Conclusion: Pull Your Shift

You and I have worked together almost fifteen years
We sure have had some times along the way
The road sign said, “To Freedom”
But it didn’t say how far
So we just walked a little every day
Suddenly we find ourselves a continent apart
Though the work we do is still the same
The true heart of the matter is a matter of the heart
In these changes everything has changed

Next year I will write to you out on the western coast
Though I know we both will be just fine
The dailyness of conversation’s what I’ll miss the most
For friendship’s built an hour at a time
You and I have worked together half our working lives
This partnership the rhythm and the rhyme
Your constancy and friendship
Have helped me to survive
And understand our work in these hard times

It’s not for you and me to finish up the job ourselves
Each generation does the work again

But neither are we free to leave it all to someone else
It’s not for us to end but to begin
Far beyond our lifetimes, when work and hope converge
When hard times seem a world ago away
The roads that we have worked to build
Will finally meet and merge
‘Til freedom is the life we live each day

The woods along the highway are cold and still tonight
High beams cut like razors through the dark
Traveling through this midnight
Am I headed towards the light
Or trapped within the terrors of the heart
There is no word in English
For one who’s shared so much
The work, the pain, the laughter and the load
You are my compañera as long as people dream
Of walking hand in hand down Freedom Road

How to “pull your shift” was something I learned about when I was organizing southern textile mill workers back in the 1970s. Today, you have to drive a long way through the South to find a mill that isn’t shuttered and shut, the machinery shipped to some third world country where it isn’t illegal to work children sixteen hours a day behind barbed wire and armed guards.

Back then, though, nearly a million people worked in the mills, three-quarters of them in the Carolinas. The work, the mills, the machines never stopped. They ran twenty-four hours a day, fifty-one weeks out of the year. When they did shut down, so that the workers could take the one week’s vacation that was all most of them got each year, they did it all at once, over the Fourth of July, whenever that came. It was as if a great silence descended on the South and hung like a giant cloud over the Piedmont, that area of rolling hills and steadily moving rivers where almost all the mills were located.

Then, the next Sunday night, the mill hands who worked the third shift, usually called “graveyard” or “hoot owl,” would come back from the mountains or the beach, wherever they and their families had spent their brief break from work, and line up at the mill gate. At midnight, when everyone had clocked in and was standing by their machines ready to go to work, the entire southern textile industry would creak back to life all at once, like some sleeping giant drawing its first deep breath after a long sleep.

Textile workers don’t actually make cloth. Rather, they tend the machines that card, draw, spin, spool, and weave an amazing variety of fibers into fabric. A weaver, for example, will tend dozens of looms, watching the shuttles slam back and forth across the warp at speeds up to a hundred miles an hour. When a thread breaks, it’s up to the worker to tie up the ends as quickly and neatly as possible in a weaver’s knot, so the machine can go back to work. If the machine breaks down beyond the weaver’s capacity to fix it, she calls for a loom fixer, then cusses him out for not getting there fast enough (most weavers are women, almost all loom fixers men), and for costing her production pay.

In any textile mill, the machines have priority, even seniority, most of them being far older than the workers who tend them. Lucy Taylor was for years a weaver in J. P. Stevens’s Rosemary Mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, until brown lung broke her down so badly she had to come out on disability. She remembered the time the threads in one of her looms caught fire. Smoke filled the weave room. Unable to breathe because of her developing disease, she headed to the door to get some fresh air, leaving the fire and smoke behind. A supervisor stopped her and ordered her back to work, saying, “If I need to replace that loom, it’s going to cost the company $30,000. If I need to replace you, all I need to do is go to the door and whistle.”

Assume, then, that you’re a weaver, working graveyard. That shift might start at 10:00 P.M., 11:00 P.M., or 12:00 A.M., depending on local custom, almost as if different mill towns ran on different clocks.

In the town where you live and work, the shift change comes at midnight. About an hour before, you leave your house and start walking towards the mill, maybe stopping along the way for a soft drink or a beer, depending on whether the town is dry or wet. As you get closer, you can hear the sound of the river roaring past, now no longer flowing through the turbines that drove the mill’s machinery, but once the heart of all that power and pride. The faintly burnt smell of raw cotton being forced through machines at high speeds hangs in the air; once you encounter that distinctive aroma, you never forget it. Cotton dust hangs in the air like morning mist; workers emerging from the mill are covered with dust and lint.

Under the lights of the mill, the shift gathers, hundreds of workers, in a variety of moods and modes: telling jokes, talking trash, taking a last drag on a cigarette before pitching it towards a half-filled ditch, the glow of the still burning tip arcing down towards the water, hissing as it hits the surface and dies.

As midnight comes closer, you join the line of workers now snaking into the mill, past the clock where you punch in, and head towards your looms. You nod to the swing shift weaver. She nods back to you.

Standing close to her, you ask, “How’s the job running?”

“Smooth as glass,” she might say. “You should have a good night.”

Or she might answer, “It’s running rough. You’re going to have a night of it.”

At midnight, the mill whistle blows. The swing shift hand takes a step back, turns, heads for the door, disappears into the night along the river. You take a step forward, into the place where she had been standing, and begin your night’s work.

For the next eight hours, your job is to tend those looms, and to pull your shift as well as you can. If you are a conscientious worker, if you care about the person who will come after you, you’ll do your best to keep the job running at least as well as it was when the second shift worker stepped back and you stepped forward. Maybe you can even make it run a little better, so that the first shift hand will have an easier time of it than you’re having this long night.

Dawn breaks over the river. Light reflects back from the millions of dust particles hanging in the air. You look up, and the first shift hand is standing just behind you.

“How’s the job running?” she asks.

At 8:00 A.M., the whistle blows again. She steps forward, you step back, turning towards the morning and home.

The mill never stops running.

Those of us who today are organizers, rabble-rousers, activists, and quiet lovers of justice did not invent this struggle for a more just and humane world. That fight has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. In every one of those generations, there have been people like us, creative radicals and rebels, who believed in and worked for the possibility of justice for all. That struggle may at times have been driven underground. But, like the river of which Vincent Harding so eloquently writes in There Is a River, it has never once stopped running.

The Pirke Avot is a collection of memorable quotes from ancient rabbis (I think of the book as “Rabbis’ Greatest Hits,” although the title actually means Sayings of the Fathers). There’s a saying from Rabbi Tarfon, who lived and taught some two thousand years ago, that I paraphrase as, “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free from the obligation to do your part.”

None of us here today will live long enough to see the just world of which we dream finally come to pass. But it will. All we have to do to make that happen is to do our work as well as we can, in a way that makes the job run just a little more smoothly for those who we absolutely believe and know will come after us, who will carry on the work we have done.

If we truly want peace and justice some day, all we have to do is pull our shift.