Slavery clings to cotton.
When the directors of a cotton mill, in a Massachusetts village, decided, in the middle '70's, to move their cotton factory from New England to Alabama, they had two objects in view—cheaper labor and cheaper staple.
And they did no unwise thing, as the books of the company from that time on showed.
In the suburbs of a growing North Alabama town, lying in the Tennessee Valley and flanked on both sides by low, regularly rolling mountains, the factory had been built.
It was a healthful, peaceful spot, and not unpicturesque. North and south the mountains fell away in an undulating rhythmical sameness, with no abrupt gorges to break in and destroy the poetry of their scroll against the sky. The valley supplemented the effect of the mountains; for, from the peak of Sunset Rock, high up on the mountain, it looked not unlike the chopped up waves of a great river stiffened into land—especially in winter when the furrowed rows of the vast cotton fields lay out brown and symmetrically turned under the hazy sky.
The factory was a low, one-story structure of half burnt bricks. Like a vulgar man, cheapness was written all over its face. One of its companions was a wooden store house near by, belonging to the company. The other companion was a squatty low-browed engine room, decorated with a smoke-stack which did business every day in the week except Sunday. A black, soggy exhaust-pipe stuck out of a hole in its side, like a nicotine-soaked pipe in an Irishman's mouth, and so natural and matter-of-fact was the entire structure that at evening, in the uncertain light, when the smoke was puffing out of its stack, and the dirty water running from its pipes, and the reflected fire from the engine's furnace blazed through the sunken eyes of the windows, begrizzled and begrimed, nothing was wanted but a little imagination to hear it cough and spit and give one final puff at its pipe and say: “Lu'd but o'ive wur-rek hard an' o'im toired to-day!”
Around it in the next few years had sprung up Cottontown.
The factory had been built on the edge of an old cottonfield which ran right up to the town's limit; and the field, unplowed for several years, had become sodded with the long stolens of rank Bermuda grass, holding in its perpetual billows of green the furrows which had been thrown up for cotton rows and tilled years before.
This made a beautiful pea-green carpet in summer and a comfortable straw-colored matting in winter; and it was the only bit of sentiment that clung to Cottontown.
All the rest of it was practical enough: Rows of scurvy three-roomed cottages, all exactly alike, even to the gardens in the rear, laid off in equal breadth and running with the same unkept raggedness up the flinty side of the mountain.