Children of Crisis Read online

  It seemed to me, then, that on my account Ruby had merely tightened up a preexisting inclination to be confounded and troubled at the representation of racial differences, not to mention the implications those differences had for how people lived. Eventually I asked her why she thought twice about how much brown she would give to a colored child. She was then eight, and we had known one another for two years. She replied directly: “When I draw a white girl, I know she’ll be okay, but with the colored it’s not so okay. So I try to give the colored as even a chance as I can, even if that’s not the way it will end up being.”

  Two years later Ruby and I could talk even more openly. At ten she was still the outgoing, winning girl she always had been, though of course each time I saw her she was taller, thinner, a bit more composed, a little less the child. She wasn’t very much interested in drawing any more. She preferred to talk. She and I looked over many of her drawings and at various intervals she made comments about them, much as if she were a colleague of mine. Almost in that vein I commented that her most recent work was less prolific but very accomplished indeed: “You didn’t draw much this past year, but when you did the people were really alive and very accurately shown, and the buildings look as real as can be.” She smiled and answered quickly: “I guess when you grow older you can see better, and so you can draw better. My teacher told me last week that my handwriting was getting better, too.” A few minutes went by and I decided to persist with my comments on her artwork, this time with a bluntness I can only justify as feeling quite “right” and appropriate at the time: “Ruby, you know my wife and I were looking at your drawings last night, and we both noticed how differently you draw Negro people now, in contrast to the way you did years ago when we first started coming to see you. Do you think there’s any reason for that, apart from the fact that you’re now a better artist in every way?”

  She paused longer than usual, and I began to feel in error for asking the question and nervous about what she might be feeling. I was scurrying about in my mind for a remark that would change the subject without doing so too abruptly when she looked right at me and spoke out: “Maybe because of all the trouble going to school in the beginning I learned more about my people. Maybe I would have anyway; because when you get older you see yourself and the white kids; and you find out the difference. You try to forget it, and say there is none; and if there is you won’t say what it be. Then you say it’s my own people, and so I can be proud of them instead of ashamed.” When she finished she smiled, as if she had delivered a hard speech and was relieved to have it done. I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand she was still the same Ruby I had known all those years; yet she now seemed grown-up. Her arms were folded quietly in her lap; her language was so clear, so pointed; and she somehow seemed both content with herself as she was and determined to make something of herself in the future. “Ruby is an exceptionally alert child,” one of her teachers wrote on her report card a few days before Ruby and I had this talk. The teacher realized that her pupil had gone through a lot and had gained an order of understanding, of worldliness, that is perhaps rare in elementary school children, at least in more sheltered ones.

  Ruby had for several years a classmate named Jimmie, a lively, agile, particularly freckled boy whose blond hair tended to fall over his forehead. She drew several pictures of him for me; he sat near her and they knew one another rather well. When I first asked Ruby to do a picture of any school chum she wished (there were only three at the time) she obliged with a painted picture of Jimmie that certainly did not ignore his hair and eyes (Figure 5). (I could not help contrasting the painting with one of a Negro boy [Figure 6] Jimmie’s age and size she had done the day before.) “He is a good boy, sometimes,” she said of Jimmie, adding the last word of qualification after a genuine moment of hesitancy. In point of fact Jimmie’s behavior troubled her. One minute he would be attentive and generous, anxious to play games or even share food with her. Yet in a flash he could turn on her, and not just as one child will do with another. Ruby knew why, and could put it into words: “Jimmie plays with me okay, but then he remembers that I’m colored, so he gets bad.” I asked whether he was “bad” at other times — fresh or spiteful simply out of a moment’s impulse. She handled my question rather forthrightly, even with a touch of impatience: “Well, he’s bad sometimes when he wants things his own way and someone won’t let him get it; but I mean it’s different when he gets bad because I’m colored. He can be my friend and play real nice with me, and suddenly he just runs and says bad things, and he even gets scared of me and says he’s going to leave; but he comes back. He forgets, and then he remembers again.”

  Jimmie’s parents had it no easier. Like him they could not establish in their minds a clear-cut set of attitudes toward colored people. When riots made their son’s school attendance dangerous they kept him home. As the mobs achieved their purpose, a near-total boycott, the noise they made and the terror they inspired in passersby gradually subsided. A few white families sent their children back to the schools involved, some in direct defiance of the small crowds that persisted, others rather quietly, almost secretly, through rear doors or side doors. Jimmie’s parents sent him back as soon as it was safe to do so openly. When I saw him come to the school, neatly dressed, carrying his lunch box, I thought the very spirit of sanity resided in him, and with him was returning to the deserted halls and classrooms of the building he so casually and confidently entered. There was something very open and calm about him as he walked along — and I guessed something refreshing, something unsullied, also.

  As I came to know Jimmie and his family I realized how unfair I had been to the boy when I first saw him. I pictured him as Ruby’s hope. In fact he returned to school in spite of Ruby because his parents did not want him to waste months of time learning nothing. When he first met Ruby he told her the facts rather explicitly: “My mother told me to stay away from you.” Ruby told me what she had been told, then informed me that Jimmie had contradicted his own words only seconds later by asking her to join him in a game. “So I did” was her way of letting the matter drop.

  When Jimmie and I started drawing together he made his feelings about Negroes rather clear: either they were in some fashion related to animals, or the color of their skin proved that if they were human they were certainly dirty human beings — and dangerous, too. I don’t think Ruby ever knew the fear she inspired in Jimmie, nor did Jimmie have any idea how very much Ruby strived to portray herself with his features and coloring, as if then she could be less afraid of him.

  When I asked Jimmie to draw his school as it appeared to him the very first day he came to enroll in it — before Ruby’s presence caused its various afflictions — he drew a rather conventional brick building; he carefully emphasized its stucco character by covering the bricks with some yellow. There were no chimneys. The grass was uniformly green, and flowers were everywhere. The sun looked down on the almost bucolic scene with a smiling face. I have seen dozens of such drawings by children of Jimmie’s age, though I did take note of his definite artistic ability and his very keen, even meticulous powers of observation.

  For a while Jimmie drew pictures of his home, his parents, his friends, and himself. He was particularly fond of landscapes, and once did eight of them in two weeks — each surprisingly different, though all dwelling upon trees, grass, and water. When I first asked him to draw a picture of Ruby he looked at me quite in dismay and said he couldn’t. I asked why. He now appeared cross: “Because I don’t know what she looks like. I don’t look at her close if I can help it.”

  I asked him whether sometimes he couldn’t help noticing her. “Accidents happen sometimes, Jimmie, even when we try to do as we feel we should.” He nodded, and allowed that he had managed a few glimpses at Ruby, and would try to draw her. He started to do so rather furtively, then somehow lost his nervousness, so that by the end he was the confident and scrupulously attentive craftsman and landscapist he always was — except, that is,
for what he had done to Ruby (Figure 7). It was almost as if he had suddenly embraced surrealism. In the midst of a stretch of grass he abruptly placed her, without feet, legs inserted in a piece of land left strangely sandy and barren in contrast to what surrounded it. He made Ruby small, though her arms were larger proportionately than those he usually drew. She had only the thinnest line of a mouth (Jimmie usually was careful to show teeth and indicate lips by double lines) and pinpoint eyes. Her hair was frizzly black, yet curiously and inappropriately long. She was brown-black, much more strikingly so than Ruby’s medium-brown complexion justified.

  I asked what Ruby was doing in the picture. Jimmie said that he didn’t know. I asked whether he could imagine something she might be doing, even if it wasn’t apparent from the drawing. He thought about it for a few seconds, looking intently at what he had done and at the crayons. I saw his eyes fall upon a bottle of cola and some crackers. A second later he had his answer: “Maybe she is drinking a Coke and eating candy or something. My mother says niggers eat stuff like that all day long, and their teeth rot away because they’re no good for you all the time.” The sweet tooth he was learning to master only with difficulty Ruby somehow was permitted to enjoy, though he felt sure her day of suffering would come.

  In time Jimmie was able to develop on paper the various (and conflicting) feelings he had toward Ruby and her race. He drew Ruby many times, at intervals upon my request and often because he wanted to do so, or felt that I silently wished him to do so. For many weeks she appeared only as a speck of brown or in caricature, sometimes both in one picture, usually on what he reminded me was his street. Jimmie had obvious trouble picturing her at all. He hesitated as he did at no other time. He told me that he didn’t know what she looked like: “She’s funny. She’s not like us, so I can’t draw her like my friends. Besides, she hides a lot from us.” Whereupon I asked him where she hid. “She doesn’t really hide. I mean she stays away sometimes; but if I say something, she answers me all right.” I wanted to know whether he had any idea why Ruby might be keeping her distance from him and the others. He knew exactly why: “Well, she’s colored, that’s why.” I reminded Jimmie that colored children lived nearby, and often played with white children. (In New Orleans large areas of the city are thoroughly mixed racially, and have been for generations.) He knew that, too: “That’s different. It’s on the street not in school. My daddy says that on the street it’s for everybody, but inside is where you have to be careful.”

  In fact he made a distinction at first between the classroom and the school playground. When I asked him whether he would draw a picture of Ruby at school he readily obliged, though invariably he put Ruby in the play area outside the building. Finally I mentioned what I saw him doing, and he scarcely hesitated before replying: “The teacher said it won’t be long before we go back to normal. She said that if most kids still stay home and the people still make all the noise in front of the school, then they’ll send Ruby away and the trouble will be over; she said Ruby still isn’t a regular member of the school, but that we have to be polite, anyway.” The yard, for him, was like a waiting room, and in one drawing he put a bench in it — in actuality there was none — and Ruby on the bench.

  In time Jimmie took Ruby into the building he drew, and in time he regularly came to see her as an individual. Amorphous spots and smudges of brown slowly took on form and structure. Ruby began to look human every time, rather than, say, a rodent or a fallen leaf one day and a rather deformed human being the next. Eventually she gained eyes and well-formed ears. It took more time for her to obtain a normal mouth; and only after a year of knowing her would Jimmie credit her with the pretty clothes he often gave to other girls. In describing Ruby’s speech after he had finished his pictures Jimmie for a long time tried his best to render a Negro dialect (or his version of one). His parents began enjoying such performances, and also hearing from him how “the nigra” was doing in school. They were changing, too — from calling Ruby a “nigger” to calling her a “nigra,” and from wanting no mention of her at home to insisting upon information about her schoolwork and her general behavior. By the middle of our second year’s talks Jimmie was forgetting himself and telling me in his own words and accent what Ruby might be saying in one of his productions.

  Jimmie may have tried to ignore Ruby, he may have consigned her to anonymity, even to the indignity of a dot, or an animal-like appearance, but he never really overlooked the difference her presence made to his school. He showed how embattled it was by drawing a policeman here, a picket with a sign there. The demonstrators were drawn big and open-mouthed, their arms unusually beefy, their hands prominent indeed, a child’s view of the shrill, stifling, clutching power they exercised over the school’s population. As they gradually lost that power and began to disband, Jimmie pictured them as the smaller, less galling irritants they were becoming.

  The school building itself took on a variety of shapes in Jimmie’s mind and on his paper. At first it was a confusing, almost ramshackle building, its walls as flimsy and unreliable as the school’s future seemed at the time. Slowly, though, Jimmie realized that — as he put it — “We’re going to make it.” Quite casually, without self-consciousness, he showed that he meant what he said. His school grew in size, each time looking sounder and more attractive for all the wear it was taking from its assailants. Eventually he allowed the building to dominate everything around it from the shrubbery to the crowd of human beings who once impressed both him and Ruby with their persistence and assertiveness.

  On occasion Jimmie would confine Ruby to her own section of the building (Figure 8), even as Ruby twice drew herself in the middle of a black circle, in turn within the building. Ruby told me each time that she meant to draw her desk, that the circle was her version of a desk. Though I never pressed the matter with her, I felt I could be more curious with Jimmie. I asked him whether he was assigning Ruby a permanent corner of the building. (It was, I thought to myself, always the corner under the chimney, and the chimney was always emitting noticeable — at the very least — or commanding billows of smoke, even on the warm spring days Jimmie did the pictures in question.) On the several occasions I questioned him on the matter he denied any such intention. Then one day he anticipated my renewed interest by letting me know his ideas on why he placed Ruby where he did: “She has to be in the same place, because she always tries to sit near the teacher, and if we take her seat she gets upset and says its hers, and once she cried. So I keep her in the same place, and that’s why.” Since Jimmie often complained that his teacher talked too much and was moody, perhaps the chimney — in Jimmie’s mind — was meant to symbolize his teacher (his disposition black, his talk mainly hot air) rather than racial conflict or the place of the Negro in this world. No matter what the doctor makes of a picture, there are often other possible interpretations. It is only after enough of a particular child’s drawings have been seen that certain trends or directions in thinking (and representation) can be reasonably established — for that child, of course.

  From the very start of our talks I asked Jimmie not only to draw Ruby but her parents and friends as well. He occasionally saw Ruby’s mother when she accompanied Ruby to school, though I doubt he would have protested lack of acquaintance as an excuse for not attempting a picture. His first drawings showed that if he had to distort Ruby’s appearance somewhat he had to caricature other Negroes far more grotesquely. Ruby’s father would appear with enormous teeth and animal-like arms coming down to his feet. Her mother came out equally simian. On several occasions he put both of them in the same picture; they were above the ground and below a tree, a compromise Jimmie never elsewhere felt called upon to make. Quite the contrary, he always started his drawings with broad strokes of brown and green to indicate the land, then firmly placed his people and buildings upon it.

  For Jimmie, Ruby’s house had to resemble its occupants, even though he knew perfectly well where she lived and what houses looked like on that street (i
t was not far from his own). He labored long and hard on his own house, or his school, drawing the walls and windows, the doors and chimneys with increasing skill and refinement over the several years we met. For a long while, however, a Negro home had to be clearly seen as just that, some lines hastily sketched perpendicular to one another, always brown, often not quite fitting together, so that the homes seemed irregular and exposed, though always warm, for every one of them had a chimney stack and plentiful black smoke to justify its presence. It is not that Jimmie has a “fixation” upon chimneys or smoke. His own home often as not lacked both. No Negro home he drew lacked either.

  He furnished other homes or his school with chairs and tables, even curtains, but not Ruby’s house, or those of her neighbors. He piled Ruby’s house and those nearby on top of one another, as if they were a jumble rather than a row of buildings. What is more, he denied them grass and for a long time he denied them the sun.

  I remember so very well the day Jimmie let the sunshine fall upon those homes. It was, in fact, a rather cloudy and humid day, very much an autumn day in New Orleans. I could tell by the slower speed of his drawing hand that he was paying more attention to the homes he was “building.” As we often did, he and I talked as he worked. I was drawing, too; sometimes Jimmie would assign a topic to me in trade for an assignment from me. He told me to draw the Lake Pontchartrain bridge. “You better get a lot of paper, because it’s the longest bridge in the world,” he warned me as we began. As we proceeded I realized that he himself would require more time than usual. He was doing an exceptionally meticulous job with Ruby’s house and a nearby store. He finished the store first, and then told me about it: “Ruby goes there every day after school and gets herself a Coke and some potato chips, and sometimes she gets some extra potato chips to bring to school the next day. She gave us some yesterday; and I like potato chips better than almost anything except maybe dessert and candy, and maybe sometimes ice cream.”