Uprising (3 page)

“Faster,” Signor Carlotti said. “You take that long over every thread, you will never earn a cent in the factory. You will be out on the streets and even Pietro won't be able to save you. Your family will starve.”

It was amazing that Bella could understand what he was saying, without comprehending a single word.

Bella glanced up and saw that the other girl had whipped through three shirtwaists in the time it had taken Bella to cut one thread. Bella decided that if the other girl wasn't afraid of ripping the shirtwaists to shreds, Bella shouldn't worry either. She sliced through the rest of the threads, dropped the shirtwaist in the basket, and picked up a new one.

“That's better,” Signor Carlotti grunted, or something like it.

“You're set then,” Pietro said. “Good-bye. I've got to get to my job. I'll meet you on the sidewalk outside, after work.”

“Okay,” Bella said. She wanted to flash him a big smile, to tell him how grateful she was that he'd be waiting for her, that she wouldn't have to find her way back to the Lucianos' alone. But Signor Carlotti was glaring again, so she dipped her head down over the shirtwaist. She resisted the impulse to watch Pietro walking back to the elevator.

Pietro,
Bella thought.
Such a nice name. Such a handsome man. And so kind to me . . .

“Faster!” Signor Carlotti said.

Bella forced herself to stop thinking about Pietro. Cut, cut, cut, drop. Pick up a new shirtwaist. Cut, cut, cut. . . drop. Pick
up a new shirtwaist. This was not a difficult job. Bella's little sister Guilia, who still sucked her thumb and clung to Mama's skirt most of the time, would have been capable of doing it. But Bella found herself having to concentrate hard, especially with Signor Carlotti hovering over her, watching her every move, yelling “Faster!” every time she so much as hesitated picking up the next shirtwaist. The pile of shirtwaists with hanging threads kept growing, and Bella couldn't even stop long enough to look up and see where they were coming from, who was bringing them over. Her neck grew stiff, but she didn't dare tilt her head back to relax it, even for a second.

Suddenly Signor Carlotti grabbed up one of the shirtwaists Bella had just dropped into the basket.

“You idiot girl!” he screamed, shaking the shirtwaist in her face. “Can't even handle a simple job like this! Look at the thread you missed!” The offending thread unfurled from a hiding place in the sleeve. It dangled in front of Bella's eyes, a mark of shame. “I'll fire you if I find another one of these! The Triangle label stands for quality and pride! Not dangling threads! Not shoddy work by useless girls like you!”

Maybe what he actually said was that she was being fired, right then and there. But Bella was determined not to hear that.

“I'm sorry! I'm sorry!” she said, snatching the shirtwaist from his hands, slicing through the thread. “I'll never make another mistake again. I promise!”

Her hands were shaking when she turned her attention to the next shirtwaist.

I cant be fired,
she told herself.
I cannot lose this job.

“Tu es ale mol inem zelbikn seyder,”
the other girl said, which
was totally incomprehensible. But it made Bella look up. She saw that the other girl was showing her something, turning the shirtwaist in her own lap this way and that.

Ooohhh,
Bella thought. The other girl meant that she'd found a pattern to her work. The hanging threads were in pretty much the same places on every shirtwaist, so the girl cut them in the same order each time. That way, she never missed any.

“Grazie,”
Bella said. “I understand.”

“Back to work!” Signor Carlotti screamed. “No chitchat!”

Bella settled into a pattern of her own. Front, right side, back, left side. Then a quick once-over just to make sure she hadn't missed anything.

Cut, cut, cut . . . drop. Cut, cut, cut . . . drop.

Something shifted in Bella's brain. She was still whipping through the shirtwaists as fast as she could, and she didn't dare look away from her work, even for a second. But she found that every now and then she could allow herself the luxury of thinking about something besides shirtwaists and scissors and hanging threads. She let herself notice the glorious rumble of the rows and rows of sewing machines, all racing together. She'd gotten a quick glimpse of them before she sat down and started cutting. How Mama would have stared, to see such a thing! Sewing was Mama's least favorite chore; when the news had come to Calia that they had machines to do such things, out in the rest of the world, Mama had talked about it for days.

“Wouldn't it be nice to be that free?” she'd asked Bella wistfully. “Just tell a machine, This is your job now,' and you can go out and enjoy the sunshine? No hunching over a needle all
the time, no worrying about mending and patching?”

Signor Carlotti bent over in front of Bella, screaming right into her face.

“You're slowing down again! The shirtwaists are piling up! Work faster!” Spittle flew out of his mouth and landed on Bella's eyebrow, but she didn't dare take her hands off the shirtwaist to wipe it away.

Oh, Mama,
Bella thought, with an ache in her heart.
You didn't know the sewing machines still left some work for girls to do! And the machines are so fast I can never keep up....

But she had to try.

Bella worked for hours, the shirtwaists flying through her hands. About noon, the machines suddenly lapsed into silence.

Grazie, grazie, Madonna mia,
Bella thought.
They're going to give us a break for lunch.

The other girl put her scissors down, stood up, and stretched. Bella smiled at her. She dropped one last shirtwaist into the basket, and reached out to place her scissors on the table too. But Signor Carlotti shoved the scissors back at her, back into her hand.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no!
You
do not get a lunch break, you lazy girl! You've done nothing all morning! Look at all these shirtwaists you haven't finished! You sit right there and keep working until they're done!”

Bella was pretty sure that was what he was saying, because he gestured at the pile of shirtwaists as he pushed Bella back into her chair. Bella wanted to fire back angry words of her own: “But you are not even paying me today! I'm just learning—how can you expect me to keep up? This
isn't right! I'm not a machine! Even back in Calia, the landowners give the laborers a chance to eat lunch!”

But Bella remembered Pietro saying this was the best job he could find for her; she remembered him saying that it would be the same anywhere else in New York. She remembered that Guilia, her little sister, had had so little food lately that sometimes she didn't have enough energy to play, she just lay on her blanket staring up at nothing.

I can skip lunch today if it means that next week Mama will have money for food for Guilia,
Bella told herself.
I can bear anything for Guilia.

Bella picked up the next shirtwaist.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. The
factory became stiflingly hot by early afternoon, and sweat poured down Bella's face, but she forced herself to ignore it. A blister rose on her thumb where the scissors rubbed, but she just shifted positions, sliding the scissors handles further up on her hand. Her back ached, her head ached, her neck ached, her hand ached—she didn't let herself care.

Bella was so dizzy, light-headed, and hungry by late in the day that she was back to needing to concentrate intensely on each shirtwaist, to focus precisely on each snip of her scissors. So she didn't notice the screaming across the room right away. The girl sitting beside her had to nudge Bella's arm.

“Ze nor!”
the girl said, and pointed.

Bella looked up.

Two tables away, a red-faced man was screaming while two other men stood on either side of him, tugging on his arms. The screaming man was thin and stooped over; the men pulling at him were big and beefy and mean-looking.

They were screaming too, but their voices didn't carry. Bella could only hear what the thin man said. Of course, Bella couldn't understand any of his words, but she could tell he was very mad. And he wasn't giving up, no matter how much the other men tugged at him. The men knocked his glasses from his face; they ripped his shirt; they slapped him and lifted him and carried him out. But still the man kept screaming, kept kicking and pulling back.

Suddenly, all around Bella, the other workers stood up. It was like watching a dance, everyone making the same movement at once, except for one or two laggards who were out of step. Bella was one of the laggards, but she sprang up only a split second after the other learner girl. Bella didn't know why, but obviously everyone was supposed to stand.

The wheels of the sewing machines kept turning for a few moments, as if, being machines, they were left out of the dance. Bella could see fabric bunching, thread snagging.

Oh, no, those shirtwaists will be ruined,
Bella fretted. But no one else seemed to care. People were streaming past her, rushing for the elevator. The girls Bella had thought were royalty, some women with matronly faces, the few men and boys who worked on this floor—all of them were rushing for the exit at once. They knocked over baskets of shirtwaists; they trampled the shirtwaists underfoot.

And they were all yelling and talking—even laughing— at once.

Is this how they always act at the end of the day?
Bella wondered.
Or just Saturdays, when they've been paid and they know they'll have the next day off?

In the confusion of strange languages Bella didn't understand,
she started noticing that one word was being repeated over and over again: “Strike.” Boys and girls yelled it; women murmured it wonderingly; men whispered it in hushed tones.

“What's a ‘strike'?” Bella asked, but in the hubbub, nobody seemed to hear her.

Bella let the crowd carry her into the elevator, out of the building. On the sidewalk below, she resisted the urge to bend down and kiss the ground—
Oh, thank you, God, I was so high up in the sky, but I made it back down safely.
The sidewalk wasn't exactly “ground,” anyway—not dirt, but pavement.

The rest of the workers scattered, but Bella leaned against the building, waiting for Pietro. He appeared around the corner, his dark hair curling at his temples, his dark eyes flashing, his lips pursed into an
O—
he was whistling. Bella forgot her aching back, neck, head, and hands; she forgot the throbbing blister on her thumb; she forgot her empty stomach.

Does whistling mean he's happy to see me?
she wondered.

“Did Signor Carlotti say to come back on Monday?” Pietro asked.

Bella had forgotten Signor Carlotti too.

“He didn't really say anything at the end of the day,” Bella said. She decided not to mention how much he'd yelled at her all day long. “Everyone just stood up to go. It was very dramatic. All the workers rushed out at once, laughing and shouting. They kept saying ‘Strike! Strike!' And a bunch of other words I couldn't figure out. But that one word they kept saying, ‘strike'—what does that mean?”

Pietro instantly turned three shades paler.

“O, Madonna mia!”
he cried.
“O, San Antonio!”

Bella wasn't sure if he was praying or swearing.

“Are you sure that was what they were saying?” he asked. “And you stood up and walked out with all the people yelling ‘Strike!'?”

“Everybody did,” Bella said, defensively. But she wasn't so sure of that now. Her memory seemed to be a tricky thing. Had Signor Carlotti still been standing there—still sputtering and screaming about unfinished shirtwaists, uncut threads? “I think everybody did,” she added.

“Oh, for the love of God,” Pietro said. “You just lost your job!”

“But why?” Bella said. “I worked so hard!”

“But a strike, see—that's when workers walk out because they want to get paid more or treated better, or something like that. And usually what happens is that they just all get fired, and the company hires somebody else, who isn't so picky.”

“I didn't say I was doing a strike,” Bella argued.

“But you walked out!” Pietro said. “You walked out with all the strikers! Think how it must have looked to Signor Carlotti!”

Bella felt her knees crumble. She lurched toward the ground, and would have fallen hard if Pietro hadn't grabbed her.

“I didn't mean it,” Bella whimpered. “I didn't know. . . .”

Pietro looked down at her with utter contempt. He had his arms around her, but it was completely wrong. Bella jerked away from him.

“I'll find Signor Carlotti,” she said. “I'll tell him I'm not making this ‘strike.' I'll tell him I'll work all night if I have to—”

She whirled back toward the door, but now there was a
huge man in an official-looking uniform standing there. He held his arms out to bar the door and said something incomprehensible.

“Oh, please,” Bella begged. “You've got to let me in!”

The man was shaking his head, pushing Bella away. She landed sprawled on the ground. The other people on the sidewalk had to walk around her.

“Stop it!” Pietro said, pulling her up. “Signor Carlotti's probably already gone, anyway. I'll go find him myself. I'll take you home and then I'll talk to him—it's not like he'd listen to a girl.”

Heartsick, Bella trudged along behind Pietro. The jabs and jostling of the crowd seemed like a fit punishment. The faces leered around her; the foreign jabbering hurt her ears. For all she knew, the entire crowd was laughing at her.
What did you expect, you foolish girl? You're just an ignorant peasant! You don't belong here! Go home! Go starve! We don't care!