CHAPTER 5. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—REFUSAL TO PAY INCOME TAX 77
Sharon had been chosen to play the piano solo at the Spring Music Festival. She was given Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue to play and told those in charge that she preferred Mozart. They told her that it was an honor to be chosen and she replied, "It is no honor to play trash; get someone who likes trash." She also refused an invitation to join the music sorority.
I felt renewed faith in that Providence which brought me safely through wind and storm and home again. I brought Lipa some mittens and her small brother Ernesto, a cap. The new irrigation ditch was nearly finished and several months of pruning the trees under the rays of the sun and away from the fog and smoke of the cities awaited me.
Back Home
This Hovey of whom I speak had been a guard over the German prisoners and had asked me if he could come and room with me when he was mustered out. He had been the errand boy of his father in the moonshine business in the Carolinas for many years and had the easy going ways of his people. Despite this he had a better judgment of character than anyone I have met. Some new worker would come and Hovey would talk to him for half an hour and find out more of his past than a detective. Then he would come to the boss and say: "Charlie, watch that fellow, he's a rogue," or else he would say of another: "Don't fight with that fellow, Charlie; he's the best man you have had outside of Hensley." Hovey called me Hensley because he had once known a man by that name and it was too much bother to learn another name. Once he mailed a letter for me and my wife did not receive it for weeks. I asked him if he had really mailed it and he said that he had. As there was a check for $41.50 in the letter he said that he would pay me this amount if the letter did not reach my wife. But he would not mail any more letters for me. My wife got the letter and Hovey felt better.
Once he asked me to "back a letter for me." I addressed the envelope and then he wanted me to write the letter to his sister, "for you write such interesting letters; write just like you do to your girls." So I told his sister of what we had been doing the past week. "Now sign it," said Hovey. I told him that would be forgery so he signed his name himself. He depended upon me to do the cooking; and if I asked him to chop three sticks of wood he surely would not make a mistake and chop four. His quaint ways and slow motion were a source of joy to be, but one Hovey was enough at a time.
I had been visiting the Indians at Isleta pueblo all along. When the Atom Bomb was exploded at nearby Alamogordo in the previous July none of us knew at the time what it was. When we all knew of it I wrote the following expression which I placed in the mouth of a Taos Indian who was visiting. Those to whom I read it felt that it expressed their ideas as well as a white man could.
- Sun-Father
- They mock you.
