Elsa was glad to put that place in her rearview mirror. She didn’t know what she was looking for, what she was driving toward, but she figured she’d know it when she saw it. A diner, maybe. No reason she couldn’t wait tables. She drove to Bakersfield and felt a little disoriented by the size of the city. So many automobiles and stores and people out walking around, so she turned onto a smaller road and kept driving. South, she thought, or maybe east.
She refused to let one man’s prejudice hurt them after all they’d been through to get here. She was angry that Loreda and Ant had experienced such baseless prejudice, but life was full of such injustice. Just look at how her father had talked about the Italians, the Irish, the Negroes, and the Mexicans. Oh, he took their money and smiled to their faces, but his words were ugly the minute the door closed. Look at what her mother had seen when she’d looked at her newborn granddaughter: the wrong skin color.
Sadly, that ugliness was a part of life and not something Elsa could shield her children from entirely. Not even in California, in their new beginning. She simply had to teach them better.
They passed a sign for DiGiorgio Farms, saw people working in the fields.
A few miles later, outside a nice-looking town, Elsa saw a row of cottages set back from the road, all neatly cared for, with trees for shade. The middle one had a FOR RENT sign in the window.
Elsa eased her foot off the gas, let the truck coast to a stop.
“What’s wrong?” Loreda asked.
“Look at those pretty houses,” Elsa said. “Could we afford that?” Loreda asked.
“We won’t know if we don’t ask,” Elsa said “Maybe, right?” Loreda did not look convinced.
“We could get a puppy if we lived here,” Ant said. “I surely do want a puppy. I’d name him Rover.”
“Every dog is named Rover,” Loreda said.
“Is not. Henry’s dog was named Spot. And—”
“Stay here,” Elsa said. She got out of the truck and closed the door behind her. In the first few steps, she felt a dream open up and welcome her in. A dog for Ant, friends for Loreda, a school bus that stops out front to pick them up. Flowers blooming. A garden …
As she neared the house, the front door opened. A woman came out, wearing a pretty floral-print dress beneath a frilly red apron, and holding a broom. Her bobbed hair was carefully curled and a pair of wireless glasses magnified her eyes.
Elsa smiled. “Hello,” she said. “The house is lovely. How much is the rent?”
“Eleven dollars a month.”
“My. That’s steep. But I can manage it, I’m sure. I could pay six dollars now and the rest—”
“When you get a job.”
Elsa was relieved by the woman’s understanding. “Yes.”
“You’d best get in your car and head on down the road. My husband will be home soon.”
“Perhaps eight dollars—” “We don’t rent to Okies.”
Elsa frowned. “We’re from Texas.”
“Texas. Oklahoma. Arkansas. It’s all the same. You’re all the same. This is a good Christian town.” She pointed down the road. “That’s the direction you want to go. About fourteen miles. That’s where your kind lives.” She went back into her house and shut the door.
A few moments later, she took the FOR RENT sign out of the window and replaced it with a placard that read: NO OKIES.
What was wrong with these people? Elsa knew she wasn’t as clean as she could be and was obviously down on her luck, but still. Most of America was. And she’d offered eight dollars a month. She wasn’t asking for charity or a handout.
Elsa walked back to the truck. “What’s wrong?” Loreda asked.
“The house didn’t look so nice up close. No room for a dog. That woman said we could find a place up the road about fourteen miles. Must be a campground or auto court for people coming west.”
“What’s an Okie?” Loreda asked. “Someone they won’t rent to.” “But—”
“No more questions,” Elsa said. “I need to think.”
Elsa drove past more cultivated fields. There were few farmhouses out here; mostly the landscape was a quilt of new green growth and brown, recently tilled fields. The first sign of civilization was a school, a pretty one, with an American flag flying out front. Not far beyond that was a well- tended-looking county hospital with a single gray ambulance parked by the entrance.
“This is about fourteen miles,” Elsa said, slowing down.
There was nothing here. No stop sign, no farm, no motor court. “Is that a campground, Mommy?” Ant asked.
Elsa pulled off to the side of the road. Through the passenger window she saw a collection of tents and jalopies and shacks set back from the road in a weedy field. There had to be a hundred of them, clustered here and there in community-like pods, but without any real plan or design. They looked like a flotilla of gray sailboats and abandoned automobiles on a brown sea. There was no road to the campground, just ruts in the field, and no sign welcoming campers.
“This must be the place she was talking about,” Elsa said.
“Yay! A campground,” Ant said. “Maybe there’ll be other kids.”
Elsa turned onto the muddy ruts and followed them. An irrigation ditch full of brown water ran the length of the field to her left.
The first tent they came to had a peaked roof and sloping sides; a stovepipe stuck out from the front like a bent elbow. The area in front of the open flaps was cluttered with belongings: dented metal wash buckets,
whiskey barrels, gas cans, a chopping block with an ax stuck in it, an old hubcap. Not far away sat a truck with no tires. Someone had built up slatted sides and draped plastic over it all to create a dry place to live.
“Ewwww,” Loreda said.
There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the placement of the tents and shacks and parked jalopies.
Rail-thin children dressed in rags ran through the tent town, followed by mangy, barking dogs. Women sat hunched on the banks of a ditch, washing clothes in brown water.
One pile of junk turned out to be a dwelling; inside, three children and two adults huddled around a makeshift stove. A family.
A man sat on a rock, wearing only his torn trousers, his feet bare and black soled, his drying shirt and socks spread out in the dirt in front of him. Somewhere, a baby cried.
Okies.
Your kind.
“I don’t like this place,” Ant whined. “It stinks.”
“Turn around, Mom,” Loreda said. “Get us out of here.”
Elsa couldn’t believe people lived this way in California. In America. These folks weren’t bindle stiffs or vagabonds or hobos. These tents and shacks and jalopies housed families. Children. Women. Babies. People who had come here to start over, people looking for work.
“We can’t drive around wasting gas,” Elsa said, feeling sick to her stomach. “We’ll stay here one night, find out what’s going on. Tomorrow I’ll find work and we’ll be on our way. At least there’s a river.”
“River? River?” Loreda said. “That is not a river and this is … I don’t know what this is, but we do not belong here.”
“No one belongs in a place like this, Loreda, but we only have twenty- seven dollars left. How long do you think that will last?”
“Mom, please.”
“We need a plan,” Elsa said. “Getting to California. That was all we thought about. Clearly it wasn’t enough. We need information. Someone here will be able to help us.”
“They don’t look like they can help themselves,” Loreda said.
“One night,” Elsa said. She forced a thin smile. “Come on, explorers. We can handle anything for one night.”
Ant whined again. “But it stinks.”
“One night,” Loreda said, staring at Elsa. “You promise?” “I promise. One night.”
Elsa looked out at the sea of tents and saw a break in them, an empty space between a ragged tent and a shack made of scrap wood. She drove into the empty area and parked on a wide patch of dirt tufted with weeds and grass.
The nearest tent was about fifteen feet away. In front of it was a collection of junk—buckets and boxes, a spindly wooden chair, and a rusted wood-burning stove with a bent pipe.
Elsa parked the truck. They got to work, set up their large tent, staked it in place, and laid the camp mattress in one corner, right down on the dirt floor, and covered it with sheets and quilts.
They unloaded only the supplies they would need for the night. Their suitcases, the food (all of it would need to be guarded constantly in this place), and buckets both for carrying water and for sitting on. Elsa built a small campfire in front of the tent and placed overturned buckets nearby as chairs.
She couldn’t help thinking that they now looked no different from everyone else here. She dropped a blob of lard into the Dutch oven, and when it started to pop, she added a precious chunk of ham along with a few canned tomatoes, a clove of garlic, and a potato cut into cubes.
Ignoring the buckets, Loreda and Ant sat cross-legged in the grassy dirt, playing cards.
When Elsa looked at her daughter, she felt an abiding sadness creep in. It was strange how you could stop seeing people who were right beside you, how images stuck in your head. Loreda was painfully thin, arms like matchsticks, knobby elbows and knees. One sunburn after another had left her cheeks full of freckles and peeling skin.
Loreda was thirteen; she should be filling out, not wasting away. A new worry. Or an old one, grown more vivid in the past hour.
As night fell, the camp livened up. Elsa heard distant conversations, dishes being filled and emptied, and fires crackling. Orange dots—open fires—sprouted here and there. Smoke drifted from tent to tent, carrying food aromas with it. A steady stream of people walked up from the road toward the tents.
Elsa heard footsteps and looked up. A family approached their campsite
—a man, a woman, and four children—two teenaged boys and two young girls. The man, tall and whippet lean, wore stained overalls and a ripped shirt. Beside him stood a woman with shaggy, shoulder-length brown hair that was going gray in streaks. She wore a baggy cotton dress with an apron over it. There seemed to be nothing over her bones but a thin layer of skin; no muscle, no fat. The two skinny little girls wore burlap sacks that had cutouts for their arms and necks; their feet were dirty and bare.
“Howdy, neighbor,” the man said. “Thought we’d come by to welcome y’all.” He held out a single red potato. “We brung yah this. Ain’t much, I know. But we ain’t too heeled, as y’all can tell.”
Elsa was touched by the generosity of the gesture. “Thank you.” She reached for one of their buckets, turned it over, and placed her sweater on it. “Sit, please,” she said to the woman, who smiled tiredly and sat on the bucket, adjusting her housedress to cover her bare, dirty knees.
“I’m Elsa. These are my children, Loreda and Anthony.” She reached sideways, withdrew two precious slices of bread from their loaf. “Please, take these.”
The man took the bread in his callused hands. “I’m Jeb Dewey. This here’s my missus, Jean, and our youngsters, Mary and Buster, Elroy and Lucy.”
The kids moved over to a patch of weedy grass and sat down. Loreda started a new shuffling of the cards.
“How long have you been here?” Elsa asked the adults when the kids were out of earshot. She sat down on an overturned bucket near Jean.
“Almost nine months,” Jean answered. “We picked cotton last fall, but winter here is hard. You got to make enough in cotton to tide you through four months of no pickin’. And don’t let anyone tell you that California is warm in the winter.”
Elsa glanced over at the Deweys’ tent, which was about fifteen feet away. It was at least ten by ten; just like the Martinelli’s. But … how could six people live in such tight quarters for nine months?
Jean saw Elsa’s look. “It can be a mite hard to manage. Sweeping seems like a full-time job.” She smiled, and Elsa saw how pretty she must have been before hunger had whittled her down. “It ain’t like Alabama, I can tell you. We were better off there.”
“I was a farmer,” Jeb said. “Not a big place, but enough for us. It’s the bank’s farm now.”
“Are most of the people here farmers?” Elsa asked.
“Some. Old Milt—he lives in the blue jalopy with the broke axle over yonder—he was a darn lawyer. Hank was a postman. Sanderson made fancy hats. You can’t tell nothin’ by lookin’ at a fella these days.”
“Watch out for Mr. Eldridge. He might come atcha when he drinks. He ain’t been right since his wife and boy died o’ dysentery,” Jean said.
“There must be some work,” Elsa said, leaning forward on the bucket. Jeb shrugged. “We go out every mornin’ to look. They’re pickin’ in
Salinas right now if ya wanna go north. We pick fruit up north in the early summer. You gotta figgur on gas prices before you start movin’. But it’s cotton that gets us along.”
“I don’t know anything about cotton,” Elsa said.
Jean smiled. “It hurts like the dickens to pick, but it’ll save you. The kids’ll do good, too.”
“The kids? What about school?”
“Oh.” Jean sighed. “There’s a school. Down the road a mile or so. But … last fall it took all of us, even the little ones, to pick enough to keep from starvin’. Not that the girls picked much, but I couldn’t leave ’em behind all day, neither.”
Elsa looked at the two little girls. What were they, four and five—in the cotton fields all day? She rushed to change the subject. “Can we get mail anywhere?”
“General delivery in Welty. They hold mail for us.”
“Well.” Jean stood, smoothing her dress. In the gesture, Elsa got a hint of who she had been before California—the quiet, respected wife of a small- town farmer. She’d probably cared about things like Fourth of July parades and wedding quilts and box socials. “Well. I should get supper on the stove. Best be takin’ our leave.”
“It ain’t so bad as it looks,” Jeb said. “You’ll see. Just go to the relief office in Welty as soon as you can. It’s up the road about two miles. You’ve got to register with the state for relief. Tell ’em you’re here. We didn’t register for a couple o’ months and it cost us. Not that it’ll help much now, since—”
“I don’t want money from the government,” Elsa said. She didn’t want them to think she’d come all this way for government handouts. “I want a job.”
“Yeah,” Jeb said. “None of us want to live on the dole. FDR and his New Deals programs done good things to help the workin’ man, but us small farmers and farmworkers sorta got forgot. The big growers got all the power in this state.”
Jean said, “Don’t worry. Y’all can learn to live with anything if you’re together.”
Elsa hoped she managed a smile, but she wasn’t sure. She got to her feet, shook their hands, and watched the entire family walk over to that small, dirty tent.
“Mom?” Loreda said, coming up beside her.
Don’t cry.
Don’t you dare cry in front of your daughter.
“It’s terrible,” Loreda said. “Yes.”
And that awful smell pervaded everything. Died o’ dysentery. No wonder, if people drank the water that ran in that irrigation ditch and lived … this way.
“I’ll find work tomorrow,” Elsa said. “I know you will,” Loreda said.
Elsa had to believe it. “This is not our life,” she said. “I won’t let it be.”
 |
ELSA WOKE TO THE sounds of a new day: fires igniting, tent flaps being unzipped, cast-iron pans hitting cookstoves, children whining, babies crying, mothers chiding.
Life.
As if this were a normal community instead of the last stop for desperate people.
Careful not to disturb her children, she exited the tent and started a campfire and made coffee with the last of the water from their canteens.
Dozens of men, women, and children ambled across the field, toward the road. In the rising sun, they looked like stick people. At the same time,
women walked toward the ditch and bent down for water, squatted on wooden planks that lay along the muddy shore.
“Elsa!”
Jean sat in front of her own tent, in a chair by a cookstove. She waved Elsa over.
Elsa poured two cups of coffee and carried them next door, offering Jean one.
“Thank you,” Jean said, wrapping her fingers around the cup. “I was just thinkin’ I should get up and pour myself a cup, but once I set down, I just stuck.”
“Did you sleep poorly?” “Since 1931. You?”
Elsa smiled. “The same.”
People walked past them in a steady stream.
“They all heading out to look for work?” Elsa asked, checking her watch. It was a little past six.
“Yep. Newcomers. Jeb and the boys left at four and ain’t likely they’ll find anything. It’ll be better when they start weedin’ and thinnin’ the cotton. They’re plantin’ it now.”
“Oh.”
Jean pushed an apple crate toward Elsa. “Set a spell.”
“Where are they looking for work? I didn’t see many farmhouses…”
“It ain’t like back home. Around here the farms are big business, thousands and thousands of acres. The owners hardly step onto their land, let alone work it. They got the coppers and the government on their side, too. The state cares more about linin’ the growers’ pockets than takin’ care of the farmworkers.” She paused. “Where’s your husband?”
“He left us in Texas.” “That’s happenin’ all over.”
“I can’t believe people live this way,” Elsa said, and immediately regretted her words when Jean looked away.
“Where can we go that’s better? Okies, they call us. Don’t matter where we’re from. Nobody’ll rent to us, but who can afford rent anyway? Maybe after cotton season you’ll have enough money to head out. We didn’t, though, not with four kids.”
“Maybe in Los Angeles—”
“We say that all the time, but who knows if it’s better there? At least here there’s pickin’ jobs.” She looked up. “You got enough money to waste it on gas going somewheres else?”
No.
Elsa couldn’t listen anymore. “I’d best go look for work. Will you keep an eye out on my children?”
“Course. And don’t forget to register with the state. Tonight I’ll introduce you around to the other women. Good luck to you, Elsa.”
“Thank you.”
After leaving Jean, Elsa carried two buckets full of fetid water from the ditch and boiled it in batches, then strained it through cloth.
She scrubbed her face and upper body as well as she could in the shadowy tent and washed her hair and put on a relatively clean cotton dress. She coiled her wet hair into a coronet and covered it with a kerchief.
This was the best she could do. Her cotton stockings were sagging but clean and the holes in her shoes couldn’t be helped. She was grateful not to have a mirror. Oh, there was one somewhere, buried in one of the boxes in the back of the truck, but it wasn’t worth rummaging around for.
She left a glass full of clean water inside the tent for the children and checked that they were still sleeping.
She left Loreda a note—Looking for work/stay here/water in glass is safe to drink—and headed out to the truck.
She drove out to the main road.
Every farm she came to had a line of people out front, waiting for work. More people walked single file along the road, looking. Tractors churned up the soil in brown fields; here and there, she saw a horse-drawn plow working the land.
After at least half an hour, she came to a HELP WANTED sign tacked to a four-rail fence.
She pulled off the road and onto a long dirt driveway lined with flowering white trees. Hundreds of acres of a low-growing green crop spread out on either side of the driveway. Potatoes, maybe.
She pulled up in front of a big farmhouse with a large screened-in porch and a pretty flower garden.
At her arrival, a man walked out of the house, let the screen door bang shut behind him. He was smoking a pipe and was well dressed, in flannel
pants and a crisp white shirt and a fedora that must have cost a fortune. His hair was precisely trimmed, sideburns shorn, as was his pencil-thin mustache.
He came around to the driver’s side of the truck. “A truck, huh? You must be new.”
“Arrived yesterday, from Texas.”
He gave Elsa an appraising look, then cocked his head. “Head that way.
The missus needs help.”
“Thank you!” Elsa hurried out of the truck before he could change his mind. A job!
She rushed toward the large house. Passing through an open picket gate and a rose garden that enveloped her in a scent that recalled her childhood, she climbed the few steps to the front door and knocked.
She heard the clip of high heels on hardwood floors.
The door opened to reveal a short, plump woman in a fashionable slit skirt dress with a flounced silken cravat at the high neckline. Carefully controlled platinum curls swept back from a center part and framed her face in a jaw-length bob.
The woman looked at Elsa and took a step back. She sniffed daintily, pressed a lace handkerchief to her nose. “Our farmhand deals with the vagrants.”
“Your … the man in the fedora said you needed help with some household chores.”
“Oh.”
Elsa was acutely aware of how ragged she looked. All that effort to present herself for work meant nothing to this woman.
“Follow me.”
Inside, the house was grand: oaken doors, crystal fixtures, mullioned windows that captured the green fields outside and turned them into a kaleidoscope of color. Thick oriental carpets, carved mahogany side tables.
A little girl came into the room, her Shirley Temple curls bouncing pertly. She wore a dress of pink polka dots and black patent leather shoes. “Mommy, what does the dirty lady want?”
“Don’t get too close, dear. They carry disease.” The girl’s eyes widened. She backed away.
Elsa couldn’t believe what she’d heard. “Ma’am—”
“Don’t speak to me unless I ask a direct question,” the woman said. “You may scrub the floors. But mind you, I don’t want to catch you shirking and I’ll check your pockets before you leave. And don’t touch anything but the water, bucket, and brush.”
