The Prince of Frogtown (6 page)

The next war, the rich man’s war, starved them. In Jacksonville, the citizens were split over the idea of secession, but a majority, urged on by the increasingly affluent planter class, would favor it. In the prewar excitement, the name of the county was even changed to erase the shame of being named for antisecessionist senator Thomas Hart Benton. It was renamed Calhoun, to honor John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who had threatened to cane a colleague in Washington who opposed a state’s right to choose its destiny.

When the war was still new, the Tenth Alabama Regiment gathered on the steps of the brick courthouse in Jacksonville, where ladies of the town presented officers with a hand-sewn standard they would carry into battle. “It was made of blue satin,” wrote one of the ladies, Carolyn Woodward, in her diary, reprinted in a history of Jacksonville commissioned by the First National Bank. “On one side was painted a cotton plant bearing fifteen bolls. At its topmost branch was a crown.” They chose the cotton boll because they believed the town’s future was bound to it, the sovereign under which they all served. The sharecroppers marched away to hurrahs in one of the true oddities of Southern history, to die to preserve a way of life closed to them. It is hard to explain that to Northerners, hard to explain why, a century and a half later, poor men still fly the Confederate battle flag from rusted pickup trucks. It is hard to explain that, for some men, the fight, not the cause, is what they have.

The cannon and the dysentery took the men who worked the fields, so crops failed and farms failed, and the state sold the farms at auction, sometimes for just a few dollars in back taxes. In 1864, four years in, the families of Confederate soldiers were starving. Troops, many fighting a hopeless war without shoes, began to desert.

The upper classes were still fighting it, across teacups, as the centuries changed. The Confederate on our square was erected forty-five years after the war ended, paid for by the General John H. Forney Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The inscription reads:

Times change, men often change with them, principles, never. Let none of the Survivors of These men offer in their behalf the Penitential Plea, “They believed they were right.” Be it ours to Transmit to Posterity our Unequivocal Confidence in the Righteousness of the Cause for which these men died.

For destitute and landless farmers, jobless laborers and wandering freedmen, the war would never end. Between Lee’s surrender and the turn of a new century, they would endure unrelenting poverty that left them reliant on government doles of corn, meal and salt until they surrendered to a life as day laborers who owned no property and had no future. They sent letters to the capitol in Montgomery begging for seed corn. As poor whites and blacks fought over the scraps, hatefulness grew. It was always blamed on color but just as surely was a by-product of a desperate competition for a place in society, any place except last.

The term “one-crop mule” came into use. It meant that tenant farmers could not afford a mule that was expected to live more than a season. Starved, blind or staggering, the mules wobbled down the rows, a whole family’s hopes resting on whether they could stay upright long enough to break ground in one essential field. When they went down, desperate men cussed them up again, whipped them with chains, built fires against their bellies, or just pulled at the reins, man against dying brute, until the leather snapped in their hands.

It was about then that my father’s father emerged from the mountains as if from some bleak fairy tale. In the mountain enclave of Pinhook, at the turn of the twentieth century, time had stood still. The farmers, loggers and cotton pickers of the valleys were tame and gentle people compared to the ones who lived higher up and deeper back, in squalid one-room shacks and lean-tos surrounded by families dressed in smut and rags. They wore loaded pistols down the front of their greasy britches and loaded shotguns with bent nails. They came to town once or twice a year to buy sugar, yeast and meal and packed bust-head liquor down the hillsides on mules. They lived in poverty but independence, a community of half-breeds, poor whites, poachers, hog farmers, fatherless children, wanted men, and unwanted women.

One of them, a woman named Frankie Bragg, dragged fallen logs into the clearing around her windowless cabin and piled them into massive, popping bonfires, to scare the panthers away. There was no man, only rumors of one. Frankie grubbed out a living with a hoe, and raised her children, Bobby, Arthur, Joe and baby girl Eldora. “Somewhere down through the kinfolks, there’d been an Indian,” and the children all had black or dark red hair, said Carlos Slaght. Eldora was his mother. Bobby, his uncle, was my grandfather.

What few, precious things Frankie owned, she carried “tucked in her buzzom,” he said. “An aspirin box, Bull Durham sack, chewing gum…She was thirteen, when she had Uncle Bobby.” They ate poke salad, highland watercress and May Pop, till Bobby was old enough to be the man. He saved them, pure and simple. “Uncle Bobby was the provider,” Carlos said. He hired himself out when he was still a little boy to farmers, and carried his mother and siblings with him. He never went to school, just sweated for another man’s profit when he should have been rolling marbles.

It was then, when Bobby was still a boy, that the red-brick walls began to reach into the sky, and locomotives dragged in machines big enough to swallow a man whole. It was salvation. The cost would be terrible, but it was salvation just the same.

If a horse had been killed, I would have lost $200. I can get more men, anytime.

—Attributed in a family history to
JAMES EVERELL HENRY,
a Northern timber baron and principal investor in the Jacksonville cotton mill, after one of his loggers was killed in an accident

In the mountains around Jacksonville, it was Yankee money that saved them, that, and a rich man’s delicate nose.

In faraway St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the eldest son of Elmore T. Ide, the handsome and charming George Peabody Ide, was expected to assume the presidency of his father’s gristmill in 1887. But the dust from pulverized grain, drifting up from the grinding wheel, caused a severe allergic reaction in young Ide. “This created a serious problem,” wrote his nephew Knox Ide, in his memoirs. It was decided by the family that George sell his interest in the gristmill back to the company, and he joined his uncle, diplomat Henry C. Ide, on a voyage by locomotive, steamboat and horse and buggy to the Deep South. They chased the promise of unlimited natural resources to a place called Jacksonville. “George thrived and became very popular with the ‘natives,’ especially the ladies, many of whom set their caps for him…a handsome dashing figure when behind two full-blooded carriage horses,” wrote his nephew Knox. These were the men—visionaries, in recorded history—who held the fate of a people, a people who could be used up and discarded, with more, always more, to take their place.

From the beginning, it was more than industry. The mill, formed from 1.5 million red clay bricks, seemed to grow out of the earth instead of just being built upon it, and in a way it did. The clay was dug from the ground at the construction site, and fired in ovens, right there, into hard, brittle permanence. The bricks rose around a skeleton of massive beams and round, hardwood pillars, all of them hacked and smoothed from giant, ancient trees. It was the single biggest man-made thing most of them had ever seen, three stories of vast, echoing rooms and towering ceilings, a battleship long, and so wide a man could not throw a silver dollar across it. The windows glowed even at midnight, lit by a coal-fired, crackling generator that must have seemed like alchemy in a town still lit by kerosene.

When it ran wide-open, when workers fed trainloads of cotton into its massive, gnashing machines, the mill seemed to take on some malevolent spirit, to come alive. The hardwood floors, built to last a hundred years, trembled and popped under tons and tons of vibrating steel, as billions of tiny scraps of cotton spun off the machines and flew like clouds of gnats through giant, stifling rooms. The separators, designed to rip and tear a 500-pound bale of cotton, were just the start of it. Stretching across the floor were eleven thousand spindles, bolted to the hardwood with iron screws as long as railroad spikes. They did the work of a million old women at a million looms, but screaming, shuddering, cutting and biting. The machines would do the spinning, but had to be fed, fixed, and unclogged when the yarn broke or fouled, and for that, the company needed people brave enough to reach into the spinning, whirring gears. If you were careless, even for a second, it would get you. Over the years, the machines and the people mingled, not in a silly philosophical sense but in a real one, as it took their fingers, hands and arms and pumped their lungs full of cotton dust, until they were each part of the other, metal, cotton, flesh and bone.

The company knew where to fish for such men and women, and knew what bait to use.

Beside the mill, a village took shape, a community of small, solid, decent houses, every one exactly the same. The streets were named just A Street, B Street, and so on, as if these plain people did not require anything else. There would be 136 houses in all, a town within the town. Made of cheap but sturdy weatherboard and roofed with wooden shingles, they were designed by George P. Ide’s new bride, Margaret Rosa Borden, a true Southern belle. She insisted that the roof lines of the little millhouses be designed to mirror the roof lines of their elegant home in Jacksonville—the antebellum Boxwood. In this way, she explained, every worker would share in its beauty.

But inside the red-brick walls of the mill was a netherworld. Women marched home, stunned and ashamed, after the machines ripped the hair from their heads or stripped off their clothes. One man died smoking on one of the mill’s walls after the bosses refused to stop production even as he worked on the power lines. Barefoot children slaved there for next to nothing, prized by the mill owners because their smaller, delicate fingers could flutter over the tiniest gears without getting caught in the machines. As people toiled, a man in a necktie—the Southern man’s mantle of power—walked the floor with a rattling lockbox under his arm. A man or woman could ask to be paid for the time they had put in, right up to that minute, so they could eat. The man in the tie dispensed not money but cheap metal disks called clinkers, named from the sound the box made. The clinkers could be redeemed for a sandwich, or a cold Coca-Cola. People drank and ate the fruit of their labor at the machine, and went back to work, still poor but not hungry. Paychecks for grown men, after deductions for food, rent and more, routinely read $0.00, so it was hard to tell, sometimes, where the exploitation ended and salvation began.

The mill bosses insisted on men with families. A man with four or five paychecks linked to the mill was a man beholden to it, a man who didn’t complain. A man with a bunch of dirty-faced kids running around his legs, who knew he would be tossed out of his house if he even breathed the word “union,” would keep his mind right when blood was shed, and serve his master.

The first bunch went down in ’05, and every year more and more men and women in faded overalls and homemade flower-print dresses trickled down, babies in their arms and barefoot children pulling on their hands. They lined up at the gate, waiting for injury or impertinence to make a place for them. They accepted the keys to the company houses, ran up a tab at the company store, and prayed at the company church. They held their tongue, or else, and the bosses never let them forget their place. One superintendent, W.I. Greenleaf, bought a panel truck and put a bed in the back so that his pregnant wife could be driven north as her time drew near, so that his baby would not be born on Southern soil.

I do not know the details of why Officer Bob Ferguson attempted to place John under arrest. Would guess it to be for imbibing too much moonshine at one time. Anyhow, I knew it led to a confrontation of blazing guns in the very late hours of a Saturday night on the sidewalk of A Street between Houses 21 and 22. I think John received more than one wound. Possible hand, arm and shoulder. I do not recall how many times Mr. Ferguson was hit. I did hear he almost died from loss of blood before he received medical help.

—CARL SMITH,
of 21 A Street, in a written statement describing an altercation between mill worker John Barnwell and the Jacksonville police

They absorbed degradation at work, and took it out on each other when the hated whistle blew. But in this community of violence and suffering were some of the finest people who have ever lived, who scraped a few handfuls of flour into a brown paper bag, house by house, until a full bag could be delivered to a family whose provider was sick, shot, cut or hurt in the machines. The choking dust took a lot of them, and some just never got over the fact that they left their mist-shrouded mountains for this, and died sorry. But they met their quotas and punched their time cards and went home to sleep under quilts dyed with roots and berries, a people neither town nor country, but something in between.

Twice a shift, the women would come out onto a cement platform, where a line of older children waited with babies in their arms. The women nursed their babies not till they were full, but till the whistle blew, then handed them off to the older children and filed back inside. Shotguns and deer rifles rusted under beds as beautifully bred coon and rabbit dogs pulled at chains in cramped little yards, waiting for a hunt that never came. Women walked five, ten miles to find blackberry bushes and plum trees for jelly and preserves, and cut their peaches out of a can.

People with no experience beyond the limitless pines were squeezed into a single, limited space. When men felt hemmed up, they reacted in unusual ways. It was common then for a man to get drunk and ride his horse or mule into a café in town. “There was lots of odd things that happened back then,” said Homer Barnwell, who grew up in the mill village, a child of its first generation of workers, and would become its historian. He cites the time in ’38 someone dynamited the brush arbor, and the time a man named Joe Pierce got drunk at Toughy Griffin’s blacksmith shop and pulled Slut Luttrel’s teeth—“and by the time he got done, he’d even pulled the right ones,” Homer said.