Fulton Bag & Cotton Mill: The Loom's Unraveling

Lyrics

[Intro]
It’s quiet now.
So quiet, I can hear the dust settle on your iron teeth.
I still talk to you.
Even after all this.

[Verse 1]
May, nineteen fourteen.
Remember the air?
Humid and thick with lint, sticking to our skin.
Sixty-six hours a week, I gave you.
My hands, my back, my breath.
For eighty cents a day.
My Lula, just a child, coughing up the dust beside me.
Your shuttle flew, your gears screamed, a language we all understood.
It was the only language we had.

[Chorus]
And then the thread snapped.
A thousand of us walked out into the sun.
Just for ten cents.
Ten cents, Mr. Elsas.
Was that too much to ask?
We watched the great loom of our lives… just unravel.

[Verse 2]
The picket line was a prayer circle in the dirt.
Faces I knew from the spinning room, the carding room.
Then came the guards, their faces hard as your frame.
And the notice.
That white paper nailed to our company door.
A clean, sharp wound.
We learned the taste of hunger then.
It tastes a lot like cotton dust.

[Chorus]
And the thread snapped.
A thousand of us stood out in the sun.
Just for ten cents.
Ten cents, Mr. Elsas.
Was that too much to ask?
We watched the great loom of our lives… just unravel.

[Bridge]
Did you even miss us?
Did you feel the silence in your cold iron bones?
Or were you just waiting for new hands?
Younger hands.
Cheaper hands.
They washed our names from the books.
Erased us.

[Outro]
But sometimes, at night, I still hear you.
A ghost in my lungs.
The thread is broken.
The thread is broken.
And we are unraveled.