Where She LivedBy Mrs. John Van Vorst(American contemporary writer on Child Labor Problems. The following is taken from her book, “The Cry of the Children.”)
By Mrs. John Van Vorst
(American contemporary writer on Child Labor Problems. The following is taken from her book, “The Cry of the Children.”)
The cotton-mill “folks” wear unwittingly a badge which distinguishes them far and wide. As I came along down over the hillside I met a child holding in her arms another smaller child; both were covered, their hair, their clothes, their very eyelids, with fine flakes of lint, wisps of cotton, fibres of the great web in which the factories imprison their victims.
“Hello,” I said, “do you work in the mill?”
“Yes, meaum.” The voice was gentle and the manner friendly. And giving a sidewise hitch to the baby, who had a tendency to slip from her tiny mother’s arms, this little worker showed me one of her fingers done up in a loose, dirty bandage.
“I cut my finger right smart,” she drawled, “so I’m takin’ a day off.”
“How old are you?”
“Tweaulve.”
“Got any brothers or sisters?”
“I’ve got him.... And I’ve got one brother in the mill.”
“How old is he?”
“Tweaulve.”
“Twins?” I asked.
She smiled and shook her head. “He’s tweaulve in the mill, and he’s teayun outside.”
This little bit of humanity, taking a day off as mother of a still tinier being, seemed a promisingsponsor, and I suggested that we walk along together. She could not go to the mill with me, she explained, without first consulting her mother, so we proceeded to the settlement in which she lodged, along with eighty or a hundred families, who man the mill in which she was a hand.
“That’s where we live.”
Her fleet little bare feet picked a way deftly over the stony path, and she kept a hand free—when it was not laid on the baby’s back—to point out the turns in the road that led to “where she lived.” Her home was one of a group of frame one-story houses, perched on a slant of ground. Each house was encircled by a wooden veranda, and the order of the housekeeping described itself before the eyes, as a whisk of the broom which carried all the dirt from the kitchen onto the porch, and another whisk which landed it on the slant of ground, bedecked, in consequence, with old tin cans, decayed vegetables, pieces of dirty paper, rags and chicken feathers.
It was to the more intimate quarters, however, that I penetrated with my guide. The inside court, or square upon which these “homes” opened their back doors, was a large mud puddle overhung with the collective wash of the neighborhood. In and out of the mud puddle wallowed the younger members of the mill families, receiving from time to time admonition and reprimand from a gently irate parent, who swished her long cotton wrapper over the court, drawling to her offspring: “I sure will whip you if you-all don’t quit.”
“That-a-ways where we live,” said my littlecompanion, stepping onto the porch and depositing her load, as she opened the door to announce a visitor to her mother. The woman turned listlessly from her sewing machine over which she was bent.
“Won’t you come in?” she called to me, dragging out a chair by the fire, without getting up. “Lookin’ for work?” she asked.
I took a seat, glancing at the interior which my little friend called “home.” The outer room was a kitchen—though it might, except for the stove, have been mistaken for a hen coop. The chickens pecked their way about the dirty floor, venturing as far, even, as the table upon which stood the meagre remains of a noonday meal. The second and the inner room had each a bed;—an unmade bed, I was going to say, but how, indeed, could a bed be made without either sheets or pillows? Two grimy counterpanes were flung in disorder across the mattresses; a few chairs, a bureau and the sewing machine completed the house furnishings.
As the listless woman talked with me in a kindly manner about work, the baby, who had crawled in from the porch, and arrived as far as his mother’s skirts, now tugged at these, to be taken up. His tiny hands had served as propellers across the filthy floor. The piece of lemon candy had added to the general stickiness of the dirt, with which both hands and face were smeared. As a soldier shoulders a gun—the burden to which he is most accustomed—this mother swung her baby into her arms, and, while she talked on, giving items about the cost of living, and factory wages, she loosened her cotton jacket—evidently theonly garment she had on—and folding the baby to her breast, she lulled its whimperings.
“Yes,” she said, “we pay $1.50 a week for three rooms. That’s a little over six a month. I call it high. We don’t get no runnin’ water. Every drop we use’s got to be drawed in the yard; an’ we don’t get no light, either, nuthin’ but lamps.”
The baby, comfortable and contented, let his hand stray over the mother’s throat, with little spasmodic caresses which left in their trail smears of dirt, flecked with tiny scarlet streaks where the sharp nails had caught in the pale, withered flesh.
“I reckon you-all might be cold,” she said, directing the older child to put more wood on the open grate fire, thinking apparently nothing of herself. “We don’t like it here first-rate. Maybe we’ll move on. I sure do crave traveling. Well, honey,” this was addressed to the baby, who had sat up with a jerk and began to whine. The candy picked up from the floor where it had fallen and restored to its owner’s mouth, did not seem the desired thing. The mother looked at me with a knowing smile.
“I reckon I can guess what ails him. He wants his babies.” And at this, always without getting out of her chair before the machine, she reached behind her and drew from a shelf over her head two white rats. These were apparently what the baby wanted. In the game that ensued between him and his pets, his chief delight seemed to be in seeing the rats disappear through the open throated gown of his mother, and making the tour of her bodice, wriggling, burrowing, crawling, to emerge finally fromher collar at the nape of her neck. Sometimes they diversified their gyrations, proceeding upward into her hair and down again by way of her ears onto easier climbing ground. Impassable, unmoved, she talked on in her gentle voice, giving no sign whatever that she noticed the animals. It was only when the baby plunged his short nails into the white rat’s side that she ejaculated mercifully:
“Quit that! You-all ’ll hurt them babies.”
I was somewhat dazed as I proceeded presently with my little girl guide from this interior to the mill. The squalor and disorder of what I had seen, the ignorance and the insensibility, contrasted strangely with the courtesy that had been shown me, the friendly concern about any intention I might have to get work, the desire to help me on my way, the strange lethargic tenderness which took the form of pity for even rats.
“Like animals,” my friend had told me. That we must wait to see.