Wobbly Bobbins: Thoughts of a Child Mill Worker
[Photo by: Hine, Lewis. “The Mill: A moment's glimpse of the outer world. Said she was 11 years old. Been working over a year.” Rhodes Mfg. Co. Lincolnton, North Carolina. Retrieved from http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/hine-glimpse.htm]
Virginia wouldn’t stand for shoes.
Pat pat pat came and went the clatter of her bare feet on the dust-laden floor, passing and preserving the same sets of bobbins every time. Shoes were for folks who could buy new ones. Shoes—proper shoes, not the grubby old slippers which she had tossed in the corner, resting up-turned and forlorn in the cobwebs—were supposed to fit the owner and aid them. The only good those slippers had ever done for Virginia was to show her she was growing. Meaning, of course, that they were giving her blisters.
Who wanted blisters in a mill? The place was flawed enough already without tight, uncomfortable spots stinging her heels. The mill was a bee’s hive, an anthill; huge and expansive and filled with the wriggling, shaking, and buzzing of bobbins and thread. The air was hot and thick with dust, constantly blown by the wind’s imaginary wings. The workers, spinners, spoolers, and weavers alike stumbled to make the hive run at the necessary speed. If the webs of cotton were silk, then Virginia was the nurse insect, watching and inspecting as the cocoons of thread encircled the bobbins in an entrancing, repetitive cycle. She would scamper the length of the spinning machine, mending any torn threads.
Up, down. Down, up. This was her routine as a spinner. That was an odd name, considering that it was the machine that did most of the spinning, but, none the less, it was what she was. For a moment, the girl tried to imagine herself spinning at the speed of the machine, whirling like a top down the narrow aisle, setting a dizzying pace as her dark braids spun round with her, getting closer and closer to the machine’s edge…
…She decided against it.
A clatter nearby shook her back to reality, and with practiced ease the girl took hold of a now-tangled bobbin. She made haste to unstick the snagged twine, and in mere seconds the bobbin was twirling again. It had barely taken any thought.
Virginia sighed and resumed her pace down the spinning machine. By now she barely noticed when she fixed a string, the action blurred into the damp page of memory that was her history at the mill. From what her mother and father had told her, the McFay family of the once-prosperous country of Ireland, had worked in this dark brick building for 6 years now, beginning when Virginia was but a child of 5 years. They said that made her 11. Between the time-eating hypnosis of mill work, and the fact Virginia had never been much hope with math, she simply took their word for it when asked her age. If left up to her, however, Virginia would much rather be 11 for the rest of her life. It diminished the need for counting.
On another pass down the aisle of twine, Virginia felt her thoughts drift to her parents. Her conscious mind took on another bout of imagination as it flew away from the numbing rhythm of her working body. Over the spinning machines and into the rafters it sailed, diving down to the looms to weave through their webs of fiber. A picture of her father appeared to her, a strong but worn man bending over a broken loom. His hammer thumped with the rhythm of a drum, but in his eyes the musical light was nonexistent. This was his work, his “hulkin’ task fer a wee bit o’ coins”. It drained him, which made Virginia’s heart sink, but she knew that his priority would always be his family.
Next, Virginia’s flying mind visited her mother, the woman’s fingers nimble as she united socks with their missing toes. Ruby, the baby, was nestled by her chest with nowhere else to go. Her mother had to work to keep the bread on the table, and to stay home with the baby was out of the question. Virginia tried to make light of this:
“Don’t be fidgetin’ now, Ruby,” she had said to her sister that morning. “You be de littlest worker ever! That makes ya’ extra special!”
An’ extra vulnerable, her parents had thought; Virginia had seen it in their eyes. But to live you needed money, and to get money you had to work. Such was the way of things in North Carolina.
She barely had to break from thought to put up with a tangled bobbin string.
As Virginia walked on, she set the sails of her consciousness yet again and threw her mind into Time’s river. It drifted back through misty years, some filled with the dust of the cotton mill, others with the first terrors of entering a strange life, and still others too clouded with fog from the Moor of Forgetfulness to bother with. Yet, even if she could not remember it directly, Virginia knew of her mysterious homeland.
A version of herself near 3 years younger appeared, the girl nestled in her mother’s arms atop a mat that took up a quarter of the room. The old mat was their lounge, the room, their house. Small cooking supplies stacked in a corner, not unlike the shoes, while a few chairs offered momentary resting places. The walls were chipped and creaked from the smoke-laden nighttime wind, but Virginia wasn’t afraid. Her father was telling their traveling story:
“T’was a beautiful place, Ireland; her fields were bloomin’ with de fruit of de earth, and every coast held de briny smell of de blue sea. Iffin you was at home more inland, then de moors and locks accompanied ya’ instead. We loved an’ laughed and sang, farmin’ off what the good Lord gave t’us. We was livin’ fine, we was, ‘till the clouds came in o’er de land an’ de potatoes died away. You laugh, my bonny lass; ah yes, it seems folly. But when de potatoes die, so do the Irishmen. There weren’t enough food fer de land, an’ de people were gettin’ to be as thin as the Fairy Folk demselves.
“Now, ya’ weren’t but just past four years when we decided to up’n leave de place…back in 1846, i’twas. We ne’er wanted t’part with de land, oh no, but you were such a small thing, an’ we chose instead to keep ya’ well by goin’ to a new home. O’er de waves we sailed, through de wind we climbed, ‘till we touched down in de land o’ the West. Tain’t much, I know, an’ I would give my beatin’ heart to let ya’ live in de Ireland I knew as a lad, but we’ve got t’pull together. Stay strong fer me, won’t ya’, Virginia?”
And she would. She would always stay strong, because if you were weak then you couldn’t work the spinners. Yet, in the back of her head, Virginia paused to wonder at her predicament. All of her familily worked hours in the mill; her clothes were torn; her freckles had made friends with mud spots; she couldn’t go to school because of mill work; she couldn’t stop to play like some richer children; and she couldn’t live in Ireland; all because of rotten potatoes. That didn’t quite add up in her book. It was as if this life was not meant to fit her, squeezing her and her family and rubbing them raw. She wished she could shake it off like her too-tight slippers, preventing the blisters that came for her, but it was out of her power.
Then she thought of Ruby, and how helpless she was. She thought of her tired mother, her disheartened father, and how hard they worked anyway to keep the family strong. Virginia wouldn’t cry. She was a big girl, a full eleven years old (at least she thought so), and she had to do some good for her family. She couldn’t let them down, even if it sometimes hurt.
Another thread broke on a wobbily bobbin. She didn’t heasitate to fix it.
