But the thing that really disturbed Bonnie was the preacher’s insistence on the sacredness of the family, and his anger at those who did not keep their families together. Nothing would have pleased her more than to stay at home and raise her children in the best way she knew how. And there were many other women like her in the village. Mr. Simpkins seemed to think if they wished they could stay at home and have a life of comparative ease. Because his wife could stay at home, he thought that other men’s wives could do the same. Bonnie could not go to church Sunday after Sunday and hear him scold them for letting the family and the home break up without getting too angry. So she stayed at home with her young ones.
She talked with John who came over sometimes—about the mill. At first she had been very glad to give the best she had to her work. Now she saved her strength wherever possible.
One day at the looms she was wondering where the money for cloth to cover the almost naked young ones would come from. And she thought, “Hit costs ten cents a yard. How much do I need?” She counted that up. Then another thought came. “I work at my looms and am paid fifty cents for making sixty yards of cloth. And to-day at the store I’m a-going t’ pay ten cents a yard for the same cloth. The cloth I make for fifty cents is sold for six dollars.”
She spoke of this to her brother and to John Stevens who had come for a visit, for John wanted Bonnie to get acquainted with his friend, and had brought him to her shack in the field, for she had a sick baby.
“Somewhere in between, hit seems that somebody makes five dollars and fifty cents,” she said.
“Well, it seems so,” John Stevens answered, looking at her and smiling a little. “But you see the owners, they figure that some money must be added to that cloth to pay for wear and tear on their machines and their buildings and such like.”
“They pay themselves for wear and tear on the machines,” Bonnie spoke. “But hit seems I don’t get paid for wear and tear on myself.”
She had spoken the words almost in fun, only trying to make a play with the words that John Stevens had spoken. But when she had said them she stopped short, for in those half playful words she felt that she had struck something that had been worrying her, some idea that had tugged at her while she worked, and at home.
She saw John and John Stevens give each other a look of understanding.
When they left after a short visit, for John Stevens must get back to his work since it was not his Sunday off, Bonnie held John back inside the door.
“He’s nice,” she said. “I liked him as soon as he set foot in the door. You bring him again.”
The next day, about the middle of the morning, Bonnie came running into the twist room where John was working.
“John,” she said, “John.” He saw that she was pale and breathless. “Little Emma’s come t’ say the baby is very sick. You go for the doctor right away and send him.”
“What’s the matter with him?” John stopped his machines, but his sister was already gone, and the section boss was standing beside him.
Bonnie had sent her little girl back to the cabin. All the way over, stumbling on the road she wondered what the sickness might be. The cold he had been sick with for several days had been just like the colds all the children had at times. She cut across the field. The broomstraw, weak as it was, seemed to hold her back, and she pushed her way through as if it was a wall that she must break down.
Running toward the cabin she could hear no sound but her own breathing, but at the place where the clearing began she could almost hear the stillness that surrounded the shack and filled it inside.
There in the room the other children were near the bed. The baby’s head just showed above the bed clothes. Little Emma had one hand on the quilt as if she was hushing the baby to make it stop crying. Yet the child was not crying. The stillness she had felt outside continued in the room.
She hurried to the bed and pulled down the covers. The child was still. In her arms he lay without moving, but she had seen that his eyes were open. She shook him almost angrily, then held him close to her face. His lips touched her cheek, but there was no breath coming from his half open mouth. Then she had to accept what she had really known when she took him up. There was no life in him. She laid him down on the bed and turned to the other young ones.
The doctor was angry with her for not calling him before. The baby, he said, must have had pneumonia for two days at least. Bonnie was silent before him. There were words that came up in her, but with the child lying on the bed, she could not speak them.
When the funeral was over and Bonnie went back to the weave room, all who worked there were sympathetic and kind. Mary, the colored woman who swept on Bonnie’s side of the room, came up and said:
“I heard about your baby, and I’m real sorry.”
“Hit’s kind of you t’ say that,” Bonnie told her as she had told the others. Now she could not speak of it. She reproached herself that she had not done something that might have prevented the child’s death. If she had not thought of expense and called the doctor earlier. It was thinking of the money involved that had held her back.
Mary Allen came up to her again before the whistle blew for going home.
“My chile, Savannah,” she said, “is a right smart gal. She’s fifteen, and of cose can’t work in the mill, so I’m trying to find her a place with some white folks in town. But I ain’t yet found a thing. So if she could stay with your children for a few days until you get more peaceful in your mind, I’d be glad for her to do it.”
Bonnie looked at Mary Allen, at her plump, good natured black face that was full of sympathy, and Mary Allen turned away. For a long time afterward Bonnie remembered with shame the thought that was behind the look she had given Mary. For she was thinking of what people said—that colored people were all shiftless and no account; and had believed what they said in face of the fact that Mary Allen did her work in the mill quietly and as if she was willing to do her best. There were days when she did not sweep so well. But there were also days when Bonnie felt that the threads might break and faults come into the cloth without her caring.
For Mary Allen sent her child to Bonnie that same evening. And after the first two days Bonnie left the children with her without any trouble in her mind. Savannah, skinny as her mother was fat, opened her eyes wide when Bonnie spoke to her of the things to be done for the children.
“Yes’m,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of them at home. I knows what to do.”
And she did know. Bonnie’s terror about the other children left alone had been made so much greater by the death of one. And Savannah’s presence during that week made her anxiety less. It was her need to have that anxiety lightened when the new grave had just been covered up that Mary Allen understood.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
A LETTER sent by Bonnie reached Jim Calhoun, after following him from town to town. He came back and for a time he and Bonnie were reunited. With his one hand Jim helped around the cabin while Bonnie was at work. But he was very awkward with the young ones and irritable. One day he slapped little Emma, and though it was given with his left hand, the blow knocked her against the bed and cut a gash on her forehead.
That night Bonnie found Jim gone from the cabin, and Emma in bed with the rough bandage that Jim had put on her head lying on the pillow beside her.
She was almost glad something had made him leave her. It was not his fault that he had become worthless, not entirely, and she did not blame him after the first anger on Emma’s account. But she gradually came to hope that he would find a life away from her. And she, loving her children, and the new one that was coming to take the place of the other baby, would find her joy in caring for them. She was still under thirty, yet she looked much older, and had no thought of another man.
Several months after Jim left, Ora came one night and helped to bring Bonnie’s baby into the world. She was always regretting that she could not take Bonnie with her. That was impossible, for with her family
and Sally’s growing one their four-room house was full to overflowing.
While Bonnie was in pain she spoke to her of their life in the mountains. She told of the night when John was born and Granpap had to take her place at Emma’s bedside. And though Bonnie knew the story, she told again about the storm and the frozen cattle.
When Bonnie could speak at all they talked of the members of the family. About Emma and Granpap who were gone, and Ora told how Young Frank had at last broken away from them and gone to live in a nearby town. He was, she thought, working as errand man for a grocer, though she was not sure, for the word had come through someone else. Young Frank could not write himself, and was probably too proud to get someone else to do it for him.
At least that was the explanation Ora gave, and Bonnie nodded agreement, and thought her own thoughts about Young Frank, and the others, until the time came when she thought only of herself.
She was back at work in ten days. And she found that during the ten days something had been happening. First, there was a tension that had not been there before. When she asked John about it, he spoke of a rumor that many were to be laid off, because new machinery was to be installed. Already they had the new device for tying threads. It was very interesting, and saved much work and trouble. It was held on the right hand like a pair of scissors, and when the thread broke a person simply had to press the ends of the thread together between a small device at the end, and there was the thread whole again. But no one, when they welcomed the new, had thought that a device or machine that would save work and trouble, meant that neighbors and friends would be put out of work. The tension in the mill was like the tension of people who know that a plague of small pox or some other disease has broken out, and no one knows who will be the next to go.
Almost everyone was laid off while the new machinery was being installed. It was almost a relief to get the word and know the worst at last. But when the machinery was in many were taken back, at less pay. But there were a thousand people who were turned out of the mill by the machines. For days after the thousands were put out there were processions of wagons piled with furniture going to the east and west, to the north and south, toward other villages. And neighbors spoke to neighbors with sorrow in their voices. They said, “It might be us next,” as people speak of dying, when they look at a funeral.
Bonnie held on, and was glad of her place, for there were her four young ones to care for. She was in debt for the coming of her baby. The money she got each week was nine dollars, and sometimes not that much when there was a fault in the cloth. She made many figures at night on scraps of paper trying to work out a way to make the money go further than it seemed able to do. There were so many items:—rent, kerosene, life insurance, and in the winter one dollar and seventy-five cents a week for coal, and every other week, two dollars and twenty cents for wood—and in the summer wood was still needed for cooking. So, like all the rest, she had very little left for food and clothing.
And the children, dressed almost in rags, looked pale in spite of all she tried to do. Little Emma, who was almost ten, had the look of the mill on her though she had never stepped inside the factory but once. It was always that way. Those who had come down from the hills kept some of their healthiness, but the children of these and their grandchildren had the mark of the mill.
“The mark of the beast,” John Stevens called it. They were sitting in his house one Sunday. John had come to Sandersville straight from the mill, for since the thousand had been dismissed he had been working until twelve Saturday night, beginning again at twelve on Sunday night.
John sat on the edge of his chair across the table from John Stevens. He wanted to ask something. There had been some words that his friend had repeated more than once. He had said “the message.” “I’m looking for the message,” something like that, but had never explained. The word ran in his head when he was at the frames, and could not reach any conclusion in his thoughts. He wanted to reason, yet always when he began, even when he went over things that John Stevens had said to him, his mind carried him back to hopelessness. He and Zinie would die without having really lived, and their young ones would do the same; and Bonnie growing old before his eyes would live and die, and her young ones would be mill hands like her. It went over and over in him, to the sound of the machinery.
Now he understood why Granpap and the others had said, “What is there to life, but to wait and hope for heaven.” In his mind he would lie down as a hound does as it accepts a beating. Then the thought would come up in him that John Stevens had said there was a “message,” and a little hope and life would rise up in him. Yet he found it was better to keep this down, for if he let any hope get in him then the realization that there was none became a sharp pain.
Yet he wanted to find out the furthest thing that John Stevens had to say, so that he could lie down and stay, knowing that there was nothing for them to look forward to but a life of going to the mill, coming home to rest for strength to work in the mill again. Over and over, forever and ever, Amen.
John Stevens fingered the Bible that was on the table before him. He was looking for a passage that he had promised to show John, a passage about the rich and the poor.
“I sometimes wonder,” John said, watching the narrow, kindly face across the table, “why the preachers are always reminding us that death is the lot of all, rich and poor. They say, many times, death is not aristocratic. Hit’s true, but I don’t know why it is they talk so much that way. Hit seems they keep their eyes on death, and not on life.”
“Do you know any preachers and their families?” John Stevens asked, and he let the pages of the Bible run through his hands: but he kept his kind eyes on John.
“Not well.”
“I’ve been acquainted with some. They speak of death, but if you see and know them, you see they want to live. They have just as good food and clothing for themselves and their children as they can get, and every one of them tries his best to get the best education he can afford for his young ones. There are some who wish well to the poor, but there are mighty few that would fight to make their wishes come true. I mean fight for the coming of the message.”
“Is it the gospel message you mean when you say that?”
“No, it’s not the gospel message I mean.”
He turned the pages of the book. “Here it is,” he said and opened to a page toward the back. “If it’s the gospel message they want, here’s what they should preach.” He read from the Bible. “Go to now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and your silver are rusted: and their rust shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. Ye have laid up your treasure in the last days. Behold the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth out: and the cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbaoth. Ye have lived delicately on the earth, and taken your pleasure: ye have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned, ye have killed the righteous one: he doth not resist you.”
“Are those words, right there, in the Bible?” John spoke in astonishment. John Stevens pushed the book across to him.
“Read for yourself,” he said.
“I want t’ show this to some others,” John told him, and wrote down the chapter and name.
“Is that it, the message?” he asked hesitating, yet wanting to know clearly.
“No,” John Stevens said. For a long time he was silent. When he spoke it was in his usual voice, but as he went on it became stronger and more full of meaning, as the machines when they first start up make little noise but soon their sound fills the whole room.
And John listened with all his attention, so that later he was able to repeat what he had heard. Not every word was the same, but the meaning and most of the words were just as John Stevens had spoken them.
“In that book,” John Stevens said, “it tells you,
‘The cries of them that reap have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbaoth.’ Now, so far as I know, the sound of the sorrow of those that work has never been heard up yonder or wherever it might be they’re expected to be heard.
“You speak of preachers who talk of death. I want to tell you now about people who speak of life: and who are killed for speaking so. No wonder the preachers speak of death to us poor, for if they spoke of life as these others have done, they would be punished by the rich.
“There were two men who were punished for speaking so. Both worked in a mill, though one of them later became a peddler of fish. They were people like you and me, though they were born in a country across the water, and could not speak our language very well. But they spoke in their own language, and part in our language to the poor. They spoke of life, and because they did the rich put them to death. The rich called them thieves and murderers. It was their excuse for murdering two innocent men. I would like to read you what these two ‘thieves and murderers’ said. I’ll come back in a minute. A friend in the North sent me some of their sayings and letters. I’ll come right back.”
He returned with some papers and sat down again. The rustling of the papers sounded very loud in the still room.
“You remember,” John Stevens said, “there in the Bible it says, ‘Ye have condemned, ye have killed the righteous one: he doth not resist you.’ These men didn’t believe in resisting, but in just being good. And they were good. From these papers I’m going t’ read you what these two ‘thieves and murderers’ said just before they were taken to the electric chair.”
“They were killed in the electric chair?”
“Yes, and they walked in proud and strong, and one of them said, ‘Good evening, Gentlemen,’ for it was gentlemen that had done this thing to them. Not long before they went in for the gentlemen to watch them die, one of them wrote: ‘This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing. The taking of our lives, lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler—all. That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.’
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