Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  3

  IN A COTTON mill at night. You are working there. There is a roar of sound — a sustained roar — now low, now high — big sounds... little sounds. There is a singing — a shouting — a talking. There are whispers. There is laughter. Thread laughs. It whispers. It runs softly and swiftly. It leaps. Thread is like a young goat on the mountains of the moon. Thread is like a little hair snake running into a hole. It runs softly and swiftly. Steel can laugh. It can cry out. Looms in a cotton mill are like baby elephants playing with mother elephants in a forest. Who understands inanimate life? A river coming down out of a hill, over rocks, through a quiet glade, can make you love it. Hills and fields can win your love as can also steel made into a machine. Machines dance. They dance on their iron legs. They sing, whisper, groan, laugh. You get woozy-headed sometimes seeing and hearing all the things going on in a mill. It is worse at night. It is better, wilder, more exciting at night. It tires you more.

  The lights in a cotton mill at night are cold blue. Molly Seabright worked in the loom room of the mill at Birchfield. She was a weaver. She had been there a long time and could just remember when she had not been a worker. She could remember, sometimes vividly, days with her father and mother in hillside fields. She remembered little creeping crawling buzzing things in grass, a squirrel running up the trunk of a tree. Her father kept gums of bees. She remembered the surprise and pain of a bee stinging her, a ride her father gave her on a cow’s back — he walking beside the cow holding her on — a quarrel her father had with a man in the road, a night of wind and heavy rain, her mother ill and in bed, a calf running suddenly, crazily across a field — so awkwardly Molly had to laugh.

  She had come down to Birchfield with her mother out of the hills one year when she was little more than a child. That year her father was half ill and couldn’t work much and there was a drought and a crop failure on the mountain farm. Just the same that year the mill was booming. It wanted workers. The mill sent out little printed circulars into the hills telling the hill people how nice it was in town, in the mill village. The wages offered seemed high to the mountain people and the Seabrights’ cow died. Then the roof of the house in which they lived began to leak. They had to have a new roof put on or get the old one fixed.

  The mother, already old, went over the hills to Birchfield that spring and in the fall she put her daughter in the mill. She didn’t want to. Molly was so very young then that she had to lie about her age. The mill people knew she was lying. There were many children in the mill who had lied about their age. It was because of the law. The mother thought, “I won’t let her stay.” The mother walked to work past the offices of the mill. She had a room with a family in the mill village. She saw stenographers in there. She thought, “I’ll get an education for my daughter. She’ll be a stenographer.” The mother thought, “We’ll get some money to buy a new cow and get the roof fixed and then we’ll go back home.” The mother did go back to the mountain farm, but Molly Seabright stayed.

  She had got used to being in the mill. A young girl wants a little money of her own. She wants new dresses and new shoes. She wants silk stockings. There are movies in town.

  There is a kind of excitement in being in a mill. After a few years, Molly got put on the night shift. The looms in the loom-room in the mill were set in long rows. They are that way in all mills. All mills are pretty much alike. Some are bigger than others and more efficiently run. Molly’s mill was a good one.

  It was nice to be in the Birchfield mill. Molly thought sometimes... her thoughts weren’t very definite... she felt sometimes, “It’s nice to be here.”

  There were even thoughts of cloth being made — nice thoughts. Cloth for dresses for many women — shirts for many men. Sheets for beds. Pillow cases for beds. People lying in beds. Lovers lying together in beds. She thought that and blushed thinking it.

  Cloth for banners to fly in the sky.

  Why can’t we, in America — machine people — machine age — why can’t we make it a sacred thing — a ceremony — joy in it — laughter in mills — song in mills — new churches — new sacred places — cloth being made for people to wear?

  Molly did not think such thoughts definitely. None of the workers in the mill did. Just the same, the thoughts were there, in the rooms in the mill, wanting to fly into people. The thoughts were like birds flying above the rooms waiting to alight in people. “We have to take it away. It’s ours. It should belong to us — we the workers. Some day we have to take it away from the little money-changers — the cheaters — the liars. We will do it some day. We’ll arise — sing — work — sing with steel — sing with thread — sing and dance with machines — a new day coming — new religion — a new life coming.”

  Year by year as machines in America had become more and more efficient the number of looms taken care of by one weaver was increased. A weaver had twenty looms, then thirty, the next year forty, then even sixty or seventy looms. The looms were becoming all the time more and more automatic, more and more independent of the weavers. They seemed more and more to have a life of their own. The looms were outside the lives of the weavers, seemed every year more and more outside. It was odd. It gave you, at night sometimes, a queer feeling.

  The difficulty was that, after all, the workers — a few workers at least — were necessary to the looms. The difficulty was that thread did break. If it weren’t for the inclination of the thread to break no weavers would be necessary at all. All the ingenuity of the smart men who made machines had been used to work out better and better ways of working the thread faster and faster. It was kept slightly damp to make it more flexible. There was a spray — a fine mist — that was blown down from somewhere up above over the flying thread.

  It was hot in the mills on the long summer nights in North Carolina. You sweated. Your clothes were wringing wet. Your hair was wet. Fine lint, floating in the air, clung to your hair. In town they called you “lint-head.” They did it to insult you. It was said in derision. They hated you in town and you hated them. The nights were long. They seemed endless. The cold blue light, falling down from somewhere up above, came through fine lint floating in the air. You got queer headaches sometimes. The looms you were taking care of danced more and more crazily.

  The foreman in the room in which Molly worked had an idea. He put a little colored card attached to a wire on the top of each loom. The cards were blue, yellow, orange, gold, green, red, white and black. Little colored cards danced in the air. That was so you could tell, when you were a long way off, when a thread had broken in one of the looms and it had stopped. The looms stopped automatically when a thread broke. You didn’t dare let them stop. You had to run quickly, sometimes a long way. Sometimes several looms stopped at once. Several of the colored cards quit dancing. You had to run swiftly here and there. You had to tie the broken threads in quickly. You can’t let your loom stop too long. You’ll get fired. You’ll lose your job.

  There they go — the dancing looms. Watch them closely. Watch. Watch.

  Clatter. Clatter. What a racket there is! There is a dancing — crazily, jerkily dancing — the loom dance. At night the lights make your eyes tired. The colored cards dancing made Molly’s eyes tired. It’s nice in the loom room of the mill at night. It’s strange. It makes you feel strange. You are in a world far from any other world. You are in the world of flying lights, flying machines, flying thread, flying colors. It’s nice. It’s terrible.

  The looms in a loom-room had stiff iron legs. Inside each loom the shuttles flew back and forth with flashing speed. You could not follow the flight of the flying shuttles with your eyes. The shuttles were shadowlike things — flying, flying, flying. “What’s the matter with me?” Molly Seabright said to herself sometimes. “I got looms in my head, I guess.” Everything in the room jerked. It was jerky. You had to be careful or you got the jerks. Molly got the jerks sometimes when she was trying to sleep in the daytime — when she worked at night — after the long night in the mill. She jer
ked awake when she tried to sleep. The loom room in the mill was still in her head. It stayed there. She could see it. She felt it.

  Thread is blood running through cloth. Thread is little nerves running through cloth. Thread is a thin stream of blood running through the body of cloth. It is a little flying stream that makes the cloth. When a thread breaks in a loom the loom is hurt. It stops dancing. It seems to jump off the floor as though hurt, stabbed, shot — as the singing woman was shot in the truck in the street of Birchfield when the strike came. Song, and then suddenly no more song. Looms in a mill at night danced in a cold blue light. In the mill at Birchfield they made many-colored cloth. There were blue threads, red threads and white threads. There was always the endless movement. Little arms and little fingers were at work down inside the looms. Thread was always flying in, flying in. It flew off little bobbins set in cylinders atop the looms. In another big room of the mill they filled bobbins... they made thread and filled bobbins.

  In there the thread came from somewhere up above. It was like a long slender snake. It never quit coming. It came out of tanks, out of tubes, out of steel, out of brass, out of iron.

  It wriggled. It leaped. It ran out of a tube onto a bobbin. Women and girls in the spinning-room got thread in the head. In the loom-room there were always the tiny streams of thread-blood running into the body of cloth. Now it was blue, now white, now red again. The eyes got tired watching.

  The point was — Molly came to understand it slowly, slowly — that you have to work in a place to know. People on the outside didn’t know. They couldn’t. You feel things. People from the outside don’t know how you feel. You have got to work in a place to know. You have got to be there through long hours, day after day, year after year. You’ve got to be there at work when you aren’t well, when your head aches. A woman who works in a mill gets... well, you ought to know how she gets. It’s monthlies. It comes sometimes suddenly. You can’t help it. Some feel like hell when it comes, others don’t. Molly did sometimes. Sometimes she didn’t.

  But she’s got to stick.

  If you are from the outside, not a worker, you don’t know. Bosses don’t know how you feel. The superintendent or the president of the mill walks through sometimes. The president of a mill takes visitors through his mill.

  The men and women, the children, working in a mill just stand there. Very likely no threads break just then. It’s just the luck. “You see, they don’t have to work hard,” he says. You hear it. You hate him. You hate the visitors in the mill. You know how they are looking at you. You know they have contempt for you.

  “Okay, smarty, you don’t know..’.you can’t know.” You’d like to throw something. How can they know about thread always coming and coming, always dancing, looms always dancing... streaming lights... clatter, clatter?

  How can they know? They don’t work in there. Your feet hurt. They hurt all night long. You get a headache. You get a backache. It’s your time again. You look around. Anyway, you know. There’s Kate, and Mary, and Grace, and Winnie. Now it’s Winnie’s time too. See the dark places under her eyes. There’s Jim, and Fred, and Joe. Joe’s going to pieces — you know that. He’s got tuberculosis. You see a little movement — the hand of a worker is going to her back, to her head, it is covering her eyes for a moment. You know. You know how it hurts because it hurts you.

  The looms in a loom-room sometimes seem to want to embrace each other. They get suddenly all alive. A loom seems to make a queer jerky leap toward another loom. Molly Seabright thought of the young mountain man who had once leaped toward her in a road at night.

  Molly had her own thoughts working in the weaving room of the mill at Birchfield through the long years. She didn’t dare do too much thinking. She didn’t want to. The thing was to keep the attention fixed always on the looms, never to let the attention waver. She had become a mother and the looms were her children.

  But she wasn’t a mother. Sometimes at night queer things happened in her head. Queer things happened in her body. After a long time, months of nights, even years of nights, the attention thus fixed hour after hour, the body gradually becoming synchronized to the movements of the machines.... There were nights when she got lost. There were nights when it seemed to her there was no Molly Seabright. Nothing mattered to her. She was in a strange world of movement. Lights were shining through mist. Colors danced before her eyes. She tried to sleep during the day but there was no rest. The dancing machines stayed in her dreams. They went on dancing in her dreams.

  If you are a woman and young yet.... But who knows what a woman wants, what a woman is? There are so many smart words written. People say things. You want something alive, leaping toward you, as a loom leaps. You want something determined, coming toward you, outside yourself. You want it.

  You don’t. You do.

  Days, after the long nights in the mill, in the hot summer, become queer days. The days are nightmares. You can’t sleep. When you do sleep, you can’t rest. The nights when you go back to work again in the mill become just hours spent in a strange unreal world. Both days and nights become unreal to you. “If that young man, in the road that night, if he had come at me more gently, more softly,” she thought sometimes. She didn’t want to think about him. He didn’t come toward her gently. He frightened her horribly. She hated him for it.

  4

  RED OLIVER HAD to think. He thought he had to think. He wanted to think — thought he wanted to think. In youth there is a kind of hunger. “I’d like to understand everything — feel everything,” youth says to itself. After some months working in the mill at Langdon, Georgia... being fairly eager-minded... Red tried to write poetry sometimes... after the strike among the workers at Langdon, a lost strike... he hadn’t shown up very well in that... he had thought... “Now I’ll stand by the workers”... then, at the last, when the pinch came, he didn’t... after the visit in the early summer to the Bradley farm in Kansas... Neil’s talk... afterwards at home, reading radical books... he took the New Republic and the Nation... then after that Neil sent him the New Masses... he thought... “It is time to try to think... we got to do it... we got to try... we young American men have got to try to do it.,. the old ones won’t.”

  He thought, “We got to begin to show courage, even fight, even be willing to be killed for it... for what?”... he wasn’t sure... “Anyway,” he thought....

  “Let me find out.

  “Let me find out.

  “I’ll go this road at any price now. If it’s communism, all right. I wonder if the communists would want me,” he thought.

  “I’m brave now. Forward!”

  Maybe he was brave, maybe not.

  “Now I’m frightened. There is too much about life to find out.” He didn’t know how it would be with him if it came to a test. “Oh, hell, let it go,” he thought. What business was it of his? He had read books, had been to college. Shakespeare. Hamlet. “The world is out of joint — wicked spite, that ever I was born to set it right.” He laughed... “ha... Oh, hell... I got tried out once and I caved in... smarter men and better men than me have caved in... but what are you going to do... be a professional ball player?”... Red could have been that; he had had an offer while he was in college... he could have begun in a minor league and worked up... he could have gone to New York and become a bond salesman... other students in college did that.

  “Stay in the mill at Langdon. Be a traitor to the workers in the mill.” He had got acquainted with some of the workers in the mill at Langdon, felt close to them. In a queer way he even loved some of them. People, like the new woman he had accidentally stumbled upon in his wanderings... wanderings started because of his uncertainty about himself, because of shame of what had happened to him in Langdon, Georgia, during the strike there... the new woman he had found and to whom he had told a lie, saying he was a communist, implying that he was something braver and finer than he was... he had begun looking upon communists in that way... perhaps he was being romantic and sentimental abou
t them... there were people just like that woman, Molly Seabright, in the mill at Langdon.

  “Get yourself in with the bosses in a mill. Be a suck. Rise. Grow rich maybe some day. Grow fat and old and rich and self-satisfied.”

  Even a few months spent in the mill at Langdon, Georgia, during that summer and during the summer before, had done something to Red. He had sensed something a little that many Americans do not sense, perhaps never can sense. “Life was an experience full of queer accidents. There was the accident of birth. Who could account for it?

  What child could say when or where or how he or she would be born?

  “Would the child, to be born, be born in a well-to-do family, or in a middle-class family — lower middle class, upper middle class?... in a big white house on a hill above an American town or in a city tenement or in a coal-mining town... millionaire’s son or daughter... Georgia cracker’s son or daughter, thief’s son, even murderer’s son... children are even born in prisons?... Are you legitimate or illegitimate?”

  People are always talking. They say, “So and so comes of nice people.” They mean that his people or her people are rich or well-to-do.

  “By what accident did he or she get born so?”

  People are always judging others. There was talk, talk, talk. The children of the rich or well-to-do... Red had seen plenty of that kind in college... they never in a long lifetime really knew anything about hunger and uncertainty, year after year of weariness, helplessness that gets into the very bones, poor food, cheap shoddy clothes. Why?

  If the mother of such a one — a worker — got sick or the child of a worker got sick... there was the question of having a doctor too... Red knew about that... his father was a doctor... doctors worked for money too... sometimes the children of workers died like flies. Why not?