Читать книгу Bellagrand - Paullina Simons - Страница 19

RIGHT AFTER THE HOLIDAYS, in the first week in January, the Lawrence women returned to work. Five days later, when they received their paychecks, they discovered there had been a small error. They got paid half a dollar less than the previous week.

Arturo asked Angela to perform some simple math. And lo! It turned out that, yes indeed, they were working two hours less a week, just as they had requested. But now they were getting two hours less pay.

That Friday night Arturo paced around the Summer Street parlor like a self-satisfied peacock, saying, “I told you. I told you. I knew they were up to no good, and I was right.”

Two hundred women, Angela at the forefront, dragging with her a desperately reluctant Gina, showed up the next Monday in front of the red doors of Wood Mill at the T-junction of Union and Essex, loudly demanding that the accounting error be corrected immediately since they were not returning to work until it was.

The manager of American Woolen, Lester Evans, a small polite man, came outside to talk to Angela and Gina.

“Why are you ladies upset?” he asked calmly, dressed in his tailored finery. “Stop shouting. What is the problem? Do you think you should be getting paid the same for less work?”

“YES!” came the defiant cries. Gina stayed quiet.

“But you all received a generous raise when you negotiated your last contract barely four months ago. Are you saying it’s not enough?”

“SHORT PAY!”

“Why would we pay you more for working less? That hardly seems fair.”

“NO CUT IN PAY! NO CUT IN PAY!”

“What’s not fair is the cut in pay,” Angela shouted into Lester’s face, strengthened by the yelling women at her back, like a sail in the tail winds.

“But you didn’t receive a cut in pay,” Lester said amiably.

“Yes, a cut in pay!”

“You’re playing with the big boys now, Annie LoPizo,” Lester told her. “In the real world you get paid for the hours you work. You don’t work, you don’t get paid.”

The women had no strategy but to continue shouting. Lester had had enough. Before he left he pointed a finger at Gina. “You have a good job,” he said to her. “You get paid well for the work you do. Don’t ruin your life by involving yourself in this malarkey. Stay away. I’ve seen this before. It’s nothing but trouble.”

All the nerve endings in Gina’s body agreed.

That evening when he heard what had happened, Arturo ordered Angela and Gina to march right back to the mill doors the following morning and make clear to this Mr. Evans that not a single worker was returning to the looms until the “accounting error” was rectified. “Not a single one.”

Shaking his head, Harry got up from the table. “Angie, you do what you want,” he said. “Listen to Arturo, don’t listen to him, it’s no difference to me. You’re a grown woman. But don’t involve my wife in this.”

“She is also a grown woman! She also got paid two hours less.”

“Yes, Harry, what are you talking about?” Arturo said, frowning. “You’re involved in this.”

“I didn’t say me. I said her.”

“What could you be thinking?”

“You know what I’m thinking,” Harry said, pulling Gina by her wrist from the table, nudging her up the stairs, away, away. “Because I just told you. I’ll do what I have to, but keep her out of it.”

Angela followed Gina upstairs behind a shut bedroom door. “Are you really not going to come with me?” she asked disbelievingly.

“I can’t, Ange. We’re having a baby. We need the money.”

“What money? There is no money. Gina, if there is a strike, no one will get paid.”

Gina turned jelly-legged. She sat on the bed. “Maybe it’ll all be over by tomorrow.”

“How in the world …”

“Maybe cooler heads will prevail.”

“Are you saying I’m not in my right mind?”

“I’m saying we need the money. Don’t you?”

“I need justice more.”

“Harry doesn’t want me involved. What am I going to do? Go against his wishes?”

“I’m family!” yelled Angela. “You’re not going to stand by your own family?”

“Angie, don’t go! He’s my family, too. And we’re having a baby. Why can’t you understand?”

“Oh, I understand. I understand being pushed away.”

“Ask Pam to go.”

“Lester hates Pam after she nearly lost her hand at the double loom and made such a stink about it. But he likes you. He’s apt to give in to you.”

“Did he give in to me this morning?” Gina shook her head. “Harry said no.”

“Look at you, all your feminist virtues into the trash as soon as there’s a hint of trouble!”

“It’s because there’s trouble that he’s telling me to keep out of it.”

“And you’re listening. What happened to the right to your own soul?”

“We’re having a baby!”

“This is social change. Progress! The revolution. It’s all the things we’ve been talking about finally carried into action. Are you really going to stand idly by while the blood of other men and women is spilled onto your sidewalk?”

“Angela, maybe you don’t hear yourself, but you’re making my argument for me. The time for radical action is not when I’m pregnant.”

“History is not going to stand still for your baby, Gina.”

“Well, then, I’ll just hop on the next train if it’s all the same to you. There seems to be a revolution every year.”

They stopped speaking. Angela stormed out, and Gina didn’t go with her the next morning. In a crowd of women, Angela went by herself to confront Lester Evans.

It couldn’t have gone less well. The manager fired Angela then and there. He told her that if she ever harassed him in front of his mill again, he’d have her arrested and thrown in jail. Through a megaphone he informed the fifty women shouting behind her that unless they showed up for work the following morning, they would also be fired. “And Miss LoPizo, please tell Miss Attaviano,” he added, “that unless she shows up for work, she too will be fired with all the rest.”

“She’s a married woman, now, Mr. Evans,” shouted Angela. “She doesn’t answer to you or to me. She answers to her husband. And he works for Bill Haywood.”

“Then too bad for her being associated with all those filthy Wobblies,” said Evans. “Too bad for all of you. Now get away from my factory.”

Gina was outraged. “I didn’t go with you and that’s how you punish me?” she said to Angela. “By making me lose my job? I’m going to work. I don’t know how you’re planning to pay your rent, but in this house we work for a living.”

“Gina, this isn’t punishment. It’s war. We have to fight.”

“I can’t and I won’t.”

“You can either stand with your family and your women and your fellow workers fighting for your wages, or you can break the line, but then no one in this town will ever speak to you again. Because we don’t talk to scabs,” Angela said. “Not even family scabs. Tell her, Arturo.”

“We don’t talk to scabs,” said Arturo.

“Get out of my house,” said Gina. “Where is Harry?”

“Striking!”

“How can he strike? He doesn’t work at the mills!”

“Organizing the strikers then,” Arturo said. “Going door to door with Joe. Wiring telegrams to Big Bill telling him he’s urgently needed in Lawrence. Calling Mother Jones. Calling Emma Goldman. Your husband,” he went on with pomposity, “is fighting for our side. Like you should be doing.”

“I thought I told you to get out of my house, Arturo.”

“Gina, this strike is for you, too. The full-time wages of mill employees are inadequate for a family.”

Gina pointedly said nothing. Angela cleared her throat. “Actually, Arturo,” she said, “Gina makes quite a decent wage working in the mending room.” She averted her eyes. “Yes, a generous wage for skilled labor. But even you, Gia, are now making less because they cut your salary.”

“They didn’t cut my salary. They cut my hours.”

“You were working too much.”

“Who decides this—you? I needed the money,” Gina said. “I didn’t want to work less, and I don’t want what’s not due me. I’m a grown-up.” She felt weak, she needed to lie down. “I’m responsible for my own choices. I want to work.”

“The IWW will fully support your efforts for larger pay and fewer hours.”

“Arturo, I thought I told you to leave!”

“If he goes, I go,” said Angela.

Folding her arms, Gina stared them both down.

“Wait till Mimoo hears about this!”

“You don’t want to know what Mimoo thinks about this, Angie,” said Gina.

“I can’t wait to ask her. She always supports me.”

“Not in folly.”

“This isn’t folly!”

“Well, too bad she can’t hear about it because, oh, that’s right—she’s still at work.”

“Wait till Salvo hears.”

“He’s also working. And staying far away.”

“Sometimes,” Arturo said, “you’ve got to not work to fight for what is right.”

“Get out!”

“Let’s go, Arturo,” said Angela. “I know where we’re not wanted.”

That night Harry told Gina what happened when he spoke with Mother Jones. Harry and Joe made a personal plea to the woman to join the coming strike, but she, despite being co-president and co-founder of the IWW with Big Bill, refused to stand with her own fair sex, pronouncing Lawrence a city headed for disaster. She would not support the women’s right not to return to their slave wages. She said all her life she had petitioned for men, not women. “Men work,” she told Harry. “Women work for the family.” Before she ended the conversation she said that Big Bill, whom she had known for years, was a cheap tightfist of a man, but Harry should ask him for a raise so his wife, too, could stay at home.

Gina was pretending to read and only half-listening. “Oh yeah? What did Bill say about that?”

“Publicly, not a word,” Harry replied. “But to us he said he will not rest until that traitor is purged from the IWW for good.”

“I mean about the raise.”

“I didn’t ask him.”

Gina shrugged her indifference. “Then all I want to know is whether come seven-thirty tomorrow morning I’m going to the mending room.”

Harry sat quietly. “No,” he said at last. “You aren’t.”

“So we’re deciding to lose me my job? My easy, well-paying, skilled-labor job that other women wait years to get?”

“I don’t want you to lose it,” he said. “But you were going to quit anyway when the baby came …”

“Seven months from now.”

“So, it’ll be a little sooner than we planned. The baby came a little sooner than we planned. It’ll all work out. You’ll see.”

“If I can’t work, then I’m going on the streets, Harry. With Angela, Pam, Dona, Elda. I have to, or they’ll never forgive me.”

“You can’t,” he said. “Gestation keeps you from other activities ending in tion. Like demonstration. It’s pandemonium out there.”

“It’s chaos in here, too. How do you propose we pay the rent? Buy food? Put money into the electric lamp you’re sitting by as you write your slogans and glue your pamphlets?”

“Mimoo is working,” Harry said.

“Don’t even think about my money,” Mimoo bellowed from upstairs. “Pretend it doesn’t exist.” How did her mother have such good hearing now, and yet was deaf when you tried to ask her all the important questions?

They lowered their voices.

“We’ll use kerosene if we can’t afford the electricity,” Harry said. “And Big Bill pays me.”

“Are you sure about that? I haven’t seen anything since before Christmas.”

“Yes. We’ll be fine. The strike will last but a few days. A week at most. I know how these things shake out. The factory will cave. William Wood needs to make money. The mill must operate. Production can’t stop. They always cave when somebody has to make money.”

“No kidding,” said Gina. “Someone like me. Can I cave?”