Hard Times (10 page)

You don’t find that now. I think maybe if you did that now, you’d get arrested. Somebody’d call the police. The atmosphere since the end of the Second War—it seems like the minute the war ended, the propaganda started. In making people hate each other.

I remember one night, we walked for a long time, and we were so tired and hungry, and a wagon came along. There was a Negro family going into town. Of course, they’re not allowed to stop and eat in restaurants, so they’d cook their own food and brought it with ‘em. They had the back of the wagon filled with hay. We asked them if we could lay down and sleep in the wagon, and they said yes. We woke up, and it was morning, and she invited us to eat with ’em. She had this box, and she had chicken and biscuits and sweet potatoes and everything in there. It was just really wonderful.

I didn’t like black people. In fact, I hated ‘em. If they just shipped ’em all out, I don’t think it woulda bothered me.

 

 

I didn’t feel any identification with the Mexicans, either. My husband and me were migrant workers. We went down in the valley of Texas, which is very beautiful. We picked oranges and lemons and grapefruits, limes in the Rio Grande Valley.

We got a nickel a bushel for citrus fruits. On the grapefruits you had to ring them. You hold a ring in your hand that’s about like that (she draws a circle with her hands), and it has a little thing that slips down over your thumb. You climb the tree and you put that ring around the grapefruit. If the grapefruit slips through, you can’t pick it. And any grapefruit that’s in your box—you can work real hard, especially if you want to make enough to buy food that day—you’ll pick some that aren’t big enough. Then when you carry your box up and they check it, they throw out all the ones that go through the ring.

I remember this one little boy in particular. He was really a beautiful child. Every day when we’d start our lunch, we’d sit under the trees and eat. And these peppers grew wild. I saw him sitting there, and every once in a while he’d reach over and get a pepper and pop it in his mouth. With his food, whatever he was eating. I thought they looked pretty good. So I reached over and popped it in my mouth, and, oh, it was like liquid fire. He was rolling in the grass laughing. He thought it was so funny—that white people couldn’t eat peppers like they could. And he was tearing open grapefruits for me to suck the juice, because my mouth was all cooked from the pepper. He used to run and ask if he could help me. Sometimes he’d help me fill my boxes of grapefruits, ‘cause he felt sorry for me, ’cause I got burned on the peppers. (Laughs.)

But that was a little boy. I felt all right toward him. But the men and the women, they were just spics and they should be sent back to Mexico.

I remember I was very irritated because there were very few gringos in this little Texas town, where we lived. Hardly anybody spoke English. When you tried to talk to the Mexicans, they couldn’t understand English. It never occurred to us that we should learn to speak Spanish. It’s really hard to talk about a time like that, ’cause it seems like a different person. When I remember those times, it’s like looking into a world where another person is doing those things.

This may sound impossible, but if there’s one thing that started me
thinking, it was President Roosevelt’s cuff links. I read in the paper how many pairs of cuff links he had. It told that some of them were rubies and precious stones—these were his cuff links. And I’ll never forget, I was setting on an old tire out in the front yard and we were poor and hungry. I was sitting out there in the hot sun, there weren’t any trees. And I was wondering why it is that one man could have all those cuff links when we couldn’t even have enough to eat. When we lived on gravy and biscuits. That’s the first time I remember ever wondering why.

And when my father finally got his bonus, he bought a secondhand car for us to come back to Kentucky in. My dad said to us kids: “All of you get in the car. I want to take you and show you something.” On the way over there, he’d talk about how life had been rough for us, and he said: “If you think it’s been rough for us, I want you to see people that really had it rough.” This was in Oklahoma City, and he took us to one of the Hoover-villes, and that was the most incredible thing.

Here were all these people living in old, rusted-out car bodies. I mean that was their home. There were people living in shacks made of orange crates. One family with a whole lot of kids were living in a piano box. This wasn’t just a little section, this was maybe ten-miles wide and ten-miles long. People living in whatever they could junk together.

And when I read
Grapes of Wrath
—she bought that for me (indicates young girl seated across the room)—that was like reliving my life. Particularly the part where they lived in this Government camp. Because when we were picking fruit in Texas, we lived in a Government place like that. They came around, and they helped the women make mattresses. See, we didn’t have anything. And they showed us how to sew and make dresses. And every Saturday night, we’d have a dance. And when I was reading
Grapes of Wrath
this was just like my life. I was never so proud of poor people before, as I was after I read that book.

I think that’s the worst thing that our system does to people, is to take away their pride. It prevents them from being a human being. And wondering why the Harlem and why the Detroit. They’re talking about troops and law and order. You get law and order in this country when people are allowed to be decent human beings. Every time I hear another building’s on fire, I say: oh, boy, baby, hit ’em again. (Laughs.)

I don’t think people were put on earth to suffer. I think that’s a lot of nonsense. I think we are the highest development on the earth, and I think we were put here to live and be happy and to enjoy everything that’s here. I don’t think it’s right for a handful of people to get ahold of all the things that make living a joy instead of a sorrow. You wake up in the morning, and it consciously hits you—it’s just like a big hand that takes your heart and squeezes it—because you don’t know what that day is going to bring: hunger or you don’t know.

POSTSCRIPT:
(A sudden flash of memory by Peggy Terry, as I was about to leave.) “It was the Christmas of ‘35, just before my dad got his bonus. We didn’t get anything for Christmas. I mean nothing. Not an orange, not an apple—nothing. I just felt so bad. I went to the church, to the children’s program and I stole a Christmas package. It was this pretty box and it had a big red ribbon on it. I stole it off the piano, and I took it home with me. I told my mother my Sunday school teacher had given me a Christmas present. When I opened it, it was a beautiful long scarf made out of velvet —a cover for a piano. My mother knew my Sunday school teacher didn’t give me that. ’Cause we were living in one room, in a little shack in what they called Gander Flat. (Laughs.) For a child—I mean, they teach you about Santa Claus and they teach you all that stuff—and then for a child to have to go to church and steal a present … and then it turned out to be something so fantastic, a piano scarf. Children shouldn’t have to go around stealing. There’s enough to give all of them everything they want, any time they want it. I say that’s what we’re gonna have.”

 

MY FATHER had a farm in southern California. I remember the
Grapes of Wrath
kind of people. They used to work for us, pick crops. It amazed me. They’d say, “Let the Jap boy count it.” They’d come in from the fields, and I’d tally up the totals for the day. I’d weigh them on the scale. I didn’t feel I was qualified. I was just a little kid. But I could count. They would honor my counting. It was a tremendous trust. It seems the less affluent you are, the more you are able to trust people, the more you are able to give others.

My father had many old-type Oriental feelings about things. If one of his friends had trouble and couldn’t afford to have anyone working for him, my father would ask me to go over. I remember once feeling badly. I had worked all day for this man, cleaning lettuce, stacking vegetables. He didn’t pay me. My father gave me a real tongue-lashing: “You’re not expected to get paid. He didn’t ask you to go.
I
asked you to go.”

The communal spirit of the Nisei is less today than it was in the Depression. The second-generation Japanese has become the most so-called American.

Someone laughingly told: Maybe the war—and the internment camp
²⁹
—was good for us. How else could we have gotten out of California? There were hundreds of Nisei Ph.D.’s working on the family’s farm or fruit stands. Their parents would live in shacks so their sons and daughters could go to college. (Laughs.)

Thousands of us—after Pearl Harbor—were assembled at the Santa Anita race track. We were assigned to camps or contracted out to farmers. My brother and I signed up to pick sugar beets for a farmer in Idaho. Here we worked on a sugar beet farm, but we couldn’t get any sugar coupons. I didn’t know the taste of sugar. (Laughs.)

 

I USED TO ask my father what he did. He never said much, except he rode around in freight trains and couldn’t find work, and at one point he went up to Alaska and worked and was hungry. He hardly talked about it at all, as a matter of fact.

 

 

No. But there’ve been times like when the band was first formed. We spent about two years on a below-poverty level. We had incomes of about anywhere from $5 to $25 a week. We managed to make it all right, though it got to be a real drag in the second year. We really started to get a craving for good food. We were surrounded by an affluent society. I just can’t imagine a whole country living like that.

It’s a long ways from me. I remember Woody Guthrie records, where he talked about this big cloud of dust coming along and they losing all their homes. They actually had houses that a bulldozer could just knock over. (Laughs.) I can’t imagine bulldozing my parents’ house down there in Berkeley. You’d have a hard time knocking down a stucco house. Maybe it’s impossible to relive that period.

I travel around and talk to some of the Mexican migrant workers. In a way, they seem closer to each other than most well-off middle-class people. Their impoverished condition somehow made them very real people. It’s hard to be phony when you haven’t got anything. I mean when you’re
really down and out. I think the Depression had some kind of human qualities with it that we lack now.

 

OH, I REMEMBER having to move out of our house. My father had brought in a team of horses and wagon. We had always lived in that house, and we couldn’t understand why we were moving out. When we got to the other house, it was a worse house, a poor house. That must have been around 1934. I was about six years old.

It’s known as the North Gila Valley, about fifty miles north of Yuma. My dad was being turned out of his small plot of land. He had inherited this from his father, who had homesteaded it. I saw my two, three other uncles also moving out. And for the same reason. The bank had foreclosed on the loan.

If the local bank approved, the Government would guarantee the loan and small farmers like my father would continue in business. It so happened the president of the bank was the guy who most wanted our land. We were surrounded by him: he owned all the land around us. Of course, he wouldn’t pass the loan.

One morning a giant tractor came in, like we had never seen before. My daddy used to do all his work with horses. So this huge tractor came in and began to knock down this corral, this small corral where my father kept his horses. We didn’t understand why. In the matter of a week, the whole face of the land was changed. Ditches were dug, and it was different. I didn’t like it as much.

We all of us climbed into an old Chevy that my dad had. And then we were in California, and migratory workers. There were five kids—a small family by those standards. It must have been around ’36. I was about eight. Well, it was a strange life. We had been poor, but we knew every night there was a bed
there,
and that
this
was our room. There was a
kitchen. It was sort of a settled life, and we had chickens and hogs, eggs and all those things. But that all of a sudden changed. When you’re small, you can’t figure these things out. You know something’s not right and you don’t like it, but you don’t question it and you don’t let that get you down. You sort of just continue to move.