The Woman Who Toils Part 27

"Why?"

"Her maw hunts her to the mill; she don't want to go--no, sir--so she's mad most the time."

Thus she sets her dogged resistance in scowling black looks, in quick, frantic gestures and motions against the machinery that claims her impotent childhood. The nimbus around her furze of hair remains; there are other heads than saints--there are martyrs! Let the child wear her crown.

Through the looms I catch sight of Upton's, my landlord's, little child. She is seven; so small that they have a box for her to stand upon. She is a pretty, frail, little thing, a spooler--"a good spooler, tew!" Through the frames on the other side I can only see her fingers as they clutch at the flying spools; her head is not high enough, even with the box, to be visible. Her hands are fairy hands, fine-boned, well-made, only they are so thin and dirty, and her nails--claws; she would do well to have them cut. A nail can be torn from the finger, _is_ torn from the finger frequently,[9] by this flying spool. I go over to Upton's little girl. Her spindles are not thinner nor her spools whiter.

[Footnote 9: In Huntsville, Alabama, a child of eight lost her index and middle fingers of the right hand in January, 1902. One doctor told me that he had amputated the fingers of more than a hundred babies. A merchant told me he had _frequently_ seen children whose hands had been cut off by the machinery.--_American Federationist_.]

"How old are you?"

"Ten."

She looks six. It is impossible to know if what she says is true. The children are commanded both by parents and bosses to advance their ages when asked.

"Tired?"

She nods, without stopping. She is a "remarkable fine hand." She makes forty cents a day. See the value of this labour to the manufacturer--cheap, yet skilled; to the parent it represents $2.40 per week.

I must not think that as I work beside them I will gain their confidence! They have no time to talk. Indeed, conversation is not well looked upon by the bosses, and I soon see that unless I want to entail a sharp reproof for myself and them I must stick to my "side." And at noon I have no heart to take their leisure. At twelve o'clock, Minnie, a little spooler, scarcely higher than her spools, lifts her hands above her head and exclaims: _"Thank G.o.d, there's the whistle!"_ I watched them disperse: some run like mad, always bareheaded, to fetch the dinner-pail for mother or father who work in the mill and who choose to spend these little legs and spare their own. It takes ten minutes to go, ten to return, and the little labourer has ten to devote to its own food, which, half the time, he is too exhausted to eat.

I watch the children crouch on the floor by the frames; some fall asleep between the mouthfuls of food, and so lie asleep with food in their mouths until the overseer rouses them to their tasks again. Here and there totters a little child just learning to walk; it runs and crawls the length of the mill. Mothers who have no one with whom to leave their babies bring them to the workshop, and their lives begin, continue and end in the horrible pandemonium.

One little boy pa.s.ses by with his broom; he is whistling. I look up at the cheery sound that pierces fresh but faint and natural above the machines' noise. His eyes are bright; his good spirits surprise me: here is an argument for my comfortable friends who wish to prove that the children "are happy!" I stop him.

"You seem very jolly!"

He grins.

"How long have you been working?"

"Two or three days."

The gay creature has just _begun_ his servitude and brings into the dreary monotony a flash of the spirit which should fill childhood.

I think it will be granted that it takes a great deal to discourage and dishearten a child. The hopefulness of the mill communities lies in just those elements that overwork in the adult and that child labour will ultimately destroy. When hope is gone in the adult he must wreak some vengeance on the bitter fate that has robbed him. There is no more tragic thing than the hopeless child. The adult who grows hopeless can affiliate with the malcontents and find in the insanity of anarchy what he calls revenge.

It seems folly to insult the common sense of the public by asking them whether they think that thirteen hours a day, with a half to three-quarters of an hour for recreation at noon, or the same amount of night-work in a mill whose atmosphere is vile with odours, humid with unhealthfulness, filled with the particles of flying cotton, a pandemonium of noise and deafening roar, so deafening that the loss of hearing is frequent and the keenness of hearing always dulled ...

whether the atmosphere combined with the a.s.sociation of men and women whose morals or lack of morals is notorious all over the world, is good for a growing child? Is it conducive to progressive development, to the making of decent manhood or womanhood? What kind of citizen can this child--if he is fit enough in the economic struggle of the world to survive--turn out to be? Not citizens at all: creatures scarcely fit to be called human beings.

I asked the little girl who teaches me to spool who the man is whom I have seen riding around on horseback through the town.

"Why, he goes roun' rousin' up the hands who ain't in their places.

Sometimes he takes the children outen thayre bades an' brings 'em back to the mill."

And if the child can stand, it spins and spools until it drops, till const.i.tution rebels, and death, the only friend it has ever known, sets it free.

Besides being spinners and spoolers, and occasionally weavers even, the children sweep the cotton-strewed floors. Scarcely has the miserable little object, ragged and odourous, pa.s.sed me with his long broom, which he drags half-heartedly along, than the s.p.a.ce he has swept up is cotton-strewn again. It settles with discouraging rapidity; it has also settled on the child's hair and clothes, and his eyelashes, and this atmosphere he breathes and fairly eats, until his lungs become diseased.

Pneumonia--fatal in nearly all cases here--and lung fever had been a pestilence, "a regular plague," before I came. There were four cases in the village where I, lived, and fever and ague, malaria and grippe did their parts.

"Why, thar ain't never a haouse but's got somebody sick," my little teacher informed me in her soft Southern dialect. "I suttinly never did see a place like this for dyin' in winter time. I reckon et's funerals every day."

Here is a little child, not more than seven years old. The land is a hot enough country, we will concede, but not a savage South Sea Island! She has on one garment, if a tattered sacking dress can so be termed. Her bones are nearly through her skin, but her stomach is an unhealthy pouch, abnormal. _She has dropsy._ She works in _a new mill_--in one of the largest mills in South Carolina. Here is a slender little boy--a birch rod (good old simile) is not more slender, but the birch has the advantage: it is elastic--it bends, has youth in it. This boy looks ninety. He is a dwarf; twelve years old, he appears seven, no more. He sweeps the cotton off the floor of "the baby mill." (How tenderly and proudly the owners speak of their brick and mortar.) He sweeps the cotton and lint from the mill aisles from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. without a break in the night's routine. He stops of his own accord, however, to cough and expectorate--he has advanced tuberculosis.

At night the shanties receive us. On a pine board is spread our food--can you call it nourishment? The hominy and mola.s.ses is the best part; salt pork and ham are the strong victuals.

It is eight o'clock when the children reach their homes--later if the mill work is behindhand and they are kept over hours. They are usually beyond speech. They fall asleep at the table, on the stairs; they are carried to bed and there laid down as they are, unwashed, undressed; and the inanimate bundles of rags so lie until the mill summons them with its imperious cry before sunrise, while they are still in stupid sleep:

"What do you do on Sundays?" I asked one little girl.

"Why, thare ain't nothing much to dew. I go to the park sometimes."

This park is at the end of a trolley line; it is their Arcadia. Picture it! A few yellow sand hills with cl.u.s.ters of pine trees and some scrubby undergrowth; a more desolate, arid, gloomy pleasure ground cannot be conceived. On Sundays the trolleys bring those who are not too tired to so spend the day. On Sundays the mill shanties are full of sleepers.

The park has a limited number of devotees. Through the beautyless paths and walks the figures pa.s.s like shadows. There come three mill girls arm in arm; their curl papers, screwed tight all the week, are out on Sunday, in greasy, abundant curls. Sunday clothes are displayed in all their superbness. Three or four young men, town fellows, follow them; they are all strangers, but they will go home arm in arm.

Several little children, who have no clothes but those, they wear, cling close to the side of a gaunt, pale-faced man, who carries in his arms the youngest. The little girl has become a weight to be carried on Sundays; she has worked six days of the week--shall she not rest on the seventh? She shall; she claims this, and lies inert on the man's arm, her face already seared with the scars of toil.

I ran such risk taking pictures that I relinquished the task, and it was only the last day at the mill, while still in my working clothes with a camera concealed in my pocket, that I contrived to get a picture or two.

I ventured to ask two little boys who swept the mill to stand for their pictures.

"I don't kyar to," the older one said. I explained that it would not hurt them, as I thought he was afraid; but his little companion vouchsafed: "We-all ain't got no nickel." When they understood it was a free picture they were as delighted as possible and posed with alacrity, making touching apologies for their greasy, dirty condition.

When I asked one of them if he was ever clean, he said: "On Sunday I wash my hands."

It was noon, on the day I chose to leave ----, turning my back on the mill that had allured me to its doors and labour. In South Carolina early April is torrid, flies and mosquitoes are rampant. What must this settlement be in midsummer heat? There is no colour in the Southern scene; the clothes of the mill-hands, the houses, the soil are of one tone--and, more strange, there is not one line of red, one dash of life, in the faces of the hundreds of women and children that pa.s.s me on their way back to work.

Under the existing circ.u.mstances they have no outlook, these people, no hope; their appearance expresses accurately the changeless routine of an existence devoted to eternal ignorance, eternal toil.

From their short half-hour of mid-noon rest, the whistle, piercing, inanimate call, has dared to command the slavish obedience of animate and intelligent beings. I pause by the trestle over which rumble the cars, heavily laden with the cotton cloth whose perfection has made this Southern mill justly famous.

The file of humanity that pa.s.ses me I shall never forget! The Blank Mill claims 1,500 of these labourers; at least 200 are children. The little things run and keep step with the older men and women; their s.h.a.ggy, frowzled heads are bent, their hands protrude pitifully from their sleeves; they are barefooted, bareheaded. With these little figures the elements wanton; they can never know the fullness of summer or the proper maturity of autumn. Suns have burned them, rains have fallen upon them, as unprotected through storms they go to their work. The winter winds have penetrated the tatters with blades like knives; gray and dusty and earth-coloured the line pa.s.ses. These are children? No, they are wraiths of childhood--they are effigies of youth! What can Hope work in this down-trodden soil for any future harvest? They can curse and swear; they chew tobacco and take snuff. When they speak at all their voices are feeble; ears long dulled by the thunder of the mill are no longer keen to sound; their speech is low and scarcely audible. Over sallow cheeks where the skin is tightly drawn their eyes regard you suspiciously, malignantly even, never with the frank look of childhood.

As the long afternoon goes by in its hours of leisure for us fatigue settles like a blight over their features, their expressions darken to elfish strangeness, whilst sullen lines, never to be eradicated, mark the distinctive visages of these children of labour.

At certain seasons of the year they actually die off like flies. They fall subject, not to children's diseases exactly--nothing really natural seems to come into the course of these little existences--they fall a prey to the maladies that are the outcomes of their conditions. They are always half-clad in the winter time; their clothes differ nothing at all from their summer clothes; they have no overcoats or coats; many of them go barefoot all winter long. They come out from the hot mills into cold, raw winds and fall an easy prey to pneumonia, scourge of the mill-town.

Their general health is bad all the year round; their skins and complexions have taken the tone of the sandy soil of the Southern country in which they are bred and in which their martyrdom is accomplished. I never saw a rosy cheek nor a clear skin: these are the parchment editions of childhood on which Tragedy is written indelibly.

You can there read the eternal condemnation of those who have employed them for the sake of gain.

It is a melancholy satisfaction to believe that mill labour will kill off little spinners and spoolers. Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. There are const.i.tutions that survive all the horrors of existence.

I have worked both in Ma.s.sachusetts and the South beside women who entered the mill service at eight years of age. One of these was still in her girlhood when I knew her. She was very strong, very good and still had some illusions left. I do not know what it goes to prove, when I say that at twenty, in spite of twelve years of labour, she still dreamed, still hoped, still longed and prayed _for something that was not a mill_. If this means content in servitude, if this means that the poor white trash are born slaves, or if, on the contrary, it means that there is something inherent in a woman that will carry her past suicide and past idiocy and degradation, all of which is around her, I think it argues well for the working women.

The other woman was forty. She had no illusions left--please remember she had worked since eight; she had reached, if you like, the idiot stage. She had nothing to offer during all the time I knew her but a few sentences directly in connection with her toil.

It is useless to advance the plea that spooling is not difficult. No child (we will cancel under twelve!) should work at all. No human creature should work thirteen hours a day. No baby of six, seven or eight should be seen in the mills.

It is also useless to say that these children tell you that they "like the mill." They are beaten by their parents if they do not tell you this, and, granted that they do not like their servitude, when was it thought expedient that a child should direct its existence? If they do not pa.s.s the early years of their lives in study, when should they learn? At what period of their lives should the children of the Southern mill-hand be educated? Long before they reach their teens their habits are formed--ignorance is ingrained; indeed, after a few years they are so vitally reduced that if you will you cannot teach them. Are these little American children, then, to have no books but labour? No recreation? To be crushed out of life to satisfy the ignorance and greed of their parents, the greed of the manufacturers? Whatever else we are, we are financiers _per se_. The fact that to-day, as for years past, Southern cotton mills are employing the labour of children under tender age--employing an army of them to the number of twenty thousand under twelve--can only be explained by a frank admittal that infantile labour has been considered advantageous to the cause of gain.

This gain, apparent by the facts that a mill can be run for thousands of dollars less in the South than a like mill can be run in the North, and its net surplus profits be the same as those of the Northern manufactory, is one by which one generation alone will profit. The attractiveness of the figures is fallacious. What I imply is self-evident. The infant population (its numbers give it a right to this dignity of term) whose cheap toil feeds the mills is doomed. I mean to say that the rank and file of humanity are daily weeded out; that thousands of possibly strong, healthy, mature labouring men and women are being disease-stricken, hounded out of life; the cotton mill child cannot develop to the strong normal adult working-man and woman. The fiber exhausted in the young body cannot be recreated. Early death carries hundreds out of life, disease rots the remainder, and the dulled maturity attained by a creature whose life has been pa.s.sed in this labour is not fit to propagate the species.