In the room where we sit Jones' wife died a few weeks before, victim to pneumonia that all winter has scourged the town—"the ketchin' kind"—that is the way it has been caught, and fatally by many.[6]
In one corner stands a sewing machine, in another an organ—luxuries: in these cases, objects of art. They are bought on the installment plan, and some of these girls pay as high as $100 for the organ in monthly payments of $4 at a time. The mill-girl is too busy to use the machine and too ignorant to play the organ.
Jones is a courteous host. His lodgers occupy
the comfortable seats, whilst he perches himself on the edge of a straight high-backed chair and converses with us, not lighting his pipe until urged, then deprecatingly smoking in little smothered puffs. I feel convinced that Jones thinks that Massachusetts shoe-hands are a grade higher in the social scale than South Carolina mill-girls! Because, after being witness more than once to my morning and evening ablutions on the back steps, he said:
"Now, I am goin' to dew the right thing by you-all; I'm goin' to fix up a wash-stand in that there loft." This is a triumph over the lax, uncleanly shiftlessness of the Southern settlement. Again:
"You-all must of had good food whar you come from: your skin shows it; 'tain't much like hyar-'bouts. Why, I'd know a mill-hand anywhere, if I met her at the North Pole—salla, pale, sickly."
I might have added for him, deathlike, ... skeleton ... doomed. But I listen, rocking in the best chair, whilst Mrs. White glides in from the kitchen and, unobserved, takes her place on a little low chair by the sewing machine behind Jones. Her baby rocks contentedly in Molly's arms.
Jones continues: "I worked in the mill fifteen years. I have done a little of all jobs, I reckon, and I ain't got no use for mill-work. If they'd pay me fifty cents a side to run the 'speeders' I'd go in fer an hour or two now and then. Why, I sell sewing machines and organs to the mill-hands all over the
country. I make $60 a month, and I touch all my money," he said significantly. "It's the way to do. A man don't feel no dignity unless he does handle his own money, if it's ten cents or ten dollars." He then explains the corporation's methods of paying its slaves. Some of the hands never touch their money from month's end to month's end. Once in two weeks is pay-day. A woman has then worked 122 hours. The corporation furnishes her house. There is the rent to be paid; there are also the corporation stores from which she has been getting her food and coal and what gewgaws the cheap stuff on sale may tempt her to purchase. There is a book of coupons issued by the mill owners which are as good as gold. It is good at the stores, good for the rent, and her time is served out in pay for this representative currency. This is of course not obligatory, but many of the operatives avail themselves or bind themselves by it. When the people are ill, Jones says, they are docked for wages. When, for indisposition or fatigue, they knock a day off, there is a man, hired especially for this purpose, who rides from house to house to find out what is the matter with them, to urge them to rise, and if they are not literally too sick to move, they are hounded out of their beds and back to their looms.