The Mexicans were weak and fled. They could not
resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the
Americans wanted land.
Then, with time, the squatters were no longer
squatters, but owners; and their children grew up and had children on the land.
And the hunger was gone from them, the feral hunger, the gnawing, tearing
hunger for land, for water and earth and the good sky over it, for the green
thrusting grass, for the swelling roots. They had these things so completely
that they did not know about them any more. They had no more the
stomach-tearing lust for a rich acre and a shining blade to plow it, for seed
and a windmill beating its wings in the air. They arose in the dark no more to
hear the sleepy birds' first chittering, and the morning wind around the house
while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres. These things
were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal
plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop
failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but
simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all
their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at
all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before
they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land
to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth
and growing things, he could not survive if he were not also a good shopkeeper.
And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger,
but there were fewer of them.
Now farming became industry, and the owners
followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although
they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They
live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don't need much. They
wouldn't know what to do with good wages. Why, look how they live. Why, look
what they eat. And if they get funny—deport them.
And all the time the farms grew larger and the
owners fewer. And there were pitifully few farmers on the land any more. And
the imported serfs were beaten and frightened and starved until some went home
again, and some grew fierce and were killed or driven from the country. And the
farms grew larger and the owners fewer.
And the crops changed. Fruit trees took the place
of grain fields, and vegetables to feed the world spread out on the bottoms:
lettuce, cauliflower, artichokes, potatoes—stoop crops. A man may stand to use
a scythe, a plow, pitchfork; but he must crawl like a bug between the rows of
lettuce, he must bend his back and pull his long bag between the cotton rows,
he must go on his knees like a penitent across a cauliflower patch.
And it came about that owners no longer worked on
their farms. They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the
feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered only what they
gained and lost by it. And some of the farms grew so large that one man could
not even conceive of them any more, so large that it took batteries of
bookkeepers to keep track of interest and gain and loss; chemists to test the
soil, to replenish; straw bosses to see that the stooping men were moving along
the rows as swiftly as the material of their bodies could stand. Then such a
farmer really became a storekeeper, and kept a store. He paid the men, and sold
them food, and took the money back. And after a while he did not pay the men at
all, and saved bookkeeping. These farms gave food on credit. A man might work
and feed himself and when the work was done, might find that he owed money to
the company. And the owners not only did not work the farms any more, many of
them had never seen the farms they owned.
And then the dispossessed were drawn west—from
Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes,
dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty
thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand.
They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless—restless as ants,
scurrying to find work to do—to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to
cut—anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no
place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for
land.
We ain't foreign. Seven generations back
Americans, and beyond that Irish, Scotch, English, German. One of our folks in
the Revolution, an' they was lots of our folks in the Civil War—both sides.
Americans.
They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they
had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred. Okies—the owners hated
them because the owners knew they were soft and the Okies strong, that they
were fed and the Okies hungry; and perhaps the owners had heard from their
grandfathers how easy it is to steal land from a soft man if you are fierce and
hungry and armed. The owners hated them. And in the towns, the storekeepers
hated them because they had no money to spend. There is no shorter path to a
storekeeper's contempt, and all his admirations are exactly opposite. The town
men, little bankers, hated Okies because there was nothing to gain from them.
They had nothing. And the laboring people hated Okies because a hungry man must
work, and if he must work, if he has to work, the wage payer automatically
gives him less for his work; and then no one can get more.
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