Rise gonna rise: A portrait of southern textile workers

by Mimi Conway

VG+/Very Good. First Edition. A Portrait of Southern Textile Workers. Remainder spray to bottom page block. DJ has edgewear and bumps to the tips.

228 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Roy Pierce III · Rating 5 out of 5]

My dad spent 34 years working in the Rosemary Mill (he called it the Rosemary plant) that was part of the family of mills in Roanoke Rapids, NC that this book focuses on. Most of his time was with JP Stevens, but towards the end it transitioned through Bibb and Westpoint Stevens. He was forced into early retirement in the penultimate round of layoffs before the mills finally shut down for good. He was a company man, through and through, and no believer in the Union, even after Stevens reinvested the employee’s’ retirement funds in company stock, which dropped dramatically from about $35/share to under $2/share in a 12 month period. He continued to remain loyal as they increased the required marketable production rate into the 95% range for the company, even though it was an insurmountable task to achieve those kinds of numbers on machines that for the most part hadn’t been updated since the 1950’s.

Having said all that, I was still basically a kid, and didn’t really understand. Dad’s been gone since 2009, 13 years as of last week, but reading Mrs. Conway’s book gave me a better understanding of my dad, or at least a slightly different perspective.

I’ve spent the overwhelming majority of my life 23 miles from Roanoke Rapids, NC. I’ve complained about the smell of the paper mill. I’ve made, and been the butt of, the predictable jokes and slurs about poor southern people that inhabit mill towns and the rural countryside that surrounds them. I also remember how the closing of the mills in 2003 broke the spirit of the town, and triggered a localized recession that lasted until 2007, ending just in time for the national recession that began in 2008.

I feel like I know the people interviewed in this book. They are my people, although we had it better than many of them. I remember the cheap sack of plastic toys that were sent home for the employees’ children at Christmas each year. I waited with anticipation, because it was more than that to a child. It was an embodiment of Christmas spirit. But that was the 80’s, and for a child there was no context against which I could be disappointed. By the time Dad hired on with Stevens, the glory days were already behind the Roanoke Rapids mills.

My Dad was a company man, it never mattered that the Company didn’t have his back. I highly recommend this book to anyone that knows what a lint head is, especially if there’s cotton blooms tangled in the branches of your family tree.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Portraits of workers, as part of a broader polemic on contemporary capitalism, is in vogue. With Barbara Ehrenreich, Steven Greenhouse, David Shipler, and other such recent authors, most of whom are dexterous with the subject matter and superlative in their writing styles and narrative formation, current readers have many such books to choose from. I'm a big fan and they inform my work and way of thinking about the world.

This book, from the late 1970s considering southern textile mills and the treatment of workers in North Carolina, fits in the broad category of those later authors. But Conway evokes one of the forefathers of the genre - Studs Terkel - in the way she lets the characters speak for themselves resulting in a more subtle, nuanced political message. Along with her sensorial style of writing - fittingly accompanied by photographs from Earl Dotter - the worker's stories are textured and relatable even almost fifty years after Conway took down their words. And there is a gentle kind of historical beauty (albeit a sad beauty) in how the author immortalizes these individuals who suffered greatly at the hands of their textile companies. Highly recommended.