Adrianne was pretty well used to me, but this time she asked, “Where in tarnation have you been?”
“Little bit of everywhere. I’ll tell you tomorrow.” I was too tired to talk.
The next day, she laughed some when I told her what happened but was too dumfounded, I think, to say much. “You ought to write your life story someday,” she said. “People will say it’s the best fiction they ever read.”
Billy came by a week later. He said he laid there till they shone a light on him. They were mad, but he gave them the story he said he would and spent the week in jail for being drunk and failing to yield the right of way, which I thought was an understatement. He said the front end of the train was damaged, and they had to bring a repair train out of New Mexico to fix it. They said he should pay for it, but of course they could see he didn’t have anything.
“I didn’t ask for a new car,” he said. “I saw a rifle in one of those railroad pickups and was afraid they’d shoot me.” He did his best to keep me out of it, but a railroad dick came in the shop and questioned me a few weeks later. I said I knew Billy but wasn’t with him that night, and the dick finally left. The railroads hire some of the best cops in the country. I thought it was like football when a good little man meets a good big man and the big man wins, only that time was the little freight train against the big one.
Regardless of my misadventure, I wasted no time moving on my plans. Chucho Hernandez had a couple of days to consider it, and I decided to see him before I saw Luther again because Luther already told me he’d go. I went to Terkel about dark to let Hernandez get in from work and eat. Same as before, he was at the edge of the yard at a car with some other men. This time, I waited for him to speak.
“Hello, Mr. Byrd,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“I got busy,” I said. “Anyway, thought you might need the extra time.”
“I thought it over. It seems like a good idea.”
I hadn’t expected him to come over that easily but was not going to act surprised. “Are you ready to go?”
“Sure, I’m ready. I’ve got a lot of men lined up.”
“How many?”
“About a hundred.”
“Well, why don’t we have a meeting?”
“When?”
“How about Friday night?”
“Where do you want it?” he asked.
“In the gin yard at Victory on the south edge of town. Bring your men just at sundown.”
“We’ll be there. Do you know why I’m doing it?”
“The reasons I gave?”
“I thought it over. It could be trouble, but I’m not afraid of that. I think we don’t have anything to lose. Farm laborers are needed so much around here that all these people will have a job whether it works or not. Personally, I doubt if it will. But if it does, we may be better off. The main thing is that we’re not afraid to try.”
“You and me and Luther are a pretty good threesome, I think,” I said. “We can do it if anybody can.”
“I don’t want to work with Luther Moore too much. I can’t forget what he did. I can let bygones be bygones for the good of everybody, but I won’t be friends with him.”
“You won’t necessarily have to. You don’t even have to talk to each other if you don’t want to.”
“Okay, I’ll see you Friday.”
It was Wednesday, and I thought Luther and him could get maybe two hundred. I told Hernandez to get as many as possible because I knew we would need seventy-five or eighty percent of the labor supply to do much good. I had no doubt that he had a hundred men. Victory is a big county, and there was a lot of land in cultivation around Terkel. We needed a man in Terkel because it was the county seat and the center of the county. I went from there to see Luther. I had to have Hernandez or somebody like him, but Luther was more valuable because he was a friend and loyal. He must have just gotten in, I thought, because his pickup had wet mud on the side.
His wife Hazel answered the door and said, “Luther’s in the tub. Come on in, sit down. He’ll be out in a minute. Can I bring you some iced tea?”
Luther had four or five boys, and they were also coming in from work. He came out of the bathroom with a towel on. A lot of men look silly that way. Luther didn’t. He turned even more serious when he saw me.
“You’re still black,” I said.
“I just wash to get darker,” he said. “Why don’t you come eat with us?”
“Sounds good.” We filled up on pork chops, pinto beans, poke salad, cornbread, corncobs and tea. Luther had a big dinner table that he made out of a wagon bed and nailed together and polished. He didn’t feel talkative, so nobody said a thing. The boys even tried to eat as quietly as they could. I didn’t bring up our project because he didn’t, thinking we could discuss it afterwards.
It was after eight when he glanced around and said, “Y’all clear on out of here. Me and Mr. Preach are goin’ to talk.” Hazel cleaned off the table, and he said, “I guess you came to tell me we’re goin’ ahead. I never knowed you to back down on anything yet.”
“Chucho Hernandez is with us,” I said. “He’s going to have a hundred men or more at the gin yard Friday night.”
“I’ll get more than him.”
“We need to make a good start. Y’all talk to them beforehand, then I’ll put it together for them.”
“You may not believe me after the way I talked the other night, but I hoped you’d go ahead on,” Luther said.” A lot of things could happen, but I win this either way. What time do you need me?”
“Right after dark. We’ll keep on some pickup lights, and I’ll get up on a hood or something. We should be through in less than an hour. Do you know what to tell everybody?”
“Yeah, we’re going to get together and get more money.”
“Tell them who all is involved,” I said. “Say we’re going to get wages up to a dollar-fifty or two dollars and work with their bosses through you, me and Hernandez. I’ll go see their bosses or maybe call a meeting for them after Friday. If they won’t come across, they won’t get any of our people. We need as many as we can get so they’ll have a hard time getting anybody else.”
“Will they need to bring any money?”
“I suppose we could wait on the dues. What do you think, five dollars a month?”
“More.”
“You and me can talk to Hernandez just before the meeting. We need to say what it’ll be.”
“Five a month from everybody to start with would be a thousand a month,” Luther said. “You need a job, don’t you?”
“I need four or five hundred, and I want you and Chucho to have a couple of hundred each. We may decide on that later. We have enough to do for now.”
“I’ll have every good hand there is, and Hernandez and me should be able to get another fifty or seventy-five each as time goes on.”
A rabbit ran across the road a mile from Luther’s house, and I got my twenty-two semi-automatic pistol from the glove compartment. He stopped on the top edge of the borrow ditch and looked at me, mesmerized in the lights. He disappeared when I fired three shots. I’d taken to carrying my Colt Woodsman with a six and a half-inch barrel because of the discouragement. I got back in the car and killed the lights and engine. The die was cast. The only choices I would have from now on were how to handle what I started.
I never have been much on listening to the radio, but for some reason I turned it on. I got lucky and found some hound dog playing one Jimmie Rodgers song after another. Jimmie Rodgers was the only singer I ever really liked. He made the Depression halfway bearable. Why does a sad song make you feel better? Maybe it makes you feel like you have some company. Little Jimmie, people believed in him because he was too sick with tuberculosis to do anything but sing, He was dying, and the rest of us were only poor. He was the best yodeler ever, and the radio played one of his best songs. “When the north winds blow and we’re gonna have snow and the rain and the hail comes bouncing, I’ll wra
p myself in a grizzly bear coat away out on the mountain.” Then he goes into a yodel that makes the hair stand up on your arm.
The radio quit playing Jimmie Rodgers, and I turned it off and rolled the windows down. Fields have a sound to them, you know. I listened to the fields for a while and heard something, probably the rabbit I missed. I started to get the pistol and shoot him but decided anything that harmless and dumb should be allowed to live if he can get away from a man with a gun one time in a night. The important thing about shooting a pistol is not to shoot too high. Put the target on top of the sights instead of right in them like you do with a rifle or shotgun. Then you miss low if you miss, and the bullet may still ricochet into your target. I started the car and headed home with the windows down for fresh air. It was getting late, but I was not in a hurry and only went thirty miles an hour, feeling like I was by myself on a riverboat going down a still river in the dark.
The next day, Thursday, was quiet. I considered going around to a few of the white men I knew who worked on farms but decided there were few enough of them that they would come over for the wages after we got started. There were also not enough of them to do much good. I thought their presence Friday night would only be confusing. Believe it or not, I spent the whole day watching television. I watched all the game shows in the morning, the soap operas in the afternoon and the shoot ’em ups till bedtime. I thought it would be better not to drink at all and had nothing. I did eat a big bowlful of lemon drops.
I was tempted to go out Friday morning but on reflection figured it would be best if I stayed in like a general and let Luther and Chucho do all the setting up. About five o’clock, I shaved and put on some khaki pants and a blue cotton shirt. I changed out of my overalls because I needed to look like a manager. I had no idea what to say beyond the obvious things. But I knew wages and protection against mistreatment would not be enough. Luther and Hernandez would build it up, and I would have to come through some way. The trouble as I saw it was that I had never got up and spoken to any kind of group in my life.
I left the house about six. My two compatriots were there just off the road by the big, empty gin yard. There were about fifty men sitting, standing around and smoking cigarettes. Cars and pickups were parked up and down both sides of the road and in the yard. More were coming behind and ahead of me up the dirt road they were using as a short cut from Terkel. I went across the ditch and got as close as I could to Luther’s pickup, where he was leaning on the front bumper by himself. Chucho was talking to some men a few yards away. I realized the meeting could have become the biggest brawl Victory ever saw if I hadn’t shown up.
“Ho,” I said. “We need to talk about membership dues and so forth.”
“I was going to suggest five dollars a month,” Hernandez said. “That’s all most of these men can afford.”
Looking at Luther, I said, “I was going to suggest seven-fifty, but we can probably get along on five. What do you think, Luther?”
“Five is all right. How much do we take?”
“It’s a thousand a month if we get two hundred members, which I think we will. I’m not going to do anything but this. How would it be if I took four-fifty as a salary and you all took two hundred each?”
“I’m not trying to argue,” Chucho said, “but I don’t see why you should get more than twice as much as we do. Can you make it on four hundred? That would leave us more to put in a fund.”
“I’m not here to argue, either,” I said. “I need four-fifty, but I think you could get two twenty-five each and we’d still have enough left over. What do you say?”
“I guess that’s all right,” Hernandez said.
“Even better,” said Luther.
More men had been arriving all the time we were talking, and now that it was almost dark, there must have been close to two hundred, if not more. Both men had done a good job. There were about as many blacks as Mexicans forming up in front of us. They sort of divided, with blacks on the side Luther was on, and Mexicans on Hernandez’ side. There were a few white men, some I didn’t know, in the middle front. They had all come directly from work and still had on their working clothes and footwear. They got quieter and quieter and finally were standing still and looking at us. Mainly, they looked at me.
Although there was enough moonlight for us to see, I went to the cab of Luther’s pickup and turned on the park lights. I decided against getting up on anything, afraid I would fall off and ruin the whole thing.
I stepped in front of the pickup and said, “Right now, every one of you is by himself. You came here by yourselves to see what you could get for yourselves better than what you’ve got. If you go with Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Moore and me, you will leave here together. You won’t be by yourselves any more. Maybe you like to be by yourself. I don’t. The best time I ever had in my life was when I played football, and one reason was because it was a bunch of guys pulling together. You might not think we can do it, but you’ve just been by yourself too long. You can’t do it by yourself. With everybody else, you can.”
“How are you going to do it?” a Mexican man about forty asked from two or three men back.
“Most of you only make seventy-five cents or a dollar an hour,” I said. “We’re going to form a group and call it the Texas Farm Laborers or something and guarantee good work for a dollar-fifty for fairly new men to two dollars for men with ten or fifteen years’ experience. Can you go for that?”
“Hell, yeah,” he answered.
“You damn right,” a black man in front said.
“After we get established, we’ll bring it up higher than that. You all need to make a living just like everybody else.”
“For a change,” another one yelled from the middle back, and everybody started hollering and raising Cain.
“Y’all might think it’s funny for a white man to be up here, but I may be more like you than some others of your own race or nationality,” I said. “If one of you inherited a million dollars, do you think you’d still be the same color to everybody else? Naw, you wouldn’t be brown or black, you’d be green for the money. When a colored man or a Mexican-American gets rich, he is not seen as colored or Mexican anymore. He’s a rich man! I have a lot more to talk about with Chucho here and Luther than I do with a bank president or some of these big shot farmers. If you and me and Luther and Chucho are ever going to have anything, we need to get together because we’ll never get anywhere by ourselves.”
“It’s true,” a Negro man I knew named Furman Nash yelled out.
“Yeah, yeah,” a bunch more hollered.
“Next week, we’ll start around the county and talk to the people you work for. We’re going to tell them what the set-up is and say we have the labor pool if you’ll pay our wages. If not, they can get somebody else besides the men who belong to this organization. You can call it a union. That’s what it is. I won’t bull you, some of you will have to find other jobs, but farm workers are in such short supply that we can get you another job. The more members we have, the more effective we can be. Remember that every farm laborer in this part of the country who doesn’t belong weakens you. Everybody line up in front of Luther and Chucho and give them your names if they don’t already know them and five dollars for a membership fee. It’ll be five a month from everybody, us included.” Everyone there, it looked like, was lining up. I didn’t see anyone leaving. “I don’t mind telling you, I’m going to work full-time and be paid four hundred and fifty dollars a month out of the money you pay in. Luther and Chucho will get two twenty-five each for as long as they keep their main jobs and don’t need more.”
The part about the money didn’t slow anybody down. They made two long lines, and Luther and Chucho took money and wrote down names for forty-five minutes or an hour. It was pretty quiet considering the occasion. Because of the lines, the cars and pickups left a few at a time, everyone in an orderly fashion. What I found hard to believe was that every last man that I could tell went through the lines and joined. We
stood there till everybody was gone but us. It was about nine o’clock.
“I guess we did some good, Mr. Byrd,” Chucho said.
“Call me Preacher,” I told him.
“Okay, what are we going to do with all this money? Some didn’t pay, but I wrote it beside their names.”
“I did the same thing,” Luther said.
“Give it to me,” I said. “I’ll put it in the bank tomorrow. We’ll take our money at the end of the month. Right now, let’s count it and see how much there is so we all know.”
There was over seven hundred dollars and about four hundred owed. We counted the names and were surprised to come up with two hundred and fifty-three.
“Not a man walked away,” Luther said. “I guess you deserve that name, Preacher.”
“Maybe I missed my calling,” I laughed. Luther and Hernandez didn’t laugh, I noticed, because they were uneasy with each other.
“Have y’all ever met?”
Luther just looked at Chucho, and Chucho said, “Nope.”
“You won’t be working together all that much, but it would be good if you feel like you know each other.”
“I hear you’re a tough man,” Chucho said.
“Not so much,” Luther said. “How tough are you?”
“I can take care of myself,” Chucho said.
“Well, I ain’t got nothing against you,” Luther said. “I’ll shake your hand if you’ll shake mine.”
Chucho said, “We can work together,” and they shook.
“Tonight was the big step,” I told them. Do y’all think we should wait till Monday to start going around?”
“I think it would be better if you went by yourself,” Chucho said. “They’ll get madder if him and me go with you.”
The Byrds of Victory Page 8