130
ROBERT COLES
for the "uppity" Negro even now as Nat Turner's Virginia ever was.
When I watched that man say goodbye to his son I wondered what he
could possibly be thinking. I saw the mixed pride and terror in his eyes
and I heard him resort to history, just as "we" do in the most desperate of
moments, just as Styron does in his novel; but I never quite dared
imagine all that went through his mind - in contrast, that is, to what
he was willing to say, and say to the likes of me. (Perhaps one day
psychiatrists will realize that a lot more goes on in the mind than even
wilIing and talkative patients can convey,
or
their doctors can compre–
hend and formulate, even by resort to such catch-all terms as the
"unconscious," that large, rambling and convenient house which pre–
sumably shelters everything not spoken or remembered.)
And the son, what could I "make" of the son? What was "going
on" in his mind as he took himself and his race into that white, rural,
Mississippi school, in that hard-core segregationist county, with its active,
powerful Klan? One of the first things the son did tell me had to do
with members of the Klan. They were all about, he was told by a white
boy in the locker room, and they meant business. They had their execu–
tions, and their next target was obvious. They would one day appear out
of nowhere, a "healthy number" of them. So, the Negro boy told me
what the white boy told him: "There are a healthy number of Klan
people hereabouts." He spoke in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice.
He was too old for me to rely on drawings - paintings - as I do
with young children when I want to get an idea of at least some of the
things that pass through their minds. He was too shy, too reserved, too
dignified for me to ask him direct questions. (Not all reluctance, even
on the part of a self-declared patient, need be called "resistance" - by
hungry listeners, psychiatrists who all too often want merely to hear
confirmed what they already claim to know.)
So, at that time, I tried to
imagine
what was alive in the mind of
that rather old child, that young man who one moment made me feel
childish - not to mention excluded, ashamed and useless - and another
moment seemed as open and direct and captivating as Wordsworth
thought a "boy" of his age should still
be.
By that time I knew all the
conflicts
he had - psychological, social,
the
lot - and I knew the
defenses
he had or would soon be required to build, and I had some
idea of what he was
thinking,
because I had asked many other Negro
children what they had in mind when, say, they walked past a fierce
mob on their way to an American school. I have never really known how
to pull it all together, though - the conflicts, the defenses, the thoughts,
the social and economic "background," the particular family's "goals."
There is something more going on in the father and the son I have
