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945 Case St.
West Durham, N. C.
July 7, 1938
I. L. M.
THE HAITHCOCKS
Down in Monkey Bottoms in a small four -room house
there lives a family of four women, two men, and four
children. The house in which they live is typical of
the houses in this section of the mill village. Monkey
Bottoms begins with a washed-out, hilly road, flanked
on one side by closely -placed and disorderly -looking
houses and on the other by a jumbled growth of hedge,
scrubby trees, and briars. The road leads down into,a
bottom and meets at right angles another road of like
kind. The houses, of the second road, all located on
its right side, maintain the same unlikely appearance.
These two roads with their houses comprise Monkey
Bottoms.
In the particular house already mentioned Haitb-
cocks, Ways, Fosters, and Piners live in dreary
confusion. One small room into which two beds are
crowded serves in the daytime as a place for tagging
tobacco sacks. The little available floor place is
littered with strings and tags. Freida Haithcock and
Hulda Foster sit in this room hours at a time, both
fortified by a generous duantity of snuff, tagging
the tiny sacks and dreaming of the day when they will
again have a job in the mill. Together they share a
tin can spittoon which is obligingly shifted from one
to the other as the need arises. Flies :imam thickly
about the poorly screened house and hunt out the bread
crumbs scattered by the three oldest children.
The walls give one the impression that some member
of the mixed family has made calendar collecting a
pastime. Over the mantelpiece enlarged pictures of
departed relatives hang crookedly against the wall. On
the mantelpiece, the central feature is a large picture
entitled "Christ in Gethsemane Praying." On one side
of the picture stands a blue and silver tinselled
combination with the words, "Hook of Life; Is My Name
Written There," and on the other, a simply framed
assurance, "Jesus Never Fails."
This household grew around four of Perry Haithcocks,
daughters, three of whom are now living. Perry, a tenant
farmer, was the father of ten children. Their life on
the farm was dull and hard and empty of promise. Perry
felt that the cotton mill offered his family a slightly
better chance than the farm had ever given. He took
his ten children to the mill, and as soon as it would
have them he put them to work. Of this crowd none went
further than the third grade in school.
The youngest of the Haithcocks, Clara, is now
twenty—five. It fell to her lot after her mother's
death to stay at home and keep house. When the time
arrived for her to go to work there was no job for her.
Now a slovenly and disgruntled person, she stays on with
the three of her sisters whom circumstances have kept
together.
The daughter second to the youngest married Evart
Piner and they began housekeeping in Monkey Bottoms.
She died at the birth of her first baby, and soon after
her death, not ouite a year ago, her sister, Effie Way,
with her husband and three children came to Evart Piner's
house to live. The mill at which they worked had closed
with no prospects of reopening in the near future and
they hoped to secure work in Durham.
After weeks of waiting Effie was given a job and
she now makes el6 a week. Her husband Tom has not
found work yet and his health is such that it is problem—
atical whether he will ever hold a job again. Kidney
trouble, high blood pressure, and asthma, make it
necessary for him to go to the doctor two or three times
monthly. Effie comes home from the mill tired and
irritable and she ouarrels with her children so much
that they have learned to treat with contempt the threats
she makes against them.
The fourth sister, Freida, had been living with
the Piners before the Ways moved in. Freida has had
pneumonia three times and typhoid fever twice. At
thirty-six she sits like an old woman, stooped and sallow
and wrinkled, as she tags the sacks for which she receives
weekly a dollar and a half. Up until a year ago she was
a spinner in the mill and drew $15.98 a week. Her health
became so bad that she was forced to give up her job.
Each time when she goes back now to ask the superinten
dent to reinstate her he tells her that he is unable to
make a place for her. Should he give her work it is
doubtful that she could keep it, for she still goes
twice a week to Watts Hospital to receive treatment.
Evart Piner, the only member of the household
except Effie Way who is working, makes fourteen dollars
a week. Out of that he pays board to his sisters-in-law
for himself and young baby.
Besides the three sisters Effie Way, Clara and
Freida Haithcock, the two brothers-in-law, Clarence
Way and Evart Piner, the three Way children and the
Piner baby, there is in the same house Hulda Foster.
Hulda was left an orphan at fifteen and she came
to live with her neighbors, the Haithcocks. One senses
in a little while that to Hulda the household owes
whatever semblance of order there may be. At ten she
went to work in the Belmont mills and there the rest
-5-.
of her childhood was spent. She tells you how glad she
was as a little girl to hear the six o'clock mill whistle
in the afternoons because it meant that as soon as she
had eaten supper her playtime would begin. The hours
from six -thirty until eight -thirty were her own. Tired
as she might be from her ten hours of work she was not
too tired to join the other children of the neighborhood
in their games. As she grew out of childhood there was
no form of recreation to take the place of those play
hours. The sound of the mill became the one rhythm to
which her life was attuned. She says that ever since
she has been without a job she has missed the hum of
machinery almost as much as she has missed the money
with which to buy her food.
Hulda lost her job when the Haw River mill closed.
She was then living with the Ways and she moved with
them to Durham. A good spinner and a hard worker, she
had high hopes of securing a job. A year of unemploy-
ment has dimmed her hopes somewhat, but hardship has
not yet made her bitter. She sits there, unlettered
but not unintelligent, tagging tobacco sacks, while
with a quiet concentration she prays for the one thing
life has yet given her work.
Even though Hulda is unable to contribute financial-
ly to this confused family, one feels that she gives to
it something which keeps it from sinking lower than its
present depth. There is quiet humor in her eyes as
she says "Yes, we eat beans and potatoes and hardboiled
cabbage mostly. Most cotton mill folks is a fool about
beans but here in this family they aint one of us that
cabbage agrees with." She talks on in an effort to
keep you from noticing too much the loud, coarse voice
of Effie Way who, in the adjoining room, is quarreling
with her children. El lie's wrangling makes the house
seem dirtier and more confused than before. Hulda and
Freida both look at the tin can spittoon and Hulda
oblingingly passes it to Freida. After a while Freida
speaks in a sickly, whining voice. "Time was when the
mill was always needin, hands and a job was no trouble
atall to git." Awed a little by the sound of her own
voice she looks at Hulda who nods her head in support.
In a manner more decisive than Freida's Hulda reaches
her hand for another sack.