How the Two Halves Live

SEVERAL HARVARD STUDENTS this winter made their way down to the richly festive New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations, and along with their descriptions of the parades, balls and strings of brightly colored beads, they returned with some shocking snippets of overheard conversation. As one of the main floats in the Mardi Gras procession passed by, with black men and women dressed as slaves spinning batons and running alongside the float, one well-dressed, slightly inebriated New Orleans citizen was heard to remark, "They really do look like monkeys, don't they?" The remark at first stunned the Harvard visitors, but as the three-day festivities went on and more comments expressing similar attitudes toward New Orleans blacks were heard, the students fancied themselves as anthropologists visiting a foreign land, and the shock subsided. They said that those members of the New Orleans elite, along with the less wealthy participants in Mardi Gras, seemed to assume roles, in which the poor were performing as servants to the rich. Superficially, at least, the visitors saw few if any signs of strain or tension between the classes.

The descriptions of Mardi Gras are fascinating, prompting one to try to envision the scene, and aided by photographs, the task is easier. But to imagine the New Orleans burgher, dressed in the black tuxedo, drink in hand, speaking out in favor of white-minority rule in South Africa, and before that, hearing the blond-haired fellow referring to the black men dressed in slave garb as monkeys, is much more difficult for me, as I sit in my Winthrop House room, isolated from the careless ways of the very rich, as well as the desperate struggles of the very poor.

Robert Coles has found a way at least to begin, if possible, to understand how such statements can be uttered. He studies and talks to their children, and the result is a book called Privileged Ones, in which he attempts to portray the children of the well-off and the rich, and the ones who are running this country. At the same time Coles has published the fourth volume of the Children of Crisis series, Eskimos, Chicanos and Indians, a book he believes the "narcissism of the rich" will overshadow. And, as he leaves his University Health Services office on Holyoke Street, Coles adds that he thinks the book about the nation's underprivileged is "more interesting" than the latter. In fact, Eskimos, Chicanos and Indians is thought-provoking from the view of the outsider, because this is how it was written, but Privileged Ones carries a much deeper message. Coles wrote Privileged Ones, the fifth and final volume of Children of Crisis, because working-class people interviewed by Coles repeatedly told him that if he really wanted to understand the nation's poor, he must also study the ones who control their lives. "You really can't know about plain working people like us unless you go find out about the bigshots. It's their decisions which make us end up living our lives the way we do," one woman told Coles.

By talking with the daughter of a rich New Orleans man, or the grandchild of a mineowner or the daughter of one of the vice presidents of a New England electronics firm, Coles seeks to and succeeds in portraying those characteristics of the rich which preserve the inequalities of American society. His interviews with the Indians, Chicanos and Eskimos are less directed toward understanding a specific aspect of their lives and are less likely to attract the attention of readers because his writing is not particularly analytical or incisive.

THE DEDICATION on the frontispiece of Privileged Ones is perhaps the best statement of Coles's purpose of writing books on the lives of children in the U.S. It reads:

To America's children, rich and well-off as well as poor, in the hope that some day, one day soon, all boys and girls everywhere in the world will have a decent chance to survive, grow, and affirm themselves as human beings.

Coles admits frankly that he offers no statistics and is writing, at times subjectively, as a "naturalistic observer." As a psychiatrist, he wishes to learn what children feel and, in his own words, "what they hope for." As an historian, he is interested in the circumstances which have shaped their thoughts, and while his writing might not make good footnotes for an economic thesis on the plight of American minorities, his work is to be deservedly respected on a more humanistic and literary level.

To a reader who is unfamiliar with Chicanos, Eskimos and Indians, volume four ultimately fails. The book has already received less attention than Privileged Ones, not because the former's subject matter is not necessarily less interesting, but because Coles does not have a strong handle on the way these children perceive their world. One sketch reads like another, until finally, all the narratives melt into one. In my impressions of these children, I am left thinking that the children who do not live in or near big cities, who have less opportunities than privileged ones, are generally less narcissistic and more individualistic. They do not parrot their parents to the extent that rich kids do, and their lives are conditioned by nature more than anything else.

THE RICH CHILDREN, on the other hand, provide a crystal-clear window into their parents' minds, and Coles is on familiar ground in presenting their lives. As a reviewer, I am perhaps prejudiced by my own first-hand knowledge of how the rich live. Growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut, the descriptions of homes as "dramatic and secluded; old, historic and architecturally interesting; large with good grounds; private and palatial..." conjure up scenes that I have come into contact with. And while I have not lived inside these homes of the very rich, I know how parents with money have worked to provide their children with private school educations that cater to their weaknesses and develop their strengths. To avoid generalizing, there are undoubtedly as many wealthy parents who look after their children's lives with care, as there are those who use their money to escape the obligation of dealing with their children at all. Coles, however, is more concerned with the ways that these children respond to their maids, New Orleans mob scenes in the '60s, and the migrant farm workers employed by their fathers.

Coles's observations culminate in two main themes: entitlement and paternalism. His observations of the rich in Privileged Ones grow into a theory, even though Coles wishes to keep himself from over-simplifying or generalizing. The word entitlement, according to Coles, was first uttered to him by a wealthy man--a lawyer and a stockbroker from a prominent family who was describing a social phenomenon that he saw in his children. Coles has adopted the idea to "describe what perhaps all quite well-off Americans transmit to their children--an important psychological common denominator, I believe: an emotional expression, really, of those familiar, class-bound prerogatives, money and power."

AS CHILDREN PASS through their narcissistic stages and develop into adults, it is the notion of entitlement which begins to distinguish the classes. Poor children feel "narcissistic despair," while rich children feel "narcissistic entitlement," Coles says. And for someone who has often wondered how the rich and even some of the not-so-rich students at Harvard can act so often as though they own the world, the word entitlement lingers, suggesting some sort of an answer. Entitlement does not necessarily connote material possessions which "spoil" a child--a child can be spoiled and not necessarily feel that everything in the world belongs to them--but entitlement is an attitude passed down through the generations, from parent to child, which prompted the seven-year-old son of an Appalachian mine-owner to make the following observation after a mine explosion in 1963:

I heard my mother saying she felt sorry for the families of the miners. I feel sorry for them, too. I hope the men who got hurt get better. I'm sure they will. My father has called in doctors from Lexington. He wants the best doctors in all of Kentucky for those miners. Daddy says it was the miners' fault; they get careless, and the next thing you know, there's an explosion. It's too bad. I guess there are a lot of kids who are praying hard for their fathers. I wish God was nice to everyone. He's been very good to us. My Daddy says it's been hard work, running the mine and another one he has. It is just as hard to run a mine as it is to go down and dig coal. I'm glad my father is the owner though. I wouldn't want him to get killed or hurt bad down there, way underground. Daddy has given us a good life. We have a lot of fun coming up, he says, in the next few years. We're going on some trips. Daddy deserves his vacations. He says he's really happy because he can keep us happy, and he does. If we want something real bad, we go tell him or mum, and they oblige us almost all the time. That's what Daddy almost always says--that he's glad to oblige my sister and me.

Coles's ability to define such an expression of entitlement seems at first obvious and perhaps oversimplistic. But it remains an important phenomenon to understand, and hearing those words from a seven-year-old child, who has few inhibitions or fears to express himself and what he has been taught, as opposed to the adult who has been taught that he should feel guilty about his privileged position, puts the facts in their barest truth.

Not all children are born to accept their parents' dictums so easily, and Coles vividly portrays the experiences of children who are taught the second theme of their privileged lives, paternalism. Hence the example of Larry, the young son of a grower who persists in asking his father, at the age of six, why there are children his age working in the fields, helping their parents, when he himself was doing nothing. His feelings take on a stronger idealistic tone at 11, when he writes an essay in school explaining why he is lucky and "unlucky" and how he does not want to be the "boss" when he grows up, because,

My father has made a lot of money and like he says, a lot of people have jobs because he's made jobs for them. But a lot of the people who work for him are very poor, and they couldn't be much worse off. My father says they should work harder and make more money. I've seen them work and they can't make much more money than they do.

The boy Larry is scolded in school and asked why he was worrying about the growers. The essay apparently called a good deal of commotion, the boy ran away from school, thought of running away from home and took vows to do something with his life which would help these people; a few years later, however, he became good friends again with his father, leaving his idealistic ambitions behind. He was taught by his parents to stop asking questions about the migrant workers, and to save his thoughts for later.

IT IS DIFFICULT to believe in the doctrine of original sin after reading the comments children offer at such young ages. They are full of questions and perceptions which are usually sharper than most people will give them credit for. In one sentence, Coles quotes a young girl who has synthesized her human instincts, with a tidbit from the maid and something "Daddy" said, and the reader is left with an insightful summary of capitalism in its more distressing form. The poor people need the rich to give them jobs and we are obligated to help them, but at the same time, "we are glad that we are not one of them." The words belong to the children, who learned them from their parents and, in turn, will most likely pass them on down to their children. Entitlement explained why a blonde haired man sitting at the Rex celebration of Mardis Gras feels entitled to sit there and defend the privileges of the white minority in South Africa. And while this year's Mardi Gras celebrations were quiet, New Orleans did indeed have "its troubles" back in the '60s. Perhaps Coles's optimistic advice is best taken by both sides--that we never stop asking questions, and that we teach our children to just keep on asking.