The Last Ballad(75)

Ella and Sophia had been working—without Beal’s or the Local’s knowledge—to arrange for the national office to have a colored organizer, an old friend of Sophia’s named Hampton Haywood, sent south. He was scheduled to arrive on the train in Charlotte a week from tomorrow. They’d do everything they could to keep it quiet until then. Ella knew that if they were going to integrate the union they’d need secrecy right up to the moment when everyone’s hands were raised and the votes were tallied.

Water squished inside Ella’s shoes, soaked her stockings. When she reached the bottom of the embankment she slipped off both of her shoes, turned them up, and watched water trickle out. She tried to wipe the water from her stockings, but they were sopping wet, and she saw no solution but to step out of them one leg at a time. Sophia stood beside her and waited for Ella to step back into her shoes with her bare feet. The strikers began to load up into trucks, which sat parked on the side of the road as it curved to the east and ran parallel to the railroad tracks. Men in overalls and women in dresses kicked mud from their shoes and helped one another climb over the open tailgates into the truck beds. Ella buckled her shoes, raised her head, and saw Sophia watching the strikers as if appraising them somehow.

“We’re going to bring fifty more on Friday night,” Sophia said. “Maybe more. Who knows? Could be a hundred colored workers.”

Ella stood, nodded toward the men and women in the trucks. “As long as they don’t run them off.”

“They won’t,” Sophia said. “They won’t even see us coming until we’re here.”

“Hopefully nobody gets hurt,” Ella said. “Or killed.”

“I already told you, Ella May. Ain’t nobody getting killed.”

They walked without speaking for a moment, as if practicing the silence of the secret they shared. Ella cleared her throat. “Will you do me a favor, Miss Blevin.”

“What’s that, Miss May?”

“When your friend gets here, you tell him to let me do the talking,” Ella said. “Colored folks I know ain’t going to listen to him just because he looks like them. And you need to make sure he don’t put on northern airs or wear fancy clothes. It’s not going to impress them. But if they see that he’s humble like them, maybe even poor like me, then they’ll listen.”

Ahead, Anderson Chesley stood on the running board of his truck. He was in his early twenties, certainly older than Sophia, probably not too much younger than Ella. She’d heard that, like her, he was from somewhere up in the mountains too, but she’d never found out exactly where, and she didn’t want to ask him. She didn’t want to think about the mistake she’d made in leaving those mountains behind. She figured Anderson Chesley didn’t want to think about it either. As Ella and Sophia drew closer to the trucks, Ella could see that Chesley stood with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Sophia saw it too. She clucked her tongue in disappointment.

“No weapons in view, Mr. Chesley,” Sophia said. “Not this far from headquarters anyway.”

Chesley looked down at his boots where they stood on the running board as if he were thinking of how to respond, and then he looked up at Sophia.

“I seen that car back there,” he said. “That’s Gibson and Roach, Miss Blevin: police officers. A few nights back, somebody followed us all the way to Bessemer City. Got right up on my tail when I turned off the highway. Nearly hit me. There were four men inside. Might have been them.”

One of the men standing by Chesley’s truck spoke up. He was a tall, red-faced man named Will Mason. He was a machinist at Ragan Spinning Company.

“He’s right,” Mason said. “Came right up on the back of us, liked to hit us almost. There were four men inside, but it was too dark to see any faces.”

“Could have been a bad driver,” Sophia said. “No reason to go shooting at people for being bad drivers.”

“I ain’t about to go shooting at people,” Chesley said. “Not yet, but I will. Last night, after I went to bed, another car sat out in front of my house. I looked out the window and seen it. Whoever it was wouldn’t leave until I went out there on the porch and showed them this here rifle.”

“Beal doesn’t want anybody to be seen carrying weapons off the premises. Weapons are only to protect headquarters and the commissary,” Sophia said. She looked at the faces around her. “You all know better: no guns.”

Chesley slipped his thumb beneath the rifle’s strap as if he were going to slide it off his shoulder, but he stopped, changed his mind.

“Well, Beal can go to hell,” Chesley said. He sat down in his truck and laid the rifle across his lap. He slammed the truck’s door, poked his face out its open window. “Let Beal drive out here by hisself one night,” he said. “He’ll be begging for a rifle after that. It’s easy to say ‘no weapons’ when you got guards protecting you up there.” He nodded in the direction of the headquarters, on the other side of the tracks. “But it’s a different thing when you’re out here, surrounded by strangers.”

When he said the word strangers his eyes fell on a woman Ella had not yet noticed. She stood in the middle of the road, several feet away from the group of workers who were still climbing up into the trucks’ beds. The woman must’ve felt the group’s eyes upon her, because she coughed, ran her gloved hands across the front of her thin jacket as if smoothing away wrinkles that she knew were not there. The jacket had a matching belt that she’d cinched tight at her waist. A fine hat sat tipped toward her eyes. She wore boots with a thin heel. Ella didn’t know who she was, but she knew that she wasn’t a striker. It scared her, the thought of someone she didn’t know being so close by without her sensing it.