by Wiley Cash
The visiting room was a high-ceilinged, drafty room just off the main foyer. I can picture the sunlight streaming in through the tall windows, the ceiling fans stirring the air far above. When I arrived there was no one in the room except for a black man who sat at one of the small tables. He wore the uniform of a Pullman porter, if you can picture it, and he looked familiar, like someone I had met before. I looked up at the pastor, unsure of what I was supposed to do with this stranger.
“I’ll be out here in the foyer should you need me,” the pastor said.
The porter looked up and smiled at me, and not knowing what else to do, I walked to the table and pulled out a chair and sat down across from him. We stared at one another like we were waiting for the other to start speaking, to explain exactly why we were sitting across from one another in the visiting room while my class learned algebra without me.
“You’ve grown up,” he said. He smiled. “And you look like her.”
“Who?”
“Your mother,” he said.
“You knew her?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old envelope. “Do you remember your mother’s friend Sophia?”
Of course I remembered Sophia. She was one of the strike organizers from up north somewhere. She was a beautiful girl, and anyone who had ever met or had even seen her would never forget her. But she was trouble, and I have always felt that she brought trouble with her.
“This is from her,” he said. He slid the envelope across the table. “She wanted me to give this to you. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to make it here. I’ve thought of coming to see you many times when I passed through Statesville, but I never found the courage to get off the train.”
I picked up the envelope and looked at it, and then I looked at him.
“Why are you afraid to get off the train in Statesville?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Bad memories, I guess.”
I opened the letter and spread it out right there on the table. It was written in pencil, the handwriting so faded it was nearly illegible. I’ve still got it, though, and you can still read what it says.
Dear Lilly,
I hope this letter finds you well and happy. I was devastated by your mother’s death. I loved her and respected her more than I can put into words. I promise to carry on her work of seeking justice and inspiring humanity and bringing together people of all races, for these are the reasons they killed her. Her death will not have been in vain. I send my best to you, Otis, Rose, and Wink.
With all my love,
Sophia
“I brought something else too,” he said. “Something Violet wants you to have.” He reached into his pocket and removed a tiny wooden chair. He set it on the table. We both stared at it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Violet found it with your mother. She wondered if it’s yours.”
“Do you know Violet?”
He smiled. “Yes,” he said. “She’s my wife.”
The chair wasn’t mine, Edwin, and I knew it didn’t belong to Rose. We’d never owned a proper toy in our lives, and certainly not something as fine and detailed as this piece of dollhouse furniture. But I took it, and I’ve held on to it.
I looked down at Sophia’s letter and read it again. In the room above us, chairs scraped across the floor, and I knew my class had just ended and it was time for lunch, but I wasn’t hungry. I wanted to stay there with this man, ask him every question I could think to ask, but I couldn’t think of what to ask first.
“Your mother saved my life,” he finally said. “She was a hero. Not just to me, but to a lot of people.”
Edwin, I’m eighty-seven years old, and to this day that’s the only kind thing I’ve ever heard someone say about my mother. I didn’t doubt him for a minute, though. I knew it was true. I know it’s still true.
There is an old saying that every story, even your own, is either happy or sad depending on where you stop telling it. I believe I’ll stop telling this one here.
Afterword
The Last Ballad is based on the life and tragic murder of Ella May Wiggins and the events surrounding the Loray Mill strike that occurred in my hometown of Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929.
Ella May was born in east Tennessee in 1900 and married a man named John Wiggins in 1916. The couple soon left the mountains for Cowpens, South Carolina, a small town upstate where Ella worked on a farm and then in her first textile mill job. The couple and their growing family were eventually lured across the North Carolina line by the hope of financial security offered by the dozens of mills in Gaston County, which had come to be known as “the combed yarn capital of the South,” the town of Gastonia leading the way as “the city of spindles.” Over the next several years, Ella and John bounced from mill to mill in Gaston County before settling in a predominately African-American community called Stumptown outside Bessemer City. John soon abandoned the family.
By the spring of 1929, twenty-eight-year-old Ella had lost four of her nine children to pellagra and whooping cough, diseases that disproportionately affected the poor. She earned $9.00 for a seventy-two-hour workweek at American Mill No. 2, one of the few integrated mills in the county. In April, when she heard about the Loray Mill strike seven miles away in Gastonia, Ella walked off her job and joined the National Textile Workers Union, a labor organization of the American Communist Party. That summer she wrote and sang protest songs that were later performed by Woody Guthrie and recorded by Pete Seeger. She traveled to Washington, D.C., and confronted North Carolina senator Lee Overman about labor conditions in southern mills and the plight of working mothers. She integrated the Gaston County branch of the National Textile Workers Union against the will of local party officials and members, opening the union to her African-American neighbors and former coworkers. In effect, Ella became the face of the Loray Mill strike and the voice of organized labor in the South. She was a workers’ rights advocate at a time when mill owners openly scoffed at federal labor laws, and she was a feminist and civil rights leader decades before these terms were staples of the American progressive movement.
A violent and unpredictable atmosphere surrounded the strike that summer. On the night of June 7, 1929, Gastonia police chief Orville Aderholt was shot and killed during a raid on the union’s headquarters. Although there was intense speculation about what had caused the raid and who had fired the shots that killed Aderholt, dozens of strikers were arrested and charged with the police chief’s murder. Nine men would stand trial that fall.
On September 14, Ella and other Bessemer City strikers were in a convoy of trucks headed to a rally in Gastonia in support of the jailed strikers when a gang of men rumored to have been hired by the Loray Mill set up a roadblock and fired into the trucks. Ella was shot in the chest and died at the scene. Dozens of people witnessed the attack, but the six men who were arrested were found innocent of Ella’s murder. The Loray Mill paid for the men’s legal defense.
Ella’s children were whisked away to an orphanage near Statesville, North Carolina, where they would remain until their eighteenth birthdays. While Ella’s murder and the events of the strike made headlines around the world, her name and legacy were slandered in newspapers across the state.
In 1935, the Firestone Corporation bought the Loray Mill and changed its name, and the story of the strike and the murders of Orville Aderholt and Ella May Wiggins disappeared from history.
I know this because I grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina, and I never heard a word about Ella May Wiggins, Orville Aderholt, or the Loray Mill strike until 2003 when I enrolled in graduate school in Louisiana. This despite the fact that my mother’s maiden name is Wiggins, and despite the fact that my grandfather Harry Wiggins at twenty-two years old worked in a South Carolina mill only a few miles from where a woman who shared his last name was murdered; despite the fact that my grandfather would eventually move to Gaston County and retire fro
m millwork there; despite the fact that my maternal grandmother Pearly Lucille Owensby Wiggins was born in Cowpens, South Carolina, in 1914, just a few short years before Ella and John arrived. But I was not alone in my ignorance. My mother and father, both born in mill villages not far from where Ella May Wiggins lived, worked, and was murdered, had never heard of her either. Anyone who remembered the violent summer of 1929 must have remembered it in private and spoken of it in whispers.
I know little of my parents’ childhoods in the mill villages. My mother has talked of my grandmother’s work in the carding room and of my grandfather’s work as a supervisor. She has told me stories of going with my grandfather to the mill on Sundays when it was closed and she was allowed to explore while sipping an RC Cola. My father, who passed away before I finished this book, told me stories of working the register at the mill store as a teenager while the store’s manager pushed the dope wagon through the mill during the afternoon shift.
One story my father told me not long before he passed away has stuck with me. He grew up in the Esther Mill village in Shelby, North Carolina, which is about twenty miles west of Gastonia. When my father was a child, his mother and father would go to work and leave my father’s older sister in charge of him and his younger brother. According to my father, he had been hanging on to a nickel for weeks, trying to decide how he would spend it, when one day he dropped the nickel between the planks of the porch floor. He could peer between the boards and see the nickel on the ground below, but he could not reach it. There was talk of using a hammer to pry the boards loose, but the house belonged to the mill, and he and his siblings were afraid of damaging the house while trying to retrieve the money. They eventually moved out of the house, but my father said he had spent the rest of his life thinking about that nickel and what it could have bought.
This book is for Ella May and her children. This book is for people like me who learned of her bravery and her family’s loss much later than we should have. This book is for Orville Aderholt, a man who, by all accounts, was virtuous and fair. This book is for my grandparents who were born on farms and saw hope in the mills. This book is for my mother and father who were born in mill villages and dreamed of the suburbs. This book is for everyone who is still reaching for nickels.
Further Reading
In researching the life of Ella May Wiggins, the events of the Loray Mill strike, and the evolution of mill culture I relied on the following resources.
Corn from a Jar: Moonshining in the Great Smoky Mountains. Daniel S. Pierce. Gatlinburg, TN: Great Smoky Mountains Association, 2013.
Documenting the American South. Audio interviews with textile workers. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. http://docsouth.unc.edu.
Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike. John A. Salmond. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Gastonia Gallop: Cotton Mill Songs and Hillbilly Blues: Piedmont Textile Workers on Record: Gaston County, North Carolina 1927–1931. Various Artists. Old Hat Records, 2009.
The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park. Daniel S. Pierce. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2000.
Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South. Patrick Huber. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Martyr of the Loray Mill: Ella May and the 1929 Textile Workers’ Strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. Kristina L. Horton. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2015.
“Mill Mother’s Lament: Ella May, Working Women’s Militancy, and the 1929 Gaston County Strike” (master’s thesis). Lynn Haessly. Thesis copy available for in-library use at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 1987.
Millhands and Preachers. Liston Pope. Westford, MA: Yale University Press, 1942.
A New South Hunt Club: An Illustrated History of the Hilton Head Agricultural Society 1917–1967. Richard Rankin. Mount Holly, NC: Willow Hill Press, 2011.
Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow. Fred E. Beal. New York: Hillman-Curl, 1937.
Textile Town: Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Betsy Wakefield Teter, ed. Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Writers Project, 2003.
Acknowledgments
A grant from the North Carolina Arts Council provided time to write this novel, and a residency at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities provided space for it to be written.
Thank you to the people whose eyes and hands touched these pages: my in-laws, Eugene and Jo-Ann Brady; my mom, Sandi Cash; Christian Helms; Thomas Murphy; Lydia Peelle; Mark Sundeen; Mitch Wieland; and Reggie Scott Young.
Thank you to the people whose ideas and encouragement pushed these pages forward: Marc Baldwin; Joseph Bathanti; Margaret Bauer; my brother Cliff Cash and my sister Jada Cash; Jim Dodson; Clyde Edgerton; Ben Fountain; Gail Godwin; Mark Koenig, the executive director of the Wilmington Railroad Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina; Kevin Maurer; Miwa Messer; Lucy Penegar; Daniel Pierce; Richard Rankin; Ron Rash; Ketch Secor; Brad Shipp and VariDesk; Shelby Stephenson; and Daniel Wallace.
Thank you to the many wonderful people at William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers, past and present, especially Jessica Williams, Liate Stehlik, Emily Homonoff, Chloe Moffett, and Tavia Kowalchuk.
Thank you to my publicist, Sharyn Rosenblum, who always finds the way, and my editor, David Highfill, who always finds the vision. David, I have no doubt that this book was as difficult to edit as it was to write. Your support has meant everything.
Thank you to Nat Sobel, Judith Weber, and the entire Sobel Weber team. Nat, I’ll never be able to thank you enough.
Thank you to my students and colleagues in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program for sitting through years of me reading excerpts of this novel while I kicked the can farther and farther down the road.
Thank you to the University of North Carolina-Asheville for changing my life in naming me writer-in-residence. It’s good to be home.
Thank you to the librarians and booksellers who sustain the creative, intellectual, and civic life of our nation.
An enduring thank you to my family: Mallory, this novel, like everything good in my life, is a testament to your grace and love. I write about strong women because I’m in love with one, and our daughters will grow into strong women because their mother is one. Early and Juniper, you have given me more joy than I deserve, and I will spend the rest of my life earning the love of hearts as pure as yours.
My dad, Roger Cash, was born in a mill village in Shelby, North Carolina, in 1943. He left this world in 2016. The glory of his life and the tragedy of his loss are in these pages.
About the Author
WILEY CASH is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home and the acclaimed This Dark Road to Mercy. He won the SIBA Book Award, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and has been nominated for many other awards. A native of North Carolina, he has held fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He is the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and teaches creative writing in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife and two daughters.
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Also by Wiley Cash
This Dark Road to Mercy
A Land More Kind than Home
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.
the last ballad. Copyright © 2017 by Wiley Cash. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitt
ed, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress
Endpaper map by Nick Springer, copyright © 2017 Springer Cartographers LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cash, Wiley, author.
Title: The last ballad : a novel / Wiley Cash.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017007053 (print) | LCCN 2017011098 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062313119 (hardback) | ISBN 0062313118 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062670731 (large print) | ISBN 9780062313133 () | ISBN 0062313134 ()
Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / General.
Classification: LCC PS3603.A86525 L37 2017 (print) | LCC PS3603.A86525 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007053
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-231313-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-231311-9
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