An automobile chugged up alongside the truck, parked. Its headlights snapped off.
Loreda saw a couple get out of the car. They were well dressed, all in black, both smoking cigarettes. Definitely not migrants or farmers.
Loreda made a snap decision: she got out of the truck and followed the couple to the barn.
The barn door opened.
Loreda slipped in behind the couple and immediately pressed herself back against the rough boards of the barn.
She couldn’t have said what she was expecting to see—grown-ups drinking hooch and dancing the Lindy Hop maybe—but whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this. Men dressed in suits mingled with women, some of whom were wearing pants. Pants. They seemed to be all talking at once, gesturing with their hands as if arguing. The place felt alive, hive-like with activity. Cigarette smoke created a haze that blurred everyone and stung Loreda’s eyes.
There were about ten tables set up in the barn’s dusty, shadowed interior, with lanterns set on each one, creating pockets of light shot through with dust and smoke. Typewriters and mimeograph machines were positioned on the tables. Women sat in chairs and smoked and typed. There was a strange aroma in the air, mixed in with the smell of smoke. Stacks of papers lined the tabletops. Every once in a while Loreda heard the briiiiing of a carriage return.
When Jack strode forward, people stopped what they were doing and turned toward him. He pulled a newspaper off a table in front of him and climbed up several loft steps, then faced the crowd. He lifted the newspaper up. The headline read: “Los Angeles Declares War on Migrants.”
“Police Chief James ‘Two Guns’ Davis, with the support of the big growers, the railroads, the state relief agencies, and the rest of the state fat cats, just closed the California border to migrants.” Jack threw the paper to the straw-covered floor. “Think of it. Desperate people, good people, Americans, are being stopped at the border at gunpoint and turned away. To go where? Many of them are starving back home or dying of dust pneumonia. If they won’t turn back, the coppers are jaili
ng them for vagrancy and judges are sentencing them to hard labor.”
Loreda was hardly surprised. She knew what it was like to come here looking for better and be treated as worse.
“Bastards,” someone yelled.
“All across the state of California, the big growers are taking advantage of the people who work for them. The migrants coming into the state are so desperate to feed their families, they’ll take any wage. There are more than seventy thousand homeless people between here and Bakersfield. Children are dying in the squatters’ camps at a rate of two a day, from malnutrition or disease. It’s not right. Not in America. I don’t care if there is a Depression. Enough is enough. It’s up to us to help them. We have to get them to join the Workers Alliance and stand up for their rights.”
There was a roar of approval from the crowd.
Loreda nodded. His words struck a nerve with her, made her think for the first time, We don’t have to take this.
“Now is the time, comrades. The government won’t help these people. It is up to us. We have to convince the workers to stand up. Rise up. Use any means at our disposal to stop big business from crushing the workers and taking advantage of them. We must stand together and fight this capitalist injustice. We will fight for the migrant workers here and in the Central Valley, help them organize into unions and battle for better wages. The time … is now!”
“Yes!” Loreda shouted. “Yes!”
Jack jumped down from the riser on the loft ladder, but just before he did, Loreda saw him look directly at her.
He strode toward her, making his way easily through the crowd.
Loreda felt the intensity of his gaze; she felt like a mouse paralyzed by the gaze of a hunting hawk.
“I thought I told you to stay in the truck.”
“I want to join your group. I could help.”
“Oh, really?” He towered over her, was even taller than her mom. She drew in a tight, ragged breath. “Go home, kid. You’re too young for this.”
“I am a migrant worker.”
He lit a cigarette, studied her.
“We live in the ditch-bank camp off Sutter Road. I picked cotton this fall when I should have been in school. If I hadn’t, we would have starved. We live in a tent. We wanted the jobs in the fields so badly that sometimes we slept in ditches at the side of the road to be first in line. The boss—that fat pig, Welty—he doesn’t care if we make enough to eat.”
“Welty, huh? We’ve been trying to unionize the migrant camps. We’ve met with resistance. The Okies are stubborn and proud.”
“Don’t call us that,” she said. “We’re people who just want jobs. My grandparents and my mom … they don’t believe in government handouts. They want to make it on their own, but…”
“But what?”
“It’s not going to work, is it? Us coming here for a better life and actually getting it?”