The Most They Ever Had (6 page)

He had the power to evict the workers from their company houses, but that would have dangerous in such a violent time, and cost him his most skilled people.

Finally, he just closed down the mill, locked its doors, and went home to the bunker of his antebellum house, which police patrolled night and day.

___

The better-off people in the foothills sided with Greenleaf. They were frightened by it all, and considered such a rebellion a socialist uprising. Newspapers editorialized against it. Without a paycheck, and with the mill commissary refusing to extend credit, workers and their families went hungry.

Nearly two hundred families, people who considered “relief” shameful, applied to the county welfare committee for help, and 175 sacks of Red Cross flour—more than two tons—were passed out in the village. As summer cooled into fall, as the flour barrels showed bottom, the first cracks in solidarity showed. Men and women who supported the strike grew angry as the outside organizers told them to hold fast, even as the strikers’ children did without bread and milk and medicine.

One night, as an out-of-town union-organizer tried again to whip up enthusiasm, a union man named Jack Taylor had all he could stand. Taylor, whose father held one of the best blue-collar jobs at the mill as a master mechanic and electrician, came up out his seat, his face red and his fists bunched up. He waded through the crowd toward the union organizer, to fight him right there for being so full of wind as the people suffered. Paul Stewart, a staunch union man, stepped between them.

Taylor threw the first punch, which landed against Stewart’s head. They traded punches and staggered across the floor, then locked arms, teeth bared, face to face. “They fought and tumbled right down the stairs all the way to the bottom,” said H.L. West. “They was going after one another pretty rough.”

Union men finally broke it up, but something was lost that night, something they would never get back. For the first time since the hill people filed in from the pines to take their places at their machines, their kinship, their oneness, was fractured.

The strike became civil war.

“Brothers fought against brothers, families against families, with axe handles,” said Homer Barnwell. Fights broke out in yards, streets, at the ballpark, in churchyards. Women would grab each other’s hair and yank as hard as they could, and children fought in the playgrounds. But what happened in daylight was nothing compared to what happened after dark.

As the strike disintegrated, as more people quit the union and said they were willing to cross the picket line, men gathered in the street, fueled by moonshine and growing desperation, and fought. Gunshots sounded throughout the night. “Momma would herd us in the corner and kneel down and hover over us, like a chicken with her biddies,” Homer said. He would lie in his bed and listen to the pounding feet outside. Men were wounded, and laid across kitchen tables.

But if you ask the oldest men and women which families were which, and who was on what side, they sit mum. “There’s things ain’t been mended yet,” Homer said.

As mill village families did without, Greenleaf let uncashed dividend checks pile up because he did not need them and because he did not want to pay taxes on them. Sam Stewart Sr. said Greenleaf hated paying federal income taxes so much he never cashed dozens of dividend checks he received. There were stacks of them in a roll-top desk. He apparently believed it possible that income taxes would either go down or go away in the future.

By winter of ’33, the workers had all they could stand, and went back to work.

The next year, in ’34, thousands of workers around the South would walk out in The Great Textile Strike, a failed and bloody crusade put down with gunfire and troops. Thousands of striking textile workers were herded into barbed-wire concentration camps, and others were shot to death by hired killers. But in Jacksonville there was no stomach for such misery any more, and the machines hummed on.

There would never be another union here.

Greenleaf had defied not just his workers but a president and the federal law, and he had won.

But he had seen his world order shaken.

“He believed unions and labor were taking over everything,” Gardner said.

People no longer knew their place.

___

Only five months after the strike ended, in April 1934, Greenleaf resigned. He had survived the strike, but the accumulated, largely ignored debt the mill owed to the Henry family and more long-running legal feuds combined to force his exit. “The Henry family thought they could run the cotton mill better than he could,” Gardner said. Greenleaf quit with more money than he could spend, with land, with everything except a mill. It should have been a splendid exile, but the old man seemed lost without his kingdom. Greenleaf spent much of his time sitting in front of the radio, downing bourbon.

The mill had, in its beginning, supplied water to the city of Jacksonville. When the town began to construct its own water system, city leaders approached Greenleaf about buying a network of water pipes still under his control. “They offered him fifty thousand dollars for his rusty pipes, and he turned them down and got mad at all the city fathers,” Pruett said.

“Cooperation? Cooperation?” Greenleaf fumed. “I know what they mean. They want me to cool while they operate.”

His retirement was bitter and wretched. The house, instead of a great showplace, became a gothic cathedral. It was crammed with furniture, magazines, old newspapers, and trunks stacked to the ceiling.

“You should have seen the junk,” John Pruett said.

Gardner had a black snake that got loose in the house’s pool room, hiding in the wall, Pruett said. “Next time that snake appeared it was as big as a damn boa constrictor.”

There were so many cats and dogs in the house that they could not keep them off the dining room table, even during meals. So, Greenleaf installed a small, crude electric fence around the table. It sounds like folklore, but Pruett and others here say it is true.

After the war ended, another Greenleaf son, Ivan, was killed in a car crash. An Army pilot, he had been at a local officers’ club with a friend and left in a Packard. “Ran off the road down at Bonny Brook and killed both of ‘em,” Pruett said. “He was one of my best friends.” Pruett remembers sitting down with the old man after the car wreck, the two men drinking hard and steady.

Finally, Greenleaf spoke: “Why couldn’t that have been one of Ross Pruett’s boys that got killed?”

Ross Pruett was John Pruett’s father.

___

The house continued to rot. The roof was full of holes. Greenleaf put buckets throughout the attic.

“You’d be sleeping, and a bit of plaster would fall on you,” Pruett said. “Mrs. Greenleaf stayed on his ass all the time about fixing that roof. Early one morning I was leaving to go on home, and she was coming in the back door, rubbing her eyes. I could tell she had just woke up. I said to her, ‘Where in the world have you been?’ And she said: ‘I slept in the car last night. I never dreamed that Daddy Greenleaf would ever sleep in a house like this.’”

Greenleaf finally put up scaffolding around his house, for repairs. “Damn if the scaffold didn’t rot down before he got any work done,” Pruett said.

He forgot to pay taxes now, and failed to collect rent from his tenants. “If he kept up with his business, he would have been a damn billionaire with all the stuff he wasted,” Pruett said.

In 1954, he went by to visit the seventy-nine-year-old Greenleaf, who was in the last stages of mouth and throat cancer. Pruett poured them both a shot of bourbon. When he returned several days later to visit, the glass was still there, still full.

Some nights Pruett could still lure the old man out on the porch, to drink and remember. One of those nights, on a second-story porch near the Grecian columns, the two men sat listening to the dark. “You sure can hear the mill tonight,” Pruett said.

“Yeah,” Greenleaf replied, “but it’s not running right.”

Finally Greenleaf refused to leave his living room. “He got so depressed,” Pruett said. “‘Best Dressed Man in Alabama’ they said. And when he died, he was the worst dressed man. He wore his smoking jacket. Had ashes all over it. Let his beard and hair grow. His beard was full of nicotine.”

Greenleaf died three days after Christmas 1954. Although he once owned much of the property that made up this town, he never considered it home, and his marker lists only that he was born in Littleton, N.H.

As Gardner lay dying, many years later, he summoned up the strength to defend his father one more time. It was the world that was out of whack, not his father. “We don’t live in a free country anymore. You may think we live in a free country, but we don’t. We live under a socialist welfare police state. We’re a member of 176 communist countries in the United Nations. I was born in freedom, and I watched that taken away. The Democratic Party has destroyed my country. We didn’t have enough patriots to offset what was happening so we’ve got the mess we’re in now.”

His father, he whispers, was a patriot, and a good man.

___

H.L. West went back to work in ’33, when the union failed. He met his future wife, Pauline Wilkerson, there, and they would linger in a stairwell to talk, stealing a little time from Greenleaf’s pocket. Eventually, he quit and went to Anniston Army Depot, earning double his salary. He never returned to the mill. In retirement, he spent seventeen years taking care of his wife, after an aneurysm and stroke crippled her. He is in his nineties now, a widower, and even with so much life and so much love and tragedy behind him he still drifts back to the mill in his mind, like the things that happened there only just occurred.

He remembers a day, after the strike, when a boss dressed him down. “I was laying up rope on frames,” he said, referring to the fat coil of yarn that would be spun into finer yarn in the machines. “There was different kinds of rope, and it had to be on certain frames. This boss man accused me of mixing it up and putting it on the wrong frame. He was just a mean ol’man.”

Sick of being talked down to, he talked back.

“You sound just like Hitler,” he told the boss.

“You’re fired,” the boss said.

“I don’t care,” H.L. said.

He did, though. He needed that job. But before West was off the floor, the boss relented. “He knew he couldn’t fire me, AND get work out of me.”

After Greenleaf’s death, a terrible thunderstorm tore through the town. Frances Greenleaf stood listening as thunder shook the old mansion, sending plaster raining down.

“That’s Daddy Greenleaf coming through,” she said. “He doesn’t like the way we’re running things.”

___

John Pruett left Jacksonville in ’52 and lived a fine life, flying his plane in an age when flight still took a man’s breath away. He took farm boys and pretty girls for rides, and one family paid him with a goat. He flew and flew, all the way to NASA, and even helped bring Apollo 13 home. He retired in 1988, two years after watching the Challenger Space Shuttle explode above his head, and came home to live out his days. He died in late summer of 2008 and was buried not far from Greenleaf.

The mansion was torn down. A pharmacy sits on the lot now, facing Highway 21. Most of the people who knew Greenleaf, who knew his times, are gone. Only the very old even remember there used to be a castle here, or that a great and terrible lord once walked its parapets, watchful of an assault on the gates of his class.

chapter four

homer’s odyssey

He lay in the freezing mud, Germans thick as blackbirds in the distant hedgerows, thousand-pound bombs falling, falling into the earth. Around him the forests splintered, towns burned, and the dead lay uncollected in the snow. Overhead, above the smoke, B-29s blacked out the moon, and artillery shells the size of garbage cans screamed across the sky. But he slept, a good soldier, hungry, dirty, too exhausted to be very much afraid, and dreamed of a blizzard of cotton, of a single, massive smokestack, of blood kin battling with tire irons and two-by-fours in the strike of ’33. Homer Barnwell might have dreamed something better, something gentler, but how do you dream of skyscrapers and swaying palms when a mill village is all you have ever known?

He could see himself there, bare feet black as tar from walking on streets of smut, peanut butter on his mouth, graham crackers in his fist. He could see his neighbors, five hundred of them, see flour-sack shirts and snuff cans and severe, ankle-length dresses, their rundown brogans and scuffed, high-top shoes shuffling toward the gate. He could see Stewart Reynolds’ pinned-up sleeve, see Pop Romine’s scandalous, undone overalls. He could see children among them, eleven years old, even younger, see fourteen-year-old Clay Hammett take up a homemade bat to smack one last raggedy baseball into the dawn, then grab a brown-paper lunch sack and fall in line.

But mostly he could see his kin, see his white-faced daddy, John, lungs ruined by the clouds of mustard gas that wafted across a WWI wasteland of dead horses and twisted wire, coughing up his life on the stoop of their company house. He could see his momma, Bertha, the angel, her limp hand in his as she led him two miles in baking heat to a swimming hole, when all she wanted after her shift was a quiet moment and a cool trickle of breeze. In the good dreams, the best ones, he could see his brothers and sisters, William, Evelyn, Carrie, Carl, Lola May, and Ethel, squirming through an endless sermon in the Pentecostal church, knowing that there was a whole wash tub full of banana puddin’ waiting for them at home. “I could see ’em,” said Homer, an old man now. “I could see ’em plain.”

He dreamed it and daydreamed it. Homesickness settled hard in that death and mud.

His sister, Lola Mae, wrote him letters, but it was his Momma’s voice in his head when he opened them, because he knew it was her thoughts. “Momma’d never been to school a day in her life, so Lola Mae wrote ’em for her…I guess they wrote me ever’ day.” It was the story of the village they wrote him, who was sick, who died, who had gone to war, who had been hurt in the machines. He read them a thousand times, folded and re-folded them until the creases, black edged from the battlefield grime on his hands, finally cut the paper in two.

“I never had been nowhere. Well, I might’ve been to Birmingham. All my life, that smokestack at the mill was our landmark. As long as I could see it, I knew I wasn’t lost. It was hard to see, from over yonder.”

___

He can no longer hear well, his eardrums pounded by the big guns he manned to fight the German with the Big Red One, and his eyes, still bright behind his bifocals, are weaker now. But his memories are sharp and glittering, like pieces from a broken mirror. He was born on October 23, 1924, his mother and father among the first of the mountain people to seek salvation in a cotton mill, discover its disappointments, and yet remain, because there was nowhere else to go and nothing to reclaim. He ran its streets as a boy and walks them now in a deliberate, careful stride, and the ghosts in every house still speak to him, softly, as he passes by.

“We could’ve all run away,” said Homer.

Then he smiles.

“I guess,” he said, “we’d a just wound up in another mill.”

The draft took some of the best of them, across generations, and people flew flags from the little houses and put cardboard stars in their windows, if they had a boy at war. They buried them under those flags, war after war, but even if you came home whole, to this place, the machines and lint would finish the job the war began. The trick, here, was to survive the bullets, bayonets, and bombs, then survive the homecoming, and endure the peace.

___

His daddy soaked up five bullets before he ever went to his war.

Now that’s a man for you, the people here always said.

Homer’s father grew up in the Georgia mountains, and went to work in the mill in ’15 or ’16, before the outbreak of World War I, before he married Bertha. On a weekend night in ’17, a night when the whole village seem splashed with moonshine, he got into an argument with a Jacksonville policeman, shot him, and was wounded five times himself.

“It was a case of mistaken identity,” is all Homer will say.

John Barnwell recovered just in time for the draft in ’18. He fought his way across the Argonne Forest with the rest of the 42nd, the vaunted Rainbow Division, the mustard gas leaching into his lungs. But even though the German machine guns cut the trees to stumps and killed every living thing around him, he was never shot again. He took his war wound home with him deep inside his chest, to work the same job in the same smothering mill.

“They put an ad in the paper that said, ‘Good working conditions,’ but you know how that is,” said Homer.

The first generation worked a ten-hour shift, Monday through Friday, and a half a day on Saturday, for about a nickel an hour, about $2.50 for the fifty-five-hour week. They were paid twice a month, always on the weekend. Children worked for a fraction, as little as a fifth of a grownup’s pay.

“Didn’t nobody get nothin’ ahead,” Homer said, of all of them. “I can still see their faces, see the hurt in them. Them people suffered, boy. But all people could think of was gettin’ on.”

They are all gone, that first generation, used-up shells buried in the red clay, lungs full of lint.

If that were all there was to it, this village, it would only be a story of misery and nothing more.

“Gosh,” Homer said, “it was their life.”

On Sunday, his mother cooked feasts from beans, cornbread, and potato salad, cheap, filling, delicious, and made banana puddin’ in a wash tub.

“I ate till I made myself sick,” Homer said.

She made tall stacks of graham crackers and peanut butter, and that was better because it was travelin’ food. Homer hated to stay still for long, then, because he might miss something. Like all the children here, he roamed through the yards and houses, welcome at every door.

“I had 136 mommas and daddies,” he said.

One day a week, just one, Homer was a prisoner in the house, forbidden to roam the village and hear its stories and greet its people, and could only stare out the window, and watch the mill workers file by.

“Momma washed my underwear that day,” he said. There was only the one pair, what people here called their long-handles. “And I had to stay in the house till they dried.”

No one was better than anyone else in that grid of small houses, because everyone was the same.

“I used to tell people I lived on May Pops and artichokes till I was in third grade,” Homer said. “Daddy would give me a nickel to go to bed without supper, during the night he’d come in an’ steal it, then charge me a nickel and whip me for losing it.”

You smiled at poverty, the way you whistled walking past a graveyard.

“I always walked in the shade,” he said.

His Momma, Bertha, had a Sunday dress, and two dresses she worked in. “There wasn’t no clothes closets in them houses,” Homer said. What would they have used them for?

It is the only time his smile slips, and he almost cries.

“But there was so much love in that place, a transfer truck couldn’t haul it out,” he said.

He cannot remember exactly when he first realized the cost. He does remember a day, just another day, his father had sunk down on the porch, exhausted after walking home from his shift. Something made Homer look up the street, then down the street, and there he saw the same scene on porch after porch, as women and men made it only as far as that and melted onto the stoops. It was as if some painter had captured the same scene on canvas a dozen times and hung them in a long, bleak hall.

His father’s health worsened in the lint, heat, and damp.

He never complained, just accepted it as his fate, his place.

“Daddy wasn’t a talker,” said Homer. He was so quiet that, to this day, Homer has trouble remembering things he said. But he never knew his father when he did not cough.

“I saw him so tired he couldn’t get up the steps,” said Homer. “He’d just sink down there on that first step,” and try to breathe.

There were mornings when he was, at first, unable to get out of bed, but there was never a morning he did not get up. A man who was too sick to work was no use to the mill, and a waste of a good house.

“You couldn’t lay out,” Homer said. “Nobody laid out. There was too many people wanted your job.”

Homer’s mother never denied her children anything that was in her power to give them. There was never money, so the only precious thing left was time.

“She’d come home wore out, and we’d be settin’ on the back porch, and we’d beg her to take us swimmin’,” Homer said. She would get up without a word and lead them down the road.

“If there ever was an angel on this earth, it was my momma,” he said.

His mother and father kept him out of the mill when he was a child. But when he was sixteen, he took a job carrying lunches into the mill. There was no lunch hour, not even a break to clean the webs of cotton from their faces, so they would eat at their machines, picking cotton out of their food. “They used a whisk broom to try and brush each other off,” said Homer, who delivered sandwiches and drinks from machine to machine.

“Mr. Woodall, at 8 A Street, always ordered an R.C.,” he said. “Ethel McCurry at 69 C Street, a hamburger. I can see ’em right now.

In ’41, as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, his father lay dying.

He was finally ready to talk. He called his sons to his side to tell them what to expect. Of course, they would be drafted, they would go to war. “He didn’t talk much, you know, but he tried to tell me some about what to expect.” John Barnwell died on December 20th.

After his death, Homer’s brother, William, helped his mother make their living in the mill, till he was drafted a few months later. He was shipped off to the South Pacific on a destroyer. Homer then took his place beside his mother in the mill.

As his eighteenth birthday neared, he waited for his draft notice, waited with a certain amount of dread that it would come, and a certain amount of shame that it didn’t come.

He got his letter in winter of ’43.

His Momma sat on the floor, clutched her arms around her knees, and wailed.

“If I was scared, it was for our family,” Homer later wrote. It was one thing to be put in harm’s way. It was another to go to war knowing that he was leaving his Momma in hardship. If she were hurt, there would be no house to come home to. It would be given to another family overnight. “It seemed to me we were leaving all the womenfolk stranded,” Homer wrote, “but the same thing was happening to all the families around us.”

Empty caskets were carried through the streets. Headstones were erected over undisturbed ground. Louis H. Harris, of 111 D Street, was taken prisoner after the fall of Corregidor, and starved to death in a Japanese prison camp. James E. Johnston, of 36 A Street, was killed on his ship. Olin L. McCurry, of 69 C Street, and Renay W. Webb, of 98 D. Street, died in combat. George Robinson Jr., of 73 C Street, was killed when his ammunition ship blew up off Marcos Island.

___

Photographs taken by his buddies show a good-looking boy who looks more fourteen than nineteen. His helmet looks too big for his head, which makes his head look too big for his body.

He did thirteen weeks of basic training at Fort Bragg and was homesick every night. “But the chow was good,” he said. “We had pork chops, mashed potatoes, gravy…”

He was assigned to the 3rd Army, 1st Division, 16th Infantry, and after basic training he boarded the U.S.S. Santa Barbara in Camp Kilmer, N.J., on Nov. 19, 1943. “I still didn’t know where we was goin’.” He was not seasick. “But a lot of ’em was.”

It was the first ocean he had ever seen.

The ship joined a convoy, the safest way to cross the Atlantic then, and zig-zagged across the ocean, to make it harder for the wolf packs of German U-boats that preyed on the allied shipping. They crept into South Hampton in thick, cold fog on Dec. 1st. He was still homesick, but it was easier. The city was blacked out, “but we found the beer joints by the smell,” he said.

He saw the destruction caused by the German bombers and he thanked God that the ocean was so much wider between the Germans and home. He tried to joke with the British about their awful weather, but found they did not have a sense of humor about rain and fog.

They put him in the artillery, and after months of rumors, he boarded a transport ship to take the fight to the Germans and commence their destruction. As the first few waves of soldiers waded ashore and died in the sand and surf of Normandy, he and his friends waited and fretted beside their big guns, their transport ship rolling in the rough seas for six days. Finally, he and his buddies rolled their giant cannons onto the beaches. “There were so many planes they covered up the sky,” he said.