They searched the cramped, poorly lit room for a place to sit. The few chairs and even fewer tables were already taken. Sophia made her way across the room and sat on the floor where a group of women had gathered by the door. Ella followed. They settled themselves and nodded at the women around them by way of hello. The women nodded back, gave no sign that they recognized either Sophia or Ella as having been onstage earlier in the evening.
A jar of yellow mustard was being passed around. When it came to Sophia, Ella watched her roll her sandwich as if she were rolling a cigarette, and she dipped each end in the jar, coating it in mustard. She passed the jar to Ella, who’d already opened her sandwich and had the two pieces of bread and the slice of bologna sitting separately on her lap; she used her finger to spoon out a dollop of mustard on each, then used the same finger to spread it. She ate slowly, first the individual slices of bread and then the bologna, pausing after each swallow. Ella noticed that Sophia had moved on to her Moon Pie by the time she’d finished the first slice of bread.
“I got a colored friend up in New York City,” Sophia said. “He’ll come down and help us organize your friends over in Bessemer City. We’ll keep it quiet, at first. Ol’ Fred ain’t going to like it one bit, but he’ll like it fine when we’re done.”
Ella knew it was all happening too fast. A different variation of the same wave that had swept her down from the mountains to the mills had now swept her into the union. She felt herself clamoring to stand against its surge, her feet struggling to touch the bottom, her lungs gasping for breath.
“I got to work,” Ella said. “I’ve got babies. I can’t lay out of work to organize.”
“Don’t you understand what you did tonight?” Sophia asked. “Getting onstage, saying your name, where you work, where you live. There ain’t going to be no job for you to go back to, Ella May.” She ate the last bit of her Moon Pie, took a drink of coffee, made a face as she swallowed it. “The union is all you’ve got now. And we’ll support you. There’s relief funds on the way. You and your babies are going to be taken care of, I promise you.”
Ella remembered what Velma had said before that evening’s rally about supplies arriving late, if ever. Her face grew hot, and the food she’d just eaten turned sour in her stomach. She’d been a fool to come here, to be so easily swayed, to write the song she’d written and to sing it in front of people she did not know. Her life had been altered, and now it could never be repaired. Charlie had been right.
Light passed across Ella’s face, and she looked to see that the door to the office in the back of the building had opened. Carlton Reed and Velma stepped out, followed by Fred Beal, who held on to the door as if preparing to close it again. Sophia got to her feet.
“I’m going to go talk to Beal about you right now, Ella May,” she said. “You don’t worry about a thing except signing your name to a union card.”
As soon as Sophia left for Beal’s office, Ella felt the enormity of what she’d done that evening. The weight of it was a physical thing, and again her mind turned toward her children. Her palm passed across her stomach. She picked up the wax paper that had covered her sandwich and opened it across her lap. She set the Moon Pie in the middle of it, wrapped it tightly and neatly as if it were a Christmas present. She would quarter it and give it to the children when she returned home.
She had not yet touched the small tin of cold coffee. Ella drank it now, and it settled in her stomach like something that would not stay there long.
She looked at the people around her, most of them women. Her eyes fell on a young girl a few feet away in a dark blue calico dress, her long brown hair pinned up in a thick braid. Although her cheeks were sunken, the soft light cast her face in sharp, beautiful angles.
“Oh, he asked me everything he could think of, you know,” the girl was saying. “He wanted to know where I was from, if I was married, if I had me a sweetheart back home. Who my daddy was. All that.”
“That’s just because he wanted to be your daddy,” said a woman with sallow skin and thin white-blond hair. She laughed, and her smile revealed a row of discolored teeth.
“I can’t say he didn’t try,” the girl said. “I can’t say he ain’t still trying.”
“That’s old Pigface for you,” the woman said.
At the mention of the name, several of the women broke into laughter and covered their mouths with their hands and looked around at one another with knowing glances. An older woman sat beside the sallow-faced girl. She swallowed the last of her sandwich and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her thin fingers smoothed back wisps of her gray hair. She looked around at the younger women, stopping for a moment on Ella’s face as if she already knew her to be a stranger.
“I know Percy Epps did right more than try with the whole lot of you,” the old woman said. She narrowed her eyes as the others lowered their gazes. “And that ain’t right. It ain’t right for a woman to have to give herself away just so she can get a job that don’t hardly pay enough to live on.” She sat up straighter so that she could better take in the great number of people packed into the small building, the dinner line still snaking out through the door. “That’s what this here’s all about. We’re all striking so girls don’t have to live that-a way.”
The other women remained quiet. The sound of wax paper being crumbled replaced the old woman’s voice. Something had come over the group that hadn’t been there before she spoke.
“Pigface is the devil all right,” the pretty girl in the calico dress said. Her eyes and face had darkened as if a shadow hung there.
The gray-haired woman sighed, and then she placed a hand on another girl’s shoulder to steady herself as she got to her feet. “If he’s the devil that would mean we’re all in hell,” she said. She dusted off the back of her dress. “And I don’t think we’re there quite yet.”
The pretty girl raised her eyes to the old woman, who now stood above her.
“Hetty, you really think it’ll happen?” she asked. “You really think they’ll turn us out tomorrow?”
Hetty looked down at the girl with a look that seemed to carry both surprise and pity.
“Why, yes, girl,” Hetty said. “That’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
“What’ll we do?” asked the sallow-faced girl.
“What can we do?” Hetty said. “Walk out? We done that. Organize ourselves? Start a union? We done that too.” She sighed. “The way I see it, we got two things left to try: we can feel bad for ourselves, or we can fight.” She reached down and opened her hand, and the girl reached up and placed hers inside it. Hetty squeezed the girl’s fingers, gave her hand a little shake. “I plan to fight,” Hetty said. “I hope you do too. I hope you all do.”