Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/120

CHAPTER 6. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—THE HOPI 107 to cut the lettuce is about one and one half inches wide, sharp, and curved a bit. The handle is about one and a half feet long. First, you feel the lettuce with your left hand and see if it is hard and, if so, you cut it with the knife in your right hand and throw it with your left hand in the trailer. I generally work on the outside row and, if possible, get the side away from the exhaust, for it would soon give you a headache. This means throwing further but there is less likelihood of there being a collision between human and lettuce heads. At times I have steadily cut lettuce without straightening up for the quarter of a mile row. Generally there are enough immature heads to give you a rest in between. This work pays from 75 cents to a dollar an hour depending upon how many hours you are able to work in the day, for at times there is frost until noon. When there is no frost you can commence at daylight, but when it is hot in the afternoon it is best not to handle the lettuce. If touched when frosty it leaves a black mark on the lettuce. No portal-to-portal pay in this agricultural work as there is, when you enter a mine and pay starts is at the time of entrance. You stand around shivering and waiting on the frost to melt and if it is not too hot you work until dark.

The lettuce is hauled to the packing sheds—two trailers at a time which are in town or in sheds along the tracks. Here the lettuce is wet packed in crushed ice. It is dumped in huge hoppers; one person cuts off the excess leaves or discards unfit heads. Another places paper in the boxes at the head of the belt line. Another keeps him supplied with boxes. One hands the packer the heads and another tops the crate. When the price is high and the crop is coming in heavily, the big money is made in these sheds with overtime. Many make $30 a day. Here the packers get more than the others. The union books are closed and it is difficult for a newcomer to get work in the sheds. If the price remains high the lettuce will be worked over and over again to get all possible good heads of lettuce. We worked half of Christmas. As the saying is here: "When there is work you work night and day, Sunday and Christmas morning." In the midst of the season crews of Filipinos come from California. There are about 45 in a crew. They man a huge combine. As far as I can make out this is the system they use: a crew goes ahead and cuts lettuce in the rows where the combine travels. This combine looked like an airplane. These heads are placed to one side. A truck with empty boxes keeps pace with it on one side, and one on the other to take care of the full crates. Lettuce heads are tossed on the wings of the combine and worked over just as in a dry packing shed. The girl who lines the boxes with paper, the cutters, the sorters, the packer, and the man who nailed the boxes, all ride on the machine.

They sure ate up the field. They had huge lights and worked most of the night if necessary. The only drawback was rain which would bog down the heavy machine. They worked as a crew and each man received a more-or-less equal share of the 55c a crate the owner paid. These workers are very quick and sober and dependable. I know of a case where a Filipino leased land and raised lettuce, hiring men of his own race. Some Anglos grumbled about it and so he built a shed and hired Anglos also. This was dry packing of lettuce in the field. He found that the shippers had to repack most of the crates of lettuce which