Police had been watching. Stepping over Roy, they seized me and Josephine. “Both of you, under arrest for assault.”
“We have been exercising our right of peaceful assembly,” Josephine announced, “with permission to march signed by your chief. This young lady was avoiding a ruffian who touched her indecently. He tripped, that’s all. How is that assault?”
“Under arrest,” the police repeated. This was worse, far worse than being taken from the San Carlo in a carriage. This was handcuffs. We were pushed into an airless Black Maria; the door locked behind us as if we were criminals. Nobody listened to my protests. Nobody cared. Josephine’s beautiful hat slipped off, and we couldn’t retrieve it.
In the stifling darkness I cried in anger and shame. “When he touched me like that, when he talked about my mother, I had to get away.”
“Of course you did,” said Josephine’s calm and steady voice, “and if they want arrests, they get arrests. Roy was paid. I just didn’t think they’d bring in strikebreakers so soon. But don’t worry. Isadore will bail us out soon.”
“Soon? If I’m not home for dinner, my mother will worry. She’ll go looking for me.” I panicked. Would she be arrested? I pounded the walls, screaming, “Let me out! I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Stop that. It doesn’t help. Someone will go to your house and explain what happened. Lucia, we never claimed a strike would be easy, only that we’ll win in the end. Now sit back and try to relax. Here’s what I do. I imagine I’m a smooth stone in a riverbed. Cool, clear water runs over me.” I peered at her face in the gloom. Cool, clear water? This was a nightmare.
We were hauled from the Black Maria, pushed into the station, and fingerprinted. Cool, clear water, I repeated to myself. But this water roiled; it was dark and bad-smelling. I was in prison, a criminal. The countess, Mrs. Livingston, my professors, and Henryk, what would they think of me now?
“Put ’em in cell three,” a clerk grunted. Two burly officers hauled us along, a hand on each of our arms. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for that sound: an iron gate creaking open and locking behind us with an echoing thud.
The constant bustle at least distracted me as our cell filled up with strikers crowding onto narrow benches against the wall. “So, what’s our first song?” Josephine demanded. How could she be so cheerful? We were in jail! Two women offered a pretty tune in Yiddish. Others sang “Casey Jones,” their voices echoing off brick walls. Police wandered by to hear “America the Beautiful,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” Swept up in the noise and fellowship, I slipped my voice into the bouncing flow. “Do ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’!” a policeman called out. We shouted back:
Come on and hear, come on and hear,
Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
Come on and hear, come on and hear,
It’s the best band in the land!
In pauses between songs, we told stories. I shared the tale of the fishermen killed by the lascivious princess of Palazzo Donn’Anna, expecting gasps of horror. Instead, a woman in the corner shared a lewd joke on the length of a fisherman’s “hook.” Talk spun into other tales of lusty excess. Translations flew across the room, followed quickly by guffaws. I remembered bits of such talk between Nannina and her friends before they shooed me away. I’d never been welcome in a circle of such freely talking women.
“Look at Lucia,” a voice called out. “She’s red as a berry.”
“The poor child hasn’t had a proper liberal education,” lamented Josephine in a tone so prim and somber that everyone laughed. Thus began another round of jokes on schools and “proper education.” As we howled after a wild story of a priest in the Irish countryside, a Polish woman suggested we get ourselves jailed all together again.
“No lack of opportunity,” Josephine commented, and we talked in easy good humor about tactics for the strike, allies we might tap, and slogans for our marches.
Near dusk, Isadore bailed us out as if the process were as perfunctory as buying onions. An assault charge hadn’t been recorded. “It was all for intimidation,” he said. “Were you intimidated, Lucia?”
“At first, yes.”
“Of course. So was I, the first time.”
“How often have you been jailed?”
“Can’t remember. Let’s say often,” he answered lightly. “It comes with the job.”
At the boardinghouse, in the markets, and around the neighborhood, everyone knew where I’d been, as if a sign around my neck read: “Arrested. Been in jail.” Friends fluttered with questions: “What was it like? Did they beat you?” Enrico and Pepe hovered around me, demanding: “Did you break out? Did you see real criminals? Did you have bread and water? Could you scratch through the wall with spoons?” Basking in unaccustomed glory, I didn’t mention the songs and jokes I’d blush to repeat.
“Never mind criminals, we need rich women,” Josephine said briskly. We would speak to them with two workers: Amelia, a young Italian mother with a cherubic baby, and Hannah, a Jewish woman whose arm had been scorched by the Lentz fire. I would translate for Amelia. Hannah spoke English well, and her dramatic tale of the fire, many said, could make a polar bear sweat.
I expected audiences like my mother’s in vaudeville, thrilled and expectant, listening avidly. Ladies of the Cuyahoga County Women’s Suffrage Association were polite, even distressed to hear Amelia’s stories of a worker’s life and to see Hannah’s arm. “However,” said their leader, “we come together for women’s suffrage. To win this fight requires focus, as does yours.” Individuals might sign a statement of personal support, but the association could not publicly endorse our strike. The ladies passed a pretty basket for donations. I saw many of them later in that long summer bandaging strikers, cheering, handing out sandwiches, or giving lemonade to weary children. But none wrote letters to the Plain Dealer or marched with us.
“Rich bitches,” Hannah muttered as we left the meeting. I explained our failure to Amelia as she soothed her hot and fretful baby.
“Well yes, but they did contribute,” I pointed out. On a secluded bench I counted our take: $547.50. If the suffragettes were so generous, how could they not see that the rightness of our cause was as clear as water, as indisputable as gravity?
“We’ll keep asking,” Josephine announced. “We’ll go back each month for more.” Each month? Hannah glanced at me. “Next, we ask the WCTU.”
We went to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, arguing that strikebreakers were being issued alcohol and the workers’ misery led many to drink. Again, some gave money or promised letters to the manufacturers’ association, but the group itself could not publicly support the strike. In the gathering heat, our dresses clung to sweaty skin and the weight of each no dragged at our feet. This must be a singer’s nightmare: a perfect performance that nobody cheers.
In all we gathered $970.56 that day for our soup kitchens. Hannah said she’d visit her father’s cousin who owned a fine haberdashery near Public Square.
“Ask for two hundred,” said Josephine. Hannah gulped. “And, Lucia, the Livingstons live off their limestone quarries. It’s nothing to them if garment workers get more. They can easily give five hundred.” The number bloomed before me, almost the cost of a Model T Ford. “You can do it. If you don’t ask, you’ll never get. But go tomorrow.”
I’d have to take Mamma with me to the Livingstons’, Roseanne said. She had been restless all day, looking for me, and might slip out the door to find me. “Besides, she makes me nervous wandering around the halls, looking in all the rooms.” How could I protest after all of Roseanne’s favors for us?
We went in the morning, when Mrs. Livingston might be reliably at home. I had persuaded Mamma to wear a somber dress and bring her knitting, even if was hard to imagine needing a woolen scarf on such a warm, sticky day. We went to the back door, where I implored Agnes to keep Mamma while I talked to her mistress about the strike. Mamma’s eyes darted around the f
ine kitchen. She tugged hard at my hand, straining to leave.
“No, no,” I said quickly in Italian. “Not to work here, just to wait. Remember what I told you? I have to speak with Mrs. Livingston. We’ll find you a quiet place to knit.”
“Your ma’s touched?” Agnes asked warily.
“No, no, she’s just nervous in new places,” I said, briefly explaining her condition. With difficulty we settled Mamma in the cool of the stone-lined pantry with a glass of iced lemonade.
“You left college to take care of your ma and now you’re helping with the strike? You’ve grown, my girl. Don’t you worry, I’ll watch her.” Agnes leaned closer. “You’ll find the missus in a better mood. The old man died last month. We all thought he’d be tormenting us forever and making the missus miserable. Then bam! Having breakfast in bed he was and the maid goes in to collect his tray. There he is, facedown in oatmeal, stone dead. Scared her silly. I was afraid they’d think I poisoned him. In fact, I’d wanted to often enough, but no, just a heart attack, the doctor says. You go around to the front door now, love, since you’re seeing the missus.”
I passed through a shaded rose garden to the front door. Even Betsy the housekeeper seemed more cheerful. Massive bouquets filled the house; carpets had been replaced and the grand staircase freshly waxed. Mrs. Livingston came floating into the morning room with the smile of her Hiram House days. Masses of curls framed her lovely face, balanced by swoops of pearls against a lacy morning dress. She directed me to a bright brocade divan.
“Oh, Lucia, it’s been like a honeymoon,” she gushed as if we were the dearest friends. “Richard never complained, but his father rode him like a horse, begrudging every penny.”
Betsy brought iced tea and little cakes. In the flurry of setting out dishes and glasses, she whispered that all was quiet in the kitchen. Mrs. Livingston listened sympathetically to my tale of leaving college to care for Mamma, never mentioning the ring she’d sold to send me. It was delightful to talk in that lovely room, to pretend I was a leisured lady with nothing to do all day but receive calls and plan for the evening’s entertainment.
The money, ask for the money, I heard Josephine whisper. How much money was here in furnishings and art, in Mrs. Livingston’s dress, jeweled watch, lace and pearls, and translucent porcelain plates for the little cakes? How many thousands? But to ask again for help, why had I told Josephine I could do this?
I asked instead if she’d heard of the Shirtwaist Factory fire. “Yes, it was terrible, ghastly. Those poor, poor girls. We gave fifty dollars to a fund for their families.” My mind raced: was this good that she was sympathetic or bad that she had already given to the fund, and so why support another labor cause? I took a breath and spoke about the Cleveland conditions, the long hours, fines, rented machines, illicit services demanded of young girls, and how factory workers were pitted against the even-worse-paid contractors. She listened avidly and asked careful questions. Was she moved by the tale or only being kind to a former student, perhaps proud of my English vocabulary?
I plunged on, explaining the benefits of strikes in other cities, the aid given by the suffragettes, WCTU, and Mink Brigades in New York, educated and far-thinking women who saw in strikers both sisters and the builders of a great nation of work. I cited Mr. Kinney’s argument: workers paid decently could buy more, uplifting every store and business. I explained how workers suffered even in a short strike. I told her the dilemma of those like Alda with sick children and how much depended on the support of the wise, compassionate, privileged citizens of Cleveland.
Mrs. Livingston put down her iced tea, seeming much younger, like a hurt and disappointed little girl. “You came here again for money, Lucia? That’s all you want from me, first for college and now this?” She had thought I dared come on a social visit? Words rattled in my throat. Sweat trickled between my breasts despite the cool of the morning room.
“The workers are suffering, Mrs. Livingston, and I—”
She sighed and held up a hand to stop me. “I’m sorry, but since Richard’s father died, do you realize how many people come or write or stop us at church wanting money for good causes? We gave to the diphtheria fund because the need seemed so desperate.”
“I know. These are difficult times.”
“Now the union wants money.”
“It does. If the workers can’t hold on long enough to convince the owners, then all their suffering will be for nothing.”
She sighed. “How much, Lucia?”
Say the words. Think about Alda. “We need five hundred dollars, Mrs. Livingston. We’ve raised some, but it’s not enough. There are six thousand strikers and their families to feed.” I was holding my glass too tightly and set it on the marble table. “I sing to the eyes,” Mamma had said on my first trip to Chicago, when her star was rising. I made myself look in Mrs. Livingston’s eyes, reposing my face, smiling slightly. She relaxed a little, becoming almost the Miss Miller of Hiram House again.
“I’ll have to speak with Richard. I don’t know how much we can give, but it will be something. And I’ll talk to friends who might be sympathetic, those whose husbands aren’t in the garment business.”
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Livingston.” I let my breath out slowly so she wouldn’t notice I’d been holding it.
“Now,” she said briskly, pouring more tea from a crystal pitcher tinkling with ice, “tell me about yourself. You are keeping up with your studies?” She explained why I must read the novels of Mrs. Edith Wharton. I told her I certainly would. Then she glanced at a dainty watch.
“Thank you so much for your time and generosity, Mrs. Livingston. I’ll be going now.”
She rang a bell, conveyed her best wishes for my mother’s recovery, and had Betsy thread me back to the kitchen.
Agnes was waiting. “So, she’ll ask the master for money, will she?”
“How do you know?”
“Now don’t look so surprised. When you were in service, didn’t you listen at doors?” I nodded sheepishly. “So Betsy happened to be dusting nearby and happened to hear you talk. The missus asks him everything. ‘This sauce or that one, darling? Which necklace tonight?’ But he’s a good man. And for sure your strikers need help. I’ll be sending over some of my oatcakes tomorrow for the children. And this”—she held up a little bag—“is from all of us here in service. Eight dollars. Payday’s tomorrow, so that’s all we could raise right now. But everything helps, no?”
The weight of it lifted my heart. “Thank you, Agnes. Thank everyone for me. It’s a week’s strike pay for a large family.”
The scullery maid looked up, startled. Agnes gasped. “Well, may the Lord hold you all in the palm of His hand.”
When we went to get my mother from the pantry’s cool, she almost smiled and even asked if I’d spoken to the countess. “She’s no countess, Mamma, but I think she’ll help us.”
A week later, Josephine told me that four hundred dollars had come from Richard Livingston’s account. “Just four? I wanted five,” I said, deflated.
“I never thought they’d give five, but if I’d told you three, they’d never have given four. So you did well, Lucia.” She left me to ponder my first lesson in organizing.
At our next march, on blazing July 4, four Bohemian women were arrested for “promoting anarchy.” One was pregnant. After she shoved aside a strikebreaker who charged at her belly, she was jailed in a different precinct, and had started bleeding by the time Josephine found her and paid the bail. She lost her baby that night. A few days later, workers loyal to Printz-Biederman broke windows in striking Bohemians’ flats.
“It’s terrible. They’re new in Cleveland and mostly poor,” Henryk said. I had stopped to order vegetables for the soup kitchen. We talked as he sorted potatoes in the slight cool of his shop. Miriam was in Pittsburgh again, visiting her aunt. “There aren’t enough rich Bohemians to help the others. Some of the Jewish strikers are getting aid through a fund at the synagogue. Wealthy families in other b
usinesses have been very generous.”
“Bohemians have the union,” I said stoutly.
“Yes, but who’s in the union? Jews and Italians, some Poles. The Bohemians feel alone.”
“Yes, maybe so.” The announcement of his engagement, difficult as it was, had one small advantage for me: with impossible hopes gone, only friendship was left. Perhaps that was enough. When I spoke of my mother’s good and bad days, Henryk listened with none of the pity or random advice that so many showered on me in those days. The constant coil of worry in my chest began to loosen.
“On bad days the dybbuk has her?” he asked lightly.
“Yes, the terrible dybbuk.” We spoke of the strike: I told him about my morning with Mrs. Livingston, how the old man had died in an oatmeal bowl, how difficult it was to ask for money, and yet I’d raised $408 between wealthy masters and poor servants. I described how the confident Miss Miller now deferred to her husband even in matters of sauces.
“I have an aunt like that,” said Henryk. “She left her brains at the altar when she married.”
“Why didn’t someone remind her?”
“Good idea. We should have said, ‘Excuse us, Aunt Gertrude, are you forgetting something?’ ” We laughed until a string of customers arrived, and then I slipped away.
Henryk was right about the Bohemians. Their union ties were unraveling. Arrests, the loss of the baby, and broken windows frightened them. Their contractors, often deeply in debt to factory owners, pressed and threatened the women relentlessly. A week after the broken windows, Isadore announced what we all feared: Bohemian workers had voted to return to work at the same miserable rate.
Josephine’s voice rose over the waves of angry, fearful talk. “Defectors do return when a union seems about to win. We must hope for this.”
“So we do all the starving,” someone shouted, “and they sponge off our rewards?” Songs and speeches, impassioned arguments on the strength of union, and prayers of compassion for the Bohemians slowly eased the angry talk. Still, walking home on that hot, muggy night, I couldn’t clear away the fear that we traveled over shifting sand.
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