by Lois Lenski
“And that’s your poor baby,” said the first lady. “He’s sickly, isn’t he?”
“No, jest ornery,” said Mama.
“And your poor husband has no job?” asked the second lady.
“He’s gone to see about gittin’ one,” said Mama.
“You won’t come home with me then?”
“Can’t leave all our plunder here by the lake and be gone when the old man gits back,” said Mama patiently.
“How long since you’ve had a good meal?” asked the first lady.
“Half an hour,” said Mama.
Judy could stand it no longer. Mama was tired and the women were pestering her to death. She walked boldly up—as boldly as if she were facing Old Man Reeves himself, and spoke loudly: “Why can’t you-all go away and leave us alone?”
But the ladies, intent upon doing good, ignored her. “I’ll get your husband a job in one of the citrus plants in the morning,” the second lady said.
“And I know where there’s a nice little house for you to live in,” said the other.
“Don’t want your nice little ole …” began Judy, but she stopped suddenly. They did want a house and a home and a job for Papa. They wanted it more than anything in the world. Judy was stricken with regret that she had been rude to the ladies. She bit her tongue. That fortune-teller was right—her hot tongue was always getting her into trouble. Then she listened to what Mama was saying. Mama was always patient. Mama never lost her temper. First she had been annoyed by that captain and then by that reporter and now by these prying women, but Mama never said a rude word.
“Jim won’t take a job inside,” Mama was saying quietly. “He can’t stand it to be cooped up indoors. Can he git a job pickin’ oranges?”
“No,” said the lady, “that’s done by colored men—experienced pickers, trained for the work. Of course if your husband is a good grove man——”
“What’s that?” asked Mama.
“A man who knows all about growing oranges and grapefruit and work on a grove.”
“Jim never saw an orange tree in his life until three days ago,” said Mama. “He was born and bred in an Alabama cotton field.”
“Too bad,” said the lady. “Too bad we can’t help you.”
“We don’t need help,” said Mama. “We’ll make out. We always have.”
The ladies went to their car, shaking their heads. Their words floated back: “You try to give them food and shelter, and a good steady job, but they refuse it all. They like to live like that, unwashed, improperly fed.” As they drove off, one lady leaned her head out and called cheerfully, “We’ll be back to see you in the morning. We’ll bring you some clean clothes and a basket of groceries.”
It got dark and Mama and the children went inside the tent. When Papa returned from town, they were all awake, sitting in the darkness, waiting for him.
“Did you get you a job?” asked Mama.
“No,” said Papa. “The plants were all closed, but I talked to some men about it. The trouble about citrus is this—you got to work in the packing plant, ’cause all the outside work, pickin’ the fruit and takin’ care of the trees, is done by colored men. I don’t think I want to start workin’ indoors in nice weather like this.”
“Just what I told them ladies,” said Mama.
“What ladies?”
Then the story of the unwelcome visitors came out.
“Puttin’ our picture in the paper!” Papa was mad. “I’d like to put a stop to that. Campin’ on the highway ain’t so good, even if we did git permission. People botherin’ their heads about us is worse than bein’ ordered off the place. We go from the fryin’ pan into the fire, don’t we?”
“They mean well, I reckon,” said Mama.
“Papa, one lady said she had a little house for us to live in,” said Judy wistfully.
“We don’t want her little ole house,” said Papa.
“But the jalopy might break down and we couldn’t go no farther,” said Joe Bob.
“Don’t worry, son, I can fix it,” said Papa.
“If the lady gits you a job, Papa, we won’t always have to be drivin’ to a new place,” said Judy.
“Gittin’ tard o’ travelin’, honey?” asked Papa. “I thought you liked to go rollin’ along.”
“I’m dog-tard of it,” said Judy.
“So are we all,” said Papa, “but we got a little farther to go … We ain’t got to Heaven yet, have we, Calla?”
Mama shook her head and hushed Lonnie.
“They’re comin’ back first thing in the mornin’ and bringin’ us clothes and vittles in a basket,” sang out Joe Bob. “I heard ’em say so.”
“Do you reckon they’ll bring shoes and stockin’s?” asked Judy, her eyes aglow with eagerness.
If only she could get a pair of shoes, she would be willing to do without the stockings. A pair of shoes—any size, whether they fitted her or not. Oh, if I’d a been nice to them ladies, they mighta brought me stockin’s too. But I was mean. I said mean things. But likely they’ll bring shoes and stockin’s anyway——
“Go to bed and get to sleep,” said Papa. “We’ll make a soon start in the mornin’.”
“You’ll wait till them ladies come back, won’t you, Papa?” cried Judy. In her voice was all the longing she felt.
“What for, honey?”
Judy couldn’t say out loud what she was thinking. Papa wouldn’t understand. He didn’t know how badly she wanted shoes, and she couldn’t find the words to tell him.
“You done right to say we’re not destitute, Calla,” said Papa. “Why, we’re rich. We’re not exactly loaded down with this world’s goods, but we got each other, and we got four nice kids, and we ain’t never starved yet. We’re not destitute, and we don’t take charity off nobody. We still got our pride.”
The next morning at daybreak, the tent came down and the jalopy drove off with the trailer behind it. Not a trace of the last night’s camping except broken-down grasses could be seen when a large shiny black car pulled up and stopped later in the day.
“They’re gone,” said a lady inside the car. “What did I tell you?”
“Thankless ingratitude,” said her companion.
Papa stopped at a filling station and talked for a long time to some men there. When he came back to the car, he had a new map and he pointed out the route the man had showed him. Judy read off the names of the towns: Lake Wales, Frostproof, Avon Park, Sebring, Childs, Hicoria and Moore Haven.
“Oh, see all the lakes on the map!” cried Judy. “This one, where we’re goin’, is the biggest of all. O—kee—cho—bee! What a funny name.”
“Indian name for ‘big water,’ the man told me,” said Papa. “Advised me to go down around the southeast corner of the lake, near Belle Glade. He said a family can make twenty to thirty dollars a week in beans.”
“What kind o’ work?” asked Mama.
“Gradin’ beans,” said Papa. “It’s light work that women folks can do—just watchin’ the stuff go by on the belt and pickin’ out the culls.”
“Go by on a belt? What you mean, Papa?” asked Judy.
“It’s in a packing house, where they pack beans and green stuff to ship up north,” explained Papa. “There’s machinery that keeps a wide belt movin’, and the beans come along on the belt, and you pick out the bad ones and toss ’em in a basket. That’s all there is to it.”
“Sounds easy,” said Mama. “But will you like workin’ indoors, Jim?”
“I can stand it for a while, jest to make a little cash money,” said Papa thoughtfully.
It was dark by the time they reached Moore Haven, and everybody was tired and sleepy, so Papa lost no time making camp in a vacant lot on the edge of town. Soon the Drummonds were all fast asleep.
CHAPTER V
The Big Lake
THEY DROVE OVER FROM Moore Haven the next morning. The road was filled with cars, trucks and trailers, many of them loaded down and piled high with furnitur
e.
“Where’s everybody goin’?” asked Mama.
“To Bean Town, I reckon,” said Papa. “All the people in them cars will be lookin’ for jobs in beans, like me.”
They stopped at a garage to have air put in the tires. “This Bean Town?” Papa asked.
“Shore is,” said the garage man, who had a nice face and a friendly smile. “All round here is beans and up the east shore of the lake too. Black muck soil ten to twenty feet deep. We shore can grow string beans, cabbage and other garden truck. We send all the stuff up north for them Yankees to eat. Where you folks from?”
“Alabama,” said Papa.
“Some come from clear across the continent. We’ve got people from every state in the Union right here. Looks like you’ve come to stay!” laughed the man.
“Can I git me a job?” asked Papa.
“Shore can,” replied the man. “They couldn’t harvest that bean crop without you. You can get a job here if you can anywhere.”
The cheerful way the man talked made Papa feel good. “Ary place to live in this-here town?” he inquired.
“What you want?” asked the man. “House? Hotel room? Boarding house? Tourist cabin? The town’s crowded—all full up. There hasn’t been an empty room since last November—all grabbed up quick before the fall crops began. Of course some growers have houses or barracks for their own workers to live in, and over to Belle Glade, the government’s put up a camp for white people. Camp Osceola they call it, but I hear they’re turnin’ folks away every day. Hit’s plumb full.”
Papa looked disappointed. “Just what would you advise?”
“Well, you migrants will have to find your own housing,” said the man. “That’s the only way.”
“What’s that you’re callin’ us?”
“‘Mi-grants’—hit means people that migrate, follow the season, on the go all the time. Migratory people—like migratory birds, you know.”
“Never heard of ’em,” said Papa.
“Never heard o’ them bluebirds and redbirds and robins that go up north in summer and come south in winter?” laughed the man.
“Oh, shore!” said Papa. “Migratory! Migrants! So that’s us, on the go all the time. What did you say we should do?”
“You’ll have to git your own quarters,” said the man, “and don’t expect nothing fancy. I tell you what you do—go down to the next corner, turn right and keep going till you get out on the south side of town. There’s a drainage canal there, and a bunch o’ white folks—migrants like you—livin’ on the bank. They’ll help you get fixed up.”
Papa thanked the man and followed his directions.
The town was full of large warehouses and loading platforms. Along the main streets were two-story business buildings, restaurants, general stores and recreation places. Then came residences, boarding houses and good and bad cottages of every description. At last they found the drainage canal.
It was like a little town in itself, all stretched in a line on the high canal bank. The houses were jammed close together, and they were all kinds—tents, trailers, tar-paper shacks, hovels of galvanized tin, and packing-box houses—all out in the bright, broiling sun. The only shade came from scattered clumps of banana trees and rank-growing castor-bean plants.
Papa got permission to camp on the canal bank at a dollar a week ground rent. He found an empty place between two other shacks, where he set up the tent and unpacked the trailer. Then he went off to town to inquire about a job.
“Not much green stuff for Missy to eat,” said Judy, unloading the goat and staking her on the slope. She looked at the water hyacinths and cattails choking the canal.
“Good place to fish,” said Joe Bob. He lost no time in rigging up a fish line and digging worms for bait.
“Oh, you got a sewing-machine!” said a strange voice. A woman put her head out of a small window in the tar-paper shack next door. “Where you folks from anyway?”
“Alabama,” said Judy. Mama came out of the tent.
“My name’s Harmon, Edie Harmon,” said the neighbor.
“I’m Calla Drummond,” said Mama, and she told her children’s names.
“We’re from California and from Michigan before that,” laughed Mrs. Harmon. “But they’re all alike—these dumps. After a while you get so you don’t feel you’re human any more. You get so dirty——”
“Where’s the water?” asked Mama.
Mrs. Harmon pointed. “Down in the canal—it’s water drained off from the lake.”
“You use that to wash with?” asked Mama.
“Sure, and to drink too.”
“That dirty water?”
“Drinkin’ canal water hasn’t killed nobody yet that I know of,” said Mrs. Harmon. “I was squeamish, too, just like you, when I first started out. But after a while you get used to it and it ain’t so bad. The kids like it—my kids has a mighty good time here. There’s rabbits to run and plenty o’ catfish in the canals, and there’s always dried beans to scrape out from under the plants if you know what fields ain’t been picked over but once or twice.”
“Here, Judy,” called Mama. “Go down and dip us up some o’ that water.”
“My land! I’m sure glad you got a sewin’ machine,” said Mrs. Harmon. “I been needin’ to mend my old man’s overalls for a long time, and I can do it so much faster on the machine. You folks’ll like it here.”
Judy took the water bucket and went down the canal bank to fill it. It was good to get out of the sound of the woman’s voice. She sat down and sunk her head in her hands.
It wasn’t what she had been expecting at all. There was no farm, no house, no yard with a fence.
There was only the second-hand tent they had camped in on the trip. The tent was their home, and they were still camping out. The farm and the house and yard were fading away into the dim and unknown future, just as the house in the cotton field had faded away into the past.
The tent and the canal bank and the canal—these were real. This was the present. This was all they had.
“Ju-dy! Ju-dy!” Suddenly she heard Mama calling. She dipped the bucket down, among the cattails and brought it up full of water. She hurried up the bank.
“Don’t know why you have to take all day,” said Mama.
Mrs. Harmon had come over and brought her own rocking-chair. She sat talking with Mama as if they had always known each other. She was holding Lonnie on her lap.
“I thought there was a lake,” said Judy, “the biggest lake in Florida, Okeechobee. Where’s the lake, Miz Harmon?”
“Right over beyond Bean Town,” replied the woman, “but you don’t never see it. It’s on the other side of the dike, and the dike’s forty feet high, I guess. You got to look up at it and then there’s nothing to see. They built the dike after that big hurricane in 1928.”
“What’s a dike?” asked Judy.
“A big pile o’ gravel to hold the water back—about two hundred feet wide at the bottom and thirty feet wide on top. It goes around the south and east sides of the lake, to stop the floods. When a hurricane comes, it can blow so strong across the lake, it makes a regular tidal wave and splashes right over on all sides. But that don’t happen often, of course.”
“You been comin’ here long?” asked Mama.
“This is our third winter,” said Mrs. Harmon. “We like Florida for winters, even if it don’t pay so good. We go back to Michigan summers. I like Florida, I like to sit in the sun.”
“You don’t work?”
“Yes, we all work, my big kids and my husband and me, when the packin’ plants git goin’. There’s only one opened up so far. I sit in the sun till the rush season starts. My youngest is a girl, Bessie—she’s twelve and in school.”
“In school?” asked Judy. “Where’s a school?”
“Over on the other side of town,” said the woman.
“Oh Mama, can I go?” begged Judy.
“Bessie will take you,” said Mrs. Harmon. “The school woul
d be jammed if all the workers’ kids went. But most of the migrants don’t bother to send ’em, they’re here for such a short time anyway.”
“Oh Mama, can me and Joe Bob and Cora Jane go?” asked Judy.
“We’ll have to ask Papa,” said Mama.
Papa looked pretty blue when he came back from town. He was no longer gay and happy as he had been on the trip. Judy decided not to mention school.
“The packing houses where you make all that cash money ain’t open yet,” he said. “It’s been cold and the beans been held back. They’re not ready for picking.”
“No other crops ready?” asked Mama.
“No, beans will be first. They use Negroes outside and whites inside,” said Papa. “The colored folks do all the picking. There’s a big colored quarter in town and several camps for them. Cars are bringin’ ’em in from every direction.”
“What’ll we do?” asked Mama. “Move on again?”
“No, I reckon we better stay right here till beans come in,” said Papa. “Likely I can find a small grower to give me day work.” He turned to Judy. “They got a nice school, honey.”
“Miz Harmon told us,” answered Judy. “Said Bessie would take me. Can I go?”
“Shore can,” said Papa. “My young uns ain’t goin’ to work in beans. They’re goin’ to school to learn a few things.”
Mama got ready to do a big washing. Judy carried water to fill the washtub and Joe Bob found scraps of kindling and built a fire under it. When all the clothes were washed, Mama spread them out on the canal bank to dry.
Nobody knew how Missy got loose, but she did.
Judy came out of the tent and found her there, chewing on Papa’s overalls. Other clothes were torn into shreds and scattered about. Missy was taking a taste of everything. Judy stared at the sight.
“‘Mischief’ is your name for shore,” she said. She grabbed a stick from the pile by the tub, went after the goat, and whacked her soundly on the back. After a few blows, Missy turned her head and gave one look at the girl with her sad eyes. Judy dropped the stick and put her arms around the goat’s neck.