The Most They Ever Had

ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-819-0

M P Publishing Limited
12 Strathallan Crescent
Douglas
Isle of Man
IM2 4NR
via
United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672
email: [email protected]

MacAdam/Cage
155 Sansome Street, Suite 550
San Francisco, CA 94104
www.MacAdamCage.com
Copyright © 2009 by Rick Bragg
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bragg, Rick.
The most they ever had / Rick Bragg.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59692-361-4
1. Textile workers—Alabama—Jacksonville—Economic conditions—20th century. 2. Textile workers—Alabama—Jacksonville—Social conditions--20th century. 3. Textile workers—Alabama—Jacksonville—Biography. 4. Jacksonville (Ala.)—Economic conditions—20th century. 5. Jacksonville (Ala.)—Social conditions—20th century. I. Title.
HD8039.T42U6416 2009
331.7’66700976163—dc22
2009028700

Cover photograph from the collection of Homer Barnwell
Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith

MACADAM CAGE

prologue

brother

As a boy, I was a little afraid of the people of the mills, of the plain, Pentecostal women in long dresses and waist-length hair, and bony, red-skinned men who still remembered the cut of a cotton sack. They had the look of a people who had not lived life so much as endured it, as if they had walked out of a fire. I would learn not to flinch when some old man offered me a three-fingered hand, or stare at people who seemed to cough all the time, even in fine weather. I knew about work then, in the 1960s and ’70s. I swung a pick, ran a chainsaw, toted concrete blocks. But this grit, this sacrifice, was something else. I understood it, finally, one March night in 2001, when I saw a man I believed to be unbreakable just taken apart, not by the mill he served, but something worse.

___

In our boyhood, my big brother, Sam, dug pieces of coal and scrap lumber from the red mud so my mother could heat a borrowed house. In the 1970s, he quit school to load boxcars with one hundred-pound sacks of clay and lime. He shoveled gravel and sand into the backs of flatbed trucks, cut pulpwood, and broke down truck tires with a chisel and a five-pound sledge. Then, he gave me a running start away from all of it.

A hundred times, it seemed, I slouched at the shoulder of some trash-strewn highway in northeastern Alabama, the hood up on a wore-out car, waiting for him to come and get me going again. I was always on my way to some writing job, some frivolous work, something you could do all day and not even get any grease under your nails.

He would pull up in his old Chevrolet pickup, hand me a flashlight—it always seemed I broke down in the dark—and go to work. He would pull wrenches and yank on alternators and water pumps till he peeled the skin off his knuckles, blood mixing with grime until I flipped my clip-on tie over one shoulder and reached in with my free hand, to help. “Quit,” he would hiss. “You’ll get dirty.”

I thought he was the toughest man I ever knew, but now I know he was just as tough as he had to be. He broke bones and let them mend on their own, not to show off, but because insurance was something you got only at a good job. I guess that life broke everything but his heart.

He worked at the end of a shovel handle for twenty years, till he finally landed work at the mill in Jacksonville, Alabama, when he was in his thirties. He armored his body like a medieval knight and went to work in the opening room, where he used bolt cutters to snip steel bands off five hundred-pound bales of cotton. The bales, bound under thousands of pounds of pressure, would explode apart, and the bands, sharp as razor blades, would go winging through the air. I got a call one afternoon to tell me one of the bands had stabbed him in the face under his goggles. A sixteenth of an inch to the right and he would have lost his eye. He was back at work that day.

“Things like that happen,” he told me, and shrugged.

I asked him why he risked it.

He ticked the reasons off on his fingers.

Insurance.

Retirement.

Decent money.

A little bit later he got a few pennies more an hour to go work in the mill itself, between rows of spinning steel in a choking cotton dust haze, where every breath drew the potential for disease into his lungs. He was still there in winter of 2001 as rumors thickened that the mill was closing down.

I will never forget how he looked as I walked into my mother’s house that night in March, big hands on his knees, afraid. And then I knew. It was a matter of distance, the distance between a hard, hot, dirty, dangerous job, and a shovel handle.

“I don’t know…” he began, and then his voice just left him.

He rubbed his face. You could see the permanent stain of grease on his hand, under his skin.

“…what to do.”

He had wrecked old trucks into trees when the front ends fell out or the bald tires blew, had jacks slip and cars fall on him, and had tumbled from trees with a chainsaw bucking in his hands. For fun, he walked the mountains in pitch black, chasing his coon dogs across foot-logs and drop-offs where a misstep would leave him freezing in the pines. But what finally scared him, that night, was talk of the end of the world.

___

I decided to write these stories that night, not about him, but people like him, the people of the mill. It has been known by various names—Ide Mill, Profile, Union Yarn—but the people were the same. Each chapter tells a story of a separate life, though the sufferings they endured do run together across the pages. They are grim in many places and sad in spaces in between, but when I told that to a friend, worried that no one would stick with such a book cover to cover, he told me not to worry. “Well, it ain’t a damn barn dance, is it? It’s an American tragedy.”

I know some smart people will say these workers should have known better than to tie their lives so long to such a thing. The world economy changes. Jobs come and go. Business is not in business to make jobs, but money. I understand that, too.

But it seems to me that life made a lot more sense in this country when we made things, built things. “It’s got to the point,” my brother Sam said, “that the only thing we make in this country is money.”

They do not deserve, people this tough, to vanish, not in the clay, and not outside the padlocked doors of their dying industry. But they seem to have few champions. The unions were crushed here, long ago. Their politicians in Washington, forgetting their own history, have pushed for legislation that ignores them, and coddles the rich.

So, as silly as it seems, you write a song for them, a poem, a fable.

This book lends flesh, blood, and bone, I hope, to bloodless numbers in plant closings and layoffs, and in hospital wards and nursing homes and unemployment lines across this land. I hope it honors them, a people once valued for what they could make, how fine it was, and how fast they could make it.

Now the thing they were needed for is going away, or already gone.

They are still here.

chapter one

the choice

Sometimes the world is flat. In the early spring of 2001, a community of people in the foothills of the Appalachians had come to a falling-off place, to the edge of all they had ever known. Now they stood looking down, angry and afraid. Across the industrial South, padlocks and logging chains bound the doors of silent textile mills, and it seemed a miracle to the blue-collar people in Jacksonville, Alabama, that their cotton mill still bit, shook, and roared. The century-old hardwood floors still trembled under rows of machines, and the people worked on in that mist of white air. The mill had become almost a living thing here, rewarding the hard working and careful with a means of survival, but punishing the careless and clumsy, taking a finger, a hand, more. It was here before the automobile, before the flying machine, and its giant, coal-fired generators lit up the evening sky with the first electricity they ever saw. It roared across generations, and they served it even as it filled their lungs with lint and shortened their lives. In return, the mill let them live in stiff-necked dignity, right here, in the hills of their fathers. So, when death did come, to the red-dirt driveways, mobile homes, and little mill village houses, no one had to ship their bodies home on a train.

___

That spring, Sonny Parker and his wife, Theresa, walked out into the parking lot of the Food Outlet, grocery bags in their hands. The city had three grocery stores, but the Food Outlet is where most of the mill workers brought their paychecks, its aisles crammed with Little Debbie snack cakes, Vienna sausage, and potted meat; its worn tile floors crisscrossed with wobbly buggies pushed by old men in overalls and middle-aged women who had, just minutes before coming inside, carefully combed the last wisps of lint from their hair.

It was just before sunset when Sonny, in his early fifties then, spotted a black leather purse in a grocery buggy. The purse was wide open and seemed to be filled with money.

They stood and stared.

It was money they desperately needed with hard times so close upon them, with Theresa, in her late forties then, so sick from brown lung she could no longer work.

“We didn’t touch a dollar,” Sonny said.

Sonny picked up the purse and walked back inside the store. He handed it to a manager, who searched inside it for find some kind of identification. “Good Lord, at the money,” the manager said. “There’s thousands of dollars in this purse.”

Sonny was already walking out the door.

The manager found the I.D. and called the woman who owned it. Sonny and Theresa never heard from her, never even got a thank you.

Sonny shakes his head when he is asked if he was tempted to take it.

“I could have throwed that purse in the truck and driven off, and nobody would have seen me,” said Sonny, whose mother worked herself to death in the choking cotton fog of a mill. “I could have took that money and run. But what good would it have done me?

“I didn’t earn it.”

It is hard to explain to an outsider how money can still be green, can still read twenty dollars, even one hundred dollars, and not be worth anything, not worth a candy wrapper blowing across the parking lot.

It was more than morality, more than Sunday school teaching.

It was his culture.

He went to work in a cotton mill when he was sixteen because he wanted to buy a car, “and no one else was going to buy me one.” He and Theresa paid off a little wood-frame house working at the mill, and raised a son and a daughter. “It might not seem like a lot, to some people, what we’ve got,” said Sonny. But they didn’t want much, just a decent home, a good-running pickup, and a like-new car every few years. Theresa’s brown lung was always seen as a part of the deal, a bargain blue-collar men and women make in their hearts every day.

What can they stand?

What is it worth?

“I wake up in the middle of the night, choking. I sleep in my recliner some nights, to breathe. But I’m not on oxygen yet. I know it’s coming, but I am not on it yet,” said Theresa, who used to sing the high, sweet notes in a gospel group before the disease took her breath. “I only have to go to the doctor once a month, and there are good days. But me and Sonny, we fed and clothed our family, put our children through school, got them raised. They never wanted for a thing. I was down to ninety-two pounds, at one point, and my daughter would look at me and cry and beg me not to go back. But I had to. I had to choose.”

___

Outsiders like to talk about the working people of the Deep South in clichés, like to say their lives are consumed by football, stock car racing, stump jumping, and a whole lot of violent history. But it is work that defines them. You hear it under every shade tree, at every dinner on the ground, whole conversations about timber cut, post holes dug, transmissions pulled.

They do not ask for help from outsiders, unless it is from a preacher, a lawyer, a doctor, people who have skills they do not possess. They can, most of them, lay block, pour concrete, swing a hammer, run a chainsaw, fix a busted water line, and jerk the engine from an American-made car with muscle, a tree limb, and a chain. If their car breaks down at the side of the highway they do not call AAA. They drive the roads with a hydraulic jack, a four-way lug wrench, and a big red tool box that takes two hands to lift and jangles with one thousand leftover screws. They have installed a million radiator hoses by the glow of a Bic lighter, and would have no more left the house without jumper cables than without pants. They know how a septic tank works, how to wire a laundry room, how to safely pull a tick off a two-year-old, and how to unravel a bird’s nest from a Daiwa reel.

The women are tougher, still. They know how to compress time, how to work a twelve-hour shift, cook a good supper, run a sewing machine, sing to the baby, ghost-write homework, go to choir practice and the Food Outlet, pick an armload of tomatoes from their own vines, and watch
General Hospital
, at 9 p.m., on the VCR. They eat supper as early as 5 p.m. and are in bed by 10 p.m.—because at 4 a.m. they have to wake up and do it all over again.

They live in little frame houses perched almost on the lip of the highways, in modest brick ranchers on the west side of town, or in the mill village itself, in what used to be company houses. On weekends they drive to Leesburg to fish for crappie, and on Christmas they shoot mistletoe from the high branches of trees. The men—and some of the women—will go at you with a tire iron if you insult them, but they can swallow a lot of bile, if it means a job. They cash their checks, usually, instead of depositing them, because they have to sacrifice the future for the right now. They play Rook on Saturday nights, and consider fried bologna and canned biscuits to be a first-rate breakfast food. They know a deer roast tastes less gamey if you soak it overnight in a pan of buttermilk, and can re-upholster a pickup seat with a sheet of vinyl, a quarter-mile of nylon cord, and a pair of needle-nose pliers.

It is the work that makes them, holds them up. They like the fact they can measure it, see yarn filling up spools, see how perfect it is. They would hate, most of them, sitting at an office keyboard, moving phantom money around on a computer screen, then glad-handing a boss with a real Rolex and a phony smile. On the mill floor, you never stopped to glad-hand—the machines would stall, and the chains of production would break.

People who do not work, but could, are despised. You see it, that disgust, in the tribunals of old men who linger at the co-ops and country stores, men entitled to a few, final years of repose on benches and cane-back chairs after a lifetime of third shifts, stretch-outs, and see-through sandwiches. Their bone-handled knives, blades black with age and sharpened to paper-thinness, would freeze over the whetstone when some shirker lounged by. “Jest sorry,” they would hiss and scrape the blade across the stone.

One-armed men shoveled coal, slung slingblades, and drove pulpwood trucks. One-legged men limped across factory floors. A blind man sold candy and chewing gum at the Calhoun County Courthouse, and no one dared cheat him. You need not use foul language to damn a man here. Just say that a day’s work would kill him, and you tore him down to the bald nothing.

At least that is how it was when there was more work here, when cotton covered the land, foundries burned orange into the night, and the machines, life-giving machines, could be heard for miles in the surrounding dark, through the third shift and into a new dawn.

That has been a while.

Sonny and Theresa Parker were paying off a red Pontiac, a Grand Prix, when the latest rumors of a shutdown and permanent layoff began to filter through the mill and the surrounding county, threatening so much more than their survival.

“To me, if a man works and tries as hard as he can, he might not have much but at least he’s a man,” said Sonny, an overhauler who is responsible for keeping the mill’s machines running. “You ain’t no lowlife. You can walk around with your head up, if you have work. That’s what a mill is. It’s hot, hard, dangerous work. And it’s loud, and if you ain’t careful, it’ll get you.

“But it ain’t when it’s runnin’ that it’s scary. It’s when it ain’t.”

___

Once, when they had gathered around the beds of their pickups in the mill parking lot, the stories had made them smile. They told tales of the eccentric mill boss, Greenleaf, who liked to stroll his property in rubber wading boots and a dressing gown, and built an electric fence around his dining room table to shock the cats. They grinned about Squat Low Webb, who did a stint as a deputy sheriff and was prone to squat low when the shooting started. And they laughed out loud about Pop Romine, who never buttoned the side button of his overalls and scandalized the women, who rode the bus all the way to Chattanooga to eat chili and then rode it all the way back again, who left with every carnival that came to town, who was deaf as a concrete block, but would go into the mill where his sisters Ethel and Maxie worked, bite down on the spinning frame and, through some miracle of vibration, hear every word they said.

The past is safely done. So they went back to it, to the days when every wide place in the road had a red-brick mill, when well-dressed wives of mill owners handed silver dollars to raggedy children on Sunday afternoons, and trucks rolled through the village streets every Christmas, passing out free shoes and frozen turkeys. Once, they even had their own baseball teams, mill hands who took their practice swings with cigarettes burning in their lips went into second with spikes high and found something very close to glory in stadiums of red dirt and chicken wire.

Before, there was only the dirt. The red clay had been the crucible here, and it had broken generations. The people chopped other men’s cotton, picked other men’s cotton, and lives vanished between rows of endless, lovely, hateful white. The most standing the poor people could usually attain, when a landed man’s name was mentioned, was to say, “Oh, I picked for him.”

Just one year after the Civil War finally ground to its inevitable end, industrialists scouted the foothills of Northeastern Alabama as a place for cotton mills, especially along the Coosa River. But it was after 1900 before Yankee investors planned and constructed a mill here, a thing of vast, echoing chambers, its towering ceilings held up by pillars taller than ships’ masts.

The company promised houses, cast-iron heaters, and coal. There would be a company store, a company school, and a company church, and electric lights. All this for a monthly rent of about twenty-five cents a room for a three-room house. So they came walking, some with everything they owned in a toe sack, some walking beside a wagon full of dirty-faced, hungry children.

It could not get so bad they would not want it.

The mill whistle, which blew for the first time in October 1905, would open a new world to that exodus of men, women, and barefoot urchins, who were especially prized by mill owners because their small, delicate fingers could flutter inside machines without getting caught. Even into the 1930s, adult workers made as little as seven dollars for a fifty-five-hour week. Pay slips in its first twenty years show that, after rent and food, workers routinely took home a monthly salary of $0.00. But it was regular, life-sustaining work, and did not depend on the fate of a blind, staggering mule, or the fickle nature of rain.

“I was fourteen years old when I went to work there. Why, that’s not such a little girl,” said Reba Houck, who was born in ’24 and went to work on third shift in ’38, after she planted, chopped, and picked cotton in her Daddy’s field until twilight. “I was making fourteen dollars a week, twice as much as a grown man could make sharecropping. I bought me and my Momma and Daddy clothes. Back then, you see, it didn’t matter about age.”

Reba spent thirty-nine years in the mill.

“When I retired, Daddy took the Oldtimer’s [Alzheimer’s] and I sat with him until he passed in ’89. I go to town now and see some of them, some of the old ones I worked with, but, darlin’, I’ve forgot their names.”

It was meant to be here, people said. The Great Depression had not killed it, or labor wars, or even World Wars, which took so many of the young men that the ones who did not serve were ashamed to look their neighbors in the face. It had even survived a direct hit by a massive tornado, an act of God. There had been layoffs, slow-downs and short-time, and even a closure or two, but it always reopened, always re-hired.

It held to people, even in death.