The Iron Puddler Part 9

I had steadily risen from the "Bucket of Blood," through the "Greasy Spoon" to a seat at the cherished "Pie" table. Here the cups were so thin that you couldn't break a man's head with them. I was steadily rising in the social world.

CHAPTER XXVIII. CAUGHT IN A SOUTHERN PEONAGE CAMP

It was while I was in Birmingham that the industrial depression reached rock bottom. In the depth of this industrial paralysis the iron workers of Birmingham struck for better pay. I, with a train load of other strikers, went to Louisiana and the whole bunch of us were practically forced into peonage. It was a case of "out of the frying pan into the fire." We had been saying that the mill owners had driven us "into slavery," for they had made us work under bad conditions; but after a month in a peon camp, deep in the swamps of Louisiana, we knew more about slavery than we did before. And we knew that work in the rolling mills, bad as it was, was better than forced labor without pay. To-day when I hear orators rolling out the word "slavery" in connection with American wages and working conditions, I have to laugh. For any man who has ever had a taste of peonage, to say nothing of slavery, knows that the wage system is not real slavery; it's not the genuine, lash-driven, bloodhound-hunted, swamp-sick African slavery. None is genuine without Simon Legree and the Louisiana bloodhounds. The silk-socked wage slave, toiling eight hours for six dollars, is not the genuine old New Orleans mola.s.ses slave. He may carry a band and give a daily street parade, but if he's not accompanied by Simon Legree and the bloodhounds, he is not a genuine Uncle Tom, his slavery is less than skin deep. You can't fool me. I know what real slavery is. I know as much about slavery as the man that made it. He's the guy that taught me. I worked under Simon Legree in Louisiana.

On the way to New Orleans we paused at a siding, and a native asked me, "Who are all them men, and which way are they goin'?"

I told him "which way" we were going, and that we were needing jobs. He replied:

"You-all are comin' down hyah now looking for food and work. In '65 you was down hyah lookin' fo' blood!"

When we reached the great city on the Mississippi, we scattered over the town looking for jobs. I saw a pile of coal in the street before a boarding-house. I asked for the job of carrying in the coal. There were two tons of it. I toted it in and was paid a dollar. New Orleans was a popular winter resort where northerners came to escape the severe cold of the North Atlantic States. I was given the job of yard-man in this boarding-house. I carried in groceries, peeled potatoes, scrubbed the kitchen floor and built fires each evening in the guests' rooms. Each room had a grate, and I carried up kindling and coal for all of them.

For this work I received a dollar a day, with two meals (dinner and supper) and was permitted to carry away from the kitchen all the cooked food that remained after the guests had eaten. This privilege had grown out of the custom of the colored help in the South having their "man"

to feed. I had several men to feed. My "gang" was still looking for work and not finding any. Times were desperate. For five cents a man could get a gla.s.s of beer and floor room to sleep on in a lodging-house for homeless men. This was called a "Five Cent Flop" house. My pals were not able at times to raise the five cents a day to buy sleeping quarters. It was late fall and too cold to sleep in the "jungle" down by the levee.

The poor fellows were able to stave off starvation by visiting various free lunches during the day. Every night I arrived with my dollar, and that meant beer and beds for a score. I also brought along a flour sack half full of biscuits, cold pancakes, corn bread, chicken necks and wings and sc.r.a.ps of roasts and steaks. These hungry men, with their schooners of beer, made a feast of these sc.r.a.ps. My loyalty in coming every night and giving them everything I could sc.r.a.pe together touched them deeply. They regarded me as deserving special honor, and while they believed in democracy as a general proposition, they voted that it would be carrying equality too far if they permitted me to get no more out of my work than all the rest got. So they decided that I was to have a fifteen-cent bed each night instead of a five-cent flop with the rest of them. And I was a.s.signed to the royal suite of that flop house, which consisted of a cot with a mosquito bar over it.

At this time they were holding "kangaroo" court in the New Orleans jail. Every vagrant picked up by the police was tried and sentenced and s.h.i.+pped out to a chain-gang camp. Nearly every man tried was convicted.

And there were plenty of camp bosses ready to "buy" every vagrant the officers could run in. My bunch down at the flop house was in deadly terror of being "kangarooed" and sent to a peon camp in the rice swamps.

One day when I was renewing the fuel in the room of a Mrs. Hubbard from Pittsburgh, I found no one in the apartment and Mrs. Hubbard's pearls and other jewels lying on the dresser. Immediately I was terrified with thought of the kangaroo court. I knew that the jewels were valued at several thousands of dollars. If I went away some one else might come into the room and possibly steal the jewels, for they were lying in plain sight and were valuable enough to tempt a weak-willed person. I sounded an alarm and stayed in the doorway. I refused to leave the room until Mrs. Hubbard returned and counted her valuables.

She found them all there and thanked me for guarding them. She said it was by an oversight that she had gone away without locking up her treasures. She asked me how she should reward me. I told her that I was already rewarded, for I had guarded her jewels in order to protect myself from being suspected of their theft and so kangarooed into a slave-camp.

But in spite of all my precautions, I landed there after all. The gang down at the flop house was dazzled by an employment agent, who offered to s.h.i.+p them out into the rice country to work on the levee for a dollar a day and cakes. The men were wild for a square meal and the feel of a dollar in their jeans. So they all s.h.i.+pped out to the river levee and I went along with the gang.

As our train rattled over the trestles and through the cypress swamps the desperate iron workers were singing:

"We'll work a hundred days, And we'll get a hundred dollars, And then go North, And all be rich and happy!"

When we reached the d.y.k.e-building camp I learned how ignorant I really was. I could not do the things the older men could. I was young and familiar only with the tools of an iron puddler. The other men were ten years older and had acquired skill in handling mule-teams and swinging an ax. They saw I couldn't do anything, so they appointed me water carrier. The employing boss was what is now called hard-boiled. He was a Cuban, with the face of a cutthroat. Doubtless he was the descendant of the Spanish-English buccaneers who used to prowl the Caribbean Sea and make headquarters at New Orleans. Beside this pirate ancestry I'll bet he was a direct descendant of Simon Legree. He suspected that I couldn't do much in a dyking camp, so he swarmed down on me the second week I was there and ordered me to quit the water-carrying job and handle a mule team and a sc.r.a.per. I saw death put an arm around my neck right then and there. But I wouldn't confess that I couldn't drive a team.

I put the lines over my head, said "Go 'long" as I had heard other muleteers say, and, grasping the handles of the sc.r.a.per, I scooped up a slip load of clay. My arms were strong and this was no trick at all. But getting the load was not the whole game. The hardest part was to let go.

I guided the lines with one hand and steadied the sc.r.a.per with the other as I drove up on the dump. Then I heaved up on the handles, the sc.r.a.per turned over on its nose and dumped the load. But that isn't all it dumped. The mules shot ahead when the load was released, and the lines around my neck jerked me wrong side up. The handle of the sc.r.a.per hit me a stunning blow in the face and the whole contraption dragged over my body bruising me frightfully. I staggered to my feet with one eye blinded by the blood that flowed from a gash in my brow. Simon Legree cursed me handsomely and told me I was fired. I asked him where I would get my pay, and he told me he was paying me a compliment by letting me walk out of that camp alive. I went to the cook shack and washed the blood off my face. I was a pretty sick boy. The cook was a native and was kind to me.

"Boy, you're liable to get lockjaw from that cut," he said. "I'll put some of this horse liniment on it and it'll heal up." He then bandaged it with court-plaster.

"It's a long way back to New Orleans," the cook concluded. "And you might as well have something to keep your ribs from hitting together."

He cut off a couple of pounds of raw bacon and put it in my pocket together with a "bait" of Plowboy tobacco. And so I hit the road. When I came to the place where my pals were working, cutting willows along the levee, I told them of my plight.

"Never mind, boy," they said. "You go back to New Orleans and wait for us. After we've worked our hundred days to get a hundred dollars each, we will work a few days more to get a hundred dollars for you. Then we'll all go north and be rich together."

I began footing it thirty-five miles to the city. I decided, like Queen Isabella, to p.a.w.n my jewels to enable me to discover America again. I had an old ring and I met a darky who had a quarter. He got my ring.

After tramping all day I was exhausted. I came to a negro cabin and went in and offered the "mammy" a pound of bacon for a pound of corn pone. I further bargained to give the first half of my other pound of bacon if she'd cook the second half for me to eat. She cooked my share of the bacon and set it and the corn bread on the table. I ate heartily for a while, but after two or three slices of the bacon, I was fed up on it.

She hadn't cooked enough of the grease out of it. I began feeding this bacon to a pickininny who sat beside me.

"Man, don't give away your meat," the mammy said. I told her that I had had all I wanted. Then she said to the pickininny:

"Child, doan eat that meat. Save it foh you papa when he come home."

When I got into New Orleans the next morning, I traded my Plowboy tobacco for a bar of laundry soap. With my twenty-five cents I bought a cotton unders.h.i.+rt. Then I went into the "jungle" at Algiers, a town across the river from New Orleans, and built a fire in the jungle (a wooded place where hoboes camp) and heated some water in an old tin pail I found there. Then I took off all my clothes and threw my underwear away. A negro who stood watching me said:

"White man, are you throwing them clothes away?"

"I certainly am," I replied.

"Why, them underclothes is northern underclothes. Them's woolen clothes.

Them's the kind of underclothes I like."

"You wouldn't like that bunch of underclothes," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because if you look in the seams you will find something that is unseemly. I've been out in a levee camp."

"Hush mah mouf, white man," laughed the negro. "Them little things would never bother a Louisiana n.i.g.g.e.r. Why we have them things with us all the time. We just call 'em our little companions."

He picked up the garments and walked off proud and happy. I took my soap and warm water and scrubbed myself from crown to heel. I put my clothing in the pail with more soap and water and boiled the outfit thoroughly.

Then I went back to New Orleans and got my old job in the boarding-house. I saved all my money except my fifteen cents for the nightly flop. A month later my gang came roaring back from the peon camp. They had worked thirty days and had not got a cent. Slave-driver Legree had driven them out when they demanded a reckoning. They were lucky to escape with their lives, their cooties and their appet.i.tes.

Instead of financing me, I had to finance them again. They finally got cleaned up and we all went back to Birmingham, where the strike was over.

"Show us that spieler," they said, "who told us the wage system was the worst kind of slavery. If daily wages is slavery, G.o.d grant that they never set us free again."

CHAPTER XXIX. A SICK, EMACIATED SOCIAL SYSTEM

The hard times I have been describing were in the early nineties. The year before there had been a financial crash. n.o.body seemed to know what was the matter at the time, but it has since been learned that the hard times were the fruit of crop failures, if one can call failure fruit.

All over the world bad years had destroyed the harvests. This great loss of foodstuffs was exactly the same as if armies in war had ravaged the fields. Farmers had to borrow money to buy food. They had no other buying power. So trade languished, credit was strained, and finally came the financial collapse. It happened after the good crop years were returning. That's why the people could not understand it. Farmers were raising crops again, but labor was idle and could not buy bread.

The lesson is this, when commerce is starved down to a certain point, it goes to pieces. Then when the food comes it can not a.s.similate it. It is like a man who has been without food for thirty days. His muscles have disappeared, his organs have shrunk, he can not walk; he is only skin and bones. The disappearance of the muscles is like the disappearance of labor's jobs in hard times. The shrinkage of the vital organs is like the shrinkage of capital and values. When the starved man is faced with food he can not set in and eat a regular dinner. He must be fed on a teaspoonful of soup, and it is many months before his muscles come back, his organs regain their normal size and he is a well-fed man again. So it is with the industrial state. It can be starved by crop failures, by war waste or by labor slacking on the job. Anything that lessens the output of field and factory, whether it be heaven's drought or man's loafing, starves the economic state and starves all men in it. If crop failure should last long enough, as it does in China, millions of men would die. If war lasts long enough, as it did in Austria, millions of citizens must starve. If labor should try slacking, as it did in Russia, the economic state would starve to death and the workers die with it.

Men who have been through strikes and lockouts until they have been reduced to rags and hunger place no trust in the Russian theory that men can quit work and loaf their way to wealth. We loafed our way to hunger, misery and peonage. We saw that the whole world would come to our fate, if all should follow our example. Luckily we won our point, so we went back to work and helped feed the starved social state, and in a few years America was rich again. And America continued rich and fat until the World War wastage shrank her to skin and bones again. Much of her muscle has disappeared (1921: five million workers are idle) and she must be nursed back by big crops, and big output by labor before she will be strong enough to reabsorb into her system every muscle in America.

That's my belief. That's my gospel. I did not make this gospel. It is G.o.d's law and we can not alter it. If I were asked to write the BIBLE OF LABOR, this chapter would be the law and the prophets. And from these truths I would advise each man to write his own Ten Commandments.

CHAPTER x.x.x. BREAKING INTO THE TIN INDUSTRY

I decided to leave Birmingham as soon as my stomach had got used to regular meals and my pocket knew what real money felt like again.

The dry years had ended and once more the northern farms were yielding mammoth crops. But the country was so sick that it couldn't sit up and eat as it ought to. So the farmers were selling their crops at steadily falling prices. This drove some of them frantic. They couldn't pay interest on their mortgaged farms, and they were seeking to find "the way out" by issuing paper money, or money from some cheap metal with which they could repudiate their debts. Banks could not collect their loans, merchants could not get money for their goods, manufacturers were swamped by their pay-rolls and had to discharge their men. c.o.xey was raising a great army of idle men to march on Was.h.i.+ngton and demand that the government should feed and clothe the people.