ALONG THE WAY

Arizona Cotton Pickin' in the '40s Taught Some Tough Life Lessons

In 1948, MY OKLAHOMA sharecropper Dad said to Mom, “Well, Hon, I reckon our best bet this year is Arizona, down around Casa Grande and Eloy. They've had a good cotton crop, and there sure ain't much around here.” “Pickin' or pullin'?” Mom wanted to know. “Mostly pickin', some pullin'.” “Pickin' ain't my favorite, but it pays more.” “Seventy-five cents a hundred,” Dad said. “The three of us could make five dollars a day.” Picking-removing the cotton from its boll-was slower and more laborintensive. Pulling meant we stripped burrs, twigs and all into our 12-foot canvas sacks and let the cotton gin worry about it.

We were no strangers to Arizona. As migrant workers, Dad, Mom and I often left our rented farm in September towing a homemade trailer with basic possessions behind a Model A pickup truck. Picking cotton in the Grand Canyon State made half our cash income for a year. Those bolls were like little white loaves to us.

One winter, we rented a two-room shack in an old Phoenix “motor court” on Van Buren. Dad loaded his pickup with oranges at a warehouse, then drove 40 miles to Apache Junction to sell them to travelers.

He was away when the motor court owner and her boyfriend torched the place for the insurance. The fire raged all night. We all escaped, but Mom's hair and gown were on fire when we crashed through the shack's plywood door. In the hellish glare of flames and smoke, a man sprayed us with a garden hose. The arsonists, quickly caught, went to prison for life.

On that memorable 1948 trip, we drove through Childress, Texas (named for our family, Dad insisted), and hit U.S. Route 66 at Amarillo. By nightfall, we were in New Mexico. Bobby Troup's rollicking “Route 66” aside, the trip was dull-except for the Riddle of the Runaway Wheel.

Near Winslow, Arizona (“don't forget Winona”), we heard an awful thump, the pickup swerved like a Saturday night drunk and a wheel went whizzing off into the sagebrush at great speed.

“Be darned,” Dad said, as calm as if he was in church. “Look at that.” The trailer had broken its axle. We searched the hot desert for half an hour, but never found the wheel. Before Dad died in 1997, age 81, he recalled the incident. “Darned if I ever figured it out,” he said. “There wasn't even much sagebrush. We shoulda found it easy.” We packed all we could in the back of the pickup, abandoned the trailer and drove on. Two days later, we were hired in Casa Grande. Bolls, bolls, bolls. An ocean of white-speckled green or green-speckled white, take your pick. Arizona in September, when cotton harvesting begins a three-month season that usually ends before Christmas.

As soon as they were quartered in their shack or tent, workers hit the fields: whites, MexicanAmericans, Southern blacks, Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos. When I was picking cotton from 1939 to 1950, I rarely saw friction among migrants. Each group stayed among themselves, but everyone treated everyone else politely. On Sunday, the only day off, kids swam through irrigation culverts with other kids, regardless of race, creed or color.

Dad liked to be up at the crack of dawn, because cotton weighed more when coated with dew, which earned a few pennies more.

On the round, tin wood-burning stove, Mom made oatmeal with brown sugar and canned milk. We ate, grabbed our sacks and hit the rows, returning 12 hours later. Lunch was a couple of cans of pork and beans with leftover biscuits, eaten in the shade of a weigh-wagon. The work was hard and monotonous, the sun hot and rattlesnakes not uncommon.

Certain rattlers (Arizona has 12 different species, the most anywhere) favored cotton fields for food, water and cover, and pickers were sometimes bitten. Once, burrowing headdown through acrid-smelling rows and shoving cotton into my sack, I almost touched a 3-foot rattler coiled around a cottonstalk.

“Snake!” I screamed, backflipping over my heavy sack. “We got a rattlesnake here!” Some men killed the snake, which was a deadly Mohave rattler, believed to possess the most potent neurotoxin of all rattlesnakes in the United States.

Migrant workers were the last slave class in America, at the mercy of rich farmers aided by a government that never aided field workers. It's not a whole lot better today, except that folks who benefit from “stoop labor” may appreciate migrant workers a little more. Al

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