Read Online The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg - Free Book Online

night, something they would never get back. For the first time since the hill people filed in from the pines to take their places at their machines, their kinship, their oneness, was fractured.
    The strike became civil war.
    “Brothers fought against brothers, families against families, with axe handles,” said Homer Barnwell. Fights broke out in yards, streets, at the ballpark, in churchyards. Women would grab each other’s hair and yank as hard as they could, and children fought in the playgrounds. But what happened in daylight was nothing compared to what happened after dark.
    As the strike disintegrated, as more people quit the union and said they were willing to cross the picket line, men gathered in the street, fueled by moonshine and growing desperation, and fought. Gunshots sounded throughout the night. “Momma would herd us in the corner and kneel down and hover over us, like a chicken with her biddies,” Homer said. He would lie in his bed and listen to the pounding feet outside. Men were wounded, and laid across kitchen tables.
    But if you ask the oldest men and women which families were which, and who was on what side, they sit mum. “There’s things ain’t been mended yet,” Homer said.
    As mill village families did without, Greenleaf let uncashed dividend checks pile up because he did not need them and because he did not want to pay taxes on them. Sam Stewart Sr. said Greenleaf hated paying federal income taxes so much he never cashed dozens of dividend checks he received. There were stacks of them in a roll-top desk. He apparently believed it possible that income taxes would either go down or go away in the future.
    By winter of ’33, the workers had all they could stand, and went back to work.
    The next year, in ’34, thousands of workers around the South would walk out in The Great Textile Strike, a failed and bloody crusade put down with gunfire and troops. Thousands of striking textile workers were herded into barbed-wire concentration camps, and others were shot to death by hired killers. But in Jacksonville there was no stomach for such misery any more, and the machines hummed on.
    There would never be another union here.
    Greenleaf had defied not just his workers but a president and the federal law, and he had won.
    But he had seen his world order shaken.
    “He believed unions and labor were taking over everything,” Gardner said.
    People no longer knew their place.
    ___
    Only five months after the strike ended, in April 1934, Greenleaf resigned. He had survived the strike, but the accumulated, largely ignored debt the mill owed to the Henry family and more long-running legal feuds combined to force his exit. “The Henry family thought they could run the cotton mill better than he could,” Gardner said. Greenleaf quit with more money than he could spend, with land, with everything except a mill. It should have been a splendid exile, but the old man seemed lost without his kingdom. Greenleaf spent much of his time sitting in front of the radio, downing bourbon.
    The mill had, in its beginning, supplied water to the city of Jacksonville. When the town began to construct its own water system, city leaders approached Greenleaf about buying a network of water pipes still under his control. “They offered him fifty thousand dollars for his rusty pipes, and he turned them down and got mad at all the city fathers,” Pruett said.
    “Cooperation? Cooperation?” Greenleaf fumed. “I know what they mean. They want me to cool while they operate.”
    His retirement was bitter and wretched. The house, instead of a great showplace, became a gothic cathedral. It was crammed with furniture, magazines, old newspapers, and trunks stacked to the ceiling.
    “You should have seen the junk,” John Pruett said.
    Gardner had a black snake that got loose in the house’s pool room, hiding in the wall, Pruett said. “Next time that snake appeared it was as big as a damn boa constrictor.”
    There were so many