The Cotton-Pickers Read Online Free PDF

and, overhearing us, threw his sack down. “So you’re talking about eggs! Haven’t I done right by you all? Every egg freshly laid! I’m entitled to my money, ain’t I, fellers?”
    “Nobody talked about not paying. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, better keep quiet,” I told him. “Listen,” broke in Antonio, “we were saying that unless we give up the needless luxury of eggs we’ll have worked all these weeks for nothing.”
    “Needless lux’ry, you call it?” Abraham yelled. “You want to walk aroun’ like skel’tons when the cotton-pickin’s over? Now I’m collectin’ my money! Antonio, you owe … “
    I didn’t care who owed for how many eggs. I paid my own bill and left for the shelter to turn in. On the way I could hear squabbling over the accounts, although it must be admitted that Abraham seemed absolutely honest in his business relations with us. But as I was dozing off that night I resolved to do without eggs the next week.
    At dawn on Monday, as I was making my way to the fire, I heard Antonio shouting: “Where are the eggs this morning, you black-as-coal Yank? I want five eggs!”
    Abraham was counting the eggs in his baskets and continued as if he hadn’t heard Antonio.
    “Hey there, didn’t you hear me? I want five eggs. Or shall I lay them myself?”
    “What’s this?” asked Abraham, all innocence. “I don’t want to force my eggs on you and rob you of your hard-earned wages. You’d better save the money. You can get along without eggs, like you did the first few days here.”
    We rose up like one man against Abraham’s new tune, against his interference with our established way of life.
    “Who do you think you are, you black nobody, telling me what I should and should not eat,” chimed in Gonzalo. “Give me six eggs at once or I’ll smash your woolly skull in.”
    “All right,” Abraham agreed, “if that’s the way you want it I’ll supply you with eggs, as before.”
    “Well, how else?” asked Sam Woe quietly. “Filst you tempt us into eating eggs, and when we get used to them you tly to withhold. Give me thlee eggs!”
    The Chink was right. Just when we’d got used to the eggs, their high food value, easy availability, and simple cooking, were we suddenly to be denied them because of Abraham’s whim? Why should I deny my poor self, and torture my poor body with the sight of beautiful, fresh eggs sizzling merrily in the others’ frying pans? “Give me six!” I ordered. And once I had eaten three fried eggs and boiled the others to take for lunch, my spirit was subdued and penitent.
    So we kept on eating eggs.
    One afternoon a few days later Mr. Shine stopped me on my way back from the field and talked about his farm, how he had started with sixty dollars of hard-earned money, how he had hacked the bush out with his own hands, and how he had widened a narrow, overgrown twelve-mile mule track into a road fit for his truck.
    “It took me twenty years of hard, very hard work to build up this place. And yet we gringos, who helped make this part of the country what it is today, feel that we must be ready to get out on short notice and leave everything behind. These people — with some reason, I admit — hate us like poison because they fear for their political and economic freedom and independence, which means everything to them.”
    Mr. Shine wasn’t the first North-American farmer to tell me this.
    “Some years are very good. I’ve had as many as four crops of corn in the same year, something I’d never get back in the States. And I must say the cotton’s very good this year, first-class fiber, if only I can get a decent offer for it. The trick is in knowing just how long to wait, just when to sell. But I can’t understand what’s happened to my hens. We’ve never had so few eggs as in these last weeks. My neighbors are also complaining about their hens, and they’re wondering what’s going on in their corn bins that they fill up in