One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families.
Pay him a wage and take all the crop.
We have to do it.
We don’t like to do it.
But the monster’s sick.
Something’s happened to the monster.
But you’ll kill the land with cotton.
We know.
We’ve got to take cotton quick before the land dies.
Then we’ll sell the land.
Lots of families in the East would like to own a piece of land.
The tenant men looked up alarmed.
But what’ll happen to us?
How’ll we eat?
You’ll have to get off the land.
The plows’ll go through the dooryard.
And now the squatting men stood up angrily.
Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away.
And Pa was born here, and he killed weeds and snakes.
Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money.
An’ we was born here.
There in the door—our children born here.
And Pa had to borrow money.
The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised.
We know that—all that.
It’s not us, it’s the bank.
A bank isn’t like a man.
Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn’t like a man either.
That’s the monster.
Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land.
We measured it and broke it up.
We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it.
Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours.
That’s what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it.
That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
We’re sorry.
It’s not us.
It’s the monster.
The bank isn’t like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there.
The bank is something else than men.
It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it.
The bank is something more than men, I tell you.
It’s the monster.
Men made it, but they can’t control it.
The tenants cried, Grampa killed Indians, Pa killed snakes for the land.
Maybe we can kill banks—they’re worse than Indians and snakes.
Maybe we got to fight to keep our land, like Pa and Grampa did.
And now the owner men grew angry.