The Most They Ever Had Read Free

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