“It wasn’t Mom’s favorite subject,” Liz said.
Before the Civil War, Uncle Tinsley explained, the Holladay family had owned a cotton plantation.
“A plantation?” I asked. “Our family had slaves?”
“We certainly did.”
“I wish I didn’t know that,” Liz said.
“Those slaves were always treated well,” Uncle Tinsley said. “My great-great-grandfather Montgomery Holladay liked to say if he was down to one final crust of bread, he would, by God, have shared it with them.”
I glanced at Liz, who rolled her eyes.
If you went back far enough, Uncle Tinsley went on, just about all American families who could afford them owned slaves, not only Southerners. Ben Franklin owned slaves. Anyway, he continued, the Yankees burned down the whole plantation during the war, but the family still knew the cotton business. Once the war was over, Montgomery Holladay decided there was no point in shipping cotton to the factories up north to make the Yankees rich, so he sold the land and moved to Byler, where he used the money to build the mill.
The Holladay family, Uncle Tinsley explained, had owned the cotton mill—and pretty much the town itself—for generations. The mill was good to the Holladays, and in turn, the Holladays were good to the workers. The family built them houses with indoor plumbing and gave out free toilet paper to go with the toilets. The Holladays also gave out hams on Christmas and sponsored a baseball team called the Holladay Hitters. The millworkers never made much in terms of wages, but most of them had been dirt farmers before the mill opened, and factory work was a step up. The main thing, he went on, was that everyone in Byler, rich and poor, considered themselves part of one big family.
Things started to go downhill fast about ten years ago, Uncle Tinsley continued. Foreign mills began undercutting everybody’s prices at the same time those Northern agitators started going around stirring up the workers to strike for higher wages. Southern mills started losing money, and as the years went by, more and more of them shut down.
By then, Uncle Tinsley said, his father had passed, and he was running Holladay Textiles himself. It, too, was in the red. Some Chicago investors agreed to buy the mill, but it didn’t bring much, only enough for him and Charlotte to get by if they watched their pennies. Meanwhile, the new owners laid off workers and did whatever they could to squeeze every last ounce of profit out of the place, not just doing away with the Christmas hams and the Holladay Hitters but cutting back bathroom breaks, turning off the air-conditioning, and using dirty cotton.
“Back in the day, Holladay Textiles made a quality product,” Uncle Tinsley said. “Now they turn out towels so thin you can read a newspaper through them.”
“It all sounds too depressing,” Liz said.
Uncle Tinsley shrugged. “Things change, even in this town.”
“Did you ever think of leaving Byler?” I asked. “Like Mom?”
“Leave Byler?” Uncle Tinsley asked. “Why would I leave Byler? I’m a Holladay. This is where I belong.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
At Mayfield we slept with the windows open, and you could hear the frogs croaking at night. I conked out as soon as my head hit the pillow, but those noisy birds woke me early every day. One morning in late June, after we’d been at Mayfield for almost two weeks, I woke up and reached out for Liz and then remembered that she was in the next room. Much as I had loved sharing a bed with Liz, I’d always thought it would be neat to have a room of my very own. The truth was, it felt lonely.
I went into Liz’s room to see if she was awake. She was sitting up in bed, reading a book called Stranger in a Strange Land, which she’d come across while we were cleaning the house. I lay down beside her.
“I wish Mom would hurry up and call,” I said. I’d been expecting to hear from her any day. I constantly checked the phone to make sure it was connected, because Uncle Tinsley didn’t particularly appreciate getting calls and sometimes unplugged it. “Uncle Tinsley’s going to think we’re a couple of moochers.”
“I think he actually likes having us here,” Liz said. She held up the book. “We’re like friendly aliens visiting from another planet.”
Truth be told, in the time we’d been there, Uncle Tinsley hadn’t had a single other visitor. He had one of those big old-fashioned radios, but he didn’t seem that interested in what was going on in the world, and he never turned it on. What fascinated him were genealogy and geology. He spent most of his time in his library, writing to county historical societies, requesting information on, say, the Middleburg Holladays, and going through what he called his archives, boxes of crumbling old letters, faded journals, and yellowed newspaper clippings that referred to the Holladay family in any way. And there was nothing he didn’t know about the earth, its layers of rocks and soil and underground water. He studied geological charts, conducted tests on little glass jars of soil and trays of rocks, and read scientific reports to cite in the articles he wrote and occasionally published.