The Last Ballad(4)

Now, outside Goldberg’s brother’s office, Ella closed her eyes and crossed her ankles and leaned against the wall, the mill causing her body to vibrate so that her bones rattled beneath her skin. She considered how the only thing worse than stepping off the line was missing a shift, and that’s what she’d done last night, and she knew that that was why she was sitting where she was sitting now.

She’d spent almost all of last night on the porch with her three-year-old daughter, Rose, asleep in her arms, singing and humming all the songs she’d ever known until she had run out of songs and begun to make up new words to old melodies. The air had been chilly, but Rose’s body had burned like a cinder against Ella’s chest. Sweat had soaked through the girl’s bedshirt, but her coughing fits had finally given way to sleep.

Ella had been able to hear the rest of her children stir inside the cabin, where they lay atop pallets on the floor, and she pictured eleven-year-old Lilly with one-year-old Joseph, whom they all called Wink, nestled in the crook of her arm. Nine-year-old Otis would have his back turned to them, his thumb in his mouth, something no one ever saw except Ella, and then only when he slept. When she heard one of the children move or cough, she stopped humming the melody she’d been humming to Rose, and she listened until the child settled to sleep again. Willie would have been four years old by now, and Ella turned her attention to the soft, high-pitched whistle of Rose’s lungs and remembered holding Willie this way before he’d died from the same whooping cough disease. The thought had made her hold Rose more tightly against her chest. She wanted to keep her daughter on this earth and in her arms for as long as possible.

Ella had spent most of the night out there on the porch envying horses for their ability to sleep standing up. She’d worn a man’s coat over her shoulders, the waxed canvas duster the only thing John had left behind when he disappeared, aside from little Wink, who’d just begun to grow inside her when John closed the door for the last time. She’d never had the chance to tell John he was a father again, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He’d said he wouldn’t live among niggers anymore, said he was sick of millwork, sick of the children themselves being sick. He’d said other things too, but Ella had decided to forget those things on her way to forgetting him. She didn’t care that her neighbors were colored; it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because there was nowhere else for her to go. As far as working as a spinner at American Mill No. 2, Ella knew that the work she did was dirty, dangerous work, knew that the nine dollars she earned for a seventy-two-hour workweek wasn’t worth the work itself. But she did it because there was nothing else to do. If there were something she could do to keep her children healthy and alive then she would’ve done it a long time ago, especially now that she might have another child on the way.

The American Mill No. 2 was the smallest mill in town and the only one to employ blacks and whites in the same jobs, albeit in separate areas of the mill. The Goldberg brothers had fled Latvia in 1915 after the German invasion, and they’d slowly made their way south from New York before settling in Bessemer City, where they’d purchased one small mill and then another before buying a Main Street home large enough to house both brothers’ wives and children. In the years that followed, the brothers busied themselves with the twin pursuits of spinning cotton and weaving themselves into the fabric of the white, Protestant populace that owned and operated the mills in Bessemer City.

But no matter how long the brothers and their families lived in town, they never forgot the first night in their new home, when sometime before dawn they awoke to the orange glow of the six-foot-tall wooden cross afire in their front yard. They also never forgot the next morning’s visit from the Christian Ladies’ Association, a group largely composed of the wives of local ministers. The women appeared unannounced that Saturday morning, cakes and flowers and casseroles in hand. They walked single file up the walk, past the blackened grass and the charred, smoking remains of the cross their husbands had left behind. The women did not glance at the wreckage, nor did they glance at the oldest Goldberg brother, whose sweat-soaked, soot-covered clothes did little to hide his hulking frame where he stood in the yard, axe in hand, the cross’s still smoking cinders gathered about his feet.

The message to the Goldberg brothers was clear: they would be considered white but not American, and because they were white but not American, the town had a different set of expectations for the brothers and the way they would run their mills. They expected the Goldbergs to buy the low-quality cotton passed over by the other mills, which they did, and they expected the Goldbergs to lack a certain allegiance to the codes of the South’s race-based society, and this was true of the Goldbergs as well. But the people of Bessemer City also expected the Goldbergs not to treat their workers any better than any other mill treated theirs; not to pay them a better wage, perhaps even a lower wage as workers at No. 2 were relegated to work near blacks. The brothers owned American Mill No. 1 as well, and although it was all-white, the conditions there weren’t much better than where Ella and Violet worked. Both mills were small, poorly lit, stuffy, and cramped, the lint-choked air enclosed by low ceilings and dirty floors. Machines rattled and whirred in a deafening hum around the clock, stopping only for maintenance or repairs, when some small-handed woman or child would be brought in to stand on a box or a ladder and close his or her eyes before reaching deep into the gears in order to investigate what had gone wrong. They were expected to be quick about it, and they always tried to move fast, for no other reason than the fear of losing an arm or a hand or a finger or three.