All that long, hot summer, Elsa and Loreda did their best to find work. They didn’t dare leave the growers’ camp to look elsewhere, and didn’t want to use relief money for gas, so they stayed in Welty and found what work they could. On days when there was no work, Elsa did her chores and then walked Loreda and Ant to the library, where Mrs. Quisdorf kept them busy with books and projects. With the kids safe at the library, Elsa often walked to the ditch-bank camp and sat with Jean by the muddy water or the buried- in-dirt truck and talked.
“Where is he?” Jean said on a particularly hot day in late August. The camp smelled to high heaven in this heat, but neither one cared. They were just happy to get a little time together.
“Who?” Elsa said, sipping the lukewarm tea Jean had made.
Jean gave Elsa that look, the one they’d perfected with each other. “You know who I mean.”
“Jack,” Elsa said. “I try not to think about him.”
“You need to try harder,” Jean said. “Or just admit he’s on your mind.” “I don’t have a good history with men.”
“You know the thing about history, Elsa? It’s over. Already dead and gone.”
“They say people who don’t heed history are doomed to repeat it.”
“Who says that? I ain’t never heard it. I say folks who hang on to the past miss their chance for a future.”
Elsa looked at her friend. “Come on, Jean,” she said. “Look at me. I wasn’t pretty in the best of times—when I was young and well fed and clean and wore fine clothes. And now…”
“Ah, Elsa. You got a wrong picture of yourself.”
“Even if that is true, what does a person do about it? The things your parents say and the things your husband doesn’t say become a mirror, don’t they? You see yourself as they see you, and no matter how far you come, you bring that mirror with you.”
“Break it,” Jean said. “How?”
“With a gosh dang rock.” Jean leaned forward. “I’m a mirror, too, Elsa.
You remember that.”
 |
Cotton’s ready.
Word spread through the Welty camp on a hot, dry day in September. Airy white tufts floated above the crop, lifted into the clear blue sky. Notices on each cabin and tent advised the folks to be ready to pick at six in the morning.
Elsa dressed in pants and a long-sleeved blouse and made breakfast, then woke the children, who now sat on the edge of their bed, eating hot, sweet polenta, chewing it silently.
It broke Elsa’s heart that they would be picking with her today. Especially Ant. But they hadn’t had a meeting about it, not this season. Last year they’d been naïve; Elsa had thought she could keep her children in school while she made enough money to feed and house and clothe them. Now she knew better. They’d been in the state long enough to understand: Cotton was their lifeblood. Even the children had to pick.
They’d had no choice but to fall into the cycle the growers wanted them in: living on credit, building up debt, and never making enough, even with relief, to break out. They had to pick enough to pay off this year’s debt, so they could start living on credit again in the winter when the work vanished. She rolled up their cotton sacks and filled their canteens and packed their lunches, and then hurried the kids out of the cabin to the row of waiting
trucks.
“You,” the boss said, pointing at Elsa. “Three of you?”
No, Elsa wanted to say. “Yes,” Loreda said.
“The kid’s scrawny,” the boss said, spitting tobacco. “He’s stronger than he looks,” Loreda said.
The boss leaned over to the truck bed beside him and pulled out three twelve-foot-long canvas picking bags. “Go to the east field. A buck and a half apiece for the bags. We’ll put ’em on your account.”
“A dollar fifty! That’s highway robbery,” Elsa said. “We have our own bags.”
“If you live on Welty land, you use Welty bags.” He looked at her. “You want the job?”
“Yes,” Elsa said. “Cabin Ten.”
He threw them the three long sacks.
Elsa and the kids climbed into the truck with the other pickers and were driven five miles to another Welty field, where each was assigned their own row. Elsa unfurled her long, empty bag and strapped it to her shoulder and let it splay out behind her, then showed Ant how to do it.
He looked so small in the row. She and Loreda had spent time explaining the work to him, but he would have to learn as they had—by getting bloody hands.
“Quit starin’ at me like that, Ma,” he said. “I ain’t a baby.” “You’re my baby,” she said.
He rolled his eyes.
A bell rang to start them off.
Elsa stooped over and got to work, reaching into the spiny cotton plant, wincing as the needle-sharp pins stuck deep into her flesh. She pulled off the bolls, separated them from leaves and twigs, and stuffed the white handfuls of cotton into her bag. Don’t think about Ant.
Over and over and over she did the same thing: pick, separate, shove into bag.
As the sun rose higher in the sky, Elsa felt her skin burning, felt sweat scrape the sunburn and collect at her collar. Behind her, the bag became heavier and heavier; she dragged it forward with every step.
By lunchtime, it was well over one hundred degrees in the field.
The water truck rolled forward, positioning itself at the end of the rows, which meant they had to walk nearly a mile for a drink of water.
Elsa saw how many workers were lined up outside the field hoping for work, standing for hours in the hot, hot sun. Hundreds of them.
Desperate enough to take any wage to feed their families.
Elsa kept picking, hating with every moment, every breath, that her children were out here picking alongside her.
When her bag was full, she muscled it out of her row and over to the line at the scales.
Loreda came up beside her. They were both red-faced and sweating profusely and breathing hard.
“Would it kill them to put in a bathroom?” Loreda said, sopping her brow.
“Hush,” Elsa said sharply. “Look at all the people waiting to take our jobs.”
Loreda looked out over the line at the entrance. “Poor folks. Even worse off.”
A truck rattled up the dirt road, dust clouding up around it. The sides were painted with a white cotton boll and read WELTY FARMS.
The truck came to a rattling stop. Mr. Welty climbed out. He was a big man, powerful-looking, with a shock of white hair that looked like cotton tufts beneath his felt fedora. Behind him, in the bed of the truck, were coils of barbed wire.
Everyone stopped working, turned.
The owner, was heard being passed in whispers among the workers. It’s him.
He climbed up on to the platform that held the scales. He looked out over his fields and his workers, then glanced pointedly at the hundreds of people waiting for work. “Thanks to the feds, I had to plant less cotton this year. There is less cotton to pick and more people to pick it. So, I’m cutting what we pay by ten percent.”
“Ten percent?” Loreda shouted. “We can’t make a—” Elsa clamped a hand over her daughter’s mouth.
Welty looked directly at Elsa and Loreda. “Anyone want to quit? Take the cut in pay or walk away. I’ve got ten men wanting to work for each
person here. Doesn’t matter to me who picks my cotton.” He paused. “Or who lives in my camp.”
Silence.
“I thought not,” he said. “Back to work.” A bell rang.
Elsa slowly lowered her hand from Loreda’s mouth. “You want to be one of them?” she said, cocking her head toward the line of people waiting for work.
“We are them!” Loreda cried. “This is wrong. You heard Jack and his friends—”
“Hush,” Elsa hissed. “That’s dangerous talk, and you know it.” “I don’t care. This is wrong.”
“Loreda—”
Loreda yanked free. “I won’t be like you, Mom. I won’t just take it and pretend it’s okay as long as they don’t actually kill us. Why aren’t you furious?”
“Loreda—”
“Sure, Mom. Tell me to be a nice girl and be quiet and keep working while we go into debt every month at the company store.”
Loreda dragged her bag up to the scale and said loudly. “Yes, sir. Pay me less. I’m happy for the job.”
The man at the scales handed her a green chit for the cotton. Ninety cents for one hundred pounds, and the company store would charge her another ten percent.
|
“YOU’RE AWFUL QUIET,” MOM said as they walked back to their cabin. “Consider it a blessing,” Loreda said. “You wouldn’t like what I have to
say.”
“Really, Ma,” Ant said. “Don’t ask her.”
Loreda stopped, turned to her mother. “How is it you aren’t as mad as I am?”
“What good does it do to be mad?” “At least it’s something.”
“No, Loreda. It’s nothing. You’ve seen the people pouring into the valley every day. Fewer crops, more workers. Even I understand basic economics.”
Loreda threw her empty cotton bag down and ran, dodging this way and that among the cabins and tents. She wanted to keep running until California was only a memory.
She was at the farthest reaches of the camp, in a thicket of trees, when she heard a man say: “Help? When did this durn state ever do anything to help us?”
“They cut wages again today, across the valley.”
“Now, Ike. Be careful. We got jobs. And a place here. That’s something.”
Loreda hid behind a tree to listen to the men gathered in the shadows. “You remember the squatters’ camp. We’re living better now.”
Ike stepped forward. He was a tall, skinny pike of a man with a pale ring of gray hair beneath a pointed bald spot. “You call this living? This is my second cotton season and I can tell you already that I’ll work my ass off, as will my wife and children, and we will end up with about four cents left over after our debt is paid. Four cents. And you know I’m not being sarcastic. Everything we make goes to the store for our cabins and tents, our mattresses, our overpriced food.”
“You know they’re cheatin’ us with their bookkeepin’.”
“They charge ten cents per dollar for converting our chits into cash but we can’t cash ’em anywhere else. Every penny we make picking cotton goes to pay our debt at the company store. Ain’t no way to get ahead. They make sure we don’t ever have money.”
“I got seven mouths to feed, Ike,” said a tall man in patched overalls and a straw hat. “Most of us have family depending on us.”
“We can’t do anything. I don’t care what this Valen says. It’s dangerous to listen to him.”
Jack.
She should have known he’d somehow be a part of this. He was a doer.
Loreda stepped out from behind the tree. “Ike’s right. Valen’s right. We have to stand up for ourselves. These rich farmers have no right to treat us this way. What would they do if we stopped picking?”
The men looked nervously at each other. “Don’t talk about a strike…”
“You’re just a girl,” one man said.
“A girl who picked two hundred pounds of cotton today,” Loreda said. She held out her hands, which were red and torn. “I say no more. Mr. Valen’s right. We need to rise up and—”
A hand clamped around Loreda’s bicep, squeezed hard. “Sorry, boys,” Elsa said. “My daughter had a rough day. Don’t pay her any mind.” She hauled Loreda back toward their cabin.
“Dang it, Mom,” Loreda hollered, yanking free. “Why did you do that?” “You get pegged as a union rabble-rouser and we’re finished. Who can
say there wasn’t a grower spy in that group? They’re everywhere.”
Loreda didn’t know how to live with this gnawing anger. “We shouldn’t have to live like this.”
Mom sighed. “It won’t be forever. We’ll find a way out.”
When it rains.
When we get to California. We’ll find a way out.
New words for an old, never realized hope.
|
TENSION BEGAN TO TAKE up space in the valley. It could be felt in the fields, in the relief lines, around camp. The lowered wages had frightened and unsettled them all. Would it happen again? Nobody was saying the word out loud, but it hung in the air anyway.
Strike.
At night, in the growers’ camps and the ditch-bank settlements, field foremen began to show up, clubs in hand. They walked from cabin to cabin and tent to tent and shack to shanty, listening to what was being said, their appearance designed to have a chilling effect on conversation. Everyone knew that there were spies living among them, people who had chosen to stay in the growers’ good graces by passing along names of anyone who expressed discontent or stirred up trouble.
Now, after a long day spent picking cotton, Loreda was slumped on her bed, watching her mom heat up a can of pork and beans on the hot plate.
She heard footsteps outside.
A piece of paper slid under the cabin door.
No one moved until the footsteps went away.
Then Loreda launched herself off the bed and grabbed the paper before her mother could.
FARMWORKERS UNITE
A call to action.
We must fight for better wages.
Better living conditions.
A coincidence our wages are cut now?
We don’t think so.
Poor, hungry, desperate folks are easier to control.
Join us.
Break free.
The Workers Alliance wants to help.
Join us Thursday at midnight
in the back room at the El Centro Hotel.
Mom grabbed the paper, read it, crumpled it. “Don’t—”
Mom lit a match and set fire to the paper; she dropped it to the concrete floor, where it burned to ash.
“Those people will get us fired and thrown out of this cabin,” Mom said. “They’ll save us,” Loreda argued.
“Don’t you see, Loreda?” Mom said. “Those men are dangerous. The farmers are opposing unionization.”
“Of course they are. They want to keep us hungry and at their mercy so we’ll work for anything.”
“We are at their mercy!” Mom cried. “I’m going to that meeting.”
“You are not. Why do you think they’re meeting at midnight, Loreda? They’re scared. Grown men are scared to be seen with the Communists and union organizers.”
“You’re always talking about my future. Your big dreams for me. College. How do you think I’m going to get there, Mom? By picking cotton in the fall and starving in the winter? By living on the dole?” Loreda moved forward. “Think about the women who fought for the vote. They had to be
scared, too, but they marched for change, even if it meant going to jail. And now we can vote. Sometimes the end is worth any sacrifice.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
“I can’t take being kicked around and treated badly, barely surviving anymore. It’s wrong what they’re doing. They should be held accountable.”
“And you, a fourteen-year-old girl, are the one to make them pay, are you?”
“No. Jack is.”
Mom frowned, tucked her chin in. “What does Mr. Valen have to do with this?”
“I’m sure he’ll be at the meeting. Nothing scares him.”
“I’ve said all I’m going to on this subject. We are staying away from union Communists.”
