The Most They Ever Had

Rick Bragg, The Most They Ever Had (Blackstone Audio, 2009).

Several years ago I listened to the unabridged audio version of this book read by the author, Rick Bragg.  For some reason, I never wrote a review of it at the time.  I recently re-listened to the book and highly recommend it.  I am sure the written copy is also excellent (I am a big fan of Rick Bragg’s writings), but with the audio version you can hear Rick Bragg “sing” the lyrics of his prose.  This book celebrates the life of hard working men and women who worked in the cotton mills of the American South.  It has been decades since I read James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was accompanied with Walker Evan’s photographs of the down and out during the Depression.  I do remember that Agee recommended his book be read aloud (I didn’t do it), but there is something about the way working people use language, that both Bragg and Agee captures, which is enhanced when audible. 

The Most They Ever Had is a tribute, a love story, to the working men and woman (and even children) in the Southern cotton mills that have mostly closed.  Bragg tells the story through the mill in Jacksonville, Alabama.  His brother worked in that huge brick building where the machines rumbled as they turned cotton into thread.   Bragg describes the building as “living” and it often consumed who worked behind its walls.  The mill ran for over a hundred years and continued on long after many other mills in neighboring communities shut down. 

Bragg presents the mill as a savior to the hill people who struggled to feed their families.  The wages were low, “but it was still more than they ever had.”  It was a regular paycheck, that was gone as soon as it arrived, but allowed people to get by.  In time, the mill became safer and children were no longer desired for their nimble fingers that sometimes were lost in the machines.  Wages rose as well as benefits.  People owned their own small homes or trailers instead of living in company housing.  And then, in 2001, after a century of operations and families that had sent generations into the mill, it closed for good.

Through extensive interviews, Bragg captures the heart of the workers at the mills.  We’re told of the excitement on Saturday afternoon baseball games in which they played company teams from other mills.  We’re told of the man who played the guitar in such an incredible way that he was invited to go to the Grand Ole Opry but wouldn’t because he couldn’t miss work.  He tells the story of soldiers from the mill who head off to war and how one, when he would dream of home, would think of the smokestack that was so high he was never lost when at home for he could always look up and find the stack.  And then there is the eccentric Old Man Greenleaf, who managed the mill for years and was hung in effigy during the labor troubles of the 1930s when the workers went on strike because he wouldn’t pay the new national minimum wage.  And there are the stories of brown lung and the people who lost their capacity to breath due to accumulating cotton dust in their lungs.  In telling these stories of people who were defined by their ability to work hard, Bragg has given voice to people who could easily be forgotten.  “It is rich people who live on in biographies; working people live on in a ledger,” Bragg notes.   But in this book, working people move out of the ledger of how many spools were spun and a part of their lives live on.  I am thankful to Bragg for the stories.