The Factory Witches of Lowell

by C. S. Malerich

  Meanwhile, Abigail was still as a stone, looking just as hard at the letter in her hands. Patience Smith moved to her side to peek over her shoulder, startling Abigail, who placed the letter facedown on the table.

  “What is it?” Patience asked.

  “My father is ill,” said Abigail. “Too ill to plant.”

  Smelling trouble, Judith had risen from her seat and came up behind the smaller girl, trailing Lydia and Lucy. Judith didn’t scruple to lift the letter from the table and read it. “Your mother begs you to send your wages home, or they will starve next winter—Well,” she proceeded swiftly from the letter’s contents to her own rebuttal, “not to fear, Abigail! No North will starve while the Factory Girls’ Union abides. When our demands are met, you’ll send twice as much back to your parents.”

  “They are all alone,” Abigail replied, taking back the letter. “They have no children at home but the babies, and now I can’t help them!” Holding herself, her fingers touched the hair-woven band around her arm and she began to cry.

  The others drew close, until the small girl was too bundled up in friendship and care to remove the band from her arm if she’d wanted to.

  “Judith is right,” Patience assured her. “Your parents won’t starve. We’ll be back at work soon.”

  “I’ll write to my people,” Georgie offered. “Perhaps they’ve got another coin for yours.”

  Covered in embraces and kind words, at last Abigail nodded. “Yes,” she agreed, “you’re right. I don’t—I mean, I know we’re in the right. My mother will be proud when she learns what we do here.”

  Relieved, Judith returned to find a seat beside Hannah. The Seer hadn’t moved but sat, eyes closed, with her face turned to the knot of young women surrounding Abigail. Judith pinched her and told her to eat, pulling over what remained of her own portion. Hannah was too thin as it was; it was a wonder she ever had the strength to manage a power-loom at all, to throw the levers and knock the weft thread home after a bobbin change.

  To liven the room, someone called for Lucy to do a reading, but instead of an original ode or acrostic, Lucy stood up on the bench and read out an opinion of the strike from the Boston Herald, with all the gravity of a schoolmarm, until all her audience laughed to tears: “‘The ambition of a woman ought to begin and end in adorning the domestic sphere, not inciting her sex to riot. Governor Everett must call up the militia and prevent a gynecracy in Lowell.’”

  “Hah. I should like to see what the militia does when they see who their enemy is,” declared Sarah Hemingway.

  “Probably lay down their arms and ask Lydia to dance,” said Judith, which neither Lydia nor Hannah smiled at. But Lucy chuckled before announcing she would write a rebuttal to the Herald.

  Sarah Payne found the next page of newsprint far more distressing. Her brown eyes, wide and liquid at the best of times, grew to the size of saucers as she spread the page across the table. “Oh, look here! Do you see?”

  Lydia leaned over and read it out in her clear, declaiming voice: “‘WANTED: healthy grown girls and women for mill work. Fair wages and clean board. Must be unmarried. Good character. Lowell, Massachusetts.’”

  Many of the young operatives grew quiet. A few muttered oaths as they passed the page around the full length of the table.

  “Boston is rife with girls who will answer that ad,” said Lydia. “Think of the shiploads of Irish, the orphans and widows—”

  “—and not one reason they oughtn’t make common cause with us against rich men in gilt houses,” said Judith, still wiping at her tears of mirth.

  “If they don’t join us, they could have a job and wages,” said Sarah Hemingway, growing gloomy.

  Surrounded by her fellow strikers, Judith could feel their uncertainty tugging at her, like a litter of insistent pups at her skirts. After Abigail had come around, she’d hoped they would show a bit of sterner stuff. “Come now! Don’t forget your worth. Sarah Payne,” she called, “when you came to Lowell, did you know a warp thread from a weft?”

  The girl blushed. “No, not at all. My family never had the money for a loom of our own.”

  “Who showed you how?”

  “Why, Georgie did. We started in the same weaving room.”

  “Now you run five looms yourself. Five! And Lucy, did you work in any factory before this one?”

  “No, Judith,” Lucy replied, grinning, for she must have seen at once what their ringleader was about. “It was Betsy Thorne and Sylvia who taught me.”

  “And you’ve worked as drawing-in girl for twelve months, haven’t you? You see?” Other faces besides Lucy’s were brightening now, eyes rising from the floorboards and up from the trestle table.

  “Us in this room are worth triple and quadruple what the owners get us for,” Judith preached, a gospel she could feel their ears eager to hear. “The corporations may try to replace us, but they’ll have no one to teach the new girls, and no one to run the machines meanwhile.”

  “That’s true,” murmured Sarah Payne.

  “Of course it’s true!” Judith cried. “This is no time for faint hearts. We are on the cusp of victory!”

  “Hear, hear,” said Lucy, rapping her spoon against her bowl.

  “Mind the crockery,” Mrs. Hanson scolded from the kitchen.

  “To victory,” wheezed Hannah, raising her cup. “To the Factory Girls’ Union of Lowell.”

  Around her, more cups rose and the chorus went up. “To victory! To the Factory Girls’ Union of Lowell!” There was nothing but watery coffee in the cups, but tonight, it sufficed.

  5: Loyalty

  STILL, NO SOUL SLEPT SOUNDLY in Mrs. Hanson’s boardinghouse that night, least of all the little general herself. At dawn, Judith whispered her plea to Hannah that the older girl come with her, away from the dormitory, away from the house, where no anxious ears would hear them.

  Together they took the path between the blocks of worker tenements leading toward the factories, quite deserted while the strike lasted. Without thousands on thousands of machines thundering along inside the factories and workers chattering to and fro, all Lowell was peaceful as a churchyard.

  “Tell me again what it’s like: what you do.”

  The Seer didn’t need to ask what Judith meant. “Think how, if you stare long at a candle’s flame, the phantom hangs there even if you shut your eyes.”

  Judith nodded. She liked this: to hear the older girl speak with confidence on a subject she knew well, her voice rough and low like a carpenter’s file against supple pine.

  “When I know a person,” Hannah continued, “I can spy their phantom in everything that’s theirs. What they own, and what they make, and what they use. It all becomes a part of them, soul if not body.” She paused, and in the silence, Judith answered the unasked question.

  “The problem,” she began with a sigh, “is, one, we Union girls are pledged to stay out of the mills until our demands are met. Two, Mr. Boott is determined not to meet them. Therefore, three, as soon as he is able, he will have new workers in the factories, more desperate and more docile.”

  “Then you are worried about the advertisement? About—about replacements?”

  “Of course! The looms don’t care who tends them.”

  “But what you said at supper . . . Our skills? Knowledge? Were you—”

  Judith caught the way she spun the braided band of Judith’s hair around her finger. “I meant what I said!” She tossed the loose hair that remained attached to her scalp. When Hannah’s mouth opened again, she rushed to finish. “But Boott and his masters won’t care: they’ll sacrifice a few months’ productivity on teaching new weavers and spinners, if at the other end they can declare victory over the Union . . .”

  The Seer only continued to twist that woven ring around her finger.

  “ . . . Unless,” said Judith, taking Hannah’s hand so the fretting ceased, “we convince the machines to strike with us.”

  They stopped now and looked up, to find out where t
heir footsteps had led them. The path that gobbled nearly eight precious minutes of meal times on a working day had taken less than three minutes now that it was empty. The Merrimack Mill, the colossus, stood before them, just over the canal: six stories of red brick, long as a village lane, and nearly a village of its own, and yet only one of the eight in Lowell. Warehouses surrounded the mill, where bales of cotton and bolts of finished cloth were stored, and offices, where the clerks and overseers kept accounts. Another morning would have found Judith and Hannah working on the upper stories of the mill itself, minding three and four looms at a time, with a hundred other girls occupied just the same. Downstairs, hundreds more would be carding and cleaning and spinning cotton on the river-powered wheels, and the smallest ones—children of eight or ten—would be filling baskets and swapping empty bobbins for full.

  Today, Judith and Hannah crossed the footbridge alone. Only the flat-bottomed skiffs in the canal broke the stillness, bobbing on the ends of their tethers. Each was piled high with burlap-covered cotton, nowhere to move it because the warehouses were already bursting at the seams.

  Judith was more interested in the mill gates. “Closed and padlocked, of course,” she muttered, though she tried the iron bars to be sure. The hinges whined, but the gate didn’t budge but an inch.

  “You plan to bewitch the machines, to be part of the strike?” Hannah’s voice rasped.

  “Why not? If a person’s genius is not only in them but in their things.”

  The Seer frowned. “With the Union now, it’s a new pattern. We’re all everywhere”—she lifted her arm with its band of hair-cloth—“and I have to look very carefully to find one person. It’s like trying to follow one thread in a field of calico.”

  Judith didn’t have the gift, but she’d felt what Hannah was describing: all of the girls together, warp and weft, so tightly woven, no capitalist could pick them apart. “If a thing is full of our genius, it ought to be a simple thing to cast our spell over it, shouldn’t it? The wheels and the looms very especially. Thirteen hours a day, six days a week, we tend them, we feed them, we kiss that damn shuttle! They’re full of us, aren’t they?”

  Hannah turned away. “Of course they are, the greedy things.”

  Judith pressed on, taking the Seer’s left hand again and capturing the right as well for good measure, pulling Hannah to face her. “This gate is padlocked, as I can see. But can you See any way for us to influence the machines? We used our hair for solidarity and friendship, to weave ourselves together into a union. Is there not some vessel for loyalty, so that the machines refuse the hands of another?”

  She stared into the Seer’s heart-shaped face, so pale and freckle-less, willing the remarkable girl to conjure a solution. Hand-in-hand, their palms warmed and softened like candle wax, and a strange bubble of feeling rose from the pit of Judith’s stomach.

  Hannah’s cheeks turned pink and she laughed—suddenly and loudly—and shook herself loose once more.

  “What is it?”

  “Spittle,” said Hannah.

  “Spittle?”

  “Yes. All spells use genius, but the vessel shapes them. Hair is different from bone is different from blood. Shadows even have some genius in them, but only for spells of seeming, strongest near dawn and dusk. At noon and midnight, the truth would be plain.

  “But for loyalty . . . Loyalty needs the passions.” Once more, Hannah turned that charming shade of pink, this time from the roots of her copper-hued hair down as far as her collar—and farther, Judith presumed. “The deepness of the lover’s kiss.” Hannah’s gaze met Judith’s briefly, before cutting away, looking off into the canal.

  Judith ignored the bubbling feeling inside herself, aiming instead for the solution which appeared on the horizon. “Of course! If I didn’t know better, I would have said Lydia shares your Seer’s gift.”

  “Lydia?”

  “She invoked the Kiss of Death when we wove the Union.”

  “I recall.”

  “How do we do it, then? There must be a way to reach the machines.” Without hesitation, Judith stepped off the edge of the footbridge, onto the slick stones of the canal’s headrace, searching the mill’s walls for another portal.

  “Judith!” Hannah called. “Judith, be careful! What are you looking for?”

  With her right hand against the mill wall for balance, Judith walked along the narrow edge, one foot’s heel at the toe of the other, following the canal’s flow. Though the fortification showed no obvious weak points, just ahead stood the tower-like housing of the mill wheel, its paddles dipping into the water with each turn, then disappearing upward and inside. The aperture there might be enough to admit one short mill operative and her taller, but willowy, companion. Their feet might get wet.

  Or they might brain themselves against the housing, catch limbs in the gear works, or snare themselves below the paddles to drown in the canal.

  A hand over her own broke Judith’s concentration and she nearly slipped. Hannah’s grip steadied her.

  “Think, Judith: spells are built on metaphor and connections,” the Seer told her. “Find a connection to the mill’s machinery, even outside the walls, and they’ll be influenced inside.”

  “The water!” Judith grinned. “It gives the machines their spark.”

  Hannah nodded without returning the smile. “But not for us. We cannot work magic on the looms and spindles.”

  “But you said! The machines are full of us, our genius—”

  Hannah shook her head fiercely. “Judith, look at those bales of cotton you see floating there. Whose genius fills those? Whose blood and sweat?”

  “Well—”

  “If witchcraft is all so simple as you imagine, did you never wonder that the enslaved wretches who pick that cotton don’t lay hexes on the whole White race?” Now Hannah’s voice rasped with the conviction of an abolitionist, and Judith marveled that she had never heard the Seer speak on the subject before this moment.

  “I—I hadn’t considered it,” she replied, bewildered.

  “All magic is mastery and command, isn’t it? You have to have a claim to something before you can cast spells over it, even your own self.” Next, she pointed at the laden skiffs in the canal. “That cotton is full of men and women, like snow that’s been tramped over, with all their tracks on it. But it doesn’t do them a lick of good unless they have the ownership.”

  Judith clicked her tongue. “Which the law of the land won’t admit.”

  Hannah sighed deeply, and began sidling carefully back to the footbridge. “Let’s go before someone spots us and we’re both in the stocks for trespass.”

  For the young woman of action, it galled to retreat now, the plan hardly begun, but she could not continue alone.

  They came back single file but walked side by side over the bridge, as they had done daily since Judith’s arrival in Lowell; although any other morning would have seen their arms entwined, fond friends. In this mood, Judith shrank to touch Hannah at all.

  “Is the law of the land so incontrovertible?” she asked instead. “Not even witchcraft can slip its yoke?”

  “The law is witchcraft, Judith,” Hannah said quietly. “I’ve Seen auctions. When the captive stands on the block and the auctioneer begins the bidding, it conjures something . . . something that sucks away at a person’s soul. At the end, when the master has his slave bought and paid for, he owns them like a mule or a dog.” Her shoulders shook.

  Judith swallowed, and lengthened her steps, putting herself where Hannah couldn’t help but look at her. “It’s a terrible wrong,” she said, lifting her arm and its hair-woven band, “but that isn’t us. We’re fortunate to still belong to ourselves. And to each other.”

  Her own words shocked Judith to stillness. Though she meant to say the members of the Factory Girls’ Union, all belonging to one body, the words also seemed to mean something particular about the two of them, flowing from that same mare incognitum in her belly that Hannah’s blushes had fou
nd.

  “Do we?” Hannah asked, blinking hard, so that Judith suspected she was not trying to See, but to hide angry tears. “So many times, standing in the work room, I’ve blinked to See my own self leaking away and filling up my looms. It’s like watching my very breath sucked away.” Her indignation proved too much for her thin form to contain, and she doubled over in a coughing fit.

  “Then we take it back!” Judith declared, as she thumped her back.

  When she could breathe again, Hannah straightened and shook her head. “It’s as I’ve been saying, Judith, the machines don’t belong to us. Nothing in the mills does.”

  “Why not? They’re more ours than some men in Boston who’ve never laid hand to thread.”

  “Capitalists have their paper-craft. They may not See it any more than Mrs. Hanson can See the craft in her tonics, but contracts and deeds conjure too. Like the . . . demon . . . at the slave auctions.”

  “Oh, Hannah, please, won’t you at least try to See a way around it? Else why did we start all this?”

  The Seer gazed back with a face forlorn, which Judith half-wanted to kiss and half-wanted to slap, as the new-struck wellspring of feeling continued to bubble inside her.

  “Hannah,” she began instead, “indulge me: do you know why I am so determined? When I first went to school, I knew my arithmetic better than the schoolmaster’s son, who was twice as old. When I finished my sums ahead of all the others, Master Hills was sure I had conned the answers somehow. Without waiting for any explanation, he laid his rod right across my hands!”

  She was gratified to observe a wince on the older girl’s face. “How did you know your sums so well?”

  “My oldest brother taught all of us at home. It was our game.” Judith touched each knuckle of her finger, remembering how she had learned to count and add. “Ever since that beating, I’ve hated masters, overseers, bosses—all these men lording it over, thinking they know best, thinking they have the measure of us! I couldn’t give up the fight now, even if they flayed me alive.”

  She waited, to see how this speech would impress and inspire her co-conspirator.