Free The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg

knowing that there was a whole wash tub full of banana puddin’ waiting for them at home. “I could see ’em,” said Homer, an old man now. “I could see ’em plain.”
    He dreamed it and daydreamed it. Homesickness settled hard in that death and mud.
    His sister, Lola Mae, wrote him letters, but it was his Momma’s voice in his head when he opened them, because he knew it was her thoughts. “Momma’d never been to school a day in her life, so Lola Mae wrote ’em for her…I guess they wrote me ever’ day.” It was the story of the village they wrote him, who was sick, who died, who had gone to war, who had been hurt in the machines. He read them a thousand times, folded and re-folded them until the creases, black edged from the battlefield grime on his hands, finally cut the paper in two.
    “I never had been nowhere. Well, I might’ve been to Birmingham. All my life, that smokestack at the mill was our landmark. As long as I could see it, I knew I wasn’t lost. It was hard to see, from over yonder.”
    ___
    He can no longer hear well, his eardrums pounded by the big guns he manned to fight the German with the Big Red One, and his eyes, still bright behind his bifocals, are weaker now. But his memories are sharp and glittering, like pieces from a broken mirror. He was born on October 23, 1924, his mother and father among the first of the mountain people to seek salvation in a cotton mill, discover its disappointments, and yet remain, because there was nowhere else to go and nothing to reclaim. He ran its streets as a boy and walks them now in a deliberate, careful stride, and the ghosts in every house still speak to him, softly, as he passes by.
    “We could’ve all run away,” said Homer.
    Then he smiles.
    “I guess,” he said, “we’d a just wound up in another mill.”
    The draft took some of the best of them, across generations, and people flew flags from the little houses and put cardboard stars in their windows, if they had a boy at war. They buried them under those flags, war after war, but even if you came home whole, to this place, the machines and lint would finish the job the war began. The trick, here, was to survive the bullets, bayonets, and bombs, then survive the homecoming, and endure the peace.
    ___
    His daddy soaked up five bullets before he ever went to his war.
    Now that’s a man for you, the people here always said.
    Homer’s father grew up in the Georgia mountains, and went to work in the mill in ’15 or ’16, before the outbreak of World War I, before he married Bertha. On a weekend night in ’17, a night when the whole village seem splashed with moonshine, he got into an argument with a Jacksonville policeman, shot him, and was wounded five times himself.
    “It was a case of mistaken identity,” is all Homer will say.
    John Barnwell recovered just in time for the draft in ’18. He fought his way across the Argonne Forest with the rest of the 42nd, the vaunted Rainbow Division, the mustard gas leaching into his lungs. But even though the German machine guns cut the trees to stumps and killed every living thing around him, he was never shot again. He took his war wound home with him deep inside his chest, to work the same job in the same smothering mill.
    “They put an ad in the paper that said, ‘Good working conditions,’ but you know how that is,” said Homer.
    The first generation worked a ten-hour shift, Monday through Friday, and a half a day on Saturday, for about a nickel an hour, about $2.50 for the fifty-five-hour week. They were paid twice a month, always on the weekend. Children worked for a fraction, as little as a fifth of a grownup’s pay.
    “Didn’t nobody get nothin’ ahead,” Homer said, of all of them. “I can still see their faces, see the hurt in them. Them people suffered, boy. But all people could think of was gettin’ on.”
    They are all gone, that first generation, used-up shells buried in the red clay, lungs full of lint.
    If that were