THE THEFT OF A CHILDHOOD
The Watts children were up the next morning by four o'clock.
Mrs. Watts ate, always, by candle-light. The sun, she thought, would
be dishonored, were he to find her home in disorder, her breakfast
uncooked, her day's work not ready for her, with his first beams.
For Mrs. Watts did not consider that arising at four, and cooking and
sweeping and tidying up the cabin, and quarreling with the Bishop as
"a petty old bundle of botheration"--and storming around at the
children--all by sun-up--this was not work at all.
It was merely an appetizer.
The children were aroused by her this morning with more severity than
usual. Half frightened they rolled stupidly out of their
beds--Appomattox, Atlanta, and Shiloh from one, and the boys from
another. Then they began to put on their clothes in the same
listless, dogged, mechanical way they had learned to do
everything--learned it while working all day between the whirl of the
spindle and the buzz of the bobbin.
The sun had not yet risen, and a cold gray mist crept up from the
valley, closing high up and around the wood-girdled brow of the
mountain as billows around a rock in the sea. The faint, far-off
crowing of cocks added to the weirdness; for their shrill voices
alone broke through the silence which came down with the mist. Around
the brow of Sand Mountain the vapor made a faint halo--touched as it
was by the splendid flush of the East.
It was all grand and beautiful enough without, but within was the
poverty of work, and the two--poverty and work--had already had their
effect on the children, except, perhaps, Shiloh. She had not yet been
in the mill long enough to be automatonized.
Looking out of the window she saw the star setting behind the
mountain, and she thought it slept, by day, in a cavern she knew of
there.
"Wouldn't it be fine, Mattox," she cried, "if we didn't have to work
at the mill to-day an' cu'd run up on the mountain an' pick up that
star? I seed one fall onct an' I picked it up."
For a moment the little face was thoughtful--wistful--then she added:
"I wonder how it would feel to spen' the day in the woods onct.
Archie B. says it's just fine and flowers grow everywhere. Oh, jes'
to be 'quainted with one Jeree--like Archie B. is--an' have him come
to yo' winder every mornin' an' say, '_Wake up, Pet! Wake up, Pet!
Wake up, Pet!_' An' then hear a little 'un over in another tree say,
'_So-s-l-ee-py--So-s-l-ee-py!_'"
Her chatter ceased again. Then: "Mattox, did you ever see a rabbit? I
seen one onct, a settin' up in a fence corner an' a spittin' on his
han's to wash his face."
She laughed at the thought of it. But the other children, who had
dressed, sat listlessly in their seats, looking at her with
irresponsive eyes, set deep back into tired, lifeless, weazened
faces.
"I'd ruther a rabbit 'ud wash his face than mine," drawled Bull Run.
Mrs. Watts came in and jerked the chair from under him and he sat
down sprawling. Then he lazily arose and deliberately spat, between
his teeth, into the fireplace.
There was not enough of him alive to feel that he had been imposed
upon.
For breakfast they had big soda biscuits and fried bacon floating in
its own grease. There was enough of it left for the midday lunch.
This was put into a tin pail with a tight fitting top. The pail, when
opened, smelt of the death and remains of every other soda biscuit
that had ever been laid away within this tightly closed mausoleum of
tin.
They had scarcely eaten before the shrill scream of the mill-whistle
called them to their work.
Shiloh, at the sound, stuck her small fingers into her ears and
shuddered.
Then the others struck out across the yard, and Shiloh followed.
To this child of seven, who had already worked six months in the
factory, the scream of the whistle was the call of a frightful
monster, whose black smoke-stack of a snout, with its blacker breath
coming out, and the flaming eyes of the engine glaring through the
smoke, completed the picture of a wild beast watching her. Within,
the whirr and tremble of shuttle and machinery were the purr and
pulsation of its heart.
She was a nervous, sensitive child, who imagined far more than she
saw; and the very uncanniness of the dark misty morning, the silence,
broken only by the tremble and roar of the mill, the gaunt shadows of
the overtopping mountain, filled her with childish fears.
Nature can do no more than she is permitted; and the terrible strain
of twelve hours' work, every day except Sunday, for the past six
months, where every faculty, from hand and foot to body, eye and
brain, must be alert and alive to watch and piece the never-ceasing
breaking of the threads, had already begun to undermine the
half-formed framework of that little life.
As she approached the mill she clung to the hand of Appomattox, and
shrinking, kept her sister between herself and the Big Thing which
put the sweet morning air a-flutter around its lair. As she drew near
the door she almost cried out in affright--her little heart grew
tight, her lips were drawn.
"Oh, it can't hurt you, Shiloh," said her sister pulling her along.
"You'll be all right when you get inside."
There was a snarling clatter and crescendo tremble, ending in an
all-drowning roar, as the big door was pushed open for a moment, and
Shiloh, quaking, but brave, was pulled in, giving the tiny spark of
her little life to add to the Big Thing's fire.
Within, she was reassured; for there was her familiar spinning frame,
with its bobbins ready to be set to spinning and whirling; and the
room was full of people, many as small as she.
The companionship, even of fear, is helpful.
Besides, the roar and clatter drowned everything else.
Shiloh was too small to see, to know; but had she looked to the right
as she entered, she had seen a sight which would have caused a stone
man to flush with pity. It was Byrd Boyle, one of the mill hands who
ran a slubbing machine, and he held in his arms (because they were
too young to walk so far) twins, a boy and a girl. And they looked
like half made up dolls left out on the grass, weather-beaten by
summer rains. They were too small to know where their places were in
the room, and as their father sat them down, in their proper places,
it took the two together to run one side of a spinner, and the tiny
little workers could scarcely reach to their whirling bobbins.
To the credit of Richard Travis, this working of children under
twelve years of age in the mills was done over his protest. Not so
with Kingsley and his wife, who were experienced mill people from New
England and knew the harm of it--morally, physically. Travis had even
made strict regulations on the subject, only to be overruled by the
combined disapproval of Kingsley and the directors and, strange to
say, of the parents of the children themselves. His determination
that only children of twelve years and over should work in the mill
came to naught, more from the opposition of the parents themselves
than that of Kingsley. These, to earn a little more for the family,
did not hesitate to bring a child of eight to the mill and swear it
was twelve. This and the ruling of the directors,--and worse than
all, the lack of any state law on the subject,--had brought about the
pitiful condition which prevailed then as now in Southern cotton
mills.
There was no talking inside the mill. Only the Big Thing was
permitted to talk. No singing--for songs come from the happy heart of
labor, unshackled. No noise of childhood, though the children were
there. They were flung into an arena for a long day's fight against a
thing of steel and steam, and there was no time for anything save
work, work, work--walk, walk, walk--watch, forever watch,--the
interminable flying whirl of spindle and spool.
Early as it was, the children were late, and were soundly rebuffed by
the foreman.
The scolding hurt only Shiloh--it made her tremble and cry. The
others were hardened--insensible--and took it with about the same
degree of indifference with which caged and starved mice look at the
man who pours over their wire traps the hot water which scalds them
to death.
The fight between steel, steam and child-flesh was on.
Shiloh, Appomattox and Atlanta were spinners.
Spinners are small girls who walk up and down an aisle before a
spinning-frame and piece up the threads which are forever breaking.
There were over a hundred spindles on each side of the frame, each
revolving with the rapidity of an incipient cyclone and snapping
every now and then the delicate white thread that was spun out like
spiders' web from the rollers and the cylinders, making a
balloon-like gown of cotton thread, which settled continuously around
the bobbin.
All day long and into the night, they must walk up and down, between
these two rows of spinning-frames, amid the whirling spindles,
piecing the broken threads which were forever breaking.
It did not require strength, but a certain skill, which,
unfortunately, childhood possessed more than the adult. Not power,
but dexterity, watchfulness, quickness and the ability to walk--as
children walk--and watch--as age should watch.
No wonder that in a few months the child becomes, not the flesh and
blood of its heredity, but the steel and wood of its environment.
Bull Run and Seven Days were doffers, and confined to the same set of
frames. They followed their sisters, taking off the full bobbins and
throwing them into a cart and thrusting an empty bobbin into its
place. This requires an eye of lightning and a hand with the
quickness of its stroke.
For it must be done between the pulsings of the Big Thing's heart--a
flash, a snap, a snarl of broken thread--up in the left hand flies
the bobbin from its disentanglement of thread and skein, and down
over the buzzing point of steel spindles settles the empty bobbin,
thrust over the spindle by the right.
It is all done with two quick movements--a flash and a jerk of one
hand up, and the other down, the eye riveted to the nicety of a
hair's breadth, the stroke downward gauged to the cup of a thimble,
to settle over the point of the spindle's end; for the missing of a
thread's breadth would send a spindle blade through the hand, or
tangle and snap a thread which was turning with a thousand
revolutions in a minute.
_Snap--bang! Snap--bang!_ One hundred and twenty
times--_Snap--bang!_ and back again, went the deft little workers
pushing their cart before them.
Full at last, their cart is whirled away with flying heels to another
machine.
It was a steady, lightning, endless track. Their little trained
fingers betook of their surroundings and worked like fingers of
steel. Their legs seemed made of India rubber. Their eyes shot out
right and left, left and right, looking for the broken threads on the
whirling bobbins as hawks sweep over the marsh grass looking for
mice, and the steel claws, which swooped down on the bobbins when
they found it, made the simile not unsuitable.
Young as she was, Shiloh managed one of these harnessed, fiery lines
of dancing witches, pirouetting on boards of hardened oak or hickory.
Up and down she walked--up and down, watching these endless whirling
figures, her bare fingers pitted against theirs of brass, her bare
feet against theirs shod with iron, her little head against theirs
insensate and unpitying, her little heart against theirs of flame
which throbbed in the boiler's bosom and drove its thousand steeds
with a whip of fire.
In the bloodiest and cruelest days of the Roman Empire, man was
matched against wild beasts. But in the man's hand was the blade of
his ancestors and over his breast the steel ribs which had helped his
people to conquer the world.
And in the Beast's body was a heart!
Ay, and the man was a man--a trained gladiator--and he was nerved by
the cheers of thousands of sympathizing spectators.
And now, centuries after, and in the age of so-called kindness, comes
this battle to be fought over. And the fight, now as then, is for
bread and life.
But how cruelly unfair is the fight of to-day, when the weak and
helpless child is made the gladiator, and the fight is for bread, and
the Beast is of steel and steam, and is soulless and heartless.
Steel--that by which the old gladiator conquered--that is the heart
of the Thing the little one must fight. And the cheers--the glamour
of it is lacking, for the little one cannot hear even the sound of
its own voice--in the roar of the thousand-throated Thing which
drives the Steel Beast on.
Seven o'clock--eight o'clock--Shiloh's head swam--her shoulders
ached, her ears quivered with sensitiveness, and seemed not to catch
sounds any more, but sharp and shooting pains. She was dazed already
and weak; but still the Steam Thing cheered its steel legions on.
Up and down, up and down she walked, her baby thoughts coming to her
as through the roar of a Niagara, through pain and sensitiveness,
through aches and a dull, never-ending sameness.
Nine o'clock! Oh, she was so tired of it all!
Hark, she thought she heard a bird sing in a far off, dreamy way, and
for a moment she made mud pies in the back yard of the hut on the
mountain, under the black-oak in the yard, with the glint of soft
sunshine over everything and the murmur of green leaves in the trees
above, as the wind from off the mountain went through them, and the
anemone, and bellworts, and daisies grew beneath and around. Was it a
bluebird? She had never seen but one and it had built its nest in a
hole in a hollow tree, the summer before she went into the mill to
work.
She listened again--yes, it did sound something like a bluebird,
peeping in a distant far off way, such as she had heard in the cabin
on the mountain before she had ever heard the voice of the Big Thing
at the mill. She listened, and a wave of disappointment swept over
her baby face; for, listening closely, she found it was an unoiled
separator, that peeped in a bluebird way now and then, above the
staccato of some rusty spindle.
But in the song of that bluebird and the glory of an imaginary mud
pie, all the disappointment of what she had missed swept over her.
Ten o'clock--the little fingers throbbed and burned, the tiny legs
were stiff and tired, the little head seemed as a block of wood, but
still the Steam Thing took no thought of rest.
Eleven o'clock--oh, but to rest awhile! To rest under the trees in
the yard, for the sunshine looked so warm and bright out under the
mill-windows, and the memory of that bluebird's song, though but an
imitation, still echoed in her ear. And those mud pies!--she saw them
all around her and in such lovely bits of old broken crockery
and--....
She felt a rude punch in the side. It was Jud Carpenter standing over
her and pointing to where a frowzled broken thread was tangling
itself around a separator. She had dreamed but a minute--half a dozen
threads had broken.
It was a rude punch and it hurt her side and frightened her. With a
snarl and a glare he passed on while Shiloh flew to her bobbin.
This fright made her work the next hour with less fatigue. But she
could not forget the song of the bluebird, and once, when Appomattox
looked at her, she was working her mouth in a song,--a Sunday School
song she had picked up at the Bishop's church. Appomattox could not
hear it--no one had a license to hear a song in the Beast Thing's
Den--nothing was ever privileged to sing but it,--but she knew from
the way her mouth was working that Shiloh was singing.
Oh, the instinct of happiness in the human heart! To sing through
noises and aches and tired feet and stunned, blocky heads. To sing
with no hope before her and the theft of her very childhood--ay, her
life--going on by the Beast Thing and his men.
God intended us to be happy, else He had never put so strong an
instinct there.
Twelve o'clock. The Steam Beast gave a triumphant scream heard above
the roar of shuttle and steel. It was a loud, defiant, victorious
roar which drowned all others.
Then it purred and paused for breath--purred softer and softer
and--slept at last.
It was noon.
The silence now was almost as painful to Shiloh as the noise had
been. The sudden stopping of shuttle and wheel and belt and beam did
not stop the noise in her head. It throbbed and buzzed there in an
echoing ache, as if all the previous sounds had been fire-waves and
these the scorched furrows of its touch. Wherever she turned, the
echo of the morning's misery sounded in her ears.
And now they had forty minutes for noon recess.
They sat in a circle, these five children--and ate their lunch of cold
soda biscuits and fat bacon.
Not a word did they say--not a laugh nor a sound to show they were
children,--not even a sigh to show they were human.
Silently, like wooden things they choked it down and then--O men and
women who love your own little ones--look!
Huddled together on the great, greasy, dirty floor of this mill, in all
the attitudes of tired-out, exhausted childhood, they slept. Shiloh
slept bolt upright, her little head against the spinning-frame, where
all the morning she had chased the bobbins up and down the long aisle.
Appomattox and Atlanta were grouped against her. Bull Run slept at her
feet and Seven Days lay, half way over on his bobbin cart, so tired that
he went to sleep as he tried to climb into it.
In other parts of the mill, other little ones slept and even large girls
and boys, after eating, dozed or chatted. Spoolers, weavers, slubbers,
warpers, nearly grown but all hard-faced, listless--and many of them
slept on shawls and battings of cotton.
They were awakened by the big whistle at twenty minutes to one o'clock.
At the same time, Jud Carpenter, the foreman, passed down the aisles and
dashed cold water in the sleeping faces. Half laughingly he did it, but
the little ones arose instantly, and with stooped forms, and tired,
cowed eyes, in which the Anglo-Saxon spirit of resentment had been
killed by the Yankee spirit of greed, they looked at the foreman, and
then began their long six hours' battle with the bobbins.
Three o'clock! The warm afternoon's sun poured on the low flat tin roof
of the mill and warmed the interior to a temperature which was
uncomfortable.
Shiloh grew sleepy--she dragged her stumbling little feet along, and had
she stopped but a moment, she had paid the debt that childhood owes to
fairy-land. The air was close--stifling. Her shoulders ached--her head
seemed a stuffy thing of wood and wooly lint.
As it was she nodded as she walked, and again the song of the bluebird
peeped dreamily from out the unoiled spindle. She tried to sing to keep
awake, and then there came a strange phantasy to mix with it all, and
out of the half-awake world in which she now staggered along she caught
sight of something which made her open her eyes and laugh outright.
_Was it--could it be? In very truth it was--_
_Dolls!_
_And oh, so many! And all in a row dressed in matchless gowns of snowy
white. She would count them up to ten--as far as she had learned to
count.... But there were ten,--yes, and many more than ten-- ... and
just to think of whole rows of them-- ... all there-- ... and waiting
for her to reach out and fondle and caress._
_And she--never in her life before had she been so fortunate as to own
one...._
A smile lit up her dreaming eyes. _Rows upon rows of dolls.... And not
even Appomattox and Atlanta had ever seen so many before; and now how
funny they acted, dancing around and around and bobbing their quaint
bodies and winking and nodding at her.... It was Mayday with them and
down the long line of spindles these cotton dolls were dancing around
their May Queen, and beckoning Shiloh to join them...._
_It was too cute--too cunning--! they were dancing and drawing her
in--they were actually singing-- ... humming and chanting a May
song...._
_O lovely--lovely dolls!..._
Jud Carpenter found her asleep in the greasy aisle, her head resting
on her arm, a smile on her little face--a hand clasping a rounded
well-threaded doll-like bobbin to her breast.
It is useless to try to speak in a room in which the Steam Beast's
voice drowns all other voices. It is useless to try to awaken one by
calling. One might as well stand under Niagara Falls and whistle to
the little fishes. No other voice can be heard while the Steam Beast
speaks.
Shiloh was awakened by a dash of cold water and a rough kick from the
big boot of that other beast who called himself the overseer. He did
not intend to jostle her hard, but Shiloh was such a little thing
that the kick she got in the side accompanied by the dash of water
shocked and frightened her instantly to her feet, and with scared
eyes and blanched face she darted down to the long line of bobbins,
mending the threads.
If, in the great Mystic Unknown,--the Eden of Balance,--there lies no
retributive Cause to right the injustice of that cruel Effect, let us
hope there is no Here-after; that we all die and rot like dogs, who
know no justice; that what little kindness and sweetness and right,
man, through his happier dreams, his hopeful, cheerful idealism, has
tried to establish in the world, may no longer stand as mockery to
the Sweet Philosopher who long ago said: "_Suffer the little children
to come unto me._..."
They were more dead than alive when, at seven o'clock, the Steam
Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home.
Outside the stars were shining and the cool night air struck into
them with a suddenness which made them shiver. They were children,
and so they were thoughtless and did not know the risk they ran by
coming out of a warm mill, hot and exhausted, into the cool air of an
Autumn night. Shiloh was so tired and sleepy that Bull Run and Seven
Days had to carry her between them.
Everybody passed out of the mill--a speechless, haggard, over-worked
procession. Byrd Boyle, with a face and form which seemed to belong
to a slave age, carried his twins in his arms.
Their heads lay on his shoulders. They were asleep.
Scarcely had the children eaten their supper of biscuit and bacon,
augmented with dandelion salad, ere they, too, were asleep--all but
Shiloh.
She could not sleep--now that she wanted to--and she lay in her
grandfather's lap with flushed face and hot, over-worked heart. The
strain was beginning to tell, and the old man grew uneasy, as he
watched the flush on her cheeks and the unusual brightness in her
eyes.
"Better give her five draps of tub'bentine an' put her to bed," said
Mrs. Watts as she came by. "She'll be fittin' an' good by mornin'."
The old man did not reply--he only sang a low melody and smoothed her
forehead.
It was ten o'clock, and now she lay on the old man's lap asleep from
exhaustion. A cricket began chirping in the fireplace, under a
hearth-brick.
"What's that, Pap?" asked Shiloh half asleep.
"That's a cricket, Pet," smiled the old man.
She listened a while with a half-amused smile on her lips:
"Well, don't you think his spindles need oilin', Pap?"
There was little but machinery in her life.
Another hour found the old man tired, but still holding the sleeping
child in his arms:
"If I move her she'll wake," he said to himself. "Po' little Shiloh."
He was silent a while and thoughtful. Then he looked up at the shadow
of Sand Mountain, falling half way down the valley in the moonlight.
"The shadow of that mountain across that valley," he said, "is like
the shadow of the greed of gain across the world. An' why should it
be? What is it worth? Who is happier for any money more than he needs
in life?"
He bowed his head over the sleeping Shiloh.
"Oh, God," he prayed--"You, who made the world an' said it might
have a childhood--remember what it means to have it filched away.
It's like stealin' the bud from the rose-bush, the dew from the
grass, hope from the heart of man. Take our manhood--O God--it is
strong enough to stand it--an' it has been took from many a strong
man who has died with a smile on his lips. Take our old age--O
God--for it's jus' a memory of Has Beens. But let them not steal that
from any life that makes all the res' of it beautiful with dreams of
it. If, by some inscrutable law which we po' things can't see
through, stealin' in traffic an' trade must go on in the world, O
God, let them steal our purses, but not our childhood. Amen."