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Davis is best known for her first publication, Life in the Iron Mills, a powerful story that exposed the inhumane working conditions of mill workers. Living in Wheeling introduced her to immigrant workers and their families, and she drew on her experiences to write Life in the Iron Mills. Published a decade before the French writer Emile Zola's naturalistic fiction, the novella movingly depicts the struggle of characters trapped in their circumstances.
In the summer of 1862, on her way home from a trip to Boston, during which she met Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott, she also met the lawyer Lemuel Clarke Davis, an admirer who was so impressed by Life in the Iron Mills that he had written to her and requested that they meet. They married on March 5, 1863, and eventually had three children: two sons and a daughter.
After their marriage, Rebecca and Clarke Davis moved to Philadelphia, where she worked as an associate editor for the New York Tribune (1869–1875) and her husband became a prominent journalist. Their son, Richard Harding Davis, also became an influential journalist.
In this excerpt from Life in the Iron Mills, the writer addresses the reader directly and introduces the story of Hugh Wolfe, an iron worker with artistic sensibilities, and his self-sacrificing cousin Deb. Although the setting is not named, the place is much like Wheeling, West Virginia, the novelist's hometown.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Novels: Frances Waldeaux (1897), Doctor Warwick's Daughters (1896), Silhouettes of American Life (1892), Kent Hampden (1892), Natasqua (1887), A Law unto Herself (1878), Kitty's Choice: A Story of Berrytown (1874), John Andross (1874), Pro Aris et Foci: A Plea for Our Altars and Hearths (1870), Dallas Galbraith (1868), Margaret Howth: A Story of To-Day (1862). Novella: Life in the Iron Mills, Atlantic Monthly 7 (April 1861), 430–51. Autobiography: Bits of Gossip (1904).
SECONDARY
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 74, 92–96. Tillie Olsen, “A Biographical Interpretation,” Life in the Iron Mills (1972), 69–156. Harold Woodell, “Rebecca Harding Davis,” Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (1979), 118–19.
FROM LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS (1861)
My story is very simple,—only what I remember of the life of one of these men,—a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's rolling-mills,—Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the great order for the Lower Virginia railroads there last winter; run usually with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I choose the half-forgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands. Perhaps because there is a secret underlying sympathy between that story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,—or perhaps simply for the reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived. There were the father and son,—both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby & John's mills for making railroad-iron,—and Deborah, their cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms….
…
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night. I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has groped through as boy and man,—the slow, heavy years of constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that it will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to be—something, he knows not what,—other than he is. There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him to a passion of pain,—when his nature starts up with a mad cry of rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile, slimy life upon him. With all this groping, this mad desire, a great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet's heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer, familiar with sights and words you would blush to name. Be just: when I tell you about this night, see him as he is. Be just,—not like man's law, which seizes on one isolated fact, but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man's life, all the countless nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him, before it judged him for this night, the saddest of all.
I called this night the crisis of his life. If it was, it stole on him unawares. These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip by unconsciously. Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell.
…
[A group of wealthy visitors touring the ironworks encounter a sculpture created by Hugh Wolfe, an iron worker who has used korl, a by-product of the ore, for his art work.]
Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,—a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning.
“Stop! Make that fire burn there!” cried Kirby, stopping short.
The flame burst out, flashing the gaunt figure into bold relief.
Mitchell drew a long breath.
“I thought it was alive,” he said, going up curiously.
The others followed.
“Not marble, eh?” asked Kirby, touching it.
One of the lower overseers stopped.
“Korl, Sir.”
“Who did it?”
“Can't say. Some of the hands; chipped it out in off-hours.”
“Chipped to some purpose, I should say. What a flesh-tint the stuff has! Do you see, Mitchell?”
“I see.”
He had stepped aside where the light fell boldest on the figure, looking at it in silence. There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman's form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolf's. Kirby and Doctor May walked around it, critical, curious. Mitchell stood aloof, silent. The figure touched him strangely.
“Not badly done,” said Doctor May. “Where did the fellow learn that sweep of the muscles in the arm and hand? Look at them! They are groping,—do you see?—clutching: the peculiar action of a man dying of thirst.”
“They have ample facilities for studying anatomy,” sneered Kirby, glancing at the half-naked figures.
“Look,” continued the Doctor, “at this bony wrist, and the strained sinews of the instep! A working-woman,—the very type of her class.”
“God forbid!” muttered Mitchell.
“Why?” demanded May. “What does the fellow intend by the figure? I cannot catch the meaning.”
“Ask him,” said the other, dryly. “There he stands,”—pointing to Wolfe, who stood with a group of men, leaning on his ash-rake.
The Doctor beckoned him with the affable smile which kind-hearted men put on, when talking with these people.
“Mr. Mitchell has picked you out as the man who did this,—I'm sure I don't know why. But what did you mean by it?”
“She be hungry.”
Wolfe's eyes answered Mitchell, not the Doctor.
“Oh-h! But what a mistake you have made, my fine fellow! You have given no sign of starvation to the body. It is strong,—terribly strong. It has the mad, half-despairing gesture of drowning.”
Wolfe stammered, glanced appealingly at Mitchell, who saw the soul of the thing, he knew. But the cool, probing eyes were turned on himself now,—mocking, cruel, relentless.
“Not hungry for meat,” the furnace-tender said at last.
“What then? Whiskey?” jeered Kirby, with a coarse laugh.
Wolfe was silent a moment, thinking.
“I dunno,” he said, with a bewildered look. “It mebbe. Summat to make her live, I think,—like you. Whiskey ull do it, in a w
ay.”
The young man laughed again. Mitchell flashed a look of disgust somewhere,—not at Wolfe.
“May,” he broke out impatiently, “are you blind? Look at that woman's face! It asks questions of God, and says, ‘I have a right to know.’ Good God, how hungry it is!”
They looked a moment; then May turned to the mill-owner:—
“Have you many such hands as this? What are you going to do with them? Keep them at puddling iron?”
Kirby shrugged his shoulders. Mitchell's look had irritated him.
“Ce n'est pas mon affaire. I have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses. I suppose there are some stray gleams of mind and soul among these wretches. The Lord will take care of his own; or else they can work out their own salvation. I have heard you call our American system a ladder which any man can scale. Do you doubt it? Or perhaps you want to banish all social ladders, and put us all on a flat table-land,—eh, May?”
The doctor looked vexed, puzzled. Some terrible problem lay hid in this woman's face, and troubled these men. Kirby waited for an answer, and, receiving none, went on, warming with his subject.
“I tell you, there's something wrong that no talk of ‘Liberté’ or ‘Égalité’ will do away. If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world's work should be machines,—nothing more,—hands. It would be kindness. God help them! What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live such lives as that?” he pointed to Deborah, sleeping on the ash-heap. “So many nerves to sting them to pain. What if God had put your brain, with all its agony of touch, into your fingers, and bid you work and strike with that?”
“You think you could govern the world better?” laughed the Doctor.
“I do not think at all.”
“That is true philosophy. Drift with the stream, because you cannot dive deep enough to find bottom, eh?”
“Exactly,” rejoined Kirby. “I do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other's throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible.”
The Doctor sighed,—a good honest sigh, from the depths of his stomach.
“God help us! Who is responsible?”
ANN DEAGON
(January 19, 1930–)
The daughter of Robert and Alice Webb Fleming, Ann Deagon was born in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned her B.A. from Birmingham-Southern College in 1950 and her doctorate in classical studies from the University of North Carolina in 1954. In 1951 she married Donald Deagon and is now the mother of two daughters.
After beginning her career as a classics professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, she joined the faculty at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1956 and served as Professor of Humanities and Writer-in-Residence there until her retirement in 1992.
Beginning her writing career in 1970, Deagon worked actively with regional and national writers’ groups and in 1980 founded Poetry Center Southeast, a forerunner of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She was editor of The Guilford Review from 1976 until 1984, and in 1981, received a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship.
She and her husband spent a dozen summers during the 1950s and early 1960s on the Qualla Reservation in Cherokee, North Carolina, working on Unto These Hills, an outdoor drama about the forced removal of the Cherokee to Oklahoma over the infamous Trail of Tears. She wrote her first book-length poem, Indian Summer, to honor Jonah Feather and to pay tribute to “the humane vigor of the Cherokee people as well as to the humor and stubborn dignity of one man.”
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Novel: The Diver's Tomb (1984). Poetry: The Polo Poems (1990), There is No Balm in Birmingham (1978), Women and Children First (1976), Indian Summer (1975), Poetics South (1974), Carbon 14 (1974). Short stories: Habitats (1982).
SECONDARY
Contemporary Authors, Vols. 57–60, 161–62. James F. Mersmann, “Erotic Hyphens: Ann Deagon's Centers That Hold,” Poets in the South 1:1, 72–83. A. McA. Miller, “Conversation with Ann Deagon,” Poets in the South 1:1 (1977), 67–71.
GIVING THE SUN
from Women and Children First (1976)
Having readied our instrument
(a cardboard box, white paper
taped inside, two pinholes)
we lead the children
warily into the unexpected
twilight. Not
looking up, we are aware
of a great absence. Its chill
silences the jays. We show
each child the obscured sun
in camera obscura. See:
I give you the sun in a box—
a small love inside four walls.
THE HOLE
from Women and Children First
At nine I dug a hole behind
the rabbit hutch, four feet
across and getting deeper. I didn't
want to find China, only
to dig in. Every red
shovelful unmade Alabama.
Squatting in the clay chalice
its tight horizon all mine
I drank the sky, the sky
drank me. Between my toes
I felt dirt quiver, felt
an hour-glass running suck me
through earth's center out
onto a blue beach. It never
happened. So how did I
get here on the other
side of the world, my childhood
under my feet?
TWINS
from Women and Children First (1976)
Sears’ Dial-Your-Twin Dress Form duplicates
your figure with amazing accuracy. Simply use
any suitable coin or screwdriver to adjust screws
at bust, waist, and hips…
When I moved out, back in ’50,
my twin stood in for me at home. Clothed
in a tasteful smock she always fitted
in. Over the years (twenty-five)
she kept her figure. (Someone with
an unsuitable implement had screwed
mine out of shape.) To compensate
they taped shoulder pads under her breasts,
diapered her hips and belly. By slow
accretion Art kept pace with Life.
Sears’ Best is better, allows
instant adjustment to reality.
An extra slice of cheesecake, or conception—
insert a coin and twist to FULL.
Diet or abortion—a turn of the screw
pulls us back in shape. Say cancer—
screw the left breast till it buckles.
Say you don't make it—the next
wife has only to readjust the screws:
bust, waist, and hips. What other
dimensions does a woman have?
POETICS SOUTH
from Poetics South (1974)
You flat poets
grey on grey
in magazines like long front porches
rock chaw whittle
sometimes spit
alike as board and board—
you listen now:
in Centreville I saw a billy goat
a yearling flush with foraging cavort
maverick down a porch of country cousins
propped to the wall, and on that primal stage
kicking his heels between panic and April
let loose a hail of planetary pellets
hot tumbling in orbit reeking of creation,
vaulted the rail and left those whittlers gasping
a universe of stink.
That's poetry, boys—
like it or lump it.
IN A TIME OF DROUGHT
from Poetics South (1974)
My grandpa hollowed
like a gourd
beside the produce counter.
&n
bsp; Disdaining chairs
he propped his eighty years'
fragility
against a grocery cart
for grandchildren
to drink of dignity.
I hang him hollow
in the wind of memory
for poems to nest in.
[BROADSIDE (1983)]
I never lust
after a man
as much as
before one.
ANGELYN DEBORD
(December 7, 1949–)
Playwright, actress, and storyteller, Angelyn DeBord grew up in western North Carolina. “The music and language of Appalachia has been the inspiration for all of my writing,” says DeBord. In an interview in the Appalshop film Strangers and Kin, she tells of moving to the North Carolina Piedmont for her dad to find work when she was a child. The whole family suffered from such homesickness that they soon moved back to the mountains.
A founding member of Appalshop's Roadside Theater, based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, DeBord has spent the past twenty-eight years performing and leading workshops all over America and Europe. She has performed at the London International Theater Festival, Lincoln Center, and Kennedy Center.
DeBord views her writing as a means of “examining in a microscopic way, the fabric, texture, weaving and stitches that hold together the patterns of this Appalachian world I've always inhabited. Coming from a background with a very strong oral tradition, my work centers around the importance of being able to tell your own story with pride and confidence.”
Her critically acclaimed play Praise House was featured at Charleston, South Carolina's Spoleto Festival in 1990. DeBord wrote the play for the Urban Bush Women, a New York City theatre group. “I pulled so much of the information for this play from extended family stories,” says DeBord.
In the following scene from Praise House, we see three generations of African American women from the same family. Moma is a domestic worker trying very hard to deal with daily realities of survival. Her daughter, Hannah, has visions, sees angels. Hannah's grandmother, Granny, born in Africa, is a freed woman who totally understands young Hannah's absorption in the spiritual world. DeBord explains, “Most of us can choose whether to see or hear angels. Some of us have no choice. This play is about those who have no choice.”