CHAPTER 7. DOROTHY VISITS PHOENIX 138
"You can't farm in this commercial valley though. Takes too much for machinery and if you lose a crop through lack of water, bugs, or poor prices, then the big company grabs your land for what they want to give. Have to get in the sticks," he added with a smile, "away from the places where you think you have to spend money."
We then discussed unions, radical organizations, churches, and the different methods of making a better world. The aim of the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God was there but so many things interferred to make us all forget it. All these organizations came first and we forgot our aim.
"And the more noise, the more traffic and the more big whirring machinery, the more we seem to forget that the man next to us is our brother. I know folks back home in the country who never saw a city who feud like all blazes though, so it isn't only where you are or what you do that counts; it must be what you have inside," my friend said as we quit for the day. He had picked 130 pounds and I had picked 111. It was 4 p.m., and as he lived down my way I pocketed my $2.22 and rode with him eastward. On the way we saw some men forking cauliflower culls into trucks for their cattle, and stopped to get some culls. But they were all gone and only the leaves that were cut from the top of the box as they were packed were left.
One morning I had gone down the highway to wait for the first bus to Coldwater, where I had heard they took on cotton pickers. I had previously asked the colored family on the corner, with whom I had worked, and they said that cotton trucks did not come by on this highway since the holidays. The trucks in town only picked up regular customers and did not bother with the slave market at Second and Jefferson in Phoenix. A young driver of a milk truck which bore the sign "no riders" picked me up before daylight and took me toward Coldwater. His first pickup was way beyond Buckeye. After a time we noticed people gathered by the side of the road, and stopping, we saw a motorcycle tangled up against a telephone pole and a young man whose brains were scattered over the ground. Later we found out that he had worked nights irrigating and by some mishap—perhaps being sleepy—had swerved across the road and had been killed as he came home from work. It was not yet daylight. The driver of the milk truck wondered why he stayed here for $75 a week when he had left a $125 a week job in Ohio. And the work of lifting heavy cans of milk on the truck was strenuous. I remembered in 1943 in Albuquerque, when I had swung cans of milk onto a truck for a farmer where I worked. One morning a new truck came for the milk which was an inch higher than the one previously used, and I could not adjust my swing of the can to this higher level for half an hour. It looks easy to swing these cans. One sturdy driver picked up a full can of milk in each hand and held them out at arms length, but he was an exception. When I got off the truck a mile beyond Coldwater I waited for an hour.
A farmer was discing with his tractor. I refused offers of half a dozen lifts as I wanted to be sure to arrive at a cotton field. A young fellow who was walking along told me that a corner, a mile east, was where trucks picked up cotton workers. I had met the Baptist preacher of this small town at a recent Fellowship of Reconciliation meeting. He was a subscriber to the CW and liked
