The Woman Who Toils Part 21

In my simple work garb I leave Columbia and take a trolley to the mill district. I have chosen Excelsior as best for my purpose. Its reputation is most at stake; its prospectus dazzling; its annals effective. If such things are done in Gath...!

I cannot say with what timidity I descend from the tram in this strange country, foreign to my Northern habitation and filled with cla.s.ses whose likeness I have never seen and around which the Southern Negro makes a tad and gloomy background.

Before the trolley has arrived at the corporation stores Excelsior has spoken--roared, clicked forth so vibrantly, so loudly, I am prepared to feel the earth shake. This is the largest mill in the world and looks it! A model, too, in point of view of architecture. I have read in the prospectus that it represents $1,750,000 capital, possesses 104,000 spindles, employs 1,200 hands, and can, with crowding, employ 3,000.

Surely it will have place for one more, then! I am impressed with its grandeur as it rises, red-bricked, with proud, straight towers toward its centre--impressed and frightened by its insistent call as it rattles and hums to me across the one-sixteenth of a mile of arid sand track. At one side Christianity and doctrine have constructed a church: a second one is building. On the other side, at a little distance, lies Granton, second largest mill. All this I take in as I make my way Excelsiorward.

Between me and the vast mill itself there is not a soul. A thick, sandy road winds to the right; in the distance I can see a black trestle over which the freight cars take the cotton manufactures to the distant railroad and ship them to all parts of the world. Beyond the trestle are visible the first shanties of the mill town.

Work first and lodgings afterward are my goals. At the door of Excelsior I am more than overwhelmed by its magnificence and its loud voice that makes itself so far-reachingly heard. There is no entry for me at the front of the mill, and I toil around to the side; not a creature to be seen. I venture upon the landing and make my way along a line of freight cars--between the track and the mill.

A kind-faced man wanders out from an un.o.bserved doorway; a gust of roar follows him! He sees me, and lifts his hat with the ready Southern courtesy not yet extinct. I hasten to ask for work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MIGHTY MILL--PRIDE OF THE ARCHITECT AND THE COMMERCIAL MAGNATE"

"Charnel house, destroyer of homes, of all that mankind calls hallowed; breeder of strife, of strike, of immorality of sedition and riot"]

"Well, thar's jest plenty of work, I reckon! Go in that do'; the overseer will tell you."

Through the door open behind him I catch glimpses of a room enormous in dimensions. Cotton bales lie on the floor, stand around the walls and are piled in the centre. Leaning on them, handling them, lying on them, outstretched, or slipping like shadows into shadow, are the dusky shapes of the black Negro of true Southern blood. I have been told there is no Negro labour in the mills. I take advantage of my guide's kind face to ask him if he knows where I can lodge.

"Hed the measles? Well, my gyrl got 'em. Thar's a powerful sight of measles hyar. I'd take you-all to bo'd at my house ef you ain't 'fraid of measles. Thar's the hotel." (He points to what at the North would be known as a brick shanty.) "A gyrl can bo'd thar for $2.25 a week. You won't make that at first."

With extreme kindness he leads me into the roaring mill past picturesque black men and cotton bales: we reach the "weave-room." I am told that carpet factories are celebrated for their uproar, but the weave-looms of a cotton mill to those who know them need no description! This is chaos before order was conceived: more weird in that, despite the din and thunder, everything is so orderly, so perfectly carried forth by the machinery. Here the cotton cloth is woven. Excelsior is so vast that from one end to the other of a room one cannot distinguish a friend. I decide instantly that the weave-room shall not be my destination! An overseer comes up to me. He talks with me politely and kindly--that is, as well as he can, he talks! It is almost impossible to hear what he says. He asks me simple and few questions and engages me promptly to work that "_evening_" as the Southerner calls the hours after midday.

"You can see all the work and choose a sitting or a standing job." This is an improvement on Pittsburg and Lynn.

I have been told there is always work in the mills for the worker.

It is not strange that every inducement consistent with corporation rules should be made to entice the labouring girl! The difficulty is that no effort is made to keep her! The ease with which, in all these experiences, work has been obtained, goes definitely to prove that there is a demand everywhere for labourers.

_Organize labour, therefore, so well that the work-woman who obtains her task may be able to continue it and keep her health and her self-respect_.

With Excelsior as my future workshop I leave the mill to seek lodging in the mill village.

The houses built by the corporation for the hands are some five or six minutes' walk, not more, from the palace-like structure of the mill proper. To reach them I plod through a roadway ankle-deep in red clay dust. The sun is bright and the air heavy, lifeless and dull; the scene before me is desolate, meager and poverty-stricken in the extreme.

The mill houses are all built exactly alike. Painted in sickly greens and yellows, they rise on stilt-like elevations above the malarial soil.

Here the architect has catered to the different families, different individual tastes in one point of view alone, regarding the number of rooms: They are known as "four-or six-room cottages." In one of the first cottages to the right a wholesome sight--the single wholesome sight I see during my experience--meets my eye. Human kindness has transformed one of the houses into a kindergarten--"Kindergarten" is over the door. A pretty Southern girl, a lady, stands surrounded by her little flock. The handful of half a dozen emanc.i.p.ated children who are not in the mills is refreshing to see. There are very few; the kindergarten flags for lack of little scholars.

I accost her. "Can you tell me any decent place to board?" She is sorry, regards me kindly with the expression I have grown to know--the look the eyes adopt when a person of one cla.s.s addresses her sister in a lower range.

"I am a stranger come out to work in the mills."

But the young lady takes little interest in me. Children are her care.

They surround her, clinging, laughing, calling--little birds fed so gently by the womanly hand. She turns from the working-woman to them, but not before indicating a shanty opposite:

"Mrs. Green lives there in that four-room cottage. She is a good woman."

Through the door's crack I interview Mrs. Green, a pallid, sickly creature, gowned, as are most of the women, in a calico garment made all in one piece. She permits me to enter the room which forms (as do all the front rooms in a mill cottage) bedroom and general living-room.

Here is confusion incarnate--and filthy disorder. The tumbled, dirty bed fills up one-half the room. In it is a little child, shaking with chills. On the bare floor are bits of food, old vegetables, rags, dirty utensils of all sorts of domestic description. The house has a sickening odour. The woman tells me she is too ill to keep tidy--too ill to keep boarders. We do not strike a bargain. "I am only here four months," she said. "Sick ever since I come, and my little girl has fevernaygu."

I wander forth and a child directs me to a six-room cottage, "a real bo'din'-house." I attack it and thus discover the dwelling where I make my home in Excelsior.

From the front room of this dwelling a kitchen opens. Within its shadow I see a Negro washing dishes. A tall woman, taller than most men, angular, white-haired, her face seared by toil and stricken with age, greets me: she is the landlady. At her skirts, catching them and staring at a stranger, wanders a very young child--a blue-eyed, clean little being; a great relief, in point of fact, to the general filth hitherto presented me. The room beyond me is clean. I draw a breath of grat.i.tude.

"Mrs. Jones?"

"Yes, this is Jones' bo'din'-house."

The old woman has a comb in her hand; she has "jest ben com'in' Letty's hair." Letty smiles delightedly.

"This yere's the child of the lady upstairs. The mother's a pore sick thing." Mrs. Jones bends the stiffness of sixty-eight years over the stranger's child. "And grandmaw keeps Letty clean, don't she, Letty? She don't never whip her, neither; jest a little cross to her."

"Can I find lodging here?"

She looks at me. "Yes, ma'am, you kin. I'm full up; got a lot of gentlemen bo'ders, but not many ladies. I got one bed up aloft; you can't have it alone neither, and the baby's mother is sick up there, too. Nuthin' ketchin'. She come here a stranger; the mill was too hard on her; she's ben sick fo' days."

I had made a quick decision and accepted half a bed. I would return at noon.

"Stranger hyar, I reckon?"

"Yes; from Ma.s.sachusetts. A shoe-hand."

She shakes her head: "You wont like the mills."

She draws Letty between her old stiff knees, seats herself on a straight chair, and combs the child's hair on either side its pathetic, gentle little face. So I leave her for the present to return to Columbia and fetch back with me my bundle of clothes.

When I return at noon it is dinner time. I enter and am introduced, with positive grace and courtesy, by my dear old landlady to her son-in-law, "Tommy Jones," a widower, a man in decent store clothes and a Derby hat surrounded by a majestic c.r.a.pe sash. He is nonchalantly loading a large revolver, and thrusts it in his trousers pocket: "Always carry it," he explains; "comes handy!" Then I am presented to the gentlemen boarders.

I beg to go upstairs, with my bundles, and I see for the first time my dwelling part of this shanty.

A ladderlike stair leading directly from the kitchen takes me into the loft. Heavens! the sight of that sleeping apartment! There are three beds in it, sagging beds, covered by calico comforters. The floor is bare; the walls are bare. I have grown to know that "Jones'" is the cleanliest place in the Excelsior village, and yet to our thinking it lacks perfection. Around the bare walls hang the garments of the other women who share the room with me. What humble and pathetic decorations!

poor, miserable clothes--a shawl or two, a coat or two, a cotton wrapper, a hat; and on one nail the miniature clothes of Letty--a little night-dress and a tiny blue cotton dress. I put my bundle down by the side of my bed which I am to share with another woman, and descend, for Mrs. Jones' voice summons me to the midday meal.

The nourishment provided for these thirteen-hour-a-day labourers is as follows: On a tin saucepan there was a little salt pork and on another dish a pile of grease-swimming spinach. A ragged Negro hovered over these articles of diet; the room was full of the smell of frying. After the excitement of my search for work, and the success, if success it can be called that so far had met me, I could not eat; I did not even sit down. I made my excuse. I said that I had had something to eat in Columbia, and started out to the mill.

By the time the mill-hand has reached his home a good fifteen minutes out of the three-quarters of an hour recreation is gone: his food is quickly bolted, and by the time I have reached the little brick hotel pointed out to me that morning and descended to its cellar restaurant, forced myself to drink a cup of sa.s.safras tea, and mounted again into the air, the troop of workers is on the march millward. I join them.

Although the student of philanthropy and the statistician would find difficulty in forcing the countersign of the manufactories, the worker may go everywhere.

I do not see my friend of the morning, the overseer, in the "weave-room"; indeed, there is no one to direct me; but I discover, after climbing the stairs, a room of flying spools and more subdued machinery, and it appears that the spool-room is this man's especial charge. He consigns to me a standing job. A set of revolving spools is designated, and he secures a pretty young girl of about sixteen, who comes cheerfully forward and consents to "learn" me.

Spooling is not disagreeable, and the room is the quietest part of the mill--noisy enough, but calm compared to the others. In Excelsior this room is, of course, enormous, light and well ventilated, although the temperature, on account of some quality of the yarn, is kept at a point of humidity far from wholesome.

"Spooling" is hard on the left arm and the side. Heart disease is a frequent complaint amongst the older spoolers. It is not dirty compared to shoe-making, and whereas one stands to "spool," when one is not waiting for yarn it is constant movement up and down the line. The fact that there are more children than young girls, more young girls than women, proves the simplicity of this task. The cotton comes from the spinning-room to the spool-room, and as the girl stands before her "side," as it is called, she sees on a raised ledge, whirling in rapid vibration, some one hundred huge spools full of yarn; whilst below her, each in its little case, lies a second bobbin of yarn wound like a distaff.

Her task controls machinery in constant motion, that never stops except in case of accident.