All They Ever Had

I’ve been reading ‘All They Ever Had’ by Rick Bragg. It’s about Mill life in Northeastern Alabama. His descriptions of the working conditions in the Mill and the people doing the work there are dead on. I know because my people on my fathers side were Mill people and for a year I worked in the Dan River Mill in Clanton.
My great grandfather, Porter King West, lost his right hand in the Mill so did his oldest son my great uncle Raymond. Granpa lost his right hand and Raymond lost his left. One of my first memories is at age three walking up the steps to grandpas house with them sitting on the porch hook to hook. As we, my siblings & cousins, got to the top of the stairs they raised their hooks together and shook them at us. Our squeals and screams set the Aunts on them and as they tried to amend the hook looked as menacing with sweet words as it did with ARGH! I do remember giving into that old mans entreaties and sitting in his lap. I even got up the courage to touch the hook. Latter, after his death, I would cry sometimes thinking how horrible that must have been for him.
My grandfather and grandmother, Maw Maw & Paw Paw, lived in the Mill Village, one house away from the road that ran across the front of the Mill. The front of the Mill was all glass with huge tilt sections that were open most months of the year. The glass was blue & blue green and always was beauty & magic to me. The noise that came from the Mill was not the sound of metal on metal but of the constant unsynchronized movements of the looms, like the roar of a waterfall. Maw Maw was a weaver, a weaver was responsible for keeping several looms running, filling the quill feeder, restarting the loom when it tripped, retying the thread when it broke. Paw Paw was a mechanic, mechanics had to keep the looms working, replacing burnt bearings, worn drive belts.
Paw Paw was proud that his son didn’t ‘go into’ the Mill. My Dad joined the Navy to escape that life. Paw Paw warned me “Get an education boy! Never ‘go into’ the Mill.”
Well after a disastrous first year at Montevallo I needed a job and went ‘into’ the Mill. It was only temporary I told them just until I could get back to school.
OMG! 19 and scared to death. That waterfall roar that had fascinated me as a child now became not just a deafening cacophony but a brutal vibration that came through the floor up my legs meeting the noise in my head somewhere near my heart. It was 93 degrees outside with 90 percent humidity, they were misting water into the air to keep the threads from breaking and the looms were creating their own atmospheric hell.
I didn’t run or cry, although I wanted badly to do both. One reason being I needed the job the other was these people were family, they’d worked beside Maw Maw & Paw Paw.
So I became an oiler. One of the easiest jobs on the floor. They gave Alton, the current oiler one week to train me then moved him to Doffing. Alton had wanted to be a Doffer for years, it paid more, and did his best to see that I knew all of the responsibilities of the job. There were seventeen little oil trays on each loom that I had to wipe the accumulated oil soaked lint from and refill with oil. I had four days to do this to every loom in the mill. I can’t remember today how many looms there were but it took every minute of every day of all four days to get it done. The looms were set back to back in rows with just enough room for the doffer to remove the cloth, the mechanics to make repairs and me to oil the Loom. As I stuck my hand into this Slamming Banging machine to wipe the lint from the tray I kept seeing my great grandpas hook. On the fifth day I had to grease the bearings on one third of the looms on the floor. I had to stop the Loom. To stop the Loom you had to time the action so the shuttle, that was flying back and forth at about one hundred passes a minute, was in the left hand or restarting was a real chore. An improper shut down could send the shuttle flying across the room destroying anything in its path, warp, window, or human. Just a quick description. The shuttle was made from hardwood about fourteen inches long four inches wide and about that tall. It was pointed at both ends with metal tips and hollowed out like an old dugout canoe to accept the quill.
So 5 days after starting I’ve learned to work in Dante’s Inferno while breathing cotton lint in one hundred and 10 percent humidity and see to the lubricating needs of a factory’s worth of Looms. Or so I thought. On Monday of my fourth week while standing in the bathroom smoking a cigarette and trying to listen to sage advice from Alton we heard loud banging noises. Now if you can hear a noise louder than the Looms running something BIG is happening. We looked out to see the first nine Looms on the far row stopped and smoking. The floor manager was quick enough to shut off the main power and saved the rest. Seems that ‘Earl & Zena’s boy’ had missed a major grease fitting on all of the Looms.
Found out latter, after I was ‘out of the Mill’, that they didn’t fire me for the same reason they’d given me the easiest job on the floor, I was ‘Earl & Zena’s boy’. So on Tuesday Alton returned to oiler and I was moved to the graveyard shift running quills to the Weavers.
After returning to school I kept a part time job at the Mill. On Sundays the Mill was closed at 6 AM and I went in to ‘Blow down the Mill’. After a week of running with the misters going and the lint flying it got real dang fuzzy in there. Using compressed air I had to blow all of the lint down from the ceiling, off of the drive shafts and pulleys and the Looms then sweep it up. After working in the violence of that big room being there alone with only the noise of escaping compressed air was spooky. Like there was violence in the floor and air still looking for a victim. I think by mid February I gave the job up, getting to Clanton by 6 AM every Sunday after partying on Saturday night wasn’t working.
I never went ‘back in’, I never gave it much thought until I read ‘All They Ever Had’. If you want to know what a large portion of Alabama’s labor force went through in the first three quarters of the 20th Century get a copy.
I didn’t learn the harder lesson that the Mill should have taught, get an education, but I learned a lot about the people in that Mill and what they went through to ‘just get by’. I also learned that they not only tolerated me and cared about me because I was ‘Earl & Zena’s boy” but because I was ‘in the Mill’ just like they were. No better, no worse. proud to be working.