On the twenty-first day of the fast, Dr. James McKnight had insisted that Chavez take medication, and also a few ounces of bouillon and unsweetened grapefruit juice. Dr. McKnight and many others felt that Chavez might be doing himself permanent harm, and subsequent events seem to bear them out; the worsening of what was thought to be a degenerative lumbar-disc condition that was to incapacitate him for three months in the fall of 1968 was generally attributed to protein deficiency, not only in the fast but in the ascetic diet that he has adopted since. Chavez himself does not agree. His bad back gave him less trouble during the fast than at any time since 1957, when it first began to bother him, and chronic headaches and sinusitis also disappeared; he never felt better.
Remembering something, Chavez began to smile. “Usually there was somebody around to guard me, give me water or help me out if I had to go to the rest room, but one time, about two o’clock in the morning, they were singing out there, and then they fell asleep, and the door was open. This worker came in who had come all the way from Merced, about fifty miles from here, and he’d been drinking. He represented some workers committee, and his job was to make me eat, and break my fast.” He began to laugh. “And he had tacos, you know, with meat, and all kinds of tempting things. I tried to explain to him, but he opens up this lunch pail and gets out a taco, still warm, a big one, and tries to force me. And I don’t want to have my lips touch the food—I mean, at that point, food is no temptation, I just thought that if it touched my lips, I was breaking the fast, you see, and I was too weak to fight him off. This guy was drunk, and he was pretty big, and so he sits on top of me, he’s wrestling with me, and I’m going like this”—Chavez twisted and groaned with horror, rolling his eyes and screwing up his mouth in a perfect imitation of a man trying to avoid a big warm taco, crying “Oh! Ow!”—“like a girl who doesn’t want to get kissed, you know. I began to shout for help, but this guy really meant business. He had told his committee, ‘Look, you pay my gas and I’ll go down there and make him eat; he’ll eat because I’ll make him eat, and I won’t leave there until he eats.’ So he didn’t want to go back to Merced without results. First he gave me a lecture and that didn’t work; then he played it tough and that didn’t work. Then he cried and it didn’t work, and then we prayed together, and that didn’t work, either.”
I asked if the man was still sitting on him while they prayed, and Chavez said that he was. By this time we were laughing so hard that we had to stop on the highway shoulder. Chavez’s expression of wide-eyed wonderment at human behavior is truly comic; reliving the experience, he pantomimed both parts. “He got my arms, like this”—he gestured—“and then he got my hands like this”—he gestured again—“in a nice way, you know, but he’s hurting me because he’s so heavy. I’m screaming for help, and finally somebody, I think it was Manuel, opens the door and sees this guy on top of me; Manuel thinks he’s killing me, but he’s so surprised he doesn’t know what to do, you know, so he stands there in the door for at least thirty seconds while I’m yelling, “Get him off me!’ Then about fifty guys rush in and pull him out of there; I thought they were going to kill him because they thought he was attacking me. I can hardly speak, but I try to cry out, ‘Don’t do anything to him, bring him back!’ ‘No!’ they yell. ‘Bring him back!’ ‘No!’ they yell. I’m shouting, you know. ‘Bring him back, I have to talk to him, don’t hurt him!’” Chavez’s voice, describing this scene, was quavering piteously. “So finally they brought him back.” He sighed with relief, quite out of breath. “He wasn’t hurt, he was too drunk. So I said, ‘Sit down, let me explain it,’ and I explained it, step by step, and the guy’s crying, he’s feeling very dejected and hurt.” Chavez laughed quietly at the memory, in genuine sympathy with the emissary from Merced.
On the seventeenth day, Chavez asked Richard to construct the cheap and simple cross that was later destroyed by vandals. The cross was the ultimate affront to at least two volunteers. One dismissed the entire fast as a “cheap publicity stunt”; the other, who had once been a priest, accused Chavez of having a messiah complex. Both soon quit the United Farm Workers for good. The messiah charge, which has been made before and since, does not ring true to my own experience of Chavez. His account of the taco man from Merced, to cite just one example, is not a parable constructed by a man who takes himself too seriously; perhaps what the ex-priest was threatened by was not an aspirant messiah but a truly religious man.
“Anyway, the kids began to feel the pressure, and my father and mother. My dad began to lose his sleep—he’s fantastic, he’ll never talk about himself—but he’s over eighty, you know, so I got a little worried. He has fasted a couple of times himself. Once he had dysentery and he couldn’t clear it up, and he was dying. And one of those hobos on his way through—this was in the Depression, and they were white Okies, mostly—learned about my father and said he could take care of it. He was an old guy with a beard, he had books in his bindle, you know, and my sister translated for him into Spanish, and he said, ‘I’ll either save you or I’ll kill you, and I’ll be back in three days, so you think it over.’ Well, my dad had been to a specialist and everything, and nobody could help him, but he said, ‘Hell, how can I stop eating, I can’t stop eating for even half a day!’ And the hoob said, ‘No, you can go for twenty days, maybe thirty days.’ Anyway, when the hobo came back, my dad said he would try it. So he stopped eating, and in three days he got rid of the dysentery, there was nothing to feed it. He went on for twenty days. I said to him, ‘Dad, you fasted for twenty days,’ and he said, ‘Yes, but that was different.’
“I had no set date in mind, but a combination of things made me end it on March eleventh. I could have gone a few days more. I broke the fast on a Sunday, it must have been about one or two o’clock. I ate a small piece of bread, but actually, I kept on fasting for the next four days, because you can’t eat right away. So really I felt weaker after the fast was over.”
The fast continued four days longer than Gandhi’s famous hunger strike in 1924 (or so I’ve read; Chavez would be the last to make this claim). As it wore on through February and into March, many of the farm workers became apprehensive, and a number of strikers came to Manuel and swore that they would never be violent again if he could just persuade Cesar to quit; like the emissary from Merced with his bag of tacos, they were terrified that the leader of la causa would be harmed.
During the fast Chavez received a wire from Senator Robert Kennedy (I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I FULLY AND UNSWERVINGLY SUPPORT THE PRINCIPLES WHICH LED YOU TO UNDERTAKE YOUR FAST . . . YOUR WORK AND YOUR BELIEF HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BASED SOLELY UPON PRINCIPLES OF NONVIOLENCE . . . YOU HAVE MY BEST WISHES AND MY DEEPEST CONCERN IN THESE DIFFICULT HOURS) and the senator, with a phalanx of the press, appeared in person on the epochal Sunday when the fast ended.
In early 1960, while in the CSO, Chavez had met Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, in a brief early-morning meeting that concerned a voter-registration drive for John Kennedy’s presidential campaign; when he saw him next, he was Senator Kennedy, attending the hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor in 1966. Apparently Kennedy had seen no point in going to Delano, but was finally persuaded by an aide that endorsement of Chavez and the minority-group Mexican-American cause could not hurt him politically and might be a very good investment; the investment was to win him the California primary two years later. And Chavez took Kennedy’s commitment at face value. “Even then, I had an idea he was going to be a candidate for the Presidency, and I was concerned for him because he endorsed us so straightforwardly, without straddling the line. This was a time when everybody was against us; the only people for us were ourselves. I was sitting next to Dolores Huerta, and we both had the same thought—that he didn’t have to go that far. Instead of that awful feeling against politicians who don’t commit themselves, we felt protective. He said we had the right to form a union and that he endorsed our right, and not only endorsed us but joined us. I was amazed at how quickly he grasped the whole
picture. Then the hearings started and they began to call the witnesses, and he immediately asked very pointed questions of the growers; he had a way of disintegrating their arguments by picking at the very simple questions. He had to leave just before the hearings ended, but he told the press that the workers were eventually going to be organized, that the sooner the employers recognized this, the sooner it was going to be over. And when reporters asked him if we weren’t Communists, he said, ‘No, they are not Communists, they’re struggling for their rights.’ So he really helped us, and things began to change.”
On March 11, 1968, while in Los Angeles, Kennedy was notified that the fast was ending; he chartered a plane and flew to Delano with the United Auto Workers’ Paul Schrade. At first, according to Chavez’s aides, Kennedy seemed rather cold. “He felt kind of uneasy,” Chavez told me, “and one of our people heard him ask Paul Schrade or somebody, ‘What do you say to a guy who’s on a fast?’ He was only in the room with me about thirty seconds. He looked at me”—Chavez grinned mischievously—“and he says, ‘How are you, Cé-zar?’ I said, ‘Very well, thank you. And I thank you for coming.’ He said, ‘It’s my pleasure,’ or something. So then we kind of changed the subject.” Chavez laughed. “I was very weak, and I did not know what to say either; I think I introduced him to Paul Schrade.
“The TV people were there, and one poor cameraman got blocked out, the monitors wouldn’t let him by. I saw he was frantic, and I was too weak to shout, but finally I signaled Leroy Chatfield, and Leroy got him in. The poor guy was really pale. And he said, ‘Senator, this is probably the most ridiculous request I ever made in my life, but would you mind giving him a piece of bread,’ and the senator gave it to me, and the camera rolled, and the man said, ‘Thank you very, very much.’”
Chavez, who used to be stocky, had dropped from one hundred and seventy-five pounds to one hundred and forty during the fast; bundled up in a dark-checked hooded parka against the March cold, he was half carried to the Mass of Thanksgiving held in a Delano park where an altar had been set up on the flatbed of a truck.
The mass began with a prayer in Hebrew: the sermon was Protestant, and Catholic ritual preceded the breaking of the poor man’s bread, semita. After Chavez and Kennedy had shared bread, priests passed through the thousands of witnesses, distributing the loaves. Because Chavez was too weak—he could scarcely keep his head erect during the ceremony—others read his speech for him, both in English and Spanish. In it, he told the gathering that his body was too weak and his heart too full for him to speak. He thanked everyone for being there, then told them that the strict water fast had been broken with liquids on the twenty-first day. He touched on the purpose of the fast, and concluded as follows: “When we are really honest with ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us be men.”
Chavez’s concept of the meaning of life being based in service to mankind is like that of Tolstoi and Hesse; his love is philosophical, not just religious. “How many people do you know,” Dolores Ruerta inquired one day, “who really love people, good and bad, enough to lay down their lives for them?” She meant that last part literally.
Robert Kennedy, who recognized Chavez’s uncommon qualities, declared that he was present out of respect “for one of the heroic figures of our time—Cesar Chavez!” After taking communion with Chavez, he began his speech in a Spanish so awful that he stopped with good grace to laugh at himself. “Am I murdering the language?” he inquired, and was wildly cheered. “Hool-ga!” he cried, in an effort to pronounce the strike slogan. “Hool-ga!” During the offertory, on behalf of his auto workers, Paul Schrade presented the Union with $50,000 for the construction of the new headquarters at the Forty Acres. After a feast of thanksgiving contributed by numerous families and committees, the meeting concluded with a fiery speech by Reies Lopez Tijerina, the leader of New Mexico’s Mexican-Americans, who was later mentioned as a possible Vice-Presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom party. Tijerina is an old-style Latin demagogue, full of shout and menace, but he failed to excite the campesinos of Delano. “The trouble is,” one staff member says, “that you get spoiled working for Cesar. When I see a person ranting and raving, I don’t feel there’s much substance there. It turns me off.”
• • •
The mass was attended by from four to ten thousand people, depending on the source of the estimate: about eight thousand is probably right. “I told the senator that we could do most everything in Delano except control crowds, and he said that that didn’t matter so long as the crowds were there. But he had a heck of a time getting from where we were sitting to the car. The crowd was pushing and surging, and when he got there, he didn’t get in; the way the people were reacting, he wanted to stand there and shake their hands and talk to them. Everybody was afraid of so many people pushing like that, and when Jim Drake got him inside, the people were saying through the windows, ‘Aren’t you going to run?’ ‘Why don’t you run?’ ‘Please run!’ Then Jim got the car moving, and Kennedy turned to the people in the car and said, ‘Maybe I will. Yes, I think I will.’ So when he announced his candidacy a week later, it was no surprise to us. Everybody had suggested that I leave Delano for a little while after the fast, to rest, so Helen and I were on the coast near the Santa Ynez Mission. Helen got a paper and brought it back to the farm where we were staying, and I was excited, but I knew he was going to do it all along.
“On March 19, when Paul Schrade called to ask if I would endorse him and be a delegate, I knew it would not be honorable to ask for something in return. With most politicians, this would have been all right, but not with this man, who had already helped us so much. After a three-hour discussion, our members voted unanimously that I should be a delegate, and we immediately began a voter-registration drive.
“We worked right up to the last minute, we had a beautiful time, and the drive was a tremendous success. Some precincts went out one hundred percent for Kennedy! But I was very tired, and I felt embarrassed when my name was called at the rally at the Ambassador, and so I left early, before the senator came downstairs. The last time I ever talked to him was when he gave me that piece of bread.”
In the voter-registration drive for Kennedy, Chavez’s CSO experience, combined with his great gifts as an organizer, were very effective; the Mexican-American vote in June was virtually unanimous, and few people doubt that it was Chavez who won for Kennedy the primary that Kennedy had to win in order to be nominated. Possibly the task was made more urgent by the murder of Martin Luther King, soon after the voter-registration drive began; there was a growing fear among the poor that all their champions were to be assassinated. Although King and Chavez had never met, only corresponded, the loss of King was personal for Chavez. “That was one time I came very close to losing my cool. I was at a rally in Sacramento, and I really resented the press, you know, resented their questions.” Still, he had not lost hope. In a telegram to Mrs. King he said: “DESPITE THE TRAGIC VIOLENCE THAT TOOK YOUR HUSBAND, THERE IS MUCH THAT IS GOOD ABOUT OUR NATION. IT WAS TO THAT GOODNESS THAT YOUR HUSBAND APPEALED . . .” In his opinon, King’s kind of nonviolence, like Gandhi’s, was the practicing of what Christ preached, but generated violence on the other side because it wasn’t passive. Since Chavez’s nonviolence is also of this kind, he has had to live with the possibility of his own assassination; fear of death was one of the problems that he dealt with in the fast.
“No one accepts death, I think,” he has said, “but what is the alternative? If you lock yourself in or give up, it’s a living death; that’s no alternative. Death is not enough to stop you. You’re really too busy to think of it. Unimportant, day-to-day things get yo
ur attention, which is just as well.”
Between the King and Kennedy assassinations, the following document was widely circulated in the Valley:
BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA
THE NEW CATHOLIC CHURCH “APOSTLES CREED”
I believe in CESAR CHAVEZ, creator of all the TROUBBBBLE, and HELL, and the “UNITED FARMERS ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE.” I believe in SAINT MARK DAY (the 2 bit politician priest of Delano) that “FOXXES” THE POOR FARMERS THE “CATHOLIC WAY” . . . I believe [Chavez] is the NEW POPE HOLY . . . I believe that he is SAINT CESAR CHAVEZ . . . I believe in WALTER REUTHER, HIS MENTOR. I believe in the $$$$$50,000 FIFTY GRAND CHECK donated by Walter Reuther to Chavez so Saint Cesar could HARRASS THE POOR FARMERS AND NON UNION WORKERS IN POOR CALIFORNIA . . . I believe HE will be SHOT “a la KENNEDY STYLE” (oh happy day) . . .
I believe LBJ-HHH-and MACNAMARA, did all their best to give all us poor Americans a GOOD FOXXING with VIETNAM, NORTH KOREA, LA FRANCE, THE ARABS, THE JEWS, THE CUBANS, THE NEEGAHS AND THE CIVIL RIGHTERS. I believe that ALL THE CATHOLIC BISHOPS in HEAH-U.S.A. are for CESAR CHAVEZ, CIVIL RIGHTERS, CARD BURNERS, DRAFT DODGERS, RAPERS, THIEVES, MURDERERS AND THE NIGGERS.
I believe BISHOP TIMOTHY MANNING OF FRESNO will “RENOUNCE” HIS IRISH BLOOD AND ANCESTORSHIP and will claim to be (like Chavez) a real COOL MEXICAN and half NEGRO. (He is a NIGGERS LOVER).
. . . I believe GEORGE C. WALLACE WILL SCARE THE SHEETS OUT OF ALL THE NEEGAHS (neeegers to you) by being ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE U.S.A. I believe FATHER GROPPIE THE S.O.B. OF MILWAUKEE WILL REST IN HELL NEXT TO A BELOVED FRIEND OF HIS, (REV.) M.L.K. (Beautiful News.)