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“It was the way the fadin’ late afternoon sun caught the side of her face, and made her skin glow like fire, and her eyes danced with little sparkles, like gold or maybe diamonds. It was May, I think, maybe June. She wore a fancy dress full of yellow flowers and blue clouds and she looked like one of them women in the magazines that ladies read, the one’s full of clothes and shoes and all that horseshit. The women who looked just as pretty with their clothes on, as the girls in the magazines I kept under my bed.

“I stood there with the shovel in my hand still tryin’ to learn the value of a hard day’s work, that’s what my daddy said I needed to learn.

“He said that to me before he run off. I never know’d my daddy real good. That’s about all he ever told me.

“It wasn’t the work in that sweaty sun that pissed me off, James, not half as much as the nickels they threw me as the boss called me a ‘good worker.’ The one day I told the boss a ‘worker’ was a fuckin’ bee, and I was a man, and the boss said, ‘Get your worthless ass back down in that goddamn ditch,’ and I did.

“That’s the day I put my head down, James.

“That day I knew the nickels was never going to buy me nothing’ but another pair of boots to wear a hole clean through and not a pair of clean pants, fancy enough to wear for that pretty lady, with the sun on her face, and the sparkly eyes, to ever notice me.

“That’s the day I started to hate the mud-slop ditch as much as the goddamn boss and his nickels. That’s the day I almost climbed out of the muddy hole and hit the boss upside the head with that fuckin’ pointed shovel and walk off to claim my goddamn life. Instead, that was the day I decided to stay in the ditch with my wet boots and dungarees with the patches on the knees and nod and smile when the boss walked by. And dig that spade into the rock and clay soil. Jesus fuck, like any man right in the mind could be happy in a ditch, with a pick and shovel.

“That’s the day I decided to let them own me and let the lady with the sun on her face and sparkling eyes and the flowery dress fade to a memory that haunted me all the rest of my days. Then came the day I realized my back was too sore to work the shovel anymore and all my bones creaked like some old sailin’ ship must have creaked when it was way too long out to sea. Scarin’ them sailors their boat was comin’ apart at every nail and riggin’

“Feelin’ that wood handle on them burnin’ callouses of my hand I realized it wasn’t some old ship creakin’, but me comin’ apart.

“And that’s the day I died. But I died a lot of days before they throw’d me in that hole. Bo and Ronnie and Dick and them other boys with shovels stood around my hole, drinkin’ warm beers, and they said I was a good man. But the boss, he never said I was a good man, he said I was a good worker; that’s what the fuckin’ boss said.”

-Mose Tester The Berry Pickers