One morning Red was walking from the mill toward town with the young man from the North, They had come through the village. The men and women of the day shift were already in the mill and those of the night shift were coming out. Red and the superintendent walked among them. He used words Red couldn’t understand. They got out into a road. As they walked along, the superintendent spoke of the mill people. “They are pretty stupid, aren’t they?” he asked. He may have thought Red was also stupid. Stopping in the road, he pointed back toward the mill. “It isn’t half what it will be,” he said. He went talking along the road. The mill president, he said, had consented to buy the new machine, the picture of which he had shown Red. It was, he of which Red had heard nothing. There was an effort being introduced into the best mills. “Machinery is going to become more and more automatic,” he said.
Again he spoke of the labor trouble brewing in the mill, of which Red had heard nothing. There was an effort being made, he said, to unionize the Southern mills. “They’d better drop that,” he said.
“Pretty soon they’ll be lucky if any of them are employed.
“We are going to run the mills with fewer and fewer people, with more and more automatic machinery. The time will come when all mills will be automatic.” He assumed that Red had his point of view. “You are working in the mill, but you are one of us,” his voice and manner implied. The mill people were nothing to him. He spoke of Northern mills in which he had worked. Some of his friends, young technicians like himself, were working in other kinds of mills, in automobile factories and in steel mills.
“In the North,” he said, “in the mills in the North, they know how to handle labor.” Since automatic machinery was being introduced there was always more and more surplus labor. “The thing to do,” he said, “is to keep plenty of surplus labor about. Then you can cut wages when you choose. You can do what you want to,” he said.
3
IN THE MILL there was always a sense of order, of things moving forward to an orderly end, and then there was the life in the Oliver house.
The big old Oliver house had gone to decay now. It had been built by Red’s grandfather, the Confederate surgeon, and his father had lived and died there. Great people of the old South built generously. The house was too large for Red and his mother. There were many empty rooms. Just behind the house and attached to it by a covered passageway was a large kitchen. It was large enough for the kitchen of a hotel. A fat old Negro woman cooked for the Olivers.
In Red’s childhood there was another Negro woman who made the beds and swept the floors of the house. She had taken care of Red when he was a small child and her mother had been a slave, belonging to old Doctor Oliver.
The old doctor had been, for his day, a great reader. There were rows of old books in glass-fronted and now dilapidated bookcases in the parlor of the house downstairs and boxes of books in one of the empty rooms. Red’s own father had never opened a book. For years, after he became a doctor, he took a medical journal, but rarely took it out of its wrapper. A little pile of these journals had been thrown on the floor upstairs in one of the empty rooms.
Red’s mother had tried to do something with the old house after she had married the young doctor, but had made little progress. The doctor was not interested in her efforts and what she tried to do had been a bother to the servants.
She made new curtains for some of the windows. Old chairs that had become broken or out of which seats had fallen and that had been standing about unnoticed in corners ever since the old doctor’s death were dragged out and repaired. There was not much money to be spent, but Mrs. Oliver hired an ingenious young Negro of the town to help. He came with nails and a hammer. She began trying to drive her servants. In the end not much was accomplished.
The Negro woman, already employed in the house when the young doctor married, did not like his wife. They were both still young then, although the cook had married. Her husband disappeared later and she grew enormously fat. She slept in a small room off the kitchen. The two Negro women had contempt for the new white woman. They did not want, did not dare to say to her: “No. I will not do that.” That was not the Negro’s way with the whites.
“Yes, indeed. Yes, Miss Susan. Yes, indeed, Miss Susan,” they said. A struggle that went on for years began between the two colored women and the white woman. The doctor’s wife was not directly crossed. She could not say, “This was done to defeat my purpose.” Chairs that had been mended became broken again.
A chair had been mended and put into the parlor. In some mysterious way it got into the front hall and the doctor, coming home late at night, stumbled over it and fell. The chair was again broken. When the white woman complained to her husband he smiled. He was fond of Negroes, liked them about. “They were here when Mama was alive. Their people belonged to us before the war,” he said. Even the child in the house knew later that there was something going on. When the white woman had, for some reason, left the house the whole atmosphere changed. Negro laughter ran through the house. When he was a child Red liked it most when his mother was not at home. The Negro women were laughing at Red’s mother. He did not know that, was too young to know. When his mother was out of the house other Negro servants from neighboring houses slipped in. Red’s mother did her own marketing. She was one of the few white women, of the better class, who did that. She went through the streets sometimes with a basket of groceries on her arm. The Negro women gathered in the kitchen. “Where is Miss Susan? Where has she gone?” one of the women asked. The woman speaking had seen Mrs. Oliver leave. She knew. “Isn’t she the grand lady,” she said. “Young Doctor Oliver has sure done well, hasn’t he, now?”
“She is gone to market. She went to the store.”
The woman who was Red’s nurse, the upstairs girl, got a basket and walked across the kitchen floor. Red’s mother always had something defiant in her walk. She held her head rigidly poised. She frowned slightly and there was a tight line about her mouth.
The Negro girl could imitate the walk. All the visiting Negro women shook with laughter and even the child laughed as the young Negro woman with the basket on her arm and her head held so rigidly walked up and down. Red, the child, did not know why he laughed. He laughed because the others did. He crowed with delight To the two Negro women Mrs. Oliver was something. She was Poor White. She was Poor White Trash. The women did not say so in the presence of the child. Red’s mother had put new white curtains at some of the windows downstairs. One of the curtains was burned.
It was being ironed, after washing, and the hot iron was left standing on it. It was one of the kind of things that kept happening. There was a great hole burned. It was no one’s fault. Red had been left alone on the floor in the hall of the house. A dog appeared and he cried. The cook, who was doing the ironing, ran to him. It was a perfect explanation of what had happened. The curtain was one of three bought for the dining-room of the house. When Red’s mother went to get cloth to make a new one to take its place all of that kind of cloth had been sold.
Sometimes, as a small child, Red cried in the night. There was some childish ailment. His tummy hurt. His mother came running upstairs, but before she could get to the child the colored woman was standing with Red held against her breasts. “He’s all right now,” she said. She did not offer the child to its mother and the mother hesitated. Her breasts ached to be holding the child and comforting it. The two colored women in the house were always speaking of how things were run in the house when the old doctor and his wife were alive. To be sure, they were themselves children. Still they remembered. There was something implied. “A real Southern woman, a lady, does so and so.” Mrs. Oliver went out of the room and back to her bed without touching her child.
The child nestled against warm brown breasts. His small hands reached up and felt warm brown breasts. With his father before him it might have been like that. Women of the South, of the old South, in the old Doctor Oliver’s day, were ladies. The Southern white men, of the slave
-owning class, made great talk of that. “I do not want my wife to soil her hands.” The women of the old South were to remain always the white spotless ones.
The strong brown woman who was Red’s nurse when he was small threw back the covering of her bed. She got the child and took it into her own bed. She bared her breasts. There was no milk, but she let the child suckle her breasts. Her large warm lips kissed the white body of a white child. There was more of that than the white woman knew.
There was much Susan Oliver never knew. When Red was small his father was often called out at night. After his father’s death, he had, for a time, quite a large practice. He rode a horse and there were three horses kept in the stable back of the house, the stable that afterwards became a garage. There was a young Negro man who took care of the horses. He slept in the stable.
Clear hot Georgia summer nights came. There were no screens at the windows or doors of the Oliver house. The front door of the old house was left open, as was the back door. There was a hallway directly through the house, the “dog run,” it was called. The doors were left open to get the breeze.... when there was a breeze.
Stray dogs did actually trot through the house at night. Cats trotted through. Occasionally there was a rush of strange, startling sounds. “What’s that?” Red’s mother, in her room downstairs, sat up in bed. The words popped out of her. They rang through the house.
The Negro cook, already beginning to grow fat, was in her room off the kitchen. She lay on her back in her bed and laughed. Her room and the kitchen were separated from the main house, but there was a covered passage, leading into the dining-room, so that, in winter or when there were rains, food could be brought in without getting wet. The doors were open between the main house and the cook’s room. “What’s that?” Red’s mother was nervous. She was a nervous woman. The cook had a booming voice. “It’s only a dog, Miss Susan. It’s only a dog. He was after a cat.” The white woman wanted to go upstairs and get her child, but for some reason hadn’t the courage. Why did it take courage to go get her own child? She often asked herself that question but could not answer. She had been reassured but was still nervous and lay awake for hours hearing strange noises, imagining things. She kept questioning herself about the child. “It’s my child. I want it. Why shouldn’t I go for it?” She said the words aloud so that the two listening Negro women often heard the soft murmured words from her room. “It’s my child. Why don’t I?” She said over and over.
The Negress upstairs had taken possession of the child. The white woman was afraid of her and of the cook. She was afraid of her husband, of the white people of the town of Langdon, who had known her husband before his marriage, and her husband’s father. She never admitted to herself that she was afraid. On many nights, when Red was a small child, his mother lay in bed trembling as the child slept. She cried softly. Red never knew about that. His father hadn’t known.
There was, in the hot Georgia summer nights, the song of insects outside and inside the house. The song rose and fell. Huge night moths came into the rooms. The house was the last one on the street and beyond it the fields began. Some one walked on a country road and shouted suddenly. A dog barked. There was the sound of horses’ hoofs trotting in dust. Red’s crib was covered with white mosquito netting. All the beds in the house were so covered. The beds for grown people had posts and canopies and the white mosquito netting hung down like curtains.
There were no closets built in the house. Nearly all of the older Southern houses were built without closets and in each sleeping-room there was a large mahogany armoire standing against a wall. The armoire was huge and went up to the ceiling.
Moonlight night came. There was an outside back stairs leading up to the second story of the house. Sometimes, when Red was a small child and when his father had been called out in the night, his horse having gone clattering away down the street, the young brown man from the stable came barefooted up the stairs.
He came into the room where the young brown woman and the babe were lying. He crept under the white canopy to the brown woman. There were sounds in there. There was a tussle. The brown woman giggled softly. On two occasions Red’s mother almost caught the young man in the room.
She came into the room without warning. She had made up her mind to take the child to her own room downstairs and, walking in, lifted Red out of his crib. He began to cry. He kept on crying.
The brown woman got out of her bed, her lover lying in silence. He was hidden under the sheets. The child kept crying until the brown woman took him from the mother and then he became silent. The white woman went away.
The next time Red’s mother came the Negro had got out of the bed but did not have time to get to the door that led to an outside stairway. He stepped into the armoire. It was high enough to let him stand upright and he pulled the door softly shut. He was almost nude and some of his clothes were lying on the floor of the room. Red’s mother did not notice.
The Negro man was a strong man with broad shoulders. He was the one who taught Red to ride a horse. One night when he was in bed with the brown woman a notion came into his head. He got out of bed and took the child into the bed with himself and the woman. Red was quite small then. Afterwards he remembered dimly. It was a clear still moonlit night. The Negro man had thrown back the white netting separating the bed from an open window and the moonlight streaming in fell across his body and across the body of the woman. Red remembered that night.
The two brown people were playing with the white child. The brown man tossed Red into the air and caught him as he fell. He laughed softly. The Negro took hold of Red’s small white hands and with his own huge black hands made him walk up the broad flat brown belly. He let him walk over the woman’s body.
The two people began pitching the child back and forth. Red loved the game. He kept begging for it to go on. It seemed glorious to him. When they had tired of playing, he crawled over the two bodies, over the broad brown shoulders of the man and over the breasts of the brown woman. His lips sought the rounded upstanding breasts of the woman. He went to sleep on her breasts.
Red remembered these nights as one remembers a fragment caught and held out of a dream. He remembered the laughter of the two brown people in the moonlight as they played with him, the soft laughter that could not be heard outside the room. They were laughing at his mother. It may have been they were laughing at the white race. There are times when Negroes do something like that.
BOOK TWO. MILL GIRLS
1
DORIS HOFFMAN, WHO worked in the spinning-room at the Langdon Cotton Mill, Langdon, Georgia, had a dim but ever-present consciousness of a world outside the cotton mill where she worked and the cotton-mill village where she lived with her husband, Ed Hoffman. She was conscious of automobiles, of passenger trains seen now and then through windows as they went whirling past the mill (don’t be wasting time now at windows, time wasters get fired in these times), of movies, of swell clothes a woman might own, of voices coming over radios. There wasn’t any radio in the Hoffman house. They hadn’t got one. She was very conscious of people. In the mill sometimes she felt like playing the devil. She would have liked playing with the other girls in the spinning-room, dancing with them, singing with them. Come on, now, let’s sing. Let’s dance. She was young. She made up songs sometimes. She was a smart fast workwoman. She liked men. Her husband, Ed Hoffman, wasn’t a very strong man. She would have liked a strong young man.
Just the same she wouldn’t have gone back on Ed Hoffman, not she. She knew that and Ed knew it.
On some days you couldn’t touch Doris. Ed couldn’t have touched her. She was closed up, quiet and warm. She was like a tree or like a hill lying still in warm sunlight. She worked quite automatically in the big light spinning-room of the Langdon Cotton Mill, the room with the lights, the flying machines, the subtle changing flying forms — you couldn’t touch her on such days, but she did her work all right. She could always do more than her share of work.
One Saturday, in the fall, there was a fair in Langdon. It wasn’t right by the cotton mill nor in the town. It was in an empty field by the river out beyond the cotton mill and the cotton-mill town. People from Langdon, if they went out there, went mostly in cars. The fair was there all week and a good many people from Langdon went out. They had the field lighted with electric lights so they could have shows at night.
It wasn’t a horse fair. It was a fair of shows. There was a ferris wheel and a merry-go-round and stands for selling things and places to ring canes and a free show on a platform. There were places for dancing, one for whites and one for Negroes. Saturday, the last day of the fair, was a day for mill hands and for poor white farmers and for Negroes mostly. Hardly any of the town people went on that day. There were hardly any fights or drunks or anything. To get the mill people it was arranged that the mill baseball team should play a game with a mill team from Wilford, Georgia. The mill at Wilford was a small one, just a little yarn mill. It was pretty sure that the Langdon mill team would have it easy. They would be almost dead sure to win.
Doris Hoffman had consciousness of the fair all week. All the girls in her room at the mill had consciousness of it. The mill at Langdon ran night and day. You put in five ten-hour shifts and one five-hour shift. You had it off from Saturday noon until Sunday night at twelve, when the night shift started the new week.
Doris was strong. She could go places and do things her husband Ed couldn’t do and go. He was always feeling done up and had to lie down. She went to the fair with three mill girls named Grace and Nell and Fanny. It would have been easier and a shorter way round to go by the railroad track, but Nell, who was also a strong girl, like Doris, said, “Let’s go through town,” so they all did. It wasn’t so nice for Grace, who was weak, going the long way, but she never said a thing. They came back the short way, by the railroad tracks that followed the winding of the river. They went to Langdon Main Street and turned to the right. Then they went through nice streets. Then it was a long way on a dirt road. It was pretty dusty.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 147