Beep, Bee

Alex was ready for the alarm this time.  He had been ready for this alarm since 1993, the last time the Chicago Bulls won the NBA Championship, 3 years before.

As tip-off approaches, Alex realizes that this is what he lives and breaths for, and while the thought of watching the Bulls is comforting and exciting, he feels a certain defeat at his growing dependency for happiness.

3 hours later…

“I left Oklahoma in 1925 and went to Oroville [California]. That’s where them three girls’ dad [Cleo] died, in Oroville, 1931. And I was 28 years old [in 1931], and I had five kids and that one [the baby in this photo, Norma] was on the road. She never even saw her daddy. She was born after he died. It was very hard. And cheap. I picked cotton in Firebaugh, when that girl there was about two years old, I picked cotton in Firebaugh for 50-cents a hundred.”

Dotson: “A ‘hundred’ [meaning] weight?”

Thompson: “A hundred pounds.”

Dotson: “How much could you pick in a day, then?”

Thompson: “I generally picked around 450, 500. I didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds. I lived down there in Shafter, and I’d leave home before daylight and come in after dark. We just existed! Anyway, we lived. We survived, let’s put it that way. I walked from what they called a Hoover camp ground right there at the bridge [in Bakersfield], I walked from there to way down on First Street, and worked at a penny a dish down there for 50-cents a day and the leftovers. Yeah, they give me what was leftover to take home with me. Sometimes, I’d carry home two water buckets full.  ”Well, [in 1936] we started from L.A. to Watsonville. And the timing chain broke on my car. And I had a guy to pull into this pea camp in Nipomo. I started to cook dinner for my kids, and all the little kids around the camp came in. ‘Can I have a bite? Can I have a bite?’ And they was hungry, them people was. That’s when she [Dorothea Lange] come back and snapped my picture.  “I come to this town [Modesto] in 1945. I transferred from Whittier State to Modesto. And when this hospital opened up out here, I went to work there. And the first eight years I lived in this town, I worked 16 hours out of 24. Eight-and-a-half years, seven days a week.”

The Peachtree Public Library is a free-standing building with a long, breezy entrance way filled with beautiful stained-glass windows.  The library is a modern looking building that Alex was always aware was there, yet had never visited before now.  Today, however, was one of those sneaky-hot Florida days in the early spring that one doesn’t normally expect; Alex needed a drink from the water fountain and to sit under the shade for a second.  Approaching the front, double-door entrance, Alex noticed the display on the coffee table in the atrium.

“This is a picture of “The Migrant Mother” and was taken of Florence Owens Thompson in Nipomo, California in 1936.  Thompson at this time was working in a labor camp picking peas to provide for her seven children during the height of the Great Depression.  Both Thompson’s children displayed in the picture have their head turned away out of embarrassment”

“oh, no” Alex thought in a dazed sleep, “did my watch just break?”

Reaching over onto the table, fumbling for his watch, Alex instead found a hand; his mother’s hand.  Alex couldn’t register why his mother would wake him up this morning because she never normally did.  His first thought after touching his mother’s hand was that of touching  a dry, cracked creek bed.

“Es la madre. Está bien, vuelve a dormir”

Alex did go back to sleep.  One of those deep, morning sleeps that happen right before getting out of bed for the day.  This morning, he dreamed about his mother and the stories she told him when he was younger.

…get back to work!

I can’t go back to work, I’m in labor, I’m having a child, I need to go to the hospital!  Carlos, do something!  I’m having a baby!

Sylvia, quickly! Over here!

Carlos had laid out several clean rags on the back seat of the bus that took them to and from the field each day, and had recruited Mary Chavez to assist with the birthing process.

“waaaaaaaa, waaaaaaaaa”

What should we name him Carlos?  Alexander?

Alexender it is,  our son.

47 minutes after going into labor, Sylvia handed her baby over to the supervisor, and returned to her tomato row to finish her work.

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

- A.E.Houseman

Why do you think my Pops cares so much what sport I want to play?

Uh? You’re a Mexican.  No Duh.  You do know that don’t you?  You already have soccer and baseball built into your DNA.  He’s just trying to get you to see that.

A brilliant, depressing realization enlightens Alex, sending him wheeling backwards as if socked in the stomach.  Alex, dumbstruck, reflects on the last week.  Throwing trash in their own yard, slamming the door, the white man with his dead stare,  basketball vs. soccer and baseball, his love for time….The dream..

Your right, that is exactly what the reason is.

Go grab us some of that fresh juice they keep over in the produce.

I was the second best small-time caperer around, but that’s because I learned from the best.  Pops taught him everything he knew about pulling a fast one.

After grabbing a bottle of fresh juice and deftly slipping it into my over sized jacket, I was turning to leave.  The white man was glaring at me over the top of some watermelons, seeing everything.  There is something about that focus-less stare he held me in.  He was almost looking right through me; It was as if he saw me do it, it registered, and he didn’t care.

Well, Pops was ready to bolt when I told him, but we already were there at the store and our shopping was done, so he decided to pay for the few items in the cart anyway.

When the white man approached from behind, I was sure he would say something to Pops, or worse the store clerks.  While Pops fumbled with our food stamps, which always seem to take forever to use, I once again made eye contact with the man behind me… That same dead, emotionless stare.

Each day an army of men and women swarmed across the land, a conglomerate of lifetime migrants and exiles from failure and defeat in rural areas of Appalachia and the Carolinas and Georgia and Alabama [and Mexico].  From the green vines they plucked hundreds of thousands of tomatoes that were processed in Florida City and Homestead and then shipped to distant markets to be served in salads and sandwiches in  New York and Boston and Chicago and Detroit…

For the first two hours, the picking was always like an adventuresome game to Kristy and Bennie…But as the sun moved higher into the sky, intensifying the heat reflecting from the rocky soil, they began to move slower and slower and fill the buckets less often… 

At noon the workers took a half-hour break.  Jared, Kristy, and Benny shared the two cans of sardines.  They also ate two tomatoes each.  Water was available from a keg on the back of the truck…

By mid-afternoon, the rows became longer and longer, and the buckets bigger and bigger.  His shirt was drenched with sweat as he too fell farther and farther behind the more experienced pickers…

Jared sat on one of the bunks that night and groaned.  “I never knew that picking tomatoes could be so rough!  My back feels like it’s broke.”

Why bother with nice toilet paper when it’s just going to get stolen?

Alex opened the door in the back of the classroom as quietly as possible, and silently slipped into the last seat in the back row.  Mrs. Smith was busying herself passing out a handout to the class, and didn’t even look up to see who came in.

Spring 1996 Reading List

Angel City (Patrick Smith)

Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko)

The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

The Outsiders (Susan Eloise Hinton)