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Updated: September 1, 2025
Next day when the men and Dick were hired to pick grapefruit, Grandpa asked the boss about better living quarters. "He said there wasn't any," Grandpa reported later. "My land of love, you mean we've got to stay here?" Grandma groaned. Grimly she set to work. The Italian neighbor had brought her a pot of stew and some coffee, but now Grandma and Rose-Ellen must go to the store for provisions.
"Floridy might do us a sight of good, and I always did hanker after palm trees. But how could we get there?" "They send you down in a truck," said Daddy. "Charge you so much a head and feed and lodge you into the bargain. I figure we've got just about enough to make it." South into summer! "That really would be a peekaneeka!" crowed Rose-Ellen.
Grandma talked to her, though she was only ten, because she and Grandma were the only women in the family, since last winter when Mother died. As Rose-Ellen let the front door slam behind her, she saw Daddy coming slowly up the street.
The people next door have leave these tent. You move in before some other bodies." "These tent" was a top and three walls of dirty canvas. "If you'd told me a Beecham would lay down in a filthy place like this. . . ." Grandma declared. Rose-Ellen did not hear the end of the sentence. She was asleep on the earth floor.
Rose-Ellen exploded the word on their last night in the "jungle" camp. "I don't believe there are enough folks in the world to cat all the peas we've picked." "And they aren't done with when they're picked, even," added Daddy. "Most of them will be canned; and other folks have to shell and sort them and put them into cans and then cook them and seal and label the cans."
Dick, you haul that shoe-box from under the seat. Rose-Ellen, fetch the crackers from the trailer. Sally, do sit still one minute." "Crackers?" asked Rose-Ellen, when she had scrambled back. "I don't see a one, Gramma." "Land's sakes, child, use your eyes for once!" Rose-Ellen rummaged in the part that was partitioned off from Carrie. "I don't see any groceries, Gramma."
Its walls were papered with his favorite calendars: country scenes that reminded him of his farm boyhood; roly-poly babies in bathtubs; a pretty girl who looked, he said, like Grandma a funny idea to Rose-Ellen. Patched linoleum, doorstep hollowed by thousands of feet Grandpa looked at everything as if it were new and bright, and as if he loved it.
The Polish Rose said that they got up at four in the morning and were in the fields at half-past; and sometimes worked till near midnight. "Mornings," she said, "I think I die, so bad I want the sleep. And then the boss, he no give us half our wages. Now most a year it has been." Curiously Rose-Ellen asked her about school. "No money, no time, no clo'es," said Polish Rose.
"In the school," Rose-Ellen told her. "But outside school they act like even Nico had smallpox. They make me sick!" Rose-Ellen spoke both indignantly and sorrowfully. That very day the three girls had come out of the church together, and had paused to look over the neat picket fence of the yard next the church. It seemed a sweet little yard, smelling of newly cut grass and flowers.
Yet Rose-Ellen, playing with Baby Pepe, discovered that her hot old swaddlings had been taken off at last. Perhaps Mrs. Serafini was learning something from the nurses after all. "If you could show me the rest of my aflabet, Rose-Ellen," Jimmie begged, "I could teach Pedro." "But, goodness!" Rose-Ellen exclaimed. "You never would let us teach you anything, Jimmie. What's happened to you?"
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