Lessons of the Harvest

These days, when I see bulky old Chevys in the dirt at the end of crop rows, I thank my good fortune that I no longer join the immigrants in the field. And I ponder the lessons of the harvests of my life.

For my first seven years, my brothers and I were the field hands on our parents’ scrub farm in the red-clay hills of Oklahoma. For 10 years after that, we pruned, picked and loaded the fruit of strangers under the searing sun of California’s San Joaquin Valley.

From backaches and blistered faces, from hands ripped open by cotton bolls, we learned:

* When you are poor you have no choices. You get up in the dark and go to work. Then you do it again the next morning.

* You do what your boss tells you. Because if you don’t, somebody else will.

* You don’t whine. Nobody likes a sniveler, especially in a place where everybody should be miserable.

* You dream of a job where it’s air-conditioned and your body doesn’t ache.

* You swear you will work your way out.

And, in a way you don’t think about much until you are older, you respect those people who were always in the fields when you got there in the morning and when you left at night. When I was a kid, they called them braceros.

During harvest they lived in their cars or in the farmers’ wooden shacks. We lived in a spare block house across a farm road from a smelly turkey ranch.

We ate white-bread sandwiches of baloney and Velveeta cheese and drank Kool-Aid. They ate beans and tortillas and drank Kool-Aid.

*

We were among the last of the Okies to work the fields in this way--having missed the Depression’s migratory curve to California by a good 20 years. And we prospered. So did they, I’m sure, judging from our state’s solid Latino middle class.

But still, when I jog early mornings past a new generation of pickers at the end of my Oxnard street, I look for Mexican kids skipping school to make an extra buck. I look for immigrant wives who for a few months a year work the fields instead of meeting their babies after school with warm whispers of “mijo” or “mija.”

I think of a strawberry picker I met a few years ago. He told me he was satisfied with his life because he could provide for his large family. But when he turned 40, his back gave way. He would roll out of a low bed in the morning so he could stretch slowly without waking his wife. The pain was excruciating. Still he worked.

His life wasn’t so different from my mom’s and dad’s. In her sun bonnet, my mom ran a cotton-chopping crew when she was 40, gritting her way through middle age. The two of us roofed her house when she was 55.

The strawberry picker’s dreams for his children were the same. His oldest daughter is in college now.

But the rules have changed. Kids can’t work the way they once did.

That is good, because today they don’t lose their childhoods to ceaseless toil. But it’s bad too, because there are good things to learn from the fields.

*

*

My two periods of farm labor were distinctly different. During the first, on our 160-acre cotton farm, we worked for ourselves. During the second, we didn’t. I liked the first a lot better.

I think of my earliest memory: Lying on my back at the end of a cotton row in the meager shade of a live oak tree, looking up. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. I could see the big, billowy clouds overhead. I dug the toes of my bare feet into the soil.

By the time I was 3, I joined my mom and dad, Hazel and Sherman, and my two older brothers, Jerry and Larry, in the fields.

I pulled the strap of a short cotton sack over my shoulder and dragged it behind. I picked as fast as I could. It was fun. By the time I was 5, I picked one row of cotton to my dad’s two. I was proud of that. When I got tired, my parents would let me nap at the end of the row.

I remember my mom--gloves on her hands, her red hair netted and wrapped with a handkerchief--sitting atop a squat, gray Ferguson tractor, plowing the weeds from furrows between cotton rows.

My dad, his hands shaking with Parkinson’s disease brought on by the bombs of World War II, could not keep the tractor straight. So he used a hoe to chop the weeds between the tiny green spouts.

*

We raised cows too, and pigs, and chickens. We grew wheat and corn to feed them. We grew acres of vegetables and fruit to preserve and store in a concrete storm cellar, where we cowered with black widow spiders during tornadoes. And where we played Monopoly when there were no chores.

We sold milk and cream. We churned cream into butter and whipped milk into ice cream.

We ate farm animals--every bit of them. Once a year we would hoist a huge pig over a bubbling caldron of water. When it was boiled, we scraped the bristles off. We cut away the sausage, ham, ham hocks, heart and brain and stored them in a smokehouse to be retrieved for months to come.

The smokehouse was near our little clapboard home, where the wind blew through and where there was no toilet until I was 4. Mom’s yeasty bread would rise on a hot wood-burning stove in the center of our living room; we popped corn there too on Sunday nights.

Mornings came early, long before the sun, so we could feed chickens and milk cows before school. There was always barbed-wire fence to fix.

By age 6, we three boys had learned to drive the tractor and to shoot squirrels from tall canyon trees for dinner. We wore overalls, but never shoes in the summer. We swam with water moccasins in Black’s Pond. We tormented tarantulas in the brushy 80 acres we leased from the Cherokees. That was fun too.

Then one day we sold our farm for $3,000 down and 15 years of small payments and left for California, where most of our relatives had already gone.

That’s where I really learned what it meant to be a farm worker.

*

We moved outside a poor little town called Armona, near Hanford, 50 miles south of Fresno. We paid $4,500 for a small, cold block of a house.

From there, in the fall, I’d run home after second grade, change clothes and meet my parents in a nearby cotton field. By then I could pick 100 pounds in a full day, and they paid my mom $3 for it.

Some Saturdays, kneeling beneath towering trees, we picked up walnuts. It turned our hands black with stain. But it was cool in the shade, so walnuts were my favorite crop.

In late summer, we drove long distances to harvest Thompson grapes. With curved knives, we cut bunches of the sweet yellow fruit from beneath dusty vines, where yellow jackets hid and waited to sting our faces.

It was dirty work, and hot, since temperatures regularly rose above 100 degrees.

But it was better than spreading the grapes on flat, rectangular sheets of slick paper to dry as raisins in the September sun. Even with knee pads, the sandy soil burned through. And the back of my neck and ears always blistered.

We were paid 6 cents a tray. So we worked fast, slashing leaves and vines, and oftentimes our hands. Some folks wore gloves, but that slowed you down.

After a while, we Kelley boys were hired to throw newspapers from our bikes after school. We had all three routes in town. That forced us to work seven days a week, but gave us money to buy red licorice and Dr. Pepper. And it helped us escape the fields, temporarily.

*

By the time I was 12, mom had decided it was time to move us near a university. So we took our savings and bought a house not far from Fresno State.

Jobless, I noticed warily that a cotton patch was just down the road from our new home. But the days of cotton-picking by hand were ending. So we boys found jobs pruning trees, bucking hay and picking peaches, plums, nectarines and apricots.

For Saturdays on end during the spring, we scrubbed the wooden pallets used to dry apricots. We turned the radio up loud and sang the songs of the early ‘60s to shut out the drudgery.

For three straight summers I worked 12-hour days picking fruit for $1.10 an hour. We didn’t know the minimum wage was $1.25.

Some days I worked until 9 p.m. loading trucks.

By age 15, I was the foreman of our crew, driving the tractor that pulled a trailer loaded with the fruit we picked. My sports buddies from school hired on for a while, and for kicks we ended the day by diving crazily into deep and swift irrigation canals.

But it didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off. And when they grew weary, my friends quit.

That’s what I envied. The freedom to quit. I would daydream of getting up in the morning and not having anything to do.

Thinking back, I guess I could have quit too by then. We had paid $16,000 cash for our new house. Dad was getting a disabled veteran’s pension. Mom had scored high on a federal civil service exam and was delivering mail for the post office.

But I kept on so I could pay my own way--there were no weekly allowances in our house--and to save money for a car.

Besides, once I was 16, I qualified for employment at a packing shed. By comparison, those jobs were easy. And in the shade. And a good way to meet girls.

So much work kept my world small, without the balance of fine music, books and carefree fun. But I learned some lessons during those long harvests that have served me well: I learned to work hard and to stay with a job until it is done.

I asked my mom about that the other day, and she said she doesn’t think work hurt us any, since all three of her sons finally did graduate from Fresno State.

“I hope you don’t make this sound too bad,” she said, her voice scratchy with age but still strong. “I think farm work taught you boys responsibility.”