The Cotton-Pickers (3 page)

“Have you picked before?” he interrupted me.

“Yes,” I answered, “in the States.”

“Ha, ha!” he laughed. “That’s a different proposition. There, you can make a good thing of it.”

“I did good enough.”

“I believe it. They pay much better, and they can afford to pay, for they get better prices than we do. If we could sell our cotton to the States we could pay better wages, too. But the States won’t let our cotton in; they want to keep the price up.

We have to depend on our home market, and that soon reaches the saturation point. Sometimes, when the States don’t interfere, we can sell to Europe, but that’s rare because they consider Europe their market.

“But now — what about you? I can’t feed you or put you up in my house. But I need every hand that comes along, so I’ll tell you what. I pay six centavos the kilo; suppose I pay you just two cents more than the others — otherwise you won’t make as much as the niggers. Only don’t tell this to the others, ‘cause if they find out they’ll give me lots of trouble. So that’s how matters stand. I’m sorry.”

“No reason for you to feel sorry,” I said. “You pay me the same as the others. Don’t let my white skin and blue eyes bother you. I understand how you feel. By all means, thank you.”

“You and your friends can sleep over there in the old house. I built it and lived in it with my family until I could afford this new one here. Agreed? It’s settled then.”

The house to which the farmer referred was about five minutes’ walk from his new place. It was the usual farmhouse of the region — poles and boards — and was built on piles so that the air moving under the floor kept the interior cool. It had only one room, and each wall had a door that also served as a window.

We entered the house by climbing the few rungs of a crude ladder set up against one of the doors. The room was completely empty. We found four old boxes lying about in the yard and brought them in to use as chairs. We would sleep on the bare floor.

Close to the house was a dried-up water hole. There was also a tank full of rain water that was several months old and teeming with tadpoles. I calculated there were about twenty-five gallons of water in the tank and we six men would have to make do with this for six or eight weeks. With three of us using the same water, we might be able to wash once a week.

Mr. Shine had already told us that we could expect no water from him; he was short of water, and had to provide for six horses and four mules. But, as he said, at this time of year it might possibly rain for two or even four hours every two weeks, and if we repaired the rain troughs we could collect quite a bit of water. Furthermore, there was a creek about three hours’ walk away, where, if we chose, we could go to bathe.

On the slim chance that it might rain within the next two weeks, we all took a wash in an old gasoline can. We hadn’t washed for three days.

I shaved. However down and out I may be, I always carry a razor, comb, and toothbrush. The Chink also shaved. Then Antonio came and asked if he could borrow my razor. He hadn’t shaved for about two weeks, and looked like a pirate.

“No, my dear Antonio,” I said, “shaving kit, comb, and toothbrush I lend to no one.”

The Chink, encouraged by my refusal, said, smiling, that his poor razor would be blunted by such a strong beard, and there was no possibility of getting the razor sharpened here. He himself had only a fuzzy stubble. Antonio accepted these refusals without protest.

We got a campfire going in front of the house; the nearby bush supplied us with plenty of fuel. Then we sat around and cooked our. suppers. I had rice and chili; a couple of the men fixed black beans and chili; someone else had beans and dried meat; while another fried some potatoes with a little bacon.

As we had to be ready for work at four o’clock the following morning, we prepared our corn bread for the next day. Then we tied up our miserable supplies and hung them from a crossbeam in the house, so that the ants and mice wouldn’t relieve us of everything during the night.

A little after six, the sun went down. Within half an hour the night was pitch black. Glowworms, with lights the size of hazelnuts, flew about us. We crept into our house to sleep.

The Chink was the only one who had a mosquito net. We others had to endure the most frightful torment from hordes of insects, and we cursed and raged as if that could have made any difference. I decided that I’d have to stand this agony for one night but that I’d take steps the next morning to do something about it.

Before sunrise we were up and about. Each of us swallowed what food we had at hand, and made off for the cotton field — an hour’s walk. The farmer and his two sons were already there. They handed us an old sack apiece, which we slung from our necks. Tightening our belts around our ragged clothes, we started picking cotton, each to his own row.

Picking cotton is hard work, especially under a tropical sun. Sweat streamed from us, tiny flies crept into our ears, and mosquitoes stung us from every angle. It was an agony, and yet we kept on pulling cotton bolls from the plants, stuffing them into our sacks, while trying to breathe in the haze of cotton dust and fuzz that hung over each of our stooping bodies. No matter how hard we worked, we would earn little more than enough to buy food to keep alive. And that was what we wanted, just to keep alive; so we worked on.

If the cotton is well ripe and you’ve got the picker’s knack, you can pick each bloom at one grasp. However, if the pods are not equally ripe it’s necessary with more than half of them to give two or three good tugs to get the bloom off the plant and into the sack. With well-ripened cotton, and when the plants are well spaced, it’s possible after some practice to pick with both hands; but with a middling crop and badly spaced plants, you may have to use both hands to pick one bloom. And another thing, you have to keep stooping all the time, for not all the blooms are at a convenient height; and at times, the cotton is close to the ground, where a heavy rainfall has flattened it, and it has to be pulled up.

Cotton is expensive stuff. Anyone who goes to buy a suit, a shirt, a towel, a pair of socks, or just a handkerchief soon discovers this. But the cotton-picker who does the toughest part of the work gets the smallest share of the cost of the finished product. For picking a kilo (about two pounds) of cotton we got six centavos. A kilo of cotton is a little mountain; to pick this much you’ve got to pluck out hundreds of pods.

We did this on a diet that could well be regarded as the very lowest on which man can remain alive. One day it was black beans and hot peppers, the next day rice (with tomatoes, if we were lucky), the following day, beans again, and then rice again. With it there was the bread we made that was either soggy or burned to a cinder; our months-old stinking rain water; and coffee made from beans that we roasted in frying pans, ground on a metate stone, and sweetened with the crude brown piloncillo sugar. The salt we used was sea salt, which we ourselves had to clean. A pound of onions a week we considered a positive delicacy; a strip of dried meat now and then was a sinful luxury that cut deep into our earnings. For we were determined to save our pennies in order to have rail fare to the next big town, where when the cotton-picking was over we hoped to find a new job.

Toward eleven o’clock, after nearly seven hours of continuous work, we were at the end of our strength. We rested in the shade of a few trees that were more than a ten-minute walk away and ate our dry pan-baked bread, which — mine anyway — was burned. Then we lay down to sleep for a couple of hours.

We woke with a ghastly thirst, and I went over to the farmer to ask for some water.

“I’m sorry, I haven’t got any. I told you yesterday, didn’t I, that I was short of water? Oh well, I’ll let you have some today, but from tomorrow on bring your own water with you.”

He sent one of his sons back to the house on a horse, and the young man soon came back with a can of rain water.

At four in the afternoon we stopped work so that we could get “home” to cook our food while there was still daylight. That was when I moved out.

I had discovered a sort of shelter about two hundred yards away from the house. What purpose it served or might have served I had no idea. It had a palm-thatched roof but no walls. Because of this lack of walls the night breeze (when there was one) could freely circulate, keeping the place cool. In the center was a table, which I would use as my bed. The shelter lay higher than the house, had no shrubs close to it, and was a good distance away from the water tank and the dried-up water hole, so that I would be removed from the mosquito menace.

The giant Negro, Charley, wanted to share the shelter with me. He came over, looked around, and liked it. But suddenly he yelled out, “A snake! A snake!”

“Where?”

“There, right at your feet.”

Sure enough, there was a snake twisting along the floor, a fiery red one, two feet or so long.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “That snake won’t swallow me. The mosquitoes in the house up there are worse.”

Charley disappeared.

After a while Gonzalo came over. The snake had gone in the meantime. Gonzalo liked the look of my new quarters and asked if I’d have any objection to his sleeping there also.

I said, “You may bunk here if you like. It’s all the same to me.”

He was staring at the floor. I looked too. It was a snake again, this time a beautiful green one.

“On second thought,” he said, looking at the lively snake, “I’d better return to the house and sleep there. It’s less noisy there, you see.”

Snakes don’t bother me. And in any case they’d hardly want to get up onto the table. And even if they did, it wasn’t sure they’d bite me. And even if they did bite, they might not be poisonous. If all snakes were poisonous and all of them bit a sleeping man who had done them no harm, I would have been a goner long ago.

The following day twelve natives arrived to work with us. They came from a village in the bush, riding on mules, some without saddles or stirrups. Others had wooden saddles but no reins; instead of reins, the beasts had ropes looped around nose and jaw, for a kind of halter.

These men, of course, were more used to field labor in the tropics than we were because, with the exception of Gonzalo and Charley, all of us were townsfolk. But they picked cotton slower than we did, and on top of that they took a much longer siesta at noon. This, however, had nothing to do with us, and we hardly gave it a second thought.

Saturday was pay day, but we drew only enough to buy food for the coming week; to avoid carrying the germs of temptation in our pockets, we left the balance with Mr. Shine. On Sunday we knocked off at three so as to take our weekly bath, pull our sweaty clothes through the water, and send two of our gang to the nearest store for supplies — a four-hour trip. Sunday’s work earned us about a kilo of bacon or five kilos of potatoes.

This time the Chink and Antonio had gone to buy the supplies. We had written down our various needs on corn husks. The hieroglyphics inscribed on these corn husks could be deciphered by the shoppers only because we’d verbally explained each fantastic symbol. It was dark when the Chink and Antonio returned from the store.

“What a miserable hike,” grumbled Antonio.

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad!” Sam tried to soothe it over.

“Shut up, you yellow son of a heathen,” shouted Antonio. “How can you with your coolie past understand how I feel about packing goods like a burro?” He sank down onto a box which collapsed under his weight, and this further increased his rage.

“Listen, Antonio, why didn’t you ask Mr. Shine for a mule or a burro?” I asked.

“But I did. He refused. He said to me and Sam: `How can I lend you a mule or a burro? I know nothing about you, you’ve got no papers to identify you, and even if you did they would probably be fake. Besides, the papers wouldn’t help me to buy a new burro if you ran off with it.”

“Well, he’s quite right, from his point of view,” I said. “From our point of view, it’s downright mean. But what can we do about it?”

Just as we were getting under way on the favored topic of workers the world over, expounding with more loquacity than wisdom the unjust conditions that divide men into exploiters and exploited, drones and disinherited, Abraham appeared with half a dozen hens and a rooster suspended on a cord, their feet tied up, their heads dangling. He dropped the birds before us, where they struggled to get on their feet and flap free of the cord that tied them.

“There you are, fellers, now you can get eggs off me.” He grinned. “I’ll let you have ‘em cheap ‘cause you’re my workmates. Nine centavos each. Cost you ten and even twelve in town.”

We stared first at the bundle of hens and then at the grinning Abraham. Not one of us had thought of going into the egg business like this, and yet it was so obvious, so simple, and required no special intelligence, so that any of us could have done the same. Sam the Chink showed no envy or jealousy, but only admiration for the enterprising Abraham, and perhaps some shame at having allowed himself to be beaten in setting up a sideline.

Thus in the course of one afternoon the disinherited and exploited worker Abraham became an owner, a capitalist. He had acquired productive hens while we had bought only food to be consumed. We had wondered why he had ordered no food from the store and had been prepared to deal with the pilfering of our supplies, which we had expected of him. Instead he was offering us future supplies of eggs in exchange for rice and beans or money. He was in business. At the worst, in case the hens went on strike, he could eat them, and the rooster too.

On the following day Abraham had four eggs for sale.

4

We regarded eggs as a greater luxury than meat.

And now that they were so temptingly close at hand and could be prepared more easily than any other food, so that we could get something better into us for breakfast than the usual thin coffee and piece of dry bread, we felt we would not and could not do without eggs. It suddenly seemed to us that without eggs we would fold up from undernourishment before the end of the harvest, or if we survived the harvest we’d be too feeble to go on to other work.