Of Lintheads, Cows, and Home by Linda Friddle The hills of up-country South Carolina were once filled with small, red-dirt farms. The people raised a little cotton, a few rows of corn and tomatoes, and plenty of towheaded children, who grew like weeds running among the scrub pines. They were mountain folk who dreaded hailstorms and hard luck. My grandmother was one of them. Her homeplace looked over the Blue Ridge Mountains , and from her front door, the hills furled 55 like a rug just shaken. She knew the best blackberry brambles and how to thump ripe watermelons. When she was only fourteen, her parents died, so she and her older brother reared the young ones, shoring up the tattered white frame house, plowing furrows into the hillsides. It was a place they could all come back to. In my memories, Grandma was seldom without an apron; her kitchen was fried chicken smells and warm steamy windows. But mainly, I recall Grandma singing the old hymns that were her life in the mountains. Making cakes was beating eggs and creaming butter, long and slow. It was best done to the strains of "The Old Rugged Cross," while "I Will Not Be Moved" jumped along with snapping beans. I never knew Grandma could also play an instrument until my family decided to purchase a piano so I could take lessons. In the music store, she stopped hesitantly at a large antique organ. Wiping her hands carefully on the hem of her dress (for once she had left her apron at home), she slipped along the bench. While I watched in amazement, Grandma closed her eyes to see the notes and began to touch the keys. The rest of us gathered around, and before long, we had done all four verses of "Rock of Ages Cleft For Me." Grandma's whole body worked, thighs and small feet pumped the pedals; little hands pushed and pulled the stops while running trills up and down. A tiny trickle of sweat ran down beside her ear; her breath puffed in cadence with the wheezing organ. When she finished, the whole store, including the boss and all his workers, clapped for her. On the way home, I asked Grandma what had happened to her own organ. "Why don't we have it now? I could learn to play the way you do. Did you sell it? We could sing every night with an organ like that." I was intrigued and somewhat jealous of her ability to charm the people at the store, and I could see myself playing while everyone admired me. "I traded my old organ off years ago," Grandma said. "It was always a hard thing to move." With that she stopped, and I only learned the truth of the story years later. In the early 1920s, my grandpa and grandma had been visited with hailstorms and hard luck. Their few crops were ruined, the chickens died, and Grandma was pregnant with their first child. Grandpa had to leave the farm and move into the lowlands so he could become a linthead. Lintheads were mill workers covered with cotton dust. Their hair and clothing were white with lint from the looms, and the fine city folk, who were glad to take the four quarters earned from a day's labor in the sweaty air of the mill, laughed at them. "Lintheads from the mountains come, worthless, lying, lazy scum," was a verse as common as a jump rope rhyme. Lintheads lived in the mill village where life was only a little better than in the hills. The Depression came early in the South, and wages were poor. Doctors wouldn't come out to the mill village at night, and many women died in childbirth for lack of attention. Mill children were charged extra to attend city schools, so none went. Grandma passed her time there like in the hills, cooking, cleaning, tending her first child, and playing her organ. Out the front door of her rented two-room house, she could see the red brick mill, smokestacks billowing, and a dusty dirt road leading down to the streetcar track. At night, after...