To Make My Bread by Grace Lumpkin

Author:Grace Lumpkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590774373
Publisher: M. Evans & Company

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

IT was just daylight. Emma hesitated on the walk, while the people hurrying into the mill passed around her and Ora and Frank as they stood together. The people entering the door of the mill seemed to Emma as if they were corn being fed into a hopper to be ground up.

Emma saw herself going in and coming out crushed and different from what she had been.

In the mountains she had thought of round silver dollars dropping into her lap, and of buying good food and fine things in the stores. But the people she had seen did not look as if they were used to many dollars. The women looked anxious about the mouth and fearful of something, and the men walked doggedly as if this was something they had to do, and they were going to get it done, simply for that reason. The young children in the pale early morning light showed up sad and pinched about the face, and thin in their bodies. Emma made up her mind further, looking at them, that Bonnie and John and Ora’s young should go to school.

But she would not let them make her give up the thoughts she had had of the promised land. She said to herself, that she, Emma McClure, could make money if she tried hard enough. If she worked hard and gave the best she had to the mill, in some fine way she would be recompensed. Perhaps all these people had failed to give their best. Perhaps they were lazy.

“I’ll work hard and show them what I can do,” Emma thought. She started forward just as Ora was about to touch her on the arm and wake her from that dreaming state that Ora knew so well as part of Emma. As they went through the door they heard the whistle blow.

Frank was to find the finishing room where he was to work as a beam hauler. Ora and Emma were spoolers. The finishing room was on the first floor. They left Frank there and walked up the stairs to the place where they were told to find the spool room. Emma found it hard to get up the stairs, for her knees had givenway with the sound of the whistle so close. Ora stepped hard on the stairs, but it did little good, for the sounds in the mill kept her from getting any confidence from her own firm steps.

They stood in the doorway of the spool room, quite alone, not knowing which way to turn. Here the floor shook to the machines. This rumble and shake was as different from the throb outside as the sound of a stream when there is little water is different from the sound when the stream is fed by snows and becomes a torrent coming down the mountain.

A man came up to them. “Are you the new spool hands?” he asked. Ora nodded.

“Come this way,” he said and led them between frames filled with long rows of spools and bobbins.

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