The Four Winds

“Get to work,” Welty yelled. “This strike is over.”

The vigilantes circled Jack, began beating and kicking him.

The workers backed away; some edged toward the cotton field. The strikebreaker trucks honked to be let through.

“Elsa!” Jack yelled, and was kicked hard for it.

She knew what he wanted. They’ll listen to you.

Elsa climbed up into the back of the truck and took up Jack’s megaphone and faced the strikers. Her hands were shaking. “Stop!” she cried out.

The workers stopped backing away, looked up at her.

She was breathing hard. Now what?

Think.

She knew these people, knew them. They were her people. Her kind, the Californians said derisively, but it was a compliment.

They were like her. Today, they were part of a new group: people who stood up, used their voices to say No more. They’d woken in the middle of the night, hungry, to stand up for their rights, and now it was Elsa’s time to show her children what her grandfather had taught her long ago. She wrapped her fingers around the soft velvet pouch at her throat. Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes, help me.

“What?” someone yelled.

“Hope,” Elsa said. The megaphone turned her whispered word into a roar that quieted the crowd. “Hope is a coin I carry. An American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times … in my journey, when it felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going. I came west … in search of a better life … but my American dream has been turned inside out by hardship and poverty.” She looked at Welty. “And greed. These years have been a time of things lost: Jobs. Homes. Food. The land we loved turned on us, broke us all, even the stubborn old men who used to talk about the weather and congratulate each other on the season’s bumper wheat crop. ‘A man’s got to fight out here to make a living,’ they’d say to each other.”

Elsa looked out at the crowd, saw all the women and children who were here, looking up at her. She saw her life in their eyes, her pain in the slant of their shoulders.

“A man. It was always about the men. They seem to think it meant nothing to cook and clean and bear children and tend gardens. But we women of the Great Plains worked from sunup to sundown, too, toiled on wheat farms until we were as dry and baked as the land we loved. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I swear I can still taste the dust.”

Elsa paused, surprised by how loud and forceful her voice had become. She stared out at the workers, saw for the first time that their ragged clothes and hungry faces were badges of courage, of survival. They were good people who didn’t give up. “We came to find a better life, to feed our children. We aren’t lazy or shiftless. We don’t want to live the way we do. It’s time,” she said. “Time to say, No more. No more company store cheating us and keeping us poor. No more lowering wages. No more using us up and spitting us out and pitting us against each other. We deserve better. No more.”

“No more!” Ike yelled.

Loreda shouted, “No more!”

There was a moment’s pause, and then the crowd rallied, blocked the strikebreakers, and chanted back at Elsa in unison.

“No more. No more. No more!”

The crowd raised their voices and their signs, ignoring the gunman in the tower and the policemen and masked vigilantes.

Their courage stunned and invigorated Elsa, who chanted with them.

“Fair wages!” the pickers chanted, lifting their picket signs into the air.

Elsa heard a high whistling sound, then a thunk of something metal landing at her feet. A second later, smoke erupted, blanketing everything, obscuring the world.

Elsa’s eyes stung. She saw the strikers run blindly into each other, panicked. They backed away from the truck.

Someone shouted, “They’re throwing tear-gas bombs!”

More whistling, metal tear-gas canisters landed among the crowd; smoke billowed up.

Elsa lifted the megaphone. “Run into the fields, not away,” she cried out, coughing hard. She wiped her eyes but it didn’t help. “Don’t give up!”

The workers panicked, ran in every direction, bumped into each other. No one could see much through the stinging tear gas.

A shot rang out, loud even in the pandemonium.