The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg Read Free Book Online Page B

rent one of Greenleaf’s houses. “Hell, by the time he got through insulting them, they just got in the car and left and blew the horn all the way out to the road,” Pruett said. Greenleaf marched down the road after them, screaming about lawsuits.
    But in a time of grim deprivation, when the whole world seemed worn and faded, Greenleaf exploded with color, with bombast and bluster.
    Pruett remembers seeing Greenleaf walking through the yard one evening in his dressing gown and a pair of rubber boots.
    Pruett yelled: “Good evening, Mr. Greenleaf.”
    “Who goes there?”
    “John Pruett.”
    “Well, ol’ John Pruett, where you going?”
    “Goin’ over to see ol’ man Greenleaf.”
    “What are you going to see ol’ man Greenleaf about?”
    “I’m goin’ over there to borrow a couple hundred dollars.”
    “Why you damn pauper,” Greenleaf said, “you wouldn’t know what to do with it if I gave it to you.”
    If Greenleaf was afraid of anything, it was his own government. Greenleaf told anyone who would listen that the Democrats were Communists in thin disguise, that putting them in power in Washington would be the end of everything American.
    In 1932, he was confident that his America would not be so foolish and talked about all the big things he was going to do, in his empire, when the Republicans won the election. Then Franklin D. Roosevelt ruined everything.
    Democrats meant reformers, and reformers meant unions, and unions meant that the little people would try to stand up to the big people, and this could not be allowed.
    ___
    In 2004, in a sickroom in Jacksonville, Gardner Greenleaf whispered a defense of his father over the hiss of a respirator. But even as he lay dying of emphysema, his family still shaped the face of this town. He had recently sold fifty acres of Greenleaf land, some of the last, to developers of a new subdivision.
    “But any damn thing we ever owned,” he said, “it cost us.”
    His father, he said, should be remembered as a good man who treated workers humanely, paid them fairly, and created a safe, clean work environment. His father made sure that the mill store sold groceries and other items at cost. He said his father gave a doctor land for his home in return for providing medical services. “It didn’t cost the cotton mill people one dime.”
    His father thought so much of his secretary at the mill, Marie, that he named the children’s fox terrier after her, spelling it backwards. “Eiram.”
    “It was a nice mill,” he said. “It didn’t have any problems.”
    His father fought to do away with the entrenched practice of child labor, he said, treated black and white employees the same in a time of rigid, violent segregation, and did not allow floor bosses to employ the hated “stretch-out,” when machines ran so fast that people could not keep up and sometimes collapsed, exhausted, into their machines.
    When he was a boy, he liked to watch it run, to watch the people rush across the floor. “It was beautiful,” he said.
    ___
    H.L. West, in his nineties now, cannot recall that mill, that idyllic realm. There were no parties, no dances in his world. At age four he had lain near death from Spanish flu, his lungs full of fluid, his fever spiking, hallucinations crawling up the wall. Spanish flu killed more people worldwide than the Great War. In Alabama, schools, stores, and businesses closed as people tied rags and handkerchiefs around their faces to avoid being infected. West’s family could not afford medicine or a doctor, and children like him just died in the pines, victims of their class as much as any microbe.
    In one of his first memories, he can recall choking in his bed, remember asking his father for a soda cracker. His father walked a mile to the store to get them, and when he came back, he held them out to his son, hoping he would rise from his bed, walk over to him, and take them. But the boy was too weak, and he can still see his father’s hands as