The Most They Ever Had (4 page)

She got used to the noise, like a million gnashing metal teeth, and the vibration, which shook the sweat from her face.

It was hard, though, to breathe the white air, “and you could smell the poison in it, sometimes,” she said.

There was always cotton in the air, a fine mist. “You couldn’t help but breathe it,” she said. “I’d pull strings of cotton from my eyes, from my nose.” But the workers would almost smother when it was time to clean the machines. They used air hoses to blow the excess cotton away, but that meant blowing it into the air. Often, the bosses would have the workers go back to work immediately, in that suffocating mess. “Oh Lord, it was bad in that card room,” she said. “But there was this one manager who was good to us. He let us stop while they blowed off.”

“They never told us nothin’, that it would hurt us,” she said, “and I am not one to go to the doctor.”

She seems more concerned that her feet hurt.

“Never could find a shoe that fit,” she said.

___

She retired in Jacksonville in 1991, to watch grandbabies play, to draw a breath that was not timed by a clock. In 1997, at a free screening for respiratory disease at a Holiday Inn, she found out she had a lung disease linked to her years of work.

But like so many of the women and men who have been hurt by the conditions of the place, she refuses to shake her fist at it, to wish it never happened.

She remembers one paycheck in particular.

“I went to Sears,” she said, “and got a dining room suite. It was a big table with six chairs, padded chairs, with vinyl.”

___

Jewel keeps the little legend from vanishing.

“I tell my grandchildren about it,” said Jewel, who is in her sixties now. “We did something they said we couldn’t.”

She was driving through the county with her grandbaby, Kay Lynn, when the little girl saw a cotton field.

“Mawmaw, what is that?” she asked.

“I stopped and let her walk to the edge of the field,” Jewel said.

The little girl reached out and touched the boll. The bur jabbed her hand.

“It sticks you,” she said.

It made Jewel think of Floria, how she could move so fast down the rows. It was not that she did not feel the sticker slide into her fingers. The secret to it was always in knowing that it would hurt you, and you reached for it anyway.

___

The fields do not blanket the valleys anymore, but that only makes the fields that remain seem even lovelier. The cotton is tall, bolls fat and bursting. Floria passes them on the way to her doctor’s office. She doubts she could pick a puny 100 pounds of it, let alone that legendary 329.

“I would like to pick,” she said, “one more time.”

She does not think about her legend much. But once in a while, she comes across it among other frivolous things, like an odd, leftover piece of knitting yarn, or a button that doesn’t match anything she wears. You can’t make anything with it. And what is a story worth?

chapter three

the kingdom

He lived in a mansion not far from the village so he could hear his mill run, and if one of those Southern peckerwoods went slack or made trouble, even for a minute, he put them out the gate, put them out of their company-owned house. Some people say he did a lot of good for this little town, that he gave away shoes and Christmas hams, and, while he paid these poor mountain people almost nothing, it was still the most they ever had. But ask the old people in the mill village if William Ivan Greenleaf was better or worse than others of his kind, and they just smile. That, they say, is like sticking your arm inside a box of copperheads, and feeling around for the best one.

___

The mill hands heard him coming as they trudged to work in the pre-dawn, their steps sending up puffs of ash from streets paved with cinders from the mill’s coal-fired generator. A massive twelve-cylinder engine pounded the air around them, as if anything to do with Greenleaf was large, loud, and mean, and bug-eyed headlights, big as searchlights on a prison wall, stabbed out from the gleaming chrome. And there he would be, riding like a sultan in a long, black Packard touring sedan. The sedan did not stop for cats or dogs or people, who learned to step off into the weeds when the car went by. They stood in the ditch till it passed, greasy, brown-paper sacks in their hands. It was the same lunch, every day, white-bread sandwiches made from pink potted meat, spread so thin the color almost didn’t show on the bread.

The big man did not wave or nod or look their way, just lounged in that leather as the big car wheeled into the gates of his kingdom. The best-dressed man in Alabama, people said, a high-toned New Hampshire Episcopalian in spats and a Bowler hat, teeth grinding on a Blackstone cigar. He was six foot two, barrel chested and hawk nosed, his iron-gray hair in a perfect part straight down the middle of his arrogant head. As he stomped into the office, clerks and secretaries smiled or tipped their hats and said, “Good morning, sir,” but he usually just walked on by. “He walked and stood like he was the king,” said Homer Barnwell, whose father and mother worked in Greenleaf’s mill. “He played the part. He was the part.”

A lot of people hated him, but never so much as in ’33. A new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed legislation that made child labor and starvation wages illegal in the textile mills. Greenleaf, who paid the lowest wages in Calhoun County, smirked at the new national minimum of twelve dollars a week, and thumbed his nose at what he called the “damned socialists.” Rather than offer his workers, who made seven dollars a week, a raise to a legal wage, he offered a compromise. He offered twenty-five cents more a week.

The resentment that had burned for years inside the walls of the gnashing, roaring mill finally roiled out into the streets, just as the sweat-soaked first shift was staggering home. They gathered in the tiny yards and in the alphabet streets in a dank, hot August dusk, hard men and hard women, cotton still clinging to them like moss. There were no grand speeches, at least none that anyone can remember. Men waved pistols and axe handles and passed jars of clear liquor from hand to hand. Torches lit up A, B, C, and D streets, and even now old people talk about it, those streets of fire.

Finally, when the people were mad enough, they went after their tormenter. They fetched Greenleaf from a closet and bore him to Big Spring, to the hanging tree. He didn’t seem to weigh all that much for a big shot, and they slung him from man to man like a rag doll as they cursed, laughed, and hooted. When they slipped the rope over his head the crowd screamed, and women in faded flower-print dresses pushed children behind them, so they could not see. A few yards away a squad car idled in the grass, but the officers knew better than to get between these hill people and their vengeance, so they just let them be.

In the glow of a hundred torches, they raised him high, their scarred arms and mutilated fingers his gallows. His face was covered with a toe sack, but they hung a sign around his neck so everyone would know:

GREENLEAF

Then they let him drop.

The roar reached up the hill, to the square, beyond.

People in town, gentler people, stared down at them, a little afraid.

It got quiet then, quickly.

The torches and hatred spent, the people shuffled home in the dark.

“They left him up there a good while,” said Homer Barnwell, who was a little boy then.

The people disappeared inside their little houses, to suppers of cornbread and beans. But it helped a little, what they had done.

It gave their hatred a place to swing.

But how truly satisfying can it be, to hang a tyrant of rags and straw?

___

Greenleaf was not born to power, but took to it. He owned an interest in the mill through his wife, Frances. Charles Buck Henry, a scion of timber and railroad barons and a childhood friend, gave Frances thirty thousand dollars in mill stock as a wedding gift. At the time, Greenleaf was in Milwaukee, running an ironworks. He had no experience in the textile industry, but Henry promised him a twenty-four thousand dollar salary—a small fortune then—and an unlimited expense account to lure him to Alabama. The still-new mill was not profitable, and Greenleaf was hired to make it so. He came down from New Hampshire in 1911 and became not so much a mill boss, people here say, as a feudal lord.

It was his prerogative, their hunger, their deprivation, their life and death. People still talk about Frank Watson, who was ordered up a ladder to reattach a disconnected electric cable on May 10, 1917. The mill bosses would not shut down power and halt production, even for a minute. So, as one of his bosses stood below, telling him to get on with it, he joined a dead line to a live one and the current burned him to death against the side of the building. Maggie Watson, his widow, sued the mill, but lawyers for Greenleaf argued, successfully, that Watson died of his own negligence, that he should have known better. But the workers here knew the truth of it. Watson only did as he was told, because to ignore an order was to forfeit your job.

Others perished more slowly, choking on the cotton they breathed in the unventilated, oven-like rooms. The mangling of fingers, hands, and arms was routine. The plant kept no records of such things, so there are no statistics, only grim memory. But you do not imagine a missing hand.

Yet in that disdain for the people who served him, Greenleaf really was no better or worse than a hundred others, no more oblivious to suffering. They forgive him—even the worst of the tragedies—as a fact of life. There was a Greenleaf everywhere there was a mill.

“As many times as I went down to that house, I never did go inside,” said Homer Barnwell, who grew up with Greenleaf’s children and played with one of his sons, Russell. “Me and Russell went to school together. We were good buddies.” He cannot explain, exactly, why he always stopped beneath the columns. “I don’t know if they told me I couldn’t go in. I just knew I wasn’t supposed to.”

But the power Greenleaf held over them seemed to swell, somehow, as the Great Depression settled on the town, and he did things that made no more sense than a small boy salting worms. He let their company houses rot down around them, would try to cheat workmen out of a dollar, for the sport of it, and was so arrogant he believed that he got to say where the sun should hang in the sky.

___

To carve away outside interference on how the mill was run, Henry and Greenleaf reduced the board of directors from eleven to three and installed Greenleaf as vice president, superintendent and, most importantly, bookkeeper. The mill continued to report little profit, on paper, but Greenleaf grew wealthier. That prompted minority stockholders to demand to see company books. “Greenleaf refused to deliver said papers…and refused to allow the auditor to make examination of said papers,” stated a lawsuit filed by the minority stockholders. Greenleaf, after losing his appeal in the Alabama Supreme Court, just bought the stockholders out so he could run the mill as he pleased. The Henry family still held financial power over him and his mill, but to the working people here, Greenleaf was the monarch of the mill.

He made money even as the Depression began to squeeze and starve the people of the foothills. As people here lost everything they had, as banks foreclosed on farms, family homes, and timberland, Greenleaf was collecting deeds.

John Pruett, a young man then, was Greenleaf’s next-door neighbor and friend.

But any rose-colored glasses he used to peer at his friend shattered a long time ago.

“Back then, Greenleaf was the only one buying things,” said Pruett, who can still hear the bombast in Greenleaf’s voice. “Nobody else had any money…and he didn’t think much of you if you didn’t.”

Pruett, who had gotten to know the patriarch through the Greenleaf children, found that he was somehow acceptable to the old man. He was not a mill worker’s child—his father ran the county retirement home—and he was welcome inside the Greenleaf home. In a time of prohibition and starvation, there was good bourbon at the Greenleaf table, and Friday night dances in the dining room. Greenleaf waltzed with the teenage sweethearts and friends of his sons, and, John Pruett said, liked to pat the young ladies on their derrieres. He would tell Pruett, as he left on a date, to “think of ol’ man Greenleaf” if he got to second base.

A biplane pilot who dusted crops and barnstormed around the South, Pruett had stories to tell of daring loops and deadly crashes, and as he got older the two of them sat alone, just drinking, talking. “He was a colorful old bastard,” Pruett said. But in time, he would see the man sitting across from him on the veranda as cold, uncaring.

“I felt sorry for the people,” said Pruett, who sometimes toured the mill with Greenleaf. “They didn’t even have a break for lunch,” and ate standing at their machines. “It was filthy. The latrines were stinking and dirty.” Greenleaf did extend credit, he said, so that his employees could eat, but they labored in perpetual debt. “What the company took out ate up their paycheck,” Pruett said. Greenleaf called it good business.

He saw himself as a benevolent soul who gave the poor mountain people a good life. But Greenleaf never bothered to repair any of the mill village houses, Pruett said. “I don’t know how many he ruined,” Pruett said. When a tenant confronted Greenleaf, he ordered them from his presence with these words: “When it is raining, I can’t fix it, and when the sun is shining, it doesn’t need it.”

If you knocked heads with him, you lost. Since the days of the Creek Indian Wars, a pristine watering hole called Big Spring had provided a constant source of cold, sweet water to the town. Greenleaf, who owned property near the spring, fouled it with construction, and pumps and spigots in the town and mill village belched red mud. Greenleaf told the complainers they could go to hell, or see his lawyer.

He dealt routinely in thousands of dollars yet seemed to enjoy the tiniest confrontations. After a handyman named Luke finished a repair at the mansion, Greenleaf pulled out a wad of money and thumbed off a few bills. As he counted, he told Luke to carry a ladder to the garage and come back and get his pay.

Luke returned and asked for his money, and Greenleaf responded that he had already paid him. When Luke insisted he hadn’t been paid, Greenleaf looked at Luke’s helper. “You look like an honest sort of chap. I paid him, didn’t I?”

The helper shook his head: “No, sir, you got your money out, but you didn’t pay him.”

“Well, I’ll just pay you again, Luke,” Greenleaf said.

“No, sir, you won’t be paying me again,” Luke replied. “You’ll be paying me for the first time.”

Greenleaf did not seem to understand what the work meant to them, the value they held for their own labor.

“He would do petty things,” Pruett said. “My Uncle Bob almost shot Greenleaf once. Caught him moving a fence, stealing a couple of feet on a property line.”

In this time of economic agony, he wasted thousands. Once, a crew delivered trees and dug more than one hundred holes for an orchard. “He never planted the first tree,” Pruett said. “The holes are still there.”

Another time, he had timber cut from land in nearby White Plains. For days, trucks rolled into the yard with loads of raw lumber that hadn’t been planed. Greenleaf stacked the lumber. “About forty thousand dollars worth of damn lumber rotted to the ground,” Pruett said. “I’ve seen him waste so much money. God.”

Greenleaf filled his yard with cars, and let many of them rot and rust, because he did not want anyone else to have them. He was eccentric, complicated, but more than anything, confident of his place in the world he had created. As sunset approached one evening, Pruett watched Greenleaf step off a certain distance from the dining room table and then do a hard left face. He looked through a piece of smoked glass at the setting sun and checked his watch. One of Greenleaf’s sons explained, quietly, that Daddy Greenleaf believed the sun was off course.

In the mill village, he controlled the electricity, the water, the groceries, all of it. Even though he was a hard-drinking man, he did not want his workers to drink—that could get in the way of production. “There was a bootlegger down here then,” Homer Barnwell said. “Greenleaf didn’t like it. He hired a man from Birmingham to run him off. They shot each other.”

He expected his employees to shop only at the company store with their metallic script, tokens called “clinkers.” But Greenleaf also owned Westside Drug, a pharmacy, said Sam Stewart Sr., who was friends with Greenleaf’s children. “He had them with food, and he had them with medicine,” Stewart said.