The Last Ballad(73)

She had turned to face the window. She stood there looking into her own reflection. They were both silent, although Katherine knew that one of them needed to say something to the other; but she could not think of what it would be. Richard stood by the closet. He walked across the room. She heard him step into the hall and go into the bathroom. He closed the door.

“Daisy Bell” had ended and a new song, one she didn’t recognize, had begun. She lifted the arm on the player. The record continued to spin in near silence beneath her. She listened for Richard’s movements, but the only thing she could hear was the humming silence of the house, the soft patter of the rain. She imagined him inside the bathroom, standing with both hands on the vanity, his eyes looking at everything around him except his own face in the mirror. Was he listening for her as she listened for him?

Katherine unmade the bed and picked up Richard’s pillow; then she opened the trunk that rested at the footboard and found a blanket. She set the pillow and the blanket on the floor in the hallway and closed the bedroom door.

She crossed the room and stood before the window again, reached out, and turned off the lamp on the dresser. Her face in the window disappeared, although the hallway light from beneath the closed door threw a faint, ghostly outline of her body on the glass. She peered into the darkness, the record still spinning. There had been a time, when they were first married, that she could stand here and see all the way down into the village to the lake and to the mill beyond it. But now the trees were too tall and dense. It was late May, and had it been day she would have seen the bright green leaves and tiny red buds that clung to the limbs.

But she was trying to see through the trees, past the limbs and leaves and buds, and into the mill village, where she knew a few last lights still burned in bedrooms and kitchens. She imagined a woman inside one of the millhouses peering through the rain toward the big house on the hill on the other side of the trees. A woman who was a mother just like Katherine—younger, perhaps, but a mother just the same. The woman stood, her fingers intertwined over her stomach just as Katherine had intertwined hers, her arms empty of the child or the children she birthed and raised and let go into the world, her womb empty of those children as well, but empty of something else too, something now lost and far away, something that felt forgotten by everyone but her and the other women who stood at windows on nights like these.

Then Katherine remembered the woman’s name, the name she’d heard the men say that night while they stood in the dark beneath the window.

Ella May Wiggins.

Gaston Transom-Times



May 26, 1929

Do the people of Gaston County know what they are subscribing to when they believe the preachments of men like Beal and Reed? They advocate racial equality, intermarriage of whites and blacks, abolition of all laws discriminating between whites and blacks. Here is their platform:

“A federal law against lynching and the protection of negro masses in their right of self defense.

“Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination. Full racial, political and social equality for the negro race.

“Abolition of all laws which result in segregation of the negroes. Abolition of all Jim Crow laws. The law shall forbid all discrimination against negroes in selling or renting houses.

“Abolition of all laws which disenfranchise the negroes.

“Abolition of laws forbidding intermarriage of persons of different races.

“Abolition of all laws and public administration measures which prohibit, or in practice prevent, negro children or youth from attending general public schools or universities.

“Full and equal admittance of negroes to all railway station waiting rooms, trains, restaurants, hotels and the theatres.”



What will it take for us to stand up and rid this city and this state of the threat of bloody red Bolshevism? Violence? We’ve witnessed violence. Protests? We’ve experienced protests. Anger? There is plenty of anger on all sides.

Will we wait to act until our Constitution has been destroyed, our churches pulled down upon us, our classrooms and courtrooms taken over by self-professed godless men like Fred Beal? Will we wait to act until our children learn and eat and play and sleep alongside the Negro? Will we wait to act until our very voices cry out for mercy in a Russian tongue?

The good people of this community are getting tired of these wops from the east side of New York telling our folks what to do and how to do it. It is time we are being rid of them. We can settle the strike without their aid and suggestions. Get them out of town, and the strike will be settled and in a way that will be satisfactory to all. As long as the union stays here, we shall have trouble, and more serious trouble than any that has yet happened.

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Chapter Nine

Ella May





Sunday, May 26, 1929



The brief burst of rain that closed the night’s meeting had ended, and Ella and Sophia shuffled and slipped their way along the muddy road away from the headquarters. To their right, dozens of wet canvas tents gleamed against the light of hanging lamps. Out in the dark field, strikers stoked soggy campfires and prepared late dinners.

Ahead of them, thirty or so Bessemer City workers in small groups of twos and threes walked over the railroad tracks, their bodies thrown into momentary silhouette by the lights from Loray, which blazed farther south.