A day for Pauline

“I am full of hate, and that, I know, is wicked” page 1

My sister limps slowly over to the mill, late with my dinner. I always joke to Katie and Margaret about her foot, hoping if I am funny enough they will let me join in their game of jackstones. And I always see a tiny smile across Arlene’s face. My hate returns and I snatch my dinner pail from her without looking at her again. I bet she smirks about me, and laughs that I must work while she gets off easy. Perhaps she is late on purpose…

The threads control us at the warm and humid mill, with bobbins and spinners and lint all around. But Mr. Godbold likes to think he has a part too, because he controls our pay. I would like my own jackstones, better than Katie’s, but I have not enough money left over after pay day for the 40 cent silver ones at the store.

A stranger entered the mill today, with a camera. We all stopped as he took our picture, puzzled as to why he was there. I wonder why we must work in a mill, why we can’t we go to school. Why we can’t leave it to the adults to work. Mama works three times harder than I. Am I waste of time working here…? I’m just a hazard. At the mill, the constant threat of injury hangs in the air like the lint thrown off by the machines. Jimmy’s thumb was taken off by the spinner today; my foot too was injured from him landing on it, and Mr. Godbold has news for Arlene about a job. I don’t know how she will manage to work with a foot like hers, and I wonder how much of a shock it will be to find out what real work is like.

I know what it is like to work all day in the heat of the mill. But then I come home, limping on my swelling foot, which balloons so that I struggle with my shoe, to a half-clean house with more chores lined up for me. I am eleven like my twin sister but I am the one who works all day. My sister Arlene is slacking off, making more work for me. She is sleeping in our bedroom, I know it. Her hands warm, all curled around the blankets. I know one day, we will catch her sleeping, forgetting the chores, and she will have to spend her days at the mill.

Hate comes boiling and ready to explode from me but I must wait. Today I have news for her. Yes, Arlene, the favoured one will go to work tomorrow. Mr. Godbold says she will take Jimmy’s place as sweeper and learn to work in a sweaty godforsaken place they call a cotton mill. No sleeping in for you.

But she wasn’t in bed when we got home, she wasn’t in the stove room either, nor Josh’s room, nor Mom and Dad’s room. We waited to make supper; we waited for the return of my sister ‘the favoured one’. While I tried not to complain about me being hungry, and the pain in my foot escalating.