Stories from Suffragette City

by M. J. Rose

  * * *

  I had defied the parade organizers by marching with the Illinois delegation that day, but I never forgot the humiliation. Even if they picked me up on a magic carpet, I would not go to the New York City parade. I understand the purpose of the event, but black women suffragists have learned the hard way that we have to chart another course.

  As thousands of white women line up to demand the right to vote in New York, I stand at a lectern in Chicago and look out upon nearly a hundred colored women. Their bright faces gaze up at me expectantly, and I realize I have been quiet too long, too lost in my memories.

  “Thank you to Mrs. Fortson,” I say, and nod at Bettiola, “for putting together such a lovely program. I will not speak long because we have invited guests today. My dear friends. You may have read about the women’s suffrage march happening in New York City today. Once again, colored women have not been included in this important work. Our voices are excluded, pushed to the margins. Two years ago, we experienced this rejection firsthand during the march in our nation’s capital. Despite these wrongs, I ask you to maintain your faith in your civic responsibility. Work remains to be done. We must be a united sisterhood that works together in all ways possible to uplift the race. Your labor, your commitment, your intellect are sorely needed. The conscience of this country needs your voice. Do not give up, my dear sisters. We must fight on. Thank you.”

  I leave the lectern and sit beside Bettiola as the women clap. I am angry that we were not included in the New York march, but my anger is tempered by envy. If only colored women could have those kinds of numbers and create such a spectacle. If only we could organize ourselves in such a way to demand our rights. But our resources are constrained by broader racial fights. And when we do succeed in those fights, we often do not share in the victories. I suppose I am just admitting to myself that I get tired sometimes. My constant reach for acknowledgment and recognition makes me weary. And today is one of those weary days.

  On the other hand, I am unable to deny my pride. I remember the soaring feeling on that day in 1913 when I marched alongside thousands of women. Despite the outrage, I was inspired to see so many women march together in their beautiful dresses, carrying their banners. I wonder if the women in New York are accompanied by marching bands. I wonder if there are brigades. I wonder if they have a grand marshal in the front riding a white horse and wearing a white suit, blue robe, and gold tiara.

  We Shall Take Our Lives into Our Own Keeping

  MEGAN CHANCE

  Eileen was glad to be out of the cold yet stifling flat, away from the stink of Da’s sweat and the pungent glue Ma used to make her artificial flowers, but mostly away from her parents’ questions about why she was home on a Saturday and how she’d managed to win the day off. Still so much suspicion, even after all this time.

  She swallowed her resentment, grateful for the excuse of Troop as she took the dog into the hall and down the narrow stairs, which stank worse than the flat. The front door wouldn’t close properly, no matter how many times they’d complained to the janitor, and the cool October air whisked in the noisomeness from the cesspool. A tangle of sounds—a dozen languages, shouts, and babies’ cries, that old German man and his wife fighting down the hall—assailed her ears, but she was used to this, and she followed Troop as he bounded out the back, where the floor had sunk and the rains had created a mini lake that the homeless or those too drunk to make it up the stairs or dogs like Troop used as a latrine.

  Eileen waited for the dog to finish and then do his usual sniffing and prowling about. The day was sunny but cold; she hugged herself against the breeze that blew trash and bits of straw and filth into growing piles against the walls and into corners. Troop growled at someone out of sight. Eileen stomped her foot. “Come on, boyo. It’s cold.”

  The dog ignored her.

  “Troop! Troop, come on!”

  The dog stiffened, his short tail stilled, and Eileen was swept with the strangest feeling. Not a premonition, and not quite dread or apprehension. It was more … something about the way the air felt, the way the breeze pressed her skirt into her stockinged legs, or perhaps it was the sudden shade of a cloud moving over the sun and then the light again shifting through the laundry strung overhead. Familiar, like a moment she’d lived before, or a nostalgia that was not welcome, but cruel and bittersweet, and then she caught the scent above that of the cesspools and the mud and the harsh soap of drying laundry.

  Lavender. And she knew.

  Or thought she did. Eileen whistled sharply for the dog and dodged back into the building. When he didn’t come, she left him there, desperate to disappear, panicked now, walking quickly for the stairs but not wanting to run, not wanting to appear afraid. Unconcern, that was what she wanted. Seeming obliviousness. The stairs were just ahead, and she had the ridiculous thought that if she made it to the second floor, to the landing, it would be far enough for escape.

  It was not.

  “There you are, Eileen,” came the voice she had thought never to hear again. “Rory told me you were still here. I didn’t believe it.”

  Eileen stopped and turned slowly. “He didn’t tell you. He wouldn’t have told you anything.”

  Maeve. Maeve of the curling hair, dark fire to Eileen’s straight, fine strawberry blond, Maeve Murphy, Maeve the One Who Dared, Maeve who had squirreled under Eileen’s skin and stayed and who she never expected to see again, never wanted to see again. The scars on her palms itched. The past was gone. Let it stay the past.

  Maeve considered Eileen, then said, “Tom, then. Tom said you were here.”

  “None of them would have told you.”

  “You won’t let me have my safe little lie?” Maeve’s smile was wistful. “You’ve grown so cold.”

  “No one wants you here.”

  “No,” Maeve disagreed. “No one wants me around you. It’s a different thing, you know.”

  Troop came shuffling over, whining, always whining, like some damnable skipping record. He made a wide circle around Maeve, sniffed at Eileen’s boots as if to be certain she was still she, and then trotted up the stairs toward the flat, ignoring them both.

  Eileen turned to follow him. “Good-bye.” She could not say the name. Her tongue would not physically form the word.

  Maeve touched her hand. Static shocked them both. Maeve leaped back; Eileen snatched her hand away, startled. Maeve laughed, and the whole thing was so absurd that Eileen could not keep her mouth from quirking.

  “You see? We’re still setting fires together,” Maeve said—the wrong thing; it sobered Eileen immediately—and then Maeve reached out. “No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please, Eileen. I’ve come here all this way to see you. I had to see you. Please. Just … will you walk with me a small ways?”

  It seemed such a nothing thing to ask, but it was not a nothing thing. The whole neighborhood would talk to see them together again. Even if she told Da and Ma a lie, they would know the truth by the end of the afternoon. Her brother, Scully, would hear of it, and his Go-to-It Boys’ Club. Rory would know. She’d promised to keep her distance from Maeve Murphy. There had been a time when it was what she herself wanted most of all.

  But then … there was that plea in Maeve’s dark eyes and that wistfulness that had always been Eileen’s undoing before. Maeve had always pretended to be so vulnerable. “I can’t do it without you, Eileen. We have to be together always.” But now Eileen knew better. Maeve was indomitable. When the world was burning, Maeve would be the one standing in the ruins. It wasn’t her vulnerability that had called to Eileen’s yearning for things she could never have, for an impossible life. It was Maeve’s strength. The excitement of her.

  Eileen had weaned herself off that addiction with care. She did not want to lose herself again. But this was only a walk, and the whole neighborhood would know, and in the end, that was her guarantee that nothing would come of it.

  “A quarter hour,” she said.

  Maeve broke into a smile—ah, t
hat smile! Like the smell of lavender, it said Maeve. It was part of the addiction. That smile that said, You are the best thing I know. “Of course! Yes. Thank you!”

  Eileen turned away. “Let me tell my folks.”

  “Must you? They’ll just say no.”

  Eileen didn’t bother to disagree. “Wait for me here.”

  She went up the stairs to the flat. Her parents were exactly as she expected to find them—they never moved, morning to night, as if they were fastened in place by the glue from the artificial flowers they made by the dozen. Ma at the table, deftly turning bits of fabric into roses, her fingers stained a muddied purple from the cheap dyes. Da half snoring on the broken-down sofa near the window, the curtains drawn to protect his damaged eyes from whatever sun managed to eke its way into the swampy inner courtyard of the tenement, the pile of wires he’d been twisting for Ma’s flower stems tangled on the floor beside him. Troop was nestled again at her mother’s feet.

  “Ma,” Eileen said quietly, “Maeve is downstairs.”

  Was she imagining the color draining from her mother’s face? “Eileen—”

  “I won’t be long. A quarter hour, that’s all.”

  “A quarter hour?” Ma glanced at Da, and Eileen saw her mother’s anxious desire to wake him, for Da to put his foot down, to say no, because she herself could not do it, and she wanted to.

  “I promise,” Eileen said.

  “Eileen—”

  “It’s been five years,” Eileen reminded her softly. “Everything’s different now.”

  “Is it?” Ma asked.

  But she said nothing to keep Eileen, and she didn’t wake Da. Eileen felt her mother’s worry trailing after her as she went back down the stairs, and she felt guilty for it, because she wished she had the strength or the will or the faith to convince her mother there was no reason for concern, but if she truly believed that, then why now was she half wishing that there was no Maeve waiting at the bottom, that Maeve’s appearance had been an illusion bred of a waft of lavender and a strange and bitter nostalgia caused by a play of light? If she was truly to believe that, why then that mix of joy and fear when she caught sight of the deep blue of Maeve’s skirt, the gray jacket, the relief and dread when it was no stranger who greeted her but the old friend she knew better than to see? Why then, after so long, did it trouble her that the connection between them was still strong enough to spark?

  Maeve asked, “Did they tell you not to come?”

  She had to know already the answer to that, and so Eileen did not bother to enlighten her. Instead, because she did not really want to meet Maeve’s gaze, nor to see what it held, Eileen led the way out onto the broken stones of the street, turning to go toward the river.

  Maeve said, “Not that way.”

  So then it was Maeve leading, and though Eileen thought it was best not—wasn’t Maeve’s leading always the problem?—she followed.

  It was just like any other Saturday, the warrenlike streets with the peddlers and the women gossiping on the stoops and the children racing about like small demons while dogs chased them, barking excitedly. But the farther they got from home, the more women swept onto the sidewalks, many all in white with sashes of green and white and purple worn across their chests or tricolor ribbons fluttering from brooches or armbands. They flocked, chirping animatedly, heads bobbing, movements quick and breathless. The parade marchers. The suffragettes. The harridans, Da called them, as did the boys at the Go-to-It Boys’ Club, “Like biddy hens, picking and pecking. ‘We want the vote bwwaaawwwkkk! Give us the vote bwwaawwkkk bwwaawwwkk!’” How Rory had laughed at Scully’s tease. How they’d all laughed. Tom Boyle had grabbed up his cornet and said he was joining the anti-suffragists, who planned to shout and play loudly enough to drown out the parade protests. “They’ll have to make a lot of noise to be heard over us.”

  Da saying, “The polls are no place for women. It’s too rough. If a woman tried to cast a ballot, someone would try to stop her, and someone else would try to protect her, and God save us all, there’d be wars all over the city.”

  Ma had said, “Alice told me that the suffragists are threatening that if they don’t get the vote, many of them will be told to commit suicide every year until men agree.”

  “You see? They should be in a madhouse. Aye, a bunch of nonsense is what it is. Women don’t know enough about the world to know what it needs.”

  Eileen had looked at her father, half-blind and ensconced on that sofa as if he’d grown into it. He’d once dreamed of owning a saloon and going into politics, which was the same dream of every Irishman in New York City, but she’d believed in him. When she was a small girl, he’d talked of it all the time. She could not remember the last time he’d stepped into the world beyond this room. What could he possibly know of it now?

  Today the protesters were everywhere, rounding every corner, laughing as they grabbed their narrow-brimmed hats against a sudden gust—white, too, and straw, bought at Macy’s for forty-eight cents; Eileen had seen them in the window display. They waited with dancing feet to buy the shiny brown pretzels stacked on Mr. Meyer’s wooden dowels. They oohed over bags of roasted peanuts from the man who sang out “Votes for women!” though Eileen suspected he was doing so just to sell peanuts, and not because he actually cared for woman suffrage. The smell of those nuts took the edge off the chill and set the taste of salt on Eileen’s tongue.

  “How happy they look, don’t you think?” Maeve asked, and again Eileen heard that pensiveness in her old friend’s voice, that yearning. “Like they’re embarking on an adventure. Like we used to be. Do you remember, Eileen?”

  Did she remember? When did she not? “Of course I remember.”

  “I wasn’t sure,” Maeve said.

  “Yes, you are,” Eileen protested, not bothering to hide her irritation. “You know very well I haven’t forgotten. Why did you come, Maeve? What do you want?”

  The tenements of Hell’s Kitchen turned to shops and houses, and the rush of men and women hurrying to the parade grew heavier. How fresh and blooming they were against rusty brown leaves and tattered broadsides, feathers and rags and dust spinning and rustling down the filthy streets. Some bore signs, others struggled with yellow banners. One sign saying WE TRUST OUR WOMEN, DO YOU? twisted in the breeze, becoming a sail that pulled the young woman holding it into a trash-filled gutter. Her friends pulled her out again, all of them laughing.

  “I wanted to show you something,” Maeve said. “Something to change your life.”

  “I’ve had enough of such promises. I don’t want to change my life.”

  Maeve went quiet. She stopped to adjust her skirt. The gesture sparked a memory, Maeve’s little restlessnesses, her pauses for thought, always accompanied by some small fix—her hair, a boot, a collar. Maeve sitting on the step of the old passenger car, laughing, unfastening her boot to cast out a stone, wiggling her white toes through the holes in her black stockings. “That was a close one!” and her voice echoing in the swollen, subterranean darkness lit only by the weak spitting of the fire Eileen had cobbled together from bits of rag and paper to light the oil lamp they kept in the cavernous ruin.

  Then the rasp of the grating cutting through Maeve’s laughter.

  Eileen could almost feel the hard edges of the long-ago necklace in her hand, the stones pressing into her fingers, the clasp biting against her thumb.

  “No, I don’t guess you do,” Maeve said, straightening. “I guess you’ve everything you want now with your factory job.”

  “Yes.” Eileen pretended she didn’t hear the contempt in Maeve’s voice.

  “Why, I guess it’s every girl’s dream, working in a candy factory.”

  Eileen said nothing, waiting for Maeve to make her point.

  “He must be a decent boss, to give you a day off on a Saturday. Did so out of the goodness of his heart, did he?”

  Eileen gave Maeve a sideways glance—how did she know? But then, for a long time, that had been the best th
ing between them. That knowing without speaking. That understanding. Eileen did not like it now, the way it made her feel small and compromised. She did not like the echo of Da’s question that she heard in it. What did you do to get it?

  What did she do? It was more what she hadn’t done. What she hadn’t done was respond to Mr. Martin’s brushing against her as she stood on the line, placing cherry-filled chocolates and caramels and nut-studded divinity into frilly white paper wrappers. What she hadn’t done was smile big enough when he leaned over her shoulder to show her precisely how he wanted things, though she’d been working there for two months and there was no need to show her anything. What she hadn’t done was let him corner her on her way back from the toilet. Instead, she’d crossed her arms over her breasts and told him that she had a beau when he’d asked her to go dancing. He’d only said, “Why, I don’t think he’d mind if you went with me to opening night of the Empire next week, lass, now, would he? He wouldn’t begrudge you a dance with your boss. Just to show your appreciation for your job, you know.”

  “Take tomorrow off, Eileen,” he’d told her last night as she’d pulled on her coat. “And maybe Monday, too, unless you think maybe you want to go with me to the dancehall.”

  The thought of it filled Eileen with such dread that she’d actually gone happily to Scully’s club in the basement of Randall’s Hardware last night, where she’d sat next to Rory on the beat-up old sofa and contemplated the lights flickering on the fake fireplace they’d made of balsa wood. When Rory had put a record on the Victrola and drawn her close and murmured in her ear about how things would be when they were married, she thought of Mr. Martin and his threats and the world seemed to narrow and choke until she couldn’t breathe, but when she’d said she needed a breath of air, Scully had said, “You aren’t going out there alone, Eileen,” and so she’d sat there scrunched between Rory and Gemma Boyle, who was thirteen if she was a day, but who sneaked out of her parents’ flat and put up her hair and let down her folded skirts in the stairwell—the way Eileen had once done—and pretended to be a grown woman, and Scully pretended she was, too, even though he knew better, because Gemma let him kiss her, and perhaps other things, and that was how Scully was going to end up with a family before he knew it.