The Last Ballad Read online

  Now, outside Goldberg’s brother’s office, Ella closed her eyes and crossed her ankles and leaned against the wall, the mill causing her body to vibrate so that her bones rattled beneath her skin. She considered how the only thing worse than stepping off the line was missing a shift, and that’s what she’d done last night, and she knew that that was why she was sitting where she was sitting now.

  She’d spent almost all of last night on the porch with her three-year-old daughter, Rose, asleep in her arms, singing and humming all the songs she’d ever known until she had run out of songs and begun to make up new words to old melodies. The air had been chilly, but Rose’s body had burned like a cinder against Ella’s chest. Sweat had soaked through the girl’s bedshirt, but her coughing fits had finally given way to sleep.

  Ella had been able to hear the rest of her children stir inside the cabin, where they lay atop pallets on the floor, and she pictured eleven-year-old Lilly with one-year-old Joseph, whom they all called Wink, nestled in the crook of her arm. Nine-year-old Otis would have his back turned to them, his thumb in his mouth, something no one ever saw except Ella, and then only when he slept. When she heard one of the children move or cough, she stopped humming the melody she’d been humming to Rose, and she listened until the child settled to sleep again. Willie would have been four years old by now, and Ella turned her attention to the soft, high-pitched whistle of Rose’s lungs and remembered holding Willie this way before he’d died from the same whooping cough disease. The thought had made her hold Rose more tightly against her chest. She wanted to keep her daughter on this earth and in her arms for as long as possible.

  Ella had spent most of the night out there on the porch envying horses for their ability to sleep standing up. She’d worn a man’s coat over her shoulders, the waxed canvas duster the only thing John had left behind when he disappeared, aside from little Wink, who’d just begun to grow inside her when John closed the door for the last time. She’d never had the chance to tell John he was a father again, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He’d said he wouldn’t live among niggers anymore, said he was sick of millwork, sick of the children themselves being sick. He’d said other things too, but Ella had decided to forget those things on her way to forgetting him. She didn’t care that her neighbors were colored; it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because there was nowhere else for her to go. As far as working as a spinner at American Mill No. 2, Ella knew that the work she did was dirty, dangerous work, knew that the nine dollars she earned for a seventy-two-hour workweek wasn’t worth the work itself. But she did it because there was nothing else to do. If there were something she could do to keep her children healthy and alive then she would’ve done it a long time ago, especially now that she might have another child on the way.

  The American Mill No. 2 was the smallest mill in town and the only one to employ blacks and whites in the same jobs, albeit in separate areas of the mill. The Goldberg brothers had fled Latvia in 1915 after the German invasion, and they’d slowly made their way south from New York before settling in Bessemer City, where they’d purchased one small mill and then another before buying a Main Street home large enough to house both brothers’ wives and children. In the years that followed, the brothers busied themselves with the twin pursuits of spinning cotton and weaving themselves into the fabric of the white, Protestant populace that owned and operated the mills in Bessemer City.

  But no matter how long the brothers and their families lived in town, they never forgot the first night in their new home, when sometime before dawn they awoke to the orange glow of the six-foot-tall wooden cross afire in their front yard. They also never forgot the next morning’s visit from the Christian Ladies’ Association, a group largely composed of the wives of local ministers. The women appeared unannounced that Saturday morning, cakes and flowers and casseroles in hand. They walked single file up the walk, past the blackened grass and the charred, smoking remains of the cross their husbands had left behind. The women did not glance at the wreckage, nor did they glance at the oldest Goldberg brother, whose sweat-soaked, soot-covered clothes did little to hide his hulking frame where he stood in the yard, axe in hand, the cross’s still smoking cinders gathered about his feet.

  The message to the Goldberg brothers was clear: they would be considered white but not American, and because they were white but not American, the town had a different set of expectations for the brothers and the way they would run their mills. They expected the Goldbergs to buy the low-quality cotton passed over by the other mills, which they did, and they expected the Goldbergs to lack a certain allegiance to the codes of the South’s race-based society, and this was true of the Goldbergs as well. But the people of Bessemer City also expected the Goldbergs not to treat their workers any better than any other mill treated theirs; not to pay them a better wage, perhaps even a lower wage as workers at No. 2 were relegated to work near blacks. The brothers owned American Mill No. 1 as well, and although it was all-white, the conditions there weren’t much better than where Ella and Violet worked. Both mills were small, poorly lit, stuffy, and cramped, the lint-choked air enclosed by low ceilings and dirty floors. Machines rattled and whirred in a deafening hum around the clock, stopping only for maintenance or repairs, when some small-handed woman or child would be brought in to stand on a box or a ladder and close his or her eyes before reaching deep into the gears in order to investigate what had gone wrong. They were expected to be quick about it, and they always tried to move fast, for no other reason than the fear of losing an arm or a hand or a finger or three.

  Ella kept her eyes closed, her head leaning against the office wall, and she hummed the tune that had been stuck in her mind since she’d held Rose in her arms the night before. “Little Mary Phagan” was a true song about a young girl who’d been murdered by her boss at a pencil factory in Atlanta, and something about the melody had stayed locked inside Ella’s head. She didn’t think for a minute that Goldberg’s brother or Dobbins or anybody else at American would ever murder her, but she knew for certain that working there might kill her just the same.

  Ella had been singing the song for years, and last night, after she tired of the original words she began to create her own. “She left home at eleven, when she kissed her mother goodbye” became “We leave our homes in the morning, we kiss our children goodbye.” Afraid that Goldberg’s brother’s secretary would take notice, Ella hummed the next line as quietly as she could: “Not one time did the poor child think she was going to die.”

  She slid her right hand into her pocket and fingered the union leaflet that she’d kept hidden there for the past month. She took it out and unfolded it on the bench beside her, then removed a stub of pencil from behind her ear and turned the paper to its blank side, where she’d written a few new lines that had come to her mind. She hummed the old line again, felt its rhythm, let its syllables roll over tongue. She wrote, “While we slave for the bosses our children scream and cry.” She looked at the line she’d just written, thought about Rose at home right now, the good chance that her cough had gotten worse, the horrifying possibility that she was wheezing and gasping for air, Lilly pounding on her back and Otis tearing up the road to Violet’s mother’s house for help. She pushed the thought from her mind. She inhaled, fought the urge to cough, and turned the leaflet over and—for what was surely the hundredth time—read the words that were printed on the other side.

  The Gastonia Local of the National Textile Workers Union

  Invites All Workers to Join the Struggle for Equality.

  We Demand:

  An End to Piecework and the Hank Clock—A Standard Wage—A 40 Hour/5 Day Workweek—$20 Weekly Minimum Wage—Equal Pay for Equal Work—An End to the Stretch-Out—Sanitary Housing—Reduced Rent—Recognition of the Union

  Seven miles east in Gastonia, the seat of Gaston County, the day shift at the Loray Mill had voted to strike on April 1. That evening, hundreds of workers had marched to the gates of the largest and most important textile mi
ll in the state and kept the night shift from going inside. By the next morning Ella had heard that West Gastonia, especially the Loray village, had transformed into a carnival overnight. Children played in the street. Women cooked food on their porches. Men strummed guitars and blew on harmonicas. They drank whiskey and slung rifles across their backs.

  Two days later the governor called in the National Guard. Women were beaten. Soldiers pressed guns to men’s heads. The strikers’ first headquarters had been destroyed by a nighttime mob. The union commissary attacked, the food stores ruined.

  The first leaflets had begun trickling through the mill in early April, carried by whispers and subtle passes from hand to hand. Ella had held on to the first one she’d seen, had kept it with her ever since. Another leaflet had come through American just a few days ago. Union members were being forcibly removed from the Loray village on Monday, May 6, just two days away. All workers in the surrounding area were invited to a rally on Sunday evening. The union would even pick you up, take you there.

  Ella looked again at the list of union demands. She had a decision to make.

  Goldberg’s brother’s voice spoke from behind the door, and Ella wondered if, godlike, he’d been able to sense that her mind had just wandered from her job at American to the strike at Loray. She folded the leaflet and slipped it into her pocket, slid the pencil back behind her ear.

  “Janet,” Goldberg’s brother said. The young secretary closed her book when she heard her name. She set it down on her tidy desk and stood and smoothed her dress. She opened the office door and stepped inside. Ella could hear their whispered voices. She closed her eyes again, uncrossed her ankles.

  “Mrs. Wiggins,” the secretary said, “Mr. Goldberg’s ready for you.”

  Ella stood and approached the door. The secretary squeezed past her, stepped back behind her desk, and gathered her book and the purse that she’d hung on the back of her chair. Ella could see Goldberg’s brother at the desk in his office, pen in hand, writing something in a thick ledger. He finished writing, capped his pen, closed the ledger, and looked up at her.

  “Come in,” he said, his voice clear but quiet, his foreign accent almost unnoticeable. He straightened his glasses, pushed them up on the bridge of his nose. He did not stand, but Ella already knew that his body was thin and angular. Although he was past middle age, his face appeared youthful despite a well-trimmed beard and dark hair that glinted with oil in the soft, yellow light. He wore a bow tie and suspenders, his brown suit jacket left folded across the back of the chair in which he sat. He seemed like he should be standing in front of a classroom instead of sitting in a tiny office on the trembling floors of a cotton mill.

  For the first time in years, Ella pictured the dark, one-room schoolhouse back in Sevierville, Tennessee, heard the voice of her mother as she begged her father to let Ella and her older brother Wesley go to school for a few days in September before her father needed them on the farm full-time. Ella was six years old and had never had a moment of schooling. Neither had Wesley, who was almost fifteen.

  The schoolmaster’s name had been Mr. Musial, and when he introduced himself Ella had misheard him, and although she never spoke his name she always thought of it as Musical. Mr. Musical had been short and thin and well dressed like Goldberg’s brother, but unlike Goldberg’s brother, Mr. Musical had a violent limp that wrenched his face into a grimace when he walked. Ella and Wesley had heard that he’d served in the Civil War, and she’d imagined that he’d been a hero and had suffered his injury in battle, but in reality an angry horse had taken a bite from his thigh and gangrene had set in; he’d lost the leg just above the knee and had never even shot the rifle he’d never learned to load. The schoolchildren did not know, no one in the small community actually knew, but Mr. Musical’s leg was made of wood from the hip down, his knee joint nothing but a shiny metal socket that swung wildly no matter how slowly he walked or how much he struggled to control his gait.

  A chair sat in front of Goldberg’s brother’s desk, but he did not ask Ella to sit down so she did not sit. He pushed himself back from his desk and put his hands in his lap. His thin lips formed a straight line.

  “I’m glad you joined us for your shift this evening,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Ella said. She did not look at him when she spoke, choosing instead to focus on the other things on his desk aside from the ledger and ink pen: a small wooden globe with etchings too faded to read; an empty mug; a half-eaten sandwich of some kind; a shiny red apple.

  “I say that because you missed last night’s shift.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said again.

  “Mrs. Wiggins,” he said.

  “It’s May.” Her eyes darted to his for a moment, returned to rest on the half-eaten sandwich.

  “What?”

  “It’s May. Ella May.”

  “I’ve got Wiggins written down here.”

  “It’s May,” she said again. “I told Dobbins to change it, but I guess he didn’t.”

  “Why have you been missing your shifts, Mrs. May?”

  “Shift,” Ella said. “I just missed the one last night.”

  “No,” Goldberg’s brother said. He leaned toward his desk, picked up a clipboard, flipped through a sheath of papers. “No, you missed one in January and one in March.”

  “It’s been a long time since March,” Ella said. “Even longer since January.”

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “Why are you missing shifts?”

  “I got a sick little girl at home. She gets bad at night, and I had to stay home,” she said. “I asked Dobbins to put me on day shift, but he won’t do it. Maybe I should’ve asked you.”

  “Dobbins handles shift change requests,” he said.

  “Well, he didn’t handle mine,” Ella said. “And now he told me to come down here, and that’s just going to set me back even more.”

  Goldberg’s brother leaned back in his chair, placed his hands in his lap again. Ella stared at the sandwich, tried to judge what kind of meat rested between the slices of bread.

  “You have a sick little girl,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Please look at me, Mrs. May. I can’t tell whether or not you’re being truthful unless you look at me.”

  She lifted her eyes to his, saw that he stared at her intently, saw that her missed shift must mean a great deal to him, but she knew it meant even more to her, because she would not be paid. “Why wouldn’t I be truthful?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. May. People often don’t tell the truth when they lay out of work. Sick means drunk. Sick means gambling. Sick means lazy. I don’t know what a sick little girl means.”

  She felt blood rush to her face, knew that her cheeks were flush with color. Her guilt, or whatever it was she had just felt, faded. She imagined throwing herself across the desk, reaching for his neck, his eyes. “Sick means my little girl’s sick,” she said. “That’s what it means.”

  He stared at her for a moment, then lifted a wastebasket from beneath his desk and swept the sandwich and apple into it. He returned the wastebasket to the floor.

  “What if all my employees had sick children, Mrs. May? What about me? What if I had a sick child at home and decided that I couldn’t come to work? Who’d run this mill?”

  Ella had never seen Goldberg’s brother’s family, knew nothing about them aside from their existence and the existence of the older brother. She had never been inside the Goldberg’s large brick home and she had never met anyone who’d been inside it either. She envisioned electric lights and running water and warm blankets and bedsheets and a pantry full of food and a cooler full of ice, a pair of soft, warm slippers tucked beneath a neatly made bed. A baby might cry out somewhere upstairs, and a nurse or a maid or a young cousin would ascend a grand, curved staircase and open a nursery door and whisper something kind and reassuring to the child inside.

  “Yes, sir,” Ella said.

  “Who’d run this mill?” Goldberg
’s brother asked again.

  “Nobody.”

  “That’s correct: nobody. And you know who runs your spinners when you decide to lay out on a shift? Nobody.” He leaned forward again. “But I can assure you of this, Mrs. Wiggins: it’ll be much easier to find someone to operate your spinners than it will be to find someone to run this mill. I expect you’ll keep that in mind next time you find yourself with the desire to stay home.”

  Ella thought that no one should ever have to look upon a sad place like Stumptown, but she knew that if someone were ever forced to look upon it, then the quiet, silvery moments before dawn would be the best time to do it. That’s what she thought of now as she and Violet stumbled down the muddy road that branched off the Kings Mountain Highway and rolled toward the settlement like an artery forgotten by its heart. The sky directly above them was dark, the sky behind them pink with the stirrings of dawn. There were no shadows yet because there was not enough light to cast them. The tarpaper shacks that huddled close to the road with their crooked porches and lopsided doors and low, tin roofs were nothing but dark forms looming beneath cottonwoods and willow trees. The scrubby patches of garden could not be seen at this early hour in this weak almost-light, nor could the clumps of geraniums that lined the walks that led toward porch steps or the clotheslines strung across the porches themselves. At this hour, at this time of morning, Stumptown could be anything one could imagine it to be.

  Ella heard the tinny scratch of “Carolina Moon” floating from the phonograph inside Fox Denton’s house on the other side of a dark stand of trees. She hummed along.

  “You going to stop in, say hello to Fox?” Violet asked. Ella smiled, quit her humming. “Ain’t you interested in making a friend?”

  “I got enough friends,” Ella said. “Too many, maybe.”

  Fox Denton, an old man who lived alone, was the only white resident of Stumptown aside from Ella and her four children. He worked as a machinist at Margrace Mill in Kings Mountain and never said a word to anyone, white or colored, but that didn’t keep Violet from teasing Ella every time they passed his house, which they did twelve times a week on their two-mile walk to and from the night shift at American Mill No. 2.