The language, culture of the mill 11/1/2009 11:16 PM By GENE OWENS Columnist
When I identify myself these days as an "old linthead," I usually have to explain myself.
A linthead, as my compatriots in the Valley know, is the mill-village cousin of a redneck.
John Kincaid Sr. of Reidsville, N.C., identified himself as a linthead in a letter he wrote me a while back. I'm going to spend a column or two talking about lintheads, their language and their culture.
I could tell right off that Kincaid was a genuine linthead. He said he was a spinning-room roping hanger. Had he been educated at Clemson or North Carolina State, instead of in the lint-filled environment of a spinning room, he would have called it "roving." Roping is produced in the card room, which takes all the trash out of the fiber, forms it into rope-like strands, then sends it to the spinning room to be twisted into yarn for the looms. "Roving" is the big-shot word for the stuff. We lintheads call it "roping," because it looks like ropes of cotton.
I used to lay up roping, too. I was a 16-year-old linthead working as a sweeper in the Vaucluse Mill's spinning room, trying to lay aside a little nest egg for college. I weighed 111 pounds at the time and probably sweated off a couple of pounds every night on the 4-to-midnight shift. Occasionally, when there was a shortage of roping hands, I would be promoted to the roping job. To keep up with the spinners' demand for roping, I had to lift a couple of bobbins at a time, grasping their thick ends between my fingers and swinging them up to the racks atop the spinning frames. After eight hours of laying up roping, my fingers would be swollen.
Mill hands eagerly awaited the arrival of the dope wagon, a lunch cart wheeled through the mill and dispensing hot dogs, Moon Pies and Coca-Cola in 6-ounce bottles. To the mill hand, "Coca-Cola" was a term as hifalutin as "roving." To them, the soft drink was either a "Co-Cola" or a "dope." They were called "dopes" because, at least in their earlier days, they actually contained extracts of coca, the raw material for cocaine. But mill hands were not consumers of cocaine in any of its potent forms. Their drug of choice was the headache powder - Stanback, Goody's or BC. They would open the little cellophane packet that contained the powder, tap it onto the tongue and wash it down with a Co-Cola.
The water house was the social center of the mill. "Water house" was the mill hands' name for the bathroom. That's where they would go to eat their lunch, chew their tobacco, dip their snuff and exchange gossip.
Kincaid thinks doffing was the hardest job in the mill. It may have been, but I think of doffers as the cowboys of the spinning room. Their job was to go up and down the rows of spindles, snatching off the full bobbins with one hand and slapping on empty bobbins with the other. A good doffer's hands would move faster than the eye could follow.
Doffing was hard, but it had its plus side. A good doffer could finish a round and have time left before the bobbins were full and ready for doffing again. I know of one North Carolina mill where the doffers would go frog gigging between rounds. During watermelon season, they would raid nearby fields and bring back ripe melons to share with the spinners.
The worst part of my job as a sweeper was "dragging out." A sweeper constantly swept up and down the alleys between the spinning frames, dumping the lint in burlap bags. I usually used two straw brooms of the type Mama had at home. With a broom in each hand, I would use them like a snow plow. I preferred the brooms to the mop-like contraption the mill provided. It used a scissors-like movement to gather the lint.
Sweeping was a constant process, because the lint would cover the floor about as fast as you could sweep it up. About twice a night, I would have to run the broom under each frame and "drag out" the accumulated lint.
It was at "blow-off" time that the linthead especially lived up to his (or her) name. Men with air hoses would walk through the mill, blowing the lint off ceiling and fixtures and creating a white blizzard. It was always frustrating to me to finish dragging out only to have the blow-off hand pile up another harvest of lint.
Working in this blizzard, of course, meant that you collected a head full of lint. At the end of a shift, we would use air hoses to blow the lint from our clothes and hair. We rarely got all the lint. You may think my hair is gray, but I'm pretty sure a lot of that gray is residual lint.
The mill hands spun their share of tall tales as well as yarn. Kincaid tells about a coworker named George who doffed about a third of the spinning frames in his mill.
"He was continually running and sweating," he said. "At the end of a week of sweat, his overalls were white. He would hang them on a nail in the bathroom [water house?] and change into his dry clothes each day as he finished work. One Friday, before starting to work, he called me into the bathroom and showed me that those white, stiff overalls could stand up in the corner by themselves. I'm not kidding. I saw them with my own eyes."
John continued: "You could always know where George was in the mill unless your olfactory nerves were out of order."
We believe you, John.
Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson, SC 29625, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.
Gene Owens is a retired newspaper editor and columnist who graduated from Graniteville High School and now lives in Anderson.
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Comment Title:
I wore holes in the ends of my thumb and index finger while learning to put up ends. But I never knew I had so many fingers until I learned to draw down ends and lay them out.
Posted by: On: 11/3/2009
Comment Title:
Been there, done that ... slung plenty of cheese around, too. Loved every minute of it. Why are the memories of such hard, back-breaking work so sweet?
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