The Great Trek

Sepia Saturday

My grandmother Cordelia and her new husband John in 1937

During the Great Depression, my father’s mother, Cordelia, had taken as much as she could of her marriage in Oklahoma. She talked it over with her best friend, Opal, and the pair of them, still in their twenties, set out to cross the Dust Bowl alone. She left behind her little son, my dad, in the care of his grandparents.

Their destination was the West Coast, where they had heard farm workers were wanted. Dee, as she was known, wasn’t a farm wife. She was a poor man’s wife on the outskirts of Tulsa. Her skills were canning, embroidery, basic quilting, and growing whatever kind of garden she could grow. But she and Opal figured they could do any work that was necessary to make a new life in the West. So they joined the migrant-worker camps.

They stayed together and worked together for quite a long while, following the various harvests. It was rough work, stooping for hours in fields while picking crops, climbing trees to pick fruit, making just enough money to move on.

If shelter was provided, it was often a camp of dirt-floor jerry-rigged shacks without running water of any kind except what could be found in ditch or creek. Sometimes camps had barracks-like tents. Sometimes rent was charged for the crude shelters. And the farmers kicked them out as soon as the picking was finished. On down the road they went, seeking the next job.

Dee and Opal managed to make it to California, and they worked their way southward along the central coast, down the farmland of the Salinas Valley. They both became friendly with a couple of fellow workers. Dee’s fellow was named John. His family had settled in a little farm town farther south. They got on well enough that Dee decided to get married again, and she went with John to join his family.

John found work as a laborer, building dams and roads, a job he would continue all his working life. Dee sent for her boy, my father in Oklahoma. For the next 30 years she and John eked out a living, never having much in material goods. She embroidered pillowcases, dishtowels, and tablecloths. She canned anything she could grow or find in quantity. She stayed in touch with Opal, who settled in another town with her new husband.

By the time I came along in the 1950s, John and Dee lived on a small rented ranch outside town. They raised chickens and had a little pony ring that traveled around to different sites for kids to ride. I found my grandmother Dee to be a little rough around the edges. She was independent and bossy. But I loved the ranch and the ponies, and sometimes I stayed the night with them, sleeping on a “pallet” made of quilts on the floor. They took me dump-pickin’, a pastime that involved wandering over the city dump, looking for what they could salvage. And Grandma Dee introduced me to coffee, making a delicious drink she called coffee-milk from the time I can remember.

She died fairly young of a heart attack, and I, her only granddaughter, inherited many of her embroidered linens. I always admired Cordelia for her great trek during the Great Depression. What a spirit and what determination she had. I would like to think I inherited some of them, too.

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