'Like Morning Glories'

"He could see, dimly at first, the mills in the Valley. And while he looked, everything was bright as day. He could see, since the time he could first remember, the faces of the wild-eyed girls like morning-glories in the mill windows. They stood there looking out at him, their bodies firm and their breasts erect, year after year since he could first remember being alive. And out in the streets in front of the mills stood bloody-lipped men, his friends and brothers, spitting their lungs into the yellow dust ... how strong men were in the Valley when they were young and how weak they were when they grew up breathing cotton lint into their lungs and dying with blood on their lips ... how pretty the girls were when they were young and how ugly they were when they were old and starving with pellagra." -- Erskine Caldwell, God's Little Acre