The Most They Ever Had (9 page)

chapter seven

breath

Eula Salter, a little girl then, used to wonder what it was like inside the mill. It was a fortress, a great, red-bricked wall. In those days, the 1950s, a man named Joe Green would hitch his mule to a creaking wagon and give Eula and other black children a ride around town. One late afternoon, in another burning summer, he drove them down Alexandria Road, past the mill.

Eula looked up, up to the second floor, and saw them.

“People were hanging out of the windows,” she said, “trying to breathe.”

She would never forget those people, their mouths wide open. They would lean as far into the breeze as they could, gasping, then give up their place to the next man or woman in line.

Eula watched the people, over her shoulder, till the mule slowly pulled her out of sight.

High above, a man named Leon Spears stood choking in the heat and the swirling cotton mist, waiting his turn for a breath of air. A lifetime later, he does not recall a little black girl, or a mule wagon, or anything else on the ground below.

But he remembers that breath.

“It put bread in your mouth, that mill did,” said Spears, his mouth slack from his medicines, his oxygen bottle—necessary since the brown lung disease stole his last few good breaths—propped against a leg of his chair. “But it cost. You paid and you paid, for every scrap.”

The medical term is byssinosis, a disease of slow suffocation, a disease of the mills. The people who have it, who have it bad, breathe like their lungs are stuffed with rags.

It is an old disease. Physicians in Europe described a respiratory disease in textile workers as early as the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century, byssinosis was a medical fact in other countries. It choked workers in British cotton mills in the 1930s, and was diagnosed from the Netherlands to Uganda. But in the United States, especially in the South, industry executives for most of the twentieth century said it was a phantom disease, a workers’ lament based more on hangovers and laziness than medicine.

Leon Spears’ only good breaths come from a metal cylinder now. Day by day, he sits in front of the television, the canister on the floor next to his easy chair, and breathes short, shallow breaths. It makes you think of baby steps, halting, unsure.

“I had a job, I had to go to it,” he says, when asked how he wound up in this shape. Ten years before he quit, he knew it was killing him.

Like all the others who have paid for their economic salvation with their lives, he laughs, weakly, bitterly, over the notion that he could have quit and saved himself.

He cannot recall a choice.

“Seemed like, I don’t know, like it was meant to be, that you worked there,” said Leon.

He can still see himself a boy, standing in the dust of a baseball field in the mill village.

“I was seventeen, barefooted, and didn’t even have a T-shirt on, and I was with a bunch of boys. I said, ‘I’m gonna go get me a job.’

“‘You ain’t,’ they said.’

“‘I am,’ I said.”

It was like a dare.

“I went in and asked, and they told me to come in at four o’clock.”

He is sixty-five now.

“I have wished so many times they’d told me they didn’t need nobody that day.”

His wife, Linda, was from cotton mill people, too. Her grandfather lost most of a hand inside its walls. It was the last thing her daddy wanted, to see his girl vanish into that thick air.

But she wonders, as her husband does, if they were born to this, somehow. Her father came into their house with cotton dust falling like snow, and she breathed it in even before she could walk. “My daddy, brothers, too, wound up with breathing problems. My daddy always told me, ‘No matter what, no matter what happens, don’t you go down there.’”

But, like Leon, she had little choice. She got married and had two little boys, and then found herself raising them by herself. “This was the best thing I could get. When my daddy died of leukemia, I went to work.”

Leon and Linda met there, on the third shift.

“He was my doffer,” she said, referring to the process of lifting the filled spools off the machines. “He come in one evening, a little late, and he was drunk. I said, ‘What in the world? What’s wrong with you? You been drinking?’”

“Yeah,” he told her.

Well, she thought, at least he was honest.

“I been to a wedding,” he said, as if that made it all all right.

“You look good,” he told her.

He was a charmer, that Leon.

She married him, anyway.

“We had some good days,” she said.

A good day, then, was a steady day, when the dust had time to settle. But she remembers how the bosses would sometimes look at their watch, mark the time, and announce that they were going to see how fast their machines could run. It was without regard, or pity. The workers called it The Stretch-Out, a back-breaking, soul-killing pace that left them weak and sick at the end of the day. “And as much as they would stretch you out, the more you would try to do,” she said. “You wanted to please.” And the faster their machines whirled and the louder they roared, the whiter the air, the thicker each breath. “When you sit down, now, and think about it, it doesn’t really make any sense at all.”

___

The lint crawling up their nose, down their throat had driven them mad. It swirled and floated, light as air, specks and hair-fine tendrils, flung off the ropes of fat cotton in the card room and whirled off the bobbins in the spinning room. It draped their eyelashes, stuck in the corners of their eyes, and found its way, like something alive, under the bandanas they tied over their mouths and noses. Over minutes, hours, it clogged their nasal passages, stuck in their throats, and was drawn into their lungs.

But there seemed so much worse, here, so much that could cripple and maim, it seemed silly to worry about lint.

Leon remembers how frightening it was, when the lights would wink out from a short or other malfunction, leaving the mill pitch black. But the machines, on a separate circuit, did not die, and they roared and bit at them, from the dark.

“You’d freeze,” he said, because a stumble—or even a motion in the wrong direction—could cripple a man.

Some machines were haunted, the ones where people had been maimed.

Others were just bad luck.

But dust?

“Nawwww,” said Leon. “Back then, you just didn’t think it was bothering you. The cotton mill was just like smoking. Nobody thought nothin’ of it.”

That is how the industry battled claims that the disease was anything more than a phantom. Most mill workers, like Leon, were smokers, too.

The truth lay buried deep, deep in their lungs.

The dust was so pervasive that it collected in their pockets, in the waistbands of their pants and dresses, even, somehow, in their wallets. They picked pieces of it off their sandwiches and scooped tendrils from their coffee cups. But the bigger pieces of cotton that floated down were not a danger, really. “It was what you couldn’t see that got you,” said Leon, about the tiny, almost microscopic bits that were drawn into their lungs.

In its early stage, brown lung is a shortness of breath, a tightness in the chest, and a chronic cough, which is worse on Monday, when the workers first re-enter the dust, than on the weekend. Bosses dismissed it for decades as whining.

But the disease gets worse over years, until the cough is persistent through the week and worse on Monday. Finally, it results in chronic bronchitis, and emphysema. Its sufferers are prone to pneumonia, and even a cold, for those with advanced brown lung, can be fatal.

A series of lawsuits in the 1970s resulted in a cotton dust standard—the allowable amount of dust in the air—that was upheld by the United States Supreme Court. Mills nationwide, under court order, were given until the mid 1980s to install expensive filters to help cut down on the amount of cotton dust that swirled in the air. But even as mills installed the filters and ventilators that would help workers breathe easier, their own government fought against them. On March 27, 1981, this story ran in
The New York Times
:

A Reagan Administration official has ordered the destruction of more than 100,000 booklets on cotton dust and is holding up distribution of films and slides on other health issues by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on the ground that they are antibusiness, a spokesman for the agency said today…

Thorne G. Auchter, the new administrator of the health and safety agency, ordered the withdrawal of the cotton dust booklets because he found them “offensive,” according to James Foster, a spokesman for the agency.

Mr. Auchter felt that the cover of the booklets, which showed a photograph of a worker who was obviously gravely ill and suffering, “makes a statement that is obviously favorable to one side,” Mr. Foster said.

The spokesman added that Mr. Auchter wanted the agency to be objective and not favor either labor or business. The booklets, and a poster which also showed the photograph of the worker, who eventually died, were ordered withdrawn from all OSHA field offices by Mr. Auchter.

Mill workers assumed then that their lungs just filled up with cotton. But, in the 1980s, medical researchers discovered that bacteria in the dust triggered an allergic reaction in the respiratory system, leading to permanent lung damage from scar tissue.

___

Leon and Linda worked together about ten years before he got sick, and then, year by year, his lungs deteriorated.

To complain, even in the 1970s and 1980s, could cost you your job, Leon said.

“You had to show you wanted the work,” he said. “You could be out of work, be sick, with a doctor’s excuse, and still be guilty. I never missed any time,” until he was so sick he couldn’t function.

The mill, like others around the country, gradually became cleaner and safer for workers, though the cotton dust remained a fact of life. Leon quietly left the mill in ’95, retiring with Linda to their home on the Nesbit Lake Road, a few miles outside Jacksonville. For a long while, he was a shut-in, fighting to breathe even with the oxygen bottles plugged into his nose, and he would reappear only on the prettiest days, when Linda would roll his wheelchair out onto the porch. People coming home from the mill would wave, and a few would stop, but not many. For some of them, he was their future. He died June 5, 2005.

___

The little girl in the mule wagon would get her look at what happened inside those walls. In her childhood, it was the domain of the hill people, mostly. But the mill slowly integrated its work force in the 1970s and 1980s as change came to the world outside its gates. Eula Salter had five children to raise in the 1980s, and the mill was the best chance they had. “I finally did get inside,” she said, “and it was a blessing, for them, for my children.”

Twenty years later, she struggles to breathe. Her lung capacity is down about 50 percent. “I used to tell my preacher, ‘Pray for me, so I can get out of there.’”

She knows, finally, that the people she saw in those windows were a warning, an omen.

“But,” she says, “I did get inside.”

chapter eight

the book of odell

There wasn’t a lot to eat, back then. Me and some of the boys would wait for it to get dark. Then we’d catch the frogs, and cut off their legs. You’d come back the next night and you’d see their eyes glowing, and they’d have no legs. I thought a lot about it. I didn’t know it’d turn around on me.

—From a Depression-era story of the mill village,
by Odell Knight

The machines that shook the ground of the mill village in World War I and into the Roaring Twenties began to sputter and stall in the Great Depression. The plant did not close but the company did not spin one more inch of yarn than it could sell, and when the orders ran out the bosses hurried across the floors with their forefingers slashing at their necks. “Kill it,” they screamed over the din, and in the middle of a shift the machines wound down to that hateful silence. People who had never begged, begged for bones. Mommas scrubbed their toddlers and sent them to churches on the east side, in hopes one of the rich people would invite them to dinner. Children walked the railroad tracks searching for pieces of coal, and played hide-and-seek in the mill warehouse, tunneling through cotton bales that lay rotting, two stories high.

Odell Knight was one of them, still a little boy as the Depression settled hard onto the people of the village. It was a time of deprivation, plain and true, but it was also a time when you could survive if you could peel enough brass and copper off a rich man’s car, when people with no money for a doctor took their babies to a village conjurer who would breathe the fire out of an infected wound. And, if you weren’t careful, you could blow up your own grandmother with a donated potbellied stove.

Here, as Odell wrote it, is what he remembers.

___

The cotton mill my mother worked at was shut down most of the time. In my family it was me and my mother, Ethel Knight. In ’32, my Uncle Charley Romine died and my Grannie Jessie Romine come to live with us. She had three sons, Donald, Elmer and Harold. There was hardly enough to eat. I remember going along Big Spring Branch with my Aunt Maxie, picking watercress and wild onions that grew along near the water.

Jay and Rube Weaver ran a grocery and meat market. Momma would send me and Donald to the store. We would go to the back of the store where they cut up the meat. We would ask Mr. Weaver did he have any bones Momma could make soup with. He always gave us a bag-full, and he made sure he gave us some with a little meat left on them. He knew what shape we and everybody else were in. He and his brother were good men.

Thanks to the Democratic Party, we got free food once a month. It wasn’t much but with watercress and wild onions and fruit in the summer and the help of neighbors, we made it.

___

Mr. John B. Nisbet, a member of the Presbyterian Church, would drive through the village every Sunday morning, picking up kids to go to Sunday School. I remember the old car had running boards on each side, and the car would be full, kids standing on each running board. About once a month he would pick a few of us and take us to his home for dinner…a meal equal to a five-star restaurant, for a bunch of half-starved kids. We didn’t know who would get to go on what Sunday, so we had perfect attendance.

During this time I learned the catechism, a small book of questions and answers from verses out of the Bible. I had to recite standing in front of the congregation. As I remember, I was nervous as a Momma cow with three sore tits.

When I finished, a beautiful, well-dressed lady came up and laid a one-dollar bill in my hand. I ran all the way home thinking of all the ice cream and candy and other good things I could buy. When I got home and told what had happened at church, it was equal to winning the lottery in this day and time. When Momma took the dollar bill and said we would go tomorrow and buy me a new pair of overalls, I seen the dream slip away. I learned later that the Lady who gave me the dollar was Mrs. Ide. She and her husband came down from New York and spent the summer in Jacksonville. Her husband built Ide Cotton Mill that later became Profile.

___

We played in the old oil mill that was used to make cottonseed oil. The cotton, hundreds of bales, was stacked high. We played on top of the bales and in tunnels that ran under and through the bales. One section of the mill, one that was shut down, was still full of machinery. We made some money by selling copper, brass, and iron we took from the building. I remember two Packard automobiles that Mr. Greenleaf had left to rust inside the building. We stripped a lot of copper, aluminum, and brass to sell for scrap off them two cars.

___

The winter months were hard on us. To take a bath, we would bring a large washtub into the kitchen, set large pans of water on the stove and heat the water, then pour it into the tub. A bath was usually taken on Saturday night. The rest of the week we took what’s called a whore’s bath, a pan of water, soap and a wash rag.

We had an open fireplace in the bedroom. You could stay warm if you stayed within four feet of the fire. Getting something to burn in them was the problem. We burned wood and coal and pretty much everything else we could find. Things got so bad one time, me, Donald, and Elmer carried toe sacks and went along the railroad tracks and picked up coal that had fallen off the train. Some of it always fell.

___

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.

___

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.

___

“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.

___

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.

___

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.

___

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.