The owner, was heard being passed in whispers among the workers. It’s him.
He climbed up on to the platform that held the scales. He looked out over his fields and his workers, then glanced pointedly at the hundreds of people waiting for work. “Thanks to the feds, I had to plant less cotton this ye
ar. There is less cotton to pick and more people to pick it. So, I’m cutting what we pay by ten percent.”
“Ten percent?” Loreda shouted. “We can’t make a—”
Elsa clamped a hand over her daughter’s mouth.
Welty looked directly at Elsa and Loreda. “Anyone want to quit? Take the cut in pay or walk away. I’ve got ten men wanting to work for each person here. Doesn’t matter to me who picks my cotton.” He paused. “Or who lives in my camp.”
Silence.
“I thought not,” he said. “Back to work.”
A bell rang.
Elsa slowly lowered her hand from Loreda’s mouth. “You want to be one of them?” she said, cocking her head toward the line of people waiting for work.
“We are them!” Loreda cried. “This is wrong. You heard Jack and his friends—”
“Hush,” Elsa hissed. “That’s dangerous talk, and you know it.”
“I don’t care. This is wrong.”
“Loreda—”
Loreda yanked free. “I won’t be like you, Mom. I won’t just take it and pretend it’s okay as long as they don’t actually kill us. Why aren’t you furious?”
“Loreda—”
“Sure, Mom. Tell me to be a nice girl and be quiet and keep working while we go into debt every month at the company store.”
Loreda dragged her bag up to the scale and said loudly. “Yes, sir. Pay me less. I’m happy for the job.”
The man at the scales handed her a green chit for the cotton. Ninety cents for one hundred pounds, and the company store would charge her another ten percent.
* * *
“YOU’RE AWFUL QUIET,” MOM said as they walked back to their cabin.
“Consider it a blessing,” Loreda said. “You wouldn’t like what I have to say.”
“Really, Ma,” Ant said. “Don’t ask her.”
Loreda stopped, turned to her mother. “How is it you aren’t as mad as I am?”
“What good does it do to be mad?”
“At least it’s something.”
“No, Loreda. It’s nothing. You’ve seen the people pouring into the valley every day. Fewer crops, more workers. Even I understand basic economics.”
Loreda threw her empty cotton bag down and ran, dodging this way and that among the cabins and tents. She wanted to keep running until California was only a memory.
She was at the farthest reaches of the camp, in a thicket of trees, when she heard a man say: “Help? When did this durn state ever do anything to help us?”
“They cut wages again today, across the valley.”