The Last Ballad(32)
She told Sophia about her family’s life on the tenant farms, then the lumber camps. The music of her mother’s voice around the campfire, the great steaming cauldron of clothes, the smell of pine tar and sap and the reek of the sawyers’ sweat. The deaths: her mother’s, her father’s, Willie’s. John’s sudden appearance in her life and the many disappearances that followed. The countless mills in both Carolinas. Life as the only white family in Stumptown. Losing Willie, her fear of losing Rose: the weight of her children and their lives upon her heart. The jangle of Charlie’s guitar, the sensation of her voice filling her chest and lifting from her throat to meet his music. She told Sophia about waiting at the crossroads, her nervous hand fingering the union leaflet she’d been carrying in her pocket, the many moments that led to the one they now shared in the back of this truck.
Sophia smiled, looked to the road as if still pondering the stories she’d just heard. She looked back at Ella. “Hot damn,” she said. “And you sing too?” She laughed, slapped her knee. “Hell, girl, we hit the jackpot with you. You might be the one we’ve been looking for.”
The early evening sky was dark enough for stars to be seen.
“Look at them stars,” Sophia said, her neck craned, her face turned directly toward the sky. “We don’t got those in Pittsburgh.”
Ella noted Sophia’s smooth neck, her olive skin. It was obvious to Ella, obvious to anyone who might see Sophia, that she had never worked in a cotton mill. She was too healthy, too happy, too at ease in the world and too in love with being alive in it.
Ella had passed through Gastonia—by far the largest city in the county, at almost twenty thousand people—on only a handful of occasions, but she knew it ran on textiles. Everyone across North Carolina, perhaps everyone in the South, knew this about the place that had come to be known as “the City of Spindles.”
Centuries earlier, the area had been settled by Native Americans because of its proximity to a meandering river they called Catawba. The river’s south branch and countless creeks that flowed west toward the Blue Ridge foothills proved especially valuable to the enterprising white settlers who were overrunning the land by the eighteenth century. Whiskey comprised the first wave of industry, bootleggers using waterpower to run their stills and the dense forests to keep them hidden. But it was soon discovered that the swift current was enough to power machinery, and it wasn’t long before the men who once used water to grind corn for whiskey decided that the same power could fuel a revolution in the area’s other primary product: cotton.
The county’s first textile enterprise, the Mountain Island Mill, began operation on the Catawba in 1848, when the county was two years old. Other mills followed. Between the Civil War and the end of World War I, Gastonia’s population tripled and the number of textile mills jumped from four to just under one hundred. Tenant farmers laid down their shovels and escaped the parched land that had never been and never would be theirs. Mountaineers from southern Appalachia left the lumber camps once there were no more trees to be felled, no more ridges to be cleared, no more logs to be floated downstream. Millhands in the South Carolina upstate believed and believed incorrectly that life might be a little better, a little easier, just a few miles north. Ella and John had followed that migration from the North Carolina mountains to the South Carolina mills, had caught the tail end of the snake as it coiled around itself and led them back across the border into Gaston County. Ella had believed that an easy life would eventually be theirs because John had said it would be so, but this was back when she believed the things he told her.
The piedmont mill barkers who stood atop stumps in the lumber camps and in knee-deep mud on the tenant farms had promised safe, sanitary housing in mill villages. Children would be educated at mill-sponsored schools. Souls saved at mill-sponsored churches. Paychecks cashed for scrip at mill-owned stores. It soon became apparent that the circularity of life in these villages differed little from what these former loggers and farmers knew about a life lived close to the land: you were forever in debt, forever hoping for the windfall that never came, forever thinking of ways to move on to another place as soon as you could save the money to do it.
Things were no different at the Loray Mill, the crown jewel of North Carolina’s textile industry. Loray had been built in 1900 and touted as the largest textile mill in the world, and although local investors had funded it, northern interests took note of the abundance of cheap labor, the proximity to raw cotton, the railroads that now crisscrossed the South like lashings. Of particular interest was the looming threat of war and the incredible ways in which it fueled the country’s need for cloth.
Loray’s profits exploded. Demand rose. The barkers went farther into the mountains. More men and women and children tumbled down the hills, swathed in expectations of riches and lush living. The war passed, demand fell, work was hard to come by, although people like Ella chased it from mill to mill, from small town to small town. All they found was filth and disease and the kind of poverty they couldn’t get away from once it took hold of them. American Mill No. 2 in Bessemer City, Rex over in Ranlo, the Cowpens Manufacturing Company down in South Carolina, Loray here in Gastonia: it didn’t matter where you looked, Ella thought, it was the same overwhelming force bearing its weight upon the same powerless group of people; people just like her. The Loray Mill was in Gastonia, but it could have been anywhere in the South. It was all the same.