Julia Nunnally Duncan’s latest collection of essays, All We Have Loved (Finishing Line Press 2023) tells stories of her childhood, growing up the daughter of textile workers in the mountains of western North Carolina, as well as the childhoods of her loved ones. In these short vignettes, Duncan describes holidays in her rural neighborhood in the 1960s in Marion, North Carolina, as well as what it was like to use an outhouse, attend church baptisms, and attend other family-centric events. Duncan also draws on her husband’s memories of his own rural upbringing, as well as her mother’s stories of growing up in Depression-era Marion, where she, too, was the daughter of textile workers.
This is the sort of book that many people wish they could write, capturing the feelings of being a “Lottie Moon Southern Baptist” in the 1960s, collecting money for missionaries and being baptized before her church congregation. She engagingly relates her husband’s story of being an eyewitness to the mythic “Wampus Cat” of western North Carolina lore, a lynx-like cat with “long tufts of fur coming out of its ears and whiskers jutting out from its jaws. Its eyes glowed reddish-yellow like the base of a wood fire.” She tells her own story of encountering dangerous snakes, such as the time that she encountered a copperhead while riding a skittish horse. After escaping before the horse noticed the snake, she “hurried to find my neighbor Neal–an older man and outdoorsman–to tell him about the snake. He came down to my yard with his hoe and promptly severed the snake’s head. As was his custom, he hung the snake’s body in his garden to ward off crows.”
This collection’s strengths lie in the recounting of such traditions, many of which were new to me, such as hanging a dead snake in a garden. It’s also quite unusual in its sympathy for the textile mills, as both her parents and her parents’ parents were millworkers. Notably, she interviews her mother about the Marion Textile Strike of 1929, which was written about by Woody Guthrie in “The Marion Massacre” and by Sinclair Lewis in his newspaper accounts. Her mother was seven years old at the time of this strike in which several strikers were injured and killed, and she remembers seeing armed members of the National Guard appear. Duncan’s mother recounts her family’s experience of the strike:
“At the time, her daddy, Hosten, worked as an overseer in the card room. ‘Daddy didn’t join the strike,’ she explained when I asked about the notorious event. ‘If he missed one week of work, we’d starve, so he continued to work.’”
Duncan’s stories are ones of company loyalty and family pride:
In my mother’s stories of her Clinchfield childhood, which she still shares with me, she doesn’t stress the poverty or deprivation that a journalist [Sinclair Lewis] once perceived in the lives of the cotton mill workers and their families. Instead, she emphasizes the love and security of family and community that she felt and the virtues of industriousness and charity that she witnessed. She has always been proud that her daddy did not miss a day of work for thirty-some years until his death at fifty-two. And she does not blame his premature death of a cerebral hemorrhage on his cotton mill work.
Rather, she blames his death on his refusal to see a doctor. Duncan also notes there were good moments in their lives:
Life for the mill families…was a struggle to be sure, with times of difficulty and sadness. And the journalist who came to town and exposed the hard conditions of the workers and their families likely had honorable intentions and revealed some truth. Yet I believe this outsider didn’t realize that the cotton mill families of Marion also experienced moments of joy, beauty, and pride that were as real to them as the hardships they faced along the way.
Duncan’s desire to tell another side of this story also stems from her own experience as the daughter of textile workers. Her own memories of her parents’ mill work are fond ones:
Sometimes they worked on Saturdays, and when they did, I came with them. In the mill, the warm air smelled of machine oil and cotton dust, and the knitting machines chattered continuously. But to me, the heat, odor, and noise seemed natural and didn’t deter my enjoyment. On Saturdays, the few workers seemed to take little notice of me, so I had the run of the place. I would jump into a pile of white socks, soft and linty, spreading them asunder and raking them over me like a blanket. And I’d play with my father’s bench vise, testing its pressure by placing my hand between the cool, oily jaws and turning the handle. Occasionally I would clamp too tight and mash my fingers, but the discomfort didn’t faze me.
Later in this same essay, she reports on the fire in the mill, started by a spark in the grinding mill next door, which ignited both dust and fertilizer. In her reflection on the fire, she notes that “it stole from my parents a workplace that they genuinely liked and the livelihood that it provided for our family . . . . The fire took the mill away, but it didn’t steal my memories of a special place and time.”
All We Have Loved consistently seeks to savor such memories. Duncan seeks out the positive at the heart of all of her memory as a counternarrative to traditional stories of hurt and hard times in her hometown. Her devotion to and enthusiasm for preserving her families’ stories are admirable.
Julia Nunnally Duncan
Julia Nunnally Duncan is a native of Western North Carolina with family connections in East Tennessee. She is an award-winning freelance writer and author of eleven books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.
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