Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can)

by Peter Matthiessen

  Chavez was quiet for a while, then said, “In Brawley, we used to shine shoes, and we really hustled. The cops wouldn’t let us into Anglo Town, but there was a diner right on the line, and everybody talked about how it was supposed to have beautiful hamburgers. It also had a sign reading WHITE TRADE ONLY, but we had just come from the country, from Arizona, from a community that was mostly Mexican or whites too poor to bother about us. So we didn’t understand yet, and we got up our nerve and went in. The counter girl was at the far end with her boy friend, and we were looking at them over the end of the counter.” For a moment, as he spoke, Chavez looked exactly like a wide-eyed boy in search of a beautiful hamburger: “Two hamburgers, please!” He shook his head. “The girl said, ‘What’s the matter, you can’t read? Goddamn dumb Mex!’ She and her boy friend laughed, and we ran out. Richard was cursing them, but I was the one who had spoken to them, and I was crying. That laugh rang in my ears for twenty years—it seemed to cut us out of the human race.”

  A few years later the Chavez family, still migrating, entered a run-down diner and were seated by the waitress before the boss came in and told her, in their hearing, to throw them out. When she protested, he threatened to fire her. She came to the table in tears.

  The Chavezes were getting up to go; they called to Cesar who hung back. “No,” he answered. “I have to speak up someday, and it’s going to be today.” He went over to the boss and said, “Why do you have to treat people like that? A man who behaves like you do is not even a human being!”

  “Aw, don’t give me that shit,” the man said. “G’wan, get outta here!”

  Cesar went. He was then fourteen or fifteen, he recalls, but it was not his age that made the difference between this story and so many others in his life. He spoke up for the first time because the waitress, by treating him as a person, gave him the sense of identity that he has since given to the Mexican farm workers.

  “Another thing that we learned—my dad especially—was that people would lie to you—lie without batting an eye. For instance, they’d say, ‘If you go to such and such a place, they have a job for you at a very high wage.’ And we always went for it hook, line and sinker. They’d get you to go because you were competition. And we’d get there and we’d find there was no housing. The wages weren’t what they’d said and in many cases there wasn’t even a job. We’d have to wait around a week or so for a job to start. I remember now that my dad and my brother had a heck of a time trying to understand why anyone would really—you know—just lie. So many things we couldn’t understand. See, we were really poor, but on the farm we had all the milk we wanted, all the eggs we wanted and all the chicken we wanted, and all the vegetables during the summer, and some fruit that we raised ourselves. And suddenly we had to pay for everything. We didn’t have electricity or gas, of course, or running water. We had a well, and used the kerosene lamps and cooked with wood. We came to town and my mother couldn’t get used to cooking with gas; she was afraid of it. We had to buy wood. Well, wood was fast disappearing and was very expensive. It was so strange. We had all we wanted over there on the farm. Cottonwood and mesquite and paloverde—that’s ironwood. You get one of those started and it’ll burn all night. Oh! And we had umbrella trees!”

  With the loss of their land in 1937, the Chavez family began the long grim period that Manuel calls “our migrating years.” Up and down the byways of California, with the armies of the dispossessed, they followed the crops. Like all the rest, the Chavezes were true paupers; their struggle was for shelter, clothing, food. In this period John Steinbeck, outraged by a lettuce strike in Salinas, was writing articles that would evolve into The Grapes of Wrath.

  No one complains at the necessity of feeding a horse while he is not working. But we complain about feeding the men and women who work our lands. Is it possible that this state is so stupid, so vicious, and so greedy that it cannot clothe and feed the men and women who help to make it the richest area in the world? Must the hunger become anger and the anger fury before anything will be done?

  Some of the migrants had cars; others traveled in rickety old buses. On the sides of the buses were scrawled names like “To the Four Winds” and “I Am Going—Who Cares? Who Cares?” For many, including the Chavezes, the car often served as a home. One long rainy winter in Oxnard, the whole family lived in a small tent.

  When the trek began, Manuel was twelve, Cesar ten, and Richard eight; their childhood was already over. Rita and the boys worked with the parents in the fields, picking prunes and figs and apricots, turning grapes for raisins, hunching and stooping down row upon row, from the Imperial Valley north to Marysville, a small part of the tattered army that Woody Guthrie sang of in “Pastures of Plenty”:

  At the edge of your city you will find us

  and then

  We come with the dust and we’ve gone with

  the wind.

  In November they would come back south again, taking such poor segregated schooling as they could find in the brief winter season between pruning and girdling: Chavez still recalls the battered books and pencil stubs that young second-class citizens were issued. Although the family were U.S. citizens, they were in constant peril of deportation: the Border Patrol, known as la Migra, rarely concerned itself with the difference between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. “My mother was so frightened of la Migra,” Cesar says, “that she would be trembling whenever we were near the border.”

  To this day, the journey from the farm on the Gila River to the slums of Sal Si Puedes, in San Jose, is the archetypal journey which hundreds of thousands of dispossessed rural Americans are still making, and which millions of poor people are making all over the world; one day the barrio will extend from San Jose to Buenos Aires. But the Chavezes’ journey was a long one, and there were no real homes along the way. The family paused in Brawley, Oxnard and Delano, then went on again. Cesar alone attended more than thirty schools without ever reaching high school. Sometimes the family lived in tents or under bridges, eking out a meager diet with fish and greens culled from roadside ditches. “Mexicans like hog weed,” Cesar says enigmatically. He and Richard collected tinfoil from old cigarette packs found on the highway; for an enormous ball weighing eighteen pounds, they got enough money to buy two sweatshirts and one pair of tennis shoes.

  In 1939, in San Jose, Cesar’s father joined a CIO union that was organizing workers in dried fruit; like all the rest, this union was broken as soon as it went out on strike. During World War II Mr. Chavez joined another short-lived union. “He had to join to get a job, that’s all,” Richard says. “He never could understand union ways. He was a big man, very strong, and when they told him to load three sacks of apricots on a cart when five was easy for him, it bothered him; he was getting good pay, he thought, so why not do the best he could? Manuel’s dad, too. They weren’t real union men. My father is a very sweet person, but he never wanted to get involved; he was content with life the way it was.”

  Cesar remembers it differently. He describes his father as a true unionist who would join any workers organization that might help: “We were involved in more plain walkouts than any other family.”

  Cesar stopped talking to point at freight cars on a railroad siding; the cars, softened by the twilight, were heaped with huge coarse sugar beets. “That is one crop I’m glad is automated. That was work for an animal, not a man. Stooping and digging all day, and the beets are heavy—oh, that’s brutal work. And then to go home to some little place, with all those kids, and hot and dirty—that is how a man is crucified. Cru-cified,” he repeated, with a very low, intense burst of real anger. He gazed back at the silent cars of beets as they dropped behind. “The growers don’t care about people and they never will. Their improvements, their labor-saving devices, are all for their own benefit, not for ours. But once we get a union, we’ll be protected.”

  But automation threatens to remove the jobs before the Union can get decent job conditions; wage increases and other benefits will only
hasten the process. The growers all talk of a machine that will automate the table-grape industry within five years, and although this seems unlikely—individual grapes infected with mildew must be cut out of each bunch or the grapes will rot in shipment—the fact remains that crop after crop is being automated. Reading my thoughts, Chavez said, “We’re not afraid of automation. We’ll split the profits of progress with them fifty-fifty.”

  Two thirds of the way to Bakersfield, Cesar strapped himself into his safety belt. In the back of the car, the three children were singing:

  “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning

  “I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land

  “I’d hammer out mercy, I’d hammer out justice

  “I’d hammer out love between the sisters and

  the brothers

  “All over this land . . .”

  The children said they had learned the song from the radio. Cesar did not know it. He said he liked music but could not sing a note. “First I liked Mexican music—you know, mariachi. Then I went through the stage as a teenager when I rejected Mexican music; I thought it was silly. I liked Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, Woody Herman. All the big bands had one-night stands around here, and we saw most of them. But then I began to go back to Mexican music. I think mariachi is beautiful; it gives me a real beautiful feeling.” He sighed. “But I cannot sing. I used to like to dance, but I cannot sing. ‘Todo está en el hombre menos al cantar bien.’ That was one of my mother’s dichos: ‘Everything is given to man except the ability to sing.’”

  At Bill Lee’s Chopsticks we sat at a big table in the corner. Sylvia, Linda, Elouise, Anna and their friend Obdulia wished the combination shrimp plate; the rest of us left the ordering to Cesar. Because the table was split into two camps, there were lots of jokes between Cesar and his children about shrimp strikes and hungry strikebreakers who might cross the picket line in the middle of the table. In the excitement Cesar repeatedly confused the names of Sylvia and Linda, his very pretty eldest daughters, until Linda cried cheerfully, “He doesn’t know us apart!” Cesar shook his head ruefully; he gazed at her until she looked at him and smiled. “Do you remember when I had you numbered? Number Five!” He saluted. “‘Yes, Father!’ Number Eight!” He saluted. “‘Yes, Father!’” But when he called Linda “Sylvia” again, his wife hissed at him with real vehemence. She had been reserved and very quiet all evening; he looked at her with genuine concern.

  “There was a Colonel Somebody at Schenley,” Helen Chavez said, in an attempt to ease matters. Cesar called him ‘Major.’”

  “Sometimes I called him ‘Mayor,’” Cesar said, feigning terror. Helen, who has fierce Spanish eyebrows, was still looking cross; her father was a colonel under Pancho Villa in the Revolution, and Chavez teases her about her hot blood. He began to tease her now about their courtship. They had met in Delano during World War II when Chavez, then fifteen and still migrating, had found himself stranded there, out of a job. At that time Helen Fabela, a pretty Delano girl, worked in the People’s Market at Garces and Glenwood. “She used to give me gas coupons, I think,” Cesar told the children. “Then she asked me to a show. How could I say no?” In spite of herself, Helen Chavez began to smile.

  “Who paid?” Sylvia asked.

  “She did, of course. And once I was sitting in the Pagoda restaurant with Roberto Jimenez. We had ordered a big bowl of rice”—with his usual optimism about the past, Cesar spread his hands apart to show the great size of the bowl, but his wife shook her head; “Twenty cents’ worth,” she said, trying not to laugh—“and your mother came in with her girl friend and asked if they could join us, and I said, ‘Of course.’” He chuckled and looked contentedly at his wife. “She had a job and I did not—what could I do? The little money I could make I sent to my mother.”

  “I give all my money to my mother too,” Babo announced, and Birdie snorted.

  “What money?”

  “Oh, I got a few pennies,” Babo said.

  Cesar did not mention the time, in 1945, when he and Helen were arrested in Delano for sitting on the wrong side of the segregated movie theater and refusing to move. He gazed appreciatively at his children as he chewed.

  “Were you a lover in your days?” Linda inquired.

  “Love ’em and leave ’em, I bet,” another daughter said, and the shrimp eaters giggled in unison. The children are all salty and affectionate with their father without being impolite.

  “Well, I was very friendly, you know; a lot of girls were my friends, but I was not a lover.” Chavez said this simply, without coyness. He has no machismo, but on the other hand, he much prefers domesticated, motherly women: if Cesar woke up thirsty in the night, he would expect Helen to fetch him a glass of water. Once an aggrieved female aide accused him angrily of being a phony: “You’re just as macho as all the rest; you think women are different!” “That’s right!” Cesar retorted. “They’re all crazy!”

  Babo was trying to extract his fortune without breaking his cookie, but the rest of us read our fates aloud to the whole company. Birdie, who is the youngest child, read out the following in a slow and serious voice: “You will be able to encourage a younger person.”

  Cesar was called to the telephone, and we waited for him in the street. The only bookstore for fifty miles in any direction was across the street from the restaurant, and Helen said, “I hope it isn’t open. Books and camera stores—he’ll be in there all night.” Helen’s shyness made me feel shy myself. She mistrusts reporters and had no real reason to make an exception in my case; doubtless she felt that in making friends with me, Cesar and Ann Israel had made a great mistake. The reporters that flock around the Union are only another burden in a life of unbroken toil and insecurity; apart from that, Helen is very shy by nature, and determined that the outside world shall not invade her private life. “Her sense of privacy is what I like about her,” her husband says. “I mean, I like everything about her, but I really like that a lot.” In the Sacramento march, Helen refused to walk in the front ranks with the leaders but remained well behind, out of range of the TV cameras and microphones.

  I said I supposed she would be very glad when the strike was over. Her smile, when it appears, is a beautiful surprise. “Yes,” she said, with all her heart. She paid no attention to the fatuity of my remark; standing there on the sidewalk, considering life without the strike, she didn’t even know that I was there.

  Over the radio, on the way home, came a gust of windy platitudes out of Miami; the Republican National Convention had begun. I turned off the radio, and Cesar and I reminisced about our service days. We are the same age, and we were both Navy enlisted men in the Pacific at the end of World War II, so that our points of reference, at age nineteen, were much the same. We both liked Benny Goodman and Sugar Ray, and remembered the better fights of Rocky Graziano and Tony Zale.

  Cesar first became interested in photography while in the Navy. “I got in this poker game,” he said. “I think it was the first and last time I ever gambled. And I won and I won—I could not stop winning; there was more money lying there than I had ever seen before. And I couldn’t quit; the guy who gets that far ahead, he can never quit.” He shook his head. “I’d gotten myself in a terrible fix by winning all that money, you see.” Finally a loser begged Chavez to buy his camera so that he could keep on losing. Chavez forgets what happened to the money, but he kept the camera and started taking a few pictures. He dislikes the tourist feeling that he gets from having it strapped around his neck, but he still uses it occasionally and looks forward to a life in which he might have time to be a professional photographer.

  After joining the Navy in 1944, Cesar served for two years on a destroyer escort on weather patrol out of Saipan. He had never been on a ship before, and at first he was very seasick and frightened of the sea. The ocean still disturbs him. “I like the sea, but I don’t rest there. I think. The waves coming in, you know—they make me think. I love the woods,” he says. “Bi
g trees. That’s where I rest.”

  In 1948 Chavez and Helen Fabela got married; Richard married Sally Gerola a few months later.

  “We went to live on a farm near San Jose, and there was a little tiny house for me and my family. I was married, and then my mother and my dad, my sister and brother. We worked the strawberries, sharecropping—it was horrible. We worked there for two and a half years and never made any money: we figured later that the whole family was making twenty-three cents an hour. At the end of every month we just didn’t have anything left over. We worked for two and a half years every day—every single day—and I couldn’t get my dad to leave. I didn’t want to leave him there, yet I couldn’t get him to leave because he’d made a commitment, you know. His word! There were hundreds of people caught in this exploitation. Finally, finally we got him to admit that we were being taken and that the best thing was just to leave the whole damn thing.”

  While still childless, Richard and Cesar shared a house in Sal Si Puedes, and often the same tree in the apricot groves. Cesar talked continually about the exploitation of farm workers, but could think of no way out. Toward 1950, hearing of well-paid work in the lumber camps of northern California, the brothers migrated to the Smith River, just south of the Oregon border. It was summer, and they slept in the big woods along the river. One day they asked the foreman if they could build a cabin in the woods, and because they were both good, dependable workers, the permission was granted. In their spare time they built a serviceable cabin, and in the process learned basic carpentry. For Richard, this was a turning point; three years later he became an apprentice carpenter. And for a time Cesar himself worked in a cabinet shop, as a “putty man and glazing expert,” Richard says. “He has small hands, you know, and was very good at it.”

  The brothers loved the cool forest and the river, they were proud of their fine cabin, and they made good money. Nevertheless, though both had steady work and could have brought their wives there, they returned that same year to San Jose. As Richard says, “We’d left something behind, I guess, that we didn’t want to leave.”