The Cotton-Pickers

by B. TRAVEN

  With that, we went to the dormitory, stuffed our working rags into an empty sugar sack, and were about to leave when Antonio suddenly remembered something.

  “Wait. We’ve left our two pesos in the old shoe, and we’d better get them. We’re not leaving our pesos for them to buy new pictures!”

  We got our pesos and passed through the bakehouse once more.

  “Who tore down the pictures?” asked the Czech.

  “We did. Any objections?” Antonio snapped. “Speak up. We’re just in the mood. We sure ought to be able to do as we please with our own pictures.”

  “I didn’t know that they belonged to you. Anyhow, you needn’t have torn them up,” said another worker.

  “I don’t like indecent pictures,” Antonio replied. “If you must have stuff like that staring you in the face, you can buy it for yourselves. We don’t need such pictures, do we, Gales?”

  “Not us! I’m glad to say that we don’t.” I spoke with great conviction. Then we went to Doux and asked for the money that was due us. “Come back tomorrow,” he told us.

  “We know all about your tomorrows,” we said.

  Antonio put his sack on the floor, leaned over the counter toward Doux, and raised his voice: “Will you give us our money now, or won’t you? Or must we call the police to make you pay us the wages we’ve earned?”

  “Don’t shout like that, or the customers will hear you,” said Doux quietly, putting his hand in his pocket. “I’ll pay you. I’ve never owed one centavo for wages. Would you like a bottle of beer?”

  “I don’t mind if I do,” replied Antonio. proud to accept it.”

  We sat at a table and a waiter served us the beer.

  “We don’t want to make Doux a present of skinflint,” I said. “He seemed to think we’d never have offered it to us.”

  “Sure,” said Antonio. “That’s why I said yes, though I didn’t really want it!”

  Doux didn’t ask us why we were leaving. These sudden departures were the norm here; he took no notice of them, and didn’t try to persuade us to stay, for he knew from experience that it would have been useless.

  He went to the cash box and then brought over our money, put it down on the table, and disappeared behind the counter without another word or another look in our direction.

  Antonio and I went to a coffee stall where we drank a glass of coffee and where the woman in charge allowed us to leave our sacks until the next morning, when we would return for breakfast. Then we went back to the girls, where life was more pleasant than in the bakehouse.

  The next day, after a morning of loafing on benches in the plaza, we went to a boardinghouse, where we each reserved a bed for fifty centavos and deposited our bags in the baggage room.

  Our names were duly registered and we were given room and bed numbers. Each room had six to eight beds, which were placed at random where there happened to be space for them.

  Baths were available at any hour, day or night — shower baths at twenty-five centavos each. For this you got soap, towel, and a piece of rafia — a sort of straw washcloth. There was no faucet to regulate the flow of water, but a chain pull, forcing you to bathe with one hand while the other hand kept pulling the chain so the water would run. If you soaped yourself with both hands, the water would stop; this saved water, of course. After taking a shower we lay down for a long siesta.

  About eight in the evening we got up and went into town again, planning to return later. We stopped at a bar. A tall man was standing around drinking tequila; he wore riding boots and spurs, his face was rough, and he sported a mighty mustache.

  “Hi, there!” he called as we were going out. “Are you looking for work?”

  “Maybe. What sort? Where?”

  “Cotton-picking. In Concordia, for Mr. G. Mason. Usual pickers’ pay, and it’s near the railroad. The fare’s only three pesos sixty.”

  “Are you authorized to hire?”

  “Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t be telling you.”

  “All right. Let me have it on a slip of paper.”

  He got himself a slip of paper from the bartender, then took a stump of a pencil from his shirt pocket and scribbled something on the paper.

  I read the note: “Mr. G. Mason, Concordia. This man has come for the picking. L. Wood.”

  I talked the matter of the job over with Antonio, but he decided against it. So the next morning I left Antonio at the boardinghouse and took the train to Concordia.

  When I arrived I found Mr. Mason right away; he was in the field where many pickers were already busy and the work was well underway. But when Mr. Mason saw my note, he said: “L. Wood? Don’t know him. Never told him to send pickers to me. Don’t need any. I’ve got enough.”

  “But you are Mr. G. Mason?”

  “No, I am W. Mason.”

  “Does a G. Mason live around here?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then it must mean you. The G must be a mistake, since you are picking here. How can that Mr. Wood, if that’s his real name, know that a Mr. Mason lives here and is just starting to pick cotton?”

  The farmer looked doubtful. “I’ve no idea, no more than you. Anyhow, I don’t know anyone named Wood, and my first name begins with W not G.”

  “This is a fine business,” I said, “making a fellow spend railway fare when he’s practically broke to start with. I’ll tell you something, Mr. Mason, there’s something wrong here. Someone has done me out of my time and money.”

  “Well, you can start picking here if you like,” Mr. Mason relented now, “but it won’t be worth your effort. I’ve got only natives picking, and they do it cheap, very, very cheap. And there’s no place for you to live around here.”

  “I don’t need a blueprint to see how things are,” I said. “Have you ever worked as a carpenter?”

  “I’m an experienced joiner.”

  If you don’t want to starve in that part of the world you have to be able to do anything. I hadn’t the faintest idea of carpentry, but I thought that once I was confronted with the job and had a tool in my hand, the rest would follow automatically.

  “If you’re a carpenter, I can get work for you,” said Mr. Mason. “There’s a farmer who’s building himself a new house, and he can’t get on with it because he doesn’t know anything about joinery. I’ll give you a note to him. He’s only an hour’s hike from the station.”

  I wasn’t born yesterday. I knew perfectly well that no farmer wanted a carpenter and that Mr. Mason was only planning to get rid of me before I insisted that he pay my fare. No doubt he’d instructed Mr. Wood to send pickers to him, and meanwhile he’d hired Indian pickers for less money. That’s the kind of tricks they pull on the unemployed; they recruited men all over the area, not being sure how many would turn up. Wherever the farmers had friends or acquaintances they’d send word for pickers, and there were always those dupes and down-and-outers who’d risk their last peso on the train fare. Then the farmer would choose the cheapest workers and, what’s more, he’d beat down the pickers’ wages; for the migrant worker wouldn’t have the money to get away again and would be forced to pick for as little as three centavos the kilo.

  There was no point in my arguing with Mason, for the only way to settle accounts with him would have been to push his face in; but he had a gun in his back pocket, and no matter how well I aimed my fists they were no match for nickel-plated bullets.

  So I had to go back to the station, and while there I thought I might as well call on the farmer. It was just as I’d thought; he didn’t want a carpenter, for he was carpenter enough himself to have built a good solid house with the help of three natives. However, my asking for a job got me a good meal. And the farmer confirmed that Mason was the meanest kind of welcher and pulled the same dirty trick every year, so that an influx of whites looking for work enabled him to cut the natives’ wages to rock bottom. For these poor fellows, who had hardly any other income during the whole year, resigned themselves to the constant lowering
of their wages when they saw that even white men were begging for the job of picking cotton.

  19

  When I got back to town I had just two pesos left — after all those months in the bakehouse.

  I went to the boardinghouse, where I hoped to find Antonio, but he wasn’t there. He never went to bed before twelve, for life was at its best in the cool evening when pretty girls promenaded in the plaza while the band played. So I went in search of him.

  Unable to find him in any of the plazas, I thought that he might be at the gambling joint. It was on the upper floor of a certain large house which had a bar on the ground floor. No drinks were sold in the gambling salons, but ice water could be had, gratis. I went in just as I was, without vest or jacket, for the owners and managers weren’t concerned with what customers had on their backs, but with what they had in their pockets. A man in a work shirt might have two or three months’ oil driller’s wages in his work pants. The more grease-stained and muddied his trousers, his shirt and hat and boots, the more likely it was that he had two or three thousand pesos on him and had come to the joint to try to double the amount.

  On the landing two men sat at a small table and watched everyone who went upstairs. They knew every customer who had been there before and had a good memory for the faces of those who weren’t allowed to enter because of past misbehavior. If a customer claimed that a croupier had defrauded him, the croupier would pay out the ten or twenty pesos in question without a word of argument, despite the fact that the bank was in the right; but the gambler would never be allowed in the place again.

  Cards and dice were promptly changed if a player showed the slightest suspicion that he was losing by some sort of manipulation; but, in fact, the bank never cheated. If anyone cheated, it was the guests. The bank knew that it was good business to play absolutely straight.

  The gambling hall was jammed, and if it hadn’t been for the many fans and ventilators, the heat would have made any long stay impossible. There were roulette tables, poker tables, baccarat, and even “seventeen and four” games. One bank was kept by a Chinese who was a member of the board. This place was called the Jockey Club, and it was open to members only; handily enough, you became a member when you entered. Though the law required that every player hold a membership card, no one was ever asked to show his card, certainly never a white man.

  I had guessed right. Antonio was there. He was standing at a dice table, where a “steerer,” paid to stimulate interest at empty tables, was playing. The steerer was raising his stake at every throw, until at last he was staking twenty-five pesos at a time, and this attracted the attention of the guests who were at other tables. People were intrigued by the high stake; they pressed nearer; they crowded around to watch the reckless player. Naturally the steerer had ordinary gambler’s luck, but it wasn’t his own money at stake; it was the bank’s. The less-experienced guests, of course, didn’t know that the fellow was a steerer. So, within a few minutes, the table was besieged by a dozen excited men watching the fall of the dice and mentally calculating combinations and intervals at which the numbers were recurring. As soon as they felt that they had figured out the combinations they started playing; so the dice table, which had been empty ten minutes earlier, with only the croupier standing by it, was now the center of attention. Every square was taken, three or four times over.

  This drained the baccarat table of players and gave its croupier a chance to make up his accounts, exchange chips, chips, and stack up a new pack of cards. When he was all set again, and the croupier at the dice table was beginning to sweat, two steerers came and started to play at the baccarat table. Gradually the dice game slowed down, while the crowd at the baccarat table increased.

  In one corner a bank was being auctioned; the bidding started at five pesos, the next bid was ten, and it finally went for sixty pesos. I looked over at the man who had bought it.

  “Damn it all, Leary, old boy, what are you doing here?” I called, for I’d worked with Leary at the oil camp. “I’ll cross my fingers for you, Leary, up to three hundred. Agreed?” I shouted.

  “Agreed, Gales,” he called back.

  The people who had heard us laughed and cane over to the table where Leary sat down to take over his bank. The play started. Leary had to bleed — a hundred, two hundred, three hundred. He shelled out the money in stacks and pushed it to the winners. He had run out of chips.

  “Damn it, Gales, what’s up?”

  ‘Don’t worry, Leary, throw in all you’ve got!”

  “All right, I’ll do it,” Leary called over, “but I’ll be after your blood if I’m left in the lurch.”

  “Keep it up. I’m good for three hundred by gentlemen’s agreement.” I had two pesos in my pocket.

  Leary went ahead with the bets — four hundred, five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred. His face was as red as a tomato, and he looked as if he were about to burst; he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped streaming sweat from his face.

  The cards fell once again. His bank won. I squeezed my fingers hard. The bank won again. Leary got up. “I’m auctioning off this bank,” he announced.

  “How much have you made, Leary?” I asked him when we met and shook hands in the crowd.

  “Made? How much? I don’t know exactly. But here, take this, it’s yours,” and he gave me two hundred pesos.

  I’d certainly earned it. But he didn’t tell me how much he’d made; he must have tucked away a tidy roll.

  Easy come, easy go. But these two hundred pesos hadn’t been so easy, and I took good care of them. I lent Antonio fifteen pesos so he could rent a cigarette stall and stock it; the rent for the tiny booth with a striped awning to keep off the hot sun was nine pesos a month.

  The daily tax on Antonio’s stall was fifteen centavos. The municipal collector came along every morning to collect it, giving Antonio a stamped receipt which had to be shown when another official appeared in the afternoon to collect from those who hadn’t paid in the morning. This small daily tax was all you had to pay the authorities to set up shop in the street.

  If business was going badly, Antonio would say to the collector: “I’ve hardly earned my lunch today,” and the collector would waive the tax for that day. He believed the street trader’s claim of poor business, just as the trader believed him if on some other occasion he had something out of the ordinary to say. Trust for trust.

  Actually, Antonio didn’t make much. One day one peso; another, two pesos — seldom more than two. But it was easier than the bakehouse, although the working hours were as long. Sometimes Antonio stayed at his stall from five in the morning until midnight.

  I got one or two packs of cigarettes from him every day and so reduced his debt to me. It took a long time, for each pack cost only ten centavos. Some packets contained premiums for ten, twenty, or fifty centavos, which Antonio had to pay out of his own pocket. Eventually the manufacturers refunded these amounts, but the outlay was hard on Antonio.

  One afternoon when I was reminiscing with him, sitting on a packing box by his stall, I asked him: “Why didn’t you come cotton-picking with me that time? You had the fare, the same as I did.”

  “That’s it, I had the fare. That’s why I didn’t come! I warned you, but you didn’t believe me. You’ll not be taken in so easily again.”

  “You never can tell in advance whether or not it’s the real thing. Last year it was,” I reminded him.

  “Yes, of course, it may be the real thing, fair work and proper picker’s pay, but I’ve had enough of that. Three years ago I went picking, and do you know what happened?”

  “What?”

  “When the first week was over, we asked for our wages, but the farmer said that he could advance us only one peso each, which of course wasn’t enough to buy the food we needed for the coming week. He could not advance us one centavo more, he said, because he had no money; but if we needed any supplies we could get them from his store. So we got food from him because we had to eat. From that day on, he g
ave us no cash, but only I.O.U.‘s on his store, charging us about twice as much for the stuff we bought as we’d have had to pay in town. Eighty-centavo tobacco went for one peso forty in his store. A three-peso shirt was six pesos. And it was the same with coffee, flour, beans — everything. When all the cotton was in and we wanted to settle our account and get our wages, he told us quite brazenly that he had no money himself and that we could have goods and supplies for the money owing us. But what could we have done with the goods? We needed money to get back to town.”

  “Did you ever get the money, Antonio?”

  “No. When we left, we had to walk. He said we should write and give our addresses so he could send the money in October. He never sent a single centavo, and still owes us the wages to this day. So we picked for those eight weeks for nothing.”

  “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now,” I said. “They still use the same tactics as during the dictatorship of Diaz. But don’t worry, Antonio, there’ll be an end to this some day before the Revolution is completely over!”

  “I don’t know. They can always get more men; but different ones, for there’s always a new crop of suckers every season, men who know they’ll starve if they stay in town, men who want to work at an honest job. Things may improve, though. We’ve got good governors in a few of the states now, elected by the workers, in San Luis Potosi and here in Tamaulipas, for example. The governors spoke at a workers’ meeting not long ago and promised action. The governor of this state is preparing a regulation whereby every cotton farmer will have to deposit twenty-five pesos for every picker, and pay his return fare. So that’s a start.

  “So far, Gales, the farmers have been able to do what they pleased with us poor devils. And when they can’t get any pickers they’ll go around moaning about the harvest rotting on their hands, and they’ll say that the Agricultural Workers’ Union is to blame and ought to be disbanded. Then they talk about the good-for-nothing Indians and the peons who’d rather live as bandits than do an honest day’s work. No one can take me in with that bunk. Cotton-picking? Me? What sort of fool do you take me for? I’d as soon be pushing up daisies. Or rob. Have you ever seen a poor farmer here? I haven’t. He might have some hard going for the first three years, but once he’s worked up his land it’s safer than a gold mine. And they’re not satisfied with that; they want to turn it into a diamond mine by cheating the workers out of their wages. Cabrones!”