Today I finished Rick Bragg’s nonfiction book, The Most They Ever Had, which is about cotton mill workers in northeast Alabama in the 20th century. The book is a series of vignettes that include stories of mill life. It takes you on a journey through working conditions before and after textile workers’ unions existed. I quite liked this book, but mostly for personal reasons. One reason is that it reminds me of the small Georgia town I grew up in–Commerce, GA (pop. approx. 6,000). We had an old cotton mill there called Harmony Grove Mill. It shut down somewhere near the century’s end. We also had another cotton mill in Jefferson, Georgia, the town where I attended high school. My mother’s brother, Toby, lost two fingers working in the Jefferson mill, and my oldest brother worked there one summer when he came home from college. Both my parents were poultry plant workers, but they picked cotton when they were growing up back in the ’50s and ’60s.
The other thing I like about Bragg’s book is that he reads the audio version himself. At times throughout, his voice catches ever so slightly, as if he’s struggling to choke back tears. He’s writing not just the personal histories of the mill workers he’s interviewed, but his own family history. His brother worked in an Alabama textile mill before it shut down. His mother picked cotton for years. Bragg has taken his own personal history and combined it with the histories of others, and added a bit of research to create something akin to a patchwork quilt.
Bragg’s book is written with nostalgia, which I’m not quite sure makes any sense. Why be nostalgic for a cotton mill? The pay was low. The job was often dangerous. And yet the book calls it the most they ever had. It reminds me a little of how some Southerners are nostalgic for the old South–a land of 90+ heat with no air conditioning, thick cotton fields, and race prejudice. Yet, sometimes when you hear an old Southerner speak of those days they will smile. I guess we all tend to romanticize childhood, regardless of what type of childhood it was.
My mother will often listen to audiobooks. When I first suggested The Most They Ever Had a few years back, she said it was too sad for her to finish reading it. I put it away myself without reading it because I was judging it based on her reading preferences. My mother hardly turns away from a sad book, so if she couldn’t finish it I didn’t think I’d be able to either. Still, I’m glad that I went back and finished listening to this one.
Monic Ductan 