Children of Crisis Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT COLES

  Bruce Springsteen’s America

  Lives of Moral Leadership

  The Moral Intelligence of Children

  The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism

  Their Eyes Meeting the World: The Drawings and Paintings of Children (with Margaret Sartor)

  The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination

  The Spiritual Life of Children

  Rumors of Separate Worlds (poems)

  Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis

  The Child in Our Times: Studies in the Development of Resiliency (edited with Timothy Dugan)

  That Red Wheelbarrow: Selected Literary Essays

  Harvard Diary: Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular

  Times of Surrender: Selected Essays

  In the Streets (with Helen Levitt)

  Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion

  Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage

  The Political Life of Children

  The Moral Life of Children

  Agee (with Ross Spears)

  The Doctor Stories of William Carlos Williams (editor)

  Dorothea Lange

  Women of Crisis, II: Lives of Work and Dreams (with Jane Coles)

  Flannery O’Connor’s South

  Walker Percy: An American Search

  Women of Crisis, I: Lives of Struggle and Hope (with Jane Coles)

  The Last and First Eskimos (with Alex Harris)

  A Festering Sweetness (poems)

  Privileged Ones: The Well-Off and the Rich in America (Volume V of Children of Crisis)

  Eskimos, Chicanos, Indians (Volume IV of Children of Crisis)

  The Mind’s Fate: Ways of Seeing Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis

  William Carlos Williams: The Knack of Survival in America

  Irony in the Mind’s Life: Essays on Novels by James Agee, Elizabeth Bowen, and George Eliot

  The Darkness and the Light (with Doris Ulmann)

  The Buses Roll (with Carol Baldwin)

  The Old Ones of New Mexico (with Alex Harris)

  A Spectacle Unto the World: The Catholic Worker Movement (with Jon Erikson)

  Twelve to Sixteen: Early Adolescence (with Jerome Kagan)

  Farewell to the South

  The South Goes North (Volume III of Children of Crisis)

  Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers (Volume II of Children of Crisis)

  The Geography of Faith (with Daniel Berrigan)

  The Middle Americans (with Jon Erikson)

  Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work

  Drugs and Youth (with Joseph Brenner and Dermot Meagher)

  Wages of Neglect (with Maria Piers)

  Teachers and the Children of Poverty

  Uprooted Children

  The Image Is You

  Still Hungry in America

  Children of Crisis, Volume I: A Study of Courage and Fear

  FOR CHILDREN

  Dead End School

  The Grass Pipe

  Saving Face

  Riding Free

  Headsparks

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2003 by Robert Coles

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  The author is grateful for permission to reprint as an epigraph the following previously copyrighted material: excerpt from William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, copyright 1948 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09049-0

  To the children across America who have had so much to teach us — and whose lives have become our nation’s history.

  In loving memory of Jane, and to our children and grandchildren; and with grateful thanks to Eric H. Erikson and Anna Freud for their constant encouragement, instruction.

  With grateful thanks also to Terry Adams, whose careful interest and concern very much enabled and gave shape to this book.

  “Outside

  outside myself

  there is a world,

  he rumbled, subject to my incursions

  — a world

  (to me) at rest,

  which I approach

  concretely —”

  Book Two,

  Paterson

  William Carlos Williams

  “All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: and not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.”

  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

  James Agee

  Contents

  ALSO BY ROBERT COLES

  Copyright

  Introduction

  I A Study of Courage and Fear

  The South

  When I Draw the Lord He’ll Be a Real Big Man

  The Students

  The Matter of Chocolate

  Pioneer Youth: John Washington

  The Teachers

  Teaching the Teacher: Miss Lawrence

  The Protesters

  Larry

  After Joe Holmes

  The Integrationist South

  “I’m the True Southerner”: Mrs. Trumbull

  Stay Home or Go to School?

  Lookers-On and the Last Ditch

  A Store Is a Store

  The Last Ditch

  II Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers

  The Land

  The Children

  Uprooted Children

  Stranded Children

  Hidden Children

  III The South Goes North

  The Streets

  Blacks in the City

  I Am Black and Nothing Else

  To Hell with All of You

  Orin

  The Wanderers

  My Room

  Black Fathers

  Who Speaks for Us?

  White Visitors

  Law and Order: That’s All There Is

  The Welfare Lady

  My Buildings

  White Northerners

  What Have We Done?

  Laura

  In the Places Where the Mountains Are Gone

  Work and No Work

  Sally

  Those Places They Call Schools

  Ghetto Schools

  Mixed Schools

  Committed Schools

  Vitality and Violence, Life and Death

  Vitality in Ghetto Children

  Violence in Ghetto Children

  IV Eskimos, Chicanos, Indians

  Once and Still the Frontier

  Eskimo Children

  Custodian of a Spirit

  Young Leader

  A Modern Girl

  Chicano Children

  In Texas: Carmen

  A Barrio Game

  Indian Children

  Pueblo Children on the Boundary Line

  Keeping an Eye on the White Man

  Hopi Girl

  V Privileged Ones

  Comfortable, Comfortable Places

  The Children

  Defender of the Garden District


  Grandchild of a Mine Owner

  Withdrawal

  Rich in the Barrio

  Entitlement

  What Profit Under the Sun?

  Introduction

  What follows are words that were meant to give an account of American children of various backgrounds who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. Those boys and girls became, in their own way, teachers. They sometimes spoke loud and clear about what crossed their minds, or they used crayons or pencils or paintbrushes to show through artistic representation what they saw, experienced, wanted to convey through portraits of themselves, of others, or through the rendering of particular faces, buildings, scenes. Over time the stories of those children, their remarks, as heard by the doctor who came to know them, became the subject matter of a series of five books, each called Children of Crisis, with the subtitles spelling out one or another aspect of a nation’s social geography: the South’s embattled racial climate of opinion and habit during the 1960s; the rural life of Dixie and beyond — up the hollows of Appalachia, and in the farms across the nation that require the traveling hands of laboring men and women (and sometimes children, too) if crops are to be planted, harvested; the cities of the North, which received so many thousands of needy and vulnerable families, eager to try the new kind of life available away from sharecropper cabins, migrant labor settlements, or the mountain hollows of, say, West Virginia, Kentucky; out West, the people who claimed the land, or worked it, now called Native Americans, once described as Indians, or now called Spanish-speaking citizens, once summoned as Chicanos, and up Alaska, those whose Eskimo bearings in distant communities gave way to the accessible life of a far northern state’s busy commercial and even industrial life; and finally, those who, across a continent, have risen to the top, acquired money and the privileges that go with it — the not rare sagas of “rags to riches” that a nation has long savored, treasured.

  In a sense, then, the Children of Crisis books tell a story of a nation’s people, whose lives take place under a broad variety of circumstances; but those volumes, published between 1967 and 1977, also tell another story, that of a physician who left the bounds of a particular profession as it once exerted its hold on one of its practitioners — only to find himself taken up in the somewhat different manner that social observers find convenient, useful. Since all stories have their beginnings, perhaps it is best to go way back to the very start of this one — to a time that preceded by almost five years any of the work and writing that would initiate the Children of Crisis series. In 1955, I was learning to be a pediatrician at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital. One of my young patients was dying of leukemia and had no chance of survival. He was ten years old, Jimmie was, a policeman’s son, quite lively in nature, and ever ready to converse with his hardworking physician, who was constantly worried about what to do, when, on behalf of a whole ward full of desperately ill youngsters. I can still see his alert, watchful face as it scrutinized my worried effort to hear his heart, elicit the reflexes of his arms, his legs, keep track of his pulse, and his sweaty, blotched skin. Yet for all the exhaustion exacted by his mortal illness, he could be not only friendly, but ever forthcoming in response to my neophyte’s questions. Once, as we talked, he asked a favor of me: Would I want to meet his three “best buddies”?

  Yes, of course — and soon enough I was sitting with Carl, Johnnie, and Larry, who were asking questions about their pal’s medical condition, his prospects, even as they let me know that they understood well what would soon be happening. “He’s going to die, Jimmie is,” Carl told me — and then, of a sudden, I was shown a picture of Jimmie that this friend had drawn, even as I was offered an explanation: Carl’s mother was an elementary schoolteacher, and she encouraged him (as well as her classroom students) to draw pictures. Carl was good at drawing, liked to do it a lot, and had carried with him a large “sketch,” he called it, of Jimmie. Now I realized what was in the folder he had in his right hand, and soon enough I was looking at a picture of Jimmie — and hearing this from Carl: “He’s a great hitter, and he’s always wanted to be a baseball player.” Silence, and then a boy’s lowered head, after which these words got spoken: “I figure, if Jimmie doesn’t get better, I can remember him this way, standing near the base, ready to swing his bat and knock a bases-loaded homer — he’s done that, you know.”

  I remember those words, decades later, because I wrote them down, so touched was I by them, by the earnest goodwill of the lad who spoke them, and by the large, multicolored picture given me — a solid Jimmie standing with his bat in his hands, and before him a full baseball field, with a pitcher at the ready, and a friendly, cloudless sky above, the sun beaming a smile on all that stretched below it.

  Weeks later, Jimmie would be gone from his family, his friends — and his stricken mother would be asking me if I might want to keep Carl’s drawing. He’d initially shown it to me; I’d handed it to Jimmie, who had asked his mother to “save” it, at home — and now I was holding it, affecting and compelling both, in my hand for keeps. To this day, I think of that boy, Jimmie, pictured, and I think of his neighborhood friend, Carl — the picture drawn, the words spoken, amidst a tragic time in a child’s life, and that of his family and friends. I go back to that early clinical experience in my life, because I learned so much then — a moment when a crisis, this one medical, prompted poignant expression, both verbal and visual.

  A year later I was in Boston, working first at the Massachusetts General Hospital, then at the Children’s Hospital — learning, in a few years’ time, to move from pediatrics to child psychiatry. So doing, I got to know many boys and girls who were having trouble at home or at school or in one or another neighborhood — to the point that they were referred to us at the hospital, in the hope that what prompted their worries or fears or outbursts of anger would somehow yield to the understanding that physicians aim to acquire as they closely attend their patients. In 1956, as I worked with those young people psychiatrically, an epidemic of polio broke out across New England, and soon enough I was working with my fellow doctors to do all we could for youths now paralyzed in one way or another. The Salk vaccine had not yet been developed, and polio was a much and justly feared disease that changed the lives of those it struck. All day, every day, we doctors did the best we could (precious little, alas, so often) on behalf of the children we came to know on wards now all too full of immobilized patients and their frightened, grief-stricken parents.

  One day, as I talked with Tim, a fourteen-year-old high schooler, an accomplished student and a fine athlete, I heard him move from a specific discussion of his legs, their sudden seeming lifelessness (for him, a fast runner, an especially disastrous development), to a broader consideration of what had happened, what might be in the offing not only for him, but for others: “My mom says there’s always hope — but you have to be realistic. This is a big crisis for all of us in the family, not only me. I got sick, and here I am, trying my best to get better, to get those legs back to where they were; but there’s just so much you can do with concentration and determination. Dad would say to us, he taught us: ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’ That’s true to some extent, I guess — not all the time, though. In a crisis, a real tough one, you find out a lot you never knew. You find out what’s true for you, in your situation. Mom is a teacher, and she tells us you learn different things at different times in different ways. I’m going through this crisis, and I hope I get out of it walking — and smarter about life. I heard my mom telling that to one of the doctors — that I’d be a lot smarter when all this is over. She meant that I’d take a lot less for granted, and I’d know when to appreciate the small things in life — that are, really, the rock-bottom big things: your family, your friends, your hometown, and your country, and the sun shining on your green lawn, the birds circling around, for a nibble here and there, and your dog, looking and looking at you, for a bite of food, or for some direction — and don’t we all need it, search hard for it!”
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br />   I was so fortunate to have a tape recorder at hand as those words came my way. I was trying to document, in a hospital setting, the manner in which young people responded to certain medical problems that beset them — whereas, then and there I was in the presence of something else, something far more precious: a thoughtful person giving voice to impressive, even haunting wisdom. Over and over I played that tape, and as I listened, the word crisis kept staying with me — polio was a wide-ranging physical disease, a serious crisis, yes, but it also was an ironically enabling presence of sorts in the minds of those afflicted: an instrument of probing, personal reflection in those unlucky enough to have caught it.

  Over a year’s time, I got to hear quite a lot from Tim, about his present prospects and future aspirations. I also heard other young patients talk about the dreaded disease, now become for them an aspect of daily living. I heard about the trials and tribulations of children, for sure, but I also heard about the strengths those youngsters found and mobilized mightily: new ways of thinking, of seeing life, its possibilities and opportunities as well as its downsides — all in all, the risks of disease become the daily experience of it, sometimes for the bad, sometimes for the good. Eventually, I got to attend Tim’s graduation from college, from law school. He would always have a “weak left leg,” he called it; but with the help of daily exercises, he managed to “limp along,” then “run, limping,” and eventually even think of his “bout with polio” as a “big prod” to his educational and professional life — he, who would go to college, then law school, and become a defender in courtrooms of individuals injured in accidents, or laid low by life’s bad turns.

  “I got knocked down by a virus,” Tim told me on his fiftieth birthday, “and here I am trying to lend a hand to some folks who can’t take very much for granted, and are staring at poverty or illness, and hoping someone will knock on their door, and say, ‘You bet, I’ll lend a helping hand.’ ” A lawyer was looking back, was remarking on fate, on “chance and circumstance,” as George Eliot put it so succinctly in Middlemarch. So it went for Tim — fate tapping him on the shoulder; and so it goes for all of us, to our possible benefit occasionally or, sadly, to our utter detriment.