CHAPTER 7. DOROTHY VISITS PHOENIX 140
"There is a certain kind of bullet and it only fits into a certain kind of a gun. When a fellow shoots with it just like this then he turns into a dog right away and a big bird comes and picks him up and carries him away and eats him as he carries him. Now if they only made more guns like that..."
"Have another drink of muscatel! Get a soapbox! I don't want to listen to such silly stuff. Get a soapbox, I say," spoke up an unshaven man by the fire. He of the imagination saw a truck stop for the two Negro women and ran over and jumped on. We saw him hanging onto it as it disappeared.
"No use of going on that truck. They just pick what cotton lays on the ground—can't make more than 70c a day," remarked the man of the unshaven countenance and continued, "Last night the chief of police knocked on my window and wanted to know my name. I told him to get the hell away; that I didn't care for his kind: and did he go!"
A huge fat man with whom I had picked cotton in November winked at me as we listened to this braggadocio. He told of an ad the day before asking for 300 women to sew parachutes in nearby Goodyear. When hundreds of applicants arrived they sorted them out and hired 25, which was all they wanted in the first place. Any who were over 30 or under 20 or weighed more than 120 pounds were not wanted. He added:
"A fat woman I know who is about my size and has had thirty years experience in sewing could not get a look in there. Getting so people's got to be all one size and one age, and I suppose pretty soon they'll want them to all look just alike."
A farmer came alone in a car and picked up two women who had worked for him before. This was all he wanted. Joe had been talking to a young man who lived in a shack for which he paid $30 a month. He received a soldier's pension of $90 a month so life was not quite so tough for him as for many others. My Oakie friend told of his wife giving the last of their food the other night to a big man who asked for a handout. After he had eaten he explained that he had been on a drunk and spent his $70 pension and would now have to mooch until his next check came. The Oakie had been in the store the day before and a poor woman with two small children asked for bread, saying she had nothing to eat for today and there was no cotton to pick because of the rain. The storekeeper (who charged from 10% to 30% too much anyway) had answered that he was not running any relief and would not help her.
It was now after 9 a.m. and no trucks came. People drifted away slowly. I asked where the bridge was that went over the Salt River to the Pima Reservation, intending to visit my Pima friend Martin with whom I had worked in the lettuce last year. There was a bridge at lateral 20 I was told, so Joe and I walked down that way. After a few miles one young fellow who had been standing around the fire drove by and stopped, giving us a ride for the remaining four miles to lateral 20. He spoke about not liking to stand around a fire with colored folks and remarked about how he would like to shoot one just as well as to look at one. We did not ask him how many notches he had on his mythical gun but tried to insert a word against such bigotry, but doubt if it did much good. We walked toward the river for a few miles and finally came to a
