Across the Fruited Plain Part 1

Across the Fruited Plain.

by Florence Crannell Means.

FOREWORD

Dear Mary and Bonnie and Jack and the rest of my readers:

Maybe you've heard about the migrants lately, or have seen pictures of them in the magazines. But have you thought that many of them are families much like yours and mine, traveling uncomfortably in rattly old jalopies while they go from one crop to another, and living crowded in rickety shacks when they stop for work?

There have always been wandering farm laborers because so many crops need but a few workers part of the year and a great many at harvest. A two-thousand-acre peach orchard needs only thirty workers most of the year, and one thousand seven hundred at picking time. Lately, though, there have been more migrants than ever. One reason is that while in the past we used to eat fresh peas, beans, strawberries, and the like only in summer, now we want fresh fruits and vegetables all year round. To supply our wants, great quant.i.ties of fresh fruit and vegetables must be raised in the warm climates where they will grow.

Another reason is that more farm machinery is used now, and one tractor will do as much work as several families of farm laborers. So the extra families have taken to migrating or wandering about the country wherever they hope to find work.

A further cause of the wandering is the long drought which turned part of our Southwestern country where there had been good farming into a dry desert that wouldn't grow crops any more. The people from the Dust Bowl, as the district is called, had to migrate, or starve. A great many of them went to the near-by state Of California, which grows much fruit and vegetables. There are perhaps two hundred thousand people migrating to California alone each year.

Of course there isn't nearly enough work for them all, and there aren't good living places for those who have work. That means that the children--like you--don't have the rights of young American citizens--like you. A great many of them can't go to school, and are growing up ignorant; and they don't have church, with all it means to us. They don't have proper homes or food, so they haven't good health; and because they are not in their home state or county, they cannot get medical and hospital care.

You may think we have nothing to do with them when you sometimes pa.s.s a jalopy packed inside with a whole family, from grandma to baby, and outside with bedding and what-not.

But we have something to do with them many times a day. Every time we sit down at our table we have something to do with them.

Our sugar may come from these children's work; our oranges, too, and our peas, lettuce, melons, berries, cranberries, walnuts . . . !

Every time we put on a cotton dress, we accept something from them.

For years no one thought much of trying to help these wanderers.

No one seemed to notice the unfairness of letting some children have all the blessings of our country and others have none. By and by, the counties and states and Federal government tried to help the migrant families. In a few places the government has set up comfortable camps and part-time farms such as this story describes. The church has tried to do something, also.

About twenty years ago, the Council of Women for Home Missions, made up of groups of women from the different churches, began to make plans for helping. They opened some friendly rooms where they took care of the children who were left alone while their parents worked. The rooms were often no more than a made-over barn, but in these "Christian Centers," as they were called, the children were given cleanliness, food, happiness and the care of a nurse, and were taught something about a loving Father G.o.d. The children who worked in the fields and the older people were also helped. From the seven with which a beginning was made, the number of Centers has grown to nearly sixty.

There is a great deal more to do in starting more Centers, and in equipping those we have, and we can do part of it. With our church school cla.s.ses, we can give CleanUp and Kindergarten Kits like Cissy's and Jimmie's and our leaders will tell us other things we can do, such as collecting bedding and clothing and toys and money. Best of all, we can give our friends.h.i.+p to these homeless people.

For they're just children like you. When you grow up, perhaps you may help our country become a place where no single child need be homeless.

Florence Crannell Means Denver, Colorado

ACROSS THE FRUITED PLAIN

[Ill.u.s.tration: Beechams in Reo]

1: THE HOUSE OF BEECHAM

"Oh, Rose-Ellen!" Grandma called.

Rose-Ellen slowly put down her library book and skipped into the kitchen. Grandma peppered the fried potatoes, sliced some wrinkled tomatoes into nests of wilting lettuce, and wiped her dripping face with the hem of her clean gingham ap.r.o.n. The kitchen was even hotter than the half-darkened sitting room where crippled Jimmie sprawled on the floor listlessly wheeling a toy automobile, the pale little baby on a quilt beside him.

Grandma squinted through the door at the old Seth Thomas dock in the sitting room. "Half after six! Rose-Ellen, you run down to the shop and tell Grandpa supper's spoiling. Why he's got to hang round that shop till supper's spoilt when he could fix up all the shoes he's got in two-three hours, I don't understand. 'Twould be different if he had anything to do. . . ."

Rose-Ellen said, "O.K., Gramma!" and ran through the hall. She'd rather get away before Grandma talked any more about the shop.

Day after day she had heard about it. Grandma talked to her, though she was only ten, because she and Grandma were the only women in the family, since last winter when Mother died.

As Rose-Ellen let the front door slam behind her, she saw Daddy coming slowly up the street. The way his broad shoulders drooped and the way he took off his hat and pushed back his thick, dark hair told her as plainly as words that he hadn't found work that day. Even though you were a child, you got so tired--so tired--of the grown folks' worrying about where the next quart of milk would come from. So Rose-Ellen patted him on the arm as they pa.s.sed, saying, "Hi, Daddy, I'm after Grampa!" and hop-skipped on toward the old cobbler shop. Before Rose-Ellen was born, when Daddy was a boy, even, Grandpa had had his shop at that corner of the city street.

There he was, standing behind the counter in the shadowy shop, his shoulders drooping like Daddy's. He was a big, kind-looking old man, his gray hair waving round a bald dome, his eyes bright blue. He was looking at a newspaper. It was a crumpled old paper that had been wrapped around someone's shoes; the Beechams didn't spend pennies for newspapers nowadays.

The long brushes were quiet from their whirling. On the rack of finished shoes two pairs awaited their owners; on the other rack were a few that had evidently just come in. Yet Grandpa looked as tired as if he had mended a hundred pairs.

He looked up when the bell tinkled. "Oh, Ellen-girl! Anything wrong?"

"Only Gramma says please come to supper. Everything's getting spoiled."

Grandpa glanced at his old clock. It said half-past five. "I keep tinkering with it, but it's seen its best days. Like me."

He took off his denim ap.r.o.n, rolled down his sleeves, put on his hat and coat, and locked the door behind them. But not before he had looked wistfully around the little place, with its smell of beeswax, leather and dye, where he had worked so long. Its walls were papered with his favorite calendars: country scenes that reminded him of his farm boyhood; roly-poly babies in bathtubs; a pretty girl who looked, he said, like Grandma--a funny idea to Rose-Ellen. Patched linoleum, doorstep hollowed by thousands of feet--Grandpa looked at everything as if it were new and bright, and as if he loved it.

Starting home, he took Rose-Ellen's small damp hand in his big damp one. The sun blinded them as they walked westward, and the heat struck at them fiercely from pavement and wall, as if it were fighting them. Rose-Ellen was strong and didn't mind. She held her head straight to make her thick brown curls. .h.i.t against her backbone. She knew she was pretty, with her round face and dark-lashed hazel eyes; and that n.o.body would think her starchy short pink dress was old, because Grandma had mended it so nicely. Grandma had darned the short socks that turned down to her stout slippers, too; and Grandpa had mended the slippers till the tops would hardly hold another pair of soles.

"Hi, Rosie!" called Julie Albi, who lived next door. "C'm'out and play after supper?"

"Next door" was the right way to say it. This Philadelphia street was like two block-long houses, facing each other across a strip of pavement, each with many pairs of twin front doors, each pair with two scrubbed stone steps down to the sidewalk, and two bay windows bulging out upstairs, so that they seemed nearly to touch the ones across the narrow street. Rose-Ellen and Julie shared twin doors and steps; and inside only a thin wall separated them.

At the door d.i.c.k overtook Grandpa and Rose-Ellen. d.i.c.k was twelve. Sometimes Rose-Ellen considered him nothing but a nuisance, and sometimes she was proud of his tallness, his curly fair hair and bright blue eyes. He dashed in ahead when Grandpa turned the key, but Grandpa lingered.

Rose-Ellen said, "Hurry, Grampa, everything's getting cold." But she understood. He was thinking that their dear old house was no longer theirs. Something strange had happened to it, called "sold for taxes," and they were allowed to live in it only this summer.

Grandma blamed the shop. It had brought in the money to buy the house in the first place and had kept it up until a few years ago. It had put Daddy through a year in college. Now it was failing. Once, it seemed, people bought good shoes and had them mended many times. Then came days when many people were poor.

They had to buy shoes too cheap to be mended; so when the soles wore out, the people threw the shoes away and bought more cheap ones. No longer were Grandpa's shoe racks crowded. No longer was there money even for taxes. All Grandpa took in was barely enough for food and shop rent. But what else besides mending shoes and farming did he know how to do? And who would hire an old man when jobs were so few?

Even young Daddy had lost his job as a photograph finisher, and had brought his wife and three children home to live with Grandpa and Grandma. There Baby Sally was born; and there, before the baby was a month old, Mother had died. Soon after, the old house had been sold for taxes.

Grandma went about her work with the strong lines of her square face fixed in sadness. She was forever begging Grandpa to give up the shop, but Grandpa smashed his fist down on the table and said it was like giving up his life. . . . And day after day Daddy hunted work and was cross because he could find none.

For d.i.c.k and Rose-Ellen the summer had not been very different from usual. d.i.c.k blacked boots on Sat.u.r.days to earn a few dimes; Rose-Ellen helped Grandma with the "ch.o.r.es." They had long hours of play besides.

But the hot summer had been hard for nine-year-old Jimmie and the baby. They drooped like flowers in baked ground. Since Jimmie's infantile paralysis, three years before, he had been able to walk very little, and school had seemed out of the question. Unable to read or to run and play, he had a dull time.

Grandpa and Rose-Ellen went through the clean, shabby hall to the kitchen, where Grandma was rocking in the old rocker, Sally whimpering on her lap.

"Well, for the land's sakes," said Grandma, "did you make up your mind to come home at last? Mind Baby, Rose-Ellen, while I dish up."

After supper, Daddy sat hopelessly studying the "Help Wanted"

column in last Sunday's paper, borrowed from the Albis. Jimmie looked at the funnies, and Grandma and Rose-Ellen did the dishes.

Julie Albi, who had come to play, sat waiting with heels hooked over a chair-rung.