The Last Ballad Read online

  She heard voices and looked toward the shadows at the end of an alley. Fred Beal stood talking with a tall, thin man in a black suit and a black stovepipe hat. A silver star gleamed on his lapel. The man must have felt Ella’s eyes on him because he raised his head, still listening to Beal, and looked at Ella where she stood at the alley’s mouth. He nodded. Beal noticed, and he looked up at Ella too, raised his hand to her. The men walked up the alley toward her, their heads bent, their voices just beginning to reach her.

  “It’s the law, Mr. Beal,” the man said. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about the law. Mill owns those houses. You know that.”

  “But it doesn’t own the people inside,” Beal said.

  “I agree,” the man said. “But they can’t just stay there if the mill wants them out. The mill has a right to remove them. I’ll have some men on hand to see that it’s done carefully and respectfully. But I need your people to be careful and respectful too, Mr. Beal.”

  “I’ve made clear to them that there is to be no violence,” Beal said. “But we’ve been attacked before, Chief Aderholt. You saw what happened to our old headquarters. You saw how the commissary was destroyed.”

  “And I hated it,” Aderholt said. “It just made everything worse, and we can’t have it get any worse than it already is.”

  “You’ve got a few ruffians on your hands too, Chief. Roach and Gibson, to name only two.”

  “I’ve spoken with them about the complaints,” Aderholt said. “And I’ve given Roach some time off to get himself together, and Gibson knows I’m watching him. Passion’s running high, and not everyone has acted as professionally as they should have, but you need to take responsibility for your people’s behavior too.”

  The men had moved out of the shadows. They stopped in front of Ella. Aderholt nodded toward her. “Is this the one?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Beal said. He smiled, put his hands in his pockets. “This is the one. This is Ella May.”

  Ella stared at Aderholt while he stared at her. He was older than she’d assumed. His skin was fair, his eyes dark. Wisps of white hair protruded from beneath his black hat. He touched its wide brim, nodded.

  “Miss,” he finally said.

  Aderholt turned back to Beal.

  “Mr. Beal?”

  “Yes, Chief?”

  “Let’s not have anyone hurt or, God forbid, killed this morning.” Aderholt looked behind him, where sunlight poured onto the road, shone against the windows of the shops and restaurants along Franklin. “It’s too nice a morning for that.” He turned and walked back toward town. Beal and Ella watched him go.

  “He’s a fine man,” Beal said. “He has to toe the city’s line, but he’s done everything he can to help us.”

  “What did he mean?” Ella asked. “When he said, ‘Is this the one?’ What does that mean?”

  Beal smiled. “Word’s out about you, Miss May.”

  “What word?” Ella said. She felt heat rising in her face, and she didn’t yet know if it came from anger or embarrassment, but she knew that whatever Beal said would decide it for her.

  “You made quite the impression last night,” Beal said. “With the story you told and your song. It all made quite the impression on Loray, on the newspapers too. They’re saying we brought you in from Nashville, paid you big-time money to get up there and sing.”

  “I ain’t from Nashville,” Ella said. “I ain’t never even been to Nashville. I’m from Sevierville.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Miss May,” Beal said. “The mill wants people to believe that you’re not real, that your story’s not real. They want everyone to believe that you’re an actor or a singer or anything other than a mill mother with sick babies and an empty wallet.

  “But we’re going to fight against lies like those,” Beal said. “Your story’s true. People need to hear it. Your singing too.” He lit a cigarette, turned his head, and blew smoke up the alley. “You were wonderful last night. And that song. It was wonderful.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She spoke the words just in time for the sound of them to merge with another sound. A westbound train that neither she nor Beal was prepared to see or hear burst from the morning’s silence and bolted past at the end of the alley. The rush of it blasted a gust of wind toward them. Beal stumbled, ducked as if someone had hurled something dangerous at him—a knife, a stick of dynamite, an unspent bullet—and in a quick sweep his eyes strafed the alley as if that dangerous, unseen thing were now rolling toward him, where it would stop at his feet. He caught himself, smiled at Ella, straightened his suit. They stood without speaking and waited for the train to pass.

  The last car slid by. The quiet morning returned.

  “Where do you think that train was headed?” Beal asked.

  “Spartanburg,” Ella said.

  “Spartanburg.” He said the word as if testing it before deciding whether he would ever say it again. “You ever been to Spartanburg, Miss May?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it like in Spartanburg?”

  “Like here, I reckon,” she said. “Not too different from any other place where they got mills. No better. No worse.”

  “What were you doing down in Spartanburg?”

  “Passing through,” she said.

  “On the way to Bessemer City? To the American Mill?”

  “No, sir. I worked other places before I worked at American.”

  “Where?”

  “A bunch of different mills,” she said.

  “And what’s it like at American Mill Number Two?”

  “I reckon it’s about like it is here at Loray,” she said.

  “No better, no worse,” he added.

  “I’d say that’s right.”

  “And you heard about our strike, so you came over to Gastonia?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I got Sundays off. I don’t go back until six tonight. But I need someone to carry me home. I reckon I could walk if I had to.”

  “You came last night to decide on the union?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t call me sir. I’m hardly older than you. Please don’t make me feel any older.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “And have you decided?”

  “No, sir,” she said. “I mean, no, I ain’t decided. Not yet.”

  “You could become the face of this strike, Miss May. Loray’s already heard about you. And they’re scared. Your story, your music: it’s all made for the newspapers. You could be what turns the tide for these people.”

  “I’ll lose my job if I join the union,” Ella said. “I got to get paid, Mr. Beal, Fred. I’ve got babies to support. I can’t be out of work.”

  “We can pay you to organize workers. Come to the rallies. Speak. Sing like you did last night.”

  Ella was silent. She’d spent enough time in front of men who promised work that she knew it was best to say as little as possible, best to wait for them to begin talking of money first.

  “How much do you make a week now, Miss May?”

  “Nine dollars,” she said.

  “We can pay nine twenty-five, maybe nine fifty. I’ll know soon.”

  “I could think about it for ten dollars,” she said. “But I can’t live here in Gastonia. I can’t bring my babies over here.”

  “Nine fifty and you can stay in Bessemer City except for rallies and meetings,” Beal said. “You can organize there with our leadership, eventually open a local chapter. But there’s one thing I’ll need you to do that’ll require you to leave home.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re sending a group to Washington in a few days,” Beal said. “They’ll be meeting with senators. I want you to go. No one can portray this struggle better than you did last night.”

  Ella had never been north of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. Her heart thrilled at the idea of it: riding on a train or in a car, watching as the countryside unfolded before
her. But she quickly calculated what that kind of freedom would cost: A trip to Washington would mean days and days away from her children, and she didn’t know if she could manage that. Violet would be there to help, but it was her absence in their lives that terrified her. And if she took the time to make such a trip then she had no doubt it would mean the end of her job at the American Mill. She could explain missing a shift to care for a sick child, but she couldn’t explain a trip north with a group of strikers.

  “I’ll have to think on it,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do just yet.”

  “I understand. Your life’s been hard,” he said. “And I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the child you lost. I can’t imagine the pain of that.”

  Ella stared at Beal for a moment, considered telling him what she’d been thinking since first feeling another new life stir inside her. She’d decided that giving birth to a child is nothing but an invitation to lose it, and that was what she’d feared each time she’d heard the first newborn cry of one of her children. The weight and space of the child in her arms carved out a similar weight and space in her heart. The mere idea of that space being rendered empty and weightless was almost too much for her to bear, even now, especially here on this sidewalk in the early morning with a strange man speaking to her.

  Beal must have registered Ella’s reticence because he cleared his throat and dropped his cigarette, stubbed it out with his shoe.

  “What do you think of our strike so far?” he asked.

  “I think it’s white,” Ella said.

  Beal laughed. “It is white, isn’t it?” He looked at the ground where his cigarette lay smoldering. “It is, come to think of it.”

  “If I work for you I want to organize colored workers,” Ella said. “For ten dollars a week I could organize a whole lot of them who’d walk off their jobs at American if the union would support them the same way it’s supporting white folks over here in Gastonia.”

  Beal stared at her. Ella wondered if he was assessing something about her, trying to make sense of who or what he was seeing.

  “You wouldn’t be working for me, Miss May. You’d be working for the union, for your fellow workers, for yourself.”

  “Well, if I work for myself and whoever else you mentioned I want to organize colored workers. I’ll do it for ten dollars.”

  “Sophia didn’t mention this to me,” Beal said. “But, knowing Sophia as I do, I can’t say I’m surprised. How’d you come to know so many Negroes?”

  “I couldn’t get no recommendations from the mills I worked at around here. I missed too much work when my baby took sick. And the mill down in South Carolina—” She stopped, considered how to proceed. “I had a little trouble there. American Number Two was the only one in the county that’d take me on without no recommendation. And it’s the only one that has white and colored working together. So that’s how I come to know them.”

  She stopped speaking, prepared herself for the comments that a man like Beal might make about a white woman living among colored men, her white children playing alongside colored children: breathing the same air, touching the same things, eating the same food. But Beal didn’t speak.

  “They ain’t no different from me,” Ella said. “I knew that before I worked with them, but I know it for sure now.”

  “What kind of trouble did you have in South Carolina?” he finally said.

  “I’d rather not say,” Ella said. “My husband got into something, but he’s gone now.”

  “Passed away?”

  “Just gone,” she said. “The what-for and the where-to don’t matter.”

  “It’s not my business anyway, is it?” Beal said. He cleared his throat. He looked around as if checking to see if anyone stood nearby. “The Negro question is a sore subject for people in this part of the country,” he said. “Most of them don’t think well of Negroes like you do, or like I do. This strike is for equal rights and equal pay, but most of these strikers aren’t quite ready for what that really means.”

  “They’ll be ready soon enough,” Ella said. “Especially if they don’t got nowhere else to live.”

  “Maybe,” Beal said. “Maybe not.”

  “They’re getting turned out today,” Ella said. “And I know the tents ain’t here yet.”

  Beal cocked his head and peered at Ella as if wondering how she had come to possess such information. He smiled. “You’ve been talking to Velma.” He shook his head, looked toward the end of the alley. He gestured for Ella to follow him. The two of them took the alley away from Franklin Avenue. Beal turned right and they walked along between the railroad tracks and the backs of the businesses that fronted Franklin. Beal turned left and climbed up the embankment, and then he looked back and offered Ella his hand. She acted as if she didn’t notice the gesture. They scrambled over the railroad tracks and picked their way down the embankment on the other side. Beal entered the woods, held back limbs so that Ella could follow him. She smelled mud, cold water.

  When she stepped from the trees she saw the gulley she’d been able to hear from outside the headquarters that morning. The water ran clear and fast along a rocky creek. The land rose before her. She couldn’t see it, but she knew that on the other side of the hill was the field where she’d been onstage the night before, the headquarters just across the road.

  “I received assurances that the tents are arriving on the train this afternoon,” Beal said. He swept his arm across the expanse of the meadow.

  “Everybody’s going to live out here?” Ella asked.

  “Yes,” Beal said. “We’re prepared to see this strike through. If that means housing and feeding evicted workers then that’s what we’re prepared to do.” He held his hand above his eyes, looked toward the sun as if judging the time by its place in the sky. “Are you going to help us, Ella?” He dropped his hand, looked at her. He waited. “Nine seventy-five a week if you’ll help us organize Bessemer City. Let things stabilize, let our numbers grow, let us reclaim some power from the bosses. We can welcome colored workers after that. We’ll need you to make it happen.”

  “Nine seventy-five a week,” she said. “And I stay in Bessemer except for rallies and meetings and the trip to Washington, just like you said.”

  “Yes, just like I said.”

  “All right,” Ella said. She held out her hand and Beal took it. They shook.

  “Welcome to the Gastonia Local of the National Textile Workers Union,” Beal said.

  “Thank you,” Ella said. She felt herself smile, tried to fight it. “I’m glad to be here.”

  He reached into his pocket and removed an old watch on a thin chain. “I hope you’re ready for your first official act of resistance as a member.”

  Ella followed him through the field. They stopped where the creek narrowed, spotted a large rock in its middle, used it to step across. They crested the hill. The stage sat on their left, the headquarters just ahead. Perhaps one hundred men and women had gathered. Ella saw Sophia and Velma, recognized the old woman Hetty from the village the night before. An old man stood beside her.

  Beal crossed the street. Ella followed behind, too insecure to walk beside him with the people’s eyes upon her. Beal stopped and surveyed the crowd. He ran his fingers through his red hair; it parted naturally at his pronounced cowlick. Ella walked past Beal and joined the other strikers, tried her best to blend in as if she’d been there all along.

  “Friends, today is a test,” Beal said. “You’re being evicted from your homes simply because you want a better life for your family. You have the money to pay the rent, but Loray has said, ‘We do not want your money as much as we want your soul, and if you do not give us your soul then you can no longer live in your home.’

  “What they want is violence, brothers and sisters, and we won’t give them violence. Our words and our actions are more effective than violence, and more powerful.

  “Mothers,” he said, “go home, and when the mill’s gangs come, hold your children i
n your arms as tightly as you can.” He smiled. “For all we know they’ll take your babies and force them to work an eighty-hour week!” The crowd hesitated to laugh at first, then did so quietly.

  The women cut their eyes at one another, turned their faces toward the village, began to slip away silently.

  “Men,” Beal said, “I need you here to guard our headquarters. As much as the bosses want you out of your village, they want you out of your union even more. So draw your guns, but steel yourselves against firing them. We do not seek violence, but we will not shrink from it.”

  A cheer rose from the men, and in that cheer Ella heard the long night of whispers and rumors and sips of whiskey culminating in some kind of darkness that now rubbed against her body. Something about the morning made it seem that a fight would be unavoidable. She left the crowd, followed the women and children toward the village.

  Sophia fell in step beside her.

  “I just talked to Beal,” she said. Ella smiled. Sophia laughed, threw her arms around Ella’s shoulders. They both stumbled, nearly fell. “I knew you’d do it, Ella May. I knew it.”

  “I ain’t done nothing yet,” Ella said.

  “You said yes,” Sophia said. “That’s plenty for now.”

  “Why’d all the men stay back there?” she asked. “Why’s it all women doing the marching?”

  “Beal says the mill’s men are less likely to beat up on women.”

  “Most men I know would rather hit a woman than a man,” Ella said.

  “Beal doesn’t want anyone carrying guns down in the village,” Sophia said. “He says it doesn’t send a good message, but the men won’t listen, so they can’t come.”

  “You’re telling me that the men keep all the guns and stand around by themselves at headquarters while the women march? That don’t make no sense.”

  “There’s a lot about this strike that doesn’t make sense, Ella,” Sophia said. “You’ll see that soon enough. But it can be fixed, and we may have to be the ones who fix it.” She hugged Ella again, then ran ahead and disappeared into the crowd.

  Ella walked with the strikers as they turned down Dalton on the east side of the mill. Clouds of white breakfast smoke drifted from cookstoves and rose above the sagging rooflines of the small, unpainted mill shacks. The muddy streets were pocked with graveled divots where water pooled. Weeds choked out the grass in the patches of yard. Aside from the women on foot, the streets were largely quiet and empty.