'."
I said, "I wuz born travelin'. Good-bye!"
The car and the lights whirled around in the road, and the tail light
and the radio music blacked out down the road in the rain.
I walked a few steps and seen it was too rainy and bad to see in the
fog, so I went to thinking about some kind of a place to lay down out of the
weather and go to sleep. I walked up to the headstones of a long cement
bridge that bent across a running river. And down under the bridge I found a
couple of dozen other people curled up, grinding their teeth in the mist and
already dreaming. The ground was loose dirt and was awful cold and damp, but
not wet or muddy, as the rain couldn't hit us under the concrete. I seen men
paired up snoring together, some rolled in newspapers and brown wrapping
paper, others in a chilled blanket, one or two here and yonder all snoozed
up in some mighty warm-looking bedrolls. And for a minute, I thought, I'm a
dam fool not to carry my own bedroll; but then again, in the hot daytime a
heavy bedroll is clumsy, no good, and in the way, and besides, people won't
give you a ride if you're lugging an old dirty bundle. So here in the
moisture of the wind whiffing under the bridge, I scanned around for
something to use for a mattress, for a pillow, and for a virgin wool
blanket. I found a soaked piece of wrapping paper which I shook the water
off of, and spread on the dirt for my easy-rider mattress; but I didn't find
a pillow, nor anything to use as a blanket. I drew my muscles down into just
a little pile of meat and bones, and shivered on the paper for about an
hour. My breath swishing, and teeth hitting together, woke a big
square-built man up off his bedroll. He listened at me for a minute, and
then asked me, "Don't you know your shiverin's keepin' everybody awake?" I
said, "Y-y-y-es-s-s, I sup-p-pose it is; I ain't gettin' no sleep, on
account of it." Then he said, "You sound like a snare drum rattlin' that
paper; c'mon over here an' den up with me."
I rolled across the ground and peeled off my wet clothes, my gobby
shoes, and stacked them up in a pile; and then he turned his wool blankets
back and said, "Hurry, jump in before the covers get wet!" I was still
shivering and shaking so hard it jerked my whole body into kinks, and
cramped me all over so that I couldn't move my lips to say a word. I scooted
my feet down inside and then pulled the itchy covers all up over my head.
"You feel like a bucket of cold frogs,'' the man told me. "Where've you
been?"
I kept on shaking, without saying a word.
"Cops walk you?" he asked me. And I just nodded my head with my back to
him.
"I'm not minding this weather very much; I'm on my way to where it will
be a hell of a lot colder than this. I don't know about the cops, but, I'll
be in Vancouver by this time next week; and I know it'll freeze the horns
off of a brass bulldog up 'there. Lumberjack. Timber. I guess you're too
cold to talk much, huh?" And his last words blotted and soaked out across
the swampy river bottom and faded away somewhere in the fog horn and red and
green lights on a little boat that pounded down the waters.
It was hard for me to walk next morning early on account of my legs
being drawn like torn leather. My thighs felt like the gristle was tore
loose from my bones, and my knees ached and jittered in the joints. I shook
hands with the lumberjack and we went our opposite ways. I never did get a
real close look at him in the clouds; and when he walked away, his head and
shoulders just sort of swum away in the fog of the morning. I had made
another friend I couldn't see. And I walked along thinking, Well, now, I
don't know if I'll ever see that man again or not, but I'll see a lot of men
a lot of places and I'll wonder if that could be him.
Before long the sun and the fog had fought and flounced around so long
on the river banks the highway run along that it didn't seem like there was
enough room in the trees and reeds and canebrakes for the sun or the clouds,
either one, to really win out; so the clouds from the ground got mad and
raised up off of the earth to grab a-hold of the sunrays, and fight it out
higher up in the air. I caught a ride on a truckload of grape stakes and
heard a hard-looking truck driver cuss the narrow, bad roads that cause you
to get killed so quick; and then found myself wheeling along with a deaf
farmer for an hour or two, an Italian grape grower in debt all of the time,
a couple of cowboys trying to beat their way to a new rodeo; and before the
day was wore very slick, I was walking down the streets of Sonora, the queen
of the gold towns, in the upper foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Sonera's crooked, narrow streets bent and run about as wild as some of
the prospectors and their burros, and I thought as I pushed my way along the
tight alleys called streets, that maybe the whole town had been laid out by
just following the tracks of a runaway prospector. Little houses poking
their bellies out over the curbs and sidewalks, and streets so steep I had
to throw myself in low gear to pull them. Down again so steep, I figured,
that most of Sonora's citizens come and went by way of parachutes. Creeks
and rocky rivers guggling along under the streets, where the gambling dives
and dram joints flush their mistakes down the drains, where, on down the
creek a-ways, the waters are planned by hungry gold-bugs.
I walked along with my address in my hand, seeing herds of cowboys,
miners, timber men, and hard-working, pioneer-looking women and kids from
the mountains around; and saw, too, the fake cowboys, the drug-store
calibre, blazing shirts of all bright colors along the streets, and
crippling along bowlegged in boots never meant to be worn on the hard
concrete. And the honest working people stand along in bunches and laugh
under their breath when the fake dudes buckle past.
In the smell of the high pines and the ripple of the nugget creeks,
Sonora, an old town now, is rated as California's second richest person.
Pasadena is first, and looks it, but what fools you in Sonora is that it
looks like one of the poorest. I walked up the main street loaded to the
brim with horses, hay, children playing, jallopy cars of the ranchers and
working folks around, buggies of the Indians, wagons loaded with groceries
for grubstake, town cars, limousines, sporty jobs, the big V-16's and the
V-Twelves. The main street crooks pretty sharp right in the business end,
and crooks another time or two trying to get out of the first crook. The
street is so narrow that people sneeze on the right-hand side and apologize
to the ones on the left.
I asked a fireman asleep on a bench, "Could you tell me where bouts
this address is?"
He disturbed, without scaring, a fly on his eyelid, and told me, 'It's
that big rock house right yonder up that hill. No danger of missing it, it
covers the whole hill."
I thanked him and started walking up a three-block flight of rock steps
thinking, Boy, I'm as dirty an' ragged an' messed up as one feller can git.
Knees outta my britches. My face needs about a half a dozen shaves. Hands
all smeary. Coal dust an' soot all over me. I don't know if I'd even know
myself in a lookin-glass. Shirt all tore to hell, an' my shoes stinkin' with
sweat. That's a hell of a big rock house up there. Musta took a mighty lot
of work ta build it. I'd go back down in town to a fillin' station an' wash
an' clean up, but gosh, I'm so empty an' hungry, so tremblin' weak, I don't
know, I couldn't pull it back up these long steps again. I'll go on up.
A black iron fence and a cedar hedge fenced the whole yard off. I stood
at the gate with the letter in my hand, looking up and down, back down at
the town and the people, and then through the irons at the mansion. I wiped
the sweat off of my face on the arm of my shirt, and unlocked the gate and
walked through. Wide green grass lawn that made me think of golf courses I'd
caddied on. Mowed and petted and smoothed and kept, the yard had a look like
it had just got back from a barber shop. The whiff of the scrub cedar and
middle-size pine, on top of the flowers that jumped up all around, made it
smell good and healthy, like a home for crippled children. But the whole
place was so still and so hushed and quiet, that I was thinking maybe
everybody was gone off somewhere. When I walked the rock walk a little more,
the whole house got plainer to see: gray native stones from the hills
around, flagstone porches and sandrock columns holding up the roof; windows
so high and wide that the sun got lost trying to find a way to shine through
all of them big thick drapes and curtains. Iron braces in the windows built
to keep the nice, good, healthy sunshine out for a long, long time. Big
double doors with iron cross braces, handles like the entrance to a funeral
parlor, locks bigger and stouter than any jail I'd ever slept in.
I'll walk quieter now, because this porch makes a lot of noise, and a
little noise, I bet, would scare all of these trees and flowers to death.
This place is so quiet. I hope I don't scare nobody when I knock on this
door. How in the dickens do you operate this knocker, anyhow? Oh. Pick it
up. Let it just fall. It knocks. Gosh. Reckon it'll bring any watchdogs out
on me? Hope not. Dern. I don't know. I'm just thinking. This old rambling's
pretty bad in some places, but, I don't know, I never did see it
get this quiet and this lonesome.
Reckon I rung that door knocker right? Guess I did. Things so still
here on this porch, I can hear my blood run, and my thoughts grazing around
in my head.
The door opened back.
My breath went away in the tips of the pines where the cones hang on as
long as they can, and then fall down to the ground to get covered up in the
loose dirt and some day make a new tree.
"How do you do," a man said.
"Ah, yeah, good day." I was gulping for air.
"May I do something for you?"
"Me? No. Nope. I wuz jist lookin' fer a certain party by this name." I
handed him the envelope.
He was wearing a nice suit of clothes. An old man, thin-faced, and
straight shoulders, gray hair, white cuffs, black tie. The air from the
house sifted past him on its way out the door, and there was a smell that
made me know that the air had been hemmed up inside that house for a long
time. Hemmed up. Walled in. Covered away from the moon and out of the reach
of the sun. Cut away from the drift of the leaves and the wash of the
waters. Hid out from the going and the coming of the people, cut loose from
the thoughts of the crowds on the streets. Lazy in there, sleepy in there,
cool and pale and shady in there, dark and dreary in the book case there,
and the wind under the beds hadn't been disturbed in twenty-three years. I
know, I know, I'm on the right hill, but I'm at the wrong house. This wasn't
what I hung that boxcar for, nor hugged that iron ladder for, nor bellied
down on top of that high rolling freight train for. The train was laughing
and cussing and alive with human people. The cops was alive and pushing me
down the road in the rain. The bridge was alive with friends under it. The
river was alive and arguing with the fog and the fog was wrestling the wind
and boxing the sun.
I remember a frog they found in Okemah, once when they tore the old
bank building down. He'd been sealed up in solid concrete for thirty-two
years, and had almost turned to jelly. Jelly. Blubbery. Soft and oozy.
Slicky and wiggly. I don't want to turn to no jelly. My belly is hard from
hard traveling, and I want more than anything else for my belly to stay hard
and stay wound up tight and stay alive.
"Yes. You are at the right house. This is the place you are looking
for." The little butler stood aside and motioned for me to walk in.
"I--er--ah--think, mebbe I made a mistake--"
"Oh, no." He was talking just about the nicest I'd ever heard anybody
talk, like maybe he'd been practicing. 'This is the place you're looking
for."
"I don't--ah--think--I think, maybe I made a little mistake. You
know--mistake--"
"I'm positive that you are at the right address."
"Yeah? Well, mister, I shore thank ya; but I'm purty shore." I backed
down off of the slate-rock steps, looking down at my feet, then up at the
house and the door, and said, "Purty shore, I'm at th' wrong address. Sorry
I woke ya, I mean bothered ya. Be seein' ya."
When I stood there on top of the hill and listened to that iron gate
snap locked behind me, and looked all down across the roofs and church
steeples and chimneys and steep houses of Sonora, I smelled the drift of the
pine rosin in the air and watched a cloud whiff past me over my head, and I
was alive again.
Chapter XV
THE TELEGRAM THAT NEVER CAME
In a bend of the Sacramento is the town of Redding, California. The
word had scattered out that twenty-five hundred workers was needed to build
the Kenneth Dam, and already eight thousand work hands had come to do the
job. Redding was like a wild ant den. A mile to the north in a railroad bend
had sprung up another camp, a thriving nest of two thousand people, which we
just called by the name of the "jungle." In that summer of 1938, I learned a
few little things about the folks in Redding, but a whole lot more, some
way, down there by that big jungle where the people lived as close to
nature, and as far from everything natural, as human beings can.
I landed in Redding early one morning on a long freight train full of
wore-out people. I fell off of the freight with my guitar over my shoulder
and asked a guy when the work was going to start. He said it was supposed to
get going last month. Telegram hadn't come from Washington yet.
"Last month, hell," another old boy said, over his shoulder. "We've
been camped right here up and down this slough for over three months,
hearin' it would git started any day now!"
I looked down the train and seen about a hundred men dropping off with
their sleeping rolls and bundles of all kinds. The guy I was talking with
was a big hard looker with a brown flannel shirt on. He said, "They's that
many rollin' in on ever' train that runs!"
"Where are all of these here people from?" I asked him.
"Some of them are just louses," he said. "Pimps an' gamblers, whores,
an' fakes of all kinds. Yes, but they ain't so many of that kind. You talk
around to twenty men an' you'll find out that nineteen of them are just as
willing and able to work as anybody, just as good a hand, knows just as
much, been all over everywhere tryin' ta git onto some kind of a regular job
an' bring his whole family, wife, kids, everything, out here an' settle
down."
It was a blistering hot day, and some of the men walked across a vacant
lot over to the main street. But the biggest part of them looked too dirty
and too beat-down and ragged to spend much time on the streets. They didn't
walk into town to sign up at no hotel, not even at a twenty-cent cot house,
not even somebody's green grass lawn, but walked out slowly across the
little hill to the jungle camp. They asked other people already stranded
there, Where's the water hole? Where's there a trash pile of pretty good tin
cans for cookin'; where's the fish biting in the river? Any of you folks got
a razor you ain't using?
I stood there on a railroad platform looking at my old wore-out shirt.
I was thinking, Well now, I don't know, there might be a merchant's daughter
around this town that's a little bit afraid of all of these other tough
lookers, but now, if I was to go an' rustle me up a couple of dollars an'
buy me a clean layout, she might spend a little time talking to me. Makes
you feel better when you get all slicked up, walking out onto the streets,
cops even nod and smile at you, and with your sleeves rolled up and
everything, sun and wind sorta brushing your skin, you feel like a new
dollar watch. And you think to yourself, Boy, I hope I can meet her
before my clothes get all dirty again. Maybe this little Army and Navy
store down the street has got a water hydrant in the rest room; and when I
put on my new shirt and pants, maybe I can wash up a little. I can pull out
my razor and shave while I'm washing, keep an eye skint for the store man,
not let him see me. And I'll come walkin' out from that little old store
looking like a man that's all bought and paid for.
I heard all kinds of singing and playing through the wide-open doors of
the saloons along the street, and dropped in at all of them and tried to
draw a hand. I'd play my guitar and sing the longest, oldest, and saddest
songs and ballads I knew; I'd nod and smile and say thank you every time
somebody dropped a penny or a nickel into my cigar box.
A plump Mexican lady wearing a sweated-out black dress, walked over and
dropped three pennies in my box and said, "Now I'm broke. All I'm waiting
forr iss thiss beeg dam to start. For somebody to come running down the
street saying, "Work hass opened up! Hiring men! Hiring everybody!' "
I made enough money to run down and buy me the new shirt and pair of
pants, but they was all sweat-soaked and covered with loose dust before I
had a chance to get in good with the merchant's daughter. I was counting my
change on the curb and had twenty some odd cents. A bareheaded Indian with
warts along his nose looked over in my hand and said, "Twenty-two cent. Huh.
Too much for chili. Not enough for beef stew. Too much for sleeping outside,
and not enough for sleeping inside. Too much to be broke and not enough to
pay a loafing fine. Too much to eat all by yourself, but not enough to feed
some other boomer." And I looked at the money and said, "I reckin one of th'
unhandiest dam sums of money a feller c'n have is twenty some-odd cents." So
I walked around with it jingling loose in my pockets, out across the street,
through a vacant lot, down a cinder dump onto a railroad track, till I come
to a little grassy trail that led into the jungle camp.
I followed the trail out over the hill through the sun and the weeds.
The camp was bigger than the town itself. People had dragged old car fenders
up from the dumps, wired them from the limbs of oak trees a few feet off of
the ground and this was a roof for some of them. Others had taken old canvas
sacks or wagon sheets, stretched the canvas over little limbs cut so the
forks braced each other, and that was a house for those folks. I heard two
brothers standing back looking at their house saying, "I ain't lost my hand
as a carpenter, yet." "My old eyes can still see to hit a nail," They'd
carried buckets and tin cans out of the heap, flattened them on the ground,
then nailed the tin onto crooked boards, and that was a mansion for them.
Lots of people, families mostly, had some bedclothes with them, and I could
see the old stinky, gummy quilts and blankets hung up like tents, and two or
three kids of all ages playing around underneath. There was scatterings of
cardboard shacks, where the people had lugged cartons, cases, packing boxes
out from town and tacked them into a house. They was easy to build, but the
first rain that hit them, they was goners.
Then about every few feet down the jungle hill you'd walk past a shack
just sort of made out of everything in general-- old strips of asphalt tar
paper, double gunny sacks, an old dress, shirt, pair of overhalls, stretched
up to cover half a side of a wall; bumpy corrugated iron, cement sacks,
orange and apple crates took apart and nailed together with old rusty burnt
nails from the cinder piles. Through a little square window on the side of a
house, I'd hear bedsprings creaking and people talking. Men played cards,
whittled, and women talked about work they'd struck and work they were
hunting for. Dirt was on the floor of the house, and all kinds and colors of
crawling and flying bugs come and went like they were getting paid for it.
There were the big green blow-flies, the noisy little street flies, manure
and lot flies, caterpillars and gnats from other dam jobs, bed bugs, fleas,
and ticks sucking blood, while mosquitoes of all army and navy types,
hummers, bombers, fighters, sung some good mosquito songs. In most cases,
though, the families didn't even have a roof or shelter, but just got
together once or twice every day and, squatting sort of Indian fashion
around their fire, spaded a few bites of thickened flour gravy, old bread,
or a thin watery stew. Gunny sacks, old clothes, hay and straw, fermenting
bedclothes, are usually piled full of kids playing, or grown-ups resting and
waiting for the word "work" to come.
The sun's shining through lots of places, other patches pretty shady,
and right here at my elbow a couple of families are squatting down on an old
slick piece of canvas; three or four quiet men, whittling, breaking grass
stems, poking holes in leaves, digging into the hard ground; and the women
rocking back and forth laughing out at something somebody'd said. A little
baby sucks at a wind-burnt breast that nursed the four other kids that crawl
about the fire. Cold rusty cans are their china cups and aluminum ware, and
the hot still bucket of river water is as warm and clear as the air around.
I watch a lot of little circles waving out from the middle of the water
where a measuring worm has dropped from the limb of a tree and flips and
flops for his very life. And I see a man with a forked stick reach the forks
over into the bucket, smile, and go on talking about the work he's done; and
in a moment, when the little worm clamps his feet around the forks of the
stick, the man will lift him out, pull him up close to his face and look him
over, then tap the stick over the rim of the bucket. When the little worm
flips to the ground and goes humping away through the twigs and ashes, the
whole bunch of people will smile and say, "Pretty close shave, mister worm.
What do you think you are, a parshoot jumper?"
You've seen a million people like this already. Maybe you saw them down
on the crowded side of your big city; the back side, that's jammed and
packed, the hard section to drive through. Maybe you wondered where so many
of them come from, how they eat, stay alive, what good they do, what makes
them live like this? These people have had a house and a home just about
like your own, settled down and had a job of work just about like you. Then
something hit them and they lost all of that. They've been pushed out into
the high lonesone highway, and they've gone down it, from coast to coast,
from Canada to Mexico, looking for that home again. Now they're looking, for
a while, in your town. Ain't much difference between you and them. If you
was to walk out into this big tangled jungle camp and stand there with the
other two thousand, somebody would just walk up and shake hands with you and
ask you, What kind of work do you do, pardner?
Then maybe, farther out on the ragged edge of your town you've seen
these people after they've hit the road: the people that are called
strangers, the people that follow the sun and the seasons to your country,
follow the buds and the early leaves and come when the fruit and crops are
ready to gather, and leave when the work is done. What kind of crops? Oil
fields, power dams, pipe lines, canals, highways and hard-rock tunnels,
skyscrapers, ships, are their crops. These are migrants now. They don't just
set along in the sun--they go by the sun, and it lights up the country that
they know is theirs.
If you'd go looking for social problems, you'd find just a good
friendly bunch of people getting a lot of laughing and talking done, and
some of it pretty good sense.
I listened to the talk in the tanglewood of the migratory jungle.
"What'll be here to keep these people going," a man with baggy overhalls and
a set of stickery whiskers is saying, "when this dam job is over? Nothing?
No, mister, you're wrong as hell. What do you think we're putting in this
dam for, anyhow? To catch water to irrigate new land, and water all of this
desert-looking country here. And when a little drop of water hits the ground
anywhere out across here--a crop, a bush, sometimes even a big tall tree
comes jumping out of the dirt. Thousands and thousands of whole families are
going to have all the good land they need, and I'm a-going to be on one of
them little twenty acres!"
"Water, water," a young man about twenty or so, wearing a pair of
handmade cowboy shoes, talks up. "You think water's gonna be th' best part?
Well, you're just about half right, friend. Did you ever stop to think that
th' most, th' best part of it all is th' electric power this dam's gonna
turn out? I can just lay here on this old, rotten jungle hill with all of
these half-starved people waiting to go to work, and you know, I don't so
much see all of this filth and dirt. But I do see--just try to picture in my
head, like--what's gonna be
here. Th' big factories makin' all kinds of things from fertilizer to
bombin' planes. Power lines, steel towers runnin' out acrost these old
clumpy hills--most of all, people at work all of th' time on little farms,
and whole bunches and bunches of people at work in th' big new factories."
"It's th' gifts of th' Lord, that's what 'tis." A little nervous man,
about half Indian, is pulling up grass stems and talking. "Th' Lord gives
you a mind to vision all of this, an' th' power to build it. He gives when
He wants to. Then when He wants to, He takes it away--if we don't use it
right."
"If we all get together, social like, and build something, say, like a
big ship, any kind of a factory, railroad, big dam--that's social work,
ain't it?" This is a young man with shell-rimmed glasses, a gray felt hat,
blue work shirt with a fountain pen stuck with a notebook in his pocket, and
his voice had the sound of books in it when he talked. "That's what 'social'
means, me and you and you working on something together and owning it
together. What the hell's wrong with this, anybody--speak up! If Jesus
Christ was sitting right here, right now, he'd say this very same dam thing.
You just ask Jesus how the hell come a couple of thousand of us living out
here in this jungle camp like a bunch of wild animals. You just ask Jesus
how many million of other folks are living the same way? Sharecroppers down
South, big city people that work in factories and live like rats in the
slimy slums. You know what Jesus'll say back to you? He'll tell you we all
just mortally got to work together, build things together, fix up old things
together, clean out old filth together, put up new buildings, schools and
churches, banks and factories together, and own everything together. Sure,
they'll call it a bad ism. Jesus don't care if you call it socialism or
communism, or just me and you."
When night come down, everything got a little stiller, and you could
walk around from one bunch of people to the other one and talk about the
weather. Although the weather wasn't such an асе-high subject to talk about,
because around Redding for nine months hand running the weather don't change
(it's hot and dry, hot and dry, and tomorrow it's still going to be hot and
dry), you can hear little bunches of folks getting acquainted with each
other, saying, "Really hot, ain't it?" "Yeah, dry too." "Mighty dry."
I run onto a few young people of twelve to twenty-five, mostly kids
with their families, who picked the banjo or guitar, and sung songs. Two of
these people drew quite a bunch every evening along toward sundown and it
always took place just about the same way. An old bed was under a tree in
their yard, and a baby boy romped around on it when the shade got cool,
because in the early parts of the day the flies and bugs nearly packed him
off. So this was his ripping and romping time, and it was the job of his two
sisters, one around twelve and the other one around fourteen, to watch him
and keep him from falling off onto the ground. Their dad parked his self
back on an old car cushion. He throwed his eyes out over the rims of some
two-bit specks just about every line or two on his reading matter, and run
his Adam's apple up and down; and his wife nearby was singing what all the
Lord had done for her, while the right young baby stood up for his first
time, and jumped up and down, bouncing toward the edge of the mattress. The
old man puckered up his face and sprayed a tree with tobacco juice, and
said, "Girls. You girls. Go in the house and get your music box, and set
there on the bed and play with the baby, so's he won't fall off."
One of the sisters tuned a string or two, then chorded a little. People
walked from all over the camp and gathered, and the kid, mama, and dad, and
all of the visitors, kept as still as day Light while the girls sang:
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song
Takes a worried man to sing a worried song
I'm worried nowwww
But I won't be worried long.
I heard these two girls from a-ways away where I was leaning back up
against an old watering trough. I could hear their words just as plain as
day, floating all around in the trees and down across the low places. I hung
my guitar up on a stub of a limb, went down and stretched myself out on some
dry grass, and listened to the girls for a long time. The baby kicked and
bucked like a regular army mule whenever they'd quit their singing; but, as
quick as they struck their first note or two on the next song, the kid would
throw his wrist in his mouth, the slobbers would drip down onto his sister's
lap, and the baby would kick both feet, but easy, keeping pretty good time
to the guitar.
I don't know why I didn't tell them I had a guitar up yonder hanging on
that tree. I just reared back and soaked in every note and every word of
their singing. It was so clear and honest sounding, no Hollywood put-on, no
fake wiggling. It was better to me than the loud squalling and bawling
you've got to do to make yourself heard in the old mobbed saloons. And,
instead of getting you all riled up mentally, morally and sexually--no, it
done something a lot better, something that's harder to do, something you
need ten times more. It cleared your head up, that's what it done, caused
you to fall back and let your draggy bones rest and your muscles go limber
like a cat's.
Two little girls were making two thousand working people feel like I
felt, rest like I rested. And when I say two thousand, take a look down off
across these three little hills. You'll see a hat or two bobbing up above
the brush. Somebody is going, somebody is coming, somebody is kneeling down
drinking from the spring of water trickling out of the west hill. Five men
are shaving before the same crooked hunk of old looking-glass, using tin
cans for their water. A woman right up close to you wrings out a tough work
shirt, saves the water for four more. You skim your eye out around the south
hill, and not less than a hundred women are doing the same thing, washing,
wringing, hanging out shirts, taking them down dry to iron. Not a one of
them is talking above a whisper, and the one that is whispering almost feels
guilty because she knows that ninety-nine out of every hundred are tired,
weary, have felt sad, joked and laughed to keep from crying. But these two
little girls are telling about all of that trouble, and everybody knows it's
helping. These songs say something about our hard traveling, something about
our hard luck, our hard get-by, but the songs say well come through all of
these in pretty good shape, and we'll be all right, we'll work, make ourself
useful, if only the telegram to build the dam would come in from Washington.
I thought I could act a little bashful and shy, and not rush the people
to get to knowing them, but something inside of me just sort of talked out
and said, "Awful good singing. What's your name?"
The two little girls talked slow and quiet but it was not nervous, and
it wasn't jittery, just plain. They told me their names.
I said, "I like the way you play that guitar with your fingers! Sounds
soft, and you can hear it a long ways off. All of these three hills was just
ringing out with your guitar, and all of these people was listening to you
sing."
"I saw them listening," one sister said.
"I saw them too," the other sister said.
"I play with a flat celluloid pick. I've got to be loud, because I play
in saloons and, well, I just make it my job to make more noise than they
make, and they're sorry for me and give me nickels and pennies."
"I don't like old saloons," one little girl said.
"Me neither," the other little girl said.
I looked over at their daddy, and he sort of looked crossways out my
side of his specks, pouched his lips up a little, winked at me, and said,
"I'm against bars myself."
His wife talked up louder, "Yes, you're against bars! Right square up
against them!"
Both of the sisters looked awful sober and serious at their dad.
Everybody in the crowd laughed, and took on a new listening position,
leaning back up against trees, squatting on smoky buckets turned upside
down, stretched out in the grass, patting down places to lay in the short
weeds.
I got up and strolled away and took my guitar down off of the sawed-off
limb, and thought while I was walking back to where the crowd was, Boy
howdy, old guitar, you been a lot of places, seen a lot of faces, but don't
you go to actin' up too wild and reckless, 'cause these Little girls and
their mama don't like saloons.
I got back to where everybody was, and the two little sisters was
singing "Columbus Stockade":
Way down in Columbus stockade
Where my gally went back on me;
Way down in Columbus stockade,
I'd ruther be back in Tennessee.
"Columbus Stockade" was always one of my first picks, so I let them run
along for a little while, twisted my guitar up in tune with theirs, holding
my ear down against the sounding box, and when I heard it was in tune with
them I started picking out the tune, sort of note for note, letting their
guitar play the bass chords and second parts. They both smiled when they
heard me because two guitars being played this way is what's called the real
article, and millions of little kids are raised on this kind of music. If
you think of something new to say, if a cyclone comes, or a flood wrecks the
country, or a bus load of school children freeze to death along the road, if
a big ship goes down, and an airplane falls in your neighborhood, an outlaw
shoots it out with the deputies, or the working people go out to win a war,
yes, you'll find a train load of things you can set down and make up a song
about. You'll hear people singing your words around over the country, and
you'll sing their songs everywhere you travel or everywhere you live; and
these are the only kind of songs my head or my memory or my guitar has got
any room for.
So these two little girls and me sung together till the crowd had got
bigger and it was dark under the trees where the moon couldn't hit us.
Takes a ten-dollar shoe to fit my feet
Takes a ten-dollar shoe to fit my feet
Takes a ten-dollar shoe to fit my feet, Lord God!
And I ain't a-gonna be treated this a-way!
When the night got late and the men in the saloons in town lost their
few pennies playing framed-up poker, they drifted out to sleep the night in
the jungle camp. We saw a bunch of twenty-five or thirty of them come
running over the rim of the hill from town, yelling, cussing, kicking tin
buckets and coffee pots thirty feet, and hollering like panthers.
And when the wild bunch run down the little trail to where we was
singing--it was then that the whole drunk mess of them stood there reeling
and listening in the dark, and then shushed each other to keep quiet and set
down on the ground to listen. Everybody got so still that it almost crackled
in the air. Men took seats and leaned their heads back against tree trunks
and listened to the lightning bugs turn their lights on and off. And the
lightning bugs must of been hushing each other, because the old jungle camp
was getting a lot of good rest there listening to the little girls' song
drift out across the dark wind.
Chapter XVI
STORMY NIGHT
I set my hat on the back of my head and walked out west from Redding
through the Redwood forests along the coast, and strolled from town to town,
my guitar slung over my shoulder, and sung along the boweries of forty-two
states; Reno Avenue in Oklahoma City, Lower Pike Street in Seattle, the jury
table in Santa Fe; the Hooversvilles on the flea-bit rims of your city's
garbage dump. I sung in the camps called "Little Mexico," on the dirty edge
of California's green pastures. I sung on the gravel barges of the East
Coast and along New York's Bowery watching the cops chase the bay-rum
drinkers. I curved along the bend of the Gulf of Mexico and sung with the
tars and salts in Port Arthur, the oilers and greasers in Texas City, the
marijuana smokers in the flop town in Houston. I trailed the fairs and
rodeos all over Northern California, Grass Valley, Nevada City; I trailed
the apricots and peaches around Marysville and the winy-grape sand hills of
Auburn, drinking the good homemade vino from the jugs of friendly grape
farmers.
Everywhere I went I throwed my hat down in the floor and sung for my
tips.
Sometimes I was lucky and found me a good job. I sung on the radio
waves in Los Angeles, and I got a job from Uncle Samuel to come to the
valley of the Columbia River and I made up and recorded twenty-six songs
about the Grand Coulee Dam. I made two albums of records called "Dust Bowl
Ballads" for the Victor people. I hit the road again and crossed the
continent twice by way of highway and freights. Folks heard me on the
nationwide radio programs CBS and NBC, and thought I was rich and famous,
and I didn't have a nickel to my name, when I was hitting the hard way
again.
The months flew fast and the people faster, and one day the coast wind
blew me out of San Francisco, through San Jose's wide streets, and over the
hump to Los Angeles. Month of December, down along old Fifth and Main, Skid
Row, one of the skiddiest of all Skid Rows. God, what a wet and windy night!
And the clouds swung low and split up like herds of wild horses in the
canyons of the street.
I run onto a guitar-playing partner standing on a bad corner, and he
called his self the Cisco Kid. He was a
long-legged guy that walked like he was on a rolling ship, a good
singer and yodeler, and had sailed the seas a lot of times, busted labels in
a lot of ports, and had really been around in his twenty-six years. He
banged on the guitar pretty good, and like me, come rain or sun, or cold or
heat, he always walked along with his guitar slung over his shoulder from a
leather strap.
We moved along the Skid looking in at the bars and taverns, listening
to neon signs sputter and crackle, and on the lookout for a gang of live
ones. The old splotchy plate-glass windows looked too dirty for the hard
rain ever to wash clean. Old doors and dumps and cubbyholes had a sickly
pale color about them, and men and women bosses and work-hands humped around
inside and talked back and forth to each other. Some soggy-sme