Uprising (10 page)

The scabs pretended not to hear. They mostly cowered, keeping their eyes on the ground. They were so rabbity, Yetta could almost feel sorry for them.

Then Yetta noticed a different group of women behind the police and scabs. These women wore stoles of fur or feathers; their dresses were tawdry colors—reds and oranges and yellows. The dresses were also oddly shaped: slit up the sides, with plunging necklines in the front and back. And the women's faces were heavily painted, every pockmark and blemish coated, every cheek and lip unnaturally reddened. Yetta had never seen anyone like this before. She'd only heard stories.

Are they . . . prostitutes? Yetta wondered. What are prostitutes doing here?

“Leave the workers alone!” one of the women screamed, slamming her fist directly into Yetta's jaw.

Yetta's brain was still trying to make sense of what she was seeing: She was working on a theory that maybe these women were apparitions, hallucinations brought on by her having skipped breakfast. So it took her even longer to accept that this woman was actually
touching
her—punching, more precisely. Punching and kicking and yanking at her hair . . . Yetta fell to the ground, her sign cracking on the pavement.

“Stop!” she cried, trying to push the woman off her.

But the woman pulled out Yetta's own hat pin, from Rahel's beautiful hat, and stabbed it into Yetta's arm. Yetta squirmed away and struggled to stand up, but another woman shoved her down again.

“Help!” Yetta screamed, but all the other strikers were suffering punches and kicks and pinches too. Yetta had seen plenty of little boys fighting in the street—even men throwing punches. But she'd never been in a fight like this herself, never known how much it would hurt. Her eyes stung, and she wasn't sure if it was from tears or blood. She kept trying to push the women away, but they were right back at her, right away, punch after punch after punch. . . .

“That's enough!”

It was a policeman, pulling the women off Yetta.

“I should say so!” Yetta said indignantly. “Thank you for finally—”

But the policeman was clamping handcuffs onto Yetta's wrists, growling into her bloody face, “You're under arrest.”

With his beefy hand wrapped tightly around Yetta's arm, holding her still, he turned toward the prostitutes.

“You're free to go,” he told them. The prostitutes straightened their dresses, patted their hair back into place. One of them blew a kiss to the policeman.

“Wait a minute! That's not fair!” Yetta complained. “They attacked me! I didn't do anything to them! Look— which of us is bleeding?”

The policeman jerked on the handcuffs, making them rub against Yetta's sore wrists.

“You're a striker, aren't you?” He asked.

“Yes, but—”

The policeman looked back and forth between Yetta and the prostitutes.

“Then I can't see much difference.”

Yetta pushed a blood-soaked strand of hair out of her eyes. She bent down and retrieved Rahel's formerly fine hat,
now mashed beyond recognition. The ostrich feather was nowhere to be seen.

“We have a right to strike!” she protested. “I haven't committed a single illegal act! Tell me—what am I under arrest for?”

The policeman yanked her toward the police wagon.

“Disorderly conduct. Now, shut up, or you'll be charged with being rude to a police officer too,” he said. He lifted the club he'd used to break up the fight.
“And
I'll beat you myself!”

So you're admitting those women beat me!
Yetta wanted to say. But she clamped her lips together. That hurt too, because they were bloody and already beginning to swell.

Yetta's fellow strikers stood in sad little clumps by the police wagon. Anna's skirt was in shreds; Rosaria's right eye was swollen shut. Policemen were shoving the girls into the wagon without regard to their injuries. Yetta fought against the policeman holding her arm; she struggled to turn back toward the prostitutes.

“Why?” she yelled at the heavily painted women. “Why do you care about our strike?”

One woman began to laugh, revealing the toothless mouth behind her too-red lips.

“Money, of course,” she cackled. “Don't you know anything? In America, money is God.”

The policeman slammed his club against Yetta's head, and everything went dark.

•  •  •

Iron bars.

That was the first thing Yetta saw when she opened her eyes. Someone was dabbing at the wound on the side of her head with a cloth. Someone was whispering, “Yetta, oh,
please, Yetta, wake up..... But there were iron bars in front of her and a filthy stone floor and dark shapes moving across the floor. . . . Were those rats?

Yetta struggled to sit up. The iron bars wavered; she was about to black out again.

“Shh, shh,” a soft voice said. “Take it easy. Just rest.”

Yetta put her head back down, and her view steadied again. She was lying on a bare wood plank, but one of the other girls had stuffed her jacket under Yetta's head. Anna and Rosaria and a few of the others were crouched around her. Gradually, Yetta found that she could focus on their faces.

“Getting blood on your coat,” Yetta murmured.

“That doesn't matter. It's ripped to ruins anyway. And we're in jail, so what good is a stupid coat?” Anna gave a laugh that turned midway into a near sob.

Yetta forced herself to sit up; she forced her eyes to keep a steady gaze on the other girls, not the iron bars.

“We'll be all right,” she said. “We didn't do anything wrong. They can't keep us here.”

“They kept my father in prison in Russia,” another girl, Surka, said. “They didn't even tell him what he was charged with until he'd been there three years.”

“That was Russia,” Yetta said. “This is America.”

At the other end of the jail cell, a ragged old woman began to laugh crazily, the sound pouring out of her mouth like a taunt. Or torture.

“She's been doing that since we got here,” Anna whispered.

Yetta was noticing the other women in the cell now-scary women with gaunt, blank faces, sores where their mouths should be, ragged clothes that looked to be mostly
held together with dirt. Or maybe they weren't actually wearing any clothes, just the filth.

And then she heard footsteps coming down the hallway outside the jail cell.

“Strikers!” a man's voice boomed out, echoing off the stone. “Your fines are paid!”

His key scraped in the lock. Yetta found she could scramble up with the others, though the wound on the side of her head throbbed and her whole body ached.

Rahel was waiting beside the jailer on the other side of the iron door.

“Oh, Yetta!” she cried, wrapping her arms around her sister. “I was so scared for you—”

“Tell your sister to stay off picket lines, then,” the jailer growled.

Yetta wanted to fling back a retort: maybe “Tell the bosses to treat us fairly, and I will!”; maybe “Tell your policemen to arrest the right people next time!” But she could only bury her face in her sister's shoulder, let her sister guide her away from those iron bars and the rats and the crazy laughing woman and the women dressed in filth.

“How did . . . how could you pay the fine?” Yetta murmured when they were back out on the street.

“Union money,” Rahel said. “And they gave me nickels for carfare, too, so we won't have to walk home. The trolley stop's right up there on the corner—can you make it that far?”

Around her, the other girls nodded wearily. Yetta was working something out in her head.

“The union doesn't have much money,” she said. “If we spend it on carfare, we won't have any left for keeping the strike going. My legs aren't bad, just my head. I'll walk.”

“But—” Rahel started.

“I'm walking too,” Anna said.

“Me, too,” Rosaria said.

“And me,” Surka said.

In the end, they all did, one bedraggled, bloodied crew. Everyone on the sidewalk stared and whispered. Yetta wished they still had their picket signs.

“We're Triangle workers,” she explained to some of the people who stared the most. “We're on strike. This is what happened.”

The strike meant something different now. It wasn't just standing out in the sunshine carrying a sign, wearing a fine hat, looking pretty. It was more like . . .

Like a war.

Rahel kept her arm around Yetta's waist, holding her up, holding her steady.

“You still want the strike?” she whispered. “Even now?”

Yetta answered through split, bloodied lips.

“More than ever.”

Rahel's face seemed especially pale, out here in the sunlight. She grimaced, then glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one else was listening.

“Yetta, those women who beat you up—they were . . . ladies of the evening. Women who . . . sell their bodies. If Papa knew . . .”

“Papa isn't here, is he?” Yetta said angrily. “Papa doesn't sit over a sewing machine ten, twelve hours a day. Papa doesn't have a contractor breathing down his neck. He doesn't have a man looking in his hair, patting down his clothes every day to make sure he hasn't stolen any shirtwaists. Papa doesn't have bosses who hire prostitutes to beat him up!”

Rahel slumped, and for a moment it seemed that it was Yetta holding Rahel up, not the other way around.

“You figured it out, then,” Rahel said sadly. “That's what we thought down at union headquarters, too. The bosses hired those . . . those women. They bribed the police to arrest you.”

Yetta nodded, not surprised.

“What I don't understand,” Rahel said, “is, why
those
women? Why not just have the police beat you up and keep it simple?”

She attempted a wry smile, but it failed miserably.

“Because they're women,” Yetta said. She remembered the police looking from her to the prostitutes, saying,
You're a striker, aren't you?... Then I can't see much difference.
“They want to say we're just as low as those women, just as unclean.”

It was all of a piece, somehow, with the men back in her shtetl praying, “Thank you, God, for not making me a woman.” Men thought women were worthless, stupid, easily cowed. Yetta narrowed her eyes, thinking thoughts she never would have dreamed of back in the shtetl. They weren't even thoughts that fit with her old socialist fervor. But they were what she believed now.

God made me, too,
she thought.
And He made me to fight.

J
ane pulled the comforter up to her chin. There seemed no reason to get out of bed this morning. Ever since Eleanor and her friends had gone back to Vassar a few weeks ago, Jane's life had felt emptied out and pointless.

“Miss Wellington?” It was Miss Milhouse, sweeping the drapes back from the floor-to-ceiling windows, letting sunlight splash into the room. “You've slept quite late enough. You have a dress fitting at half past eleven, and you've not had breakfast yet. You're leaving yourself no time to prepare your toilette. . . .”

Jane sighed, barely listening. What did a dress fitting matter? The new dress had ruffles where many of her old dresses had bows, and it was a butter-cream color she'd not had in her wardrobe before. But it was really the same as every other dress she owned. Along with her corset, it would pinch in so much at the waist that she'd barely be able to breathe; it would seem not so much an article of clothing as a cage.

Ever since her father had forbidden her to go to college, everything seemed like a cage.

No,
some nitpicky, precise part of her brain corrected.

He didn't forbid it. He just called women's colleges preposterous, and you were scared to say anything else.

Jane sighed again.

Miss Milhouse whirled around from the windows and marched directly toward the bed.

“Really, Miss Wellington,” she said briskly. “You must expunge yourself of this . . . this torpor.”

She came to the side of Jane's bed and reached out as though she were going to fluff the pillows. Instead, she grabbed Jane by the shoulders and began shaking them.

“You simply must—”

A look like horror crept over Miss Milhouse's expression. She dropped Jane's shoulders and turned away, plunging her face into her hands. Her whole body quivered, as if shaken by silent sobs.

Miss Milhouse—crying?

“I'm sorry,” Jane said in a small voice, like a small child who doesn't quite understand what she's being scolded for.

Miss Milhouse spun back around, brushing tears away, pretending they'd never happened.

“You
will
be ready for the dress fitting on time,” she said. “I insist on it. And then, this afternoon, perhaps . . . perhaps I can take you for a treat.”

An ice cream sundae, probably,
Jane thought.
Who cares?

But Miss Milhouse was rushing out of the room. She quickly reappeared, carrying a newspaper. She waved it in front of Jane's eyes, so quickly Jane could only focus on a few words at a time:
WILBUR WRIGHT
, and then
SURE TO FLY
.

“He did it,” Miss Milhouse said. “People are saying he flew his aeroplane twenty miles this morning, up the Hudson
River. In the city! Can you imagine? If the weather holds out, he'll be flying an exhibition this afternoon, for everyone to see, at the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. If you'd like, I could take you to watch.”

Jane felt a flicker of interest. An aeroplane—a machine taking a man high into the sky. Incredible. She remembered how excited everyone had been when the news came out that the Wright brothers had flown the first plane. And now, for the first time, Wilbur Wright had brought his contraption to New York City. It was probably the most amazing thing she'd ever get the chance to see.