‘The Same Road Led Everyone to This Place’

You can put your trust in gravy

the way it stretches out

the sausage

the way it stretches out

the dreams

--Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel the so-called Gravy Poet of the San Joaquin Valley

*

A producer from a Washington talk show called last week. She was convention-bound and looking to line up guests. She wanted someone who could talk about “all the stuff going on out there?”

What stuff?

She ran through her list. It took a while. She mentioned the immigrant backlash, the run on affirmative action, the decline in public schools, the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake, the economic fallout from base closures, the Los Angeles gangs, the outward migration of Californians, O.J., the racial divide, and “the cultural trends, like roller-blading.”

Oh. That stuff.

A few Californians came to mind, but they were not the kind of people typically found yakking on the talk shows. They were people like the Gravy Poet. If they want the long view on immigrant-bashing, they might look up Wilma McDaniel.

She was part of an earlier wave of migration into California: the Dust Bowl refugees. They were as unwelcome then as Mexicans are now. Some of the most vocal antagonists were people who had arrived as immigrants themselves only a generation earlier. Late in her life, McDaniel became fairly well known for her poems about the Dust Bowl migrants.

I met her a couple years ago. She was a slender, reclusive woman who spoke with a slight twang. She lived in a small apartment in Tulare, hard by Highway 99. When I asked her view on the current public raging over Mexican immigrants, she said flatly: “I am not a political person.” After a pause, however, she reached for a volume of her poetry and began to read aloud:

They forgot so easily,

the same road led

everyone to this place

“I think,” McDaniel said, closing the book, “that still stands. Don’t you?”

*

I wish they could meet the Trejo brothers. There were three of them, Manuel, Lionel and Salvatore. As a college kid, I worked summers alongside these men at a feedlot up near Kerman. They had a dream of their own, and it had nothing to do with taking advantage of the American welfare system or any of that Prop. 187 rhetorical blather.

They had come up from Mexico. It was assumed they had no papers, but I can’t say for certain. In California agriculture, this is not exactly a relevant question. The brothers lived together in a company bunkhouse and sent most of their money south, where they were attempting to build a cattle operation of their own. I didn’t know a soul at the feedlot who wasn’t rooting for them.

These weren’t “aliens” or “illegals.” They weren’t “invaders.” These simply were hard-working men with a dream that in no way infringed on any Californian. They weren’t here to take; they were here to work. And in this, it must be added, there was nothing exceptional about them. The last I heard, they were back in Mexico, running a cattle ranch.

And I wish they could talk to Hank Hendrickson. He was a career soldier, saw combat duty in Vietnam, served as garrison commander of Ft. Ord until his retirement. Then came a second life. Hendrickson was brought in to develop a conversion plan for the fort. That it was to be shut down, along with so many other military facilities, was cause for much noisy whining in California. Hendrickson did not whine. He went to work, and last fall--against long odds--accomplished his mission. Ft. Ord was now Cal State Monterey Bay.

“In a way,” Hendrickson told me at the time, “not much has changed. This place has served young Americans since the 1930s. You teach soldiers how to survive, how to kill. Now we will be teaching students how to function in a changing world.”

I swear the old colonel’s eyes welled up as he thought about this.

And I wish they would have gone with me last year to hear Prem S. Dean’s take on the racial divide. An immigrant from Pakistan, Dean was working then as principal of a small school near the corner of 3rd and Vermont in Los Angeles. This is the most demographically diverse sector of the city, with seemingly every tongue and tribe in the world represented.

I found Prem standing outside his schoolhouse, watching the pupils play. They came in all colors. Prem likened them to a “bouquet of flowers. . . . Our children come from different parts of the world, a wide variety of countries--Korea, Japan, China, Mexico, El Salvador, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan. All are here, and all add to the beauty of the bouquet.

“At first, some will keep to their own. It is natural. But we bring them along. After a while, they don’t know who they are playing with. You can see it on the playground. Blacks play with whites. Chinese play with Koreans, and Koreans with Mexicans. They don’t care. They just play like children. I find it exhilarating.”

And to those who expect to find a state beaten down by earthquake, fire and flood, I would suggest a visit to Guerneville and a fellow there named Bill Guerne. The onetime logging town was named after his great-grandfather. It sits on the banks of the Russian River, and two winters ago it was hit by a flood. It actually made the national news, one more installment in the great California apocalypse.

The day after the flood, I came upon Guerne at the riverbank, covered with mud, mucking out his father’s house. This was not the first time.

“It happens,” he said. “The same house got it in ‘41, in ‘55, in ‘64, in ‘86, and now this one. It will get it again. There’s not much you can do about it. You strip out the Sheetrock. Rewire the electricity. Mop the floors. And move back in.”

Mop the floors and move back in. It might as well be the California motto.

*

The point of all this is simple enough. Despite the hateful and self-serving rhetoric of our own “leaders,” despite the dirges of the newsmagazines--see the current issue of Life magazine for the latest California obituary--despite all the noise about decay and division, there exists within our borders a lost tribe of Californians who share a strange secret:

The place is still paradise enough.

These are people who understand the basic, long-standing--and unspoken--pact with immigrants, both legal and otherwise: They come and fill jobs nobody else wants; we enjoy, literally, the inexpensive fruits of their labor. And by any honest accounting, they always get the short end of the stick.

These are people who after quake and fire and flood have mopped up, swept up, repainted, rebuilt, whatever, and quietly moved back in. These are people who look at a closed military base and see a college campus. These are people who look at a playground filled with children of many colors and see, not calamity, but a bouquet.

They have accepted the fact that Ozzie and Harriet don’t live here anymore, that the predominantly white California of the 1950s is now a museum piece. There will be no return, and the pangs of nostalgia expressed most vividly in political initiatives meant to drive out immigrants and abolish affirmative action only get in the way of creating what may well become an even better California.

These are people who have not forgotten that the same road led everyone to this place. They recognize that the dream isn’t dead; it just comes now in many more colors. And they know too that in hard times it can be stretched with gravy. They are out there, and in numbers greater than the doomsayers who now dominate the stage. And, yes, some of them even roller-blade.