The Miracle Market, a few miles away, had piped music and innumerable machines of chemical-colored bubblegum balls and candies for the women in hair curlers who dominated the clientele; it also had Diet-Rite Cola. By the time we returned Connors was ready, and the Union negotiators trooped upstairs to the motel balcony.
A short time later they emerged; in the parking lot, Chavez did a little dance. “Cesar was extremely tough,” Mrs. Huerta whispered. “Cool and tough. He was scared to death of starting the whole fight over again, but he didn’t flinch. ‘If you want to go to war,’ he said, ‘that’s fine with me.’” Jerry Cohen, elated too, was repeating some of the great lines of the victory: “‘We got a contract, and goddamn it, we’re going to hold you to it!’” Di Giorgio had been told that in addition to the suit, a boycott of S & W products would begin on Monday unless the HI-COLOR label was withdrawn, and that the non-Union growers who had used that label (Dispoto, for one) might be sued in any case. Connors advised Di Giorgio to give in. “Jerry and I heard him say that on the phone,” Chavez admitted. “We weren’t eavesdropping; it was an accident, right?” He seemed genuinely worried, and Cohen laughed. “We were just going out, and we heard it,” Chavez said. “It was an accident.”
Mack Lyons, quieter than the other three, saw us to the car, and Chavez gave their parting full attention.
“Oh! I never asked you! How is your family, Mack?”
“Oh,” Lyons said. “One has the measles.”
Chavez nodded: measles could be serious. He patted Lyons on the shoulder as he said good-bye. “We’ll be out of a job, Mack, one of these days, I hope.”
On the way home everybody was exuberant. “‘No more guerrilla warfare’! They were begging us!” Cohen yelled. “The Vietcong, that’s what they call us!” Chavez cried, raising a clenched revolutionary fist. “The Vietcong strikes again!” Though he took full part in the conversation, he was now noticing the passing scene. “Look at the toilets!” he called at one point, pointing to five brand-new field toilets lined up for the world to see in a ranch yard at Giumarra. “Next thing you know, they’ll be putting them in the fields,” somebody said. I wondered aloud if Connors would warn Dispoto of the impending suit. “Don’t worry,” Cohen said. “They’re on the phone right now.” He was lighting another cigarette, and Chavez, who is intolerant of smoking, made a few remarks. He himself has been giving up smoking for thirty years. The last time was a few years ago, and Mrs. Huerta remembered the exact date: January 1, 1966.
We discussed old Mexican Westerns: Viva Zapata, The Magnificent Seven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Vera Cruz. Everyone was happy, all talking at once. “Boy, did they kill those Mexicans!” Chavez laughed. “Forty-two got it in one scene—I counted them! There was this very smart white guy, and he just kept plugging those dumb Mexicans. I kept my eye on one of the Mexicans, you know, and he kept showing up again; that same guy got killed three or four times single-handed! Another time Fernando came running in; he was watching TV. ‘Dad! Dad! You want to see a bunch of Mexicans killed on film?’” Chavez sighed. “He was very upset. ‘Those stupid gringos,’ Fernando said.”
“Do you notice they don’t kill Negroes in the films any more?” Cohen remarked.
“That’s right,” Mrs. Huerta said. “They kill them in the streets instead.”
Everyone laughed briefly, without joy.
“He got into other scenes too, this guy,” Chavez said after a while. “Altogether he got killed about ten times.” He seemed subdued. In the silence, more than halfway home, he began to strap himself into his safety belt. “How fast are we going, Peter?” It was a comment, not a question, and it seemed odd, since on the way to Bakersfield I’d had to drive much faster. I offered to slow down, but Chavez said no, it was all right. Preoccupied, he could not work the belt; the strapping in went on and on. On the way south he had not bothered with the belt at all.
The glove compartment snapped open with a loud bang and Chavez jumped; his arms shot up to shield his head. He grinned cheerfully at his own nerves and clowned a little, pretending that the snap of the compartment door had been the snap of a six-gun leaving its holster. “Zam!” he cried. “See that?” He dropped his hand to his side. “See how I went for my gun? The Diet-Rite Kid!” Again his mouth widened in a smile, and his dark eyes watched us laughing.
In Delano, Leroy Chatfield came outside to hear the news; he strolled beside Chavez around the corner toward the Pink Building. At this moment a big white station wagon passed me, going much too fast for this narrow street, and spun around the corner onto Asti, where it braked to a violent halt opposite Chatfield and Chavez. The driver of the car was Gilbert Rubio and his passenger was Joe Mendoza, who was pointing something at Chavez. “Click!” Mendoza said, working his camera. “Click, click!” Chavez walked toward the car, and Mendoza, for want of a better plan, kept clicking idiotically. “You look like someone roughed you up!” he jeered at Chavez. Chavez said, “What?” and Mendoza repeated his taunt. “You say you want to rough me up?” Chavez inquired. He kept on coming. Taken aback by his coolness, Rubio and Mendoza roared away. A little later a woman from a right-wing paper came around and was surprised to see Chavez intact. “You don’t look so bad to me,” she said. Apparently she had been told that Chavez had been beaten up. “She looked kind of disappointed,” Chavez said.
I had not heard the exchange between Chavez and Mendoza, which was related to me by Leroy Chatfield when the car had gone. Like all of Chavez’s people, Chatfield worries constantly about Chavez’s safety. The Chavez house is continually threatened and broken into, and the strain on Helen and the children is considerable. Yet Chavez refused to have a bodyguard. In a rare reference to his own safety, he remarked to Chatfield that no meaningful protection can be bought. “No man,” he said, “will jump in front of that bullet, not for money. For love, maybe, but not for money.”
Like Dolores Huerta, Chatfield warned me that Chavez must never be left alone; he wanted to put a stop to Chavez’s long walks from his house to his office. Since the next day was Sunday, Chavez would be sure to walk, and it was important that somebody accompany him. I volunteered.
6
BEFORE leaving for California I had expected that I would be impressed by Cesar Chavez, but I had not expected to be startled. It was not the “charisma” that is often ascribed to him; most charisma is in the eye of the beholder. The people who have known him longest agree that before the strike, Chavez’s presence was so nondescript that he passed unnoticed; he is as unobtrusive as a rabbit, moving quietly wherever he finds himself as if he had always belonged there. The “charisma” is something that has been acquired, an intensification of natural grace which he uses, not always unconsciously, as an organizing tool, turning it on like a blowtorch as the job requires. Once somebody whom he had just enlisted expressed surprise that Chavez had spent so little time in proselytizing. “All he did for three whole days was make me laugh,” the new convert said, still unaware that he’d been organized.
Since Chavez knows better than anyone else what his appeals to public sentiment have accomplished for la causa, I had no doubt that as a writer I would be skillfully organized myself; but warmth and intelligence and courage, even in combination, did not account for what I felt at the end of the four-hour walk on that first Sunday morning.
Talking of leadership during the walk, Chavez said, “It is like taking a road over hills and down into the valley: you must stay with the people. If you go ahead too fast, then they lose sight of you and you lose sight of them.” And at the church he was a man among his neighbors, kneeling among them, joining them to receive holy communion, conversing eagerly in the bright morning of the churchyard, by the white stucco wall. What welled out of him was a phenomenon much spoken of in a society afraid of its own hate, but one that I had never seen before—or not, at least, in anyone unswayed by drugs or aching youth: the simple love of man that accompanies some ultimate acceptance of oneself.
It is this l
ove in Chavez that one sees and resists naming, because to name it is to cheapen it; not the addled love that hides self-pity but a love that does not distinguish between oneself and others, a love so clear in its intensity that it is monastic, even mystical. This intensity in Chavez has burned all his defenses away. Taking the workers’ hands at church, his face was as fresh as the face of a man reborn. “These workers are really beautiful,” he says, and when he says it he is beautiful himself. He is entirely with the people, open to them, one with them, and at the same time that he makes them laugh, his gaze sees beyond them to something else. “Without laying a cross on him,” Jim Drake says, “Cesar is, in theological terms, as nearly ‘a man for others’ as you can find. In spite of all his personal problems—a very bad back, poverty, a large family—he does not allow his own life to get in the way.”
We sat for an hour or more in the adobe shade outside the small room where he had spent his fast, and as he spoke of the old missions and his childhood and the fast, I grew conscious of the great Sunday silence and the serenity that flowed from the man beside me, gazing out with such equanimity upon the city dump. What emerges when Chavez talks seriously of his aim is simplicity, and what is striking in his gentle voice is its lack of mannerisms; it comes as naturally as bird song. For the same reason, it is a pleasure to watch him move. He has what the Japanese call hara, or “belly”—that is, he is centered in himself, he is not fragmented, he sits simply, like a Zen master.
For most of us, to quote Dostoevsky, “to love the universal man is to despise and at times to hate the real man standing at your side.” This is not true of Chavez. But he is super human, not superhuman. He acknowledges that his reactions are not entirely unaffected by the humiliations and pain of his early life, so that even his commitment to nonviolence is stronger in his head than in his heart. And like many people who are totally dedicated, he is intolerant of those who are less so. I asked him once for the names of the best volunteers no longer with the Union, and he said flatly, “The best ones are still here.” I dropped the subject. As his leadership inevitably extends to the more than four million Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, Cesar will necessarily become more lonely, more cut off in a symbolic destiny. Already, sensing this, he puts great emphasis on loyalty, as if to allay a nagging fear of being abandoned, and people who are not at the Union’s disposal at almost any hour of the day or night do not stay close to him for very long. It has been said that he is suspicious of Anglos, but it would be more accurate to say that he is suspicious of everybody, in the way of people with a tendency to trust too much. He is swift and stubborn in his judgments, yet warm and confiding once he commits his faith, which he is apt to do intuitively, in a few moments. The very completeness of this trust, which makes him vulnerable, may also have made him wary of betrayal.
The closer people are to Chavez, the greater the dedication he expects. If they can’t or won’t perform effectively, he does their job himself (“It’s a lot easier to do that than keep after them”), or if they are going about it the wrong way, he may let them persist in a mistake until failure teaches them a lesson. Some of these lessons seem more expensive to the Union than they are worth, but Chavez is determined that his people be self-sufficient—that they could, if need be, get along without him.
His staff has also learned to sacrifice ego to political expedience within the Union. Watching Chavez conduct a meeting, large or small, is fascinating: his sly humor and shy manner, his deceptive use of “we,” leave his own position flexible; he directs with a sure hand, yet rarely is he caught in an embarrassing commitment. Most of his aides have had to take responsibility for unpolitic decisions initiated by Cesar himself, and may experience his apparent disfavor, and even banishment to the sidelines, for circumstances that were not their fault. The veterans do not take this personally. In private, Cesar will be as warm as ever, and they know that their banishment will last no longer than the internal crisis. They know, too, that he never uses people to dodge personal responsibility, but only to circumvent obstruction from the board or from the membership that would impede la causa’s progress; he is selfless, and expects them to be the same.
“Sometimes he seems so damned unfair, so stubborn, so irrational—oh, he can be a sonofabitch! But later on, maybe months later, we find ourselves remembering what he did, and every damned time we have to say, ‘You know something? He was right.’ That edge of irrationality—that’s his greatness.”
Because he is so human, Cesar’s greatness is forgiven; he is beloved, not merely adored. “Often he says, ‘Have you got a minute?’ but what he means is, ‘Talk to me,’ and he doesn’t really mean that; he just has to have somebody close to him all the time, it doesn’t matter who, just someone who isn’t a yes-man, who will bounce his ideas back at him. We all take turns at it, and he knows we’re always there.”
Jim Drake recalls a day sometime ago when he and Cesar and Marshall Ganz drove north to a hospital in Kingsbury, near Fresno, to visit Dave Fishlow, the editor of El Malcriado, who had been badly burned in a car accident. Although they had come one hundred and twenty miles, the supervisor would not let them in because they arrived after visiting hours. “Just a typical Valley cluck, you know. He says, ‘Now what’s going on out here, don’t you know you can’t break regulations? Absolutely not!’ So I said, ‘How about letting me see him? I’m his minister.’ So he agreed, and then I said, ‘Well, since you’re letting somebody go in, it might as well be Cesar, since he’s the one that would do your patient the most good.’ But he said no, so I went in, and Dave suggested to me that Cesar come around under the window, just to say hello. But Cesar refused. You know how he hates discrimination of any kind; well, he thought he’d been discriminated against. I didn’t but he did. He said he had gone to the back door all his life, and he wasn’t going to do it any more. He was almost childish about it. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen him that mad—so stubborn, I mean, that he wouldn’t say hello to a friend. Most of the time that Cesar’s mad, he’s acting mad; he loves to act mad. But this time he was really mad.”
On another occasion Drake himself got angry when Al Green, the AFL-CIO man, referred to Chavez as “that beady-eyed little Mex,” and was astonished when Chavez, hearing this, burst out laughing. “He does very strange things; you can’t anticipate him. When we had that conference at St. Anthony’s Mission, he was very anxious at have everybody get to work and everything, and then he just disappeared. Later we found out that he and Richard and Manuel had been scooting around taking pictures of the nearby missions.”
“In public, he’s simple in his manner,” Dolores Huerta says, “and when things are tense, he can make everyone relax by acting silly. When he used to drink a little, he was a real clown at parties; there were always games and dancing, and he would dance on the table.” She laughed, remembering. “But I find him a very complicated person.” In truth, Dolores finds Chavez difficult, but Dolores can be difficult herself, and anyway, her openness about him is a sign of faith, not disaffection.
One person in the Union with reservations about Chavez remarked to me of his own accord that in the creation of the United Farm Workers, Chavez had done something that “no one else has ever done. What can I say? I disagree with him on a lot of things, but I work for him for nothing.”
This last sentence is eloquent because it says just what it means. Applied to the Chavez of la causa, ordinary judgments seem beside the point; a man with no interest in private gain who will starve himself for twenty-five days and expose his life daily to the threat of assassination, who takes serious risks, both spiritual and physical, for others, may be hated as well as adored, but he cannot be judged in the same terms as a man of ordinary ambitions.
The fast began on February 14, 1968, just after his return from a fund-raising journey around the country. Everywhere he went, the militant groups which supported him or sought his support were ranting about the violence planned for the summer of 1968. In the background, like a pall,
was the destruction of Vietnam, which was still seen by its perpetrators as a tactical problem, not a moral one, and in the foreground, in Delano, his own people were rivaling the growers in loose talk of quick solutions. It was winter, in the hungry time between the pruning and girdling of vines, and the strike had drained the workers’ nerves for two and a half years, and some were muttering that they had waited long enough. Many were still concerned with their machismo, or manliness, which sometimes emerges in oblique ways; as one worker says, “the women get afraid. The growers say they goin to call the law, and we don’t know no law. So the women, they get afraid.” They felt they were being cowardly in permitting the growers to continue exploiting them; anyway, wasn’t violence traditional to labor movements? Hadn’t violence gotten results in the ghetto riots of 1967? Perhaps a little burning in Delano, an explosion or two, might force the growers to negotiate. (Chavez doesn’t deny this. “If we had used violence,” he once told me, “we would have won contracts long ago, but they wouldn’t be lasting, because we wouldn’t have won respect.”) Depressed, Chavez decided on the fast as a kind of penitence for the belligerence that had developed in his own union, and a commitment to nonviolence everywhere.
From every point of view, the twenty-five-day fast was the most serious risk that Chavez had ever taken, and it placed the hard work of six years in the balance. Chavez himself speaks mildly of the fast, but his people don’t feel mild about it, even now; it split the Union down the middle. Helen, Richard and Manuel knew that Cesar had been fasting before he made it known, but they were stunned by his intention to prolong the fast indefinitely. So were Leroy Chatfield, who still speaks of Chavez’s announcement speech with awe, and Marion Moses, a volunteer Union nurse now on the boycott in New York, who has lent me some notes that she set down at the time.