To Make My Bread

by Grace Lumpkin

  “And they wanted to live, John. They wanted to enjoy life. And they thought of a world where all people would enjoy living. The day on which he was to die, one of them wrote a letter to his son. Here is part of the letter: ‘So, Son, instead of crying’ (he meant when they had killed him) ‘be strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother, and when you want to distract your mother from the discouraging soulness, I will tell you what I used to do. To take her a long walking in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and there, resting under the shade of trees, between the harmony of the vivid stream and the gentle tranquillity of the mother nature, and I am sure that she will enjoy this very much, as you surely would be happy for it. But remember, always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your side, and help the weak ones that cry for help, help the persecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends: they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartol fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all the poor workers.’ ”

  There was the sound of a heavy sigh in the quiet room.

  “I told you once,” John Stevens said, “about workers being killed in the West. This happened in the North. I could tell you many more stories of people being killed by the rich because they wanted something better. I want you to feel that you are not the only one, that there are many others wanting what you and Bonnie and all those others in the village want, ‘the joy of freedom for all the poor workers.’

  “And the rich will never give it to us. We must take it for ourselves. You understand that? Take it for ourselves. They couldn’t give it to us if they wanted to, even if they had that kindness your preacher once spoke about: for they have made something that is bigger than they are, bigger and stronger. But they like what they have. Don’t you forget that, and they’re going to keep it. And so we won’t do anything about our misery, they keep us in the darkness of ignorance and talk about death, to keep our eyes on death and heaven, so we won’t think too much about life. We are taught that to struggle is a sin.

  “But it ain’t a sin, John. People must learn that. We must work in a strike, but there is something else. We must go beyond the strike to the message . . . that we must join with all others like us and take what is ours. For it is our hands that have built, and our hands that run the machines and ours that dig the coal and keep the furnaces going; and our hands that bring in the wheat for flour. And because we have worked and suffered, we will understand that all should work and all should enjoy the good things of life. It is for us who know to make a world in which there will not be masters, and no slaves except the machines: but all will work together and all will enjoy the good things of life together.”

  “Can hit be done?”

  “It has been done,” John Stevens said, “though it isn’t yet finished.”

  He spoke more words. They talked long into the night, so that John, reaching his work late the next morning, was told that he would lose a day’s pay for his lateness. He did not hear everything the overseer said to him, and it was just as well, for the things said were not pleasant enough for a person to enjoy. He knew this dimly, yet there was something else in him greater than the overseer’s words. He stood before his machines with a joyous feeling swelling in him.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  THAT week something unusual happened in the mill. People at work at their looms or frames suddenly found themselves being watched by strange men. If one of them went for a drink of water, or something more important than a drink of water, the man stood looking at his watch, and put down something in a book when they came back. It was very distressing, for the watching kept up over several days. But it had to be endured, for everyone knew that more people were to be laid off very soon, and each was hoping against hope that he would not be one of these.

  In the third week hank clocks were installed on the machines, and people were paid by the time the hank clock registered. Sam Carver who worked on the night shift in the card room, and knew something about electricity, tinkered with his clock, and made his wages very high. The others did not approve of his behavior. They spoke to Sam in no uncertain way, but he went right on. “For,” he said, “they aim t’ get as much out of me as they can, so I aim t’ get the same from them.”

  For all except Sam the wages went down further. And there were other changes. The mill took off all helpers, which meant that boys and girls were left without work, and slubber hands had to drag in the creels, and there were no more doffers, but people must doff their own spools and mark them, which took up time from the frames and so cut down their pay. Card hands were forced to run forty cards instead of twenty-one and were given less for the double work.

  Automatic spoolers were put in, and when this was done thirty-five people were used where one hundred and sixty had been used before. Weavers who had tended eight to twenty looms now had nearly one hundred each: but when it was found that people fainted too often the number was reduced a little. Most of the women had to give up weaving. Ora stayed on, for old as she was, she was still as strong as a horse, as she herself said. It was very different with Frank, because he had one lung gone from tuberculosis.

  Ora said a thing that many others repeated after her. “I don’t run the machines any more,” she said. “They run me.”

  Everyone tried to take it all in the right way. They had been told how to take it. In each room Mr. Randolph, the manager, spoke to them. He said: “There is nothing that can disrupt the sincere spirit of brotherly love which for so long has been a bond between the management and the workers in our mills. Now when the management finds it necessary because of hard times to tighten up on time and wages, we hope that same spirit will continue so that we work together in harmony and peace.”

  For several weeks everyone tried to accept his words. For one thing they were naturally easy going, and for another they felt that behind Mr. Randolph’s spoken words were others which said, “If you don’t like this, there are plenty of others who will.”

  Then, like a cloud that comes without any warning over the top of a mountain, a feeling of misery came over the mill. Before there had been a feeling of deadness, which nothing perhaps could arouse, a feeling of stolid endurance. Now the feeling was different. It was one of acute, active misery. People fainted, others became sick because of the hard work, and lack of food, for in most of the homes, where there had been at least plenty of hominy and bacon, there was not even enough of these.

  And always there was the thought of those who were waiting for a place if one of them should give up. There were so many who came to the village every day looking for work. They were lined up or in groups every morning outside the office.

  Word went around in the mill that there were spies who listened for any word of complaint, so people became afraid to speak to their neighbors in the rooms, and so complaints were whispered from friend to friend, and even then there was suspicion.

  Bonnie found Mary Allen crying at her work one day. Her tears were splashing on her hands that held the broom handle. Some of them she wiped away with her apron, but Bonnie could see them plainly. She went over and spoke to Mary, leaving the hated clocks to register that she was taking time off.

  Mary was sweeping, and her eyes were looking at the floor. Bonnie, to get her attention, touched her on the shoulder.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I’ve got my time,” Mary said. She looked up at Bonnie and then down again, and pushed the broom, as if she was afraid to stop working even for a moment. But she had really stopped.

  “To-day is my last day,” she said. “They’re making two sweepers do the work of four. And I ain’t one of them.”

  She looked up then and smiled at Bonnie, trying to make the best of it. “Many is called,” she said, “but few is chosen.”

  “I’ve got fifty cents,” Bonnie said to her. “You wait here till I go to the washroom.”

  “No,” Ma
ry insisted. “You better keep that. I got my pay to-day, my las’ pay and right now it’s enough. You keep your fifty cents, honey. But I thank you just the same.”

  “You’re going t’ take hit,” Bonnie insisted stubbornly. And at last she did persuade her friend to accept what she had.

  At closing time John was waiting for her outside the door of the mill. “Take the young ones to Ora’s,” he said, “and come to our house to-night with Frank and Ora.”

  Bonnie spoke out loud, “What is it?”

  But she saw that his voice was very quiet and still when he spoke, and she lowered her own before she had finished.

  “Don’t tell anybody you’re coming,” he said. “Just come.”

  She saw that he was speaking of something very important. “I’ll come then.”

  When he left her she saw that he went up to others and spoke the same words to them. He did it casually, as if he was talking with good friends, and that of course was what he was doing. Then he came back to her and they walked on together.

  John spoke to her quietly, for there were people still around them. “A man came up to me the other night, and asked which way I was going. I told him. And he said, ‘How would you like to come up to my boarding house. I’m boarding with Mrs. Sevier.’ I looked at him, for I wasn’t sure he was a friend. He spoke in a way that we don’t speak. So I asked, ‘What do you want?’ And he said, ‘John Stevens sent me.’ Then I knew. I went up to the boarding house, and we sat there and listened to the victrola in the dining-room that was empty, for everybody had eaten. Then he said to me, ‘What do you think of unions?’ And I said. ‘I think they’re good.’ So we talked. He’s a-coming tonight. His name is Tom Moore, and he has worked in a mill the same as this one, only in the North.”

  The next day people who had been to the meeting the night before spoke to others, in the washroom, and at the frames, or between bites of food at lunch time. And that night Ora’s house where they met was filled to the doors. They pulled down the curtains and had one light on, for the meetings were to be kept secret.

  For a week they went on and had to be held in more than one house, since so many wanted to hear the words that Tom Moore had to speak. And they had words to speak for themselves, words that had been kept hidden. Everyone understood the importance of keeping what was going on a secret until it was time to carry out certain plans. And they were careful. But there must have been a spy among them.

  Tom Moore went away on Saturday to another village which had sent for him, for there were many places where people were discontented.

  On Monday, about the middle of the morning, something unexpected happened. In the room where John worked the section boss was summoned to the office. He came back, walked up to John and said, “Here’s your time. You’re to leave the mill right away.”

  He spoke softly, but John answered him in a loud voice, loud enough for the others to hear.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “You heard me,” the section boss told him.

  “I want you t’ say hit for others t’ hear.”

  “All right. You’ve got your time. Now get out.”

  Someone near by heard the loud talk and went up to the two men. Others, seeing that something was wrong, left their frames and gathered around.

  “Will you tell me why?” John asked.

  “No, I won’t.”

  John looked around him. He recognized some of those who had come to the meetings. One of them was Jesse McDonald.

  The section boss turned to Jesse. “And you, too,” he said. “You’re fired.”

  “Anybody else?” John asked.

  “Not in this room.”

  He and Jesse were members of the committee that had been elected at one of the secret meetings.

  “Get back to work, you,” the section boss said to the other men.

  Some of them slunk off to their frames, but others stood by John and Jesse. They spoke in low tones to each other.

  “Get back to work,” the section boss cried out, “all except those two.”

  “No,” one of the men said slowly, “I reckon if they go I’m a-going too.”

  “And me,” another one said.

  “Well, John. It looks like we’re in for it. Let’s go,” another neighbor spoke up.

  The overseer came in the room and up to the group.

  “Now, men,” he said firmly, “get to work.”

  The men looked at him. In the short time that they had stood together they had felt something. They had felt a sense of standing up for each other. For so long each had been alone with his family striving after enough food to keep from starving, and enough clothes to keep from going naked. And they had been alone in that fight. Now they were going to stand together, side by side, and there came to them the feeling of strength.

  They looked at each other with a new light in their eyes, as if they were seeing each other for the first time. And very slowly, almost imperceptibly, they smiled, before their faces turned to Dewey Fayon, the overseer.

  One of them said. “We’ll see you again, Dewey.” And as John turned toward the door they walked with him.

  In the hall they met others coming out. Almost the same thing had happened in the rooms where Bonnie, Ora, Frank and ten others had been given their time. Those who had attended the secret meetings, and some who had not, but were indignant over the dismissal of their friends, went out from the mill. In the middle of the morning they walked out into the sunshine. It was an amazing thing, that they felt the courage to leave their machines. There was excitement in this thought, yet they still felt the mill on them, and were quiet and thoughtful, for if this was a new thing they had done, it was also a serious thing.

  They stood in the road near the gate, and did not look back at the mill which stood behind them, huge and quiet except for the low throb of the machines—until John called to them.

  He had climbed up a little way on the thick wire fence.

  “Come to this place to-morrow, at half past eleven,” he said.

  As they walked on the road people began talking, for they had been as if they were dumb before. But the talking was not loud. They seemed to have a fear that the mill would hear them.

  John spoke to Bonnie who was walking beside him.

  “We’ve got to let Tom Moore know about this.”

  “I know hit,” Bonnie said. She raised her face, and he saw that it was lit up with the warm fire that had not been there since she was first married.

  “I’ll find him.” John said. “You leave your young ones with Ora, and all of you keep your eyes on the mill. Ill find him and get back to-night if I can.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  BONNIE stood on Ora’s porch with her baby in her arms, watching for John. It was the morning after they had walked out of the mill and John had not yet returned. Somewhere, she knew, he was looking for Tom Moore, or they together were hurrying to get back. When would they come?

  She was anxious and disturbed, for something must be done very soon. She thought of John Stevens, but it was too late to get him a message. If they did not hear from John during the day, then someone must go for John Stevens that night.

  She thought again of the words which John Stevens had spoken, when she had talked with him at different times. At first she had not believed in his words, for they seemed too fanciful to be true. Then she had been convinced that he had a message that was founded in the facts of her everyday life. It seemed reasonable and sure. For the present she was interested in the immediate need, the things that Tom Moore had suggested they might hope to win—a day in which they would work only eight hours, and pay that was not less than twenty dollars. To Bonnie, who had been receiving nine dollars a week, twenty seemed riches.

  Ora came out of the house. “You don’t see him yet?” she asked and stood beside Bonnie on the porch.

  They sat on the steps and talked; Ora tall above Bonnie with her rawboned old face looking fine and earnest.

&nbs
p; “We’ve got t’ win,” she said.

  “Yes, and us women have got to fight hard, like the men,” Bonnie added.

  “There’ll be some who’ll say women should stay at home, and not mix in men’s affairs. But they don’t say hit when we go out t’ work, and I can’t see why they should say hit now.”

  “Yes, if we work out, we’ve got a right to speak.”

  “Is that Dewey Fayon’s wife a-coming up the street?”

  “I don’t know. Is hit?”

  “I believe so. I wonder what she wants.”

  Dewey Fayon lived on Strutt Street, and his wife did not often come down into the village, but stayed on her street or went into town where she had friends. She was a stout woman, but very pretty. She wore high heeled slippers and at every moment a person watching expected to see her topple over on one side; and often she did turn her ankle so that her heels were continually run down at the edges.

  She came and stood right before Ora and Bonnie as if she had planned to speak with them.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning,” Ora told her.

  “Well, it looks as if you’re not working to-day.”

  “Yes’m,” Ora said. “Hit looks as if you’re not a-working either.”

  “I was just walking around.”

  “And we’re just setting here.”

  “Is John around?” Mrs. Fayon asked, looking at Bonnie.

  “No’m.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “Somewheres. I don’ know.”

  Mrs. Fayon moved her heavy weight from one high heel to the other.