The Cotton-Pickers Read online

  Then there was Abraham, the little Negro from New Orleans, who wore a shirt as black as his skin, so that it wasn’t easy to distinguish between the shreds of his shirt and the skin it tried to cover. Abraham was the only one who wore a cap, oddly enough a blue-striped cap of the kind worn by railroad stokers and engineers. He had no bundle, but he carried a coffee pot and a frying pan, and some food in a small canvas bag. Abraham was wily, cunning, cheeky, and ever in good spirits. He had a mouth organ on which he played that silly tune “Yes, we have no bananas” so often that on the second day we let loose on him with our fists.

  Gonzalo said that Abraham stole like a crow, and Antonio said that he lied like a Dominican friar. On the third evening out, we caught Abraham stealing a slice of Antonio’s dried beef, but we relieved him of it before he got it into his frying pan and solemnly explained to him that if we caught him stealing again we would deal with him according to the law of the bushland. We would try him, duly sentence him, then take a cord from one of our bundles and hang him on the nearest ebony tree, leaving a note pinned on his body to explain why he had been hanged. Whereupon Abraham told us that we would not dare to lay a finger on him, for he was an American citizen, “native-born,” and would report us to the government in Washington if we so much as touched him. They would then come with a gunboat flying the stars and stripes and work vengeance on us. He was a free citizen “of the United States,” could prove it with certificates, and so had the right to be tried before a proper court. When we told him that no gunboat flying the stars and stripes could sail into the bush, he said, “Well, Gentlemen, Sirs, just touch me with the tip of one finger and see what happens.”

  What happened was that we caught him a few days later stealing a can of condensed milk from the Chink. He brazenly claimed he’d bought the milk at a store in Tampico, but we gave him such a beating that he couldn’t have held a pen to write to Washington. (Later, when he pilfered from others, that was, of course, none of our business.)

  Then last in line there was Gerard Gales — that’s my name. There’s not much to say about me. In dress I was indistinguishable from the others, and I was going cotton-picking — laborious, underpaid work — because there was no other work to be had and I badly needed a shirt, a pair of shoes, and some trousers. Even so, they would have to come from a second-hand shop. Ten weeks’ work at cotton-picking would never earn enough to buy them new.

  The sun was already low when we began to look around for a place to pitch camp.

  Before long we found a spot where high grass extended into the bush; we pulled out as much of it as was necessary to clear a camping ground and set fire to the surrounding grass, thereby gaining some freedom from insects and creeping vermin for the night. A freshly-burned grass area is supposed to be the best protection you can have if you are obliged to journey in these parts without the equipment of the tropical traveler.

  We had a campfire, but no water to cook with. At this point the Chink produced a bottle of cold coffee. We had had no idea that he was carrying such precious stuff with him. He heated the coffee and obligingly offered us all a drink. But what was a bottle of coffee among six men who had been plodding along in the tropical sun for half a day without a drop of water? Furthermore, it was probable that we’d find as little water during the next day as we had found on this first afternoon. The bush is green, yes, the whole year through, but water is to be found only during the rainy season and then only in those spots where ponds and basins form.

  So, no one who has not himself wandered the tropical bush can possibly realize the extent of the Chink’s sacrifice. But none of us said “No, thank you.” Everyone seemed to take it quite for granted that the coffee should be shared. And we’d have taken it equally for granted had the Chink drunk all his coffee himself. Half a day’s march in waterless country isn’t enough to make you turn robber for the sake of a cup of coffee, but three days in the bush may find you thinking seriously of murder for the sake of even a small rusty can of stinking fluid called water only because it is wet.

  Antonio and I had some dry bread to munch. Gonzalo had some tortillas and four mangos. Charley had a few bananas. Abraham ate something furtively; I couldn’t see what it was.

  We made ready to sleep. The Chink put a piece of canvas on his sleeping place and then wrapped himself, head and all, in a large towel; Gonzalo rolled himself into his sarape; and I wrapped my head in a tattered rag as a protection against mosquitoes and promptly fell asleep. The others were talking and smoking around the fire and I’ve no idea when they turned in.

  Before dawn, we were on our way. The trail through the bush was overgrown for long stretches. Saplings reached more than shoulder-high and the ground was so dense with cactus shrubs that they often covered the path. My bare calves were soon so scratched up that all sorts of insects were attracted to the blood.

  Toward noon we arrived at a place where a barbed-wire fence ran along the right side of the trail and knew that we were near a farm. We kept the fence on our right, and after an hour or more arrived at a wide, open clearing overgrown with high grass. We searched the place and found a cistern — empty. A few rotten beams, some old cans, rusty corrugated iron sheets, and similar junk indicated an abandoned farm.

  This was a disappointment, but we were not disheartened by it. In this part of the world farms are carved out of the bush, worked for ten or even twenty years, and then suddenly for one reason or another are abandoned. Within five years, often sooner, the bush has obliterated all signs of the men who once lived and worked there. The tropical bush devours more quickly than men can build. The bush has no memory; it knows only the living, growing present.

  By four o’clock we got to another farm; an American family was living on it. I was well received, was given a good meal with the farmer, and was offered a place to sleep in the house. The others were fed on the patio and were allowed to sleep in a shed.

  The farmer knew Mr. Shine, and told me that we had about another thirty miles to go. He said there was no water along the route and that the road was barely recognizable in some places, as it hadn’t been used since that time three years ago. Mr. Shine now took his cotton to the Pozos station, on the other side of Ixtli…. “That place isn’t quite so far from Shine’s as the one you fellows are hiking from,” he said. “The road’s good too. At first there was no road to Pozos either, but since the oil men came they’ve made one. Now all the farmers around there use that station, and I’d advise you to take that road when you go back. By the way,” he added, “I wonder why no, one told you to go to Pozos in the first place?”

  Why? Because to the men out recruiting pickers for the cotton farmers, what did it matter how we got to the job? “Ixtlixochicuauhtepec” they wrote out, and that ended their part in the matter. What concern was it of theirs to check out the route?

  Because to the stationmaster it hadn’t occurred that it might make a difference which station he made out the ticket for, or maybe he hadn’t even known there was a choice, or, if he had, that the choice was between a three-day walk beating a path under a burning sun and a real road where we might even have been able to pick up a ride.

  The next morning we were all given a generous breakfast, I once more eating at the family table. When we were getting ready to leave, the farmer rounded up enough bottles so that each of us could have a bottle of cold tea to take along, and we started out on those last thirty or so miles.

  3

  On the following day, about noon, we arrived at Mr. Shine’s. He received us with real satisfaction, for he was short of hands.

  Calling me into the house, he cross-examined me. “What?” he asked. “You want to pick cotton, too?”

  “Yes, I must. I’m flat broke, You can see that, by my rags. And there’s no work to be found in the towns. Every place is flooded with job-hunters from the States, where they’re having their postwar slump. But when workers are needed here, they prefer to take on natives, because they pay them wages they’d never dare offer
a white man, even if this Revolution is supposed to change all that.”

  “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 “ho
me” 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.”