Elsa pretended not to hear. “Let’s go, explorers. Time to set up camp.”

They got to work. They set up the tent and hauled out the stove and beat the lumpy, dirty camp mattress to redistribute the feathers. They stacked the buckets inside the copper tub and set them in front of the tent, alongside their washboard and broom.

“Great,” Loreda said, returning with two buckets of water. “We’re back where we started. Home, sweet home.”

Elsa balled up a newspaper, saw the headline: “Relief Crippling the State Financially,” and started a fire in the stove.

Loreda stood beside her. “You know school already started, right?”

“Yes.”

“You know I’m not going back, right?” Loreda said.

Elsa sighed. All she wanted—all she’d ever wanted, really—was to be a good mother. How could she accomplish that if Loreda wasn’t educated? And yet. They’d been in California for less than five months and they’d worked as hard as was possible, and Elsa still had less than twenty dollars to her name. With the gas it took to follow the crops north and the paltry wages and the cost of goods, there was no way to get ahead. And winter was coming. Their survival depended on cotton money and Loreda could pick as much as Elsa could. Double the wages.

“Yes,” Elsa said. “I know you have to pick cotton, but Ant goes to school. Period.” She looked at her daughter. “And the minute the cotton is done, you are back in school.”

THE NEXT MORNING, LOREDA wakened before sunrise and listened for footsteps. At four A.M., she heard what she’d been waiting for: Jeb’s voice at the tent flaps. “It’s time.”

Loreda and Elsa lurched out of bed already dressed, gathered up the rolled, twelve-foot-long canvas sacks they’d each paid fifty cents for, and went out of the tent.

Jeb and the boys, Elroy and Buster, were there.

The five of them walked out to the main road and turned right and kept walking until they came to the first Welty field.

There were already forty people or so in line, some of whom had probably slept on the roadside to ensure their place. Men, women, children as young as six. Mexicans, Negroes, Okies. Mostly Okies. Small particles of fluffy white cotton floated in the air, landed on Loreda’s face, caught in her hair.

A row of trucks stood ready to be filled with cotton, their trailers lined with chicken wire.

At sunrise, a bell rang out. The crowd of pickers grew anxious. Not all of them would be chosen to pick. By now, there were hundreds of them in line.

The gates to the cotton field opened and a tall, ruddy-faced man wearing a ten-gallon hat walked out, surveying the crowd, moving along it, picking workers. “You,” he said, pointing to Jeb.

Jeb rushed toward the gate.

“You,” he said to Elsa, and then to Loreda, “And you . . .”

Loreda rushed into the fields, went to the row to which she was assigned.

She yanked her long canvas sack around, slung the leather strap over her shoulder.

The bell rang again and Loreda reached into the nearest cotton plant and yelped in pain. When she drew her hand back it was covered in blood. That was when she saw the spikes on the plant. They looked like darning needles. Wincing, she tried again, more slowly this time; still, she felt her flesh tear. She gritted her teeth and kept picking.

For hours the sun beat down, until heat and dust and human sweat were all Loreda could smell. Her throat was so dry it hurt to breathe. She had drunk all the water in her canteen—almost hot enough to scald—and now there was no more. Her bag grew heavier by the minute and her hands hurt.

Nearing noon, she dragged the heavy sack behind her and moved into the line formed at the giant scales. She unhooked the strap and dropped the load and learned instantly why the other pickers hadn’t removed the strap in line: It was a bad idea. Now she had to haul the bag with her bloody, aching hands toward the scales.

She sagged in relief when it was finally her turn. A foreman slung a chain underneath her sack and hung it on the scales.

“Sixty pounds.” The foreman stamped a ticket and handed it to her. “You can cash this in town. Pick faster if you want to keep a job.”

Loreda retrieved her empty bag, backed away, and went back to work.

SEPTEMBER WAS ONE LONG, hot, backbreaking day after another in the cotton fields. Elsa’s hands bled, her back ached, her knees hurt. Hour after scorching hour. Dawn to dusk, hunched over, picking bolls of cotton from between the razor-sharp spikes. There were no bathrooms in the fields, so it wasn’t easy for a woman at certain times of the month, and Loreda had just begun menstruating.

Still, there was work. Steady work.

By mid-October, Elsa and Loreda had learned how to pick nearly two hundred pounds of cotton each per day. That meant four dollars a day in combined earnings. It felt like a fortune, even with the ten percent Welty charged to cash their wage chits. They’d been slow to get to the two-hundred-pound mark, but everyone knew there was a learning curve for picking.

IN NOVEMBER, WHEN THE weather turned blessedly cool, and the last of the cotton had been picked, Elsa’s metal cash box was stuffed with dollar bills. She had stocked up on food, bought bags of flour and rice and beans and sugar, as well as cans of milk and some smoked bacon. There was no refrigeration at the camp, no ice, so she learned to cook in a new way—everything came from bags or cans. No fresh pasta or sun-dried tomatoes, no homemade baked bread or nutty-flavored olive oil. The kids learned to love pork and beans doctored with corn syrup, and chipped beef on toast, and hot dogs cooked over an open fire, and saltine crackers fried in oil and dusted with sugar. American food, Loreda called it.