Pretty isn’t the word I’d use to describe this house. Pretentious yes. A Spanish-style mansion that we can’t really afford. My late father-in-law, Frank’s father, built it early in the Midas-touch twenties when apricots were still worth growing. Now, we have keep it up, keep at least the minimum of servants, pretend to be prosperous, or have the circling banks close in. Appearances are important when one is relying on credit and in these times credit has become just so nervous. Here in California the apricot harvest and our profits come in May and June. The rest of the year it’s all outgoings. Since the bottom fell out of the markets we have had little spare cash of our own. In the mad euphoric times Frank did what so many others did. He bought shares on margin assumimg that they were going to climb forever. He lost the entire surplus that his daddy had accumulated and yet he doesn’t see himself as being in any way at fault but then I don’t see anyone else accepting blame. Our collective foolishness and greed has not only crippled our own country but financially crippled the entire world. I would doubt that we are the only ones in this valley fending off the banks and it’s coming up May when the trees set the rules. The pickers, the packers, those wandering homeless tribes, will soon be flooding into our valley. ‘The Associated Farmers’ insists that growers’ survival requires that piece rates must be made even lower for 1934 and none of us dare break ranks. Yet we are still meant to see ourselves as occupying the moral high ground in providing APRICOTS Page 2
work for these nomads. Myself, I don’t see how the rates can be any lower than they were. We landowners may be suffering but these people have nothing. They have just survived their three worst hunger months. Except for those lucky few who found early-vegetable work, Java beans, brussell sprouts, asparagus, and the like. I feel for these people. It used to be that Califonia’s itinerant field workers were Mexicans and Asians. We have always needed help with the harvest. We would ship them in, chase them off, glad to be rid of them, when our own crop was in. The state shipped them home when the various seasons had ended. But now, they are our countrymen who have crashed in these hard times. Like other growers we have basic accommodation quarters that they can rent but even these are too expensive for those with more than one mouth to feed. They congregate in ‘Gypsy’ camps set up near a spring or water course. They have no sanitation. Even the best housed will have no more than a tattered tent. And all of them have cot-case cars that they hope will somehow stagger with them to the next harvest. These form an important part of their accommodation. At least some of their kids can sleep off the ground but child mortality is high and a doctor will only call when a child is dead. The county will do nothing for them when they’re alive. I have longed for a child but these unfortunates, for whom each new mouth is further disaster, seem to produce them all too easily. What have we come to in this country? We have a civil war even though no guns are being fired. We take cruel advantage of our fellow countrymen and when they try to unionise we farmers cry’foul’ and paint the organisers as ‘reds’,
APRICOTS Page 3 and ‘foreign agitators’, and their actions as ‘Un-American’. We cannot have the workers gain the least power. As taxpayers of the county, the courts and the police force are behind us. When we ask the authorities to deal with these trouble-makers, we are supposedly doing our duty in preserving the American way of life. And naturally, they see us as their enemy. We take a serious risk in entering their camps. And being part of that enemy I can do nothing obvious to help them. They would never accept it. I have done one sneaky thing though. I have aloes growing here in the garden. I get these awful skin rashes and have found that the aloes juice always helps. It seems to be useful for just about anything that afflicts one’s outside. It is almost magic in fact. Several years ago I visited the two nearest sites, then unoccupied, and trod-in a few of the aloes from my garden here. A free remedy that they can have readily available. Although aloes are not native to California I was hoping that they would think them somehow established naturally. Otherwise they would just pull them out. That’s what hatred does. California is one vast garden and yet we have people here dying from starvation. So Roosevelt has got into the White House with his New Deal and his campaign song ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’. Happy days? We have yet to see any of those happy days here. Politicians trumpet that ‘tomorrow is going to be a great day’ but of what use is ’tomorrow’ to the starving infant seeking comfort from the long-dry breast of its malnourished distraught mother?