Book Description

Original poetry, dozens of archival images, and illuminating historical summaries depict the rise of the mills and King Cotton in the 19th century through the turn of the 20th. An accomplished poet weaves a tapestry of the textile industry that the Historian Laureate of Rhode Island calls "a blend of both triumph and tragedy." With the rise of the mills came a matrix of events, at times deadly, always in the name of prosperity. Labor "paced for the first time to feed the nation's frenzy for finished cloth. Northern collusion in slave-grown southern cotton. The tuberculosis epidemic. "Kissing the shuttle" was a common weaving practice that spread TB, and is but one inter-connected subject of this lyric narrative. Discover Rhode Island's pioneering public health role in curbing TB: "open-air" schools, the first hot school lunch program and formal outdoor recess, child labor laws and factory sanitation. Experience life in a TB sanatorium and open-air school through the eyes of a spirited young girl, inspired by the author's ancestors. Glimpse mill towns teeming with new arrivals, toxins coloring the Blackstone River, tenement porches strung with clotheslines "sagging with shirts that never dry / the same blue shirts / that cling, damp / to the backs of the laborers / a gray-blue line reaching to dawn." The author, also an occupational therapist, has delivered a well-researched, engaging volume which will inform, surprise, and entertain readers of history and poetry alike, and provide a teaching tool for YA students. Mayer re-enacts a history at risk of being forgotten, and shows its human face.