Naomi Trammel talks about transferring to the weave room, but transferring back to avoid illness.

Audio Transcript

Allen Tullos

So you worked in the spinning room from the time you were about eleven years old until you were twenty-two.

Naomi Sizemore Trammel

Un-huh. I went to the weave room one time. They let me go to the weave room so I’d make a dollar a day. And I like to took galloping TB. People’s dying ’round with it, you know. And that doctor told me, said “Now”—when he’d doctored me about two weeks—he said, “now, younglady” said “you can go back to the cloth room, and live, or you can go back to the weave room and die, whichever you want to do.” So I went back to cloth room. [laughter] And the most people died there at Victor Mill.

Allen Tullos

In the weave room.

Naomi Sizemore Trammel

With what you call galloping TB. It’d come out, you know, and it be just wet all over, so hot, you know? And that just give ‘em TB. I don’t know of the people that didn’t die.

Allen Tullos

But it was just happening in the weaving department?

Naomi Sizemore Trammel

In the weave room. Just the people that wove. And he said that’s what’d happen to me if I went back, so I didn’t go back.