Seven miles east in Gastonia, the seat of Gaston County, the day shift at the Loray Mill had voted to strike on April 1. That evening, hundreds of workers had marched to the gates of the largest and most important textile mill in the state and kept the night shift from going inside. By the next morning Ella had heard that West Gastonia, especially the Loray village, had transformed into a carnival overnight. Children played in the street. Women cooked food on their porches. Men strummed guitars and blew on harmonicas. They drank whiskey and slung rifles across their backs.
Two days later the governor called in the National Guard. Women were beaten. Soldiers pressed guns to men’s heads. The strikers’ first headquarters had been destroyed by a nighttime mob. The union commissary attacked, the food stores ruined.
The first leaflets had begun trickling through the mill in early April, carried by whispers and subtle passes from hand to hand. Ella had held on to the first one she’d seen, had kept it with her ever since. Another leaflet had come through American just a few days ago. Union members were being forcibly removed from the Loray village on Monday, May 6, just two days away. All workers in the surrounding area were invited to a rally on Sunday evening. The union would even pick you up, take you there.
Ella looked again at the list of union demands. She had a decision to make.
Goldberg’s brother’s voice spoke from behind the door, and Ella wondered if, godlike, he’d been able to sense that her mind had just wandered from her job at American to the strike at Loray. She folded the leaflet and slipped it into her pocket, slid the pencil back behind her ear.
“Janet,” Goldberg’s brother said. The young secretary closed her book when she heard her name. She set it down on her tidy desk and stood and smoothed her dress. She opened the office door and stepped inside. Ella could hear their whispered voices. She closed her eyes again, uncrossed her ankles.
“Mrs. Wiggins,” the secretary said, “Mr. Goldberg’s ready for you.”
Ella stood and approached the door. The secretary squeezed past her, stepped back behind her desk, and gathered her book and the purse that she’d hung on the back of her chair. Ella could see Goldberg’s brother at the desk in his office, pen in hand, writing something in a thick ledger. He finished writing, capped his pen, closed the ledger, and looked up at her.
“Come in,” he said, his voice clear but quiet, his foreign accent almost unnoticeable. He straightened his glasses, pushed them up on the bridge of his nose. He did not stand, but Ella already knew that his body was thin and angular. Although he was past middle age, his face appeared youthful despite a well-trimmed beard and dark hair that glinted with oil in the soft, yellow light. He wore a bow tie and suspenders, his brown suit jacket left folded across the back of the chair in which he sat. He seemed like he should be standing in front of a classroom instead of sitting in a tiny office on the trembling floors of a cotton mill.
For the first time in years, Ella pictured the dark, one-room schoolhouse back in Sevierville, Tennessee, heard the voice of her mother as she begged her father to let Ella and her older brother Wesley go to school for a few days in September before her father needed them on the farm full-time. Ella was six years old and had never had a moment of schooling. Neither had Wesley, who was almost fifteen.
The schoolmaster’s name had been Mr. Musial, and when he introduced himself Ella had misheard him, and although she never spoke his name she always thought of it as Musical. Mr. Musical had been short and thin and well dressed like Goldberg’s brother, but unlike Goldberg’s brother, Mr. Musical had a violent limp that wrenched his face into a grimace when he walked. Ella and Wesley had heard that he’d served in the Civil War, and she’d imagined that he’d been a hero and had suffered his injury in battle, but in reality an angry horse had taken a bite from his thigh and gangrene had set in; he’d lost the leg just above the knee and had never even shot the rifle he’d never learned to load. The schoolchildren did not know, no one in the small community actually knew, but Mr. Musical’s leg was made of wood from the hip down, his knee joint nothing but a shiny metal socket that swung wildly no matter how slowly he walked or how much he struggled to control his gait.
A chair sat in front of Goldberg’s brother’s desk, but he did not ask Ella to sit down so she did not sit. He pushed himself back from his desk and put his hands in his lap. His thin lips formed a straight line.
“I’m glad you joined us for your shift this evening,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Ella said. She did not look at him when she spoke, choosing instead to focus on the other things on his desk aside from the ledger and ink pen: a small wooden globe with etchings too faded to read; an empty mug; a half-eaten sandwich of some kind; a shiny red apple.
“I say that because you missed last night’s shift.”
“Yes, sir,” she said again.
“Mrs. Wiggins,” he said.
“It’s May.” Her eyes darted to his for a moment, returned to rest on the half-eaten sandwich.
“What?”
“It’s May. Ella May.”
“I’ve got Wiggins written down here.”
“It’s May,” she said again. “I told Dobbins to change it, but I guess he didn’t.”
“Why have you been missing your shifts, Mrs. May?”
“Shift,” Ella said. “I just missed the one last night.”
“No,” Goldberg’s brother said. He leaned toward his desk, picked up a clipboard, flipped through a sheath of papers. “No, you missed one in January and one in March.”
“It’s been a long time since March,” Ella said. “Even longer since January.”
“That’s not the point,” he said. “Why are you missing shifts?”
“I got a sick little girl at home. She gets bad at night, and I had to stay home,” she said. “I asked Dobbins to put me on day shift, but he won’t do it. Maybe I should’ve asked you.”
“Dobbins handles shift change requests,” he said.
“Well, he didn’t handle mine,” Ella said. “And now he told me to come down here, and that’s just going to set me back even more.”
Goldberg’s brother leaned back in his chair, placed his hands in his lap again. Ella stared at the sandwich, tried to judge what kind of meat rested between the slices of bread.
“You have a sick little girl,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Please look at me, Mrs. May. I can’t tell whether or not you’re being truthful unless you look at me.”
She lifted her eyes to his, saw that he stared at her intently, saw that her missed shift must mean a great deal to him, but she knew it meant even more to her, because she would not be paid. “Why wouldn’t I be truthful?”