The Most They Ever Had (10 page)

___

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.

___

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.

___

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.”

___

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 closed 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.

___

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.

___

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.

The demolition began in 2006. There had been efforts to preserve it, because it was such a part of history, of life, but it was just working people’s history. So the crews came, Mexicans mostly, hard-working men, to tear it down.

___

Only the lint seems permanent. The lint, at least, will linger for years in their lungs, their bodies. But you could learn to love it, once you understood the trade. “It was good to us,” Sonny Parker said. But he does not expect everyone to understand.

___

“I rode by there today, expecting to see it like it used to be,” said Randall, who trained as a mechanic when he left the mill. “It killed a lot of people over the years.” But it broke his heart anyway to see it in pieces on the ground.

“It made me think of something my granddaddy used to say. ‘The only thing that never changes, is that everything has to change.’”

___

The stories linger. Over gravy and biscuits at Hardees, the dominoes game at E.L. Green’s Store, in the Food Outlet parking lot you can still hear about Pop Romine’s ears, or the Sandwich Thief, or the day Ralph Johnson learned to fly.

It was in the wartime summer of ’45, when Ralph was sixteen. With spring planting done, he was looking for a place to make a little money. In Jacksonville, that meant the mill. Ralph joined other boys there, all too young to draft, as a doffer, moving spools of yarn around the mill. It was like working on a stove eye that summer. “When you’re that age, you don’t mind it so much,” he said. But he knew that first week he could not spend his life in such a loud, hot, gnashing place.

When materials needed to be moved from floor to floor, workers used an open elevator, which they signaled by pulling a chain. When the elevator was in motion, a gate came down, blocking the shaft. If the gate was not in place, it meant the elevator was either at your floor, or approaching it. It almost always worked.

One day while Ralph was in the bathroom, some of his buddies ran in and splashed him with cold water. Such foolishness was common among the teenagers. They were the only ones with the energy for it in the middle of an Alabama summer.

The next day, Ralph began to plot his revenge. He spotted the same boys slipping inside the bathroom with their cigarettes and noticed the bathroom was only a few steps from the elevator. He looked at the bathroom, at the elevator, back. Once on the elevator, heading up or down, he would be safe from any immediate revenge. Timing was crucial.

He filled a cup of cold water and sneaked to the bathroom door. “They were sitting in there, smoking their Country Gentlemen,” he said.

He waited till he saw the gate swing up and open, signaling that the elevator was almost there, then ducked inside the bathroom and let the water fly. He ran as fast as he could to the elevator and flung himself across the threshold.

“That elevator,” he said, “was done gone.”

Instead of being just below his floor, it was just above it.

“God,” he remembers thinking, “it’s a long way down.”

He hit almost at the feet of a woman on the line.

Her eyes got big, but she just went back to work.

He stood up to count his broken bones. He was bruised, but fine.

“Might not have been, if I hadn’t been as hard as a rock back then,” he said.

When he walked back upstairs, the boys looked at him in wonder. In the sixteen-year-old mind, he was a hero. How brave to dive down an elevator shaft.

But Ralph, hero or not, got tired of slaving for mill wages. “Twenty-two cents an hour, shoot, man, that wasn’t nothing,” he said. Ralph and the other teenagers asked the manager, Frank Deason, for a three-cent raise that would put them at a quarter an hour. Deason hotly replied, “If you ask for another raise, we’re gonna fire you.” They waited for the right moment, when the machines were full of yarn. “Frank come through with a hat, suit, and tie,” he said. The boys approached him and asked again for their raise. He told them they were fired, and “we said, ‘No, you ain’t. We quit,’” Ralph said. The boys walked out, just kids tired of their diversion, as the people bound by their service to the mill, bound by their circumstances, watched them leave.

Ralph wound up working for the government, in forestry at Fort McClellan. A few years ago, he saw the woman in the grocery, the woman he almost landed upon.

“Are you the one?” she asked.

He told her, yes’m, I am.

She walked on by.

“Like to kilt me,” he said to her back.

She had no time for his foolishness, still.

The cotton millers just didn’t think much of people who came and went.

___

Ralph Johnson was a well-liked man. He could tell a story or a tall tale and make you smile.

But he never claimed to be a mill hand.

You could be anyone, even a mill-shaft rocket-man, and not be one of them.

You had to breathe the cotton.

You had to reach into the gears.

You had to be safe in the roar, and afraid of the quiet, to be.