Sal Si Puedes (Escape If You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (34 page)

Cesar remembers it differently. He describes his father
as a true unionist who would join any workers organization
that might help: “We were involved in more plain walkouts
than any other family.”

Cesar stopped talking to point at freight cars on a railroad
siding; the cars, softened by the twilight, were heaped
with huge coarse sugar beets. “That is one crop I’m glad is
automated. That was work for an animal, not a man. Stooping
and digging all day, and the beets are
heavy
—oh, that’s
brutal work. And then to go home to some little place,
with all those kids, and hot and dirty—
that
is how a man
is crucified.
Cru
-cified,” he repeated, with a very low, intense
burst of real anger. He gazed back at the silent cars
of beets as they dropped behind. “The growers don’t care
about people and they never will. Their improvements,
their labor-saving devices, are all for their own benefit, not
for ours. But once we get a union, we’ll be protected.”

But automation threatens to remove the jobs before the
Union can get decent job conditions; wage increases and
other benefits will only hasten the process. The growers
all talk of a machine that will automate the table-grape
industry within five years, and although this seems unlikely—individual
grapes infected with mildew must be
cut out of each bunch or the grapes will rot in shipment—the
fact remains that crop after crop is being automated.
Reading my thoughts, Chavez said, “We’re not afraid of
automation. We’ll split the profits of progress with them
fifty-fifty.”

Two thirds of the way to Bakersfield, Cesar strapped
himself into his safety belt. In the back of the car, the three
children were singing:

“If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning
“I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land
“I’d hammer out mercy, I’d hammer out justice
“I’d hammer out love between the sisters and
    the brothers
“All over this land  .  .  .”

The children said they had learned the song from the
radio. Cesar did not know it. He said he liked music but
could not sing a note. “First I liked Mexican music—you
know,
mariachi
. Then I went through the stage as a teenager
when I rejected Mexican music; I thought it was silly.
I liked Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, Woody Herman.
All the big bands had one-night stands around here, and
we saw most of them. But then I began to go back to Mexican
music. I think
mariachi
is beautiful; it gives me a real
beautiful feeling.” He sighed. “But I cannot sing. I used
to like to dance, but I cannot sing.
‘Todo está en el hombre
menos al cantar bien.’
That was one of my mother’s
dichos:
‘Everything is given to man except the ability to sing.’”

At Bill Lee’s Chopsticks we sat at a big table in the
corner. Sylvia, Linda, Elouise, Anna and their friend Obdulia
wished the combination shrimp plate; the rest of us
left the ordering to Cesar. Because the table was split into
two camps, there were lots of jokes between Cesar and his
children about shrimp strikes and hungry strikebreakers
who might cross the picket line in the middle of the table.
In the excitement Cesar repeatedly confused the names of
Sylvia and Linda, his very pretty eldest daughters, until
Linda cried cheerfully, “He doesn’t know us apart!” Cesar
shook his head ruefully; he gazed at her until she looked at
him and smiled. “Do you remember when I had you numbered?
Number Five!” He saluted. “‘Yes, Father!’ Number
Eight!” He saluted. “‘Yes, Father!’” But when he called
Linda “Sylvia” again, his wife hissed at him with real
vehemence. She had been reserved and very quiet all evening;
he looked at her with genuine concern.

“There was a Colonel Somebody at Schenley,” Helen
Chavez said, in an attempt to ease matters. Cesar called
him ‘Major.’”

“Sometimes I called him
‘Mayor,’
” Cesar said, feigning
terror. Helen, who has fierce Spanish eyebrows, was still
looking cross; her father was a colonel under Pancho Villa
in the Revolution, and Chavez teases her about her hot
blood. He began to tease her now about their courtship.
They had met in Delano during World War II when Chavez,
then fifteen and still migrating, had found himself
stranded there, out of a job. At that time Helen Fabela, a
pretty Delano girl, worked in the People’s Market at Garces
and Glenwood. “She used to give me gas coupons, I think,”
Cesar told the children. “Then she asked me to a show. How
could I say no?” In spite of herself, Helen Chavez began to
smile.

“Who paid?” Sylvia asked.

“She did, of course. And once I was sitting in the Pagoda
restaurant with Roberto Jimenez. We had ordered a
big
bowl of rice”—with his usual optimism about the past,
Cesar spread his hands apart to show the great size of the
bowl, but his wife shook her head; “Twenty cents’ worth,”
she said, trying not to laugh—“and your mother came in
with her girl friend and asked if they could join us, and I
said, ‘Of course.’” He chuckled and looked contentedly
at his wife. “She had a job and I did not—what could I
do? The little money I could make I sent to my mother.”

“I give all my money to my mother too,” Babo announced,
and Birdie snorted.

“
What
money?”

“Oh, I got a few pennies,” Babo said.

Cesar did not mention the time, in 1945, when he and
Helen were arrested in Delano for sitting on the wrong side
of the segregated movie theater and refusing to move. He
gazed appreciatively at his children as he chewed.

“Were you a lover in your days?” Linda inquired.

“Love ’em and leave ’em, I bet,” another daughter said,
and the shrimp eaters giggled in unison. The children are
all salty and affectionate with their father without being
impolite.

“Well, I was very friendly, you know; a lot of girls were
my friends, but I was not a lover.” Chavez said this simply,
without coyness. He has no
machismo
, but on the other
hand, he much prefers domesticated, motherly women: if
Cesar woke up thirsty in the night, he would expect Helen
to fetch him a glass of water. Once an aggrieved female
aide accused him angrily of being a phony: “You’re just
as
macho
as all the rest; you think women are different!”
“That’s right!” Cesar retorted. “They’re all crazy!”

Babo was trying to extract his fortune without breaking
his cookie, but the rest of us read our fates aloud to the
whole company. Birdie, who is the youngest child, read
out the following in a slow and serious voice: “You will be
able to encourage a younger person.”

Cesar was called to the telephone, and we waited for
him in the street. The only bookstore for fifty miles in any
direction was across the street from the restaurant, and
Helen said, “I hope it isn’t open. Books and camera
stores—he’ll be in there all night.” Helen’s shyness made me
feel shy myself. She mistrusts reporters and had no real
reason to make an exception in my case; doubtless she felt
that in making friends with me, Cesar and Ann Israel had
made a great mistake. The reporters that flock around the
Union are only another burden in a life of unbroken toil
and insecurity; apart from that, Helen is very shy by nature,
and determined that the outside world shall not invade her
private life. “Her sense of privacy is what I like about her,”
her husband says. “I mean, I like
everything
about her, but
I really like that a lot.” In the Sacramento march, Helen
refused to walk in the front ranks with the leaders but remained
well behind, out of range of the TV cameras and
microphones.

I said I supposed she would be very glad when the strike
was over. Her smile, when it appears, is a beautiful surprise.
“Yes,” she said, with all her heart. She paid no attention to
the fatuity of my remark; standing there on the sidewalk,
considering life without the strike, she didn’t even know
that I was there.

Over the radio, on the way home, came a gust of windy
platitudes out of Miami; the Republican National Convention
had begun. I turned off the radio, and Cesar and I
reminisced about our service days. We are the same age,
and we were both Navy enlisted men in the Pacific at the
end of World War II, so that our points of reference, at age
nineteen, were much the same. We both liked Benny Goodman
and Sugar Ray, and remembered the better fights of
Rocky Graziano and Tony Zale.

Cesar first became interested in photography while in
the Navy. “I got in this poker game,” he said. “I think it
was the first and last time I ever gambled. And I won and
I won—I could not stop winning; there was more money
lying there than I had ever seen before. And I couldn’t quit;
the guy who gets that far ahead, he can never quit.” He
shook his head. “I’d gotten myself in a terrible fix by winning
all that money, you see.” Finally a loser begged Chavez
to buy his camera so that he could keep on losing. Chavez
forgets what happened to the money, but he kept the
camera and started taking a few pictures. He dislikes the
tourist feeling that he gets from having it strapped around
his neck, but he still uses it occasionally and looks forward
to a life in which he might have time to be a professional
photographer.

After joining the Navy in 1944, Cesar served for two
years on a destroyer escort on weather patrol out of Saipan.
He had never been on a ship before, and at first he was
very seasick and frightened of the sea. The ocean still disturbs
him. “I like the sea, but I don’t rest there. I think.
The waves coming in, you know—they make me think. I
love the woods,” he says. “Big trees. That’s where I rest.”

In 1948 Chavez and Helen Fabela got married; Richard
married Sally Gerola a few months later.

“We went to live on a farm near San Jose, and there was
a little tiny house for me and my family. I was married, and
then my mother and my dad, my sister and brother. We
worked the strawberries, sharecropping—it was horrible.
We worked there for two and a half years and never made
any money: we figured later that the whole family was making
twenty-three cents an hour. At the end of every month
we just didn’t have anything left over. We worked for two
and a half years every day—every single day—and I
couldn’t get my dad to leave. I didn’t want to leave him
there, yet I couldn’t get him to leave because he’d made a
commitment, you know. His word! There were hundreds of
people caught in this exploitation. Finally,
finally
we got
him to admit that we were being taken and that the best
thing was just to leave the whole damn thing.”

While still childless, Richard and Cesar shared a house in
Sal Si Puedes, and often the same tree in the apricot groves.
Cesar talked continually about the exploitation of farm
workers, but could think of no way out. Toward 1950, hearing
of well-paid work in the lumber camps of northern
California, the brothers migrated to the Smith River, just
south of the Oregon border. It was summer, and they slept
in the big woods along the river. One day they asked the
foreman if they could build a cabin in the woods, and because
they were both good, dependable workers, the permission
was granted. In their spare time they built a serviceable
cabin, and in the process learned basic carpentry. For
Richard, this was a turning point; three years later he became
an apprentice carpenter. And for a time Cesar himself
worked in a cabinet shop, as a “putty man and glazing
expert,” Richard says. “He has small hands, you know, and
was very good at it.”

The brothers loved the cool forest and the river, they
were proud of their fine cabin, and they made good money.
Nevertheless, though both had steady work and could have
brought their wives there, they returned that same year to
San Jose. As Richard says, “We’d left something behind, I
guess, that we didn’t want to leave.”

By 1951, Richard had already moved into the trade of
carpentry, and by 1952, Cesar found a union job in a local
yard as a lumber handler. In this period he made friends
with the parish priest, Father Donald McDonnell, who
taught him a good deal about the labor movement. “I
would do anything to get Father to tell me about labor
history,” he has said. “I began going to the
bracero
camps
with him to help with mass, to the city jail with him to talk
with the prisoners—anything to be with him so that he
could tell me more about the farm labor movement.”

But Chavez still smoldered about his inability to improve
his own plight and that of farm workers; like the rest, he
was penniless and uneducated, and his first child, Fernando,
had already been born. Embittered, he fought off
Fred Ross when Ross first appeared in Sal Si Puedes. But
within a few days, in Ross’s words, the greatest potential
grass-roots leader that Ross had ever seen “burst into
flame.”

Jim Drake, Leroy Chatfield and Dave Averbuck were
already at Jerry Cohen’s house when we arrived. Like Cohen,
Averbuck went to law school at Berkeley, where both
were sympathetic to, though not a part of, the Free Speech
Movement that began the modern rampage of student protest.
Though he had worked with Cohen only a few months,
he had quickly learned about the perils of his job. Ten
days before my arrival, while working late, they were surprised
by an intruder who entered the law office through
a window. Pointing a gun at the young lawyers, the man
said, “I’m going to get you bastards,” then retreated the
way he had come.

The group chattered for a while about Cohen’s press
conference in San Francisco, then discussed the possibility
of a meeting with Senator McCarthy. “The Democrats
should run
you
, Cesar!” Cohen called. “You’d
really
stink
things up, back in Chicago!” Chavez peered at him, disingenuous.
“You mean stink bombs?”