The Last Ballad(120)
“I want to thank all of you for coming,” she said. “I’d like to be doing something else on a Saturday, but this is what we have to do, so we’ll do it.” Someone whistled from the lead truck. A few people clapped. Ella stopped speaking for a moment, looked up the road toward Bessemer City, and recalled what it had meant for her only five months ago to walk this road alone to the crossroads of West Virginia Avenue. What it had meant to wait for strangers to pick her up in an automobile and carry her to her first union rally. Who had that woman been? Who was she now?
She looked back at the two trucks and saw Violet’s face peering out at her from in between the slats. “I didn’t join up in this union to be no kind of leader,” Ella said. “But the police and the bosses have either locked up our leaders or run them off somewhere. So, like I said, I ain’t no kind of leader, but I’m going to lead you now, and I need you to listen to me.
“We’re about to leave here and go into town, where there are going to be hundreds of people, maybe thousands. Some of them are going to want us there, some of them aren’t, but there’s only two kinds of people you need to be on the lookout for today: the ones holding guns and the ones holding cameras. There ain’t no need to say a word to either of them, no matter what they say to you. We’re there to be seen. Let somebody else give interviews.” She smiled, tried to fight it, but found that she couldn’t stop. “Let somebody else get shot at.
“I’m proud to stand alongside all of you,” she said. She looked at Violet. “I’m proud to be with my friends.”
She walked to the back of the second truck, where Violet waited, her hand outstretched. Ella took Violet’s hand, climbed up, and stood beside her. The driver came around and slammed the tailgate shut. The engine fired on the first truck, then the second.
They sang a few songs that everyone knew, and then Ella sang “Two Little Strikers” and “All Around the Jailhouse,” both of which she’d written after Aderholt had been killed and the strikers arrested in June. She’d sing a line and the rest of the people in the truck would repeat it, and they carried on that way while they grew closer to Gastonia. The day warmed as the sun climbed higher. Ella shrugged off John’s old coat and put her hands in the pockets of her dress to hide her belly.
The caravan crossed the bridge into Gastonia. Ella felt the truck slow and come to a stop. They waited.
“What’s going on?” Ella asked. “Why we stopping?”
One of the men in her group climbed the slats on the side of the truck and peered over and saw that the other truck had stopped as well. The engine still ran, vibrating the floor and sending tremors through Ella’s body. She heard voices, then shouts.
The truck jolted backward, and Ella stumbled. She would have been tossed over the tailgate had Violet not grabbed hold of her arm. The truck reversed itself, driving backward across the bridge slowly as if the driver were uncertain of what was happening up ahead.
“Other truck’s backing up too,” the man who’d remained posted atop the slats said. “Looks like we’re turning around.”
“We shouldn’t be turning around,” Ella said. “Ain’t no reason to turn around.”
But once they’d crossed the bridge and parked on the shoulder, with the other truck having passed them en route back to Bessemer City and the driver of Ella’s truck having turned back toward home too, she was able to see what had caused them to stop. On the other side of the bridge, a cluster of parked automobiles blocked the road. Dozens of men stood holding rifles. She narrowed her eyes and did her best to recognize their faces; she thought she may have recognized a few.
“Damn,” Ella said. She slapped the tailgate as hard as she could, hard enough to hurt her had she taken notice. “Damn, damn, damn.” She wanted to jump out, run around to the front of the truck, flag the driver down, and tell him to turn around. They’d find another way into the city.
The truck rounded a bend, and she could no longer see the roadblock that was now a mile or so behind her. She turned to Violet.
“We can’t go back to Bessemer,” Ella said. Terror had gripped Violet’s eyes. She nodded, and Ella knew without her admitting it that Violet did not agree.
Ella pushed her way toward the front of the truck bed. She’d bang her fist on the roof of the cab, order the driver to stop, ask him what the men at the roadblock had said, and sort through their options. She’d made it halfway to the front when there was the sound of a car speeding past, followed by the force of its passing as it rocked the truck on its axles. A woman beside Ella screamed and grabbed on to Ella as if she feared falling. The next sound Ella heard was the crunch of metal hitting metal.
“They’re running them off the road!” a man called out, but Ella could not see to whom the voice belonged, did not know who they or them were. The people surrounding her broke into a panic, and when she looked for Violet she saw another black car behind them just before it struck the rear of their truck, slamming them into the truck in front of them.
At first Ella thought it was the violence of the accident that caused her to stumble and lose her balance, but when she saw the sky give way to trees and then earth she understood that the truck had been overturned, and she found herself caught in a web of arms and legs and bodies, all of them screaming and trying desperately to untangle from one another. She struggled to free herself, calling Violet’s name over and over but getting no response.