Cotton-Picking Cotton Picking
The young protagonist of the book learns quickly that picking cotton is not as easy as it sounds. Turns out there is a lot more to the whole cotton-picking act of picking cotton that meets the eye:
“It was not as easy as I thought. I tried to pick with both hands, just like Roberto, but could only pick one cotton boll at a time. I held the cotton shells steady from underneath with my left hand while I picked the bolls with my right hand and piled them on the ground. The shells' sharp prongs scratched my hands like cat's claws and, sometimes, dug into the corner of my fingernails and made them bleed.”
The Jacket
A simple jacket becomes a demonstration of the rarity of genuine acts of kindness inherent in the life of a migrant child. Even though it is old, used, and hardly a perfect fit, almost instantly the jacket becomes a source of pride. Unfortunately, almost as quickly, it will also become an object of contention and violence, but even that unpleasantness cannot dilute the moment of glory at receiving it:
“One cold Thursday morning, during recess, I was the only kid on the playground without a jacket. Mr. Sims must have noticed I was shivering because that afternoon, after school, he took me to his office and pulled out a green jacket from a large cardboard box that was full of used clothes and toys. He handed it to me and gestured for me to try it on. It smelled like graham crackers.”
That’s Entertainment
Entertainment in a tent city is hard to come by. Kids basically take any opportunity to do something different that arises as an opportunity for entertainment. The imagery of this reality is almost impossible to read without feeling some great sense of collective shame. Or, it should be, anyway:
“On windy days, the foul smell of the city dump competed with the stench of the Tent City dump. The older neighborhood kids killed snakes and threw them in the garbage hole when it was burning and watched them sizzle and squirm. I could not figure out why they twisted and turned in the fire after they were dead. It was as though the fire brought them back to life.”
The Honking
Sensory imagery associated with sounds also helps to delineate the experience as much as the visual and olfactory imagery in the example above. There is also something kind sad going on here, but the root cause of this emotional disturbance is more ambiguous:
“Like an alarm clock, the honking of the horn woke me with a start Saturday morning. It was the contratista, the labor contractor, who drove around in his beat-up red Ford truck, honking the horn to let us know that the cotton was dry and ready to pick…On days when I was not in school, the honking of the horn was for me like the final bell on the last day of school. It meant I had to go to work. But for Papá, who usually hated any kind of noise, this loud sound was a tonic. It perked him up.”
