Bellagrand: A Novel Read online

  “I need justice more.”

  “Harry doesn’t want me involved. What am I going to do? Go against his wishes?”

  “I’m family!” yelled Angela. “You’re not going to stand by your own family?”

  “Angie, don’t go! He’s my family, too. And we’re having a baby. Why can’t you understand?”

  “Oh, I understand. I understand being pushed away.”

  “Ask Pam to go.”

  “Lester hates Pam after she nearly lost her hand at the double loom and made such a stink about it. But he likes you. He’s apt to give in to you.”

  “Did he give in to me this morning?” Gina shook her head. “Harry said no.”

  “Look at you, all your feminist virtues into the trash as soon as there’s a hint of trouble!”

  “It’s because there’s trouble that he’s telling me to keep out of it.”

  “And you’re listening. What happened to the right to your own soul?”

  “We’re having a baby!”

  “This is social change. Progress! The revolution. It’s all the things we’ve been talking about finally carried into action. Are you really going to stand idly by while the blood of other men and women is spilled onto your sidewalk?”

  “Angela, maybe you don’t hear yourself, but you’re making my argument for me. The time for radical action is not when I’m pregnant.”

  “History is not going to stand still for your baby, Gina.”

  “Well, then, I’ll just hop on the next train if it’s all the same to you. There seems to be a revolution every year.”

  They stopped speaking. Angela stormed out, and Gina didn’t go with her the next morning. In a crowd of women, Angela went by herself to confront Lester Evans.

  It couldn’t have gone less well. The manager fired Angela then and there. He told her that if she ever harassed him in front of his mill again, he’d have her arrested and thrown in jail. Through a megaphone he informed the fifty women shouting behind her that unless they showed up for work the following morning, they would also be fired. “And Miss LoPizo, please tell Miss Attaviano,” he added, “that unless she shows up for work, she too will be fired with all the rest.”

  “She’s a married woman, now, Mr. Evans,” shouted Angela. “She doesn’t answer to you or to me. She answers to her husband. And he works for Bill Haywood.”

  “Then too bad for her being associated with all those filthy Wobblies,” said Evans. “Too bad for all of you. Now get away from my factory.”

  Gina was outraged. “I didn’t go with you and that’s how you punish me?” she said to Angela. “By making me lose my job? I’m going to work. I don’t know how you’re planning to pay your rent, but in this house we work for a living.”

  “Gina, this isn’t punishment. It’s war. We have to fight.”

  “I can’t and I won’t.”

  “You can either stand with your family and your women and your fellow workers fighting for your wages, or you can break the line, but then no one in this town will ever speak to you again. Because we don’t talk to scabs,” Angela said. “Not even family scabs. Tell her, Arturo.”

  “We don’t talk to scabs,” said Arturo.

  “Get out of my house,” said Gina. “Where is Harry?”

  “Striking!”

  “How can he strike? He doesn’t work at the mills!”

  “Organizing the strikers then,” Arturo said. “Going door to door with Joe. Wiring telegrams to Big Bill telling him he’s urgently needed in Lawrence. Calling Mother Jones. Calling Emma Goldman. Your husband,” he went on with pomposity, “is fighting for our side. Like you should be doing.”

  “I thought I told you to get out of my house, Arturo.”

  “Gina, this strike is for you, too. The full-time wages of mill employees are inadequate for a family.”

  Gina pointedly said nothing. Angela cleared her throat. “Actually, Arturo,” she said, “Gina makes quite a decent wage working in the mending room.” She averted her eyes. “Yes, a generous wage for skilled labor. But even you, Gia, are now making less because they cut your salary.”

  “They didn’t cut my salary. They cut my hours.”

  “You were working too much.”

  “Who decides this—you? I needed the money,” Gina said. “I didn’t want to work less, and I don’t want what’s not due me. I’m a grown-up.” She felt weak, she needed to lie down. “I’m responsible for my own choices. I want to work.”

  “The IWW will fully support your efforts for larger pay and fewer hours.”

  “Arturo, I thought I told you to leave!”

  “If he goes, I go,” said Angela.

  Folding her arms, Gina stared them both down.

  “Wait till Mimoo hears about this!”

  “You don’t want to know what Mimoo thinks about this, Angie,” said Gina.

  “I can’t wait to ask her. She always supports me.”

  “Not in folly.”

  “This isn’t folly!”

  “Well, too bad she can’t hear about it because, oh, that’s right—she’s still at work.”

  “Wait till Salvo hears.”

  “He’s also working. And staying far away.”

  “Sometimes,” Arturo said, “you’ve got to not work to fight for what is right.”

  “Get out!”

  “Let’s go, Arturo,” said Angela. “I know where we’re not wanted.”

  That night Harry told Gina what happened when he spoke with Mother Jones. Harry and Joe made a personal plea to the woman to join the coming strike, but she, despite being co-president and co-founder of the IWW with Big Bill, refused to stand with her own fair sex, pronouncing Lawrence a city headed for disaster. She would not support the women’s right not to return to their slave wages. She said all her life she had petitioned for men, not women. “Men work,” she told Harry. “Women work for the family.” Before she ended the conversation she said that Big Bill, whom she had known for years, was a cheap tightfist of a man, but Harry should ask him for a raise so his wife, too, could stay at home.

  Gina was pretending to read and only half-listening. “Oh yeah? What did Bill say about that?”

  “Publicly, not a word,” Harry replied. “But to us he said he will not rest until that traitor is purged from the IWW for good.”

  “I mean about the raise.”

  “I didn’t ask him.”

  Gina shrugged her indifference. “Then all I want to know is whether come seven-thirty tomorrow morning I’m going to the mending room.”

  Harry sat quietly. “No,” he said at last. “You aren’t.”

  “So we’re deciding to lose me my job? My easy, well-paying, skilled-labor job that other women wait years to get?”

  “I don’t want you to lose it,” he said. “But you were going to quit anyway when the baby came . . .”

  “Seven months from now.”

  “So, it’ll be a little sooner than we planned. The baby came a little sooner than we planned. It’ll all work out. You’ll see.”

  “If I can’t work, then I’m going on the streets, Harry. With Angela, Pam, Dona, Elda. I have to, or they’ll never forgive me.”

  “You can’t,” he said. “Gestation keeps you from other activities ending in tion. Like demonstration. It’s pandemonium out there.”

  “It’s chaos in here, too. How do you propose we pay the rent? Buy food? Put money into the electric lamp you’re sitting by as you write your slogans and glue your pamphlets?”

  “Mimoo is working,” Harry said.

  “Don’t even think about my money,” Mimoo bellowed from upstairs. “Pretend it doesn’t exist.” How did her mother have such good hearing now, and yet was deaf when you tried to ask her all the important questions?

  They lowered their voices.

  “We’ll use kerosene if we can’t afford the electricity,” Harry said. “And Big Bill pays me.”

  “Are you sure about that? I haven’t seen anything since before Christmas.” />
  “Yes. We’ll be fine. The strike will last but a few days. A week at most. I know how these things shake out. The factory will cave. William Wood needs to make money. The mill must operate. Production can’t stop. They always cave when somebody has to make money.”

  “No kidding,” said Gina. “Someone like me. Can I cave?”

  Three

  AFTER GINA LOST HER JOB, she went to work with her mother cleaning houses in Prospect Hill while Arturo and Joe organized rolling walkouts across the mills to disrupt operations as much as possible. They knew the looms needed (wo)manning, and without an adequate workforce, fabrics would not be made, and 600,000 pounds of sheep fleece would remain unspun.

  Smiling Joe, no stranger to oratory, collected a thousand women right on the Common, hopped up on a soggy bench, and started shouting Harry-written bromides. “If one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, another man has a dollar he didn’t get!” One minute it was about two unpaid hours, the next it was about equality and economic freedom and brotherhood of man.

  The ladies got revved up like little runarounds after hearing Joe yell for an hour. The next morning, two thousand women descended on Essex and Union. By the third morning, there were three thousand women on the streets. They interlocked arms and paraded on Merrimack and Water, across the bridges, and down Broadway. They hurled stones through mill windows, chanted and yelled, and exhorted all the workers to walk off their jobs.

  Big Bill arrived for a brief visit. He praised Joe’s and Arturo’s efforts, commended Harry’s speechifying, approved of the protesting women, advised Joe and Arturo to urge them to be louder and more violent, and went on a speaking tour around the country lauding the IWW’s efforts in the Lawrence strike.

  The walkouts rolled on through all eight mills in Lawrence. By the end of the second week, ten thousand people, mostly women and their children, were on the streets. The looms stopped spinning completely.

  When Joe saw how many women were in his corner, he raised his demands, calling for a blanket fifteen percent increase in wages, double overtime pay, and a fifty-three-hour week. It wasn’t just about American Woolen anymore.

  Harry built Joe a special platform, four feet off the ground, which he and Arturo set up on the Common. Arturo extravagantly praised Harry’s work. “You write speeches and build platforms? Where did you learn to do that, Harvard man? You’re like the future hero Engels was talking about. You can be an architect for an hour, but also push a wheelbarrow, if need be. I’m looking at you, Harold Barrington, and the future is here.”

  Onto Harry’s platform, Joe hopped every day and denounced the mill owners, shouting Harry’s penned words until he was hoarse.

  “Labor produces all wealth! All wealth belongs to the producer thereof!”

  The mills shuttered their doors. No one was reporting to work. Other businesses were forced to close. The unstoppable mobs frightened the shop owners. Now that the women weren’t working and weren’t getting paid, no one was buying things.

  “Complete demolition of social and economic conditions is the only salvation of the working classes!”

  In desperation, American Woolen and the Lawrence Association of Businesses called on Mayor Scanlon to resolve things. The mayor did the only thing he could think of: he brought in additional police protection. The chief of police himself showed up on Union Street and warned the women that if they didn’t get off the streets and stop loitering, they’d be arrested, “each and every bloody one of you,” and dispersed through the minimum-security prisons of Massachusetts. The women nearly trampled him to death. Afterward, Angela ran to City Hall’s research room to look up “loitering” in the legal code. It was defined as “standing still in the public square.” In defiance, the women began to march back and forth on Union Street in the reformed moving picket line. The police had to devise another way to get the ladies off the streets.

  Lawrence brought in another reinforcement division from nearby Andover and arrested thousands of strikers, most of them kicking and screaming, for disturbing the peace. The city didn’t have the space to jail three hundred women, much less ten thousand livid women. The clogging up of the courts was prohibitively expensive and socially debilitating. As soon as they were released, the women returned to the picket lines, parading and chanting in a singsong day in and day out, “We want bread, but we want roses too!”

  All women, that is, but an anxious and defenseless Gina, who, wishing only for bread, bowed her head and walked the other way to St. Vincent de Paul’s to spin for pennies or up to Prospect Hill with Mimoo to dust for the affluent.

  Emma Goldman, not to remain in the shadows of Mother Jones’s limelight, decided to come to Lawrence and weigh in on her nemesis’s well-publicized comments by giving her own impassioned speech atop Harry’s platform. Of course, she said, the most prominent woman socialist in the country wanted ever stronger chains of bondage for women. In the middle of freezing January, Goldman yelled that free love was the only way out for women because freedom and equality and justice for women were utterly incompatible with marriage. Goldman declared that unlike certain others she would not mention by name, she would gladly stand in the cold with the Lawrence strikers.

  When Big Bill, over in Montana, heard what Emma Goldman was saying, he telegraphed Harry to inform him that if he ever saw Emma Goldman on the streets of Lawrence he would suffocate her with his bare hands. The last thing the IWW wanted was Goldman in the middle of a striking city advocating for freedom from state regulation! The IWW advocated total state control, not freedom from it. Like Mother Jones, though for different reasons, Emma Goldman was detrimental to the strikers’ cause.

  “Gina, my faithful wife, tell me something,” Harry said after he related the day’s events. “Your beloved Emma Goldman was yelling in the freezing rain, yet I couldn’t help but notice that you were nowhere to be found.”

  “You told me to stay inside,” she replied, arranging a white poster board on the dining table. “I’m being a good wife.” Lightly she smiled. “I have no time for free love in the freezing rain.”

  “Very wise. What in the world are you doing?”

  She had been making placards. equality now! justice now! fair wages now!

  “I’m helping Angie.”

  “I know why you’re doing it.” He took away her black paintbrush. “I don’t want you to appease her.”

  “I told her I would.” She reached for the brush. “Make amends for before.”

  “Tell her you’ll make amends by feeding her. Because it all starts with the placards. The next thing you know you’re marching to ‘The Marseillaise’ and defeating Britain. It’s dangerous out there.”

  She took the brush from him. “I’m not going out, tesoro. I’m just making signs.”

  “You’re going to St. Vincent’s, aren’t you?”

  “It’s on Haverhill. The other way.” She didn’t want to remind him, as if he needed reminding, that their Victorian on Summer Street was just half a block from the Common where Joe Ettor shouted twice a day every day, and four blocks from Essex and Union, a long lobbed softball away from all the trouble. She had no business being out, and they both knew it. But what choice did she have? Mimoo’s seven houses to clean were not enough to cover their bills, and new cleaning work was scarce with so many women competing for the only viable employment. At least St. Vincent’s paid her a tiny wage for sewing, ironing, sorting donations, and spinning, and they gave her food from their pantry, as if she herself were now one of the people in desperate need of help.

  Harry stood close, twisting the curls of her hair around his fingers. “I’m glad we don’t meet here anymore,” he said. “Now we go to talk nonsense at Arturo’s. It’s better. Our house is quieter. Nicer.”

  “Yes, here is quieter. Because you’re never here. You’re always there, on Lowell, in that boiling cauldron of plotting. How is that better?”

  “We have to keep planning. But when I come home, it’s quiet.” He bent to her ch
eek.

  She raised her face to him. “If you’re just planning, I’m just making art.”

  Harry watched her paint in block letters. “I have to go out there,” he said. “I’m on the strike committee. And Bill’s paying me. I have to go out there so you don’t have to. Just like Mother Jones said.”

  “Oh, so now we listen to her. Some feminist I am.”

  “Some feminist indeed.” Leaning down, he patted her belly.

  She kissed him. “I won’t go out there, mio amore. Only to clean and spin.”

  “Promise?” He blinked anxiously.

  “Of course.” She blinked anxiously back.

  She prayed for her child, for her husband, for her mother, for the strike to be over. Sometimes not in that order. Angela barely spoke to her. The placards weren’t sufficient atonement.

  Gina hated being broke, hated having no money. The bills piled up. Rent was coming due in February, the light bill. Food needed to be bought. They could eat her stewed tomatoes for only so long. Eventually they’d need bread, pasta. Harry might not care about mundane things like food on the table, but Gina did. She was too poor for idealism.

  Four

  THE LAWRENCE TEXTILE BOARD of directors brought in Floyd Russell, a whip-smart lawyer from Boston, to defend themselves against an association with police brutality. Apparently it was bad publicity to spray women with fire hoses to disperse them. A no-nonsense man, Floyd said, “Brutality? But they’re still on the street! This ridiculous mess should’ve been stopped weeks ago. The police should’ve been instructed to shoot. That’s how successful leaders handle things.”

  But the police didn’t shoot. They only threatened to shoot. The state militia arrived to boost their numbers because the striking crowds kept swelling, to fifteen thousand, to twenty.

  “Twenty thousand angry screaming women,” Harry said to Gina over one tense dinner of boiled beans and artichokes. “I can barely handle just one.”

  “When have I screamed at you, marito?”

  “Once you wanted to.”

  She remembered that one time. “Not the same.”

  He agreed that it wasn’t.