THERE WAS A MAN ON THE PICKET LINE BY THE NAME of Luis Tamez who was related to Connie Chavez, an uncle of her mother. He had worked as a migrant for more than forty years, in fields from Texas to Michigan and in Montana. This was his first strike and he was enjoying it, watching the workers fighting the melons, knowing he would never do it again unless they paid him what he wanted. He enjoyed watching Connie and would remember himself at her age and wonder where she had learned so much and why they hadn’t done this a long time ago, when he was working in the beet fields for twenty-five cents an hour. Being on the picket line gave him a feeling he had never experienced before. He could stand with his hands in his pockets and look the foreman, Larry Mendoza, in the face and not care what Mendoza was thinking. He could look at a cop the same way—as a police car rolled past—though it was not as easy as staring at Larry Mendoza. He was thinking of the police as he saw Connie coming toward him, passing the others, giving each one a few words.
“No police today. They must be scared of us,” Luis Tamez said.
“It’s early,” Connie said. “They’re still in bed.”
“You think they’ll come?”
“What else they got to do?” She offered him the bullhorn then. “You want to play with this, papa? Tell them a few things.”
“I never use one before.”
“Press the button and talk. It’s all you do.” Connie touched his arm then, stepping closer. “In a few minutes tell them Mora’s coming.”
Luis Tamez seemed surprised. “But he’s already here.”
“They don’t know it. Say he’s coming to talk to them. Have the others start with his name. You know, like we did the other day?”
The old man nodded and she left him, walking behind the pickets, back down the road to where their cars were parked. There were a few people here, getting paper cups of Kool-Aid from a cooler on the tailgate of a station wagon; for the strikers, or for the workers, if they would come out of the field for a cold drink.
Connie Chavez took a cup of Kool-Aid with her and moved down the line of cars to an old-model Volkswagen bus that was a faded washed-out blue and filmed with road dust: Vincent Mora’s field office, which he had brought with him from California eight months ago. Connie opened the side door to see him sitting at the table that was covered with folders and papers and magazines. He was holding a pen and had paused from writing to light a cigarette. As Connie stepped inside she looked up—the strange ugly-attractive man with the pockmarked face and the gentle gaze.
“It’s hot in here,” Connie said. Sitting down at the table she pushed the cup toward him.
He shook his head but said nothing, watching her as she removed the straw hat and bandana and then the binoculars.
“Soldadera,” he said finally. “Born sixty years too late.”
She saw him watching her and took her hand from her hair. “Too late for what?”
“The revolution.”
“You didn’t hear? There’s another one going on.”
He smiled then and it showed briefly in his eyes. “You did a job on the foreman.”
“If they were all as easy as he is.”
“He hasn’t got hold of it yet, what’s going on.”
“He got mad this time, called me a whore.”
“What do you want to do, sue him?” Vincent Mora drew on his cigarette. He handed Connie a pad of paper and a pencil. “Give me some names, people working out there.”
“Some of them you can’t tell.” She closed her eyes, as if picturing the field. “The women with the bonnets, you can’t see their faces. There’s an Anglo who’s been here a few days. Young guy.”
“Chicanos. People that live around here.”
“A Chicano who wears a white tennis hat. How does that grab you?”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know, I never saw him before.”
“Just give me a few you’re sure of.”
She wrote a name and another one on the pad before turning to stare out the window. It was quiet in the bus. Vincent Mora began writing again. He would look up at the girl’s profile, at her hair and the glimpse of a gold earring—studying her, or perhaps looking through her, deep in thought—then would lower his head and continue writing.
When the cigarette smoke drifted across the window Connie knew he was looking up and she thought hard to remember the names of people. Eduardo Ortiz. Ambrocio Varrera. Carlos Leija. Emilio . . . Villescas. She shifted her gaze to the pad and began writing the names and, for some reason, thought of the Anglo boy out in the field, seeing his light-colored hair and gray T-shirt in the glare of the sun. But she could also feel the presence of the man sitting across from her in the little bus. Vincent Mora.
She could see his coarse, heavy features and dark hair that, if you looked closely, was dusted with gray. After working for him three months, being with him almost every day, she still didn’t know the man. At first she had thought him too trusting and easygoing, maybe even a little slow—a nice guy who was not quite with it. Except that he was an experienced labor organizer. He had worked for the Community Service Organization in Los Angeles and the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, also in California, and had been involved in the grape strike and the boycott. He had come here in October and in eight months of talking to workers—in the fields, in cafés, visiting them in their homes and gradually gaining their confidence—he had organized over five hundred of them into a union, VAWA Local 101, and had a week ago called a strike against Stanzik Farms, the largest independent melon grower in the valley.
He never wore a hat or a tie. Usually an open shirt and a zip-up jacket.
He didn’t drink, not even a glass of beer or wine. Though he smoked more than two packs of cigarettes a day.
He was a farm labor organizer who had never worked in the fields. She was certain of that.
He had a name that could be Mexican but he would never be taken for one. Maybe his grandfather had been Chicano. If he was, he had married an Anglo. And his father had married one. Vincent Mora could be German or Black Irish for all she knew.
He was about thirty-eight but looked older, Connie Chavez had decided. In her mind she would not permit him to be as old as forty. She had also decided he was attractive. She couldn’t say his scarred, heavy-boned face was handsome, no. It was attractive. Unusual. Really interesting. A man’s face.
What else?
He had never touched her. He had never touched her shoulder or her arm or brushed her hand with his. She had never pictured herself in bed with him. She had thought about it, but she couldn’t see it clearly. She couldn’t see him with his clothes off. She assumed he was not married. Maybe he had been at one time, she didn’t know.
What else?
He never raised his voice.
That was it. A rough-looking man who spoke quietly and was always composed. It frightened her a little—his restraint. And his awareness—there in the slight movement of his eyes, his gaze shifting to someone speaking, listening patiently, waiting, letting the man run out of things to say, his gaze never wavering or looking away. It was his not speaking more than his speaking or his appearance or his background that described him and formed the picture in the girl’s mind. She would wonder what he thought and what he knew that he wasn’t telling.
With the sound of the bullhorn Mora looked up and Connie watched him as he gazed out the side windows.
“Mora!” The people on the picket line were calling his name and the bullhorn said, over them, “¡Viva Mora! You want to hear the truth? Listen to Vincent Mora. He’s coming to talk to you.”
“Lady?”
“What?”
“You told them to do that?”
“Just a little I thought would be all right.”
“Just a little.” His expression and the tone of his voice remained mild. “But I’m not Juárez. I’m not Villa or Zapata. I’m not the leader of a holy war.”
“I thought, just to get them a little excited—”
“I’m not a spokesman for La Causa or La Raza. I’m not a prophet representing a brown Christ or an Indian Virgin Mary. Am I?”
Outside, the pickets were calling now, “¡Viva Mora!” repeating his name in a chant.
“We’re not selling me. We’re selling an idea.”
“But they like to do it. It gives them a name, a word to use.” She was thinking and trying very hard to explain this. “You understand? Something to excite them, get them up, instead of an idea they have to think about.”
“The word is huelga,” Vincent Mora said. “Strike. And the word and the idea are the same. It’s what we’re selling today. The special. Not race or integration, but a strike.”
“If your name helps, why not use it?”
“I’ll say it again. I’m not Juárez. I’m not Villa—”
Connie nodded. “I’m not Zapata.”
“I’m not,” Mora said. “I don’t know about you. Whether you want a labor union or a revolution.”
Connie picked up the bandana, pressed it to her head, and tied it in back. “I guess I don’t either,” she said. “Or maybe I don’t see any difference. It’s for Chicanos. And if we win, the Chicanos win. So it’s racial, whether we want to think of it that way or not.”
“But it’s not how we think of it that’s important,” Mora said. “It’s how the Stanzik people think. If they believe it’s a race issue they’ll say we’re rioting and call in the troops—make an emergency out of an incident and send us home. But if we keep this a business matter, then we have a chance they’ll come to terms.”
“We’re still talking about La Causa,” Connie said. “These people love the land as much as Stanzik does. But he owns it and they have to live like serfs and he’s the lord of the manor.”
“Lady—I’ve read it. I even wrote some of it.”
He watched her shrug and sit back against the seat, maybe tired of talking about it: the twenty-year-old girl soldier, tough good-looking girl who in another time might have worn a bandoleer across her breast and ridden for Zapata. He said quietly, “What do you want to do, burn the man’s house down?”
“I’ve thought about it,” she said and might have been serious.
“And what do you get out of that?”
“A nice warm feeling.”
“You get shot,” Mora said. “Or twenty years.”
“But they’d know we’re here, wouldn’t they?”
“Connie Chavez died here. You get your high school graduation picture in the paper. For one day. Tell me, really, why are you in this? For what?”
“I want to help the people. Tell them how it is.”
“Tell them they’re poor?”
“Help them.”
“Tell them they don’t eat the right food and live in filthy shacks and their babies die of pneumonia and malnutrition? They know that.”
“I want to tell them their rights, that they don’t have to work like animals for whatever the man wants to pay.”
Mora was nodding as she spoke. He said then, “You want to win?”
“Of course I want to win.”
“Then tell them what it’s like to stand on a picket line.”
She was silent a moment. “I don’t think you can.”
“Tell them what it feels like.”
“I don’t think you can explain it. You have to experience being there.”
“Why?”
“Because of the feeling. What it is.”
“So all you have to do is get them to try it. Right?”
Connie was nodding, understanding it now.
“Then it’s done,” Mora said. “Because once a man walks out of the field and joins a picket line, he’s never the same again.”
HAROLD RITCHIE HAD BRAKED ALMOST TO A STOP AND was letting the patrol car roll slowly on its own momentum, bumping along in the road ruts past the line of pickets holding their signs and red bandanas. Every one of them turned from the field to watch him and nobody said a word or moved, though the car passed within a couple of yards of most of them. Beyond the line he accelerated a little, giving the car just enough speed to swing into the side road, and came to a stop in the shade of some bushes close to a cement irrigation tank.
Getting out, he took his Stetson from the front seat and put it on carefully, setting the brim an inch above his eyes. On duty a trooper was always supposed to be covered. It made sense, it was part of the uniform; except Ritchie didn’t particularly like wearing it. The hat itself was all right—he’d owned a few tan Stetsons in his life—but Captain McKellan made them all wear the hats the same way, the brim curled just a little and pointing straight over their eyes. He’d have curled his more and creased both sides of the crown instead of having just the one groove on top, but it wasn’t regulation. After four years in the Marines he’d sworn he was through with regulations. But here he was in a tan uniform again, not as formfitting as a Marine shirt, but with short sleeves, which he liked. It showed the tattoo on his left forearm: the snake curled around the dagger and “Death Before Dishonor” in dark blue. The gold-frame trooper sunglasses were regulation.
This was his first close look at the strike. On highway patrol they were told to keep an eye on the union hall and he’d seen the strike signs and the people hanging around outside; but this was the first day he’d been assigned to watch the pickets and keep order. A one-man job it looked like. Nobody would be out to relieve him till after noon. Harold Ritchie took off his hat and reached through the car window to drop it on the seat.
As he walked up the road toward the pickets someone in the line said, “Hey, come on over here. We need a cop on our side.” Somebody else said, “Give him a sign to hold.” They watched him approach in that casual cop stride, looking like a cop or a soldier even without his hat: short-haired, good solid five-ten build that showed only a trace of a belly.
Harold Ritchie had lived in Trinity all his life except for the twelve months in Vietnam. Faces in the picket line were familiar. He knew some of them by name. A couple of them he’d even arrested: drunk and disorderly, in a Mexican café throwing beer bottles at each other, laughing and swearing and having a hell of a time. He’d gone to school with some of them, or their kids. He’d probably picked crops with some of them too, before he went in the Marines. When he saw Luis Tamez in the line holding a bullhorn he walked over to him.
“What’re you doin’ here?”
“I’m in the strike. What do you think I’m doing?”
“Papa, you ought to go sit in the shade.”
“I’m in the strike,” Luis Tamez said again.
Someone down the line said, “Leave him alone, he wants to be here.”
Harold Ritchie looked up, surprised. “I’m talkin’ to the man.”
And someone else said, “You want to arrest us, try it. We got a lawyer and he say we have a right to be here.”
“I think you’re all nuts. I’m talkin’ to him,” Ritchie said. “You understand that?”
“You’re police, you’re for Stanzik,” the man down the line said. “How much he pay you to watch us? See we don’t go on his property. Listen, maybe we don’t ever go on his property again. Tell him that for us.”
“That’s right,” a woman’s voice said. “We ain’t going to work for him again till he pay us what we want and you can’t make us.”
What the hell was going on? Ritchie looked at the faces in the line and remembered them as he drove in, the pickets staring silently, not moving. What the hell were they mad at him about?
“You got a gun,” the woman said then. “Take it out and shoot us, we still don’t go in the field. Your gun don’t scare us, mister.”
Ritchie said to Luis Tamez, “For Christ’s sake, is everybody drunk or something?”
“We’re on strike,” Luis Tamez said. “We got a right to be here if we want.”
“I know you have. What the hell are you mad at me for?”
The old man’s expression did not change, nor did he seem to hear or understand. Harold Ritchie had known the man’s grandson, the only other person he had met in the Marines from Trinity. They had not been close friends, though they had been close the day he carried the grandson’s dead body over his shoulder eight miles out of the DMZ and back to base. After he was home, discharged, he had told the old man about it, some of it, and the old man had touched his shoulder and let his hand rest there while he thought about his grandson and said nothing.
The man down the line said, “Leave him alone. He don’t have to talk to a cop.”
Harold Ritchie walked up close to the man, almost toe to toe, and said, “Buddy, if you want I’ll take that fuckin’ sign and bust it over your fuckin’ head and you better fuckin’ believe it.”
The man didn’t say a word, because this cop with his haircut and sunglasses and tattoo on his arm was close and very real.
But someone behind him said, “Listen how he talks. We got ladies here, he don’t care.”
Harold Ritchie had to turn away, his hands tight on his hips, or he might have swung at the man. They were nuts, all of them. Christ, if they really wanted it he could take any four at one time, deck every one of them. But he said to himself, Come on, what’s the matter with you? Knowing he had to make himself calm down. It was weird. People he’d known all his life. He saw Connie Chavez over by the line of old cars, then Vincent Mora coming along behind her. Ritchie got to them before they reached the picket line.
“What’s the matter with those people?”
Connie’s expression was cold, giving him nothing.
“I walk up and they’re all over me.”
“You want them to smile and hold their hats? What do you want?”
“They’re crazy—I’m talking to old man Tamez, they try and pick a fight.”
“They frighten you, why don’t you pull your gun?” Connie Chavez brushed past him, cold eyes and gold earrings beneath a Texas straw hat.
“I don’t know,” Ritchie said. “Maybe everybody’s crazy.” He was looking at Mora now, their eyes just about even. From a distance he had judged Mora to be taller and bigger. “You the one gettin’ them talkin’ that way?”
“What way?”
“I thought you were the one for nonviolence. I walk up and they try and pick a fight.”
“Why would they want to fight you?”
“Buddy, that’s what I’d like to know. I never in my life had trouble with those people.”
“And they never talked back to you before this,” Mora said. “Those people.”
“I’m talkin’ about common ordinary courtesy. I walk up and they start bad-mouthin’ me. I come here to keep order, see they don’t trespass, and I get all this shit.”
“You want them to apologize?”
“I want to understand it more’n anything else. I know those people.”
Mora shook his head. “No, you don’t. Maybe you know their names. But there’s no way you could know them, unless you were one of them. Understand that much,” Mora said, “you’ll be doing fine.”
“Buddy”—Harold Ritchie had to turn as Mora started past him—“I worked with them. Listen, in Vietnam I lived in the same bunker with David Tamez, talked to him all the time—”
But Mora kept going and Ritchie shut up, seeing the people in the picket line watching him.
“EDUARDO ORTIZ, HOW’RE YOU MAKING IT?”
The workers in the field looked over at the sound of the new voice coming from the bullhorn, knowing it was Vincent Mora now.
“Eduardo, we want you to come here and stand with us. Ambrocio Varrera, you also. Carlos Leija . . . Emilio Villescas, all of you come here and show them we stand together. Join the picket line and see what it’s like to stand up for your rights.”
Connie Chavez, next to Mora, watched them turn to the rows again and begin picking. Only a few of the men remained standing, looking his way. Through the binoculars her gaze moved over the rows until she found the Anglo, there, coming off the stake truck. He had a handkerchief or something tied around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. Her gaze moved on and she said to Mora, “The one in the plaid shirt, over there, that’s Ambrocio Varrera.”
“Ambrocio,” Mora said through the bullhorn. “You think a dollar ten cents is better than nothing? If you do, that’s the value you put on your self-respect. A dollar ten cents. Maybe tomorrow they buy it from you for eighty cents. Whatever they want to pay. But if you respect yourself and your family, then join the picket line and tell them what you want for a change. See the sign? A dollar sixty or nothing. No pay, no work. No melons get picked.”
“He’s thinking about it,” Connie said.
The man in the plaid shirt was standing now.
Mora held the bullhorn on him. “We’ll give you food for your family. We share what we have. We stand together and we’re going to win. You want to be with us or not?”
Some of the pickets began to call now, “Come on, join us!” and wave their signs and red bandanas.
Connie raised her glasses. The Anglo was still by the truck. Doping off. If he was out there to work, then why didn’t he work? He looked to be about her age. She had gone out with some Anglos at Texas. They had all tried to score the first time and she told them what they could do with it. Xavier University. She had heard of the school but didn’t know where it was.
The one in the white tennis hat was standing up now, watching—God, that hat was something in a melon field—and a man with him wearing a headband, like the Anglo’s, a handkerchief.
She let the glasses slide along the row to Ambrocio Varrera, standing, still undecided.
“The one just behind him, to the right, is Carlos Leija,” Connie said.
The man was hunched down in the vines, but looking this way and watching Ambrocio.
“Ask yourself,” Mora said through the bullhorn. “You want to be able to say yes, I was on the picket line at Stanzik Farms when we stood together and made them recognize our union? Or, you going to say no, I was out in the field with the kids they had to hire and the scabs and the strikebreakers? You going to tell me you have more respect for a dollar ten cents than you have for yourself? I don’t believe it. You’re going to tell them to keep their dollar ten, because you’re a man and you know it. You know what it feels like.”
“Come on, do it,” Connie said. “Walk out.” Though only Vincent Mora could hear her.
He said, “Give him time. The first step’s a giant one.” Mora was patient, thinking there was a good chance of getting this one, but not putting all his hopes on it. Each day they had coaxed one or two out of the field, no more than that. They would come out when they were ready; or they wouldn’t come at all.
“He’s going to do it,” Connie said. “I know it.” She raised the glasses again to study him and said, “Move, man, what’re you waiting for?”
In that moment, almost as if he heard her, Ambrocio Varrera started across the rows, looking at the pickets and then over toward the police car where the trooper without the hat stood watching him.
“Ambrocio, leave the sack,” Mora told him. “You don’t need it here. Today that’s for people who have no respect for themselves.”
The man slipped the rope from his shoulder, letting the sack fall, and came on again.
The pickets cheered, calling his name and waving him toward them, and Mora said, “That feels good, doesn’t it. Like taking off chains.” He could see the man was afraid, coming out of the field alone.
“Carlos Leija,” Mora said then. “You going to let him walk out by himself? Go with him, man. Keep him company.” He watched Ambrocio look around and now the other man, Carlos, rose and came after him, slipping the sack from his shoulder. All of the other workers were watching now from behind the vines. Only a few were standing. They were thinking about it—they had to be—but none of them moved from their rows as Ambrocio and Carlos walked out of the field.
You have them, Mora was thinking, and felt tired and alone.
Two more who had given up their jobs for him. He could see they were still afraid, but they were committed now and, in having made the decision, already felt some relief and were beginning to smile, each drawing some strength from the other and from the pickets waiting on the road, the pickets cheering and calling their names. They came out of the field directly toward Mora—putting themselves in his hands, their expressions saying, All right here we are, we trust you and we did it.
Then it was Mora’s turn to smile and extend his hand and give them each a firm grip—showing no trace of the weariness he felt—and say welcome to the Valley Agricultural Workers Association and add their names to the list of five hundred and forty-six members—over three thousand people including their families—who would rely on the union for their daily existence for as long as the strike lasted.
“HE’S PRETTY GOOD,” CHINO SAID. “HE GRABS THEM by the balls and keeps pulling.”
Paco said, “I like the girl. She gave it to that foreman.”
Chino was looking toward the picket line, fifty yards away through the glare, the white rim of his tennis hat turned down all around and low over his sunglasses. “She don’t look like much from here, but she’s all right, uh? I like to see her up close.”
“Without any clothes on.”
“Yeah, I bet she don’t waste a minute.”
“Let’s go find out,” Paco said.
“You had enough of this?”
Paco’s expression showed a flicker of hope. “You mean it? Sure, what good we doing here? Nothing.”
The pickets were bunched around the two men who had walked out of the field. Mora was among them, in the crowd somewhere. Chino couldn’t see him now. He said, almost to himself, “I wonder if he’ll know me.”
“What difference does it make?” Paco was anxious now. “He remember you, he don’t remember you, so what?”
“I just wondered,” Chino said. His gaze held on the pickets across the melon rows. He wished there was a side road here that led to the road, so he could walk along taking his time and not have to step over the rows. He should have gone before those two guys. They were up there now and everybody was around them. He should have beat them to it; but he’d been watching the two guys and not thinking about walking to Mora, who didn’t know he was here and maybe wouldn’t recognize him when he did walk up.
He said to Paco, “You think he’ll know me?”
Paco was about to tell him again, Christ, what difference did it make? But he thought about it a moment and said, “Sure, he’ll know you.”
“It’s been six years.”
“It don’t matter. He’ll know you. Man, he’ll be glad to see you.”
“No, we better wait a while,” Chino said, looking at the road again. “It’s not the right time.”