🌿 Riding the Orange Bus

The orange bus idled in front of the packing house like a promise. Anyone who wanted to pick oranges could climb aboard, and that morning I did. I was the only white person on the bus, but for once I wasn’t the only female. The driver was a big, warm-hearted Black woman named Sally Mae, and one of the pickers was a Jamaican girl.

Sally offered me an orange bag to pick with but warned I’d have to buy it if I stayed on. Soon we were rolling toward the grove, where a tractor trailer delivered bins to all twelve pickers. The rhythm was simple: pick as fast as you could until the bins were full. By the time the bins ran out, I had filled four. Most of the others had six to eight, but the Jamaican girl had four too. Since pay came by the bin, anything less than four meant you couldn’t survive. For me, survival was the goal—and I was proud. Sally Mae was proud of me too.

Over time, Sally Mae took me under her wing. She became my surrogate mother, finding me a place to stay and defending me fiercely. I remember her announcing to everyone on the bus that I was one of them—even if I was white. I loved her for that.

Life on the bus was raw and real. Sometimes we’d stop to pick up a worker who wouldn’t come out because he was too hungover, and Sally would send a couple of guys in to drag him out. Every morning, the crew showed up at my door, and together we drove to a new grove. At night, they brought me back to the little house Sally had arranged for me in the orange grove.

Once in a while, another white newcomer would sit beside me and ask what it was like. My answer was always the same: “It’s hell.” And it was—for them. No white newcomer lasted more than a day that winter. But for me, it was different.

The outsiders came and went, unable to bear the grind. But we stayed—rooted in oranges, laughter, and belonging. For them it was hell; for us, it was home.

Come May, a letter arrived from my mother asking me to return to the farm to help out. It felt less like a request than a summons, a sign that it was time to go back. Leaving Sally was hard—we hugged, we cried, we promised—but promises couldn’t hold against time. It wasn’t meant to last, only meant to change me.