by Rick Bragg
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We got lucky. Somone gave mother a two-eyed cast-iron heater. We put it in one of the bedrooms. The whole family was so excited you would have thought we had a pot of gold in there. All of us boys couldn’t wait to fire that thing up, and that night we did. We got that heater so hot it was red all over. We would lay back on the bed and marvel at how warm it was. Everything worked out well until one morning Grannie got out of bed thinking the fire was out in the heater. She got some kerosene and poured it into the heater and put the lid back in place, and turned to get a match to light the coal she had put in there. And then it happened. There was an explosion. It brought all of us out of bed. Grannie was lying by the bed. She was black from her head to her feet, from soot. It blew out the bricks from the fireplace. It scared Grannie bad.
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About forty yards behind each house was an outhouse. One outhouse served two houses, a small wooden building with a partition that separated each side. It was a nasty, dirty place, always full of flies and insects. There was always a supply of old newspapers and catalogs. It was a tradition to turn some of them over on Halloween—until we turned one over with Willis Woodall inside. That got us into hot trouble.
My friends during those years was Ray Bedwell, Fred Woodall, Peck Champion, and Grady Knighton, and more who lived in the Cotton Mill Village. If we were ever able to get some firecrackers we would wait and when we seen someone go into the outhouse we slipped around behind of it and would throw it right under the hole. We would hear the yelling and cussing as we ran away.
I think back to that time and see the Old Man coming up the back alley with the mule pulling a two-wheel cart, stopping at each toilet and shoveling out that mess, and putting it in his cart. The old mule had done this so many times over the years that when the old man got his last shovel full out, the mule would take off running, and stop exactly in the right spot at the next toilet. We kids liked to aggravate the Old Man. We would get inside the toilet and throw things in his shovel. One time we killed a large snake down on the creek. We put it in a cardboard box and started on the way home to show everyone what a large snake we killed. We seen the Old Man coming up the back alley with the mule and cart, and thought we could have some fun. We got in that toilet and the first time that shovel came under us we threw the snake in it. We heard all kind of yelling and banging on the outside. We peeped through a crack, and he was hitting that snake with the shovel. The old mule got excited and ran away, and it took the Old Man about two hours to get his mule back and clean himself up. We knew we had done something real bad, and high-tailed it for home.
Mr. Pace Bedwell, who lived in the next house across the back alley from us, was a grumpy old man that had never laughed in his life, and happened to see it all. News traveled fast in the village, and it didn’t take long for Mama and Grannie to hear about it. When I got home, Mama, Grannie, Maxie, they got to telling me what a bad thing I had done, but the more they talked about the thing I had done they got tickled and laughed and it got louder, all through the house. So, my problems was laughed away.
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“A few days before Christmas me and Pop Romine went to the woods surrounding the village and brought back a Christmas tree. Mama brought cotton home from the mill, and she would place it all under the tree, pinching it into little pieces to make it look like snow. We would all get together, some of us popping popcorn, some of us stringing it and wrapping it around the tree. We used lots of things to decorate such as tinfoil, ribbons, and pictures cut out of catalogs. I can’t remember any special gift I received—most of the time it was a small windup toy and a small bag of candy.
“Well, there is one thing. Calvin Davis, my Aunt Maxie’s husband, asked me what I wanted one year, and I told him I wanted five cinnamon buns and a R.C. Cola. On Christmas Eve Calvin told me to come out to the back porch. He handed me a sack, and inside was everything I wanted for Christmas. I hugged him and started trying to find a place to hide them. I can still taste them.
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Sometimes we would go and stand outside a softball game and wait till an old softball come flying out, and we’d grab it and run off with it, as fast as we could run. Then we would try to find some kerosene, and we would leave that softball soaking in that kerosene. We wouldn’t do it unless it was a real, real old ball, with the stuffing about knocked out. But if it was an old one, we would soak it, a whole day, and then at night we’d take it out to a dark field and we would light it. You had to be brave to light that ball. And we would take turns picking it up and throwing it from one side of the field to another. You had to snatch it quick, and some of the boys would use their shirt sleeves over their hands, but that would ruin their shirts. And we would just throw it as far as we could, and it looked like a shooting star.
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There was no lunch break for the people in the mill. The machines didn’t quit running, so the people took their lunch, and ate it at the frames. Every day, Hoyt Hammett would set his lunch on his frame. And he’d reach up there at noon, and get it. He always took the same thing, a potted meat sandwich.
But one day when he reached for that sandwich, he patted his hand on the frame and it was not there. The first day Hoyt found his sandwich missing, he wondered if a fellow worker had made some kind of mistake. The second day he found it missing, he knew it was no mistake. On the third day, Hoyt got some friends to watch for the thief.
Sure enough, they spotted him, and Hoyt plotted his revenge. This time, he would make a sandwich, but different—from his family’s outhouse. Hoyt put the sandwich in its paper bag on the fly frame in the same spot where it always was, and when he looked for it, it was missing. Somebody followed the sandwich thief, and watched. They figured he would eat it fast, to keep from getting caught. He took a bite, and run for the bathroom. The next day, Hoyt brought his potted meat sandwich and set it on the same spot on the fly frame. There never was any trouble, after that.
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When we got a minor burn on our arms or legs Mother would hold the burned place up to an open fire, hold it until we yelled or cried. That was to draw the fire out of it. People did things like that then. They used smut for medicine. When someone was cut or burned, old women would slip a finger inside a cold stove or hearth and coat the wound, and when it healed the scar would be black. To wean a baby off the breast, they would take black smut from the inside of a stove pipe and put it around the nipple. This was done to scare the baby off, and get it to start eating off the table. To cure the itch, Mama mixed sulfur and lard, and it stunk so bad no one would come near you.
But if the wound was bad, they would take us to Miss Cenie, who lived in Frogtown. She scared me to death.
The one thing we sure didn’t have was money for a doctor, and when we would get sick we would go see Cenie. Some people said Cenie was a witch, but I wouldn’t say that. She was real, real tall and skinny and she was sharp-faced, what people called hawk-faced. She wore long black dresses and the old high-top shoes. She might have been an Indian. When you went to her, with a fever or a burn or anything that got infected, she would talk the fire out of it.
She was religious. People said she had The Gift. She would pray over you and she would quote that part of the scripture from Ezekiel. (“And I will pour out Mine indignation upon thee, I will blow against thee in the fire of my wrath and deliver thee into the hand of brutish men and skillful to destroy.” [Ezekiel, Chapter 21, Verse 31]) “Thou shalt be for fuel to the fire, thy blood shall be in the mist of the land, and thou shall be no more remembered. For I the Lord have spoken it.”
She would talk in tongues. She would put her mouth down almost on a burned place, and breathe it in. I was six years old when they took me to see her. It was in the summer. We had an old stove and Mama had told me not to back up on it, but I did, and burned myself bad. It was sore and infected. They just couldn’t get it healed up. So Mama walked me over to see Cenie. Just looking at her gave you a spooky feeling. I tried
to back out, but Momma had me by the hand.
They took me inside and she held me by the arm and studied it. She blew on it and mumbled on it. She called the Holy Ghost. The next day, it was better. I don’t know if it was her talking that did it. I don’t know if it healed because of her, or else she just scared the hell fire out of it. All I know is, it worked. Cenie had power. Certain people just had a reputation like that, that they could heal you.
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I was sixteen when I went to work there in the mill, for thirty-five cents an hour. The Navy took me in ’43 and when I got out, in ’46, I went to the machine shop instead of going to work in the mill itself. Cotton was so thick you could only see thirty or forty yards in front of you. But there was a lot of chemicals in the machine shop, and I spent a lot of years in them. Did I think I was lucky? You better believe I thought I was lucky. I thought I was safe.
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He worked forty-six years there. In 1990, at his retirement, he was whole and healthy, and believed he had survived the brown lung and trauma that had doomed or crippled so many of his friends who worked on the floor.
But the whole time, his body had been soaking up the chemicals of the machine shop, and the poisons and asbestos he worked with lingered in his system until old age. In 1993, after suffering from pneumonia, he slipped into a three-week coma. He awoke to find himself mostly gone—both legs, an arm, even the fingers on his remaining hand.
The arm, Cenie healed. The legs that carried him across that dark field, chasing shooting stars.
He had been an avid reader and wanted to write about his life. After his tragedy, he refused to read a book or magazine. He told his wife to throw away his newspapers and ignore his magazine subscriptions. “I don’t want to hear anything outside these four walls,” he said. Everything he read reminded him of all the things he could not do.
But like most people who grew up in the mill village, all he needed to hammer out a place in this world was the right tool. He spent five months in a rehabilitation center in Birmingham. While he was there, doctors gave him prosthetic legs. “I seen then I was going to make it,” he said.
His driver’s license expired while he was in rehab. He went to reapply and take the driver’s test and did not bother to tell the instructor he had no legs. “If she’d known I had no legs, she’d have been more nervous than I was. She said I passed with flying colors,” said Odell. After that, he went where he wanted and used a special steering wheel attachment to make up for his missing limbs. As he passed people on the side of the road, he found himself lost not in bitterness or envy but in a simple nostalgia..
“It does no good to place blame,” he once said. But he hated one thing. He had dreamed, he said, of doing that book about his childhood. But the trauma of his illness took so much time from him, so much precious time, and he reckoned it would be buried with him.
Odell died in March 2008, at eighty-two. His obituary said only that he was a loving husband, father, and grandfather, and a retired employee of Union Yarn Mills. It was far short of the volume he wanted to leave behind. But in this place, where flesh is so expendable, no story is ever cut clean away. The book he would never write is—at least some of it—written here.
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We had fun catching the snakes that lay on the limbs and bushes along the creek. They were easy to find. We used a snare made out of copper wire and string tied to a cane pole to catch them. I remember we would catch one, two or three, find a fruit jar, put them inside a jar, build a fire and put the jar on the fire. It was a mean time.
chapter nine
runination day,
the sound of nothing,
and the day ralph johnson learned to fly
“You walk into any place for twenty, thirty years, you get to believing it belongs to you,” said Randall Johnson, a third-generation mill worker who never worked anywhere else.
On March 14, 2001, the bosses told Randall to help set up a stage and about two hundred chairs in the cotton warehouse for a meeting between executives and employees. The workers filed in, nervous, their faces blank, unsure. The quiet was always unnerving, anyhow, and it was silent except for the rustling of pant legs and the scudding of chairs on the floor. You never really heard the sounds of people in a mill. They moved without sound inside that roar. But with so many workers off the line, the mill’s bosses had to do the unthinkable. They shut down the machines, and the people waited in all that awful silence.
They were all there that day, doffers, spinners, openers, sweepers, all of them. Some were third-generation mill-workers, and a few could trace their lineage back even deeper, to the first generation. “They’d been telling us everything was fine, so nobody, I’d say, really knew what was coming,” Randall said. It could be that the company just wanted to say thank you for their hard work, or just wanted to reassure them, again.
He sat, waiting, thinking about his third day. He graduated from high school in May of ’89, took ten days off, and went to work at the mill in June. The rule was that if you were late to work in your first ninety days, you were fired automatically, and the other workers laughed at him because he was so nervous about getting to work on time. On his third day, he woke an hour late. “I done blew my job,” he thought, but people looked out for one another there, and someone clocked him in. His grandmother and grandfather had worked here for a few silver dimes, for meal and beans. It would have been a sin, almost, to lose that legacy in the first week.
“They put you on the worst job they had when you came through them doors to see if you could cut it,” he said. “I did.”
The executives came straight to the point. Due to an “overcapacity of yarn and textile production,” the mill would close for good. The 197 employees would be laid off, and their machines would be relocated.
In a letter read aloud to mill employees, Jim Browning, senior vice president of manufacturing, wrote: “Effective today, we will begin an immediate phase down. Given the extreme circumstances that we are faced with, there was no alternative.”
He went on to explain in his letter that, since the company’s bankruptcy filing in 1999, “Fruit of the Loom has altered business strategies and realigned operations to take the company back to the core products that made it successful.”
“Right then and there they told us we was shuttin’ down, ‘for the good of the company,’” Randall said. “They shut us down with a big smile on their face.”
But it was odd how the people reacted.
No one yelled or cursed in rage.
Now that it was over, that everything was over, they didn’t have any real fight in them. How do you fight against a man or woman three thousand miles away, or half a world away? How do you fight against people who are willing to work for pocket change, and draw water from a ditch?
Their ancestors had fought with guns and axe handles for basic human rights. The bitter truth was, as their jobs became safer and more sustaining, they were too expensive to keep. Now, other textile factories would restart those machines in places free of any real regulation, with much cheaper labor.
Like the grandparents and great-grandparents of the Jacksonville workers, the Latin American and Asian workers would take what they could get, because there was little else.
In the warehouse, people stared at the floor.
Some cried, but quietly.
Company officials told the newspapers it was a difficult decision to close the mill, a good facility staffed by dedicated employees, but its production was no longer required.
Sonny Parker remembers just being tired. His mind kept circling back to the same thing, the thought that was with him when he went to sleep, and when he woke in the morning:
“We did everything they asked us to do.”
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There was no big switch to throw to shut it down. The mill ran through the cotton in its warehouse. Slowly, over weeks, as one part of the production line was no longer needed, it was clos
ed down, and then the next, and the next, and the people were laid off as their stations went silent. The mill died in pieces.
Finally, all that remained was a handful of people in the office and a few of the overhaulers, who, for a few paychecks more, began to take the place apart.
The machines, hundreds of them, were unbolted and dismantled, some sent as close as Leesburg, to one of the few cotton mills that had been spared. But others were crated up and sent to Brazil, Peru, India, China.
Sonny Parker walked through the vast rooms, hating the sound of his own footsteps.
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A people this resourceful, who could do so many things with their hands, would survive. Some of them, like Debbie Glenn, used the layoff to break the inertia of the mill and get a better job. She went to work at the Honda plant in Lincoln, forty-five minutes away. Others were less fortunate. Some found work, but in jobs that pay only a fraction of what the mill did, with no benefits or with such expensive insurance that it consumed their paycheck. One man went to work in a factory that makes pet food from discarded food. Others are still looking for work, or have become so sick from brown lung they live on partial disability.
Sonny was one of the lucky ones. “I got a good job,” he said, helping make cotton swabs at a plant in Anniston. He made twelve dollars an hour at the mill and makes $10.15 at his new job. He paid $35 a week for medical insurance at the mill, but paid $85 at his next job. After a few years, he went to work for the city of Jacksonville street department, for the security.
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It sat empty for a year or two. The supporting pillars, bigger around than a man could reach, towered into a dark nothing. People who walked through it swore that, in the vacuum, they could hear a rustling sound, as if the ghosts of generations shuffled through the vast rooms.