The Most They Ever Had (2 page)

Iladean Deason Ford, who is well past seventy now, was six years old when she roamed the mill village, eating supper at a different house every night, whether she was invited or not. They lived at 7 A Street when her father began to show the early signs of brown lung. “I don’t go down through there,” she said, “I don’t see my Daddy walking across the street.”

The modern-day workers can tell you the year, month, and day they got on, the information stored away with birthdays and anniversaries and their babies’ first words, but, somehow, more important. That is what they say, “got on,” not hired, as if this were the last rung on a ladder, a high branch in a tree. It means they got someplace important, almost someplace safe.

“I got on September 20, 1974,” said Smiley Sams. “I quit school when I was sixteen, and Momma said I could either go back to school or I could go to work. Momma worked here. I got nine brothers and sisters, and all but one worked here. I’ve never even filled out an application. This is all I’ve ever done.”

He took his place on a line of machines that had spun enough yarn to tie the moon and earth together with one long, uninterrupted cotton string, on a floor worn smooth by people named Hop, Bunk, Chee, Slate Rock, Squirrely, Dago, Jutt, Hook, Kitty, Boss, Elk, Lefty, Possum, Sam Hill, Pot Likker, the Sandwich Thief, and the Clinker Man.

But by the year 2001, it was the future they talked about, an uncertain nothingness every bit as grim to them as the mill’s darkest past.

___

They could have just left, all two hundred of them. The mill’s last generation could have loaded everything they owned on a pickup and a flat-bed trailer, and said goodbye. They could have stopped at the mill office for one last paycheck, what they call “picking up their time.” The Okies, when the winds blew the dust from beneath their feet, left their struggle behind. There is no shame in it. Sometimes, the road is all there is.

Two things held them here.

One, they did not know if another secure place was for their kind. It was as if once they picked up their time, their time would be over.

Two, they were bound, many of them, to these mountains with something longer and harder than nails or even chains. Few of them owned more than a few acres of the land they loved, and some of them, as their ancestors had, still went to sleep in rented houses. But the highway led no place they wanted to go.

Their ancestors had watered these trees with sweat, bile, and blood, not in some silly, philosophical way, but drop by drop. These dense canopies of oaks and pines had, for almost two hundred years, hidden hunger, hardship, violence, massacre, and murder—their story. But, as the old men like to say, they were
rar’ purty trees
.

The mill paid the light bill, grocery bill, and the Christmas bill in a land where big buck deer leap across the blacktop, where canned peaches, apple butter, and crabapple jelly shine yellow-gold in the sunlight through the kitchen window, and nothing—not two cars parked side by side at a motel, not even their blood pressure —is a secret.

“You could get a job here if you wanted it,” said Debbie Glenn, whose father farmed cotton in Calhoun County. She went to work in the Jacksonville mill as a young woman, and stayed. She considered it a blessing to wake up in this land. “I got to stay at home. The people I worked with became closer to me than my own family.”

They considered themselves kin. The Reverend James Martin was born at 127 D Street and married a girl from 43 B Street, Sara Ford. They remember a village where people would give a fistfull of flour to co-workers, even if their fingernails scraped the bottom of their own sack. It was called a “grocery shower,” the Reverend Martin said.

“If you got in trouble, people would help you out,” said Sara Martin. But, “you didn’t hear much com-
plaining.”

They took each other to the doctor, kept each other’s children, and brought in a few hundred covered dishes for a mill dinner every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Men discussed their gout in line at the funeral home, or on stadium benches under Friday night lights. Women discussed the sorry nature of men.

In time, they worked not just for subsistence, but for one of the best blue collar paychecks in their foothills. The modern-day workers, whose ancestors labored to stave off deprivation, made ten dollars an hour, eleven dollars, more, and bought modest houses, bass boats, and above-ground swimming pools. The mill here, like others around the country, became safer, cleaner, better ventilated. A job that had once carried a social stigma—lintheads, people called them—now carried a rock-solid respectability. And the thing the mill workers never could explain to better-off people was, it always had.

But human dignity, in a global economy, is just one more cost to cut. Long before the economic meltdown of 2008, the age of the textile worker was coming to an end.

In 1991, an American trade journal ran this advertisement:

Rosa Martinez produces apparel for U.S. markets
on her sewing machine in El Salvador.
You can hire her for thirty-three cents an hour.

___

A dying machine has a smell to it, an acrid, burning smell that tells you it is about to finish, as all mechanical things will, in a junked silence. It was Sonny Parker’s job to know when a machine’s life was coming to an end.

But in Jacksonville, in the winter of 2001, the oil on the machines still smelled new and clean. The company, even in its decline, had spent millions on the future of this one mill. Air blew through a brand-new air-conditioning system, and workers laid new, gleaming hardwood floors. It was like a written guarantee to Sonny and the others here, people who saved every left-over screw, washer, bent nail, and scrap of wire they had ever come across, just in case they might need it someday in some machine they did not yet even own. They could not conceive of such a waste, all this construction, on a doomed mill.

In the midst of the uncertainty, mill workers said, company officials told them that the cavernous structure was doing fine work, and their jobs were safe.

But mostly, Sonny trusted in the machines.

“Any time you look at brand new machines,” he said, “you know the talk of shuttin’ down is just talk.”

Like most of the people here, he had cotton in his bloodstream even before he was born. He had worked in mills as a boy and man. He could say, without an ounce of exaggeration, that his mother died to make less money in a day than most well-off people left scattered on a restaurant table top. In her day, mill owners treated human components of their mills like so many interchangeable parts, and when one of them wore out, there was always another, fresh, new, and even cheaper part waiting to be plugged in.

His mother walked miles to a mill every afternoon for the second shift, and came home before midnight. “My dad was a bad alcoholic. They separated when I was six years old.” His mother contracted brown lung early, and suffered. Early on, he understood what their living cost.

He helped as much as he could. He picked up pecans for money, and ran a paper route on his bicycle before going to school. “That’s how we made our living, me and my Mom,” he said. “At times we’d go to bed, nothing to eat but cornbread and buttermilk with salt and pepper. It was rough on Momma.” To help the family get by, firemen at the station next door would cook extra food for them for lunch and supper, “’cause sometimes we didn’t have anything,” he said.

One day on his paper route, a car crashed into him. He was not badly hurt, but his bike was ruined. Insurance from the driver replaced his bike and gave him $150. “Back then, $150 was a lot of money,” he said. “There was a dress my Mama had been wanting. I told her, ‘You take that money and buy a new dress.’ That’s what she did.”

His mother wore it as she was courted by a man at the mill, James Edward Harris, a good man who became his stepfather and treated him like his own son. Sonny likes to think the dress bought his mother a little happiness before she died. But that is how a cotton-mill story goes. There is always that trade, the mill giving something with one hand as, with the other, it takes something away.

___

To sleep at night, they had to ignore the bones.

In the wider world, they were already relics, leftover pieces of a rummage sale that was shipping their industry across borders, across oceans. The number of jobs in United States textile mills slipped from 2.3 million in 1970 to 1.6 million in 1996.

Almost as long as Sonny Parker had been a mill hand, the mills had been in decline, but there were so many across the Carolinas, across Alabama, that it seemed like a man could walk through the doors of one mill and step right into the door of another.

Like Twain’s Tom Sawyer, he had seen his own funeral. Economists told him and his co-workers that their jobs were not good jobs, not jobs of the future, told them, with straight faces, they should retrain for jobs in computer programming, radiology, or hotel management. They heard industrialists, men who had never pulled a wrench, say that the workers who talked about keeping American jobs in America were ignorant of global economics, of the big picture. But it seemed to the men and women of the mills that global economics was a rich man’s phrase and a rich man’s invention, and the big picture was a sure place for a little man to lose himself for good.

In 1994, in the midst of that steady decline, President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, which promised to be a boon to an already struggling American working class by, somehow, creating a greater demand for American goods. Instead, American jobs poured south to third-world plants where workers drew drinking water from ditches and lived in squatter communities beside hastily constructed industrial parks that stank of open sewers and human suffering. It had seemed, to even the most unlettered working man, such a fool’s bargain, a governmental gutting of the industry in a time when it was already dying. At first it was Latin America, then China that swallowed the American textile industry.

Here, the closing of doors boomed across the state, and layoffs rolled on and on. “Skeletons, all over Alabama,” said Harvey Jackson, head of the history department at Jacksonville State University, just up the hill from the cotton mill village.

In 1997, it was Johnson Industries in Valley. The plant shut down and laid off more than three hundred workers. Four years later, Russell Yarns shut down four plants in Coosa County, Sylacauga and two in Alexander City, putting eight hundred out of work. CMI in Geneva padlocked its doors, leaving four hundred without work. The graveyard extended far beyond Alabama, to the Carolinas, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and up into Maine, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania. Hundreds of thousands of workers were left with nothing, with no health insurance, with just scraps of pensions or no pensions at all.

In Jacksonville, the workers watched their own company’s decline with a kind of sickening disbelief. Fruit of the Loom shut down mills across the South, and laid off thousands. The last time the looms of the country had been so quiet was in the Great Textile Strike of 1934, when mill workers nationwide banded together to protest deplorable pay and dangerous, unhealthy conditions. The machines went silent that time because the workers demanded basic human rights and something more than starvation pay, and they battled strike busters and the National Guard in the streets. Thousands of them were tear-gassed, jailed and beaten, some clubbed to death or crippled by hired thugs in what would become the bloodiest, government-sanctioned reaction to a labor movement in United States history. But the spindles started up again, eventually, because the workers were still necessary.

This time, machines were dismantled, crated, and moved. Towns withered. Shoe stores became pawn shops. Chain groceries that had carried name-brand foods became places to buy unlabeled, dented mystery cans, twenty cents a chance.

Hundreds of thousands went without work and health insurance, with house and car payments and grocery bills unmet. These were not a people who wanted federal aid. They wanted a tool to pound out a living, but their hammers—the machines—were being pulled away.

But not here, not yet. The Jacksonville mill roared on. People prayed that it would, in places like Pleasant Valley, Roy Webb, Williams, Piedmont, Midway, Nances Creek, Websters Chapel, White Plains, Whites Gap, Hollis Crossroads, Tredegar, Cedar Springs, Blue Mountain, Alexandria, Rabbit Town, Frogtown, and through the West Side.

“Every time we were told to do a budget, I just prayed that we could get the cost down low enough to stay open,” said Gail Penny, the mill’s office manager and accounting manager for twenty-six years. “I’d say, ‘Lord, let this be it.’”

But people did more than pray. To save themselves, they increased production and worked safe. They believed in an old-fashioned ideal, that by working long, fast, and hard enough, by making something fine and making more of it in less time, they could force the men in suits to see their value, and reward them with work.

“People killed themselves on them machines,” Sonny said.

When machines wore out, the overhaulers rebuilt them from the floor up, racing the clock. Sonny started spending more time at the mill than he did at home. There were his wife’s medical bills to pay, so he took as much overtime as they would give him, volunteering to work Saturdays and Sundays, too.

Saturdays paid time and a half time, and Sundays paid double time.

“I’d go in for twelve and get paid for twenty-four,” he said. “You can’t beat that.”