The Last Ballad(124)
I opened the letter and spread it out right there on the table. It was written in pencil, the handwriting so faded it was nearly illegible. I’ve still got it, though, and you can still read what it says.
Dear Lilly,
I hope this letter finds you well and happy. I was devastated by your mother’s death. I loved her and respected her more than I can put into words. I promise to carry on her work of seeking justice and inspiring humanity and bringing together people of all races, for these are the reasons they killed her. Her death will not have been in vain. I send my best to you, Otis, Rose, and Wink.
With all my love,
Sophia
“I brought something else too,” he said. “Something Violet wants you to have.” He reached into his pocket and removed a tiny wooden chair. He set it on the table. We both stared at it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Violet found it with your mother. She wondered if it’s yours.”
“Do you know Violet?”
He smiled. “Yes,” he said. “She’s my wife.”
The chair wasn’t mine, Edwin, and I knew it didn’t belong to Rose. We’d never owned a proper toy in our lives, and certainly not something as fine and detailed as this piece of dollhouse furniture. But I took it, and I’ve held on to it.
I looked down at Sophia’s letter and read it again. In the room above us, chairs scraped across the floor, and I knew my class had just ended and it was time for lunch, but I wasn’t hungry. I wanted to stay there with this man, ask him every question I could think to ask, but I couldn’t think of what to ask first.
“Your mother saved my life,” he finally said. “She was a hero. Not just to me, but to a lot of people.”
Edwin, I’m eighty-seven years old, and to this day that’s the only kind thing I’ve ever heard someone say about my mother. I didn’t doubt him for a minute, though. I knew it was true. I know it’s still true.
There is an old saying that every story, even your own, is either happy or sad depending on where you stop telling it. I believe I’ll stop telling this one here.
Afterword
The Last Ballad is based on the life and tragic murder of Ella May Wiggins and the events surrounding the Loray Mill strike that occurred in my hometown of Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929.
Ella May was born in east Tennessee in 1900 and married a man named John Wiggins in 1916. The couple soon left the mountains for Cowpens, South Carolina, a small town upstate where Ella worked on a farm and then in her first textile mill job. The couple and their growing family were eventually lured across the North Carolina line by the hope of financial security offered by the dozens of mills in Gaston County, which had come to be known as “the combed yarn capital of the South,” the town of Gastonia leading the way as “the city of spindles.” Over the next several years, Ella and John bounced from mill to mill in Gaston County before settling in a predominately African-American community called Stumptown outside Bessemer City. John soon abandoned the family.
By the spring of 1929, twenty-eight-year-old Ella had lost four of her nine children to pellagra and whooping cough, diseases that disproportionately affected the poor. She earned $9.00 for a seventy-two-hour workweek at American Mill No. 2, one of the few integrated mills in the county. In April, when she heard about the Loray Mill strike seven miles away in Gastonia, Ella walked off her job and joined the National Textile Workers Union, a labor organization of the American Communist Party.
That summer she wrote and sang protest songs that were later performed by Woody Guthrie and recorded by Pete Seeger. She traveled to Washington, D.C., and confronted North Carolina senator Lee Overman about labor conditions in southern mills and the plight of working mothers. She integrated the Gaston County branch of the National Textile Workers Union against the will of local party officials and members, opening the union to her African-American neighbors and former coworkers. In effect, Ella became the face of the Loray Mill strike and the voice of organized labor in the South. She was a workers’ rights advocate at a time when mill owners openly scoffed at federal labor laws, and she was a feminist and civil rights leader decades before these terms were staples of the American progressive movement.
A violent and unpredictable atmosphere surrounded the strike that summer. On the night of June 7, 1929, Gastonia police chief Orville Aderholt was shot and killed during a raid on the union’s headquarters. Although there was intense speculation about what had caused the raid and who had fired the shots that killed Aderholt, dozens of strikers were arrested and charged with the police chief’s murder. Nine men would stand trial that fall.
On September 14, Ella and other Bessemer City strikers were in a convoy of trucks headed to a rally in Gastonia in support of the jailed strikers when a gang of men rumored to have been hired by the Loray Mill set up a roadblock and fired into the trucks. Ella was shot in the chest and died at the scene. Dozens of people witnessed the attack, but the six men who were arrested were found innocent of Ella’s murder. The Loray Mill paid for the men’s legal defense.
Ella’s children were whisked away to an orphanage near Statesville, North Carolina, where they would remain until their eighteenth birthdays. While Ella’s murder and the events of the strike made headlines around the world, her name and legacy were slandered in newspapers across the state.