[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

MARY THOMPSON:

… my mind. I just can't remember names. I tried to think the other day of some of the names at the company that I worked for, and it's hard to remember. Because it has been a good while ago. But I first came in 1933 and worked down here a few months, less than a year, and went back to Greenville, South Carolina. I went to Slater, South Carolina, and worked there a while, and then I went to Judson and worked there a while, and then went back to Slater. At that time it was Carter Manufacturing Company. And then I went to South Boston, Virginia, and stayed a while. Now I don't remember how long I stayed, because I would just stay till the job was caught up. That was Carter Manufacturing Company. Then I went to Alta Vista, Virginia, and worked there a while, and that was Burlington. And then I worked at Radford, Virginia, and that was Burlington, and went to Roanoke, Virginia. And it seems to me like that was Burlington. I ain't going to say for sure. And then I came back to South Carolina, and I went to Johnson City, Tennessee, and worked a while. Went back and worked at… What's that little place in South Carolina I worked? [Laughter] I can't think of the name of it. Out from [unknown], a little town. See, they-Greensbury sent me different places that was needing work. And then in the meantime I'd go back to Slater, that was owned by the Carter Company. And then I went to another place in South Carolina—I done forgot it—and I was raised in South Carolina. And then I came back down here to Highland Park.

JIM LELOUDIS:

And you came back to Charlotte in what year?

MARY THOMPSON:

I think it was about 1939.

JIM LELOUDIS:

So you did all that moving in six years.

MARY THOMPSON:

[Laughter] Yes. Then I stayed here a little over a year, and I went to Baltimore, Maryland, and stayed five years.

CARL THOMPSON:

That was during the War.

MARY THOMPSON:

And I worked at a chemical plant up there, the Chesapeake Bay Chemical Plant.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Why were you moving around so much?

MARY THOMPSON:

Mostly it was the work I did. I made patterns, and then they made the cloth like the pattern was made. After they got all the looms filled with the patterns, you see, they laid us off or either sent us somewhere else to work. If there was somebody else wanting work, they'd call. I was a… I guess you'd call grass widow or something. Anyway, I had a little girl, but she stayed at my mother's most of the time. Sometime I'd take her with me. And so I was free to go, and I could make more money like that, and I had a child to support. So that's the reason I went around, because I couldn't afford to lay up several weeks a month and had my child to support. So anywhere they wanted to send me or I found out there was a job, I went to and worked till they'd catch up, and then I'd go back somewhere else.

JIM LELOUDIS:

You said "they." Were you working with one company that had a number of plants?

MARY THOMPSON:

Not all the time. I worked for several companies. I worked for Burlington, I worked for Carter, and I worked down here at Cone. And then I worked at Bessemer City, and I forgot the name of that company. And then I worked another place in South Carolina.

CARL THOMPSON:

They sent you to Bimburg one time from down here, and you went down there and stayed.

MARY THOMPSON:

And then when I come back I worked down here a while, and then I went to Baltimore and went to work up there at a chemical plant. And I worked up there till sometime in 1945, and I came back here and worked here a while. Then me and him got married. And then I went to that Cone's at Pineville and worked after that. Then I worked at Bessemer City after that. But then I decided that this running around wasn't for married

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people, so I went and got me a job over here at, it was Southern Knitwear then, and was supervisor over there. And then after I quit there I was out a while and didn't work, and then I went to Schoatz [unclear] Manufacturing Company as supervisor over there, and stayed over there then till my health got bad. And I quit there on account of my health more than anything else, so I didn't work for a long time. Then I went to work at this hosiery mill over here—what was the name of it?—and I run the cafeteria on the second shift while.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Was it Knievel or Charlotte …

CARL THOMPSON:

Chadbourn.

MARY THOMPSON:

Chadbourn. And then I went and put in for my Social Security on disability, and I got it on account of my heart. So I haven't worked since.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Could you explain to me a little more what this job of setting up patterns was like?

MARY THOMPSON:

It was drawing patterns. They had frames, and they put these warps on the frame and had lots of threads to it and they put it over. Well, I had to draw them threads through the drop wires harness and reed. And then they were taken to the weave room. We went by a pattern, and the way we drawed it is the way the cloth come out. Like yours would be a stripe, and his'n would be a check. And I worked on fancy work most of the time. They have got plain work, but most of my work was always on fancy. And that's the reason I was more able to travel around and get jobs, because it took special drawing-in hands for the fancy on account of it's harder to do, and I had worked so much on it. And you made more money on it.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Didn't the mills have drawing-in hands of their own?

MARY THOMPSON:

They usually all of them had some, regular help, and then they'd get laid off sometime, but some of them had husbands and they didn't care. They'd draw their unemployment till they were called back to work. But the only one that I stayed with, I stayed with Slater about ten years. When I first started to work, I was at Poe Mill Manufacturing Company.

CARL THOMPSON:

That was at Greenville.

MARY THOMPSON:

I was just fourteen years old when I first started there and worked there in the summer, and then went back to school in the winter, and then worked again in the summer, and then got married.

JIM LELOUDIS:

I don't understand exactly why the labor was so sporadic. Why would they all of a sudden need a lot of drawing-in hands?

MARY THOMPSON:

Because they'd change patterns. They'd change the styles, just like everything else, you know; they always have changed different styles. And when they had to change styles, they had to draw a new pattern for it. They finally got draw-in machines for them. That's the reason there ain't no more of it now. There's still some. I've got a sister—I believe she's working at Poinsett now—but she's more of a plain drawing hand. And she's still working some, but she just works a while and they get caught up and lay her off. It's never been a fulltime job, that I know of, for anyone. I've worked as much as maybe a year or two and then get laid off, but that was very seldom for some people to run that far. But that's what we did, we made patterns, and then they'd run weave room. See, they'd tie them back behind the looms and just keep on running the same patterns till they changed styles, and then they'd have to be drawed again.

JIM LELOUDIS:

They'd all have to be done over again.

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes. You see, we had to draw by a draft that was made for us to draw threads, and there'd be from maybe a thousand ends in the whole pattern

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to maybe, I have drawn them twenty thousand. That'd be finer than your hair. But you see, it's just according to the styles it was then, and now, too, as far as that's concerned. The only thing is, they've got draw-in machines now that does most of it, what little there are. There ain't so much now; most of it now is knit and print. Back then there was lots of woven material. So that's the reason I was laid off so much.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Instead of printing the stripe, it would be woven in.

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes. You don't see too much woven material now. It was better then than it is now, I thought. They just kept making different kinds of patterns and had to have different things as styles come in. But all of that's about gone now. And what they do have, mostly, they've gotten machines to do it.

CARL THOMPSON:

Them draw-in machines would take care of a lot more hands. They could take one machine, and it'd take the place of maybe ten or twelve hands, what maybe ten or twelve could do. And it was a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot faster, too, put out more work.

MARY THOMPSON:

But I was born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina. I was borned up there in town, but I was raised there at Poe Mill.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Let's talk about your childhood some. What did your parents do?

MARY THOMPSON:

My father worked in the mill. My mother, till she got married, worked in the cotton mill. But she had seven children. [Laughter] You know, mothers didn't work then like they do now. After they started having a houseful of children, they had a job at home. So she didn't work after she got married. But my father worked in the mill. He worked at Camperdown, and then he went to Poe Mill and worked there in the machine shop. And he worked there until about 1928, and he went to Georgia and worked a while down there, but he didn't like it too well. He come back and

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went to Union Bleachery and worked up there several years. When he retired he was working at Poinsett.

CARL THOMPSON:

I think he was a mechanic in the machine shop.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Was he a fixer?

MARY THOMPSON:

He run all kind of things, but when he retired he was running a lathe. Before then he had a cancer on his hand and had to have his hand took off. And they fixed a clamp, and he could run the lathe, because he had always worked in a machine shop. He couldn't run his other jobs, so they put him on a lathe, and he run the lathe then till he retired. He was seventy-two when he retired.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Why did he move so much?

MARY THOMPSON:

Well, he didn't move so much. He stayed at Poe Mill from the time I was about five years old till I was about eighteen, I guess. And then he got a better job in Georgia. An uncle of mine knew about the job in Georgia and told him about it, and he went down there a while. And then he come back and went to Union Bleachery, and he worked there for several years. And then he went to Poinsett, and he was working there in 1945, and I forget what year he retired. He was seventy-two when he retired, but I forget how old he was then. But he worked there a good many years. But he didn't move too much, but it was always a better job, mostly. But the Union Bleachery got to where it hurt him, that dyeing stuff, you know, there, and so he got the job at Poinsett and stayed there then till he retired, until he was seventy-two years old.

JIM LELOUDIS:

What do you remember about your childhood? What things stand out in your mind?

MARY THOMPSON:

[Laughter] Well, there was a whole lot that was different than it is now with childhoods, I know, because we had to behave ourselves

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or we got punished, and we were raised to go to church. We didn't have any recreation, only what church put, out, because we wasn't allowed to go just anywhere. Some people may not have been as strict on their children, but my father and them did. Anything the church had to do, parties and all, we got to go to, but we wasn't allowed to go to dances. And our mother and father was strict; they were good, but they were strict. It's entirely different, the way it is now. And when I went to school, we had to do all of the washing and hang it out before we went to work in the morning, and come home and do all the ironing after we got home. Mama had a houseful of children. And we were made to work. I had to milk the cow every morning. We had a cow and a hog, and we lived right there in town. We still had the cow and hogs and chickens, and my job was to milk the cow every morning. And I've got up under a cow many a time when it was snowing [Laughter] and raining in the milk. Oh, it was all fun. I can look back now and say we wouldn't gripe about what we had to do; we was raised not to. And anyway, there wasn't no use in griping. The biggest thing I ever done, that I regretted mostly, was quitting school when I did, not finishing school, which I could have done. But parents then didn't make you go to school if you didn't want to. My daddy give us the opportunity; if we didn't want it, why, we had to go to work. But we had a happy childhood. We didn't have much, but we didn't know we was poor, so we were happy. [Laughter] But if it was a time like it is now, why, they'd be putting us on welfare, giving us some Food Stamps. At least I think they'd think we was on starvation [Laughter] . What clothes we got—we didn't even have no clothes much—my mother made them all. After we got big enough we made our own, but we never did have nothing but one dress for Sunday to go to church. Our Sunday clothes, you know, and then we had two dresses to wear to school. We wore one one week

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and one the next week. But we'd wear them a week at a time. But it was different than it is now, whole lots different. Maybe I'm wrong, but I really think we were better off than they are today. Children today get out and complain about nothing to do. Have to build parks for them so they can go smoke their grass and all and drink their liquor. We was always too tired. We didn't even have to think about being bored to death. We did get to go to parties, mostly church parties and sometime a friend's house, but they didn't have no dancing.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Why did your parents object to dancing so strongly?

MARY THOMPSON:

I don't know. That was just the way they were raised. You know, the Baptists used to be against dancing, and my mother was always a Baptist, and so they were just against it, I guess. They was against drinking. There wasn't no drinking in our house. No cursing. That's unusual now, for the families now. I'm proud my mother raised me that way. But our father didn't do it; my brothers didn't do it. My sisters never did drink or smoke. My father did smoke cigarettes. He was the only one that used tobacco. It was just the way they were raised, and they raised us that way, and I can't see that we were hurt by it.

JIM LELOUDIS:

But did any of you ever sneak off and try any of these things?

MARY THOMPSON:

We used to get under the house and get this rabbit tobacco and roll it in paper and try to smoke it, but it tasted bad, so we never did do very much of it. [Laughter] We did sneak around and do that. And none of us never did like it well enough to smoke it. But we were mean children, in a way, just like all children were. We wasn't perfect, not by a long shot. We done lots of things that if our mother had caught up with us, we would have got a beating.

CARL THOMPSON:

Just more devilish than anything else.

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, we didn't do any harm. We didn't smoke cigarettes; we never thought about such as that. One time there was a girl who had some snuff, and she wanted me to taste some, and I took just a little bit on my tongue and like to strangle myself. [Laughter] I never did want any more snuff. And if my mother had knowed that, she'd have whipped me for it, but she didn't know it. We were always wanting to make things, too. My brothers liked to work with things, and we'd make our own valentines and things like that. We had things to keep busy. We sewed. And I don't know how them houses at that mill are still standing, but we used to get up in the loft when Mama and Daddy'd leave and cut the wires up there and splice it and put us lights all up in there. [Laughter] Before they got home, we'd take them down. I don't know how we helped from getting killed. Of course, the power wasn't as strong into the houses, I don't think, then as they are now. But if Mama and Daddy left us home, that was after we got pretty good-sized children. My brothers was older than me, and so they liked to fool with electricity. And so we'd just climb up in there and cut it apart, get us some lights. My daddy, see, working in the machine shop, always had wires and tape and light bulbs around the house, and we'd get them and we'd put us lights up in there. And sometime we'd want to make valentines up in there, if they was going to go to the store and be gone a good while. We done the meanest things. I've wondered lots of times how the houses are still standing, but they're still standing, so we must have done a pretty good job at it. [Laughter]

JIM LELOUDIS:

You said if your mother had found out, she would have whipped you. Was she the one who did the disciplining?

MARY THOMPSON:

She's the one who done most of the disciplining. We were a little scared of Daddy when he got mad at us for anything, but Mama was the one,

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she done the bossing. My daddy worked all the time. Then you didn't work eight hours like you do now, you see, and he was working in the machine shop, so he'd have to work sometimes night and day. I have knowed him to work two days and nights before he even got to come home. They'd had machinery break down, you know, and all. So most all men then done the work; the women done the raising of the children. I can't say that that's altogether right. [Laughter] I think both ought to take responsibility, but at that time men didn't have time to do around the house like they do now.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Who handled the family's finances?

MARY THOMPSON:

My mother did. My daddy was one of these "Live today and let tomorrow take care of itself." [Laughter] And if it had been left up to him, we'd have starved to death. But my mother was very close. She could manage real good, and she managed all the finances.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did she ever give him an allowance or something like that?

MARY THOMPSON:

Very seldom she give him anything. Of course, he always had an automobile. And she managed enough to pay the things that he needed, but I have knowed him to want a Coca-Cola, and she'd fuss that that was throwing away money. She didn't let her children throw away money. She wasn't mean, that she wouldn't let you have what you wanted, but there wasn't too much money to spend for things like that then. Not with seven children to raise. He was pretty good; he never did fuss at her about the way she managed the money, because he knowed she was a better manager than he was. He couldn't have kept an automobile to drive all the time if… There wasn't too many people around there had automobiles then. But we usually had an automobile, and if my father wasn't working at all on Sunday we'd always go up in the mountains or somewhere and take a picnic dinner, all the

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whole family. It was a carful [Laughter] , but we'd always go somewhere, up in the mountains or somewhere. You know, it ain't far to the mountains from Greenville, South Carolina. And I had an aunt that lived up there, and we'd go up there sometimes and stay all night at their house, way back up in the mountains. But it was always the family went together. My daddy wasn't a person to run around. When he went, the family went with him. I had a good father, and a good mother. Naturally we thought Daddy was the best, because he didn't have the responsibility that Mama had. She had to be a little bit tougher.

JIM LELOUDIS:

So you saw her as kind of the mean one, huh?

MARY THOMPSON:

[Laughter] Yes. But after I got bigger, I realized that it was for our own good, that she had to be. If she was like my daddy, I don't know what would become of us, because he was one of these that didn't try to make us do much. That wasn't none of his job; it was Mama's job. But I had a real good daddy; I was lucky.

JIM LELOUDIS:

You said you had your own animals and all. I guess you had a garden, too.

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, we had a garden. The mill company gave a place to put your hogs. And the cows was back in the backyard. They had barns, with four stalls in it for four houses, and every house had one stall for a cow. But our hogs had to be on down. There was a place down there fixed for them. We had chickens, mostly, in the yard, but we had a little garden. But about three or four blocks from there there was some open land, and we had a garden there. They let us have gardens there. And we always had a garden, raised our own things and had our own meat and our own milk and butter. And my mother sold buttermilk. We liked butter very well, but we wasn't crazy about milk, so she sold milk and made money

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thataway. But we did drink what we wanted. Most of the milk we ever wanted was buttermilk. None of us children wasn't crazy about any other kind of milk. We made pretty good. My mother canned vegetables and things. Back then, people were very nice to one another, too. If one didn't have it, they wanted to divide with them, you know. People was more neighborly then than they are now. We had a good life. We didn't have things. I don't have much now—I never have had—so it doesn't make much difference to me. But still, we didn't have things like they have now. We didn't even have rugs on the floor till I got pretty good size. We scrubbed the floors. My daddy was the bossman when he was at Poe Mill, so they put water in our house, and we had water and bath and all. But all the regular mill people that lived there had pumps out on the street, and that was cooler water than what was in the house, so we'd get our drinking water out there, mostly. But we didn't have to tote water for things, but I have worked for neighbors, help them wash clothes and scrub floors for them. We'd go anywhere around anybody wanted to hire us, twenty-five cents a room to scrub a floor. And I mean you had to scrub it and tote the water from way over across the street.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

JIM LELOUDIS:

That's really interesting, that you kids would hire yourself out to help neighbors.

MARY THOMPSON:

Oh, yes, sir, we was going to make a dime every way we can. [Laughter] From the time we got big enough to tote buckets of water, some people would hire us —some of them didn't have as much as we did, too, like it is now—to tote their water to wash the clothes. They always washed

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outside and had tubs of water to wash and rinse, and a pot to boil them. And they'd pay us maybe ten or fifteen cents to tote their water for them. And we'd do that, and then we'd babysit some after we got a little bigger, and scrub floors for people, twenty-five cents a room. I never will forget that. [Laughter] I scrubbed four floors one time, me and my brother; we made a dollar, and we thought we got rich that day. [Laughter] But we did most anything that we could to make a little money.

CARL THOMPSON:

Yes, that dollar would have went farther than five dollars would go now, though.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did you have to give that money to your mother, or was that yours?

MARY THOMPSON:

We had to give it to Mama, but the only thing is, she usually bought us some cloth to make us a dress, or the boys would get a shirt out of it or something like that. We'd get cloth; then we'd have to make us a dress. Of course, if we had enough dresses right then, we wasn't allowed to have too many; we couldn't afford them. But then she'd spend the money maybe to buy ice cream for all of us or something like that.

JIM LELOUDIS:

So, in a way, you always got a little of it back in some kind of treat.

MARY THOMPSON:

I got some of it, and we'd have ice cream suppers at our church, and we'd get some of that money to buy us ice cream at the church. And boys and girls would get together and play and sing at different homes, too, and we enjoyed ourself thataway.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Tell me about some of this. I was going to ask you what type things you did when you had some free time, what type games you played and what you did to entertain yourself.

MARY THOMPSON:

We went to parties and done about the same thing… Well, I don't know what they do at parties now. I don't guess it's the same thing

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now; I guess it's smoking and all that. Now I don't know what they do, but then we played games, spinning the bottle, things like that. And of course, like all boys and girls, we loved to talk. We wasn't allowed to go outdoors or nothing like that, but get off to ourself and talk, you know. And then we'd have times where they'd all come to one house, different houses, and some of them had pianos, and we had a piano. And we'd play and sing and then sit around and talk.

JIM LELOUDIS:

What would you talk about?

MARY THOMPSON:

Like all boys and girls. [Laughter] Just different things. We'd talk about music and the church, and then we just liked to talk to one another. There ain't too much difference, only just they have more freedom now; they have too much freedom. But there wasn't too much difference; boys and girls then fell in love and fell out, just like now. [Laughter] They fell in love too quick. So I got married real young, and I had a baby, and then that cut it out, all the parties and things. Then we didn't live together too long till we were separated, and so I raised the baby. Oh, he helped some, but not much. He's dead now. But the trouble is, most boys and girls at that time got married too early. They don't get married quite as early now as they did back then, I don't think.

JIM LELOUDIS:

When did you feel like you had grown up, that you were an adult?

MARY THOMPSON:

We was just then like they are now; we thought we knowed it all when we was fourteen years old. All boys and girls thinks that. Then after they get up around thirty, they find out they didn't know nothing. That's the whole thing about it. It's the same thing. They've always thought they knowed it all when they started about fourteen.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How old were you when you married?

MARY THOMPSON:

I lacked one month of being sixteen. I was fifteen.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How did you meet your husband?

MARY THOMPSON:

At a party at my house. He had lived in the mountains about all his life, and his daddy and him had come down and got a job in the cotton mill there at Poe Mill. And they moved down there, and his mother had twelve children, I believe, but one of them was married when I met him. And he come to a party one night there, and that's how I met him. And then after we got married, his people moved back to the mountains. They didn't stay down there very long, and then after we separated he went back up there above Slater. He went to work at Slater and stayed up there with his daddy and them.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did your parents approve of your getting married so young?

MARY THOMPSON:

No, they didn't want me to, but I did.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did you run off? Did you elope?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, run off. Like all of them, nearly. Back then, we thought that if we just got married, we could be free then, do as we pleased, and found out you don't ever get free in life. [Laughter] But that's just the mistakes young people makes, but there are lots of them does. Others was marrying young, and I thought I had to, too.

JIM LELOUDIS:

You said you had a child real quickly. How did getting pregnant so young make you feel?

MARY THOMPSON:

I was eighteen when she was born. Back then, I guess everywhere, around where we lived that was mostly what they did. They got married young and started a family young, but I didn't have but one. I stopped. [Laughter] But most of them did that; they had children around eighteen or nineteen years old. And I got a brother, him and his wife married when they were sixteen, and by the time they was eighteen, they'd already had two children.

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They ain't but fifty-three now. They've just got two children, but they've got seven grandchildren, some of them about grown.

JIM LELOUDIS:

You said once you got married and had a child, that put an end to things.

MARY THOMPSON:

It put an end to running around to parties. You see, married people didn't go to parties then, not with the single ones.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did that upset you any?

MARY THOMPSON:

No.

JIM LELOUDIS:

It sounded like maybe you were just a little …

MARY THOMPSON:

You worked so hard you didn't even think about things like that. I didn't. After my baby got two months old, I went back to work in the mill. We worked so hard, and then we got two rooms there on the mill village and we kept house there on the mill village.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Who took care of the child after you went back to work?

MARY THOMPSON:

My mother, till she got bigger, and then you could hire colored people for two dollars a week to come there every day and take care of them, so I hired a colored woman after she got big enough, weaned and all.

JIM LELOUDIS:

I was talking to a woman this morning who told me that while her child was young, they allowed her to come home during the day to nurse the child.

MARY THOMPSON:

I did.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did they allow you to do that?

MARY THOMPSON:

I sure did. I worked there after me and my husband separated. My father then was living at Union Bleachery. I don't know whether you know anything about Greenville or not, but it's about a mile or a little more from American Spinning Company. I don't know whether they still go by

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that name now or not. It's next there to Poe Mill. I went to work at American Spinning Company. It's a little over a mile, cutting through; it's a little more if you went around the street. I'd get up and go to work every morning, and then we got an hour for dinner. We worked ten hours then. And I'd walk home—I mean it was uphill most of the way [Laughter] —and let her nurse and then walk back and work till six o'clock that night, then walk back home.

JIM LELOUDIS:

But they didn't give you any special time off, did they, to do …

MARY THOMPSON:

No.

JIM LELOUDIS:

I talked to this woman, and they had given her breaks during the day.

CARL THOMPSON:

Well, they would, practically, in some …

MARY THOMPSON:

They didn't let me have no breaks to go home.

CARL THOMPSON:

I remember several there at Rock Hill that had babies, and they let them go home and nurse.

MARY THOMPSON:

They lived right close, but you see …

JIM LELOUDIS:

But you were a good ways away.

CARL THOMPSON:

In other words, they could walk home maybe in ten minutes, and they'd give them about thirty minutes to go home and nurse the baby, then go back.

MARY THOMPSON:

After my daughter got up in school, I went back to work at Slater and I took her and we moved up there. And I'd always work all I could. If they had plenty of drawing in, sometimes I'd work sixteen hours a day. And after she got in school, when they wanted me to work late I'd go home and get her and bring her some coloring books and pencil and paper, and bring her down there and sit her by the drawing frame, and we'd sit there and I'd work till eleven o'clock and take her home. [Laughter] I've worked many a time with her sitting right by me. [Laughter]

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did many women do that? Was that a pretty common practice?

MARY THOMPSON:

No, there wasn't too many of them that was single like me that was raising a child. That wasn't as common then as it is now. Most of them was married people, and if they had to work they worked them hours, some of them did. Some of them that had husbands wouldn't even do that, if they had more than one child. But I just had one. And they didn't have to do it, to tell you the truth, but there wasn't very many. There was one once in a while that would bring their child if they had to have work, but it wasn't a common thing.

JIM LELOUDIS:

You said you had a black woman to come take care of her. Would she just come take care of the child, or did she help you with your housework?

MARY THOMPSON:

She'd do the housework and take care of the child. You could usually pick up right good colored people. Of course, sometime you'd have trouble with them. I never did like to, but I had to do it anyway. I went to the welfare office lots of times and asked for somebody to keep my child, and I'd always have to let them live in. And they'd send me somebody, and if they didn't work out they'd take them off of the welfare. If they done something that they could have helped doing and just didn't work out, why, they'd tell them that they'd have to work or they'd be took off the welfare. If they'd do that now, they'd be better off. Then they'd send me somebody else. But very seldom I had to report them, that something happened. They'd steal money or steal food or something like that, and I'd catch them and have to let them off, and then they'd just turn them out of the welfare.

JIM LELOUDIS:

You said they would live in. Was that pretty common? Did most of the women you had work for you live in?

MARY THOMPSON:

Most of the time they did, because when she was at that age

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from starting school on up till I had to start leaving Greenville to get jobs, Slater is in the country like, and I lived on my father's cousin's place, and that was up in the country. And I'd get help from town, because there wasn't no help around there to get. And I'd have to go get them on Sunday night and take them back on the next Saturday evening. And so they had to stay all the week. And I could get help thataway better, because there was always plenty of help in Greenville, because there was lots of colored people and they were lots of them on welfare. So that's the way I got help.

JIM LELOUDIS:

When did your mother start taking care of your daughter?

MARY THOMPSON:

She taken care of her before she started school, from the time she was a baby on up. She'd go sometime and stay with Mama a week or two at a time, but she didn't take care of her after she started school. I'd always hire somebody.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How did you feel about this having to travel around and leave your daughter in Greenville?

MARY THOMPSON:

When I'd leave her, I'd leave her with my mother, so I never did worry about it. And if I was on a job that I had to stay a while and couldn't come home, if I could come home once a month I'd come home, and if I seen I couldn't—it was too far, or I had to work on Saturday (I wouldn't have had time to come home and go back on Sunday)—I'd call Mama or send money, and then Mama would put her on the train if it was somewhere that she didn't have to change. You know, Altavista, Virginia, she'd send her up there, and she'd send her to South Boston. She'd put her on a train, and then I'd meet the train. She'd come by herself. And then I'd send her back on Sunday night. So I was with her. It never was over three or four weeks at the most that I ever wasn't around her, as far as [unknown]. But I had her spoilt to me [Laughter] . She'd stay at Mama's a while,

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and then she'd start throwing a fit, wanting to come to her mama. [Laughter] So I had her a little bit spoilt. But everything worked out pretty good. I can look back now and see it worked out a heap better than I thought it was working out then.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did you feel then like it wasn't working out very well?

MARY THOMPSON:

Oh, I'd get worried lots of times about having to leave her at Mama's and her wanting to come to me, and sometimes I couldn't take her. But I kept up with most everything she done. I knew about whether she was behaving herself or not, and so I worried some but not too much. I knowed I had to work. There wasn't no way of keeping her up, and I had her spoilt so I had to… I'm just like all the mothers; I'd give her things she didn't have to have. I wasn't like my mother; I wasn't as tight with her as my mother was with us. And it might have been better if I had been, because now she don't pay too much attention to that dollar [Laughter] , like we did. But I'd send her money, and I'd buy her things and send to her, things to keep her from getting dissatisfied. But then the job would give out. She knew I was coming back, so I didn't have too much trouble. I worried a little bit when she'd come to me because she'd be on the train by herself, but back then they'd write her name on a piece of paper and pin it on her, and her address and telephone number and all, so nothing ever did happen. We done fine. When I was in Baltimore, she came to me. Of course, she was about eleven years old then. And she even changed trains in Washington then. She had been travelling so much, she knew how to do it. [Laughter] So then she just stayed up there with me, after I got settled up there.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How old was she when you and your husband separated?

MARY THOMPSON:

We separated so many times, it's hard to say. The first time, she wasn't but five weeks old, and then we went back together so many times. After she got about two years old, we never did go back together. We was around one another, because we worked at the same place a good bit. He went to Detroit, Michigan, and I went up there and stayed with him two or three weeks and left to come back home.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Why did you separate? Do you mind telling me?

MARY THOMPSON:

He loved the women too well. [Laughter]

JIM LELOUDIS:

He was running around?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes. He didn't want to settle down, and so we separated for good.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did you get a legal divorce eventually?

MARY THOMPSON:

We did finally get one, but it was about twelve to fifteen years.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How did people treat you?

MARY THOMPSON:

I had my friends, just like everybody else had. Really, I'm always a person, I don't meet no strangers, and I can make friends with most everybody. If they didn't like me, it didn't make no difference to me; I'd just let them alone.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did people think you were doing something wrong by not pretending to be married?

MARY THOMPSON:

Oh, I knew they did, but they didn't have the guts to tell me to my face. [Laughter] I knew that some people was kind of… You know, they always looked down on grass widows. I knew some of them felt thataway about it, but I never did have nobody that had guts enough to tell me to my face anything.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did it bother you that people thought that way?

MARY THOMPSON:

No, it didn't.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did you say "grass widows"?

MARY THOMPSON:

That's what they called them back then, grass widows. Now I think they just call them, what? I don't know what they call people that's divorced now, or separated.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Do you know where that term originated? That's an interesting phrase.

MARY THOMPSON:

No, I sure don't.

CARL THOMPSON:

I don't, either.

MARY THOMPSON:

I've heard that all my life.

CARL THOMPSON:

I've heard it all my life, but I don't know where it originated at. But now they say, "I'm separated from my husband," or "I will divorce."

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, that kind of branded the woman.

CARL THOMPSON:

Yes, they've quit using that "grass widow."

MARY THOMPSON:

They didn't call a man that. They were just single after they had separated, but a woman was branded a grass widow. I guess that's to separate a widow from a divorced person, is all I know. It didn't make any difference to me noway.

CARL THOMPSON:

But now, if they're not divorced, they'll just say, "No, we're not living together, we're separated," and that's all. And after they get divorced, say, "Well, we're divorced."

MARY THOMPSON:

I know they don't brand them now.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Yes, I don't think it's quite such a social stigma anymore.

CARL THOMPSON:

No.

MARY THOMPSON:

I don't think so, either.

CARL THOMPSON:

It's been a long time since I've heared that word "a grass

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widow."

MARY THOMPSON:

I hadn't heard it in years. I have to think about us calling people that's separated …

CARL THOMPSON:

You used to hear it rather often back years and years ago, but it's very seldom you hear it now.

MARY THOMPSON:

But it didn't make any difference to me. I never did worry about it. I had my own friends. I always made lots of friends, so I never did have any trouble. I still make lots of friends, and I don't worry about the ones I don't make, either. I always just try to hold my head up and do right and live as close to the Lord as I can, so I don't really worry about things like that. If nobody don't like me, well, that's just their hard luck, not mine. [Laughter]

JIM LELOUDIS:

Let's talk a little bit about how you first went to work. You said you worked in the summers when you were young.

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes. I was fourteen when I went to work in the summer. I went to work there at Poe Mill, and I went to work creeling on warpers. And then I run the warpers, and then I went back to school. And then the next summer I went to the spooler room and worked in the spooler room a good while; then I went back to school. But I quit then in school and went back to work, and I worked in the spooler, and then I went to the draw-in room and learned to draw in. And so I stayed in the draw-in room from then on.

JIM LELOUDIS:

And drawing in was your first permanent job?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How did you get those summer jobs?

MARY THOMPSON:

My daddy was boss in the machine shop, and you know one always has pulled for the other; they always tried to work one another's

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children. So that's the way we did. We didn't have no trouble getting jobs.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How did you learn those jobs? Did you get any formal training, or did they assign you to someone?

MARY THOMPSON:

You have somebody to show you to get started. Then you just keep learning. Then, in some of the jobs, you had to work six weeks to learn, but then we never did. I never did work but three or four weeks.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did you get paid while you were learning?

MARY THOMPSON:

No. But that mill quit that. They quit and got to paying. I think they give them about two weeks to learn, and then start paying them. But I don't think I ever worked over two or three weeks without pay to learn anything. And then when I went to drawing in, that was piecework. And my sister drawed in, and she was the one that taught me, so I got the pay from the start there. They paid you so much for a warp, and so I got pay from the start. Of course, I was slow and I didn't make very much. When your speed picks up, you make more and more. But my sister taught me there. Now anyone that come in there that didn't have nobody to teach them, had to pay somebody to teach them. They wouldn't hire you unless you could hire somebody to teach you.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Oh, you paid somebody to teach you.

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Why would they do that?

MARY THOMPSON:

Because it was expensive to teach anyone.

JIM LELOUDIS:

But that person would lose their pay, I guess, while they were…

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, that's right, while they was teaching them. But most people had somebody that would teach them. But it didn't cost me nothing.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Had you ever been in the mill before the summer jobs?

MARY THOMPSON:

I hadn't worked any.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Had you been in? Had you visited?

MARY THOMPSON:

Oh, yes, my daddy was the bossman. He'd take us down there and take us all the way through, and so we'd been in the mill ever since I can remember.

JIM LELOUDIS:

But did you have someone to teach you those summer jobs?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, but you didn't have to pay for that. They'd just start you off, and it was all piecework. Now creeling, you tied the threads on at the back, and you had to fill up a whole thing, and it run up on the warps then. That's the first job I ever done. Somebody showed me how; I wouldn't have been able to do it. And then after I learned to do that, I learned to pull the threads through, and then I just learnt myself warping. When the warper hand would go off to the rest room or somewhere, it's a wonder I hadn't tore up the warps, but I had seen her enough that I learned [Laughter] to run the warperjust while she was gone. That's the way I learned to run a car, too. [Laughter] I learned to run the warpers, and so he had me run warpers. You made more money at that. I was always kind of curious. I wanted to learn everything. Everything looked more interesting than what I was doing, so I'd want to do something else.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Was drawing in the only job you had to pay to get somebody to teach you?

MARY THOMPSON:

That's the only one I know of.

JIM LELOUDIS:

I guess that took a lot more skill and a lot more practice and all.

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, it'd take more skill. And the bosses couldn't teach you that, because they didn't know it theirself. So they'd have to get somebody that knew how to draw in to teach you, and that's the reason you had to pay for that. Now that was just when I first started. Now years

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after that, the laws changed and all, and they even stopped them from working them six weeks without pay, too. When I first went to Slater, they had boys to put up the warps on the back of the frames and pull them over for us, because they was heavy. I don't know how much they weighed, but a hundred or so pounds, I guess. Anyway, they were whole lots heavier than a woman could lift. And they had boys for that, and they'd work them. They'd go out there in the country and get them boys and hire them and tell them they'd have to work six weeks. You know, country people, their money just come in once a year, and the mountain people didn't make too much noway unless they made liquor. And they'd hire them and tell them they'd have to work six weeks without money. Well, that just tickled them to death, that they'd just get a chance to work in a mill. And they'd work them six weeks, and they'd find something wrong with them and lay them off, and get other boys.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Labor for nothing.

MARY THOMPSON:

And they run it a long time like that. And then, you see, the laws …

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

MARY THOMPSON:

… when they got to talking about Roosevelt, when he come in he was going to put it on forty hours? And I said, "Well, that's dumb, going to pay people as much money to not do nothing." I thought that was the craziest thing I ever heard tell of.

JIM LELOUDIS:

You thought Roosevelt and the forty-hours thing was dumb?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes. Well, I'd been working ten hours a day. I didn't mind it. And he wanted to cut down to eight hours a day and then pay the same

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amount of money. I thought, well, that was the dumbest thing I ever heard tell of.

JIM LELOUDIS:

[Laughter]

MARY THOMPSON:

I says, this was what was [unclear] going to make lazy people. And it did. [Laughter] Because naturally people got lazier when they worked eight hours. But they did put more work on people, on some jobs that they could do it. For us, we just went by piece anyway, so it didn't hurt us.

JIM LELOUDIS:

That's really interesting, about hiring those young boys out of the country.

MARY THOMPSON:

[Laughter]

JIM LELOUDIS:

When did you say those laws changed so they couldn't do that?

MARY THOMPSON:

Well, that's been years and years ago. That was way before Roosevelt come in, because about the time Roosevelt come in, that's when they started that forty hours and started making them pay. They put a minimum wage on.

CARL THOMPSON:

That was back in the twenties.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Back in the twenties that they stopped that no-pay training period?

MARY THOMPSON:

I imagine so.

JIM LELOUDIS:

I think we missed it on the first tape. That's why I wanted to get that on here.

MARY THOMPSON:

I don't remember just what year it was. No, Nola was born in 1929, so it was in the early thirties.

CARL THOMPSON:

According to that, then, it wasn't long before Roosevelt came in.

MARY THOMPSON:

It wasn't. It was after I went up there to work, but it was in the early thirties. It was before Roosevelt come in. But when he come in, he changed lots of laws. He was the best President we ever had. [Laughter] But we didn't realize it then, because he was going to do so much, and we

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never had done nothing, so we just wondered, is this lots of baloney and all. But he sure did help the working person a whole lot.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How so, besides changing the minimum wage and the hours?

MARY THOMPSON:

The minimum wage, and cut it down to forty hours, and that was a big help. And then they'd keep raising the minimum wage, and naturally we'd make more money. And from then on, things has been building up. Now it's gotten to where inflation's about to take over, but he's the one that started the country building up to where it is now. And people working eight hours that had been working ten, that's a big difference.

CARL THOMPSON:

Well, I've worked eleven hours.

MARY THOMPSON:

We worked ten hours, and then worked five on Saturday, too, you see. We worked fifty-five hours a week till he put that forty hours on. And they wouldn't pay that time-and-a-half unless it was an emergency, so we didn't have to work overtime, just forty hours. Now that was a big cut.

JIM LELOUDIS:

It gave you a lot more time off to spend with your daughter.

MARY THOMPSON:

That's right. But we never had had it, so we didn't know what to do with it for a while. [Laughter] But it was wonderful. And then, you see, we got the same pay. They raised the minimum wage till we got the same pay. He was a wonderful President, the best one we've ever had. I wish we had another one that had the brains that he had. I think they do the best they can—I'm not downing no President—but I just think that everybody ain't got that gift, to have the brains he had to straighten it out. Because the country was in a pretty bad fix, you know, during the Depression, but he straightened it out, and that was good.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Tell me a little bit about this travelling around to the different jobs. How would you hear about jobs around?

MARY THOMPSON:

Through the company. They would call the company and tell.

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If a place wanted draw-in hands, they'd call a company that had draw-in hands, ask them if they'd have one to come. And they'd find out if they had work or whether they were laying them off. And one company would call another; that's the way it went. Some of them was the same company. Carter had them all over Virginia, and I was working for Carter's at Slater. And then from there at Burlington they'd call other Carter's up there, wanting to know, and that's the way we found it out.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Was there a group of you that would sometimes travel together?

MARY THOMPSON:

Sometimes there was more than one go, but most of the time I'd find out by myself. Sometimes somebody else would go with me. There was a crowd went to Tarboro, North Carolina, from here, but I wouldn't go up there with them. I had a chance to go there, but that was after me and Carl married, and I wouldn't go up there.

CARL THOMPSON:

You mean Bimburg?

MARY THOMPSON:

No, it was Tarboro, when they first started going up there. Then we did go up there and try to get a job, and Carl got one by the time the drawing in was give out, so I didn't get one. I went to Calvine Mill, too. I was working there when it shut down. I don't know whether you know where that's at.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Yes, I've been by there.

MARY THOMPSON:

And I don't know what company it was—I didn't go—but they called there wanting some drawing-in hands to Puerto Rico, and they sent some of them around. But he couldn't send none from Calvine, because we had plenty of work at the time. I said something about I'd like to go, but he said I'd be leaving the job, because he'd have to hire somebody in my place. So he called some of the drawing-in hands that we knew that was out of work, and some of them went to Puerto Rico. But that's the way it all

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happened. They'd call different cotton mills that had draw-in hands and used draw-in hands for fancy work. It's mostly fancy work that they wanted you for. Calvine was a plain mill, but that's the only plain mill I've worked in.

JIM LELOUDIS:

So most of you that travelled were the ones that knew how to set up the fancy?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes. Most of them was wanting fancy, because it didn't pay them to learn a bunch of people just for the help they get. [unclear] It was cheaper for them to pay our way—they'd pay our way up there and pay our expenses and all and then pay us a salary—than it was to teach a draw-in hand.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Would the plain mills usually have their own draw-in hands?

MARY THOMPSON:

They usually had theirs. They didn't use very many, and it wasn't too hard to teach people the plain work, because that was just drawing straight threads through, so that wasn't hard to teach people.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Where would you stay when you would go off to a mill?

MARY THOMPSON:

They'd get you places to stay in boarding houses and hotels and anywhere close that they had. And I stayed at hotels at some of them; I stayed at boarding houses. Most of them was boarding houses, because I preferred boarding houses. I'd a heap rather stay in a boarding house, because it wasn't as lonesome away from home. But it was mostly either hotels or boarding houses.

JIM LELOUDIS:

What was it like, living in a boarding house?

MARY THOMPSON:

It was kind of family-like. Most every boarding house I ever lived in was real nice. Usually someone real nice runs it, and it's kind of like living in a family. You know, I was raised in a big family [Laughter] , so it's kind of like a home. And so I didn't mind it; I liked

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boarding houses.

CARL THOMPSON:

Yes, you'd get used to everyone after you stayed there a while, stay maybe six months or maybe sometime a year. And you'd get acquainted with them, and you'd just hate to see them leave, or you'd hate to leave yourself whenever you would leave, because you'd made a lot of friends and enjoyed yourself and all. And it was almost like leaving home, whenever you'd stay a pretty good while thataway.

MARY THOMPSON:

I wouldn't stay in just any kind. I've heard of broken-down boarding houses and rough boarding houses and such as that, but I wouldn't stay at places like that. It had to be a nice respectable place.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Would people in the houses get together and …

MARY THOMPSON:

Play cards. They mostly played cards and maybe checkers and dominoes and things like that. We'd do that every night, nearly. If there was enough there, sometime we'd go uptown or something like that, you know, at different places. But we'd play cards till eleven or twelve o'clock at night lots of times. He never would play cards [Laughter] , so that after I married I never did get to play cards. I used to play with my daughter, but she lives at Rock Hill so I don't get around her much. But I enjoyed it. There ain't no place like home, but I guess that's the nearest place like home there is, is a boarding house. And I always stayed in nice ones. The people who run it was always nice. I wouldn't stay at a rough house.

JIM LELOUDIS:

I'd like to know a little bit more about this job. You said the supervisors wouldn't know how to do it. Did that mean you could kind of go about your work the way you wanted to?

MARY THOMPSON:

Sure. They knew if you made a mistake. When it went to the weave room it showed up, and you had to go in there and straighten it

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out. But they knew that, if you was making mistakes. If you made too many mistakes, they might get after you. I don't know; I never did have that trouble. But I did have to fix some. I'm not saying I didn't make mistakes, but I never did make enough that it caused the bossman to say anything. I never would have any trouble like that. But he didn't know how to do the work. He could see how it was supposed to be done and all like that, but he couldn't have sat down and done it hisself. But he knew enough about the draft of the pattern. He'd just give us the draft. It was done in the office, and we drawed it like the draft was.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Do you feel like that gave you any more freedom than other workers?

MARY THOMPSON:

I enjoyed it more than anything I've done. I tell you, lots of people would complain about the work, but honest to goodness, I'd rather draw in than eat when I was hungry. I never got tired of drawing in. And it kept your mind occupied all the time, because if you didn't keep your mind on it you'd make a mistake. It was something that you had to keep your mind going all the time, and counting in your mind. Every thread had to be counted. And you knew just when to drop off and start another pattern and all, and it was interesting to me.

JIM LELOUDIS:

It sounds like you took a lot of pride in it.

MARY THOMPSON:

I loved drawing in. I was a person who always liked things that took a mind to do, and not just labor. Now when I went to school, arithmetic and algebra, something that took a little studying. Now I enjoyed that. But when you come to other work, reading and writing and such as that, that was boresome to me.

JIM LELOUDIS:

And of course your job was really kind of a practical application of that math.

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, so I really loved it. I always did love to draw in.

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I wish I was drawing in now. If I was in Greenville, I'd be trying to get [unknown], even if it was plain work. I wasn't crazy about plain work, because you didn't use your mind enough on that. It's all the same thing over and over. But I'd rather draw in than eat when I was hungry. I really loved it. The only thing I ever done in my life that I loved. [Laughter]

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did those of you who were draw-in hands ever set some kind of informal rules about how long you'd work or how fast you'd work?

MARY THOMPSON:

No, you could work as fast as you wanted to. Of course, there was laws; if you worked over eight hours after the law come in, you'd have to be paid time-and-a-half. But before the law come in, they didn't have to pay time-and-a-half noway, but you still got paid for the work you done; it was piecework. And the more you worked, the more money you made, but you still didn't get time-and-a-half. But if the bossman wanted you to work and you wanted to work, there wasn't no law that said that you couldn't work or nothing like that. So maybe I'd want to work late, and if they needed me the bossman would ask me, and I'd tell him I would. I always was right up to working late, getting all the work in I could. So that's just the way it was. It was all piecework, and if I drawed in fast I just made more money. Somebody else fool around and go to the bathroom or sit around and talk and such as that, why, they just lost their money. But I was out for making all the money I could. [Laughter] So I done good at it.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did you prefer piece rate over an hourly wage?

MARY THOMPSON:

Oh, yes. That gives you the incentive to get more interested in your work, to see how much you can do. Yes, I liked piecework the best. People that didn't like to work much, that wanted to sit around and talk and

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go to the bathroom and such as that, most of them would say they'd rather work on hour work, but people that go in there to make money… See, you made more money on piecework. But that's about all I know about my work. It was kind of interesting to me, but it was boresome, I guess, to hear other people talk about it. [Laughter]

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did any of you ever compete to see who would do the most?

MARY THOMPSON:

I don't know whether you could call it competing or not. Some of us could do it whole lots better than others. There was some that could do even better than me. I could usually stay up about with the top. And there was some of them that wasn't a fast hand and didn't want to be. As long as they could make the minimum wage, they were satisfied, and so they didn't make too much. But drawing in is a good-paying job. They always paid us good.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How much did you make?

MARY THOMPSON:

Well, there was different prices. When Roosevelt first come in, we made twenty-five cents an hour. [Laughter] Before then, we didn't make that much. I don't remember much. When I first started working in the mill spooling, I think I made about ten cents an hour. But then when I went to drawing in, I don't remember just what I made then, but I've made as much as a hundred dollars a week drawing in. That was before things got… That was good money, but not every week. Just when they'd have good work, good patterns, and everything went just right.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did the other people in the mill look up to you or treat you any better?

MARY THOMPSON:

No. We was all cotton mill people, so it didn't make any difference. I don't guess they did. I never did think of myself as

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any better than anybody else.

CARL THOMPSON:

We was all just about alike.

MARY THOMPSON:

Loom fixers made about the same as we did. Everybody was just about the same. There wasn't no one no better than the others because they had a different job. We was all workers, and cotton mill workers. One time when they laid me off at Poe Mill, me and another girl, a friend of mine, went down there at Kress's. Never had worked in a store. We got us a job at Kress's right at Christmastime. I never will forget it; it was the hardest work I ever done in my life. You didn't make nothing, though. Now them girls acted a little snooty. They said, "Well, I certainly wouldn't work in a cotton mill for nothing." I said, "I'd rather work in a cotton mill for what money I make than slave like y'all working for what y'all are making." And they didn't make no money, hardly, in the stores then, but it was the prestige, I guess, that they liked. But that's the only time that I ever heard anybody say anything about …

JIM LELOUDIS:

Were you ever called a "linthead" as a child or when you got older?

MARY THOMPSON:

No, because we lived on the mill village, and everybody else was the same thing we was. [Laughter] And we went to the church right there on the village, so everybody was the same as we was, so nobody couldn't call the other one names. That's the only time, the time I went to Kress's, and they said they certainly wouldn't work in an old cotton mill. That's the first time I'd ever heard anybody say anything about a cotton mill.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did it make you mad?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, it made me mad.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did it hurt your feelings?

MARY THOMPSON:

No, it didn't hurt my feelings. It made me mad. I always had a little temper, and I got about it. I said, "I sure wouldn't

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want to slave here all the time for what little y'all are making. I'd rather work in a cotton mill anytime." I went back to the cotton mill, too, after Christmas, when they laid us off. They just had us hired till Christmas. After Christmas there was some drawing in picked up. I didn't even try to go to another store. I thought, "Lord, don't give me no store work." But, of course, store work got better after that. That was back during the Depression.

JIM LELOUDIS:

How widespread was the negative town attitude toward cotton mill people?

MARY THOMPSON:

I don't know. In Greenville, South Carolina, the cotton mill people run the place, nearly. The real city is very small. It's a little bigger now, but back then the city of Greenville wasn't anything, hardly. I had a friend who moved up in the city part and had to go to Greenville High, and they said they were snooty up there at the school about them coming from cotton mill people. But that's about the only thing I ever heard, because I didn't… My grandfather lived in town, and my daddy and mother were raised in town. But then we were raised at the cotton mill. They tried to take those cotton mills in the city several times. They had to vote on it, and so everybody'd vote for it to stay out of the city, and the city'd lose. And one year there, I know that they went and made a law that you had to pay your taxes… You know, sometimes people would pay their taxes late, because they didn't make too much, and they just paid them kind of as they got it, I guess. I don't know. But they made a rule there that they'd have to have their tax receipt before they could vote, when they said they was going to vote to take it in the city. They had lost so many times because everybody in the cotton mill

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part would vote against taking them in the city. And so they brought it up then that they'd have to have their tax receipt before they could vote. So when it come up, the mill companies paid their taxes for them so they'd know they'd have it paid on time, so they'd have their receipt. So they still killed it. And they still ain't brought the mills in the city.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Why did the mill people vote against it?

MARY THOMPSON:

Because the mills would have to pay higher taxes, and we didn't want to go in the city noway. We didn't want the city.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Why not?

MARY THOMPSON:

Because we never had lived in the city, and we wanted to stay at the cotton mills.

CARL THOMPSON:

They wanted to stay in the county.

MARY THOMPSON:

We lived about a mile from the city.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did the mill management come talk to you and try to persuade you to vote against it?

MARY THOMPSON:

They couldn't say they'd persuade you, no. They brought it up, and then they said that they would pay everybody's taxes, and then you could pay the mill company, and then you'd have your receipt. So everybody'd have their receipt to vote the way they wanted to. So they voted it down. And I believe that's the last time they've ever brought it up to vote the cotton mills into the city. I can't remember them ever bringing it back up. Now the city has stretched out some good bit, but it's not stretched out thataway. They've take in more land and built more houses and all, and it's went more south. But at that time the city was very small. I believe Camperdown was the only one in the city at the time. I'm not sure. Mills Mill might have been in the city at the time. I think they had one or two in the city, and, law, Greenville had I don't know how many cotton mills.

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It was pretty good-sized. It ain't nothing like Charlotte, but it is pretty good-sized, but they had lots of cotton mills. But they was outside the city, you see. But they quit fooling with them, because they seen they couldn't win. And they didn't try to vote, to my knowing. Now I left there, but still, to my knowing they never did try to vote them in the city no more. They just taken the city the other way. But we didn't want in the city. The cotton mill people didn't want the city. They'd have to pay the city taxes, and we wouldn't get nothing out of it. And the mill companies naturally didn't want in the city, because they'd have to pay higher taxes. So that's the way they kept out of the city.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Going back to your work, do you ever remember dreaming about your work at all?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Do you remember what you dreamed, the type of dreams you'd have?

MARY THOMPSON:

I dreamed about drawing in. [Laughter] I never did dream about doing nothing else. I always loved it so it was always good dreams.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did you ever have any bad ones about it?

MARY THOMPSON:

The only bad dreams I ever had [were] after I went to supervising in the sewing room. I'd dream sometime about that and having trouble. That was the aggravatingest job that I ever had in my life. My health wouldn't have went down so bad, I don't think, if I hadn't have went for that. But I had dreams about having trouble after I went to the sewing room, but I never did when I was drawing in.

JIM LELOUDIS:

That was at Southern Knitwear?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes. Southern Knitwear and Schultz [unclear] Manufacturing Company.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Did people ever tell jokes in the mill?

MARY THOMPSON:

Yes, they'd tell jokes, and they were like they are all the time.

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Some would tell dirty jokes, but decent people wouldn't listen to them. We told jokes, but they was clean jokes.

JIM LELOUDIS:

What kind of jokes would you tell? Did you ever tell jokes on the machines or one another?

MARY THOMPSON:

Really, I never was a person could tell a joke. That's one thing I never could do. Some of them would tell me jokes, and I'd try to tell them and I'd forget them by the time I tried to tell somebody else. I never was as interested in jokes as some people are, and I never could tell them.

JIM LELOUDIS:

Do you remember some of the topics they would tell them about?

MARY THOMPSON:

No. I haven't heard no jokes in so long, I don't recall a whole lot of them. [Laughter]

CARL THOMPSON:

I never did care much about it. I'd joke [unknown], usually. If they was going to tell smutty jokes, I'd just turn around and walk off. But I never did care nothing about them, or I never did curse. And