Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  For him, people were apparently of no account. “Here, you. What’s your name?” he would say to a workman or a workwoman, or to a child. A good many children were at work in that mill. He never noticed. He asked the same workman his name several times during one week. Sometimes he fired a man or a woman. “Here, you. You are not wanted here any more. Get out.” The mill worker knew what that meant. Word had been whispered about the mill often enough. The worker went quickly away. He hid himself. Others helped. Soon he was back at his old place. The superintendent did not notice, or if he did notice he said nothing.

  At night, when his work was done for the day he went home. He lived in the largest house in the mill village. Visitors seldom came there. He sat in a chair, and, putting his stockinged feet in another chair, spoke to his wife. “Where’s the paper?” he asked. His wife got it. This would be after dining and in a few minutes he was asleep. He got up and went to bed. His mind was still in the mill. It was running. “I wonder what is going on down there,” he was thinking. His wife and children were also afraid of him, although he seldom spoke unkindly to them. He seldom spoke at all. “Why be wasting words?” he perhaps thought.

  The president of the mill had an idea in his head, at least he thought he had. At that time he was remembering Red’s father and grandfather. Red s grandfather had been the family doctor for his family when he was a child. He thought, “There aren’t many young Southern men with any family at all who would do as this boy has done. He is a good boy.” Red had simply come into the mill office. “May I have a job, Mr. Shaw?” he had said to the president of the mill, having been, after waiting some ten minutes, admitted to Mr. Shaw.

  “May I have a job?”

  There was a little smile on the mill president’s face. Who wouldn’t like to be a mill president? He can give jobs.

  In every situation there are these shades. Red’s father, so well known after all to the mill president, hadn’t made good. He had been a doctor. Like other men who set forth in life he had his chance. So he hadn’t tended to his practice, had begun drinking instead. There had been whispers about his morals. There was that yellow woman in the country. The mill president also had heard whispers about that.

  And then it was said he had married a woman who was beneath him. That was what people in Langdon said. They said she came from rather low-class people. Her father, it was said, amounted to nothing. He kept a little general store in a workingman’s suburb in Atlanta and a brother of hers had been sent to prison for stealing.

  “Just the same, there’s no use blaming this boy for all that,” the mill president thought. How kindly and fair he felt, thinking that. He smiled. “What do you want to do, young man?” he asked. —

  “I don’t care. I’ll do anything I can get to do.” That was the way to talk. All of this took place on a hot day in June, as had been suggested after Red’s first year at school in the North. Red had suddenly come to a resolution. “I’ll just see if I can get a job,” he had thought. He had consulted no one. He knew that the mill president, Thomas Shaw, had known his father. Red’s father had, at that time, been dead but a short time. He had walked down to the offices of the mill on a hot morning. The air was heavy and still on Main Street when he passed through. Such moments are pregnant to a boy or to a young man. He is going to work for the first time. Look out now, boy. You start. How, when and where will you stop? This moment may have as much significance in your life as a birth, a marriage or a death. There were merchants and clerks standing inside the doors of stores on Langdon’s main street. Most of them were in their shirt sleeves. A good many of the shirts did not look too clean.

  In the summer the men in Langdon wore light linen clothes. Such clothes, when soiled, had to be sent to a laundry. In Georgia, in summer, the days were so hot that men moving about were soon wringing wet with sweat. The linen suits they wore soon sagged at the elbows and knees. They became soiled quickly.

  It did not seem to matter to a good many of the men of Langdon. Some of them went on wearing such a soiled suit for weeks.

  There was a sharp contrast coming from the scene on Main Street to the mill office. The office of the mill at Langdon was not in the mill proper but stood off by itself. It was in a new-looking brick building, with a green watered lawn in front and with flowering bushes by the front door.

  The mill was quite modern. One of the reasons so many of the Southern mills had succeeded, rapidly replacing New England mills, so that, after the rise of the South industrially, there was a sharp industrial slump in New England, was that the Southern mills, being newly built, had put in the very latest machinery. In America, when it came to machinery... a machine could be the very latest thing, the most efficient, and then.. five, ten or, at the latest, twenty years later...

  To be sure, Red did not know about such things. He knew something vaguely. He had been a child when the mill in Langdon was built. It had been almost a semi-religious occasion. Suddenly there was talk everywhere along the main street of the little sleepy Southern town. The talk was heard on the streets, in the churches, and even in the schools. When that happened Red was a small child in one of the lower grades in the town school. He remembered it all, but vaguely. The man who was now president of the mill and who was at that time cashier of the little local bank.. his father, John Shaw, being president... the young cashier had started it all.

  He was at that time, physically, a rather small young man with a delicate body. He was, however, capable of enthusiasms and of stirring others. What had happened in the North and in particular in the great American Middle West, even during the very years when the Civil War was being fought had begun to happen in the South. Young Tom Shaw began running about the little Southern town and talking. “Look,” he said, “what’s happening everywhere, all over the South. Look at North Carolina and at South Carolina.” It was true things had happened. At that time there was a man in Atlanta, an editor on the staff of the Daily Constitution there, a man named Grady, who had suddenly become the South’s new Moses. He went about making speeches, both in the North and in the South. He wrote editorials. The South still remembers the man. His statue stands in a public street near the offices of the Constitution in Atlanta. He also, if the statue is to be believed, was a rather small man with a somewhat delicate body and, like Tom Shaw, with a round chubby face.

  Young Shaw had read his Henry Grady. He had begun talking. He had at once enlisted the churches in his cause. “It isn’t only a matter of money,” he kept saying to people. “Let’s forget for the time about money.

  “The South is ruined,” he declared. It had happened that just at that time, when men in Langdon began talking of building a cotton mill as other towns all over the South were doing, a revivalist preacher came to Langdon. Like the revivalist, who was afterwards to convert Red Oliver’s mother, he was a Methodist.

  He was a man with power as a preacher. Like the later revivalist, who came when Red was a high school boy, he was a large man with a mustache and a great booming voice. Tow Shaw went to see him. The two men talked. That whole section of Georgia raised practically nothing but cotton. The fields had been worked for cotton before the Civil War and were still so worked. They were rapidly becoming worn out. “Now, you look at it,” Tom Shaw said, talking to the preacher, “our people are getting poorer and poorer with every passing year.”

  Tom Shaw had been in the North, he had gone to school in the North. It happened that the revivalist to whom he talked that time... the two men spending several afternoons together closeted in a little room in the Langdon Savings Bank, the bank then housed precariously in an old frame building on Main Street... the revivalist preacher to whom he talked was a man without education. He could scarcely read, but Tom Shaw had taken it for granted that he wanted what Tom called a full life. “I tell you,” he said that time to the preacher, his face flushed, a kind of holy enthusiasm running through him, “I tell you...

  “Have you ever been in the North or in the East?”


  The preacher said that he had not. He was the son of a poor farmer, really a Georgia Cracker himself. He told Tom Shaw so. “I’m just a Cracker,” he said. “I’m not ashamed of it.” He had been inclined to get off the subject.

  At first he suspected Tom Shaw. “These old Southerners. These aristocrats,” he thought. What did the banker want of him? The banker asked him if he had children. Well, he had. He had been married early in life and his wife had given birth to a new child almost every year since. He was now a man of thirty-five. He hardly knew how many children he had. There was a troop of them, thin-legged children living in a little old frame house in another Georgia town very like Langdon, a run-down town, it was. He said so. The takings of a preacher, going about as he did, a revivalist, were meager enough. “I’ve got a good many children,” he said.

  He did not say how many, and Tom Shaw did not press the point.

  He was driving at something. “We, of the South, have all got to get to work,” he continually said in those days. “Let’s have an end to all of this mourning about the old South. Let’s get to work.”

  If a man, such a man as that preacher, a common enough man... Almost any man, if he had children...

  “We have to think of the children of the South,” Tom was always saying. Sometimes he mixed things up a bit. “In the children of the South lies the womb of the future,” he said.

  A man, such as that preacher, might not have any very lofty personal ambitions. He might be satisfied, just going about, shouting at a lot of poor whites about God... still... if a man had children... The preacher’s wife had come from a family of poor Southern whites as he had himself. She had already grown thin and yellow.

  There was one thing rather nice about this being a revivalist preacher. A man did not always have to stay at home. He went places. Women crowded about him. Some of the Methodist women were nice. There were some good-lookers among them. He was a big man among them.

  He knelt beside such a one in prayer. What fervor he put into his prayers!

  Tom Shaw and the preacher had got together. There had been a new kind of revival in town and in the country communities about Langdon. Presently the revivalist dropped everything else and, instead of talking about a life after death, talked only of the present... of a new glowing kind of life, already lived in many Eastern and Middle-Western towns and that, he said, might as well be lived in the South, in Langdon. As a somewhat cynical citizen of Langdon, who later remembered those days, said, “You would have thought the preacher had been a traveler all his life, and he hasn’t been out of a half-dozen Georgia counties.” The preacher began to wear better clothes and to spend more and more time talking to Tom Shaw. “We Southerners have got to arouse ourselves,” he cried. He described towns of the East and of the Middle West. “Citizens,” he cried, “you should pay a visit up there.” Now he was describing a town in Ohio. It had been a small no-account sleepy place, as Langdon, Georgia, still was. It was merely a little crossroads town. A few poor farmers came in there to trade as they did to Langdon.

  Then there had been a railroad built and presently a factory came. Other factories followed. Things began to change with incredible rapidity. “We Southerners do not know what such a life is like,” the preacher declared.

  He went all over the county making speeches; he talked in the court house in Langdon and in all of the town churches. In the North and in the East, he declared, towns had been transformed. A town in the North, in the East, or in the Middle West was a little sleepy place and then suddenly the factories came. People who had been out of work, many people who had never had a cent to their names, suddenly began to get wages.

  How rapidly everything changed! “You ought to see it,” the preacher cried. He was carried away. Enthusiasm shook his big body. He pounded pulpits. When he had come to town, but a few weeks earlier, he had been able to arouse but a feeble enthusiasm among a few poor Methodists. Now every one came to listen. There was a good deal of confusion. Although the preacher had got a new theme, was speaking now of a new Heaven men might enter, did not have to wait until death to enter, he still used the tone of a man delivering a sermon and, as he talked, often pounding some pulpit and running up and down before his audience, the audience became confused. There were shouts and groans at the mill meetings as there had been at the religious meeting. “Yes, God, that’s true,” a voice shouted. The preacher said that, because of the wonderful new life, brought into so many Eastern and Middle-Western towns by the factories, every one had suddenly become prosperous. Life was filled with new joys. Now, in such towns any man could own an automobile. “You ought to see how people are living up there. I do not mean rich people, but poor people like me.”

  “Yes, God,” some one in the audience said fervently.

  “I want that. I want it. I want it,” a woman’s voice cried. It was a sharp plaintive voice.

  In the Northern and Western towns the preacher was describing, all people, he said, had phonographs; they had automobiles. They could hear the best music in the world. Their houses were filled day and night with music....

  “Streets of gold,” a voice cried. A stranger, coming into Langdon, when the preliminary work for selling stock in the new cotton mill was being done, might have thought that the voices of the people, responding to that of the preacher, were really making fun of him. He would have been mistaken. It is true there were a few people of the town, a few old Southern women and one or two old men who said, “We do not want any of this Yankee nonsense,” they said, but such voices were for the most part unheard.

  “They are building new houses and new stores. There are bathrooms in all of the houses.

  “There are people, common people like me, not rich people, mind you, who walk about on floors of stone.”

  A voice: “Did you say, bathroom?”

  “Amen!”

  “It is the new life. We must build a cotton mill here in Langdon. The South has been dead too long.

  “There are too many poor people. Our farmers are making no money. What do we poor people of the South get?”

  “Amen. Bless God.”

  “Every man and every woman must go down deep into his pocket now. If you have a little property go to the bank and borrow some money on it. Buy stock in the mill.”

  “Yes, God. Save us, God.”

  “Your children are half starved. They have got the rickets. There are no schools for them. They grow up ignorant.”

  The preacher at Langdon sometimes grew humble as he talked. “Look at me,” he said to the people. He remembered his wife at home, the woman who had, but so short a time ago, been a fair young girl. She was a toothless worn-out old woman now. It was no fun to be with her, to be near her. She was always too tired out.

  At night, when a man went to her...

  It was better to be out preaching. “I am myself an ignorant man,” he said humbly. “God has, however, called me to do this work. My people were once proud people here in the South.

  “Now I have many children. I cannot educate them. I cannot feed them as they should be fed. Gladly would I put them into a cotton mill.”

  “Yes, God. It’s true. It’s true, God.”

  The campaign made by the revivalist preacher in Langdon had been successful. As the preacher talked publicly, Tom Shaw was quietly and energetically at work. Money was got in. The mill in Langdon was built.

  It is true some capital had to be borrowed in the North; machinery had to be bought on credit; there were dark years when it looked as though the mill would fail. Presently the people no longer prayed for its success.

  Better years, however, came.

  The mill village at Langdon had been hurriedly thrown up. Cheap lumber was used. Before the World War the houses in the mill village had been left unpainted. There were rows of little frame houses to which the working people came to live. For the most part they were poor people off little worn-out Georgia farms. They had come swarming in when the mill was first built. At first four or five
times as many people came as could be employed. There were not too many houses built. Money was at first wanted for the building of better houses. The houses were crowded with people.

  A man, such as that preacher had been, who had many children, could, however, do very well. In Georgia there were few enough laws concerning children at work. The mill ran night and day when it did run. Children of twelve, thirteen and fourteen went to work in the mill. It was easy to lie about your age. Small children in the mill village at Langdon had nearly all of them two ages. “How old are you, my child?”

  “What do you mean, my real age or my mill age?”

  “For God’s sake, be careful, child. What do you mean, talking like that? We people of the mills, we lint-heads... they call us that, the people of the town, you know they do... don’t be gabbling like that.” For some queer reason the streets of gold, the fair lives of work people pictured by the preacher before the mill in Langdon was built hadn’t materialized. The houses remained as they had been built, small sheds really, hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter. No grass grew in the little lawns before the houses. There were rows of half-fallen-down privies at the back of houses.

  However, a man who had children could do fairly well. Often he did not have to work. Before the days of the World War and the great boom, there were enough mill daddies, men not unlike that revivalist preacher, in the cotton mill village at Langdon.

  *

  THE mill at Langdon closed on Saturday afternoons and on Sundays. It started again at midnight on Sunday and ran steadily, night and day, until the next Saturday noon.

  After he became an employee of the mill, Red went down there once on a Sunday afternoon. He walked down through Langdon’s main street to the mill village.

  In Langdon the main street was dead and silent. Red had stayed a long time in bed that morning. A Negro woman who had been in the house since Red was a babe brought his breakfast upstairs. She had grown middle-aged and was now a big brown woman with great hips and breasts. She took a motherly attitude toward Red. He could talk more freely with her than with his mother. “What you want to work down there in that mill for?” she asked, when he went to work. “You ain’t no poor white,” she said. Red laughed at her. “Your father wouldn’t have liked you doing what you are doing,” she said. In bed Red lay reading one of the books he had brought home from college. A young English professor, who had been attracted to him, had filled an old grip with books and had suggested his reading his way through them during the summer. He did not dress until after his mother left the house for church.