I con Jack out of some of his beer...

Springtime in Wenatchee is cool and pleasant. Momma and Daddy got jobs at the hop orchard where Billy, Gladys, Charlie and Velma already worked. Daddy dug postholes and put together climbing frames for the vines. Momma trained the vines and weeded and sorted strawberries, grapes and vegetables for the truck farm next door.

I sat on a pallet next to the field with Johnny Blankenship while our mothers worked. Sometimes they left us with a teenage babysitter, Betty, back in one of the cabins.

The cabins were small, just one room each with metal doors on the cabinets in the tiny kitchenette. One day, Johnny suddenly opened a cabinet door, hitting me in the head with the sharp corner.

The terrified babysitter ran all the way to the hop orchard carrying me while I screamed and bled all over her. Poor Johnny on his fat little two-year-old legs ran behind us, crying, too, because he had hurt me. I still have the scar in the edge of my hair after almost sixty years.

Later, Betty got in trouble with our parents for trying to make us wear diapers so she could practice changing them since she planned to get married when she turned sixteen in the summer. We were potty trained and didn't like being treated like babies so we told on her.

Momma and Velma said that the next time Betty suggested Johnny wear a diaper that he take his peepee out and wet on her. Gladys didn't think that was such a good idea but they talked her into telling him to do it.

He couldn't wait to try it and the next day, before Betty even mentioned diapers or anything, he did it and I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Betty laughed too and laughed even more when I told her that if she tried to put a diaper on me I would poop on her.

Charlie's brother Jack, Betty's boyfriend, would sometimes come and hide beer in our icebox since Velma would not let him keep it at Charlie's place. Once I talked Jack into sharing a sip of the beer with me because I told him that Momma and Daddy gave me beer all the time. I meant root beer and when I tasted what Jack gave me I told him it was the worst beer I had ever tasted and that he should take it back to the store because it had turned to buttermilk.

Betty and Jack got into trouble again when I told my dad about how bad the beer was that Jack had hid behind the ice, milk, lettuce and grapes. They ended up running away to get married, even though neither of them was old enough to do so without their parents saying it was okay.

So we didn't have a babysitter anymore and Johnny and I played under the trees while our mothers worked in the hop orchard and in the long sorting sheds beside the truck farm. It got hot in the summer and we would pull off our clothes and run through the tall sourgrass and get little red marks on our arms and legs where the sharp edges almost cut us.

We would try to hide when our mothers chased us but they always found us and made us put our clothes back on. Somebody took pictures of us playing in the grass wearing nothing but our shirts. They used one of those old black box cameras and all you can see is two little kids in white t-shirts far away on a huge field of grass.

Most of the summer had passed and so had my third birthday when Momma and Daddy decided to go back to Arkansas. I don't know why. Maybe they had a letter from someone there needing them to come back.

We loaded up the Packard the same way again and started back toward Arkansas. But something happened. They played my favorite song on the radio.

The brat in the back seat throws her weight around...

The radio played my favorite song, "Big Rock Candy Mountain," all summer long in two or three different versions. Burl Ives sang it on the pop stations, and Harry McClintock sang it on the Country and Western stations in between Hank Williams tunes. I loved that song.

I made everybody be quiet whenever it was playing. I would shush them, and I wasn't above climbing into someone's lap and putting a hand over their mouth if they wouldn't shut up talking while I listened to my favorite song.

And then on the trip back to Arkansas, Momma made the mistake of reading a sign that said, "Big Rock Candy Mountain" so many miles down the road. There were more signs often enough that it became a game to me to spot them before Momma could read them. I couldn't read, but I could recognize those signs with their jumble of candy-colored mountains behind a big set of words.

Big Rock Candy Mountain must be a real place, I believed. I began to sing the song and make up my own words about puppy dogs and root beer, and houses made of ice cream. I probably sang it a hundred times, with Momma and Daddy laughing at first but probably getting pretty tired of it after a while.

We came to a fork in the road, just north of Salt Lake City. Turn east here for Arkansas, keep going south for the Big Rock Candy Mountain. A sign with an arrow on it pointed the way to the land of Lemonade Springs and Peppermint Trees. And Daddy turned east.

I howled. I screamed. I cried as only a three-year-old can because adults won't use up their lungs that way. Daddy, the goal-oriented driver, was going to Arkansas and did not intend to make a side-trip to the Big Rock Candy Mountain where little kids could play with the rubber-toothed bulldogs.

Momma tried to reason with me, but I wasn't having any of it. I cried till I choked, and I choked till I puked, and Momma had to crawl into the back to clean me up.

So she tried to reason with him. Couldn't we go on a little farther south before we turned back east? she asked.

No, he said, we'd already passed the turn-off, and it was too late to change our minds. We were going to Arkansas.

I wailed. I blew bubbles of snot out of my nose. I threw up again. Momma cleaned me up once more and put me into the front seat next to Daddy. I got the hiccoughs. I sat there beside him and looked up with my baby blue eyes, and asked him, please could we go see the Big Rock Candy Mountain? Hic.

We stopped for gas. Momma took me to the restroom, and we both changed clothes. When we came out, Daddy had the car filled up and pointed toward the road. We climbed in, and I sat between them in the front seat. Daddy had bought us all soda pop, a root beer for me, and we ate some peanuts.

Daddy called me "Punkin" back then. Punkin, he said, will you promise not to cry for anything else on this whole trip if we go back and see the Big Rock Candy Mountain?

Oh, yes, I said. I promise. Are we going to go back? I asked.

I guess so, said Daddy. We can just keep going south and visit your Aunt Grace and Uncle Herman in Casa Grande. After we see them, we can go back to Arkansas before the winter makes the roads too bad.

I think I started singing again then.

Momma said, maybe we can see the Grand Canyon on the way, too.

Don't you start, said Daddy. That would be another side-trip.

But that's how the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain" kept us from being in Arkansas, so we could go out to California and save my Aunt Opal from starving to death.

Yes, we did stop at the Big Rock Candy Mountain. No, I don't remmeber it. On to Casa Grande...

Casa Grande is a small city south of Phoenix, Arizona. Back in 1951 it was a place of cotton farms and cattle ranches.

Aunt Grace was Momma’s second oldest sister, a plump cheerful woman with black hair and a house full of kids all older than me. Uncle Herman was a big Oklahoman with a booming voice and a call to the ministry. I'm not sure if he had a church in Casa Grande that time but when he wasn't preaching he worked on farms or in the construction business.

There were other cousins in the general area, too. The Arkie and Okie diaspora of the twenties and thirties had spread the hill clans all over the West, especially Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington, all of which were developing rapidly and needed people. Wages were high because there were never enough workers.

Like in a lot of cotton-growing areas, when the cotton crop needed work -- planting, weeding or picking -- everybody jumped in and worked at it. Buses would bring people from other areas, even Mexico, to work in the fields and the state and federal governments co-ordinated things so that the cotton crops in different areas didn't all need work at the same time. Picking time was August in Missouri and Arkansas and got later as you went west, as late as January in some parts of California.

I remember it being spring and summer in Washington but it must have been September by the time we got to Casa Grande because everyone was working in the cotton fields bringing in sacks of white gold. Mills in the eastern states were trying to clothe a nation and the world and they needed lots of the stuff.

The cotton farmers offered pay so high that my parents delayed going on to Arkansas after our visit with Aunt Grace and Uncle Herman and stayed to pick cotton at good wages. I even had a tiny little cotton sack and went to the fields with Mom and Dad.

Workers were paid by the pound but when I would get a little cotton in my bag, I would go to the water wagon and crawl under it to sleep with my head on the pillowy sack. I liked to lay there and watch the grown-ups and bigger kids work.

There were lots of kids near my age to play with and it was lying in the dirt under the wagon where I first learned some Spanish from my Mexican and Indian playmates. I don't think I realized it was a different language, just a different way of talking.

The wagon was made of old wood and rusty iron and had several big sideways metal barrels full of water with house-style faucets for turning them on and off. One barrel had a drinking fountain as well as a faucet. Because of the dripping water, the cottonwood trees it was parked under, and the big mass of the wagon, things stayed cool underneath even when the temperature got well over 100 degrees.

Fall weather in Casa Grande is still warm compared to fall anywhere else. Most of the men wore denim overalls or khaki trousers and long-sleeved cotton shirts with straw or felt hats. The Mexicans, both immigrants and Mexican-Americans, tended to wear bigger hats. My father seldom wore a hat, he had a lot of perfectly-combed, curly, black hair and a hat would mess it up.

The local Indians usually wore white or gray trousers instead of khaki. A number of black people dressed pretty much like the whites. The young men of all of the groups would sometimes take off their shirts to work, probably as much to show off for the girls as to stay cool.

The women worked in the fields right alongside the men. Some of them wore dresses but usually they wore bib overalls. Momma wore khaki pants under a thin cotton print dress to protect her legs from the sharp edges of the plants, as did a lot of other women and girls. Many of them would quit work in mid-morning to prepare lunch then back to work in the afternoon and quit earlier than the men in the evening so they could go home and make dinner.

Myself, I wore bib overalls like more than half of the kids there and more than half of the grownups, too.

Kids of all ages either helped pick cotton or played around the edges of the field, or like me, sat in the shade and watched. Some of the women actually picked cotton while carrying a baby at the hip. This was boom time and good money could be made.

The Mexicans and Indians ate beans and tortillas with hot chili peppers for lunch. They drank water with their meals. The whites and blacks, almost all of whom were from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri or Texas, ate cornbread, pot beans, fried squash, sliced onions and drank lots of iced tea when they could get it. Some of the men drank beer and a few of the kids had sodas.

Cotton bags were weighed when full and at the end of the day and someone recorded the weights. Wages were paid daily in cash at a little table under the trees lining the edge of the fields. I don't know how much they were paid per pound but Mom and Dad were happy that they were earning more than they had in Wenatchee or in almost any other sort of work they had ever done. Wages were four times as much as similar work paid in Arkansas or Missouri.

Picking cotton is hard labor and I took frequent breaks under the water wagon where I probably cemented another one of my nicknames. My cousins called me "Doodlebug" because I liked to play in the dirt, digging holes and making lines and shapes with sticks. A doodlebug is an ant lion in Arkansawyerese. Still, I did pick some cotton. All told, in three weeks, Momma later told me that I earned thirty cents. Not bad money for a three-year-old in 1951, I suppose.

We finally made it to California!

Near the end of the three weeks, Aunt Grace got a phone call from Aunt Opal, the oldest of the sisters. Aunt Opal lived in Brawley, California a town almost as much like Casa Grande as Cleveland is like Chicago, which is to say, quite a lot and not at all.

Both desert cities had mixed populations of blacks, white Anglos and at least two flavors of Mexicans with a few Indians in Casa Grande and a few Asians in Brawley. Both had cattle ranches and farms surrounding them. Both grew a lot of cotton, though Brawley's picking season was in mid-winter rather than early fall, and farms around Brawley did more truck farming, like Wenatchee. Both did a lot of irrigation, Brawley from canals, Casa Grande from a convenient river and lots of wells.

Other than those economic facts, they weren't much alike, somehow. Despite being located in one of the hottest, driest deserts in the world, Brawley seemed to be twenty times as green as Casa Grande. To anyone from a truly green city like St. Joseph, Missouri or Portland, Oregon, Brawley looked dry and drab and tan and gray. Compared to Casa Grande, though, Brawley could have been the Emerald City of Oz. After all, it was surrounded by a deadly desert.

Aunt Opal had moved to Brawley with her husband, Ray, and three children, Helen, Jane and John, a few years earlier. Ray had a habit of disappearing, sometimes for years at a time. According to Momma, he only showed up every four or five years to get Aunt Opal pregnant then he was gone again.

This time, Ray had left Aunt Opal with no money for food or rent and with three young children. She couldn't afford to hire someone to look after the younger ones. Helen and Jane went to school but John was only five and there was no kindergarten in town.

The only thing Aunt Opal had bringing any money in was doing other people's ironing and mending. In the heat of a Mohave desert summer, in an un-airconditioned cottage, she did as much ironing and mending as she could find to do. What money she earned went for food, she couldn't afford rent and if she had not been staying in Hanks’s Court, owned by my Uncle Herman's brothers and sister, she would have been out on the street.

Uncle Herman was her brother-in-law, of course, and for Arkies and Okies back then, that relationship mattered. Herbert and Lloyd and Marie would not kick her out because of family, but they sent a letter to Uncle Herman to see if he could get her some help. Then they let her make a long distance phone call to Aunt Grace in Arizona.

And there we were. We hadn't gone to Arkansas, first because of my tantrum about the Big Rock Candy Mountain (which I did see but don’t really remember, HA!), and then because of the cotton harvest in Casa Grande, and so we were available to travel the hundred fifty miles from Casa Grande to Brawley to Aunt Opal's rescue.

I got all excited because it meant seeing more cousins. John and Jane and Helen were all older than me and I only vaguely remembered them from back in Missouri but cousins meant fun. It would be my first visit to Brawley, a town where I eventually spent many of my growing up years.

We made the trip in Dad’s typical style, leaving Casa Grande at first light in the morning and arriving in Brawley before some people had had time to eat breakfast. After the burning deserts and sand dunes, Brawley seemed cool and soft and green. On the northwest corner of the town sat Hanks’ Court, a collection of small cottages surrounded by chinaberry trees with a grove of more trees in the middle.

And all of the chinaberry trees were painted white as high up as a tall man could reach. I never did know why, except perhaps that Herbert, Uncle Herman’s older brother, liked things to look neat and clean. Every tree also had a thick rubber boot made from an old inner tube just above the paint to keep cats and kids from climbing the trees. In the summer, the leafy green tops hid the boots but in the winter when chinaberry trees lose their leaves, the white trunks, black rubber boots and the pruned-back bare limbs made the trees look very odd. There were clotheslines strung from tree to tree, too, one on each side of each tree and two rows of trees.

We moved into one of the little cottages, with Aunt Opal in one across the courtyard of chinaberry trees and clotheslines. These cabins came in two sizes; small and tiny. The bigger cabins were about twelve by twenty-five feet and were three rooms, shotgun-style; if you stood at the front door, you could shoot your shotgun through the house at something outside the back door. Full choke, I suppose.

The smaller cabins measured about ten by twenty and had only two rooms, though both sizes managed to squeeze in cramped bathrooms. When I say cramped, I mean a three-year-old thought they were too small. They were so small, they had no tubs or showers, just sinks and toilets. There were showers in a building at one end of the complex that also held a sort of laundromat.

The cottages had originally been built in the early 1920s to house people who worked on city constructions; streets, water, sewer, gas, power and municipal buildings. The court covered about half a city block with thirty or more of the tiny cabins. A single, larger house on the corner was home and office for the Hanks's; Herbert, his wife and children, and his younger siblings.

At the back of the court, a long building with screen windows that could be closed in the winter with plywood panels held a laundry room at one end and shower stalls at the other end. Modern for the time, because the washers were electric, but there were no dryers. Running a load of wash cost a nickel but the showers were free for residents.

The two rows of clotheslines nailed to trees in the courtyard were usually full of clothes. In the desert air, even the wettest of clothes would dry in an hour or so, the danger being the dirty winds blowing off the farm fields north and west of the town.

Busy streets on three sides of the court meant that we little kids were not allowed outside to play without a parent or at least a bigger kid to act as babysitter.

Helen, who for some reason everyone called “Vonzell” at this time, was ruled not quite old enough to babysit. I think she was 12 or 13. (That can’t be right! She was older than that.) I was in high school before I found out her name was Helen. This is a Southern thing: you give a kid a name and then call them something else.

Helen (or Vonzelle) had more freedom while at the same time getting assigned more chores, like helping with the ironing and running errands. I think Marie, who must have been only about fifteen then, helped Aunt Opal with the babysitting.

Lloyd and Herbert did repairs, and I think worked as painters and drywallers on construction around town with a crew of Mexican immigrants. Daddy worked for a time with them, but he never was much of a painter, and Herbert and he did not get along well when together for very long.

More than fifty years passed and Lloyd and Marie attended my Mom's funeral but they still remembered me best as the littlest kid who would run and run to keep up with the bigger kids and then suddenly be found sleeping in some unlikely place like a laundry basket or under the porch with a litter of puppies. I had a ton of blonde curls back then and I must have been adorable.