This is a tale of redemption, how one man can wait forty-four years to right something left wrong in his past.
A Lint-Head is someone who labored in the cotton textile mills of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under harsh and mostly unhealthy conditions, workers spent most of their lives toiling in a cloud of cotton fibers, which would latch to their hair and tangle there in. The term was used to describe these workers, but it was also often used as an insult; a slanderous accusation of social rank.
The cotton textile industry began to shift its orders out of the US in the late nineteen six
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A Lint-Head is someone who labored in the cotton textile mills of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under harsh and mostly unhealthy conditions, workers spent most of their lives toiling in a cloud of cotton fibers, which would latch to their hair and tangle there in. The term was used to describe these workers, but it was also often used as an insult; a slanderous accusation of social rank.
The cotton textile industry began to shift its orders out of the US in the late nineteen sixties and continued to do so through the seventies and eighties. Automation, having caught up with the need to reduce costs, replaced many workers and forced a major social change in the Piedmont towns that traditionally made their living in the mills.
In 1925, communists came to organize the mills in, perhaps, the most important mill town in the Carolinas: Gastonia N.C. The organization attempt met with violent failure; lives were lost when the National Guard opened fire with machine guns mounted atop the towers of the old Loray Mill.
Lucius Coleman has been lead doffer at old Loray most of his life. His friends, co-workers and employers always think of him as the go-to guy. The simple world he has built his nest within is changing, however; mills are closing, people are being laid off, his closest friend and next-door neighbor is ill and a strange kid is always outside looking over at his little house.
Johnny Thunder is about to be all alone in the world. He just came to Gastonia with his grandmother, who is dying in the hospital. She has told him that the man in the house is someone who will want to invite Johnny to live with him. It doesn’t make any sense to Johnny; nothing makes sense except that he has no one in this world to relate to. This town, the world as he knows it, are just not ready for Johnny.
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