The Last Ballad(95)

“Morning, Miss May,” the woman said.

“Good morning,” Ella said. “How’s it going back there?”

The woman smiled. “We might not starve come fall,” she said.

Ella nodded toward the cabin. “She up?”

“Will be soon if she’s not already,” the woman said. “I’ll go check.” The woman walked up the porch steps, opened a screen door, let it close silently behind her. A young girl stood in the doorway and looked out at them. Ella waved.

“Hey, Iva,” she said.

The girl opened the screen door. She wore a dress the color of an old potato. Her hair was pulled back in a single braid that brushed the nape of her neck. Hampton saw that, just like Ella’s children, the girl wasn’t wearing shoes. She looked at Sophia.

“Y’all leave the truck down there?” she asked.

“I did,” Sophia said. The girl leaned her head back inside. Hampton heard her say, “I’m going to go down to Lilly’s.”

“You bring them back up here if they hungry,” the woman’s voice said. Hampton saw that Ella stared at the ground as if she hadn’t overheard the conversation.

The girl leapt off the porch and tore across the yard at a sprint.

Sophia called after her. “I told Lilly I’ve got the keys with me.”

The girl kept running and said, “Otis’ll get it started.”

“He better not!” Ella hollered.

The screen door slammed shut, and Hampton looked up to the porch to find a young woman about his age blinking her eyes against the midmorning light. Her hair was plaited into two thick braids that grazed her shoulders. She wore a dress that buttoned down the middle, and it was open at the collar so that he could see the shadows that pooled in the hollowed spaces her clavicles made. She had big brown eyes and a gentle, frowning face that was at once innocent and world-weary. Hampton thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She stood on the porch, her hip cocked, and stared down at Ella. She crossed her arms, shook her head. “I done told you,” she said.

“Well, you going to have to tell me again,” Ella said.

“I can’t do it,” the woman said. “I just can’t.”

Ella stepped in between Sophia and Hampton, grabbed hold of his hand, and pulled him toward the porch steps. “This man here came all the way down from New York City to knock on doors,” she said. “You mean to tell me you can’t walk up and down the street?”

“This ain’t New York City,” the woman said. “Ain’t none of your white friends want to see a colored girl join your union.”

Ella pointed to Sophia. “This one does,” she said.

“She’s right, Violet,” Sophia said. “We need you, and we need your help.”

The woman named Violet sighed and shook her head again. She looked at Hampton as if seeing him for the first time. Hampton slipped his hands into his pockets, fingered his watch.

“Violet, you’ve given American Mill Number Two every night of your life for as long as I’ve known you,” Ella said. “Give us the afternoon.”

“Just the afternoon,” Violet said. “And it don’t mean nothing.”

Ella smiled. “It means something to me,” she said.



The four of them spent the rest of the morning knocking on doors in Stumptown, approaching people bent to their work in small patches of gardens, sitting down on porch steps, and standing in open doorways. Although Ella and Violet knew them all, the men and women of Stumptown looked at Sophia and Hampton with stone faces and reticent eyes. Hampton studied the men he met, regardless of their age, and tried to mirror their country formality, tried to stand with the same rigidity, to measure his words with the same deliberateness.

After a lunch of chicken and dumplings at Violet’s mother’s house, they loaded themselves into the truck and drove to a tiny town called Waco, where Ella knew of a few workers who might be interested in the union. Waco, which was near Cherryville’s few mills, was almost an hour’s drive away. When they arrived Hampton saw that it was hardly more than a crossroads of shanties, shotgun houses, and lean-tos set in the midst of rows of cotton fields owned by white people but worked solely by blacks.

Hampton took the lead in Waco, and while he spoke to strangers in hot, crowded rooms with low ceilings, he felt the eyes of his three companions upon him. He did his best to explain the inalienable rights of the worker, how those rights extended to whites and Negroes alike, how disagreement about these rights had caused a major struggle just a few miles away, in Gastonia, in the shadow of the Loray Mill.

But no matter what Hampton said, talk always turned to the weekend-long jamboree to honor Confederate veterans that was scheduled to take place just a few miles away in Charlotte beginning on Friday morning. It was the first news Hampton heard of the Confederate gathering, and although he was from the North, the side that had actually won the war, he’d never seen or heard of any celebrations like this. It seemed to him that the South now reveled in its loss as if it had been a victory.

On the drive to Waco, Hampton had ridden alone in the back of Sophia’s truck while the three women had squeezed into the cab, but the day had turned blisteringly hot, and on the return trip to Stumptown, Violet opted to ride in the open air with him. They sat with their backs against the cab, Hampton’s feet crossed at the ankles, Violet’s legs pulled up beneath her dress. The sun was behind them now, and the cab offered a little shade. Violet looked over at Hampton.