Кристин Ханна - The Four Winds

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.”