“I did,” Sophia said. The girl leaned her head back inside. Hampton heard her say, “I’m going to go down to Lilly’s.”
“You bring them back up here if they hungry,” the woman’s voice said. Hampton saw that Ella stared at the ground as if she hadn’t overheard the conversation.
The girl leapt off the porch and tore across the yard at a sprint.
Sophia called after her. “I told Lilly I’ve got the keys with me.”
The girl kept running and said, “Otis’ll get it started.”
“He better not!” Ella hollered.
The screen door slammed shut, and Hampton looked up to the porch to find a young woman about his age blinking her eyes against the midmorning light. Her hair was plaited into two thick braids that grazed her shoulders. She wore a dress that buttoned down the middle, and it was open at the collar so that he could see the shadows that pooled in the hollowed spaces her clavicles made. She had big brown eyes and a gentle, frowning face that was at once innocent and world-weary. Hampton thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She stood on the porch, her hip cocked, and stared down at Ella. She crossed her arms, shook her head. “I done told you,” she said.
“Well, you going to have to tell me again,” Ella said.
“I can’t do it,” the woman said. “I just can’t.”
Ella stepped in between Sophia and Hampton, grabbed hold of his hand, and pulled him toward the porch steps. “This man here came all the way down from New York City to knock on doors,” she said. “You mean to tell me you can’t walk up and down the street?”
“This ain’t New York City,” the woman said. “Ain’t none of your white friends want to see a colored girl join your union.”
Ella pointed to Sophia. “This one does,” she said.
“She’s right, Violet,” Sophia said. “We need you, and we need your help.”
The woman named Violet sighed and shook her head again. She looked at Hampton as if seeing him for the first time. Hampton slipped his hands into his pockets, fingered his watch.
“Violet, you’ve given American Mill Number Two every night of your life for as long as I’ve known you,” Ella said. “Give us the afternoon.”
“Just the afternoon,” Violet said. “And it don’t mean nothing.”
Ella smiled. “It means something to me,” she said.
The four of them spent the rest of the morning knocking on doors in Stumptown, approaching people bent to their work in small patches of gardens, sitting down on porch steps, and standing in open doorways. Although Ella and Violet knew them all, the men and women of Stumptown looked at Sophia and Hampton with stone faces and reticent eyes. Hampton studied the men he met, regardless of their age, and tried to mirror their country formality, tried to stand with the same rigidity, to measure his words with the same deliberateness.
After a lunch of chicken and dumplings at Violet’s mother’s house, they loaded themselves into the truck and drove to a tiny town called Waco, where Ella knew of a few workers who might be interested in the union. Waco, which was near Cherryville’s few mills, was almost an hour’s drive away. When they arrived Hampton saw that it was hardly more than a crossroads of shanties, shotgun houses, and lean-tos set in the midst of rows of cotton fields owned by white people but worked solely by blacks.
Hampton took the lead in Waco, and while he spoke to strangers in hot, crowded rooms with low ceilings, he felt the eyes of his three companions upon him. He did his best to explain the inalienable rights of the worker, how those rights extended to whites and Negroes alike, how disagreement about these rights had caused a major struggle just a few miles away, in Gastonia, in the shadow of the Loray Mill.
But no matter what Hampton said, talk always turned to the weekend-long jamboree to honor Confederate veterans that was scheduled to take place just a few miles away in Charlotte beginning on Friday morning. It was the first news Hampton heard of the Confederate gathering, and although he was from the North, the side that had actually won the war, he’d never seen or heard of any celebrations like this. It seemed to him that the South now reveled in its loss as if it had been a victory.
On the drive to Waco, Hampton had ridden alone in the back of Sophia’s truck while the three women had squeezed into the cab, but the day had turned blisteringly hot, and on the return trip to Stumptown, Violet opted to ride in the open air with him. They sat with their backs against the cab, Hampton’s feet crossed at the ankles, Violet’s legs pulled up beneath her dress. The sun was behind them now, and the cab offered a little shade. Violet looked over at Hampton.
“What about your accent?” she said. The truck must have changed direction because the sunlight hit her eyes. Hampton noticed they were a lighter shade of brown than he’d assumed. Violet lifted her hand and cupped it over her eyes, dropping them back into shadow.
“What about it?” Hampton said.
“Half the time you talk, you sound like you’re from down here,” Violet said. She lowered her hand but didn’t look away from him.
“I am from down here,” he said. “Was, anyway. Went up north when I was six.”
“You got free of it.”
“More like ‘got gone of it,’” he said.
“Where?” she asked.
“Mississippi.” He pulled his legs up to his chest and rested his elbows on his knees. Hampton opened his mouth to speak, but he stopped. He tried again. “My daddy shot a white man. The plantation owner’s son. He killed him before he could get killed.”
“What happened?” Violet asked.
“They yanked him off a train the next morning,” he said. “Never saw him again.”
Violet put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Hampton shrugged. “I try not to think about what might’ve happened to him. Just imagine that the South took him. Makes it easier,” he said. “Makes it easier just to say that the South killed my daddy.”
“My daddy keeled over dead in a white man’s field while Mama was pregnant with Iva,” Violet said. “I reckon you could say the South killed him too. Maybe we should have jumped on a train north.”
“Still can,” Hampton said. “Plenty of trains going north.”
“Shoot,” Violet said. She smiled. “You got an extra ticket?”
“Might could find one.”
“Shoot,” she said again, still smiling.
Bessemer City began to make itself apparent around them. A few cars passed going in the opposite direction. The homes were suddenly larger, set closer together. The truck skirted the edge of downtown on its way back to Stumptown.
“So,” Hampton said, “you going back to the mill tonight?”
Violet stared down at her lap as if looking for an answer. “I hadn’t decided yet,” she said.
Hampton reached into his pocket and removed his wristwatch, saw that it was almost 4:30 p.m. “You got an hour and a half,” he said.