Loreda walked slowly toward him. The way he looked at her, through narrowed eyes, sent a shiver down her spine. “Yes, sir?”
“You pick cotton for me?”
“I do.”
“Happy for the job?”
Loreda forced herself to meet his gaze. “Very.”
“You hear any of the men talking about a strike?”
Men. They always thought everything was about them. But women could stand up for their rights, too; women could hold picket signs and stop the means of production as well as men.
“No, sir. But if I did, I’d remind them what it’s like not to have work.”
Welty smiled. “Good girl. I like a worker who knows her worth.”
Loreda slowly walked back to the cabin, shutting the door firmly behind her. Locking it.
“What’s the matter?” Mom said, looking up.
“Welty questioned me.”
“Don’t draw that man’s attention, Loreda. What did he ask?”
“Nothing,” Loreda said, grabbing a pancake from the hot plate. “The trucks just drove up.”
Five minutes later, they were all out the door, walking toward the line of trucks parked along the chain-link fence.
Quietly, they joined their fellow workers and climbed up into the back of a truck.
When the sun rose on the cotton fields, Loreda saw the changes that had been made by the growers overnight: coils of spiked barbed wire topped the fencing. A half-finished structure stood in the center of the field, a tower of some kind. The clatter and bang of building it rang out. Men she’d never seen before paced the path between the chain-link fence and the road, carrying shotguns. The place looked like a prison yard. They were readying for a fight.
But with guns? It wasn’t as if they could shoot people for striking. This was America.
Still, a ripple of unease moved through the workers. It was what Welty wanted: the workers to be afraid.
The trucks rumbled to a stop. The workers got out.
“They’re afraid of us, Mom,” Loreda said. “They know a strike—”
Mom elbowed Loreda hard enough to shut her up.
“Hurry up,” Ant said. “They’re assigning rows.”
Loreda dragged her sack out behind her, took her place at the start of the row she’d been assigned.
When the bell rang, she bent over and went to work, plucking the soft white bolls from their spiked nests. But all she could think about was tonight.
Strike meeting. Midnight.
At noon the bell rang again.
Loreda straightened, tried to ease the cricks out of her neck and back, listening to the sound of men hammering.
Welty stood on the scales’ raised platform, looking out at the men and women and children who worked themselves bloody to make him rich. “I know that some of you are talking to the union organizers,” he said. His loud voice carried across the fields.
“Maybe you think you can find other jobs in other fields, or maybe you think I need you more than you need me. Let me tell you right now: that is not the case. For every one of you standing on my property, there are ten lined up outside the fence, waiting to take your job. And now, because of a few bad apples, I have had to put up fencing and hire men to guard my property. At considerable cost. So, I am lowering wages another ten percent. Anyone who stays agrees to that price. Anyone who leaves will never pick for me or any other grower in the valley again.”