“Thank you,” she said. “And thank you for letting me be here tonight.” She opened her mouth, waited. She wanted to turn toward Sophia to ask what to say next, but instead she searched for Velma in the crowd. All the faces looked the same. She touched the leaflet in her pocket. Eventually, more words came. “I ain’t from here. I’m from up in the mountains in Tennessee.” A whistle came from the back of the crowd, and someone clapped his hands and hollered, “Johnson City!” The people in front of the stage turned at the sound. Some of them laughed, a few of them applauded. “Bristol!” a woman’s voice called out. More laughter, more applause. Ella felt that a game had begun, and the crowd cheered as a list of towns, cities, and counties in Tennessee were shouted out: Knoxville, Cocke County, Erwin, Elizabethton, Greeneville. Ella waited until the crowd grew quiet and the laughter and applause died away.
“Is that everybody?” she asked. The audience erupted in cheers. “I don’t want to leave nobody out.” She laughed then, and she felt the tightness in her stomach leave her body. Her heart slowed.
“It feels good to hear the names of all them places,” she said. “I ain’t visited all of them, and I’ll probably never see the Tennessee hills again, but it feels good to hear those names, so thank you.
“I reckon I ended up here the same way most of you did. The mills sent men up into the mountains, told us all about the good life down here.” Boos lifted from the audience, and Ella acted surprised that someone would boo such promises. She heard laughter, and she watched as the people in the audience slowly came into focus, and she felt as if she were looking into each individual face and seeing that they’d been made the same promises she’d been made, and there was nothing to do now but laugh at the absurdity of their own belief in those promises and the men who made them. “They talked about how much money we’d make, didn’t they? About how fine our homes would be, what nice things we could buy in town. My husband—the man who was my husband, anyway—he wanted to go. He said, ‘It sounds good,’ and I said, ‘Well, let’s go then.’ I’ve worked in one mill or another ever since, a lot of them here in Gaston County. I figure one mill ain’t too different from another: they’re all bad as far as I know.
“I work at American over in Bessemer City now. I work six days a week for nine dollars, but it ain’t enough.”
Ella stopped speaking, let her eyes linger on a young woman standing just a few feet away. She wore a homespun dress and held a sleeping baby in her arms, and as Ella stared at her she noticed how the woman swayed back and forth.
“I’ve got four kids at home,” Ella said. “I had five, but I lost one of them when he was just a baby.” She pulled her gaze from the baby in the young mother’s arms and stared out at the audience, searched the faces again until she found an older woman with a little girl standing beside her who could have been her granddaughter. “I got a little girl sick at home right now. I asked the foreman to put me on days so I could be there to care for her at night, but he won’t do it. I don’t know why. I’m doing my best for the babies I’ve still got. But it’s hard. You men might not know it the way we know it, but it’s hard.
“That’s why I come out to learn about the union tonight, and that’s why I wrote this song. I ain’t never sung it before, so forgive me if it ain’t no good. It don’t have a title yet.”
She stepped away from the edge of the stage, closed her eyes for a moment to find the melody, imagined herself becoming the girl she’d been all those years ago in the Champion Lumber camp in the hills outside Bryson City. She opened her eyes, then her mouth, and she sang as if it were just she and her mother out there by the fire. It was twilight. Warm, soapy water ran over her hands. Her father was still working up in the hills. The tree that would fall and kill him had not yet fallen. The flu that would drown her mother’s lungs had not yet found her. She had not yet met John Wiggins. Willie had not been born, would not die.
We leave our homes in the morning,
We kiss our children good-bye.
While we slave for the bosses,
Our children scream and cry.
And when we draw our money,
Our grocery bills to pay,
Not a cent to spend for clothing,
Not a cent to lay away.
And on that very evening
Our little son will say:
“I need some shoes, Mother,
And so does sister May.”
How it grieves the heart of a mother,
You, everyone, must know.
But we can’t buy for our children,
Our wages are too low.
It is for our little children,
That seems to us so dear,
But for us nor them, dear workers,
The bosses do not care.
But understand, dear workers,
Our union they do fear.
Let’s stand together, workers,
And have a union here.
She finished her song, caught her breath, stepped away from the podium. She felt someone beside her, felt Sophia’s hand close around hers, felt their fingers intertwine. Sophia lifted their hands together, and when she did Ella’s senses awakened to the noise coming from the crowd: people cheered, whistled and pointed, called her name and chanted union slogans. Flashbulbs popped and illuminated ghostly white faces as if lightning had threaded itself through the audience. Ella’s legs were numb, her feet affixed to the stage. Sophia led her down the steps, the two of them clinging to one another’s hands. Ella followed her into the dark night on the edge of the crowd.
Sophia spun to face her. “That was amazing, Ella. Just amazing. How’d you remember all them words?”
Ella had forgotten about the leaflet in her pocket. She reached for it now, pulled it free. “I didn’t expect I’d remember them,” she said.
Sophia looked at the leaflet as if it were a holy thing. “We’re going to bust this strike wide open, Ella,” she said. “You keep on writing them songs. We’ll organize your colored friends. This will be over before Loray knows what happened.” She smiled, and Ella felt something warm and safe spring up between them.
A man’s voice came from the stage behind her, and Ella turned. The man onstage was tall and thin, his brown hair slicked back in a deep sheen. He wore a dark suit. “That was some fine, fine singing,” he said. “And what a story. What a struggle.”
“Is that Fred Beal?” Ella asked.
“No,” Sophia said. “That’s Carlton Reed. He’s big-time with the party up in New York. He knows his stuff.”
Reed smiled at the audience, put his hands on either side of the podium, leaned forward as if he might leap over it.
“Friends, I’m a reporter,” he said. “And as a reporter I’ve always got my ear to the ground.” He held on to the podium, but now he leaned away from it. “I’ve got to listen to both the rich and the poor, the high—” He raised his hand as if he were measuring his own height, and he looked to his right, south toward Loray. The audience laughed. “And the low,” he said. “I must listen to everyone, or I’ll hear no one.
“And this is what I’ve heard: tomorrow, the high and the rich are coming to kick you out of your homes. The high and the rich are doing their best to discredit you. They scream words like communism and Bolshevism and Lovestoneiteism,” he said, purposefully stumbling over the last word.
Ella pictured Charlie in bed that morning, the angry frustration on his face, the things he’d said about communism and the strike. Charlie was neither high nor rich. He was poor just like her and he couldn’t even read, but he’d trashed the union just the same.
“But you don’t care about Russia, do you? We’re not in Russia, are we? We’re in the United States of America!”