by Wiley Cash
Then Katherine remembered the woman’s name, the name she’d heard the men say that night while they stood in the dark beneath the window.
Ella May Wiggins.
Gaston Transom-Times
May 26, 1929
Do the people of Gaston County know what they are subscribing to when they believe the preachments of men like Beal and Reed? They advocate racial equality, intermarriage of whites and blacks, abolition of all laws discriminating between whites and blacks. Here is their platform:
“A federal law against lynching and the protection of negro masses in their right of self defense.
“Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination. Full racial, political and social equality for the negro race.
“Abolition of all laws which result in segregation of the negroes. Abolition of all Jim Crow laws. The law shall forbid all discrimination against negroes in selling or renting houses.
“Abolition of all laws which disenfranchise the negroes.
“Abolition of laws forbidding intermarriage of persons of different races.
“Abolition of all laws and public administration measures which prohibit, or in practice prevent, negro children or youth from attending general public schools or universities.
“Full and equal admittance of negroes to all railway station waiting rooms, trains, restaurants, hotels and the theatres.”
What will it take for us to stand up and rid this city and this state of the threat of bloody red Bolshevism? Violence? We’ve witnessed violence. Protests? We’ve experienced protests. Anger? There is plenty of anger on all sides.
Will we wait to act until our Constitution has been destroyed, our churches pulled down upon us, our classrooms and courtrooms taken over by self-professed godless men like Fred Beal? Will we wait to act until our children learn and eat and play and sleep alongside the Negro? Will we wait to act until our very voices cry out for mercy in a Russian tongue?
The good people of this community are getting tired of these wops from the east side of New York telling our folks what to do and how to do it. It is time we are being rid of them. We can settle the strike without their aid and suggestions. Get them out of town, and the strike will be settled and in a way that will be satisfactory to all. As long as the union stays here, we shall have trouble, and more serious trouble than any that has yet happened.
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Chapter Nine
Ella May
Sunday, May 26, 1929
The brief burst of rain that closed the night’s meeting had ended, and Ella and Sophia shuffled and slipped their way along the muddy road away from the headquarters. To their right, dozens of wet canvas tents gleamed against the light of hanging lamps. Out in the dark field, strikers stoked soggy campfires and prepared late dinners.
Ahead of them, thirty or so Bessemer City workers in small groups of twos and threes walked over the railroad tracks, their bodies thrown into momentary silhouette by the lights from Loray, which blazed farther south.
“Well, looky there,” Sophia said. She pointed into the damp woods that ran along the north side of the railroad tracks. An automobile sat parked deep in the trees.
“Looks like a police car,” Ella said.
As they passed, the driver drew on his cigarette, and the faint light was enough for Ella to recognize Officer Tom Gibson behind the wheel. She assumed that the large, round head in the passenger’s seat belonged to Officer Albert Roach. Two others sat in the backseat, but it was too dark and they were too far away for Ella to see them clearly.
“That’s Gibson for sure,” Ella said. “Looks like Roach too. Got a mind to knock on the window, ask Gibson for a cigarette.”
“You don’t smoke,” Sophia said.
“And you quit.”
“I reckon we’ll leave them alone then,” Sophia said, but as if unable to resist, she raised her hand and waved. “Hey, boys!” she called. She blew a kiss. Ella laughed.
Ella and Sophia clambered up the rise toward the tracks. Beneath them the strikers’ dark figures had already made their way down the other side of the embankment. “Police are just watching us,” Sophia said. “Just waiting to see if Hampton’s here yet.”
Ella turned back and looked at the police car, saw that it hadn’t moved.
“You think they know he’s coming?”
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” Sophia said.
“Beal doesn’t even know,” Ella said. “What makes you think they know?”
“You saw what the Council put in the paper this morning, and now they’re sitting out here in the dark like a lynching party,” Sophia said. “They know. Somebody’s tipped them off.”
“Police are always out here,” Ella said. “If it ain’t Gibson and Roach it’s somebody else. Tonight’s no different.”
“Well, it feels different,” Sophia said. “Things have changed.”
Ella knew that was true: things had changed. In the twenty-one days since she’d attended her first rally in Gastonia, word of the strike had spread to Bessemer City and other mill towns where workers had grown desperate enough to be curious about the union. The rallies had gotten larger as people from outside Gastonia came to view the crisp tents that housed the evicted Loray strikers, to listen to music, to hear speakers, and, sometimes, to eat free food until the food ran out.
The one truck owned by the union soon proved insufficient, and a Gastonia striker named Anderson Chesley had lent his truck to the cause. They could shuttle more people now, and it was safer to have two trucks on the highway at night.
Ella had changed too. It had only been three weeks since she walked off her job at American and joined the union, but she’d traveled by car to Washington, D.C. She’d given a United States senator a piece of her mind. She’d heard rumors that record companies in Charlotte and Nashville were planning to send music producers to the rallies to record her songs, although none of them had shown up yet. She was beginning to understand the ebb and flow of the strike, the inner workings of the union, and, once she’d gotten Loray’s attention and made a name for herself among the strikers, mill owners, newspapermen, and politicians, she was beginning to understand her role in it all too.
She’d written more songs, sung them at the meetings here in Gastonia and at impromptu rallies elsewhere when she’d been invited. Everywhere she went people asked her to sing the “mill mother song,” the song she’d sung her first night in Gastonia, and “The Mill Mother’s Song” was what she’d begun to call it as well. She’d written it as a love letter to her children, but her heart had turned toward angry protest, and she’d told Sophia that “The Mill Mother’s Song” might be the last ballad she’d ever sing. The songs she sang now were still based on popular melodies, but the lyrics had grown more political: “Two Little Strikers,” “On Top of Ol’ Loray,” “All Around the Jailhouse.”
She spent every day organizing workers in Bessemer City, waiting outside gates during shift changes, handing out leaflets on paydays downtown. Beal had done his best to keep his word about Ella’s pay, and Sophia had done her best to make sure of it. Ella’s pockets and her children’s bellies had been full more often than not, and although the union relief funds were not consistent, the food she’d been able to come by was at least reliable.
And now she’d told Charlie about the baby. He’d mostly disappeared, but not before accusing her of being unfaithful and threatening her if she didn’t stay away from Gastonia. She wasn’t any more scared of him now than she’d been before sharing the news, and his selling his guitar and buying a rifle hadn’t changed her feelings. She’d already risked her life by joining the union. After that, Charlie Shope with a gun in his hand didn’t seem so scary.
But Ella was about to risk the union itself because she wanted Violet, her friends from Stumptown, and her former coworkers at American to be welcome beside her at rallies and alongside her on the trucks that drove strikers to and from Bessemer Cit
y each evening. Ella knew they were as hungry as she had been, just as overworked and underpaid. The only advantage she had over them was the color of her skin, and she knew that was the only reason she was here now while Violet and all the people who looked like her were stuck in lives they didn’t deserve. It wasn’t right. She wanted to open the union to them because they’d opened their homes and lives to her. They’d given her food and clothes without her asking. Violet and Violet’s mother had watched her children—were watching them right now, as a matter of fact—and never asked for anything in return. They hadn’t asked for the union either, but they deserved it. Everyone deserved it. They just needed to feel welcome, to see someone who looked like them among the union ranks. Maybe then they’d believe that the Local could be integrated. Maybe then the Local would believe it too.
Ella and Sophia had been working—without Beal’s or the Local’s knowledge—to arrange for the national office to have a colored organizer, an old friend of Sophia’s named Hampton Haywood, sent south. He was scheduled to arrive on the train in Charlotte a week from tomorrow. They’d do everything they could to keep it quiet until then. Ella knew that if they were going to integrate the union they’d need secrecy right up to the moment when everyone’s hands were raised and the votes were tallied.
Water squished inside Ella’s shoes, soaked her stockings. When she reached the bottom of the embankment she slipped off both of her shoes, turned them up, and watched water trickle out. She tried to wipe the water from her stockings, but they were sopping wet, and she saw no solution but to step out of them one leg at a time. Sophia stood beside her and waited for Ella to step back into her shoes with her bare feet. The strikers began to load up into trucks, which sat parked on the side of the road as it curved to the east and ran parallel to the railroad tracks. Men in overalls and women in dresses kicked mud from their shoes and helped one another climb over the open tailgates into the truck beds. Ella buckled her shoes, raised her head, and saw Sophia watching the strikers as if appraising them somehow.
“We’re going to bring fifty more on Friday night,” Sophia said. “Maybe more. Who knows? Could be a hundred colored workers.”
Ella stood, nodded toward the men and women in the trucks. “As long as they don’t run them off.”
“They won’t,” Sophia said. “They won’t even see us coming until we’re here.”
“Hopefully nobody gets hurt,” Ella said. “Or killed.”
“I already told you, Ella May. Ain’t nobody getting killed.”
They walked without speaking for a moment, as if practicing the silence of the secret they shared. Ella cleared her throat. “Will you do me a favor, Miss Blevin.”
“What’s that, Miss May?”
“When your friend gets here, you tell him to let me do the talking,” Ella said. “Colored folks I know ain’t going to listen to him just because he looks like them. And you need to make sure he don’t put on northern airs or wear fancy clothes. It’s not going to impress them. But if they see that he’s humble like them, maybe even poor like me, then they’ll listen.”
Ahead, Anderson Chesley stood on the running board of his truck. He was in his early twenties, certainly older than Sophia, probably not too much younger than Ella. She’d heard that, like her, he was from somewhere up in the mountains too, but she’d never found out exactly where, and she didn’t want to ask him. She didn’t want to think about the mistake she’d made in leaving those mountains behind. She figured Anderson Chesley didn’t want to think about it either. As Ella and Sophia drew closer to the trucks, Ella could see that Chesley stood with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Sophia saw it too. She clucked her tongue in disappointment.
“No weapons in view, Mr. Chesley,” Sophia said. “Not this far from headquarters anyway.”
Chesley looked down at his boots where they stood on the running board as if he were thinking of how to respond, and then he looked up at Sophia.
“I seen that car back there,” he said. “That’s Gibson and Roach, Miss Blevin: police officers. A few nights back, somebody followed us all the way to Bessemer City. Got right up on my tail when I turned off the highway. Nearly hit me. There were four men inside. Might have been them.”
One of the men standing by Chesley’s truck spoke up. He was a tall, red-faced man named Will Mason. He was a machinist at Ragan Spinning Company.
“He’s right,” Mason said. “Came right up on the back of us, liked to hit us almost. There were four men inside, but it was too dark to see any faces.”
“Could have been a bad driver,” Sophia said. “No reason to go shooting at people for being bad drivers.”
“I ain’t about to go shooting at people,” Chesley said. “Not yet, but I will. Last night, after I went to bed, another car sat out in front of my house. I looked out the window and seen it. Whoever it was wouldn’t leave until I went out there on the porch and showed them this here rifle.”
“Beal doesn’t want anybody to be seen carrying weapons off the premises. Weapons are only to protect headquarters and the commissary,” Sophia said. She looked at the faces around her. “You all know better: no guns.”
Chesley slipped his thumb beneath the rifle’s strap as if he were going to slide it off his shoulder, but he stopped, changed his mind.
“Well, Beal can go to hell,” Chesley said. He sat down in his truck and laid the rifle across his lap. He slammed the truck’s door, poked his face out its open window. “Let Beal drive out here by hisself one night,” he said. “He’ll be begging for a rifle after that. It’s easy to say ‘no weapons’ when you got guards protecting you up there.” He nodded in the direction of the headquarters, on the other side of the tracks. “But it’s a different thing when you’re out here, surrounded by strangers.”
When he said the word strangers his eyes fell on a woman Ella had not yet noticed. She stood in the middle of the road, several feet away from the group of workers who were still climbing up into the trucks’ beds. The woman must’ve felt the group’s eyes upon her, because she coughed, ran her gloved hands across the front of her thin jacket as if smoothing away wrinkles that she knew were not there. The jacket had a matching belt that she’d cinched tight at her waist. A fine hat sat tipped toward her eyes. She wore boots with a thin heel. Ella didn’t know who she was, but she knew that she wasn’t a striker. It scared her, the thought of someone she didn’t know being so close by without her sensing it.
“There’s just too many strangers,” Chesley said. He cranked the engine. It sputtered, caught, then fired. Sparks shot from somewhere beneath the truck. The woman in the road jumped at the sound. A few of the workers laughed.
The woman turned, looked at Ella. Her face was pretty, her cheeks brushed lightly with rouge, her mouth red with lipstick. Ella figured her for an out-of-town reporter who’d suddenly found herself surrounded by a rough bunch of millhands.
“You’re Ella May,” the woman said, her voice lilting in a way that made clear that she was asking a question but was afraid to do so outright.
For Ella to hear her name in the mouth of a stranger was akin to someone standing on her chest and forcing the air from her lungs. It had been happening more and more often, ever since the first night she’d spoken at the rally, but she had yet to grow used to it, and each time it happened it was accompanied by the dizzying realization that people she did not know somehow knew her. Ella looked over at Sophia, who didn’t seem bothered by the woman’s presence. She must have figured her for a reporter as well, and Ella knew how much reporters and newspapers excited Sophia. Sophia nodded at Ella and flicked her eyes toward the stranger, clearly encouraging her to answer.
“Yes,” Ella said. “I’m Ella.”
“Are you a reporter?” Sophia asked.
“No,” the woman said. “I’m not a reporter. I’m . . . I . . . I don’t know what I am, actually.”
Sophia smiled, nodded toward Ella. “You a fan?” she asked the woman.
“I . . . I don’t k
now,” she said. She looked at Ella. “I just wanted to meet you.”
Sophia whistled as if in disbelief. She shook her head, turned away from the woman, and walked back toward the truck.
“Why?” Ella asked. “Why’d you want to meet me?”
The woman took a step toward Ella, stopped, took another. She interlaced her fingers, held her gloved hands before her as if they offered something either invisible or too small to be seen.
“I’ve heard about you,” the woman said, “and I heard you sing tonight. It was just lovely, wonderful. I wanted to talk to you.”
“About what?” Ella asked.
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I just—”
She opened her mouth to say something else, but instead she looked past Ella to the two trucks that sat on the side of the road behind her. The woman’s gaze moved from one truck to the other. Ella turned and saw that the workers had all been watching and listening.
It began to rain. The woman coughed, put her hands in her pockets. Ella wondered if the woman would leave now. The woman shifted her feet, coughed again. Otherwise, she didn’t move.
Sophia opened the driver’s-side door of her truck and climbed inside. An older woman named Maize Creedmore was already sitting on the passenger’s side. Sophia cranked the engine. It was too dark and rainy to witness the black smoke that Ella knew belched from the tailpipe.