Page:The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist.djvu/154

CHAPTER 7. DOROTHY VISITS PHOENIX 141 dead end road. It seemed that the bridge was two miles up on lateral 22 and another bridge below at lateral 17 and no one we spoke to knew just where the Reservation was located. So we walked back toward home, stopping to pull a few carrots and sugar beets from the fields for our dinner.

We met some Oakies clustered around a woodpile in their yard enjoying the sun. One boy was wielding an ax and the father rested, snuggled a few inches away against a log, much as cartoons depict certain long whiskered hill billies. The subject of continued rain here and snow further north came up. One young man remarked that it wasn't fair to drop food to the Indians while the white ranchers got nothing. How much he knew of white ranchers was another thing. The inference seemed to be that no airplanes dropped anything near this particular woodpile. All the poor kid knew was depression and war so for him to think of an All Time Santa Claus was understandable.

Nearing home we were picked up by a colored man, partly Indian, whom I had known before when he came to visit me in my cabin last winter when he was irrigating near the Molokon's where I lived. He was, as he described it. "A Witness, for they gives and they don't take, and they are not Jim Crow."

At this time there were articles over the country about migrant workers starving out at Coldwater and nearby Avondale. I had been through these settlements in a truck on my way to the cotton fields and had talked to many who lived there. The starving children spoken of was not an exaggeration. Now that there has been the publicity the Red Cross came; barbers offered free haircuts; and the county hired a doctor by the month to attend to the cotton pickers especially. The little corner stores have slot machines and charge awful prices. The big companies import Mexican labor which is steady and of course much cheaper. All authorities deny this and say that only Mexican Nationals come when no local help can be gotten. But we all know this is a lie. Right now they are irrigating in the field next to me... The camp manager should have reported about the starving children but his job was to collect rents. A truck with huge cans of hot soup would help, but there is little chance of getting a CW house started there as long as I cannot get a Catholic to help me sell CWs.

Joe Mueller was a house painter but dabbled in portraits. He made a huge oil painting of an airplane dropping a bomb; and of a battlefield and a graveyard with crosses. I could not get in a bus with such a sign. Having no other means of transportation, I got up early and walked the ten miles into Phoenix with my two signs, pairs and leaflets, arriving by 8 a.m. The small yellow leaflet which I handed out was rather saucy and not a masterpiece. Rik varityped it. It read:

WHY AM I PICKETING?

Well, why aren't you? Do the A-Bomb and the H-Bomb make you sleep any better at night? Do you trust our politicians to protect us from destruction in an atomic war? Does it make good sense to foot the bill by paying income taxes?