Children of Crisis Read online

  The South’s difference from the rest of the nation depends upon more than villages named in honor of Indian tribes or patriots to be celebrated. The South is not only its history, of those towns, of slavery, of rebellion. The skin feels the bouts of winter warmth, and must live with the heat in summer, dry in Atlanta, steamy in New Orleans; for heat is the South, and the weather is indeed kinder in winter and fatiguing in the summer. Whole theories of human nature have centered themselves on climate, and most often they seem single-minded or excessive, except for a moment in February when a soft wind rises from the bay and comes into Mobile, and with it a warm sun which brings out azaleas and high spirits both; or a time in midsummer when the damp heat in Louisiana has gone on long enough to make nerves already worn thin become frayed beyond recovery.

  The earth, too, is special, much of it red with copper. The growth is different; tropical plants and palm trees, the famous wisteria and symbolic magnolia. The water is particularly abundant and rich in its variety: wide rivers, their tributaries weaving through the entire region, and the still smaller bayous, and canals, and the swamps with the mist over them. Lakes are everywhere, and much of the oceanside shows a tropical green band when it touches the shore.

  The people have their own ways, too — their words, their food and stories, their kind of churches and praying. It’s been noted so often, but an outsider like me coming from Northern or Western cities is surprised at first by the very few names that are not Anglo-Saxon; those names, of course, shared by Negroes, who are not simply confined to ghettoes as they are so predominantly in the North, but are everywhere. They take care of homes and often live near them; they work in stores, gas stations, office buildings, and on the farms which still dominate the area; they cultivate and harvest crops, sharing in some of the profits in exchange for land and house, or moving from state to state to wait for harvests and gather them.

  White and Negro alike, the people are, I suspect, church-going beyond all others in the nation. The land seems covered with churches, and their denominational variety is astonishing. Revivals are common, and strict tithing by no means rare. The Bible is read literally in many towns throughout the section, which is still rural, strong on family and unashamed patriotism. Many whites have not yet surrendered their intensely suspicious regional and national pride, and many Negroes have till now found no reason to let go of the apathy and dependency, the alternation of good-natured frolic and sulky aloofness which characterized for so long their lack of pride in both themselves and their condition. Both races share some of the social form of the society — the expressions like “Y’all come back,” said frequently out of meaning as well as ritual, or the food, like pecan pie, grits and okra, which come upon any visitor fairly soon and which one “favors” or is “partial to.”

  The federal roads are coming in, television with its widespread news and “culture” is everywhere, and national loyalties have always contended with local ones. The region, though, for good and bad has had a stubborn power, not only in its social and economic system, but in its history, its earth, its language and literature. Certainly what I have described about the South’s particular nature is familiar to most of us, and has been repeatedly described before. I had read those descriptions and “knew” their message before going to live there. Yet the experience of those differences of living and thinking made for a sharper kind of awareness in me of the very real effect of those differences on the outsider who comes to live there as well as the lifelong inhabitant of the section. Too much can be made of these “local” variations; but then too little significance can be granted them in an age that recognizes perhaps rather exclusively the grossest kinds of political and economic power, or dwells with a certain preoccupation upon the unqualified sovereignty of early childhood experiences.

  My work has been concerned with changes in Southern life as it moodily breaks with the past. For well over a generation a “new South” has been anticipated and hailed, but its arrival is now certain. As I walk through Atlanta or Charlotte the people can be seen in all their hurry, dressed out of New York, their office buildings as new, ugly, and efficient as those in other “growing” sections. The airports are the same boxes of never-ending buoyant music, and the runways as hungry for jets as all others. Yet Southerners have resisted as well as yielded to and even welcomed our modern nearness to one another. In studying the adjustment of white and Negro children (and their parents and teachers) to school desegregation I have learned to expect just that unusual blend of affection and reserve, accommodation and resentment which characterizes not only racial relations as they change in form and substance these days, but the South itself — recasting itself, but in its own fashion.

  No one interested in the individual as he encounters a society in swift transition will be bored by Mississippi or the Carolinas. Some of the South’s people hurt and exploit others, but the region itself has been ruthlessly exploited over the generations. Many of its people are poor, ignorant, and capable of an absurd kind of defensive chauvinism, but many are sturdy, hardworking, and kind people, so that as a whole every bit of Faulkner’s vision seems sound. For all the shrill and resentful voices there have been many silent warriors in hopeless causes, many silent sufferers reduced to poverty and defeat; and now their descendants fight against hateful mobs and the mean conditions of life which generate them.

  These past one hundred years have not been a pretty story, and distress has not fallen upon one race alone. The kind of political tyranny practiced by whites over Negroes has gained little for large numbers of whites, and the saddest part of studying whites hating Negroes by forming mobs or being nasty to them in schools, or sharing their fate on the collapsing farms of the region or in the flow of migrant farmers which travels through it each year, is how very treacherous that “psychological satisfaction” of racial superiority has really been to the lives of those who have sought nourishment from it, and sometimes almost it alone.

  A nation within a nation, emerging from years of exile and hardship, the South’s people today are showing individual dignity and courage as well as fear and desperation. Today, when some of us wonder whether our social order is in fact becoming drab and lifeless through its ability to make many of us fearfully similar and compliant, the South still clings to its almost biblical struggles between those willing to risk and dare and those anxious to flee and hide. Perhaps out of no special virtue except its own tragic history, the people there are fighting one another with an intensity and consistency which is rare indeed in our country.

  The protagonists have been ordinary people, but all of them have found themselves in a place and a time which have given heroic and symbolic proportions to their struggles. I am thinking, in this connection, of a white woman in New Orleans whose four children, with only a very few others, defied the mobs attempting a total boycott of an elementary school in opposition to one little Negro girl. Why did this woman, deeply of the South, not by any means committed to “integration,” hazard her life, the lives of her husband and children? I was in the company of those who tried to find the answer; a reporter, a sociologist, a psychiatrist, each of us worked at our common curiosity about human nature and its motives. I think we were all baffled — perhaps because we were all eager for the categorical solution, afraid of the clumsy, undefined, paradoxical flow of life and its events which may, in fact, be the truth of it.

  Again and again — I talked with this woman over a period of two years — she came back to her only reply: she hadn’t planned to dispute the angry, threatening crowds; she didn’t think she was actually in favor of desegregation when all the uproar started; perhaps she was now, though; but she had always believed in education for her children, and she also felt a deep loyalty to the South’s tradition, as she put it, “of good manners.”

  One day she was at her most open, and most persuasive: “My heart is divided, and at the worst of it I thought we’d die, not just from dynamite, but from nervous exhaustion. I wasn’t brought
up to have nigras at school with me or my children. I just wasn’t…. If I had to do it over, I wouldn’t have made this system, but how many people ever have a say about what kind of world they’re going to live in? … I guess in a sense I did have my way with those mobs. But I didn’t plan to, and we were near scared to death most of the time…. People blame the South for the mobs, but that’s just part of the South. If I did right, that’s part of the South, too…. They just don’t know how a lot of us down here suffer. We didn’t make all this, we just were born to it, and we don’t have all the opportunity and money down here that they do in the North…. I told my children the other day that we’re going to live to see the end of this trouble, and when we do I’ll bet both races get on better down here than anywhere else in America…. Why? Because I think we’re quieter down here, and we respect one another, and if we could clear up the race thing, we really would know one another better…. We’ve lived so close for so long….”

  A full transcript of what this woman has said at various times tells more than any comments from those who have heard her. She is not alone in her courage. The South is filled with an underground of sly liberals in the midst of situations hardly likely to support their efforts. It is filled with a tradition of solid, dignified Negroes and ashamed, confused whites, enough of both so that it would take a bold man indeed to separate and weigh their respective suffering. It is also, however, filled with bitter, spiteful whites and fearful, apathetic Negroes, some of them capable of exploiting their own people or demeaning them.

  Perhaps nowhere in America is there so much that is good and bad about human beings so clearly in evidence. Few would want to keep the region’s special virtues at the price of its outrageous faults. Yet, it is a beautiful land to see, and its people in their guilt and distress may have a good deal to teach us all. The United States as a whole has known little frustration and defeat for some time. The South has lived intimately with both, and it may have some wisdom to offer from that experience. This is surely a time in our national life when we need any help we can get about how to live properly and sensibly in the face of prolonged uncertainty, ambiguity, and even the frustrations which come from not winning every battle in every war. The South has not only seen the gloomy and tormented side of man’s destiny; it has seen it and known enough of it perhaps to realize also the redemptive promise and power in human suffering. Sorrow may be fated, but to survive it and grow is an achievement all its own.

  When I Draw the Lord

  He’ll Be a Real Big Man

  In recent years child psychiatrists have steadily increased their ability to understand what is happening in the minds of even their youngest or only remotely communicative patients. When Freud insisted upon the extreme relevance of childhood experiences to the lives of grownups he did so in a middle-class Viennese climate that held children either innocents in need of progressive enlightenment or devilish knaves whose mischief deserved every possible restraint and punishment. On a tide of free associations he and his followers carried virtually an entire culture backward to the life of the child’s mind, and as a result the new profession of child psychiatry came into existence.

  Within the psychoanalytic tradition his daughter Anna took the lead in giving the profession purpose and competence. In fact she turned the new interest in children to a continuing study of them; to a concern with childhood she added her concern for children. Soon, in the twenties and thirties, the influential pull of psychoanalysis came to be felt by academic psychologists and anthropologists, so that children in all sorts of cultures eventually were watched, while children in the Western world were observed, tested, and measured as carefully as adult ingenuity permitted.

  Once children became so significant to doctors or social scientists, ways had to be found to learn what was going on inside them as well as what they could or could not do at various ages. Direct observation was — and still is — championed by Anna Freud. The psychoanalytically sensitive can discover in the “ordinary” or “random” behavior of children, be they in the nursery, classroom, or clinic, a number of patterns and clues to what holds their attention and concerns them, or worse, troubles them. No tests or questionnaires are necessary, only watchful eyes and attentive ears. When such direct observation is coupled with conscientious interviews of parents and teachers, the child’s behavior becomes reasonably well understood.

  Yet those who treat children have a task rather different from those who study them. They have to not only find out what they can, but so reach and affect the child’s mind that he no longer ails. The child must be helped to comprehend what bothers him, and he must then settle the problem so decisively that he no longer feels upset, or indeed shows any signs to the ever-watchful clinician that he may still be troubled “deep down.” To accomplish that goal in young children of five or six, to exchange views with them, to learn what they feel, commonly requires in the doctor a willingness to abandon his reliance upon one of his chief assets in his work with grown-ups, or for that matter older boys and girls — the service of the spoken word.

  In the case of very young children, say of six months or a year, by the nature of things the child psychiatrist will direct a heavy share of his attention to the parents, or those standing in for them by choice or necessity. Infants and toddlers who refuse food, develop unusually cranky dispositions, and in general show signs of poor emotional or neurological development that cannot be explained by the presence of a physical illness are babies responding to unduly apprehensive care, or worse, to cruel care or no care worthy of the name. As a result a generation of therapists have appreciated the value of holding the baby, playing with him and feeding him, so that what he does not obtain outside the office he at least consistently gets inside. What must be communicated by the doctor at that age is solicitude and affection.

  As children go into the third year their interest in play becomes quite reliable and developed, an obvious result of their increasingly organized and purposeful mental life; in brief, they have more going on within them that seeks engagement and expression with the outside world, both of people and things. During the thirties and into the forties child psychiatrists took increasing clinical advantage of that fact, harnessing toys and games to their investigative and therapeutic efforts — a development stimulated by the simple yet revolutionary psychoanalytic tenet that all behavior, however discrete or frivolous, makes sense and is likely to express something more (or other) than what is apparent.

  In contrast, much less clinical attention has been given the drawings children so abundantly produce from three and four until adolescence. For that matter, the grown artist has both confused and fascinated psychoanalysts. Freud looked closely at the lives of a number of them, but was careful to acknowledge that what actually makes the artist, what separates him from others (non-artists whose lives and problems resemble his, or would-be artists who never seem to make the grade) is unaccountably nonspecific, i.e., not by itself derived from any necessary, particular — or at least presently obvious — kind of psychological experience or development.

  A few psychoanalysts have continued to struggle with the twin problems of what makes for creativity, and what can be learned from artistic productions, be they ordinary or outstanding. Ernst Kris gave close attention to those who paint and what they produce, and particularly demonstrated the revelatory nature of drawings and paintings done by the psychotic: illness finds its way to the canvas in both themes and styles of representation. Henry Murray spent years perfecting the Thematic Apperception Test, an imaginative and practical way to take advantage of our everyday inclination to look at pictures and talk about them in ways that tell some truth about ourselves. With the development of the Children’s Apperception Test boys and girls also could be asked to say what a series of pictures — photographs of drawings or paintings — meant to them.

  Of course for several decades social, experimental, and educational psychologists, or those interested in measuring neurological development,
have used drawings in studying the attitudes children have, how competent and coordinated they are with their hands, or how they see themselves or others. Asking a child to draw himself, his parents, or simply a boy or a girl has become one of a number of ways to appraise growth, development, intelligence, and in some cases a patient’s psychological status.

  In therapy, however, child psychiatrists often use toys and games rather than crayons and paints. Even in research the significant work done by social scientists on the child’s growing sense of racial identity, his awareness of prejudice or his capacity to have it consistently, has involved the use of dolls and other toys coupled with questionnaires or a series of picture cards. Such methods have the advantage of being standard, somewhat measurable ways to evaluate children and compare their feelings on one or another issue.

  On the other hand, to ask a child to draw whatever he wishes to draw in order to learn about his racial attitudes, or even to request from a series of children that they each draw the same person, place, or thing for such a purpose, is to court the subjective and the individually variable, usually thought of as the clinician’s job. Consequently any “results” that emerge from that sort of endeavor must rest upon the validity of case histories, upon the cumulative insights of a very particular kind those histories may offer. In this regard, I am offering the analysis of many hundred drawings as evidence only of what they suggest to a child psychiatrist who has come to know those who drew them. I value these pictures for what they have told me about individual children, rather than children in general or children of one race or another. The fact that many other children, under certain social and historical circumstances, share feelings that these children have been willing to indicate with crayons and paint is probably a fair assumption. That is as far as I would care to take the matter of what scientific relevance this study has.