Me and Estrellita come up from Homestead with Joaquin, Dierdre, Gesner the little Haitian, and the Obligado brothers to work the fall harvest. We didn’t even bother to look for housing but slept in the bus at the edge of campus and went to the English Department to apply and waited to see if enrollment would be anything like the bumper crop we’d heard about. Dierdre grumbled the whole time. She wanted to go back and pick lettuce, then beans, then navel oranges and tangerines. It was real hot, and we had to walk a long way to find some dorm showers we could use.

“Why you want to pick?” I asked Dierdre. “This is white-collar work. This is America. ” She just fan herself with one of the textbooks and look out the bus window with that black face of hers like a mean squall coming off the Gulf. “Jamaicans too proud to do this work,” she said. “This is stoop labor. I rather cut cane.” She helped Estrellita cook, but she wouldn’t sing with us after dinner.

It was a bumper crop, the highest freshman enrollment ever. We all got four sections Freshman Comp except little Gesner, who got two comps and two ESLs, which was by then about the only thing could make Dierdre smile. She said English was his second language, all right—a long second. Even we had trouble understanding little Gesner, but he was a cheerful little dude and did his class preparations just like he could read. We had it worked out that we all got our MFAs in different places and Gesner was Cajun, but they didn’t ask us for no papers.

Dierdre got sick before midterms. First it was just throwing up and headaches, then she just stopped meeting her students and laid around all the time in the bus and wouldn’t eat nothing but Burger King milk shakes. We didn’t have no student benefits because we was faculty and no faculty benefits because we was temporary. The local welfare couldn’t help because we wasn’t U.S. citizens, though that never kept them from deducting our taxes. The campus doctor did look once at her before he found out she wasn’t no student from Zaire and said it looked like depression to him. He wrote a prescription for pills that we couldn’t afford. Dierdre stayed on her cot with the Burger King milk shakes and a copy of Huckleberry Finn. At least the weather cooled off.

She was a little better by Thanksgiving and went with us to the cafeteria for dinner, but the next time I saw her she was packed and heading for the Greyhound station. “I’m goin’ south,” she said. “Don’t try to stop me!”

I didn’t. We all talked about it that night. How could she give up being a teacher in an American university? “Ai, Chihuahua, but she’s proud,” Estrellita said. “Too proud for her own good.” We decided to send her some money as soon as we could. We got a few postcards from her over the spring semester. We were all busting our tails to keep up and never got enough money ahead to send her any. She said she’d worked the lettuce again, the snap beans, the Valencias and grapefruit. She said she could breathe deep again and didn’t even mind the pesticides, snakes and skeeters.

One thing about teaching, the time passes quick. Before we knew it our final grades were due. Little Gesner got hired for the summer, but the rest of us got cut loose. We’d been hearing rumors about a budget crunch here and a big crop of freshmen due next year in North Carolina. We headed up there in late August, but the rumors was false and only Estrellita and one of the Obligados got hired, part time. It was tough. Me and Joaquin and the other Obligado scratched for work, but we didn’t find much. We wouldn’t have made it through that winter if it wasn’t for the money Dierdre sent.

reprinted here with the permission of Richard Hill
first published by In These Times