Gene Smith: Hard labor, funny money and Tennessee Ernie Ford – Fayetteville Observer

Laurinburg native David Evans has rightly called me out over an omission from last week's column, in which I wrote: "Slavery, and the peonage that took its place until World War II, are gone."

Peonage of the kind that Douglas A. Blackmon described in his searing "Slavery by Another Name" died out about then. That was the kind that enabled a white man - be he planter, industrialist or something else - to point to an able-bodied ex-slave and tell the local constable, "Get me that one." The victim would be arrested for vagrancy and delivered into unpaid, involuntary servitude for a year or more to cover the "expenses" of the officials who had been paid to arrest and convict him. Beatings were the norm. Many lawfully shanghaied laborers died of violence or sickness before their time was up. Others had their time extended, with little explanation or none.

There has been no end, though, of opportunists eager to exploit people who aren't positioned to protect themselves. Myriad cases of migrant farmworker abuse have been preserved in state records and exposed in the pages of this newspaper and others.

Folks of David's vintage and mine well remember Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" (he didn't write it, but no one else made it a major hit in two genres) and the last line of its refrain, "I owe my soul to the company store." Credit Ernie's big bass voice for some of its success, but only some. You didn't have to be nonwhite or lack a green card to get its drift. There were many thousands of millworkers who could relate to a coal miner whose income was committed to his employer before he even got his hands on it.

Among them were David's father, grandfather, great-uncles, and great-grandfather. His father put in 46 years as a textile worker with Waverly Mills in East Laurinburg. Today, David can reel off a list of good things that the mill's owner, McNair Investments, did for East Laurinburg and add, "The mills no longer exist and we are worse off because of that." But he also remembers how things were back in the day.

Until the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s sent waves of change across the land, his daddy was paid in cash. "He was paid 60 percent American money and 40 percent 'dookie' money," redeemable only at the company store. "It was probably the best provisioned store in Scotland County and it was said that you could get anything from a chaw of Black Maria to a new wedding dress. The prices were high and every time the workers were given a 2 or 3 percent raise the prices went up 3 or 4 percent. The same thing happened for the rent in the houses that were ALL owned by the McNairs."

Not long after the Civil Rights Act was passed, though, the store and the "dookie money" disappeared and David's daddy began drawing a paycheck that could be deposited in a bank. Workers who wanted to buy their rental houses were invited to do that. So include white textile workers among the beneficiaries of the movement.

On average, American women earn much less than men doing comparable work. We quarrel about whether a minimum wage higher than $7.25 an hour would be too generous to sustain. And in some undeveloped countries where U.S. manufacturers do business, laborers living on the brink are paid much less and dare not ask for more.

It isn't over. And justice is not inevitable.

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Gene Smith: Hard labor, funny money and Tennessee Ernie Ford - Fayetteville Observer