“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 promising sponsor, 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 little companion, 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.