Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  Gina tried hard to keep her Italian self concealed from him, hidden behind pressed-together teeth, a composed smile, half-hooded eyes, clenched fists as he spooned her in bed. She didn’t want to have loud words and prove Mimoo right. Her mother kept saying to her, “Who are you putting on airs for? You don’t think sooner or later he’ll notice the hot Sicilian blood that runs through your deepest veins straight into your heart?”

  “The ladies he was used to before me didn’t hector their men about desperately unsuitable employment.”

  “Is he married to them? As I recall, he deliberately discarded one of those prissy debutantes for you, or am I wrong?”

  “I don’t want to discuss this with you, Mimoo. I’m glad at the very least you’re acknowledging our nuptials.”

  “Only to make my point.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’re like Pompeii. You keep hissing, letting out steam. When he least expects it, and least wants it, you’re going to erupt. It’ll be judgment day for him and he won’t even know why he’s up in flames. You should give him fair warning, daughter.”

  “Mother, I’m going to prove you wrong. I’m an American lady now. We keep our boiling on the inside where it belongs.”

  “Why is he out every night?”

  “He’s with Joe at their place. I didn’t want them here anymore, you know that.”

  “So your husband you accept on any terms, but our poor Angela you won’t speak to?”

  “She won’t speak to me!”

  “She’s right not to.”

  “Is she? Do you want me to go out and picket with her? Because that’s what she wants.”

  Mimoo put her hand on her daughter’s face. “No, mia figlia. I want you to be careful most of all.”

  ***

  Sam Gompers and his American Federation of Labor were called to Lawrence to negotiate a settlement and act as the voice of reason against the IWW. “It takes a man like Bill Haywood to make Gompers, of all people, look like an angel,” remarked the district attorney. But as soon as Gompers was called to the table and it looked as if a deal might be struck, Big Bill promptly returned to Lawrence, this time for good.

  To ingratiate himself with the strikers and to push the AFL out of Lawrence, Haywood warned American Woolen that they could not weave their cloth with bayonets. An AFL negotiator accused Haywood of having no interest in industrial peace. He said that for the last ten years Big Bill’s actions screamed from the streets that what he wanted was the creation of a proletarian impulse that would do nothing less than revolutionize society. To this Big Bill happily replied, hopping up onto Harry’s podium—though he didn’t need to, being over six feet tall—that the AFL drudge was right. “The complete DEMOLITION of social and economic conditions is the only salvation of the working classes!” he shouted. He turned his left side to the cheering women to hide his empty right eye socket. Harry stood nearby and watched him. “The mine owners did not find the gold, did not mine the gold, did not mill the gold. Yet all the gold belongs to them! How can this be? It can’t be! It won’t do, ladies, it simply Will. Not. Do.”

  Under Haywood’s direction, it didn’t take long for the Bread and Roses women to gain notoriety as radicals of the worst sort. Big Bill wanted the women front and center every day as if on a stage, harassing the factories in their bonnets, hitching up their long skirts to wade over the mud, shouting down men, waving American flags and placards in the men’s faces. He exhorted the women to speak their mind, to bravely bear the cold, to nag the men into submission. When the strident tactics resulted in shoving, falls, broken noses, visible and copious blood, Bill became even more excited. Women bleeding on the streets of Lawrence to defend their principles against the brutality of the capitalists, who employed them, and the police, who tried to subdue them, was far better than meekly marching down the streets, singing songs and carrying signs.

  The women were accused of having “lots of cunning” and “bad temper.”

  “One police officer can handle ten men,” the district attorney was quoted as saying in The Evening Tribune. “But it takes ten police officers to handle one woman.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” echoed Harry, closing the newspaper. His one woman was sitting at her workbench in the corner of their living room, stitching a roomy panel into a cotton skirt to allow for her expanding belly.

  “What is it about me,” Gina wanted to know without turning around, “that requires ten men to handle and my husband to make such a comment?”

  He came over to her chair, pushed her loose bun to the side, and pressed his lips deeply into the slope of her bare neck. “Husband is trying to be funny.”

  “Divertente? Trying and failing.”

  Five

  IN AN UNPRECEDENTED MOVE, Haywood arranged for six hundred children of the striking women to be publicly taken away from their mothers (he called it being taken out of “harm’s way”) and bussed south to New York City to stay with some well-to-do families for the duration of the strike. The women that agreed to this became even more violent after their children left them.

  Crying children separated from their howling mothers was a public relations disaster for American Woolen and for Lawrence. Mayor Scanlon was urged to break the strike, and though he stated that his aim was “to break the strikers’ heads,” it was nothing but grandstanding, for he did nothing. An incredulous Floyd Russell raged against the mayor’s impotent response. “How long are you going to let this continue? Your city is going bust! No one is working! No one is making any money. You’ve got millions of dollars’ worth of international contracts going unfulfilled because of what’s happening under your fucking windows. You’re destroying Lawrence with your inaction!”

  “Not my inaction—their action!” Scanlon shouted back. “They won’t compromise! You heard Haywood. What am I supposed to do? Shoot the women?”

  “Yes,” Floyd said instantly. “That’s how Napoleon did it.”

  “He shot the women?”

  “He ordered the strikers to be shot, yes.”

  “Not women!”

  “Listen,” the lawyer said defiantly, “they want to work like men, live like men, get paid like men? Fuck like men? Then they should accept being shot like men.”

  American Woolen tried again to negotiate. With Gompers and his AFL long gone, William Wood came to the table with Haywood and offered fifty-four hours and $8.76 a week. Big Bill walked out. He loved the attention. He refused to let the women back down. Though he said the fight was about wages and hours, it was a well-known fact, which he didn’t attempt to hide, that his IWW held union-written contracts in disdain because they encouraged workers to become complacent and abandon the class struggle. He and Smiling Joe continued to advocate for violence as a means to an end, supporting not only a general strike, but the overthrow of American capitalism itself. “Let the workers own the textile mills and set their own wages and hours,” Joe yelled from the podium when Bill grew tired in the late afternoons and Harry stood and watched nearby. “Until that happens, nothing is going to do the trick!”

  With Harry’s help, Haywood raised the funds to feed the strikers. Gina volunteered at the soup kitchen. As long as she didn’t leave the basement of the Corpus Christi Church where she prepared the food, Harry agreed to accept her mild contribution to the war effort. Not Angela. “What do you expect?” Mimoo said to Harry. “Two Sicilian women butting heads like mules. Cooler heads can’t prevail because no one in this town’s got one.”

  Gina baked bread and cooked beans in molasses while the law enforcement and business heavyweights of Lawrence joined in daily condemnation of Big Bill.

  Haywood kept his demands deliberately outrageous and William Wood continued to respond in kind: he said he would go broke before he was blackmailed.

  “Behind raised wages, resumed work, vanished militia, and the whirring looms is the most revolutionary organization in the history of American industry,” thundered the district attorney on the pages of
the Tribune. Floyd Russell, having given up, left town like Gompers.

  The mayor was staying quiet. He was running for reelection the following November. He didn’t want to further incense the public.

  “First in violence, deepest in dirt, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nation,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, a reporter, in The Shame of the Cities.

  The town of Lawrence was crumbling—no work, no orders filled by American Woolen, no retail sales. The town was sliding into anarchy and bankruptcy, with no end to the impasse.

  Something had to give. But what Gina felt as she cooked the beans, and begged Angela to stop marching in the streets, and accompanied Mimoo on the bus to clean their few remaining homes, was that nothing good could possibly come from this.

  Six

  LATE ONE MORNING, at the end of January, Gina was helping the Sodality sisters at St. Vincent’s organize the incoming donations when Big Bill walked into their little mission house across from St. Mary’s rectory. He frightened the nuns and they wouldn’t glance up at him. It took a lot to frighten the nuns. In their spare time they cared for lepers. He scared Gina too, but she was the one he addressed, so she had no choice but to respond. He said it was freezing outside and the marching women were so miserable they were thinking of packing it in for the day and heading home. He couldn’t allow that. Were there any coats or waterproof shoes he could take to keep the women warm and keep them on the streets?

  Gina and the sisters hurried to collect a few dozen warm coverings. It wasn’t enough, but it was a start.

  “Can you help me cart them?” Bill asked. “You’re Harry’s wife, aren’t you?” He brazenly appraised her with his one good eye.

  She nodded as she helped him put the coats and boots into a wheelbarrow.

  “Why is he hiding you? Why are you never by his side? He’s out there every day busting his hide, helping the righteous cause. Why aren’t you supporting the women?”

  Gina didn’t want to tell him the truth. She wanted to tell him nothing.

  “I work here,” she replied tersely. If Harry hadn’t told Bill about the baby, she certainly wasn’t going to. If Harry hadn’t told Bill she worked in the soup kitchen making lunch for the strikers, she wasn’t going to.

  “Are you not on our side?” He glared at her with his one eye.

  “I’m on your side,” she replied in her smallest voice.

  He forgot to turn his good profile to her, such as it was, and left her staring at him full on. She muttered something vapid about looms and missions and her work for the church. All her bravado had left her. She began to understand why her husband couldn’t say no to this man. She was pregnant. She was hardly going to provoke him into an argument. He was completely intimidating.

  “Come and help me,” he said. “It’s nearly lunchtime.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “I make the food. Hot beans. Bread.”

  “Ah. Very good. But today you can help me serve them.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to. My regular girl is out sick. The nuns can spare you for an hour or two, can’t they?”

  “They can’t.”

  The sisters assured Gina they could.

  “I have to speak to Harry first,” Gina muttered.

  “Come, we’ll find him together. Put on your coat.”

  She left with Bill, trying very hard not to stare into the vacant horror show of a socket that once housed his eye. Rumor had it that he had punctured it with a knife while whittling a slingshot when he was eight. She tried to walk on his right side, so he would walk closer to the curb, but Bill had suddenly become less self-conscious about his ocular deficiency. It was windy and cold and ice was falling. Bill wore a tailored gray wool overcoat and didn’t want the mud and slush to spatter it as cars and horses passed by. He kept talking to Gina in an endless harangue, but she pulled her hat over her ears and eyes so she wouldn’t hear him or be forced to look up into his dead milky deformity. She was drowning in her anxiety over heading straight to Union Street after promising Harry she would keep away. Surely he wouldn’t be upset when he learned his boss made her do it. Madame Camilla indeed! The only real money they had was the money this man was paying her husband. From blocks away she could hear the mob, even through her hat and over Bill’s booming voice.

  The crowds were impassable; it was only because she was with him that they were able to push through. He could push through a stone barricade. They distributed the meager coat donations to some women in the picket line in front of Wood Mill and walked through the low iron fence of the Corpus Christi church to the lunch tent.

  “Bill, I really need to speak to my husband,” Gina said. “You said you would go find him?”

  “I said I would go find him,” he repeated to mock her. “Yes, I’m now your fetch boy.”

  “I’ll be glad to go myself. I’ll be right back.”

  He put his hand out. “Stay here. Serve the women. I’ll find him.”

  Her hands were shaking so bad she could barely ladle out the beans into bowls. The gruel kept spilling from the sides, upsetting the women.

  No sooner had Bill left than a dozen or so state troopers appeared out of the human sea to confront her at the cast-iron pot, telling her that if she didn’t want to be arrested for aiding and abetting the criminal elements out and about on the street, she’d better stop what she was doing, and head on home and out of trouble. Finding this to be eminently and blessedly sensible advice, Gina moved away, planning to rush through the back streets to Summer Street. But a hundred shouting women in front of her hot beans ordered her not to move, but to feed them as she had come to do, feed those who were fighting for her rights. The police again commanded her to leave.

  Tempers got short, bodies inched closer.

  Within moments it got so pulsing loud that Gina could scarcely think for the din of enraged noise. All she knew was she wanted out—not now, not later, but thirty minutes ago. She cursed the day Harry ever shook Big Bill’s hand. She cursed the day she took Angela to see Emma Goldman, the fateful day she introduced her to Arturo.

  There was a wall of people between her and anywhere. Big Bill was nowhere to be seen. In the near distance, across Union Street near the red doors of the factory, Gina spotted Angela. She thought she heard Angela’s strident voice, frenzied above the rest. Helplessly Gina looked around for Harry. She wouldn’t be able to explain to him how she had ended up here, in the worst possible place at the worst possible time with cold faces and empty stomachs and flared rage all around. She tried to hide near the police, but most of the direct action was aimed at them. They were the frontline.

  The iron pot was flipped over—by the police? By the protesters?—and hot beans dripped onto the wet slushy pavement, onto her boots and the police boots and the battered footwear of the strikers. There was nowhere for her to run, nowhere to move. No one was going to part the red irate crowd for her so she could run to safety through the alleys.

  Someone grabbed her arm from behind, yanked her sideways. She spun around. It was Harry.

  She started to cry.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted because she wouldn’t have heard him otherwise, although he was standing in front of her. “What the hell are you doing here? I told you . . .”

  “I want to go home!”

  “Gina! God, why did you come here?” They were surrounded on all sides. The tent was shaking on its supports, any minute it was going to come down. He pulled her close for the briefest of moments, then yelled to her to crawl under the table. She saw Angela thirty heads away getting trampled, screaming, shoving, slapping somebody, in desperate trouble herself.

  “Harry, look, Angela . . .”

  “Can’t help her now,” he said, pulling Gina under the table.

  “Angela!” Gina shouted, hoarse, out of breath. Angela didn’t hear.

  Big Bill reappeared with great force. He pu
shed his way past the sticks of the police and confronted Harry. “Come with me,” he yelled, grabbing Harry’s arm. “We need your help.”

  “I can’t, Bill,” Harry shouted back, pulling away. “My wife.”

  Bill didn’t even glance at Gina. “She’ll be fine. She’s safer than the rest of us. Come quick. Vandalism in the grocery store—the coppers are about to arrest Arturo. I need your silver tongue. Come! Quick.”

  Harry stared desperately at Gina. “Go, Harry,” she said. “Go with Bill. Go help Angie.”

  “I’ll be right back,” he said—and was swallowed up by Big Bill and the mob.

  Under the table she curled into a ball, covered her head and closed her eyes. She lay on the dead January grass in a fetal position, facing away from the mob, facing toward the church, praying it would help, that anything would. A gaggle of people caught in the clash barreled in under the table after her. The narrow table was knocked over, the legs broke apart, it fell on their heads, on Gina’s. There was only screaming.

  Behind her there was the sound of assault, fists meeting faces, sticks meeting bodies, black panic, wild confusion. She imagined Milan, long ago, her revered brother Alessandro, hotheaded, impulsive, mule-stubborn, beautiful, dead, vile unrest, horses, policemen, stampede, a knife flying out, a life snuffed out, one life, then another. For who could live bearing the weight of your child’s last moment. Her father couldn’t.

  Popping sounds. Shots? Everybody really screamed. She kept her head covered. More firecracker noise, perhaps return fire? Gina squeezed shut her eyes. Harry, Harry, come back to me, please. Legs, boots, feet, bottoms of coats whooshing by, people falling. She was shoved hard in the back by someone trying to get up, someone else stepped on her ankle trying to get away. Still in a fetal position, she put one hand on her head and the other on her stomach to protect the fragile life barely forming. Another boot landed on her head, on her knuckles. Man, woman? She couldn’t even stand up in her blind terror.

  “Get your fucking head off the ground, lady! Or you’ll get your skull bashed in! Get off the ground!”