Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/121

CHAPTER 6. LIFE AT HARD LABOR—THE HOPI 108 the Anglos had packed. And in the hoeing, the Filipinos could hoe twice as fast as the Anglos and much better. I will admit I would not speed up the average of the Anglos myself.

One morning the boss told us to get in the closed truck and we would all go to the sheds. I had never been there. I found there was broccoli to pack. We finished all there was in a few hours. Meanwhile, I had heard the conversation of the workers and had picked up a bulletin of the union and found that there was a strike of the shed workers. The fields are not organized. I then looked outside and saw the pickets. The foreman told us he would take us home early for dinner and pick us up and pack lettuce until late that day. I told him that I was not working in the shed that afternoon because I did not want to be a strikebreaker. He said "you are already a strikebreaker." I replied that because I was dumb I did not have to stay dumb. Here the pay was about $1.25 an hour but in the fields where I worked from that time on it was 85c and at times 60 cents.Afterwards they never asked me to work in the sheds, and did not discriminate against me because of my refusal to scab, although the foreman would at times, jokingly refer to me as a strikebreaker. Two I.W.W.'s, one of them a Mormon, also refused the next day to scab. The strike finally lost and the head of the union resigned and started a tavern.

One cold morning about fifty of us were cutting weeds out of the beds of small celery. This was done with a paring knife and was tedious work. Next to me was a fellow who had not been there before. He was sympathetic to the I.W.W., and as the work was slow we had an opportunity to talk. I had not found anyone for a long time who knew the meaning of radical phrases and who even quoted Veblen and Plato. He had never heard of the CW and was glad to know of such a paper. I always had an extra one in my pocket. At noon one of the winos who could not help hearing our conversation asked me what I had been drinking. In my younger days I would have uselessly argued with the man but now I only said "I don't drink." In his mind he was right, for what business did educated people have coming to these fields and talking a lingo which the others did not understand. The foreman and a few of the more sober workers knew that I was doing farm work in order not to have a tax for the bomb taken from my pay. I did not have the time nor the inclination to explain this to every newcomer. So, maybe to this man, I did appear "drunk."

All that season a man was in the crew who, upon hearing the person in the next row say anything would immediately begin mumbling a long line of semi-Biblical babble. This was not meant to be a part of the conversation which he was interrupting for he never looked up as he mumbled but this was just an habitual "aside" on his part. I might say to my partner "I don't eat meat." Immediately this man would mumble: "Meat—now there is all kinds of meat: cow, pig and horse. Then fish is meat and so is chicken. I don't rightly know if an oyster is meat. The Lord said to Peter "Slay and eat; so it must be o.k. Jesus ate fish but what kind of fish did he eat? That is a question. Samson was a strong man and he didn't eat meat. The elephant is the strongest animal and eats grass. Now I eat meat—when I can get it—but I was never really very strong—meat, meat, meat."