By ALEXANDRE JULIETE ROSA*
Considerations on the recently published book by B. Traven
“When we leave the sphere of simple circulation or commodity exchange […] it seems to us that something changes in the physiognomy of the characters in our drama. The former owner of money now marches forward as a capitalist; the owner of labor-power follows him. The former with an air of importance, a roguish smile and eager for business; the latter timid and self-conscious, like someone who has sold his own skin and is only waiting to be flayed” (Karl Marx, 1992, p. 12). The capital).
The cotton pickers [The Wooden Flowerpot] appeared in serials in the months of June and July 1925, in the newspaper Forward, from Berlin, and the following year it was published in book form by the publisher Burchmeister, with the title The Vagabond. The work took a few more years to acquire its final version. According to Alcir Pécora, who wrote the afterword to the Brazilian edition, “B. Traven did not seem to be satisfied with the result of this second version, and continued working on it. Only in 1929 did he conclude the work and publish the final version of the book, returning to the original title he had given to the series of installments.”[I]
who read The death ship Now he will find his hero-narrator, Gales – who survived the terrible shipwreck that ends that book – wandering in search of some work in Mexico; how he survived and in what conditions he ended up in that country is a lapse that could, with a lot of imagination and talent, yield a beautiful book. What is certain is that Gales reappears in Mexico, at a train station, and manages to establish contact with a Mexican native, but of Spanish origin (Antônio).
The two had the same goal: to find their way to the town of Ixitlxochitchuatepec and meet Mr. Shine, a farmer, and introduce themselves to him as cotton pickers. It is very likely that B. Traven is referring to the town of Asunción Ixtaltepec, in the state of Oaxaca, far south of Mexico, almost on the North Pacific coast. He himself lived for some time in Chiapas, where he worked as a photographer and followed the production of ethnographic films.[ii]
In the same scene in which Gales meets Antonio, other characters appear: a tall, strong black man (Charley) and a Chinese man (Sam Woe), both with the same interest in finding Mr. Shine and applying for the job of cotton pickers. From then on, the narrator says, “the proletarian class was formed and we could immediately begin to organize things; the four of us felt as at ease as brothers who, after a long separation, suddenly found themselves unexpectedly in some strange and distant point on Earth.”[iii]
This first group is joined by two more candidates to be cotton pickers: another black character (Abraham) and a “chocolate-brown Indian” (Gonzalo). Gales naturally appears as the leader of these proletarians, most likely because he is white and a foreigner. In the best “who has a mouth goes to Rome” style, the group sets out in an adventurous search for Mr. Shine.
In this first movement of the book we already find an element that will be decisive in the future successes of the character-narrator Gales: the fact that he is white and a gringo (American) works as open sesame for the conquest of small and rapid occupations. B. Traven allegorically brings together the representatives of the indigenous races (the original peoples of Mexico), white, black, yellow and mestizos. This would be a small sample of a universal male proletariat, which finds itself by chance in the Mexican jungles in search of survival.
The Chinese man Sam Woe is presented as the “most elegant of all”; his new clothes contrast with the rags of his other companions, and he is also the most lively, pragmatic and has the best vision for the future. He did not like to stop to rest and at these times disagreements arose between Sam Woe and the rest of the group: “It was at these times that we reprimanded him, saying that we were true Christians, while he was a damned Chinaman, who had been shocked by a grotesque yellow dragon, and that this was the secret of the superhuman resistance of his stinking and disgusting race. He explained, smiling serenely, that he could do nothing, and that we were all created by the same God, but that this God was yellow and not white” (p. 20).
The “giant Negro Charley,” who claimed to be from Florida but could neither speak nor understand English fluently nor pronounce “the Negro American dialect.” He may have been from Honduras or San Domingo, but he could have come from Brazil or “smuggled in from Africa.” Charley was the only one who stated “loud and clear that, to him, picking cotton was the most beautiful and well-paid job there was” (p. 21).
Another character, “little black boy Abraham from New Orleans,” who had “a skin color as black as the shirt he wore, and we couldn’t quite tell where the last scraps of the shirt ended and where the skin that should have been covered began.” Abraham was a “real Southern American Negro, dumb-witted, shrewd, cheeky, and always funny. He had a harmonica, on which he played for us the stupid Yes, we have no bananas for so long that on the second day we had to beat him so that, at least temporarily, he would only sing or whistle during work, and also dance. He stole like a crow and lied like a Dominican friar” (p. 22). On the long journey to Mr. Shine’s farm, Abrahan was beaten a few times for committing petty thefts—a piece of dried meat from Antonio and a can of milk from China.
After a long and tortuous walk, the group arrived at a farm where an American family lived. Gales was warmly welcomed by the residents and invited into the house. The others, “as non-whites, were fed on the porch and spent the night in a shed. Everyone ate a lot, but I (Gales) was the real guest. I was served as only in such a sparsely populated country can a white person be served by white hosts” (p. 26).
On this farm they get more precise information on how to get to Mr. Shine, which in fact happened at noon the following day: “Mr. Shine received us with some joy, since he did not have enough labor to pick cotton.” The farmer was a little surprised to learn that Gales, a white man and an American, was also applying for that job and decided to pay his fellow countryman a little more: “I pay six cents a pound, for you I will pay eight, otherwise you will never reach as much as the blacks. Of course you don’t need to tell the others” (p. 27).
Although he suffers the same hardships and misfortunes as his fellow workers, Gales manages to gain certain advantages from being white. The warm welcome he receives on the American farm and the extra two cents per kilo of cotton were the first in a series of different treatments he receives throughout the book.
Even though it is not as extensive as the theme of labor exploitation, the racial issue presents itself as a subsidiary force in the plot, and at times as an obstacle to the realization of the concept of proletarian unity above and beyond racial distinction. This appears most prominently in the first major episode of the book, during the period in which Gales works as a scavenger.
In the first weeks of work they experience the hardships of cotton picking, the unsanitary conditions of their tents and the hunger that almost annihilated them, in addition to the chronic lack of water. The fact that Mr. Shine had not lent a mule to Antonio and Sam to go to the nearest store to buy some provisions [they had to walk three hours], gave rise to a discussion about the unjust nature of the world: “And just at this moment, when we were about to approach the favorite subject of all the workers of the Earth, and to understand rather with lung force than with wisdom the state of injustice in the world, which divides people into exploiters and exploited, into drones and disinherited, Abraham arrived with six hens and a rooster, which he had tied by the feet and carried head downwards, hanging from his shoulder by a rope.” (p. 34)
Abraham had discovered a great business venture and offered to sell each egg for nine cents to his fellow workers. “Any one of us could have done it. Sam Woe felt no envy or jealousy, only admiration for the poultry farmer’s enterprise; yet he felt ashamed that he had been outdone by a black man in finding an honest extra income” (p. 35). The eggs from Abraham’s hens [which were actually stolen from the neighborhood] would play a crucial role during the most cruel period of the work, as they became the great source of nutrients to support the exorbitant hours.
The eggs of “the little black boy Abraham, from New Orleans, who stole like a crow and lied like a Dominican friar”, end up hindering the possibility of proletariat unity, which would only be resumed at the end of the episode on Mr. Shine’s farm, when a strike led by the indigenous people manages to curb the farmer’s exploitative rage.
It is not explicit in the text that Abraham represents a dissociative force because of his color or race. This is a point of interpretative suggestion for the narrative situations and their development. The stereotypical description of Abraham is eloquent and speaks for itself about the situation of racial inferiority of the population of African origin that began to come to that region of Mexico, as a result of the slave trade.[iv]
B. Traven does not engage in discussions of racial content, whether in relation to blacks and whites, between blacks and indigenous people or mixed-race people, between mixed-race people and whites, etc. The problematic issue between “Indians” and “whites” is present throughout the book, but without direct consideration by the narrator.
Regarding black characters, the observations of a scholar on the subject can help us understand the place they occupy in The collectors: “As blacks appear in the literature of various countries around the world, the attitude of writers varies according to the ideas that prevail at the time and the growing knowledge of other lands, including Africa and its inhabitants. They were seen as vague and mysterious, then as slaves, a subject race whose duty was to work for the conquerors and masters, and more recently as a minority group, free, but still facing old prejudices and fighting for their acceptance as equal members of a free society. […] In Mexico, where the racial problem is predominantly that of relations between Indians and whites, there was a novel in which the protagonist is black, or, more precisely, mulatto. It is the novel The black Anguish, by Rojas Gonzalez (1944)”.[v]
Alcir Pécora discusses the issue in the following terms: “The perception of the economic situation in Mexico, however, never arises without a racial component, experienced at various times by Gales. As can be seen in several passages of the narrative, the bosses and even the employees felt strange, and even uncomfortable, that a white man would venture into a job that they considered more suitable for blacks, Indians, or Asian immigrants. From this point of view, Gales is a kind of middleman, a man with no place in the given hierarchies. In fact, Gales’s crossing intensifies a contradiction between class and race that ends up affecting the pride of the white boss, who feels affronted or diminished by having to hire a white worker, in a situation identical to that of the Indians or miserable blacks” (p. 240).
Returning to the plot, Mr. Shine tries to entice Gales to enter into negotiations with the strikers: “You [Gales] are the only white man here among the pickers, and since I already pay you eight cents, you are exempt and can take part in the discussion.” (p.45). Gales, however, does not give in to the farmer’s pressure and declares himself sympathetic to the strike action, which leads Mr. Shine to give in to the demands of the cotton pickers. He grants a salary increase, from six to eight cents per kilo, with retroactive payment to the initial period of collection.
After his time in the cotton fields, Gales gets another job opportunity, this time at an oil drilling camp. Mr. Shine himself was the one who arranged the job, after hearing about an accident during the drilling of a well, which resulted in a serious injury, incapacitating the official driller from working for a few weeks. The work in the cotton harvest would continue for a few more weeks and Mr. Shine is worried about Gales' future.
Upon hearing the news of the accident, the farmer tells the oil field manager that he knows a young man who could replace the injured driller: “So I [Mr. Shine] said to the manager, 'Well', I said, 'I have a Fellow, a scavenger, a white man, white in face and white in chest, a young man who, in the most miserable filth, will dig the deepest hole for you.' So I said, 'Mr. Beales, I'll send you the fellow' (p. 51).
The activities in the oil field lasted a short time, but long enough for Gales to enjoy a certain fulfillment, even within the precariousness of his life. For some time he lived carefree, without thirst or hunger; “a free man in the free tropical forest, taking naps at will and wandering wherever, whenever and for as long as I wanted. I was fine. And I lived this feeling very consciously” (p. 55).
A new pilgrimage in search of work leads Gales to meet his colleague Antônio again, who helped him find a new job, as a baker and confectioner in the bakery. The Aurora, belonging to a Frenchman named Doux, who also owned a café-restaurant and leased a hotel.
This large part of the story, which has as its central core Gales' life in the bakery, takes up a good part of Book Two of The collectors. It is here, too, that the author's worldview appears most pronouncedly and his favorite theme – the class struggle and the exploitation of labor – takes on its most perfect contours: “Señor Doux and all his business colleagues in the city already knew how to take away any possibility of us learning to reflect. This is a new land. Everyone has only one thought: to get rich really quickly, without worrying about what will become of the other. That is what the oil people, the mine workers, the merchants, the hotel owners, the coffee growers, everyone who has a few pennies to exploit something. Those who cannot exploit an oil field, a silver mine, the clientele, or hotel guests, then exploit the hunger of the ragged workers. Everything has to make money, and everything makes money. There is as much gold accumulated in the veins and arteries of the workers as in the mines…” (p. 133).
As in The death ship, there are moments of relaxation and idyll in the life of the narrator hero, a bit of the 'beautiful side of life'. And, even so, these moments do not escape the general rule of the civilization of capital – someone will be exploited. Gales has the habit of frequenting places of prostitution. The narration of the neighborhood of ladies and the entire prostitution system is one of the highlights of this work and culminates in the tragic and fascinating story of the prostitute Jeannette, one of the “interposed episodes” of the book, as observed by Alcir Pécora.
Such episodes provide the narrative with a very peculiar structure, as they appear interspersed with the main action and “end up promoting a great diversity of registers, which are the key to its lively progress, articulating intriguing or comical cases in unexpected sequences” (p. 232).
As expected, Gales' skin color will once again influence the outcome of his life. After finishing his work at the bakery, he manages to get a letter of introduction from a cotton farmer, a certain Mr. Mason, through a recruiter. Arriving at the farm, Gales ends up being tricked by Mr. Mason, who says he doesn't know the recruiter. He manages to get rid of the would-be picker with another letter of introduction, addressed to a farmer who was building a new house and needed carpentry work.
Gales heads to the farm, where he discovers that there is no need for a carpenter. Even so – because he is white – Gales manages to get a good lunch and also discovers, in a conversation with the farmer, that Mr. Mason is nothing more than a scoundrel, who every year “uses this scam to recruit pickers, in order to put even more pressure on the wages of the white pickers who are looking for work, using the native workers” (p. 174).
After this little misfortune, our hero decides to have a drink to calm his temper. In a bar, he ends up meeting an American – “an older man, definitely a farmer” – and from there he enters the last work experience of the book, this time as a driver of a huge herd of cattle. In the conversation he has to arrange the job, Gales learns the reasons why the American had invited him for the task. The farmer and owner of the cattle, Mr. Pratt, offers him one hundred pesos a day, in addition to six of his men, all “Indians”, and a “half-breed” foreman, a very intelligent guy, according to Mr. Pratt, but who does not inspire confidence and that he, Mr. Pratt, prefers “a white man to take charge of the troop” (p. 183).
The task of driving around a thousand head of cattle through the interior of Mexico, apart from one or two incidents, is narrated almost as an idyll. Even an attack they suffered from a band of former revolutionary combatants is resolved in the most serene peace. There is a communion between the narrator and the herd, which reminds us of the great cattle crossings described in some stories by João Guimarães Rosa: “Ah, but how beautiful is the sight of an enormous herd of healthy semi-wild cattle. There, in front of us, they stamp and march, their necks wide, their bodies round, their horns powerful. It is a turbulent sea full of indescribable beauty. The gigantic force in living nature, tamed by the will. And each pair of horns represents a life in itself, with its own will, with its own small desires, thoughts and feelings” (p. 203)
The narrative of this herd of cattle – healthy, imposing, disciplined – is an absurd contrast compared to the situation of the working class. Both, cattle and proletarian, march to the slaughterhouse. It is precisely from this mass of people, living on that threshold between poverty and misery, it is from this dog-eat-dog world that B. Traven takes the characters of this and other books, such as The death ship e The treasure of Sierra Madre.
Traven's books seem to dramatize, to the last consequences, the characters who count only on their own skin and who are willing to be skinned by the capitalists in exchange for a starvation wage. They are like those beings described by Marx, who materialize the historical passage of the transformation of money into capital, beings who have sold their own skin and are just waiting to be skinned.
*Alexandre Juliete Rosa He holds a master's degree in Brazilian literature from the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo (IEB-USP).
Reference
B. Traven. The cotton pickers. Translation: Erica Gonçalves Ignacio de Castro. New York, Imprimatur Publishing House, 2024, 256 pages. [https://amzn.to/4hXvId0]
Notes
[I] Alcir Pécora. “The tragedy of work (but also the epic of the strike and the apology of delight). In: The cotton pickers, P. 227.
[ii] Isis Saavedra Luna and Jorge Munguía Espitia report on this phase of Traven in the article “Enigmas de Bruno Traven”, available through link.
[iii] B. Traven. The cotton pickers. Translation by Erica Gonçalves Ignacio de Castro. Rio de Janeiro: Imprimatur / Quimera, literary seal, 2024, p. 15.
[iv] On this topic, see the work of María Elisa Velásquez and Gabriela Iturralde Nieto: Afro-descendants in Mexico: A story of silence and discrimination. Available from link.
[v] Gregory Rabassa. “The Negro in History and Literature”. In: The black man in Brazilian fiction. Translated by Ana Maria Martins. New York: Routledge, 1965, pp. 49 and 74.
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