Bellagrand

Harry stood close, twisting the curls of her hair around his fingers. “I’m glad we don’t meet here anymore,” he said. “Now we go to talk nonsense at Arturo’s. It’s better. Our house is quieter. Nicer.”

“Yes, here is quieter. Because you’re never here. You’re always there, on Lowell, in that boiling cauldron of plotting. How is that better?”

“We have to keep planning. But when I come home, it’s quiet.” He bent to her cheek.

She raised her face to him. “If you’re just planning, I’m just making art.”

Harry watched her paint in block letters. “I have to go out there,” he said. “I’m on the strike committee. And Bill’s paying me. I have to go out there so you don’t have to. Just like Mother Jones said.”

“Oh, so now we listen to her. Some feminist I am.”

“Some feminist indeed.” Leaning down, he patted her belly.

She kissed him. “I won’t go out there, mio amore. Only to clean and spin.”

“Promise?” He blinked anxiously.

“Of course.” She blinked anxiously back.

She prayed for her child, for her husband, for her mother, for the strike to be over. Sometimes not in that order. Angela barely spoke to her. The placards weren’t sufficient atonement.

Gina hated being broke, hated having no money. The bills piled up. Rent was coming due in February, the light bill. Food needed to be bought. They could eat her stewed tomatoes for only so long. Eventually they’d need bread, pasta. Harry might not care about mundane things like food on the table, but Gina did. She was too poor for idealism.

Four

THE LAWRENCE TEXTILE BOARD of directors brought in Floyd Russell, a whip-smart lawyer from Boston, to defend themselves against an association with police brutality. Apparently it was bad publicity to spray women with fire hoses to disperse them. A no-nonsense man, Floyd said, “Brutality? But they’re still on the street! This ridiculous mess should’ve been stopped weeks ago. The police should’ve been instructed to shoot. That’s how successful leaders handle things.”

But the police didn’t shoot. They only threatened to shoot. The state militia arrived to boost their numbers because the striking crowds kept swelling, to fifteen thousand, to twenty.

“Twenty thousand angry screaming women,” Harry said to Gina over one tense dinner of boiled beans and artichokes. “I can barely handle just one.”

“When have I screamed at you, marito?”

“Once you wanted to.”

She remembered that one time. “Not the same.”

He agreed that it wasn’t.

Gina tried hard to keep her Italian self concealed from him, hidden behind pressed-together teeth, a composed smile, half-hooded eyes, clenched fists as he spooned her in bed. She didn’t want to have loud words and prove Mimoo right. Her mother kept saying to her, “Who are you putting on airs for? You don’t think sooner or later he’ll notice the hot Sicilian blood that runs through your deepest veins straight into your heart?”

“The ladies he was used to before me didn’t hector their men about desperately unsuitable employment.”

“Is he married to them? As I recall, he deliberately discarded one of those prissy debutantes for you, or am I wrong?”

“I don’t want to discuss this with you, Mimoo. I’m glad at the very least you’re acknowledging our nuptials.”

“Only to make my point.”

“Which is?”

“You’re like Pompeii. You keep hissing, letting out steam. When he least expects it, and least wants it, you’re going to erupt. It’ll be judgment day for him and he won’t even know why he’s up in flames. You should give him fair warning, daughter.”

“Mother, I’m going to prove you wrong. I’m an American lady now. We keep our boiling on the inside where it belongs.”

“Why is he out every night?”

“He’s with Joe at their place. I didn’t want them here anymore, you know that.”

“So your husband you accept on any terms, but our poor Angela you won’t speak to?”

“She won’t speak to me!”

“She’s right not to.”

“Is she? Do you want me to go out and picket with her? Because that’s what she wants.”

Mimoo put her hand on her daughter’s face. “No, mia figlia. I want you to be careful most of all.”

Sam Gompers and his American Federation of Labor were called to Lawrence to negotiate a settlement and act as the voice of reason against the IWW. “It takes a man like Bill Haywood to make Gompers, of all people, look like an angel,” remarked the District Attorney. But as soon as Gompers was called to the table and it looked as if a deal might be struck, Big Bill promptly returned to Lawrence, this time for good.

To ingratiate himself with the strikers and to push the AFL out of Lawrence, Haywood warned American Woolen that they could not weave their cloth with bayonets. An AFL negotiator accused Haywood of having no interest in industrial peace. He said that for the last ten years Big Bill’s actions screamed from the streets that what he wanted was the creation of a proletarian impulse that would do nothing less than revolutionize society. To this Big Bill happily replied by hopping up onto Harry’s podium—though he didn’t need to, being over six feet tall—that the AFL drudge was right. “The complete DEMOLITION of social and economic conditions is the only salvation of the working classes!” he shouted. He turned his left side to the cheering women to hide his empty right eye socket. Harry stood nearby and watched him. “The mine owners did not find the gold, did not mine the gold, did not mill the gold. Yet all the gold belongs to them! How can this be? It can’t be! It won’t do, ladies, it simply will. Not. Do.”

Under Haywood’s direction, it didn’t take long for the Bread and Roses women to gain notoriety as radicals of the worst sort. Big Bill wanted the women front and center every day as if on a stage, harassing the factories in their bonnets, hitching up their long skirts to wade over the mud, shouting down men, waving American flags and placards in the men’s faces. He exhorted the women to speak their mind, to bravely bear the cold, to nag the men into submission. When the strident tactics resulted in shoving, falls, broken noses, visible and copious blood, Bill became even more excited. Women bleeding on the streets of Lawrence to defend their principles against the brutality of the capitalists, who employed them, and the police, who tried to subdue them, was far better than meekly marching down the streets, singing songs and carrying signs.

The women were accused of having “lots of cunning” and “bad temper.”

“One police officer can handle ten men,” the District Attorney was quoted as saying in The Evening Tribune. “But it takes ten police officers to handle one woman.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” echoed Harry, closing the newspaper. His one woman was sitting at her workbench in the corner of their living room, stitching a roomy panel into a cotton skirt to allow for her expanding belly.

“What is it about me,” Gina wanted to know without turning around, “that requires ten men to handle and my husband to make such a comment?”

He came over to her chair, pushed her loose bun to the side, and pressed his lips deeply into the slope of her bare neck. “Husband is trying to be funny.”

“Divertente? Trying and failing.”

Five

IN AN UNPRECEDENTED MOVE, Haywood arranged for six hundred children of the striking women to be publicly taken away from their mothers (he called it being taken out of “harm’s way”) and bussed south to New York City to stay with some well-to-do families for the duration of the strike. The women that agreed to this became even more violent after their children left them.

Crying children separated from their howling mothers was a public relations disaster for American Woolen and for Lawrence. Mayor Scanlon was urged to break the strike, and though he stated that his aim was “to break the strikers’ head,” it was nothing but grandstanding, for he did nothing. An incredulous Floyd Russell raged against the mayor’s impotent response. “How long are you going to let this continue? Your city is going bust! No one is working! No one is making any money. You’ve got millions of dollars’ worth of international contracts going unfulfilled because of what’s happening under your fucking windows. You’re destroying Lawrence with your inaction!”

“Not my inaction—their action!” Scanlon shouted back. “They won’t compromise! You heard Haywood. What am I supposed to do? Shoot the women?”

“Yes,” Floyd said instantly. “That’s how Napoleon did it.”

“He shot the women?”