Zippy, no doubt bursting with importance with all this supervision, led me to an open space in the middle of the long room, where, sitting near some waste boxes, were two girls, barefooted, about my own age. Zippy led me right up to them, and with a wave of the hand announced, “Girls, this here’s Al Priddy. This is Mary, and t’other’s Jane. Come on, girls, it’s time to go around the mill before the boss sees us.”
But just then the second hand caught us grouped there, and stormed, angrily, “Get to work!”
Mary was a very strong girl of thirteen, with a cheery, fat face. She had been in the mill a half year, and was learning to spin during her spare time. I noticed that her teeth were yellow, and with a bluntness that I did not realize I said to her, when she had taken me to show me how to sweep, “What makes your teeth so yellow, Mary?”
She laughed, and then said, confidentially, “I chew snuff. I’m learning from the older girls.”
“Chew snuff?”
She nodded, “I’m rubbing, you see,” and we sat down while she showed me what she meant. She took a strip of old handkerchief from her apron, and a round box of snuff. She powdered the handkerchief with the snuff, and then rubbed it vigorously on her teeth.
“I like it,” she announced. “It’s like you boys when you chew tobacco, only this is the girl’s way.”
My work required little skill and was soon mastered. I had to sweep the loose cotton from the floor and put it in a can. Then there were open parts of stationary machinery to clean and a little oiling of non-dangerous parts. This work did not take more than two-thirds of the ten and a half hours in the work day. The remainder of the time, Zippy, the girls, and I spent in the elevator room, where the doffers also came for a rest.
I had occasion to get very well acquainted with two of the doffers that first day. Their names were “Mallet” and “Curley,” two French Canadians. Mallet was a lithe, sallow-faced, black-haired depreciator of morals, who fed on doughnuts, and spent most of his wages in helping out his good looks with the aid of the tailor, the boot-maker, and the barber. He came to the mill dressed in the extreme of fashion, and always with his upper lip curled, as if he despised every person he passed—save the good-looking girls. Curley was Mallet’s antithesis in everything but moral ignorance. He was a towering brute, with a child’s, yes, less than a child’s, brain. He ran to muscle. He could outlift the strongest man in the mill without increasing his heartbeat. His chief diversions were lifting weights, boasting of his deeds with weights in contests of the past, and the recital of filthy yarns in which he had been the chief actor.
That afternoon of my first day in the mill, Mallet and Curley shut themselves in the elevator room with Zippy and me.