I was about to leave when the Filipino Communist and Anna Dozier came to our apartment.
“You can’t establish a separate Filipino unit of the Party,” she said. “Why, it is a divisionist tactic!”
“It is complete disobedience of the Party’s rules,” the Filipino said. “Every action regarding the Party must come from me.”
“But I’m not a member,” I countered.
Anna was hesitant. Then she said, “Nevertheless.”
“The Party is a democratic organization,” the Filipino said.
“I didn’t say it was undemocratic,” I answered. “And if it’s communism our countrymen want, let them have it. I think that is democracy.”
“You talk like an intellectual,” Anna said.
“You know well enough that I have washed dishes for a living,” I said. “You know well enough that I have never made any pretensions to intellectualism.”
“I don’t trust him,” the Filipino said to Anna as he turned to leave the apartment.
I was naïve. I wanted to be sure that communism was what Filipinos needed. I felt somehow that I needed it too. What was the nemesis of communism? Was it Trotskyism? Whatever it was that seemed relevant to the needs of the Filipinos in California, I knew that I must assimilate it.
I left for the north in confusion. I knew that I would battle with myself for a decision. I rode in the bus and watched familiar scenes that evoked poetry in me. When was it that I had first seen this broad land?
I trembled with joy passing the familiar scenes. It was where I belonged—here in the color of green, the bitter taste of lemon peels, the yellow of ripe peas; in the pleasure, the beauty, the fragrance.
CHAPTER XXXIX
I stopped in San Fernando, a citrus town twenty-five miles north of Los Angeles. I walked to a big Filipino agricultural laborers’ camp, in the center of a wide lemon farm. It was Sunday and there was a light rain in the sky. I found the lemon pickers crowded in a large garage, where they were playing cards and washing clothes. I asked one of the men where I could find the leader of the crew. I was courteously guided to a little house under two tall eucalyptus trees.
I knocked softly on the door and a young Filipino woman opened it. I said that I would like to see her husband, but she answered that he had gone to town. She invited me into the house. I could wait for her husband. I knew from the way she spoke English that she was an educated woman.
“That is my husband,” she said, pointing to a picture of a man about forty-five on the table. “I met him in Manila when I was going to college there. He was in the Philippines for ten months. I found out later that he went there to look for a wife.”
“I have seen your husband around,” I said. “But I don’t know him. I understand that he has been managing this camp for fifteen years.”
“Yes,” she said. “But I have been here only two years. I went to Stanford University for three years, then came here for good. I can’t use my education.” She stared at me and said: “The Pinoys can’t use their education, either. That is why Pinoys have only one objective—to marry someone with economic security. But the parents are partly to blame: they teach their daughters to be greedy. So Pinoys in general are arrogant and stupid and lacking in humor.”
I nodded silently.
“I didn’t get your name,” she said.
I told her.
“Don’t you write for the Filipino press?” she asked.
“Now and then,” I said. “I’m just learning. . . .”
“I like your poems,” she said finally.
A car came into the yard. She went to the door and opened it. It was her husband. He climbed up the stairs and stomped onto the porch, shouting at the children there. Then he burst into the house with his arms full of packages.
I jumped to my feet to help him, introducing myself. He acknowledged the introduction with a swift jerk of his head, as though he had heard of me somewhere. When we had piled the packages on a table, he invited me outside. We sat on the porch steps, throwing pebbles into the tall grass. He talked easily though with visible restraint. I could see that he had been lonely—that the apparent happiness of his marriage could not make him forget the loneliness which had shadowed him during his fifteen years in this lemon grove.
“When I first came to this camp,” he said, “these lemon trees were only a foot high. The land on the west side of my camp was still a desert. I went to the town and recruited Mexican laborers. Afterward I went to Los Angeles and carted off Filipinos who had just arrived from the sugar plantations of Hawaii and from the peasant country of the Philippines.”
He looked affectionately toward the lemon groves east of the camp, then at the orange groves on the west.
“I have made this valley fruitful and famous,” he said quietly. “Some ten years ago I wanted to go into farming myself, so close I was to the soil, so familiar with the touch of clay and loam. But I found that I couldn’t buy land in California. I had served in the United States navy in World War I, so I thought I had the privilege. But after the war I was on the ocean most of the time, because I didn’t resign when the armistice was signed. I didn’t know that three years after the armistice I could no longer file my citizenship papers. I could no longer become an American citizen. I wanted to become an American citizen for many reasons, but at that time my most urgent desire was to buy a piece of land so that I could farm. I guess I’m a sucker for the land.”
He had the gentleness and the passion of my father when he spoke about the land. Perhaps he had come from the peasantry in the Philippines. I also felt attached to the land, but it was now a different attachment. In the years long gone it was merely a desire to possess a plot of earth and to draw nourishment from it. But now this desire to possess, after long years of flight and disease and want, had become an encompassing desire to belong to the land—perhaps to the whole world.
I felt this way when I talked to him. It was a discovery. I found myself in him, in the strange melody of his attachment to the land that did not belong to him, in his almost mystical belief in the fertility of the earth. I talked for a while to some of the laborers and then walked to the dirt road that led to town. I had not gone very far when I heard a car approaching from behind. I stopped and waited. The car came slowly and stopped. The woman at the camp called me. I jumped in, sure now that I could catch the first bus to Bakersfield.
I was wordless with gratitude. I had cultivated silence early in life, and there were times when I felt I would burst into tears if I spoke.
“Come back to see us again,” she said at the bus station. “Come back next year! Maybe the year after! Come back, Mr. Bulosan!”
I boarded the bus and left San Fernando. But in the night, passing through blooming orange groves, I could hear the woman’s lonely voice: “Come back, Mr. Bulosan!” It was the first time that anyone had addressed me that way.
* * *
—
I arrived in Bakersfield and walked from poolrooms to gambling houses. The season for picking grapes was still far off. The vines were just pruned. There was no work for the cold months of winter. From the gambling houses I went to the whorehouses, hoping to find someone I knew. There were no other places where Filipinos could go. I sat in the living room and watched lonely Filipinos paw at the semi-nude girls. I felt angry and lost. Where in this wide country could I go? I felt the way other Filipinos felt. I rushed out and cursed the cold night.
I discovered that three Filipino farm labor contractors controlled the grape industry. Nearly three thousand Filipino workers depended on them. They lived in crowded bunkhouses operated by these men. It was exploitation everywhere, even among ourselves. It was the same thing I had known years before.
I wanted to see one of the contractors. I was introduced to Cabao, who had nearly eight hundred Filipinos under him. He was younger than most contractors, but I was skep
tical. He drove me to his ranch. His house was large and gaudy. I saw a college diploma on the wall above his writing desk.
I was looking at it when a car drove into the yard. Cabao rushed to the window and looked out.
“My wife,” he said.
She burst into the house and came to the study with a bottle of whisky. I was shocked when I saw her face. Where had I seen her before? I stumbled to my feet when Cabao introduced me to her. But she did not stay long. I heard her drive out of the yard. Then I remembered where I had seen her! I looked at Cabao sadly.
“I’m sure you have seen my wife before,” he said apologetically. “Everybody knows what she was before I married her. She worked in every important town in California. That is why everybody knows her. She followed the seasons, the way Filipinos follow the crops.”
I wanted to find out why he married her. He had almost everything he wanted. He had had a good education.
“I saw your wife once some years ago,” I said carefully. “But I didn’t mean to ask you about her life history.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “When I talk about it I feel free. Do you think it’s money she wants? I give her enough. But she still is eager for the attention of men. I guess they are all the same.”
“Why did you marry her?” I asked.
“She was young when I saw her in Watsonville,” he said. “I was young, too. I had gone there to work for the summer, because I wanted to earn enough money to pay my college fees that year. I was taking Sociology at the University of California. I took her with me and worked for her. There were years of desperation. But when I came here and made a little money, I bought this house for her. I thought she would settle down. I was wrong. Do you know where she is going tonight?”
I did not want to know. But I could guess. I got up and started moving to the door.
“I’ll drive you to town,” Cabao said.
At the station, when Cabao had left, I discovered that he had put some money in my coat pocket. I took the bus and sat silently in a corner.
I was on my way north again. Familiar towns. But I could not erase Cabao from my mind. I recalled his gentle, educated voice, his delicate hands. There was something lost and futile, something utterly defeated in him.
“It’s all right for me to suffer,” I said to myself. “I’m stronger than he is. He has no right to suffer. . . .”
* * *
—
I arrived in Stockton during a strike. Filipino asparagus workers were in the midst of a general walkout. A long parade was moving down El Dorado Street, but the strikers were orderly and quiet. I stood on a corner reading the pennants and placards carried by some of the men. I noticed that all the stores and other buildings were closed on either side of the street. Even the gambling houses and liquor stores were closed.
I saw Claro leading a section of strikers. He was boldly carrying a sign which said:
PAISANOS! DON’T PATRONIZE JAP STORES! IT MEANS HUNGER!
His chin was up, his face animated. There was a grin on his mouth. Suddenly I felt an urge in me to run to him. When was it that I first saw him? It seemed so long ago! I shouted to him and pointed to the sign. He looked in my direction but did not recognize me. I ran to him and shouted into his ear.
“Don’t you remember me?”
For a moment he stopped, his eyes wandering wildly into the past, and then he flung his arms about me. There was genuine affection in his voice. The gesture of Claro, similar to the moving salutation of the French, was to spread to the members of our circle—to the Filipinos in the labor and progressive movements. It was to become a sign of affinity and affection.
“You have changed, Carlos!” he said.
I ignored him. But I said, “I don’t understand some of your placards. I thought this was a general walkout of asparagus workers.”
“Yes, it is!” he shouted with anger. “But a Japanese woman is breaking it. She is supplying laborers.” He walked on, looking from side to side, shouting greetings to friends watching from doorways. When he saw a Japanese face he became furious.
Where had I met a similar character? Was it in Gorki’s Decadence? In this novel, in one of the crowded streets, a revolutionist was walking with a surging crowd, anonymously. There was a powerful secret in his heart, and as he moved with the crowd remembering comrades who had fallen and thinking of the promise of the future, his eyes glowed with happiness and his whole face became animated with sudden joy.
I tugged at his sleeve. Could I tell him that I had come back to fight? Would he remember that he had sent me away long ago but advised me to return when I was ready to fight for our people? Would he remember that autumn day when I ate hungrily in his restaurant?
“This strike means more than dollars and cents in the asparagus fields,” Claro said. “This very day the trade union movement and other progressive groups in Manila are demanding that the government boycott Japanese products. But it is deeper than you think. Tons and tons of scrap iron are going to Japan from the United States. These are made into bombs that are being dropped upon the peaceful Chinese people.”
“I thought you didn’t like the Chinese people,” I said.
“There are good and bad men in every people,” he said. “For instance, I didn’t like the Chinese vice lords in Stockton. I still don’t like them, but they are co-operating in this strike.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“They have closed all their gambling houses. Do you see what this means? The Pinoys will keep their money and spend it only on food. The strike will last longer, and the farmers will lose two million dollars this season. Of course, the Chinese will also lose—but they figure that they will win in the end.”
“There is no sense to it,” I said. “If you win from one side, you lose to the other. Is there no way of winning from both sides? Isn’t there, Claro?”
The parade moved eastward to Main Street and into the huge auditorium where local leaders were assembled to address the strikers.
“The UCAPAWA is now in power in the agricultural areas of the coast,” Claro said. “But we have a strong independent union here.”
I went to the back room and sent a dispatch to a labor paper in San Francisco about the strike. A representative from the Philippine government in Washington went to the rostrum and offered his support. This man was a spectacular figure in Filipino life. A labor commissioner in Hawaii as a young man, he was also a writer and an editor. He was multilingual. He was a leader for the common man, and he tried, in his brief career among Filipinos in California, to bring their predicament to the attention of the home government. Unfortunately he died before he could accomplish his mission.
CHAPTER XL
After the meeting I found Percy Toribio, the secretary-treasurer of the striking union. He was also editor of the union’s organ. He was young and unsure of himself, a graduate of the University of Washington and a foreign correspondent for one of the weeklies in Manila.
“I’m more interested in writing,” he confided. “I started a novel some years ago, upon the insistence of my professor, but it is still unfinished. Family life and labor problems—”
There was something about the way he talked that disturbed me. I was skeptical, remembering other college-bred Filipino leaders. But I envied Toribio’s education and writing ability.
“I read some of your stories in the pages of Graphic,” I said. “I liked some of them—especially those pieces about cannery workers in Alaska.”
“I haven’t written a story since I left the university,” he said sadly.
I said, suddenly changing the subject, “Have you thought of affiliating your organization with either the CIO or the AFL?”
He leaped to his feet. “No!” he shouted emphatically. Suddenly he said, “That is not what I mean. If the members wanted to affiliate with the big organizations, it’s pro
bable they would join with the AFL.”
“But the CIO seems more democratic,” I said. “Besides, it has some of its most militant organizers in this valley.”
“I don’t think it is feasible,” he said impulsively. “The farmers might think we were a bunch of radicals. It doesn’t work here.”
I began to boil with anger. “Are you afraid of losing your job?” I said coldly.
“I wish you hadn’t said that, Carl!” He turned and walked silently away.
I knew it was impossible to talk with him. I had never trusted college-bred leaders because, in my experience, when the crucial moment came, they were not to be found.
I walked down El Dorado Street thinking of Toribio. I felt that if I met him again he would be against me. Was there no common ground? He was a representative of the Filipino intelligentsia, while I represented the peasants and workers. I was also a revolutionist. And because of my firm conviction that Filipino workers should be educated politically in order to contribute effectively to the general upsurge of democratic forces in the United States, Toribio and I would oppose each other if we met again.
* * *
—
I was eating in a restaurant when Claro came in with a morning paper. He spread it in front of me, his face beaming. I read the headline:
FILIPINO COMMUNIST LEADS STRIKE!
Swiftly I read the article, filled with premonition. It did not mention my name, but the description was almost exact. Who could have done it? José, perhaps? Perhaps the Filipino Communist in Boyle Heights? I could not understand it.
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