CHAPTER 6. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—THE HOPI 94
is a Quaker. No one has to be hangman; no one has to be a tax man. The next day I mailed this tax man a letter explaining in detail my ideas and also marked a copy of the CW. In over two months I have not heard from him but the red tape of bureaucracy moves slowly.
Cotton picking again
In early November, date picking is nearly finished and lettuce harvesting is commencing. I live in the mist of hundreds of acres of lettuce but the big company for whom I previously worked is hiring mostly Mexican Nationals by the week. Until they hire men by the day I can have no work in the lettuce. I took a cotton bus west to the cotton fields on election day. I did not make much: only $1.88, as they quit work to vote at 2 p.m. The next day I missed the cotton bus and walked 11 miles until I found a field in which I could work. I did a little better. Several fellow workers wanted to know how I voted. I told them that I voted every day practicing my ideals against war and the capitalist system which caused war, and did not bother to choose between the rival warmongers who sought to run the country. Each day that week it happened that I got a different cotton truck. The next Monday I disced and harrowed in wheat and alfalfa with a blind mule and a deaf mule for the Old Pioneer (The mules belonged to a neighbor a mile down the road who loaned them to us). The next day I rode 40 miles west, beyond Buckeye, to a cotton field. I was the only white worker among Negroes. Here the cotton was of fine quality and I earned $4.30.
In a few days I learned to pick cotton with both hands and reasonably fast so that by the end of the week I was picking 200 pounds and making $6.00. I bought a 12-foot canvas sack rather than rent one each day for 25 cents. While a sack will hold 100 pounds I found that to put 65 pounds in it was enough to carry up the ladder and dump in the truck. Time went fast in the open air. I walked the two miles to the highway by 6 a.m. and stood with my cotton sack over my shoulders in the dark so the cotton truck would not miss me. In the truck it was chilly, and each of us was wrapped like a mummy in his sack and wobbled like a pin in the bowling alley when the truck swerved corners or hit bumps. In the center of the truck was a dish pan with sticks of wood burning and smoking. If we ever were upset we would all burn before we could get untangled from our cotton-sack-cocoon. By 10 a.m. I had taken off my shirt and coat and tied them around my waist in the fashion in the fields. One morning I thought I was doing fine as I was keeping up with the man next to me. Looking closer I saw that he was doing two rows to my one and did not seem to work any harder. The man who weighed the cotton and who paid us before we emptied it in the truck was paid by the farmer to supervise the work. He received so much per picker also for bringing us to the field. His mother cooked and sold soda pop. One evening as we were riding home we stopped for groceries in Buckeye. Moving on homeward a young Negro was drinking two cans of beer, being kidded meanwhile by an older Negro who was a teetotaler, and who at the same time was eating a pie and a huge ring of sausage. The
