Dearest Tony and Rose,
June in California is beautiful. Hard red flowers have burst out in the cotton fields. Imagine the look of it across thousands of acres, with the mountains in the distance.
The friends we have made promise plenty of work for all when the cotton is ready to pick.
I must admit, it’s hard to imagine myself working in someone else’s fields. I’m sure it will make me think of you and the many wonderful hours we spent tending to our grapes and our fruit and our vegetables.
We miss you and think of you often and hope you are well.
Love, Elsa, Ant, and Loreda
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IN JUNE, ELSA FOUND that if she woke at four A.M. and joined Jeb and the boys in line, there was usually work in the cotton fields, weeding and thinning the crop. Not every day, but most days she worked twelve hours for fifty cents. The pay wasn’t good but she spent carefully and they survived. When Loreda’s shoes wore out, instead of buying a new pair, Elsa cut out pieces of cardboard and fit them carefully inside the shoes.
Today, after a long, tiring day, she walked home with the others from the ditch-bank camp who’d found work at Welty Farms, which had nearly
twenty thousand acres of cotton in California; the nearest field was about three miles north of the ditch-bank camp, past the town of Welty.
Jeb was beside her, walking back from work with his boys. “There’s talk that Welty might cut wages,” he said.
“How can they possibly pay us less?” Elsa said.
Another man said, “So many desperate folks floodin’ into the state.
More’n a thousand a day, I heard.”
“Most of ’em’ll take any pay at all if it means they can put food on the table,” Jeb said.
“The durn farm owners can pay less and less,” said another man. “I’m Ike,” he said to Elsa, extending a thin-fingered hand in greeting. “I live at the Welty camp.”
She shook his hand. “Elsa.”
Fifty cents. That was what she’d earned today, and it wouldn’t go far, and there was never any way of knowing how long this money had to last or when she’d get work again or what she’d be paid. What if they offered her forty cents tomorrow? What choice would she have but to agree?
“Once we’re pickin’ cotton, we’ll be better,” Jeb said.
The man named Ike made a sound. “I don’t know, Jeb. I got a bad feeling. The price of cotton is down, and the damned Ag Adjustment Act is putting the squeeze on the growers again. The government wants less cotton planted to raise prices. You know what that means. Sooner or later, if the growers get squeezed, we get pounded.”
“What about the summer months?” Elsa asked. “Once the cotton is thinned, it will be months before it’s ready to pick. What work is there then?”
“Most of us move north pretty soon to pick fruit. We come back in the fall for cotton.”
“Is it worth the gas money?” Elsa asked.
Jeb shrugged. “It’s work, Elsa. We take it where we can, when we can.”
Up ahead, Elsa saw women cooking in front of whatever dwellings they had. She heard the strains of a fiddle rising up and it made her smile.
Outside their tent, Loreda and Ant sat on the buckets on the ground.
Beside them, a pot of beans simmered on the stove. “Mom?” Loreda said. “I need to talk to you.”
That couldn’t be good. Lately, Loreda’s anger had grown exponentially. She didn’t complain much, or roll her eyes and storm off, but somehow that made it worse. Elsa knew her daughter was eating a steady diet of outrage and sooner or later she would explode. “Sure.”
“Stay here, Ant,” Loreda said, rising to her feet.
Elsa followed Loreda toward the ditch they pathetically called a river. Beneath a spindly tree in full bloom, Loreda stopped and turned to face
Elsa. “School ended two days ago.” “I’m aware of that, Loreda.”
“Are you also aware that I’m the only thirteen-year-old in camp during the day?”
Elsa knew where this was going. She’d been expecting it. Dreading it. “Yes.”
“Seven-year-olds are working in the fields, Mom.” “I know, Loreda, but…”
Loreda moved closer. “I’m not deaf, Mom. I hear what people say. Winter in California is bad. There’s no work. We can’t get state relief until next April. So the only money we have is what we make working in the fields. It will have to get us through four months with no work and no relief money.”
“I know.”
“Tomorrow I’m going to work with you.” Elsa wanted to say—to scream—NO.
But Loreda was right. They needed to save money for the winter.
“Just for the summer. Then you go back to school,” Elsa said. “Jean can watch Ant.”
“You know he’ll want to work, too, Mom,” Loreda said. “Ant’s strong.” Elsa walked away, pretending she hadn’t heard.
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BY JULY, THE WORK in the cotton fields had ended again; there would be no more until it was time to pick the crop. Still, each day, new migrants walked or rode into the San Joaquin Valley. More workers, less work. The newspapers were full of outrage and despair on the part of the citizens, who worried that their tax dollars were being spent to help nonresidents. The
schools and hospitals were overrun, they said, unable to survive the demands of so many outsiders. They worried about bankruptcy and losing their way of life and being made unsafe by the wave of crime and disease they blamed on migrants.
Elsa called an Explorers Club meeting and asked her children if they wanted to stay in the ditch-bank camp or follow the Deweys—and many of the camp’s inhabitants—north to the Central Valley to find work picking fruit. As always, it was a difficult choice in which each of them was aware how precarious their survival was. Spend money or save it.
In the end, they made the choice that most of the migrants made: they packed their belongings in boxes and tore down the tent and repacked the truck for travel. They headed north behind the Deweys; in Yolo County, they moved into another field full of tents and set up camp. There, they learned to pick peaches. Elsa hated to bring Ant into the fields with her, but there was no choice. She was a single mother and her son was too young to stay alone all day, every day. With all of them picking, they made just enough to feed themselves and stay clothed. Certainly there were no savings.
When peach season ended, they picked up stakes again. For the rest of the summer, they joined the horde of migrants who moved from field to field, crop to crop, and learned to pick whatever was in season and be unseen by the good folks who needed their crops picked but didn’t want to see the people who did the picking and expected them to move on when the season ended. They didn’t go to town or see movies or even go into the libraries. They stayed in their camps, surviving together. Jean taught Elsa how to make hush puppies from ground corn and Elsa showed Jean how the cornmeal could be made into polenta cakes, which were delicious beneath a ladleful of soup or stew. They ate casseroles made of canned tomato soup and macaroni and chopped-up hot dogs. Through all of that long, hot summer, they waited for two words.
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Cotton’s ready.
The news swept the Central Valley in September. Elsa and the kids packed up in the middle of the night and drove back to the San Joaquin
Valley and the ditch-bank camp that had been their first stop in California.
They turned onto the deep, dry ruts in the weedy field after a long, hot day of driving. Jeb’s jalopy was in front of them, churning up dust.
“Jeepers,” Ant said, peering through the dirty, bug-splattered windshield. “Look at that.”
In the time they’d been gone, the population of the ditch-bank camp had increased dramatically. There had to be two hundred tents in the field now, filled with more desperate Americans looking for nonexistent jobs. The place looked like the aftermath from a tornado, all broken-down cars and junk spread out.
Jeb drove off to the right, away from the clot of tents and cardboard shacks. He found a nice spot, fairly level, with room for their tents to be side by side, but also each have a little privacy.
Elsa pulled up alongside him and parked.
“Long walk to the river,” Loreda said, and then shook her head, muttering, “I can’t believe I just called it a river.”
Elsa pretended not to hear. “Let’s go, explorers. Time to set up camp.”
They got to work. They set up the tent and hauled out the stove and beat the lumpy, dirty camp mattress to redistribute the feathers. They stacked the buckets inside the copper tub and set them in front of the tent, alongside their washboard and broom.
“Great,” Loreda said, returning with two buckets of water. “We’re back where we started. Home, sweet home.”
Elsa balled up a newspaper, saw the headline: “Relief Crippling the State Financially,” and started a fire in the stove.
Loreda stood beside her. “You know school already started, right?” “Yes.”
“You know I’m not going back, right?” Loreda said.
Elsa sighed. All she wanted—all she’d ever wanted, really—was to be a good mother. How could she accomplish that if Loreda wasn’t educated? And yet. They’d been in California for less than five months and they’d worked as hard as was possible, and Elsa still had less than twenty dollars to her name. With the gas it took to follow the crops north and the paltry wages and the cost of goods, there was no way to get ahead. And winter was coming. Their survival depended on cotton money and Loreda could pick as much as Elsa could. Double the wages.
“Yes,” Elsa said. “I know you have to pick cotton, but Ant goes to school. Period.” She looked at her daughter. “And the minute the cotton is done, you are back in school.”
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THE NEXT MORNING, LOREDA wakened before sunrise and listened for footsteps. At four A.M., she heard what she’d been waiting for: Jeb’s voice at the tent flaps. “It’s time.”
Loreda and Elsa lurched out of bed already dressed, gathered up the rolled, twelve-foot-long canvas sacks they’d each paid fifty cents for, and went out of the tent.
Jeb and the boys, Elroy and Buster, were there.
The five of them walked out to the main road and turned right and kept walking until they came to the first Welty field.
There were already forty people or so in line, some of whom had probably slept on the roadside to ensure their place. Men, women, children as young as six. Mexicans, Negroes, Okies. Mostly Okies. Small particles of fluffy white cotton floated in the air, landed on Loreda’s face, caught in her hair.
A row of trucks stood ready to be filled with cotton, their trailers lined with chicken wire.
At sunrise, a bell rang out. The crowd of pickers grew anxious. Not all of them would be chosen to pick. By now, there were hundreds of them in line.
The gates to the cotton field opened and a tall, ruddy-faced man wearing a ten-gallon hat walked out, surveying the crowd, moving along it, picking workers. “You,” he said, pointing to Jeb.
Jeb rushed toward the gate.
“You,” he said to Elsa, and then to Loreda, “And you…”
Loreda rushed into the fields, went to the row to which she was assigned.
She yanked her long canvas sack around, slung the leather strap over her shoulder.
The bell rang again and Loreda reached into the nearest cotton plant and yelped in pain. When she drew her hand back it was covered in blood. That was when she saw the spikes on the plant. They looked like darning
needles. Wincing, she tried again, more slowly this time; still, she felt her flesh tear. She gritted her teeth and kept picking.
For hours the sun beat down, until heat and dust and human sweat were all Loreda could smell. Her throat was so dry it hurt to breathe. She had drunk all the water in her canteen—almost hot enough to scald—and now there was no more. Her bag grew heavier by the minute and her hands hurt.
Nearing noon, she dragged the heavy sack behind her and moved into the line formed at the giant scales. She unhooked the strap and dropped the load and learned instantly why the other pickers hadn’t removed the strap in line: It was a bad idea. Now she had to haul the bag with her bloody, aching hands toward the scales.
She sagged in relief when it was finally her turn. A foreman slung a chain underneath her sack and hung it on the scales.
“Sixty pounds.” The foreman stamped a ticket and handed it to her. “You can cash this in town. Pick faster if you want to keep a job.”
Loreda retrieved her empty bag, backed away, and went back to work.
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SEPTEMBER WAS ONE LONG, hot, backbreaking day after another in the cotton fields. Elsa’s hands bled, her back ached, her knees hurt. Hour after scorching hour. Dawn to dusk, hunched over, picking bolls of cotton from between the razor-sharp spikes. There were no bathrooms in the fields, so it wasn’t easy for a woman at certain times of the month, and Loreda had just begun menstruating.
Still, there was work. Steady work.
By mid-October, Elsa and Loreda had learned how to pick nearly two hundred pounds of cotton each per day. That meant four dollars a day in combined earnings. It felt like a fortune, even with the ten percent Welty charged to cash their wage chits. They’d been slow to get to the two- hundred-pound mark, but everyone knew there was a learning curve for picking.
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IN NOVEMBER, WHEN THE weather turned blessedly cool, and the last of the cotton had been picked, Elsa’s metal cash box was stuffed with dollar bills. She had stocked up on food, bought bags of flour and rice and beans and sugar, as well as cans of milk and some smoked bacon. There was no refrigeration at the camp, no ice, so she learned to cook in a new way— everything came from bags or cans. No fresh pasta or sun-dried tomatoes, no homemade baked bread or nutty-flavored olive oil. The kids learned to love pork and beans doctored with corn syrup, and chipped beef on toast, and hot dogs cooked over an open fire, and saltine crackers fried in oil and dusted with sugar. American food, Loreda called it.
Elsa tried to hold back as much as she could for the winter, but after so many months of deprivation, she found her children’s joy at suppertime and their full bellies to be her undoing.
Many of the camp’s inhabitants, including Jeb and the boys, had moved on, looking for an extra few days’ work in fields farther away, but Elsa had decided to stay put, as had Jean and her daughters.
It was time for Loreda to be back in school.
On this Saturday morning, Elsa got out of bed and swept the tent’s dirt floor. She didn’t know how it was possible, but dirt grew overnight, in the dark, like mushrooms. She swept the debris outside and opened the tent flaps to let in fresh air.
Outside, a layer of cool gray fog lay over the camp, blurring the sea of tents. She pulled an old newspaper from the salvaged fruit box where they stored every scrap of paper they could find, and read the local news as the coffee brewed.
The aroma brought Loreda stumbling out of the tent, her dark hair a snarl of tangles, her bangs a fringe well past her jawline. “You let me sleep,” she growled.
“No work today,” Elsa said. “You start school on Monday.”
Loreda poured herself a cup of coffee. She pulled the bucket closer to the stove and sat down. “I’d rather pick cotton.”
Elsa wished she had Rafe’s gift for words, his eloquent way of shaping a dream. Loreda needed that now, she needed some spark to relight the fire she’d had before her father’s abandonment and hardship had snuffed it out.
Unfortunately, Elsa didn’t know much about dreaming, but she knew about school and the hardships that came from not fitting in. “I have an
idea,” she said.
Loreda gave her a skeptical look
“We are going to have breakfast and go somewhere.” “My joy is uncontainable.”
Elsa couldn’t help smiling, even as her daughter’s hopelessness wounded her.
Elsa made a quick breakfast of oatmeal cooked in canned milk and topped with sugar for the kids, and then hurried them to get dressed. By nine o’clock, they were headed out from the camp, walking through a brown field draped in diaphanous gray fog.
“Where we goin’, Mommy?” Ant asked, holding her hand. She loved that he still held her hand in public.
“To town.”
“Oooh,” Loreda said. “What fun we’ll have standing in line for the few dollars we earned this week.”
Elsa elbowed her daughter. “No member of the Explorers Club is allowed to be unhappy on a Saturday adventure. New rule.”
“Who made you President?” Loreda said.
“I did.” Ant giggled. “Mo-mmy for President, Mo-mmy for President,” he chanted, marching on the soft, wet grass.
Elsa pressed a hand to her heart. “It is such an honor. Why … I never expected such a thing. A woman President.”
Loreda finally laughed and the mood lifted.
They turned onto the main road and walked all the way to Welty. By the time they reached the quaint little town, with its cotton-boll welcome sign, the fog had been burned away by a surprisingly warm sun. The mountains in the distance showed a new layer of snow. The trees along Main Street displayed their autumn finery.
“Wait here,” Elsa said outside the Welty Farms office. Inside, she got into line and waited her turn to cash her chit.
“Here yah go,” the man at the desk said, taking her chit worth twenty dollars and giving her eighteen dollars in exchange. Elsa rolled the money as tightly as she could, mentally calculating the total of their savings. It seemed like a lot now, but she knew it wouldn’t be much by February.
But she wasn’t going to think of that today. She returned to the street, where the children stood beneath a lamppost, waiting.
It was one of those sharp-as-a-tack moments when she saw them: Loreda, thin as a chicken bone in a threadbare dress and shoes that didn’t fit and long, raggedly growing-out hair; Ant, scrawny and with dirty hair no matter how hard Elsa tried to keep him clean, still—thankfully—fitting into Buster’s old shoes.
Elsa forced a smile as she walked out to meet them. Taking Ant’s hand, she headed down Main Street, where the shops were opening for the day. She smelled coffee and freshly baked pastries as she passed the diner, and the familiar smell of baled hay and bags of grain as they passed the feed store.
There it was: the destination she’d had in mind when they left the camp this morning.
Betty Ane’s Beauty Shop.
Elsa had seen the pretty little salon every time she came to town, seen well-dressed women coming out with stylish hair.
Elsa walked toward the salon. It was housed in an old-fashioned bungalow with a fenced yard out front.
Loreda stopped, shook her head. “No, Mom. You know how they’ll treat us.”
Elsa knew better than to make another hollow promise; she also knew that no matter how often you were knocked down, you had to keep getting up. She tightened her hold on Ant’s hand and opened the gate.
Loreda wasn’t following. Elsa knew it and kept going. Come on, Loreda, be brave.
Elsa and Ant walked up to the front door and Elsa opened it. A bell jangled overhead.
Inside, the salon filled what had once been the bungalow’s parlor. There were two pink chairs stationed in front of mirrors. Cords lay snaked on the floor, gathered up at a machine in the corner. Framed photographs of movie stars lined the pink walls.
A middle-aged woman in a white frock coat stood in the center of the salon holding a broom. She looked thoroughly, almost stubbornly modern, with waved, chin-length platinum-dyed hair and pencil-thin eyebrows. Her Clara Bow lips were painted a bright French red. “Oh,” she said at the sight of them huddled together.
Loreda slipped in beside Elsa, took hold of her hand, and tugged it. “Let’s go, Mom.”
Elsa took a deep breath. “This is my daughter, Loreda. She’s thirteen and about to start school on Monday, after a season of picking cotton. She expects to be teased, because … well…”
Loreda groaned beside her.
“Let me speak to my husband,” the beautician said, and left the room. “She’s probably calling the police,” Loreda said. “She’ll say we’re
vagrants. Or worse.”
A few moments later, the woman returned to the beauty parlor and faced them, pulling a comb out of her pocket. “I’m Betty Ane,” she said, moving toward them, her high heels clicking on the hardwood floor. She came to a stop in front of Loreda. Close but not too close.
Please, Elsa thought, tightening her hold on Loreda’s hand, be kind to my girl.
At the same moment, a large man in a brown suit came into the parlor from another room, carrying a big cardboard box.
“This is my husband, Ned,” Betty Ane said.
“I understand,” Elsa said. “You and Ned want us to leave. Go back to our kind.”
Ned pulled the hat off of his head. “No, ma’am. We came here in ’30. It was tough to make a living, but nothing like it is now.” He offered her the box. “Here’s some coats and sweaters and such. Winter can be cold here. There’s a shower in our bathroom. Hot water. Why don’t y’all help yourselves? A hot shower and new clothes can be a mighty bit of help in hard times.”
Betty Ane smiled kindly at Loreda. “And I see a girl who needs a new hairstyle for her first day of school. Lord knows thirteen is hard enough without all of this.” Betty Ane gave Loreda an appraising look. “You’re a real beauty, doll. Let me work my magic.”
