“Use the hoe,” Eddie said.
“So you pulled this before?”
“Yes. Last year. This pigweed was not a problem when I first came to America. Now it is a big problem. It is everywhere.”
I dug my hoe into the baked earth and, pulling as hard as I could, tore out a weed.
Just then the crew leader shouted at me. “Move it, Frank.”
Eddie didn’t look up from his hoe but said, “Why does he call you Frank?”
“He thinks he’s funny.” I glanced over; Curtis was still staring at me. “Is he going to watch us all day?”
“That is his job.”
Curtis shouted, “Keep it movin’, Frank.”
I dug faster. “I feel like a slave.”
“Yes,” Eddie said. “Maybe.”
A few minutes later Eddie said, “You know, gringo, you can eat this weed. It is very good for you. And it grows very good, even in drought. People have eaten it for thousands of years in Mexico.”
“Maybe they should grow these instead of cotton. It seems to grow better.”
“That would be too smart, gringo.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
According to the article I read, pigweed, a product of evolution, has been spreading throughout the southern part of the US for nearly a decade now. No pesticide kills it that won’t kill the crop as well. Left alone, it grows upward of seven feet high, and is tough enough to damage farm equipment. I guess that makes me a soldier in the battle against the perfect weed.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
If it hadn’t been for my three weeks of walking and the strength I’d gained from it, I wouldn’t have made it through the first day. Probably not even the first hour. Curtis must have smelled weakness on me; he kept after me all day. Sometimes warranted, sometimes not. It took all the restraint I could muster not to throttle him.
In addition to the difficulty of the work, the sun was merciless, and the whole day I was drenched in sweat.
We stopped around eleven for lunch. My muscles already ached. I couldn’t remember the last time that I had worked so hard.
Eddie and I sat down together. He tossed me a handkerchief. “Put that around your neck. Your skin is too fair, gringo. Are you sure you are Mexican?”
I tied the cloth around my neck. “Half. My mother was Irish. White as snow.”
“You got her skin, gringo.”
I opened my bag and brought out all I had purchased: a candy bar, some jerky, and sodas. Eddie looked at my ration. “That is all you have to eat?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t get the memo.”
Eddie’s brow furrowed. “Memo?”
“I didn’t know how this worked. I assumed that they fed us.”
He shook his head. “No. Some farms will feed the workers, but they charge a lot of money. It is better this way.” He leaned forward and handed me half of his sandwich. “Take this.”
As hungry as I was, I didn’t take it. “No, it’s your lunch.”
“I have more. You can buy food tomorrow night. They will drive us to the grocery store.”
“You sure?”
“I have more.”
I took the sandwich. “Thank you.”
The sandwich had cheese, ham, wilted lettuce, and mayo on a hoagie bun. Eddie also had a block of cheddar cheese and a package of tortillas. We broke off pieces of cheese and rolled them in the tortillas. Such simple food had never tasted so good. Twenty minutes later a whistle blew.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Thirty minutes for lunch,” Eddie said.
My legs had cramped up as I sat, and I stood with difficulty. I practically hobbled back to the cotton field. This isn’t worth eight dollars an hour, I thought. It’s not worth eight dollars a minute.
At around four o’clock, another whistle blew, signaling the end of the workday. We had worked for ten hours, though it felt like more. Outside of my childhood labor, it was the hardest money I’d ever worked for.
A pungent, acrid odor filled the air. About sixty yards from the field, the mountain of weeds we’d picked were burning, giving off thick, black smoke that rose in a column nearly a mile high. Eddie and I carried our bags and hoes over to a truck. I retrieved my pack from the truck we’d come in, and then we walked—in my case, limped—back to where Curtis was standing. There was an armed security guard next to him holding a bag of money. Curtis was going down his list distributing payment. He called a name and someone would step forward and he’d hand them their money.
When he called my pseudonym, “Frank,” I stepped up to him. He handed me three twenty-dollar bills. For a moment I just looked at them in my grimy hands, then said, “We worked ten hours.”
“Mostly,” he said.
“You said we got paid eight dollars an hour.”
The foreman’s eyes narrowed. “You did. I took twenty for transportation.”
“Transportation?”
“You got a ride here, didn’t ya?”
“No one said anything about charging us.”
“Not my problem,” he said. “You don’t like it, go find something else. Now get the hell out of here.”
In my previous life I would have knocked the man to the ground. Instead, I turned and walked back to where Eddie stood. He shook his head. “It is the way it is, gringo. They take something from everything.”
Eddie and I walked over to one of the produce trucks, where most of the workers had already climbed aboard. I pulled myself up onto the truck, though my aching arms nearly gave out.
“Are they going to charge us for this ride too?” I asked.
Eddie nodded. “Yes. Everything.”
After twenty minutes or so, the engine started up, shaking the truck with its exertion. Then it lurched forward, tossing us all back into each other like dominoes. One of the men fell off the truck. They left him.
I said to Eddie, “I don’t like Legree.”
His forehead furrowed. “Who?”
“The crew leader. Simon Legree.”
Eddie looked confused. “That is not his name.”
“I know.”
“I do not understand.”
“Simon Legree. He was a plantation owner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Eddie just gazed at me.
“It’s a book,” I said. “A famous book about slavery.”
Eddie thought for a moment, then said, “You call him Legree. Maybe that is why he calls you Frank.”
The produce trucks dropped us off about two miles from the cotton fields on a barren acre of dirt and weeds adjacent to the far east side of the property. There were eight squat, flat-topped buildings constructed of a weathered gray corrugated metal housing.
Between two of the buildings was a cagelike structure made of iron pipe built over a concrete pad. The sides were covered with fiberboard and the top of the structure had four bars running horizontally across it, a platform for a five-hundred-gallon plastic water tank. A green hose ran from the bottom of the tank and was coiled up on the concrete. This was the community shower. There was no drain. The water just ran off onto the dirt around the pad.
There was an old tractor tire just a few yards from the tower with a wooden door on it piled with blankets. It was somebody’s bed.
My quads and lower back were aching as I walked toward the structure. “This is our housing?”
Eddie sensed my disappointment. “It is not so bad, gringo.”
I stopped and looked at him. “How is this not bad?”
“Many times I have had worse. One place in Oregon charged us five hundred dollars a month for our housing. Our house, for six of us, was a shipping container with a bucket for a toilet.”
“That would be worse,” I conceded.
I followed Eddie inside the shack. Worse, but not by much. It was a large, open room, paneled with plywood and filled with various-sized beds.
The room had just one window, which was partially veiled with a stained bedsheet for a curtain, darkening
the room. I remembered once yelling at the Buckhead Ritz-Carlton’s concierge because I didn’t like the way my bed had been made. I was a long way from the Ritz.
In the middle of the space a naked lightbulb hung from a rusted steel supporting beam that ran horizontally across the length of the room. The light’s cord dangled thirty or forty inches above one of the beds and was held against the wall by a nail that had been pounded into the plywood and then bent around the cord. The line ran down to an uncovered electrical outlet.
The beds were simple box frames with thin, single mattresses covered with grimy, torn covers.
“It ain’t five star,” I said beneath my breath. I lay my pack on one of the beds, then turned to Eddie. “I think we need to call housekeeping. They forgot to leave truffles on the pillows. Oh wait, they forgot to leave pillows.”
“I have had worse,” Eddie repeated, as he walked between the beds. He swung the lightbulb to one side, then let it swing as shadows played in the room. “It has a lightbulb that works.”
“Not sure that’s a plus,” I said, still looking around. A cockroach scurried across the floor between my feet. I tried to squash it but missed.
“La cucaracha,” Eddie said. “That is good.”
I laughed. “You are Pollyanna on steroids. What is good about cockroaches?”
“It means there are not so many rats to eat them.”
I looked at him empathetically. “This is how you live?”
“It is not so bad,” Eddie said again.
“Aren’t there laws for housing?”
“There are laws, but they are your laws, not ours.” He looked around to make sure that no one from the farm was around. “These people are sin papeles. Without papers. They don’t even know there are laws, but it makes no difference. Who are they going to complain to? Most of them do not speak English. And if they complain, they will get sent back to Mexico. We are at their mercy.”
“What about the government?”
“They make laws to, what is the word . . . keep people from being mad.”
“Appease,” I said.
He nodded. “But they do not obey their own laws. Farming is a very big money business. It makes billions of dollars. And if they catch a farmer breaking the law, they do not do anything to him. So it does not matter. Who is going to care about us? We are like that cucaracha.”
“No. You’re not.” I again panned the room. “Where’s the toilet?”
“It is outside. Everyone shares it.”
“It? There’s only one toilet?”
He added, “It is enough. Most do not bother with a toilet. They just pee where they are.” He headed for the door. “Follow me, gringo. I will show you the toilet. Maybe we will be lucky and there will be toilet paper.”
Outside the shack, the orange-red Texas sun touched the western horizon. Even though there were a dozen or so women and children in the camp, a man had stripped naked and was showering beneath the water tank.
I was following Eddie to the outhouse when Legree pulled into camp in an older-model Chevy pickup truck. He parked in front of what looked to be an office building about twenty-five yards from where Eddie and I stood. He shouted to me, “Hey, Frank.”
I looked at him.
“Come here. I’ve got someplace for you.”
I turned to Eddie. “Let’s go see. Maybe he has someplace better.”
“He is not talking to me,” Eddie said.
Legree stood there looking at me impatiently. “Haven’t got all day.”
I walked over to him, and he led me inside the building. It was a large, open room with fluorescent lighting. It had once been an office of sorts but now it was mostly used as storage; it was piled with old desks and file cabinets, assorted junk, like an indoor landfill.
There were three beds in the room, and it appeared that the former occupants had arranged the furniture around the beds to give them privacy. It was definitely an improvement over the hovel Eddie had showed me.
“You can sleep in here. It’s got a clean toilet, decent bed.”
I looked at him. “Why are you putting me in here?”
“You’re different from the others.”
At first I was baffled by his offer. I was pretty sure that this guy hated me, so why was he giving me a prime spot? Then I remembered what Eddie had just said. I spoke English and I wasn’t an undocumented laborer. If I complained, someone might actually listen. I looked at him for a moment, then shook my head. “I’m no different.” I walked back to the shack and my only friend.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I’ve received more genuine generosity from this humble man in a week than I have from my millionaire associates in an entire career. Perhaps to want is to understand want in others.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
When I returned to the shack, two other men and a woman were there. The woman, who looked at least ten years older than me, eyed me warily.
“Do you know these people?” I asked Eddie.
“Yes. That is Albert, Johnnie, and Eleena.”
They each nodded at the sound of their name.
“Mucho gusto,” I said to them. They just stared at me. “Mi casa es su casa?” Nothing. I turned back to Eddie. “Tough crowd.”
“They do not know you. We only stay with people we know. We have no place to hide our money.”
“Maybe you should ask for a check.”
“That is not how it is done. The farmer does not want to make a check. And if they give us a check, who will cash them? Just the payday loan places, but they will charge us a lot of money to cash them, even though they know the farmer and they know that it is a good check.” Eddie shook his head. “What did Mr. Legree want?”
I grinned at his adoption of the nickname. “He showed me another place to stay.”
“It was good?”
“No. Not as good. Where do I sleep?”
“That bed is for you.”
I looked at it. The mattress was depressed in the middle but it was possible that they had given me the best one. “Thank you. Muchas gracias.”
They all nodded in acceptance of my thanks.
I opened my pack and laid my pad across the bed along with my sleeping bag. I unzipped my bag and spread it open across the bed like a sheet.
Eddie sat down on the bed across from me, the one with the lightbulb hanging above it, and lay back on the mattress, rubbing his forehead. The mattress squeaked.
“Going to bed so soon?” I asked.
“Acostarse con las gallinas, gringo. Morning comes early.”
“Right.” I lay down as well, taking my journal out of my bag. “Can we leave the light on for a moment? I need to write.”
“Sí.”
I wrote for about ten minutes, then returned my journal to my pack. “Okay.”
Eddie reached up and turned off the light.
“Buenas noches, gringo.”
“Buenas noches, Eddie.” As I lay there staring at the ceiling, all I could think was, What have I gotten myself into?
Chapter Thirty-Four
Slavery still exists. It’s just been rebranded into something more ignorable.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
Just as Eddie had warned, morning came early—far too early. In spite of my exhaustion, I hadn’t slept very well, tossing and turning on the thin, uneven mattress. I also heard the scurrying of rodents throughout the night. Or maybe they were just monster cockroaches.
I woke to the smell of coffee beans. It was still dark inside our room except for the red glow of a hot plate. I sat up, my neck sunburned and my back aching, likely as much from the bed as the previous day’s labor.
Eddie was in the corner of the room squatting down next to the hot plate. The two men and the woman were sitting on the ground next to him. I was the only one still in bed.
On one of the burners was a pot of coffee. On the other Eddie was cooking eggs in a saucepan. To one side of the hot plate, on a torn piece of cardboard
box, was a stack of fried corn tortillas. There was a bowl of refried beans on the other.
“Buenos días,” Eddie said.
I rubbed my eyes. “Buenos días.”
“I was about to wake you. It is almost time to work. Come and eat.”
I took some money out of my pocket. “I’ll pay for this.”
“Do not worry. You can buy food tonight.”
About half an hour later, I heard the clattering approach of the produce truck, followed by a horn blast. Everyone emerged from their shacks and climbed onto the truck for the two-mile ride back to the cotton fields.
Our group had worked more than a hundred acres the day before, so our gathering point had moved about a quarter mile west. Again, Legree was there to check us in. He looked at me spitefully, likely because I had rejected his offer the night before. Without comment, he wrote down my name. Then he looked up and said, “Let’s see if you can earn your wage today.”
The weather was better than it had been the day before. It was still uncomfortably hot, but at least there were clouds that offered some relief from the Texas sun. The weeds, unfortunately, were just as stubborn. Even though I was sore, I worked faster than the day before, not that Legree noticed. He harassed me most of the morning, and I was grateful when we stopped for lunch, which Eddie and I took alone. Again, Eddie provided my meal: two tamales wrapped in corn husks and an apple.
“Tonight we go shopping for more groceries,” Eddie said. “They will drive us in the truck.”
“How much will they charge us?”
“Maybe ten dollars each.”
“It’s only a couple of miles away.”
“It is the way it is,” Eddie said. “There is nothing we can do. This is not so bad as other places. Some places charge you money without telling you. Some places you owe them money for working for them.”
“That’s The Grapes of Wrath,” I said.
“Grapes? Yes, I have picked grapes.”
“No, The Grapes of Wrath. It’s a book by John Steinbeck.” I checked his face for recognition. “It’s about the Great Depression.”