The Twelve-Mile Straight

It was 1901, just after the Wilsons had built the mill and moved from the farm into town. George Wilson and his brothers had inherited a hill of money from an uncle in the railroad business. In a few years George had grown bored of planting, of buying up land all over Cotton County. He got it into his head to buy rights to the Creek River at the edge of town, where the river and the Straight and the new railroad converged. He borrowed more money from his brothers in north Georgia, one in the turpentine business, another in sawmills. He found builders and then mill hands in the same way, by riding his horse from farm to farm. He needed Juke and Juke’s father at the crossroads farm, but he pulled whole families from cropper cabins five counties around. On the train from Marietta, George’s brother sent cars full of farmers’ daughters in search of work. He sent the sheriff around to the Fourth Quarter to find loose-foot Negroes. The sheriff offered them the chain gang or the picker room. They chose the picker room. All of Florence was mighty proud of that mill.

Juke wanted to see it himself. So, after fetching the three sacks of corn seed, he tied the mule and its cart to a gum tree by the road and walked down to the river to wait for String to walk home from school. It was springtime, the wiregrass along the river wild with cornflower. Juke kicked off his shoes to chase tadpoles. When String came along the railroad and saw him, he let out a yelp of joy. “What in Hades you doing out here?”

The Wilsons’ new house was the biggest house Juke had ever gotten close to, with a porch that wrapped around three sides. From the front porch you could see the cotton mill straight down the hill, three stories of bricks and as long as a freight train. The Creek River rushed rapid out of the woods there, feeding into the new dam that formed a pond at the head of the mill. To the east you could see the three-acre garden Parthenia Wilson had planted for the mill families, and Lefty, still tied to the tree by the Straight. To the west you could see the mill village, where the mill families lived, just a dozen clapboard bungalows then and more rising before Juke’s eyes, houses no bigger than the shacks on the farm, the spaces between them no bigger than each house. And the Wilsons owned all of it. At ten years old, John Jesup—he was not yet called Juke—had traveled no farther than Macon, hopping the freight train with String and his cousins, and that city, with its smokestacks and street trolleys and brick-paved block after block, had left him feeling nauseous with longing and homesickness and the penny candy String’s cousins had stolen from the sweets shop, though they had plenty of pennies in their pockets. There was so much to see he’d had to close his eyes.

That was how Juke felt on the porch of String Wilson’s new house. He wanted, and he didn’t want to want.

String seemed to know not to invite Juke inside. He left his school satchel on the porch and snuck Juke into the mill through the picker room in the basement, where colored men were opening bales, standing up to their knees in clouds of cotton. They paid the boys no mind.

“Looks like they in Heaven,” Juke said to String as they passed through.

String laughed. “This here Heaven is the onliest place you’ll find darkies in the mill. We won’t hire them for nothing more.” Up a narrow staircase, they came to the shop floor, the biggest room Juke had ever been in. A wall of windows, tall as silos, stretched from his elbow all the way up to the ceiling, and down the room, laid out like pews, was row after row of spinning machines, a girl standing at each one. “Look like church,” said Juke.

String laughed again. “If there was only girls.”

“That’s the church for me,” said Juke. “Bout as hot as church too.” He took off his cap and fanned himself with it.

“We hire girls for spinners, mostly. Ain’t nothing to it.” String kept his voice low, and over the sound of the machines, Juke hardly heard him. “Most of the work boys do in the spinning room is sweeping.”

“You sound like you the boss already, tombout all this hiring you doing.”

“My daddy’s learning me on the floor.” String fetched a couple of push brooms hanging from the wall and handed one to Juke. “You know how to sweep?”

“I live on your daddy’s farm, don’t I?”

“Just push it around while we walk about, and Mr. Richard won’t give us no trouble.”

Juke put his cap back on his head and did so, following String down the line of machines. The women were studying so hard on their work that they barely raised their heads at the boys. They were too young to be called women, too tall to be called girls. The spinners all wore their hair in the same high, heavy pile, like a round loaf of bread on top of each of their heads, and their hair was dusted with the flour that was cotton lint, cotton everywhere, down their dresses, in the air, catching in Juke’s broom, so much cotton that he felt he might sneeze, and then he did.

As he passed a girl at her machine, she looked up at him. This one was a girl, no bigger than Juke. She wore her yellow hair like a girl’s, in a braid down her back, with a red satin bow hanging limp at the end of it. She wore a calico dress to her chin and a dirty apron and no shoes on her dirty feet. “God bless you,” she said to Juke, and then returned her eyes to her work.

“Thank you kindly,” said Juke, leaning on his broom. Like him, the girl had freckles, and he went near cross-eyed staring at them. “Ain’t you hot in here,” he asked, “standing at that machine all day?”

“Reckon we all hot,” said the girl, not looking up.

“Y’all oughta open the window and let in some air.”

“Daddy won’t let them,” String cut in. “When the breeze comes in it musses up the threads.”

“That so?” said Juke. He took his cap off again and wiped his brow with it. Already he was damp with sweat. “How old are you?” he asked, yelling over the whirr of her machine.

The girl said she was twelve, and though Juke was ten he said he was too. He hadn’t thought to ask the girl her name, but as they pushed their brooms into the weaving room, String told Juke it was Jessa. She’d come to the mill on the train from up near Atlanta, and she had no family but the one she boarded with in the mill village. “And she ain’t no twelve years old,” String said, “no more than we are. Twelve’s the youngest we’re supposed to hire.”

He left only with her name. Jessa, Jessa, Jessa. The sun was setting over the mill village when Juke emerged from the mill. The mill hands, finishing the second shift, were making their way to their porches. Juke didn’t yet know if he loved the mill or hated it. His stomach was empty and he hoped String would ask him to stay for supper but he didn’t. Juke’s eyes adjusted to the dusk, the open air. He’d forgotten the mule, he’d forgotten its name, he’d nearly forgotten his own legs and how to use them. He was both relieved and panicked to see him there—Lefty—like a baby shocked to tears when its mother returns to a room. “Good boy, Lefty. There you are. Did you think I left you, Lefty boy?” There was Lefty, there was the cart, but inside it were only two bags of corn—one, two—and Juke had bought three. That much he knew.

His daddy whipped him good, of course. It was darker than pitch when Juke and Lefty finally returned to the farm, and his daddy came out of the house and hauled Juke down from the mule. Juke tried to explain, but his daddy ripped a branch from the chinaberry tree and right there under it by the light of his lantern switched his behind. Juke’s father was angry about the stolen seed, but he was angrier that Juke had gone to the mill. “That ain’t the place for you,” he said, panting, after Juke was good and whipped. “Ain’t this house enough?” He couldn’t feel his behind but he could feel the wet warmth on his legs and hoped he hadn’t messed himself. He was relieved to see it was blood.

Come August, Juke took Lefty to the mill once more. His sore behind had healed; enough time had passed that he was willing to risk another one. This time he didn’t see String, who was out riding freight cars with his cousins. But he took what he’d come for, a cart full of corn, sickled down from the garden in broad daylight, not near as much corn grown from a sack of seed, but it would have to do. Juke Jesup had a long memory, long as the shadows laid across the Twelve-Mile Straight on the ride home. He closed his eyes, feeling the sun press against his lids, remembering the tremor of the train as it made its way from Macon to Florence, the stolen butterscotch on his tongue, the taste of the city’s sickly sweetness.