Daily, after lunch, Cesar paid a second visit to the hospital, and then rested. In the warm Pacific sunlight outside his room, I talked with Helen for a while. She told me that when the fast began, Cesar had concealed it from her for three days; he would pretend that he had already eaten or that he wasn’t hungry. Then one day Manuel said to her, “Is he still fasting?” After that, she offered Cesar everything he liked, and still he neither said nor ate a thing. Finally she confronted him in his office, and when he admitted he was fasting, she became upset: she was sure he would harm himself. “The kids were already worried,” Helen said. “And when I told them, they said, ‘Dad looks awful—will he be okay?’ But after another day or so, we got used to the idea and went along with him.”
In talking about their early days together, Helen said that her family had not been so much against Cesar and his union as convinced that he was doomed to fail. She spoke fondly of Fernando, whose nickname is “Polly”; the boy was still drifting. In talking about her life, she speaks with impressive candor, softening nothing for her own sake or her listener’s, neither disappointed nor defensive, merely concerned. Here in Santa Barbara she looked pretty and relaxed; she was seeing more of Cesar than she had in years.
Unlike her husband, Helen takes pleasure in stories about Manuel’s hot temper; she described a day when Manuel stood up to both of the Dispotos during the 1967 picketing at Giumarra. Bruno Dispoto had come along in his pickup and started to abuse a group of women strikers, Helen among them, calling them whores and worse. Manuel, nearby, yelled contemptuously at Dispoto; the Dispotos were famous for insulting women and beating up cripples, he said, but he, Manuel, was not afraid of them, and he would take on Bruno and Charlie together. Both, to the delight of the pickets, declined. From then on, Helen said, the strikers yelled, “Look out, we’ll call Manuel!” every time the Dispotos came by.
Manuel himself came to Santa Barbara two days later, and was reminded of this story. “Those guys are big,” he said. “I think either one could take me with one hand.” Obviously he didn’t believe this, and neither did Chavez, who was shaking his head on the white pillow. “Manuel would have kicked the shit out of them,” he said quietly, with a hard satisfaction he made no attempt to hide.
On Tuesday, December 3, there was bad news from Delano. Mack Lyons had found two groups of non-Union pruners working in Di Giorgio’s Arvin vineyards; questioned, the pruners said that this 1,100-acre tract had been sold to a rancher named A. Caratan. Without bothering to notify the Union, Di Giorgio was selling off the whole Arvin operation, and since the Union had failed to obtain a successor clause in the arbitration of the original contract, the new owners—whom Di Giorgio refused to identify—were not obliged to hire Union workers. Since this huge ranch gave work to a large fraction of the Union membership in the Delano area, this was a serious blow, and Chavez called an emergency meeting, to be held in Santa Barbara as soon as possible.
The lieutenants arrived at suppertime on Tuesday evening. Manuel Chavez came up from East Los Angeles; Jerry Cohen and Dave Averbuck came down from San Francisco; Jim Drake, Tony Orendain and Philip Vera Cruz came from Delano; and Mack Lyons came from Lamont, as did Fermin Moreno, who had been in charge of the 1967 Giumarra strike. They squashed into the tiny room, sitting on chairs and tabletops; Mack lay across the foot of Cesar’s bed.
For two days Cesar had been cheerful, and the new emergency did not appear to dampen him at all. Mack Lyons gave his account of the crisis; he had sent a wire to the Di Giorgio office in San Francisco, demanding that the new owners be identified. Since the Union had not been notified of the change of ownership, its position was that non-Union people were on the ranch illegally; names of the new owners were needed as the basis for a legal suit. The rumor was that the major new owner was W. H. Camp, a friend of the right-wing Texas billionaire H. L. Hunt, who had recently paid Camp a visit, and that the main purpose of the deal, which Di Giorgio might be helping to finance, was an anti-Union plot on the part of national agricultural interests, which know that the farm workers’ plight is not confined to grapes or to California.
Chavez talked quietly about possible maneuvers, arriving finally at the necessity of a confrontation. A committee of Union workers would march into the fields and harangue the pruners, on the grounds that this was Union territory; to have them arrested for trespassing, the new owners would have to reveal their identity. An arrest would be foolish, but the growers had done foolish things before, and possibly the committee would have to spend a few days in jail. Sometimes jailing is desirable, in a test case or to win public support; unwanted arrests usually happen to people who are untrained. “Under pressure,” Chavez says, “some people fall back from the offensive to the defensive, and one of two things happens: they blame their companions or they make the fight personal and get put in jail. In trying to prove something, they lose sight of the cause.”
Somebody pointed out that the membership might be disillusioned if the Union failed to bail out people who had gone to jail for it, but this was a risk that had to be taken. “I’m just throwing this idea out,” Chavez said with his usual deference. “It’s just an idea.” But nobody seriously questioned it, not even Tony Orendain, who tends to question. As Union treasurer, Orendain would lead the confrontation group. “We aren’t going to try to be jailed,” Cesar warned him. “We just have to be ready for it.” Orendain had got himself jailed in Texas, where bail for Union members has been very expensive; he nodded and said nothing, and Chavez turned to Mack.
“You got any white guys on your ranch committee?”
“Yah. Two.”
“They got any guts?”
“One of ’em do. But he’s out of town, man. I ain’t so sure about the other.”
“We want an integrated committee. You got any black guys that have guts?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Well, you tell your men that it’s time somebody else made sacrifices, not just a few of you.” Cesar grinned. “Tell ’em we’ll get some women instead if they haven’t got guts enough to go to jail.”
Mack Lyons laughed. Their relationship is laconic and close; they respect each other. During Cesar’s fast Mack came up from Lamont to say, “I dig what you’re doing, man, I really do.”
It was late when the strategy meeting ended. The men had a three-hour drive back to Delano and had to rise again at dawn, but Cesar, excited and intense, did not stop talking. He spoke of the lean Nixon years ahead, and the new pressure on the Union that the Di Giorgio sale was going to bring; it was important that everybody show a new spirit and solidarity. For example, when somebody came into the credit union he should be welcomed, not just serviced; it should be made clear to all members that this was their union. And in Filipino Hall the brothers should mingle and share things—no more Mexicans on the left and Filipinos on the right. When he got back to Delano, he intended to go to the hall each day for the noon meal, and he hoped everyone else would do the same. (“We got to make them damn Mexicans eat Filipino food, and the Filipinos eat Mexican food,” Manuel said.) “It shouldn’t be just a noon meal,” Cesar said, “it should be a happy occasion, kind of a revival: we’ll greet each other, we’ll acknowledge individuals, what they’ve done, we’ll sing the way we used to do, we’ll teach a few people to play the guitar.” (“You do that,” Manuel said, “and they’ll leave the Farm Workers and join the musicians’ union.”) “Maybe we’ll have to learn all over again how to organize. You could learn a lot from Goebbels; that’s why I wanted some of you to read him.” He grinned at Jerry Cohen, who has refused to do this. “That’s one thing Goebbels really understood—how to bring people together.” Manuel winked at Cohen, at the same time jerking his head toward his cousin, but catching Cesar’s eye, restrained his joke.
In a little while the men were gone, all but Manuel, who decided to stay over until morning. Slowly Cesar got out of bed and went down along the empty portico to the washroom at the end of the building. It was past midnight. While he
was gone, Manuel said that he had been jailed the night before in East Los Angeles; he had kicked a cop who falsely accused him of intoxication, then shoved him around. Another cop had held his arms while the first slugged him in the belly. Manuel laughed. “They’re not so tough,” he said. Helen, who had just come in, glanced toward the washroom. Knowing how Cesar worries about Manuel, she said in a whisper, “Did you tell him?” Manuel said no. But when Cesar came back and got into bed, Manuel immediately revealed all. It was his way of teasing Cesar about nonviolence, but in the telling, he was like a boy confessing a bad deed of which he is secretly proud.
Surprisingly, Cesar did not get angry at Manuel. “Did they hurt you?” he asked in a stricken voice. He made Manuel come to the bed and hoist his shirt up and display his bruises, which were not serious. “Do you need a painkiller? Maybe you should have an x-ray!” Manuel slapped himself on the belly and dropped his shirt. Cesar was serious, but he was also teasing Manuel by taking the account so seriously.
Cesar forgives Manuel what he will not forgive in anybody else; he loves him, but he also depends on him. In Union work Manuel stays in the background, where he is often most useful. “He is very generous,” Cesar says, “and doesn’t care if other people get the credit. And for sniffing things out, there’s nobody like him”—he spread out his arms—“Manuel has a nose this long.”
After mass the next morning Manuel drove Cesar over to Summerland, near Carpinteria. “We used to camp here every summer, on the way south to the Imperial Valley,” Manuel said. Cesar exclaimed over the eucalyptus wood above the sea cliffs; his parents had lived in a tent in the wood, and the children were in a tent out in the open. The old coast road was buried under a four-lane boulevard of asphalt; otherwise, little had changed. “There were eighty or ninety tents right on that little hill,” Manuel said, “and they put a water tank up at the top for us. We came to pick tomatoes, on the way from Delano to Brawley; we used to migrate into Summerland every year.”
Cesar had gotten out of the car and was gazing out at the swaying kelp and pewter sea. “We used to like it here,” he said. “After work, when we were hot, we could wash in the ocean.” He turned to Manuel. “Remember those beers we got and buried on the beach? And Uncle Marin stole them? And we put laxative in his food? We were minors,” he explained to me, “but we liked beer.”
“You were very bad,” Manuel said. “You were always getting me into trouble. We were in the same grade, but I guess you were five years older than me, right? Maybe ten.”
From Santa Barbara I drove to Delano, stopping first at the simple Santa Ynez Mission, in the Santa Ynez Valley, then continuing north and east over the mountains of the Los Padres National Forest, winding down out of the clear skies of the Coast Range to the murky Valley floor at Maricopa; there was a police car on the lonely road west of town, and for want of anything better to do, it followed me through Maricopa and out a little ways on the far side.
In December, the Valley mists had darkened. At Maricopa there were no cover crops, no green, only a flat brown world without horizons. In the autumn dusk the skeletal black mantis-headed pumps were still rocking up and down, probing the water table; here and there, the mantis figures were as many as twelve to the square mile, herding like great Cretaceous creatures in the cold mist. To the east, a full moon loomed in the brown night that shrouded the far Sierra, but I could see no sky. On U.S. 99 I took my place in the angry chain of lights that was whining its way northward. From northeast to southeast, for 100 degrees across the cold bare land, there were no houses or tree silhouettes, no landmarks, nothing, only the huge brown-silver moon in the upper left quadrant of the void, and weak car lights far away on Sandrini Road, probing the murk like the eyes of a night animal.
By morning the murk had thickened, a rank heavy gloom that penetrated to the skin. Cars bumped through the streets of Delano like blind bugs under a log. I groped my way to Albany Street, then followed the ghostly cotton fields to the farm workers’ offices at the edge of town. The cotton fields were a grim reminder of the urgency of the farm workers’ plight: the automation of the cotton industry destroyed the jobs of thousands of unskilled workers who were unprotected by a union.
My errand done, I planned to continue north to San Francisco, but the fog made it impossible; I would have to turn back to Los Angeles. I stopped for a fine Mexican lunch at Leroy and Bonnie Chatfield’s house in the rose fields of McFarland, then went on south. (Not long before, a shot had been fired at this house from a passing car, and shortly after my visit, Leroy and Bonnie were evicted because of their association with the Union; they now live in Delano.)
A winter sun spun through the mist, but all the highway lights were lit, and other lights shone from the railway sidings, tanks, and anonymous towers of light industry, on the far side of metal fences that run down both sides of U.S. 99. Below McFarland the highway crosses the Friant-Kern Canal, a steep-sided concrete trench perhaps fifty feet across that bores across the Valley like a giant gutter; in the canal the water was low and in the old Kern River bed, just north of Bakersfield, there was no water at all.
The fog thinned and high billboards became visible, looming over the sunken trenches of the freeway. Where the freeway was at ground level, the signs were smaller: AUTO SUPPLY and THE BEST CEMENT PIPE CO. and a sign for car wreckers, off the road to Oildale (2 MI.). On either side of the highway, utility wires wandered in the mist; the low winter sun took shape and then withdrew. Stalled by the fog, strange yellow machines squatted on their mounds of heaped raw earth, and the few weed trees that straggled skyward did less to offset than to set off the desolation. Otherwise, all lines were straight: the six lanes and their center lines, the concrete island down the highway spine, the steel barriers flanking the concrete, the railroad tracks and ties, the vine rows in the rectangles of the uniform flat fields. Here and there a strip of planting had been jammed into the concrete of the “median divider”—a last rigid line in the pattern of progress laid down like an iron grid upon the land.
At the south end of the Valley the road climbed quickly to the sky. Northward the mist lay banked, like a brown cloud on the Valley floor. To the south, closing off the whole horizon, was the great gray-yellow contamination that hangs over the spreading megalopolis.
“But you know what I—what I really think? You know what I really think? I really think that one day the world will be great. I really believe the world gonna be great one day.”
The man who said that was a migrant farm worker, and a black man. Cesar Chavez shares this astonishing hope of an evolution in human values, and I do too; it is the only hope we have.
I think often of the visit to the archdiocese on that summer day in San Francisco, and the way Cesar vanished into the cold modern house of God, so unlike the simple missions he prefers. An elevator must have rushed him to the top, because moments later there came a rapping from on high, and Cesar appeared in silhouette behind the panes, waving and beckoning from the silences of sun and glass like a man trapped against his will in Heaven. His dance of woe was a pantomime of man’s fate, and this transcendental clowning, this impossible gaiety, which illuminates even his most desperate moments, is his most moving trait. Months later I could still see that human figure in the glittering high windows of the twentieth century. The hands, the dance, cried to the world: Wait! Have faith! Look, look! Let’s go! Good-bye! Hello! I love you!
EPILOGUE
FOR Cesar Chavez and his people, the dank winter in Delano has always been a time of low morale, and the winter of 1968–69 was darkened further by the Di Giorgio sale and by Chavez’s physical inability to provide active leadership. When he came home from Santa Barbara in December, Cesar was still half crippled by pain, and finally the Union acquired another house next to its present headquarters, so that he could try to administer from bed. In mid-January he delivered an impassioned speech at Filipino Hall, asking the members for renewed sacrifice and dedication. There were plans to extend the Service Center t
o other cities in California, Texas and Arizona, and to establish a retirement farm for the Filipino members. In Delano, Leroy Chatfield and Marion Moses were revitalizing the Union’s health and welfare program, which now includes a medical insurance plan to which all Union ranches contribute. With the expansion of the clinic had come a need for a full-time doctor as well as a program of preventive medicine; too many of the clinic’s patients were half dead by the time they came in for help. At a meeting of two hundred farm workers it was discovered that nine out of ten had never been to a dentist, and that only three had ever had X-rays of the chest. Most of the farm workers’ complaints were based directly on deprivation, but the most serious illnesses were caused by exposure to agricultural chemicals. In early January, in a letter to the growers’ organizations calling for negotiations to avoid a third year of boycott, Chavez said that the Union wished to negotiate this problem of “economic poisons . . . even if other labor relations problems have to wait.”
The growers did not answer his letter, and on January 25, at a general meeting in Delano, plans were set up for an intensified boycott, as well as an effort to draw public attention to the irresponsible use of agricultural chemicals.
Four days after this meeting in Delano, court hearings began in Bakersfield in response to a UFWOC suit demanding access to public records on the use of pesticides kept by the Kern County Agricultural Commission. In August 1968, because of numerous worker injuries in the Coachella and San Joaquin valleys, Jerry Cohen had gone to the commission and asked to see the records. “I went there at eleven in the morning. I was told to come back the next day. At one thirty-three the same day a temporary restraining order was issued preventing me from seeing the reports of the spray. That’s one of the fastest injunctions ever issued in the Valley.”
Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can) Page 34