My father liked to tease kids with trick questions such as “Whose daddy are you?” and “Do you live around here or pick peas?”

The second question came to mind when I read of the attempt to fill Alabama’s farm jobs left open by displaced Hispanics.
Daddy, his daddy, brothers, uncles and cousins were not farmers, but coal miners. They knelt or lay on their side in cramped, wet holes to shovel coal over their shoulder. Daddy also picked cotton. He made picking sacks for my brother and me, and we followed him to the cotton patch before I was 10 years old.
Later, when we lived in the mining camp and I was 13 or 14 and my brother was 3 years younger, he and I became field hands, as did the women and children of many miners. We boys picked okra for 30 cents an hour. There was no talk of minimum wage or child labor. We rode our bikes 2 or 3 miles from camp to farm in the morning dark. Fear pumped our pedals faster as we passed the white house where two big collies chased us twice a day.
As soon as there was enough light, we struck out down the long rows of scratchy okra plants in Mr. Walker’s field, left arm hooked through the wire handles of a market basket, hands thrust into rubber gloves. We snapped off the good pods into the basket and dropped the tough ones on the ground. We were good pickers, and willing.
Mr. Walker couldn’t pay us much because he was a sharecropper. The landlord sent tractors to plow the fields in the spring and furnished the seed and fertilizer. Mr. Walker and his children thinned the stand and chopped out grass with a hoe. To encourage new growth, they topped the taller plants with a butcher knife.
I don’t know how sharecropper and landlord split the money the okra brought at the Farmers Market in Birmingham, but I suspect that out of his part the farmer paid for the seed and fertilizer and the rude house his family lived in. Okra grew right up to the shaky house on one side and to the hardpan yard on the other.
Mr. Norman and Mr. Walker had loaded coal together and both bore the scars of their occupation. Daddy had part of an ear missing, blown off by a premature explosion. Blue-black streaks that looked like faded tattoos ran under the skin of Mr. Walker’s face. Another close call with dynamite.
When we brought our full baskets in to be counted, Mr. Walker lit his pipe and dumped the okra out on a make-do plywood table and sorted the pods by size. Buyers from supermarkets and restaurants paid top price for the small, tender pods and less for larger ones. We hit the field at first light so our okra would be at the market for early shoppers.
We were young and small, but we were fast. A rubber glove would grow baggy with sweat and get a tear in a finger. We stripped it off and slipped on a new one in a blur of motion. We made quick work of the field, so quick that we often made less than a dollar each for a morning’s work. While the baskets were stacked into a covered truck for the market, Jack and I hit the dirt road home. We would return every other day all that summer, and the next.
We worked a few early hours before the sun got hot, not 10 to 12 hours a day, as hired hands do today. But we learned how hard such work can be, and I’m grateful that I never had to support a family as a picker.
For decades, Hispanic workers hardened by such labor picked Alabama’s okra and tomatoes, peaches and apples, berries and melons, cucumbers, peppers, beans and squash. But we drove them from the fields.
The other week, more than 50 black and white workers were hauled in to fill the jobs in Chandler Mountain’s tomato fields left vacant by brown workers. Most quit in two or three days. I guess they learned, as I did as a kid, at the end of summertime, the pickin’ ain’t easy.