The Bale's Journey: From Field to Mill

Lyrics

It begins in the sun. Always in the sun. A white bloom on a green stalk. The heat of a Georgia August. Fingers, quick and stained. The gin tears the seed from the fiber. A metal scream, then quiet. Pressed into a cube of summer. Five hundred pounds of someone's harvest. Wrapped in rough burlap, a scratchy skin. Bound with steel wire that sings when you strike it. A small paper tag tacked to the side. Miller's Farm, Troup County. A name that will be lost in an hour. And the journey begins. From red dirt to red brick. From the field's horizon to the warehouse door. A slow river of white gold, flowing north. 691 John Wesley Dobbs is just a stop on the map. A place to catch its breath. The boxcar door groans open. Sunlight cuts the dusty dark. Then the thud. The solid, final sound of five hundred pounds hitting the heart pine floor of the Virginia Cotton Docks. Men with hooks pull it into shadow. It waits with a thousand others just like it. The air is thick with fiber, with the smell of distance. Each bale a silent story of a field. Each one flammable. A held breath. And the journey continues. From red dirt to red brick. From the field's horizon to the warehouse door. A slow river of white gold, flowing north. 691 John Wesley Dobbs is just a stop on the map. A place to catch its breath before the fire. Then the call comes from a mile south. From Jacob Elsas's great machine. The hooks dig in again. It rolls onto another car, on the rails below. The whistle blows for Cabbagetown. The little paper tag from Troup County flutters, then tears away. Its name is gone now. It is only raw material. At the Fulton Bag & Cotton Mill, the wires are cut. The burlap is torn away. The compressed summer explodes into a cloud. Carding combs pull it into line. Spinning frames twist it into thread. The looms... the looms will give it a new shape. Back at the docks, another boxcar door slides open. Another thud. Another summer arrives.