The World Is on Fire Read online

  Say the names.

  Platt Saco Lowell made textile machinery and replacement parts. In 1979, it employed 1,527 workers; it was razed three years ago to make way for a new Wal-Mart Supercenter. American Spinning made synthetic fabrics. In 1979, it employed 479 workers; today it’s used for storage, a Tweaker Extreme Energy bottle flattened on the cracked parking lot. Poe Mill burned to the ground, and now skateboarders slide and jump off the wrecked foundations. Union Bleachery dyed cotton and synthetics. It employed 487 workers; it burned in 2003 and is listed as a Superfund site because of chromium contamination. Woodside Mill, once the largest textile mill under one roof in the world, made polyester/rayon and polyester/cotton fabrics and employed 1,150 workers. Today it’s abandoned, its bricked-up windows covered with vinyl to make it look like they still have glass. Fooled me. “Hey,” yelled the kids getting off the school bus as I stood there on the curb, staring at the quiet building. “Hey.”

  Builders used to site mills along riverbanks to harness the waterpower. That was in the early days; capital follows cheap labor. The mills here replaced the ones in New England, so it’s only logical that a century later these mills were supplanted in their turn by those in Mexico and Central America. Same song, different verse.

  In 1903, when the nearby Pacolet River flooded, six mill buildings were heavily damaged or swept away. Collapsed timbers and empty space where the spinning rooms had been. Tongues of muddy water and slick boil over stone. The waters rose so fast that a shopkeeper who slept in the raw had just enough time to escape from his bed above the store and clamber naked onto the roof; a neighbor lady gave him her apron to “restore his dignity.”

  One man ferried people to safety on a raft made of cotton bales, one soul at a time; he saved ninety-nine, but when he went back to make it a hundred, the current pulled him under. Whole families drowned. When the Pacolet subsided, one body was given away by an errant knee protruding from the clay, others by streams of flies. Many were never found.

  Memphis Minnie would have grieved, would have understood. Her given name was Lizzie Douglas, but her family called her Kid. After Langston Hughes heard her play a show one New Year’s Eve, he compared the sound of her electric guitar to “a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.” After she died, her grave went unmarked for better than twenty years until Bonnie Raitt bought a stone.

  When my friend from the weave room was a girl, she’d spend her bottle-deposit nickels on banana Popsicles and jukebox songs. “Wooly Bully” was her grandma’s favorite, “Mustang Sally” her mama’s. Even had that last one played at her funeral. Preacher didn’t understand, but it wasn’t for him to say. Ain’t it a comfort to hear a familiar song again? Somehow it helps to sing along.

  And I think now that the genius of “When the Levee Breaks”—no matter who’s singing it—is how it retells an old story. Not just this flood, but the Flood, whose waters swell to envelop everything: tents and robes or trucks and kitchen towels, sheep, parents, haircombs, dipper gourds, billfolds, panicked children; the daily routine you once kept to, dreamlike now in retrospect. Ink, rain, leaves. Even drought, the dry bone hid at the bottom of things. Memphis Minnie escaped somehow, in a boat I believe she built herself and daubed with pitch. Floated to safe harbor and knew that it could have been, could always be, worse.

  When I left home I didn’t want to go, but told myself if I came back it would be because I chose to, not because I had to. In every other town I’ve lived I’ve reckoned distance by how many miles’ drive it was back to here.

  I see a boy weep as he wraps his dead dog in a terry-cloth towel. I see a daughter fold a washcloth with ice and apply it to her mother’s forehead to break a fever. I see a woman unroll a stocking over one foot, then the other, and secure them at the top with stays. I see knitted socks balled on the floor beside a bed. I see a woman pull a day dress over her head, clip on her earrings, and set about her marketing. I see a woman fill a pillowcase with cotton batting and stitch shut the end. At the hospital a man lays his head down and will not raise it again in this life, but has this comfort at the end.

  I see a man doff the last bolt and box it for shipping. After his shift is over he comes back and strips the remnant to take to his wife. The concrete holding the fence posts cures in a few days, longer if it rains. I see the maintenance crew staple the chain link into place, stretch barbed wire over the top. I see the man take the slack out of the chain, tuck in the ends, and snap on a lock.

  Icy Norman spent her whole life working at a Southern textile mill. I read her story in an oral history. After she retired, she said, “When I come out of that mill, I know that I done the very best I could. Somewhere along the way I felt a peaceable mind.”

  When the mills closed, one owner had the machines cut into pieces so that nobody could steal his technology from the scrapyard. Workers had to take photographs of the torches cutting the frames apart. Another owner sold the machines to salvage dealers who picked them clean for parts.

  I like thinking about the salvage warehouses, dim hangars lined with shelves and bins full of cotter pins and drivetrains, motors and rotors and spinners and travelers, little staples you clip onto bobbins of ring-spun cotton. Smell of old grease and electricity and tang of rust. Hard lumps of steel waiting their turn.

  I know the dyes colored the river blue on Tuesdays and red on Wednesdays. That the waterfall downtown sudsed and bubbled; that the riverbed silt is still poisoned. That as a monograph published in 1933 put it, “There has never, in the history of the industry, been a protracted period when workers could not be replaced fairly readily with people anxious to get jobs.” That the mill hired young—and plenty of kids, even kids I knew, quit school for that reason. But I also know it was about more than the cloth. Yes, it could kill you. Fires, accidents—I read about women scalped by speeder frames, a man caught in a belt that bashed his brains out on the ceiling. Lint filled lungs, clatter dulled ears; hands splayed, backs broke. Work takes your life, one shift at a time, and what choice do we have? Honest wages for honest labor, but you might as well acknowledge the cost. Restore its dignity.

  A former supervisor at Riverdale Mill in Spartanburg described the day he had to tell his workers that the mill was going to close. “I started calling their names,” he said, “saying you been here this many years, you been here this many years, and you know we did a good job. ‘You’ve done it. You have bought us this much more time we would not have had. You’ve got sixty days, and we’re gonna do this sixty days just like we’ve done it for the last hundred years. We’re not gonna do it one bit different, and when we go out of here we’re going to hold our heads high.’”

  I see you, man who painted the sign that reads NO ADMITTANCE. Brushstrokes still clear after all this time, laid on steel you’d coated with primer to stay the rust. Nailed to bricks made of clay that some other man had poured into forms, sent through a kiln, and let cure in the sun. Sun that even now licks the rainwater off the gleaming weeds. You could make something here, a life that would last.

  No wonder I felt a shiver, standing in the stack, inside a thing that telescopes from past into future. You could stand on the top rung both in the clouds and hemmed in by red clay. This could be the seat of life, or a hold gaping open to an underground cave. A man who watched Union Bleachery burn told me the dyes painted the smoke clouds brilliant blue, green, pink. Dark rainbow, sign that appeared only to him, and just that once.

  Afterward, I felt sorry about trespassing. It wasn’t the current mill owners I hoped to sneak past, but the doffers, canteen mistresses, cleanup woman sweeping with two brooms. Crawling inside the stack had been like entering a mausoleum, a narrow room with an oculus cut in the ceiling. Proof positive of how dead the mill is; were the boiler lit, you’d never dare.

  I think the workers would forgive me. They locked the gates against themselves, too, knowing they’d become outsiders in what used to be their place. If nobody sings a song for long enough it dies. We throw it
away like a faded blouse.

  The flood of 1927 was the worst river flood in the history of the United States, and we remember it now primarily because Memphis Minnie wrote her song. This is the verse given to us to sing. TURN BACK, said the graffiti on the door. YOU’RE NEXT. So I’m taking this story and saying it’s mine, ours. I’m clinging to the wreckage with Shem, Ham, and Noah’s wife—her name lost to time, but if you claim the story, she’s mother to us all.

  You could say the song retells an even older story, of moving away from a loved place to seek bread by the sweat of one’s brow. (I didn’t think I’d ever come back; there weren’t jobs.) Zeppelin’s drumbeat sounds like hitching footsteps, the trudging tread of those turned out of a first home.

  I followed work all over the country and what is my aim now but to try and make sense of things and to help others in their attempts. Here with the fallen world’s cadged gleams of beauty: dark reef of cloud behind Echols Oil, mimosa trees blooming in sprays of floozy pink, hawk beating hard in a rising wind. Overhearing a man say, I feel so good, I’d give twenty dollars for a headache.

  You understand, my friend from the weave room kept saying. You understand. She keeps a big garden now—watermelon hills in old tractor tires, tomatoes in cages, staked beans, roses. She said she’d give me a seedling, but when I tried to thank her, she stopped me short. “Don’t thank someone for plants! They won’t grow!” she said. “Now cut flowers, sure. You can thank someone for those because they’re already dead.”

  Years later, Jimmy Page stood in the staircase at Headley Grange and rested his hand on the newel post. “I was quite overwhelmed when I went in,” he admitted in an interview. Of course Headley Grange had been, at one time, both an orphanage and a workhouse. Think of the scores of others who went forth from there to their jobs, sliding their palms down the polished rail as they left. Something of that smooth surface comes through in the recording of the song, in the drumbeat’s massive echo. All those workers shaping the space that in turn shaped them. Come along then, they murmur, next shift’s starting, not that you can hear them over the rising pound of the flood.

  And when Robert Plant sings the song’s last lines, they sound like the cry of a drowning man. “Going, I’m going to Chicago,” he wails, the distortion making his words slip and snag. Even though I know it’s an effect Page engineered, listening makes me uneasy. “Going to Chicago,” Plant sings. “Sorry but I can’t take you. Going down, going down now.” The guitar and drums wheel around his voice, the center of a whirlpool, a gyre, an overwhelmed sluice. That voice is all there is to hold onto—Going down, going down now—but by the song’s end, the undertow pulls the singer down into muddy, opaque silence.

  Rust can bind wounds, Pliny wrote, and maybe he was right. Rusty nail heads stain the mill floor; rusty paper clips hold forgotten bills of lading, formulas for dye lots. Mix a draught of well water and bitter powder; drink it down and feel it anchor you here. To these bricks in a heap, bricks in a pile. You have to believe or it won’t work, said my friend from the weave room. Bricks without holes and chalky to the touch. Bricks edgeworn from weather. Bricks burnt orange but for the side that had faced the weave room: pale green. Stacks of bricks in the busted parking lot, forgotten so long that little weeds rooted in them. Clay shearing off in red leaves.

  Consider the brick’s beginnings. Clay dug from a flat place and poured into forms, slid into an oven and burned hard, a decade of summers in a single slow trip through the fire. Cool them slow lest they split: channel bricks, air bricks, plinth and coping. Squints, jambs, bullnoses; rough stocks, grizzles, and my favorites, shuffs and shakes. Bricks are dirt, our dirt, turned to stone strong enough to withstand any weather. “A thoroughly good brick,” I read in the excellent Modern Brickmaking (1911), “should give out a clear ringing sound when struck either with a stone, another brick, or a piece of metal.” Yet for all their strength bricks are friendly; we’re clay too, and I feel the kinship when I run my fingers across a brick’s face.

  The empty lots and burned foundations, the cars streaming past, the sparrows flying through the superstore’s Home and Garden Center carry no memory of the factories that used to stand here. But if you pay attention, you’ll be reminded by the brick smokestacks, built a century ago by steeplejacks who were themselves far from home, floating high above the ground as they worked.

  It grieved me to learn that for so long, Memphis Minnie’s grave had no stone. But every time I sing her lyrics, I call her back, and every time I see the stacks I remember. Not Memphis Minnie alone, but Si Kahn, who wrote “Aragon Mill” about a mill in Georgia: “There’s no smoke at all coming out of the stack,” the song goes.

  For the mill has shut down and it ain’t coming back

  There’s no children at all in the narrow empty streets

  Now the looms have all gone, it’s so quiet I can’t sleep.

  I think of the old photographs: the loom fixer, the boys on the baseball team, the tired children (boys in caps and suspenders, girls with thin, clasped hands) of the Spinning Department, 1901, who leaned against the same brick wall that I would, more than a century later. I think of the laughing women standing under the mill’s oak tree in 1931, and what it might have been like for the sole black man in that group of two dozen.

  Like a grave marker, the smokestack is a monument. When you drive past one, you have a choice. You can overlook it, as I used to, or you can think about the masons who built it. About the families who lived in the long shadow it cast. About the suffocating feeling of standing inside it, or about the fact that an escape ladder was always right there in front of you.

  Before the final levee breaks, the speaker leaves. But it was given me to go back after the waters receded and walk the ruins. I knew what it meant to miss home but it was a new thing to return to a changed place and be pulled under by memories, not bad ones: watching a boy in a white-and-green uniform play shortstop on the mill field; hunting treasure at the junkyard with my father; a slow hike up Georges Creek on a hot afternoon, orange silt blooming in the water around my feet. When the train barreled over the trestle, the creosote-soaked girders shook.

  Somehow, even when I stand alone, mill stairwells always feel crowded to me. These were the channels that bore the heaviest traffic, men and women hurrying, always, from the raw cotton of the basement opening room to the first floor’s carding and spinning, weave rooms on the second and third, Quality Control on the top. People called these “vertical mills” and it was literally true; what started as fiber on the ground floor turned into finished cloth by the rafters.

  And even in the mills that have had all the spirit dry-walled out of them in the renovation process, the stairwells still hold a charge with their smooth banisters and waffle-tread steps. If developers want to keep a building on the National Register of Historic Places, they must leave the stairwells intact. Here you sense the rush and hustle; wherever you’re headed, you’re not yet there. The stairs at Headley Grange worked so well for Zeppelin’s purposes because they were “dead space.” But I wouldn’t call them that myself. This feels like the most alive space in the whole building, electric with bodies. Here you can run up to the sky or descend into the mud. This is the ladder in the smokestack made public, accessible to scores instead of just the lone boy shinnying up the bars. This is the stand of poplars, peeled and painted, that bears the mill’s weight. This is the tent camp set up in view of the levee, populated with people wearing the only clothes they managed to save, people throwing dice to pass the time, people—one woman in particular—taking notes with a pencil.

  You don’t realize how many bricks it takes to build a textile mill until they’re heaped in windrows stretching two city blocks. Brad called last week to say they were tearing down Alice Manufacturing. (Product: synthetic print cloth, employees: 354.) He’d heard the walls fall, weird thunder on a bluebird day. By the time we got there, a rubble field of tar paper, cast-iron pipes, tatters of fiberglass, and splintered lumber spread from
the sidewalk to the railroad siding. Teenagers sat on a front porch watching us, and every few minutes a man eased past in a shiny black pickup. We figured he was a supervisor. NO TRESPASSING, said a sign. THIS BUILDING CONTAINS LEAD. The smell of dug dirt hung around the neatly stacked bricks, shrink-wrapped and ready to be sold as reclaimed.

  A man in a Bobcat bashed beams against the ground, breaking off old cement. Down the way, someone running a giant clawed machine dropped tangles of rebar into an open railcar. There were tongue-and-groove boards four inches thick in careful piles—the subfloor, heart pine, good for three millings for fancy lake houses. And the scrap metal was bound across the ocean to the smelters in China.

  Where had the smokestack stood? We couldn’t say, nor find any sense of scale. The only everyday things I could latch onto were a busted office chair and a plastic Gatorade bottle. “I wish we could have found something like a bobbin,” Brad said, “or a cotton-bale tag, something textile-related.” But we were too late—all of that would have been buried by the wrecking ball.

  I found a handle from a coffee cup and dropped it in my pocket. Pigeons wheeled around the north wall. Behind us, the kids muttered on the front porch. Rusty nails stuck up from popped-out planks, and bricks from the inside walls, painted Sanitary Green long ago, glowed in the mellow light. What would become of the huge poplar beams that had borne the weight of everything? It was past five on a Friday, and the man in the Bobcat took a last turn around the lot. I turned to David and Brad and said, “Does this not feel like the end times to you?” A train slid by, headed into downtown and going slow. “The end of something.”