Hard Times (11 page)

But this had quite an impact on my father. He had been used to owning the land and all of a sudden there was no more land. What I heard … what I made out of conversations between my mother and my father—things like, we’ll work this season and then we’ll get enough money and we’ll go and buy a piece of land in Arizona. Things like that. Became like a habit. He never gave up hope that some day he would come back and get a little piece of land.

I can understand very, very well this feeling. These conversations were sort of melancholy. I guess my brothers and my sisters could also see this very sad look on my father’s face.

 

 

No, never. It never happened. He stopped talking about that some years ago. The drive for land, it’s a very powerful drive.

When we moved to California, we would work after school. Sometimes we wouldn’t go. “Following the crops,” we missed much school. Trying to get enough money to stay alive the following winter, the whole family picking apricots, walnuts, prunes. We were pretty new, we had never been migratory workers. We were taken advantage of quite a bit by the labor contractor and the crew pusher.
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In some pretty silly ways. (Laughs.)

Sometimes we can’t help but laugh about it. We trusted everybody that came around. You’re traveling in California with all your belongings in your car: it’s obvious. Those days we didn’t have a trailer. This is bait for the labor contractor. Anywhere we stopped, there was a labor contractor offering all kinds of jobs and good wages, and we were always deceived by them and we always went. Trust them.

Coming into San Jose, not finding—being lied to, that there was work. We had no money at all, and had to live on the outskirts of town under a bridge and dry creek. That wasn’t really unbearable. What was unbearable was so many families living just a quarter of a mile. And you know how kids are. They’d bring in those things that really hurt us quite a bit. Most of those kids were middle-class families.

We got hooked on a real scheme once. We were going by Fresno on our way to Delano. We stopped at some service station and this labor contractor saw the car. He offered a lot of money. We went. We worked the first week: the grapes were pretty bad and we couldn’t make much. We all stayed off from school in order to make some money. Saturday we were to
be paid and we didn’t get paid. He came and said the winery hadn’t paid him. We’d have money next week. He gave us $10. My dad took the $10 and went to the store and bought $10 worth of groceries. So we worked another week and in the middle of the second week, my father was asking him for his last week’s pay, and he had the same excuse. This went on and we’d get $5 or $10 or $7 a week for about four weeks. For the whole family.

So one morning my father made the resolution no more work. If he doesn’t pay us, we won’t work. We got in a car and went over to see him. The house was empty. He had left. The winery said they had paid him and they showed us where they had paid him. This man had taken it.

Labor strikes were everywhere. We were one of the strikingest families, I guess. My dad didn’t like the conditions, and he began to agitate. Some families would follow, and we’d go elsewhere. Sometimes we’d come back. We couldn’t find a job elsewhere, so we’d come back. Sort of beg for a job. Employers would know and they would make it very humiliating … .

 

 

Never.

We were among these families who always honored somebody else’s grievance. Somebody would have a personal grievance with the employer. He’d say I’m not gonna work for this man. Even though we were working, we’d honor it. We felt we had to. So we’d walk out, too. Because we were prepared to honor those things, we caused many of the things ourselves. If we were picking at a piece rate and we knew they were cheating on the weight, we wouldn’t stand for it. So we’d lose the job, and we’d go elsewhere. There were other families like that.

 

 

They knew it, and they rubbed it in quite well. Sort of shameful to come back. We were trapped. We’d have to do it for a few days to get enough money to get enough gas.

One of the experiences I had. We went through Indio, California. Along the highway there were signs in most of the small restaurants that said “White Trade Only.” My dad read English, but he didn’t really know the meaning. He went in to get some coffee—a pot that he had, to get some coffee for my mother. He asked us not to come in, but we followed him anyway. And this young waitress said, “We don’t serve Mexicans here. Get out of here.” I was there, and I saw it and heard it. She paid no more attention. I’m sure for the rest of her life she never thought of it again. But every time we thought of it, it hurt us. So we got back in the car and we had a difficult time trying—in fact, we never got the coffee. These are sort of unimportant, but they’re … you remember ’em very well.

One time there was a little diner across the tracks in Brawley. We used to shine shoes after school. Saturday was a good day. We used to shine shoes for three cents, two cents. Hamburgers were then, as I remember, seven cents. There was this little diner all the way across town. The moment we stepped across the tracks, the police stopped us. They would let us go there, to what we called “the American town,” the Anglo town, with a shoe shine box. We went to this little place and we walked in.

There was this young waitress again. With either her boyfriend or someone close, because they were involved in conversation. And there was this familiar sign again, but we paid no attention to it. She looked up at us and she sort of—it wasn’t what she said, it was just a gesture. A sort of gesture of total rejection. Her hand, you know, and the way she turned her face away from us. She said: “Wattaya want?” So we told her we’d like to buy two hamburgers. She sort of laughed, a sarcastic sort of laugh. And she said, “Oh, we don’t sell to Mexicans. Why don’t you go across to Mexican town, you can buy ’em over there.” And then she turned around and continued her conversation.

She never knew how much she was hurting us. But it stayed with us.

We’d go to school two days sometimes, a week, two weeks, three weeks at most. This is when we were migrating. We’d come back to our winter base, and if we were lucky, we’d get in a good solid all of January, February, March, April, May. So we had five months out of a possible nine months. We started counting how many schools we’d been to and we counted thirty-seven. Elementary schools. From first to eighth grade. Thirty-seven. We never got a transfer. Friday we didn’t tell the teacher or anything. We’d just go home. And they accepted this.

I remember one teacher—I wondered why she was asking so many questions. (In those days anybody asked questions, you became suspicious. Either a cop or a social worker.) She was a young teacher, and she just wanted to know why we were behind. One day she drove into the camp. That was quite an event, because we never had a teacher come over. Never. So it was, you know, a very meaningful day for us.

This I remember. Some people put this out of their minds and forget it. I don’t. I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want it to take the best of me, but I want to be there because this is what happened. This is the truth, you know. History.

 

MY MOTHER HAD a really big family, she was one of seven kids. She brought me up, not on fairy tales, but on stories of the Depression. They feel almost like fairy tales to me because she used to tell bedtime stories about that kind of thing.

The things they teach you about the Depression in school are quite different from how it was: Well, you knew for some reason society didn’t get along so well in those years. And then you found out that everybody worked very hard, and things somehow got better. People didn’t talk about the fact that industries needed to make guns for World War II made that happen. “It just got better” ‘cause people pitched in and worked. And’cause Roosevelt was a nice guy, although some people thought he went too far. You never hear about the rough times.

 

A lot of young people feel angry about this kind of protectiveness. This particular kind is even more vicious somehow, because it’s wanting you not to have to go through what is a very real experience, even though it is a very hard thing. Wanting to protect you from your own history, in a way.

 

WHATEVER I HAVE, I’m very thankful for. I’ve never brought up the Depression to my children. Never in my life. Why should I? What I had to do, what I had to do without, I never tell ’em what I went through, there’s no reason for it. They don’t have to know from bad times. All they know is the life they’ve had and the future that they’re gonna have.

All I know is my children are well-behaved. If I say something to my daughters, it’s “Yes, sir,” “No, sir.” I know where my kids are at all times. And I don’t have no worries about them being a beatnik.

I’ve built my own home. I almost have no mortgage. I have a daughter who’s graduating college, and my daughter did not have to work, for me to
put her through college. At the age of sixteen, I gave her a car, that was her gift. She’s graduating college now: I’ll give her a new one.

We had to go out and beg for coal, buy bread that’s two, three days old. My dad died when I was an infant. I went to an orphan home for fellas. Stood there till I was seventeen years old. I came out into the big wide world, and my mother who was trying to raise my six older brothers and sisters, couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. So I enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC. This was about 1937.

I was at CCC’s for six months, I came home for fifteen days, looked around for work, and I couldn’t make $30 a month, so I enlisted back in the CCC’s and went to Michigan. I spent another six months there planting trees and building forests. And came out. But still no money to be made. So back in the CCC’s again. From there I went to Boise, Idaho, and was attached to the forest rangers. Spent four and a half months fighting forest fires.

These big trees you see along the highways—all these big forests was all built by the CCC. We went along plain barren ground. There were no trees. We just dug trenches and kept planting trees. You could plant about a hundred an hour.

I really enjoyed it. I had three wonderful square meals a day. No matter what they put on the table, we ate and were glad to get it. Nobody ever turned down food. They sure made a man out of ya, because you learned that everybody here was equal. There was nobody better than another in the CCC’s. We never had any race riots. Couple of colored guys there, they minded their business; we minded ours.

I came out of there, enlisted in the navy. I spent five and a half years in the United States Navy. It was the most wonderful experience I’ve ever had. Three wonderful meals a day and my taxes paid for. I had security.

I came up the hard way, was never in jail, never picked up and whatever I’ve done, I have myself to thank for. No matter how many people were on relief in those days, you never heard of any marches. The biggest stealing would be by a guy go by a fruit store and steal a potato. But you never heard of a guy breaking a window. In the Thirties, the crimes were a hundred percent less than they are now. If a guy wants to work, there’s no reason for being poor. There’s no reason for being dirty. Soap and water’ll clean anybody. Anybody that’s free and white in a wonderful country like these United States never had any wants, never.

In the days of the CCC’s, if the fella wouldn’t take a bath, we’d give ‘im what we call a brushing. We’d take this fella, and we’d take a big scrub brush and we’d give ’em a bath, and we’d open up every pore, and these pores would get infected. That’s all he needed was one bath. I imagine we gave a hundred of ’em. A guy’d come in, he’d stink, ten guys would get him in the shower, and we’d take a GI brush. If a guy come in, he wanted to look like a hillbilly—no reflection on the boys from the South—but if
he wanted to look like the backwoods, we’d cut his hair off. Yeah, we’d keep him clean.

You know, in the CCC’s or in the navy, you’re sittin’ amongst thirty guys in one room, and you’re not gonna take that smell.

 

 

No, we’d just look at each other and we’d say, “Hey, look at this rat, he’s dirty.” Then we say, “O.K., he’s ready for one… .” We’d tell him, “You got until today to take a bath.” He’d say, “You’re not gonna run my life.” We’d say, “You got twenty-four hours.” And if he didn’t, I guarantee you we grabbed him. We never heard of a goatee… .

 

 

Absolutely, CCC or navy. I liked that very much. We didn’t have to worry where our next three meals were coming from, what the hell….

 

 

Sure. And high school. We had a woodshop teacher, and he would tell you what to do. You give him any back talk, he’d pick up a ruler and crack across the rear end. You settled down. In those days, when I went to school, you said “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” You never gave ’em back talk. They had a parental school, Montefiore, that made a man out of you. You learn to keep yourself clean, I’ll tell you that. Obedience. Today, they’re giving kids cars when they’re sixteen. Another thirty years from now, these kids graduating high school, one may be President, another may be up there buying a planet.