THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS
THE MILL VILLAGE
Columbia, South Carolina, of course is conscious that there are mills
without its city precincts. It is proud of the manufacture that gives
the city precedence and commercial value all over the world. The trolley
runs to the mills empty, as a rule, after the union depot is passed.
Frankly, what is there to be seen in these dusty suburbs? Entry to the
mills themselves is difficult, if not absolutely impossible. And that
which forms the background for the vast buildings, the Mill Village, is
a section to be shunned like the plague. Plague is not too strong a word
to apply to the pest-ridden, epidemic-filled, filthy settlement where in
this part of the country the mill-hand lives, moves and has his being,
horrible honeycomb of lives, shocking morals and decency.
Around Columbia there lie five mills and their respective
settlements--Excelsior, the Granton, Calcutta, the Richland and the
Capital City. Each of these mills boasts its own so-called town. When
these people are free on Saturday afternoon and Sunday they are too
exhausted to do anything but turn into their hovels to sleep. At most on
Saturday afternoons or Sundays they board a trolley and betake
themselves to a distant park which, in the picturesque descriptions of
Columbia, reads like an Arcadia and is in reality desolation.
The mill-hands are not from the direct section of Columbia. They are
strangers brought in from "the hills" by the agents of the company, who
go hither and thither through the different parts of the country
describing to the poor whites and the hill dwellers work in the mills as
a way to riches and success. Filled with dreams of gain and possessions,
with hopes of decent housing and schooling for their children, they
leave their distant communities and troop to the mills. These immigrants
are picturesque, touching to see. They come with all they own in the
world on their backs or in their hands; penniless; burrs and twigs often
in the hair of the young girls. They are hatless, barefooted, ignorant;
innocent for the most part--and hopeful! What the condition of these
labourers is after they have tested the promises of the manufacturer and
found them empty bubbles can only be understood and imagined when one
has seen their life, lived among them, worked by their side, and
comprehended the tragedy of this population--a floating population,
going from Granton to Excelsior, from Excelsior to Richland, hither and
thither, seeking--seeking better conditions. They have no affiliation
with the people of the town; they are looked down upon as scum: and in
good sooth, for good reason, scum they are!
It is spring, warm, gracious. This part of the world seems to be
well-nigh treeless! There is no generous foliage, but wherever there are
branches to bear it the first green has started out, delicate, tender
and beautiful.
In my simple work garb I leave Columbia and take a trolley to the mill
district. I have chosen Excelsior as best for my purpose. Its reputation
is most at stake; its prospectus dazzling; its annals effective. If such
things are done in Gath...!
I cannot say with what timidity I descend from the tram in this strange
country, foreign to my Northern habitation and filled with classes whose
likeness I have never seen and around which the Southern Negro makes a
tad and gloomy background.
Before the trolley has arrived at the corporation stores Excelsior has
spoken--roared, clicked forth so vibrantly, so loudly, I am prepared to
feel the earth shake. This is the largest mill in the world and looks
it! A model, too, in point of view of architecture. I have read in the
prospectus that it represents $1,750,000 capital, possesses 104,000
spindles, employs 1,200 hands, and can, with crowding, employ 3,000.
Surely it will have place for one more, then! I am impressed with its
grandeur as it rises, red-bricked, with proud, straight towers toward
its centre--impressed and frightened by its insistent call as it rattles
and hums to me across the one-sixteenth of a mile of arid sand track. At
one side Christianity and doctrine have constructed a church: a second
one is building. On the other side, at a little distance, lies Granton,
second largest mill. All this I take in as I make my way Excelsiorward.
Between me and the vast mill itself there is not a soul. A thick, sandy
road winds to the right; in the distance I can see a black trestle over
which the freight cars take the cotton manufactures to the distant
railroad and ship them to all parts of the world. Beyond the trestle are
visible the first shanties of the mill town.
Work first and lodgings afterward are my goals. At the door of Excelsior
I am more than overwhelmed by its magnificence and its loud voice that
makes itself so far-reachingly heard. There is no entry for me at the
front of the mill, and I toil around to the side; not a creature to be
seen. I venture upon the landing and make my way along a line of freight
cars--between the track and the mill.
A kind-faced man wanders out from an unobserved doorway; a gust of roar
follows him! He sees me, and lifts his hat with the ready Southern
courtesy not yet extinct. I hasten to ask for work.
[Illustration: "MIGHTY MILL--PRIDE OF THE ARCHITECT AND THE COMMERCIAL
MAGNATE"
"Charnel house, destroyer of homes, of all that mankind calls hallowed;
breeder of strife, of strike, of immorality of sedition and riot"]
"Well, thar's jest plenty of work, I reckon! Go in that do'; the
overseer will tell you."
Through the door open behind him I catch glimpses of a room enormous in
dimensions. Cotton bales lie on the floor, stand around the walls and
are piled in the centre. Leaning on them, handling them, lying on them,
outstretched, or slipping like shadows into shadow, are the dusky shapes
of the black Negro of true Southern blood. I have been told there is no
Negro labour in the mills. I take advantage of my guide's kind face to
ask him if he knows where I can lodge.
"Hed the measles? Well, my gyrl got 'em. Thar's a powerful sight of
measles hyar. I'd take you-all to bo'd at my house ef you ain't 'fraid
of measles. Thar's the hotel." (He points to what at the North would be
known as a brick shanty.) "A gyrl can bo'd thar for $2.25 a week. You
won't make that at first."
With extreme kindness he leads me into the roaring mill past picturesque
black men and cotton bales: we reach the "weave-room." I am told that
carpet factories are celebrated for their uproar, but the weave-looms of
a cotton mill to those who know them need no description! This is chaos
before order was conceived: more weird in that, despite the din and
thunder, everything is so orderly, so perfectly carried forth by the
machinery. Here the cotton cloth is woven. Excelsior is so vast that
from one end to the other of a room one cannot distinguish a friend. I
decide instantly that the weave-room shall not be my destination! An
overseer comes up to me. He talks with me politely and kindly--that is,
as well as he can, he talks! It is almost impossible to hear what he
says. He asks me simple and few questions and engages me promptly to
work that "_evening_" as the Southerner calls the hours after midday.
"You can see all the work and choose a sitting or a standing job." This
is an improvement on Pittsburg and Lynn.
I have been told there is always work in the mills for the worker.
It is not strange that every inducement consistent with corporation
rules should be made to entice the labouring girl! The difficulty is
that no effort is made to keep her! The ease with which, in all these
experiences, work has been obtained, goes definitely to prove that there
is a demand everywhere for labourers.
_Organize labour, therefore, so well that the work-woman who obtains her
task may be able to continue it and keep her health and her
self-respect_.
With Excelsior as my future workshop I leave the mill to seek lodging in
the mill village.
The houses built by the corporation for the hands are some five or six
minutes' walk, not more, from the palace-like structure of the mill
proper. To reach them I plod through a roadway ankle-deep in red clay
dust. The sun is bright and the air heavy, lifeless and dull; the scene
before me is desolate, meager and poverty-stricken in the extreme.
The mill houses are all built exactly alike. Painted in sickly greens
and yellows, they rise on stilt-like elevations above the malarial soil.
Here the architect has catered to the different families, different
individual tastes in one point of view alone, regarding the number of
rooms: They are known as "four-or six-room cottages." In one of the
first cottages to the right a wholesome sight--the single wholesome
sight I see during my experience--meets my eye. Human kindness has
transformed one of the houses into a kindergarten--"Kindergarten" is
over the door. A pretty Southern girl, a lady, stands surrounded by her
little flock. The handful of half a dozen emancipated children who are
not in the mills is refreshing to see. There are very few; the
kindergarten flags for lack of little scholars.
I accost her. "Can you tell me any decent place to board?" She is sorry,
regards me kindly with the expression I have grown to know--the look the
eyes adopt when a person of one class addresses her sister in a lower
range.
"I am a stranger come out to work in the mills."
But the young lady takes little interest in me. Children are her care.
They surround her, clinging, laughing, calling--little birds fed so
gently by the womanly hand. She turns from the working-woman to them,
but not before indicating a shanty opposite:
"Mrs. Green lives there in that four-room cottage. She is a good woman."
Through the door's crack I interview Mrs. Green, a pallid, sickly
creature, gowned, as are most of the women, in a calico garment made all
in one piece. She permits me to enter the room which forms (as do all
the front rooms in a mill cottage) bedroom and general living-room.
Here is confusion incarnate--and filthy disorder. The tumbled, dirty bed
fills up one-half the room. In it is a little child, shaking with
chills. On the bare floor are bits of food, old vegetables, rags, dirty
utensils of all sorts of domestic description. The house has a sickening
odour. The woman tells me she is too ill to keep tidy--too ill to keep
boarders. We do not strike a bargain. "I am only here four months," she
said. "Sick ever since I come, and my little girl has fevernaygu."
I wander forth and a child directs me to a six-room cottage, "a real
bo'din'-house." I attack it and thus discover the dwelling where I make
my home in Excelsior.
From the front room of this dwelling a kitchen opens. Within its shadow
I see a Negro washing dishes. A tall woman, taller than most men,
angular, white-haired, her face seared by toil and stricken with age,
greets me: she is the landlady. At her skirts, catching them and staring
at a stranger, wanders a very young child--a blue-eyed, clean little
being; a great relief, in point of fact, to the general filth hitherto
presented me. The room beyond me is clean. I draw a breath of gratitude.
"Mrs. Jones?"
"Yes, this is Jones' bo'din'-house."
The old woman has a comb in her hand; she has "jest ben com'in' Letty's
hair." Letty smiles delightedly.
"This yere's the child of the lady upstairs. The mother's a pore sick
thing." Mrs. Jones bends the stiffness of sixty-eight years over the
stranger's child. "And grandmaw keeps Letty clean, don't she, Letty? She
don't never whip her, neither; jest a little cross to her."
"Can I find lodging here?"
She looks at me. "Yes, ma'am, you kin. I'm full up; got a lot of
gentlemen bo'ders, but not many ladies. I got one bed up aloft; you
can't have it alone neither, and the baby's mother is sick up there,
too. Nuthin' ketchin'. She come here a stranger; the mill was too hard
on her; she's ben sick fo' days."
I had made a quick decision and accepted half a bed. I would return at
noon.
"Stranger hyar, I reckon?"
"Yes; from Massachusetts. A shoe-hand."
She shakes her head: "You wont like the mills."
She draws Letty between her old stiff knees, seats herself on a
straight chair, and combs the child's hair on either side its pathetic,
gentle little face. So I leave her for the present to return to Columbia
and fetch back with me my bundle of clothes.
* * * * *
When I return at noon it is dinner time. I enter and am introduced, with
positive grace and courtesy, by my dear old landlady to her son-in-law,
"Tommy Jones," a widower, a man in decent store clothes and a Derby hat
surrounded by a majestic crape sash. He is nonchalantly loading a large
revolver, and thrusts it in his trousers pocket: "Always carry it," he
explains; "comes handy!" Then I am presented to the gentlemen boarders.
I beg to go upstairs, with my bundles, and I see for the first time my
dwelling part of this shanty.
A ladderlike stair leading directly from the kitchen takes me into the
loft. Heavens! the sight of that sleeping apartment! There are three
beds in it, sagging beds, covered by calico comforters. The floor is
bare; the walls are bare. I have grown to know that "Jones'" is the
cleanliest place in the Excelsior village, and yet to our thinking it
lacks perfection. Around the bare walls hang the garments of the other
women who share the room with me. What humble and pathetic decorations!
poor, miserable clothes--a shawl or two, a coat or two, a cotton
wrapper, a hat; and on one nail the miniature clothes of Letty--a
little night-dress and a tiny blue cotton dress. I put my bundle down by
the side of my bed which I am to share with another woman, and descend,
for Mrs. Jones' voice summons me to the midday meal.
The nourishment provided for these thirteen-hour-a-day labourers is as
follows: On a tin saucepan there was a little salt pork and on another
dish a pile of grease-swimming spinach. A ragged Negro hovered over
these articles of diet; the room was full of the smell of frying. After
the excitement of my search for work, and the success, if success it can
be called that so far had met me, I could not eat; I did not even sit
down. I made my excuse. I said that I had had something to eat in
Columbia, and started out to the mill.
By the time the mill-hand has reached his home a good fifteen minutes
out of the three-quarters of an hour recreation is gone: his food is
quickly bolted, and by the time I have reached the little brick hotel
pointed out to me that morning and descended to its cellar restaurant,
forced myself to drink a cup of sassafras tea, and mounted again into
the air, the troop of workers is on the march millward. I join them.
Although the student of philanthropy and the statistician would find
difficulty in forcing the countersign of the manufactories, the worker
may go everywhere.
I do not see my friend of the morning, the overseer, in the
"weave-room"; indeed, there is no one to direct me; but I discover,
after climbing the stairs, a room of flying spools and more subdued
machinery, and it appears that the spool-room is this man's especial
charge. He consigns to me a standing job. A set of revolving spools is
designated, and he secures a pretty young girl of about sixteen, who
comes cheerfully forward and consents to "learn" me.
Spooling is not disagreeable, and the room is the quietest part of the
mill--noisy enough, but calm compared to the others. In Excelsior this
room is, of course, enormous, light and well ventilated, although the
temperature, on account of some quality of the yarn, is kept at a point
of humidity far from wholesome.
"Spooling" is hard on the left arm and the side. Heart disease is a
frequent complaint amongst the older spoolers. It is not dirty compared
to shoe-making, and whereas one stands to "spool," when one is not
waiting for yarn it is constant movement up and down the line. The fact
that there are more children than young girls, more young girls than
women, proves the simplicity of this task. The cotton comes from the
spinning-room to the spool-room, and as the girl stands before her
"side," as it is called, she sees on a raised ledge, whirling in rapid
vibration, some one hundred huge spools full of yarn; whilst below her,
each in its little case, lies a second bobbin of yarn wound like a
distaff.
Her task controls machinery in constant motion, that never stops except
in case of accident.
With one finger of her right hand she detaches the yarn from the distaff
that lies inert in the little iron rut before her. With her left hand
she seizes the revolving circle of the large spool's top in front of
her, holding this spool steady, overcoming the machinery for the moment
not as strong as her grasp. This demands a certain effort. Still
controlling the agitated spool with her left hand, she detaches the end
of yarn with the same hand from the spool, and by means of a patent
knotter harnessed around her palm she joins together the two loosened
ends, one from the little distaff and one from this large spool, so that
the two objects are set whirling in unison and the spool receives all
the yarn from the distaff. Up and down this line the spooler must walk
all day long, replenishing the iron grooves with fresh yarn and
reknitting broken strands. This is all that there is of "spooling." It
demands alertness, quickness and a certain amount of strength from the
left arm, and that is all! To conceive of a woman of intelligence
pursuing this task from the age of eight years to twenty-two on down
through incredible hours is not salutary. You will say to me, that if
she demands nothing more she is fit for nothing more. I cannot think it.
The little girl who teaches me spooling is fresh and cheerful and
jolly; I grant her all this. She lives at home. I am told by my
subsequent friends that she thinks herself better than anybody. This
pride and ambition has at least elevated her to neat clothes and a
sprightliness of manner that is refreshing. She does not hesitate to
evince her superiority by making sport of me. She takes no pains to
teach me well. Instead of giving me the patent knotter, which would have
simplified my job enormously, she teaches me what she expresses "the
old-fashioned way"--knotting the yarn with the fingers. I have mastered
this slow process by the time that the overseer discovers her trick and
brings me the harness for my left hand. She is full of curiosity about
me, asking me every sort of question, to which I give the best answers
that I can. By and by she slips away from me. I turn to find her; she
has vanished, leaving me under the care of a truly kind, sad little
creature in a wrapper dress. This little Maggie has a heart of gold.
"Don't you-all fret," she consoles. "That's like Jeannie: she's so
_mean_. When you git to be a remarkable fine spooler she'll want you on
her side, you bet."
She assists my awkwardness gently.
"I'll learn you all right. You-all kin stan' hyar by me all day. Jeannie
clean fergits she was a greenhorn herself onct; we all wuz. Whar you
come from?"
"Lynn, Massachusetts."
"Did you-all git _worried_ with the train? I only bin onto it onct, and
it worried me for days!"
She tells me her simple annals with no question:
"My paw he married ag'in, and me stepmother peard like she didn't care
for me; so one day I sez to paw, 'I'm goin' to work in the mills'--an' I
lef home all alone and come here." After a little--"When I sayd good-by
to my father peard like _he_ didn't care neither. I'm all alone here. I
bo'ds with that girl's mother."
I wore that day in the mill a blue-checked apron. So did Maggie, but
mine was from Wanamaker's in New York, and had, I suppose, a certain
style, for the child said:
"I suttenly dew think that yere's a awful pretty apron: where'd you git
it?"
"Where I came from," I answered, and, I am sorry to say, it sounded
brusque. For the little thing blushed, fearful lest she had been
indiscreet....(Oh, I assure you the qualities of good breeding are
there! Some of my factory and mill friends can teach the set in which I
move lessons salutary!)
"I didn't mean jest 'xactly wherebouts," she murmurs; "I only meant it
warn't from these parts."
* * * * *
During the afternoon the gay Jeannie returns and presents to me a tin
box. It is filled with a black powder. "Want some?" Well, what is it?
She greets my ignorance with shrieks of laughter. In a trice half a
dozen girls have left their spooling and cluster around me.
"She ain't never _seen_ it!" and the little creature fills her mouth
with the powder which she keeps under her tongue. "It is _snuff_!"
They all take it, old and young, even the smallest children. Their
mouths are brown with it; their teeth are black with it. They take it
and smell it and carry it about under their tongues all day in a black
wad, spitting it all over the floor. Others "dip," going about with the
long sticks in their mouths. The air of the room is white with cotton,
although the spool-room is perhaps the freest. These little particles
are breathed into the nose, drawn into the lungs. Lung disease and
pneumonia--consumption--are the constant, never-absent scourge of the
mill village. The girls expectorate to such an extent that the floor is
nauseous with it; the little girls practise spitting and are adepts at
it.
Over there is a woman of sixty, spooling; behind the next side is a
child, not younger than eight, possibly, but so small that she has to
stand on a box to reach her side. Only the very young girls show any
trace of buoyancy; the older ones have accepted with more or less
complaint the limitation of their horizons. They are drawn from the hill
district with traditions no better than the loneliness, desertion and
inexperience of the fever-stricken mountains back of them. They are
illiterate, degraded; the mill has been their widest experience; and all
their tutelage is the intercourse of girl to girl during the day and in
the evenings the few moments before they go to bed in the mill-houses,
where they either live at home with parents and brothers all working
like themselves, or else they are fugitive lodgers in a boarding-house
or a hotel, where their morals are in jeopardy constantly. As soon as a
girl passes the age, let us say of seventeen or eighteen, there is no
hesitation in her reply when you ask her: "Do you like the mills?"
Without exception the answer is, "I _hate them_."
Absorbed with the novelty of learning my trade, the time goes swiftly.
Yet even the interest and excitement does not prevent fatigue, and from
12:45 to 6:45 seems interminable! Even when the whistle blows we are not
all free--Excelsior is behindhand with her production, and those whom
extra pay can beguile stay on. Maggie, my little teacher, walks with me
toward our divided destinations, her quasi-home and mine.
Neither in the mill nor the shoe-shops did I take precaution to change
my way of speaking--and not once had it been commented upon. To-day
Maggie says to me:
"I reckon you-all is 'Piscopal?"
"Why?"
"Why, you-all _talks_ 'Piscopal."
So much for a tribute to the culture of the church.
* * * * *
At Jones' supper is ready, spread on a bare board running the length of
the room--a bare board supported by saw-horses; the seats are boards
again, a little lower in height. They sag in the middle threateningly.
One plate is piled high with fish--bones, skin and flesh all together in
one odourous mass. Salt pork graces another platter and hominy another.
I am alone in the supper room. The guests, landlord and landlady are all
absent. Some one, as he rushes by me, gives me the reason for the
desertion:
"They've all gone to see the fight; all the white fellers is after a
nigger."
Through the window I can see the fleeing forms of the settlers--women,
sunbonnets in hand, the men hatless. It appears that all the world has
turned out to see what lawless excitement may be in store. The whirling
dust and sand in the distance denote the group formed by the Negro and
his pursuers. This, standing on the little porch of my lodging-house, I
see and am glad to find that the chase is fruitless. The black man,
tortured to distraction, dared at length to rebel, and from the moment
that he showed spirit his life was not worth a farthing, but his legs
were, and he got clear of Excelsior. The lodgers troop back. Molly, my
landlady's niece, breathing and panting, disheveled, leads the
procession and is voluble over the affair.
"They-all pester a po'r nigger's life out 'er him, ye'es, they dew so!
Ef a nigger wants ter show his manners to me, why, I show mine to him,"
she said generously, "and ef he's a mannerly nigger, why, I ain't got
nothin' ag'in him; no, sir, I suttenly ain't!"
It is difficult to conceive how broad and philanthropic, how generous
and unusual this poor mill girl's standpoint is contrasted with the
sentiment of the people with which she moves.
I slip into my seat at the table in the centre of the sagging board and
find Molly beside me, the girl from Excelsior with the pretty hair on
the other side. The host, Mr. Jones, honours the head of the table, and
"grandmaw" waits upon us. Opposite are the three men operatives,
flannel-shirted and dirty. The men are silent for the most part, and
bend over their food, devouring the unpalatable stuff before them. I
feel convinced that if they were not so terribly hungry they could not
eat it. Jones discourses affably on the mill question, advising me to
learn "speeding," as it pays better and is the only advanced work in the
mill.
Molly, my elbow-companion, seems to take up the whole broad seat, she is
so big and so pervading; and her close proximity--unwashed, heavy with
perspiration as she is, is not conducive to appetite. She is full of
news and chatter and becomes the leading spirit of the meal.
"I reckon you-all never did see anything like the fight to the mill
to-day."
She arouses at once the interest of even the dull men opposite, who
pause, in the applying of their knives and forks, to hear.
"Amanda Wilcox she dun tol' Ida Jacobs that she'd _do her_ at noon,
and Ida she sarst her back. It was all about a _sport_[5]--Bill James.
He's been spo'tin' Ida Jacobs these three weeks, I reckon, and Amanda
got crazy over it and 'clared she'd spile her game. And she tol' Ida
Jacobs a lie about Bill--sayd he' been spo'tin' her down to the Park
on Sunday.
[Footnote 5: A beau.]
"Well, sir, the whole spinnin'-room was out to see what they-all'd do at
noon, and they jest resh'd for each other like's they was crazy; and one
man he got between 'em and sayd, 'Now the gyrl what spits over my hand
first can begin the fight.'
"They both them spit right, into each other's faces, they did so; and
arter that yer couldn't get them apart. Ida Jacobs grabbed Amanda by the
ha'r and Amanda hit her plump in the chest with her fist. They was
suttenly like to kill each other ef the men hadn't just parted them; it
took three men to part 'em."
Her story was much appreciated.
"Ida was dun fer, I can tell ye; she suttenly was. She can't git back
to work fer days."
The spinning-room is the toughest room in the mill.
After supper the men went out on the porch with their pipes and we to
the sitting-room, where Molly, the story-teller, seated herself in a
comfortable chair, her feet outstretched before her. She made a lap, a
generous lap, to which she tried to beguile the baby, Letty. Mrs. White
had disappeared.
"You-all come here to me, Letty." She held out her large dirty hands to
the blue-eyed waif. In its blue-checked apron, the remains of fish and
ham around its mouth, its large blue eyes wandering from face to face in
search of the pale mother who had for a time left her, Letty stood for a
moment motionless and on the verge of tears.
"You-all come to Molly and go By-O."
There was some magic in that word that at long past eight charmed the
eighteen-months'-old baby. She toddled across the floor to the
mill-girl, who lifted her tenderly into her ample lap. The big, awkward
girl, scarcely more than a child herself, uncouth, untutored, suddenly
gained a dignity and a grace maternal--not too much to say it, she had
charm.
Letty leaned her head against Molly's breast and smiled contentedly,
whilst the mill-girl rocked softly to and fro.
"Shall Molly sing By-O?"
She should. The little face, lifted, declared its request.
"Letty must sing, too," murmured the young girl. "Sing By-O! We'll all
sing it together."
Letty covered her eyes with one hand-to feign sleep and sang her two
words sweetly, "By-O! By-O!" and Molly joined her. Thus they rocked and
hummed, a picture infinitely touching to see.
One of these two would soon be an unclaimed foundling when the unknown
woman had faded out of existence. The other--who can say how to her
maternity would come!
* * * * *
In the room where we sit Jones' wife died a few weeks before, victim to
pneumonia that all winter has scourged the town--"the ketchin'
kind"--that is the way it has been caught, and fatally by many.[6]
[Footnote 6: There are no statistics, they tell me, kept of
births, marriages or deaths in this State; it is less surprising
that the mill village has none.]
In one corner stands a sewing machine, in another an organ--luxuries: in
these cases, objects of art. They are bought on the installment plan,
and some of these girls pay as high as $100 for the organ in monthly
payments of $4 at a time. The mill-girl is too busy to use the machine
and too ignorant to play the organ.
Jones is a courteous host. His lodgers occupy the comfortable seats,
whilst he perches himself on the edge of a straight high-backed chair
and converses with us, not lighting his pipe until urged, then
deprecatingly smoking in little smothered puffs. I feel convinced that
Jones thinks that Massachusetts shoe-hands are a grade higher in the
social scale than South Carolina mill-girls! Because, after being
witness more than once to my morning and evening ablutions on the back
steps, he said:
"Now, I am goin' to dew the right thing by you-all; I'm goin' to fix up
a wash-stand in that there loft." This is a triumph over the lax,
uncleanly shiftlessness of the Southern settlement. Again:
"You-all must of had good food whar you come from: your skin shows it;
'tain't much like hyar-'bouts. Why, I'd know a mill-hand anywhere, if I
met her at the North Pole--salla, pale, sickly."
I might have added for him, deathlike, ... skeleton ... _doomed_. But I
listen, rocking in the best chair, whilst Mrs. White glides in from the
kitchen and, unobserved, takes her place on a little low chair by the
sewing machine behind Jones. Her baby rocks contentedly in Molly's arms.
Jones continues: "I worked in the mill fifteen years. I have done a
little of all jobs, I reckon, and I ain't got no use for mill-work. If
they'd pay me fifty cents a side to run the 'speeders' I'd _go_ in fer
an hour or two now and then. Why, I sell sewing machines and organs to
the mill-hands all over the country. I make $60 a month, and _I touch
all my money_," he said significantly. "It's the way to do. A man don't
feel no dignity unless he does handle his own money, if it's ten cents
or ten dollars." He then explains the corporation's methods of paying
its slaves. Some of the hands never touch their money from month's end
to month's end. Once in two weeks is pay-day. A woman has then worked
122 hours. The corporation furnishes her house. There is the rent to be
paid; there are also the corporation stores from which she has been
getting her food and coal and what gewgaws the cheap stuff on sale may
tempt her to purchase. There is a book of coupons issued by the mill
owners which are as good as gold. It is good at the stores, good for the
rent, and her time is served out in pay for this representative
currency. This is of course not obligatory, but many of the operatives
avail themselves or bind themselves by it. When the people are ill,
Jones says, they are docked for wages. When, for indisposition or
fatigue, they knock a day off, there is a man, hired especially for this
purpose, who rides from house to house to find out what is the matter
with them, to urge them to rise, and if they are not literally too sick
to move, they are hounded out of their beds and back to their looms.
Jones himself, mark you, is emancipated! He has set himself free; but he
is still a too-evident although a very innocent partisan of the
corporation.
[Illustration: "THE SOUTHERN MILL HAND'S FACE IS UNIQUE, A FEARFUL
TYPE"]
"I think," he says, "that the mill-hand is _meaner_ to the corporation
than the corporation is to the mill-hand."
"Why?"
"Why, they would strike for shorter hours and better pay."
Unconsciously with one word he condemns his own cause.
"What's the use of these hyar mill-hands tryin' to fight corporations?
Why, Excelsior is the biggest mill under one roof in the world; its
capital is over a million; it has 24,500 spindles. The men that run
these mills have got all their stuff paid for; they've got piles of
money. What do they care for a few penniless lot of strikers? They can
shut down and not feel it. Why, these hyar people might just as well
fight against a stone wall."
The wages of these people, remember, pay Jones for the organs upon which
they cannot play and the machines which they cannot use. His home is a
mill corporation house; he makes a neat sum by lodging the hands. He has
fetched down from the hills Molly, his own niece, to work for him. He
perforce _will_ speak well. I do not blame him.
He is by all means the most respectable-looking member of the colony. He
wears store clothes; he dresses neatly; he is shaven, brushed and
washed.
"Don't you let the mill hands discourage you with lies about the mill.
Any of 'em would be jealous of you-all." Then he warns, again forced
to plead for another side: "You-all won't come out as you go in, I
tell you! You're the picture of health. Why," he continues, a little
later, "you ain't got no idea how light-minded the mill-girl is. Why,
in the summer time she'll trolley four or five miles to a dance-hall
they've got down to ---- and dance there till four o'clock--come home
just in time to get into the mills at 5:45." Which fact convinces me
of nothing but that the women are still, despite their condition and
their white slavery, human beings, and many of them are young human
beings (Thank God, for it is a prophecy for their future!) _not yet
crushed to the dumb endurance of beasts_.
Rather early I bid them all good-night and climb the attic stairs to my
loft. There the three beds arrayed in soggy striped comforters greet me.
Old boots and downtrodden shoes are thrown into the corners and the
lines of clothing already describe fantastic shapes in the dark,
suggesting pendant sinister figures. Windows are large, thank Heaven! In
the mill district the air is heavy, singularly lifeless; the night is
warm and stifling.
Close to an old trunk I sit down with a slip of paper on my knee and try
to take a few notes. But no sooner have I begun to write than a step on
the stair below announces another comer. Before annoyance can deepen too
profoundly the big, awkward form of the landlady's niece slouches into
sight. Sheepishly she comes across the room to me--sits down on the
nearest bed. Molly's costume is typical: a dark cotton wrapper whose
colours have become indistinct in the stains of machinery oil and
perspiration. The mill girl boasts no coquetry of any kind around her
neck and waist, but her headdress is a tribute to feminine vanity!
Compactly screwed curl papers, dozens of them, accentuate the hard,
unlovely lines of her face and brow. Her features are coarse, heavy and
square, but her eyes are clear, frank and kind. She has an appealing,
friendly expression; Molly is a distinctly whole-souled, nice creature.
One elbow sinks in the bed and she cradles her crimped head in her
large, dirty hand.
"My, ef I could write as fast as you-all I'd write some letters, I
reckon. Ust ter write; like it good enough, tew; but I ain't wrote in
months. I was thinkin' th' other day ef I didn't take out the _pencile_
I'd dun forgit how to spell."
Without the window through which she gazes is seen the pale night sky
and in the heavens hangs the thread of a moon. Its light is unavailing
alongside of the artificial moon--an enormous electric light. This lifts
its brilliant, dazzling circumference high in the centre of the mill
street. I have but to move a trifle aside from the window coping's
shelter to receive a blinding blaze. But Molly has been subtle enough to
discover the natural beauty of the night. She sees, curiously enough,
past this modern illumination: the young moon has charm for her. "Ain't
it a pretty night?" she asks me. Its beauty has not much chance to
enhance this room and the crude forms, but it has awakened something
akin to sentiment in the breast of this young savage.
"I don't guess ever any one gets tired of hearing _sweet music_[7], does
you-all?"
[Footnote 7: The Southern term for stringed instruments.]
"What is the nicest music you have ever heard, Molly?"
"Why, a gui-taar an' a mandolin. It's so sweet! I could sit for hours
an' hyar 'em pick." Her curlpaper head wags in enthusiasm.
"Up to the hills, from whar I cum, I ust ter hyar 'em a serenadin' of
some gyrl an' I ust ter set up in bed and lis'en tel it died out; it
warn't for _me_, tho'!"
"Didn't they ever serenade you?"
"No, _ma'am_; I don't pay no 'tention to spo'tin'."
Without, the moon's slender thread holds in a silvery circle the
half-defined misty ball that shall soon be full moon. Thank heavens I
shall not see this golden globe form, wane, decline in this town,
forgotten of gods and men! But the woman at my side must see it mark its
seasons; she is inscrutably part of the colony devoted to unending toil!
Here all she has brought of strong youth shall fade and perish; womanly
sentiment be crushed; die out in sterility; or worse, coarsen to the
animal like to those whose companion she is forced to be.
"I live to the Rockies, an' Uncle Tom he come up after me and carried
me down hyar. My auntie died two weeks ago in the livin'-room; she had
catchin' pneumonia. I tuk care of her all through her sickness, did
every mite for her, and there was bo'ders, tew--I guess half a dozen of
'em--and I cooked and washed and everything for 'em all. When she died I
went to work in the mill. Say, I reckon you-all didn't see my new hat?"
It was fetched, done up with care in paper. She displayed it, a white
straw round hat, covered with roses. At praise of it and admiration the
girl flushed with pleasure.
"My, you _dew_ like it? Why, I didn't think it _pretty, much_. Uncle Tom
dun buy it for me."
She gives all her wages to Uncle Tom, who in turn brings her from time
to time such stimulus to labour as some pretty feminine thing like this.
_This_ shall crown Molly's hair freed from the crimpers when the one day
of the week, Sunday, comes! Not from Sunday till Sunday again are those
hair crimpers unloosed.
Despite Uncle Tom's opposition to mill work for women, despite his
cognizance of the unhealthfulness of the mills, he knew a thing or two
when he put his strapping innocent niece to work thirteen hours a day
and pocketed himself the spoils.
"I can't go to bade awful early, because I don't sleep ef I do; I'm too
tired to sleep. When I feel real sick I tries to stay home a day, and
then the overseer he rides around and _worries_ me to git up. I declare
ef I wouldn't near as soon git up as to be roused up. They don't give
you no peace, rousing you out of bed when you can scarcely stand. I
suttenly dew feel bade to-night; I suttenly can't scarcely get to bed!"
Here into our discourse, mounting the stairs, comes the pale mother and
her little child. This ghost of a woman, wedding-ringless, who called
herself Mrs. White, could scarcely crawl to her bed. She was whiter than
the moon and as slender. Molly's bed is close to mine. The night toilet
of this girl consisted of her divesting herself of her shoes, stockings
and her cotton wrapper, then in all the other garments she wore during
the day she turned herself into bed, nightgownless, unwashed.
Mrs. White undressed her child, giving it very good care. It was a tiny
creature, small-boned and meager. Every time I looked over at it it
smiled appealingly, touchingly. Finally when she went downstairs to the
pump to get a drink of water for it, I went over and in her absence
stroked the little hand and arm: such a small hand and such an
infinitesimal arm! Unused to attention and the touch, but not in the
least frightened, Letty extended her miniature member and looked up at
me in marvel. Mrs. White on her return made herself ready for the night.
She said in her frail voice: "Letty's a powerful hand for vegetubbles,
and she eats everything."
Memory of the ham and the putrid fish I had seen this
eighteen-months-old child devour not an hour ago came to my mind.
Mrs. White let down her hair--a nonchalance that Molly had not been
guilty of. This woman's hair was no more than a wisp. It stood out thin,
wiry, almost invisible in the semilight. This was the extent of her
toilet. She slipped out of her shoes, but she did not even take off her
dress. Then she turned in by her child. She was very ill; it was plain
to be seen. Death was fast upon this woman's track; it should clutch her
inevitably within the next few weeks at most, if that emaciated body had
resistance for so long. Her languor was slow and indicative, her gray,
ashen face like death itself.
"Lie still, Letty," she whispers to the baby; "don't touch mother--she
can't stand it to-night."
My mattress was straw and billowy, the bed sheetless, and under the
weight of the cotton comforter I tried to compose myself. There were
five of us in the little loft. My bedfellow was peaceful and lay still,
too tired to do anything else. In front of me was the open window,
through which shone the electric light, blatant and insistent; behind
this, the clock of Excelsior--brightly lit and incandescent--glared in
upon us, giant hands going round, seeming to threaten the hour of dawn
and frightening sleep and mocking, bugbearing the short hours which the
working-woman might claim for repose.
It was well on to nine o 'clock and the mills were working overtime.
Molly turned restlessly on her bed and murmured, "I suttenly dew feel
bad to-night." A little later I heard her say over to herself: "My, I
forgot to say my prayers." She was the sole member of the loft to whom
sleep came; it came to her soon. I lay sleepless, watching the clock of
Excelsior. The ladder staircase openly led to the kitchen: there was no
door, no privacy possible to our quarters, and the house was full of
men.
A little later Letty cries: "A drink, a drink!" and the tone of the
mother, who replies, is full of patience, but fuller still of suffering.
"Hush, Letty, hush! Mother's too sick to get it." But the child
continues to fret and plead. Finally with a groan Mrs. White stretches
out her hand and gets the tin mug of water, of that vile and dirty water
which has brought death to so many in the mill village. The child drinks
it greedily. I can hear it suck the fluid. Then the woman herself
staggers to her feet, rises with dreadful illness upon her, and all
through the hot stuffy night in the close air of the loft growing
momentarily more fetid, unwholesome, intolerable--she rises to be
violently sick over and over again. It seems an indefinite number of
times to one who lies awake listening, and must seem unceasing to the
poor wretch who returns to her bed only to rise again.
She groans and suffers and bites her exclamations short. Twice she goes
to the window and by the light of the electric lamp pours laudanum into
a glass and takes it to still her pain and her need.
The odours become so nauseous that I am fain to cover my face and head.
The child fed on salt ham and pork is restless and thirsty all night and
begs for water at short intervals. At last the demand is too much for
the poor agonized mother--she takes refuge in silencing unworthy, and to
which one feels her gentleness must be forced. "Hark! The cat will get
you, Letty! See that cat?" And the feline horror in nameless form,
evoked in an awe-inspiring whisper, controls the little creature, who
murmurs, sobs and subsides.
What spirit deeper than her character has hitherto displayed stirs the
mill-girl in the bed next to me? Possibly the tragedy in the other bed;
possibly the tragedy of her own youth. At all events, whatever burden is
on her, her cross is heavy! She murmurs in her dreams, in a voice more
mature, more serious than any tone of hers has indicated:
"Oh, my God!"
It is a strange cry--call--appeal. It rings solemn to me as I lie and
watch and pity. Hours of night which should be to the labourer peaceful,
full of repose after the day, drag along from nine o'clock, when we
went to bed, till three. At three Mrs. White falls into a doze. I envy
her. Over me the vermin have run riot; I have killed them on my neck and
my arms. When it seemed that flesh and blood must succumb, and sleep,
through sheer pity, take hold of us, a stirring begins in the kitchen
below which in its proximity seems a part of the very room we occupy.
The landlady, Mrs. Jones, has arisen; she is making her fire. At a
quarter to four Mrs. Jones begins her frying; at four a deep, blue, ugly
smoke has ascended the stairway to us. This smoke is thick with
odours--the odour of bad grease and bad meat. Its cloud conceals the
beds from me and I can scarcely pierce its curtain to look through the
window. It settles down over the beds like a creature; it insinuates
itself into the clothes that hang upon the wall. So permeating is it
that the odour of fried food clings to everything I wear and haunts me
all day. I can hear the sputtering of the saucepan and the fall and flap
of the pieces of meat as she drops them in to fry. _I know what they
are_, for I have seen them the night before--great crimson bits of flesh
torn to pieces and arranged in rows by the fingers of a ragged Negro as
he crouched by the kitchen table.
This preparation continues for an hour: it takes an abnormally long time
to cook abnormally bad food! Long before five the clock of Excelsior
rings and the cry of the mill is heard waking whomsoever might be lucky
enough to be asleep. Mrs. Jones calls Molly. "Molly!" The girl murmurs
and turns. "Come, you-all git up; you take so powerful long to dress
yo'self!" Long to dress! It is difficult to see how that would be
possible. She rises reluctantly, yawning, sighing; lifts her scarcely
rested body, puts on her stockings and her shoes and the dirty wrapper.
Her hair is untouched, her face unwashed, but she is ready for the day!
Mrs. White has actually fallen asleep, the small roll, her baby, curled
up close to her back.
Molly's summons is mine as well. I am a mill-hand with her. I rise and
repeat my ablutions of the evening before. Unhooking the tin basin,
possessing myself of a bit of soap on the kitchen stairs, I wash my face
and hands. Although the water is dipped from the pail on which a scum
has formed, still it is so much more cool, refreshing and stimulating
than anything that has come in contact with me for hours that it is a
positive pleasure.
* * * * *
THE MILL
By this time the morning has found us all, and unlovely it seems as
regarded from this shanty environment. At 4:50 Excelsior has shrieked
every settler awake. At half-past five we have breakfasted and I pass
out of the house, one of the half-dozen who seek the mill from our
doors.
We fall in with the slowly moving, straggling file, receiving additions
from each tenement as we pass.
Beside me walks a boy of fourteen in brown earth-coloured clothes. He is
so thin that his bones threaten to pierce his vestments. He has a
slender visage of the frailness I have learned to know and distinguish:
it represents the pure American type of people known as "poor white
trash," and with whose blood has been scarcely any admixture of foreign
element. A painter would call his fine, sensitive face beautiful: it is
the face of a martyr. His hat of brown felt slouches over bright red
hair; one cuffless hand, lank and long, hangs down inert, the other
sleeve falls loose; he is one-armed. His attitude and gait express his
defrauded existence. Cotton clings to his clothes; his shoes, nearly
falling off his feet, are red with clay stains. I greet him; he is shy
and surprised, but returns the salutation and keeps step with me. He is
"from the hills," an orphan, perfectly friendless. He boards with a lot
of men; evidently their companionship has not been any solace to him,
for, as he is alone this day, I see him always alone.
He works from 5:45 to 6:45, with three-quarters of an hour at noon, and
has his Saturday afternoons and his Sundays free. He is destitute of the
quality we call joy and has never known comfort. He makes fifty cents a
day; he has no education, no way of getting an education; he is almost
a man, crippled and condemned. At my exclamation when he tells me the
sum of his wages he looks up at me; a faint likeness to a smile comes
about his thin lips: "_It keeps me in existence_!" he says in a slow
drawl. He used just those words.
At the different doors of the mill we part. He is not unconscious of my
fellowship with him, that I feel and know. A kindling light has come
across his face. "Good luck to you!" I bid him, and he lifts his head
and his bowed shoulders and with something like warmth replies, "I hope
you-all will have good luck, tew."
As we come into the spooling-room from the hot air without the mill
seems cold. I go over to a green box destined for the refuse of the
floors and sit down, waiting for work. On this day I am to have my own
"side"--I am a full-fledged spooler. Excelsior has gotten us all out of
our beds before actual daylight, but that does not mean we are to have a
chance to begin our money-making piece-work job at once! "Thar ain't
likely to be no yarn for an hour to-day," Maggie tells me. She is no
less dirty than yesterday, or less smelly, but also she is no less kind.
"I reckon you-all are goin' to make a remarkable spooler," she cheers me
on. "You'll get tired out at first, but then I gets tired, tew, right
along, only it ain't the same _kind_--it's not so _sharp_." Her
distinction is clever.
Across the room at one of the "drawing-in frames" I see the figure of
an unusally pretty girl with curly dark hair. She bends to her job in
front of the frame she runs; it has the effect of tapestry, of that
work with which women of another--oh, of _quite_ another class--amuse
their leisure, with which they kill their time. "Drawing-in,"[8]
although a sitting job, is considered to be a back-breaker. The girls
are ambitious at this work; they make good wages. They sit close to
their frames, bent over, for twelve hours out of the day. This girl
whom I see across the floor of the Excelsior is an object to rest the
eyes upon; she is a beauty. There is not much beauty of any kind or
description in sight. Maggie has noticed her esthetic effect. "You-all
seen that girl; she's suttenly prob'ly am _peart_."
[Footnote 8: A good drawer-in makes $1.25 a day.]
She is a new hand from a distance. This is her first day. What miserable
chance has brought her here? If she stays the mill will claim her body
and soul. The overseer has marked her out; he hovers in the part of the
room where she works. She has colour and her difference to her pale
companions is marked. Excelsior will not leave those roses unwithered. I
can foretell the change as yellow unhealthfulness creeps upon her cheeks
and the red forever goes. There are no red cheeks here, not one. She has
chosen a sitting-down job thinking it easier. I saw her lean back, put
her hands around her waist and rest, or try to, after she has bent four
hours over her close task. I go over to her.
"They say it's awful hard on the eyes, but they tell me, too, that I'll
be a remarkable fine hand."
I saw her apply for work, and saw, too, the man's face as he looked at
her when she asked: "Got any work?"
"We've got plenty of work for a good-looking woman like you," he said
with significance, and took pains to place her within his sight.
The yarn has come in, and I return to my part of the mill; Maggie flies
to her spools and leaves me to seek my distant place far away from her.
I set my work in order; whilst my back is turned some girl possesses
herself of my hand-harness. Mine was a new one, and the one she leaves
for me is broken. This delays, naturally, and the overseer, after
proving to his satisfaction that I am hampered, gets me a new one and I
set to work.
Many of the older hands come without breakfast, and a little later tin
pails or paper parcels appear. These operatives crouch down in a Turkish
fashion at the machines' sides and take a hasty mouthful of their
unwholesome, unpleasant-looking food, eating with their fingers more
like animals than human beings. By eight the full steam power is on, to
judge by the swift turning, the strong resistance of the spools. Not one
of the women near me but is degrading to look upon and odourous to
approach. These creatures, ill clad, with matted, frowsy hair and hands
that look as though they had never, never been washed, smell like the
byre. As for the children, I must pass them by in this recital. The
tiny, tiny children! The girls are profane, contentious, foul-mouthed.
There is much partisanship and cliqueism; you can tell it by the scowls
and the low, insulting words as an enemy passes. To protect the hair
from the flying pieces of cotton the more particular women, and
oftentimes children as well, wear felt hats pulled down well over the
eyes. The cotton, indeed, thistledown-like, flies without cessation
through the air--spins off from the spools; it rises and floats, falling
on the garments and in the hair, entering the nostrils and throat and
lungs. I repeat, the expectoration, the coughing and the throat-cleaning
is constant. Over there two girls have taken advantage of a wait for
yarn to go to sleep on the floor; their heads are pillowed on each
others' shoulders; they rest against a cotton bale. Maggie wanders over
to me to see "how you-all is gettin' on." "Tired?" "Well, I reckon I am.
Thank God we get out in a little while now."
* * * * *
One afternoon I went up to the loft to rest a few moments before going
to the mill. Mrs. White was sitting on her bed, a slender figure in the
blue-checked wrapper she always wore. Her head was close to the window,
her silhouette in the light, pale and slender. "I wa'n't sick when I
come hyar, but them mills! They's suttinly tew hyard on a woman!
Weave-room killed me, I guess. I couldn't hyar at all when I come out
and scarcely could stan' on ma feet when I got home. Tew tyred to eat,
tew; and the water hyar is regularly pisen; hev you-all seen it? It's
all colours. Doctor done come to see me; ain't helpin' me any; 'pears
like he-all ain't goin' to come no mo'!"
"If you have a husband, why don't you go to him and let him care for
you?"
She was silent, turning her wedding-ringless hand over and over on her
lap: the flies came buzzing in around us, and in the near distance
Excelsior buzzed, the loudest, most insistent creature on this part of
the earth.
"Seems like a woman ought to help a man--some," she murmured. Downstairs
Mrs. Jones sums her up in a few words.
"She-all suttinly ain't no _'Mrs'_ in the world! Calls herself
_'White.'_" (The intonation is not to be mistaken.) "Pore thing's
dyin'--knows it, tew! Come hyar to die, I reckon. She'll die right up
thar in that baed, tew. Doctor don't come no mo'. Know she cayn't pay
him nothin'. You-all come hyar to grandmaw, Letty!"
The child around whom the threads of existence are weaving fabric more
intricate than any woof or warp of the great mills goes confidingly to
the old woman, who lifts her tenderly into her arms. With every word she
speaks this aged creature draws her own picture. To these types no pen
save Tolstoi's could do justice. Mine can do no more than display them
by faithfully transcribing their simple dialect-speech.
"I am sixty-four years old, an' played out. Worked too hyard. Worked
every day since I was a child, and when I wasn't workin' had the fevar.
Come from the hills las' month. When his wife dyde, the son he come an'
fetched me cross the river to help him."
How has she lived so long and so well, with life "so hyard on her"?
"I loved my husban', yes, ma'am, I regularly loved him; reckon no woman
didn't ever love a man mo', and he loved me, tew, jest ez much. Seems
tho' God couldn't bayr to see us-all so happy--couldn't las'; he dyde."
Mrs. Jones' figure is a case of bones covered with a brown
substance--you could scarcely call it skin; a weather-beaten, tanned
hide; nothing more. This human statue, ever responsive to the eternal
moulding, year after year has been worked upon by the titan instrument,
Labour: struggle, disease, want. But this hill woman has known love. It
has transfigured her, illumined her. This poor deformed body is a torch
only for an immortal flame. I know now why it seems good to be near her,
why her eyes are inspired.... I rise to leave her and she comes forward
to me, puts out her hand first, then puts both thin, old arms about me
and kisses me.
In speaking of the settlement, it borders on the humourous to use the
word sanitation. In the mill district, as far as my observation reached,
there is none. Refuse not too vile for the public eye is thrown into the
middle of the streets in front of the houses. The general drainage is
performed by emptying pans and basins and receptacles into the
backyards, so that as one stands at the back steps of one's own door one
breathes and respires the filth of half a dozen shanties. Decaying
vegetables, rags, dirt of all kinds are the flowers of these people, the
decorations of their miserable garden patches. To walk through Granton
(which the prospectus tells us is well drained) is to evoke nausea; to
_inhabit_ Granton is an ordeal which even necessity cannot rob of its
severity.
These settlers, habitants of dwellings built by finance solely for the
purpose of renting, are celebrated for their immorals--"a rough, lying,
bad lot." "Oh, the mill-hands!" ... Sufficient, expressive designation.
Nevertheless, these people, simple, direct and innocent, display
qualities that we have been taught are enviable--a lack of curiosity,
for the most part, in the affairs of others, a warm Southern courtesy,
a human kindliness. I found these people degraded because of their
habits and not of their tendencies, which statement I can justify;
whatever may be their natural instincts, born, nurtured in their
unlovely environment, they have no choice but to fall into the usages of
poverty and degradation. They have seen nothing with which to compare
their existences; they have no time, no means to be clean, and no
stimulus to be decent.
A job at Granton was no more difficult to secure than was "spoolin'" at
the other mill. I applied one Saturday noon, when Granton was silent and
the operatives within their doors asleep, for the most part, leaving the
village as deserted as it is on a workday. A like desolation pervades
the atmosphere on holiday and day of toil. I was so lucky as to meet a
shirt-sleeved overseer in the doorway. Preceding him were two ill-clad,
pale children of nine and twelve, armed with a long, mop-like broom with
which their task was to sweep the cotton from the floors--cotton that
resettled eternally as soon as it was brushed away. The superintendent
regarded me curiously, I thought penetratingly, and for the first time
in my experience I feared detection. My dread was enhanced by the
loneliness, the lawlessness of the place, the risk and boldness of my
venture.
By this I was most thoroughly a mill-girl in appearance, at least; my
clothes were white with cotton, my hair far from tidy; fatigue and
listlessness unassumed were in my attitude. I had not heard the Southern
dialect for so long not to be able to fall into it with little effort. I
told him I had been a "spooler" and did not like it--"wanted to spin."
He listened silently, regarding me with interest and with what I
trembled to fear was disbelief. I desperately pushed back my sunbonnet
and in Southern drawl begged for work.
"Spinnin'?" he asked. "What do you want to spin for?"
He was a Yankee, his accent sharp and keen. How clean and decent and
capable he appeared, the dark mill back of him; shantytown, vile, dirty,
downtrodden, beside him!
I told him that I was tired of spooling and knew I could make more by
something else.
He thrust his hands into his pockets. "To-night is Saturday; alone
here?"
"Yes."
"Where you going to stay in Granton?"
"I don't know yet."
"Don't learn spinnin'," he said decidedly. "I am head of the
_speedin'-room_. I'll give you a job in my room on Monday morning."
My relief was immense. His subsequent questions I parried, thanked him,
and withdrew to keep secret from Excelsior that I had deserted for
Granton.
Although these mills are within three hundred feet of each other, the
villagers do not associate. The workings of Granton are unknown to
Excelsior and vice versa.
The speeding-room in Granton is second only in noise to the weave-room.
Conversation must be entrancing and vital to be pursued here! The
speeder has under her care as many machines as her skill can control.
My teacher, Bessie, ran four sides, seventy-six speeders on a side, her
work being regulated by a crank that marked the vibrations. To the lay
mind the terms of the speeding-room can mean nothing. This girl made
from $1.30 to $1.50 a day. She controlled in all 704 speeders; these she
had to replenish and keep running, and to clean all the machinery gear
with her own hands; to oil the steel, even to bend and clean under the
lower shelf and come into contact with the most dangerous parts of the
mechanism. The girl at the speeder next to me had just had her hand
mashed to a jelly. The speeder watches her ropers run out; these stand
at the top and back of the line. The ropers are refilled and their ends
attached to the flying speeders by a quick motion. The yarn from the
ropers is wound off on to the speeders. When the speeders are full of
yarn they are detached from the nest of steel in which they whirl and
are thrown into a hand-car which is pushed about the room by the girls
themselves. Speeding is excessively dirty work and greasy; the oiling
and cleaning is only fit for a man to do.
The girl who teaches me has been at her work for ten years; she entered
the factory at eight. She was tall, raw-boned, an expert, deft and
capable, and, as far as I could judge in our acquaintance, thoroughly
respectable.
There are long waits in this department of the cotton-spinning life. On
tall green stools we sit at the end of our sides during the time it
takes for one well-filled roper to spin itself out; we talk, or rather
contrive to make ourselves heard. She has a sweet, gentle face; she is
courtesy and kindness itself.
"What do you think about all day?"
"Why, I couldn't even begin to tell all my thoughts."
"Tell me some."
"Why, I think about books, I reckon. Do you-all like readin'?"
"Yes."
"Ain't nuthin' I like so good when I ain't tyrd."
"Are you often tired?" And this question surprises her. She looks up at
me and smiles. "Why, I'm _always_ tyrd! I read novels for the most part;
like to read love stories and about fo'ran travel."
(For one short moment please consider: This hemmed-in life, this limited
existence, encompassed on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of
maddening sounds, vibrations around her during twelve hours of the day,
vibrations which, mean that her food is being gained by each pulse of
the engine and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side. Before her
the scene is unchanged day after day, month after month, year after
year. It is not an experience to this woman who works beside me so
patiently; it is her life. The forms she sees are warped and scarred;
the intellects with which she comes in contact are dulled and
undeveloped. All they know is toil, all they know of gain is a
fluctuation in a wage that ranges from cents to a dollar and cents
again, never touching a two-dollar mark. The children who, barefooted,
filthy, brush past her, sweeping the cotton from the infected floors,
these are the only forms of childhood she has ever seen. The dirty women
around her, low-browed, sensual, are the forms of womanhood that she
knows; and the men? If she does not feed the passion of the overseer,
she may find some mill-hand who will contract a "mill marriage" with
this daughter of the loom, a marriage little binding to him and which
will give her children to give in time to the mill. This is the realism
of her love story: She reads books that you, too, may have read; she
dares to dream of scenes, to picture them--scenes that you have sought
and wearied of. A tithe of our satiety would mean her banquet, her
salvation!... Her happiness? _That_ question who can answer for her or
for you?)
She continues: "I'm very fond of fo'ran travel, only I ain't never had
much occasion for it."
This pathos and humour keep me silent. A few ropers have run out; she
rises. I rise, too, to replace, to attach, and set the exhausted line
taut and complete again.
Ten years! Ten years! All her girlhood and youth has been given to
keeping ropers supplied with fresh yarn and speeders a-whirling. During
this travail she has kept a serenity of expression, a depth of sweetness
at which I marvel. Her voice is peculiarly soft and, coupled with the
dialect drawl, is pleasant to hear.
"I hate the mills!" she says simply.
"What would you be if you could choose?" I venture to ask. She has no
hesitation in answering.
"I'd love to be a trained nurse." Then, turn about is fair play in her
mind, I suppose, for she asks:
"What would _you-all_ be?"
And ashamed not to well repay her truthfulness I frankly respond: "I'd
like to write a book."
"I _dee_-clare." She stares at me. "Why, you-all _is_ ambitious. Did you
ever write anything?"
"A letter or two."
She is interested and kindles, leaning forward. "I suttenly ain't so
high in my ambitions," she says appreciatively. "Wish you'd write a love
story for me to read," and she ponders over the idea, her eyes on my
snowy flying speeders.
"Look a-hyar, got any of your scrappin's on writin' hyar? Ef you don't
mind anybody's messin' with your things, bring your scrappin's to me an'
I'll soon tell you ef you can write a book er not," she whispered to me
encouragingly, confidentially, a whisper reaching farther in the mills
than a loud sound.
I thanked her and said: "Do you think that you'd know?"
"Well, I guess I would!" she said confidently. "I ain't read all my life
sense I was eight years old not to know good writin' from bad. Can
you-all sing?"
"No."
"Play sweet music?"
"No."
"I jest love it." She enthuses. "Every Saturday afternoon I take of a
music teacher on the gee-tar. It costs me a quarter."
I could see the scene: a shanty room, the tall, awkward figure bending
over her instrument; the type that the teacher made, the ambition, the
eagerness--all of which qualities we are so willing to deny to the
slaves of toil.
"They ain't much flowers here in Granton," she said again. "'Tain't no
use to try to have even a few geraneums; it's so dry; ain't no yards nor
gardens, nuther."
Musing on this desolation as she walks up and down the line, she says:
"I dew love flowers, don't you?"
* * * * *
Over and over again I am asked by those whose wish I suppose is to prove
to themselves and their consciences that the working-girl is not so
actively wretched, her outcry is not so audible that we are forced to
respond:
"The working people are happy? The factory girls are happy, are they
not? Don't you find them so?"
Is it a satisfaction to the leisure class, to the capitalist and
employer, to feel that a woman poorly housed, ill-fed, in imminent moral
danger, every temptation rampant over barriers down, overworked,
overstrained by labour varying from ten to thirteen hours a day, by
all-night labour, and destruction of body and soul, _is happy_?
Do you _wish_ her to be so? Is the existence _ideal_?
I can speak only for the shoe manufacturing girl of Lynn and for the
Southern mill-hand.
I thank Heaven that I can say truthfully, that of all who came under my
observation, not one who was of age to reflect was happy. I repeat, the
working-woman is brave and courageous, but the most sane and hopeful
indication for the future of the factory girl and the mill-hand is that
she rebels, dreams of something better, and will in the fullness of time
stretch toward it. They have no time to think, even if they knew how.
All that remains for them in the few miserable hours of relief from
labour and confinement and noise is to seek what pastime they may find
under their hand. We have never realized, they have never known, that
their great need--given the work that is wrung from them and the
degradation in which they are forced to live--is a craving for amusement
and relaxation. Amusements for this class are not provided; they _can_
laugh, they rarely do. The thing that they seek--let me repeat: I
cannot repeat it too often--in the minimum of time that remains to them,
is distraction. They do not want to read; they do not want to study;
they are too tired to concentrate. How can you expect it? I heard a
manufacturer say: "We gave our mill-hands everything that we could to
elevate them--a natatorium, a reading library--and these halls fell into
disuse." I ask him now, through these pages, the questions which I did
not put to him then as I listened in silence to his complaint. He said
he thought too much was done for the mill-hands. What time would he
suggest that they should spend in the reading-room, even if they have
learned to read? They rise at four; at a quarter before six they are at
work. The day in winter is not born when they start their tasks; the
night has fallen long before they cease. In summer they are worked long
into their evenings. They tell me that they are too tired to eat; that
all they want to do is to turn their aching bones on to their miserable
mattresses and sleep until they are cried and shrieked awake by the mill
summons. Therefore they solve their own questions. Nothing is provided
for them that they can use, and they turn to the only thing that is
within their reach--animal enjoyment, human intercourse and
companionship. They are animals, as are their betters, and with it, let
us believe, more excuse.
The mill marriage is a farce, and yet they choose to call their unions
now and again a marriage. Many a woman has been a wife several times in
the same town, in the same house. The bond-tying is a form, and, of
course, mostly ignored. The settlements swarm with illegitimate
children. Next to me work two young girls, both under seventeen, both
ringless and with child.
* * * * *
Let me picture the Foster household, where I used to call Saturday
evenings.
Mrs. Foster herself, dirty, slipshod, a frowzy mass, hugs her fireside.
Although the day is warm, she kindled a fire to stimulate the thin, poor
blood exhausted by disease and fevers. Two flatirons lie in a dirty heap
on the floor. As usual, the room is a nest of filth and untidiness.
Mrs. Foster is half paralyzed, but her tongue is free. She talks
fluently in her soft Southern drawl, more Negro than white as to speech
and tone. Up to her sidles a dirty, pretty little boy of four.
"This yere is too little to go to the mill, but he's wild to go; yes,
ser, he is so. Las' night he come to me en say, 'Auntie, you-all wake me
up at fo' 'clock sure; I got ter go ter the mill.'"
Here the little blond child, whose mouth is set on a pewter spoon
dripping over with hominy, grins appreciatively. He throws back his
white and delicate little face, and his aunt, drawing him close to her,
caresses him and continues: "Yes, ma'am, to-day he dun wake up after
they-all had gone and he sayd, 'My goodness, I dun oversleep mase'f!' He
sha'n't go to the mill," she frowned, "not ef we can help it. Why, I
don't never let him outen my sight; 'fraid lest those awful mill
children would git at him."
Thus she sheltered him with what care she knew--care that unfortunately
_could not go far enough back to protect him_! His mother came in at the
noon hour, as we sat there rocking and chatting. She was a straight,
slender creature, not without grace in her shirt-waist and her
low-pulled felt hat that shadowed her sullen face. She was very young,
not more than twenty-two, and her history indicative and tragic. With a
word only and a nod she passes us; she has now too many vital things and
incidents in her own career to be curious regarding a strange mill-hand.
She goes with her comrade--and cousin--Mamie, into the kitchen to
devour in as short a time as possible the noon dinner, served by the
grandmother: cabbage and hominy. "They don't have time 'nough to eat,"
the aunt says; "no sooner then they-all come in and bolt their dinner
then it is time to go back." Her child has followed her. Minnie was
married at thirteen; in less than a year she was a grass widow. "My
goodness, there's lots of grass widows!" my frowsled hostess nods. "Why,
in one weave-room hyar there ain't a gyrl but what's left by her
husband. One day a new gyrl come for to run a loom and they yells out at
her, 'Is you-all a grass widow? Yer can't come in hyar ef you ain't.'"
But it was after her grass widowhood that Minnie's tragedy began. The
mill was her ruin. So much grace and good looks could not go, cannot go,
_does not_ go unchallenged by the attentions of the men who are put
there to run these women's work. The overseer was father of her child,
and when she tried to force from him recognition and aid he threw over
his position and left Columbia and this behind him. This, one instance
under my own eyes observed. There are many.
"Mamie works all night" (she spoke of the other girl)--"makes more
money. My, but she hates the mills! Says she ain't ever known a restful
minute sence she left the hills."
My hostess has drawn the same conclusion from my Northern appearance
that the Joneses drew.
"You-all must eat good where you come from! you look so healthy.' Do
you-all know the Banks girl over to Calcutta?"
"No."
"They give her nine months." (Calcutta is the roughest settlement round
here.) "Why, that gyrl wars her hair cut short, and she shoots and cuts
like a man. She drew her knife on a man last week--cut his face all up
and into his side through his lung. Tried to pass as she was his wife,
but when they had her up, ma'am, they proved she had been three men's
wives and he four gyrl's husbands. He liked to died of the cut. They've
given her nine months, but he ain't the only man that bears her marks.
Over to Calcutta it's the knife and the gun at a wink. This yere was an
awful pretty gyrl. My Min seed her peekin' out from behind the loom in
the weave-room, thought she was a boy, and said: 'Who's that yere pretty
boy peekin' at me?' And that gyrl told Min that she couldn't help knife
the men, they all worried on her so! 'Won't never leave me alone; I jest
have to draw on 'em; there ain't no other way.'"...
For the annals of morality and decency do not take up this faithful
account and picture the cotton-mill village. You will not find it in
these scenes drawn from the life as it is at this hour, as it is
portrayed by the words that the very people themselves will pour into
your ears. Under the walls of Calcutta Negroes are engaged in laying
prospective flower beds, so that the thirteen-hour workers may look out
from time to time and see the forms of flowers. On the other side rise
some twenty shanties. These houses of Calcutta village are very small,
built from the roughest unpainted boards. Here it is, in this little
settlement, that the knife comes flashing out at a word--that the women
shoot as well as men, and perhaps more quickly.
* * * * *
"Richmond aint so bad as the other!" I can hear Mrs. Foster drawl out
this recommendation to us. "They ain't so much chills here. We dun move
up from town first; had to--too high rents for we-all; now we dun stay
hyar. Why, some of the gyrls and boys works to Granton and bo'ds hyar;
seems like it's mo' healthy."
Moving, ambulant population! tramping from hill to hill, from sand-heap
to sand-heap to escape the slow or quick death, to prolong the toiling,
bitter existence--pilgrims of eternal hope; born in the belief, in the
sane and wholesome creed that, no matter what the horror is, no matter
what the burden's weight must be, _one must live_! It takes a great
deal to wake in these inexpressive, indifferent faces illumination of
interest. At what should they rejoice?
I have made the destitution of beauty clear. I believe there is an
absolute lack of every form or sight that might inspire or cause a soul
to awake. There is nothing to lift these people from the earth and from
labour. There should be a complete readjustment of this system. I have
been interested in reading in the New York _Sun_ of April 20th of the
visit of the bishops to the model factories in Ohio. I am constrained to
wish that bishops and clergy and philanthropists and millionaires and
capitalists might visit in bodies and separately the mills of South
Carolina and their tenement population. It is difficult to know just
what the ideas are of the people who have constructed these dwellings.
They tell us in this same prospectus, which I have read with interest
after my personal experience, that these villages are "_picturesque_."
This is the only reference I find to the people and their conditions. I
have seen nothing but horror, and yet I went into these places without
prejudice, prepared to be interested in the industry of the Southern
country, and with no idea of the tragedy and nudity of these people's
existence. The ultimate balance is sure to come; meanwhile, we cannot
but be sensible of the vast individual sacrifices that must fall to
destruction before the scales swing even.
* * * * *
THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS
* * * * *