To Make My Bread

by Grace Lumpkin

  As it went around the long curves of the mountain road the procession reminded Ora of Kirk’s funeral. She did not say so, for it would be a mistake to make Emma think of such things. It was a fine morning, clear, and the sun shone straight at them as if it was showing them the way. This was not like that gloomy time in winter when they had carried Kirk down the mountain. Up the slope of the mountain the calico plants were in blossom, and in places higher up there were some laurel clusters of darker rose color. It was impossible to see into the valley, for, looking that way, the sun was a bright, white light in the eyes. But a person could look up on the side of the mountain and see the flowers. The clusters were still wet with dew, and with the early sun striking them, they were like pink sunburnt faces covered with tiny sweat drops.

  Emma thought of them like that, and then she turned away to watch Granpap, Frank, and the two older boys manage the sledge, which needed all their care, around the narrow slippery curves.

  The sledge was in front. It was piled up with household goods strapped on with rope. Emma’s bed was there, her trunk, and the bed clothes tied up in a quilt. Ora had about the same, though from her cabin, since there were seven children, had come two large bundles of quilts. Sally sat on the back of the sledge with the baby in her arms. Presently Bonnie would take her place there. Ora carried little Raymond when he was too tired to toddle along beside her. The other children walked ahead of the sledge, or lagged behind when they were too tired to keep up. At night they would camp on the side of the road, undo the quilts and cover themselves from the cold night dew.

  On the third day, when the sun was in the middle of the sky, as they were walking along Emma looked across the valley from the mountain road. They were still some distance up in the mountains though the road now sloped downward all the way. This meant they were near the valley.

  “Hit’s like the Israelites,” Emma said to the others, “a-going to the Promised Land.”

  Granpap heard her. “Only,” he said, “I hope the Lord don’t leave us in a wilderness for forty years.”

  “Hit’s not likely.” Emma put her hand out and pointed to the valley. Far off they could see smoke rising up. The air was so clear they could make out white smoke and black, and there, below the smoke, must be the chimneys of many houses.

  “No,” Emma said. “The Promised Land is too close.” She laughed a little as if she was making fun of herself. Bonnie was sitting on the sledge with the baby. She looked up to listen.

  “Where money grows on trees?” Ora said, and smiled at Emma.

  “Does hit grow on trees?” Bonnie asked. Her voice shook each time the sledge hit a stone, and what she said was not clear.

  “What did ye say?” Emma asked her.

  “Does hit grow on trees?”

  “Well,” Emma answered her, “I guess hit don’t really. Hit probably grows in the factory and you have to work for it. But I reckon hit’s plentiful all the same.”

  Granpap and Frank knew the city, for they had been there before. But they were acquainted only with the way to the courthouse. Hal Swain had told them they must follow the road straight into town and it would lead them to the railroad station. From there they could ask anyone how to reach the mill village.

  As they entered the town the road widened out into a street not much wider than the country road they had left. On each side of this street there were dirt sidewalks and beyond the walks unpainted shacks blackened by smoke. The children, who had wandered where they wished along the country road, came closer to Emma and Ora. These two had drawn closer to the sledge. They were feeling bereft, as if just now they realized that the old life was gone from them.

  “John,” Bonnie said, “look!” From the porches stared children with small black faces. John had seen them already. The town, so far, was a disappointment to him, for the houses here were very much like those in the mountains, except they were made of planks instead of logs. They were unpainted cabins and had big chimneys. Certainly there were windows, but Hal Swain’s house had four windows. The young ones here were behaving just as those in the mountains did when anyone passed along the road. These were different, but John would not get excited about them as Bonnie did. He looked at the brown solemn faces from the corners of his eyes, though his legs took him straight along the road. Bonnie turned right in the road and stared until she stumbled over a rock.

  At a corner a black woman was pumping water into a bucket. Bonnie was thirsty at once.

  “Could I ask for a drink?” she asked Emma, and Emma nodded. Bonnie’s face was red and sweaty, and so were the faces of the other children. In the calico dress that Emma had made long before, and that was now too short, though the hem had been let out, Bonnie walked over to the woman. But when she reached the pump she was silent and could only stand and stare. “She wants a drink,” Emma said, speaking up for Bonnie.

  The black woman reached into the bucket and held out a full dipper to Bonnie’s mouth. The water dripped to the ground from the edges of her mouth. One of the other children left the road and went toward the woman with the bucket and the others followed immediately. In a moment some of the black young ones came out of the yards nearby and stood close to Emma and Ora’s young ones.

  “Granpap,” Emma said, “couldn’t we go in for a while and rest?” She pointed to the woman who was ladling out drinks for the children. “She seems real friendly.”

  “No,” Granpap said. He looked as if something was very wrong. “Bring the young ones,” he said to Emma. “They can get water at the station.”

  For a moment Emma did not obey. She saw that the children were still drinking and wanted them to finish. Granpap should understand how hot and tired they were. She would have liked a drink herself.

  “They’re niggers, Emma,” Granpap said. “White and black don’t mix.” He looked angrily at the small black heads and the tow heads gathered around the pump.

  Emma wanted to say “Thank ye,” to the woman, but she was afraid to do so with Granpap waiting. Instead she called out for Sally and Bonnie to make the children hurry. She stood helplessly in the road. John could see that something was wrong. He went up to Emma and asked, “What is it?” She was looking back toward the woman who was pumping her bucket full again.

  “They’re niggers,” she told John, and turned to follow the sledge. John went back to Bonnie. “They’re niggers,” he said and looked contemptuously over his shoulder at the group of black young ones who stood by the pump staring after them.

  At the station Granpap herded them into the waiting room and showed them the benches where they could rest while he and Frank watered the steers and got some information.

  Emma and Ora sat on a bench, and while Ora nursed the youngest Emma opened the food sack and gave out cornbread to the hungry young ones who pressed up to her. The station room was rather large, and few people were sitting on the benches, so their group was isolated. Emma looked around the room. She wondered where all the people of the town were gone, for she had expected to find many of them here. Two girls sat over in a corner talking with a young man who was dressed like the young man from the factory. The girls had on real hats with feathers that drooped over their faces and bobbed up and down in a fluttering way when they talked. She could not see their faces, which were hidden by the wide hats. Over next the door there was a woman with a child in her arms. They seemed to be asleep, both of them. Emma was trying to pick out a friendly face, one that she could ask where to take the young ones. These, now they had been fed, were looking furtively for some bushes or woods in which to go. But there were only scattered trees around the station and gravel everywhere on the ground. There were no friendly bushes out there to hide behind.

  One of the young women from the corner got up and left her friends. She went through a door over which something was written. Emma watched the door and soon another woman came from the outside of the station and entered that same door. Emma looked at the writing above it. If she could read books she would know what
that writing said. Ora nudged her with her free arm and pointed to the door. “Hit’s got to be done,” Emma said to herself. She got up and walked straight through the door over which the mysterious word was written.

  The girl who had gone in first was standing at a mirror in there. “Is this?” Emma began. The girl smiled and nodded toward a swinging door.

  Emma went back and beckoned to Ora, who brought the young ones. In the large room there were comfortable chairs, larger than any Hal Swain and Sally had in their house. And there was a couch on which anyone who wished might lie down, for the woman who had come in through the outside door lay down on it as if she belonged there. Emma thought to herself, “Someday if I am tired I can come here and rest.” She thought then that the station was part of the factory.

  They took the children through the swinging door. When the last one had finished, Emma, Ora, Sally and Bonnie spent some time trying to get them all out again and back into the waiting room. For each child wanted another turn at the mysterious string that made the rush of water come down.

  The older ones were impressed. “Hit’s like the Israelites again,” Emma told Ora as they shooed the others into the big waiting room. “Hit’s like Moses striking the rock and bringing forth water.”

  Granpap and John were standing before a picture on the wall. There was much printing on the card around the picture, but Granpap was not interested in that. When Emma went over to say they were ready he pointed to the picture. It was an old man with a beard like Granpap’s, dressed in a gray long-tailed suit of clothes with gold braid and gold buttons on the coat.

  “Hit’s a Confederate,” Granpap said.

  “Well!” Emma exclaimed and beckoned Ora to come over and look. Soon all of them were standing around the picture, admiring the old man with the fine gray suit trimmed in gold, until Granpap, rousing himself, said it was time to go.

  It seemed the journey would never end. They left the station and passed through the straggling edges of the town and on to another country road. Though it was late afternoon the young ones were so tired they found it necessary to stop again and give them time to rest.

  They sat on the grass at the edge of the road at the bottom of a rise. Ora’s baby was crying and when he kept it up Raymond joined him. The two babies crying made the only sounds that came from the people resting along the sides of the road. The children lay about listlessly on the grass. They were too worn out to protest as the youngest were doing. Granpap and Frank sat together. They had lit their pipes and were watching the steers anxiously. The animals were almost blown. Their sides went in and out like huge bellows.

  Sally lay against a sloping bank. She was thinking of Jesse and wishing with all her might that she had let him come down with them, marry her, and take her back as he had wanted to do. But Ora had needed her on the journey and she wanted to see the city before she settled down for good. Well, she was seeing it . . . . She thought, dismally, that it would be three whole months before Jesse would come for her. Even then he might not come, for he had not liked the notion of waiting. He might decide to marry one of the girls up there, Lorene Wesley, or someone else. His work at the saw mill would begin on Monday, and he would be able to care for a wife.

  When they began the journey again, Ora sat on the sledge holding the baby, with Raymond beside her. Some of the children, rested somewhat, went ahead of the tired steers and reached the top of the hill ahead of them. Bonnie was the first to see the factory. Emma saw her standing on the rise pointing, then she came running back. “Hit’s the factory,” she said, and pulled at Emma’s arm until they reached the top of the slope.

  About two miles away, judging by mountain sight, in the middle of streets and streets of small houses, one exactly the same size and height of the other, sat a huge brick building. As Emma thought, it was like a hen with chickens that have come out of the same setting, all of one size. Only how many hundreds of chickens this old hen had brought forth! Even from the rise they could scarcely see where the rows of houses stopped.

  Up from the brick structure rose two huge chimneys, towering into the sky, like two towers of Babel. Smoke poured out of them into the wide open heavens.

  Emma felt one of the steers nosing at her shoulder. Then Ora came from the back of the sledge with the baby in her arms.

  “Hit’s the factory,” Emma said to Ora with a catch in her voice.

  Ora wondered if it was the evening sun on Emma’s face that made it look so queer, almost glorified. The look and Emma’s voice made her wish to be very practical and every-day.

  “I reckon hit couldn’t be anything else,” she said. “Hit looks like a working place.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE big doors of the factory, some distance from the road, stood open. A few people, women and men, were straggling one by one into these doors. Granpap halted the steers at the near end where a one story brick building jutted out from the large one even with the road. Here, someone had said, they could apply for work.

  Granpap and Frank entered first. Emma and Ora sat on the steps at one side so they would not be in the way of anyone who wished to go in, and Ora began again to feed the crying baby. John and Young Frank guarded the steers and the sledge, and the two girls, leaving the other children to Ora and Emma, walked timidly to a corner that was nearest. Sally had her sunbonnet off and fanned herself vigorously. Bonnie peeped from under her bonnet observing everything that was to be seen.

  Across the road there was a large wooden building with a platform in front, like a porch. Two or three young men who were lounging on the platform watched Sally. She was wearing her new calico dress. It was wrinkled and soiled but it could not hide the fact that Sally had a nice figure.

  “Ain’t that a woman for ye?” Ora asked Emma, though her words were not so much a question as a statement. She nodded her head toward Sally’s back. “She knows those pants over there are a-looking at her.”

  The two girls stood at the corner for a moment, then turned and walked back sedately to the steps. Bonnie was much smaller than Sally, though she was getting to be a woman, and promising to be pretty. Now she had the sunbonnet pulled down over her eyes, as if she was afraid to let anyone see her face. Ora looked under the bonnet when the girls were standing before them. “Are ye shamed of something, Bonnie?” she asked.

  “No,” Bonnie said, and looked down at her bare feet. Sally had shoes, bought at Swain’s, but they had thought it was not necessary for Bonnie to have them. She was four years younger than Sally. “What’s that a-rumbling?” Bonnie asked, partly because she hadn’t found any words for Ora.

  “I feel it, too.” For some time Emma had felt a throb in the air, a dull shake to the ground, as if people were dancing a long way off. Now when Bonnie spoke she felt out for the sound as she had often done for sounds around the cabin at night, when she was not sure where they came from.

  They all listened, feeling out, like Emma, to locate the cause of the throb.

  “Hit’s the factory, I think,” Emma said. She spoke in a whisper as if she was afraid the factory would hear. “You remember that church song,” she went on speaking low to Ora, “that says, ‘There’s power in the blood.’ Well, that sound seems t’ say, ‘There’s power in the factory, there’s power in the factory.’ ”

  After she had said it she was a little ashamed as she always was of some of her notions before Ora. But she saw Bonnie look up from under her bonnet as if she understood.

  “Yes,” Ora answered. Perhaps she was going to say something else, for her mouth was open, when another and very different sound startled them. It was a terrible, earsplitting shriek, as if many people cried out in sorrow, just once.

  Sally covered her ears with her hands, and Bonnie’s eyes under the bonnet grew round and wide as they did when she was disturbed. The steers out in the road moved as if about to start off. John called out “Whoa” and pulled on the ropes.

  One of the young men across the road, seeing Sally’s frightened gest
ure, called out, “It’s just the factory whistle,” and laughed.

  “Look!” Emma said. “Look, Ora.”

  From the two doors of the factory came streams of people, women and girls, men and children. It was almost more than anyone could bear to see so many people at once. The doors belched them out in two long streams that came together at the road. Here they divided again and spread out across the road, some of them going out toward the long rows of houses, some toward the place where the McClures watched. A few of these looked curiously at the steers as they passed, but most of them hurried on without noticing the strangers. They were sunk down into a sort of sleep, or perhaps they were thinking only of getting home. The late afternoon sun shone right on the factory and made out of its windows fiery eyeballs that watched the home-goers steadily.

  “I didn’t think there was so many people, anywhere,” Emma said, with a gasp, watching them go by.

  “I reckon all the houses ain’t here for nothing,” Ora thought, and then said it out loud, and added, “Hit’s a sight of houses.”

  “And a sight of people,” Emma repeated. In herself she was feeling that with so many there might not be a place for her and hers. How could the man that owned the place want more when he had so many already?

  She was relieved when Granpap and Frank came out of the office, for they would say if there was a place. But Granpap said nothing at first. He went to the sledge, took the ropes from John’s hand and turned the steers, so that the sledge faced the other way.

  Then he turned his head toward them. “I feel we’d best go back where we came from,” he said in a loud voice.

  “What is it, Frank?” Emma asked.

  “They told us to wait,” Frank said. “And we waited. Then Granpap asked how long, and the man said just wait. So we did. Then he came to us and said, ‘Hit’s too late. Come to-morrow.’ ”

  There would be no house for the night, then. And the young ones needed a roof over their heads and a little straw or something to sleep on under their bodies. Granpap was waiting, but they could not follow him. They could not turn back to the hills, now they were at the place where they had been promised work. Perhaps to-morrow if there was no work they could bear to turn back, but not late in the evening with the sun going down.