Children of Crisis; A Study of Courage and Fear, by Robert Coles
Goodman, Susan
"The teachers, they say it's inside us, that's where all the trouble is and the mean words, they come from people with bad hearts; but it's outside, too, because they're all the time...
...None of this is new to the literature of prejudice...
...The white young sters ascribe to the blacks all sorts of forbidden pleasures, and therefore thoroughly disapprove of them...
...it was shock, like seasickness...
...The vignettes of the people who were forced to contend with the integration of the first elementary school in New Orleans comprise the best reporting in the book...
...They've helped me realize that some unpleasant times in my own life were not spent in vain...
...I felt sick all over, and frightened...
...As Coles cries out, after relating the poverty-stricken life history of a lyncher and noting that his actions do not differ from those of many "respectable" citizens in his state: I wonder about the eager emphasis given private, aberrant motives by some in our society...
...The Negro children believe themselves mutilated and suffer inhibited rage against the whites...
...A third is that we have no right to call the ones who persist in evil action "crazy...
...Obviously a sympathetic man, he is neither ready to condemn the people he interviews nor eager to fit their experiences into a preconceived theory...
...for those who have, the information is repetitious...
...As for the public and private etiology of race hatred—a matter of considerable importance— Coles's analysis is a bit more sophisticated, but not much more profound, than the view of the six-yearold Negro child I have quoted...
...That he does not know enough yet about the human condition to predict who will come through, or why, or when, forms another strand...
...Coles quotes her as saying after two years with an integrated class: I've never felt so useful, so constantly useful, not just to the children but to our whole society, American as well as Southern...
...Coles asks the children illuminating questions and makes good psychological sense out of their replies...
...Unfortunately, Coles does not go on to ask why the mere sight of a naked Negro lady in a dormitory shower should so discomfit her white fellow student...
...Life is indeed perplexing, as Coles observes, but there's more to be done in classifying and explaining that confusion than he chooses to undertake...
...he sits "on the front steps of the house carving a piece of wood, throwing it away, hurling the knife at the house's wood, then fetching a new branch to peel, cut and again discard...
...However, because of the tangible witness of the drawings and the painful aptness of the children's comments, this report moves us in accordance with the actuality of the innocents' suffering...
...Those children, all of them, have given me more than I've given them...
...She was talking with Robert Coles, the author of this book, and a child psychiatrist by profession...
...There were several showers and she was standing there, drying herself...
...In reading his reports of interviews with their elders, on the other hand, one occasionally feels that he failed to probe deeply enough...
...My mind was in a terrible panic...
...He insists on the "clumsy, undefined, paradoxical flow of life and its events which may, in fact, be the truth of it...
...Here, Coles's training as a child psychiatrist comes to the fore in his sensitive interpretations of the drawings he asked them to make...
...Speaking 14 years after the event, she says of an episode that happened in the women's dormitory where she stayed: I'll never quite forget the second it took place...
...She had just come out herself (I thought about that later, you know) and we were probably taking showers at the same time...
...Fortunately, 13 of the pictures are reproduced...
...I was just another teacher up North for the summer, but it made me a better Southerner, a better person, for a long time afterward...
...What I remember—I'll never forget it—is that horrible feeling of being caught in a terrible trap...
...That's a privilege, to be able to have your life tested and found somewhat consistent, at least over the long haul...
...Once and for all, in the face of what we have seen in this century, we must all know that the animal in us can be elaborately rationalized in a society until an act of murder is seen as selfdefense and dynamited houses become evidence of moral courage...
...This analysis of the origins of prejudice came from a six-year-old Negro girl who walked daily through mobs in 1960 to the first integrated school in New Orleans...
...The bestiality I have seen in the South cannot be attributed only to its psychotic and ignorant people...
...I thought of everything I could do at once, but I felt paralyzed...
...He does tell how she learned to eat, as well as shower, with Negroes that Northern summer and how, many years later, she volunteered to teach one of the first integrated classes in Alabama...
...I thought of running out of the room and screaming at that woman to get out, or running back into the shower...
...Coles says the purpose of the book is to find out: "What was happening to that Negro child both in school and in her mind...
...The price paid by both is that of losing much of their humanity in the process of growing up...
...What made het white assailants finally take their angry opposition to the streets...
...When I saw her I didn't know what to do...
...came, through an unforseeable sequence of events, "determined" enough to send her children to school during the lengthy boycott...
...I felt like fainting, and vomiting, too...
...Its fault is that he does not tell us much more...
...Then there are the few black and white children who set the crucial precedent for Southern education simply by going to school...
...and not knowing what to do about it...
...Anyway, she came out of hers just a few seconds before I came out of mine...
...That ordinary people can act morally in a social crisis forms an underlying theme of Coles's book...
...A caste system certainly can flourish on the ground of such passionate abhorrence...
...While they did that, why did other white people refuse to join them—or even to take the little girl's side...
...but it's outside, too, because they're all the time around, the people shouting at us, and they fired my daddy from his job yesterday...
...Nor is the confused, damaged South the only region of this country in need of that particular knowledge...
...The author does a compassionate job of psychological journalism in answering questions of this sort about Southerners faced with desegreagtion in New Orleans and elsewhere...
...Oddly, this seems especially the case with matters that apparently belong in the province of a psychiatrist...
...There is the fat white woman, a member of the mob, "struggling to manage herself and her large family in the face of poverty, ignorance, social isolation, and virtual abandonment by her occasionally employed husband...
...I guess I grew up there in New York, and used the strength from it down here later on...
...It was an ordinary morning and I was coming out of the shower when suddenly I saw that nigra woman...
...The teachers, they say it's inside us, that's where all the trouble is and the mean words, they come from people with bad hearts...
...Many ignore crying, horrible, concrete social and political realities whose effects—as a matter of fact—might lead us to understand how [the lyncher] and others like him continue to plague us...
...It is easier, I suppose, to look for the madman's impulse and make explaining the doctor's task...
...Coles relates an interview with a white teacher who describes a summer she has spent in New York City doing graduate work in education...
...The substance of Coles's interpreta tion is that, by the age of three, chil dren of both races perceive and ex press—either verbally or visually—the way the caste system molds their lives...
...It was if I'd seen the Devil himself, or I was about to face Judgment Day...
...There's the unemployed Negro father, who lost his job because his daughter was attending a white school...
...This enables the reader to appreciate the accuracy of Coles's analysis of the characteristic fashion in which racial prejudice shapes the content and composition of the art works...
...she describes herself, Coles says, when she complains of Negroes: "They eat pig food and they eat just like pigs, too...
...The account of how she put aside her prejudices to teach—and to teach kindness more than subject matter— is a document of human decency...
...There's the white, Catholic mother—previously untroubled by segregation—who be...
...it took hold of me all over and I wondered whether I was about to die...
...The book can be highly recommended to those who have not been exposed to the voluminous writings on the South...
...The virtue of Coles's book is that he tells us this...
Vol. 14 • September 1967 • No. 5
