Factory Man : How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town (9780316322607)

by Macy, Beth

  During one such trip to New York, the story went, Mr. J.D. proudly bragged to his competitors that he was “the bread in my small town of Bassett.”

  “Yeah, but up in New York, you’re only the damn crumb,” one shot back.

  In a 1967 Fortune magazine issue, a dismissive headline called Bassett, Virginia, “the Town the Daddy Rabbits Built.” The story openly mocked the company for its cronyism and its mass-produced, Middle America designs—a backwoods throwback.

  The unincorporated town of Bassett, Virginia, is the headquarters of the world’s largest manufacturer of wood furniture. It is also one of the last examples of a dying appendage of industry—the company town dominated by a single family. Employees of Bassett Furniture Industries enter the world in a Bassett-endowed hospital, are educated in the John D. Bassett [high] school, live in Bassett houses, work in one of the six local Bassett plants, deposit their savings in a Bassett bank, and worship at the Pocahontas Bassett Baptist Church.

  “It was the feudal system,” recalled Sonny Cassady, who grew up poor and fatherless in Bassett with a mother who waitressed at the Main Street Café. That’s where Jiranek and two of the company’s top salesmen hung out when they waltzed in from New York every spring and fall. His mother, Mary, had beautiful legs, Sonny told me, and she went out dancing with the men nightly in exchange for a twenty-dollar tip at the week’s end. “In the spring, she bought me tennis shoes and jeans with that money,” he said. “In October, she bought me a coat.”

  When his mother married his stepfather, a teenage Sonny left to live with the town’s cabdriver, Roy Martin, who drove to the Greensboro airport to pick up Jiranek and the New York salesmen. Accompanying Roy on the trips, Sonny learned he wanted nothing to do with factory life. “The rich people lived in castles on the hill, and the rest of us were peasants living in riverside shacks,” he said. A football scholarship gave him a college education, and Sonny eventually went into sales, wearing wide-lapelled double-breasted suits just like the ones worn by the New York salesmen. He now owns two merchandise-closeout companies.

  Sophisticated or not, the furniture was leaving the riverside factories as quickly as the Bassett Speed Lines employees could load it into the railcars. The Bassetts were making so much money they could now hire decorators to fill their own homes with antiques and high-end pieces made in Grand Rapids.

  “We made awful furniture,” lamented Jane Bassett Spilman, who owns property in Virginia and North Carolina but does not have a single Bassett Furniture piece in any of her homes. In a 1970 New York Times article, she told a reporter, “I’m sort of the Perle Mesta of Bassett,” a reference to the Washington socialite.

  Fortunately for the Bassett family, the country was growing, and the masses needed places to sit, eat, and sleep. By the time JBIII left for boarding school, in 1952, fifty years after the company was formed, it was selling $33 million in furniture a year and had 3,100 employees. W.M. had talked his father into letting him pump $6 million into factory modernizations to fully capitalize on the postwar prosperity and the new housing boom. Bassett’s slogan was “Pioneers in Furniture for the Nation,” and its company newspaper was the Bassett Pioneer.

  The waterfall design—and the hands that planed, sanded, and stained it—had made those poor, unsophisticated Daddy Rabbits rich. The joke, it seemed, was on everybody but them.

  4

  Hilltop Hierarchy

  The Negroes made me.

  —J.D. BASSETT SR.

  To get to Junior and Mary Thomas’s tidy trailer, you turn into the cut between the two dominant hills of Bassett. The hill to the left is where C.C. Bassett lived in his sprawling Victorian mansion, and the hill to the right is where Mr. J.D., his brother, lived in an almost identical home. The Thomases lived down below, like many of the black laborers, along a road that used to be named for George Washington Carver, in a snaky hollow that was home to a thirty-nine-house shantytown built for the black workers of Bassett Furniture.

  There are just fifteen houses there now, and several years ago, when the new 911 road-naming system went into effect, the road’s name was changed from Carver Lane to Carson Drive. Both were improvements over what people called the hollow back when it was part of Horsepasture—Snot Holler and Chigger Ridge.

  Junior Thomas was born in 1926 in one of the original shacks, now a bank thick with kudzu. He was brought into this world by his grandmother, a midwife, and raised by a homemaker mom and a dad who worked first in J.D. Bassett’s sawmill and later at Old Town, the first Bassett plant. Junior’s father-in-law worked at Bassett Mirror and helped Junior get hired there after he came home from World War II.

  For forty years, Junior poured silver nitrate and cut glass for mirrors. When he retired, in 1990, he was making six dollars an hour plus benefits. He’s been on call for the Bassett family ever since, occasionally chauffeuring for Spencer Morten and C.C. Bassett’s granddaughter Roxann Dillon, who gives him forty dollars at the end of every month—tiding him over until his Social Security check arrives—in exchange for his being available for odd jobs she needs performed. “I never did get weaned away from ’em,” Junior said, a sly grin forming on his unwrinkled face.

  Reed-thin and agile at eighty-five, he moves gracefully, his tight-cropped silver hair a blur much of the time. He sings like a nightingale, and he rarely eats more than half a sandwich for lunch, believing that sluggishness from overeating and good health don’t mix. When I left his house after our first interview, he refilled my water bottle and gave me Nabs for the ride home, then coached me as I navigated his steep curvy driveway across a crumbly narrow bridge so I wouldn’t land my car in his front-yard creek. (“Keep going,” he directed gently, moving his arms like a traffic cop. “That’s right, you got it, that’s right.”)

  Clad in a housecoat and slippers, his wife, Mary, stood on the front porch as I drove away, hollering for me to “Have a blessed day!” After my third visit, they sent me home with a produce basket full of bottled beer. A friend had given it to them after cleaning out someone’s estate. “We don’t want somebody from church coming by, seeing it, and getting the wrong impression!” Mary said.

  Unlike the employees in the whites-only mills in nearby Martinsville and Fieldale, Bassett’s workforce was 20 percent black from the very beginning. Bassett Furniture paid its first black workers half of what it paid the white workers, but the company did hire them, and it provided housing, segregated and ramshackle though most of it was. While the white line workers lived in four-room shotgun houses with outhouses that fed directly into the Smith River, most black workers lived in shacks dotting Carver Lane, which angled away from the river and the railroad tracks like a tributary. Their outhouses fed into the woods.

  “That was unusual for the time, blacks and whites working together at industrial jobs,” historian John Kern said. The Civil War had raged here just four decades before. In many Southern cities, it was illegal for blacks to live in certain neighborhoods, and Jim Crow laws throughout the former Confederacy prevented biracial gatherings in barbershops and baseball parks, at circuses and domino matches.

  Black employees knew their salaries weren’t equal to the whites’ working at Bassett, and the possibility for advancement was nil. But for the most part, they were treated with some dignity, and, relative to other jobs in the segregated South, working conditions were adequate.

  Besides, it was better than what the North Carolina furniture makers were offering blacks, which initially was no jobs at all. With most of his Southern competitors hiring only whites, relegating the blacks to sawmilling and sharecropping, Mr. J.D. knew that hiring blacks would yield high dividends. A black employee’s pay stub from 1932 showed that for one hundred hours worked, the take-home pay was ten dollars, or ten cents an hour. A white worker made more than double that for the same number of hours. (In later decades, the pay disparity amounted to about five cents an hour for comparable work, sometimes more, according to Kern’s research. One table-plant worker he interv
iewed was earning $1.25 an hour when he quit, in 1963; his white replacement started out at $1.35.)

  Blacks had to use separate bathrooms and drinking fountains. But like the Taiwanese and Chinese rice-paddy peasants who would replace them a century later, they were eager to join the cash economy—and to work inside, away from the blazing heat of the tobacco fields. In the southern United States in the early 1900s, hiring black factory workers was unprecedented. None of the industries in nearby Martinsville were hiring blacks—not until 1933, when three black entrepreneurs and a Jewish mill owner founded Jobbers Pants Company, a sewing plant run out of a former R. J. Reynolds tobacco factory.

  In early photos of Bassett employees, the black workers stood together in the back row or sat inside the second-story window frames, their feet dangling. They worked the hottest, dirtiest jobs, usually in the finishing room, where it didn’t matter how dark you were: when the whistle blew at the end of the day, everyone was stained with varnish. Many of those who didn’t live in Snot Holler/Carver Lane walked or caught the train to a black enclave in nearby Fieldale, recalled rub-room worker Doretha Estes, whose grandfather, parents, and husband worked in the factories or as domestics in the Bassett homes.

  Outside the factory walls, Jim Crow brutality loomed in many corners of the 1920s American South. Cabell Finney, one of Estes’s uncles, was running late to catch the train to Bassett one morning, so he jumped on a slow-moving train car. As he made his way through the whites-only section to get to the black car in the back, an angry conductor grabbed him and literally kicked him off the train. Killed on impact, Cabell Finney was twenty. His father, George Finney, a minister who worked at Bassett’s veneer plant, sued the N&W Railway and won a four-hundred-dollar settlement, according to the family.

  Another Finney, George’s cousin Ben, later had the nerve to use the whites-only bathroom inside the Bassett plant, where he worked as janitor. “He was self-taught, and he carried himself with dignity and pride,” his niece Carolyn Blue said.

  When the foreman asked why he went to the white bathroom, Ben Finney told him the “colored [one] was occupied.”

  “Ben, you know you shouldn’t have used that bathroom,” the foreman said.

  “The last time I checked, shit was shit, and I was not gonna go on myself,” Ben replied, and after a moment of awkward silence, the foreman walked away.

  “Do you know how bodacious that was at the time?” Carolyn exclaimed after she told me the story.

  Talk to people in Bassett today, and most say the company viewed all workers through a paternalistic but pragmatic lens: work hard and show up on time, and management didn’t care what color you were. The Bassetts spoke out virulently against unions but never expressed outward racial prejudice in their factories or homes during segregation, many people, black and white, told me. When a service station opened in Bassett in the 1950s, Mr. J.D. was heard to say that the owners “had better hire some blacks if they wanted to stay in business.”

  When a white doctor who worked for the company refused to treat the black employees, Mr. J.D. told the doctor to pack his bags, according to Naomi Hodge-Muse, Estes’s daughter and an NAACP leader. “It’s all jaded with the reality of racism, but Mr. Bassett did believe the doctor had to take care of everybody, so it ended up the doctor changed his freakin’ mind and stayed,” Naomi said.

  One of the family’s maids, Mary Hunter, trusted the couple so much that she left her estate to them, along with instructions that it be put toward the education of black children. Born during the Civil War or immediately after (census records give conflicting dates), Mary Hunter was badly burned as an infant when her mother left her sitting in front of a fireplace while she fetched water from the well. Despite her crippled feet, she worked hard, ironing the family’s clothes and polishing the silver. She often sat in a rocking chair and used it to scoot herself across the floor. When she cooked, she propped herself up on a single crutch. Living in the Bassett family home, Mary Hunter minded the house and helped raise the four children while Miss Pokey worked at the company store.

  According to Hodge-Muse and her mother, when Mary Hunter died, in 1940 at the age of seventy-eight, the Bassett family tried to cover her funeral expenses, only to be reminded of the servant’s vehement final wishes: It was beneath her dignity to let her employers pay for her burial and headstone; her estate would take care of it.

  “I don’t remember if it was a hundred dollars or a thousand,” Jane Bassett Spilman said of Mary Hunter’s estate, adding that the family made sure the county’s segregated school for blacks, built in 1956, was named Mary Hunter Elementary. “But I remember her saying, ‘You are my family.’ ”

  According to an account written by the school’s first principal, John B. Harris, Mr. J.D. visited the school shortly after it opened and explained how Mary Hunter had managed his household “so efficiently and well, how she saved money for his family and herself.” Astonishingly, the maid, who had never learned to read or write, had somehow amassed forty thousand dollars. (Her will, however, shows her estate was valued at only $782.64 in cash—suggesting, again, that family lore and the facts weren’t always in sync.) The first school in the county to be named for a woman or a black person, Mary Hunter Elementary had an enrollment of 450 students.

  Hodge-Muse went on to graduate from high school and college, but it’s the alma mater song from Mary Hunter Elementary that has stuck with her, she told me. Then she sang it through twice:

  Mary Hunter’s gonna shine tonight, Mary Hunter’s gonna shine

  It will shine with beauty bright on down the line

  When the sun goes down and the moon comes out

  Mary Hunter’s gonna shine.

  Jane told me Mary Hunter’s story at her horse farm in Manakin-Sabot soon after she had watched the movie The Help, the film adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s book of the same name. She was shocked by the way Southern whites demeaned their servants in the film. “The people I knew would never dream of treating their help that way,” she said. Jane certainly didn’t, according to several of the area’s black residents, who recall Jane and her longtime cook sharing a warm relationship. Jane’s maid, who died in 2012, was still baking homemade yeast rolls for the family on holidays well into her nineties. Jane also had a house built for her parents’ servants, Augusta and Willie Green, a home now owned and occupied by the Greens’ daughter.

  But Jane seemed not to know of the thinly veiled secrets surrounding some of the men in her extended family—that Estes’s mother, a Bassett family cook, wore two girdles at once to keep wandering Bassett hands in check; that there were whispers about the light-skinned black children who grew up in C.C. Bassett’s home.

  In the Bassett Historical Center, as I photocopied the seventeen-pound Bassett genealogy, a tome written by Mr. J.D.’s granddaughter, a library assistant told me in all sincerity: “She left one of her relatives out.”

  Talk to the right people long enough, and the worst-kept secret in town emerges again and again. A former Bassett salesman brought up the sexually exploitative practice of sleeping with the servants, common in slavery as well as in Reconstruction and continuing in Bassett, in the most well-known instance, with C.C. Bassett and the family maid. Hodge-Muse was the first of many to reveal the mulatto child’s name: Clay Barbour. Naomi’s grandmother Dollie Finney was the one who corseted herself with two girdles, and she was there when another servant hollered at Mr. J.D., “John Bassett, you’d screw a black snake if someone would hold its head!” Her frankness sent the old man into such a fit of roaring laughter that he slapped his hat on his leg.

  “He didn’t get insulted by nothing [servant] women said to him. He was too busy on his journey,” Doretha Estes said. “He figured, If I can’t get this one, I’ll get me another.”

  Estes, who was eighty-six when I interviewed her, stood to demonstrate the way her girdled mother bent over the dining-room table while serving the family’s dinner, using both hands to hold a dish. The way she ste
eled herself as the inevitable hand began to crawl up her leg, knowing that she couldn’t flinch or complain—otherwise a Bassett wife might accuse her of flirtation and, quite possibly, fire her.

  Estes told me all this eighteen months after I started reporting this book, during my fifth visit to the house she shares with her daughter. She was initially reluctant to be interviewed, snapping that I had no right to dredge up such uncomfortable things. But finally, having witnessed a lifetime of Bassett family decision-making—and its rippling effects on the community, pro and con—she was ready to talk.

  Working for the Bassetts allowed Estes to send her daughter to college, a family first. It allowed her grandfather George Finney to build a three-hundred-dollar home out of chestnut—by lantern, at night, after working in the factory all day. “Look, the truth is, back then, the Bassetts weren’t too stingy. It’s just so hard now to be fair about it all, but I’m trying.”

  Her daughter, speaking in her usual impassioned tone, struggled to articulate her own mixed feelings. “They were greedy, yes. They were controlling, yes. But they weren’t all evil,” Naomi told me, citing the separate black and white recreation centers they built. “As strange as it was, it was a symbiotic relationship,” she said, “and I think that biological term actually applies. They were the huge tree that gave life to small vines, and because there were small vines, I’m sitting here in Chatmoss”—a high-end subdivision near Martinsville that is also home to some Bassett descendants.

  Henry “Clay” Barbour was born in 1911, lived on Carver Lane, and died a bachelor in a Martinsville nursing home in 1993. In his obituary, his mother is listed as the late Julie Ann Barbour. No father was named, though his employer—the Bassett family—was mentioned. According to census documents, he was a mulatto child who lived in the C.C. Bassett home. Unlike his mother, who never learned to read or write, Clay was literate, though he’d been schooled only through the third grade.