Cabarrus County, NC - Emma Willis Interview

Aunt Emma Willis 
Interview done by the Federal Writer's Project
Federal Writer's Project (later the WPA) 
 
The Locke Mill Concord NC Sept 21, 1938 
 
Aunt Emma Willis to very proud of being eighty-one years old. She is 
proud too that she doesn't have to wear glasses, even for reading, and 
that she still has her own teeth. If you ask her about cotton mills the 
will say quite causally in her high, thready voice "I worked in a 
cotton mill for sixty-three years, but I never did care for it much. I 
had to quit six years ago when I had a bad case of the grippe."

Now that the weather is cool she sits in her walnut rocker by the 
window and knits lace from spool thread. "I just make up the patterns," 
she will explain "and every time I knit a long piece I change because I 
get tired of doing the same one." For making enough lace to go on a 
pair of pillow cases (between 80 and 90 yards) she charges 50¢ and 
supplies the thread. This is the only money she can earn now.

But Aunt Emma is not doleful about it. With a sly smile on her face she 
will tell you quietly that she "lives on charity." Then her gray eyes 
twinkle as she says "I'm just like everybody else now, letting the 
government support me. Before they gave me my old age pension, my 
church and the folks I knowd here kept me going."

Aunt Emma is too "stiff in her bones" to go out much but she is 
tremendously interested in what is happening in the world and reads 
anything that is given to her. When I brought her some copies of 
Hollands' she was delighted because she likes the poetry in it she 
said. One of her favorite magazines is The Flaming Sword, a 
Fundamentalist Baptist magazine which her niece sends her from Texas.
 
The editor has been writing a series of articles on his travels through 
the [west?],  and Aunt Emma was particularly interested in what he had 
to say about the Mormons. "Those people know how to get along," she 
commented.

Important in her life are the visits from the preacher of the small 
Lutheran Church -- in the mill section -- to which the belongs. "Every 
week that comes, he is here to see me," she said, "and I surely do 
enjoy him. It tickles me to look at him because he's so young -- just a 
boy you'd call him -- and he's got a new baby new too."

She spit in a can that stood on the window sill, then took a carefully 
folded square of cloth from her apron pocket and wiped the snuff from 
her lips. Everything about her person was precise -- her dark voile 
dress with the checked apron tied tightly over it; her hair, carefully 
parted in the middle and looped back on either side so that the 
delicate gold crosses in her ears were visible. Her face was remarkable 
-- long straight featured, and intelligent. Behind her quiet reserve 
was the humor that occasionally showed in her eyes or the manner in 
which she made a remark.

It was not easy to get Aunt Emma to tell about herself. She was more 
interested in talking of the Mormons, her preacher, what had been 
happening in town or in reminiscing about Concord in the old days.
"I was born down near Gold Hill, but I've lived all my life in Concord.
 
Folks used to tell me I had a foreign look," she said with pride "and I 
guess it was because one of my Grandfathers was a Yankee. He settled up 
near Greensboro. My Great-Grandfather came from Germany, but I'm 
Scotch-Irish.

"When the war came and Pa went off to fight, I was so little I just 
can't remember such about it. But law, I'll never forget when the 
Yankees burned Salisbury. I wasn't but four years old but to this day I 
can remember how the sky looked that night -- it was red all over one 
side. The Yankees never did hurt us; I guess they must have knowd my 
Grandfather was one.

"Pa came back from the war, but he died not so long after that. I had 
to go to work to support the family. There was my mother, who had the 
heart trouble; my little sister and little brother; and my old aunt who 
couldn't walk a step for twelve years before she died."

I interrupted Aunt Emma to ask if she had ever gone to school.

"Why yes, some men here in town run a school in a log building down 
Spring Street, and I went. I got all the education I ever had up until 
the time I was ten year old, but I learned everything so good I never 
have forgotten it. They made you back then." Her faint voice become 
pert "I'll bet right now I could outspell any of these teachers down 
here at the school.

"Course, I guess I would have gone on and maybe learned some more if I 
hadn't been bound to support my family. When I was twelve, I started 
work in the old McDonald Mill that had been running here in town since 
before the war. It was the only cotton mill in Concord then. I went to 
work every morning at six and stayed until seven in the evening. They 
paid 35¢ a day. But law, in those days people didn't mind work -- we 
had a good time. Many a night I would come in from the mill, wash my 
face, put on my hat and go off to choir practice or somewhere. I was 
young and strong so I didn't get tired."

During her sixty-three years in the mill, Aunt Emma worked at various 
wages and hours in the Locke, the Osbarrus, the Branoord and the 
Kannapolis plants. She is not ashamed to boast a little about her 
record, although the pretends at first that her work was a mere matter 
of duty and routine. "Every pay day that come, I brought my money home 
and laid it in my mother's hand; then after she died, I turned every 
cent over to my sister who kept house for me almost fifty years. I 
worked steady too, once while I was at the Cannon Mill I went eleven 
years without missing a day's pay. Back then if you didn't go, they'd 
send for you because they didn't have no one else to do your work. Now 
they've got more hands for a job than they know what to do with. If a 
hand lays out, they've got somebody else to do his job and pretty soon 
he'll find himself out of work."

Of all the places she worked, Aunt Emma liked the Cabarrus Mill best 
because it had so many country people. "Old Mr. Cannon used to say when 
he was alive, that he wanted to get country folks to work for him 
because they'd stay with him. They did too." Her voice changed tone as 
she added "You know how mill people are; they just move about from 
place to place."

Once during our conversation Aunt Emma made a remark without her usual 
shy little smile. "There's something I've been studying about," and she 
put down her knitting. "I spent all my life working as hard as I could, 
but now I've got so I can't go anymore. You just look at the rich 
people this town has -- people who've got plenty and more than they can 
ever use. It looks to me like the town ought to take care of the old 
people who can't help theirselves anymore.

"Why I don't know what I'd a done after I quit work, if it hadn't been 
for the folks around me, and the mill. The Locke Mill let me stay in 
one of their houses, without paying a cent of rent, until last fall 
when they sold off the property my house was on. Then I had to move."

She moved in with Granny Lizzie Morgan, sharing the expenses of the 
house rent and supplies. Both get old age pensions, and the City 
Welfare Department helps them occasionally. Although she is too proud 
to say anything, Aunt Emma -- fastidious and intellectually keen -- 
cannot possibly be happy with Granny.

Granny at eighty-four is fat, talkative, vulgar, and full of energy. 
She thumps about in her bare feet sweeping, scouring, washing clothes; 
she rushes to a neighbor's house to phone for wood or ice; goes to see 
Mary Alexander, the landlady, about the rent; frequently walks the mile 
down to the Welfare Department to try to wrangle something from it. 

When she came in to see me, she sat in a straight chair tilted 
precariously on the two hind legs, took a dip of snuff, and talked 
incessantly in her low, course voice, her head shaking with palsy. She 
came from #10 township, has never worked in a mill, but some of her 
children have. "I've got five children a-livin'," she said dolefully 
"and not a one of them will look after their poor old mother."

For sixteen years Granny has lived in the drab four-room house which 
she rents from a Negro woman, Mary Alexander. Mary owns three such 
houses facing on a ragged meadow by the Locke Mill Village. Granny's 
place has plumbing, no electricity, and only fireplaces for heating. It 
needs paint badly outside; inside the gray ceiled walls are dirty, the 
unpainted floor stained with tobacco.

"All the time I have been a-living here Mary hain't done a thing to 
this house," Granny drawled. "She says it takes all she's got to go 
over to that college in Charlotte and take all them special courses, 
but she's got plenty of wealth. The Welfare Department told her $16 a 
month was too much rent to charge on this house. She won't come down a 
penny, though."

The rooms in which we sat was furnished with Granny's things. The iron 
bed, chest of drawers, littered table, split bottom chairs, and even 
the calendars on the wall, the pictures and the postcards on the mantel 
were hers. Only the nicely made rocker in which she sat belonged to 
Aunt Emma.

When I rose to go, Aunt Emma smiled shyly and told me goodbye, but she 
didn't get up. Granny enveloped me in her soft arms, squeezed me and 
urged me to come again. "We love to have company," she said heartily, 
then asked me if I knew the people in the Welfare Department. If I did, 
she wanted me to tell them something for her.
Aunt Emma watched me go from the window.

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