The Last Ballad(41)

The last car slid by. The quiet morning returned.

“Where do you think that train was headed?” Beal asked.

“Spartanburg,” Ella said.

“Spartanburg.” He said the word as if testing it before deciding whether he would ever say it again. “You ever been to Spartanburg, Miss May?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it like in Spartanburg?”

“Like here, I reckon,” she said. “Not too different from any other place where they got mills. No better. No worse.”

“What were you doing down in Spartanburg?”

“Passing through,” she said.

“On the way to Bessemer City? To the American Mill?”

“No, sir. I worked other places before I worked at American.”

“Where?”

“A bunch of different mills,” she said.

“And what’s it like at American Mill Number Two?”

“I reckon it’s about like it is here at Loray,” she said.

“No better, no worse,” he added.

“I’d say that’s right.”

“And you heard about our strike, so you came over to Gastonia?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I got Sundays off. I don’t go back until six tonight. But I need someone to carry me home. I reckon I could walk if I had to.”

“You came last night to decide on the union?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please,” he said. “Don’t call me sir. I’m hardly older than you. Please don’t make me feel any older.”

“All right,” she said.

“And have you decided?”

“No, sir,” she said. “I mean, no, I ain’t decided. Not yet.”

“You could become the face of this strike, Miss May. Loray’s already heard about you. And they’re scared. Your story, your music: it’s all made for the newspapers. You could be what turns the tide for these people.”

“I’ll lose my job if I join the union,” Ella said. “I got to get paid, Mr. Beal, Fred. I’ve got babies to support. I can’t be out of work.”

“We can pay you to organize workers. Come to the rallies. Speak. Sing like you did last night.”

Ella was silent. She’d spent enough time in front of men who promised work that she knew it was best to say as little as possible, best to wait for them to begin talking of money first.

“How much do you make a week now, Miss May?”

“Nine dollars,” she said.

“We can pay nine twenty-five, maybe nine fifty. I’ll know soon.”

“I could think about it for ten dollars,” she said. “But I can’t live here in Gastonia. I can’t bring my babies over here.”

“Nine fifty and you can stay in Bessemer City except for rallies and meetings,” Beal said. “You can organize there with our leadership, eventually open a local chapter. But there’s one thing I’ll need you to do that’ll require you to leave home.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re sending a group to Washington in a few days,” Beal said. “They’ll be meeting with senators. I want you to go. No one can portray this struggle better than you did last night.”

Ella had never been north of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. Her heart thrilled at the idea of it: riding on a train or in a car, watching as the countryside unfolded before her. But she quickly calculated what that kind of freedom would cost: A trip to Washington would mean days and days away from her children, and she didn’t know if she could manage that. Violet would be there to help, but it was her absence in their lives that terrified her. And if she took the time to make such a trip then she had no doubt it would mean the end of her job at the American Mill. She could explain missing a shift to care for a sick child, but she couldn’t explain a trip north with a group of strikers.

“I’ll have to think on it,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do just yet.”

“I understand. Your life’s been hard,” he said. “And I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the child you lost. I can’t imagine the pain of that.”

Ella stared at Beal for a moment, considered telling him what she’d been thinking since first feeling another new life stir inside her. She’d decided that giving birth to a child is nothing but an invitation to lose it, and that was what she’d feared each time she’d heard the first newborn cry of one of her children. The weight and space of the child in her arms carved out a similar weight and space in her heart. The mere idea of that space being rendered empty and weightless was almost too much for her to bear, even now, especially here on this sidewalk in the early morning with a strange man speaking to her.

Beal must have registered Ella’s reticence because he cleared his throat and dropped his cigarette, stubbed it out with his shoe.

“What do you think of our strike so far?” he asked.

“I think it’s white,” Ella said.

Beal laughed. “It is white, isn’t it?” He looked at the ground where his cigarette lay smoldering. “It is, come to think of it.”

“If I work for you I want to organize colored workers,” Ella said. “For ten dollars a week I could organize a whole lot of them who’d walk off their jobs at American if the union would support them the same way it’s supporting white folks over here in Gastonia.”