The Last Ballad(5)
Ella kept her eyes closed, her head leaning against the office wall, and she hummed the tune that had been stuck in her mind since she’d held Rose in her arms the night before. “Little Mary Phagan” was a true song about a young girl who’d been murdered by her boss at a pencil factory in Atlanta, and something about the melody had stayed locked inside Ella’s head. She didn’t think for a minute that Goldberg’s brother or Dobbins or anybody else at American would ever murder her, but she knew for certain that working there might kill her just the same.
Ella had been singing the song for years, and last night, after she tired of the original words she began to create her own. “She left home at eleven, when she kissed her mother goodbye” became “We leave our homes in the morning, we kiss our children goodbye.” Afraid that Goldberg’s brother’s secretary would take notice, Ella hummed the next line as quietly as she could: “Not one time did the poor child think she was going to die.”
She slid her right hand into her pocket and fingered the union leaflet that she’d kept hidden there for the past month. She took it out and unfolded it on the bench beside her, then removed a stub of pencil from behind her ear and turned the paper to its blank side, where she’d written a few new lines that had come to her mind. She hummed the old line again, felt its rhythm, let its syllables roll over tongue. She wrote, “While we slave for the bosses our children scream and cry.” She looked at the line she’d just written, thought about Rose at home right now, the good chance that her cough had gotten worse, the horrifying possibility that she was wheezing and gasping for air, Lilly pounding on her back and Otis tearing up the road to Violet’s mother’s house for help. She pushed the thought from her mind. She inhaled, fought the urge to cough, and turned the leaflet over and—for what was surely the hundredth time—read the words that were printed on the other side.
The Gastonia Local of the National Textile Workers Union
Invites All Workers to Join the Struggle for Equality.
We Demand:
An End to Piecework and the Hank Clock—A Standard Wage—A 40 Hour/5 Day Workweek—$20 Weekly Minimum Wage—Equal Pay for Equal Work—An End to the Stretch-Out—Sanitary Housing—Reduced Rent—Recognition of the Union
Seven miles east in Gastonia, the seat of Gaston County, the day shift at the Loray Mill had voted to strike on April 1. That evening, hundreds of workers had marched to the gates of the largest and most important textile mill in the state and kept the night shift from going inside. By the next morning Ella had heard that West Gastonia, especially the Loray village, had transformed into a carnival overnight. Children played in the street. Women cooked food on their porches. Men strummed guitars and blew on harmonicas. They drank whiskey and slung rifles across their backs.
Two days later the governor called in the National Guard. Women were beaten. Soldiers pressed guns to men’s heads. The strikers’ first headquarters had been destroyed by a nighttime mob. The union commissary attacked, the food stores ruined.
The first leaflets had begun trickling through the mill in early April, carried by whispers and subtle passes from hand to hand. Ella had held on to the first one she’d seen, had kept it with her ever since. Another leaflet had come through American just a few days ago. Union members were being forcibly removed from the Loray village on Monday, May 6, just two days away. All workers in the surrounding area were invited to a rally on Sunday evening. The union would even pick you up, take you there.
Ella looked again at the list of union demands. She had a decision to make.
Goldberg’s brother’s voice spoke from behind the door, and Ella wondered if, godlike, he’d been able to sense that her mind had just wandered from her job at American to the strike at Loray. She folded the leaflet and slipped it into her pocket, slid the pencil back behind her ear.
“Janet,” Goldberg’s brother said. The young secretary closed her book when she heard her name. She set it down on her tidy desk and stood and smoothed her dress. She opened the office door and stepped inside. Ella could hear their whispered voices. She closed her eyes again, uncrossed her ankles.
“Mrs. Wiggins,” the secretary said, “Mr. Goldberg’s ready for you.”
Ella stood and approached the door. The secretary squeezed past her, stepped back behind her desk, and gathered her book and the purse that she’d hung on the back of her chair. Ella could see Goldberg’s brother at the desk in his office, pen in hand, writing something in a thick ledger. He finished writing, capped his pen, closed the ledger, and looked up at her.
“Come in,” he said, his voice clear but quiet, his foreign accent almost unnoticeable. He straightened his glasses, pushed them up on the bridge of his nose. He did not stand, but Ella already knew that his body was thin and angular. Although he was past middle age, his face appeared youthful despite a well-trimmed beard and dark hair that glinted with oil in the soft, yellow light. He wore a bow tie and suspenders, his brown suit jacket left folded across the back of the chair in which he sat. He seemed like he should be standing in front of a classroom instead of sitting in a tiny office on the trembling floors of a cotton mill.
For the first time in years, Ella pictured the dark, one-room schoolhouse back in Sevierville, Tennessee, heard the voice of her mother as she begged her father to let Ella and her older brother Wesley go to school for a few days in September before her father needed them on the farm full-time. Ella was six years old and had never had a moment of schooling. Neither had Wesley, who was almost fifteen.