Go Triad
September 2, 2004
Jeri Rowe, Editor

On this long holiday weekend when we’ll say goodbye to summer, Laurelyn Dossett’s new tune will stick close to me like one of my favorite Grateful Dead T-shirts. I’ll hear in my head her mournful soprano pine over the plight of a young mother shouldering an emotional weight many people know all too well: leaving your family, your town and everything you know to find work elsewhere. Her tune comes on a weekend when we celebrate the success of American labor. It’s a simple, elegant tune she wrote for Polecat Creek, her roots-music group that over the past three years has created some of the most refreshing sounds on the local music scene. But what gets me about Dos¬sett’s tune is its subject matter. Dossett has poig¬nantly captured one of the darkest chapters in the South’s manufacturing history, a time when a bedding company went belly up and caused the largest mass job loss ever in North Carolina. Pillowtex Inc., a company that made pillows and comforters, closed 16 of its plants in the United States and Canada in July 2003. More than 6,400 people lost their jobs, including 4,000 in North Carolina and 450 in a Rockingham County town ironically named after the universal metaphor for paradise.

Her song? “Leaving Eden.”

Hush now, don’t you wake up
We’ll be leaving at first light
Mama’s buying you a mockingbird
To lull you through the night
We’ll cross the Dan by morning
Here’s a blanket for you to share
They’re building down in Georgia
Daddy hears he’ll find work there.

If you live in Rockingham County, you couldn’t escape the woes of Pillowtex. For at least two years, the company’s future hung over the county like an angry thundercloud ready to burst. In March 2001, the employees’ union ran a half-page ad in Eden’s local newspaper to ask for the community’s support. Two months later, more than 400 people from Eden and other parts of the South crammed into a Baptist church in Kannapolis to try to persuade the company’s main creditor, Bank of America, to help save their jobs.

They wanted, as one worker said, to “bother somebody’s conscience.” They also asked for divine intervention. But in the end, that meeting in a symbol of the deeply religious South only added injury to the inevitable. On July 30, 2003, after mounting debt, declining retail sales and overwhelming Asian competition, Pillowtex died.

“I grew up with those people in there,” Pam Patterson, a longtime Pillowtex worker, said the other day. “Some people I worked with for 33 years. They were my friends, and it’s just sad not knowing your future. You’re afraid, you’re scared, you don’t know what to do.”

Like many Southern communities once dependent on textiles, Eden has begun reinventing itself. As the county’s unemployment rate hovers at 9.9 percent, this town of roughly 16,000 has become more aggressive, and now its small yet significant steps are paying off.

In June, Guildan Activewear in Eden said it will create 100 jobs in the next three years. Next weekend, local officials will hold the first Riverfest to encourage river tourism. And soon, boilermaker Weil-McLain will move into Pillowtex’s old plant and bring 103 jobs.

Life is better for Patterson, too. At 53, she is studying nursing at Rockingham Community College so she can, as she says, “do something that can touch someone’s heart.” She’ll finish next summer.

As for Dossett, she has wondered if her song about Pillowtex rang true. She got her answer last November, when she sang in the fellowship hall of a Methodist church in Winston-Salem. A woman in her 70s was sitting near the front, listening intently to “Leaving Eden.” Afterward, Dossett found out that she had worked for Pillowtex her entire life. So, Dossett asked the question that nagged her:

“So, did I get it right? Is this accurate?” Dossett asked.

“Oh yeah,” the woman responded.