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The Most They Ever Had [With Headphones] (2009)

by Rick Bragg(Favorite Author)

4.01 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1441707883 (ISBN13: 9781441707888)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Playaway

review 1: Truly outstanding. Rick Bragg is a great writer.The story reminds me of stories from my home town -- Greenwood SC. Greenwood was also a cotton mill town where most of the inhabitants, in one way or another, lived at the margins. There are many such stories that can be told of Greenwood. But there are not many who could take those stories and turn them into the literature as Rick Bragg does. I wish I had that gift.Here is one of my favorite excerpts:Floria was one of the best, the fastest. Her hands moved in a rhythm, one reaching for one open boll as the other, in a smooth mechanical motion, eased another boll into the sack. She could pick three hundred pounds in just one day in a time when some people were glad to pick one hundred, and her cotton was clean, without t... morewigs and brittle leaf. When you sighted down a row she had picked it was green-black, empty, without a scrap of white. Her mind, when she picked, was free of daydreams. “I thought of the money,” she said. She did not think about washing machines and new bedroom suites and kitchen tables. She thought about that little bit extra, a boy’s shirt, or boots, or a notebook. She liked to crochet when she was sitting down, because otherwise it was just wasted time, and as she picked she would calculate how much yarn she might buy, and what she might make with it. “A dollar,” she said, “was a whole lot.” She concentrated on stripping every stalk clean, on filling her sack the fullest in the least amount of steps—one boll, a million times. “I thought about making all I could.” But no matter how careful you were, it would always stick you. She would reach for a soft, white boll of cotton only to feel the bur, a needle-like sticker on the nut-like shell, lance her fingers or slip under the quick of her fingernails. “They would break off under the skin,” she said. You seldom quit long enough to dig them out. Some of the old women would carry a sewing needle stuck in their bonnets, or a big safety pin on the collar of their dresses, and at the noon break or at quttin’ time they would gently try to lift them out. “It’d fester if you didn’t,” Floria said. It could be burning hot in the afternoon, but picking time came as the summer was dying, and in the gloom of the early mornings a cold dew soaked the fields. “You worked wet, up to your neck,” she said, “and cold.” The dew made the bolls slick, and made her sure, deft fingers clumsy. “My hands would bleed,” she said. The pickers gathered discarded guano sacks at the side of the field and piled and burned them. “It was the only way we could warm our hands,” she said. Snakes, Copperheads and rattlers, hid in the stalks. The wasps and yellow jackets came out of holes in the red dirt, and the old women would daub a little wet snuff on the sting, to ease it. The cotton stank of poison. The mill workers could even smell it in the bales. But sometimes the cotton was so tall it seemed as if she barely had to bend over to fill a sack, and she and her friends would find a watermelon vine, a gift, in the field, and they would break it open right there and eat it with their hands. The farmers paid a sliding scale, from a handful of change in the worst of times—in the Depression, the people worked for what they could get—to two dollars for one hundred pounds in the 1950s and early 1960s. To ease the tug of the sack, some workers daydreamed about a better life, not some great wealth on earth but something finer, everlasting. Old women sang about it as they dragged their sacks across the clay.I heard an old, old story How the Savior came from Glory How he gave his life on Calvary To save a wretch like me Flora did not sing as she worked, but she listened. The songs swirled around her and over her, with a sweetness that cut the dust and kept the devil of self-pity and laziness underground. Oh victory in Jesus, My Savior forever He sought me, and bought me With His redeeming Blood Some people prayed as they picked. Beatrice McCurley, a big woman who would get so full of the spirit in church that she would shake the hair pins from her head, would straighten up in the rows and begin to speak to Jesus in the rising dust. No one was quite sure what to do then, in the middle of a field, when a woman was getting right with God. “She’d just break out praying, and we stopped and listened,” Floria said. He loved me ‘ere I knew Him All my love is due Him And plunged me to victory Beneath the cleansing flood[JAT Comment: Amen!]
review 2: Not a long read--but a great one. Each chapter focuses on a different mill worker in Alabama---from the Depression on up through the closing of the cotton manufacturing factories in the 1970's. Their stories are all a little different, but they have the same theme: hard-working Americans, doing what it takes to get by. Some of these profiles will be with me for a long time...especially the guitar player who has no choice but to work inside the lint-clogged mills, with the constantly-moving machinery. Bragg is such a wonderful writer; the stories are as if you were sitting around your back porch, having someone tell you what it was like. less

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