard one mother use? She was always asking questions like the ones I have just asked. She is utterly convinced that the streets really do change the bodies of those who move into them from the countryside. She would list her reasons rather like a good scientist does, briefly and to the point: “The sun, it’s never around. The sky, who sees it? The clouds, they’re always over you. The moon, poor thing, fights like Hell to get out from under those clouds; it probably thinks the clouds will get tired, after being there all day. But that’s not the way it goes, no sir. They’re tricky, those clouds. They let the moon through, then quick as can be, they shut it out again. There are no birds around, except a few pigeons, and they’re in a bad state, you can see. They’re always at each other. They’re not relaxed and easygoing like the birds we had back home in the hills. A day doesn’t go by that you’re not trying to get something out of your eye. A day doesn’t go by that you don’t hear the cars hitting into each other, or the fire trucks racing by, or the police and their sirens. Will it be my building next, you wonder? Will it catch on fire or lose its heat? No wonder your body shakes all the time and begins to fall apart. There’s just so much a body can take.”

  Those complaints are by no means the whole story, so far as she is concerned. She simply is not used to the “clock life” of the city. In the country everyone got up when the sun came up, and prepared to go to sleep when the sun left for other places. She and her family lingered, of course. They talked, and after they shared a secondhand television set, they listened to it for a while “into the night.” But “come sundown” they withdrew from the outside world into their own world, the world of their cabin — ever so frail, likely as not perched on those cinder blocks, the floors full of holes and cracks, the roof made of rusted tin equally full of leaks. Nor does she fail to notice a bit of a paradox in her current situation: “I used to think to myself that one day I’d go into a city and I’d live better. I’d have a house where I’d be able to close my door and not worry that it’s cold outside or raining. Now we have bricks in this building, and it sure is stronger than the cabin we had back there. The cold stays out, and the wind and the rain, but everything else comes in here from outside: the whole street, with its sirens, and the rats, they’re always eating their way in, and the bugs and more bugs, and the roaches, huge they are. We had some roaches back home. I’m not denying it. But I kept on top of them. I cleared them out. I kept the mice out, too — field mice, and you’ll always have them. But there weren’t rats trying to eat you, and bugs that bite you, and the walls didn’t have the lead poison in them that nearly killed my girl last year. I used to be afraid of coal. My father was killed down in a mine. Now it’s lead you have to fear, around here it’s lead.”

  She is afraid that she and her children will never really accommodate themselves to the “schedule of this place,” or as mentioned above, the “clock life.” In the city she is supposed to sleep, even though it is light outside early in the morning. In the city she is supposed to ignore dusk, the evening, the night. In the city her husband comes home tired but fretful — when he is lucky enough to have left home and stayed away doing a good day’s work. He doesn’t carve wood, make things anymore. Where indeed would he get the wood? He doesn’t go walking — all the while talking with his dog. (“You’d have to be a murderer to keep a dog up here. Some do, but I can’t. I just couldn’t.”) He doesn’t try to fix things, or stand there outside his cabin, lost in his thoughts, alone with his memories, or maybe just still and unbothered and without anything at all on his mind. What he often does do is describe those times that are gone and compare them with the “better life” he now has: “I’d get myself in a nice place, where I might hear some birds and listen to some animals sounding off, really sounding off, or where I could look out — no, not at anything special, just at everything, you might say. I’d rest myself standing there. It’s hard to explain to you, it is; after being up here a while, it’s hard to explain to myself! But we have a better life up here. I don’t say it’s a happier one. I don’t. But it’s better, the way we live. Hell, maybe it’s happier, too! I always was one to forget the troubles I had and remember only the good. We had more troubles back in those hills than we do here in this city, living on this street.”

  And I had better remember those words. More than once he has brought himself up short and let me know how misleading he could be about his own life, about the advantages and disadvantages of one or another part of that life. More than once he and others like him have let me know that I ought be as wary of their words and sentiments, and above all their nostalgia, as they themselves from time to time become — wary and self-mocking and delightfully clever and shrewdly philosophical: “I’m the kind of man who turns his miseries into a good time — once he’s feeling fine. That’s when you should turn sweet on the sourness you’ve been through, when you’re through with it, the bad time. When I first came here to the city I used to miss it back there, real bad I did. I’d go to bed thinking of our little house and the hollow and the creek and the trees I’d carved my initials on when I was a boy, and the ones my own boys were starting to carve. Well, I had to stop that. But you know, the thing that made me stop was the minister up here I talked with. He said to me one day: would you go back? Would you really go back? And I came home and I thought, and by God if I didn’t decide that a lot of my bellyaches are now gone, and even the worst of what I don’t like isn’t as bad as some of the troubles we had back there.”

  He meant “bellyaches” quite specifically and concretely, though he also was speaking symbolically. He and his family are no longer as hungry as they used to be during those long winters, when no money came in, when no work was to be had, when they were denied welfare, when bottled and canned food, grown outside, “up the mountain,” and put away for January and February, began to run out, while at the same time the weather remained bitter cold and snow simply would not stop falling. But he used to have other bellyaches, too. Not only could he find no job, not only did he get no help at all from county officials, there was, additionally, the sight of his children. Before his very eyes they were “growing into his shoes,” which ironically means growing up to have no shoes, to walk barefoot, to miss school on that account as well as for other reasons, all of them “part of a bundle” he would say: sickness with its attendant weakness; gloominess and self-doubt; and indifference, a child’s realization that books don’t matter in a neighborhood where very few people, literate or not, can find work.

  The streets, then, offer hope. The streets have received, continue to receive, men and women and children who have had to leave their homes elsewhere; they are people driven and forsaken, compelled by fate to seek not merely a new life, but the conditions under which survival is possible. Hard pressed and afraid and tired, they arrive determined to live, anxious to find shelter and food and “something to do, anything that will fill up the hours.” Bitter and fatalistic and bewildered, they are also resourceful and canny and inventive. There is the address of a brother to find or the address of kin, not close kin, but above all kin. There is a piece of paper to keep, to show, to look at and use; on it is a telephone number, a contact, the name of a person or a
n organization. The hand holds on to that paper. The arms lift that paper up again and again so that people of the city can see it. The lips say the word or words one time, two times, ten times. They are tentative hands and arms, and God knows, the voices let out by those lips tremble, falter, are often barely audible. Still, the hands and arms and voices belong to men and women who have picked themselves up and done the moving, the traveling, “the carrying of ourselves”; and once arrived, those men and women persist. Only later will they recall the first moments up North, and reveal why they very much want to stay where they are (even if they at times talk like prisoners condemned). But as they talk they also reveal what it meant to decide upon a departure, to pack up and go off, to get someplace, however far away it may be, however strange and forbidding it may appear to be when reached.