by Lois Lenski
“It’s a thick pancake, hard and solid. It bites hard, but it stays by you a long time,” said Judy.
“Taste good?”
“Not very. It just fills you up.”
“I thought you folks ate cornbread all the time .…”
“Mama says it’s easier to buy a poke o’ white flour, and Papa likes his biscuit and gravy, only Mama hasn’t any oven to bake biscuit now.”
“What did you eat for breakfast back home in Alabama?” asked Madame Rosie.
“Fried fatback and molasses and biscuit and gravy,” said Judy. “That was before Papa swapped the oven.”
“Good heavens! Never no milk nor orange juice?” cried Madame Rosie. “Think of bringin’ up kids like that. It’s a wonder they don’t die. Must be tough stock.”
“We got a goat,” said Judy, “only she don’t give much milk when we don’t feed her grain. Just weeds and bushes don’t make much milk, but what we git, Lonnie drinks it. And we had oranges once! That was when we lived by our little lake … I called it the Mirror of the Sky .…”
“Florida full of oranges … oranges rottin’ on the ground in all the groves … and kids right here never gittin’ a drop of orange juice!” mumbled Madame Rosie. “Can you beat that? Does your Mama ever cook any vegetables?”
“No ma’m, she don’t have no time to cook,” explained Judy. “At the bean house she can get all the ‘culls’ she wants—them’s the beans that they throw out. Sometimes other things too— lettuce and cabbage and tomatoes and peppers—but she don’t bother to bring them home no more. She ain’t got no time to cook.”
“Did you have a vegetable garden in Alabama?” asked Madame Rosie.
“No ma’m,” said Judy. “Old Man Reeves wouldn’t let us. He made Papa plant cotton right up to the house on all sides. Said good cotton land shouldn’t be wasted.”
“What do you eat for supper while Mama’s at the bean house?”
“Papa gives me a dime, or a quarter when he’s got it, and we stop and buy hot-dogs and pop on our way home from school,” said Judy.
“You can’t cook?” asked Madame Rosie.
“No ma’m,” said Judy, “Miz Harmon asks us to supper sometimes. She lives next door, she’s from Michigan—that’s in the Central States. Bessie Harmon can cook—her Mama learned her how.”
“You get Bessie to give you lessons,” suggested Madame Rosie.
“But I ain’t got no time either,” said Judy. “I’m sewin’. Miz Harmon’s helpin’ me make my new dress. She’s learnin’ me to sew on Mama’s sewin’-machine.” Judy’s face lighted up as she told about buying the goat with a dime, and how the goat brought her the feed sack for a new dress. “It’ll be pretty, don’t you think?”
“Yes I do,” said Madame Rosie.
Then Judy told about Gloria Rathbone, the prettiest girl in the Third Grade, who was going to have a birthday party when she was nine years old, in a couple of weeks.
“I gotta go home and sew on my dress,” said Judy. “I’m going to wear it to Gloria’s party. Where do you think she’s from? Connecticut! That’s in the New England States.”
Madame Rosie said goodbye and watched the little group disappear down the street. Joe Bob and Cora Jane hadn’t said a word all through the visit, but they talked about the ice-cream cones all the way home. When they got there, Mama called from inside the tent. She was lying down and said she felt sick. Mrs. Harmon brought Lonnie in.
“I came back early,” said Mama. “I told the boss that bean work was too rushing for a woman, and that I was sick and couldn’t stand it no longer. He told me I needn’t come back no more. I’ve lost my job, and the beans are beginning to play out. The belts only ran two hours today.”
“Too bad,” said Mrs. Harmon. “That’s the way it goes. My folks was laid off last week. We’re lucky we have so many of us can work. We earn enough to git by.”
“We won’t be movin’ on, will we?” asked Judy anxiously. “Gloria Rathbone’s goin’ to have a birthday party at her house and if I git my new dress done, I can wear it.”
“When the boss laid me off, it made your Papa mad,” said Mama. “He talked back to the boss and told him he wasn’t treatin’ us right and said he wouldn’t work for him no more.”
“We ain’t leavin’, are we?” cried Judy.
Suddenly the thought of moving on was more than she could bear. She remembered how awful the prospect of living on the canal bank had seemed when they first came. Now all that was changed. They had made a way of life in this dreadful and impossible place, and now that life seemed more desirable than any she had known before. There was the school, the nurse, the kind Third Grade teacher, Madame Rosie, the nice neighbors, the Geography book and the new dress. The canal bank had become home. How could she leave all this and get used to being on the go again?
“Papa’s gone to git a job in celery,” said Mama in a low voice.
“Hope he ain’t rheumatic,” said Mrs. Harmon. “He’ll have to work in the wet all day in celery. Of course they furnish him rubber apron, boots and gloves. Work’s heavier too than in beans and the shifts are sixteen hours at a stretch.”
Mrs. Harmon went out. Mama turned her face to the tent wall.
“Oh, this ain’t no way to live,” said Mama in a dull voice. “Never no meetin’ to go to, never no preachin’ to listen to, never no all-day singin’ .… A woman at the bean house told me they have meetin’ every Sunday at that government camp at Belle Glade. Wisht we’d a gone there to live. They got runnin’ water there too .…”
“We couldn’t get in,” said Judy. “That government camp was plumb full. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, if only I could go to an all-day singin’ once again .…”
Mama was homesick for Alabama and the little meetinghouse there. Judy could see that she was crying. She got out her print cloth and tried to sew on the new dress, but she couldn’t enjoy it somehow.
The days passed. If Papa was over-tired from work in beans, he became nervous and irritable after he started in celery. It wasn’t long until his joints began to ache, and he knew he would have to get out of the wash house or come down with rheumatism. His old longing to be outdoors came back in full force.
“Here we are in the land of sunshine,” he said to Mama one day, “and we never see the sun. What good does it do us?”
“We’re layin’ by a little cash money,” said Mama, trying to be cheerful. “Remember that little farm we’re goin’ to git?”
“I’ll be an ole man before I git it,” said Papa bitterly. “I feel like an ole man already I’m so sore in my joints.”
Judy finished her new dress, and on Gloria Rathbone’s ninth birthday she wore it to school. It was made jumper style with a gathered skirt, and a plain white blouse underneath. Mrs. Harmon had given her the cloth for the blouse and Mrs. Holloway had loaned her her iron to press them with.
Bright red cannas were blooming along the canal, and Judy gathered a bunch. When she gave them to Miss Norris, she noticed some girls pointing their fingers at her and whispering, but she was too happy to bother. All day she did good work, and Miss Norris told her that as soon as her Arithmetic caught up to her Reading, she could go in the Fourth Grade.
Judy beamed. She kept looking at Gloria—pretty Gloria with her soft blond curls clustered round her face. Gloria wore a silk dress today. The party was to be at Gloria’s house. Judy wanted to see the house that Gloria lived in. She knew it would be a nice one and have carpet on the floor like Grandma Wyatt’s. It was a long time since she had been in a house.
At last school was dismissed and all the children hurried out. Judy waited by the side door until Joe Bob and Cora Jane came, and got them started on their way home alone. Then she looked for Gloria and the other Third Graders.
They were going out the gate on the other side of the school yard. They had their arms linked around each other’s waists and Gloria with the sunshine hair was in the middle.
“Glor-ia! Gl
or-ia!” called Judy. She called Beverly and Alice and Betty Anne by name too.
But they kept right on going.
“Wait for me, Gloria!” sang out Judy. “I’m coming to your birthday party too!”
Gloria and the other girls turned their heads and looked back. Then they started to run off down the street.
Judy stopped, overcome. They didn’t want her. They were running away from her. She couldn’t believe it. She refused to believe it. She chased the girls and caught up close behind them.
Then Gloria switched around and said haughtily, “What do you want? Why are you coming with us, I’d like to know?”
“I made … my new dress … to wear to your birthday p-p-par-ty, Gloria,” stammered Judy. “I’ve never been to a party in all my life——”
“You’re not invited!” Gloria stamped her foot on the sidewalk. She wore new patent-leather slippers today. “I don’t want you—in your old feed-sack dress! And your dirty bare feet—I suppose you don’t even own a pair of shoes. Who’d want a big, overgrown bean-picker at their party? I don’t, so there!”
Beverly and Alice and Betty Anne and the others all linked arms again with Gloria in the middle. They went skipping off down the street.
Judy stood there. She had to believe it now—Gloria had said it plainly enough. She wasn’t invited. You had to be invited, to go to a birthday party. Judy didn’t know that before.
She looked down at her bare feet. They were stained and dirty. She had washed them clean the night before, but she had never once thought of shoes. Her new dress had taken all her attention. Of course you couldn’t go to a party without shoes. That was it. You had to have shoes to be invited.
She walked slowly home. Bessie Harmon caught up with her and asked what was wrong. Judy told her everything.
“Aw—what do you bother with them little babies for?” said Bessie. ‘You’ll go through the Fourth Grade in no time, and then you’ll be in Fifth, with girls your own age. That little Gloria Rathbone’s a snooty Yankee from Hartford, Connecticut. Thinks she’s the whole cheese because her father owns one of these big packing plants down here.”
A Yankee! Judy thought of the things her parents had said about mean, thieving Yankees. It couldn’t be true—Gloria was so pretty and Judy had liked her so much …
“Bet she’s a dumb-bell,” Bessie went on. “Does she ever know her lessons?”
“She don’t know her multiplication table yet,” said Judy, “and I been helpin’ her with her spelling.”
“Aw—forget her then,” said practical Bessie. “Hope you sassed her good.”
“No, I never said a word,” admitted Judy.
The thought comforted her. For once, when she might have said many things to be sorry for, she had held her tongue.
Judy felt better after listening to Bessie. But she wondered what she would tell all the children along the canal. They would all want to hear about the party and see what she had brought for them.
But when she got home, nobody asked her anything. Something more important was happening. The party faded away.
Papa! Mama! Are we leaving? She tried to find the words but couldn’t.
She saw in one glance that the place where the tent had been standing was empty, and that the jalopy and trailer were loaded. Missy was in the trailer, bleating noisily.
All the neighbors were crowding round to say goodbye. Papa and Mama and the children were already in their seats. They were waiting for her to come.
“Goodbye, goodbye,” called Bessie and her mother. “See you down here again next winter.”
“Goodbye, goodbye,” called the Holloways. “We’ll meet you in New Jersey.”
“Goodbye! Good luck!” called Mister Mulligan.
Over the sound of the engine Judy could hear the neighbors’ voices, but she could not see them. Her eyes were blurred with tears.
“We’re on the go again,” she whispered to herself.
CHAPTER VIII
Oleander
“PAPA,” SAID JUDY, “ARE we goin’ to git us a farm?”
“With a cow and a mule and a dog and a cat?” asked Joe Bob.
“Not jest yet,” said Papa, laughing. “We gotta make more money first.”
“Where we goin’ this time?” asked Cora Jane.
“Up north,” answered Papa.
Papa was gay again, now that they had started going somewhere. He seemed more like himself than he had for a long time. It was April—real summer weather in Florida, but not yet too warm. Papa had decided to leave Bean Town before the end of the bean harvest, when all the other workers would be leaving.
“We’ll be like the redbirds and bluebirds and robins,” said Papa. “We’ll go up north for the summer. They say it gits so all-fired hot down here nobody can stand it. And there’s no work, so the Negroes go north by big truckloads. They follow potato and other vegetable crops along the Atlantic seaboard. All the big Florida vegetable fields are flooded by summer rains. The growers have to pump the water off and drain the land, before they can begin planting again in September.”
“Will we come back to Florida next winter?” asked Joe Bob.
“Depends on what we find up north,” said Papa.
“Are we going up north?” cried Judy.
Up north was a far away and very mysterious place, but it had somehow changed character. It was not so much the home of Yankees who had burned your great-grandmother’s house and stolen her silver, but of strange people who consumed tons of oranges, beans, celery and other vegetables.
“Will we git us a farm up north, Papa?” asked Judy.
“Law, no,” said Papa, “but I hope I’ll git some of that Yankee money in my pocket.”
“I never went to Gloria Rathbone’s party, after all,” said Judy.
“Why not?” demanded Joe Bob. “You promised to bring me somethin’.”
Judy bristled. “That mean little ole Gloria called me names,” she explained. “Said nobody couldn’t come to her party who wasn’t invited. I never even saw the house she lives in. Didn’t want to see her wonderful ole house neither.”
“I call that a low-down Yankee trick,” growled Papa.
“She’s a Yankee all right, Bessie Harmon said so,” Judy went on. “Just because her father owns a bean house, she thinks she’s smart. But I had to help her with her multiplication table and her spelling. She wore a silk dress and had new patent-leather shoes too.”
“Bet your new dress was prettier than hers, honey,” said Papa.
“Nobody looked at it,” mourned Judy. After a pause she added, “I never did see Lake Okeechobee once. I never went up on the dike.”
“And I never caught nothin’ but catfish in that little ole dirty canal,” said Joe Bob.
It was good to leave the flat, level sawgrass and elderberry land of the Glades and the unending miles of vegetable fields. It was good to get away from the great treeless stretches of muck and swamp. Soon there were shiny-leaved citrus groves again and towns with shady streets to rest the eyes from the sun. The towns were full of white houses and green grass lawns with sprinklers going, and bright-colored flowers blooming—azalea, hibiscus, flame-vine and bougainvillea.
“We’ll take Holloway’s advice and go to New Jersey,” said Papa, consulting the map. “Route 17 is what we want—the shore route through Georgia and the Carolinas. If we see anything promising along the way, we can always stop. No use shootin’ through like a railroad train. Mama don’t feel so good, so we’ll jest mosey along.”
The first night they camped on a side road, and Papa and Joe Bob caught a mess of fish in a pond near by. Blue herons waded in the water along the shore. The night was warm and the frogs kept up a continuous chant, yank—y pank—yank—y—pank, which soothed everybody to sleep.
The next morning they stopped in the nearest town. The streets were lined with large bushes, whose pink and white blossoms were beginning to open. Mama and Papa took Lonnie into a grocery store to buy food, while the
children waited in the jalopy. Judy reached out and picked a sprig off the bush by the car, with a cluster of pink flowers on it.
“You like them posies?” asked a woman’s voice.
“Yes ma’m,” said Judy shyly.
The woman, who wore a long skirt and a man’s wide-brimmed straw hat, had come across the street. She stopped by the loaded car.
“You can root it easy,” she said. “Jest keep the stem in a bottle o’ water till the roots start growin’, then set it out. Did you ever root any ‘slips’?”
“No ma’m,” said Judy. “Never heard o’ ’em before. Never saw no posies like these before.”
“They’re called oleanders,” said the woman. “We named our town for ’em—Oleander.”
“I think it’s the nicest town in the whole world,” said Judy impulsively. “Wisht we could live here always. Wisht we could git us a farm here …”
“Where do you live?” asked the woman.
“Nowheres,” broke in Joe Bob bitterly. “Different place every night.”
“We’re all the time on the go,” said Judy.
“Where’s your home?” asked the woman, looking at the car’s license plate.
“It was in Alabama, but it ain’t no more,” said Judy. “We’re lookin’ for Papa a job.”
“What kind of a job?” asked the woman.
“Outdoors,” said Judy. “Papa don’t like machinery nor factory work. He don’t want to be whistled in and whistled out. All he knows to do is farm.”
“Can he pick tomatoes and cucumbers?” asked the woman.
“Yes ma’m!” smiled Judy. “Best picker that ever was. I can pick too. So can Joe Bob, but Cora Jane’s too little. We used to pick cotton.”
“When your father comes, you tell him to come to my place and see my husband,” said the woman. “We need help bad. Go out the main road four miles and look for a mailbox that says GIBSON on it. That’s us. I got a girl, Mary John, just your age. Remember the name: GIBSON.” She hurried away.
Judy and Joe Bob looked at each other, then they burst out laughing. “We got Papa a job!” they cried. They began to dance up and down. Joe Bob bumped against the horn and it began to honk.