Picking cotton is hard work, especially under a tropical sun. Sweat streamed from us, tiny flies crept into our ears, and mosquitoes stung us from every angle. It was an agony, and yet we kept on pulling cotton bolls from the plants, stuffing them into our sacks, while trying to breathe in the haze of cotton dust and fuzz that hung over each of our stooping bodies. No matter how hard we worked, we would earn little more than enough to buy food to keep alive. And that was what we wanted, just to keep alive; so we worked on.
If the cotton is well ripe and you’ve got the picker’s knack, you can pick each bloom at one grasp. However, if the pods are not equally ripe it’s necessary with more than half of them to give two or three good tugs to get the bloom off the plant and into the sack. With well-ripened cotton, and when the plants are well spaced, it’s possible after some practice to pick with both hands; but with a middling crop and badly spaced plants, you may have to use both hands to pick one bloom. And another thing, you have to keep stooping all the time, for not all the blooms are at a convenient height; and at times, the cotton is close to the ground, where a heavy rainfall has flattened it, and it has to be pulled up.
Cotton is expensive stuff. Anyone who goes to buy a suit, a shirt, a towel, a pair of socks, or just a handkerchief soon discovers this. But the cotton-picker who does the toughest part of the work gets the smallest share of the cost of the finished product. For picking a kilo (about two pounds) of cotton we got six centavos. A kilo of cotton is a little mountain; to pick this much you’ve got to pluck out hundreds of pods.
We did this on a diet that could well be regarded as the very lowest on which man can remain alive. One day it was black beans and hot peppers, the next day rice (with tomatoes, if we were lucky), the following day, beans again, and then rice again. With it there was the bread we made that was either soggy or burned to a cinder; our months-old stinking rain water; and coffee made from beans that we roasted in frying pans, ground on a metate stone, and sweetened with the crude brown piloncillo sugar. The salt we used was sea salt, which we ourselves had to clean. A pound of onions a week we considered a positive delicacy; a strip of dried meat now and then was a sinful luxury that cut deep into our earnings. For we were determined to save our pennies in order to have rail fare to the next big town, where when the cotton-picking was over we hoped to find a new job.
Toward eleven o’clock, after nearly seven hours of continuous work, we were at the end of our strength. We rested in the shade of a few trees that were more than a ten-minute walk away and ate our dry pan-baked bread, which — mine anyway — was burned. Then we lay down to sleep for a couple of hours.
We woke with a ghastly thirst, and I went over to the farmer to ask for some water.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t got any. I told you yesterday, didn’t I, that I was short of water? Oh well, I’ll let you have some today, but from tomorrow on bring your own water with you.”
He sent one of his sons back to the house on a horse, and the young man soon came back with a can of rain water.
At four in the afternoon we stopped work so that we could get “home” to cook our food while there was still daylight. That was when I moved out.
I had discovered a sort of shelter about two hundred yards away from the house. What purpose it served or might have served I had no idea. It had a palm-thatched roof but no walls. Because of this lack of walls the night breeze (when there was one) could freely circulate, keeping the place cool. In the center was a table, which I would use as my bed. The shelter lay higher than the house, had no shrubs close to it, and was a good distance away from the water tank and the dried-up water hole, so that I would be removed from the mosquito menace.
The giant Negro, Charley, wanted to share the shelter with me. He came over, looked around, and liked it. But suddenly he yelled out, “A snake! A snake!”
“Where?”
“There, right at your feet.”
Sure enough, there was a snake twisting along the floor, a fiery red one, two feet or so long.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “That snake won’t swallow me. The mosquitoes in the house up there are worse.”
Charley disappeared.
After a while Gonzalo came over. The snake had gone in the meantime. Gonzalo liked the look of my new quarters and asked if I’d have any objection to his sleeping there also.
I said, “You may bunk here if you like. It’s all the same to me.”
He was staring at the floor. I looked too. It was a snake again, this time a beautiful green one.
“On second thought,” he said, looking at the lively snake, “I’d better return to the house and sleep there. It’s less noisy there, you see.”
Snakes don’t bother me. And in any case they’d hardly want to get up onto the table. And even if they did, it wasn’t sure they’d bite me. And even if they did bite, they might not be poisonous. If all snakes were poisonous and all of them bit a sleeping man who had done them no harm, I would have been a goner long ago.
The following day twelve natives arrived to work with us. They came from a village in the bush, riding on mules, some without saddles or stirrups. Others had wooden saddles but no reins; instead of reins, the beasts had ropes looped around nose and jaw, for a kind of halter.
These men, of course, were more used to field labor in the tropics than we were because, with the exception of Gonzalo and Charley, all of us were townsfolk. But they picked cotton slower than we did, and on top of that they took a much longer siesta at noon. This, however, had nothing to do with us, and we hardly gave it a second thought.
Saturday was pay day, but we drew only enough to buy food for the coming week; to avoid carrying the germs of temptation in our pockets, we left the balance with Mr. Shine. On Sunday we knocked off at three so as to take our weekly bath, pull our sweaty clothes through the water, and send two of our gang to the nearest store for supplies — a four-hour trip. Sunday’s work earned us about a kilo of bacon or five kilos of potatoes.
This time the Chink and Antonio had gone to buy the supplies. We had written down our various needs on corn husks. The hieroglyphics inscribed on these corn husks could be deciphered by the shoppers only because we’d verbally explained each fantastic symbol. It was dark when the Chink and Antonio returned from the store.
“What a miserable hike,” grumbled Antonio.
“Oh, it wasn’t so bad!” Sam tried to soothe it over.
“Shut up, you yellow son of a heathen,” shouted Antonio. “How can you with your coolie past understand how I feel about packing goods like a burro?” He sank down onto a box which collapsed under his weight, and this further increased his rage.
“Listen, Antonio, why didn’t you ask Mr. Shine for a mule or a burro?” I asked.
“But I did. He refused. He said to me and Sam: ‘How can I lend you a mule or a burro? I know nothing about you, you’ve got no papers to identify you, and even if you did they would probably be fake. Besides, the papers wouldn’t help me to buy a new burro if you ran off with it.”
“Well, he’s quite right, from his point of view,” I said. “From our point of view, it’s downright mean. But what can we do about it?”
Just as we were getting under way on the favored topic of workers the world over, expounding with more loquacity than wisdom the unjust conditions that divide men into exploiters and exploited, drones and disinherited, Abraham appeared with half a dozen hens and a rooster suspended on a cord, their feet tied up, their heads dangling. He dropped the birds before us, where they struggled to get on their feet and flap free of the cord that tied them.