Through the mill: The life of a mill-boy

by Frederic Kenyon Brown

In all, at this time I had five men over me who had the right to boss me. They were: two spinners, the overseer, second hand, and third hand. One of the spinners was a kindly man, very considerate of my strength and time, while the other was the most drunken and violent-tempered man in the room. He held his position only by virtue of having married the overseer’s sister. He was a stunted, bow-legged man, always in need of a shave. He wagged a profane tongue on the slightest provocation, and tied to me the most abusive epithets indecency ever conjured with. He always came to work on Monday mornings with a severe headache, a sullen mood, and filled himself with Jamaica ginger, which, on account of its percentage of alcohol, served him the same palatable, stimulating, and satisfying functions of whisky without making him unfit to walk up and down his alley between his dangerous mules.

By having to be in the mill when the machinery was stopped, I was forced to listen to the spinners as they held their lewd, immoral, and degenerate conversation. It was rarely that a decent subject was touched upon; there seemed to be few men there willing to exclude profligacy from the rote. This was because “Fatty” Dunding, a rounded knot of fat, with a little twisted brain and a black mouth, was the autocrat of the circle, and, withal, a man who delighted to talk openly of his amours and his dirty deeds. As there were no women or girls in the room, significant words and suggestive allusions were shouted back and forth over the mules, whisperings, not too low for a skulking, fascinated boy, hidden behind a wastebox, to drink in, were in order during the noon-hour. The brothel, the raid of a brothel, the selling of votes, and references to women, formed the burden of these conferences. Occasionally some spinner would “Hush” out loud, there would be a warning hand held up, but only occasionally.

God had not endowed me with any finer feelings than most of the lads I worked with, but outside the mill I put myself in closer touch with refining things than some of them: reading, occasional attendance on a Sunday-school and a mission, and in me there was always a never-to-be-downed ambition to get an education. That is why those conversations I was forced to hear were like mud streaks daubed with a calloused finger across a clear conscience. It was like hearkening to the licking of a pig in a sty after God in His purity has said sweet things. I felt every fine emotion toward womankind, and toward manhood, brutalized, impiously assaulted. I felt part of the guilt of it because I was linked in work with it all. That mule-room and its associations became repugnant. My spirit said, “I will not stand it.” My will said, “You’ll have to. What else can you do?”

That became the question which held the center of the state in my rebellion against the mill. “What else could I do?”

I wanted an education. I wanted to take my place among men who did more than run machines. I wanted to “make something of myself.”

The arousement of this ambitious spirit in me was curiously linked with the reading of a great number of five-cent novels which had to do with the “Adventures” of Frank Merriwell. This young hero was a manly man, who lived an ideal moral life among a group of unprincipled, unpopular, and even villainous students at Yale College. Frank had that Midas touch by which every character he touched, no matter how sodden, immediately became changed to pure gold. Frank himself was an intense success in everything he did or undertook. He preached temperance, purity of speech, decency, fairness, and honor. He had both feet on the topmost principle in the moral code. True, with romantic prodigality he did everything under any given conditions with epic success. If he went to a track-meet as a spectator, and the pole vaulter suddenly had a twisted tendon, Frank could pull off his coat, take the pole and at the first try, smash all existing records. A Shakesperian actor would be suddenly taken ill, and Frank would leap from a box, look up the stage manager, dress, and take the rôle so successfully that everybody would be amazed at his art. It was the same with all branches of sport, or study, of social adventure—he did everything in championship form. But back of it all were good habits, fair speech, heroic chivalry, and Christian manliness, and the reading of it did me good, aroused my romantic interest in college, made me eager to live as clean a life as Frank amidst such profligacy as I had to meet. That reading spoiled me ever after for the mill, even if there had been nothing else to spoil me. I, too, a poor mill lad, with little chance for getting money, with so sober a background as was against my life, wanted to make my mark in the world as the great figures in history had done. I immediately made a special study of the literature of ambition. I took the Success Magazine, read the first part of Beecher’s biography, where he made a tablecloth of an old coat, and fought through adverse circumstances. I fellowshipped with Lincoln as he sprawled on the hearth and made charcoal figures on the shovel. I felt that there must be something beyond the mill for me. But the question always came, “What else can you do?”

And the question had great, tragic force, too. I had not strength enough to make a success in the mule-room. I had an impoverished supply of muscle. My companions could outlift me, outwork me, and the strenuous, unhealthy work was weakening me. The long hours without fresh air made me faint and dizzy. One of the back-boys, himself a sturdy fellow, in fun, poked my chest, and when I gave back with pain, he laughed, and sneered “Chicken-breasted!” That humiliated me, and I might have been found thereafter gasping in the vitiated air, enthused by the hope that I could increase my chest expansion a few inches; and I also took small weights and worked them up and down with the intention of thickening my muscles!

“What else can you do?” That haunted me. It would not be long before I should have to give in: to tell my overseer that I had not strength enough to do the work. Yet, as if Fate had obsessed me with the idea, I could not bring myself to think that the world was open to exploration; that there were easier tasks. I was curiously under the power of the fatalistic, caste thought, that once a mill-boy, always a mill-boy. I could not conceive there was any other chance in another direction. That was part of the terror of the mill in those days.

So that dream, “to make something of myself,” with a college appended, only made my days in the mill harder to bear. When the sun is warm, and you, yourself are shut in a chilly room, the feeling is intensified tragedy.

But day after day I had to face the thousands of bobbins I had in charge and keep them moving. Thousands of things turning, turning, turning, emptying, emptying, emptying, and requiring quick fingers to keep moving. A fight with a machine is the most cunning torture man can face—when the odds are in favor of the machine. There are no mistaken calculations, no chances with a machine except a break now and then of no great consequence. A machine never tires, is never hungry, has no heart to make it suffer. It never sleeps, and has no ears to listen to that appeal for “mercy,” which is sent to it. A machine is like Fate. It is Fate, itself. On, on, on, on it clicks, relentlessly, insistently, to the end, in the set time, in the set way! It neither goes one grain too fast or too slow. Once started, it must go on, and on, and on, to the end of the task. Such was the machine against which I wrestled—in vain. It was feeding Cerebus, with its insatiable appetite. The frames were ever hungry; there was always a task ahead, yes, a dozen tasks ahead, even after I had worked, exerted myself to the uttermost. I never had the consolation of knowing that I had done my work. The machine always won.