The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
her little life to add to the Big Thing's fire.
Within, she was reassured; for there was her familiar spinning frame,
with its bobbins ready to be set to spinning and whirling; and the
room was full of people, many as small as she.
The companionship, even of fear, is helpful.
Besides, the roar and clatter drowned everything else.
Shiloh was too small to see, to know; but had she looked to the right
as she entered, she had seen a sight which would have caused a stone
man to flush with pity. It was Byrd Boyle, one of the mill hands who
ran a slubbing machine, and he held in his arms (because they were
too young to walk so far) twins, a boy and a girl. And they looked
like half made up dolls left out on the grass, weather-beaten by
summer rains. They were too small to know where their places were in
the room, and as their father sat them down, in their proper places,
it took the two together to run one side of a spinner, and the tiny
little workers could scarcely reach to their whirling bobbins.
To the credit of Richard Travis, this working of children under
twelve years of age in the mills was done over his protest. Not so
with Kingsley and his wife, who were experienced mill people from New
England and knew the harm of it--morally, physically. Travis had even
made strict regulations on the subject, only to be overruled by the
combined disapproval of Kingsley and the directors and, strange to
say, of the parents of the children themselves. His determination
that only children of twelve years and over should work in the mill
came to naught, more from the opposition of the parents themselves
than that of Kingsley. These, to earn a little more for the family,
did not hesitate to bring a child of eight to the mill and swear it
was twelve. This and the ruling of the directors,--and worse than
all, the lack of any state law on the subject,--had brought about the
pitiful condition which prevailed then as now in Southern cotton
mills.
There was no talking inside the mill. Only the Big Thing was
permitted to talk. No singing--for songs come from the happy heart of
labor, unshackled. No noise of childhood, though the children were
there. They were flung into an arena for a long day's fight against a
thing of steel and steam, and there was no time for anything save
work, work, work--walk, walk, walk--watch, forever watch,--the
interminable flying whirl of spindle and spool.
Early as it was, the children were late, and were soundly rebuffed by
the foreman.
The scolding hurt only Shiloh--it made her tremble and cry. The
others were hardened--insensible--and took it with about the same
degree of indifference with which caged and starved mice look at the
man who pours over their wire traps the hot water which scalds them
to death.
The fight between steel, steam and child-flesh was on.
Shiloh, Appomattox and Atlanta were spinners.
Spinners are small girls who walk up and down an aisle before a
spinning-frame and piece up the threads which are forever breaking.
There were over a hundred spindles on each side of the frame, each
revolving with the rapidity of an incipient cyclone and snapping
every now and then the delicate white thread that was spun out like
spiders' web from the rollers and the cylinders, making a
balloon-like gown of cotton thread, which settled continuously around
the bobbin.
All day long and into the night, they must walk up and down, between
these two rows of spinning-frames, amid the whirling spindles,
piecing the broken threads which were forever breaking.
It did not require strength, but a certain skill, which,
unfortunately, childhood possessed more than the adult. Not power,
but dexterity, watchfulness, quickness and the ability to walk--as
children walk--and watch--as age should watch.
No wonder that in a few months the child becomes, not the flesh and
blood of its heredity, but the steel and wood of its environment.
Bull Run and Seven Days were doffers, and confined to the same set of
frames. They followed their sisters, taking off the full bobbins and
throwing them into a cart and thrusting an empty bobbin into its
place. This requires an eye of lightning and a hand with the
quickness of its stroke.
For it must be done between the pulsings of the Big Thing's heart--a
flash, a snap, a snarl of broken thread--up in the left hand flies
the bobbin from its disentanglement of thread and skein, and down
over the buzzing point of steel spindles settles the empty bobbin,
thrust over the spindle by the right.
It is all done with two quick movements--a flash and a jerk of one
hand up, and the other down, the eye riveted to the nicety of a
hair's breadth, the stroke downward gauged to the cup of a thimble,
to settle over the point of the spindle's end; for the missing of a
thread's breadth would send a spindle blade through the hand, or
tangle and snap a thread which was turning with a thousand
revolutions in a minute.
_Snap--bang! Snap--bang!_ One hundred and twenty
times--_Snap--bang!_ and back again, went the deft little workers
pushing their cart before them.
Full at last, their cart is whirled away with flying heels to another
machine.
It was a steady, lightning, endless track. Their little trained
fingers betook of their surroundings and worked like fingers of
steel. Their legs seemed made of India rubber. Their eyes shot out
right and left, left and right, looking for the broken threads on the
whirling bobbins as hawks sweep over the marsh grass looking for
mice, and the steel claws, which swooped down on the bobbins when
they found it, made the simile not unsuitable.
Young as she was, Shiloh managed one of these harnessed, fiery lines
of dancing witches, pirouetting on boards of hardened oak or hickory.
Up and down she walked--up and down, watching these endless whirling
figures, her bare fingers pitted against theirs of brass, her bare
feet against theirs shod with iron, her little head against theirs
insensate and unpitying, her little heart against theirs of flame
which throbbed in the boiler's bosom and drove its thousand steeds
with a whip of fire.
In the bloodiest and cruelest days of the Roman Empire, man was
matched against wild beasts. But in the man's hand was the blade of
his ancestors and over his breast the steel ribs which had helped his
people to conquer the world.
And in the Beast's body was a heart!
Ay, and the man was a man--a trained gladiator--and he was nerved by
the cheers of thousands of sympathizing spectators.
And now, centuries after, and in the age of so-called kindness, comes
this battle to be fought over. And the fight, now as then, is for
bread and life.
But how cruelly unfair is the fight of to-day, when the weak and
helpless child is made the gladiator, and the fight is for bread, and
the Beast is of steel and steam, and is soulless and heartless.
Steel--that by which the old gladiator conquered--that is the heart
of the Thing the little one must fight. And the cheers--the glamour
of it is lacking, for the little one cannot hear even the sound of
its own voice--in the roar of the thousand-throated Thing which
drives the Steel Beast on.
Seven o'clock--eight o'clock--Shiloh's head swam--her shoulders
ached, her ears quivered with sensitiveness, and seemed not to catch
sounds any more, but sharp and shooting pains. She was dazed already
and weak; but still the Steam Thing cheered its steel legions on.
Up and down, up and down she walked, her baby thoughts coming to her
as through the roar of a Niagara, through pain and sensitiveness,
through aches and a dull, never-ending sameness.
Nine o'clock! Oh, she was so tired of it all!
Hark, she thought she heard a bird sing in a far off, dreamy way, and
for a moment she made mud pies in the back yard of the hut on the
mountain, under the black-oak in the yard, with the glint of soft
sunshine over everything and the murmur of green leaves in the trees
above, as the wind from off the mountain went through them, and the
anemone, and bellworts, and daisies grew beneath and around. Was it a
bluebird? She had never seen but one and it had built its nest in a
hole in a hollow tree, the summer before she went into the mill to
work.
She listened again--yes, it did sound something like a bluebird,
peeping in a distant far off way, such as she had heard in the cabin
on the mountain before she had ever heard the voice of the Big Thing
at the mill. She listened, and a wave of disappointment swept over
her baby face; for, listening closely, she found it was an unoiled
separator, that peeped in a bluebird way now and then, above the
staccato of some rusty spindle.
But in the song of that bluebird and the glory of an imaginary mud
pie, all the disappointment of what she had missed swept over her.
Ten o'clock--the little fingers throbbed and burned, the tiny legs
were stiff and tired, the little head seemed as a block of wood, but
still the Steam Thing took no thought of rest.
Eleven o'clock--oh, but to rest awhile! To rest under the trees in
the yard, for the sunshine looked so warm and bright out under the
mill-windows, and the memory of that bluebird's song, though but an
imitation, still echoed in her ear. And those mud pies!--she saw them
all around her and in such lovely bits of old broken crockery
and--....
She felt a rude punch in the side. It was Jud Carpenter standing over
her and pointing to where a frowzled broken thread was tangling
itself around a separator. She had dreamed but a minute--half a dozen
threads had broken.
It was a rude punch and it hurt her side and frightened her. With a
snarl and a glare he passed on while Shiloh flew to her bobbin.
This fright made her work the next hour with less fatigue. But she
could not forget the song of the bluebird, and once, when Appomattox
looked at her, she was working her mouth in a song,--a Sunday School
song she had picked up at the Bishop's church. Appomattox could not
hear it--no one had a license to hear a song in the Beast Thing's
Den--nothing was ever privileged to sing but it,--but she knew from
the way her mouth was working that Shiloh was singing.
Oh, the instinct of happiness in the human heart! To sing through
noises and aches and tired feet and stunned, blocky heads. To sing
with no hope before her and the theft of her very childhood--ay, her
life--going on by the Beast Thing and his men.
God intended us to be happy, else He had never put so strong an
instinct there.
Twelve o'clock. The Steam Beast gave a triumphant scream heard above
the roar of shuttle and steel. It was a loud, defiant, victorious
roar which drowned all others.
Then it purred and paused for breath--purred softer and softer
and--slept at last.
It was noon.
The silence now was almost as painful to Shiloh as the noise had
been. The sudden stopping of shuttle and wheel and belt and beam did
not stop the noise in her head. It throbbed and buzzed there in an
echoing ache, as if all the previous sounds had been fire-waves and
these the scorched furrows of its touch. Wherever she turned, the
echo of the morning's misery sounded in her ears.
And now they had forty minutes for noon recess.
They sat in a circle, these five children--and ate their lunch of cold
soda biscuits and fat bacon.
Not a word did they say--not a laugh nor a sound to show they were
children,--not even a sigh to show they were human.
Silently, like wooden things they choked it down and then--O men and
women who love your own little ones--look!
Huddled together on the great, greasy, dirty floor of this mill, in all
the attitudes of tired-out, exhausted childhood, they slept. Shiloh
slept bolt upright, her little head against the spinning-frame, where
all the morning she had chased the bobbins up and down the long aisle.