And when the rains came the house melted and washed away.
He settled in Hooverville and he scoured the countryside for work, and the little money he had went for gasoline to look for work.
In the evening the men gathered and talked together.
Squatting on their hams they talked of the land they had seen.
There’s thirty thousan’ acres, out west of here.
Layin’ there.
Jesus, what I could do with that, with five acres of that!
Why, hell, I’d have ever’thing to eat.
Notice one thing?
They ain’t no vegetables nor chickens nor pigs at the farms.
They raise one thing—cotton, say, or peaches, or lettuce. ’Nother place’ll be all chickens.
They buy the stuff they could raise in the dooryard.
Jesus, what I could do with a couple pigs!
Well, it ain’t yourn, an’ it ain’t gonna be yourn.
What we gonna do?
The kids can’t grow up this way.
In the camps the word would come whispering, There’s work at Shafter.
And the cars would be loaded in the night, the highways crowded—a gold rush for work.
At Shafter the people would pile up, five times too many to do the work.
A gold rush for work.
They stole away in the night, frantic for work.
And along the roads lay the temptations, the fields that could bear food.
That’s owned.
That ain’t our’n.
Well, maybe we could get a little piece of her.
Maybe—a little piece.
Right down there—a patch.
Jimson weed now.
Christ, I could git enough potatoes off’n that little patch to feed my whole family!
It ain’t our’n.
It got to have Jimson weeds.
Now and then a man tried; crept on the land and cleared a piece, trying like a thief to steal a little richness from the earth.
Secret gardens hidden in the weeds.
A package of carrot seeds and a few turnips.
Planted potato skins, crept out in the evening secretly to hoe in the stolen earth.
Leave the weeds around the edge—then nobody can see what we’re a-doin’.
Leave some weeds, big tall ones, in the middle.
Secret gardening in the evenings, and water carried in a rusty can.
And then one day a deputy sheriff: Well, what you think you’re doin’?
I ain’t doin’ no harm.
I had my eye on you.
This ain’t your land.
You’re trespassing.
The land ain’t plowed, an’ I ain’t hurtin’ it none.
You goddamned squatters.
Pretty soon you’d think you owned it.
You’d be sore as hell.
Think you owned it.
Get off now.
And the little green carrot tops were kicked off and the turnip greens trampled.