Now, I've been involved in a number of larger social movements--with the Civil Rights movement in the South, with the Appalachian volunteers, with migrant farmers and with groups that have been trying to effect very fundamental changes.
But I'm very worried about the dangers of a kind of political activity that ignores the ironies and ambiguities of life, including political life. And I am worried about the apparently inevitable things that happen to all institutions, the legal calcifications and rigidities that occur in even the most militantly free and flexible of groups once they have obtained power, once they start consolidating themselves and become self-protective. These are problems that I think transcend even the New Left; they're human problems.
I think a lot of these doubts are shared by people in the New Left, shared by a lot of students, but I don't think these people always act on their doubts, and I'm afraid I want them to act on their doubts as well as on their political princlples. I want them to demonstrate some of the tension that goes between humility and arrogance, some of the tension that goes between idealism and pragmatism, some of the tension that goes between pride and self-doubt and a kind of inner agony.
The Irony of Liberal Agonizing
I worry about my own privileged position as someone who is here in this office, and can go back and forth between communities, and can read [T. S. Eliot's] Four Quartets and get something out of them, but who is not struggling for his next week's salary. I think that the criticism that is leveled against people like me is a valid one: We are privileged; if we don't know it, we are living in sin--I use the word sin.
On the other hand, if I try to destroy myself to be like the people I work with, if I shed myself of the privileges that I've had all my life--well, I think that's impossible. If there's anything I've learned about the people I've worked with, I have found that they are perhaps more accepting of my life than I am of it. I think we live with guilt, we live with our Puritan heritage, we live with all of the self-derogation and self-assault that goes with complicated middle-class Western life.
Let me give you an example of the kind of agonizing I am talking about, how unnecessary and irrelevant it is. I happen to drive a sports car. When I first started working in the South ten years ago, I knew that I couldn't go with that sports car into some of these communities because I had decided that that would interfere with my relationship with these people. Well, it took me a long time to feel free enough to get to know some of these children well enough so that they could visit us in our home, and now, of course, I have found that these children love my sports car, and that these children don't begrudge me it, and that these children don't begrudge me a lot of the things that I begrudge myself.
Coles, dissatisfied with children's books that "abusively romanticize" real experience, wrote a children's book this year--Dead End School--depicting the difficulties faced by two ghetto boys when they are thrust into a desegregation effort. The boys, Larry and Jim, are modeled after two boys Coles got to know in Roxbury. The story gives Jim's view of his own experience in the bussing crisis. Larry peripherally presents a black militant reaction to that same experience.
Coles comments on the difficulty of communicating social complexities to children:
COLES: The book was described by one critic as "well-scrubbed." It was meant to be a compliment, but it's a terribly accurate and I think just criticism of the book. Those children emerge as well-scrubbed because I couldn't use some of the swear words I would have liked to.
As it is, the book is not the usual children's book, and I'm afraid it isn't going to be overwhelmingly received by a lot of conventionally minded guardians of children's literature.
Reach the Children
I meant this book to reach middle-class white children. I wasn't really trying to describe Negro children or their view of the world. I wanted to describe through the activities of children how some of these confusing social and political events occur, what gets them going, how ambiguous and tentative and accidental a lot of them are.
The real challenge that I failed to make in writing that book was the challenge of writing it from the point of view of Larry rather than Jim, of conveying Larry's life to middle-class children--Larry being the boy who came from a much more disorganized home, really a black militant. But it's difficult anyway to communicate these lives to other lives that are so different, and so I chose the easier way out, I chose the black boy who is more like white middle-class boys.
QUESTION: Do you think middle-class children are receptive to social themes, or to lives so far outside their experience?
COLES: I know that this book will not be the easiest book for a lot of children to read, but I think it will get things going in their mind, even if they don't really totally comprehend everything that I had in mind when I was writing it--that it as least a beginning.
I've written another children's book--on another complicated subject, marijuana; and this is directed at junior high children. I think after this I'm going to stop for awhile, because these are such complicated subjects to write about for young people. They require more sweat from me than anything else I've done.