I was seventeen years old, in the twelfth grade, and had gotten pregnant—but I was not about to let this ruin the rest of my life.
When my mother found out I was pregnant, she was adamant about me going to find a job. Her exact words were, “I’m not signing no papers for you to go and get on welfare.” I got a job working at Shoney’s Restaurant in Aberdeen, North Carolina, as a waitress and hostess–cashier. When I got hired, I told no one, not even the manager who hired me, that I was pregnant.
Every day after school, I would go home, do whatever homework I had, eat, and get ready for work. During the week, I would work from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and on the weekends I would work longer hours. Some days I would greet the customers, and on other days I would wait tables. For some odd reason, I absolutely loved it. The benefit of having a job was having my own money so I could buy my own clothes. I loved not being dependent on my parents for the little things.
My supervisor, a white woman by the name of Barbara, taught me how to run the register and correctly count change back to the customer. I remember one day a customer was checking out and paying his bill, which came to $11.51. The customer gave Barbara, who was hostessing at the time, $20 and a penny. For the life of me, I could not understand why he was giving her a penny if he had given her a $20 bill.
After the transaction, I mustered up the courage to ask her, “Why did he give a penny if he had already given $20?”
She turned to me, without judgment, and explained in simple terms that he gave the penny to keep from getting pennies back. She went on to say he gave me the penny so that he could get 50 cents back instead of 49 cents.
Wow, this seemed like simple math. I had been in school for twelve years, confined to the four corners of the public or the private school system, and no one had ever taught me this simple trick. Today, most Millennials don’t know this simple math. If you don’t believe me, test them by giving them a penny if you ever have a bill that totals up to the change being an odd number.
I learned a lot from Barbara. She taught me how to meet and greet customers, how to run hourly reports to see if sales were up or down from the previous year, and then record them. She showed me how to keep the menus and the front of the store clean, even down to the bathrooms. She would say, “Customers can tell how clean the restaurant’s kitchen is by checking the bathrooms. If the bathrooms are dirty, then the kitchen is dirty.” A lot of these tasks were easy for me because Father had taught me the importance of such things when he owned the laundromat.
When I worked on the weekends, I was able to wait tables. As a waitress, if the supervisor saw you just standing around, she would say, “If you got time to lean, you got time to clean.” It was a good day if you were able to make $60 in tips. Most days when I was waitressing, I would make just that.
The one thing I loved about my supervisor, Barbara, was that she never made me feel inferior or less than. If I didn’t understand something, she would explain it; if I needed something and she had it, she would give it. She did everything within her power to help me, and I trusted her wholeheartedly. And one day, after I was going into four months of being pregnant, she came right out and asked me directly, “Are you pregnant?”
Almost too embarrassed to admit it, I told her, “Yes.”
She never looked at me differently. She congratulated me and said she hoped it was a boy.
I worked the whole nine months of my pregnancy. Some mornings, I would have morning sickness because certain smells would make me sick. I would always push through and continue to go to school because my number one goal was to graduate on time from high school. I refused to be added to the statistics as a dropout, and I refused to let morning sickness or any sickness having to do with my pregnancy keep me from working. I kept going, and finally I was graduating.
After graduating from high school, I continued working at Shoney’s, and I was able to obtain more hours. Though I was getting bigger, I still went to work every day, and the people that I worked with had become my work family. They looked out for me because I was pregnant.
I remember wanting a baby shower, and Mother said that she was not throwing me a baby shower because I was having a baby out of wedlock. Things were a lot different back in those days. Being pregnant without being married was looked down upon, not celebrated. I wasn’t saddened by it; it was what it was. My colleagues at work took it upon themselves and gave me a beautiful baby shower. My parents did not attend because of their beliefs.
During my pregnancy, I went from 110 pounds to 180 pounds. There were days when I just didn’t feel well, but I kept pushing it. One day, while at a doctor’s appointment, the doctor looked at me and said, “You look like you are holding too much fluid.” She admitted me to the hospital to induce labor because my baby was not budging. Though it was time for him to come out, he was not ready.
When they admitted me into the hospital, they began giving me medicine through an IV to induce my labor, which had me experiencing contractions. The contractions were so painful, the doctors ended up giving me an epidural.
An epidural is an injection of a local anesthetic into the space around the dura mater of the spinal cord in the lower back region to produce loss of sensation, especially in the abdomen or pelvic region.
After that, I remember falling off into a deep sleep. The strangest thing is, I could hear my surroundings, but I was asleep. I remember hearing the TV show Dallas going off when my mother must have gone to get the nurse. She said she could see the baby’s head. After that, they were waking me up, ready for me to push. A little after 11:00 p.m., my son was born. It was official, I was a mother.
After about a week of being home with a newborn baby, I was ready to return back to work, and that’s exactly what I did. Mother thought I should stay in the house for six weeks, but I felt fine. Thank God for Mother because, while I worked, she took care of my son. Then, after a long day of work, I would have to come home and pick up the slack.
My son’s father was about to join the military. His mother called me and told me that he would give me fifty dollars a month in child support, and I should go get on food stamps. Damn that! I wasn’t interested in getting on any form of welfare, and I wasn’t just going to accept fifty measly dollars a month. So I sued him for child support. Once my son’s father joined the military, my son was able to receive an allotment. When he got out of the military, my son was able to receive child support.
I thank God for my parents during this journey in my life because they were able to stand in the gap when my son or I needed anything.
After my son’s father got out of the military, things started rekindling again. It was like old times but with a son. As we were dating, though, I started noticing his manipulative and controlling ways. He always had a problem with me being around my sisters; he would say they were coercing me into doing things he didn’t like. He was trying to keep me in this box where I could have no outside contact with anyone but him. One day, he saw empty beer bottles in Silk’s car and made it his business to go and tell my mom about it. Silk and I were livid.
The next thing he did was leave a note on my parents’ car, informing them that he and I were having sex. When I got off of work, Mother and Father called me into Mother’s office and sat me down to question me about it. I was pissed off and petrified at the same time. My mother looked at me and said, “If you’re going to be having sex, then you need to be married. We are pastors. How is this going to make us look when you’re out there having sex, and you’re not married!” She demanded that I get married.
I felt powerless and like I was being forced into something that I did not want to do. Though I was sleeping with my son’s father, I did not love him, and I had already stopped liking him because of his manipulative ways. But I did what I was told to do, and it was the worst mistake I ever made in my life.
I don’t blame my mother; I blame myself for not speaking up on my own behalf and for not using my voice, which was my power, to say “No” to what I didn’t want. I went along to get along, and, in the end, I ended up all alone.
The marriage ended in divorce, and the experience left me so empty, I never wanted to be married again. In the end, life was giving me a crucial assignment that I had to keep repeating until I passed the test and learned the lesson.
Some may ask why I didn’t go to college. I could have gone to college; hell, I tried to go to college, but when I walked in that classroom and saw the teacher writing all of that stuff on the board, I didn’t know what it was, so I got my little book bag and walked right out. I watched my cousins go to college because their parents told them to get it on the wall. One cousin went to school to be a foot doctor, and we found out years later that she’s no more a doctor than Dr. Pepper.
Years later we also found out she couldn’t even pass the medical boards. All that money was wasted.
I was working at Shoney’s, but I still wanted to make more money, so I got a second job at McDonald’s. I started off there happy to work, ready to do my part. Only trouble was, McDonald’s wanted to have me work on the fry machine, but I had a Jheri curl.
Oh, God. We did have the Jheri curls with the activator and moisturizer, hahaha.
I did not want that grease popping in my hair and, all of a sudden, now we have a fire.
Hahaha. This wasn’t around the time when Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire from his Jheri curl, was it?
I can’t remember, but it probably was.
So I had two jobs: I had to make the salads for the next day, and then I would have to get on the fry machine. All was well until I noticed that when the supervisor hired for the cashier positions, he always hired white girls.
So this one particular day, I asked him if I could move to the register or do something else because I didn’t want my hair catching on fire from the fry machine.
He said when the next cashier position opened up, then I could take that position. No worries.
I kept doing my job, showing up on time, giving it all I’ve got. I was happy because the only part I didn’t like about the job would end soon.
Shortly after this, another cashier position opened up. I’m thinking, okay, good, I’ll get that position, and my time on the fryer will be over with.
Would you believe, y’all, the supervisor hired another white girl for the position?
Wow.
That was my last day working on the fry machines, though, because I went off on that manager, gave him his little apron, and I quit. That was my first time quitting a job, but I felt justified in walking out. He had told me the next cashier’s position would be mine, then he turned right around and gave it to someone else. It wasn’t even about the girl being white. It was about him lying to me, telling me one thing and doing another.
Was your supervisor a white supervisor, a black supervisor, or Hispanic?
He was a white supervisor. Remember now, this was in the late eighties. I quit because he promised me something but didn’t deliver on what he promised.
Mm-hmm.
So, after I quit, I only had my job at Shoney’s. What about you, Silk? Where did you work?
I remember working at Kolcraft. I was eighteen years old when I started there. Kolcraft makes baby furniture, and they are still a pretty big deal in Aberdeen, North Carolina, today, employing about 245 people.
My job was making the small components that connect car seat handles to the actual seats.
My trainer’s name was Martha, and she was a good trainer. In fact, she trained me so well that I became the lead on that particular line. When the line got moving along, everyone started scrambling, but that’s when I rested a bit because I had produced so much work that the line had to catch up with me.
You were a fast, strategic worker.
Exactly. I went ahead and did what I had to do, but I did it in a particular way, and the method worked. The way I saw things, there was no point in being on the line if what you were doing wasn’t working. Why bother being there?
About six months later, I got my second job, at Burlington Industries, in Raeford, North Carolina. I hated to do it, but I had to go back to Kolcraft to let them know I was quitting. I’m not going to lie, they put up quite a fuss. The supervisors wanted to know if there was anything that they could do to make me stay. They told me that if it didn’t work out at Burlington, I would always have a job there at Kolcraft.
Oh, my…
I remember that, gurl, and it meant a lot to me.
Whenever I’m traveling back and forth to the airport, I pass Kolcraft, and I often look over there and remember what those supervisors told me. That left a vivid impression on me—then I thank God that He delivered me, hahaha.
Hahaha, I know that’s right.
So I got hired at Burlington when I was nineteen. It seemed like everybody in Raeford wanted to get on at Burlington. It was a long, exhausting process, and people would park their cars at two or three o’clock in the morning just to get in line.
The reason everybody wanted to get on at Burlington was because they were a manufacturer. Back in the late eighties and nineties, people could raise families, send their children to college, and pay their bills with a good job like that.
That’s right.
So, staying in a small town such as Raeford, if you were able to bring home $30, 40, 50,000 a year, that was really good money for the average family.
That’s right.
That’s why people were lined up; they wanted those jobs.
Exactly right.
So, I got in line, and I put in my application like everybody else. However, what I did differently is almost every other day I called and spoke with someone to ask if they had received my application. I also let them know how hard a worker I was and that they would not regret hiring me. It was like I was doing my own interview over the phone, almost every day.
I talked to whoever happened to answer the phone in human resources. It got to the point where they knew my name when I called. Finally, the day came when I was receiving the call back from them. They wanted me to start on third shift that same night.
So there I was that same night, starting my new job at Burlington Industries in the winding department. I had a wonderful supervisor, Betty K.—light-skinned, beautiful lady—and Mary R. was my instructor. She taught me how to drop the bobbins to create the yarn so that they could be processed to go to the next department.
So with Silk being at Burlington Industries making all kinds of money, of course I wanted to work there too. Not long after Silk started there, they needed workers for the cloth room. I didn’t know a thing about cloth, but they were hiring for that position. So I put in an application.
Mm-hmm.
Just about a week or two later, I got a phone call for an interview. I was thrilled; this would provide the kind of money needed to make a good life, so I thought. I think I had to do a drug test, and all that kind of stuff came back good, so I was hired.
Mm-hmm.
Once I got hired, there were a few weeks of training. They were up-front about it: if we couldn’t pass the training, we wouldn’t get the job. Myrtle was our trainer, and she showed us how to thread up a needle, how to look at the cloth, how to read the cloth to determine whether there was a missed reed or a wrong draw or if we had to stitch it somewhere to fill in that missed reed. Whatever the error was, we only had so many minutes to fix it.
Mm-hmm.
Once that cloth started rolling on the roller, we had to inspect it to make sure no damaged cloth was delivered to the customers. We were the last department before the cloth shipped out, so after it went through all of the other departments, it came to the cloth room.
If there was a missed reed—when the yarn didn’t stitch all the way through—or a wrong draw or something that just didn’t look right, we would have to either fix it or mark that it was unable to be repaired.
The stress of those few weeks in training was almost overwhelming. Luckily, I was able to complete each and every task that they gave me. Not everyone made it through training because it was challenging, it really was. I remember one of the other girls, she was a Caucasian girl, she could not thread her needle up fast, and she was not fast enough sewing in the little spaces that needed to be mended.
Mm-hmm.
So they were giving her one more day to catch on, and we were all rooting for her, but she couldn’t get it right, so they had to let her go.
Oh, no…
After moving up from training, I was officially a cloth inspector on third shift. I had to inspect that cloth to make sure that no damage had been done to it and there were no missed reeds or wrong draws. We had to be on our game because after we inspected it, it went to another inspector to make sure we did our job. If we didn’t do our job accurately, they would send all that cloth back for us to inspect it again.
That’s right. Wow.
In the winding department, we had to make sure that the bobbin colors didn’t get mixed up because the shades and hues were so close. If we didn’t read all of the item lines off to make sure that we had the correct color bobbins, we could easily be working with the wrong yarn. I became especially intrigued with counting my numbers at the end of my shift to see how many bobbins I had actually dropped.
One time, I had just come back from lunch, and when I got to the two machines I worked on, all the bobbins in my tray were gone. Everything was empty; my machines were stopped; everything was lit up red.
Well, I felt like I turned into Wonder Woman.
Hahaha.
All of a sudden, gurl, here I go: I started from one end and worked my way to the next, getting those machines back up and running. I was working at high speed; that’s just something that I excelled at. I didn’t bother anybody, and no one bothered me. I didn’t look up to see if anyone noticed me; I just kept dropping those bobbins.
I went down one row, came back up on the other side, and completed row after row in that way. When I was just about done with the last row, I noticed this distinguished-looking white gentleman standing there.
I remember that gentleman. He was a department head, and he looked like Richard Gere when he was fine.
Hahaha. Yes, that’s exactly who he looked like.
So he was standing there at the end of my machine, and he said, “I just stood here and watched you drop all of these bobbins and just get your job back up to running smoothly.” And he said, “Have you ever thought about working in the weave room?”
Now, y’all, the weave room is where you made the big bucks because you’re really making the actual cloth that’s about to be distributed to the other departments in order to make quality clothes.
Right.
So I was excited about this possibility, and I’m sure my eyes were wide and the surprise was all over my face as I responded, “I want to work in the weave room, but I’m blind in one eye.”
When I was born, my optic nerve did not develop properly, so I am legally blind in one of my eyes. I can see some light, but everything is blurry. I refused to go on disability, though, because I didn’t want my blind eye to “dis my ability” to be able to work. Does that make sense?
Yes, it sure does.
It never stopped me, and no one ever knew about it unless I told them. Since I’ve gotten older, my eye has gotten a lot lazier. I’ve received several emails from some good-hearted folks offering to correct my eye free of charge.
Wow.
Although those offers were kind and considerate, I decided not to tamper with it. I’ve been living with this eye like this for all of these years, I’ll just leave well enough alone. Some may call it a cockeye, but I call it my super eye, hahaha.
Hahaha.
My super eye has the capability to look at you and around you at the same time. I feel like the chosen one because I have something the average person doesn’t have. I turned my negative into positive. I’ve embraced and replaced my flaws with peace, and I always ask God to lead and guide me in the right direction.
That’s the right way to look at it too.
So, anyhoo, I told the supervisor that I am blind in one eye, and that’s been my deterrent. He gave me his name anyhow. Turns out he wasn’t just a supervisor; he was head honcho over the whole department.
So he told me what time to come in the next day and where to go and to tell the people up front that he referred me. I did just what he said because I wanted that job.
Mm-hmm.
As part of that application process, I had to go back through another eye exam. I was so nervous, I even told the examiner, “Ma’am, I can’t see out of this eye.”
She said, “Oh, don’t worry about it.”
I thought they were testing to see if I was going to work out okay. I found out later that this supervisor wanted me in the weave room so bad that the testing was just a formality. I already had the position. The next day, I was in training. It happened just that fast.
Wow.
So here’s the craziest thing, y’all: By the time Silk left the winding department and was in the weave room, where the big bucks were at, they were getting ready to lay off people in the cloth room. So my job was being threatened by layoffs.
That’s right.
I actually thought I was going to be laid off, but instead they moved me to the winding department. I believe they trained me on second shift, and my supervisor’s name was Charlie D. Then I was pushed to third shift, and my supervisor was also Betty K.
So, now I’m in the winding department, and Silk is in the weave department, both of us working midnight to 8:00 a.m.
Mm-hmm.
Well, on one of my shifts, at about 7:00 a.m., I had to get a crate of yarn. So I went through this whole procedure of taking the main bobbin out and making sure to match it to what was on the machine so I was sure to be running the right bobbin. I was focused on my task, not paying attention to anything else around me, really, when the department head comes through—the one who looked like Richard Gere.
Well, he saw me following the right protocol, doing something that the others weren’t doing, and while their yarn was getting mixed up, mine wasn’t.
So he came over and complimented me on following the rules, and then he asked me if I would like to be in the weave room.
I’m staring at him in shock and I said something like, “Well, my sister works back there; it sounds good to me.”
And, so, I don’t even think I had to put in another application. It was like, “Training starts on this day.” And that’s just the way it was.
Mm-hmm.
Let me add this, y’all: I know sometimes black Americans feel like all white people are racist; that’s not true. Even though I had experienced racism in the workplace, if I had let that be my story for every job I went to, I might not have accepted that this individual—a white man—was looking out for me. He wanted me to have this job, just like he wanted Silk to have the job, because he felt that we could do the job.
He couldn’t have cared less about Silk being blind in one eye.
Hahaha. That’s right.
Hell, he didn’t care if she could see at all, as long as she kept those machines in that weave room running, hahaha.
Hahaha, yes.
I didn’t fit the criteria for employment in the weave room. They wanted us to have high-functioning vision to work with the fine details of the cloth. He wanted me back there for my work ethic.
Right.
So, I’m working back there, and now my sister is back there. You’ve got your tool belt and I’ve got mine, and we’re making good money and doing our thing.
Mm-hmm.
Betty M. was the only trainer at the time, and they needed another, so the position of instructor opened up, and I decided to apply. I was ecstatic when I got the job.
The individuals whom I trained, after finishing training and getting out there on the floor, were outstanding in their positions, and they stayed there a long time. I actually began making more money than the instructor who trained me because of how effective I was.
Wow.
For me, y’all, I was back there in that weave room, trying to keep the machines going, but I just woke up one day and I felt like I wanted to be a supervisor.
Mm-hmm.
Of course, when I went to talk to the department manager about it, he looked at me like I was crazy.
Yes, he did.
He didn’t think I was ready to be a supervisor, and maybe I wasn’t ready; but, hell, at least I tried.
Yeah. Nothing beats a failure but a try.
That’s right. I never became a supervisor. So, instead, I focused all of my energy on keeping those weave machines going so that the cloth would weave because we had to produce that cloth and move it out of there.
The machines, which were called looms, were huge and dominated ten feet of space all around.
That’s right. Yes.
We had to wear our tool belts with our scissors and our weave hooks ready.
Yes. We tied weaver’s knots.
Yes. We had to tie weaver’s knots, and we had to tie them in so many seconds.
Yes.
We had to be able to inspect the cloth to make sure that we didn’t have a wrong draw. A wrong draw happened when one of the threads broke. We had to get a matching thread, tie a knot, pull the string through the heddle eye with a weaver’s hook, then take a reed hook and thread it through the reeds, and then start the machine.
Mm-hmm.
Now, the pattern had to match the other pattern. If it didn’t match, it could have been a wrong draw or a missed reed.
Mm-hmm.
You did not want your cloth going far with a wrong draw because you could get written up or even get fired, because it’s a total loss to the company.
That’s right. Imagine purchasing a coat, and you see a yellow line that’s not supposed to be there going down the back of the coat.
Absolutely. Even when I shop for clothes today, I can pretty much spot if there is a missed reed or a wrong draw in the fabric because I’ll take a look at the pattern.
Mm-hmm.
A wrong draw was easy to have happen because sometimes the pattern looked the same. They would have to take a little magnifying glass out and put it on the cloth to see if the pattern was wrong.
Right. Sometimes you were using two or three different colors that looked the same. You had to know how to look at the yarn, to twist it, to see if it was double or single yarn.
Wrong draws were not something that Diamond or I did often.
Right.
But every now and then, something could get crossed up. Dust would sometimes get into the machines and put a knot in the yarn, causing one of the threads to break. Before you knew it, things were crossed up, and it was up to you to uncross it. That’s why we had to do an inspection every hour on the hour. I even remember my inspection number, it was 212.
Right.
We’d have to go over there and unmat it; remember that?
Oh, gurl, I remember it.
So, whenever that happened, our supervisor, Mr. Williams, was there to really shield us because he loved the Hardaway girls’ work ethic.
Yes, he did. I don’t even know if Mr. Williams is still alive, but he was a really good supervisor. I really enjoyed working for him.
Yes.
We’ve really always been proactive and involved on the job.
That’s right.
If we learned that somebody was upset about a new rule, we had no problem going to the department head, department manager, or a supervisor to get it all straightened out.
That’s right.
I specifically remember a meeting that was supposed to last no more than fifteen minutes; we stayed up there for almost an hour.
Mm-hmm. I remember they wanted us to do some extra jobs. At that time, they had a crew of workers who blew the dust from under the machines. During the meeting, they told us they wanted to add that to our list of job duties.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! We shut that meeting down. This was not part of our job description, and we weren’t supposed to do this. They already had workers to go through there and blow the lint out from under the machines.
Right. We weren’t going to do additional tasks that were outside of our job description without getting paid for it. They had a crew to clean out all of the lint. Don’t put that on us to do.
We shut down a few meetings when we didn’t like something. There were times I may have even gone too far, but they put up with us because it wasn’t about starting trouble just to start trouble. It was about having a high-quality work environment for everyone. The flip side to that was we were responsible to produce excellent work. We did that, and we constantly picked up shifts and worked overtime.
That’s why they weren’t going to fire us.
I remember working twenty-four hours straight. Each shift needed somebody to work, and they came to us. Because one thing they knew about us Hardaway girls, we didn’t have a problem with work. We would work, and we were going to get the job done.
Mm-hmm. Thank God for our mother. She would have food cooked up.
Yes.
Sometimes somebody would have to bring us a plate out there for dinner.
Yes. I remember that. They allowed us to have whatever we needed so we would be happy.
Yes, they did. And back in those days, it was common for us to bring home $1,000 every two weeks. Now, that may not sound like a lot of money today, but back then that was very good money.
Right. It sure was.
You could pay your house payment, your car payment, buy a few extras, save some money. I mean, those were the days back then.
Mm-hmm, yes.
Do you remember that supervisor who was so highly educated that he knew nothing about the machinery? He knew nothing about the looms—he didn’t even know how to start them—and he didn’t know how to tie a weaver’s knot.
Gurl, I remember this one time when that man was walking the weave room floor, I had my machine running good, y’all, and he was trying to show me how to do something. I’m looking at him like, get off my job, I know what I’m doing, you’re making me miss out on money while my machine is stopped.
He went ahead and got off my job.
Hahaha, I’ll bet he did.
So we really enjoyed our work, and we used to work overtime whenever we could.
We didn’t just work over in the weave room. Sometimes we’d be walking through the winding department, going home, and a supervisor would stop us to see if we could work over in that department too.
Yes, that’s right. That highly educated supervisor saw how much overtime we were getting—sometimes we were bringing home more money than the supervisors—and he didn’t like it.
That’s right. By working over in both departments, we were making more money than he was, and he was supposed to be the top-notch supervisor.
He was like, “You’re making that type of money? Oh, no, you don’t. You’re making more money than me.”
This one particular night, we wanted to work over because they needed people.
Yes.
Well, the supervisor with all that education was running that shift and didn’t want us to work over in anybody’s department.
Yes. He was the one who didn’t want us to work over, but another supervisor was the one who went running around telling other department heads not to let us work over.
Okay. So the one with the fancy-pants education was like, “Well, y’all can’t work over on my shifts anymore.”
Right. But the other supervisor was the main person who brought us our checks. He would look at our checks and be like, “There’s no way these girls are making this kind of money.” Then he’d give them to us and we’d keep on going, but we knew he was jealous.
That’s right. So just thinking about it, who in the hell did he think he was?
Yes. Who in the hell did he think he was?
He went over to other departments and told them that the Hardaway girls couldn’t work over in their departments. They’re the ones that wanted to be supervisors; all we were doing was the weaving. We made the money because we put in the time.
So, now the supervisor with all the education needed people for overtime work, but there was such a fuss going on about how our paychecks looked, he didn’t want to give us the opportunity to work over in his department.
So you know what? We went on home. No problem. You may not pay what you owe, but you will reap what you sow.
That’s right.
Well, that next night, y’all, he needed some people to work over, and all of his little friends that he gathered the night before weren’t going to help him out the next night.
Mm-hmm.
So here he comes, looking at us, coming to us wondering if we could work over. And we were like, oh hell, no.
We said the words, “Hell, no.”
We said, “Hell, no.” We knew he needed people, but it wasn’t going to be us two people.
Yes.
Oh, yes, we let him have it. We said, “You figure out how you’re going to run all of these looms because we won’t be running them. Not tonight.”
Yes, we sure did. I remember this vividly, yes.
Production was down that night. He had no one to work over, so he had sections of machine lights lit up in that weave room like a Christmas tree, hahaha.
Hahaha. Yes.
Lights on every machine were on because there wasn’t anybody keeping them running, so they had stopped.
See, we were the reliable people that worked over, and he wasn’t allowing us to take advantage of an opportunity. He allowed all of these other folks to work. They promised him they’d be there, then let him down. Now, here he was running to us.
Mm-hmm, that’s right.
Never, ever, let anybody do that to you. First of all, when you know that you’re good at something and somebody tries to make you think you’re not good, it’s only because they’re envious of you: the money you might be bringing home, your potential, the possible success that might come your way.
They told us no, but when they needed workers, they came back and told us yes.
Mm-hmm.
That’s when we simply looked at them and told them, “Hell, no.”
“Hell, no.”
What I’m saying is, don’t let people use you.
Mm-hmm.
He was trying to use us for his own gain. When we wanted to help him, he didn’t want that.
No, he didn’t. We wanted to work over, and he wouldn’t let us.
He wasn’t going to use us when it was convenient. He better be glad that, at nineteen years of age, I didn’t have the words or the empowerment to say what should have been said. If I was treated that way today, I’d have to take him down.
Hahaha. That’s right.
Those supervisors should have lost their jobs, first of all, for meddling and going to other departments and discussing our pay, then conspiring with other supervisors to keep us from working and making our money.
Exactly right. That situation got out of hand, and we got it back in hand by not allowing them to use their other hand to stop us.
Don’t get us wrong, the company was good to us and a good place to work. I specifically recall one perk: they would have nice steak dinners for the different departments that met certain quotas.
Mm-hmm.
Well, we couldn’t attend this one particular steak dinner because we found out we had chicken pox.
That’s right. We had the chicken pox. It was Silk, y’all, that broke out first. At that time, I was living with Silk, so living in the same household, I broke out too.
See, the chicken pox vaccine was added to the childhood immunization schedule in 1995, which means we probably weren’t vaccinated for it. In fact, back then, it was a normal childhood experience to get the chicken pox. Well, sometimes people got them later in life, and they were generally more severe in adults. So there we were, with the chicken pox.
Yes. We both got them together. So, on the night of the dinner, they said, “Send somebody up here to get your food.”
They had our steaks and all the fixings packed up for us to come up there, and they brought them out to the car for us.
Right. That’s what they did.
We didn’t even go in the building.
Right. We had the chicken pox; we couldn’t go into the building with it because we didn’t want to spread it to anybody, but they still made sure we got our steak dinners.
That’s right.
That was fun. You know, working in the weave room was really a fun experience.
Yes, it was.
We got to see the machines, how cloth was made, and how the process developed. It was a good experience for us to know how certain things were done.
Then, all of a sudden, around mid-1993, it seems as though things started dwindling down.
Mm-hmm.
They began doing something called “short time.” So instead of working forty hours a week, you might work thirty-two hours a week, or somebody would be rotated out. The person that was rotated out had to draw unemployment for that week.
That’s right. Temporary unemployment.
We didn’t know what was going on, but we knew something wasn’t quite right when we started seeing things like that.
Mm-hmm. That’s when NAFTA came into play.
Right. All of a sudden, Bill Clinton started talking about NAFTA. Now, in case y’all don’t know what NAFTA is, it stands for North American Free Trade Agreement. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? However, in a nutshell, this was an agreement to ship American jobs overseas.
Mm-hmm.
Now that I’m older, and I look back on all of this, it wouldn’t surprise me if old Bill Clinton didn’t get a kickback-paddy-whack for sending jobs overseas.
Mm-hmm.
I can remember hearing talk about it, then Silk started asking, “How is this going to benefit us?”
Right.
This was going to kill our jobs.
What I couldn’t understand for the life of me was how our jobs were being sent overseas for somebody else to work; the products would then come back here; then the American people were expected to have money to be able to pay for the products, but we didn’t have the jobs to make the money.
I’m like, y’all don’t see what’s about to happen here? It didn’t make sense to me from the start. Then, as time progressed, you see how it turned out because a lot of people lost their jobs.
Yes. A lot of people started getting laid off.
Right. There were three parts to this that we saw: American jobs were going overseas; illegal aliens came here and were trained by Americans for the jobs that were left; after they were trained, the Americans that had trained these people were laid off, and the jobs were given to illegal aliens for lower wages.
That’s right. In reality, if an illegal alien wasn’t taking your job, your job was going overseas.
That’s right.
And they started really laying off people in droves. For those who kept their jobs, companies cut the work week down, so people were working four days a week instead of five days or six days.
Right.
Folks were used to rocking a seven-day workweek. Suddenly, they wouldn’t work for three days straight, and they’d have to draw unemployment. So it started getting really, really scarce when Bill Clinton put NAFTA in place.
Now, let me make sure that we specify this: the illegal aliens that we saw were working at the turkey plants and hog plants.
Right. We didn’t know that they were illegal aliens; we thought they were just Mexican folks.
Right.
Companies were laying off regular Americans, especially black Americans who had worked there faithfully for ten or twenty years, and they brought in these illegal aliens for cheap labor.
We didn’t know that at the time, but that’s why they were brought in: for cheap labor.
You know, when you look at all of the American people, white people thrive on having something they build or whatever they have; Hispanic people, they do the same; Asian people, they do the same; but black people, we are always left at the bottom of the totem pole. I’ve always wondered why that is.
In this case, though, it didn’t matter whether you were black or white, you couldn’t get some of those jobs anymore. It was like they were bussing in illegal aliens, and they were taking over.
That’s right.
Those illegal aliens were able to come in and take these jobs; they also built Spanish-speaking communities; they built businesses all while they were taking American jobs.
And then you even had, in some instances, almost twenty to thirty of them in one home, living together, without paying any taxes. I would think about this and wonder how other Americans weren’t seeing this.
So when I would see American people without a job, on the corner, losing their homes, losing their cars, it did not make sense to me, and no one was doing anything about it.
It needs to be said, too, that even though they were living thirty to a house and not paying taxes, they were still taken advantage of because landlords would charge them outrageous rates, by the head, to stay there.
Yes. So, when you hear us talk about illegal immigration—or, excuse me, let me rephrase that: they’re called illegal aliens, and we talk with such passion because we actually saw how it destroyed a lot of families, American families, people that did it the right way.
They broke into the house of America. When you break into the house, you are an illegal alien, not a guest.
Yes.
When you get in line, wait your turn, and do it the right way, you are a legal immigrant.
Mm-hmm. At Burlington, we saw, firsthand, a lot of jobs going overseas because of NAFTA.
Here in the South, manufacturing was pretty much everywhere. It wasn’t like you had to go get a college degree. You could still raise your children and provide for your family from working at one of the mills, in manufacturing.
That’s right.
After NAFTA, most of the manufacturing buildings were closed.
They were closed, and they sat empty.
They were. They were empty because of NAFTA. Anything that’s coming back now is because of President Donald J. Trump.
That’s right. Donald J. Trump.
So, especially in the South, manufacturing was one of the keys to survival. It was very important when it came down to the economics in the South because people worked in manufacturing to take care of their families.
Yes. Also, what I found interesting is that when the other jobs did go overseas, they coerced folks to go back to school.
Mm-hmm.
Well, you had no other choice. If you needed a job, you had to go back to school and take more training to do other jobs.
That’s right.
And all these older people were getting into more debt. Now, they had to use their Social Security to continue to pay off that school debt. And, really, they didn’t get any further ahead than when they had the first job, working in manufacturing.
Yes. That’s right.
I’ll tell you, it devastated the American people, and it left people destitute, with nothing, absolutely nothing.
Exactly. I clearly see that it was a Democrat that signed NAFTA into law, causing jobs to go away; then Democrats told us how we needed to go back to school to become qualified for new positions.
I don’t know what it is about Democrats: They don’t want us to work and have the opportunity to obtain things on our own without getting involved in it and twisting it up. It seems like when they see that you’re doing something and it’s working well, Democrats find a way to put some red tape there to block you or stop you.
I call them left-leaning liberals, and you’re absolutely right. They don’t want the people to thrive; they don’t want the people to prosper; they don’t want the people to be successful.
Instead of Bill Clinton having somebody whack him up under the desk, if you know what I mean, he should have been thinking this: Wait a minute, if I sign NAFTA into law, how many millions of people will be out of work?
That’s right.
Because it destroyed whole communities. Companies were doing what they could to keep things going, but it was a hopeless time. At Burlington, they didn’t completely close down, but they closed certain departments, like the weave room, like the cloth room.
Mm-hmm.
They outsourced those tasks, and they sent those jobs overseas.
That’s right.
So those kinds of good jobs were gone.
Let me touch on another thing: When you say manufacturing jobs kept the whole town going, that goes for the grocery stores, small service businesses, the entertainment that was going on in those towns. When the manufacturing businesses were thriving, people were able to open up a business within those communities because people had money to be able to go out and spend.
That’s right.
You see, restaurants, theaters, even beauty salons and specialty shops whittled down and went away.
It affected everything, and it affected everybody.
Yes.
That was one of the great devastations that we will never, ever forget.
You know, speaking of jobs, I remember when you were interested in being a teacher.
Hahaha. Yes. Back in the day, when my son was younger, I used to volunteer in his classroom, and I remember thinking I wanted to be a teacher. So the first thing I did to get my feet wet was volunteer.
Mm-hmm.
So, this one day, I volunteered at my son’s school, but the principal, for some unknown reason, had issues with me.
So this particular day, a teacher had an emergency and had to leave, so the principal needed somebody to volunteer for a class for about an hour until school let out, and he couldn’t find anybody to do it.
So I said, “I’ll do it.”
Well, he wouldn’t let me, and he didn’t want me to do it. I don’t know who he ended up finding, but I ended up not doing it, and that sort of deterred me from even wanting to help or volunteer in anyone’s school. Maybe he thought I was going to take his job.
Mm-hmm. Maybe.
Sometimes people may try to break your spirit or stop your flow because either they have a problem with you or they don’t like something about you. This just means they have a problem with themselves.
However, when you know you are good at what you do, you have to just keep it moving.
Now, did I ever become a teacher at a school? No. We became teachers that teach all across the world. Because we don’t just teach thirty students in a classroom. Now, we can teach millions of people in the United States and around the world.
That’s right.
That just proves how good God is.