The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Woman Who Toils
by Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
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Title: The Woman Who Toils
Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls
Author: Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
Release Date: March 1, 2005 [EBook #15218]
Language: English
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Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Alicia Williams and the PG Online
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[Illustration: MRS. JOHN VAN VORST AS "ESTHER KELLY" Wearing the
costume of the pickle factory]
[Illustration: MISS MARIE VAN VORST AS "BELL BALLARD" At work in a shoe
factory]
* * * * *
THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
_Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls_
BY
MRS. JOHN VAN VORST
and
MARIE VAN VORST
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK:
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1903
* * * * *
DEDICATION
To Mark Twain
In loving tribute to his genius, and to his human sympathy, which in
Pathos and Seriousness, as well as in Mirth and Humour, have made him
kin with the whole world:--
this book is inscribed by
BESSIE and MARIE VAN VORST.
* * * * *
PREFATORY LETTER FROM THEODORE ROOSEVELT
_Written after reading Chapter III. when published serially_
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, October 18, 1902.
_My Dear Mrs. Van Vorst_:
_I must write you a line to say how much I have appreciated
your article, "The Woman Who Toils." But to me there is a most
melancholy side to it, when you touch upon what is
fundamentally infinitely more important than any other
question in this country--that is, the question of race
suicide, complete or partial_.
_An easy, good-natured kindliness, and a desire to be
"independent"--that is, to live one's life purely according to
one's own desires--are in no sense substitutes for the
fundamental virtues, for the practice of the strong, racial
qualities without which there can be no strong races--the
qualities of courage and resolution in both men and women, of
scorn of what is mean, base and selfish, of eager desire to
work or fight or suffer as the case may be provided the end to
be gained is great enough, and the contemptuous putting aside
of mere ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance of toil and
worry. I do not know whether I most pity or most despise the
foolish and selfish man or woman who does not understand that
the only things really worth having in life are those the
acquirement of which normally means cost and effort. If a man
or woman, through no fault of his or hers, goes throughout
life denied those highest of all joys which spring only from
home life, from the having and bringing up of many healthy
children, I feel for them deep and respectful sympathy--the
sympathy one extends to the gallant fellow killed at the
beginning of a campaign, or the man who toils hard and is
brought to ruin by the fault of others. But the man or woman
who deliberately avoids marriage, and has a heart so cold as
to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to
dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the
race, and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by
all healthy people_.
_Of course no one quality makes a good citizen, and no one
quality will save a nation. But there are certain great
qualities for the lack of which no amount of intellectual
brilliancy or of material prosperity or of easiness of life
can atone, and which show decadence and corruption in the
nation just as much if they are produced by selfishness and
coldness and ease-loving laziness among comparatively poor
people as if they are produced by vicious or frivolous luxury
in the rich. If the men of the nation are not anxious to work
in many different ways, with all their might and strength, and
ready and able to fight at need, and anxious to be fathers of
families, and if the women do not recognize that the greatest
thing for any woman is to be a good wife and mother, why, that
nation has cause to be alarmed about its future_.
_There is no physical trouble among us Americans. The trouble
with the situation you set forth is one of character, and
therefore we can conquer it if we only will._
_Very sincerely yours,_
_THEODORE ROOSEVELT._
* * * * *
PREFATORY NOTE
A portion of the material in this book appeared serially under the same
title in _Everybody's Magazine_. Nearly a third of the volume has not
been published in any form.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
By MRS. JOHN VAN VORST
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Introductory 1
II. In a Pittsburg Factory 7
III. Perry, a New York Mill Town 59
IV. Making Clothing in Chicago 99
V. The Meaning of It All 155
By MARIE VAN VORST
CHAPTER PAGE
VI. Introductory 165
VII. A Maker of Shoes at Lynn 169
VIII. The Southern Cotton Mills 215
The Mill Village
The Mill
IX. The Child in the Southern Mills 275
* * * * *
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Miss Marie and Mrs. John Van Vorst in their factory costumes,
_Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
"The streets are covered with snow, and over the snow the soot
falls softly like a mantle of perpetual mourning," 12
"Waving arms of smoke and steam, a symbol of spent energy, of the
lives consumed, and vanishing again," 58
"They trifle with love," 70
After Saturday night's shopping, 84
Sunday evening at Silver Lake, 96
"The breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy
with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards," 102
In a Chicago theatrical costume factory, 114
Chicago types, 128
The rear of a Chicago tenement, 144
A delicate type of beauty at work in a Lynn shoe factory, 172
One of the swells of the factory: a very expert "vamper,"
an Irish girl, earning from $10 to $14 a week, 172
"Learning" a new hand, 184
The window side of Miss K.'s parlour at Lynn, Mass., 196
"Fancy gumming," 210
An all-round, experienced hand, 210
"Mighty mill--pride of the architect and the commercial magnate," 220
"The Southern mill-hand's face is unique, a fearful type," 240
* * * * *
THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTORY
BY
MRS. JOHN VAN VORST
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Any journey into the world, any research in literature, any study of
society, demonstrates the existence of two distinct classes designated
as the rich and the poor, the fortunate and the unfortunate, the upper
and the lower, the educated and the uneducated--and a further variety of
opposing epithets. Few of us who belong to the former category have come
into more than brief contact with the labourers who, in the factories or
elsewhere, gain from day to day a livelihood frequently insufficient for
their needs. Yet all of us are troubled by their struggle, all of us
recognize the misery of their surroundings, the paucity of their moral
and esthetic inspiration, their lack of opportunity for physical
development. All of us have a longing, pronounced or latent, to help
them, to alleviate their distress, to better their condition in some, in
every way.
Now concerning this unknown class whose oppression we deplore we have
two sources of information: the financiers who, for their own material
advancement, use the labourer as a means, and the philanthropists who
consider the poor as objects of charity, to be treated sentimentally,
or as economic cases to be studied theoretically. It is not by economics
nor by the distribution of bread alone that we can find a solution for
the social problem. More important for the happiness of man is the hope
we cherish of eventually bringing about a reign of justice and equality
upon earth.
It is evident that, in order to render practical aid to this class, we
must live among them, understand their needs, acquaint ourselves with
their desires, their hopes, their aspirations, their fears. We must
discover and adopt their point of view, put ourselves in their
surroundings, assume their burdens, unite with them in their daily
effort. In this way alone, and not by forcing upon them a preconceived
ideal, can we do them real good, can we help them to find a moral,
spiritual, esthetic standard suited to their condition of life. Such an
undertaking is impossible for most. Sure of its utility, inspired by its
practical importance, I determined to make the sacrifice it entailed and
to learn by experience and observation what these could teach. I set out
to surmount physical fatigue and revulsion, to place my intellect and
sympathy in contact as a medium between the working girl who wants help
and the more fortunately situated who wish to help her. In the papers
which follow I have endeavoured to give a faithful picture of things as
they exist, both in and out of the factory, and to suggest remedies that
occurred to me as practical. My desire is to act as a mouthpiece for
the woman labourer. I assumed her mode of existence with the hope that I
might put into words her cry for help. It has been my purpose to find
out what her capacity is for suffering and for joy as compared with
ours; what tastes she has, what ambitions, what the equipment of woman
is as compared to that of man: her equipment as determined,
1st. By nature,
2d. By family life,
3d. By social laws;
what her strength is and what her weaknesses are as compared with the
woman of leisure; and finally, to discern the tendencies of a new
society as manifested by its working girls.
After many weeks spent among them as one of them I have come away
convinced that no earnest effort for their betterment is fruitless. I am
hopeful that my faithful descriptions will perhaps suggest, to the
hearts of those who read, some ways of rendering personal and general
help to that class who, through the sordidness and squalour of their
material surroundings, the limitation of their opportunities, are
condemned to slow death--mental, moral, physical death! If into their
prison's midst, after the reading of these lines, a single death pardon
should be carried, my work shall not have been in vain.
* * * * *
IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
* * * * *
CHAPTER II
IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
In choosing the scene for my first experiences, I decided upon
Pittsburg, as being an industrial centre whose character was determined
by its working population. It exceeds all other cities of the country in
the variety and extent of its manufacturing products. Of its 321,616
inhabitants, 100,000 are labouring men employed in the mills. Add to
these the great number of women and girls who work in the factories and
clothing shops, and the character of the place becomes apparent at a
glance. There is, moreover, another reason which guided me toward this
Middle West town without its like. This land which we are accustomed to
call democratic, is in reality composed of a multitude of kingdoms whose
despots are the employers--the multi-millionaire patrons--and whose
serfs are the labouring men and women. The rulers are invested with an
authority and a power not unlike those possessed by the early barons,
the feudal lords, the Lorenzo de Medicis, the Cheops; but with this
difference, that whereas Pharaoh by his unique will controlled a
thousand slaves, the steel magnate uses, for his own ends also,
thousands of separate wills. It was a submissive throng who built the
pyramids. The mills which produce half the steel the world requires are
run by a collection of individuals. Civilization has undergone a change.
The multitudes once worked for one; now each man works for himself first
and for a master secondarily. In our new society where tradition plays
no part, where the useful is paramount, where business asserts itself
over art and beauty, where material needs are the first to be satisfied,
and where the country's unclaimed riches are our chief incentive to
effort, it is not uninteresting to find an analogy with the society in
Italy which produced the Renaissance. Diametrically opposed in their
ideals, they have a common spirit. In Italy the rebirth was of the love
of art, and of classic forms, the desire to embellish--all that was
inspired by culture of the beautiful; the Renaissance in America is the
rebirth of man's originality in the invention of the useful, the virgin
power of man's wits as quickened in the crude struggle for life.
Florence is _par excellence_ the place where we can study the Italian
Renaissance; Pittsburg appealed to me as a most favourable spot to watch
the American Renaissance, the enlivening of energies which give value to
a man devoid of education, energies which in their daily exercise with
experience generate a new force, a force that makes our country what it
is, industrially and economically. So it was toward Pittsburg that I
first directed my steps, but before leaving New York I assumed my
disguise. In the Parisian clothes I am accustomed to wear I present the
familiar outline of any woman of the world. With the aid of coarse
woolen garments, a shabby felt sailor hat, a cheap piece of fur, a
knitted shawl and gloves I am transformed into a working girl of the
ordinary type. I was born and bred and brought up in the world of the
fortunate--I am going over now into the world of the unfortunate. I am
to share their burdens, to lead their lives, to be present as one of
them at the spectacle of their sufferings and joys, their ambitions and
sorrows.
I get no farther than the depot when I observe that I am being treated
as though I were ignorant and lacking in experience. As a rule the
gateman says a respectful "To the right" or "To the left," and trusts to
his well-dressed hearer's intelligence. A word is all that a moment's
hesitation calls forth. To the working girl he explains as follows: "Now
you take your ticket, do you understand, and I'll pick up your money for
you; you don't need to pay anything for your ferry--just put those three
cents back in your pocket-book and go down there to where that gentleman
is standing and he'll direct you to your train."
This without my having asked a question. I had divested myself of a
certain authority along with my good clothes, and I had become one of a
class which, as the gateman had found out, and as I find out later
myself, are devoid of all knowledge of the world and, aside from their
manual training, ignorant on all subjects.
My train is three hours late, which brings me at about noon to
Pittsburg. I have not a friend or an acquaintance within hundreds of
miles. With my bag in my hand I make my way through the dark, busy
streets to the Young Women's Christian Association. It is down near a
frozen river. The wind blows sharp and biting over the icy water; the
streets are covered with snow, and over the snow the soot falls softly
like a mantle of perpetual mourning. There is almost no traffic.
Innumerable tramways ring their way up and down wire-lined avenues;
occasionally a train of freight cars announces itself with a warning
bell in the city's midst. It is a black town of toil, one man in every
three a labourer. They have no need for vehicles of pleasure. The
trolleys take them to their work, the trains transport the products of
the mills.
I hear all languages spoken: this prodigious town is a Western bazaar
where the nations assemble not to buy but to be employed. The stagnant
scum of other countries floats hither to be purified in the fierce
bouillon of live opportunity. It is a cosmopolitan procession that
passes me: the dusky Easterner with a fez of Astrakhan, the gentle-eyed
Italian with a shawl of gay colours, the loose-lipped Hungarian, the
pale, mystic Swede, the German with wife and children hanging on his
arm.
[Illustration: "THE STREETS ARE COVERED WITH SNOW, AND OVER THE SNOW THE
SOOT FALLS SOFTLY LIKE A MANTLE OF PERPETUAL MOURNING"]
In this giant bureau of labour all nationalities gather, united by a
common bond of hope, animated by a common chance of prosperity, kindred
through a common effort, fellow-citizens in a new land of freedom.
At the central office of the Young Women's Christian Association I
receive what attention a busy secretary can spare me. She questions and
I answer as best I can.
"What is it you want?"
"Board and work in a factory."
"Have you ever worked in a factory?"
"No, ma'am."
"Have you ever done any housework?"
She talks in the low, confidential tone of those accustomed to reforming
prisoners and reasoning with the poor.
"Yes, ma'am, I have done housework."
"What did you make?"
"Twelve dollars a month."
"I can get you a place where you will have a room to yourself and
fourteen dollars a month. Do you want it?"
"No, ma'am."
"Are you making anything now?"
"No, ma'am."
"Can you afford to pay board?"
"Yes, as I hope to get work at once."
She directs me to a boarding place which is at the same time a refuge
for the friendless and a shelter for waifs. The newly arrived population
of the fast-growing city seems unfamiliar with the address I carry
written on a card. I wait on cold street corners, I travel over miles of
half-settled country, long stretches of shanties and saloons huddled
close to the trolley line. The thermometer is at zero. Toward three
o'clock I find the waif boarding-house.
The matron is in the parlour hovering over a gas stove. She has false
hair, false teeth, false jewelry, and the dry, crabbed, inquisitive
manner of the idle who are entrusted with authority. She is there to
direct others and do nothing herself, to be cross and make herself
dreaded. In the distance I can hear a shrill, nasal orchestra of
children's voices. I am cold and hungry. I have as yet no job. The
noise, the sordidness, the witchlike matron annoy me. I have a sudden
impulse to flee, to seek warmth and food and proper shelter--to snap my
fingers at experience and be grateful I was born among the fortunate.
Something within me calls _Courage_! I take a room at three dollars a
week with board, put my things in it, and while my feet yet ache with
cold I start to find a factory, a pickle factory, which, the matron
tells me, is run by a Christian gentleman.
I have felt timid and even overbold at different moments in my life,
but never so audacious as on entering a factory door marked in gilt
letters: "_Women Employees_."
The Cerberus between me and the fulfilment of my purpose is a
gray-haired timekeeper with kindly eyes. He sits in a glass cage and
about him are a score or more of clocks all ticking soundly and all
surrounded by an extra dial of small numbers running from one to a
thousand. Each number means a workman--each tick of the clock a moment
of his life gone in the service of the pickle company. I rap on the
window of the glass cage. It opens.
"Do you need any girls?" I ask, trying not to show my emotion.
"Ever worked in a factory?"
"No, sir; but I'm very handy."
"What have you done?"
"Housework," I respond with conviction, beginning to believe it myself.
"Well," he says, looking at me, "they need help up in the bottling
department; but I don't know as it would pay you--they don't give more
than sixty or seventy cents a day."
"I am awfully anxious for work," I say. "Couldn't I begin and get
raised, perhaps?"
"Surely--there is always room for those who show the right spirit. You
come in to-morrow morning at a quarter before seven. You can try it,
and you mustn't get discouraged; there's plenty of work for good
workers."
The blood tingles through my cold hands. My heart is lighter. I have not
come in vain. I have a place!
When I get back to the boarding-house it is twilight. The voices I had
heard and been annoyed by have materialized. Before the gas stove there
are nine small individuals dressed in a strange combination of uniform
checked aprons and patent leather boots worn out and discarded by the
babies of the fortunate. The small feet they encase are crossed, and the
freshly washed faces are demure, as the matron with the wig frowns down
into a newspaper from which she now and then hisses a command to order.
Three miniature members are rocking violently in tiny rocking chairs.
"_Quit rocking_!" the false mother cries at them. "You make my head
ache. Most of 'em have no parents," she explains to me. "None of 'em
have homes."
Here they are, a small kingdom, not wanted, unwelcome, unprovided for,
growled at and grumbled over. Yet each is developing in spite of chance;
each is determining hour by hour his heritage from unknown parents. The
matron leaves us; the rocking begins again. Conversation is animated.
The three-year-old baby bears the name of a three-year-old hero. This
"Dewey" complains in a plaintive voice of a too long absent mother. His
rosy lips are pursed out even with his nose. Again and again he
reiterates the refrain: "My mamma don't never come to see me. She don't
bring me no toys." And then with pride, "My mamma buys rice and tea and
lots of things," and dashing to the window as a trolley rattles by, "My
mamma comes in the street cars, only," sadly, "she don't never come."
Not one of them has forgotten what fate has willed them to do without.
At first they look shrinkingly toward my outstretched hand. Is it coming
to administer some punishment? Little by little they are reassured, and,
gaining in confidence, they sketch for me in disconnected chapters the
short outlines of their lives.
"I've been to the hospital," says one, "and so's Lily. I drank a lot of
washing soda and it made me sick."
Lily begins her hospital reminiscences. "I had typhoy fever--I was in
the childun's ward awful long, and one night they turned down the
lights--it was just evening--and a man came in and he took one of the
babies up in his arms, and we all said, 'What's the row? What's the
row?' and he says 'Hush, the baby's dead.' And out in the hall there was
something white, and he carried the baby and put it in the white thing,
and the baby had a doll that could talk, and he put that in the white
thing too, right alongside o' the dead baby. Another time," Lily goes
on, "there was a baby in a crib alongside of mine, and one day he was
takin' his bottle, and all of a suddint he choked; and he kept on
chokin' and then he died, and he was still takin' his bottle."
Lily is five. I see in her and in her companions a familiarity not only
with the mysteries but with the stern realities of life. They have an
understanding look at the mention of death, drunkenness and all domestic
difficulties or irregularities. Their vocabulary and conversation image
the violent and brutal side of existence--the only one with which they
are acquainted.
At bedtime I find my way upward through dark and narrow stairs that open
into a long room with a slanting roof. It serves as nursery and parlour.
In the dull light of a stove and an oil lamp four or five women are
seated with babies on their knees. They have the meek look of those who
doom themselves to acceptance of misfortune, the flat, resigned figures
of the overworked. Their loose woolen jackets hang over their gaunt
shoulders; their straight hair is brushed hard and smooth against high
foreheads. One baby lies a comfortable bundle in its mother's arms; one
is black in the face after a spasm of coughing; one howls its woes
through a scarlet mask. The corners of the room are filled with the
drones--those who "work for a bite of grub." The cook, her washing done,
has piled her aching bones in a heap; her drawn face waits like an
indicator for some fresh signal to a new fatigue. Mary, the
woman-of-all-work, who has spent more than one night within a prison's
walls, has long ago been brutalized by the persistence of life in spite
of crime; her gray hair ripples like sand under receding waves; her
profile is strong and fine, but her eyes have a film of misery over
them--dull and silent, they deaden her face. And Jennie, the charwoman,
is she a cripple or has toil thus warped her body? Her arms, long and
withered, swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree; her back is
twisted and her head bowed toward earth. A stranger to rest, she seems a
mechanical creature wound up for work and run down in the middle of a
task.
What could be hoped for in such surroundings? With every effort to be
clean the dirt accumulates faster than it can be washed away. It was
impossible, I found by my own experience, to be really clean. There was
a total absence of beauty in everything--not a line of grace, not a
pleasing sound, not an agreeable odour anywhere. One could get used to
this ugliness, become unconscious even of the acrid smells that pervade
the tenement. It was probable my comrades felt at no time the discomfort
I did, but the harm done them is not the physical suffering their
condition causes, but the moral and spiritual bondage in which it holds
them. They are not a class of drones made differently from us. I saw
nothing to indicate that they were not born with like _capacities_ to
ours. As our bodies accustom themselves to luxury and cleanliness,
theirs grow hardened to deprivation and filth. As our souls develop with
the advantages of all that constitutes an ideal--an intellectual,
esthetic and moral ideal--their souls diminish under the oppression of a
constant physical effort to meet material demands. The fact that they
become physically callous to what we consider unbearable is used as an
argument for their emotional insensibility. I hold such an argument as
false. From all I saw I am convinced that, _given their relative
preparation_ for suffering and for pleasure, their griefs and their joys
are the same as ours in kind and in degree.
* * * * *
When one is accustomed to days begun at will by the summons of a tidy
maid, waking oneself at half-past five means to be guardian of the hours
until this time arrives. Once up, the toilet I made in the nocturnal
darkness of my room can best be described by the matron's remark to me
as I went to bed: "If you want to wash," she said, "you'd better wash
now; you can't have no water in your room, and there won't be nobody up
when you leave in the morning." My evening bath is supplemented by a
whisk of the sponge at five.
Without it is black--a more intense black than night's beginning, when
all is astir. The streets are silent, an occasional train whirls past,
groups of men hurry hither and thither swinging their arms, rubbing
their ears in the freezing air. Many of them have neither overcoats nor
gloves. Now and then a woman sweeps along. Her skirts have the same
swing as my own short ones; under her arm she carries a newspaper bundle
whose meaning I have grown to know. My own contains a midday meal: two
cold fried oysters, two dried preserve sandwiches, a pickle and an
orange. My way lies across a bridge. In the first gray of dawn the river
shows black under its burden of ice. Along its troubled banks
innumerable chimneys send forth their hot activity, clouds of seething
flames, waving arms of smoke and steam--a symbol of spent energy, of the
lives consumed and vanishing again, the sparks that shine an instant
against the dark sky and are spent forever.
As I draw nearer the factory I move with a stream of fellow workers
pouring toward the glass cage of the timekeeper. He greets me and starts
me on my upward journey with a wish that I shall not get discouraged, a
reminder that the earnest worker always makes a way for herself.
"What will you do about your name?" "What will you do with your hair and
your hands?" "How can you deceive people?" These are some of the
questions I had been asked by my friends.
Before any one had cared or needed to know my name it was morning of
the second day, and my assumed name seemed by that time the only one I
had ever had. As to hair and hands, a half-day's work suffices for their
undoing. And my disguise is so successful I have deceived not only
others but myself. I have become with desperate reality a factory girl,
alone, inexperienced, friendless. I am making $4.20 a week and spending
$3 of this for board alone, and I dread not being strong enough to keep
my job. I climb endless stairs, am given a white cap and an apron, and
my life as a factory girl begins. I become part of the ceaseless,
unrelenting mechanism kept in motion by the poor.
The factory I have chosen has been built contemporaneously with reforms
and sanitary inspection. There are clean, well-aired rooms, hot and cold
water with which to wash, places to put one's hat and coat, an
obligatory uniform for regular employees, hygienic and moral advantages
of all kinds, ample space for work without crowding.
Side by side in rows of tens or twenties we stand before our tables
waiting for the seven o'clock whistle to blow. In their white caps and
blue frocks and aprons, the girls in my department, like any unfamiliar
class, all look alike. My first task is an easy one; anybody could do
it. On the stroke of seven my fingers fly. I place a lid of paper in a
tin jar-top, over it a cork; this I press down with both hands, tossing
the cover, when done, into a pan. In spite of myself I hurry; I cannot
work fast enough--I outdo my companions. How can they be so slow? I have
finished three dozen while they are doing two. Every nerve, every muscle
is offering some of its energy. Over in one corner the machinery for
sealing the jars groans and roars; the mingled sounds of filling,
washing, wiping, packing, comes to my eager ears as an accompaniment for
the simple work assigned to me. One hour passes, two, three hours; I fit
ten, twenty, fifty dozen caps, and still my energy keeps up.
The forewoman is a pretty girl of twenty. Her restless eyes, her
metallic voice are the messengers who would know all. I am afraid of
her. I long to please her. I am sure she must be saying "_How well the
new girl works_."
Conversation is possible among those whose work has become mechanical.
Twice I am sent to the storeroom for more caps. In these brief moments
my companions volunteer a word of themselves.
"I was out to a ball last night," the youngest one says. "I stayed so
late I didn't feel a bit like getting up this morning."
"That's nothing," another retorts. "There's hardly an evening we don't
have company at the house, music or somethin'; I never get enough rest."
And on my second trip the pale creature with me says:
"I'm in deep mourning. My mother died last Friday week. It's awful
lonely without her. Seems as though I'd never get over missing her. I
miss her _dreadful_. Perhaps by and by I'll get used to it."
"Oh, no, you won't," the answer comes from a girl with short skirts.
"You'll never get used to it. My ma's been dead eight years next month
and I dreamt about her all last night. I can't get her out o' me mind."
Born into dirt and ugliness, disfigured by effort, they have the same
heritage as we: joys and sorrows, grief and laughter. With them as with
us gaiety is up to its old tricks, tempting from graver rivals, making
duty an alien. Grief is doing her ugly work: hollowing round cheeks,
blackening bright eyes, putting her weight of leaden loneliness in
hearts heretofore light with youth.
When I have fitted 110 dozen tin caps the forewoman comes and changes my
job. She tells me to haul and load up some heavy crates with pickle
jars. I am wheeling these back and forth when the twelve o'clock whistle
blows. Up to that time the room has been one big dynamo, each girl a
part of it. With the first moan of the noon signal the dynamo comes to
life. It is hungry; it has friends and favourites--news to tell. We herd
down to a big dining-room and take our places, five hundred of us in
all. The newspaper bundles are unfolded. The ménu varies little: bread
and jam, cake and pickles, occasionally a sausage, a bit of cheese or a
piece of stringy cold meat. In ten minutes the repast is over. The
dynamo has been fed; there are twenty minutes of leisure spent in
dancing, singing, resting, and conversing chiefly about young men and
"sociables."
At 12:30 sharp the whistle draws back the life it has given. I return to
my job. My shoulders are beginning to ache. My hands are stiff, my
thumbs almost blistered. The enthusiasm I had felt is giving way to a
numbing weariness. I look at my companions now in amazement. How can
they keep on so steadily, so swiftly? Cases are emptied and refilled;
bottles are labeled, stamped and rolled away; jars are washed, wiped and
loaded, and still there are more cases, more jars, more bottles. Oh! the
monotony of it, the never-ending supply of work to be begun and
finished, begun and finished, begun and finished! Now and then some one
cuts a finger or runs a splinter under the flesh; once the mustard
machine broke--and still the work goes on, on, on! New girls like
myself, who had worked briskly in the morning, are beginning to loiter.
Out of the washing-tins hands come up red and swollen, only to be
plunged again into hot dirty water. Would the whistle never blow? Once I
pause an instant, my head dazed and weary, my ears strained to bursting
with the deafening noise. Quickly a voice whispers in my ear: "You'd
better not stand there doin' nothin'. If _she_ catches you she'll give
it to you."
On! on! bundle of pains! For you this is one day's work in a thousand of
peace and beauty. For those about you this is the whole of daylight,
this is the winter dawn and twilight, this is the glorious summer noon,
this is all day, this is every day, this is _life_. Rest is only a bit
of a dream, snatched when the sleeper's aching body lets her close her
eyes for a moment in oblivion.
Out beyond the chimney tops the snowfields and the river turn from gray
to pink, and still the work goes on. Each crate I lift grows heavier,
each bottle weighs an added pound. Now and then some one lends a helping
hand.
"Tired, ain't you? This is your first day, ain't it?"
The acid smell of vinegar and mustard penetrates everywhere. My ankles
cry out pity. Oh! to sit down an instant!
"Tidy up the table," some one tells me; "we're soon goin' home."
Home! I think of the stifling fumes of fried food, the dim haze in the
kitchen where my supper waits me; the children, the band of drifting
workers, the shrill, complaining voice of the hired mother. This is
home.
I sweep and set to rights, limping, lurching along. At last the whistle
blows! In a swarm we report; we put on our things and get away into the
cool night air. I have stood ten hours; I have fitted 1,300 corks; I
have hauled and loaded 4,000 jars of pickles. My pay is seventy cents.
The impressions of my first day crowd pell-mell upon my mind. The sound
of the machinery dins in my ears. I can hear the sharp, nasal voices of
the forewoman and the girls shouting questions and answers.
A sudden recollection comes to me of a Dahomayan family I had watched at
work in their hut during the Paris Exhibition. There was a magic spell
in their voices as they talked together; the sounds they made had the
cadence of the wind in the trees, the running of water, the song of
birds: they echoed unconsciously the caressing melodies of nature. My
factory companions drew their vocal inspiration from the bedlam of
civilization, the rasping and pounding of machinery, the din which they
must out-din to be heard.
For the two days following my first experience I am unable to resume
work. Fatigue has swept through my blood like a fever. Every bone and
joint has a clamouring ache. I pass the time visiting other factories
and hunting for a place to board in the neighbourhood of the pickling
house. At the cork works they do not need girls; at the cracker company
I can get a job, but the hours are longer, the advantages less than
where I am; at the broom factory they employ only men. I decide to
continue with tin caps and pickle jars.
My whole effort now is to find a respectable boarding-house. I start
out, the thermometer near zero, the snow falling. I wander and ask,
wander and ask. Up and down the black streets running parallel and at
right angles with the factory I tap and ring at one after another of the
two-story red-brick houses. More than half of them are empty, tenantless
during the working hours. What hope is there for family life near the
hearth which is abandoned at the factory's first call? The sociableness,
the discipline, the division of responsibility make factory work a
dangerous rival to domestic care. There is something in the modern
conditions of labour which act magnetically upon American girls,
impelling them to work not for bread alone, but for clothes and finery
as well. Each class in modern society knows a menace to its homes:
sport, college education, machinery--each is a factor in the gradual
transformation of family life from a united domestic group to a
collection of individuals with separate interests and aims outside the
home.
I pursue my search. It is the dinner hour. At last a narrow door opens,
letting a puff of hot rank air blow upon me as I stand in the vestibule
questioning: "Do you take boarders?"
The woman who answers stands with a spoon in her hand, her eyes fixed
upon a rear room where a stove, laden with frying-pans, glows and
sputters.
"Come in," she says, "and get warm."
I walk into a front parlour with furniture that evidently serves
domestic as well as social purposes. There is a profusion of white
knitted tidies and portieres that exude an odour of cooking. Before the
fire a workingman sits in a blue shirt and overalls. Fresh from the
barber's hands, he has a clean mask marked by the razor's edge. Already
I feel at home.
"Want board, do you?" the woman asks. "Well, we ain't got no place;
we're always right full up."
My disappointment is keen. Regretfully I leave the fire and start on
again.
"I guess you'll have some trouble in finding what you want," the woman
calls to me on her way back to the kitchen, as I go out.
The answer is everywhere the same, with slight variations. Some take
"mealers" only, some only "roomers," some "only gentlemen." I begin to
understand it. Among the thousands of families who live in the city on
account of the work provided by the mills, there are girls enough to
fill the factories. There is no influx such as creates in a small town
the necessity for working-girl boarding-houses. There is an ample supply
of hands from the existing homes. There is the same difference between
city and country factory life that there is between university life in
a capital and in a country town.
A sign on a neat-looking corner house attracts me. I rap and continue to
rap; the door is opened at length by a tall good-looking young woman.
Her hair curls prettily, catching the light; her eyes are stupid and
beautiful. She has on a black skirt and a bright purple waist.
"Do you take boarders?"
"Why, yes. I don't generally like to take ladies, they give so much
trouble. You can come in if you like. Here's the room," she continues,
opening a door near the vestibule. She brushes her hand over her
forehead and stares at me; and then, as though she can no longer silence
the knell that is ringing in her heart, she says to me, always staring:
"My husband was killed on the railroad last week. He lived three hours.
They took him to the hospital--a boy come running down and told me. I
went up as fast as I could, but it was too late; he never spoke again. I
guess he didn't know what struck him; his head was all smashed. He was
awful good to me--so easy-going. I ain't got my mind down to work yet.
If you don't like this here room," she goes on listlessly, "maybe you
could get suited across the way."
Thompson Seton tells us in his book on wild animals that not one among
them ever dies a natural death. As the opposite extreme of vital
persistence we have the man whose life, in spite of acute disease, is
prolonged against reason by science; and midway comes the labourer, who
takes his chances unarmed by any understanding of physical law, whose
only safeguards are his wits and his presence of mind. The violent
death, the accidents, the illnesses to which he falls victim might be
often warded off by proper knowledge. Nature is a zealous enemy;
ignorance and inexperience keep a whole class defenseless.
The next day is Saturday. I feel a fresh excitement at going back to my
job; the factory draws me toward it magnetically. I long to be in the
hum and whir of the busy workroom. Two days of leisure without resources
or amusement make clear to me how the sociability of factory life, the
freedom from personal demands, the escape from self can prove a
distraction to those who have no mental occupation, no money to spend on
diversion. It is easier to submit to factory government which commands
five hundred girls with one law valid for all, than to undergo the
arbitrary discipline of parental authority. I speed across the
snow-covered courtyard. In a moment my cap and apron are on and I am
sent to report to the head forewoman.
"We thought you'd quit," she says. "Lots of girls come in here and quit
after one day, especially Saturday. To-day is scrubbing day," she smiles
at me. "Now we'll do right by you if you do right by us. What did the
timekeeper say he'd give you?"
"Sixty or seventy a day."
"We'll give you seventy," she says. "Of course, we can judge girls a
good deal by their looks, and we can see that you're above the average."
She wears her cap close against her head. Her front hair is rolled up in
crimping-pins. She has false teeth and is a widow. Her pale, parched
face shows what a great share of life has been taken by daily
over-effort repeated during years. As she talks she touches my arm in a
kindly fashion and looks at me with blue eyes that float about under
weary lids. "You are only at the beginning," they seem to say. "Your
youth and vigour are at full tide, but drop by drop they will be sapped
from you, to swell the great flood of human effort that supplies the
world's material needs. You will gain in experience," the weary lids
flutter at me, "but you will pay _with your life_ the living you make."
There is no variety in my morning's work. Next to me is a bright, pretty
girl jamming chopped pickles into bottles.
"How long have you been here?" I ask, attracted by her capable
appearance. She does her work easily and well.
"About five months."
"How much do you make?"
"From 90 cents to $1.05. I'm doing piece-work," she explains. "I get
seven-eighths of a cent for every dozen bottles I fill. I have to fill
eight dozen to make seven cents. Downstairs in the corking-room you can
make as high as $1.15 to $1.20. They won't let you make any more than
that. Me and them two girls over there are the only ones in this room
doing piece-work. I was here three weeks as a day-worker."
"Do you live at home?" I ask.
"Yes; I don't have to work. I don't pay no board. My father and my
brothers supports me and my mother. But," and her eyes twinkle, "I
couldn't have the clothes I do if I didn't work."
"Do you spend your money all on yourself?"
"Yes."
I am amazed at the cheerfulness of my companions. They complain of
fatigue, of cold, but never at any time is there a suggestion of
ill-humour. Their suppressed animal spirits reassert themselves when the
forewoman's back is turned. Companionship is the great stimulus. I am
confident that without the social _entrain_, the encouragement of
example, it would be impossible to obtain as much from each individual
girl as is obtained from them in groups of tens, fifties, hundreds
working together.
When lunch is over we are set to scrubbing. Every table and stand, every
inch of the factory floor must be scrubbed in the next four hours. The
whistle on Saturday blows an hour earlier. Any girl who has not finished
her work when the day is done, so that she can leave things in perfect
order, is kept overtime, for which she is paid at the rate of six or
seven cents an hour. A pail of hot water, a dirty rag and a
scrubbing-brush are thrust into my hands. I touch them gingerly. I get a
broom and for some time make sweeping a necessity, but the forewoman is
watching me. I am afraid of her. There is no escape. I begin to scrub.
My hands go into the brown, slimy water and come out brown and slimy. I
slop the soap-suds around and move on to a fresh place. It appears there
are a right and a wrong way of scrubbing. The forewoman is at my side.
"Have you ever scrubbed before?" she asks sharply. This is humiliating.
"Yes," I answer; "I have scrubbed ... oilcloth."
The forewoman knows how to do everything. She drops down on her knees
and, with her strong arms and short-thumbed, brutal hands, she shows me
how to scrub.
The grumbling is general. There is but one opinion among the girls: it
is not right that they should be made to do this work. They all echo the
same resentment, but their complaints are made in whispers; not one has
the courage to openly rebel. What, I wonder to myself, do the men do on
scrubbing day. I try to picture one of them on his hands and knees in a
sea of brown mud. It is impossible. The next time I go for a supply of
soft soap in a department where the men are working I take a look at the
masculine interpretation of house cleaning. One man is playing a hose on
the floor and the rest are rubbing the boards down with long-handled
brooms and rubber mops.
"You take it easy," I say to the boss.
"I won't have no scrubbing in my place," he answers emphatically. "The
first scrubbing day, they says to me 'Get down on your hands and knees,'
and I says--'Just pay me my money, will you; I'm goin' home. What
scrubbing can't be done with mops ain't going to be done by me.' The
women wouldn't have to scrub, either, if they had enough spirit all of
'em to say so."
I determined to find out if possible, during my stay in the factory,
what it is that clogs this mainspring of "spirit" in the women.
I hear fragmentary conversations about fancy dress balls, valentine
parties, church sociables, flirtations and clothes. Almost all of the
girls wear shoes with patent leather and some or much cheap jewelry,
brooches, bangles and rings. A few draw their corsets in; the majority
are not laced. Here and there I see a new girl whose back is flat, whose
chest is well developed. Among the older hands who have begun work early
there is not a straight pair of shoulders. Much of the bottle washing
and filling is done by children from twelve to fourteen years of age.
On their slight, frail bodies toil weighs heavily; the delicate child
form gives way to the iron hand of labour pressed too soon upon it.
Backs bend earthward, chests recede, never to be sound again.
* * * * *
After a Sunday of rest I arrive somewhat ahead of time on Monday
morning, which leaves me a few moments for conversation with a
piece-worker who is pasting labels on mustard jars. She is fifteen.
"Do you like your job?" I ask.
"Yes, I do," she answers, pleased to tell her little history. "I began
in a clothing shop. I only made $2.50 a week, but I didn't have to
stand. I felt awful when papa made me quit. When I came in here, bein'
on my feet tired me so I cried every night for two months. Now I've got
used to it. I don't feel no more tired when I get home than I did when I
started out." There are two sharp blue lines that drag themselves down
from her eyes to her white cheeks.
"Why, you know, at Christmas they give us two weeks," she goes on in the
sociable tone of a woman whose hands are occupied. "I just didn't know
what to do with myself."
"Does your mother work?"
"Oh, my, no. I don't have to work, only if I didn't I couldn't have the
clothes I do. I save some of my money and spend the rest on myself. I
make $6 to $7 a week."
The girl next us volunteers a share in the conversation.
"I bet you can't guess how old I am."
I look at her. Her face and throat are wrinkled, her hands broad, and
scrawny; she is tall and has short skirts. What shall be my clue? If I
judge by pleasure, "unborn" would be my answer; if by effort, then "a
thousand years."
"Twenty," I hazard as a safe medium.
"Fourteen," she laughs. "I don't like it at home, the kids bother me so.
Mamma's people are well-to-do. I'm working for my own pleasure."
"Indeed, I wish I was," says a new girl with a red waist. "We three
girls supports mamma and runs the house. We have $13 rent to pay and a
load of coal every month and groceries. It's no joke, I can tell you."
The whistle blows; I go back to my monotonous task. The old aches begin
again, first gently, then more and more sharply. The work itself is
growing more mechanical. I can watch the girls around me. What is it
that determines superiority in this class? Why was the girl filling
pickle jars put on piece-work after three weeks, when others older than
she are doing day-work at fifty and sixty cents after a year in the
factory? What quality decides that four shall direct four hundred?
Intelligence I put first; intelligence of any kind, from the natural
penetration that needs no teaching to the common sense that every one
relies upon. Judgment is not far behind in the list, and it is soon
matured by experience. A strong will and a moral steadiness stand
guardians over the other two. The little pickle girl is winning in the
race by her intelligence. The forewomen have all four qualities,
sometimes one, sometimes another predominating. Pretty Clara is smarter
than Lottie. Lottie is more steady. Old Mrs. Minns' will has kept her at
it until her judgment has become infallible and can command a good
price. Annie is an evenly balanced mixture of all, and the five hundred
who are working under the five lack these qualities somewhat, totally,
or have them in useless proportions.
Monday is a hard day. There is more complaining, more shirking, more
gossip than in the middle of the week. Most of the girls have been to
dances on Saturday night, to church on Sunday evening with some young
man. Their conversation is vulgar and prosaic; there is nothing in the
language they use that suggests an ideal or any conception of the
abstract. They make jokes, state facts about the work, tease each other,
but in all they say there is not a word of value--nothing that would
interest if repeated out of its class. They have none of the
sagaciousness of the low-born Italian, none of the wit and penetration
of the French _ouvriere_. The Old World generations ago divided itself
into classes; the lower class watched the upper and grew observant and
appreciative, wise and discriminating, through the study of a master's
will. Here in the land of freedom, where no class line is rigid, the
precious chance is not to serve but to live for oneself; not to watch a
superior, but to find out by experience. The ideal plays no part, stern
realities alone count, and thus we have a progressive, practical,
independent people, the expression of whose personality is interesting
not through their words but by their deeds.
When the Monday noon whistle blows I follow the hundreds down into the
dining-room. Each wears her cap in a way that speaks for her
temperament. There is the indifferent, the untidy, the prim, the vain,
the coquettish; and the faces under them, which all looked alike at
first, are becoming familiar. I have begun to make friends. I speak bad
English, but do not attempt to change my voice and inflection nor to
adopt the twang. No allusion is made to my pronunciation except by one
girl, who says:
"I knew you was from the East. My sister spent a year in Boston and when
she come back she talked just like you do, but she lost it all again.
I'd give anything if I could talk _aristocratic_."
I am beginning to understand why the meager lunches of
preserve-sandwiches and pickles more than satisfy the girls whom I was
prepared to accuse of spending their money on gewgaws rather than on
nourishment. It is fatigue that steals the appetite. I can hardly taste
what I put in my mouth; the food sticks in my throat. The girls who
complain most of being tired are the ones who roll up their newspaper
bundles half full. They should be given an hour at noon. The first half
of it should be spent in rest and recreation before a bite is touched.
The good that such a regulation would work upon their faulty skins and
pale faces, their lasting strength and health, would be incalculable. I
did not want wholesome food, exhausted as I was. I craved sours and
sweets, pickles, cake, anything to excite my numb taste.
So long as I remain in the bottling department there is little variety
in my days. Rising at 5:30 every morning, I make my way through black
streets to offer my sacrifice of energy on the altar of toil. All is
done without a fresh incident. Accumulated weariness forces me to take a
day off. When I return I am sent for in the corking-room. The forewoman
lends me a blue gingham dress and tells me I am to do "piece"-work.
There are three who work together at every corking-table. My two
companions are a woman with goggles and a one-eyed boy. We are not a
brilliant trio. The job consists in evening the vinegar in the bottles,
driving the cork in, first with a machine, then with a hammer, letting
out the air with a knife stuck under the cork, capping the corks,
sealing the caps, counting and distributing the bottles. These
operations are paid for at the rate of one-half a cent for the dozen
bottles, which sum is divided among us. My two companions are earning a
living, so I must work in dead earnest or take bread out of their
mouths. At every blow of the hammer there is danger. Again and again
bottles fly to pieces in my hand. The boy who runs the corking-machine
smashes a glass to fragments.
"Are you hurt?" I ask, my own fingers crimson stained.
"That ain't nothin'," he answers. "Cuts is common; my hands is full of
'em."
The woman directs us; she is fussy and loses her head, the work
accumulates, I am slow, the boy is clumsy. There is a stimulus
unsuspected in working to get a job done. Before this I had worked to
make the time pass. Then no one took account of how much I did; the
factory clock had a weighted pendulum; now ambition outdoes physical
strength. The hours and my purpose are running a race together. But,
hurry as I may, as we do, when twelve blows its signal we have corked
only 210 dozen bottles! This is no more than day-work at seventy cents.
With an ache in every muscle, I redouble my energy after lunch. The girl
with the goggles looks at me blindly and says:
"Ain't it just awful hard work? You can make good money, but you've got
to hustle."
She is a forlorn specimen of humanity, ugly, old, dirty, condemned to
the slow death of the overworked. I am a green hand. I make mistakes; I
have no experience in the fierce sustained effort of the bread-winners.
Over and over I turn to her, over and over she is obliged to correct me.
During the ten hours we work side by side not one murmur of impatience
escapes her. When she sees that I am getting discouraged she calls out
across the deafening din, "That's all right; you can't expect to learn
in a day; just keep on steady."
As I go about distributing bottles to the labelers I notice a strange
little elf, not more than twelve years old, hauling loaded crates; her
face and chest are depressed, she is pale to blueness, her eyes have
indigo circles, her pupils are unnaturally dilated, her brows
contracted; she has the appearance of a cave-bred creature. She seems
scarcely human. When the time for cleaning up arrives toward five my
boss sends me for a bucket of water to wash up the floor. I go to the
sink, turn on the cold water and with it the steam which takes the place
of hot water. The valve slips; in an instant I am enveloped in a
scalding cloud. Before it has cleared away the elf is by my side.
"Did you hurt yourself?" she asks.
Her inhuman form is the vehicle of a human heart, warm and tender. She
lifts her wide-pupiled eyes to mine; her expression does not change from
that of habitual scrutiny cast early in a rigid mould, but her voice
carries sympathy from its purest source.
There is more honour than courtesy in the code of etiquette. Commands
are given curtly; the slightest injustice is resented; each man for
himself in work, but in trouble all for the one who is suffering. No
bruise or cut or burn is too familiar a sight to pass uncared for.
It is their common sufferings, their common effort that unites them.
When I have become expert in the corking art I am raised to a better
table, with a bright boy, and a girl who is dignified and indifferent
with the indifference of those who have had too much responsibility. She
never hurries; the work slips easily through her fingers. She keeps a
steady bearing over the morning's ups and downs. Under her load of
trials there is something big in the steady way she sails.
"Used to hard work?" she asks me.
"Not much," I answer; "are you?"
"Oh, yes. I began at thirteen in a bakery. I had a place near the oven
and the heat overcame me."
Her shoulders are bowed, her chest is hollow.
"Looking for a boarding place near the factory, I hear," she continues.
"Yes. You live at home, I suppose."
"Yes. There's four of us: mamma, papa, my sister and myself. Papa's
blind."
"Can't he work?"
"Oh, yes, he creeps to his job every morning, and he's got so much
experience he kind o' does things by instinct."
"Does your mother work?"
"Oh, my, no. My sister's an invalid. She hasn't been out o' the door for
three years. She's got enlargement of the heart and consumption, too, I
guess; she 'takes' hemorrhages. Sometimes she has twelve in one night.
Every time she coughs the blood comes foaming out of her mouth. She
can't lie down. I guess she'd die if she lay down, and she gets so tired
sittin' up all night. She used to be a tailoress, but I guess her job
didn't agree with her."
"How many checks have we got," I ask toward the close of the day.
"Thirteen," Ella answers.
"An unlucky number," I venture, hoping to arouse an opinion.
"Are you superstitious?" she asks, continuing to twist tin caps on the
pickle jars. "I am. If anything's going to happen I can't help having
presentiments, and they come true, too."
Here is a mystic, I thought; so I continued:
"And what about dreams?"
"Oh!" she cried. "Dreams! I have the queerest of anybody!"
I was all attention.
"Why, last night," she drew near to me, and spoke slowly, "I dreamed
that mamma was drunk, and that she was stealing chickens!"
Such is the imagination of this weary worker.
The whole problem in mechanical labour rests upon economy of force. The
purpose of each, I learned by experience, was to accomplish as much as
possible with one single stroke. In this respect the machine is superior
to man, and man to woman. Sometimes I tried original ways of doing the
work given me. I soon found in every case that the methods proposed by
the forewoman were in the end those whereby I could do the greatest
amount of work with the least effort. A mustard machine had recently
been introduced to the factory. It replaced three girls; it filled as
many bottles with a single stroke as the girls could fill with twelve.
This machine and all the others used were run by boys or men; the girls
had not strength enough to manipulate them methodically.
The power of the machine, the physical force of the man were simplifying
their tasks. While the boy was keeping steadily at one thing, perfecting
himself, we, the women, were doing a variety of things, complicated and
fussy, left to our lot because we had not physical force for the simpler
but greater effort. The boy at the corking-table had soon become an
expert; he was fourteen and he made from $1 to $1.20 a day. He worked
ten hours at one job, whereas Ella and I had a dozen little jobs almost
impossible to systematize: we hammered and cut and capped the corks and
washed and wiped the bottles, sealed them, counted them, distributed
them, kept the table washed up, the sink cleaned out, and once a day
scrubbed up our own precincts. When I asked the boy if he was tired he
laughed at me. He was superior to us; he was stronger; he could do more
with one stroke than we could do with three; he was by _nature_ a more
valuable aid than we. We were forced through physical inferiority to
abandon the choicest task to this young male competitor. Nature had
given us a handicap at the start.
For a few days there is no vacancy at the corking-tables. I am sent back
to the bottling department. The oppressive monotony is one day varied by
a summons to the men's dining-room. I go eagerly, glad of any change. In
the kitchen I find a girl with skin disease peeling potatoes, and a
coloured man making soup in a wash-boiler. The girl gives me a stool to
sit on, and a knife and a pan of potatoes. The dinner under preparation
is for the men of the factory. There are two hundred of them. They are
paid from $1.35 up to $3 a day. Their wages begin above the highest
limit given to women. The dinner costs each man ten cents. The $20 paid
in daily cover the expenses of the cook, two kitchen maids and the
dinner, which consists of meat, bread and butter, vegetables and coffee,
sometimes soup, sometimes dessert. If this can pay for two hundred
there is no reason why for five cents a hot meal of some kind could not
be given the women. They don't demand it, so they are left to make
themselves ill on pickles and preserves.
The coloured cook is full of song and verse. He quotes from the Bible
freely, and gives us snatches of popular melodies.
We have frequent calls from the elevator boy, who brings us ice and
various provisions. Both men, I notice, take their work easily. During
the morning a busy Irish woman comes hurrying into our precincts.
"Say," she yells in a shrill voice, "my cauliflowers ain't here, are
they? I ordered 'em early and they ain't came yet."
Without properly waiting for an answer she hurries away again.
The coloured cook turns to the elevator boy understandingly:
"Just like a woman! Why, before I'd _make a fuss_ about cauliflowers or
anything else!"
About eleven the head forewoman stops in to eat a plate of rice and
milk. While I am cutting bread for the two hundred I hear her say to the
cook in a gossipy tone:
"How do you like the new girl? She's here all alone."
I am called away and do not hear the rest of the conversation. When I
return the cook lectures me in this way:
"Here alone, are you?"
"Yes."
"Well, I see no reason why you shouldn't get along nicely and not kill
yourself with work either. Just stick at it and they'll do right by you.
Lots o' girls who's here alone gets to fooling around. Now I like
everybody to have a good time, and I hope you'll have a good time, too,
but you mustn't carry it too far."
My mind went back as he said this to a conversation I had had the night
before with a working-girl at my boarding-house.
"Where is your home?" I asked.
She had been doing general housework, but ill-health had obliged her to
take a rest.
She looked at me skeptically.
"We don't have no homes," was her answer. "We just get up and get
whenever they send us along."
And almost as a sequel to this I thought of two sad cases that had come
close to my notice as fellow boarders.
I was sitting alone one night by the gas stove in the parlour. The
matron had gone out and left me to "answer the door." The bell rang and
I opened cautiously, for the wind was howling and driving the snow and
sleet about on the winter air. A young girl came in; she was seeking a
lodging. Her skirts and shoes were heavy with water. She took off her
things slowly in a dazed manner. Her short, quick breathing showed how
excited she was. When she spoke at last her voice sounded hollow, her
eyes moved about restlessly. She stopped abruptly now and then and
contracted her brows as though in an appeal for merciful tears; then she
continued in the same broken, husky voice:
"I suppose I'm not the only one in trouble. I've thought a thousand
times over that I would kill myself. I suppose I loved him--but I _hate_
him now."
These two sentences, recurring, were the story's all.
The impotence of rebellion, a sense of outrage at being abandoned, the
instinctive appeal for protection as a right, the injustice of being
left solely to bear the burden of responsibility which so long as it was
pleasure had been shared--these were the thoughts and feelings breeding
hatred.
She had spent the day in a fruitless search for her lover. She had been
to his boss and to his rooms. He had paid his debts and gone, nobody
knew where. She was pretty, vain, homeless; alone to bear the
responsibility she had not been alone to incur. She could not shirk it
as the man had done. They had both disregarded the law. On whom were the
consequences weighing more heavily? On the woman. She is the sufferer;
she is the first to miss the law's protection. She is the weaker member
whom, for the sake of the race, society protects. Nature has made her
man's physical inferior; society is obliged to recognize this in the
giving of a marriage law which beyond doubt is for the benefit of woman,
since she can least afford to disregard it.
Another evening when the matron was out I sat for a time with a young
working woman and her baby. There is a comradeship among the poor that
makes light of indiscreet questions. I felt only sympathy in asking:
"Are you alone to bring up your child?"
"Yes, ma'am," was the answer. "I'll never go home with _him_."
I looked at _him_: a wizened, four-months-old infant with a huge flat
nose, and two dull black eyes fixed upon the gas jet. The girl had the
grace of a forest-born creature; she moved with the mysterious strength
and suppleness of a tree's branch. She was proud; she felt herself
disgraced. For four months she had not left the house. I talked on,
proposing different things.
"I don't know what to do," she said. "I can't never go home with _him_,
and if I went home without him I'd never be the same. I don't know what
I'd do if anything happened to _him_." Her head bowed over the child;
she held him close to her breast.
But to return to the coloured cook and my day in the kitchen. I had
ample opportunity to compare domestic service with factory work. We set
the table for two hundred, and do a thousand miserable slavish tasks
that must be begun again the following day. At twelve the two hundred
troop in, toil-worn and begrimed. They pass like locusts, leaving us
sixteen hundred dirty dishes to wash up and wipe. This takes us four
hours, and when we have finished the work stands ready to be done over
the next morning with peculiar monotony. In the factory there is
stimulus in feeling that the material which passes through one's hands
will never be seen or heard of again.
On Saturday the owner of the factory comes at lunch time with several
friends and talks to us with an amazing _camaraderie_. He is kindly,
humourous and tactful. One or two missionaries speak after him, but
their conversation is too abstract for us. We want something dramatic,
imaginative, to hold our attention, or something wholly natural. Tell us
about the bees, the beavers or the toilers of the sea. The longing for
flowers has often come to me as I work, and a rose seems of all things
the most desirable. In my present condition I do not hark back to
civilized wants, but repeatedly my mind travels toward the country
places I have seen in the fields and forests. If I had a holiday I would
spend it seeing not what man but what God has made. These are the things
to be remembered in addressing or trying to amuse or instruct girls who
are no more prepared than I felt myself to be for any preconceived ideal
of art or ethics. The omnipresence of dirt and ugliness, of machines and
"stock," leave the mind in a state of lassitude which should be roused
by something natural. As an initial remedy for the ills I voluntarily
assumed I would propose amusement. Of all the people who spoke to us
that Saturday, we liked best the one who made us laugh. It was a relief
to hear something funny. In working as an outsider in a factory girls'
club I had always held that nothing was so important as to give the poor
something beautiful to look at and think about--a photograph or copy of
some _chef d'oeuvre_, an _objet d'art_, lessons in literature and art
which would uplift their souls from the dreariness of their
surroundings. Three weeks as a factory girl had changed my beliefs. If
the young society women who sacrifice one evening every week to talk to
the poor in the slums about Shakespeare and Italian art would instead
offer diversion first--a play, a farce, a humourous recitation--they
would make much more rapid progress in winning the confidence of those
whom they want to help. The working woman who has had a good laugh is
more ready to tell what she needs and feels and fears than the woman who
has been forced to listen silently to an abstract lesson. In society
when we wish to make friends with people we begin by entertaining them.
It should be the same way with the poor. Next to amusement as a means
of giving temporary relief and bringing about relations which will be
helpful to all, I put instruction, in the form of narrative, about the
people of other countries, our fellow man, how he lives and works; and,
third, under this same head, primitive lessons about animals and plants,
the industries of the bees, the habits of ants, the natural phenomena
which require no reasoning power to understand and which open the
thoughts upon a delightful unknown vista.
My first experience is drawing to its close. I have surmounted the
discomforts of insufficient food, of dirt, a bed without sheets, the
strain of hard manual labour. I have confined my observations to life
and conditions in the factory. Owing, as I have before explained, to the
absorption of factory life into city life in a place as large as
Pittsburg, it seemed to me more profitable to centre my attention on the
girl within the factory, leaving for a small town the study of her in
her family and social life. I have pointed out as they appeared to me
woman's relative force as a worker and its effects upon her economic
advancement. I have touched upon two cases which illustrate her relative
dependence on the law. She appeared to me not as the equal of man either
physically or legally. It remained to study her socially. In the factory
where I worked men and women were employed for ten-hour days. The
women's highest wages were lower than the man's lowest. Both were
working as hard as they possibly could. The women were doing menial
work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. The men were
properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and
pickles. Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a
single factory. I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw
myself. The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at
the level of bare subsistence. This level and its accompanying
conditions are determined by competition, by the nature and number of
labourers taking part in the competition. In the masculine category I
met but one class of competitor: the bread-winner. In the feminine
category I found a variety of classes: the bread-winner, the
semi-bread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries. This inevitably
drags the wage level. The self-supporting girl is in competition with
the child, with the girl who lives at home and makes a small
contribution to the household expenses, and with the girl who is
supported and who spends all her money on her clothes. It is this
division of purpose which takes the "spirit" out of them as a class.
There will be no strikes among them so long as the question of wages is
not equally vital to them all. It is not only nature and the law which
demand protection for women, but society as well. In every case of the
number I investigated, if there were sons, daughters or a husband in the
family, the mother was not allowed to work. She was wholly protected. In
the families where the father and brothers were making enough for bread
and butter, the daughters were protected partially or entirely. There is
no law which regulates this social protection: it is voluntary, and it
would seem to indicate that civilized woman is meant to be an economic
dependent. Yet, on the other hand, what is the new force which impels
girls from their homes into the factories to work when they do not
actually need the money paid them for their effort and sacrifice? Is it
a move toward some far distant civilization when women shall have become
man's physical equal, a "free, economic, social factor, making possible
the full social combination of individuals in collective industry"? This
is a matter for speculation only. What occurred to me as a possible
remedy both for the oppression of the woman bread-winner and also as a
betterment for the girl who wants to work though she does not need the
money, was this: the establishment of schools where the esthetic
branches of industrial art might be taught to the girls who by their
material independence could give some leisure to acquiring a profession
useful to themselves and to society in general. The whole country would
be benefited by the opening of such schools as the Empress of Russia has
patronized for the maintenance of the "petites industries," or those
which Queen Margherita has established for the revival of lace-making in
Italy. If there was such a counter-attraction to machine labour, the
bread-winner would have a freer field and the non-bread-winner might
still work for luxury and at the same time better herself morally,
mentally and esthetically. She could aid in forming an intermediate
class of labourers which as yet does not exist in America: the
hand-workers, the _main d'oeuvre_ who produce the luxurious objects of
industrial art for which we are obliged to send to Europe when we wish
to beautify our homes.
The American people are lively, intelligent, capable of learning
anything. The schools of which I speak, founded, not for the
manufacturing of the useful but of the beautiful, could be started
informally as classes and by individual effort. Such labour would be
paid more than the mechanical factory work; the immense importation from
abroad of objects of industrial art sufficiently proves the demand for
them in this country; there would be no material disadvantage for the
girl who gave up her job in a pickle factory. Her faculties would be
well employed, and she could, without leaving her home, do work which
would be of esthetic and, indirectly, of moral value.
I was discouraged at first to see how difficult it was to help the
working girls as individuals and how still more difficult to help them
as a class. There is perhaps no surer way of doing this than by giving
opportunities to those who have a purpose and a will. No amount of
openings will help the girl who has not both of these. I watched many
girls with intelligence and energy who were unable to develop for the
lack of a chance a start in the right direction. Aside from the few
remedies I have been able to suggest, I would like to make an appeal for
persistent sympathy in behalf of those whose misery I have shared. Until
some marvelous advancement has been made toward the reign of justice
upon earth, every man, woman and child should have constantly in his
heart the sufferings of the poorest.
On the evening when I left the factory for the last time, I heard in the
streets the usual cry of murders, accidents and suicides: the mental
food of the overworked. It is Saturday night. I mingle with a crowd of
labourers homeward bound, and with women and girls returning from a
Saturday sale in the big shops. They hurry along delighted at the
cheapness of a bargain, little dreaming of the human effort that has
produced it, the cost of life and energy it represents. As they pass,
they draw their skirts aside from us, the labourers who have made their
bargains cheap; from us, the coöperators who enable them to have the
luxuries they do; from us, the multitude who stand between them and the
monster Toil that must be fed with human lives. Think of us, as we herd
to our work in the winter dawn; think of us as we bend over our task
all the daylight without rest; think of us at the end of the day as we
resume suffering and anxiety in homes of squalour and ugliness; think of
us as we make our wretched try for merriment; think of us as we stand
protectors between you and the labour that must be done to satisfy your
material demands; think of us--be merciful.
[Illustration: "WAVING ARMS OF SMOKE AND STEAM, A SYMBOL OF SPENT
ENERGY, OF THE LIVES CONSUMED, AND VANISHING AGAIN"
Factories on the Alleghany River at the 16th Street bridge, just below
the pickle works]
* * * * *
PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN
* * * * *
CHAPTER III
PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN
No place in America could have afforded better than Pittsburg a chance
to study the factory life of American girls, the stimulus of a new
country upon the labourers of old races, the fervour and energy of a
people animated by hope and stirred to activity by the boundless
opportunities for making money. It is the labourers' city _par
excellence_; and in my preceding chapters I have tried to give a clear
picture of factory life between the hours of seven and six, of the
economic conditions, of the natural social and legal equipment of woman
as a working entity, of her physical, moral and esthetic development.
Now, since the time ticked out between the morning summoning whistle to
that which gives release at night is not half the day, and only
two-thirds of the working hours, my second purpose has been to find a
place where the factory girl's own life could best be studied: her
domestic, religious and sentimental life.
Somewhere in the western part of New York State, one of my comrades at
the pickle works had told me, there was a town whose population was
chiefly composed of mill-hands. The name of the place was Perry, and I
decided upon it as offering the typical American civilization among the
working classes. New England is too free of grafts to give more than a
single aspect; Pittsburg is an international bazaar; but the foundations
of Perry are laid with bricks from all parts of the world, held together
by a strong American cement.
Ignorant of Perry further than as it exists, a black spot on a branch of
a small road near Buffalo, I set out from New York toward my destination
on the Empire State Express. There was barely time to descend with my
baggage at Rochester before the engine had started onward again,
trailing behind it with world-renowned rapidity its freight of travelers
who, for a few hours under the car's roof, are united by no other common
interest than that of journeying quickly from one spot to another, where
they disperse never to meet again. My Perry train had an altogether
different character. I was late for it, but the brakeman saw me coming
and waved to the engineer not to start until my trunk was checked and
safely boarded like myself. Then we bumped our way through meadows
quickened to life by the soft spring air; we halted at crossroads to
pick up stray travelers and shoppers; we unloaded plowing machines and
shipped crates of live fowl; we waited at wayside stations with
high-sounding names for family parties whose unpunctuality was
indulgently considered by the occupants of the train.
My companions, chiefly women, were of the homely American type whose New
England drawl has been modified by a mingling of foreign accents. They
took advantage of this time for "visiting" with neighbours whom the
winter snows and illnesses had rendered inaccessible. Their inquiries
for each other were all kindliness and sympathy, and the peaceful,
tolerant, uneventful way in which we journeyed from Rochester to Perry
was a symbol of the way in which these good people had journeyed across
life. Perry, the terminus of the line, was a frame station lodged on
stilts in a sea of surrounding mud. When the engine had come to a
standstill and ceased to pant, when the last truck had been unloaded,
the baggage room closed, there were no noises to be heard except those
that came from a neighbouring country upon whose peace the small town
had not far encroached; the splash of a horse and buggy through the mud,
a monotonous voice mingling with the steady tick of the telegraph
machine, some distant barnyard chatter, and the mysterious, invisible
stir of spring shaking out upon the air damp sweet odours calling the
earth to colour and life. Descending the staircase which connected the
railroad station with the hill road on which it was perched, I joined a
man who was swinging along in rubber boots, with several farming tools,
rakes and hoes, slung over his shoulder. A repugnance I had felt in
resuming my toil-worn clothes had led me to make certain modifications
which I feared in so small a town as Perry might relegate me to the
class I had voluntarily abandoned. The man in rubber boots looked me
over as I approached, bag in hand, and to my salutation he replied:
"Going down to the mill, I suppose. There's lots o' ladies comes in the
train every day now."
He was the perfection of tact; he placed me in one sentence as a
mill-hand and a lady.
"I'll take you down as far as Main Street," he volunteered, giving me at
once a feeling of kindly interest which "city folks" have not time to
show.
We found our way by improvised crossings through broad, soft beds of
mud. Among the branches of the sap-fed trees which lined the unpaved
streets transparent balls of glass were suspended, from which, as
twilight deepened, a brilliant artificial light shot its rays, the
perfection of modern invention, over the primitive, unfinished little
town of Perry, which was all contrast and energy, crudity and progress.
"There's a lot of the girls left the mill yesterday," my companion
volunteered. "They cut the wages, and some of the oldest hands got right
out. There's more than a thousand of 'em on the pay-roll, but I guess
you can make good money if you're ready to work."
We had reached Main Street, which, owing to the absence of a trolley,
had retained a certain individuality. The rivers of mud broadened out
into a sea, flanked by a double row of two-story, flat-roofed frame
stores, whose monotony was interrupted by a hotel and a town hall. My
guide stopped at a corner butcher shop. Its signboard was a couple of
mild-eyed animals hanging head downward, presented informally, with
their skins untouched, and having more the appearance of some
ill-treated pets than future beef and bouillon for the Perry population.
"Follow the boardwalk!" was the simple command I received. "Keep right
along until you come to the mill."
I presently fell in with a drayman, who was calling alternately to his
horse as it sucked in and out of the mud and to a woman on the plank
walk. She had on a hat with velvet and ostrich plumes, a black frock, a
side bag with a lace handkerchief. She was not young and she wore
spectacles; but there was something nervous about her step, a slight
tremolo as she responded to the drayman, which suggested an adventure or
the hope of it. The boardwalk, leading inevitably to the mill, announced
our common purpose and saved us an introduction.
"Going down to get work?" was the question we simultaneously asked of
each other. My companion, all eagerness, shook out the lace
handkerchief in her side bag and explained:
"I don't have to work; my folks keep a hotel; but I always heard so much
about Perry I thought I'd like to come up, and," she sighed, with a
flirt of the lace handkerchief and a contented glance around at the rows
of white frame houses, "I'm up now."
"Want board?" the drayman called to me. "You kin count on me for a good
place. There's Doctor Meadows, now; he's got a nice home and he just
wants two boarders."
The middle-aged woman with the glasses glanced up quickly.
"Doctor Meadows of Tittihute?" she asked. "I wont go there; he's too
strict. He's a Methodist minister. You couldn't have any fun at all."
I followed suit, denouncing Doctor Killjoy as she had, hoping that her
nervous, frisky step would lead me toward the adventure she was
evidently seeking.
"Well," the drayman responded indulgently, "I guess Mr. Norse will know
the best place for you folks."
We had come at once to the factory and the end of the boardwalk. It was
but a few minutes before Mr. Norse had revealed himself as the pivot,
the human hub, the magnet around which the mechanism of the mill
revolved and clung, sure of finding its proper balance. Tall, lank and
meager, with a wrinkled face and a furtive mustache, Mr. Norse made his
rounds with a list of complaints and comments in one hand, a pencil in
the other and a black cap on his head which tipped, indulgent, attentive
to hear and overhear. His manner was professional. He looked at us,
placed us, told us to return at one o'clock, recommended a
boarding-house, and, on his way to some other case, sent a small boy to
accompany us on future stretches of boardwalk to our lodgings. The
street we followed ended in a rolling hillside, and beyond was the
mysterious blue that holds something of the infinite in its mingling of
clouds and shadows. The Geneseo Valley lay near us like a lake under the
sky, and silhouetted against it were the factory chimney and buildings.
The wood's edge came close to the town, whose yards prolong themselves
into green meadows and farming lands. We knocked at a rusty screen door
and were welcomed with the cordiality of the country woman to whom all
folks are neighbours, all strangers possible boarders. The house, built
without mantelpiece or chimney, atoned for this cheerlessness with a
large parlour stove, whose black arms carried warmth through floor and
ceiling. A table was spread in the dining-room. A loud-ticking clock
with a rusty bell marked the hour from a shelf on the wall, and out of
the kitchen, seen in vista, came a spluttering sound of frying food. Our
hostess took us into the parlour. Several family pictures of stony-eyed
women and men with chin beards, and a life-sized Frances Willard in
chromo, looked down at our ensuing interview.
Board, lodging, heat and light we could have at $2.75 a week. Before the
husky clock had struck twelve, I was installed in a small room with the
middle-aged woman from Batavia and a second unknown roommate.
Now what, I asked myself, is the mill's attraction and what is the power
of this small town? Its population is 3,346. Of these, 1,000 work in the
knitting-mill, 200 more in a cutlery factory and 300 in various flour,
butter, barrel, planing mills and salt blocks. Half the inhabitants are
young hands. Not one in a hundred has a home in Perry; they have come
from all western parts of the State to work. There are scarcely any
children, few married couples and almost no old people. It is a town of
youthful contemporaries, stung with the American's ambition for
independence and adventure, charmed by the gaiety of being boys and
girls together, with an ever possible touch of romance which makes the
hardest work seem easy. Within the four board walls of each house, whose
type is repeated up and down Perry streets, there is a group of factory
employees boarding and working at the mill. Their names suggest a
foreign parentage, but for several generations they have mingled their
diverse energies in a common effort which makes Americans of them.
As I lived for several weeks among a group of this kind, who were
fairly representative, I shall try to give, through a description of
their life and conversation, their personalities and characteristics,
their occupations out of working hours, a general idea of these unknown
toilers, who are so amazingly like their more fortunate sisters that I
became convinced the difference is only superficial--not one of kind but
merely of variety. The Perry factory girl is separated from the New York
society girl, not by a few generations, but by a few years of culture
and training. In America, where tradition and family play an unimportant
part, the great educator is the spending of money. It is through the
purchase of possessions that the Americans develop their taste, declare
themselves, and show their inherent capacity for culture. Give to the
Perry mill-hands a free chance for growth, transplant them, care for
them, and they will readily show how slight and how merely a thing of
culture the difference is between the wild rose and the American beauty.
What were my first impressions of the hands who returned at noon under
the roof which had extended unquestioning its hospitality? Were they a
band of slaves, victims to toil and deprivation? Were they making the
pitiful exchange of their total vitality for insufficient nourishment?
Did life mean to them merely the diminishing of their forces?
On the contrary, they entered gay, laughing young, a youth guarded
intact by freedom and hope. What were the subjects of conversation
pursued at dinner? Love, labour, the price paid for it, the advantages
of town over country life, the neighbour and her conduct. What was the
appearance of my companions? There was nothing in it to shock good
taste. Their hands and feet were somewhat broadened by work, their skins
were imperfect for the lack of proper food, their dresses were of coarse
material; but in small things the differences were superficial only. Was
it, then, in big things that the divergence began which places them as a
lower class? Was it money alone that kept them from the places of
authority? What were their ambitions, their perplexities? What part does
self-respect play? How well satisfied are they, or how restless? What
can we learn from them? What can we teach them?
We ate our dinner of boiled meat and custard pie and all started back in
good time for a one o'clock beginning at the mill. For the space of
several hundred feet its expressionless red brick walls lined the
street, implacable, silent. Within all hummed to the collective activity
of a throng, each working with all his force for a common end. Machines
roared and pounded; a fine dust filled the air--a cloud of lint sent
forth from the friction of thousands of busy hands in perpetual contact
with the shapeless anonymous garments they were fashioning. There were,
on their way between the cutting-and the finishing-rooms, 7,000 dozen
shirts. They were to pass by innumerable hands; they were to be held and
touched by innumerable individuals; they were to be begun and finished
by innumerable human beings with distinct tastes and likings, abilities
and failings; and when the 7,000 dozen shirts were complete they were to
look alike, and they were to look as though made by a machine; they were
to show no trace whatever of the men and the women who had made them.
Here we were, 1,000 souls hurrying from morning until night, working
from seven until six, with as little personality as we could, with the
effort to produce, through an action purely mechanical, results as
nearly as possible identical one to the other, and all to the machine
itself.
[Illustration: "THEY TRIFLE WITH LOVE"]
What could be the result upon the mind and health of this frantic
mechanical activity devoid of thought? It was this for which I sought an
answer; it is for this I propose a remedy.
At the threshold of the mill door my roommate and I encountered Mr.
Norse. There was irony in the fates allotted us. She was eager to make
money; I was indifferent. Mr. Norse felt her in his power; I felt him in
mine. She was given a job at twenty-five cents a day and all she could
make; I was offered the favourite work in the mill--shirt finishing, at
thirty cents a day and all I could make; and when I shook my head to see
how far I could exploit my indifference and said, "Thirty cents is too
little," Mr. Norse's answer was: "Well, I suppose you, like the rest of
us, are trying to earn a living. I will guarantee you seventy-five cents
a day for the first two weeks, and all you can make over it is yours."
My apprenticeship began under the guidance of an "old girl" who had been
five years in the mill. A dozen at a time the woolen shirts were brought
to us, complete all but the adding of the linen strips in front where
the buttons and buttonholes are stitched. The price of this operation is
paid for the dozen shirts five, five and a half and six cents, according
to the complexity of the finish. My instructress had done as many as
forty dozen in one day; she averaged $1.75 a day all the year around.
While she was teaching me the factory paid her at the rate of ten cents
an hour.
A touch of the machine's pedal set the needle to stitching like mad. A
second touch in the opposite direction brought it to an abrupt
standstill. For the five hours of my first afternoon session there was
not an instant's harmony between what I did and what I intended to do. I
sewed frantically into the middle of shirts. I watched my needle,
impotent as it flew up and down, and when by chance I made a straight
seam I brought it to so sudden a stop that the thread raveled back
before my weary eyes. When my back and fingers ached so that I could no
longer bend over the work, I watched my comrades with amazement. The
machine was not a wild animal in their hands, but an instrument that
responded with niceness to their guidance. Above the incessant roar and
burring din they called gaily to each other, gossiping, chatting,
telling stories. What did they talk about? Everything, except domestic
cares. The management of an interior, housekeeping, cooking were things
I never once heard mentioned. What were the favourite topics, those
returned to most frequently and with surest interest? Dress and men. Two
girls in the seaming-room had got into a quarrel that day over a packer,
a fine looking, broad-shouldered fellow who had touched the hearts of
both and awakened in each an emotion she claimed the right to defend.
The quarrel began lightly with an exchange of unpleasant comment; it
soon took the proportions of a dispute which could not give itself the
desired vent in words alone. The boss was called in. He made no attempt
to control what lay beyond his power, but applying factory legislation
to the case, he ordered the two Amazons to "register out" until the
squabble was settled, as the factory did not propose to pay its hands
for the time spent in fights. So the two girls "rang out" past the
timekeeper and took an hour in the open air, hand to hand, fist to fist,
which, as it happens to man, had its calming effect.
We stitched our way industriously over the 7,000 dozen. Except for the
moments when some girl called a message or shouted a conversation,
there was nothing to occupy the mind but the vibrating, pulsing,
pounding of the machinery. The body was shaken with it; the ears
strained.
The little girl opposite me was a new hand. Her rosy cheeks and straight
shoulders announced this fact. She had been five months in the mill; the
other girls around her had been there two years, five years, nine years.
There were 150 of us at the long, narrow tables which filled the room.
By the windows the light and air were fairly good. At the centre tables
the atmosphere was stagnant, the shadows came too soon. The wood's edge
ran within a few yards of the factory windows. Between it and us lay the
stream, the water force, the power that had called men to Perry. There,
as everywhere in America, for an individual as for a place, the
attraction was industrial possibilities. As Niagara has become more an
industrial than a picturesque landscape, so Perry, in spite of its
serene and beautiful surroundings, is a shrine to mechanical force in
whose temple, the tall-chimneyed mill, a human sacrifice is made to the
worshipers of gain.
My _vis-à-vis_ was talkative. "Say," she said to her neighbour, "Jim
Weston is the worst flirt I ever seen."
"Who's Jim Weston?" the other responded, diving into the box by her side
for a handful of gray woolen shirts.
"Why, he's the one who made my teeth--he made teeth for all of us up
home," and her smile reveals the handiwork of Weston.
"If I had false teeth," is the comment made upon this, "I wouldn't tell
anybody."
"I thought some," continues the implacable new girl, unruffled, "of
having a gold filling put in one of my front teeth. I think gold
fillings are so pretty," she concludes, looking toward me for a
response.
This primitive love of ornament I found manifest in the same
medico-barbaric fancy for wearing eye-glasses. The nicety of certain
operations in the mill, performed not always in the brightest of lights,
is a fatal strain upon the eyes. There are no oculists in Perry, but a
Buffalo member of the profession makes a monthly visit to treat a new
harvest of patients. Their daily effort toward the monthly finishing of
40,000 garments permanently diminishes their powers of vision. Every
thirty days a new set of girls appears with glasses. They wear them as
they would an ornament of some kind, a necklace, bracelet or a hoop
through the nose.
When the six o'clock whistle blew on the first night I had finished only
two dozen shirts. "You've got a good job," my teacher said, as we came
out together in the cool evening air. "You seem to be taking to it."
They size a girl up the minute she comes in. If she has quick motions
she'll get on all right. "I guess you'll make a good finisher."
Once more we assembled to eat and chat and relax. After a moment by the
kitchen pump we took our places at table. Our hostess waited upon us.
"It takes some grit," she explained, "and more grace to keep boarders."
Except on Sundays, when all men might be considered equals in the sight
of the Lord, she and her husband did not eat until we had finished. She
passed the dishes of our frugal evening meal--potatoes, bread and butter
and cake--and as we served ourselves she held her head in the opposite
direction, as if to say, "I'm not looking; take the biggest piece."
It was with my roommates I became the soonest acquainted. The butcher's
widow from Batavia was a grumbler. "How do you like your job?" I asked
her as we fumbled about in the dim light of our low-roofed room.
"Oh, Lordy," was the answer, "I didn't think it would be like this. I'd
rather do housework any day. I bet you won't stay two weeks." She was
ugly and stupid. She had been married young to a butcher. Left alone to
battle with the world, she might have shaken out some of her dullness,
but the butcher for many years had stood between her and reality,
casting a still deeper shadow on her ignorance. She had the monotony of
an old child, one who questions constantly but who has passed the age
when learning is possible. The butcher's death had opened new
possibilities. After a period of respectful mourning, she had set out,
against the wishes of her family, with a vague, romantic hope that was
expressed not so much in words as in a certain picture hat trimmed with
violet chiffon and carried carefully in a bandbox by itself, a new,
crisp sateen petticoat, and a golf skirt she had sat up until one
o'clock to finish the night before she left home. It was inevitable that
the butcher's widow should be disappointed. There was too much grim
reality in ten-hour days spent over a machine in the stifling mill room
to feed a sentimentalist whose thirty odd years were no accomplice to
romance. She grumbled and complained. Secret dissatisfaction preyed upon
her. She was somewhat exasperated at the rest of us, who worked cheerily
and with no _arrière pensée_. At the end of the first week the picture
hat was tucked away in the bandbox; the frou-frou of the sateen
petticoat and the daring swish of the golf skirt were packed up, like
the remains of a bubble that had reflected the world in its brilliant
sides one moment and the next lay a little heap of soap-suds. She had
gone behind in her work steadily at the factory; she was not making more
than sixty cents a day. She left us and went back to do housework in
Batavia.
My other roommate was of the Madonna type. In our class she would have
been called an invalid. Her hands trembled, she was constantly in pain,
and her nerves were rebellious without frequent doses of bromide. We
found her one night lying in a heap on the bed, her moans having called
us to her aid. It was the pain in her back that never stopped, the ache
between her shoulders, the din of the machines in her ears, the
vibration, the strain of incessant hours upon her tired nerves. We fixed
her up as best we could, and the next day at quarter before seven she
was, like the rest of us, bending over her machine again. She had been a
school-teacher, after passing the necessary examination at the Geneseo
Normal School. She could not say why school-teaching was uncongenial to
her, except that the children "made her nervous" and she wanted to try
factory work. Her father was a cheese manufacturer up in the Genesee
Valley. She might have lived quietly at home, but she disliked to be a
dependent. She was of the mystic, sentimental type. She had a broad
forehead, straight auburn hair, a clear-cut mouth, whose sharp curves
gave it sweetness. Though her large frame indicated clearly an
Anglo-Saxon lineage, there was nothing of the sport about her. She had
never learned to skate or swim, but she could sit and watch the hills
all day long. Her clothes had an esthetic touch. Mingled with her
nervous determination there was a sentimental yearning. She was an
idealist, impelled by some controlling emotion which was the mainspring
of her life.
Little by little we became friends. Our common weariness brought us
often together after supper in a listless, confidential mood before the
parlour stove. We let the conversation drift inevitably toward the
strong current that was marking her with a touch of melancholy, like all
those of her type whose emotional natures are an enchanted mirror,
reflecting visions that have no place in reality. We talked about
blondes and brunettes, tall men and short men, our favourite man's name;
and gradually the impersonal became personal, the ideal took form. Her
voice, like a broken lute that might have given sweet sounds, related
the story. It was inevitable that she should love a dreamer like
herself. Nature had imbued her with a hopeless yearning. She slipped a
gold locket from a chain on her throat. It framed her hero's picture,
the source of her courage, the embodiment of her heroic energy: a man of
thirty, who had failed at everything; good-looking, refined, a personage
in real life who resembled the inhabitants of her enchanted mirror. In
the story she told there were stars and twilight, summer evenings,
walks, talks, hopes and vague projects. Any practical questions I felt
ready to ask would have sounded coarse. The little school-teacher with
shattered nerves embodied a hope that was more to her than meat and
drink and money. She was of those who do not live by bread alone.
Among the working population of Perry there are all manner of American
characteristics manifest. In a country where conditions change with
such rapidity that each generation is a revelation to the one which
preceded it, it is inevitable that the family and the State should be
secondary to the individual. We live with our own generation, with our
contemporaries. We substitute experience for tradition. Each generation
lives for itself during its prime. As soon as its powers begin to
decline it makes way with resignation for the next: "We have had our
day; now you can have yours." Thus in the important decisions of life,
the choosing of a career, matrimony or the like, the average American is
much more influenced by his contemporaries than by his elders, much more
stimulated or determined by the friends of his own age than by the older
members of his family. This detaching of generations through the
evolution of conditions is inevitable in a new civilization; it is part
of the country's freedom. It adds fervour and zest and originality to
the effort of each. But it means a youth without the peace of
protection; an old age without the harvest of consolation. The man in
such a battle as life becomes under these circumstances is better
equipped than the woman, whose nature disarms her for the struggle. The
American woman is restless, dissatisfied. Society, whether among the
highest or lowest classes, has driven her toward a destiny that is not
normal. The factories are full of old maids; the colleges are full of
old maids; the ballrooms in the worldly centres are full of old maids.
For natural obligations are substituted the fictitious duties of clubs,
meetings, committees, organizations, professions, a thousand unwomanly
occupations.
I cannot attempt to touch here upon the classes who have not a direct
bearing on our subject, but the analogy is striking between them and
the factory elements of which I wish to speak. I cannot dwell upon
details that, while full of interest, are yet somewhat aside from the
present point, but I want to state a fact, the origin of whose ugly
consequences is in all classes and therefore concerns every living
American woman. Among the American born women of this country the
sterility is greater, the fecundity less than those of any other
nation in the world, unless it be France, whose anxiety regarding her
depopulation we would share in full measure were it not for the
foreign immigration to the United States, which counteracts the
degeneracy of the American.[1] The original causes for this increasing
sterility are moral and not physical. When this is known, does not the
philosophy of the American working woman become a subject of vital
interest? Among the enemies to fecundity and a natural destiny there
are two which act as potently in the lower as in the upper classes:
the triumph of individualism, the love of luxury. America is not a
democracy, the unity of effort between the man and the woman does not
exist. Men were too long in a majority. Women have become autocrats or
rivals. A phrase which I heard often repeated at the factory speaks by
itself for a condition: "She must be married, because she don't work."
And another phrase pronounced repeatedly by the younger girls: "I
don't have to work; my father gives me all the money I need, but not
all the money I _want_. I like to be independent and spend my money as
I please."
[Footnote 1: George Engelman, M.D., "The Increasing Sterility of
American Women," from the Journal of the American Medical
Association, October 5, 1901.]
What are the conclusions to be drawn? The American-born girl is an
egoist. Her whole effort (and she makes and sustains one in the life of
mill drudgery) is for herself. She works for luxury until the day when a
proper husband presents himself. Then, she stops working and lets him
toil for both, with the hope that the budget shall not be diminished by
increasing family demands.
In those cases where the woman continues to work after marriage, she
chooses invariably a kind of occupation which is inconsistent with
child-bearing. She returns to the mill with her husband. There were a
number of married couples at the knitting factory at Perry. They
boarded, like the rest of us. I never saw a baby nor heard of a baby
while I was in the town.
I can think of no better way to present this love of luxury, this
triumph of individualism, this passion for independence than to
continue my account of the daily life at Perry.
On Saturday night we drew our pay and got out at half-past four. This
extra hour and a half was not given to us; we had saved it up by
beginning each day at fifteen minutes before seven. In reality we worked
ten and a quarter hours five days in the week in order to work eight and
a half on the sixth.
By five o'clock on Saturdays the village street was animated with
shoppers--the stores were crowded. At supper each girl had a collection
of purchases to show: stockings, lace, fancy buckles, velvet ribbons,
elaborate hairpins. Many of them, when their board was paid, had less
than a dollar left of the five or six it had taken them a week to earn.
"I am not working to save," was the claim of one girl for all. "I'm
working for pleasure."
This same girl called me into her room one evening when she was packing
to move to another boarding-house where were more young men and better
food. I watched her as she put her things into the trunk. She had a
quantity of dresses, underclothes with lace and tucks, ribbons, fancy
hair ornaments, lace boleros, handkerchiefs. The bottom of her trunk was
full of letters from her beau. The mail was always the source of great
excitement for her, and having noticed that she seemed especially
hilarious over a letter received that night, I made this the pretext for
a confidence.
"You got a letter to-night, didn't you?" I asked innocently. "Was it
the one you wanted?"
"My, yes," she answered, tossing up a heap of missives from the depths
of her trunk. "It was from the same one that wrote me these. I've been
going with him three years. I met him up in the grape country where I
went to pick grapes. They give you your board and you can make
twenty-seven or thirty dollars in a fall. He made up his mind as soon as
he saw me that I was about right. Now he wants me to marry him. That's
what his letter said to-night. He is making three dollars a day and he
owns a farm and a horse and wagon. He bought his sister a $300 piano
this fall."
"Well, of course," I said eagerly, "you will accept him?"
She looked half shy, half pleased, half surprised.
"No, my! no," she answered, shaking her head. "I don't want to be
married."
"But why not? Don't you think you are foolish? It's a good chance and
you have already been 'going with him' three years."
"Yes, I know that, but I ain't ready to marry him yet. Twenty-five is
time enough. I'm only twenty-three. I can have a good time just as I am.
He didn't want me to come away and neither did my parents. I thought it
would 'most kill my father. He looked like he'd been sick the day I
left, but he let me come 'cause he knew I'd never be satisfied until I
got my independence."
What part did the love of humanity play in this young egoist's heart?
She was living, as she had so well explained it, "not to save, but to
give herself pleasure"; not to spare others, but to exercise her will in
spite of them. Tenderness, reverence, gratitude, protection are the
feelings which one generation awakens for another. Among the thousand
contemporaries at Perry, from the sameness of their ambitions, there was
inevitable rivalry and selfishness. The closer the age and capacity the
keener the struggle.
[Illustration: AFTER SATURDAY NIGHT'S SHOPPING]
There are seven churches in Perry of seven different denominations. In
this small town of 3,000 inhabitants there are seven different forms of
worship. The church plays an important part in the social life of the
mill hands. There are gatherings of all sorts from one Sunday to
another, and on Sunday there are almost continuous services. There are
frequent conversions. When the Presbyterian form fails they "try" the
Baptist. There is no moral instruction; it is all purely religious; and
they join one church or another more as they would a social club than an
ordained religious organization.
Friday was "social" night at the church. Sometimes there was a "poverty"
social, when every one put on shabby clothes, and any one who wore a
correct garment of any sort was fined for the benefit of the church.
Pound socials were another variety of diversion, where all the
attendants were weighed on arriving and charged a cent admission for
every pound of avoirdupois.
The most popular socials, however, were box socials, and it was to one
of these I decided to go with two girls boarding in the house. Each of
us packed a box with lunch as good as we could afford--eggs, sandwiches,
cakes, pickles, oranges--and arrived with these, we proceeded to the
vestry-room, where we found an improvised auctioneer's table and a pile
of boxes like our own, which were marked and presently put up for sale.
The youths of the party bid cautiously or recklessly, according as their
inward conviction told them that the box was packed by friend or foe.
My box, which, like the rest, had supper for two, was bid in by a tall,
nice-looking mill hand, and we installed ourselves in a corner to eat
and talk. He was full of reminiscence and had had a checkered career.
His first experience had been at night work in a paper mill. He worked
eleven hours a night one week, thirteen hours a night the next week, in
and out of doors, drenched to the skin. He had lost twenty-five pounds
in less than a year, and his face was a mere mask drawn over the
irregular bones of the skull.
"I always like whatever I am doing," he responded at my protestation of
sympathy. "I think that's the only way to be. I never had much appetite
at night. They packed me an elegant pail, but somehow all cold food
didn't relish much. I never did like a pail.... How would you like to
take a dead man's place?" he asked, looking at me grimly.
I begged him to explain.
"One of my best friends," he began, "was working alongside of me, and I
guess he got dizzy or something, for he leaned up against the big belt
that ran all the machinery and he was lifted right up in the air and
tore to pieces before he ever knew what struck him. The boss came in and
seen it, and the second question he asked, he says, 'Say, is the
machinery running all right?' It wasn't ten minutes before there was
another man in there doing the dead man's work."
I began to undo the lunch-box, feeling very little inclined to eat. We
divided the contents, and my friend, seeing perhaps that I was
depressed, told me about the "shows" he had been to in his wanderings.
"Now, I don't care as much for comedy as some folks," he explained. "I
like 'Puddin' Head Wilson' first rate, but the finest thing I ever seen
was two of Shakespeare's: 'The Merchant of Venice' and 'Julius Cæsar.'
If you ever get a chance I advise you to go and hear them; they're
great."
I responded cordially, and when we had exhausted Shakespeare I asked
him how he liked Perry people.
"Oh, first rate," he said. "I've been here only a month, but I think
there's too much formality. It seems to me that when you work alongside
of a girl day after day you might speak to her without an introduction,
but they won't let you here. I never seen such a formal place."
I said very little. The boy talked on of his life and experiences. His
English was good except for certain grammatical errors. His words were
well chosen. There was between him and the fortunate boys of a superior
class only a few years of training.
The box social was the beginning of a round of gaieties. The following
night I went with my box-social friend to a ball. Neither of us danced,
but we arrived early and took good places for looking on. The barren
hall was dimly lighted. In the corner there was a stove; at one end a
stage. An old man with a chin beard was scattering sand over the floor
with a springtime gesture of seed sowing. He had his hat on and his coat
collar turned up, as though to indicate that the party had not begun. By
and by the stage curtain rolled up and the musicians came out and
unpacked a violin, a trombone, a flute and a drum. They sat down in the
Medieval street painted on the scenery back of them, crossed their legs
and asked for _sol la_ from an esthetic young lady pianist, with whom
they seemed on very familiar terms. The old man with the chin beard made
an official _entrée_ from the wing, picked up the drum and became a part
of the orchestra. The subscribers had begun to arrive, and when the
first two-step struck up there were eight or ten couples on the floor.
They held on to each other closely, with no outstretched arms as is the
usual form, and they revolved very slowly around and around the room.
The young men had smooth faces, patent leather boots, very smart cravats
and a sheepish, self-conscious look. The girls had elaborate
constructions in frizzed hair, with bows and tulle; black trailing
skirts with coloured ruffled under-petticoats, light-coloured blouses
and fancy belts. They seemed to be having a very good time.
On the way home we passed a brightly lighted grocery shop. My friend
looked in with interest. "Goodness," he said, "but those Saratoga chips
look good. Now, what would you order," he went on, "if you could have
anything you liked?" We began to compose a ménu with oysters and chicken
and all the things we never saw, but it was not long before my friend
cried "Mercy! Oh, stop; I can't stand it. It makes me too hungry."
The moon had gone under a cloud. The wooden sidewalks were rough and
irregular, and as we walked along toward home I tripped once or twice.
Presently I felt a strong arm put through mine, with this assurance:
"Now if you fall we'll both fall together."
After four or five days' experience with a machine I began to work with
more ease and with less pain between my shoulders. The girls were kind
and sympathetic, stopping to help and encourage the "new girl." One of
the shirt finishers, who had not been long in the mill herself, came
across from her table one day when I was hard at work with a pain like a
sword stab in my back.
"I know how you ache," she said. "It just makes me feel like crying when
I see how you keep at it and I can guess how tired you are."
Nothing was so fatiguing as the noise. In certain places near the eyelet
and buttonhole machines it was impossible to make one's neighbour hear
without shouting. My teacher, whose nerves, I took it, were less
sensitive than mine, expressed her sensations in this way:
"It's just terrible sitting here all day alone, worrying and thinking
all by yourself and hustling from morning until night. Lots of the girls
have nervous prostration. My sister had it and I guess I'm getting it. I
hear the noise all night. Quite a few have consumption, too, from the
dust and the lint."
The butcher's widow, the school-teacher and I started in at about the
same time. At the end of two weeks the butcher's widow had long been
gone. The school-teacher had averaged seventy-nine cents a day and I
had averaged eighty-nine. My best day I finished sixteen dozen shirts
and netted $1.11. My board and washing cost me three dollars, so that
from the first I had a living insured.
There was one negress in the factory. She worked in a corner quite by
herself and attended to menial jobs, such as sweeping and picking up
scraps. A great many of the girls and boys took correspondence courses
in stenography, drawing, bookkeeping, illustrating, etc., etc. The
purely mechanical work of the mill does not satisfy them. They are
restless and ambitious, exactly the material with which to form schools
of industrial art, the class of hand-workers of whom I have already
spoken.
One of the girls who worked beside us as usual in the morning, left a
note on her machine at noon one day to say that she would never be back.
She was going up to the lake to drown herself, and we needn't look for
her. Some one was sent in search. She was found sitting at the lake's
edge, weeping. She did not speak. We all talked about it in our leisure
moments, but the work was not interrupted. There were various
explanations: she was out of her mind; she was discouraged with her
work; she was nervous. No one suggested that an unfortunate love affair
be the cause of her desperate act. There was not a word breathed against
her reputation. I would have felt impure in proposing what to me seemed
most probable.
The mill owners exert, as far as possible, an influence over the moral
tone of their employees, assuming the right to judge their conduct both
in and out of the factory and to treat them as they see fit. The average
girls are self-respecting. They trifle with love. The attraction they
wish to exert is ever present in their minds and in their conversation.
The sacrifices they make for clothes are the first in importance. They
have superstitions of all kinds: to sneeze on Saturday means the arrival
of a beau on Sunday; a big or little tea leaf means a tall or a short
caller, and so on. There is a book of dreams kept on one table in the
mill, and the girls consult it to find the interpretation of their
nocturnal reveries. They are fanciful, sentimental, cold, passionless.
The accepted honesty of married life makes them slow to discard the
liberty they love, to dismiss the suitors who would attend their wedding
as one would a funeral.
There is, of course, another category of girl, who goes brutally into
passionate pleasures, follows the shows, drinks and knocks about town
with the boys. She is known as a "bum," has sacrificed name and
reputation and cannot remain in the mill.
We discussed one night the suitable age for a girl to become mistress of
herself. The boy of the household maintained that at eighteen a girl
could marry, but that she must be twenty-one before she could have her
own way. All the girls insisted that they could and did boss themselves
and had even before they were eighteen.
Two chums who boarded in my house gave a charming illustration of the
carelessness and the extravagance, the independence and love of it which
characterizes feminine America. One of these was a _deracinee_, a child
with a foreign touch in her twang; a legend of other climes in the
dexterity of her deft fingers; some memory of an exile from France in
her name: Lorraine. Her friend was a _mondaine_. She had the social
gift, a subtle understanding of things worldly, the _glissey mortel
n'appuyez jamais_ attitude toward life. By a touch of flippancy, an
adroit turn of mind, she kept the knowing mastery over people which has
mystified and delighted in all great hostesses since the days of Esther.
When the other girls waited feverishly for love letters, she was opening
a pile of invitations to socials and theatre parties. Discreet and
condescending, she received more than she gave.
As soon as the posters were out for a Tuesday performance of "Faust,"
preparations began in the household to attend. Saturday shopping and
supper were hurried through and by six o'clock Lorraine was at the
sewing machine tucking chiffon for hats and bodices. After ten hours'
work in the mill, she began again, eager to use the last of the spring
twilight, prolonged by a quarter moon. There was a sudden, belated gust
of snow; in the blue mist each white frame house glowed with a warm,
pink light from its parlour stove. Lorraine's fingers flew. A hat took
form and grew from a heap of stuff into a Parisian creation; a bolero
was cut and tucked and fitted; a skirt was ripped and stitched and
pressed; a shirt-waist was started and finished. For two nights the
girls worked until twelve o'clock so that when the "show" came they
might have something new to wear that nobody had seen. This must have
been the unanimous intention of the Perry populace, for the peanut
gallery was a bower of fashion. Styles, which I had thought were new in
Paris, were familiarly worn in Perry by the mill hands. White kid gloves
were _en regle_. The play was "Faust." All allusions to the triumph of
religion over the devil; all insinuations on the part of Mephistopheles
in regard to the enviable escape of Martha's husband and of husbands in
general, from prating women in general; all invocations of virtue and
moral triumph, were greeted with bursts of applause. Between the acts
there was music, and the ushers distributed showers of printed
advertisements, which the audience fell at once to reading as though
they had nothing to talk about.
I heard only one hearty comment about the play: "That devil," said
Lorraine, as we walked home together, "was a corker!"
I have left until the last the two friends who held a place apart in
the household: the farmer and his wife, the old people of another
generation with whom we boarded. They had begun life together forty
years ago. They lived on neighbouring farms. There was dissension
between the families such as we read of in "Pyramus and Thisbe," "Romeo
and Juliet." The young people contrived a means of corresponding. An old
coat that hung in the barn, where nobody saw it, served as post-office.
Truman pleaded his cause ardently and won his Louisa. They fixed a day
for the elopement. A fierce snowstorm piled high its drifts of white,
but all the afternoon long the little bride played about, burrowing a
path from the garden to her bedroom window, and when night came and
brought her mounted hero with it, she climbed up on to the saddle by his
side and rode away to happiness, leaving ill nature and quarrels far
behind. Side by side, as on the night of their wedding ride, they had
traversed forty years together. Ill health had broken up their farm
home. When Truman could no longer work they came in to Perry to take
boarders, having no children. The old man never spoke. He did chores
about the house, made the fire mornings, attended to the parlour stove;
he went about his work and no one ever addressed a word to him; he
seemed to have no more live contact with the youth about him than
driftwood has with the tree's new shoots. He had lived his life on a
farm; he was a land captain; he knew the earth's secrets as a ship's
captain knows the sea's. He paced the mild wooden pavements of Perry,
booted, and capped for storm and wind, deep snow and all the inimical
elements a pioneer might meet with. His new false teeth seemed to shine
from his shaggy gray beard as a symbol of this new town experience in a
rough natural existence, out of keeping, ill assorted. Tempted to know
what his silence hid, I spent an hour with him by the kitchen stove one
Sunday afternoon. His memory went easily back to the days when there
were no railroads, no telegraphs, no mills. He was of a speculative turn
of mind:
"I don't see," he said, "what makes men so crazy after gold. They're
getting worse all the time. Gold ain't got no real value. You take all
the gold out of the world and it wouldn't make no difference whatever.
You can't even make a tool to get a living with, out of gold; but just
do away with the iron, and where would you be?" And again, he
volunteered:
"I think Mr. Carnegie would have done a deal nobler if he had paid his
men a little more straight along. He wouldn't have had such a name for
himself. But don't you believe it would have been better to have paid
those men more for the work they were doing day by day than it is now to
give pensions to their families? I know what I think about the matter."
[Illustration: SUNDAY EVENING AT SILVER LAKE
The mill girls' excursion resort. A special train and 'busses run on
Sundays, and "everybody" goes.]
I asked him how he liked city life.
"Give me a farm every time," was his answer. "Once you've seen a town
you know it all. It's the same over and over again. But the country's
changing every day in the year. It's a terrible thing, being sick," he
went on. "It seems sometimes as though the pain would tear me to pieces
when I walk across the floor. I wasn't no good on the farm any more, so
my wife took a notion we better come in town and take boarders."
Thus it was with this happily balanced couple; as his side grew heavier
she took on more ballast and swung even with him. She had the quick
adaptability common to American women. During the years of farm life
religious meetings and a few neighbours had kept her in touch with the
outside world. The church and the kitchen were what she had on the farm;
the church and the kitchen were what she had in town; family life
supplemented by boarders, a social existence kept alive by a few
faithful neighbours. She had retained her activity and sympathy because
she was intelligent, because she lived with the _young_. The man could
not make himself one of another generation, so he lived alone. He had
lost his companions, the "cow kind and the sheep kind"; he had lost
control over the earth that belonged to him; he was disused; he
suffered; he pined. But as they sat together side by side at table, his
look toward her was one of trust and comfort. His glance traveled back
over a long vista of years seen to them as their eyes met, invisible to
those about--years that had glorified confidence in this life as it
passed and transfigured it into the promise of another life to come.
* * * * *
MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO
* * * * *
CHAPTER IV
MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO
On arriving in Chicago I addressed myself to the ladies of Hull House,
asking for a tenement family who would take a factory girl to board. I
intended starting out without money to see at least how far I could go
before putting my hand into the depths where an emergency fund was
pinned in a black silk bag.
It was the first day of May. A hot wind blew eddies of dust up and down
the electric car tracks; the streets were alive with children; a group
swarmed in front of each doorstep, too large to fit into the house
behind it. Down the long, regular avenues that stretched right and left
there was a broken line of tenements topped by telegraph wires and
bathed in a soft cloud of black soot falling from a chimney in the
neighbourhood. The sidewalks were a patchwork of dirt, broken
paving-stones and wooden boards. The sunshine was hot and gloomy. There
were no names on the corner lamps and the house numbers were dull and
needed repainting. It was already late in the afternoon: I had but an
hour or two before dark to find a lodging. The miserable, overcrowded
tenement houses repelled me, yet I dreaded that there should not be room
among them for one more bread-winner to lodge. I hailed a cluster of
children in the gutter:
"Say," I said, "do you know where Mrs. Hicks lives to?"
They crowded around, eager. The tallest boy, with curly red hair and
freckles, pointed out Mrs. Hicks' residence, the upper windows of a
brick flat that faced the world like a prison wall. After I had rung and
waited for the responding click from above, a cross-eyed Italian woman
with a baby in her arms motioned to me from the step where she was
sitting that I must go down a side alley to find Mrs. Hicks. Out of a
promiscuous heap of filth, a broken-down staircase led upward to a row
of green blinds and a screen door. Somebody's housekeeping was scattered
around in torn bits of linen and tomato cans.
The screen door opened to my knock and the Hicks family gushed at
me--ever so many children of all ages and an immense mother in an
under-waist and petticoat. The interior was neat; the wooden floors were
scrubbed spotless. I congratulated myself. Mrs. Hicks clucked to the
family group, smiled at me, and said:
"I never took a boarder in my life. I ain't got room enough for my own
young ones, let alone strangers."
[Illustration: "THE BREATH OF THE BLACK, SWEET NIGHT REACHED THEM,
FETID, HEAVY WITH THE ODOUR OF DEATH AS IT BLEW ACROSS THE STOCKYARDS"]
There were two more names on my list. I proceded to the nearest and
found an Irish lady living in basement rooms ornamented with green
crochet work, crayon portraits, red plaid table-cloths and chromo
picture cards.
She had rheumatism in her "limbs" and moved with difficulty. She was
glad to talk the matter over, though she had from the first no intention
of taking me. From my then point of view nothing seemed so desirable as
a cot in Mrs. Flannagan's front parlour. I even offered in my eagerness
to sleep on the horsehair sofa. Womanlike, she gave twenty little
reasons for not taking me before she gave the one big reason, which was
this:
"Well, to tell you the truth, I wouldn't mind having you myself, but
I've got three sons, and you know _boys is queer_."
It was late, the sun had set and only the twilight remained for my
search before night would be upon me and I would be driven to some
charity refuge.
I had one more name, and climbed to find its owner in a tenement flat.
She was a German woman with a clubfoot. Two half-naked children
incrusted with dirt were playing on the floor. They waddled toward me as
I asked what my chances were for finding a room and board. The mother
struck first one, then the other, of her offspring, and they fell into
two little heaps, both wailing. From a hole back of the kitchen came the
sympathetic response of a half-starved shaggy dog. He howled and the
babes wailed while we visited the dusky apartment. There was one room
rented to a day lodger who worked nights, and one room without a window
where the German family slept. She proposed that I share the bed with
her that night until she could get an extra cot. Her husband and the
children could sleep on the parlour lounge. She was hideous and dirty.
Her loose lips and half-toothless mouth were the slipshod note of an
entire existence. There was a very dressy bonnet with feathers hanging
on a peg in the bedroom, and two gala costumes belonging to the tearful
twins.
"I'll come back in an hour, thank you," I said. "Don't expect me if I am
not here in an hour," and I fled down the stairs. Before the hour was up
I had found, through the guidance of the Irish lady with rheumatism, a
clean room in one street and board in another. This was inconvenient,
but safe and comparatively healthy.
My meals were thirty-five cents a day, payable at the end of the week;
my room was $1.25 a week, total $3.70 a week.
My first introduction to Chicago tenement life was supper at Mrs.
Wood's.
I could hear the meal sputtering on the kitchen stove as I opened the
Wood front door.
Mrs. Wood, combining duties as cook and hostess, called to me to make
myself at home in the front parlour. I seated myself on the sofa, which
exuded the familiar acrid odour of the poor. Opposite me there was a
door half open leading into a room where a lamp was lighted. I could see
a young girl and a man talking together. He was sitting and had his hat
on. She had a halo of blond hair, through which the lamplight was
shining, and she stood near the man, who seemed to be teasing her. Their
conversation was low, but there was a familiar cry now and then, half
vulgar, half affectionate.
When we had taken our places at the table, Mrs. Wood presented us.
"This is Miss Ida," she said, pointing to the blonde girl; "she's been
boarding over a year with me, and this," turning to the young man who
sat near by with one arm hanging listlessly over the back of a chair,
"this is Miss Ida's intended."
The other members of the household were a fox terrier, a canary and
"Wood"--Wood was a man over sixty. He and Mrs. Wood had the same devoted
understanding that I have observed so often among the poor couples of
the older generation. This good little woman occupied herself with the
things that no longer satisfy. She took tender care of her husband,
following him to the door with one hand on his shoulder and calling
after him as he went on his way: "Good-by; take care of yourself." She
had a few pets, her children were married and gone, she had a miniature
patch of garden, a trust in the church guild--which took some time and
attention for charitable works, and she did her own cooking and
housework. "And," she explained to me in the course of our conversation
at supper, "I never felt the need of joining these University Settlement
Clubs to get into society." Wood and his wife were a good sort. Miss Ida
was kind in her inquiries about my plans.
"Have you ever operated a power machine?" she asked.
"Yes," I responded--with what pride she little dreamed. "I've run an
electric Singer."
"I guess I can get you a job, then, all right, at my place. It's
piece-work; you get off at five, but you can make good money."
I thanked her, not adding that my Chicago career was to be a checkered
one, and that I was determined to see how many things I could do that I
had never done before.
But social life was beginning to wear on Miss Ida's intended. He took up
his hat and swung along toward the door. I was struggling to extract
with my fork the bones of a hard, fried fish. Mrs. Wood encouraged me in
a motherly tone:
"Oh, my, don't be so formal; take your knife."
"Say," called a voice from the door, "say, come on, Ida, I'm waiting for
you." And the blonde fiancée hurried away with an embarrassed laugh to
join her lover. She was refined and delicate, her ears were small, her
hands white and slender, she spoke correctly with a nasal voice, and her
teeth (as is not often the case among this class, whose lownesses seem
suddenly revealed when they open their mouths) were sound and clean.
The man's smooth face was all commonness and vulgarity.
"He's had appendicitis," Mrs. Wood explained when we were alone. "He's
been out of work a long time. As soon as he goes to his job his side
bursts out again where they operated on him. He ain't a bit strong."
"When are they going to be married?" I asked.
"Oh, dear me, they don't think of that yet; they're in no hurry."
"Will Miss Ida work after she's married?"
"No, indeed."
Did they not have their share of ideal then, these two young labourers
who could wait indefinitely, fed by hope, in their sordid, miserable
surroundings?
I returned to my tenement room; its one window opened over a narrow
alley flanked on its opposite side by a second tenement, through whose
shutters I could look and see repeated layers of squalid lodgings. The
thermometer had climbed up into the eighties. The wail of a newly born
baby came from the room under mine. The heat was stifling. Outdoors in
the false, flickering day of the arc lights the crowd swarmed, on the
curb, on the sidewalk, on the house steps. The breath of the black,
sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it
blew across the stockyards. Shouts, calls, cries, moans, the sounds of
old age and of infancy, of despair and of joy, mingled and became the
anonymous murmur of a hot, human multitude.
The following morning I put ten cents in my pocket and started out to
get a job before this sum should be used up. How huge the city seemed
when I thought of the small space I could cover on foot, looking for
work! I walked toward the river, as the commercial activity expressed
itself in that direction by fifteen-and twenty-story buildings and
streams of velvet smoke. Blocks and blocks of tenements, with the same
dirty people wallowing around them, answered my searching eyes in blank
response. There was an occasional dingy sign offering board and lodging.
After I had made several futile inquiries at imposing offices on the
river front I felt that it was a hopeless quest. I should never get work
unknown, unskilled, already tired and discouraged. My collar was wilted
in the fierce heat; my shabby felt sailor hat was no protection against
the sun's rays; my hands were gloveless; and as I passed the plate glass
windows I could see the despondent droop of my skirt, the stray locks of
hair that blew about free of comb or veil. A sign out: "Manglers
wanted!" attracted my attention in the window of a large steam laundry.
I was not a "mangler," but I went in and asked to see the boss. "Ever
done any mangling?" was his first question.
"No," I answered, "but I am sure I could learn." I put so much ardour
into my response that the boss at once took an interest.
"We might give you a place as shaker; you could start in and work up."
"What do you pay?"
"Four dollars a week until you learn. Then you would work up to five,
five and a half."
Better than nothing, was all I could think, but I can't live on four a
week.
"How often do you pay?"
"Every Tuesday night."
This meant no money for ten days.
"If you think you'd like to try shaking come round Monday morning at
seven o'clock."
Which I took as my dismissal until Monday.
At least I had a job, however poor, and strengthened by this thought I
determined to find something better before Monday. The ten-cent piece
lay an inviting fortune in my hand. I was to part with one-tenth of it
in exchange for a morning newspaper. This investment seemed a reckless
plunge, but "nothing venture, nothing have," my pioneer spirit prompted,
and soon deep in the list of _Wanted, Females_, I felt repaid. Even in
my destitute condition I had a choice in mind. If possible I wanted to
work without machinery in a shop where the girls used their hands alone
as power. Here seemed to be my heart's content--a short, concise
advertisement, "Wanted, hand sewers." After a consultation with a
policeman as to the whereabouts of my future employer, it became evident
that I must part with another of my ten cents, as the hand sewers worked
on the opposite side of the city from the neighbourhood whither I had
strayed in my morning's wanderings. I took a car and alighted at a busy
street in the fashionable shopping centre of Chicago. The number I
looked for was over a steep flight of dirty wooden stairs. If there is
such a thing as luck it was now to dwell a moment with one of the
poorest. I pushed open a swinging door and let myself into the office of
a clothing manufacturer.
The owner, Mr. F., got up from his desk and came toward me.
"I seen your advertisement in the morning paper."
"Yes," he answered in a kindly voice. "Are you a tailoress?"
"No, sir; I've never done much sewing except on a machine."
"Well, we have machines here."
"But," I almost interrupted, beginning to fear that my training at Perry
was to limit all further experience to an electric Singer, "I'd rather
work with my hands. I like the hand-work."
He looked at me and gave me an answer which exactly coincided with my
theories. He said this, and it was just what I wanted him to say.
"If you do hand-work you'll have to use your mind. Lots of girls come in
here with an idea they can let their thoughts wander; but you've got to
pay strict attention. You can't do hand-work mechanically."
"All right, sir," I responded. "What do you pay?"
"I'll give you six dollars a week while you're learning." I could hardly
control a movement of delight. Six dollars a week! A dollar a day for an
apprentice!
"But"--my next question I made as dismal as possible--"when do you pay?"
"Generally not till the end of the second week," the kindly voice said;
"but we could arrange to pay you at the end of the first if you needed
the money."
"Shall I come in Monday?"
"Come in this afternoon at 12:30 if you're ready."
"I'm ready," I said, "but I ain't brought no lunch with me, and it's too
late now to get home and back again."
The man put his hand in his pocket and laid down before me a fifty-cent
piece, advanced on my pay.
"Take that," he said, with courtesy; "get yourself a lunch in the
neighbourhood and come back at half-past twelve."
I went to the nearest restaurant. It was an immense bakery patronized by
office girls and men, hard workers who came for their only free moment
of the day into this eating-place. Everything that could be swallowed
quickly was spread out on a long counter, behind which there were
steaming tanks of tea, coffee and chocolate. The men took their food
downstairs and the ladies climbed to the floor above. I watched them.
They were self-supporting women--independent; they could use their money
as they liked. They came in groups--a rustling frou-frou announced silk
underfittings; feathers, garlands of flowers, masses of trimming weighed
down their broad-brimmed picture hats, fancy veils, kid gloves, silver
side-bags, embroidered blouses and elaborate belt buckles completed the
detail of their showy costumes, the whole worn with the air of a
manikin. What did these busy women order for lunch? Tea and buns,
ice-cream and buckwheat cakes, apple pie _a la mode_ and chocolate were
the most serious ménus. This nourishing food they ate with great nicety
and daintiness, talking the while about clothes. They were in a hurry,
as all of them had some shopping to do before returning to work, and
they each spent a prinking five minutes before the mirror, adjusting the
trash with which they had bedecked themselves exteriorly while their
poor hard-working systems went ungarnished and hungry within.
This is the wound in American society whereby its strength sloughs away.
It is in this class that campaigns can be made, directly and
indirectly, by preaching and by example. What sort of women are those
who sacrifice all on the altar of luxury? It is a prostitution to sell
the body's health and strength for gewgaws. What harmony can there be
between the elaborate get-up of these young women and the miserable
homes where they live? The idolizing of material things is a religion
nurtured by this class of whom I speak. In their humble surroundings the
love of self, the desire to possess things, the cherished need for
luxuries, crowd out the feelings that make character. They are but one
manifestation of the egoism of the unmarried American woman.
For what and for whom do they work?
Is their fundamental thought to be of benefit to a family or to some
member of a family? Is their indirect object to be strong, thrifty
members of society? No. Their parents are secondary, their health is
secondary to the consuming vanity that drives them toward a ruinous
goal. They scorn the hand-workers; they feel themselves a _noblesse_ by
comparison. They are the American snobs whose coat of arms marks not a
well-remembered family but prospective luxuries.... Married, they bring
as a portion thriftless tastes, to satisfy which more than one business
man has wrecked his career. They work like men; why should they not live
as men do, with similar responsibilities? What should we think of a
class of masculine clerks and employees who spent all their money on
clothes?
The boss was busy when I got back to the clothing establishment. From
the bench where I waited for orders I could take an inventory of the
shop's productions. Arrayed in rows behind glass cases there were all
manner of uniforms: serious uniforms going to the colonies to be shot to
pieces, militia uniforms that would hear their loudest heart-beats under
a fair head; drum-majors' hats that would never get farther than the
peaceful lawn of a military post; fireman's hats; the dark-blue coat of
a lonely lighthouse guardian; the undignified short jacket of a
"buttons." All that meant parade and glory, the uniforms that make men
identical by making each proud of himself for his brass buttons and gold
lace. Even in the heavy atmosphere of the shop's rear, though they
appeared somewhat dingy and tarnished, they had their undeniable charm,
and I thought with pity of the hands that had to sew on plain serge
suits.
[Illustration: IN A CHICAGO THEATRICAL COSTUME FACTORY]
As soon as the boss saw me, the generous Mr. F. who advanced me the
fifty cents smiled at the skeptical Mr. F. who had never expected to see
me again. One self said to the other: "I told you so!" and all the
kindly lines in the man's face showed that he had looked for the best
even in his inferiors and that he had found mankind worth trusting. He
was the most generous employer I met with anywhere; I also took him to
be the least businesslike. But, as though quickly to establish the law
of averages, his head forewoman counterbalanced all his mercies by her
ferocious crossness. She terrorized everybody, even Mr. F. It was to
her, I concluded, that we owed our $6 a week. No girl would stay for
less; it was an atelier chiefly of foreign employees; the proud American
spirit would not stand the lash of Frances' tongue. She had been ten
years in the place whose mad confusion was order to her. Mr. F. did not
dare to send her away; he preferred keeping a perpetual advertisement in
the papers and changing hands every few days.
The workroom on our floor was fifty or sixty feet long, with windows on
the street at one end and on a court at the other. The middle of the
room was lighted by gas. The air was foul and the dirt lay in heaps at
every corner and was piled up under the centre tables. It was less like
a workshop than an old attic. There was the long-accumulated disorder of
hasty preparation for the vanities of life. It had not at all the aspect
of a factory which makes a steady provision of practical things. There
were odds and ends of fancy costumes hanging about--swords, crowns,
belts and badges. Under the sewing machines' swift needles flew the
scarlet coats of a regiment; gold and silver braid lay unfurled on the
table; the hand-workers bent over an armful of khaki; a row of young
girls were fitting military caps to imaginary soldier's heads; the
ensigns of glory slipped through the fingers of the humble; chevrons and
epaulets were caressed never so closely by toil-worn hands. In the midst
of us sits a man on a headless hobby horse, making small gray trunks
bound in red leather, such boxes as might contain jewels for Marguerite,
a game of lotto, or a collection of jack-straws and mother-of-pearl
counters brought home from a first trip abroad. The trunk maker wears a
sombrero and smokes a corn-cob pipe. He is very handsome with dark eyes
and fine features, and he has the "average figure," so that he serves as
manikin for the atelier; and I find him alternately a workman in
overalls and a Turkish magnate with turban and flowing robes. It is into
this atmosphere of toil and unreality that I am initiated as a hand
sewer. Something of the dramatic and theatrical possesses the very
managers themselves. Below, a regiment waits impatient for new brass
buttons; we sew against time and break all our promises. Messengers
arrive every few minutes with fresh reports of rising ire on the part of
disappointed customers. Down the stairs pell-mell comes an elderly
partner of the firm with a gold-and-purple crown on his head and after
him follows the kindly Mr. F. in an usher's jacket. "If you don't start
now," he calls, "that order'll be left on our hands."
Amid such confusion the regular rhythm of the needle as it carries its
train of thread across the yards of coloured cloth is peaceful,
consoling. I have on one side of me a tailor who speaks only Polish, on
the other side a seamstress who speaks only German. Across the frontier
I thus become they communicate with signs, and I get my share of work
planned out by each. Every woman in the place is cross except the girl
next to me. She has only just come in and the poison of the forewoman
has not yet stung her into ill nature. She is, like all the foreigners,
neatly, soberly dressed in a sensible frock of good durable material.
The few Americans in the shop have on elaborate shirt-waists in
light-coloured silks with fancy ribbon collars. We are well paid, there
is no doubt of it. We begin work at 8 A.M. and have a generous half-hour
at noon. Most of the girls are Germans and Poles, and they have all
received training as tailoresses in their native countries. To the sharp
onslaught of Frances' tongue they make no response except in dogged
silent obedience, whereas the dressy Americans with their proper spirit
of independence touch the limit of insubordination at every new command.
Insults are freely exchanged; threats ring out on the tired ears.
Frances is ubiquitous. She scolds the tailors with a torrent of abuse,
she terrorizes the handsome manikin, she bewilders the kindly Mr. F.,
and before three days have passed she has dismissed the neat little
Polish girl, in tears. This latter comes to me, her face wrought with
emotion. She was receiving nine dollars a week; it is her first place in
America. This sudden dismissal, its injustice, requires an explanation.
She cannot speak a word of English and asks me to put my poor German at
her service as interpreter.
Mr. F. is clearly a man who advocates everything for peace, and as there
is for him no peace when Frances is not satisfied, we gain little by our
appeal to him except a promise that he will attend later to the troubles
of the Polish girl. But later, as earlier, Frances triumphs, and I soon
bid good-by to my seatmate and watch her tear-stained face disappear
down the dingy hallway. She was a skilled tailoress, but she could not
cut out men's garments, so Frances dismissed her. I wonder when my turn
will come, for I am a green hand and yet determined to keep the American
spirit. For the sake of justice I will not be downed by Frances.
It is hard to make friends with the girls; we dare not converse lest a
fresh insult be hurled at us. For every mistake I receive a loud, severe
correction. When night comes I am exhausted. The work is easy, yet the
moral atmosphere is more wearing than the noise of many machines. My job
is often changed during the week. I do everything as a greenhorn, but I
work hard and pay attention, so that there is no excuse to dismiss me.
"I am only staying here between jobs," the girl next me volunteers at
lunch. "My regular place burnt out. You couldn't get _me_ to work under
_her_. I wouldn't stand it even if they do pay well." She is an
American.
"You're lucky to be so independent," says a German woman whose dull
silence I had hitherto taken for ill nature. "I'm glad enough to get the
money. I was up this morning at five, working. There's myself and my
mother and my little girl, and not a cent but what I make. My husband is
sick. He's in Arizona."
"What were you doing at five?" I asked.
"I have a trade," she answers. "I work on hair goods. It don't bring me
much, but I get in a few hours night and morning and it helps some.
There's so much to pay."
She was young, but youth is no lover of discomfort. Hardships had chased
every vestige of _jeunesse_ from her high, wrinkled brow and tired brown
eyes. Like a mirror held against despair her face reflected no ray of
hope. She was not rebellious, but all she knew of life was written there
in lines whose sadness a smile now and again intensified.
Added to the stale, heavy atmosphere there is now a smell of coffee and
tobacco smoke. The old hands have boiled a noon beverage on the gas; the
tailors smoke an after-dinner pipe. Put up in newspaper by Mrs. Wood, at
my matinal departure, my lunches, after a journey across the city, held
tightly under my arm, become, before eating, a block of food, a
composite meal in which I can distinguish original bits of ham sandwich
and apple pie. The work, however, does not seem hard to me. I sew on
buttons, rip trousers, baste coat sleeves--I do all sorts of odd jobs
from eight until six, without feeling, in spite of the bad air, any
great physical fatigue which ten minutes' brisk walk does not shake off.
But never have the hours dragged so; the moral weariness in the midst of
continual scolding and abuse are unbearable. Each night I come to a firm
decision to leave the following day, but weakly I return, sure of my
dollar and dreading to face again the giant city in search of work.
About four one afternoon, well on in the week, Frances brings me a pair
of military trousers; the stripes of cloth at the side seam are to be
ripped off. I go to work cheerfully cutting the threads and slipping one
piece of cloth from the other.
Apparently Frances is exasperated that I should do the job in an easy
way. It is the only way I know to rip, but Frances knows another way
that breaks your back and almost puts your eyes out, that makes you
tired and behindhand and sure of a scolding. She shows me how to rip her
way. The two threads of the machine, one from above and one from below,
which make the stitch, must be separated. The work must be turned first
on the wrong, then on the right side, the scissors must lift first the
upper, then the under thread. I begin by cutting a long hole in the
trousers, which I hide so Frances will not see it. She has frightened me
into dishonesty. Arrived at the middle of the stripe I am obliged to
turn the trousers wrong side out and right side out again every other
stitch. While I was working in this way, getting more enraged every
moment, a bedbug ran out of the seam between my fingers. I killed it. It
was full of blood and made a wet red spot on the table. Then I put down
the trousers and drew away my chair. It was useless saying anything to
the girl next me. She was a Pole, dull, sullen, without a friendly word;
but the two women beyond had told me once that they pitied Frances'
husband, so I looked to them for support in what I was about to do.
"There's bedbugs in them clothes," I said. "I won't work on 'em. No,
sir, not if she sends me away this very minute."
In a great hurry Frances passed me twice. She called out angrily both
times without waiting for an answer:
"Why don't you finish them pants?"
Frances was a German. She wore two rhinestone combs in her frizzes,
which held also dust and burnt odds and ends of hair. She had no lips
whatever. Her mouth shut completely over them after each tirade. Her
eyes were separated by two deep scowls and her voice was shrill and
nasal.
On her third round she faced me with the same question:
"Why don't you finish them pants?"
"Because," I answered this time, "there's bedbugs in 'em and I ain't
goin' to touch 'em!"
"Oh! my!" she taunted me, in a sneering voice, "that's dreadful, ain't
it? Bedbugs! Why, you need only just look on the floor to see 'em
running around anywhere!"
I said nothing more, and this remark was the last Frances ever addressed
to me.
"Mike!" she called to the presser in the corner, "will you have this
_young lady's_ card made out."
She gave me no further work to do, but, too humiliated to sit idle, I
joined a group of girls who were sewing badges.
We had made up all description of political badges--badges for the
court, for processions, school badges, military badges, flimsy bits of
coloured ribbon and gold fringe which go the tour of the world, rallying
men to glory. In the dismal twilight our fingers were now busied with
black-and-silver "in memoriam" badges, to be worn as a last tribute to
some dead member of a coterie who would follow him to the grave under
the emblem that had united them.
We were behindhand for the dead as well as for the living. At six the
power was turned off, the machine hands went home, there was still an
unfinished heap of black badges.
I got up and put on my things in the dark closet that served for
dressing-room. Frances called to the hand sewers in her rasping voice:
"You darsn't leave till you've finished them badges."
How could I feel the slavery they felt? My nerves were sensitive; I was
unaccustomed to their familiar hardships. But on the other hand, my
prison had an escape; they were bound within four walls; I dared to
rebel knowing the resources of the black silk emergency bag, money
lined. They for their living must pay with moral submission as well as
physical fatigue. There was nothing between them and starvation except
the success of their daily effort. What opposition could the German
woman place, what could she risk, knowing that two hungry mouths waited
to be fed beside her own?
With a farewell glance at the rubbish-strewn room, the high, grimy
windows, the group of hand sewers bent over their work in the increasing
darkness, I started down the stairs. A hand was laid on my arm, and I
looked up and saw Mike's broad Irish face and sandy head bending toward
me.
"I suppose you understand," he said, "that there'll be no more work for
you."
"Yes," I answered, "I understand," and we exchanged a glance that meant
we both agreed it was Frances' fault.
In the shop below I found Mr. F. and returned the fifty cents he had
advanced me. He seemed surprised at this.
"I'm sorry," he said, in his gentle voice, "that we couldn't arrange
things."
"I'm sorry, too," I said. But I dared not add a word against Frances.
She had terrorized me like the rest, and though I knew I never would see
her again, her pale, lifeless mask haunted me. I remembered a remark the
German woman had made when Frances dismissed the Polish girl: "People
ought to make it easy, and not hard, for others to earn a living."
At the end of this somewhat agitating day I returned to my tenement
lodgings as to a haven of rest. There was one other lodger besides
myself: she was studying music on borrowed money at four dollars a
lesson. Obviously she was a victim to luxury in the same degree as the
young women with whom I had lunched at the bakery. Nothing that a rich
society girl might have had been left out of her wardrobe, and borrowed
money seemed as good as any for making a splurge.
Miss Arnold was something of a snob, intellectual and otherwise. It was
evident from my wretched clothes and poor grammar that I was not
accustomed to ladies of her type, but, far from sparing me, she
humiliated me with all sorts of questions.
"I'm tired of taffeta jackets, aren't you?" she would ask, apropos of my
flimsy ulster. "I had taffeta last year, with velvet and satin this
winter; but I don't know what I'll get yet this summer."
After supper, on my return, I found her sitting in the parlour with Mrs.
Brown. They never lighted the gas, as there was an electric lamp which
sent its rays aslant the street and repeated the pattern of the window
curtains all over Mrs. Brown's face and hands.
Drawn up on one end of the horsehair sofa, Miss Arnold, in a purple
velvet blouse, chatted to Mrs. Brown and me.
"I'm from Jacksonville," she volunteered, patting her masses of curly
hair. "Do you know anybody from Jacksonville? It's an elegant town, so
much wealth, so many retired farmers, and it's such an educational
centre. Do you like reading?" she asked me.
"I don't get time," is my response.
"Oh, my!" she rattles on. "I'm crazy about reading. I do love blank
verse--it makes the language so choice, like in Shakespeare."
Mrs. Brown and I, being in the majority as opposed to this autocrat,
remain placid. A current of understanding exists between us. Miss
Arnold, on the other hand, finds our ignorance a flattering background
for her learning and adventures. She is so obviously a woman of the
world on the tenement horsehair sofa.
"In case you don't like your work," she Lady Bountifuls me, "I can get
you a stylish place as maid with some society people just out of
Chicago--friends of mine, an elegant family."
"I don't care to live out," I respond, thanking her. "I like my Sundays
and my evenings off."
Mrs. Brown pricks up her ears at this, and I notice that thereafter she
keeps close inquiry as to how my Sundays and evenings are spent.
But the bell rings. Miss Arnold is called for by friends to play on the
piano at an evening entertainment. Mrs. Brown and I, being left alone,
begin a conversation of the personal kind, which is the only resource
among the poor. If she had had any infirmity--a wooden leg or a glass
eye--she would naturally have begun by showing it to me, but as she had
been spared intact she chose second best.
"I've had lots of shocks," she said, rocking back and forth in a squeaky
rocking-chair. The light from over the way flickered and gleamed. Mrs.
Brown's broad, yellow face and gray hair were now brilliant, now somber,
as she rocked in and out of the silver rays. Her voice was a metallic
whine, and when she laughed against her regular, even, false teeth there
was a sound like the mechanical yelp of a toy cat. Married at sixteen,
her whole life had been Brown on earth below and God in His heaven
above. Childless, she and Brown had spent over fifty years together. It
was natural in the matter of shocks the first she should tell me about
was Brown's death. The story began with "a breakfast one Sunday morning
at nine o'clock.... Brown always made the fire, raked down the ashes,
set the coffee to boil, and when the toast and eggs were ready he called
me. And that wasn't one morning, mind you--it was every morning for
fifty years. But this particular morning I noticed him speaking strange;
his tongue was kind o' thick. He didn't hardly eat nothing, and as soon
as I'd done he got up and carried the ashes downstairs to dump 'em. When
he come up he seemed dizzy. I says to him, 'Don't you feel good?' but he
didn't seem able to answer. He made like he was going to undress. He put
his hand in his pocket for his watch, and he put it in again for his
pocketbook; but the second time it stayed in--he couldn't move it no
more; it was dead and cold when I touched it. He leaned up against the
wall, and I tried to get him over on to the sofa. When I looked into his
eyes I see that he was gone. He couldn't stand, but I held on to him
with all my force; I didn't let his head strike as he went down. _When
he fell we fell together_." Her voice was choked; even now after three
years as she told the story she could not believe it herself.
Presently when she is calm again she continues the recital of her
shocks--three times struck by lightning and once run over. Her simple
descriptions are straightforward and dramatic. As she talks the wind
blows against the windows, the shutters rattle and an ugly white china
knob, against which the curtains are draped, falls to the floor.
Tenderly, amazed, she picks it up and looks at it.
"Brown put that up," she says; "there hasn't no hand touched it since
his'n."
Proprietor of this house in which she lives, Mrs. Brown is fairly well
off. She rents one floor to an Italian family, one to some labourers,
and one to an Irishman and his wife who get drunk from time to time and
rouse us in the night with tumult and scuffling. She has a way of
disappearing for a week or more and returning without giving any account
of herself. Relations are strained, and Mrs. Brown in speaking of her
says:
"I don't care what trouble I was in, I wouldn't call in that Irish
woman. I don't have anything to do with her. I'd rather get the Dago
next door." And hereafter follows a mild tirade against the
Italians--the same sentiments I have heard expressed before in the
labouring centres.
[Illustration: CHICAGO TYPES]
"They're kind folks and good neighbours," Mrs. Brown explains, "but
they're different from us. They eat what the rest of us throw away, and
there's no work they won't do. They're putting money aside fast; most of
'em owns their own houses; but since they've moved into this
neighbourhood the price of property's gone down. I don't have nothing to
do with 'em. We don't any of us. They're not like us; they're
different."
Without letting a day elapse I started early the following morning in
search of a new job. The paper was full of advertisements, but there was
some stipulation in each which narrowed my possibilities of getting a
place, as I was an unskilled hand. There was, however, one simple "Girls
wanted!" which I answered, prepared for anything but an electric sewing
machine.
The address took me to a more fashionable side of the city, near the
lake; a wide expanse of pale, shimmering water, it lay a refreshing
horizon for eyes long used to poverty's quarters. Like a sea, it rolled
white-capped waves toward the shore from its far-away emerald surface
where sail-freighted barks traveled at the wind's will. Free from man's
disfiguring touch, pure, immaculate, it appeared bridelike through a
veil of morning mist. And at its very brink are the turmoil and
confusion of America's giant industries. In less than an hour I am
receiving wages from a large picture frame company in East Lake Street.
Once more I have made the observation that men are more agreeable bosses
than women. The woman, when she is not exceptionally disagreeable, like
Frances, is always annoying. She bothers and nags; things must be done
her way; she enjoys the legitimate minding of other people's business.
Aiming at results only, the masculine mind is more tranquil. Provided
you get your work done, the man boss doesn't care what methods you take
in doing it. For the woman boss, whether you get your work done or not,
you must do it her way. The overseer at J.'s picture frame manufactory
is courteous, friendly, considerate. I have a feeling that he wishes me
to coöperate with him, not to be terrorized and driven to death by him.
My spirits rise at once, my ambition is stimulated, and I desire his
approval. The work is all done by the piece, he explains to me, telling
me the different prices. The girls work generally in teams of three,
dividing profits. Nothing could be more modern, more middle-class, more
popular, more philistine than the production of J.'s workrooms. They are
the cheap imitations fed to a public hungry for luxury or the semblance
of it. Nothing is genuine in the entire shop. Water colours are imitated
in chromo, oils are imitated in lithograph, white carved wood frames are
imitated in applications of pressed brass. Great works of art are
belittled by processes cheap enough to be within reach of the poorest
pocket. Framed pictures are turned out by the thousand dozens, every
size, from the smallest domestic scene, which hangs over the baby's crib
in a Harlem flat, to the large wedding-present size placed over the
piano in the front parlour. The range of subjects covers a familiar
list of comedies or tragedies--the partings before war, the interior
behind prison bars, the game of marbles, the friendly cat and dog, the
chocolate girl, the skipper and his daughter, etc., etc.
My job is easy, but slow. With a hammer and tacks I fasten four tin
mouldings to the four corners of a gilt picture frame. Twenty-five cents
for a hundred is the pay given me, and it takes me half a day to do this
many; but my comrades don't allow me to get discouraged.
"You're doing well," a red-haired _vis-a-vis_ calls to me across the
table. And the foreman, who comes often to see how I am getting along,
tells me that the next day we are to begin team-work, which pays much
better.
The hours are ten a day: from seven until five thirty, with twenty-five
minutes at noon instead of half an hour. The extra five minutes a day
mount up to thirty minutes a week and let us off at five on Saturdays.
The conversation around me leads me to suppose that my companions are
not downtrodden in any way, nor that they intend letting work interfere
with happiness. They have in their favour the most blessed of all
gifts--youth. The tragic faces one meets with are of the women
breadwinners whose burdens are overwhelming and of the children in whom
physical fatigue arrests development and all possibility of pleasure.
My present team-mates and those along the rest of the room are Americans
between fourteen and twenty-four years of age, full of unconscious hope
for the future, which is natural in healthy, well-fed youth, taking
their work cheerily as a self-imposed task in exchange for which they
can have more clothes and more diversions during their leisure hours.
The profitable job given us on the following day is monotonous and
dirty, but we net $1.05 each. There is a mechanical roller which passes
before us, carrying at irregular intervals a large sheet of coloured
paper covered with glue. My _vis-à-vis_ and I lay the palms of our right
hands on to the glue surface and lift the sheet of paper to its place on
the table before us, over a stiff square of bristol board. The boss of
the team fixes the two sheets together with a brush which she
manipulates skilfully. We are making in this way the stiff backs which
hold the pictures into their frames. When we have fallen into the proper
swing we finish one hundred sheets every forty-five minutes. We could
work more rapidly, but the sheets are furnished to us at this rate, and
it is so comfortable that conversation is not interrupted. The subjects
are the same as elsewhere--dress, young men, entertainments. The girls
have "beaux" and "steady beaux." The expression, "Who is she going
with?" means who is her steady beau. "I've got Jim Smith _now_, but I
don't know whether I'll keep him," means that Jim Smith is on trial as
a beau and may become a "steady." They go to Sunday night subscription
dances and arrive Monday morning looking years older than on Saturday,
after having danced until early morning. "There's nothing so smart for a
ball," the mundane of my team tells us, "as a black skirt and white silk
waist."
About ten in the morning most of us eat a pickle or a bit of cocoanut
cake or some titbit from the lunch parcel which is opened seriously at
twelve.
The light is good, the air is good, the room where we work is large and
not crowded, the foreman is kind and friendly, the girls are young and
cheerful; one can make $7 to $8 a week.
The conditions at J.'s are too favourable to be interesting, and, having
no excuse to leave, I disappear one day at lunch time and never return
to get my apron or my wages. I shall be obliged to draw upon the
resources of the black silk bag, but before returning to my natural
condition of life I wish to try one more place: a printing job. There
are quantities of advertisements in the papers for girls needed to run
presses of different sorts, so on the very afternoon of my
self-dismissal I start through the hot summer streets in search of a
situation. On the day when my appearance is most forlorn I find
policemen always as officially polite as when I am dressed in my best.
Other people of whom I inquire my way are sometimes curt, sometimes
compassionate, seldom indifferent, and generally much nicer or not
nearly as nice as they would be to a rich person. Poor old women to whom
I speak often call me "dear" in answering.
Under the trellis of the elevated road the "cables" clang their way.
Trucks and automobiles, delivery wagons and private carriages plunge
over the rough pavements. The sidewalks are crowded with people who are
dressed for business, and who, whether men or women, are a business
type; the drones who taste not of the honey stored in the hives which
line the streets and tower against the blue sky, veiling it with smoke.
The orderly rush of busy people, among whom I move toward an address
given in the paper, is suddenly changed into confusion and excitement by
the bell of a fire-engine which is dragged clattering over the cobbles,
followed closely by another and another before the sound of the horses'
hoofs have died away. Excitement for a moment supersedes business. The
fire takes precedence before the office, and a crowd stands packed
against policemen's arms, gazing upward at a low brick building which
sends forth flames hotter than the brazen sun, smoke blacker than the
perpetual veil of soot.
I compare the dingy gold number over the burning door with the number in
print on the newspaper slip held between my thumb and forefinger.
Decidedly this is not one of my lucky days. The numbers correspond. But
there are other addresses and I collect a series of replies. The
employer in a box factory on the West Side takes my address and promises
to let me know if he has a vacancy for an unskilled hand. Another boss
printer, after much urging on my part, consents to give me a trial the
following Monday at three dollars a week. A kindly forelady in a large
printing establishment on Wabash Avenue sends me away because she wants
only trained workers. "I'm real sorry," she says. "You're from the East,
aren't you? I notice you speak with an accent."
By this time it is after three in the afternoon; my chances are
diminishing as the day goes on and others apply before me. There is one
more possibility at a box and label company which has advertised for a
girl to feed a Gordon press. I have never heard of a Gordon press, but I
make up my mind not to leave the label company without the promise of a
job for the very next day. The stairway is dingy and irregular. My
spirits are not buoyant as I open a swinging door and enter a room with
a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier, dressed in a red silk waist,
sits on a high stool overlooking the office. Three portly men, fat, well
nourished, evidently of one family, are installed behind yellow ash
desks, each with a lady typewriter at his right hand. I go timidly up to
the fattest of the three. He is in shirt sleeves, evidently feeling the
heat painfully. He pretends to be very busy and hardly looks up when I
say:
"I seen your ad. in the paper this morning."
"You're rather late," is his answer. "I've got two girls engaged
already."
"Too late!" I say with an intonation which interrupts his work for a
minute while he looks at me. I profit by this moment, and, changing from
tragedy to a good-humoured smile, I ask:
"Say, are you sure those girls'll come? You can't always count on us,
you know."
He laughs at this. "Have you ever run a Gordon press?"
"No, sir; but I'm awful handy."
"Where have you been working?"
"At J.'s in Lake Street."
"What did you make?"
"A dollar a day."
"Well, you come in to-morrow about eleven and I'll tell you then whether
I can give you anything to do."
"Can't you be sure now?"
Truly disappointed, my voice expresses the eagerness I feel.
"Well," the fat man says indulgently, "you come in to-morrow morning at
eight and I'll give you a job."
The following day I begin my last and by far my most trying
apprenticeship.
The noise of a single press is deafening. In the room where I work
there are ten presses on my row, eight back of us and four printing
machines back of them. On one side of the room only are there windows.
The air is heavy with the sweet, stifling smell of printer's ink and
cheap paper. A fine rain of bronze dust sifts itself into the hair and
clothes of the girls at our end of the room, where they are bronzing
coloured advertisements. The work is all done standing; the hours are
from seven until six, with half an hour at noon, and holiday at one
thirty on Saturdays. It is to _feed_ a machine that I am paid three
dollars a week. The expression is admirably chosen. The machine's iron
jaws yawn for food; they devour all I give, and when by chance I am slow
they snap hungrily at my hand and would crush my fingers did I not
snatch them away, feeling the first cold clutch. It is nervous work.
Each leaf to be printed must be handled twice; 5,000 circulars or
bill-heads mean 10,000 gestures for the printer, and this is an
afternoon's work.
Into the square marked out for it by steel guards the paper must be
slipped with the right hand, while the machine is open; with the left
hand the printed paper must be pulled out and a second fitted in its
place before the machine closes again. What a master to serve is this
noisy iron mechanism animated by steam! It gives not a moment's respite
to the worker, whose thoughts must never wander from her task. The
girls are pale. Their complexions without exception are bad.
We are bossed by men. My boss is kind, and, seeing that I am ambitious,
he comes now and then and prints a few hundred bill-heads for me. There
is some complaining _sotto voce_ of the other boss, who, it appears, is
a hard taskmaster. Both are very young, both chew tobacco and
expectorate long, brown, wet lines of tobacco juice on to the floor.
While waiting for new type I get into conversation with the boss of
ill-repute. He has an honest, serious face; his eyes are evidently more
accustomed to judging than to trusting his fellow beings. He is
communicative.
"Do you like your job?" he asks.
"Yes, first rate."
"They don't pay enough. I give notice last week and got a raise. I guess
I'll stay on here until about August."
"Then where are you going?"
"Going home," he answers. "I've been away from home for seven years. I
run away when I was thirteen and I've been knocking around ever since,
takin' care of myself, makin' a livin' one way or another. My folks
lives in California. I've been from coast to coast--and I tell you I'll
be mighty glad to get back."
"Ever been sick?"
"Yes, twice. It's no fun. No matter how much licking a boy gets he
ought never to leave home. The first year or so you don't mind it so
much, but when you've been among strangers two years, three years, all
alone, sick or well, you begin to feel you must get back to your own
folks."
"Are you saving up?" I ask.
He nods his head, not free to speak for tobacco juice.
"I'll be able to leave here in August," he explains, when he has
finished spitting, "for Omaha. In three months I can save up enough to
get on as far as Salt Lake, and in another three months I can move on to
San Francisco. I tell you," he adds, returning to his work, "a person
ought never to leave home." He had nine months of work and privation
before reaching the goal toward which he had been yearning for years.
With what patience he appears possessed compared to our fretfulness at
the fast express trains, which seem to crawl when they carry us full
speed homeward toward those we love! Nine months, two hundred and
seventy days, ten-hour working days, to wait. He was manly. He had the
spirit of adventure; his experience was wide and his knowledge of men
extended; he had managed to take care of himself in one way or another
for seven years, the most trying and decisive in a boy's life. He had
not gone to the bad, evidently, and to his credit he was homeward bound.
His history was something out of the ordinary; yet beyond the circle
where he worked and was considered a hard taskmaster he was a
nonentity--a star in the milky way, a star whose faint rays, without
individual brilliancy, added to the general luster.
The first day I had a touch of pride in getting easily ahead of the new
girl who started in when I did. From my machine I could see only the
back of her head; it was shaking disapproval at every stroke she made
and had to make over again. She had a mass of untidy hair and a slouchy
skirt that slipped out from her belt in the back. If not actually
stupid, she was slow, and the foreman and the girl who took turns
teaching her exchanged glances, meaning that they were exhausting their
patience and would readily give up the job. I was pleased at being
included in these glances, and had a miserable moment of vanity at lunch
time when the old girls, the habitués, came after me to eat with them.
The girl with the untidy hair and the long skirt sat quite by her self.
Without unfolding her newspaper bundle, she took bites of things from
it, as though she were a little ashamed of her lunch. My moment of
vanity had passed. I went over to her, not knowing whether her
appearance meant a slipshod nature or extreme poverty. As we were both
new girls, there was no indiscretion in my direct question:
"Like your job?"
I could not understand what she answered, so I continued: "Ever worked
before?"
She opened her hands and held them out to me. In the palm of one there
was a long scar that ran from wrist to forefinger. Two nails had been
worn off below the quick and were cracked through the middle. The whole
was gloved in an iron callous, streaked with black.
"Does that look like work?" was her response. It was almost impossible
to hear what she said. Without a palate, she forced the words from her
mouth in a strange monotone. She was one of nature's monstrous failures.
Her coarse, opaque skin covered a low forehead and broad, boneless nose;
her teeth were crumbling with disease, and into her full lower lip some
sharp tool had driven a double scar. She kept her hand over her mouth
when she talked, and except for this movement of self-consciousness her
whole attitude was one of resignation and humility. Her eyes in their
dismal surroundings lay like clear pools in a swamp's midst reflecting
blue sky.
"What was you doing to get your hands like that?" I asked.
"Tipping shoe-laces. I had to quit, 'cause they cut the pay down. I
could do twenty-two gross in a day, working until eight o'clock, and I
didn't care how hard I worked so long as I got good pay--$9 a week. But
the employer'd been a workman himself, and they're the worst kind. He
cut me down to $4 a week, so I quit."
"Do you live home?"
"Yes. I give all I make to my mother, and she gives me my clothes and
board. Almost anywhere I can make $7 a week, and I feel when I earn that
much like I was doing right. But it's hard to work and make nothing. I'm
slow to learn," she smiled at me, covering her mouth with her hand, "but
I'll get on to it by and by and go as fast as any one; only I'm not very
strong."
"What's the matter with you?"
"Heart disease for one thing, and then I'm so nervous. It's kind of hard
to have to work when you're not able. To-day I can hardly stand, my
head's aching so. They make the poor work for just as little as they
can, don't they? It's not the work I mind, but if I can't give in my
seven a week at home I get to worrying."
Now and then as she talked in her inarticulate pitiful voice the tears
added luster to her eyes as her emotions welled up within her.
The machines began to roar and vibrate again. The noon recess was over.
She went back to her job. Her broad, heavy hands began once more to
serve a company on whose moderate remuneration she depended for her
daily bread. Her silhouette against the window where she stood was no
longer an object for my vain eyes to look upon with a sense of
superiority. I could hear the melancholy intonation of her voice,
pronouncing words of courage over her disfigured underlip. She was one
of nature's failures--one of God's triumphs.
Saturday night my fellow lodger, Miss Arnold, and I made an expedition
to the spring opening of a large dry-goods shop in the neighbourhood of
Mrs. Brown's. I felt rather humble in my toil-worn clothes to accompany
the young woman, who had an appearance of prosperity which borrowed
money alone can give. But she encouraged me, and we started together for
the principal street of the quarter whose history was told in its
show-case windows. Pawnshops and undertakers, bakeries and soda-water
fountains were ranged side by side on this highway, as the necessity for
them is ranged with incongruous proximity in the existence of those who
live pell-mell in moral and material disorder after the manner of the
poor. There was even a wedding coach in the back of the corner
undertaker's establishment, and in the front window a coffin, small and
white, as though death itself were more attractive in the young, as
though the little people of the quarter were nearer Heaven and more
suggestive of angels than their life-worn elders. The spotless tiny
coffin with its fringe and satin tufting had its share of the ideal,
mysterious, unused and costly; in the same store with the wedding coach,
it suggested festivity: a reunion to celebrate with tears a small
pilgrim's right to sleep at last undisturbed.
The silver rays of the street lamps mingled with the yellow light of
the shop windows, and on the sidewalk there was a cosmopolitan public.
Groups of Italian women crooned to each other in their soft voices over
the bargains for babies displayed at the spring opening; factory girls
compared notes, chattered, calculated, tried to resist, and ended by an
extravagant choice; the German women looked and priced and bought
nothing; the Hungarians had evidently spent their money on arriving.
From the store window wax figures of the ideal woman, clad in latest
Parisian garb, with golden hair and blue eyes, gazed down benignly into
the faces uplifted with envy and admiration. Did she not plainly say to
them "For $17 you can look as I do"?
The store was apparently flourishing, and except for such few useful
articles as stockings and shirts it was stocked with trash. Patronized
entirely by labouring men and women, it was an indication to their
needs. Here, for example, was a stand hung with silk dress skirts,
trimmed with lace and velvet. They were made after models of expensive
dress-makers and were attempts at the sort of thing a Mme. de Rothschild
might wear at the Grand Prix de Paris.
Varying from $11 to $20, there was not one of the skirts made of
material sufficiently solid to wear for more than a few Sunday outings.
On another counter there were hats with extravagant garlands of flowers,
exaggerated bows and plumes, wraps with ruffles of lace and long
pendant bows; silk boleros; a choice of things never meant to be
imitated in cheap quality.
[Illustration: THE REAR OF A CHICAGO TENEMENT]
I watched the customers trying on. Possessed of grace and charm in their
native costumes, hatless, with gay-coloured shawls on their shoulders,
the Italian women, as soon as they donned the tawdry garb of the
luxury-loving labourer, were common like the rest. In becoming
prosperous Americans, animated by the desire for material possession
which is the strength and the weakness of our countrymen, they lost the
character that pleases us, the beauty we must go abroad to find.
Miss Arnold priced everything, compared quality and make with
Jacksonville productions, and decided to buy nothing, but in refusing to
buy she had an air of opulence and taste hard to please which surpassed
the effect any purchase could have made.
Sunday morning Mrs. Brown asked me to join her and Miss Arnold for
breakfast They were both in slippers and dressing-gowns. We boiled the
coffee and set the table with doughnuts and sweet cakes, which Miss
Arnold kept in a paper bag in her room.
"I hardly ever eat, except between meals," she explained. "A nibble of
cake or candy is as much as I can manage, my digestion is so poor."
"Ever since Brown died," the widow responded, "I've had my meals just
the same as though he were here. All I want," she went on, as we seated
ourselves and exchanged courtesies in passing the bread and butter,
"all I want is somebody to be kind to me. I've got a young niece that
I've tried to have with me. I wrote to her and says: 'Your auntie's
heart's just crying out for you!' And I told her I'd leave her all I've
got. But she said she didn't feel like she could come."
As soon as breakfast is over the mundane member of the household starts
off on a day's round of visits. When the screen door has shut upon her
slender silhouette, Mrs. Brown settles down for a chat. She takes out
the brush and comb, unbraids her silver locks and arranges them while
she talks.
"Miss Arnold's always on the go; she's awful nervous. These society
people aren't happy. Life's not all pleasure for them. You can be sure
they have their ups and downs like the rest of us."
"I guess that's likely," is my response.
"They don't tell the truth always, in the first place. They say there's
got to be deceit in society, and that these stylish people pretend all
sorts of things. Well, then, all I say is," and she pricks the comb into
the brush with emphasis, "all I say is, you better keep out of society."
She had twisted her gray braids into a coil at the back of her head, and
dish-washing is now the order of the day. As we splash and wipe, Mrs.
Brown looks at me rather closely. She is getting ready to speak. I can
feel this by a preliminary rattle of her teeth.
"You're a new girl here," she begins; "you ain't been long in Chicago. I
just thought I'd tell you about a girl who was workin' here in the
General Electric factory. She was sixteen--a real nice-lookin' girl from
the South. She left her mother and come up here alone. It wasn't long
before she got to foolin' round with one of the young men over to the
factory. They were both young; they didn't mean no harm; but one day she
come an' told me, cryin' like anythin', that she was in trouble, and her
young man had slipped off up to Michigan."
Here Mrs. Brown stopped to see if I was interested, and as I responded
with a heartfelt "Oh, my!" she went on:
"Well, you ought to have seen that girl's sufferin', her loneliness for
her mother. I'd come in her room sometimes at midnight--the very room
you have now--and find her on the floor, weepin' her heart out. I want
to tell you never to get discouraged. Just you listen to what happened.
The gentleman from the factory got a sheriff and they started up north
after the young man, determined to get him by force if they couldn't by
kindness. Well, they found him and they brought him back; he was willin'
to come, and they got everythin' fixed up for the weddin' without
tellin' her a thing about it, and one day she was sittin' right there,"
she pointed to the rocking chair in the front parlour window, "when he
come in. He was carryin' a big bunch of cream roses, tied with long
white ribbons. He offered 'em to her, but she wouldn't look at them nor
at him. After awhile they went together into her room and talked for
half an hour, and when they come back she had consented to marry him. He
was real kind. He kept askin' me if she had cried much and thankin' me
for takin' care of her. They were married, and when the weddin' was over
she didn't want to stay with him. She said she wanted her mother, but we
talked to her and told her what was right, and things was fixed up
between them."
She had taken down from its hook in the corner sunlight the canary bird
and his cage. She put them on the table and prepared to give the bird
his bath and fresh seed.
"You see," she said, drawing up a chair, "that's what good employers
will do for you. If you're working in a good place they'll do right by
you, and it don't pay to get down-hearted."
I thanked her and showed the interest I truly felt in the story.
Evidently I must account for my Sundays! It was with the bird now that
Mrs. Brown continued her conversation. He was a Rip Van Winkle in
plumage. His claws trailed over the sand of the cage. Except when Mrs.
Brown had a lodger or two with her, the bird was the only living thing
in her part of the tenement.
"I've had him twenty-five years," she said to me. "Brown give him to
me. I guess I'd miss him if he died." And presently she repeated again:
"I don't believe I even know how much I'd miss him."
On the last evening of my tenement residence I was sitting in a
restaurant of the quarter, having played truant from Mrs. Wood's, whose
Friday fish dinner had poisoned me. My hands had been inflamed and
irritated in consequence, and I was now intent upon a good clean supper
earned by ten hours' work. My back was turned to the door, which I knew
must be open, as I felt a cold wind. The lake brought capricious changes
of the temperature: the thermometer had fallen the night before from
seventy to thirty. I turned to see who the newcomer might be. The sight
of him set my heart beating faster. The restaurant keeper was
questioning the man to find out who he was.... He was evidently
nobody--a fragment of anonymous humanity lashed into _debris_ upon the
edge of a city's vortex; a remnant of flesh and bones for human
appetites to feed on; a battleground of disease and vice; a beggar
animated by instinct to get from others what he could no longer earn for
himself; the type _par excellence_ who has worn out charity
organizations; the poor wreck of a soul that would create pity if there
were none of it left in the world. He was asking for food. The
proprietor gave him the address of a free lodging-house and turned him
away. He pulled his cap over his head; the door opened and closed,
letting in a fresh gale of icy air. The man was gone. I turned back to
my supper. Scientific philanthropists would have means of proving that
such men are alone to blame for their condition; that this one was in
all probability a drunkard, and that it would be useless, worse than
useless, to help him. But he was cold and hungry and penniless, and I
knew it. I went as swiftly as I could to overtake him. He had not
traveled far, lurching along at a snail's pace, and he was startled when
I came up to him. One of his legs was longer than the other; it had been
crushed in an accident. They were not pairs, his legs, and neither were
his eyes pairs; one was big and blind, with a fixed pupil, and the other
showed all his feelings. Across his nose there was a scar, a heavy scar,
pale like the rest of his face. He was small and had sandy hair. The
directors of charity bureaus could have detected perhaps a faint
resemblance to the odour of liquor as he breathed a halo of frosty air
over his scraggly red beard.
Through the weather-beaten coat pinned over it his bare chest was
visible.
"It's a cold night!" I began. "Are you out of a job?"
With his wistful eye he gave me a kind glance.
"I've been sick. There's a sharp pain right in through here." He showed
me a spot under his arm. "They thought at the hospital that I 'ad
consumption. But," his face brightened, "I haven't got it." He showed in
his smile the life-warrant that kept him from suicide. _He wanted to
live._
"Where did you sleep last night?" I asked. "It was a cold night."
"To tell you the truth," he responded in his strong Scotch accent, "I
slept in a wagon."
I proposed that we do some shopping together; he looked at me gratefully
and limped along to a cheap clothing store, kept by an Italian. The
warmth within was agreeable; there was a display of garments hung across
the ceiling under the gas-light. My companion waited, leaning against
the glass counter, while I priced the flannel shirts. To be sure, my own
costume promised little bounty. The price of the shirt was seventy-five
cents, and as soon as he heard this the poor man said:
"Oh, you mustn't spend as much as that."
Looking first at the pauper, then at me, the Italian leaned over and
whispered to me, "I think I understand. You can have the shirt for
sixty, and I'll put in a pair of socks, too."
Thus we had become a fraternity; all were poor, the stronger woe helping
the weaker.... When his toilet was complete the poor man looked half a
head taller.
"Shall I wrap up your old cap for you?" the salesman asked, and the
other laughed a broken, long-disused laugh.
"I guess I won't need it any more," he said, turning to me.
His face had changed like the children's valentines that grow at a touch
from a blank card to a glimpse of paradise.
Once in the street again we shook hands. I was going back to my supper.
He was going, the charity directors would say, to pawn his shirt and
coat.
The man had evidently not more than a few months to live; I was leaving
Chicago the following day. We would undoubtedly never meet again.
As his bony hand lay in mine, his eyes looked straight at me. "Thank
you," he said, and his last words were these:
"I'll stand by you."
It was a pledge of fraternity at parting. There was no material
substance to promise. I took it to mean that he would stand by any
generous impulses I might have; that he would be, as it were, a patron
of spontaneous as opposed to organized charity; a patron of those who
are never too poor to give to some one poorer; of those who have no
scientific reasons for giving, no statistics, only compassion and pity;
of those who want to aid not only the promising but the hopeless cases;
of those whose charity is tolerant and maternal, patient with the
helpless, prepared for disappointments; not looking for results, ever
ready to begin again, so long as the paradox of suffering and inability
are linked together in humanity.
* * * * *
THE MEANING OF IT ALL
* * * * *
CHAPTER V
THE MEANING OF IT ALL
Before concluding the recital of my experiences as a working girl, I
want to sum up the general conclusions at which I arrived and to trace
in a few words the history of my impressions. What, first of all, was my
purpose in going to live and work among the American factory hands? It
was not to gratify simple curiosity; it was not to get material for a
novel; it was not to pave the way for new philanthropic associations; it
was not to obtain crude data, such as fill the reports of labour
commissioners. My purpose was to _help_ the working girl--to help her
mentally, morally, physically. I considered this purpose visionary and
unpractical, I considered it pretentious even, and I cannot say that I
had any hope of accomplishing it. What did I mean by _help_? Did I mean
a superficial remedy, a palliative? A variety of such remedies occurred
to me as I worked, and I have offered them gladly for the possible aid
of charitable people who have time and money to carry temporary relief
to the poor. It was not relief of this kind that I meant by _help_. I
meant an _amelioration in natural conditions_. I was not hopeful of
discovering any plan to bring about this amelioration, because I
believed that the conditions, deplorable as they appear to us, of the
working poor, were natural, the outcome of laws which it is useless to
resist. I adopted the only method possible for putting my belief to the
test. I did what had never been done. I was a skeptic and something of a
sentimentalist when I started. I have become convinced, as I worked,
that certain of the most unfortunate conditions are not natural, and
that they can therefore be corrected. It is with hope for the material
betterment of the breadwinning woman, for the moral advancement of the
semi-breadwinner and the esthetic improvement of the country, that I
submit what seems a rational plan.
For the first three weeks of my life as a factory girl I saw among my
companions only one vast class of slaves, miserable drudges, doomed to
dirt, ugliness and overwork from birth until death. My own physical
sufferings were acute. My heart was torn with pity. I revolted against a
society whose material demands were satisfied at the cost of minds and
bodies. Labour appeared in the guise of a monster feeding itself on
human lives. To every new impression I responded with indiscriminate
compassion. It is impossible for the imagination to sustain for more
than a moment at a time the terrible fatigue which a new hand like
myself is obliged to endure day after day; the disgust at foul smells,
the revulsion at miserable food soaked in grease, the misery of a straw
mattress, a sheetless bed with blankets whose acrid odour is stifling.
The mind cannot grasp what it means to be frantic with pain in the
shoulders and back before nine in the morning, and to watch the clock
creep around to six before one has a right to drop into the chair that
has stood near one all day long. Yet it is not until the system has
become at least in a great measure used to such physical effort that one
can judge without bias. When I had grown so accustomed to the work that
I was equal to a long walk after ten hours in the factory; when I had
become so saturated with the tenement smell that I no longer noticed it;
when any bed seemed good enough for the healthy sleep of a working girl,
and any food good enough to satisfy a hungry stomach, then and then only
I began to see that in the great unknown class there were a multitude of
classes which, aside from the ugliness of their esthetic surroundings
and the intellectual inactivity which the nature of their occupation
imposes, are not all to be pitied: they are a collection of human
individuals with like capacities to our own. The surroundings into which
they are born furnish little chance for them to develop their minds and
their tastes, but their souls suffer nothing from working in squalour
and sordidness. Certain acts of impulsive generosity, of disinterested
kindness, of tender sacrifice, of loyalty and fortitude shone out in
the poverty-stricken wretches I met on my way, as the sun shines
glorious in iridescence on the rubbish heap that goes to fertilize some
rich man's fields.
My observations were confined chiefly to the women. Two things, however,
regarding the men I noticed as fixed rules. They were all breadwinners;
they worked because they needed the money to live; they supported
entirely the woman, wife or mother, of the household who did not work.
In many cases they contributed to the support of even the wage-earning
females of the family: the woman who does not work when she does not
need to work is provided for.
The women were divided into two general classes: Those who worked
because they needed to earn their living, and those who came to the
factories to be more independent than at home, to exercise their
coquetry and amuse themselves, to make pin money for luxuries. The men
formed a united class. They had a purpose in common. The women were in a
class with boys and with children. They had nothing in common but their
physical inferiority to man. The children were working from necessity,
the boys were working from necessity; the only industrial unit
complicating the problem were the girls who worked without being obliged
to--the girls who had "all the money they needed, but not all the money
they wanted." To them the question of wages was not vital. They could
afford to accept what the breadwinner found insufficient. They were
better fed, better equipped than the self-supporting hand; they were
independent about staying away from the factory when they were tired or
ill, and they alone determined the reputation for irregularity in which
the breadwinners were included.
Here, then, it seemed to me, was the first chance to offer help.
The self-supporting woman should be in competition only with other
self-supporting industrial units. The problem for her class will settle
itself, according to just and natural laws, when the purpose of this
class is equally vital to all concerned. Relief, it seemed to me, could
be brought to the breadwinner by separating from her the girl who works
for luxuries.
How could this be done?
There is, I believe, a way in which it can be accomplished naturally.
The non-self-supporting girls must be attracted into some field of work
which requires instruction and an especial training, which pays them as
well while calling into play higher faculties than the brutalizing
machine labour. This field of work is industrial art: lace-making,
hand-weaving, the fabrication of tissues and embroideries,
gold-smithery, bookbinding, rug-weaving, woodcarving and inlaying, all
the branches of industrial art which could be executed by woman in her
home, all the manual labour which does not require physical strength,
which would not place the woman, therefore, as an inferior in
competition with man, but would call forth her taste and skill, her
training and individuality, at the same time being consistent with her
destiny as a woman.
The American factory girl has endless ambition. She has a hunger for
knowledge, for opportunities to better herself, to get on in the world,
to improve. There is ample material in the factories as they exist for
forming a new, higher, superior class of industrial art labourers. There
is a great work to be accomplished by those who are willing to give
their time and their money to lifting the non-breadwinners from the
slavish, brutalizing machines at which they work, ignorant of anything
better, and placing them by education, by cultivation, in positions of
comparative freedom--freedom of thought, taste and personality.
Classes in industrial art already exist at the Simmons School in Boston
and Columbia University in New York. New classes should be formed.
Individual enterprise should start the ball and keep it rolling until it
is large enough to be held in Governmental hands. It is not sufficient
merely to form classes. The right sort of pupils should be attracted.
There is not a factory which would not furnish some material. The
recompense for apprenticeship would be the social and intellectual
advancement dear to every true American's heart. The question of wages
would be self-regulating. At Hull House, Chicago, in the Industrial Art
School it has been proved that, provided the models be simple in
proportion to the ability of the artisan, the work can be sold as fast
as it is turned out. The public is ready to buy the produce of
hand-workers. The girls I speak of are fit for advancement. It is not a
plan of charity, but one to ameliorate natural conditions.
Who will act as mediator?
I make an appeal to all those whose interests and leisure permit them to
help in this double emancipation of the woman who toils for bread and
the girl who works for luxuries.
* * * * *
MARIE VAN VORST
INTRODUCTORY
VII. A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN
VIII. THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS
IX. THE CHILD IN THE SOUTHERN MILLS
* * * * *
CHAPTER VI
INTRODUCTORY
There are no words too noble to extol the courage of mankind in its
brave, uncomplaining struggle for existence. Idealism and estheticism
have always had much to say in praise of the "beauty of toil." Carlyle
has honoured it as a cult; epics have been written in its glory. When
one has turned to and performed, day in and day out, this labour from
ten to thirteen hours out of the twenty-four, with Sundays and legal
holidays as the sole respite--to find at the month's end that the only
possible economics are pleasures--one is at least better fitted to
comprehend the standpoint of the worker; and one realizes that part of
the universe is pursuing means to sustain an existence which, by reason
of its hardship, they perforce cling to with indifference. I laid aside
for a time everything pertaining to the class in which I was born and
bred and became an American working-woman. I intended, in as far as was
possible, to live as she lived, work as she worked. In thus approaching
her I believed that I could share her ambitions, her pleasures, her
privations.
Working by her side day after day, I hoped to be a mirror that should
reflect the woman who toils, and later, when once again in my proper
sphere of life, to be her expositor in an humble way--to be a mouthpiece
for her to those who know little of the realities of everlasting labour.
I have in the following pages attempted to solve no problem--I have
advanced no sociologic schemes. Conclusions must be drawn by those who
read the simple, faithful description of the woman who toils as I saw
her, as I worked beside her, grew to understand in a measure her point
of view and to sympathize with her struggle.
MARIE VAN VORST.
Riverdale-on-Hudson,
1902.
* * * * *
A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN
* * * * *
CHAPTER VII
A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN
"Those who work neither with their brains nor their hands are a menace
to the public safety."--Roosevelt.
Well and good! In the great mobs and riots of history, what class is it
which forms the brawn and muscle and sinew of the disturbance? The
workmen and workwomen in whom discontent has bred the disease of riot,
the abnormality, the abortion known as Anarchy, Socialism. The hem of
the uprising is composed of idlers and loungers, indeed, but it is _the
labourer's head_ upon which the red cap of protest is seen above the
vortex of the crowd.
_That those who labour with their hands may have no cause to menace
society, those who labour with their brains shall strive to encompass._
Evils in any system American progress is sure to cure. Shops such as the
Plant shoe factory in Boston, with its eight-hour labour, ample
provision for escape in case of fire, its model ventilating, lavish
employment of new machinery--tells on the great manufacturing world.
Reason, human sympathy, throughout history have been enemies to slavery
or its likeness: reason and sympathy suggest that time and place be
given for the operative man and woman to rest, to benefit by physical
culture, that the bowed figures might uplift the flabby muscles. Time is
securely past when the manufacturers' greed may sweat the labourers'
souls through the bodies' pores in order that more stuff may be turned
out at cheaper cost.
The people through social corporations, through labour unions, have made
their demands for shorter hours and better pay.
* * * * *
LYNN
Luxuries to me are what necessities are to another. A boot too heavy, a
dress ill-hung, a stocking too thick, are annoyances which to the
self-indulgent woman of the world are absolute discomforts. To omit the
daily bath is a little less than a crime in the calendar; an odour
bordering on the foul creates nausea to nostrils ultra-refined; undue
noises are nerve exhausting. If any three things are more unendurable to
me than others, they are noises, bad smells and close air.
I am in no wise unique, but represent a class as real as the other class
whose sweat, bone and fiber make up a vast human machine turning out
necessities and luxuries for the market.
[Illustration: A DELICATE TYPE OF BEAUTY--At work in a Lynn shoe
factory]
[Illustration: ONE OF THE SWELLS OF THE FACTORY: A very expert "vamper,"
an Irish girl, earning from $10 to $14 a week]
The clothes I laid aside on December 18, 1901, were as follows:
Hat $ 40
Sealskin coat 200
Black cloth dress 150
Silk underskirt 25
Kid gloves 2
Underwear 30
----
$ 447
The clothes I put on were as follows:
Small felt hat $ .25
Woolen gloves .25
Flannel shirt-waist 1.95
Gray serge coat 3.00
Black skirt 2.00
Underwear 1.00
Tippet 1.00
----
$9.45
* * * * *
When I outlined to my friends my scheme of presenting myself for work in
a strange town with no introduction, however humble, and no friends to
back me, I was assured that the chances were that I would in the end get
nothing. I was told that it would be impossible to disguise my class, my
speech; that I would be suspected, arouse curiosity and mistrust.
* * * * *
One bitter December morning in 1901 I left Boston for Lynn, Mass. The
route of my train ran close to marshes; frozen hard ice many feet thick
covered the rocks and hillocks of earth, and on the dazzling winter
scene the sun shone brilliantly.
No sooner had I taken my place in my plain attire than my former
personality slipped from me as absolutely as did the garments I had
discarded. I was Bell Ballard. People from whose contact I had hitherto
pulled my skirts away became my companions as I took my place shoulder
to shoulder with the crowd of breadwinners.
Lynn in winter is ugly. The very town itself seemed numbed and blue in
the intense cold well below zero. Even the Christmas-time greens in the
streets and holly in the store windows could not impart festivity to
this city of workers. The thoroughfares are trolley lined, of course,
and a little beyond the town's centre is a common, a white wooden church
stamping the place New England.
Lynn is made up of factories--great masses of ugliness, red brick,
many-windowed buildings. The General Electric has a concern in this
town, but the industry is chiefly the making of shoes. The shoe trade in
our country is one of the highest paying manufactures, and in it there
are more women employed than in any other trade. Lynn's population is
70,000; of these 10,000 work in shoe-shops.
The night must not find me homeless, houseless. I went first to a
directory and found the address of the Young Women's Christian
Association: a room upstairs in a building on one of the principal
streets. Here two women faced me as I made my appeal, and I saw at once
displayed the sentiments of kindness thenceforth to greet me throughout
my first experience--qualities of exquisite sympathy, rare hospitality
and human interest.
"I am looking for work. I want to get a room in a safe place for the
night."
I had not for a moment supposed that anything in my attire of simple
decorous work-clothes could awaken pity. Yet pity it was and nothing
less in the older woman's face.
"Work in the shops?"
"Yes, ma'am."
The simple fact that I was undoubtedly to make my own living and my own
way in the hard hand-to-hand struggle in the shops aroused her sympathy.
She said earnestly: "You must not go anywhere to sleep that you don't
know about, child."
She wrote an address for me on a slip of paper.
"Go there; I know the woman. If she can't take you, why, come back here.
I'll take you to my own house. I won't have you sleep in a strange town
just _anywheres_! You might get into trouble."
She was not a matron; she was not even one of the staff of managers or
directors. She was only a woman who had come in to ask some question,
receive some information; and thus in marvelous friendliness she turned
and outstretched her hand--I was a stranger and this was her welcome.
I had proved a point at the first step; help had been extended. If I
myself failed to find shelter I could go to her for protection. I
intended to find my lodging place if possible without any reference or
any aid.
Out of the town proper in a quiet side street I saw a little wooden
tenement set back from the road.
"Furnished Room to Rent," read the sign in the window. A sweet-faced
woman responded to the bell I had rung. One glance at me and she said:
"Ve only got a 'sheep' room."
At the compliment I was ill-pleased and told her I was looking for a
_cheap_ room: I had come to Lynn to work. Oh! that was all right. That
was the kind of people she received.
I followed her into the house. I must excuse her broken English. She was
French. Ah! was she? That made my way easier. I told her I was from
Paris and a stranger in this part of the country, and thenceforth our
understanding was complete. In 28 Viger Street we spoke French always.
My room in the attic was blue-and-white papered; a little, clean,
agreeable room.
Madam begged that I would pardon the fact that my bed had no sheets. She
would try to arrange later. She also insinuated that the "young ladies"
who boarded with her spoiled all her floor and her furniture by
slopping the water around. I assured her that she should not have to
complain of me--I would take care.
The room was $1.25 a week. Could I pay her in advance? I did so, of
course. I would have to carry up my water for washing from the first
floor morning and night and care for my room. On the landing below I
made arrangements with the tenant for board at ten cents a meal. Madame
Courier was also a French Canadian, a mammoth creature with engaging
manners.
"Mademoiselle Ballard has work?"
"Not yet."
"Well, if you don't get a job my husband will speak for you. I have here
three other young ladies who work in the shops; they'll speak for you!"
Before the door of the first factory I failed miserably. I could have
slunk down the street and gladly taken the first train away from Lynn!
My garments were heavy; my skirt, lined with a sagging cotton goods,
weighed a ton; the woolen gloves irritated.
The shop fronted the street, and the very sight through the window of
the individuals representing power, the men whom I saw behind the desks,
frightened me. I could not go in. I fairly ran through the streets, but
stopped finally before a humbler shop--where a sign swung at the door:
"Hands Wanted." I went in here and opened a door on the third floor
into a small office.
I was before a lank Yankee manufacturer. Leaning against his desk,
twisting from side to side in his mouth a toothpick, he nodded to me as
I entered. His wife, a grim, spectacled New Englander, sat in the
revolving desk-chair.
"I want work. Got any?"
"Waal, thet's jist what we hev got! Ain't we, Mary?"
(I felt a flashing sensation of triumph.)
"Take your tippet off, set right down, ef you're in earnest."
"Oh, I am in earnest; but what sort of work is it?"
"It's gluein' suspender straps."
"Suspenders! I want to work in a shoe-shop!"
He smiled, indulgent of this whim.
"They all does! Don't they, Mary?" (She acquiesced.)
"Then they get sick of the shop, and they come back to me. You will!"
"Let me try the shoe-shop first; then if I can't get a job I'll come
back."
He was anxious to close with me, however, and took up a pile of the
suspender straps, tempting me with them.
"What you ever done?"
"Nothing. I'm green!"
"That don't make no difference; they're all green, ain't they, Mary?"
"Yes," Mary said; "I have to learn them all."
"Now, to Preston's you can get in all right, but you won't make over
four dollars a week, and here if you're smart you'll make six dollars in
no time." ...
Preston's!
That was the first name I had heard, and to Preston's I was asking my
way, stimulated by the fact, though I had been in Lynn not an hour and a
half, a job was mine did I care to glue suspender straps!
I afterward learned that Preston's, a little factory on the town's
outskirts, is a model shoe-shop in its way. I did not work there, and
neither of the factories in which I was employed was "model" to my
judgment.
A preamble at the office, where they suggested taking me in as office
help:
"But I am green; I can't do office work."
Then Mr. Preston himself, working-director in drilling-coat, sat before
me in his private office. I told him: "I want work badly--"
He had nothing--was, indeed, turning away hands; my evident
disappointment had apparently impressed a man who was in the habit of
refusing applicants for work.
"Look here"--he mitigated his refusal--"come to-morrow at nine. I'm
getting in a whole bale of cloth for cutting linings."
"You'll give me a chance, then?"
"Yes, I will!"
It was then proven that I could not starve in Lynn, nor wander
houseless.
With these evidences of success, pride stirred. I determined before
nightfall to be at work in a Lynn shoe-shop. It was now noon, streets
filled with files and lines of freed operatives. Into a restaurant I
wandered with part of the throng, and, with excitement and ambition for
sauce, ate a good meal.
Factories had received back their workers when I applied anew. This time
the largest building, one of the most important shops in Lynn, was my
goal. At the door of Parsons' was a sign reading:
"_Wanted, Vampers_."
A vamper I was not, but if any help was wanted there was hope. My demand
for work was greeted at the office this time with--"Any signs out?"
"Yes."
(What they were I didn't deem it needful to say!) The stenographer
nodded: "Go upstairs, then; ask the forelady on the fifth floor."
Through the big building and the shipping-room, where cases of shoes
were were being crated for the market, I went, at length really within
a factory's walls. From the first to the fifth floor I went in an
elevator--a freight elevator; there are no others, of course. This
lift was a terrifying affair; it shook and rattled in its shaft, shook
and rattled in pitch darkness as it rose between "safety
doors"--continuations of the building's floors. These doors open to
receive the ascending elevator, then slowly close, in order that the
shaft may be covered and the operatives in no danger of stepping
inadvertently to sudden death.
I reached the fifth floor and entered into pandemonium. The workroom was
in full working swing. At least five hundred machines were in operation
and the noise was startling and deafening.
I made my way to a high desk where a woman stood writing. I knew her for
the forelady by her "air"; nothing else distinguished her from the
employees. No one looked up as I entered. I was nowhere a figure to
attract attention; evidently nothing in my voice or manner or aspect
aroused supposition that I was not of the class I simulated.
Now, into my tone, as I spoke to the forelady bending over her account
book, I put all the force I knew. I determined she should give me
something to do! Work was everywhere: some of it should fall to my hand.
"Say, I've got to work. Give me anything, anything; I'm green."
She didn't even look at me, but called--shrieked, rather--above the
machine din to her colleagues:
"Got anything for a green hand?"
The person addressed gave me one glance, the sole and only look I got
from any one in authority in Parsons'.
"Ever worked in a shoe-shop before?"
"No, ma'am."
"I'll have you learned _pressin'_; we need a _presser_. Go take your
things off, then get right down over there."
I tore off my outside garment in the cloak-room, jammed full of hats and
coats. I was obliged to stack my belongings in a pile on the dirty
floor.
Now hatless, shirt-waisted, I was ready to labour amongst the two
hundred bond-women around me. Excitement quite new ran through me as I
went to the long table indicated and took my seat. My object was gained.
I had been in Lynn two hours and a half and was a working-woman.
On my left the seat was vacant; on my right Maggie McGowan smiled at me,
although, poor thing, she had small cause to welcome the green hand who
demanded her time and patience. She was to "learn me pressin'," and she
did.
Before me was a board, black with stains of leather, an awl, a hammer, a
pot of foulest-smelling glue, and a package of piece-work, ticketed. The
branch of the trade I learned at Parsons' was as follows:
Before me was outspread a pile of bits of leather foxings, back straps,
vamps, etc. Dipping my brush in the glue, I gummed all the extreme
outer edges. When the "case" had been gummed, the first bits were dry,
then the fingers turned down the gummed edges of the leather into fine
little seams; these seams are then plaited with the awl and the ruffled
hem flattened with the hammer--this is "pressing." The case goes from
presser to the seaming machine.
The instruments turn in my awkward fingers. I spread glue where it
should not be: edges designated for its reception remain innocent. All
this means double work later. "_Twict the work_!" my teacher remarks.
Little by little, however, the simplicity of the manual action, the
uniformity, the mechanical movement declare themselves. I glance from
time to time at my expert neighbours, compare our work; in an hour I
have mastered the method--skill and rapidity can be mine only after many
days; but I worked alone, unaided.
As raw edges, at first defying my clumsiness, fell to fascinating
rounds, as the awl creased the leather into the fluting folds, as the
hammer mashed the gummed seam down, I enjoyed the process; it was
kindergarten and feminine toil combined, not too hard; but it was only
the beginning!
Meanwhile my teacher, patient-faced, lightning-fingered, sat close to
me, reeking perspiration, tired with the ordeal of instructing a
greenhorn. With no sign of exhausted patience, however, she gummed my
vamps with the ill-smelling glue.
"This glue makes lots of girls sick! In the other shops where I worked
they just got sick, one by one, and quit. I stuck it out. The forelady
said to me when I left: 'My! I never thought anybody could stand it's
long's you have.'"
I asked, "What would you rather do than this?"
She didn't seem to know.
"I don't do this for fun, though! Nor do you--I bet you!"
(I didn't--but not quite for her reason.)
As I had yet my room to make sure of, I decided to leave early. I told
Maggie McGowan I was going home.
"Tired already?" There was still an hour to dark.
As I explained to her my reasons she looked at my amateur accomplishment
spread on the board before us. I had only pressed a case of shoes--three
dozen pairs.
"I guess I'll have to put it on my card," she soliloquized, "'cause I
learned you."
"Do--do----"
"It's only about seven cents, anyway."
"Three hours' work and that's all I've made?"[2]
[Footnote 2: An expert presser can do as many as 400 shoes a day.
This is rare and maximum.]
She regarded me curiously, to see how the amount tallied with my hope of
gain and wealth.
"Yet you tell me I'm not stupid. How long have you been at it?"
[Illustration: "LEARNING" A NEW HAND
Miss P., an experienced "gummer" on vamp linings, is a New England girl,
and makes $8 or $9 a week. The new hand makes from $2.50 to $3 a week at
the same work]
"Ten years."
"And you make?"
"Well, I don't want to discourage you." ...
(If Maggie used this expression once she used it a dozen times; it was
her pat on the shoulder, her word of cheer before coming ill news.)
"... I don't want to discourage you, but it's slow! I make about twelve
dollars a week."
"Then I will make four!"
(Four? Could it be possible I dreamed of such sums at this stage of
ignorance!)
"_I don't want to discourage you_, but I guess you'd better do
housework!"
It was clear, then, that for weeks I was to drop in with the lot of
women wage-earners who make under five dollars a week for ten hours a
day labour.
"Why don't _you_ do housework, Maggie?"
"I do. I get up at five and do all the work of our house, cook
breakfast, and clean up before I come to the shop. I eat dinner here.
When I go home at night I get supper and tidy up!"
My expression as I fell to gumming foxings was not pity for my own fate,
as she, generous creature, took it to be.
"After you've been here a few years," she said, "you'll make more than I
do. I'm not smart. You'll beat me."
Thus with tact she told me bald truth, and yet had not discouraged!
Novel situations, long walks hither and thither through Lynn, stairs
climbed, and three hours of intense application to work unusual were
tiring indeed. Nevertheless, as I got into my jacket and put on my hat
in the suffocation of the cloak-room I was still under an exhilarating
spell. I belonged, for time never so little, to the giant machine of
which the fifth floor of Parsons' is only an infinitesimal humming,
singing part. I had earned seven cents! Seven cents of the $4,000,000
paid to Lynn shoe employees were mine. I had bought the right to one
piece of bread by the toil of my unskilled labour. As I fastened my
tippet of common black fur and drew on my woolen gloves, the odour from
my glue-and leather-stained hands came pungent to my nostrils. Friends
had said to me: "Your hands will betray you!" If the girls at my side in
Parsons' thought anything about the matter they made no such sign as
they watched my fingers swiftly lose resemblance to those of the leisure
class under the use of instruments and materials damning softness and
beauty from a woman's hands.
Yet Maggie had her sensitiveness on this subject. I remarked once to
her: "I don't see how you manage to keep your hands so clean. Mine are
twice as black." She coloured, was silent for a time, then said: "I
never want anybody to speak to me of my hands. I'm ashamed of 'em; they
used to be real nice, though." She held the blunted ends up. "They're
awful! I do love a nice hand."
The cold struck sharp as a knife as I came out of the factory. Fresh
air, insolent with purity, cleanness, unusedness, smiting nostrils,
sought lungs filled too long with unwholesome atmosphere.[3]
[Footnote 3: At Plant's, Boston, fresh air cylinders ventilate
the shop.]
Heated by a brisk walk home, I climbed the stairs to my attic room, as
cold as Greenland. It was nearly six thirty, supper hour, and I made a
shift at a toilet.
Into the kitchen I was the last comer. All of the supper not on the
table was on the stove, and between this red-hot buffet and the supper
table was just enough room for the landlady to pass to and fro as she
waited upon her nine guests.
No sooner did I open the door into the smoky atmosphere, into the midst
of the little world here assembled, than I felt the quick kindness of
welcome.
My place was at the table's end, before the Irish stew.
"Miss Ballard!" The landlady put her arm about my waist and introduced
me, mentioning the names of every one present. There were four women
besides myself and four men.
"I don't want Miss Ballard to feel strange," said my hostess in her
pretty Canadian _patois_. "I want her to be at home here."
I sat down.
"Oh, she'll be at home all right!" A frowzy-headed, pretty brunette
from the table's other end raised kind eyes to me and nodded a smiling
good-fellowship.
"Come to work in the shops?"
"Yes."
"Ever been to Lynn before?"
"No; live in Paris--stranger."
"My, but that's hard--all alone here! Got a job?"
"Yes."
And I explained to the attentive interest of all.
From the Irish stew before me they helped themselves, or passed to me
the plates from the distance. If excitement had not taken from me every
shred of appetite, the kitchen odours, smoke and frying, the room's
stifling heat would have dulled hunger.
Let it go! I was far too interested to eat.
The table was crowded with all manner of substances passing for
food--cheese, preserves, onion pickles, cake and Irish stew, all eaten
at one time and at will; the drink was tea.
At my left sat a well-dressed man who would pass anywhere for a business
man of certain distinction. He was a common operator. Next him was a
bridal couple, very young and good looking; then came the sisters, Mika
and Nannette, their brother, a packer at a shop, then Mademoiselle
Frances, expert hand at fourteen dollars a week (a heavy swell indeed),
then Maurice.
Although I was evidently an object of interest, although countless
questions were put to me, let me say that curiosity was markedly absent.
Their attitude was humane, courteous, sympathetic, agreeable, which
qualities I firmly believe are supreme in those who know hardship, who
suffer privation, who labour.
Great surprise was evinced that I had so soon found a job. Mika and
Nannette, brunette Canadians, with voices sweet and carrying, talked in
good English and mediocre French.
"It's wonderful you got a job right off! Ain't she in luck! Why, most
has to get spoken of weeks in advance--introduced by friends, too!"
Mika said: "My name's been up two months at my sister's shop. The
landlady told us about your coming, Miss Ballard. We was going to speak
for you to our foreladies."
Here my huge hostess, who during my stay stood close to my side as
though she thought I needed her motherliness, put her hand on my
shoulder.
"Yes, _mon enfant_, we didn't want you to get discouraged in a strange
place. _Ici nous sommes toute une famille_".
"All one family?" Oh, no, no, kind creature, hospitable receiver of a
stranger, not all one family! I belong to the class of the woman who,
one day by chance out of her carriage, did she happen to sit by your
side in a cable car, would pull her dress from the contact of your
clothes, heavy with tenement odours; draw back as you crushed your huge
form down too close to her; turn no look of sisterhood to your face,
brow-bound by the beads of sweat, its signet of labour.
Not one family! I am one with the hostess, capable even of greeting her
guest with insolent discourtesy did such a one chance to intrude at an
hour when her presence might imperil the next step of the social
climber's ladder.
Not one family, but part of the class whose tongues turn the _truffle_
buried in _pate de foie gras_; whose lips are reddened with Burgundies
and cooled with iced champagnes; who discuss the quality of a _canard a
la presse_ throughout a meal; who have no leisure, because they have no
labour such as you know the term to mean; who create disease by feeding
bodies unstimulated by toil, whilst you, honestly tired, really hungry,
eat Irish stew in the atmosphere of your kitchen dining-hall.
Not one family, I blush to say! God will not have it so.
The Irish stew had all disappeared, every vestige.
"But mademoiselle eats nothing--a bird's appetite." And here was
displayed the first hint of vulgarity we are taught to look for in the
other class.
She put her hands about my arms. "_Tiens! un bras tout de meme!_" and
she looked at Maurice, the young man on my right.
"_Maurice c'est toi qui devrait t'informer des bras d'mademoiselle."_
("Maurice, it is you who should inform yourself of mademoiselle's
arms.")
Maurice laughed with appreciation, as did the others. He was the sole
American at table; out of courtesy for him we talked English from time
to time, although he assured us he understood all we said in "the
jargon."
* * * * *
To Maurice a master pen could do justice; none other. His _type_ is seen
stealing around corners in London's Whitechapel and in the lowest
quarters of New York: a lounger, indolent, usually drunk. Maurice was
the type, with the qualities absent. Tall, lank, loosely hung together,
made for muscular effort, he wore a dark flannel shirt, thick with
grease and oil stains, redolent with tobacco, a checked waistcoat, no
collar or cravat. From the collarless circle of his shirt rose his
strong young neck and bullet head; his forehead was heavy and square
below the heavy brows; his black eyes shone deep sunken in their
caverns.
His black hair, stiff as a brush, came low on his forehead; his mouth
was large and sensual, his teeth brilliant. But his hands! never to be
forgotten! Scrubbed till flesh might well have parted from the bones!
clean, even if black and mutilated with toil; fingers forever darkened;
stained ingrained ridges rising around the nails, hard and ink-black as
leather. Maurice was Labour--its Symbol--its Epitome.
At the landlady's remark he had blushed and addressed me frankly:
"Say, I work to de 'Lights.'"
(Lights! Can such a word be expressive of the factory which has daily
blackened and scarred and dulled this human instrument?)
"To the 'Lights,' and it ain't no _cinch_, I can tell you! I got to keep
movin'. Every minute I'm late I get docked for wages--it's a day's work
to the 'Lights.' When _she_ calls me at six--why, I don't turn over and
snooze another! I just turn right out. I walk two miles to my shop--and
every man in his place at 6:45! Don't you forgit it!"
He cleaned his plate of food.
"I jest keep movin' all de time."
He wiped his mouth--rose unceremoniously, put on his pot-like derby
ajaunt, lit a vile cigar, slipped into a miserable old coat, and was
gone, the odour of his weed blending its new smell with kitchen fumes.
He is one of the absolutely real creatures I have ever seen. Of his
likeness types of crime are drawn. Maurice--blade keen-edged, hidden in
its battered sheath, its ugly case--terrible yet attractive specimen of
strength and endurance--Youth and Manhood in you are bound to labour as
on the rack, and in the ordeal you keep (as does the mass of humanity)
Silence!
Eat by this man's side, heap his plate with coarse victuals, feel the
touch of his flannel sleeve against your own flannel blouse, see his
look of brotherhood as he says:
"Say, if de job dey give you is too hard, why, I guess I kin get yer in
to the 'Lights'!"
These are sensations facts alone can give.
* * * * *
After dinner we sit all together in the parlour, the general
living-room: carpet-covered sofa, big table, few chairs--that's all. We
talk an hour--and on what? We discuss Bernhardt, the divine Sarah. "Good
shows don't come to Lynn much; it don't pay them. You can't get more
than fifty cents a seat. Now Bernhardt don't like to act for fifty-cent
houses! But the theatres are crowded if ever there's a good show. We get
tired of the awful poor shows to the Opera House." Maude Adams was a
favourite. Réjane had been seen. Of course, the vital American
interest--money--is touched upon, let me say lightly, and passed. The
packer at Rigger's, intelligent and well-informed and well-read,
discoursed in good French about English and French politics and on the
pleasure it would be to travel and see the world.
At nine, friendly handshaking. "Good-night. You're tired. You'll like
it all right to the shops, see if you don't! You'll make money, too. The
forelady must a-seen that you were ambitious. Why, to my shop when a new
hand applies for a job the foreman asks: 'What does he look like?
Ambitious lookin'? Well, then--there's room."
Ambitious to make shoes! To grind out all you can above the average five
dollars a week, all you may by conscientious, unflagging work during 224
hours out of a month.
Good-night to the working world! Landlady and friendly co-labourers.
"_Il ne faut pas vous gener, mademoiselle; nous sommes toute une
famille_."
Upstairs in my room the excitement died quite out of me. I lay wakeful
in the hard, sheetless bed. It was cold, my window-pane freezing
rapidly. I could not sleep. On either side, through the thin walls of
the house, I could hear my neighbours settling to repose. Maurice's room
was next to mine. He whistled a short snatch of a topical song as he
undressed. On the other side slept the landlady's children; opposite,
the packer from Rigger's. The girls' room was downstairs. When Maurice's
song had reached its close he heaved a profound sigh, and then followed
silence, as slumber claimed the sole period of his existence not devoted
to work. The tenement soon passed to stillness complete.
Before six the next morning--black as night--the call: "Mau--rice!
Mau--_rice_!" rang through the hall. Summons to us all, given through
him on whom the exigencies of life fell the heaviest. Maurice worked by
day system--the rest of us were freed men and women by comparison.
The night before, timid and reluctant to descend the two flights of
pitch dark stairs with a heavy water-pitcher in my hand, I had brought
up no water! It is interesting to wonder how scrupulous we would all be
if our baths were carried up and down two flights of stairs pitcher by
pitcher. A little water nearly frozen was at hand for my toilet. By six
I was dressed and my bed made; by 6:15 in the kitchen, dense with smoke
from the frying breakfast. Through the haze the figures of my friends
declared themselves. Codfish balls, bread and butter and coffee formed
the repast.
Maurice is the first to finish, standing a moment to light his pipe, his
hat acock; then he is gone. The sisters wash at the sink, Mika combing
her mass of frowzy dark hair, talking meanwhile. The sisters' toilet,
summary and limited, is frankly displayed.
At my right the bride consumes five enormous fish balls, as well as much
bread. Her husband, a young, handsome, gentle creature, eats sparingly.
His hand is strapped up at the wrist.
"What's wrong?"
"Strained tendons. Doctor says they'd be all right if I could just hold
up a little. They don't get no chance to rest."
"But why not 'hold up' awhile?" He regards me sympathetically as one who
says to an equal, a fellow: "You know why!--for the same reason that you
yourself will work sick or well."
"_On fait ce que l'on peut_!"
("One does one's best!")
When the young couple had left the room our landlady said:
"The little woman eats well, doesn't she! She needs no tonic! All day
long she sits in my parlour and rocks--and rocks."
"She does nothing?"
Madame shrugged.
"But yes! She reads novels!"
It was half-past six when I got into the streets. The midwinter sky is
slowly breaking to dawn. The whole town white with fresh snow, and still
half-wedded to night, is nevertheless stirring to life.
I become, after a block or two, one of a hurrying throng of labour-bound
fellows--dark forms appear from streets and avenues, going in divers
directions toward their homes. Homes? Where one passes most of one's
life, is it not _Home_?
These figures to-day bend head and shoulders against the wind as it
blows neck-coverings about, forces bare hands into coat pockets.
By the time the town has been traversed, railroad track crossed, and
Parsons' in sight, day has nearly broken. Pink clouds float over factory
roofs in a sky growing bluer, flushing to day.
[Illustration: THE WINDOW SIDE OF MISS K.'s PARLOUR AT LYNN, MASS]
From now on the day is shut out for those who here and there enter the
red-brick factories. An hour at noon? Of course, this magnificent hour
is theirs! Time to eat, time to feed the human machine. One hour in
which to stretch limbs, to pull to upright posture the bent body.
Meanwhile daylight progresses from glowing beauty to high noon, and
there the acme of brilliance seems to pause, as freed humanity stares
half-blinded at God's midday rest.
All the remaining hours of daylight are for the leisure world. Not till
night claims Lynn shall the factory girl be free.
Ascending the five flights of dirty stairs, my steps fell side by side
those of a young workman in drilling coat. He gave me a good-morning in
a cheery tone.
"Working here? Got it good?"
"I guess so."
"That's all right. Good-day."
Therefore I began my first labour day with a good wish from my new
class!
On the fifth floor I was one of the very first arrivals. If in the long,
low-ceiled room windows had been opened, the flagging air gave no sign
to the effect. It was fetid and cold. Daylight had not fully found the
workshop, gas was lit, and no work prepared. I was eager to begin, but
was forced to wait before idle tools till work was given me--hard ordeal
for ambitious piece-worker. At the tick of seven, however, I had begun
my branch of the shoe-making trade. One by one my mates arrived; the
seats beyond me and on either side were filled.
Opposite me sat a ghost of girlhood. A tall, slender creature, cheeks
like paper, eyes sunken. She, too, had the smile of good-fellowship--coin
freely passed from workwoman to workwoman.
This girl's job was filthy. She inked edges of the shoes with a brush
dipped in a pot of thick black fluid. Pile after pile of piece-work was
massed in front of her; pile by pile disappeared. She worked like
lightning.
"Do you like your job?" I ventured. This seemed to be the open sesame to
all conversations in the shops. She shrugged her narrow shoulders but
made no direct reply. "I used to have what you're doing; it's awful.
That glue made me sick. I was in bed. So when I came back I got _this_."
She was separated from my glue-pot by a table's length only.
"But don't you smell it from here?"
"Not so bad; this here" (pointing to her black fluid) "smells stronger;
it _drownds_ it.
"I make my wages clear," she announced to me a few minutes later.
"How do you mean?"
"Why, at noon I wait in a restaurant; they give me my dinner afterward.
I go back there and wait on the table at supper, too. My vittles don't
cost me anything!"
So that is where your golden noon hour is spent, standing, running,
waiting, serving in the ill-smelling restaurant I shall name later; and
not your dinner hour alone, but the long day's fag end!
"I ain't from these parts," she continued, confidentially, "I'm down
East. I used to run a machine, but it hurts my side."
My job went well for an amateur. I finished one case of shoes
(thirty-six pairs) in little more than an hour. By ten o'clock the room
grew stifling hot. I was obliged to discard my dress skirt and necktie,
loosen collar, roll up my sleeves. My warmer blooded companions did the
like. It was singular to watch the clock mark out the morning hours, and
at ten, already early, very early in the forenoon, feel tired because
one had been three hours at work.
A man came along with nuts and apples in a basket to sell. I bought an
apple for five cents. It was regarded by my teacher, Maggie, as a
prodigal expenditure! I shared it with her, and she in turn shared her
half with her neighbours, advising me wisely.
"Say, you'd better _earn_ an apple before you buy one!"
My companion on the other side was a pretty country girl. She regarded
her work with good-humoured indifference; indeed, her labour was of very
indifferent quality. I don't believe she was ever intended to make
shoes. In a cheerful "undertone she sang topical songs the morning long.
It drove Maggie McGowan "mad," so she said.
"Say, why don't some of _youse_ sing?" said the little creature, looking
down our busy line. "I never hear no singing in the shops."
Maggie said, "Sing! Well, I don't come here to sing."
The other laughed sweetly.
"Well, I jest have to sing."
"You seem happy; are you?" She looked at me out of her pretty blue eyes.
"You bet! That's the way to be!" Then after a little, in an aside to me
alone, she whispered:
"Not always. Sometimes I cry all to myself.
"See the sun?" she exclaimed, lifting her head. (It shone golden through
the window's dirty, cloudy pane.) "He's peekin' at me! He'll find _you_
soon. Looks like he was glad to see us sitting here!"
Sun, friend, light, air, seek them--seek them! Pour what tide of pure
gold you may in through the sullied pane; touch, caress the bowed heads
at the clicking machines! Shine on the dusty, untidy hair! on the bowed
shoulders! on the flying hands!
At noon I made a reluctant concession to wisdom and habit. Unwilling to
thwart my purposes and collapse from sheer fatigue, at the dinner hour I
went to a restaurant and ordered a meal in keeping with my appetite. I
had never been so hungry. I almost wept with joy when the chicken and
cranberry and potato appeared. Never was sauce more poignant than that
which seasoned the only real repast I had in Lynn.
The hours, from one to three went fairly well, but by 3:30 I was tired
out, my fingers had grown wooden with fatigue, glue-pot and
folding-line, board, hammer and awl had grown indistinct. It was hard-to
continue. The air stifled. Odours conspired together. Oil, leather, glue
(oh, that to-heaven-smelling glue!), tobacco smoke, humanity.
* * * * *
Maggie asked me, "How old do I look?" I gave her thirty. Twenty-five it
seemed she was. In guessing the next girl's age no better luck. "It's
this," Maggie nodded to the workroom; "it takes it out of you! Just you
wait till you've worked ten years in Lynn."
Ten years! Heaven forbid! Already I could have rushed from the factory,
shaken its dust from my feet, and with hands over ears shut out the
horrid din that inexorably cried louder than human speech.
Everything we said was shrieked in the friendly ear bent close.
Although Maggie McGowan was curious about me, in posing her questions
she was courtesy itself.
"Say," to her neighbour, "where do you think Miss Ballard's from?
Paris!"
My neighbour once-removed leaned forward to stare at me. "My, but that's
a change to Lynn! Ain't it? Now don't you think you'll miss it?"
She fell to work again, and said after a little: "Paris! Why, that's
like a dream. Is it like real places? I can't never guess what it is
like!"
The girl at the machine next mine had an ear like a sea-shell, a skin of
satin. Her youth was bound, strong shoulders already stooped, chest fast
narrowing. At 7 A.M. she came: albeit fresh, pale still and wan; rest of
the night too short a preparation for the day's work. By three in the
afternoon she was flushed, by five crimson. She threw her hands up over
her head and exclaimed: "My back's broke, and I've only made thirty-five
cents to-day."
Maggie McGowan (indicating me): "Here's a girl who's had the misfortune
never to work in a shoe-shop."
"_Misfortune?_ You don't mean that!"
Maggie: "Well, I guess I don't! If I didn't make a joke now and then I'd
jump into the river!"
She sat close to me patiently directing my clumsy fingers.
"Why do you speak so strongly? 'Jump into the river!' That's saying a
lot!"
"I am sick of the shoe-shops."
"How long have you been at this work?"
"Ten years. When you have worked ten years in Lynn you will be sick of
the shops."
I was sick of the shops, and I had not worked ten years. And for my
hard-toiling future, such as she imagined that it would be, I could see
that she pitied me. Once, supposing that since I am so green and so
ill-clad, and so evidently bent on learning my trade the best I knew,
she asked me in a voice quick with sisterhood:
"Say, are you hungry?"
"No, no, no."
"You'll be all right! No American girl need to starve in America."
In the shops the odours are more easily endured than is the noise. All
conversation is shrieked out, and all the vision that one has as one
lifts one's eyes from time to time is a sky seen through dirty
window-panes, distant chimney-pots, and the roof-lines of like houses of
toil.
* * * * *
I gathered this from our interrupted talk that flowed unceasingly
despite the noise of our hammers and the noise of the general room.
They worked at a trade uncongenial. Not one had a good word to say for
shop-labour there, despite its advantages, in this progressive land of
generous pay. Each woman in a narrow, touching degree was a dreamer.
Housework! too servile; but then, compared to shopwork it was leisure.
By four the gas was lit here and there where burners were available.
Over our heads was no arrangement for lighting. We bent lower in
semi-obscurity. In the blending of twilight and gaslight the room became
mysterious, a shadowy corridor. Figures grew indistinct, softened and
blurred. The exhausted air surrounded the gas jets in misty circles.
Unaltered alone was the ceaseless thud, the chopping, pounding of the
machinery, the long soughing of the power-engine.
Here and there a woman stops to rest a second, her head sunk in her
hand; or she rises, stretches limbs and body. A man wanders in from the
next room, a pipe in his mouth, or a bad cigar, and pausing by one of
the pale operators, whose space of rest is done, he flings down in front
of her a new pile of piece-work from the cutting machines.
We are up five flights of stairs. There are at least two hundred girls.
Machine oil, rags, refuse, cover the floor--such _dèbris_ as only awaits
a spark from a lighted match or cigar to burst into flames. Despite laws
and regulations the building is not fire-proof. There is no fire-escape.
A cry of fire, and great Heaven! what escape for two hundred of us from
this mountain height, level with roofs of the distant town!
Thus these women, shapes mysterious in gaslight and twilight, labour:
life is at stake; health, youth, vigour, supply little more than bread.
I rise; my bruised limbs, at first numb, then aching, stir for the first
time after five hours of steady work. The pile of shoes before me is
feeble evidence of the last hours' painful effort.
I get into my clothes--skirt, jacket and hat, all impregnated now with
factory and tenement odours, and stumble downstairs and out into the
street. I have earned fifty cents to-day--but then, I am green!
When once more in the cool, fresh air, released, I draw in a long and
grateful breath.
Lynn on this winter night is a snow-bound, midwinter village. In the
heavens is the moon's ghost, a mist-shrouded, far-away disk. But it is
the Christmas moon, shining on the sleeping thousands in the town, where
night alone is free. The giant factories are silent, the machines at
last quiet, the long workrooms moon-invaded. Labour is holy, but serfdom
is accursed, and toil which demands that every hour of daylight should
be spent in the race for existence--all of the daylight--is kin to
slavery! There is no time for mental or physical upright-standing, no
time for pleasure.
* * * * *
One day I decided to consider myself dismissed from Parsons'. They had
taught me all they could, unless I changed my trade, in that shop; I
wished to learn a new one in another. Therefore, one morning I applied
at another factory, again one of the largest in Lynn. The sign read:
"_Cleaner Wanted_!"
"Cleaner" sounded easy to learn. My experience this time was with a
foreman instead of a forelady. The workroom I sought was on the second
floor, a room filled with men, all of them standing. Far down the room's
centre I saw the single figure of a woman at her job. By her side I was
soon to be, and we two the sole women on the second floor.
The foreman was distinctly a personage. Small, kind, alive, he wore a
straw hat and eye-glasses. He had decided in a moment that my short
application for "something to do" was not to be gainsaid.
"Ever worked before?"
This time I had a branch of a trade at my fingers' ends.
"Yes, sir; presser."
I was proud of my trade.
I did not even know, as I do now, that "cleaning" is the filthiest job
the trade possesses. It is in bad repute and difficult to secure a woman
to do the unpleasant work.
"You come with me," he said cheerfully; "I'll teach you."
The forelady at Parsons' did not know whether I worked well or not. She
never came to see. The foreman in Marches' taught me himself.
Two high desks, like old-time school desks, rose in the workshop's
centre. Behind one of these I stood, whilst the foreman in front of me
instructed my ignorance. The room was filled with high crates rolled
hither and thither on casters. These crates contained anywhere from
thirty-two to fifty pairs of boots. The cases are moved from operator to
operator as each man selects the shoes to apply to them the especial
branch of his trade. From the crate of boots rolled to my side I took
four boots and placed them on the desk before me. With the heel of one
pressed against my breast, I dipped my forefinger in a glass of hot soap
and water, water which soon became black as ink. I passed my wet, soapy
finger all around the boot's edges, from toe to heel. This loosened, in
the space between the sole and vamp, the sticky dye substance on the
leather and particles so-called "dirt." Then with a bit of wood covered
with Turkish toweling I scraped the shoe between the sole and vamp and
with a third cloth polished and rubbed the boot clean. In an hour's time
I did one-third as well as my companion. I cleaned a case in an hour,
whilst she cleaned three.
When my employer had left me I observed the woman at my side: an untidy,
degraded-looking creature, long past youth. Her hands beggared
description; their covering resembled skin not at all, but a dark-blue
substance, leatherlike, bruised, ingrained, indigo-hued. Her nails
looked as though they had been beaten severely. One of her thumbs was
bandaged.
"I lost one nail; rotted off."
"Horrible! How, pray?"
"That there water: it's poison from the shoe-dye."
Swiftly my hands were changing to a faint likeness of my companion's.
"Don't tell him," she said, "that I told you that. He'll be mad; he'll
think I am discouraging you. But you'll lose your forefinger nail, all
right!" Then she gave a little laugh as she turned her boot around to
polish it.
"Once I tried to clean my hands up. Lord! it's no good! I scrub 'em with
a scrubbin'-brush on Sundays."
"How long have you been at this job?"
"Ten months."
They called her "Bobby"; the men from their machines nodded to her now
and then, bantering her across the noise of their wheels. She was
ignorant of it, too stupid to know whether life took her in sport or in
earnest! The men themselves worked in their flannel shirts. Not far from
us was a wretchedly ill-looking individual, the very shadow of manhood.
I observed that once he cast toward us a look of interest. Under my feet
was a raised platform on which I stood, bending to my work. During the
morning the consumptive man strolled over and whispered something to
"Bobby." He made her dullness understand. When he had gone back to his
job she said to me:
"Say, w'y don't yer push that platform away and stand down on the floor?
You're too tall to need that. It makes yer bend."
"Did that man come over to tell you this?"
"Yes. He said it made you tired."
From my work, across the room, I silently blessed the pale old man,
bowed, thin, pitiful, over the shoe he held, obscured from me by the
cloud of sawdust-like flying leather that spun scattered from the sole
he held to the flying wheel.
* * * * *
I don't believe the shoe-dye really to be poisonous. I suppose it is
scarcely possible that it can be so; but the constant pressure against
forefinger nail is enough to induce disease. My fingers were swollen
sore. The effects of the work did not leave my hands for weeks.
"Bobby" was not talkative or communicative simply because she had
nothing to say. Over and over again she repeated the one single question
to me during the time I worked by her side: "Do you like your job?" and
although I varied my replies as well as I could with the not too
exhausting topic she offered, I could not induce her to converse. She
took no interest in my work, absorbed in her own. Every now and then
she would compute the sum she had made, finally deciding that the day
was to be a red-bean day and she would make a dollar and fifty cents.
During the time we worked together she had cleaned seventeen cases of
shoes.
In this shop it was hotter than in Parsons'. We sweltered at our work.
Once a case of shoes was cleaned, I wrote my initial "B" on the tag and
rolled the crate across the floor to the man next me, who took it into
his active charge.
The foreman came to me many times to inspect, approve and encourage. He
was a model teacher and an indefatigable superintendent. Just how far
personal, and just how far human, his kindness, who can say?
"You've been a presser long at the shoe-shops?"
"No."
"I like your pluck. When a girl has never had to work, and takes hold
the way you do, I admire it. You will get along all right."
"Thank you; perhaps I won't, though."
"Now, don't get nervous. I am nervous myself," he said; "I know how that
is."
On his next visit he asked me: "Where you goin'; to when you get out of
here to-night?"
I told him that I was all right--that I had a place to stay.
"If you're hard up, don't get discouraged; come to me."
[Illustration: "FANCY GUMMING."
Mrs. T earns $8 or $9 a week. Her husband also works in a factory, and
between them they have made enough to build a pretty little cottage]
[Illustration: AN ALL-AROUND, EXPERIENCED HAND.
Mrs. F., who has worked in the factory more than twenty years, once as
a forewoman, now earns only $5 or $6 a week]
I thanked him again and said that I could not take charity.
"Nonsense! I don't call it charity! If I was hard put, don't you s'pose
I'd go to the next man if he offered me what I offer you? The world owes
you a livin'."
When the foreman had left me I turned to look at "Bobby." She was in the
act of lifting to her lips a glass of what was supposed to be water.
"You're not going to drink that!" I gasped, horrified. "Where did you
get it?"
"Oh, I drawed it awhile ago," she said.
It had stood gathering microbes in the room, visible ones evidently, for
a scum had formed on the glass that looked like stagnant oil. She blew
the stuff back and drank long. Her accent was so bad and her English so
limited I took her to be a foreigner beyond doubt. She proved to be an
American. She had worked in factories all her life, since she was eight
years old, and her brain was stunted.
At dinner time, when I left Marches', I had stood, without sitting down
once, for five hours, and according to Bobby's computation I had made
the large sum of twenty-five cents, having cleaned a little more than
one hundred shoes. To all intents, at least for the moment, my hands
were ruined. At Weyman's restaurant I went in with my fellow workwomen
and men.
Weyman's restaurant smells very like the steerage in a vessel. The top
floor having burned out a few weeks before, the ceiling remained
blackened and filthy. The place was so close and foul-smelling that
eating was an ordeal. If I had not been so famished, it would have been
impossible for me to swallow a mouthful. I bought soup and beans, and
ate, in spite of the inconveniences, ravenously, and paid for my dinner
fifteen cents. Most of my neighbours took one course, stew or soup. I
rose half-satisfied, dizzy from the fumes and the bad air. I am safe in
saying that I never smelled anything like to Weyman's, and I hope never
to again. Never again shall I hear food and drink discussed by the
_gourmet_--discuss, indeed, with him over his repast--but there shall
rise before me Weyman's restaurant, low-ceiled, foul, crowded to
overflowing. I shall see the diners bend edged appetites to the
unpalatable food. These Weyman patrons, mark well, are the rich ones,
the swells of labour--able to squander fifteen to twenty cents on their
stew and tea. There are dozens, you remember, still in the unaired
fourth and fifth stories--at "lunching" over their sandwiches. Far
more vivid, more poignant even must be to me the vision of "Bobby." I
shall see her eat her filthy sandwich with her blackened hands, see her
stoop to blow the scum of deadly matter from her typhoid-breeding glass.
In Lynn, unless she boards at home, a girl's living costs her at best
$3.75 a week. If she be of the average[4] her month's earnings are
$32. Reduce this by general expenses and living and her surplus is
$16, to earn which she has toiled 224 hours. You will recall that
there are, out of the 22,000 operatives in Massachusetts, 5,000 who
make under $5 a week. I leave the reader to compute from this the
luxuries and possible pleasures consistent with this income.
[Footnote 4: Lynn's average wages are $8 per week.]
A word for the swells of the trade, for swells exist. One of my
companions at 28 Viger Street made $14 a week. Her expenses were $4; she
therefore had at her disposition about $40 a month. She had no
family--_every cent of her surplus she spent on her clothes_.
"I like to look down and see myself dressed nice," she said; "it makes
me feel good. I don't like myself in poor clothes."
She _was_ well-dressed--her furs good, her hat charming. We walked to
work side by side, she the lady of us. Of course she belongs to the
Union. Her possible illness is provided for; her death will bring $100
to a distant cousin. She is only tired out, thin, undeveloped, pale,
that's all. She is almost a capitalist, and extremely well dressed.
Poor attire, if I can judge by the reception I met with in Lynn,
influences only those who by reason of birth, breeding and education
should be above such things. In Viger Street I was more simply clad
than my companions. My aspect called forth only sisterhood and kindness.
Fellowship from first to last, fellowship from their eyes to mine, a
spark kindled never to be extinguished. The morning I left my tenement
lodging Mika took my hand at the door.
"Good-by." Her eyes actually filled. "I'm awful sorry you're going. If
the world don't treat you good come back to us."
I must qualify a little. One member of the working class there was on
whom my cheap clothes had a chilling effect--the spoiled creature of the
traveling rich, a Pullman car porter on the train from Boston to New
York! Although I called him first and purposely gave him my order in
time, he viewed me askance and served me the last of all. As I watched
my companions in their furs and handsome attire eat, whilst I sat and
waited, my woolen gloves folded in my lap, I wondered if any one of the
favoured was as hungry, as famished as the presser from Parsons', the
cleaner from Marches'.
* * * * *
THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS
* * * * *
CHAPTER VIII
THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS
THE MILL VILLAGE
Columbia, South Carolina, of course is conscious that there are mills
without its city precincts. It is proud of the manufacture that gives
the city precedence and commercial value all over the world. The trolley
runs to the mills empty, as a rule, after the union depot is passed.
Frankly, what is there to be seen in these dusty suburbs? Entry to the
mills themselves is difficult, if not absolutely impossible. And that
which forms the background for the vast buildings, the Mill Village, is
a section to be shunned like the plague. Plague is not too strong a word
to apply to the pest-ridden, epidemic-filled, filthy settlement where in
this part of the country the mill-hand lives, moves and has his being,
horrible honeycomb of lives, shocking morals and decency.
Around Columbia there lie five mills and their respective
settlements--Excelsior, the Granton, Calcutta, the Richland and the
Capital City. Each of these mills boasts its own so-called town. When
these people are free on Saturday afternoon and Sunday they are too
exhausted to do anything but turn into their hovels to sleep. At most on
Saturday afternoons or Sundays they board a trolley and betake
themselves to a distant park which, in the picturesque descriptions of
Columbia, reads like an Arcadia and is in reality desolation.
The mill-hands are not from the direct section of Columbia. They are
strangers brought in from "the hills" by the agents of the company, who
go hither and thither through the different parts of the country
describing to the poor whites and the hill dwellers work in the mills as
a way to riches and success. Filled with dreams of gain and possessions,
with hopes of decent housing and schooling for their children, they
leave their distant communities and troop to the mills. These immigrants
are picturesque, touching to see. They come with all they own in the
world on their backs or in their hands; penniless; burrs and twigs often
in the hair of the young girls. They are hatless, barefooted, ignorant;
innocent for the most part--and hopeful! What the condition of these
labourers is after they have tested the promises of the manufacturer and
found them empty bubbles can only be understood and imagined when one
has seen their life, lived among them, worked by their side, and
comprehended the tragedy of this population--a floating population,
going from Granton to Excelsior, from Excelsior to Richland, hither and
thither, seeking--seeking better conditions. They have no affiliation
with the people of the town; they are looked down upon as scum: and in
good sooth, for good reason, scum they are!
It is spring, warm, gracious. This part of the world seems to be
well-nigh treeless! There is no generous foliage, but wherever there are
branches to bear it the first green has started out, delicate, tender
and beautiful.
In my simple work garb I leave Columbia and take a trolley to the mill
district. I have chosen Excelsior as best for my purpose. Its reputation
is most at stake; its prospectus dazzling; its annals effective. If such
things are done in Gath...!
I cannot say with what timidity I descend from the tram in this strange
country, foreign to my Northern habitation and filled with classes whose
likeness I have never seen and around which the Southern Negro makes a
tad and gloomy background.
Before the trolley has arrived at the corporation stores Excelsior has
spoken--roared, clicked forth so vibrantly, so loudly, I am prepared to
feel the earth shake. This is the largest mill in the world and looks
it! A model, too, in point of view of architecture. I have read in the
prospectus that it represents $1,750,000 capital, possesses 104,000
spindles, employs 1,200 hands, and can, with crowding, employ 3,000.
Surely it will have place for one more, then! I am impressed with its
grandeur as it rises, red-bricked, with proud, straight towers toward
its centre--impressed and frightened by its insistent call as it rattles
and hums to me across the one-sixteenth of a mile of arid sand track. At
one side Christianity and doctrine have constructed a church: a second
one is building. On the other side, at a little distance, lies Granton,
second largest mill. All this I take in as I make my way Excelsiorward.
Between me and the vast mill itself there is not a soul. A thick, sandy
road winds to the right; in the distance I can see a black trestle over
which the freight cars take the cotton manufactures to the distant
railroad and ship them to all parts of the world. Beyond the trestle are
visible the first shanties of the mill town.
Work first and lodgings afterward are my goals. At the door of Excelsior
I am more than overwhelmed by its magnificence and its loud voice that
makes itself so far-reachingly heard. There is no entry for me at the
front of the mill, and I toil around to the side; not a creature to be
seen. I venture upon the landing and make my way along a line of freight
cars--between the track and the mill.
A kind-faced man wanders out from an unobserved doorway; a gust of roar
follows him! He sees me, and lifts his hat with the ready Southern
courtesy not yet extinct. I hasten to ask for work.
[Illustration: "MIGHTY MILL--PRIDE OF THE ARCHITECT AND THE COMMERCIAL
MAGNATE"
"Charnel house, destroyer of homes, of all that mankind calls hallowed;
breeder of strife, of strike, of immorality of sedition and riot"]
"Well, thar's jest plenty of work, I reckon! Go in that do'; the
overseer will tell you."
Through the door open behind him I catch glimpses of a room enormous in
dimensions. Cotton bales lie on the floor, stand around the walls and
are piled in the centre. Leaning on them, handling them, lying on them,
outstretched, or slipping like shadows into shadow, are the dusky shapes
of the black Negro of true Southern blood. I have been told there is no
Negro labour in the mills. I take advantage of my guide's kind face to
ask him if he knows where I can lodge.
"Hed the measles? Well, my gyrl got 'em. Thar's a powerful sight of
measles hyar. I'd take you-all to bo'd at my house ef you ain't 'fraid
of measles. Thar's the hotel." (He points to what at the North would be
known as a brick shanty.) "A gyrl can bo'd thar for $2.25 a week. You
won't make that at first."
With extreme kindness he leads me into the roaring mill past picturesque
black men and cotton bales: we reach the "weave-room." I am told that
carpet factories are celebrated for their uproar, but the weave-looms of
a cotton mill to those who know them need no description! This is chaos
before order was conceived: more weird in that, despite the din and
thunder, everything is so orderly, so perfectly carried forth by the
machinery. Here the cotton cloth is woven. Excelsior is so vast that
from one end to the other of a room one cannot distinguish a friend. I
decide instantly that the weave-room shall not be my destination! An
overseer comes up to me. He talks with me politely and kindly--that is,
as well as he can, he talks! It is almost impossible to hear what he
says. He asks me simple and few questions and engages me promptly to
work that "_evening_" as the Southerner calls the hours after midday.
"You can see all the work and choose a sitting or a standing job." This
is an improvement on Pittsburg and Lynn.
I have been told there is always work in the mills for the worker.
It is not strange that every inducement consistent with corporation
rules should be made to entice the labouring girl! The difficulty is
that no effort is made to keep her! The ease with which, in all these
experiences, work has been obtained, goes definitely to prove that there
is a demand everywhere for labourers.
_Organize labour, therefore, so well that the work-woman who obtains her
task may be able to continue it and keep her health and her
self-respect_.
With Excelsior as my future workshop I leave the mill to seek lodging in
the mill village.
The houses built by the corporation for the hands are some five or six
minutes' walk, not more, from the palace-like structure of the mill
proper. To reach them I plod through a roadway ankle-deep in red clay
dust. The sun is bright and the air heavy, lifeless and dull; the scene
before me is desolate, meager and poverty-stricken in the extreme.
The mill houses are all built exactly alike. Painted in sickly greens
and yellows, they rise on stilt-like elevations above the malarial soil.
Here the architect has catered to the different families, different
individual tastes in one point of view alone, regarding the number of
rooms: They are known as "four-or six-room cottages." In one of the
first cottages to the right a wholesome sight--the single wholesome
sight I see during my experience--meets my eye. Human kindness has
transformed one of the houses into a kindergarten--"Kindergarten" is
over the door. A pretty Southern girl, a lady, stands surrounded by her
little flock. The handful of half a dozen emancipated children who are
not in the mills is refreshing to see. There are very few; the
kindergarten flags for lack of little scholars.
I accost her. "Can you tell me any decent place to board?" She is sorry,
regards me kindly with the expression I have grown to know--the look the
eyes adopt when a person of one class addresses her sister in a lower
range.
"I am a stranger come out to work in the mills."
But the young lady takes little interest in me. Children are her care.
They surround her, clinging, laughing, calling--little birds fed so
gently by the womanly hand. She turns from the working-woman to them,
but not before indicating a shanty opposite:
"Mrs. Green lives there in that four-room cottage. She is a good woman."
Through the door's crack I interview Mrs. Green, a pallid, sickly
creature, gowned, as are most of the women, in a calico garment made all
in one piece. She permits me to enter the room which forms (as do all
the front rooms in a mill cottage) bedroom and general living-room.
Here is confusion incarnate--and filthy disorder. The tumbled, dirty bed
fills up one-half the room. In it is a little child, shaking with
chills. On the bare floor are bits of food, old vegetables, rags, dirty
utensils of all sorts of domestic description. The house has a sickening
odour. The woman tells me she is too ill to keep tidy--too ill to keep
boarders. We do not strike a bargain. "I am only here four months," she
said. "Sick ever since I come, and my little girl has fevernaygu."
I wander forth and a child directs me to a six-room cottage, "a real
bo'din'-house." I attack it and thus discover the dwelling where I make
my home in Excelsior.
From the front room of this dwelling a kitchen opens. Within its shadow
I see a Negro washing dishes. A tall woman, taller than most men,
angular, white-haired, her face seared by toil and stricken with age,
greets me: she is the landlady. At her skirts, catching them and staring
at a stranger, wanders a very young child--a blue-eyed, clean little
being; a great relief, in point of fact, to the general filth hitherto
presented me. The room beyond me is clean. I draw a breath of gratitude.
"Mrs. Jones?"
"Yes, this is Jones' bo'din'-house."
The old woman has a comb in her hand; she has "jest ben com'in' Letty's
hair." Letty smiles delightedly.
"This yere's the child of the lady upstairs. The mother's a pore sick
thing." Mrs. Jones bends the stiffness of sixty-eight years over the
stranger's child. "And grandmaw keeps Letty clean, don't she, Letty? She
don't never whip her, neither; jest a little cross to her."
"Can I find lodging here?"
She looks at me. "Yes, ma'am, you kin. I'm full up; got a lot of
gentlemen bo'ders, but not many ladies. I got one bed up aloft; you
can't have it alone neither, and the baby's mother is sick up there,
too. Nuthin' ketchin'. She come here a stranger; the mill was too hard
on her; she's ben sick fo' days."
I had made a quick decision and accepted half a bed. I would return at
noon.
"Stranger hyar, I reckon?"
"Yes; from Massachusetts. A shoe-hand."
She shakes her head: "You wont like the mills."
She draws Letty between her old stiff knees, seats herself on a
straight chair, and combs the child's hair on either side its pathetic,
gentle little face. So I leave her for the present to return to Columbia
and fetch back with me my bundle of clothes.
* * * * *
When I return at noon it is dinner time. I enter and am introduced, with
positive grace and courtesy, by my dear old landlady to her son-in-law,
"Tommy Jones," a widower, a man in decent store clothes and a Derby hat
surrounded by a majestic crape sash. He is nonchalantly loading a large
revolver, and thrusts it in his trousers pocket: "Always carry it," he
explains; "comes handy!" Then I am presented to the gentlemen boarders.
I beg to go upstairs, with my bundles, and I see for the first time my
dwelling part of this shanty.
A ladderlike stair leading directly from the kitchen takes me into the
loft. Heavens! the sight of that sleeping apartment! There are three
beds in it, sagging beds, covered by calico comforters. The floor is
bare; the walls are bare. I have grown to know that "Jones'" is the
cleanliest place in the Excelsior village, and yet to our thinking it
lacks perfection. Around the bare walls hang the garments of the other
women who share the room with me. What humble and pathetic decorations!
poor, miserable clothes--a shawl or two, a coat or two, a cotton
wrapper, a hat; and on one nail the miniature clothes of Letty--a
little night-dress and a tiny blue cotton dress. I put my bundle down by
the side of my bed which I am to share with another woman, and descend,
for Mrs. Jones' voice summons me to the midday meal.
The nourishment provided for these thirteen-hour-a-day labourers is as
follows: On a tin saucepan there was a little salt pork and on another
dish a pile of grease-swimming spinach. A ragged Negro hovered over
these articles of diet; the room was full of the smell of frying. After
the excitement of my search for work, and the success, if success it can
be called that so far had met me, I could not eat; I did not even sit
down. I made my excuse. I said that I had had something to eat in
Columbia, and started out to the mill.
By the time the mill-hand has reached his home a good fifteen minutes
out of the three-quarters of an hour recreation is gone: his food is
quickly bolted, and by the time I have reached the little brick hotel
pointed out to me that morning and descended to its cellar restaurant,
forced myself to drink a cup of sassafras tea, and mounted again into
the air, the troop of workers is on the march millward. I join them.
Although the student of philanthropy and the statistician would find
difficulty in forcing the countersign of the manufactories, the worker
may go everywhere.
I do not see my friend of the morning, the overseer, in the
"weave-room"; indeed, there is no one to direct me; but I discover,
after climbing the stairs, a room of flying spools and more subdued
machinery, and it appears that the spool-room is this man's especial
charge. He consigns to me a standing job. A set of revolving spools is
designated, and he secures a pretty young girl of about sixteen, who
comes cheerfully forward and consents to "learn" me.
Spooling is not disagreeable, and the room is the quietest part of the
mill--noisy enough, but calm compared to the others. In Excelsior this
room is, of course, enormous, light and well ventilated, although the
temperature, on account of some quality of the yarn, is kept at a point
of humidity far from wholesome.
"Spooling" is hard on the left arm and the side. Heart disease is a
frequent complaint amongst the older spoolers. It is not dirty compared
to shoe-making, and whereas one stands to "spool," when one is not
waiting for yarn it is constant movement up and down the line. The fact
that there are more children than young girls, more young girls than
women, proves the simplicity of this task. The cotton comes from the
spinning-room to the spool-room, and as the girl stands before her
"side," as it is called, she sees on a raised ledge, whirling in rapid
vibration, some one hundred huge spools full of yarn; whilst below her,
each in its little case, lies a second bobbin of yarn wound like a
distaff.
Her task controls machinery in constant motion, that never stops except
in case of accident.
With one finger of her right hand she detaches the yarn from the distaff
that lies inert in the little iron rut before her. With her left hand
she seizes the revolving circle of the large spool's top in front of
her, holding this spool steady, overcoming the machinery for the moment
not as strong as her grasp. This demands a certain effort. Still
controlling the agitated spool with her left hand, she detaches the end
of yarn with the same hand from the spool, and by means of a patent
knotter harnessed around her palm she joins together the two loosened
ends, one from the little distaff and one from this large spool, so that
the two objects are set whirling in unison and the spool receives all
the yarn from the distaff. Up and down this line the spooler must walk
all day long, replenishing the iron grooves with fresh yarn and
reknitting broken strands. This is all that there is of "spooling." It
demands alertness, quickness and a certain amount of strength from the
left arm, and that is all! To conceive of a woman of intelligence
pursuing this task from the age of eight years to twenty-two on down
through incredible hours is not salutary. You will say to me, that if
she demands nothing more she is fit for nothing more. I cannot think it.
The little girl who teaches me spooling is fresh and cheerful and
jolly; I grant her all this. She lives at home. I am told by my
subsequent friends that she thinks herself better than anybody. This
pride and ambition has at least elevated her to neat clothes and a
sprightliness of manner that is refreshing. She does not hesitate to
evince her superiority by making sport of me. She takes no pains to
teach me well. Instead of giving me the patent knotter, which would have
simplified my job enormously, she teaches me what she expresses "the
old-fashioned way"--knotting the yarn with the fingers. I have mastered
this slow process by the time that the overseer discovers her trick and
brings me the harness for my left hand. She is full of curiosity about
me, asking me every sort of question, to which I give the best answers
that I can. By and by she slips away from me. I turn to find her; she
has vanished, leaving me under the care of a truly kind, sad little
creature in a wrapper dress. This little Maggie has a heart of gold.
"Don't you-all fret," she consoles. "That's like Jeannie: she's so
_mean_. When you git to be a remarkable fine spooler she'll want you on
her side, you bet."
She assists my awkwardness gently.
"I'll learn you all right. You-all kin stan' hyar by me all day. Jeannie
clean fergits she was a greenhorn herself onct; we all wuz. Whar you
come from?"
"Lynn, Massachusetts."
"Did you-all git _worried_ with the train? I only bin onto it onct, and
it worried me for days!"
She tells me her simple annals with no question:
"My paw he married ag'in, and me stepmother peard like she didn't care
for me; so one day I sez to paw, 'I'm goin' to work in the mills'--an' I
lef home all alone and come here." After a little--"When I sayd good-by
to my father peard like _he_ didn't care neither. I'm all alone here. I
bo'ds with that girl's mother."
I wore that day in the mill a blue-checked apron. So did Maggie, but
mine was from Wanamaker's in New York, and had, I suppose, a certain
style, for the child said:
"I suttenly dew think that yere's a awful pretty apron: where'd you git
it?"
"Where I came from," I answered, and, I am sorry to say, it sounded
brusque. For the little thing blushed, fearful lest she had been
indiscreet....(Oh, I assure you the qualities of good breeding are
there! Some of my factory and mill friends can teach the set in which I
move lessons salutary!)
"I didn't mean jest 'xactly wherebouts," she murmurs; "I only meant it
warn't from these parts."
* * * * *
During the afternoon the gay Jeannie returns and presents to me a tin
box. It is filled with a black powder. "Want some?" Well, what is it?
She greets my ignorance with shrieks of laughter. In a trice half a
dozen girls have left their spooling and cluster around me.
"She ain't never _seen_ it!" and the little creature fills her mouth
with the powder which she keeps under her tongue. "It is _snuff_!"
They all take it, old and young, even the smallest children. Their
mouths are brown with it; their teeth are black with it. They take it
and smell it and carry it about under their tongues all day in a black
wad, spitting it all over the floor. Others "dip," going about with the
long sticks in their mouths. The air of the room is white with cotton,
although the spool-room is perhaps the freest. These little particles
are breathed into the nose, drawn into the lungs. Lung disease and
pneumonia--consumption--are the constant, never-absent scourge of the
mill village. The girls expectorate to such an extent that the floor is
nauseous with it; the little girls practise spitting and are adepts at
it.
Over there is a woman of sixty, spooling; behind the next side is a
child, not younger than eight, possibly, but so small that she has to
stand on a box to reach her side. Only the very young girls show any
trace of buoyancy; the older ones have accepted with more or less
complaint the limitation of their horizons. They are drawn from the hill
district with traditions no better than the loneliness, desertion and
inexperience of the fever-stricken mountains back of them. They are
illiterate, degraded; the mill has been their widest experience; and all
their tutelage is the intercourse of girl to girl during the day and in
the evenings the few moments before they go to bed in the mill-houses,
where they either live at home with parents and brothers all working
like themselves, or else they are fugitive lodgers in a boarding-house
or a hotel, where their morals are in jeopardy constantly. As soon as a
girl passes the age, let us say of seventeen or eighteen, there is no
hesitation in her reply when you ask her: "Do you like the mills?"
Without exception the answer is, "I _hate them_."
Absorbed with the novelty of learning my trade, the time goes swiftly.
Yet even the interest and excitement does not prevent fatigue, and from
12:45 to 6:45 seems interminable! Even when the whistle blows we are not
all free--Excelsior is behindhand with her production, and those whom
extra pay can beguile stay on. Maggie, my little teacher, walks with me
toward our divided destinations, her quasi-home and mine.
Neither in the mill nor the shoe-shops did I take precaution to change
my way of speaking--and not once had it been commented upon. To-day
Maggie says to me:
"I reckon you-all is 'Piscopal?"
"Why?"
"Why, you-all _talks_ 'Piscopal."
So much for a tribute to the culture of the church.
* * * * *
At Jones' supper is ready, spread on a bare board running the length of
the room--a bare board supported by saw-horses; the seats are boards
again, a little lower in height. They sag in the middle threateningly.
One plate is piled high with fish--bones, skin and flesh all together in
one odourous mass. Salt pork graces another platter and hominy another.
I am alone in the supper room. The guests, landlord and landlady are all
absent. Some one, as he rushes by me, gives me the reason for the
desertion:
"They've all gone to see the fight; all the white fellers is after a
nigger."
Through the window I can see the fleeing forms of the settlers--women,
sunbonnets in hand, the men hatless. It appears that all the world has
turned out to see what lawless excitement may be in store. The whirling
dust and sand in the distance denote the group formed by the Negro and
his pursuers. This, standing on the little porch of my lodging-house, I
see and am glad to find that the chase is fruitless. The black man,
tortured to distraction, dared at length to rebel, and from the moment
that he showed spirit his life was not worth a farthing, but his legs
were, and he got clear of Excelsior. The lodgers troop back. Molly, my
landlady's niece, breathing and panting, disheveled, leads the
procession and is voluble over the affair.
"They-all pester a po'r nigger's life out 'er him, ye'es, they dew so!
Ef a nigger wants ter show his manners to me, why, I show mine to him,"
she said generously, "and ef he's a mannerly nigger, why, I ain't got
nothin' ag'in him; no, sir, I suttenly ain't!"
It is difficult to conceive how broad and philanthropic, how generous
and unusual this poor mill girl's standpoint is contrasted with the
sentiment of the people with which she moves.
I slip into my seat at the table in the centre of the sagging board and
find Molly beside me, the girl from Excelsior with the pretty hair on
the other side. The host, Mr. Jones, honours the head of the table, and
"grandmaw" waits upon us. Opposite are the three men operatives,
flannel-shirted and dirty. The men are silent for the most part, and
bend over their food, devouring the unpalatable stuff before them. I
feel convinced that if they were not so terribly hungry they could not
eat it. Jones discourses affably on the mill question, advising me to
learn "speeding," as it pays better and is the only advanced work in the
mill.
Molly, my elbow-companion, seems to take up the whole broad seat, she is
so big and so pervading; and her close proximity--unwashed, heavy with
perspiration as she is, is not conducive to appetite. She is full of
news and chatter and becomes the leading spirit of the meal.
"I reckon you-all never did see anything like the fight to the mill
to-day."
She arouses at once the interest of even the dull men opposite, who
pause, in the applying of their knives and forks, to hear.
"Amanda Wilcox she dun tol' Ida Jacobs that she'd _do her_ at noon,
and Ida she sarst her back. It was all about a _sport_[5]--Bill James.
He's been spo'tin' Ida Jacobs these three weeks, I reckon, and Amanda
got crazy over it and 'clared she'd spile her game. And she tol' Ida
Jacobs a lie about Bill--sayd he' been spo'tin' her down to the Park
on Sunday.
[Footnote 5: A beau.]
"Well, sir, the whole spinnin'-room was out to see what they-all'd do at
noon, and they jest resh'd for each other like's they was crazy; and one
man he got between 'em and sayd, 'Now the gyrl what spits over my hand
first can begin the fight.'
"They both them spit right, into each other's faces, they did so; and
arter that yer couldn't get them apart. Ida Jacobs grabbed Amanda by the
ha'r and Amanda hit her plump in the chest with her fist. They was
suttenly like to kill each other ef the men hadn't just parted them; it
took three men to part 'em."
Her story was much appreciated.
"Ida was dun fer, I can tell ye; she suttenly was. She can't git back
to work fer days."
The spinning-room is the toughest room in the mill.
After supper the men went out on the porch with their pipes and we to
the sitting-room, where Molly, the story-teller, seated herself in a
comfortable chair, her feet outstretched before her. She made a lap, a
generous lap, to which she tried to beguile the baby, Letty. Mrs. White
had disappeared.
"You-all come here to me, Letty." She held out her large dirty hands to
the blue-eyed waif. In its blue-checked apron, the remains of fish and
ham around its mouth, its large blue eyes wandering from face to face in
search of the pale mother who had for a time left her, Letty stood for a
moment motionless and on the verge of tears.
"You-all come to Molly and go By-O."
There was some magic in that word that at long past eight charmed the
eighteen-months'-old baby. She toddled across the floor to the
mill-girl, who lifted her tenderly into her ample lap. The big, awkward
girl, scarcely more than a child herself, uncouth, untutored, suddenly
gained a dignity and a grace maternal--not too much to say it, she had
charm.
Letty leaned her head against Molly's breast and smiled contentedly,
whilst the mill-girl rocked softly to and fro.
"Shall Molly sing By-O?"
She should. The little face, lifted, declared its request.
"Letty must sing, too," murmured the young girl. "Sing By-O! We'll all
sing it together."
Letty covered her eyes with one hand-to feign sleep and sang her two
words sweetly, "By-O! By-O!" and Molly joined her. Thus they rocked and
hummed, a picture infinitely touching to see.
One of these two would soon be an unclaimed foundling when the unknown
woman had faded out of existence. The other--who can say how to her
maternity would come!
* * * * *
In the room where we sit Jones' wife died a few weeks before, victim to
pneumonia that all winter has scourged the town--"the ketchin'
kind"--that is the way it has been caught, and fatally by many.[6]
[Footnote 6: There are no statistics, they tell me, kept of
births, marriages or deaths in this State; it is less surprising
that the mill village has none.]
In one corner stands a sewing machine, in another an organ--luxuries: in
these cases, objects of art. They are bought on the installment plan,
and some of these girls pay as high as $100 for the organ in monthly
payments of $4 at a time. The mill-girl is too busy to use the machine
and too ignorant to play the organ.
Jones is a courteous host. His lodgers occupy the comfortable seats,
whilst he perches himself on the edge of a straight high-backed chair
and converses with us, not lighting his pipe until urged, then
deprecatingly smoking in little smothered puffs. I feel convinced that
Jones thinks that Massachusetts shoe-hands are a grade higher in the
social scale than South Carolina mill-girls! Because, after being
witness more than once to my morning and evening ablutions on the back
steps, he said:
"Now, I am goin' to dew the right thing by you-all; I'm goin' to fix up
a wash-stand in that there loft." This is a triumph over the lax,
uncleanly shiftlessness of the Southern settlement. Again:
"You-all must of had good food whar you come from: your skin shows it;
'tain't much like hyar-'bouts. Why, I'd know a mill-hand anywhere, if I
met her at the North Pole--salla, pale, sickly."
I might have added for him, deathlike, ... skeleton ... _doomed_. But I
listen, rocking in the best chair, whilst Mrs. White glides in from the
kitchen and, unobserved, takes her place on a little low chair by the
sewing machine behind Jones. Her baby rocks contentedly in Molly's arms.
Jones continues: "I worked in the mill fifteen years. I have done a
little of all jobs, I reckon, and I ain't got no use for mill-work. If
they'd pay me fifty cents a side to run the 'speeders' I'd _go_ in fer
an hour or two now and then. Why, I sell sewing machines and organs to
the mill-hands all over the country. I make $60 a month, and _I touch
all my money_," he said significantly. "It's the way to do. A man don't
feel no dignity unless he does handle his own money, if it's ten cents
or ten dollars." He then explains the corporation's methods of paying
its slaves. Some of the hands never touch their money from month's end
to month's end. Once in two weeks is pay-day. A woman has then worked
122 hours. The corporation furnishes her house. There is the rent to be
paid; there are also the corporation stores from which she has been
getting her food and coal and what gewgaws the cheap stuff on sale may
tempt her to purchase. There is a book of coupons issued by the mill
owners which are as good as gold. It is good at the stores, good for the
rent, and her time is served out in pay for this representative
currency. This is of course not obligatory, but many of the operatives
avail themselves or bind themselves by it. When the people are ill,
Jones says, they are docked for wages. When, for indisposition or
fatigue, they knock a day off, there is a man, hired especially for this
purpose, who rides from house to house to find out what is the matter
with them, to urge them to rise, and if they are not literally too sick
to move, they are hounded out of their beds and back to their looms.
Jones himself, mark you, is emancipated! He has set himself free; but he
is still a too-evident although a very innocent partisan of the
corporation.
[Illustration: "THE SOUTHERN MILL HAND'S FACE IS UNIQUE, A FEARFUL
TYPE"]
"I think," he says, "that the mill-hand is _meaner_ to the corporation
than the corporation is to the mill-hand."
"Why?"
"Why, they would strike for shorter hours and better pay."
Unconsciously with one word he condemns his own cause.
"What's the use of these hyar mill-hands tryin' to fight corporations?
Why, Excelsior is the biggest mill under one roof in the world; its
capital is over a million; it has 24,500 spindles. The men that run
these mills have got all their stuff paid for; they've got piles of
money. What do they care for a few penniless lot of strikers? They can
shut down and not feel it. Why, these hyar people might just as well
fight against a stone wall."
The wages of these people, remember, pay Jones for the organs upon which
they cannot play and the machines which they cannot use. His home is a
mill corporation house; he makes a neat sum by lodging the hands. He has
fetched down from the hills Molly, his own niece, to work for him. He
perforce _will_ speak well. I do not blame him.
He is by all means the most respectable-looking member of the colony. He
wears store clothes; he dresses neatly; he is shaven, brushed and
washed.
"Don't you let the mill hands discourage you with lies about the mill.
Any of 'em would be jealous of you-all." Then he warns, again forced
to plead for another side: "You-all won't come out as you go in, I
tell you! You're the picture of health. Why," he continues, a little
later, "you ain't got no idea how light-minded the mill-girl is. Why,
in the summer time she'll trolley four or five miles to a dance-hall
they've got down to ---- and dance there till four o'clock--come home
just in time to get into the mills at 5:45." Which fact convinces me
of nothing but that the women are still, despite their condition and
their white slavery, human beings, and many of them are young human
beings (Thank God, for it is a prophecy for their future!) _not yet
crushed to the dumb endurance of beasts_.
Rather early I bid them all good-night and climb the attic stairs to my
loft. There the three beds arrayed in soggy striped comforters greet me.
Old boots and downtrodden shoes are thrown into the corners and the
lines of clothing already describe fantastic shapes in the dark,
suggesting pendant sinister figures. Windows are large, thank Heaven! In
the mill district the air is heavy, singularly lifeless; the night is
warm and stifling.
Close to an old trunk I sit down with a slip of paper on my knee and try
to take a few notes. But no sooner have I begun to write than a step on
the stair below announces another comer. Before annoyance can deepen too
profoundly the big, awkward form of the landlady's niece slouches into
sight. Sheepishly she comes across the room to me--sits down on the
nearest bed. Molly's costume is typical: a dark cotton wrapper whose
colours have become indistinct in the stains of machinery oil and
perspiration. The mill girl boasts no coquetry of any kind around her
neck and waist, but her headdress is a tribute to feminine vanity!
Compactly screwed curl papers, dozens of them, accentuate the hard,
unlovely lines of her face and brow. Her features are coarse, heavy and
square, but her eyes are clear, frank and kind. She has an appealing,
friendly expression; Molly is a distinctly whole-souled, nice creature.
One elbow sinks in the bed and she cradles her crimped head in her
large, dirty hand.
"My, ef I could write as fast as you-all I'd write some letters, I
reckon. Ust ter write; like it good enough, tew; but I ain't wrote in
months. I was thinkin' th' other day ef I didn't take out the _pencile_
I'd dun forgit how to spell."
Without the window through which she gazes is seen the pale night sky
and in the heavens hangs the thread of a moon. Its light is unavailing
alongside of the artificial moon--an enormous electric light. This lifts
its brilliant, dazzling circumference high in the centre of the mill
street. I have but to move a trifle aside from the window coping's
shelter to receive a blinding blaze. But Molly has been subtle enough to
discover the natural beauty of the night. She sees, curiously enough,
past this modern illumination: the young moon has charm for her. "Ain't
it a pretty night?" she asks me. Its beauty has not much chance to
enhance this room and the crude forms, but it has awakened something
akin to sentiment in the breast of this young savage.
"I don't guess ever any one gets tired of hearing _sweet music_[7], does
you-all?"
[Footnote 7: The Southern term for stringed instruments.]
"What is the nicest music you have ever heard, Molly?"
"Why, a gui-taar an' a mandolin. It's so sweet! I could sit for hours
an' hyar 'em pick." Her curlpaper head wags in enthusiasm.
"Up to the hills, from whar I cum, I ust ter hyar 'em a serenadin' of
some gyrl an' I ust ter set up in bed and lis'en tel it died out; it
warn't for _me_, tho'!"
"Didn't they ever serenade you?"
"No, _ma'am_; I don't pay no 'tention to spo'tin'."
Without, the moon's slender thread holds in a silvery circle the
half-defined misty ball that shall soon be full moon. Thank heavens I
shall not see this golden globe form, wane, decline in this town,
forgotten of gods and men! But the woman at my side must see it mark its
seasons; she is inscrutably part of the colony devoted to unending toil!
Here all she has brought of strong youth shall fade and perish; womanly
sentiment be crushed; die out in sterility; or worse, coarsen to the
animal like to those whose companion she is forced to be.
"I live to the Rockies, an' Uncle Tom he come up after me and carried
me down hyar. My auntie died two weeks ago in the livin'-room; she had
catchin' pneumonia. I tuk care of her all through her sickness, did
every mite for her, and there was bo'ders, tew--I guess half a dozen of
'em--and I cooked and washed and everything for 'em all. When she died I
went to work in the mill. Say, I reckon you-all didn't see my new hat?"
It was fetched, done up with care in paper. She displayed it, a white
straw round hat, covered with roses. At praise of it and admiration the
girl flushed with pleasure.
"My, you _dew_ like it? Why, I didn't think it _pretty, much_. Uncle Tom
dun buy it for me."
She gives all her wages to Uncle Tom, who in turn brings her from time
to time such stimulus to labour as some pretty feminine thing like this.
_This_ shall crown Molly's hair freed from the crimpers when the one day
of the week, Sunday, comes! Not from Sunday till Sunday again are those
hair crimpers unloosed.
Despite Uncle Tom's opposition to mill work for women, despite his
cognizance of the unhealthfulness of the mills, he knew a thing or two
when he put his strapping innocent niece to work thirteen hours a day
and pocketed himself the spoils.
"I can't go to bade awful early, because I don't sleep ef I do; I'm too
tired to sleep. When I feel real sick I tries to stay home a day, and
then the overseer he rides around and _worries_ me to git up. I declare
ef I wouldn't near as soon git up as to be roused up. They don't give
you no peace, rousing you out of bed when you can scarcely stand. I
suttenly dew feel bade to-night; I suttenly can't scarcely get to bed!"
Here into our discourse, mounting the stairs, comes the pale mother and
her little child. This ghost of a woman, wedding-ringless, who called
herself Mrs. White, could scarcely crawl to her bed. She was whiter than
the moon and as slender. Molly's bed is close to mine. The night toilet
of this girl consisted of her divesting herself of her shoes, stockings
and her cotton wrapper, then in all the other garments she wore during
the day she turned herself into bed, nightgownless, unwashed.
Mrs. White undressed her child, giving it very good care. It was a tiny
creature, small-boned and meager. Every time I looked over at it it
smiled appealingly, touchingly. Finally when she went downstairs to the
pump to get a drink of water for it, I went over and in her absence
stroked the little hand and arm: such a small hand and such an
infinitesimal arm! Unused to attention and the touch, but not in the
least frightened, Letty extended her miniature member and looked up at
me in marvel. Mrs. White on her return made herself ready for the night.
She said in her frail voice: "Letty's a powerful hand for vegetubbles,
and she eats everything."
Memory of the ham and the putrid fish I had seen this
eighteen-months-old child devour not an hour ago came to my mind.
Mrs. White let down her hair--a nonchalance that Molly had not been
guilty of. This woman's hair was no more than a wisp. It stood out thin,
wiry, almost invisible in the semilight. This was the extent of her
toilet. She slipped out of her shoes, but she did not even take off her
dress. Then she turned in by her child. She was very ill; it was plain
to be seen. Death was fast upon this woman's track; it should clutch her
inevitably within the next few weeks at most, if that emaciated body had
resistance for so long. Her languor was slow and indicative, her gray,
ashen face like death itself.
"Lie still, Letty," she whispers to the baby; "don't touch mother--she
can't stand it to-night."
My mattress was straw and billowy, the bed sheetless, and under the
weight of the cotton comforter I tried to compose myself. There were
five of us in the little loft. My bedfellow was peaceful and lay still,
too tired to do anything else. In front of me was the open window,
through which shone the electric light, blatant and insistent; behind
this, the clock of Excelsior--brightly lit and incandescent--glared in
upon us, giant hands going round, seeming to threaten the hour of dawn
and frightening sleep and mocking, bugbearing the short hours which the
working-woman might claim for repose.
It was well on to nine o 'clock and the mills were working overtime.
Molly turned restlessly on her bed and murmured, "I suttenly dew feel
bad to-night." A little later I heard her say over to herself: "My, I
forgot to say my prayers." She was the sole member of the loft to whom
sleep came; it came to her soon. I lay sleepless, watching the clock of
Excelsior. The ladder staircase openly led to the kitchen: there was no
door, no privacy possible to our quarters, and the house was full of
men.
A little later Letty cries: "A drink, a drink!" and the tone of the
mother, who replies, is full of patience, but fuller still of suffering.
"Hush, Letty, hush! Mother's too sick to get it." But the child
continues to fret and plead. Finally with a groan Mrs. White stretches
out her hand and gets the tin mug of water, of that vile and dirty water
which has brought death to so many in the mill village. The child drinks
it greedily. I can hear it suck the fluid. Then the woman herself
staggers to her feet, rises with dreadful illness upon her, and all
through the hot stuffy night in the close air of the loft growing
momentarily more fetid, unwholesome, intolerable--she rises to be
violently sick over and over again. It seems an indefinite number of
times to one who lies awake listening, and must seem unceasing to the
poor wretch who returns to her bed only to rise again.
She groans and suffers and bites her exclamations short. Twice she goes
to the window and by the light of the electric lamp pours laudanum into
a glass and takes it to still her pain and her need.
The odours become so nauseous that I am fain to cover my face and head.
The child fed on salt ham and pork is restless and thirsty all night and
begs for water at short intervals. At last the demand is too much for
the poor agonized mother--she takes refuge in silencing unworthy, and to
which one feels her gentleness must be forced. "Hark! The cat will get
you, Letty! See that cat?" And the feline horror in nameless form,
evoked in an awe-inspiring whisper, controls the little creature, who
murmurs, sobs and subsides.
What spirit deeper than her character has hitherto displayed stirs the
mill-girl in the bed next to me? Possibly the tragedy in the other bed;
possibly the tragedy of her own youth. At all events, whatever burden is
on her, her cross is heavy! She murmurs in her dreams, in a voice more
mature, more serious than any tone of hers has indicated:
"Oh, my God!"
It is a strange cry--call--appeal. It rings solemn to me as I lie and
watch and pity. Hours of night which should be to the labourer peaceful,
full of repose after the day, drag along from nine o'clock, when we
went to bed, till three. At three Mrs. White falls into a doze. I envy
her. Over me the vermin have run riot; I have killed them on my neck and
my arms. When it seemed that flesh and blood must succumb, and sleep,
through sheer pity, take hold of us, a stirring begins in the kitchen
below which in its proximity seems a part of the very room we occupy.
The landlady, Mrs. Jones, has arisen; she is making her fire. At a
quarter to four Mrs. Jones begins her frying; at four a deep, blue, ugly
smoke has ascended the stairway to us. This smoke is thick with
odours--the odour of bad grease and bad meat. Its cloud conceals the
beds from me and I can scarcely pierce its curtain to look through the
window. It settles down over the beds like a creature; it insinuates
itself into the clothes that hang upon the wall. So permeating is it
that the odour of fried food clings to everything I wear and haunts me
all day. I can hear the sputtering of the saucepan and the fall and flap
of the pieces of meat as she drops them in to fry. _I know what they
are_, for I have seen them the night before--great crimson bits of flesh
torn to pieces and arranged in rows by the fingers of a ragged Negro as
he crouched by the kitchen table.
This preparation continues for an hour: it takes an abnormally long time
to cook abnormally bad food! Long before five the clock of Excelsior
rings and the cry of the mill is heard waking whomsoever might be lucky
enough to be asleep. Mrs. Jones calls Molly. "Molly!" The girl murmurs
and turns. "Come, you-all git up; you take so powerful long to dress
yo'self!" Long to dress! It is difficult to see how that would be
possible. She rises reluctantly, yawning, sighing; lifts her scarcely
rested body, puts on her stockings and her shoes and the dirty wrapper.
Her hair is untouched, her face unwashed, but she is ready for the day!
Mrs. White has actually fallen asleep, the small roll, her baby, curled
up close to her back.
Molly's summons is mine as well. I am a mill-hand with her. I rise and
repeat my ablutions of the evening before. Unhooking the tin basin,
possessing myself of a bit of soap on the kitchen stairs, I wash my face
and hands. Although the water is dipped from the pail on which a scum
has formed, still it is so much more cool, refreshing and stimulating
than anything that has come in contact with me for hours that it is a
positive pleasure.
* * * * *
THE MILL
By this time the morning has found us all, and unlovely it seems as
regarded from this shanty environment. At 4:50 Excelsior has shrieked
every settler awake. At half-past five we have breakfasted and I pass
out of the house, one of the half-dozen who seek the mill from our
doors.
We fall in with the slowly moving, straggling file, receiving additions
from each tenement as we pass.
Beside me walks a boy of fourteen in brown earth-coloured clothes. He is
so thin that his bones threaten to pierce his vestments. He has a
slender visage of the frailness I have learned to know and distinguish:
it represents the pure American type of people known as "poor white
trash," and with whose blood has been scarcely any admixture of foreign
element. A painter would call his fine, sensitive face beautiful: it is
the face of a martyr. His hat of brown felt slouches over bright red
hair; one cuffless hand, lank and long, hangs down inert, the other
sleeve falls loose; he is one-armed. His attitude and gait express his
defrauded existence. Cotton clings to his clothes; his shoes, nearly
falling off his feet, are red with clay stains. I greet him; he is shy
and surprised, but returns the salutation and keeps step with me. He is
"from the hills," an orphan, perfectly friendless. He boards with a lot
of men; evidently their companionship has not been any solace to him,
for, as he is alone this day, I see him always alone.
He works from 5:45 to 6:45, with three-quarters of an hour at noon, and
has his Saturday afternoons and his Sundays free. He is destitute of the
quality we call joy and has never known comfort. He makes fifty cents a
day; he has no education, no way of getting an education; he is almost
a man, crippled and condemned. At my exclamation when he tells me the
sum of his wages he looks up at me; a faint likeness to a smile comes
about his thin lips: "_It keeps me in existence_!" he says in a slow
drawl. He used just those words.
At the different doors of the mill we part. He is not unconscious of my
fellowship with him, that I feel and know. A kindling light has come
across his face. "Good luck to you!" I bid him, and he lifts his head
and his bowed shoulders and with something like warmth replies, "I hope
you-all will have good luck, tew."
As we come into the spooling-room from the hot air without the mill
seems cold. I go over to a green box destined for the refuse of the
floors and sit down, waiting for work. On this day I am to have my own
"side"--I am a full-fledged spooler. Excelsior has gotten us all out of
our beds before actual daylight, but that does not mean we are to have a
chance to begin our money-making piece-work job at once! "Thar ain't
likely to be no yarn for an hour to-day," Maggie tells me. She is no
less dirty than yesterday, or less smelly, but also she is no less kind.
"I reckon you-all are goin' to make a remarkable spooler," she cheers me
on. "You'll get tired out at first, but then I gets tired, tew, right
along, only it ain't the same _kind_--it's not so _sharp_." Her
distinction is clever.
Across the room at one of the "drawing-in frames" I see the figure of
an unusally pretty girl with curly dark hair. She bends to her job in
front of the frame she runs; it has the effect of tapestry, of that
work with which women of another--oh, of _quite_ another class--amuse
their leisure, with which they kill their time. "Drawing-in,"[8]
although a sitting job, is considered to be a back-breaker. The girls
are ambitious at this work; they make good wages. They sit close to
their frames, bent over, for twelve hours out of the day. This girl
whom I see across the floor of the Excelsior is an object to rest the
eyes upon; she is a beauty. There is not much beauty of any kind or
description in sight. Maggie has noticed her esthetic effect. "You-all
seen that girl; she's suttenly prob'ly am _peart_."
[Footnote 8: A good drawer-in makes $1.25 a day.]
She is a new hand from a distance. This is her first day. What miserable
chance has brought her here? If she stays the mill will claim her body
and soul. The overseer has marked her out; he hovers in the part of the
room where she works. She has colour and her difference to her pale
companions is marked. Excelsior will not leave those roses unwithered. I
can foretell the change as yellow unhealthfulness creeps upon her cheeks
and the red forever goes. There are no red cheeks here, not one. She has
chosen a sitting-down job thinking it easier. I saw her lean back, put
her hands around her waist and rest, or try to, after she has bent four
hours over her close task. I go over to her.
"They say it's awful hard on the eyes, but they tell me, too, that I'll
be a remarkable fine hand."
I saw her apply for work, and saw, too, the man's face as he looked at
her when she asked: "Got any work?"
"We've got plenty of work for a good-looking woman like you," he said
with significance, and took pains to place her within his sight.
The yarn has come in, and I return to my part of the mill; Maggie flies
to her spools and leaves me to seek my distant place far away from her.
I set my work in order; whilst my back is turned some girl possesses
herself of my hand-harness. Mine was a new one, and the one she leaves
for me is broken. This delays, naturally, and the overseer, after
proving to his satisfaction that I am hampered, gets me a new one and I
set to work.
Many of the older hands come without breakfast, and a little later tin
pails or paper parcels appear. These operatives crouch down in a Turkish
fashion at the machines' sides and take a hasty mouthful of their
unwholesome, unpleasant-looking food, eating with their fingers more
like animals than human beings. By eight the full steam power is on, to
judge by the swift turning, the strong resistance of the spools. Not one
of the women near me but is degrading to look upon and odourous to
approach. These creatures, ill clad, with matted, frowsy hair and hands
that look as though they had never, never been washed, smell like the
byre. As for the children, I must pass them by in this recital. The
tiny, tiny children! The girls are profane, contentious, foul-mouthed.
There is much partisanship and cliqueism; you can tell it by the scowls
and the low, insulting words as an enemy passes. To protect the hair
from the flying pieces of cotton the more particular women, and
oftentimes children as well, wear felt hats pulled down well over the
eyes. The cotton, indeed, thistledown-like, flies without cessation
through the air--spins off from the spools; it rises and floats, falling
on the garments and in the hair, entering the nostrils and throat and
lungs. I repeat, the expectoration, the coughing and the throat-cleaning
is constant. Over there two girls have taken advantage of a wait for
yarn to go to sleep on the floor; their heads are pillowed on each
others' shoulders; they rest against a cotton bale. Maggie wanders over
to me to see "how you-all is gettin' on." "Tired?" "Well, I reckon I am.
Thank God we get out in a little while now."
* * * * *
One afternoon I went up to the loft to rest a few moments before going
to the mill. Mrs. White was sitting on her bed, a slender figure in the
blue-checked wrapper she always wore. Her head was close to the window,
her silhouette in the light, pale and slender. "I wa'n't sick when I
come hyar, but them mills! They's suttinly tew hyard on a woman!
Weave-room killed me, I guess. I couldn't hyar at all when I come out
and scarcely could stan' on ma feet when I got home. Tew tyred to eat,
tew; and the water hyar is regularly pisen; hev you-all seen it? It's
all colours. Doctor done come to see me; ain't helpin' me any; 'pears
like he-all ain't goin' to come no mo'!"
"If you have a husband, why don't you go to him and let him care for
you?"
She was silent, turning her wedding-ringless hand over and over on her
lap: the flies came buzzing in around us, and in the near distance
Excelsior buzzed, the loudest, most insistent creature on this part of
the earth.
"Seems like a woman ought to help a man--some," she murmured. Downstairs
Mrs. Jones sums her up in a few words.
"She-all suttinly ain't no _'Mrs'_ in the world! Calls herself
_'White.'_" (The intonation is not to be mistaken.) "Pore thing's
dyin'--knows it, tew! Come hyar to die, I reckon. She'll die right up
thar in that baed, tew. Doctor don't come no mo'. Know she cayn't pay
him nothin'. You-all come hyar to grandmaw, Letty!"
The child around whom the threads of existence are weaving fabric more
intricate than any woof or warp of the great mills goes confidingly to
the old woman, who lifts her tenderly into her arms. With every word she
speaks this aged creature draws her own picture. To these types no pen
save Tolstoi's could do justice. Mine can do no more than display them
by faithfully transcribing their simple dialect-speech.
"I am sixty-four years old, an' played out. Worked too hyard. Worked
every day since I was a child, and when I wasn't workin' had the fevar.
Come from the hills las' month. When his wife dyde, the son he come an'
fetched me cross the river to help him."
How has she lived so long and so well, with life "so hyard on her"?
"I loved my husban', yes, ma'am, I regularly loved him; reckon no woman
didn't ever love a man mo', and he loved me, tew, jest ez much. Seems
tho' God couldn't bayr to see us-all so happy--couldn't las'; he dyde."
Mrs. Jones' figure is a case of bones covered with a brown
substance--you could scarcely call it skin; a weather-beaten, tanned
hide; nothing more. This human statue, ever responsive to the eternal
moulding, year after year has been worked upon by the titan instrument,
Labour: struggle, disease, want. But this hill woman has known love. It
has transfigured her, illumined her. This poor deformed body is a torch
only for an immortal flame. I know now why it seems good to be near her,
why her eyes are inspired.... I rise to leave her and she comes forward
to me, puts out her hand first, then puts both thin, old arms about me
and kisses me.
In speaking of the settlement, it borders on the humourous to use the
word sanitation. In the mill district, as far as my observation reached,
there is none. Refuse not too vile for the public eye is thrown into the
middle of the streets in front of the houses. The general drainage is
performed by emptying pans and basins and receptacles into the
backyards, so that as one stands at the back steps of one's own door one
breathes and respires the filth of half a dozen shanties. Decaying
vegetables, rags, dirt of all kinds are the flowers of these people, the
decorations of their miserable garden patches. To walk through Granton
(which the prospectus tells us is well drained) is to evoke nausea; to
_inhabit_ Granton is an ordeal which even necessity cannot rob of its
severity.
These settlers, habitants of dwellings built by finance solely for the
purpose of renting, are celebrated for their immorals--"a rough, lying,
bad lot." "Oh, the mill-hands!" ... Sufficient, expressive designation.
Nevertheless, these people, simple, direct and innocent, display
qualities that we have been taught are enviable--a lack of curiosity,
for the most part, in the affairs of others, a warm Southern courtesy,
a human kindliness. I found these people degraded because of their
habits and not of their tendencies, which statement I can justify;
whatever may be their natural instincts, born, nurtured in their
unlovely environment, they have no choice but to fall into the usages of
poverty and degradation. They have seen nothing with which to compare
their existences; they have no time, no means to be clean, and no
stimulus to be decent.
A job at Granton was no more difficult to secure than was "spoolin'" at
the other mill. I applied one Saturday noon, when Granton was silent and
the operatives within their doors asleep, for the most part, leaving the
village as deserted as it is on a workday. A like desolation pervades
the atmosphere on holiday and day of toil. I was so lucky as to meet a
shirt-sleeved overseer in the doorway. Preceding him were two ill-clad,
pale children of nine and twelve, armed with a long, mop-like broom with
which their task was to sweep the cotton from the floors--cotton that
resettled eternally as soon as it was brushed away. The superintendent
regarded me curiously, I thought penetratingly, and for the first time
in my experience I feared detection. My dread was enhanced by the
loneliness, the lawlessness of the place, the risk and boldness of my
venture.
By this I was most thoroughly a mill-girl in appearance, at least; my
clothes were white with cotton, my hair far from tidy; fatigue and
listlessness unassumed were in my attitude. I had not heard the Southern
dialect for so long not to be able to fall into it with little effort. I
told him I had been a "spooler" and did not like it--"wanted to spin."
He listened silently, regarding me with interest and with what I
trembled to fear was disbelief. I desperately pushed back my sunbonnet
and in Southern drawl begged for work.
"Spinnin'?" he asked. "What do you want to spin for?"
He was a Yankee, his accent sharp and keen. How clean and decent and
capable he appeared, the dark mill back of him; shantytown, vile, dirty,
downtrodden, beside him!
I told him that I was tired of spooling and knew I could make more by
something else.
He thrust his hands into his pockets. "To-night is Saturday; alone
here?"
"Yes."
"Where you going to stay in Granton?"
"I don't know yet."
"Don't learn spinnin'," he said decidedly. "I am head of the
_speedin'-room_. I'll give you a job in my room on Monday morning."
My relief was immense. His subsequent questions I parried, thanked him,
and withdrew to keep secret from Excelsior that I had deserted for
Granton.
Although these mills are within three hundred feet of each other, the
villagers do not associate. The workings of Granton are unknown to
Excelsior and vice versa.
The speeding-room in Granton is second only in noise to the weave-room.
Conversation must be entrancing and vital to be pursued here! The
speeder has under her care as many machines as her skill can control.
My teacher, Bessie, ran four sides, seventy-six speeders on a side, her
work being regulated by a crank that marked the vibrations. To the lay
mind the terms of the speeding-room can mean nothing. This girl made
from $1.30 to $1.50 a day. She controlled in all 704 speeders; these she
had to replenish and keep running, and to clean all the machinery gear
with her own hands; to oil the steel, even to bend and clean under the
lower shelf and come into contact with the most dangerous parts of the
mechanism. The girl at the speeder next to me had just had her hand
mashed to a jelly. The speeder watches her ropers run out; these stand
at the top and back of the line. The ropers are refilled and their ends
attached to the flying speeders by a quick motion. The yarn from the
ropers is wound off on to the speeders. When the speeders are full of
yarn they are detached from the nest of steel in which they whirl and
are thrown into a hand-car which is pushed about the room by the girls
themselves. Speeding is excessively dirty work and greasy; the oiling
and cleaning is only fit for a man to do.
The girl who teaches me has been at her work for ten years; she entered
the factory at eight. She was tall, raw-boned, an expert, deft and
capable, and, as far as I could judge in our acquaintance, thoroughly
respectable.
There are long waits in this department of the cotton-spinning life. On
tall green stools we sit at the end of our sides during the time it
takes for one well-filled roper to spin itself out; we talk, or rather
contrive to make ourselves heard. She has a sweet, gentle face; she is
courtesy and kindness itself.
"What do you think about all day?"
"Why, I couldn't even begin to tell all my thoughts."
"Tell me some."
"Why, I think about books, I reckon. Do you-all like readin'?"
"Yes."
"Ain't nuthin' I like so good when I ain't tyrd."
"Are you often tired?" And this question surprises her. She looks up at
me and smiles. "Why, I'm _always_ tyrd! I read novels for the most part;
like to read love stories and about fo'ran travel."
(For one short moment please consider: This hemmed-in life, this limited
existence, encompassed on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of
maddening sounds, vibrations around her during twelve hours of the day,
vibrations which, mean that her food is being gained by each pulse of
the engine and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side. Before her
the scene is unchanged day after day, month after month, year after
year. It is not an experience to this woman who works beside me so
patiently; it is her life. The forms she sees are warped and scarred;
the intellects with which she comes in contact are dulled and
undeveloped. All they know is toil, all they know of gain is a
fluctuation in a wage that ranges from cents to a dollar and cents
again, never touching a two-dollar mark. The children who, barefooted,
filthy, brush past her, sweeping the cotton from the infected floors,
these are the only forms of childhood she has ever seen. The dirty women
around her, low-browed, sensual, are the forms of womanhood that she
knows; and the men? If she does not feed the passion of the overseer,
she may find some mill-hand who will contract a "mill marriage" with
this daughter of the loom, a marriage little binding to him and which
will give her children to give in time to the mill. This is the realism
of her love story: She reads books that you, too, may have read; she
dares to dream of scenes, to picture them--scenes that you have sought
and wearied of. A tithe of our satiety would mean her banquet, her
salvation!... Her happiness? _That_ question who can answer for her or
for you?)
She continues: "I'm very fond of fo'ran travel, only I ain't never had
much occasion for it."
This pathos and humour keep me silent. A few ropers have run out; she
rises. I rise, too, to replace, to attach, and set the exhausted line
taut and complete again.
Ten years! Ten years! All her girlhood and youth has been given to
keeping ropers supplied with fresh yarn and speeders a-whirling. During
this travail she has kept a serenity of expression, a depth of sweetness
at which I marvel. Her voice is peculiarly soft and, coupled with the
dialect drawl, is pleasant to hear.
"I hate the mills!" she says simply.
"What would you be if you could choose?" I venture to ask. She has no
hesitation in answering.
"I'd love to be a trained nurse." Then, turn about is fair play in her
mind, I suppose, for she asks:
"What would _you-all_ be?"
And ashamed not to well repay her truthfulness I frankly respond: "I'd
like to write a book."
"I _dee_-clare." She stares at me. "Why, you-all _is_ ambitious. Did you
ever write anything?"
"A letter or two."
She is interested and kindles, leaning forward. "I suttenly ain't so
high in my ambitions," she says appreciatively. "Wish you'd write a love
story for me to read," and she ponders over the idea, her eyes on my
snowy flying speeders.
"Look a-hyar, got any of your scrappin's on writin' hyar? Ef you don't
mind anybody's messin' with your things, bring your scrappin's to me an'
I'll soon tell you ef you can write a book er not," she whispered to me
encouragingly, confidentially, a whisper reaching farther in the mills
than a loud sound.
I thanked her and said: "Do you think that you'd know?"
"Well, I guess I would!" she said confidently. "I ain't read all my life
sense I was eight years old not to know good writin' from bad. Can
you-all sing?"
"No."
"Play sweet music?"
"No."
"I jest love it." She enthuses. "Every Saturday afternoon I take of a
music teacher on the gee-tar. It costs me a quarter."
I could see the scene: a shanty room, the tall, awkward figure bending
over her instrument; the type that the teacher made, the ambition, the
eagerness--all of which qualities we are so willing to deny to the
slaves of toil.
"They ain't much flowers here in Granton," she said again. "'Tain't no
use to try to have even a few geraneums; it's so dry; ain't no yards nor
gardens, nuther."
Musing on this desolation as she walks up and down the line, she says:
"I dew love flowers, don't you?"
* * * * *
Over and over again I am asked by those whose wish I suppose is to prove
to themselves and their consciences that the working-girl is not so
actively wretched, her outcry is not so audible that we are forced to
respond:
"The working people are happy? The factory girls are happy, are they
not? Don't you find them so?"
Is it a satisfaction to the leisure class, to the capitalist and
employer, to feel that a woman poorly housed, ill-fed, in imminent moral
danger, every temptation rampant over barriers down, overworked,
overstrained by labour varying from ten to thirteen hours a day, by
all-night labour, and destruction of body and soul, _is happy_?
Do you _wish_ her to be so? Is the existence _ideal_?
I can speak only for the shoe manufacturing girl of Lynn and for the
Southern mill-hand.
I thank Heaven that I can say truthfully, that of all who came under my
observation, not one who was of age to reflect was happy. I repeat, the
working-woman is brave and courageous, but the most sane and hopeful
indication for the future of the factory girl and the mill-hand is that
she rebels, dreams of something better, and will in the fullness of time
stretch toward it. They have no time to think, even if they knew how.
All that remains for them in the few miserable hours of relief from
labour and confinement and noise is to seek what pastime they may find
under their hand. We have never realized, they have never known, that
their great need--given the work that is wrung from them and the
degradation in which they are forced to live--is a craving for amusement
and relaxation. Amusements for this class are not provided; they _can_
laugh, they rarely do. The thing that they seek--let me repeat: I
cannot repeat it too often--in the minimum of time that remains to them,
is distraction. They do not want to read; they do not want to study;
they are too tired to concentrate. How can you expect it? I heard a
manufacturer say: "We gave our mill-hands everything that we could to
elevate them--a natatorium, a reading library--and these halls fell into
disuse." I ask him now, through these pages, the questions which I did
not put to him then as I listened in silence to his complaint. He said
he thought too much was done for the mill-hands. What time would he
suggest that they should spend in the reading-room, even if they have
learned to read? They rise at four; at a quarter before six they are at
work. The day in winter is not born when they start their tasks; the
night has fallen long before they cease. In summer they are worked long
into their evenings. They tell me that they are too tired to eat; that
all they want to do is to turn their aching bones on to their miserable
mattresses and sleep until they are cried and shrieked awake by the mill
summons. Therefore they solve their own questions. Nothing is provided
for them that they can use, and they turn to the only thing that is
within their reach--animal enjoyment, human intercourse and
companionship. They are animals, as are their betters, and with it, let
us believe, more excuse.
The mill marriage is a farce, and yet they choose to call their unions
now and again a marriage. Many a woman has been a wife several times in
the same town, in the same house. The bond-tying is a form, and, of
course, mostly ignored. The settlements swarm with illegitimate
children. Next to me work two young girls, both under seventeen, both
ringless and with child.
* * * * *
Let me picture the Foster household, where I used to call Saturday
evenings.
Mrs. Foster herself, dirty, slipshod, a frowzy mass, hugs her fireside.
Although the day is warm, she kindled a fire to stimulate the thin, poor
blood exhausted by disease and fevers. Two flatirons lie in a dirty heap
on the floor. As usual, the room is a nest of filth and untidiness.
Mrs. Foster is half paralyzed, but her tongue is free. She talks
fluently in her soft Southern drawl, more Negro than white as to speech
and tone. Up to her sidles a dirty, pretty little boy of four.
"This yere is too little to go to the mill, but he's wild to go; yes,
ser, he is so. Las' night he come to me en say, 'Auntie, you-all wake me
up at fo' 'clock sure; I got ter go ter the mill.'"
Here the little blond child, whose mouth is set on a pewter spoon
dripping over with hominy, grins appreciatively. He throws back his
white and delicate little face, and his aunt, drawing him close to her,
caresses him and continues: "Yes, ma'am, to-day he dun wake up after
they-all had gone and he sayd, 'My goodness, I dun oversleep mase'f!' He
sha'n't go to the mill," she frowned, "not ef we can help it. Why, I
don't never let him outen my sight; 'fraid lest those awful mill
children would git at him."
Thus she sheltered him with what care she knew--care that unfortunately
_could not go far enough back to protect him_! His mother came in at the
noon hour, as we sat there rocking and chatting. She was a straight,
slender creature, not without grace in her shirt-waist and her
low-pulled felt hat that shadowed her sullen face. She was very young,
not more than twenty-two, and her history indicative and tragic. With a
word only and a nod she passes us; she has now too many vital things and
incidents in her own career to be curious regarding a strange mill-hand.
She goes with her comrade--and cousin--Mamie, into the kitchen to
devour in as short a time as possible the noon dinner, served by the
grandmother: cabbage and hominy. "They don't have time 'nough to eat,"
the aunt says; "no sooner then they-all come in and bolt their dinner
then it is time to go back." Her child has followed her. Minnie was
married at thirteen; in less than a year she was a grass widow. "My
goodness, there's lots of grass widows!" my frowsled hostess nods. "Why,
in one weave-room hyar there ain't a gyrl but what's left by her
husband. One day a new gyrl come for to run a loom and they yells out at
her, 'Is you-all a grass widow? Yer can't come in hyar ef you ain't.'"
But it was after her grass widowhood that Minnie's tragedy began. The
mill was her ruin. So much grace and good looks could not go, cannot go,
_does not_ go unchallenged by the attentions of the men who are put
there to run these women's work. The overseer was father of her child,
and when she tried to force from him recognition and aid he threw over
his position and left Columbia and this behind him. This, one instance
under my own eyes observed. There are many.
"Mamie works all night" (she spoke of the other girl)--"makes more
money. My, but she hates the mills! Says she ain't ever known a restful
minute sence she left the hills."
My hostess has drawn the same conclusion from my Northern appearance
that the Joneses drew.
"You-all must eat good where you come from! you look so healthy.' Do
you-all know the Banks girl over to Calcutta?"
"No."
"They give her nine months." (Calcutta is the roughest settlement round
here.) "Why, that gyrl wars her hair cut short, and she shoots and cuts
like a man. She drew her knife on a man last week--cut his face all up
and into his side through his lung. Tried to pass as she was his wife,
but when they had her up, ma'am, they proved she had been three men's
wives and he four gyrl's husbands. He liked to died of the cut. They've
given her nine months, but he ain't the only man that bears her marks.
Over to Calcutta it's the knife and the gun at a wink. This yere was an
awful pretty gyrl. My Min seed her peekin' out from behind the loom in
the weave-room, thought she was a boy, and said: 'Who's that yere pretty
boy peekin' at me?' And that gyrl told Min that she couldn't help knife
the men, they all worried on her so! 'Won't never leave me alone; I jest
have to draw on 'em; there ain't no other way.'"...
For the annals of morality and decency do not take up this faithful
account and picture the cotton-mill village. You will not find it in
these scenes drawn from the life as it is at this hour, as it is
portrayed by the words that the very people themselves will pour into
your ears. Under the walls of Calcutta Negroes are engaged in laying
prospective flower beds, so that the thirteen-hour workers may look out
from time to time and see the forms of flowers. On the other side rise
some twenty shanties. These houses of Calcutta village are very small,
built from the roughest unpainted boards. Here it is, in this little
settlement, that the knife comes flashing out at a word--that the women
shoot as well as men, and perhaps more quickly.
* * * * *
"Richmond aint so bad as the other!" I can hear Mrs. Foster drawl out
this recommendation to us. "They ain't so much chills here. We dun move
up from town first; had to--too high rents for we-all; now we dun stay
hyar. Why, some of the gyrls and boys works to Granton and bo'ds hyar;
seems like it's mo' healthy."
Moving, ambulant population! tramping from hill to hill, from sand-heap
to sand-heap to escape the slow or quick death, to prolong the toiling,
bitter existence--pilgrims of eternal hope; born in the belief, in the
sane and wholesome creed that, no matter what the horror is, no matter
what the burden's weight must be, _one must live_! It takes a great
deal to wake in these inexpressive, indifferent faces illumination of
interest. At what should they rejoice?
I have made the destitution of beauty clear. I believe there is an
absolute lack of every form or sight that might inspire or cause a soul
to awake. There is nothing to lift these people from the earth and from
labour. There should be a complete readjustment of this system. I have
been interested in reading in the New York _Sun_ of April 20th of the
visit of the bishops to the model factories in Ohio. I am constrained to
wish that bishops and clergy and philanthropists and millionaires and
capitalists might visit in bodies and separately the mills of South
Carolina and their tenement population. It is difficult to know just
what the ideas are of the people who have constructed these dwellings.
They tell us in this same prospectus, which I have read with interest
after my personal experience, that these villages are "_picturesque_."
This is the only reference I find to the people and their conditions. I
have seen nothing but horror, and yet I went into these places without
prejudice, prepared to be interested in the industry of the Southern
country, and with no idea of the tragedy and nudity of these people's
existence. The ultimate balance is sure to come; meanwhile, we cannot
but be sensible of the vast individual sacrifices that must fall to
destruction before the scales swing even.
* * * * *
THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS
* * * * *
CHAPTER IX
THE CHILD IN THE SOUTHERN MILLS
In the week before I left for the South I dined in ---- with a very
charming woman and her husband. Before a table exquisite in its
appointments, laden with the best the market could offer and good taste
display, sat the mistress, a graceful, intelligent young woman, full of
philanthropic, charitable interests, and one whom I know to be devoted
to the care and benefiting of little children in her city. During the
meal I said to her casually:
"Do you know that in your mills in South Carolina to-night, as we sit
here, little children are working at the looms and frames--little
children, some of them not more than six years old?"
She said, in astonishment, "I don't know it; and I can't believe it."
I told her I should soon see just how true the reports were, and when I
returned to New York I would tell her the facts. She is not alone in her
ignorance. Not one person, man or woman, to whom I told the facts of the
cases I observed "_dreamed that children worked in any mills in the
United States_!" After my experience amongst the working class, I am
safe in saying that I consider their grievances to be the outcome of the
ignorance and greed of the manufacturer abetted, aided and made possible
by the ignorance and poverty of the labourer.
There is nothing more conscience-silencing than to accuse the writers of
the different articles on child-labour of sentimentality. The comfort in
which we live makes it easy to eliminate thoughts that torture us to
action in the cause of others. I will be delighted to meet an accusation
of sentimentality and exaggeration by any man or woman who has gone to a
Southern mill as an operative and worked side by side with the children,
lived with them in their homes. It is defamation to use the word "home"
in connection with the unwholesome shanty in the pest-ridden district
where the remnant of the children's lives not lived in the mill is
passed. This handful of unpainted huts, raised on stilts from the soil,
fever-ridden and malarious; this blank, ugly line of sun-blistered
shanties, along a road, yellow-sand deep, is a mill village. The word
_village_ has a cheerful sound. It summons a country scene, with the
charms of home, however simple and unpretentious. There is nothing to
charm or please in the villages I have already, in these pages, drawn
for you to see and which with veritable sick reluctance I summon again
before your eyes. Every house is like unto its neighbour--a shelter put
up rapidly and filled to the best advantage.
There is not a garden within miles, not a flower, scarcely a tree. Arid,
desolate, beautyless, the pale sand of the State of South Carolina
nurtures as best it can a stray tree or shrub--no more. At the foot of
the shanties' black line rises the cotton mill. New, enormous, sanitary
(!!). Its capital runs into millions; its prospectuses are pompous; its
pay-roll mysterious. You will not be able to say how many of the fifteen
hundred odd hands at work in this mill are adults, how many children. In
the State of South Carolina there are statistics of neither births,
marriages nor deaths. What can you expect of a mill village!
At 5:45 we have breakfasted--the twelve of us who live in one small
shanty, where we have slept, all five of us in one room, men to the
right of the kitchen, women and children on the left. To leave the
pestilence of foul air, the stench of that dwelling, is blessed, even if
the stroke that summons is the mill whistle.
As we troop to work in the dawn, we leave behind us the desert-like
town; all day it drowses, haunted by a few figures of old age and
infirmity--but the mill is alive! We have given up, in order to satisfy
its appetite, all manner of flesh and blood, and the gentlest morsel
between its merciless jaws is the little child.
So long as I am part of its food and triumph I will study the mill.
Leaving the line of flashing, whirling spools, I lean against the green
box full of cotton refuse and regard the giant room.
It is a wonderful sight. The mill itself, a model of careful,
well-considered building, has every facility for the best and most
advantageous manufacture of textiles. The fine frames of the intricate
"warping," the well-placed frames of the "drawing-in" all along the
window sides of the rooms; then lines upon lines of spool frames. Great
piles of stuff lie here and there in the room. It is early--"all the
yarn ain't come yet." Two children whose work has not been apportioned
lie asleep against a cotton bale. The terrible noise, the grinding,
whirling, pounding, the gigantic burr renders other senses keen. By my
side works a little girl of eight. Her brutal face, already bespeaking
knowledge of things childhood should ignore, is surrounded by a forest
of yellow hair. She goes doggedly at her spools, grasping them sullenly.
She walks well on her bare, filthy feet. Her hands and arms are no
longer flesh colour, but resemble weather-roughened hide, ingrained with
dirt. Around the tangle of her hair cotton threads and bits of lint make
a sort of aureole. (Her nimbus of labour, if you will!) There is nothing
saint-like in that face, nor in the loose-lipped mouth, whence exudes a
black stain of snuff as between her lips she turns the root she chews.
"She's a mean girl," my little companion says; "we-all don't hev nothin'
to say to her."
"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 God, 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 passes 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 association 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
constitution 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, passed me with his long broom, which
he drags half-heartedly along, than the space 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 molasses 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 clusters 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 pass 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 pass me on their
way back to work.
Under the existing circumstances 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 passes 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 shaggy,
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 passes. 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 constitutions that survive all the horrors of existence.
I have worked both in Massachusetts 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 pass 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 passed in this
labour is not fit to propagate the species.
The excessively low wages paid these little mill-hands keep under, of
necessity, the wage paid the grown labourer. It is a crying pity that
children are equal to the task imposed upon them. It is a crying pity
that machines (since they have appeared, with their extended,
all-absorbing power) should not do all! Particularly in the Southern
States do they evince, at a fatal point, their limit, display their
inadequacy. When babies can be employed successfully for thirteen hours
out of the twenty-four at all machines with men and women; when infants
feeds mechanism with labour that has not one elevating, humanizing
effect upon them physically or mentally, it places human intelligence
below par and cheapens and distorts the nobler forms of toil. Not only
is it "no disgrace to work," but on the contrary it is a splendid thing
to be able to labour, and those who gain their bread by the sweat of
their brow are not the servants of mankind in the sense of the term, but
the patriarchs and controllers of the world's march and the most subtle
signs of the times. But there are distinctly fitnesses of labour, and
the proper presentation to the working-man and woman and child is a
consideration.
No one to-day would be likely for an instant to concede that to replace
the treadmill horse with a child (a thing often seen and practised in
times past) would be an advantage. And yet the march of the child up and
down before its spooling frame is more suggestive of an animal--of the
dog hitched to the Belgian milk cart; of the horse on the
mill-tread--than another analogy.
Contrast this pallid automaton with the children of the poor in a New
York kindergarten, where the six-or seven-year-old child of the German,
the Hungarian, the Polish emigrant, may have its imagination stimulated,
its creative and individual faculties employed as it is taught to _make
things_--construct, combine, weave, sew, mould. Every power latent is
cajoled to expression, every talent encouraged. Thus work in its first
form is rendered attractive, and youth and individuality are encouraged.
In the South of this American country whose signet is individualism,
whose strength (despite our motto, "United we stand") is in the
individual freedom and vast play of original thought, here in the South
our purest born, the most unmixed blood of us, is being converted into
machines of labour when the forms of little children are bound in youth
to the spindle and loom.
In a certain mill in Alabama there are seventy-five child-labourers who
work twelve hours out of the twenty-four; they have a half-hour at noon
for luncheon. There is a night school in connection with this mill
corporation. Fancy it, a night school for the day-long child labourer!
Fifty out of seventy-five troop to it. Although they are so tired they
cannot keep awake on the benches, and the littlest of them falls asleep
over its letters, although they weep with fatigue, they are eager to
learn! Is there a more conclusive testimony to the quality of the
material that is being lost to the States and the country by the
martyrdom of intelligent children?
One hears two points of view expressed on this subject. The capitalist
advances that the greed of the parents forces the children into the
mills; the people themselves tell you that unless they are willing to
let their available children work, their own lives are made impossible
by the overseers. A widow who has children stands a fair chance of
having her rent free; if she refuses this tithe of flesh and blood she
is too often thrust into the street. So I am told. Now, which of these
facts is the truth? It seems to be clearly too much left to the decision
of private enterprise or parental incapability. The Legislature is the
only school in which to decide the question. During my stay in South
Carolina I never heard one woman advocate the mills for children. One
mother, holding to her breast her illegitimate child, her face dark with
dislike, said: "_Them mills!_ I would not let _my_ little boy work in
'em! No, sir! He would go over my dead body." Another woman said: "_My_
little girl work? No, ma'am; she goes to school!" and the child came in
even as she spoke--let me say the only cheerful specimen of childhood,
with the exception of the few little creatures in the kindergarten, that
I saw in the mill district.
South Carolina has become very haughty on this topic and has reached a
point when she tells us she is to cure the sore in her own body without
aid or interference. At a late session of the Legislature the bill for
the restriction of child labour--we must call it this, since it
legislates only for the child under ten--this bill was defeated by only
two dissenting voices. A humane gentleman who laid claim to one of
these voices was heard to ejaculate as the bill failed to pass: "Thank
God!" Just why, it is not easy to understand.
When I was so arrogant as to say to the editor of _The State_, the
leading paper in South Carolina, that I hoped my article might aid the
cause, I made an error clearly, for he replied:
"We need no aid. The people of South Carolina are aroused to the horror
and will cure it themselves."
Georgia is not roused to the horror; Alabama is stirring actively; but
the Northerners who own these mills--the capitalists, the manufacturers,
the men who are building up a reputation for the wealth of South
Carolina and Alabama mills, are the least aroused of all. We must
believe that many directors of these mills are ignorant of the state of
affairs, and that those who are enlightened willingly blind their eyes.
The mill prospectuses are humourous when read by the investigator. We
are told "labour-unions cut no figure here!"
Go at night through the mills with the head of the Labour Federation and
with the instigator of the first strikes in this district--with men who
are the brain and fiber of the labour organization, and see the friendly
looks flash forth, see the understanding with which they are greeted all
through certain mills. Consider that not 200 miles away at the moment
are 22,000 labourers on strike. Then greet these statements with a
smile!
* * * * *
On my return to the North I made an especial effort to see my New
England friend. We lunched together this time, and at the end of the
meal her three little children fluttered in to say a friendly word. I
looked at them, jealous for their little defrauded fellows, whose
twelve-hour daily labour served to purchase these exquisite clothes and
to heap with dainties the table before us. But I was nevertheless
rejoiced to see once again the forms of real childhood for whom air and
freedom and wealth were doing blessed tasks. When we were alone I drew
for my friend as well as I could pictures of what I had seen. She leaned
forward, took a brandied cherry from the dish in front of her, ate it
delicately and dipped her fingers in the finger-bowl; then she said:
"Dear friend, I am going to surprise you very much."
I waited, and felt that it would be difficult to surprise me with a tale
of a Southern mill.
"Those little children--_love the mill!_ They _like_ to work. It's a
great deal better for them to be employed than for them to run the
streets!"
She smiled over her argument, and I waited.
"Do you know," she continued, "that I believe they are really very
happy."
She had well presented her argument. She had said she would surprise
me--and she did.
"You will not feel it a breach of affection and hospitality if I print
what you say?" I asked her. "It's only fair that the capitalist's view
should be given here and there first hand. You own one-half the mill
in ----, Carolina?"
"Yes."
"What do you think of a model mill with only nine hours a day labour,
holidays and all nights free, schools, where education is enforced by
the State; reading-rooms open as well as churches--amusement halls,
music, recreation and pleasure, as well as education and religion?"
"I think," she said keenly, "that united, concentrated action on the
part of the cotton mill owners might make such a thing feasible; for us
to try it alone would mean ruin."
"Not ruin," I amended; "a reduction of income."
"Ruin," she said, firing. "We couldn't compete. To compete," she said
with the conviction of an intelligent, well-informed manufacturer, "I
must have my sixty-six hours a week!"
The spirit of discontent is always abroad when false conditions exist.
Its restless presence is controlled by one spirit alone--humanity--when
reasonably are weighed and justly decided the questions of balance
between Capital and Labour.
We must believe that there is no unsolvable problem before us in
considering the presence of the child in the Southern mills.
There is nothing in the essence of the subject to discourage the social
economist. The question should not be left to the decision of the
private citizen. This stuff is worth saving. There is the making in
these children of first-class citizens. I quote from the illustrated
supplement of the South Carolina _State_ that you may see what the mill
manufacturers think of the quality of the "poor white trash":
"The operatives in the South Carolina mills are the common
people--the bone and sinew who have left the fields to the
Negroes. They are industrious, intelligent, frugal, and have
the native instincts of honesty and integrity and of fidelity
which are essential to good citizenship."
If such things are true of the mill-hands of South Carolina, it is worth
while to save their children.
* * * * *
Henceforth, to my vision across the face of the modern history of labour
and manufacture will eternally defile the gray, colourless column of the
Southern mill-hands: an earth-hued line of humanity--a stream that
divides not.
Here there are no stragglers. At noon and night the pace is quick,
eager. Steady as a prison gang, it goes to food, rest and freedom. But
this alacrity is absent in the morning. On the hem of night, the fringe
of day, the march is slow and lifeless. Many of the heads are bent and
downcast; some of the faces peer forward, and sallow masks of human
countenances lift, with a look set beyond the mill--toward who can say
what vain horizon! The Stream wanders slowly toward the Houses of
Labour, although whipped by invisible scourge of Need. Without this
incentive and spur, think you it would pursue a direction toward
_thirteen hours of toil_, shut from air and sunlight and day, taking in
its rank the women, the young girl and the little child?
The tone of the garments is somber and gray, blending with the gray of
the dawn; or red, blending with the earth stains of the peculiar
Southern soil; or claylike and pale yellow. Many of the faces are
pallid, some are tense, most of them are indifferent, dulled by toil and
yet not all unintelligent. Those who are familiar with the healthy type
of the decent workmen of the West and East must draw their distinctions
as they consider this peculiar, unfamiliar class. The Southern
mill-hand's face is unique--a fearful type, whose perusal is not
pleasant or cheerful to the character-reader, to the lover of humanity
or to the prophet of the future. Thus they defile: men with felt hats
drawn over their brows; women, sunbonneted or hatless; children
barefoot, bareheaded, ragged, unwashed. Unwashed these labourers have
gone to bed; unwashed they have arisen. To their garments cling the bits
of cotton, the threads of cotton, the strands of roping, badges of
their trade, brand of their especial toil. As they pass over the red
clay, over the pale yellow sand, the earth seems to claim them as part
of her unchanging phase; cursed by the mandate primeval--"by the sweat
of thy brow"--Earth-Born!
In the early morning the giant mill swallows its victims, engorges
itself with entering humanity; then it grows active, stirring its
ponderous might to life, movement and sound. Hear it roar, shudder,
shattering the stillness for half a mile! It is full now of flesh and
blood, of human life and brain and fiber: it is content! Triumphantly
during the long, long hours it devours the tithe of body and soul.
Behind lies the deserted, accursed village, destitute of life during the
hours of day, condemned to the care of a few women, the old, the
bedridden and the sick--of which last there are plenty.
Mighty Mills--pride of the architect and the commercial magnate; charnel
houses, devastators, destructors of homes and all that mankind calls
hallowed; breeders of strife, of strike, of immorality, of sedition and
riot--buildings tremendous--you give your immutable faces,
myriads-windowed, to the dust-heaps, to the wind-swept plains of sand.
When South Carolina shall have taken from you (as its honour and wisdom
and citizenship is bound to do) the youngest of the children, do you
think that you shall inevitably continue to devour what remains? There
is too much resistance yet left in the mass of human beings. Youth will
then rebel at a servitude beginning _at ten years of age_: and the women
will lift their arms above their heads one day in desperate gesture of
appeal and cry out--not for the millionaire's surplus; not a tirade
anarchistic against capital.... What is this woman of the hills and
woman of the mills that she should so demand? She will call for hours
short enough to permit her to bear her children; for requital
commensurate with the exigence of progressive civilization; for wages
equal to her faithful toil.
This is not too fantastic a demand or too ideal a state to be divinely
hoped for, believed in and brought to pass.[10]
[Footnote 10: Of the 21,000,000 spindles in the United States, the
South has 6,000,000. $35,381,000 of Carolina's wealth is in
cotton mills.
NOTE. I have seen, in Aragon, Georgia, hope for the future of the
mill-hands. The Aragon Cotton Mills are an improvement on the
South Carolina Mills and are under the direct supervision of an
owner whose sole God is not gain. Mr. Walcott is an agitator of
the nine-hours-a-day movement; he is opposed to Child Labour, and
in all his relations with his hands he is humane and kindly. I
look to the time when Aragon shall set a perfect pattern of what
a mill-town should be. It is already quite the best I have seen.
Its healthfulness is far above the average, and its situation
most fortunate.]
* * * * *
Not inapt here is the pagan idea of _Nous_, moving upon chaos, stirring
the stagnant, unresponsive forces into motion; agitating these forces
into action; the individual elements separate and go forth, each one on
its definitely inspired mission. Some inevitable hour shall see the
universal agitation of the vast body known as the "labouring class." For
the welfare of the whole world, may it not come whilst they are so
ignorant and so down-pressed.
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by Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
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