The Long, Hot Wait For Pickin' Work (2024)

The startled kitchen crowd of about 50 children, old women and men looked up from their newspapers and naps to see who the stranger was.

He switched off the ignition and emerged from the blue cloud of exhaust, a dark-skinned man with a couple of teeth in his mouth and thick tufts of hair sticking straight up from his head.

He wore a white T-shirt several sizes too small and boasted a mammoth pot belly that sagged over his trousers like yeasty black dough.

As a ragged crew of men bearing wary looks gathered around to size him up, he grinned and wiped beads of sweat from his face. Then he introduced himself as Billy Bongo.

"I got work for ya," he proclaimed in a high-pitched twang that echoed in the driveway. "Pickin' work in North Carolina . . . . Lotta guys get fifty dollars a day."

For five hot and dusty weeks this summer I'd waited at SOME House to hear those words.

I arrived there at dawn each morning, eager to explore a mysterious phenomenon known in the slums of Washington as "the Bus," a motley assortment of vans that show up at public parks, unemployment offices, shelters and soup kitchens a dozen times or more from July to November to load up with men desperate for work.

Some have given the Bus a more ominous name--the Black Dispatch. It comes from the fields of Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and other eastern states to find a fresh supply of jobless and homeless men, most of them blacks, to work as migrants.

There are a few, at SOME House at least, who scoff at the driver's pitch. They argue that the man is nothing but a flim-flam artist, that the grueling work he offers will amount to little more than slavery, that the pay is meager and the beds much worse than those at the city's fetid public shelters.

They know, they say. They've taken the ride before.

Yet there are always plenty who will take a glance at their homely surroundings, recall the emptiness of their pockets, and consider the Bus a ticket to salvation.

I, too, wanted to climb aboard the Bus to see what the work was like and to find out if it provided true opportunities for destitute men to earn money.

I could have chosen to wait for the Bus at other places. There's the Community for Creative Non-Violence Drop-In Center at Sixth and G streets NW, and the Zacchaeus House soup kitchen at 14th and Willard streets NW.

But at both places the Bus is considered such a harbinger of evil and exploitation that derelicts and volunteers alike allegedly have chased it away with clubs in their hands.

At SOME House, however, the Black Dispatch is generally viewed as another rite of summer, a fleeting chance at a change of fortune.

I didn't know at first when it would come, nor where or how far it would take me once I got into it. During those weeks before Billy Bongo arrived, I only knew what the men at SOME House told me about it. And what they told me was terrifying.

Willard Webster, the manager of So Others Might Eat--SOME House--is responsible for feeding more than 500 people a day, everyday throughout the year, at the soup kitchen and medical clinic at 71 O St. NW.

For eight years, the beefy 47-year-old philosopher and part-time peace keeper says he has seen the Bus pull in and load up.

And for eight years Webster has seen most of the men straggle back to town, just as penniless as before, with tales of slavery, hunger and hair-raising escapes from places as farflung as Immokalee, Fla., and Newton Grove, N.C.

When I showed up in early June, Webster said three vans had already come and departed this summer. "They'll be around again," he said. "They're like buzzards. Just wait around here long enough."

On June 19 my assignment at SOME House began. I arrived at 5:30 a.m. to claim a place in line alongside a chain-link fence outside the kitchen. At that time of day, the rats were still up and about on their nightly rounds, hopping from one garbage can to another in a trash-strewn alley out back.

About 6:30, Webster opened a creaking door that led to the cement courtyard behind the kitchen, where those waiting for the 7:30 breakfast could while away the hour sitting on a dozen or so rickety wooden pews adorned with tiny crucifixes that had been rescued years before from a razed church.

After a week or two there, after a number of talks with others about the Bus--conversations that were much like horror stories delivered around a campfire--the circle of people who knew my identity grew to a dozen or more.

To those who didn't know I was a journalist, I must have seemed to be just another threadbare young black man with a scraggly beard, without a job and little to do. And to those, like Webster, who knew I was a writer, my efforts were alternately praised or ridiculed, depending on the speaker.

James Williams, a 58-year-old man who occasionally sleeps in an abandoned car behind the kitchen, laughed himself hoarse whenever he saw me, for he said he had taken the Bus the year before and ended up having to escape like a convict from a chain gang.

"Yeah," he often shouted, waving his black cap in his hand, his purplish, ruddy face a picture of delight, "when it comes I'll lead you to it personally."

And James Theodore Brown, a 33-year-old ex-convict and drifter from Nashville, described his experience after being picked up to work in South Carolina sweet potato fields several summers ago.

As several old men waiting for lunch gathered around to hear him one day, Brown said he worked for two months straight in a migrant camp patroled by men with guard dogs.

"Two months," he repeated, as his listeners shook their heads in sympathy and disgust. After all that, he went on, he still--"still!"--ended up owing the camp crew leader money for room and board.

One afternoon, he alleges, he watched as a field boss pounded the end of a pitchfork over the head of a worker who refused to work. That same night, Brown said, he escaped under cover of darkness, fleeing through the Carolina countryside with his upper body hunched forward, parallel to the ground like a grunt in combat.

A man named Willie, an old guy with a thick gray mustache, once described the time he and two others were picked up by the Bus in Washington, lured by a man with "two pretty 'ho'es" and a bottle of scotch and promises of work and money in North Carolina.

"Mother ------ said we was gonna get poke chops every night," Willie said, as listeners clung to his words. "Now, them other dudes, they wanted the work and them 'ho'es. Me, I ain't had poke chops in damn near five years. So, I goes down to North Carolina with 'em and that mother ------ puts us to work picking them damn peppers. I got beat up. I never got no money. I never saw them 'ho'es again and I never touched a goddamn poke chop."

From that point on, whenever he saw me, Willie would wag his finger in my direction with a knowing smile and grunt, "poke chop."

Everyone at the kitchen, whether they like it or not, is tagged with a nickname if they stick around long enough. There were a couple of "Slims," quite a few "Shorties" and a number of others who were nicknamed not so much by their appearance as their behavior or possessions.

There was "Guitar," an itinerant blues musician with a Col. Sanders goatee who often entertained those waiting for food with renditions of "Johnny B. Good" and "Amazing Grace."

There was also the "Man with the Electric Head," a troubled young fellow with a gentle disposition who, when he wasn't talking about a family named the Muldoons who "lives in trees on North Capitol Street," spent much of his time sculpting a surprisingly elegant model of a human head made out of electrical odds and ends culled from city streets and junk yards.

In time, I became known as "That Dude Who Wants the Bus."

As the weeks dragged by, my effort began to look as gloomy as some of the lives that filtered through the kitchen, day in, day out.

I was waiting for a vehicle that had neither a fixed schedule nor a known destination. And I was becoming as much a part of the everyday clientele at SOME House as the kitchen's pet cat, a bony gray and white creature with no name that fed on leftovers and fiercely guarded its turf from dogs and rats alike.

During those weeks word spread to me three different times that migrant vans with Florida tags had shown up in other parts of town, picking up a half-dozen or so men.

One morning, a tramp told me, a van appeared at the Blair School public shelter on H Street NE.

"You missed it, dude," he rasped, sharing my exasperation. "You shoulda been there."

Amid the everyday din of voices and the clatter of plates and silverware at SOME House, there was always talk of money and work, food stamps and welfare--who had it, who didn't, where to get it.

And eventually someone would mention the Bus.

Billy Bongo finally arrived in his white van shortly after noon on Monday, July 25. The courtyard and driveway were packed with hungry men, and Webster spotted him first and winked my way and smiled.

"I got room in the bus for fifteen men," Billy Bongo shouted, a toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth. "Goin' to Benson, North Carolina."

As the stranger spoke, offering guarantees of steady work and wages, more and more men gathered around to contemplate whether his promises boded better than the little they had in the ghetto.

"We're pickin' green peppers. Ya get thirty cents a bucket. Buckets are about this big," Billy Bongo explained, holding his meaty hands about 10 inches apart.

One at a time he fielded the men's questions, which came quickly. "Yeah, we feed ya," Billy Bongo said. "Good food, too. nigg*h food. Poke chops, cone bread, collard greens. Cost you only three dollars a day and the rent's free . . . . And three dollars is nothin'."

"Benson?" he continued, answering another question. "Well, that's about three hours on the other side of Richmond. I takes you down free of charge . . . . No, you gotta make your own way back. You works as long's you want. Nobody's gonna stop you from leaving."

In the back of Billy Bongo's van was an array of rusty metal benches anchored to the walls and rear door, a thermos of water, one paper cup and two young men he had picked up earlier in the day from a public park across from the Trailways bus station downtown.

They were a frightful looking pair, with an eerie emptiness in their eyes. One was thin as a sheet of paper, about 25 years old, wearing clothes so dark and oily they appeared to glow.

The other was chubby, about the same age, and was outfitted in a floppy brown hat, football jersey, blue tennis shoes and a black handkerchief that was tied around his face and made him look like an overstuffed Lone Ranger.

It seemed clear that Billy Bongo had already searched high and low for bodies.

At SOME House, however, he struck gold. Besides me, six other men accepted his offer that day, men whose faces I recognized from the human ebb and flow at the kitchen, but whom I didn't get to know until we hopped into the van together.

In addition to the odd pair already in the van whom we dubbed "Skinny" and "Space Cowboy," my companions included:

Tony Hart, a 23-year-old Cardozo High School dropout who worked for nine months at St. Elizabeths Hospital as a janitor before being RIFfed from the federal job in 1981. For nine months he said he was "shootin' good," bringing home $287 every two weeks, with an apartment and a 650 Yamaha motorcycle.

After being laid off, the best he could do was collect unemployment benefits, and when those ran out he ran into trouble with the law. In June he was found guilty of a misdemeanor assault charge. According to court papers, he hit a woman over the head with a car part. At the time the bus came, he was free pending sentencing in D.C. Superior Court in September.

Hart, a moody loner who hopped aboard Billy Bongo's bus with nothing but the clothes on his back, said he needed time and distance from Washington to "clear my head."

Audell Garland, 29, an archetypal D.C. street dude down on his luck, who was sleeping at the Blair School public shelter and eating at SOME House when the bus arrived. A compact figure with a bushy goatee, Garland was embarking on his first trip to the southern countryside. Though he had witnessed and experienced much brutality and desperation in the streets of the city, the people of the South petrified him more.

"I always know what to do and where to go in the city, no matter how bad I'm shootin'," he once said. "Here, I don't know nothin' and nobody."

An ex-convict and Navy enlistee who said he was booted out of the military service on a dishonorable discharge for being AWOL once too often, Garland was the most sensitive and quick-tempered of the troop, a man who remained defiant to authority.

To him, the trip offered a chance, no matter how slim, for a turn of luck.

George (Shorty) Fewell, a 53-year-old street scavenger with, he boasted, a $150-a-month second-floor apartment next to the Kung Fu Equipment store on 12th Street NW, a 19-year-old wife and a taste for wine. His dearest possession, besides the color snapshot of his wife, was a tiny red magnet, the tool of his city trade.

Throughout the year, Fewell collects aluminum cans from the streets of Washington and turns them over to recycling centers for about 36 cents a pound. He used the magnet to test whether a can was aluminum or steel. A disciplined and tireless worker, he is a stocky little guy with arms as thick as pythons and a sober sense of mission.

To him, the journey was a matter of simple arithmetic: $50 a day seemed better than 36 cents a pound.

Larry (Slim) David, 32, a lanky, dark-skinned fellow from Richmond with a wife, a 2-year-old child and another on the way. Unable to find work in the cigarette plants in Richmond, he was traveling through Washington on his way to New York with a buddy, James Allen Moody, 33, to hustle there for work when Billy Bongo showed up at the kitchen. For Slim and Moody, a Vietnam veteran with premature flecks of gray in his beard and afro, the Bus was the only good omen to roll their way in a long time.

Finally, there was 54-year-old Clyde Couch, a roly-poly gent who was nicknamed Heavy by the others. For him, work meant money for wine.

I joined them, wearing an old pair of blue jeans and a tattered blue flannel shirt. I carried only a Social Security card in my hip pocket for identification, along with a notebook and a Washington Post press pass. For me, the trip offered a chance to discern whether the tales about the Black Dispatch were apocryphal or true.

We ate a last meal of chicken and vegetables at SOME House, then piled into the van. As Billy Bongo shifted the Bus into gear and backed out of the driveway amid a belch of smoke, the last thing I saw of SOME House was Willard Webster jotting down the van's license plate number for my wife.

Next: Deliverance CAPTION: Picture 1, Willard Webster at SOME House soup kitchen: Each summer, he says, the migrant vans return "like buzzards." ; Pictures 2 and 3, For George (Shorty) Fewell, becoming a migrant was a matter if simple arithmetic,: 36 cents a pound picking up cans here versus a promised $50 a day for picking crops there; Picture 4, Audell Garland, was down on his luck and eating at the SOME House soup kitchen when the bus arrived. A D.C. street dude who had never been South, he figured he might as well go along. It was a chance for a change of fortune. Photos by James M. Thresher--The Washington Post