Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  They were always speaking of the ignorance and stupidity of the mill people. The mill girls Red saw that day did not look stupid. He liked them. They walked along the track and stopped near where he was lying in the tall grass. Among them was one girl Red had noticed in the mill. She was one of the girls who had, he thought, given him the eye. She was a little thing with a short body and a big head, and Red thought she had nice eyes. She had thick lips, almost like a nigger’s lips.

  She was evidently a leader among the mill girls. They gathered about her. They had stopped but a few feet from where Red lay. “Come on now. You teach us that new song you got,” one of them said to the thick-lipped girl.

  “Clara says you got a new one,” one of the girls urged. “She says it’s hot stuff.” The thick-lipped girl prepared to sing. “You all got to help. You all got to join in the chorus,” she said.

  “It’s about the water-house,” she said. Red smiled, lying hidden in the grass. He knew that in the mill the girls called the toilets water-houses.

  The foreman in the spinning-room in the mill, the same young man who had asked Red about playing with the mill ball team, was named Lewis.

  In the mill, during the hot afternoons, a man from the town was permitted to pass through the mill with a little cart. He sold bottles of Coca Cola and cheap candies. There was one kind of cheap candy, a great soft chunk of cheap candy that was called “Milky Way.”

  The song the girls were singing concerned the life in the mill. Red suddenly remembered that he had heard Lewis and other foremen complaining that the girls went too often to the toilets. When they grew tired, in the long hot afternoons, they went in there to rest. The girl on the track was singing about that.

  “You can hear those doggone clean-up hands say,” she sang, throwing her head back.

  Give me Coca Cola and a Milky Way.

  Give me Coca Cola and a Milky Way.

  Twicet a day.

  Give me Coca Cola and a Milky Way.

  The other girls sang with her. They laughed.

  Give me Coca Cola and a Milky Way.

  We’re going down the room four by four,

  Faces toward the water-house door.

  Give me Coca Cola and a Milky Way.

  Old Lewis swear, old Lewis knock,

  I’d like to hit him with a rock.

  The girls went off down the tracks. They were shouting with laughter. Red could hear them for a long time singing as they went.

  Coca Cola and a Milky Way.

  Pilin’ into the water-house.

  Outa the water-house.

  Into the water-house door.

  Evidently there was a life in the mill at Langdon of which Red Oliver knew nothing. With what gusto that thick-lipped girl had sung her song of life in the mill. What feeling she had managed to put into the crude words. In Langdon there was always talk going on about the attitude of the mill hands toward Tom Shaw. “Look what he has done for them,” people said. Red had heard such talk in the streets of Langdon all his life.

  It was thought the mill people were grateful. Why shouldn’t they be? Many of them couldn’t read and write when they came to the mill. Hadn’t some of the finest women of the town gone down to the mill village at night to teach them to read and write?

  They were living in better houses than they had known when they were back on the Georgia plains and in the hills. They lived in such shacks then.

  Now they had medical attention. They had everything.

  Evidently they were not satisfied. There was something wrong. Red lay in the grass, thinking of what he had heard. He stayed there, on the incline by the river, back of the mill and the railroad tracks, until darkness came. —

  Old Lewis swear, old Lewis knock,

  I’d like to hit him with a rock.

  That must have been Lewis, foreman of the spinning room, knocking on the toilet-room doors, trying to herd the girls back to their work. There had been venom in the voices of the girls as they sang the crude lines. “I wonder,” Red thought, “I wonder if that Lewis really has the nerve to do that.” Lewis had been so respectful when he spoke to Red about playing ball on the team with the mill boys.

  *

  THE long rows of spindles in the spinning-room of the mill flew at terrific speed. How clean and orderly it was in the big rooms! It was so all through the mill. All of the machines, that moved at such speed, doing their work with such accuracy, were kept bright and shining. The superintendent saw to that. His eyes were forever on the machines. The ceilings, the walls and the floors of the rooms were clean. The mill was in sharp contrast to the life of the town of Langdon, to the life in houses, on the streets and in stores. Everything was orderly, everything moved with orderly speed toward one end — the making of cloth.

  The machines knew what they had to do. You did not have to tell them. They did not stop or hesitate. All day they went singing and humming to their tasks.

  Fingers of steel moved. There were in the mill hundreds of thousands of tiny steel fingers handling thread, handling cotton to make thread, handling thread to weave it into cloth. There were, in the great loom-room of the mill, threads of many colors. Little steel fingers picked up just the right-colored thread to make the design of the cloth. Red felt a kind of exaltation in the rooms. He felt it in the spinning-rooms. There was thread dancing in the air in there; here were spoolers and warpers in a nearby room. There were great drums. The warping machines fascinated him. Thread came from hundreds of spools onto a great roll of thread, each thread in its place. It would be harnessed into the looms from the great rolls.

  In the mill, as never before in his young life, Red got a sense of the human mind doing something definite and in an orderly way. There were the great machines that handled the cotton as it came from the cleaners. These were combing and caressing the tiny fibers of the cotton, laying them in straight parallel lines, to be twisted into thread. The cotton came white from the huge machines... in a thin broad veil.

  There was something exultant in Red, working in that place. On some days all the nerves in his body seemed to dance and run with the machines. Without knowing what was happening to him he had fallen into the path of the American genius. For generations before his day, the best brains of America had gone into the making of such machines as he found in the mill.

  There were other marvelous, almost superhuman machines in great automobile plants, in steel plants, in plants where food was put up in tins, in plants where steel was fabricated. Red was glad he had not applied for a job in the office of the mill. Who would want to be a keeper of books, a buyer or a seller? Without quite realizing it, Red had struck upon America at its best, at its finest.

  Oh, the great light rooms, the singing machines, the shouting dancing machines!

  Look at them against the sky in cities! See the machines running in a thousand mills!

  Red had borne, within him, a great admiration for the day superintendent in the mill, that man who knew every machine in the plant, knew just what it should do, who watched his machines so closely. Why was it that, as his admiration for that man grew, he grew also to have a kind of contempt for Tom Shaw and the men of the mill office? He did not know Tom Shaw well, but did know that, in some way, he was always bragging. He thought he had himself made what Red now, for the first time, saw. What he saw must really have been made by workmen, men like that superintendent. There were machine tenders in the mill too, men who cleaned the machines, who repaired machines that got out of order. In the streets of the town men were always bragging. Each man seemed to be trying to make himself appear bigger than some other man. There was no such bragging in the mill. Red knew that the tall stoop-shouldered mill superintendent would never be a braggart. How could a man be in the presence of such machines and be a braggart a man who sensed the machines?

  It must be that men like Tom Shaw... Red did not see Tom Shaw often after he got the job... he came seldom into the mill. “Why do I think about him?” Red asked himself. He was in that g
reat light clean place. He helped to keep it clean. He had become a sweeper.

  It was true there was lint in the air. It hung in the air like fine white dust, scarcely visible. Overhead, against the ceiling, there were flat disks from which came a fine white spray. Sometimes the spray was blue. Red thought it must have appeared blue because there were certain heavy cross beams in the ceiling that had been painted blue. The walls of the room were white. There was even a touch of red. Two of the young girls working in the spinning-room wore red cotton dresses.

  There was life in the mill. The girls in the spinning-room were all young. You had to be quick in there. They chewed gum. Some of them chewed snuff. It made dark, discolored little places at the corners of the mouth. There was the girl with the large mouth and big nose, the one Red had seen with other girls walking on the railroad tracks, the one who had made the songs. She looked at Red. There was something provocative in her eyes. They challenged. Red couldn’t think why. She was not pretty. When he went near her a thrill ran through him and he dreamed of her afterwards at night.

  They were a young man’s woman dreams. “Why does one of them set me off like that while another doesn’t?” That one was a laughing talkative girl. If there was ever labor trouble among the women in that mill she would be a leader. Like the others, she ran up and down between the long rows of machines tying broken thread. For that purpose she wore on her hand an ingenious little tying machine. Red watched the hands of all the girls. “How nice working people’s hands are,” he thought. The hands of the girls did the little job of tying broken threads so rapidly the eye could not follow. Sometimes the girls walked slowly up and down and sometimes they ran. No wonder they grew tired and went off to the water-houses to rest. Red dreamed he was running up and down between rows of machines after the big-mouthed girl. She kept running to other girls and whispering to them. She dogged about, laughing at him. She had a strong little body with a long waist. He could see her firm young breasts, their forms showing through the thin dress she wore. When, in his dreams, he pursued her, she was like a bird in her quickness. Her hands were like wings. He never could catch her.

  There was even, Red thought, a certain affinity between the girls in the spinning-room and the machines they tended. They seemed at times to become all one thing. The young girls, almost children, who attended the flying machines, seemed like little mothers. The machines were children who needed constant attention. In the summer the air in the room was stifling hot. The air was kept damp by the floating spray from above. Dark stains showed on the surface of the thin dresses. The girls ran restlessly up and down all day long. Toward the end of the first summer of Red’s experience as a workman he was put on the night shift. In the daytime he could get some relief from the feeling of tenseness that always pervaded the mill, a feeling of something flying, flying, flying, a tenseness in the air. There were windows through which he could look. He could see into the mill village or, from another side of the room, the river and the railroad tracks. Occasionally a train passed. There was another kind of life outside. There were forests and rivers. Children were playing in the bare streets of the nearby mill village.

  At night everything was different. The walls of the mill closed in on Red. He felt himself sinking, sinking, down, down — into what? He was sunk utterly in the strange world of lights and movement. Little fingers seemed always playing on his nerves. How long the nights were! He grew at times utterly tired. It wasn’t that he was tired physically. His body was strong. The tiredness came from just watching the never-ceasing speed of the machines and the movements of those who attended the machines. There was a young man in that room who played third base on the mill ball team and who was a doffer. He took bobbins loaded with thread out of the machines and put in bare bobbins. He moved so rapidly that at times, just to watch him, tired Red terribly and at the same time frightened him a little.

  Queer little moments of fright came. He was going about his work. Suddenly he stopped. He stood staring at some machine. How incredibly fast it ran! There were thousands of spindles at work in the same room. There were men who went about to tend the machines. The superintendent moved silently through the rooms. He was younger than the day man and this one also came from the North.

  It was difficult to sleep in the daytime, after a night in the mill. Red kept waking suddenly. He sat up in bed. He slept again and in dreams sank away into the world of movement. In dreams also there were the flying belts, the looms danced, making a clattering sound as they danced. Tiny steel fingers were dancing as they danced in the looms. Bobbins were flying as they flew in the spinning-room. Tiny fingers of steel were picking at Red’s hair. They were weaving that also into cloth. Often by the time Red grew really quiet it was time to get up and go again to the mill.

  How was it with the girls and women and the young boys who worked all the year, many of whom would work all their lives in the mill? Was it so with them? Red wished he could ask. He was still shy with them, as they were with him.

  There was a foreman in each room of the mill. In the rooms where the cotton first began to move forward in its journey toward becoming cloth, the rooms near a platform where the baled cotton was taken from cars, burly Negro men handling the bales, where it was broken up and cleaned, the dust in the air was thick. Huge machines handled the cotton in that room. They broke it out of the bales, rolling and tumbling it. Negro men and women tended the machines. It passed from one huge machine to another. The dust became a cloud. The kinkly hair of the men and women working in that room became gray. The faces were gray. Some one told Red that many of the Negro cotton-mill workers died young of tuberculosis. They were Negroes. The man who told Red laughed. “What does it matter? So many less niggers,” he said. In all of the other rooms the workers were white.

  Red became acquainted with the superintendent of the night shift. In some way he found out that Red was not of the mill village but of the town, that he had been to a Northern college during the summer before and was going back to college. The night superintendent was a young man of twenty-seven or -eight with a small body and an extraordinarily large head covered with fine yellow hair cropped close. He had come to the mill out of a technical school of the North.

  He felt lonesome in Langdon. The South puzzled him. The Southern civilization is complex. There are all sorts of cross-currents. Southerners say, “No Northerner can understand. How can he?” There is the queer fact of Negro life, so intimately connected with white life, so drawn away from it. Little quibbles come up and become vastly important. “You must not call a Negro man mister or a Negro woman Mrs. Even the newspapers, wanting Negro circulation, have to be careful. All sorts of queer subterfuges are used. Life between the browns and the whites becomes unexpectedly intimate. It draws sharply apart over the most unexpected details of everyday life. There is confusion. In these late years, industry coming in, the poor whites being brought suddenly, sharply and suddenly, into modern industrial life...

  The machine makes no distinctions.

  A white clerk can kneel before a colored woman in a shoe store, to sell her a pair of shoes. It’s all right. If he were to say, “Miss Grayson, do you like the shoes?” He has used the word “Miss.” A Southern white says: “I’d cut my arm off before I’d do that.”

  Money makes no distinction. There are shoes to be sold. Men live by selling shoes.

  There are the more intimate relations between men and women. Better keep quiet about that.

  If a man could cut down through everything, get at the quality of life.... The young mill superintendent Red met asked him questions. He was a new kind of man to Red. He lived at a hotel in town.

  He walked away from the mill at the same hour Red did. When Red began to work at night they left the mill at the same hour in the morning.

  “So you are working as a common laborer?” He took it for granted that what Red was doing was just a temporary thing. “While your vacation lasts, eh?” he said. Red didn’t know. “Yes, I guess,” he said.
He asked Red what he was going to do in life and Red couldn’t answer. “I don’t know,” he said, and the young man stared. One day he invited Red to come to his room at the hotel. “Come this afternoon, when you get through sleeping,” he said.

  He was like the day superintendent in that machines were the important thing in his life. “What do they mean here in the South when they say so and so? What are they driving at?”

  He had felt, even in the president of the mill, Tom Shaw, a kind of queer self-consciousness about the working people. “Why,” the young Northern man asked, “is he always talking about ‘my people’? In what way are they ‘his people’? They are men and women, aren’t they? They do their work all right or they don’t.

  “Why do they use colored working people in one room and whites in another?” The young man was like the day superintendent. He was a machine man. When Red was in his room that day he got out a catalog issued by a machine maker of the North. There was a machine he was trying to get the mill to introduce. The man had small and rather delicate white fingers. His hair was thin and was of a pale sandy yellow. It was hot in the little Southern hotel room and he was in his shirt sleeves.

  He had laid the catalog upon his bed and was showing it to Red. The white fingers opened the pages reverently. “See,” he exclaimed. He had come to the Southern mill at about the time Red got his job, having replaced another man who had died suddenly, and since he had come, there had been a threat of trouble among the workers. Red had known little of that. None of the men with whom he played ball or saw in the mill had talked of it to him. There had been a ten per-cent cut in wages and there was grumbling. The mill superintendent knew. Foreman in the mill had told him. There were even among the mill employees a few amateur agitators.

  The superintendent showed Red the picture of a huge and complex machine. His fingers fairly trembled with delight pointing to it, and trying to explain its workings. “Look,” he said. “It does the work twenty or thirty people are now doing and does it automatically.”