Bellagrand: A Novel (6 page)

“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 cheek.

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.

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?