Read Online The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg - Free Book Online Page A

the power lines. Barefoot children slaved there for next to nothing, prized by the mill owners because their smaller, delicate fingers could flutter over the tiniest gears without getting caught in the machines. As people toiled, a man in a necktie—the Southern man’s mantle of power—walked the floor with a rattling lockbox under his arm. A man or woman could ask to be paid for the time they had put in, right up to that minute, so they could eat. The man in the tie dispensed not money but cheap metal disks called clinkers, named from the sound the box made. The clinkers could be redeemed for a sandwich, or a cold Coca-Cola. People drank and ate the fruit of their labor at the machine, and went back to work, still poor but not hungry. Paychecks for grown men, after deductions for food, rent and more, routinely read $0.00, so it was hard to tell, sometimes, where the exploitation ended and salvation began.
    The mill bosses insisted on men with families. A man with four or five paychecks linked to the mill was a man beholden to it, a man who didn’t complain. A man with a bunch of dirty-faced kids running around his legs, who knew he would be tossed out of his house if he even breathed the word “union,” would keep his mind right when blood was shed, and serve his master.
    The first bunch went down in ’05, and every year more and more men and women in faded overalls and homemade flower-print dresses trickled down, babies in their arms and barefoot children pulling on their hands. They lined up at the gate, waiting for injury or impertinence to make a place for them. They accepted the keys to the company houses, ran up a tab at the company store, and prayed at the company church. They held their tongue, or else, and the bosses never let them forget their place. One superintendent, W.I. Greenleaf, bought a panel truck and put a bed in the back so that his pregnant wife could be driven north as her time drew near, so that his baby would not be born on Southern soil.

             
    I do not know the details of why Officer Bob Ferguson attempted to place John under arrest. Would guess it to be for imbibing too much moonshine at one time. Anyhow, I knew it led to a confrontation of blazing guns in the very late hours of a Saturday night on the sidewalk of A Street between Houses 21 and 22. I think John received more than one wound. Possible hand, arm and shoulder. I do not recall how many times Mr. Ferguson was hit. I did hear he almost died from loss of blood before he received medical help.

    —CARL SMITH, of 21 A Street, in a written statement describing an altercation between mill worker John Barnwell and the Jacksonville police
             
    They absorbed degradation at work, and took it out on each other when the hated whistle blew. But in this community of violence and suffering were some of the finest people who have ever lived, who scraped a few handfuls of flour into a brown paper bag, house by house, until a full bag could be delivered to a family whose provider was sick, shot, cut or hurt in the machines. The choking dust took a lot of them, and some just never got over the fact that they left their mist-shrouded mountains for this, and died sorry. But they met their quotas and punched their time cards and went home to sleep under quilts dyed with roots and berries, a people neither town nor country, but something in between.
    Twice a shift, the women would come out onto a cement platform, where a line of older children waited with babies in their arms. The women nursed their babies not till they were full, but till the whistle blew, then handed them off to the older children and filed back inside. Shotguns and deer rifles rusted under beds as beautifully bred coon and rabbit dogs pulled at chains in cramped little yards, waiting for a hunt that never came. Women walked five, ten miles to find blackberry bushes and plum trees for jelly and preserves, and cut their peaches out of a can.
    People with