The Last Ballad(96)

“What about your accent?” she said. The truck must have changed direction because the sunlight hit her eyes. Hampton noticed they were a lighter shade of brown than he’d assumed. Violet lifted her hand and cupped it over her eyes, dropping them back into shadow.

“What about it?” Hampton said.

“Half the time you talk, you sound like you’re from down here,” Violet said. She lowered her hand but didn’t look away from him.

“I am from down here,” he said. “Was, anyway. Went up north when I was six.”

“You got free of it.”

“More like ‘got gone of it,’” he said.

“Where?” she asked.

“Mississippi.” He pulled his legs up to his chest and rested his elbows on his knees. Hampton opened his mouth to speak, but he stopped. He tried again. “My daddy shot a white man. The plantation owner’s son. He killed him before he could get killed.”

“What happened?” Violet asked.

“They yanked him off a train the next morning,” he said. “Never saw him again.”

Violet put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Hampton shrugged. “I try not to think about what might’ve happened to him. Just imagine that the South took him. Makes it easier,” he said. “Makes it easier just to say that the South killed my daddy.”

“My daddy keeled over dead in a white man’s field while Mama was pregnant with Iva,” Violet said. “I reckon you could say the South killed him too. Maybe we should have jumped on a train north.”

“Still can,” Hampton said. “Plenty of trains going north.”

“Shoot,” Violet said. She smiled. “You got an extra ticket?”

“Might could find one.”

“Shoot,” she said again, still smiling.

Bessemer City began to make itself apparent around them. A few cars passed going in the opposite direction. The homes were suddenly larger, set closer together. The truck skirted the edge of downtown on its way back to Stumptown.

“So,” Hampton said, “you going back to the mill tonight?”

Violet stared down at her lap as if looking for an answer. “I hadn’t decided yet,” she said.

Hampton reached into his pocket and removed his wristwatch, saw that it was almost 4:30 p.m. “You got an hour and a half,” he said.

Violet looked surprised to see him holding the watch. “Let me see that,” she said. He passed it to her. She looked at it for a long time, draped it over her wrist, held it so that the sunlight caught it.

Hampton wondered if she’d ever held a piece of jewelry as fine as his watch. He’d saved up for the watch for more than a year, and he’d owned it for less than that, but something urged him to give it to her. He could not tell if he wished to impress her or to prove to himself that he was capable of such giving. “You can have it,” he finally said.

She stopped playing with the watch and looked up at him. She smiled, shook her head.

“It’s yours,” he said, “if you want it.”

She laughed, handed it back to him. “What do I need a fancy watch for?” she said. “I only care about four times: waking up time, going to work time, getting off time, and going to sleep time. I know when to do what.”

Hampton held the watch for a moment, shame creeping over him as he realized that he’d offered the watch knowing that Violet wouldn’t accept it. He draped it over his wrist and began to fasten it. Violet put her hand over his.

“Put that back in your pocket,” she said. “You already sound like a city boy half the time. No use looking like one too.”



Violet did not return for the night shift at American Mill No. 2 that evening, and over the next four days the four of them canvassed Gaston County in advance of Fred Beal’s Loray rally on Friday night. Four days of heat and rain and Hampton’s ruined shoes traipsing from shack to shack, from lunch counter back rooms in the stark daylight to darkened juke joints set off in the dense woods at night. Hampton’s head buzzed with the names of people he’d met and the names of the communities he’d visited: Ranlo, Booger Mountain, Shuffletown. He’d sat through a Wednesday night church service, smacked mosquitos against his skin that were so fat and full of blood that it looked like he’d been shot, and witnessed a baptism at a muddy creek near a place called Cramerton. He’d eaten things he’d never considered eating before, seen more guns than he’d ever seen in his life. More than once he’d been pulled aside by an older gentleman and asked how he’d come to be wandering through town with three women—two of them white—in tow.

Late Friday afternoon, Hampton found himself holding Violet’s hand while standing shoeless and calf-deep in cold spring water. Along with Ella and Sophia, they’d spent the morning in Bessemer City handing out leaflets outside the gates of American Mill No. 2 and telling black workers about that night’s integrated rally in Gastonia. Then they’d visited the back room of a diner where a group of Negro railroad men hunched silently over their cooling lunches while Ella talked about the union. The afternoon had been devoted to sitting on porches and porch steps in and around Stumptown, until Violet’s mother finally invited them all over for supper. After that they planned to gather as many black workers as they could and head for Gastonia at dusk.