Lizzie
Henry and I sold everything we could at a yard sale and bought bus tickets to El Paso. We arrived on a blustery spring day in 1935, just a week after we buried our parents, and checked into a rooming house, with every little thing we had left in the world neatly packed into two suitcases.
I’d never been to a city before. I’d seen photos in the newspaper, so I thought I knew what it would be like, but I wasn’t prepared for the sensory overload. Cars and trucks roared past us, people hurried by, store signs and street signs and clothing were all so bright. Even the air smelled wrong, like a tractor had just backfired right near me.
There was no time to say goodbye to the land we loved or to begin to mourn our parents, but as I found myself completely out of place, the immensity of the loss and the abruptness of the change all hit me at once. I hadn’t cried much other than the day Mother and Daddy left us. I didn’t even cry when Pastor Williams picked us up from the farm to take us to the bus stop. But it wasn’t car exhaust causing my eyes to sting as I looked around the tiny room Henry and I would be sharing. He set his suitcase on the bed and I set mine on the little sofa, staring down at it so Henry didn’t see the tears in my eyes.
“Lizzie,” he said gently, and when I composed myself and turned back to face him, he grinned and pointed to a string hanging from the roof. Back home, electric lights were only for the rich—but it was obvious that the rooming house wasn’t a place for rich people. I found the contradiction to be perplexing. I walked briskly across the room to tug the string. The light flickered on, so I pulled the string again, to turn it off, then repeated the process, momentarily distracted by the novelty.
“And indoor plumbing too,” Henry said, as he stretched out on the bed and crossed his arms beneath his head. “See? This is fine. And once I start working for the CCC, you’ll have this room all to yourself.”
Henry was convinced he’d find work in the city, all because of an article he’d read in the newspaper about Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps—the CCC. He was only a few months away from twenty-five, and as far as we could tell, the program was only for young men up to twenty-five. But Henry “had a good feeling” they’d take him anyway.
“What kind of a job do you think I’m going to get, Henry?” I shifted the pile of linen to the side of the sofa and sat. It was springy and lumpy and it smelled suspiciously like someone else’s sweat.
“Well, sis, you just have to ask yourself what you want to do. I like working with my hands—fixing things, building things. What do you like?”
“Farming,” I said flatly. Henry winced.
“We’re in the city now.”
“That’s my point, Henry. All I know how to do is drive a tractor. Collect eggs. Help a horse if she’s stuck in foal. I can sew a button on but I can’t sew a dress. I don’t have any skills.”
“Tomorrow you get out there and go talk to some businesses.”
“And if the CCC hires you, you’ll live there?” I asked. My voice wobbled but I lifted my chin. I told myself that things had changed, and I just needed time to get used to it, but I was terrified of being separated from Henry. All that had got me through that awful week was the hope that he’d make sure that we were both okay.
“You aren’t afraid, are you? You’ve never been afraid of anything.”
If only he knew. There wasn’t much in life that scared me, but the thought of being all alone in that city was enough to make my stomach cramp.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said abruptly, and I started to make up the sofa. “I’m just wondering when I get the good bed.”
But just two weeks later, Henry and I found ourselves standing on the street with our suitcases by our feet. As cheap as it was, the rooming house fees had cleaned us out, and the CCC did not offer Henry a job. Even if they had hired him, his employment would only have lasted till his twenty-fifth birthday—just two short months away. Not even Henry’s charm could circumvent the eligibility criteria for an in-demand government program. We learned that when the CCC advertised vacancies in the past, the line of applicants stretched around several city blocks. For every potential job in El Paso, there was a hundred or more desperate candidates.
“It will be okay,” Henry said firmly. “Maybe we sleep outside tonight, but something good will come up tomorrow.”
I was already growing a little tired of Henry’s insistence that things were going to turn around, but it would do me no good to discourage him. I scooped up my suitcase and pointed to the west.
“I saw a camp of homeless folk that way,” I said wearily. “Let’s see if we can find somewhere to sleep down there.”
Days began to blend into weeks, but I was too tired to keep track of how long we’d been in the city. We found ourselves a cast-off square of canvas and Henry fashioned it into a kind of tent, strung across rope between a tree and the side of a bridge, in a camp full of other makeshift tents. We slept on piles of old newspapers I collected from trash cans while Henry lined up at a church, waiting to be given someone’s old blankets.
Henry and I traversed the city knocking on every door asking for work until we knew its dead ends the same way we’d once known every field on the farm. At the end of the day, we would meet up at a soup kitchen for dinner.
At night, as we lay top-to-toe beneath that tent, I’d think about Mother. I knew what she’d say if she was still with us. She’d remind me that I was strong. A survivor, she’d say. She’d tell me to have faith. She’d tell me to keep going, even when it felt hopeless.
But while I waited and I prayed and I tried to be patient as I persevered, I came across an emotion I’d never felt before—I started to feel lost.
I knew downtown El Paso back to front after a few months, but I still couldn’t figure out who I was in that place, or who I was meant to be.
I’d been knocking on doors in the industrial district one day, and I was running a little early to meet Henry at the soup kitchen for dinner. I didn’t want to stand in the line on my own, so I was dawdling when I found myself standing opposite the new Hilton hotel—the tallest building in downtown El Paso. I scanned the opulent front entrance, then cast my gaze up over twenty-one astounding stories to the rooftop balconies.
Just then, a woman emerged from the laneway beside the building. I recognized the exhaustion on her face—I’d seen it in the mirror a hundred times. That was the look of someone who had worked an honest day’s living, who had made it to the end of the day tired, dignity intact.
I knew that feeling. I wanted to feel that kind of tired again so bad, I could taste it.
That exhausted maid emerging from the hotel represented the first glimmer of familiarity I’d experienced in months. She might have laughed if she knew how inspired I was by the bags under her eyes and her slumped shoulders, her feet that dragged through sheer weariness.
But when I saw her, I also saw a way forward. I’d spent months trying to find work, finding every door I knocked on remained closed. Something had to change.
I was going to master city life, just as I’d mastered every skill I’d ever needed on the farm. I still didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I had just decided where.