The Last Ballad(43)

“Friends, today is a test,” Beal said. “You’re being evicted from your homes simply because you want a better life for your family. You have the money to pay the rent, but Loray has said, ‘We do not want your money as much as we want your soul, and if you do not give us your soul then you can no longer live in your home.’

“What they want is violence, brothers and sisters, and we won’t give them violence. Our words and our actions are more effective than violence, and more powerful.

“Mothers,” he said, “go home, and when the mill’s gangs come, hold your children in your arms as tightly as you can.” He smiled. “For all we know they’ll take your babies and force them to work an eighty-hour week!” The crowd hesitated to laugh at first, then did so quietly.

The women cut their eyes at one another, turned their faces toward the village, began to slip away silently.

“Men,” Beal said, “I need you here to guard our headquarters. As much as the bosses want you out of your village, they want you out of your union even more. So draw your guns, but steel yourselves against firing them. We do not seek violence, but we will not shrink from it.”

A cheer rose from the men, and in that cheer Ella heard the long night of whispers and rumors and sips of whiskey culminating in some kind of darkness that now rubbed against her body. Something about the morning made it seem that a fight would be unavoidable. She left the crowd, followed the women and children toward the village.

Sophia fell in step beside her.

“I just talked to Beal,” she said. Ella smiled. Sophia laughed, threw her arms around Ella’s shoulders. They both stumbled, nearly fell. “I knew you’d do it, Ella May. I knew it.”

“I ain’t done nothing yet,” Ella said.

“You said yes,” Sophia said. “That’s plenty for now.”

“Why’d all the men stay back there?” she asked. “Why’s it all women doing the marching?”

“Beal says the mill’s men are less likely to beat up on women.”

“Most men I know would rather hit a woman than a man,” Ella said.

“Beal doesn’t want anyone carrying guns down in the village,” Sophia said. “He says it doesn’t send a good message, but the men won’t listen, so they can’t come.”

“You’re telling me that the men keep all the guns and stand around by themselves at headquarters while the women march? That don’t make no sense.”

“There’s a lot about this strike that doesn’t make sense, Ella,” Sophia said. “You’ll see that soon enough. But it can be fixed, and we may have to be the ones who fix it.” She hugged Ella again, then ran ahead and disappeared into the crowd.

Ella walked with the strikers as they turned down Dalton on the east side of the mill. Clouds of white breakfast smoke drifted from cookstoves and rose above the sagging rooflines of the small, unpainted mill shacks. The muddy streets were pocked with graveled divots where water pooled. Weeds choked out the grass in the patches of yard. Aside from the women on foot, the streets were largely quiet and empty.

When the group turned right on Fourth Avenue it stumbled upon a crowd of strikers who had gathered in the street in front of a dilapidated shack with broken shutters and a haphazard set of steps that led up to the porch. They stood watching as a dozen or so men in overalls and work clothes moved empty-handed into the house through the flung-open front door and then reappeared carrying beat-up furniture and old, lumpy mattresses. They dropped the items in piles on the lawn, piles that spilled over the edge of the yard and down into the crowded street.

Ella’s eyes fixed themselves on a woman in a blue gingham dress who stood with a crying, pink-faced baby in her arms. The woman’s hips rocked from side to side as if she were either trying to quiet the child or contemplating whether or not to spring upon the men. Sophia stood whispering to a group of strikers. She led them up the porch steps and inside the house. A few moments later the strikers reappeared, sitting in chairs that were being carried by two men instead of one. Sophia was rolled up inside a mattress. When the men dropped her on the lawn the mattress uncoiled itself; she stood up and ran back inside the house. But it soon became apparent that nothing could stop the men from carrying out the furniture and piling it by the road. Heaps of it were strewn everywhere. A few of the women cried, especially the younger ones, new wives and even newer mothers, but Ella watched as the older women stood back, their arms folded across their chests, their eyes locked on the men’s faces.

“You proud, boy?” one woman asked a young man who couldn’t have been older than fifteen. “Boss Guyon got your palms greasy enough?”

The boy lowered his face and brushed past her. He walked back into the house.

Another old woman lifted the crying baby from the girl’s arms and held it in front of one of the men.

“Here, Cass,” the woman said. She pushed the baby into the man’s arms as if it were his own. “You got babies at home and food to spare. Take this one home with you. It ain’t got nowhere to live no more, thanks to you.”

The man took the child into his arms. It was wailing. The man sighed, carried the baby back to its mother. He moved up through the yard and went back inside the house.

Over the next few hours, the men cleared the houses on one side of Fourth Avenue, and then they crossed and moved down the other. By midmorning, furniture, clothing, and people cluttered the yards in huge piles. But soon, once the shock of homelessness had worn off, the strikers began to celebrate their removal, as if not having a roof over their heads had given them one less thing to worry about. Some of the men who’d spent the morning guarding union headquarters had left their weapons behind and come down to the village to join their families in sorting through their belongings. Even the handful of police officers who were on hand to make certain that heightened tensions didn’t give way to violence seemed relaxed. As Aderholt had promised Beal, the police had kept their distance.