Picking Cotton

Ammon Hennacy spent many years working and being paid as a day laborer to reconcile his obligation to support his children with his philosophical opposition to paying taxes to support war and other forms of governmental injustice. He often wrote about these experiences for The Catholic Worker. This essay was originally published in April 1948 and is reproduced from A Penny A Copy: Readings from The Catholic Worker, edited by Thomas C. Cornell, Robert Ellsberg, and Jim Forest (Orbis, 1995).

Having a few free days after the winter lettuce season at the large vegetable ranch where I had worked, I left my shack situated between a cabbage field and a lettuce field on land of the Russian pacifist Molokons and went to Phoenix to visit an atheist friend and spend the night in order to get the cotton truck before daylight. (This friend had bought a Catholic Worker from me in front of the library in Milwaukee one Saturday in 1941. He later read an article of mine in the Catholic C.O. His admiration of the courageous pacifist spirit of these papers led him to deviate from his atheistic norms.)

The next morning two bonfires were already burning along the curb where Mexicans, Indians and Anglos, many of the latter being "winos," were waiting to select the truck in which they would go to work. Just now there were only cotton trucks, there being a lull in citrus picking. Cotton pickers carry their own eight-foot to ten-foot sacks fastened with a strap around the shoulders and dragging behind them like a giant worm. There were eight trucks and several pickups. Most of them were shaped like the traditional covered wagon with canvas. There were benches on either side and in the middle. I walked around searching for someone I might know, but my friends of the lettuce fields were wary of cotton picking, considering this the hardest job to be had and one to be taken only as a last resort.

"Last call! Take you there and bring you back. Three dollars a hundred. All aboard gentlemen!" shouted a good-natured Negro in a bright mackinaw. The truck to which he pointed was box-shaped, of good veneer, with a short ladder leading inside from the rear. I entered and found a seat between a colored woman and a colored man. After a few more calls the doors were shut, and we could see each other only as one would light a cigarette.

Later on the truck stopped and we were joined by a large group of laughing Negroes of all ages. There were three whites besides myself, and one Indian.

Our destination was nine miles beyond Buckeye, which is about thirty miles west of Phoenix. After several sharp turns, when all in the truck were thrown this way and that, we came to the field. The Indian and I did not have sacks, so we rented them from the boss for a quarter.

This was tall cotton, and harder to pick than the small variety. The field was a quarter of a mile long and a mile wide. A young white man worked in one row, then the Indian, and then myself. I had never picked cotton before. The Indian, a Navajo, said this was to be clean picking, he understood.

Where the cotton was fluffy it was easy to grab, but where the boll was only partly open it was difficult to extract and hurt your fingers. As we worked along the row from the far end of the field toward the weighing scales and truck, my Navajo friend said he was learning a lesson which he sadly needed. Now he had just enough money from day to day. Before this he had spent money freely and never had to count his pennies. He paid a dollar a night for a cot in a cheap hotel in Phoenix. He had an older brother who had been quite wealthy before the depression and was a big shot among his people because of his holdings in cattle. He drank, bought fine cars. Now with the "plowing under" and rationing system of the government he was a poor Indian indeed.

In speaking of the Navajo he said that they had always been poor in these last years, but that the suffering was now no greater than last year. If left to themselves in sheep and cattle raising and in growing corn they would be able to get along. But the government restrictions as to grazing and its refusal to provide schools for the Navajo according to treaty had given them little to do in their spare time except to succumb to the temptations of liquor and the allurements of the cities. The recent provision of half a million dollars for food from Congress was coupled with three times that amount to "rehabilitate" the Navajo. This was another word for jobs for the white bureaucrats to feed on the misery of the Indian with boondoggling experiments.

Navajo do not eat fish, bear, pork; in fact any animal that does not eat grass is not "clean" to them. They will not kill a coyote for the bounty as do the whites.

We had worked three hours and took our cotton in to be weighed. I had thirty pounds and he had forty-two. The white man near us had eighty-five. In talking over this discrepancy we found that we had been picking only the clean white cotton, while the more experienced pickers picked the bolls along with the cotton and more than doubled the weight.

As we waited our turn for weighing our cotton, groups were shooting dice in the roadway. A Negro woman served coffee, chili, pie, wieners, etc., at reasonable prices. Some of the truck drivers sold food to their passengers.

Returning to the field we picked in more of an orthodox fashion, and in the total five and a half hours the Navajo picked eighty-two pounds and I picked sixty-two. Before we left I gave him The Catholic Worker to read with my letter about the Hopi refusing to go to war.

The next morning I met my Navajo friend beside the bonfire at Second and Madison. The truck of Negroes did not go out on Sunday. One truck took only those who had sacks. I got in a small pickup which headed westward about thirty miles to Litchfield Park. Several young girls kept us merry with songs. When we arrived at the field my Navajo friend came in on another truck. We happened to get sacks at different times, so did not work together.

An old man said that the rule here was "rough picking" which meant everything that had white in it, but no stems or leaves. When I emptied my sack, I had fifty-four pounds. The man next to me seemed to work rather expertly, and I asked him what time they quit on weekdays here. He replied that he only came on Sundays. "Make $1.25 an hour at my job in town, and time and a half overtime."

I commented that unless a person had a large family that was a good wage.

"I don't work here for the money," he continued. "I just come out here so I can keep sober. Was drunk from Christmas until yesterday -- ten days. I can keep sober if I'm working, but I can't stand to be quiet or to loaf. And as I have eight kids, I need to keep working."

There was not much cotton left to pick in this field, and the word went around that we would quit about two P.M. At that time my second sack weighed thirty-one pounds, which, after paying for my sack, netted me $2.23. My Navajo friend had not done so well, picking only sixty-eight pounds. He said he had liked my reference to the Hopi in The Catholic Worker.

As we were going into town in the truck the man who picked cotton to keep sober was discussing the merits of different brands of liquor with another picker. This man was telling of going too a town upon receiving a paycheck as a "gandy dancer" on the railroad, going to the police and asking them how much the fine was for being "drunk and disorderly." They said it was $17.50 so he paid it at once, for he intended to get drunk and disorderly. I did not hear the rest of the story for the truck soon passed lateral 20, nearby where I lived, and I proceeded homeward with $3.93 for two part-days spent in the cotton fields.

Later in the day, sitting in my doorway, resting, I was asked by a man who drove up in a car to work for him for a week irrigating at $7.20 per day. Gladly I was willing to let this two part-days of cotton picking suffice. Good pickers can make from $8 to $12 a day, but I was not in that class.