The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
modern structure which stood in another part of the town, filled with
the necessaries of life as well as the flimsy gewgaws which delight
the heart of the average mill hand. In establishing this store, the
directors followed the usual custom of cotton-mills in smaller towns
of the South; paying their employees part in money and part in
warrants on the store. It is needless to add that the prices paid for
the goods were, in most cases, high enough to cut the wages to the
proper margin. If there was any balance at the end of the month, it
was paid in money.
Kingsley personally supervised this store, and his annual report to
the directors was one of the strong financial things of his
administration.
A crowd of factory hands stood around his desk, and the
Superintendent was busy issuing orders on the store, or striking a
balance for the Secretary and Treasurer to pay in silver.
They stood around tired, wretched, lint- and dust-covered, but
expectant. Few were there compared with the number employed; for the
wages of the minors went to their parents, and as minors included
girls under eighteen and boys under twenty-one, their parents were
there to receive their wages for them.
These children belonged to them as mercilessly as if they had been
slaves, and despite the ties of blood, no master ever more
relentlessly collected and appropriated the wages of his slaves than
did the parents the pitiful wages of their children.
There are two great whippers-in in the child slavery of the
South--the mills which employ the children and the parents who permit
it--encourage it. Of these two the parents are often the worse, for,
since the late enactment of child labor laws, they do not hesitate to
stultify themselves by false affidavits as to the child's real age.
Kingsley had often noticed how promptly and even proudly the girls,
after reaching eighteen, and the boys twenty-one, had told him
hereafter to place their wages to their own credit, and not to the
parent's. They seemed to take a new lease on life. Decrepit,
drawn-faced, hump-shouldered and dried up before their time, the few
who reached the age when the law made them their own masters, looked
not like men and women who stand on the threshold of life, but rather
like over-worked middle-aged beings of another period.
Yet that day their faces put on a brighter look.
They stood around the office desk, awaiting their turn. The big
engine had ceased to throb and the shuttles to clatter and whirl. The
mill was so quiet that those who had, year in and year out, listened
to its clatter and hum, seemed to think some overhanging calamity was
about to drop out of the sky of terrible calm.
"Janette Smith," called out Kingsley.
She came forward, a bony, stoop-shouldered woman of thirty-five years
who had been a spooler since she was fifteen.
"Seventy-seven hours for the week"--he went on mechanically, studying
the time book, "making six dollars and sixteen cents. Rent deducted
two dollars. Wood thirty-five cents. Due commissary for goods
furnished--here, Mr. Kidd," he said to the book-keeper, "let me see
Miss Smith's account." It was shoved to him across the desk. Kingsley
elevated his glasses. Then he adjusted them with a peculiar lilt--it
was his way of being ironical:
"Oh, you don't owe the store anything, Miss Smith--just eleven
dollars and eighty cents."
The woman stood stoically--not a muscle moved in her face, and not
even by the change of an eye did she indicate that such a thing as
the ordinary human emotions of disappointment and fear had a home in
the heart.
"Mother was sick all last month," she said at last in a voice that
came out in the same indifferent, unvarying tone. "I had to
overdraw."
Kingsley gave his eye-glasses another lilt. They said as plainly as
eye-glasses could: "Well, of course, I made her sick." Then he added
abruptly: "We will advance you two dollars this week--an' that will
be all."
"I hoped to get some little thing that she could eat--some relish,"
she began.
"Not our business, Miss Smith--sorry--very sorry--but try to be more
economical. Economy is the great objective haven of life. Emerson
says so. And Browning in a most beautiful line of poetry says the
same thing," he added.
"The way to begin economy is to begin it--Emerson is so helpful to
me--he always comes in at the right time."
"And it's only to be two dollars," she added.
"That's all," and he pushed her the order. She took it, cashed it and
went hurriedly out, her poke bonnet pulled over her face. But there
were hot tears and a sob under her bonnet.
And so it went on for two hours--some drawing nothing, but remaining
to beg for an order on the store to keep them running until next
week.
One man with six children in the mill next came forward and drew
eighteen dollars. He smiled complacently as he drew it and chucked
the silver into his pocket. This gave Jud Carpenter, standing near, a
chance to get in his mill talk.
"I tell you, Joe Hopper," he said, slapping the man on the back,
"that mill is a great thing for the mothers an' fathers of this
little settlement. What 'ud we do if it warn't for our chillun?"
"You're talkin now--" said Joe hopefully.
"It useter be," said Jud, looking around at his crowd, "that the
parents spoiled the kids, but now it is the kids spoilin' the
parents."
His audience met this with smiles and laughter.
"I never did know before," went on Jud, "what that old sayin' really
meant: 'A fool for luck an' a po' man for chillun.'"
Another crackling laugh.
"How much did Joe Hopper's chillun fetch 'im in this week?"
Joe jingled his silver in his pocket and spat importantly on the
floor.
"I tell you, when I married," said Jud, "I seed nothin' but poverty
an' the multiplication of my part of the earth ahead of me--poverty,
I tell you, starvation an' every new chile addin' to it. But since
you started this mill, Mister Kingsley (Kingsley smiled and bowed
across the desk at him), I've turned what everybody said 'ud starve
us into ready cash. And now I say to the young folks: 'Marry an'
multiply an' the cash will be forthcomin'.'"
This was followed by loud laughs, especially from those who were
blessed with children, and they filed up to get their wages.
Jim Stallings, who had four in the mill, was counted out eleven
dollars. As he pocketed it he looked at Jud and said:
"Oh, no, Jud; it don't pay to raise chillun. I wish I had the chance
old Sollerman had. I'd soon make old Vanderbilt look like shin
plaster."
He joined in the laughter which followed.
In the doorway he cut a pigeon-wing in which his thin, bowed legs
looked comically humorous.
Jud Carpenter was a power in the mill, standing as he did so near to
the management. To the poor, ignorant ones around him he was the
mouth-piece of the mill, and they feared him even more than they did
Kingsley himself, Kingsley with his ironical ways and lilting
eye-glasses. With them Jud's nod alone was sufficient.
They were still grouped around the office awaiting their turn. In the
faces of some were shrewdness, cunning, hypocrisy. Some looked out
through dull eyes, humbled and brow-beaten and unfeeling. But all of
them when they spoke to Jud Carpenter--Jud Carpenter who stood in
with the managers of the mill--became at once the grinning, fawning
framework of a human being.
"Yes, boys," said Jud patronizingly as Stallings went out, "this here
mill is a god-send to us po' folks who've got chillun to burn. They
ain't a day we ortenter git down on our knees an' thank Mr. Kingsley
an' Mister Travis there. You know I done took down that sign I useter
have hangin' up in my house in the hall--that sign which said, _God
bless our home_? I've put up another one now."
"What you done put up now, Jud?" grinned a tall weaver with that
blank look of expectancy which settles over the face of the middle
man in a negro minstrel troupe when he passes the stale question to
the end man, knowing the joke which was coming.
"Why, I've put up," said Jud brutally, "'_Suffer Little Children to
Come Unto Me_.' That's scriptural authority for cotton mills, ain't
it?"
The paying went on, after the uproarious laughter had subsided, and
down the long row only the clinking of silver was heard, intermingled
now and then with the shrill voice of some creature disputing with
Kingsley about her account. Generally it ran thus: "_It cyant be thet
away. Sixty hours at five cents an hour--wal, but didn't the chillun
wuck no longer than that? I cyant--I cyant--I jes' cyant live on that
little bit._"
Such it was, and it floated down the line to Helen like the wail of a
lost soul. When her time came Kingsley met her with a smile. Then he
gave her an order and Travis handed her a bright crisp ten-dollar
bill.
She looked at him in astonishment. "But--but," she said. "Surely, I
didn't earn all this, did I? Maggie--you had to pay Maggie for
teaching me this week. It was she who earned it. I cannot take it."
Kingsley smiled: "If you must know--though we promised her we would
not tell you," he said--"no, Miss Conway, you did not earn but five
dollars this week. The other five is Maggie's gift to you--she left
it here for you."
She looked at him stupidly--in dazed gratitude. Travis came forward:
"I've ordered Jim to take you home to-night. I cannot leave now."
And he led her out to where the trotters stood. He lifted her in,
pressing her hand as he did so--but she did not know it--she burned
with a strange fullness in her throat as she clutched her money, the
first she had ever earned, and thought of Maggie--Maggie, dying and
unselfish.
Work--it had opened a new life to her. Work--and never before had she
known the sweetness of it.
"Oh, father," she said when she reached home, "I have made some
money--I can support you and Lily now."
When Travis returned Jud Carpenter met him at the door.
"I had a mess o' trouble gittin' that gal into the mill. Huh! but
ain't she a beaut! I guess you 'orter tip me for throwin' sech a
peach as that into yo' arms. Oh, you're a sly one--" he went on
whisperingly--"the smoothest one with women I ever seed. But you'll
have to thank me for that queen. Guess I'll go down an' take a dram.
I want to git the lint out of my throat."
"I'll be down later," said Travis as he looked at his watch. "Charley
Biggers and I. It's our night to have a little fun with the boys."
"I'll see you there," said Jud.
The clinking of silver, questions, answers, and expostulations went
on. In the midst of it there was the sudden shrill wail of an angry
child.
"I wants some of my money, Paw--I wants to buy a ginger man."
Then came a cruel slap which was heard all over the room, and the boy
of ten, a wild-eyed and unkempt thing, staggered and grasped his face
where the blow fell.
"Take that, you sassy meddling up-start--you belong to me till you
are twenty-one years old. What 'ud you do with a ginger man 'cept to
eat it?" He cuffed the boy through the door and sent him flying home.
It was Joe Sykes, the wages of whose children kept him in active
drunkenness and chronic inertia. He was the champion loafer of the
town.
In a short time he had drawn a pocketful of silver, and going out
soon overtook Jud Carpenter.
"I tell you, Jud, we mus' hold these kids down--we heads of the
family. I've mighty nigh broke myself down this week a controllin'
mine. Goin' down to take a drink or two? Same to you."
CHAPTER VI
THE PLOT
A village bar-room is a village hell.
Jud Carpenter and Joe Hopper were soon there, and the silver their
children had earned at the mill began to go for drinks.
The drinks made them feel good. They resolved to feel better, so they
drank again. As they drank the talk grew louder. They were joined by