Uprising

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

But when they stepped out into the sunshine, she was grinning too. It was hard not to. Yetta felt so free and happy. Jane was waiting for them at the corner.

  And beside her, dressed in as much lace and as many frills as a china doll, was a little girl.

  “I had to bring Harriet,” Jane said, frowning apologetically.

  Bella instantly bent down to Harriet’s level.

  “Hello, Harriet. I’m Bella. How old are you?”

  “I’m this many,” Harriet said, holding up five fingers. She placed her other hand on her head. “And I’m this tall!”

  While the little girl was distracted, Yetta leaned in close and whispered in Jane’s ear, “Won’t you get in trouble if Mrs. Blanck finds out where you’re taking her?”

  “Oh, no,” Jane laughed. “Mrs. Blanck wants her daughters to be modern American girls. I’ve convinced her that suffrage is part of that. I just don’t think she’ll tell her husband.”

  “She should tell him to treat his workers better, too,” Yetta said.

  A shadow crossed Jane’s face. Yetta wasn’t sure if Jane was thinking about her own parents, how her own father had hired strikebreakers and said it didn’t matter if her mother knew or not. Or if Jane was thinking about how it’d been impossible, even working in the Blancks’ house, to find out any information about Triangle that would help the union. Jane’s sleuthing efforts had completely failed.

  “Mr. Blanck wouldn’t listen to anything his wife said about his business,” Jane said. “They’re totally different worlds, his work and his home.” She grimaced. “He’s actually a really good father. A lot better than mine ever was.”

  Yetta didn’t want to think about Mr. Blanck or Jane’s father today. She was actually glad when Harriet piped up self-importantly, “Millicent got to go to a birthday party, but I get to go to a parade.”

  “That’s right,” Jane said, patting Harriet’s shoulder. “But first, I need to introduce you to my other friend. Yetta, this is Harriet. Harriet, this is Yetta.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” Harriet said carefully, looking to Jane for approval.

  “Uh, yeah. Me, too,” Yetta said. Then, to prove that socialist, suffragist immigrants could also have manners, she added, “Jane’s told us a lot about you.”

  “That’s Mademoiselle Michaud to her,” Jane corrected.

  But Harriet was already clapping her hands, crying out, “Bella and Yetta and Jane! Bella and Yetta and Jane!”

  Yetta leaned close again and whispered to Jane, “Will she do this all the way to Fifth Avenue?”

  “We’ll take the trolley,” Jane whispered back, “so we get there faster.”

  Harriet was actually still chanting when they climbed down from the trolley, into the throngs of people milling around on the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue. But Yetta could easily tune out the little girl’s singsong in all the noise of the crowd.

  “Can you believe all these people want women to vote?” she marveled to Bella. “This is for us! They want us to have a voice!”

  Policemen cleared the street, and then the parade began. Row after row of women dressed in white carried huge signs: VOTES FOR WOMEN; NEW YORKERS FOR SUFFRAGE; POLITICS MAY BE DIRTY, BUT WOMEN ARE GOOD AT CLEANING UP AFTER MEN!

  Between the rows of marchers, cars full of even more suffragists glided along, draped in yellow bunting and decorated with jonquils and daisies. The cars made Yetta think of the strikers’ automobile parade, her own moment of glory.

  “I was in a parade like this once,” Yetta told Harriet, because Jane and Bella already knew. “I rode in one of the cars.”

  Harriet blinked up at her.

  “You must be really portant,” she said.

  “When we can vote, we’ll all be important,” Jane said.

  Across the street, a small group of men were jeering, “Go home and wash the dishes!” “Does your husband know where you are?” “I’d just as soon let my dog vote!” Yetta wanted to rush across the street and tell them off Why don’t you wash your own dishes? Does your wife know where you are? I bet your dog could vote better than you do!

  Then she noticed that there was another group on the sidelines, a group of women, holding up signs that said, NO VOTES FOR WOMEN!; NO TO SUFFRAGE; KEEP THE FAIRER SEX ABOVE THE FRAY! She nudged Jane and muttered, “Do those signs say what I think they say?” She was hoping that her reading skills had just failed her. “Why would any woman not want to vote?”

  Jane winced.

  “There’s a whole club, the New York Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage,” she said. “I read about it in the newspaper. They say women voting would destroy family life, or just be unnecessary, because women would always vote exactly like their husbands or fathers. But really”—she was carefully not looking at Bella or Yetta or Harriet— “they don’t want their servants to have a vote. They don’t want female immigrants voting.”

  Yetta felt her face burning. She watched a woman passing through the crowd, handing out fliers that said suffrage now! in big print at the top. Yetta shoved her way through the crowd and grabbed the woman’s wrist.

  “How can I join your cause?” Yetta begged. “How can I help?”

  The woman jerked back a little in surprise, but she spoke firmly as she moved on through the crowd.

  “We meet the second and fourth Thursday afternoons of every month at—”

  “I can’t meet on a Thursday afternoon,” Yetta said. “I work. I’m a shirtwaist girl.”

  The woman stopped.

  “A shirtwaist girl? Were you in the strike?”

  “Yes. Till the very end.”

  The woman was looking at her with respect now— respect and sympathy.

  “Then—here. Help me pass out these flyers,” the woman said, handing her a stack. “And next year—if we don’t have the vote by then—next year, come back and we’ll put you in the parade!”

  Yetta gave out the flyers until they were all gone. Then she found her way back to her friends.

  “When women have the vote, fathers will want to send their daughters to college, just like boys,” Jane was saying as the last of the parade went by.

  “And girls won’t feel like they can’t go into banks, like they have to hand over all their money to the men in their family,” Bella said.

  “And we’ll vote to make work fair,” Yetta added.

  Jane glanced warningly down at Harriet, clearly trying to remind Yetta that she couldn’t say too much in front of the little girl.

  “What do you think will happen when women can vote?” Jane asked the girl, to distract her. Harriet tilted her head to the side, considering.

  “I’ll get a pony for my birthday,” she said, as if “women getting to vote” was just another way of saying “wishing.” “And the pony will have wings, and I’ll ride that pony right up to the sun, and the sun will give me flowers. . . .”

  “It’s fun to daydream, isn’t it?” Bella said, smiling.

  But we’re not just daydreaming, telling ourselves fairy tales, playing little-girl let’s-pretend, Yetta reminded herself. Please, God, let it someday be true! Someday we really will be able to vote. Someday Triangle will be a closed union shop. And someday I won’t be so restless. Someday I’ll be able to sit back and say, “Yes, everything worked out....” Hope surged in Yetta for all those somedays, which seemed so far off. At least she knew a date for one hope: Next year, she would march in the suffrage parade.

  Jane

  Jane leaned against the side of the Asch Building waiting for Yetta and Bella to come out after work. It was November now: The summer had melted away in a blur of trips to the beach with Millicent and Harriet, reading lessons and hot nights lying on the tenement fire escape with Yetta and Bella, ice cream cones shared three ways because they only had enough money for one. Autumn blew in with a flurry of falling leaves, and Jane had begun playing a memory game with herself: A year ago at this time, I refused to get out of bed to go watch Wilbur Wright’s aeroplane. A year ago, I hadn’
t even met Yetta. A year ago, Eleanor Kensington asked me if I wanted to join the picket line with the strikers.... She knew Yetta and Bella played a similar type of game, but Bella’s anniversaries were about death and disappearance, and Yetta’s only reminded her of disappointment.

  “Y-you’re Yetta’s friend, aren’t you?” someone stuttered nearby. Jane turned and recognized the chestnut hair: It was Charles Livingston, the law student Yetta had harassed back in the spring. “Tell Yetta I have an answer now.”

  “An answer?”

  He nodded impatiently.

  “She asked about whether the strikers had any legal recourse if the company violated the terms of the strike agreement.”

  Jane didn’t remember Yetta asking the question in quite those words.

  “And?” she prompted.

  “It was just a verbal agreement, as far as I can tell. Nothing was put in writing. So—there’s nothing the strikers can do. Except go out on strike again of course.” He started to turn away again, such an odd boy. Then, as if remembering something else, he turned back. “But one of my professors did write to the city building department complaining about the safety conditions he’d seen at Triangle. So that’s something at least.”

  Safety conditions? Jane couldn’t imagine the city building department caring. In the tenements she’d seen rusty pipes hanging out from the wall, children falling from half-demolished buildings, peddlers who scooped out food with the same hand they coughed into. And of course, the dead horse in the street. By comparison, Triangle was a marvel, a modern factory—that was something Bella and Yetta bragged about.

  “What took you so long to answer Yetta’s question?” she asked Charles.

  “Well, last year I was just a first-year, so I was too scared of my professors to ask anything. And then I went to Europe over the summer—London, Paris, Rome, all the usual places. And then when I got back, they gave us so much homework right away that I was barely keeping up. But I’m a second-year now, so I’m getting better at figuring out what I really need to know.”

  Jane barely listened after he said the word “Europe,” because it made her remember the trip Eleanor Kensington had been planning. If Jane hadn’t run away from home, maybe right now she, too, would be slipping mention of the Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum or the Elgin Marbles into casual conversation. For a moment she felt a pang, but then she noticed the reediness in Charles Livingston’s voice.

  Such a callow, inexperienced youth, she thought. And last November I was even worse. . . .

  “Thank you for your help,” Jane said. “Yetta will appreciate your efforts.”

  Though that probably wasn’t true, Jane reflected. It was more likely that Yetta would storm and fret and fume that there must be something the Triangle workers could do. Maybe if they all wrote letters to the city ... ?

  Jane smiled with fondness for her fervent friend as Charles Livingston nodded and reluctantly moved away. She leaned back against the building and idly watched the traffic. A year ago, she would have been thinking, Is that car grander than ours? Is that chauffeur’s uniform smarter than Mr. Corrigan’s? How about that lady’s hat—oh, dear, is that the latest fashion? Something new that I didn’t know about? I must get a hat like that! Now she didn’t care about cars or chauffeur’s uniforms, and she was wearing a hat that she and her friends had put together from bits and scraps and other women’s cast-offs.

  One of the cars in the street slowed down and pulled up to the curb. The chauffeur stepped out, shielding his eyes against the sunset. His car was unfamiliar, his uniform was unfamiliar, but there was something about the way he stood ... He turned, and Jane caught a glimpse of a bushy gray moustache.

  It was Mr. Corrigan, her father’s chauffeur.

  Ever since she’d run away, ever since she’d taken the job as the Blancks’ governess, Jane had feared that someone from her old life would spot her, report her, drag her back home. But even wealthy Jewish immigrants like the Blancks patronized few of the same stores and restaurants and ice cream parlors as Jane’s former friends; they didn’t go to any of the same resorts or tourist hotels or beaches. And Jane knew her old friends’ routines. She didn’t take Harriet and Millicent to Macy’s in the mornings when her old friends did their shopping; she didn’t go to Central Park in the afternoon when they might be out bicycling. She watched the newspapers and made sure she wasn’t anywhere near the theater or the opera house when there were big performances. Even at the suffrage parade she’d kept an eye out, ready to duck behind a street light or a sign post if she saw Eleanor Kensington or any of that crowd.

  She’d never thought to worry about being spotted near Triangle by her father’s chauffeur.

  Instantly she whipped around, hiding her face from the street. Had he seen her? She decided to slip inside the Triangle factory doors just in case, but the crowd was thick on the sidewalk around her. Maybe the other direction would work better. ... She turned around, and came face to face with Mr. Corrigan.

  “Miss Wellington,” he whispered.

  He put his hands on her shoulders, stopping just short of pulling her into a hug. He had tears in his eyes.

  “Faith and begorra, miss! I’ve been looking for you for months!”

  “Really?” Jane said. “My father told you to—”

  She saw the truth in Mr. Corrigan’s eyes: Her father had had nothing to do with it. Jane started to turn away, but Mr. Corrigan tightened his grip on her shoulders.

  “Now, don’t be like that! Don’t get lost again!”

  “I haven’t been lost,” Jane said coldly. “I know exactly where I am.”

  Mr. Corrigan didn’t even flinch. Ever the obedient servant, he wouldn’t have flinched if she’d slapped him.

  “I know your father’s worried about you, because he has bags under his eyes and he’s grumpier than ever,” he said apologetically. “But, see, he told everyone that you’re off visiting your aunt in Chicago. So that when you came home, your reputation wouldn’t be ruined, you know? But, having said that, he couldn’t go around inquiring about where you were.”

  Jane saw how it was, the intricacy of the lies that her father and society would consider necessary. That would be necessary. A girl who ran away from home would be ruined no matter where she went or what she did; everyone would assume that she’d surrendered her virtue, whether she actually had or not. So Jane’s father had chosen to protect her reputation above all else.

  Oh, yes—better to protect my reputation than to protect me, she thought bitterly. I was lying in the street on rotting horseflesh, set upon by pickpockets who might have killed me just for the ring on my finger! And my father wasn’t even trying to find me!

  Jane remembered that she hadn’t needed protection. She’d escaped from the pickpockets all by herself. With Bella and Yetta’s help, she’d managed to live on her own for the past nine months. She tossed her head haughtily.

  “I’ve been quite all right without my father’s concern,” she said.

  Mr. Corrigan’s eyes seemed to be taking in the cheap quality of her hat, the threadbare fingertips of her gloves. She wouldn’t have suspected that he was a man who knew about fashion, but she wondered if he could see that the blue serge she was wearing again was last season’s dress. She even wondered if he could tell that, like Yetta, she now had holes in the soles of her boots.

  “I’m sure your father thought that you’d come back home quickly,” Mr. Corrigan said. “That a day or two would have been enough to—”

  “What? Break my spirit?” Jane asked.

  “Bring you to your senses,” Mr. Corrigan finished in an even tone. “And maybe he did hire detectives, privately, that I don’t know about.”

  “Not very good ones, obviously,” Jane sneered. Though, she reflected, who would have been able to predict that she’d go live in the slums? That she’d work as a servant for immigrants? That she’d be happy?

  “Come home,” Mr. Corrigan said. “I’m sure your father will find it in his he
art to forgive you.”

  He bowed his head humbly, a servant presuming to speak for his master.

  “Forgive me? Forgive me?” Jane felt a sudden surge of outrage, as powerful as the indignation that Yetta seemed to carry around all the time. “He’s the one who should be begging my forgiveness, for using me and my well-being as an excuse for exploiting his workers, for hiring strikebreakers to beat up his own employees, for . . . for exploiting you, Mr. Corrigan. Haven’t you noticed that he’s exploiting you? My father owes an apology to all of society, for what he is and what he does—”

  “Now, listen here, young lady.” Mr. Corrigan’s eyes flashed. “I would give my eyeteeth to get my daughters even a fraction of the advantages that you’ve had. Just to let them go to one of those fancy balls . . . They could live on that the rest of their lives. Maybe I would have even sold my soul to the devil to have them trade places with you, had the devil given me the opportunity, God protect my poor, weak soul from such temptation.” He crossed himself, as if he were afraid the devil was listening. “You don’t know what it’s like for your father, and you his only child . . .”

  Jane broke her gaze away from Mr. Corrigan’s and stared out into the street. She was beginning to feel just the slightest twinge of doubt. What if her father weren’t quite as bad as she thought? What if she were wrong?

  Her eyes fell on the shiny car Mr. Corrigan had left parked by the curb.

  “My father couldn’t be too heartbroken if he had time to go out and buy a new car,” Jane said, “and to outfit you in a new uniform . . . I’ll warrant, he hasn’t missed a single party since I’ve been gone, hasn’t turned down a single social engagement!”

  “He had to keep up appearances,” Mr. Corrigan said, but it was like he was begging again, like Jane had the upper hand despite her ragged clothes.

  “You know how it is to be a father,” Jane said. “I’ll tell you how it is to be a girl. I’m a servant now—me! A servant! All day long, I’m subject to the whims of a five-year-old and a twelve-year-old and a woman who can barely speak English. I look at a bun in a bakery window and I think, ‘Can I afford to buy that? What else would I have to give up if I buy that bun?’ But it’s my decision whether I buy that bun or a piece of lace for my dress or a book that I can stay up all night to read, if I want to. It’s my own money, and I’m beholden to nobody! I’m freer now than I was when I was going to all those fancy parties, and Miss Milhouse was telling me what to wear and how to do my hair and whom to be nice to and how to act and how to think—”