The Most They Ever Had
By Rick Bragg
- Release Date: 2012-04-30
- Genre: U.S. History
Description
The story of the mill people of Jacksonville, Alabama.
In spring 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills had come to the edge of all they had ever been. Now they stood looking down, bitter, angry, afraid. Across the South, padlocks and logging chains bound the doors of silent mills, and it seemed a miracle to blue-collar people in Jacksonville, Alabama, that their mill still bit, shook, and roared.
The century-old hardwood floors still trembled under whirling steel, and people worked on, in a mist of white air. The mill had become almost a living thing, rewarding the hard-working and careful with the best payday they ever had, but punishing the careless and clumsy, taking a finger, a hand, more.
Reviews
The Most They Ever Had
5By UdaCommishStories that needed to be told, stories that need to be remembered. Rick Bragg delivers their history and brings dignity where it has long been so deserved. God bless those people.The Best They Ever Had
4By RayNelsonIn his signature style of classic story-telling and southern flavor, Bragg evokes the ghosts of a generation not long past; a folk whose legacy was a work ethic born of necessity, honesty, and Illimitable courage. Nostalgia mixes with pity--and with admira- tion--in this memoir of a south that will not come again. Nor should it.The Most They Ever Had
4By Bama1980girlOnce again, Rick Bragg sings the sad, true song on the lower Appalachians. My own people were lint heads - mill workers who were as much enslaved as employed by Dwight Mill a few towns away from Jacksonville. The stories are the same. Bragg mines the tales from those who lived the stories and tells them in a voice that needs hearing. The mills are gone, their vibrating floors ripped from their bones and shipped to far away places to rich folk installing "reclaimed textile mill hardwood". I hope they read and look for the blood and sweat.
