The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (28 page)

Manuel Chavez, of course, was different. “One of the things he [Cesar] was trying to accomplish was the redemption of Manuel,”
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Jerry Cohen wrote in his diary. Whether or not Manuel was repentant about his own misdeeds, he spent a lot of time with his cousin and supported him in every way. He no doubt saw the benefit of the fast from an organizing point of view, and he also played his usual role of cheerful prankster. Once when someone was waiting to come in to see Cesar, Manuel called out, “He’s not finished eating yet.” On another occasion, as Cesar lectured him about great nonviolent leaders and mentioned Gandhi and King, Manuel called out, “And Hitler.” Only Manuel, with his disarming smile, could get away with that degree of irreverence in a way that made everyone laugh.

Chavez used an analogy to explain the fast and the Catholic tradition of penitence to Jews such as Cohen and Ganz. Chavez pointed to a white wall and told them to imagine rows of colored ping-pong balls, jumping up and down, twelve different colors, each representing something different: religion, organizing, publicity. People would be drawn to different-colored balls, but the trick was to keep your eye on one ball. Everyone could find one ball to which he or she could relate. Keep your eye on that one.

Ganz, as a rabbi’s son, understood the importance of religious imagery. He latched on to the ball that was organizing. He went out and met with the ranch committees—the elected leaders at each vineyard under contract—to explain Chavez’s fast and urge workers to come to Forty Acres. He needed as many people as possible to stage the protest they had in mind for the day Chavez was due in court to answer to the contempt citation. On the eve of his appearance, more than two thousand people attended the nightly mass.

On the thirteenth day of his fast, Chavez arrived at the Kern County courthouse in downtown Bakersfield. Hundreds of silent farmworkers ringed the building, standing four deep. Every ten feet stood a monitor with an armband, and whatever the monitor did, the workers followed. The lines of workers threaded into the courthouse and along the halls and filled every seat in every courtroom. Chavez walked into the building, supported by Cohen. Rows of workers dropped to their knees. As a frail-looking Chavez stumbled a bit at the top of the escalator, Cohen asked if he were all right. Chavez turned away from the television cameras, toward Cohen, and winked.

The case was postponed a day because flummoxed court officials did not know what to do with the overflow crowd. The next day, the same scene repeated itself. In the judge’s chambers, William Quinlan, an attorney for Giumarra, demanded that Judge Walter Osborne clear the workers from the building. Cohen objected. “I said, ‘You kick us out, that’s just going to be another example of what kind of justice you give the people,’” Cohen recounted to a group of farmworkers afterward. “And Judge Osborne looked at Quinlan and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s right, if we kick these farmworkers out, that’ll just be another example of goddamn gringo justice.’”
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Osborne postponed the trial for two months because of Chavez’s medical condition, finding that should he be held in contempt, he would have to be force-fed in jail.

“How necessary the fast was to prevent the court hearing which could have exposed union violence and marred our image,”
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Chatfield noted in his journal. Chavez said, however, that he had planned the fast long before he was served with the contempt citation. He consistently denied any link between the court hearing and the timing of the fast.

The nation’s leading proponent of nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr., sent a telegram to Chavez: “You stand today as a living example of the Gandhian tradition with its great force for social progress and its healing spiritual powers. My colleagues and I commend you for your bravery, salute you for your indefatigable work against poverty and injustice, and pray for your health and your continuing service as one of the outstanding men of America.”

Chavez knew he would experience pain during the first week because he had experimented twice with unpublicized fasts. The first was in the summer of 1962, soon after he moved to Delano and started his farmworker census. As he had written to Ross at the time, Chavez worried he had become too impatient. “I knew inside of me that it was going to take a long time, it had to be done slowly in order to be done at all, and you couldn’t rush it. Yet, I wanted to keep rushing it,” he recalled. “I was fouling things up . . . I was becoming too indecisive.” He had read that Gandhi, as well as some early Christian crusaders, would fast before they embarked on a march or battle, in order to think more clearly. Chavez fasted for four days at home. “I was trying to get the whole caboodle, everything had to be done, and I was trying to dissect it, to see how one piece fit into the other.” After the third day, his edginess dissipated. “All of a sudden, like when you’re driving over a ridge, your ears pop.”
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Chavez’s second fast came at the end of the fight with the Teamsters at the Perelli-Minetti vineyard. When the agreement was reached, Chavez decided to fast in thanks while the contract language was finalized, a process expected to take only a few days. Snags tied things up and he ended up not eating for a week, and the fast did not go well.

Those earlier experiments had helped him prepare psychologically for the first public fast. Chavez knew to expect bad leg cramps during the first week. He kept busy with meetings to distract himself, and the pain passed. “I went into a beautiful floating feeling,
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like I was in space,” he recalled. He watched others eat, and they reminded him of animals. Helen reminded him of something between a dog and a cat, and the children seemed like puppies. His back hurt, and one of the nurses offered to give him a back rub. He debated for a few days whether that comfort would violate the spirit of the fast. He decided to accept the massage.

During the second week, Chatfield suggested they put up a large symbol to remind them of the fast in years to come. They settled on a cross. Richard Chavez scavenged old power poles from the utility and constructed a thirty-foot-high crucifix. They figured the solemn, white-washed cross would make a dramatic backdrop when Chavez finally broke his fast.

As the days passed, Chavez grew weaker. He needed more support to walk to the bathroom. Richard could tell his brother was in great pain. He begged him to stop, to think of others, including his family. Librado Chavez also asked his son to end the fast, saying he had sacrificed enough. Helen Chavez, in typical fashion, had two reactions, one public and one private. In private, she was furious. She had argued with Cesar on the walk to Forty Acres and vented to friends throughout the fast about how angry she was at Cesar for jeopardizing his health. In public, she supported her husband unflinchingly, as he had known she would. She also knew that when he made up his mind, there was no point arguing.

Cesar’s mother, Juana, had a similar response. Richard, apprehensive about his mother’s reaction, talked to her out of Cesar’s earshot and asked if she thought they should ask him to stop. Her response caught him by surprise: “She said, ‘No, he knows what he’s doing. Just pray to God.’”
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She told Richard she had confidence because of Cesar’s faith. “When he believes in something, you know your brother,” Richard recalled his mother saying. “He believes very strongly in things, and he knows that God is with him . . . I will not ask him to stop. This will be his own decision.’”

As the fast neared the end of the third week, his doctor urged Chavez to stop and warned he risked serious damage to his kidneys and liver. After the twenty-first day, Chavez agreed to take light liquids in addition to water. On Wednesday night, March 6, 1968, Chatfield urged Chavez to end the fast. You can’t get the people here till Sunday, Chavez responded. As soon as he heard that, Chatfield announced the fast would end in four days. They began to plan for a mass event.

One of the first calls went to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Drake had notified Kennedy’s staff when the fast began, before it became national news. Kennedy expressed concern
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about Chavez’s health and asked for updates each day. He knew he might be asked to fly out to Delano on short notice; as Chavez’s health worsened, his staff considered asking Kennedy to appeal to Chavez to stop. As soon as Chatfield set a date, Kennedy was invited to be the guest of honor at the celebration to break the fast on the twenty-fifth day.

Chavez’s top aides had viewed King’s telegram as an overture indicating that the civil rights leader wanted to visit. They deliberately did not extend an invitation. As Cohen wrote in his diary, King was “someone on the way down
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trying to attach himself to someone on the way up.” Kennedy, widely rumored to be a presidential contender, would enhance the movement’s national stature.

On Sunday morning, March 10, Kennedy flew into Los Angeles and dodged a dozen questions
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about his political plans from reporters who followed him onto the tarmac, where he boarded a private plane. Huerta and Jim Drake picked up Kennedy at the Delano airstrip and brought him to Forty Acres. Everyone was nervous. What do you say
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to a guy on a fast? Kennedy asked as he came in. He stayed with Chavez only a few minutes. Kennedy asked for a glass of water and a bathroom. They had no water, and no one could find the key to the bathroom. They were all embarrassed. Kennedy went to Drake’s house to wait for the ceremony. On the plane ride from Los Angeles, the senator had told his top three aides that he was going to run for president.
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A rainstorm a few days earlier had turned the ground so soggy that the ceremony had been moved from Forty Acres to a city park. Chavez sat on a makeshift stage on the back of a flatbed truck, between his mother and Kennedy. Thousands of people poured into the park, and dozens of photographers and cameramen from around the United States jostled for space. Kennedy asked to move so that he did not have to speak on the truck decorated with crosses and the Virgen, but the crowds made it impossible to shift. Kennedy broke the tension when he began his speech in Spanish, acknowledged he was mangling the language, and drew tremendous applause.

“When your children and grandchildren take their place in America, going to high school and college, and taking good jobs at good pay,” Kennedy said, “when you look at them, you will say, ‘I did this, I was there at the point of difficulty and danger.’ And though you may be old and bent from many years of hard labor, no man will stand taller than you when you say, ‘I was there. I marched with Cesar!’”
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Chris Hartmire handed Chavez the bread to break his fast. Then Chavez reached out to share the bread with Kennedy. The photographs of Kennedy and Chavez became among the most enduring images of the movement.

Chavez was too weak to talk and asked Drake to read a statement, which Drake had largely drafted. The text spoke of what the fast meant to Chavez, and concluded: “When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men.”

The crowds mobbed Kennedy, reaching out to touch him, shake hands, and ask for his autograph. He took almost half an hour to make his way eighty yards to the car where Drake waited to take the senator back to the airstrip. Drake started to leave, but Kennedy jumped out and climbed on top of the car, leaving a dent in the blue Chevy Nova’s roof that the Drake family treasured. In his Boston accent, Kennedy shouted the union’s battle cry: “Viva la huelga! Viva la causa!”

Chavez was whisked away to recuperate at a twenty-five-hundred-acre ranch north of Santa Barbara, owned by Katy Peake’s sister, Helen Pedotti. Pedotti cleared out rooms for Cesar and Helen, six of their children, and a nurse. Chavez read Gandhi and recovered quickly in the crisp ocean air. In appreciation for the hospitality shown to her son, Juana Chavez sent
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Pedotti a set of hand-embroidered towels.

Two days after Chavez ended his fast, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, running on an anti–Vietnam War platform, nearly defeated President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, an upset that effectively forced the incumbent into retirement. Four days later, on March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for president. When Kennedy called to ask Chavez to run as a delegate in the California primary, he convened a membership meeting to solicit the farmworkers’ approval. Putting the question of an endorsement up for a vote gave Chavez cover with the AFL-CIO, which supported Johnson and was displeased by Chavez’s decision. Presenting the endorsement as the members’ choice, like taking decisions “to the board,” was Chavez’s preferred form of democracy—a process where the outcome was never in question.

Kennedy had a late start in California, a state whose large delegate bloc was crucial. Many liberals had already committed to McCarthy. The farmworkers union had never endorsed a candidate or worked on a political campaign. Chavez and Ross had never explicitly urged support for a particular candidate, but they had plenty of experience turning out the vote. Democratic registration
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had fallen dramatically in California, by a million votes in the previous year. Ross led a registration drive in Los Angeles that signed up eleven thousand Democrats in three weeks and about forty thousand across the state. They paid 25¢ per signature and gave cash prizes to those who signed up the most new voters.