I grew up in Walhalla, South Carolina, a small town in the Appalachian Foothills, bookended by a failed railroad tunnel in Stumphouse Mountain and two red-brick cotton mills, now long gone. Home was a view westward from the road leading in, a smokestack of Kenneth Mill against the rolling Blue Ridge.
In the year 2000, my late father handed me a VHS tape that changed my life. I don’t recall his exact words, but they were something like, “Watch this film. It’s about a textile strike you’ve never heard of. Down in Honea Path (not sixty miles from home), they shot the strikers in the back as they tried to run.” Daddy had a sharp intelligence and a profound, uncompromising belief in right and wrong. When he issued such commands, I paid attention.
The documentary film “Uprising of ’34” (George Stoney, Judith Helfand, Susanne Rostock; 1995) tells the long-buried, painful story of the 1934 General Textile Strike through first person accounts, a startling representation of the 170,000 southern millworkers who participated. Watching that film planted a seed.
In 2006, the idea for a novel came to me deep in the night, waking me up—as the cliché goes—literally and figuratively. I studied how-to books on creative writing, researched labor history and the General Strike, and talked to millworkers about their experiences. I worked my government job and wrote in my spare time. In 2019, I left work to finish the novel. The Rise is a coming-of-age story told through the eyes of Reecie, a determined young woman aching to be a cotton mill worker like her departed mother, who is soon thrust into a labor uprising that changed America. There’s romance, the deep bond of female friendship, and a fight to save her family’s Appalachian farm in the darkest days of the Great Depression.
Writing a novel was a humbling experience. I’m grateful for the lessons learned from frustrated ignorance, writing in isolation, and rejection. I hope it’s made me a better person. If someone were to ask why I kept going, I’d say I had a lot of role models, beginning with my grandmothers—one a teacher, one a cotton mill worker, both amazing and driven. My mother worked full time and earned a 4-year degree while raising me. I’ve learned from hard workers my entire life: farmers, utility and plant workers, engineers and mathematicians, heavy equipment operators, healthcare folks, teachers, and true civil servants. Everyday—white collar or blue—they put on their britches and give it all they’ve got. This book pays homage to that truly American spirit. It was inspired by and written for family and friends, descendants of textile workers in the Depression-Era South.
Heather Ramey Ramsay worked 28 years for the US Department of Agriculture in South Carolina. Most of her service was spent in her home county helping farmers with conservation planning and voluntary agricultural easements to protect their prime farmlands from development. She lives with her husband on his family’s Century Farm by the Tugaloo River. The Rise is her first novel.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Heather Ramey Ramsay’s The Rise in 2028.
