Crusader of the Cane : Mary Ellen Beaver could fill her days with her grandkids. Instead, she toils tirelessly for migrant workers. ‘This is war,’ she snaps.

MIAMI LOCKS LABOR CAMP, Fla. — She had come bearing good news on a rainy night, and Mary Ellen Beaver expected a warm welcome. But when she entered the barracks of 30 sugar-cane workers just back from the fields, it was more like stepping into a lion’s den.

“Lady, you tryin’ to cheat us!” roared a Jamaican man, crumpling the newsletter that Beaver had given him. “Where’s the $51 million we gonna get? How much of it you got?”

“Goodby!” shouted another worker, towering over Beaver and backing her into a corner of the darkened room. “You legal aid people nothin’ but trouble for us!”

Someone else might have fled, but the grandmother in stretch pants and sneakers stood her ground. A court had awarded cane workers $51 million in back wages, she told the men, and it was a huge victory. The cash payments were delayed because growers had appealed the ruling. Yet progress had been made.

“You’ve been cheated, and we’re on your side,” insisted Beaver, 61, a paralegal for Florida Rural Legal Assistance. “We’ve always been on your side.”

It should have been an easy message to convey. But in the world of migrant farm workers, nothing is simple. Soon after public-interest lawyers won their lawsuit last year, sugar companies slashed the number of Jamaicans who cut cane in Florida. There would be fewer jobs, officials said, and it was all because of those meddling lawyers from the big city.

“This is a frustrating business,” says Beaver, hurrying through the labor camp in South-Central Florida with an armful of brochures. “It sounds corny, but trying to help farm workers is a David-and-Goliath story, and David keeps taking a beating. You get it from all sides. It’s uphill all the way.”

Beaver should know. For 23 years, she’s been one of the nation’s leading advocates for migrant workers, first in Pennsylvania and now in Florida. A modest, plain-spoken woman who looks more like a church lady than a rabble-rouser, she’s mixed it up with farmers, corporate growers and field bosses, earning their contempt but also their grudging respect.

Along the way, she’s helped pass one of the nation’s toughest farm worker laws in Pennsylvania. She’s been a potent force behind lawsuits that dramatically increased migrants’ rights in Maryland, Florida and other Southern states.

She’s become a legend in farm-worker circles, and her gritty, persistent work has not gone unnoticed: Last year, Beaver was cited by the National Legal Aid and Defender Assn. and the Florida Bar Foundation, and she’s also received a medal of honor from Pope John Paul II.

More important, she’s become a symbol of courage for the lawyers and activists who work with migrants. When someone has to visit a remote labor camp in Florida and risk physical danger, the folks at Rural Legal Aid usually leave it to Beaver. When labor bosses chisel wages from Jamaican cane cutters, it’s Beaver who collects evidence and blows the whistle on them.

But the victories are short-lived. Laws passed to protect farm workers are not always enforced, and court decisions expanding their rights are frequently undermined. After years of agitation, migrants still don’t have the benefits enjoyed by millions of other workers, and Beaver often feels like she’s pounding her head against a wall.

Yet it doesn’t slow her down: Mary Ellen Beaver typifies the daily struggles of some Americans to keep a collapsing system afloat--long after the battle seems to be lost.

“She’s an American original,” says Roger Rosenthal, who heads the Migrant Legal Action Program, a national support group for farm worker activists that is based in Washington. “I don’t know of many people with her courage, especially when it comes to dangerous assignments. She’s a voice of conscience for us all--someone who really wants to make a difference.”

Even if most people aren’t paying attention.

Much of Beaver’s job is unglamorous grunt work, and she admits that many Americans, distracted by other problems, could care less about the Jamaicans, Haitians, El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans and homeless blacks who make up Florida’s roughly 200,000 migrant workers.

At her age, most people move south to soak up the sun and play some shuffleboard by the pool. But Mary Ellen came to raise a little hell.

“That woman is always complaining,” barks a Pennsylvania farming official who asks not to be identified. “She wouldn’t be happy if we put her workers up in Holiday Inns, for God sakes. But I’ll say this much: She’s an enemy to be reckoned with.”

Small-Town Homemaker

Once upon a time, Beaver was a small-town mother who raised seven children and organized church rummage sales in eastern Pennsylvania. Life was a parade of PTA meetings and potluck dinners, interspersed with odd jobs to help pay the family bills.

A friendly, good-natured woman, Beaver never dreamed that the farmers down the road who sold her produce would one day become her enemies. But her life changed abruptly in 1969, when she became curious about the migrant workers who were picking vegetables on farms near her home. She began asking tough questions about the way they were treated--and hasn’t stopped since.

Unlike the legal aid lawyers who clash with agribusiness attorneys in courtrooms from California to New York, Beaver is strictly grass-roots. She travels the back roads of southern Florida in a beat-up Dodge, visiting farm workers in labor camps, urban slums and sometimes in the fields of plenty themselves. In a typical year, she racks up 50,000 miles.

By now, she’s seen it all: Migrant homes crawling with rats. Crew leaders taunting her with guard dogs. Nuisance lawsuits aimed at putting her out of business. Politicians who branded her a communist--and worse.

She’s been labeled a crackpot and a prostitute, a woman who wrecked her marriage of 26 years when she should have been home with her family. Mary Ellen Badger, they call her. As if that would make a difference.

“Fiddlesticks,” she snaps. “This is war, and I’m a soldier.”

‘Unfinished Business’

But not just any soldier. Beaver greets a visitor to her Belle Glade, Fla., office with a friendly handshake and small talk about the weather. She relaxes you with stories about her three grandchildren, then sits down with a bottle of Pennsylvania ale or a tuna sandwich, cracking jokes about Washington politicians.

Sooner or later, she mentions the nuns back in the farm country who taught her about injustice. Then, as a guest nods sympathetically, she moves in for the kill.

“If you don’t remember the workers the next time you put sugar in your coffee, shame on you,” she says, sounding like a Sunday-school teacher. “Is that too much to ask?”

Sometimes it’s easy to forget, because Beaver deals with clients who are anything but angels. While most migrants are hard-working, some are alcoholics or drug addicts, and their lifestyle makes it hard for lawyers to keep track of them. They shuttle from one job to the next and often accept abuse as the price of a paycheck. At times, they’re afraid to even be seen with Beaver.

“There’s a lot of unfinished business when it comes to farm workers, and they remain invisible to most Americans,” says Greg Schell, a Harvard-trained attorney who runs the migrant-worker division of Florida Rural Legal Services. A trim, intense man in his 30s, Schell is Beaver’s boss. But he says the two have a symbiotic relationship that defies traditional job descriptions.

During the past decade, Schell has filed more than half of the lawsuits in America that went to trial and resulted in greater federal protections for migrant workers. He says he couldn’t have done it without Beaver.

Last year, for example, Schell won litigation that could reshape much of Florida agriculture. After months of bitter wrangling, he convinced a judge that farmers were liable for the actions of crew leaders who abused migrant workers. Previously, growers had argued that labor bosses were not their employees but independent contractors who were beyond their control.

To win the lawsuit, Schell had to round up key farm workers who had been treated badly and prepare them for trial. In one case, he needed to locate a mentally disabled man who had worked for three years picking cabbage, earning no more than $15 a week. The abuse was clear, but finding the man was another matter. Schell only knew that he was somewhere in North Carolina.

Enter Mary Ellen Beaver.

“Somehow, she went to North Carolina and located them,” says Schell. “I told her that I had to be in Jacksonville in four days to start the trial, and she knew what had to be done. She flew to Charlotte, rented a van, took care of the men, kept them sober and brought them down to Florida. We would never have gotten this case as far as we did without her help.”

It’s one of the victories that Schell relishes most. But he sounds pessimistic about the future of U.S. farm workers, even under a Democratic Administration. Even after 30 years of pressing for change.

“Migrants are utterly forgotten people,” Schell says. “They don’t vote, and there’s no political lobby to force a change. These people live on the fringes, far outside the mainstream of American life, and you wonder if that’s ever going to change.”

Many Americans first became aware of migrant workers after CBS aired “Harvest of Shame,” a 1960 documentary by Edward R. Murrow. The broadcast exposed a world of abuses endured by farm workers, and several federal laws were subsequently passed to improve their lot, including minimum-wage and workers’ compensation protections.

During the ‘60s, migrants became a more visible national issue, especially in California, where Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers won the right to organize field workers.

Despite these advances, millions of farm workers still suffer from the problems that Murrow unveiled. Indeed, a 1992 congressional report concluded that “these hardships continue to raise both public and congressional concern. . . . Hired farm workers are not adequately protected by federal laws, and their health and well-being are at risk.”

The estimated 1.5 million to 2.5 million people who pick crops in this country are still poorly housed, clothed and fed. They suffer high rates of tuberculosis, pesticide poisoning and other diseases. They experience crippling injuries and sometimes die in accidents because of poor working conditions.

They’re lucky to make $5,000 a year, and real wages have been declining for some migrants because of a surplus of labor caused by thousands of undocumented workers.

“I can’t believe this still happens in the United States,” Beaver says. “And it’s because nobody thinks migrants are important.”

Few issues arouse such controversy, however, and many farm spokesmen contend that activists have unfairly attacked their industry.

Some firms, like the huge U.S. Sugar Corp. in Florida, point out that they have made improvements in the way they treat employees. Other companies take a harder line, fighting to keep legal advocates off their property.

“These people have a tendency not to cooperate, or to want to solve problems,” says Walter Kates, director of labor relations for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Assn. “Instead, they go after issues that stir up publicity, and they have an attitude of taking no prisoners. It’s a constant battle we fight, something that continues indefinitely.”

Sewage and Shantytowns

For Beaver, the best strategy is to keep her feet on the ground and remember why she gets up every morning.

“You just do what has to be done,” she says, blasting down a country road at 65 m.p.h. “And you can never forget the pain that’s out there.”

From her base in Belle Glade, Beaver sees the plight of migrant workers firsthand. The little town near Lake Okeechobee has gained headlines with its skyrocketing AIDS rate, but it’s also home to one of the nation’s largest concentration of farm workers.

Desperate for seasonal jobs, many of them live in squalid tenements and pay exorbitant rents. Raw sewage flows in the gutters, like it does in the nearby slums of Pahokee, Harlem, Immokalee and other migrant shantytowns.

Much of Beaver’s work is daily outreach, and thousands of farm workers have met with her on the streets, telling horror stories about their jobs. After 23 years, her mind is a Rolodex of redress. She never forgets a face--or a lawsuit.

“Mr. Thompson,” Beaver calls out to a worker in Belle Glade. “I remember you from back in New Jersey. You were in the blueberry lawsuit, right? You got money in a settlement.”

“You bet,” stammers an amazed Thompson, who hasn’t seen her in years.

Beaver turns a corner and runs into Raphael Taylor, a quiet man who’s been a longtime friend. He was badly injured in the sugar cane fields six months ago, and the 63-year-old Jamaican hasn’t worked since. Beaver helped him apply for workers’ compensation and other social services.

This morning, he says, all his belongings were stolen from the tiny room he shares with another man. The day before, doctors found a tumor growing on his back. He hasn’t seen his family in months. But he’s glad to see Beaver.

“That lady takes care of business,” Taylor says. “But she don’t need to be here, right? This is not a pretty town. So I need to ask, why is she here?”

Why, indeed?

Beaver has a 96-acre farm in Catawissa, Pa., and a houseful of children and grandchildren to fill her days. Instead, she’s trooping out to labor camps on soggy nights, trying to convince cane workers that legal aid lawyers aren’t stealing their money.

“It’s rough, but I look at the old people who have retired in Miami, and I wonder, what do they do with their time?” she says, trying to explain her life. “I mean, I can’t sit still.”

Not-So-Happy Endings

In the close-knit world of Florida farm worker advocacy, everybody has their favorite Mary Ellen stories. Margaret Hennessey, a Rural Legal Aid attorney, recalls the time she and a colleague visited a labor camp, only to be confronted by angry field bosses.

“A couple of these guys were drunk and they began grabbing me, asking the man I was with how much he wanted for his wife,” Hennessey says. “We tried to meet with some workers but finally left.

“The next day, Mary Ellen and I came back to the camp, and the same thing started again,” she continues. “But Mary Ellen has this grandmotherly way of talking to you. And by the time she was done with one man, he was telling her about his grandchildren, for goodness’ sake. They had almost become friends.”

Some stories don’t end happily. Last year, Beaver visited a labor camp run by the Okeelanta Sugar Co., the largest in Florida. She drove past a security gate and began handing out brochures to cane workers, explaining their legal rights. Suddenly, five burly guards appeared and told her to leave. They knew who she was, and they weren’t amused.

“They began jumping up and down, but of course I had no intention of leaving,” Beaver says. “I told them so, and they ran to get help. They told me to speak to their lawyer on the phone, but I had no intention of doing that either. I just finished my work and left.”

Not bad for a woman who never graduated from college and was raised to be a homemaker. Looking back, Beaver says her activism was born on a freezing winter’s day in 1969, when her small church had some blankets left over from a Christmas charity sale. She knew how they could be put to good use.

Curious about the black migrants in nearby tomato fields, Beaver had gone to local labor camps and seen repulsive living conditions. Men and women were housed in shacks, often without running water or toilets. Those who protested were beaten. Children rarely went to school, and disease was rampant.

“I couldn’t imagine this kind of thing,” she says now. “And I never dreamed I’d get involved in this issue. But one thing just led to another.”

In one sense, it was no surprise. Beaver had been brought up by parents who stressed tolerance and charity. Her father, a dry goods salesman, made a point of visiting the homes of black families, Beaver says.

Just as important, Beaver learned the value of labor. She worked her way through school and quit college after a year to get a job in a shirt factory when her mother became ill. Later, she worked as a rural switchboard operator, drove a school bus and held down the graveyard shift in a hospital records department. And that wasn’t counting her farm chores.

By the early 1970s, she had married George Beaver, a truck driver, and was raising children of her own. But she continued speaking out on behalf of farm workers, especially at church meetings. The workers needed more than prayers, Beaver insisted, and good people had to do more than wring their hands. She brought her own children to the labor camps, so they could see for themselves.

Soon, Beaver began taking matters into her own hands. Responding to complaints from African-American farm workers who said they hadn’t been paid in months, she organized an underground railroad similar to that used by slaves during the Civil War. Late at night, she set up meetings and gave the workers money for bus rides back to Virginia and other states.

“Mary Ellen energized the whole religious community around these issues, and she was the driving force for migrant worker reforms,” says Dr. Albert Meyers, director of the Pennsylvania Council of Churches. “Some farmers refused to let her visit their camps after awhile, and there were public officials who got tired of her. But she didn’t give up.”

After years of lobbying, Beaver played a major role in the passage of Pennsylvania’s 1978 farm worker law, which continues to be one of the nation’s toughest statutes. She also helped raise $160,000 from public and private donors to create the state’s first legal services office for migrants.

To her family, Beaver’s evolution into a full-time activist was jarring. Yet they came to accept it.

“Suddenly, she had a much bigger world to worry about than her children, or what comes up with the Council of Catholic Women,” says daughter Frances Moser, 35. “Some farmers would say, ‘Here comes that radical Catholic woman again, raising the roof.’ But for us, it was just Mom.”

Personal Costs

Some changes were painful. Beaver’s marriage dissolved in 1978 under the pressures of her work. There were arguments, and more days away from home.

“We drifted apart, and if I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t work harder to keep the marriage together,” Beaver says.

After a falling-out with fellow activists in Pennsylvania, Beaver hooked up with Schell in the early 1980s at Maryland Legal Services. Several years later, he took his current job in Belle Glade--but only on the condition that his colleague be hired as well. Schell said he couldn’t imagine working without the gray-haired woman who was old enough to be his mother.

“He’s a good man,” says Beaver. “He’s not some whippersnapper who makes fun of an old lady. And I’m proud of the work we do.”

Hard work. Emotionally draining work. The kind nobody thanks you for.

It’s late at night, and Beaver is winding up her trip to the Miami Locks sugar cane camp. She visits each barracks until only one more is left and knocks on the last screen door. John Wilson, a tall man wearing a Stars-and-Stripes tank top, takes a brochure. He scans it and then explodes.

“Where’s the money, lady?” he demands. “They say you be keepin’ it. Why?”

Beaver starts to answer, but Wilson points to the legal services logo printed on the brochure--the scales of justice--and cuts her off.

“Lady, those scales. They are scales of justice, right?”

“They are,” she says, staring hard into his eyes.

“Well, they not balanced. Not for me.”

For once, Beaver falls silent. In the darkness, a halo of mosquitoes hovers around her face.

“No, sir,” she says at last. “No, sir, they’re not.”

Researcher Anna Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.