“If these walls could talk…” That phrase has recently taken on new meaning for me. An article found in an old mag brought me back fifty years to the worn brick factory walls in a New Hampshire town. Today those walls contain the Exeter Mills Apartments located on the scenic Squamscott river. Granite countertops, hardwood floors, kayak storage racks and a fitness center tell little of the lives of those who worked there.
When I first walked in, in the spring of 1974 there was none of that. “Oh, and by the way, we don’t like unions,” my intake interviewer informed me curtly on my first day. That was an understatement! The company president, Roger Milliken, was an anti-union powerhouse and an architect of the Republican Party’s racist strategy. I didn’t know any of that then. But I knew that Milliken & Co, perched above the town of Exeter, was hiring. I also knew that the furniture mill I’d been at had gone belly up. They bragged at intake that this was the oldest continually operating textile mill in all of New England. I never put much thought into what that meant. I was more concerned with the age of the creaky freight elevators I operated every day. Part of my job as delivering barrels of chemicals and rolls of fabric throughout the complex to be turned into automotive upholstery and other specialty fabrics
The article was about the roots of US feminism, tracing them to the struggles of free and enslaved Black women, New England “mill girls” and middle class urban ladies. I worked in one of those mills, so I went online and learned that it began as the Exeter Manufacturing Company, in 1829. It was powered by the river and a steady stream of women and girls, fresh from the farm. The women were forbidden to live more than a five minute walk from its gates. At the turn of the century, an age requirement of 14 years was enacted.
The women labored thirteen-hour days at the spinners and looms turning raw cotton into fabric bolts. The bales were unloaded from wagons and brought down a ramp to stock the racks from which, a century and a half later, I’d lift barrels of chemicals onto flatbeds for their elevator ride up the floors. Destined to cover the beds and wrap the bodies of northern clients, this cotton had been loaded on those wagons by enslaved Black bodies on southern plantations. It was they who had planted, cultivated and harvested the fluffy white bolls under the heat of a southern sun and the crack of southern whips, but it was northern industrialists that pocketed the lion’s share of profit. I had known in my head about the connection between northern industry and southern slavery, but I hadn’t felt it viscerally until now.
But walls can’t talk, especially when muffled behind heavy drapes, layered varnish and stainless steel fixtures. And powerful interests. Book banning, teacher firings and textbook censorship are intended to suppress the voices, not of worn brick walls but of the working people, in factory and field, shipyard and kitchen, whose stories remain a threat to those who rule. It’s because those voices will remind us who we are. What we need. And who stands in the way. Walls can’t talk. But we can still hear them.
Categories: Activism, Class, Economy, Environment, Feminism, Health, history, Justice, racism, Social Justice
Ricardo Levins Morales
Ricardo Levins Morales Art Studio 