The Poetry of Childhood

"They're hungry. / So hungry, they bark the pain. / They would eat me / Down to the last meat / On the last bone. / But they'd still run and growl/So, it's lucky the police have a chain on them/ The mad white dogs!"

Those were the statements of Ruby Bridges, a black girl of six in 1961; she faced viciously threatening segregationist mobs every day for months as she desegregated (all by herself) a totally boycotted elementary school in New Orleans. Many Americans may well remember her—escorted by federal marshalls past the howling men and women. She knew they wanted her blood. Yet, she smiled at her tormentors. She even told me she prayed for them. Why? Because her grandmother told her that "they were to be pitied—as Christ pitied His assailants." But Ruby was not one to bury her fears in the sands of nightly appeals to God. She was plain scared. She was also plain smart; she took careful, daily estimate of the dangerous world around her. She tried to understand what was happening and why. No student of history, no political scientist, and bless her, no psychologist or psychiatrist, she yet was able to come to a conclusion or two, and assert her humanity by putting her sense of things into the instruments of a particular language: words.

I have taken some remarks made to me in February of 1961, in the course of a few minutes of innocent afternoon "talk," and put marks between the various sentences, which followed one another, just as they do above. Ruby intended no poem; yet, she was calling upon a sustained image, and her brief, pungent sentences, punctuated by occasional moments of silence—pauses which possessed great power—were not easily forgotten by my wife or me. Nor by one of the federal marshalls, a big, burly, somewhat morose fellow, who only gradually overcame some of his strenuous white, Alabama prejudices enough to take an obvious, if reluctant fancy to "the kid," as he always called Ruby. One day the marshall, often ravenously hungry himself, had a comment for my wife and me: "She's right, the kid. They're crazy, those people on the street; and they're hungry—for her. They would eat her up alive, if we weren't there to protect her! She's a smart one. She's like a poet, she says these things, and you don't forget them. I tell my wife what I've heard the kid say, and my wife asks how come our daughter doesn't talk like that, and she's nine, three years older. Maybe our daughter does, though; maybe we don't hear her."

I got to know his daughter, eventually; and a number of other ordinary white Southern children, who, like Ruby, had to go through the confusions of historical change—which had become, for them, everyday life. A white girl, a year older than Ruby, and a member of a family that lived on the same street as the federal marshall just mentioned, had this to tell me one day in 1962: "It's over, the storm. / The black clouds came / The white clouds came/Then, lightning and thunder, a bad rain / We almost drowned / Fire and noise and water / Now the sky is clear / The sun shines on both races / Like the Bible says / The rain falls on the just / The unjust, too—some of us white folks / I pray for all people / In this city, not God's: New Orleans."

She spoke those words in May of 1962, already a hot and humid day in that old, cosmopolitan port city. I've not pulled sentences out of context. I've not really left out much—a few stray words, a few oh's and ah's. She was telling my wife and me a story of sorts. She was remembering. She was trying to make sense of what she'd gone through. As she talked, she used her hands, her arms. She used her voice: ups and downs of excitement, sadness, fear, bewilderment, all those "emotions" my kind talks...