Hank Perritt

White-Trash Millhand Hank Perritt

Gorman Lidell, the son of a poor hill-country farmer who disowned him because he is gay, works in an Alabama cotton mill as a mule spinner. Kirby Fitts, the son of the owner of the cotton mill, goes to work in the mill, planning to use his engineering studies to get new machinery and save the mill. He and Gorman are immediately attracted to each other. Gorman teaches Kirby about the practical aspects of cotton manufacture, and Kirby makes a project out of seeing that Gorman gets some education and improves himself. Kirby's father is outraged, because he has planned to close the mill, and he is disturbed by the apparently unnatural relationship between his son and the millhand. Kirby's college roommate is the son of a successful mill owner in Birmingham, who buys the Tuscaloosa mill and supports the young men's increasingly successful efforts to turn it into an exemplar of the industrialization of the South in the 1890s. New York financial interests are threatened by the competition represented by Kirby's and Gorman's success. They conspire to frighten the young men away from their venture by a variety of commercial and terroristic means. Dangerous love intersects economic revolution, as entrenched capital confronts courageous entrepreneurship. With the American South struggling over the character of its new identity, departing from its scarred past of slavery and the War; Kirby's sometimes conflicted affections between two very different other young men; Gorman's challenge to break from his roots to improve himself in the face of intimidating obstacles; Austin's internal conflict between his sexuality and the pressures of maintaining a public image; and all three boys' decisions to chart a new path from their paternal elders who preceded them, the narrative comes full circle back to Kirby's first day at the mill when he learns what a "piecer" does-mending two broken, frayed threads. That theme tattoos itself across the story-if one is careful enough to look for it-and is woven throughout much like these mills' final products. Indeed, the job of the "piecer" at the mill is not unlike a universal human quest: mending our broken threads.